Pace has always been an important component of a successful lesson, particularly with able or gifted groups of high-achieving students who are more than able to cope with 50 minutes of rigorous challenge, who thrive on the demands of a lesson that asks them to move quickly through exposition and review to get to new learning points and spend time developing and extending new learning. Pace is also a critical feature of a well-disciplined classroom; if pupils are busy enough there is no time for off-task behaviour

 

If your lesson is described as having ‘unrelenting pace’, sometimes we are not sure whether this was a compliment about a fast-moving, productive lesson in which students were asked to work hard with unbroken concentration, or a criticism of the lesson providing too few opportunities for the students to reflect and ponder on the skills they were being taught.

 

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