What is a record of work, and how is it different from a lesson note

Ask a new teacher what a "record of work" is and you will usually get a shrug, or a guess that it is the same thing as the lesson note. It is not. A lesson note is written before you teach. A record of work is written after, and it is where the two are allowed to disagree.

What it is

A record of work is a running log of what you actually taught, kept lesson by lesson across the term. Not generated once and filed away: you add to it as you go, the same way an exercise book fills up one day at a time. Where a lesson note describes the plan, a record of work describes what happened when the plan met a real classroom.

Why teachers keep it

Ghanaian teachers keep the record of work alongside two documents that headteachers do formally check: the scheme of work and the lesson note. The record fills the gap those two leave. A scheme sets the term's pace before it starts, and a lesson note sets one week's plan before you teach it. Neither one can say whether a lesson actually ran long, whether an activity changed on the day, or whether a class needed a second attempt at an indicator. The record of work is where that gets written down, as it happens rather than as it was planned.

How it differs from a lesson note

The short version: a lesson note is the plan, a record of work is the evidence. They can, and often do, read differently for the same lesson. If your lesson note planned a starter, a main and a reflection for Tuesday, and Tuesday actually ran short because the class needed longer on the starter, the lesson note still shows the plan. The record of work is what shows the class spent the whole period on the starter and the main moved to Wednesday.

That difference is also why a record of work is never generated from a lesson note and left untouched. It starts from what was planned, because that is the closest guess to what was taught, but it only stays accurate if it is edited to match what really happened.

What it commonly contains

Unlike the NaCCA curriculum documents, which GES has published and this site transcribes directly, there is no single official format for the record of work. What Ghanaian record-of-work books converge on, in practice, is a table with one row per lesson:

• Week and Day
• Strand and Sub-strand
• Work covered, in the teacher's own words
• Remarks, a short note on how the lesson actually went
• A line for the teacher's signature

Because there is no one official version, the exact columns vary a little from book to book. The two that matter most are the ones above: what was actually covered, and a remark on how it went. A record that just restates the lesson note's indicators, week after week, is not doing its job.

Keeping one without starting from a blank table

In teache, the record of work is built from the lesson notes you already wrote, not started from nothing. Work covered fills in from each lesson's indicators, and you edit it, and add a remark, once teaching is actually done. If you want the screen-by-screen walkthrough, using the record of work covers it.