"These issues refer to political education's firm objectives and its legitimation, to the educational content and the reasoning behind its selection, to the prerequisites with regard to society, institutions and individuals and to how the learning process is organized, that is, to the choice of methods and media involved in lessons and interaction with students. This means, then, that the decisions that teachers have to make with regards to lessons are spread across a number of levels while at the same time being closely linked and mutually conditional. They encompass the findings borne out of the debate around political education as much as they do knowledge provided by political and other social sciences.

This catalogue of questions should not be misunderstood as a recipe of how to plan lessons in politics. Neither is a finished teaching unit created nor the success of lessons guaranteed even when all these ingredients have been added. Instead teachers should regard this collection of different issues more as a tool for helping them to check whether they have taken all the important aspects into account during the planning process and whether they have attached sufficient importance to some of the core issues. Indeed, this long list of questions is far from complete. The foundations on which these questions are based have not been derived from a systematic, subject-related, scientific theory or concept, but rather taken from problems encountered during real teaching situations. (...)

These questions were taken and assigned to three different levels according to their nature and organized into a logical structure in as far as this was possible. It might also be easy to get the impression that planning a lesson is a additive process and that the different questions should be addressed in a particular order. It would be wrong to think this and to do so would be to neglect an important aspect of the lesson planning process. Planning lessons involves a circular way of thinking rather than a linear one. This means two things: For one there is no set place from where to begin when it comes to planning lessons. Teachers can start with whatever issue they feel most suitable, while at the same time making sure that they consider, reflect and indeed make a decision on all of the other issues. And, for another, all of the issues involved in the planning process are related to each other. Or rather, a decision made on one issue has a bearing on all the other decisions. Teachers need to keep adjusting things until all the decisions in the planning process fit together."

[Politikdidaktik kurzgefasst. Planungsfragen für den Politikunterricht, published by Federal Centre for Political Education, series Bd. 326, Bonn 1994; p. 9.

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