Teaching planning as a space for reflection and meaning in the contemporary school

Abstract

This theoretical reflection essay argues that teaching planning, understood as a reflective device and not merely as a bureaucratic instrument, constitutes the space where the class begins to take shape. To develop this thesis, we review, on the one hand, the epistemological conception of Didactics, which must be understood as critical and propositive reflection on teaching practices and not as a battery of prescriptive, generalizable, and applicable tools. On the other hand, the contextual conditions in which this planning is produced and developed, marked by the asynchrony between the modern school matrix, the contemporary world, and the social function of the school today. Likewise, exchanges produced during the 2026 academic year in the Didactics I course, a subject in the fourth year of the teaching programs in History, Literature, Philosophy, and Geography at the Faculty of Humanities of the National University of the Northeast (UNNE), are recovered, showing how the problematization of the social function of the school emerges in initial teacher training as a condition for understanding what it means to plan with pedagogical intentionality from a situated perspective. Taking up the Orphic metaphor proposed by Perrupato (2024), it is argued that reflective planning has valuable potential by constituting itself as a professional teaching competence and offering something more powerful than the discourses that erode the meaning of teaching: the possibility of enabling, depending on how it is designed, significant and deep learning environments that turn the class into an experience worth living.