As an active and committed member of iTDi, I read lots of awesome posts about how educators approach lesson planning, especially in the English for Teachers‘s course available at iTDi; so I though it was high time I tried to post how I plan my lessons.
Truth must be told, having taught EFL for a long time, I tend to plan less but I love to see how I start with an idea, usually coming form my students and pen in hand my lesson plan becomes a colourful drawing. Sometimes, with better results than others, sometimes like the lady in the GPS says: “recalculating“. Part of the process, and teaching is about learning.
So, I watched Jeremy Harmer‘s extraordinary webinar Planningfor the future (and how we deal with it) to kick off.
Jeremy Harmer speaks about different attitudes towards lesson planning
– To plan or not to plan?
– What are lessons like?
– What goes in a plan?
To present his ideas about planning, this is his “lesson-planning pyramid”
Aims: Jeremy Harmer says that goals and aims are similar for him. I am so relieved to have listened to such an expert making almost no difference between these two words, because I usually have a nightmare trying to sort out what exactly is a goal and which are the aims. Refer to my post about goals and objectives.
Aims are what you hope students will be able to do or achieve after the lesson
At the end of this lesson students will be better to …
At the end of this lesson students will know about …
Class Description: Is our class a large class? (50 students, 10 students, 1 student?)
Anticipated Problems: It’s not about predicting students might have problems understanding Present Perfect, as it is a logical anticipated problem, this goes beyond what we can take for granted that students will find it challenging. It’s more: What problems might arise, a teacher as a mind reader. My anticipated problem theory: Will the material be too challenging in terms of being a sensitive subject for a student?
Additional Possibilities: What activities do we, as teachers have under the sleeve in case we need a twist in the lesson?
How many times students come on a Monday and tell us: “I went to the movies and I saw a movie I just loved”. I thank them for that memorable learning moment we are about to explore. I usually collect my lesson plans in different files according to levels. And often within those files sub-files according to skills, functions, themes, topics. So, I let them express as free as they please and then we plunge into a “movie lesson plan” and why not welcome a Teaching Unplugged, Dogme lesson.
Timetable Fit: What we do in class has to fit what will come in the future
As a freelancer I enjoy the freedom to be more flexible and after all, I am not a great planning ahead teacher. We don’t even follow textbooks, maybe this is one of the benefits of being a freelancer, but trust me there are also a few drawbacks. Nothing is perfect.
Outcomes: What’s going to come out of the lesson? What are students going to take out of the lesson? How will students have changed after the lesson?
Students will be better to …
Students will leave the lesson with …
Is it possible to guarantee that learners will achieve outcomes planned by teachers? – Hardly ever. Reflection after classes usually reminds me that I doubt whether learners have really been able to learn what I have planned, sometimes, I feel students learn what they need to learn, what they are willing to learn, which might not the precise aims and expected outcomes we plan. Yet, if reflection after class indicates what the student has learnt I know we can come back to see if they/we (teaching and learning go hand in hand) succeed in taking out the planned outcomes.
Activities: When students have done the activities what will have changed?
Game/Information Gap Activity: What’s the learner going to get out of the game? (fun, vocabulary, language chunks, grammar, etc)
Timings: Very usually, we, teachers find it hard to calculate how long an activity will take. How can we predict what will happen in the class? This is a challenge on daily basis for me, but I have learnt that taking care of timing is crucial, sometimes students get so motivated to read or watch a clip about a person they like and I let them explore more and more, and so many times, I had to leave my planned outcomes aside just because after over exposure to the subject students get demotivated to go on.
Procedures: How will we, teachers, make activities work?
Interactions: Anticipate how we will group students for the different activities. (Pair work, Teacher-Student, Whole Group)
Language Exponents: The different language formulations for performing a Language Function: If I were you I would … / How about …? / Why don’t you …? (Exponents of the Function: Advice)
Language Skills: Integration of skills: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking.
Are we going to teach Grammar, chunks of language, vocabulary, how to get main ideas from a text? How will we deal with language that comes by surprise in the class?
Personal Aims: What the teacher want to get out of the lesson. What will we be able to do that we have not done before? Self-Challenge / Self-Aiming: Research through reflection. I am going to try to set self aims soon, having the feeling that if we dare experiment new ideas it could result in great benefit for our students and for our personal satisfaction and professional development.
If you are willing to share if you have already set your self-aims into planning, I will be pleased to learn from and with you. I might have actually done it unconsciously.
Aids: Most important is what we do with what we have, than what we have in fact. Blackboard, flashcards, Interactive White Boards, laptops, blackboard, paper, etc. What equipment do students have that will help them learn better. Shift from what we will do to what students will do
This is my last plan for the theme “crime”. First, I jotted ideas down on paper, then came lesson plan using Word and the selection of appropriate tools.
Reflections on my lesson plan:
Looking back at Jeremy Harmer’s Planning Pyramid:
I did not anticipate problems: I might have to do with the fact that she has been my student for some years and I might have been sure this was going to run smooth, in fact so far the plan is in full swing! Yet, the challenge is timing the last activity we still have to do which is reading the articles she has selected, to avoid over exposure and demotivation.
Personal Aims: I planned this lesson before watching the webinar and reading Jeremy harmer’s blog, but I would like to explore how we can put all the parts together using technology. One of my favourite tools for this kind of task would be “prezi”, yet I know my student would not be able to handle it, and she does not enjoy getting concerned with technology, so I think that we can take all the material we keep in a shared google doc and post it to our community blog. I own it and though I push students to visit it, I have not succeeded yet. I could let her try posting it herself in class (she has never blogged before). Or I might create the prezi for the blog and I could measure how she feels about achieved outcomes.
I think I chose a wide range of activities for the planned outcomes:
- A gap and a matching exercise for vocabulary. Though she had been exposed and practised the vocabulary before she found this challenging which leads me to think that learning vocabulary is an issue by itself. Today, before the end of the lesson I asked her what she had learnt and right at this point I could see she had not grasp the difference between “steal and rob”, this might have to do with first language interference, as these two words are just one in Spanish. (robar)
- The video clip was right for her level, sometimes I either over or sub estimate the listening difficulty, especially when dealing with authentic material. The activity for the listening has to do with open questions, summary, personal reactions to the video
- Practicing Modals was a good review of a challenging grammar topic. But we talked and wrote lots of sentences about what might/could/must have happened to him, and also where and what he might/could be now. Also, I used images of different crimes to create sentences using modals, some of which turned out to be whole rich stories.
To end I would like to say that she hardly likes to record her voice, this time she accepted and she told me “I don’t like how I sound, I think I speak better than that”. Very interesting reflection and I think this will help us in our future speaking memorable moments.
Some students over-estimate their real level of language; while others are convinced that they cannot learn much, this is why I insist on recording their voices and keeping track of the work in the blog, documenting their performance.