How detailed are your lesson plans?

Introduction

The following thoughts on lesson planning are from the Trinity Dip TESOL Course at ISIS Tefl (part of the Oxford International Education Group). This module begins by asking teachers to consider how they plan their lessons, going through some key definitions before analysing a series of lesson plans. 

For more information on our Cert TESOL (4 week full-time or 3 month part-time) and Dip TESOL (9 month distance/blended learning) courses, click through to www.isistefl.com.


Planning in General

It is fair to say that once many EFL teachers have completed their initial teacher training, they will slowly abandon the practice of detailed lesson plan writing.

Some write out a bullet pointed outline or skeleton of the main stages to be followed, others have a plan of sorts in their head, and many more simply work their way through course books on a page by page basis. The main reason for this is, quite understandably, the typically heavy workload which most EFL teacher are faced with.

Task One

Ask yourself:

With what level of detail do you plan lessons on a day-to-day basis?
Would you ideally like to plan in a different way? How?
How clear are you about the overall purpose of any given lesson?
How do you approach observed lessons differently to unobserved lessons?
What helpful tips have you come across for successful lesson planning?


Diploma Lesson Planning

Teaching on a diploma course, however, requires participants to once again write very detailed lesson plans in order to demonstrate the ability to plan, execute and evaluate the success of lessons independently. The term independently is very important in this context. After completing a certificate course, teachers are still seen to be in need of guidance while they are getting more experience under their belt. Once teachers have achieved a diploma-level qualification, they are expected to be fully-fledged and in the position to provide such guidance rather than require it. 

Let's start by having a look at the launch pad for lesson planning. Aims, objectives & outcomes.

Firstly, why are they the starting point?

At diploma level, teachers should be analysing their students’ needs and building lesson content to help meet them. A tendency with pre-diploma teachers is to choose the tasks they want to include (often because they seem ‘fun’ or ‘work well’) and then write the lesson aims to match them.

This is clearly the wrong way round. The plan should begin with the identified lesson goals, and then the staging and content of the lesson is chosen to help achieve them.
Secondly, what are they?

Discussion about aims, objectives and outcomes in the staff room can often lead to a rather frustrating absence of clarity about the terms which is odd considering that one’s aims should obviously be clearly worded in the first place. See Aims, Objectives & Outcomes in the reading older for an example of this type of analysis.

To help bring clarity to a potentially confusing area, our diploma lesson plans require you to focus more on Aims and Outcomes. Broadly speaking, Aims will be more linguistically-based, while outcomes will tend to focus on what you hope students will be better able to practically do following the lesson.

Below you can see section one of a blank diploma lesson plan.

Target Language: Aims: Subsidiary aims:

Learning outcomes:

Professional aims:

Assumptions:

As you can see, it is broken down into subsections which can be helpfully defined as below. Unhelpfully they are not in the same order as above.

Task Two

Individually, decide which description below applies to which section above?

___________________: These may focus on what the teacher will be doing during the lesson. A favourite phrase which can also be used in this context is To raise awareness of... especially useful for receptive skills lessons. Another way of phrasing them is to view things from the students’ perspective e.g. Students will be able to...or Students will practise... both of which shift focus to the class.

___________________: Throughout the series of observations you need to show that you're a reflective practitioner and that you are able to make professional choices based on those reflections. Defining these shows that you've identified areas of development and how to address them in the next lesson. These are usually more concerned with the "how" of teaching rather than the "what". 

___________________: These are, as the name suggests, things you think are true though you have no definite proof. It is an important area as we all have certain beliefs (usually about our students) which influence our decisions of, for example, lesson content or mode of delivery. One must be aware of these before the lesson so it can be identified if they are proven right or wrong during the lesson. This is an important learning step.

___________________: These are very important because, main aims aside, there are many other things happening in the lesson. It is often the case that a receptive skill is being practiced as ‘a vehicle’ to set up a context for the main aim of working on the target language.

___________________: This typically relates to which parts of specific language systems – such as grammatical, lexical, functional, and phonological – will be focussed on. 

___________________: We will be defining them as what the teacher hopes students will take away from the lesson – i.e. what the students will hopefully be better able to do out in the real world as a result of the lesson’s language focus. 

Task Three

The bullet points below are all from the first part of a genuine lesson – again they are jumbled up. Associate them with the correct sub-sections above.

1. To present a clear context for use of the target language by presenting a short text about Job Interviews

2. To guide students to discover the meaning of the target language for themselves, and to check understanding by asking students to create their own contexts from sentence prompts

3. Students will be familiar with the concept of idiomatic language, i.e. that the meaning is almost always impossible to deduce by analysis of the component parts of the phrase.

4. To maximise STT

5. To provide oral fluency practice using the target language by responding to questions with real-life relevance

6. To provide practice with the pronunciation of weak forms (e.g. for ‘a’ - /ə/ as opposed to /eɪ/; for ‘of’ - /ə/ or /əv/ as opposed to /ɒv/)

7. To control the volume of my voice/ensure that I use alternative methods to get students’ attention

8. To provide written practice with the target language form, through a sentence completion task

9. To drill sentence stress within the target language

10. Reading for gist and for specific information 7 Idiomatic expressions related to communication (all Animal idioms e.g. to talk the hind legs off a donkey; to let the cat out of the bag)

11. Students will be able to recognise (and employ) a wider variety of language related to different communicative ‘acts’ (e.g. the act of being shy, and giving away secrets, etc.) which will be demonstrated by their application of such language in personalised, freer tasks towards the end of the lesson

12. To give succinct instructions and ask ICQs 

After this point, we go into staging your lesson - but that's all for now!

By Mark Lewis

Director of Teacher Training Courses, ISIS Tefl (Oxford International Education Group)

www.isistefl.com