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| from pixabay.com. Photographer: Pexels |
Lesson planning is an unpaid piece of your free time that comes with teaching. And it's not like you can't have a plan when those kids show up. What are you gonna do with them for an hour or more? You can't play games for the whole period. Even young learners will get bored after a while.
There is nothing more nerve-wracking than thinking from the top of your head for what to do while trying to manage a class of young people.
You got little Mario out of his seat again. Cindy Lou and Sara are marking each other's paper with scriggly marks. Adrian is insulting Marcos. Little Tina is asking to go to the restroom. Now, you have five other kids who have decided to go to the restroom. Paco keeps pulling on your shirt asking what he should be doing next. It's hell.
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| from pixabay.com. Artist: Jordan Dreyer |
Have a plan. Have a plan. have a plan. If you end up changing it, fine. But always have something to fall back on.
Anyways, having a plan can consume a lot of your time, especially when you first start out teaching. Planning takes experience as well as knowing your students and the material. You need to know: what they can do; what they need support in completing; how long it takes them to do certain activities; and what things they like to do. If you have a plan for teaching a song in class with singing and dancing but your students hate dancing and/ or singing, that's gonna be the longest 3 minutes of your life. 3 minutes when it should have taken 10!
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| from pixabay.com. Photographer: nastya_gepp |
So you have to plan. I've heard horror stories of teachers planning every day from anywhere from 2 -4 hours a day! Why!?! Who has that much time!?! And you're doing it for free.
I have kids, other interests and a household to run. I don't have 2-3 hours daily for planning. And if I did, I wouldn't want to be planning in the same amount of time to teach it. You probably don't want the same either.
Let me help you change all that in less time. With the plan below, it takes me an hour per week to completely plan my lesson for the next week. I do spend some time gathering material to photocopy. And as an extra measure, every morning I go over the plan for that day's class to make sure it works and I have what I need for it. But this takes about 10 to 20 minutes. So you are looking altogether at about less than 3 hours a week that I spend on lesson planning.
It's effective. Efficient. And less of your free time taken up.
Regardless of the experience you have or don't have, here is a lesson structure for all levels that will make your planning faster.
The Plan:
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Time in an hour class
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Activity
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5 to 15 minutes
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Review (This could be simple exercises from the last grammar point you
have covered in class. Or vocabulary connected to the lesson that you have
seen before. Or drilling. I usually use workbook material not used in
previous lessons or I take exercises from webpages that we had not completed.
Either way, the key here is revising. So don't show them anything new in
content and style.)
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16 to 18 minutes
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Lead-in to book/ lesson activity (Sign up to my weekly
newsletter to get tips on different lead-ins)
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17 to 37 minutes
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Book content (Don't have a book? Use whatever resources you have to present and
teach the learning objective)
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38 to 52 minutes
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Workbook/Practice worksheets
(This time is used to practice the aim of the lesson.)
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*Note: Fun activities can be mixed into the presenting and/or completion
of the book content and workbook practice
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53 to 54 minutes
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Students pack up
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55 to 60 minutes
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Game Time (Hopefully something connected to what they did today. But if not,
have it related to previously taught topics/grammar)
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It's that simple.
Keep in mind that you will incorporate lead-ins for every transition into a new activity. They can be as basic as a pair discussion about the topic, describing the picture in the text, pre-reading using the title or a list race. (A list race is where students have a certain allotment of time to write down as many words as they can which group in the topic you have given them. Example: The topic is food. So they write banana, pear, etc.) More lead-in ideas are available in the weekly newsletter. Click to join.
Keep this as your routine. Modify it by adding exam practice during workbook time for exam students. Or if you have a class longer than an hour, add testing strategies for listening and speaking. Moreover, be sure to place a break in the middle of a long class session for a 5-minute game, instead of at the end. This will help reboot the students so their eyes are not glazing over towards the end of the period.
Try planning this way and see how long it takes you. You'll be surprised at how refreshed you will become when you get your free time back during the workweek.
Let me know how it goes. Write a comment about your experience with planning and/or what happened when you tried my method.
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This is a resource for teachers in ESL. To help the community, please leave comments about other ideas that have worked for you, or how some of these ideas have been successful in your classroom. Thank You.