Job Discussion Forums

[daniel_hayes]

I really like my current job in Valencia, Spain. Nice school, teaching adults (18-40), pay is pretty crap but more than enough to live on. And Valencia is without doubt the best place I've lived (only other places are Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Manchester)

At this school, we use New English File which is a popular and pretty good text-book. We have teachers books etc.

Sometimes I take more than an hour to plan a 2 hour lesson. But I feel like all I'm doing is putting the teacher's book into my own words. This week I had to do 2-3 lessons with zero preparation, and to be honest, I don't think the lessons were any worse. I just followed the students book, and if anything, I could take a little more time to discuss and brainstorm things with students.

I feel that it is very important to have a stock of games and fun activities, especially for the start of lessons. And I will try and organise myself and build up a stock of images, and other activities.

I am very interested to hear how much planning other teachers do. Does it depend on the text-books you use, the countries you teach, the age of the students, or how long you've been doing the job?

[spiral78]

[Sashadroogie]

Lessons that are centrally planned are more efficient and socially superior.

[spiral78]

Yet another factor to be considered!

In some situations, I am a Central Authority.

And you?

[Sashadroogie]

In all situations, of course. Hic!

[spiral78]

I must Share Authority at times

[Cool Teacher]

When I started I spent like loads of time doint eh lesson planing and used so many plastic folders to put each lesson plan in but then I never used the same lesson again and I just started to teach the lessons without planning and like you they were no better or worse actually sometimes better but not worth and I wondered why I spent all the time planning. But then over time I started getting lazy and only teaching the same lessons and ideas over and over again so I went back to thinking about what to teach and to learn from it and it made me a beeter teacher I think.

[Qaaolchoura]

I know the company I'm at (wonder if it's the same company) also has specific lesson plans we have to stick to, but still requires us to plan lessons. This is mainly to insure that new teachers have internalized the lessons by boiling about a dozen pages into one sheet of paper, and also to have crib note which are supposedly less obvious than looking at the book.

Any rate, while I don't frankly much care for it, but the school�which has a ton of teaching hours�claims that once you've got the hang of it, almost no prep is required. I honestly wouldn't believe that of most schools (didn't at first at this one, but wanted a job that actually does the legal work permits, and those tend to have worse pay and/or hours than comparable illegal ones) but I've gone from taking forty minutes to taking twenty, and I've seen teachers who've been there awhile prepare in literally five minutes or less, so yeah. When you teach 30 lessons a week and only have about 80 different pre-planned lessons, I imagine it becomes routine pretty quickly.

~Q

[coledavis]

My thoughts on this. There is nothing wrong with familiarising yourself with the material. However, the discussion then becomes more book-specific. New English File has so much material that the job is paring it down and occasionally inserting other materials when NEF is boring or inappropriate to your particular students. On the other hand, with most books, it is certainly worth choosing activities to supplement and reinforce the text material.

[Teacher in Rome]

It can help if you've got specific outcomes in mind. I've taught "Business English" classes where the aims were explicit from the beginning of the course. This meant that I planned the entire curriculum with a basic overview of where it would all fit in, but with enough flexibility to spend longer on one area if needed.

On the other hand, having a lot of material planned (especially supplementary activities) is very useful in other classroom settings when you might need to change direction mid-lesson for whatever reason (bored teenagers, extra help or exercises needed etc). Having a few of these activities - at least in mind - can take a lot of the stress out of planning. It cuts time enormously if these activities are the minimum resource type activity, so you don't have to go and then photocopy and cut up lots of paper...

[johncoan]

It's a funny old one. Many TEFLers don't like to plan in any formal sense, but tend to (try and) get by on the strength of their personalities and a decent coursebook.

It's really about familiarising yourself with the material (reading or listening texts, particularly), preparing a variety of activities (and exploiting them) and having answers to those activities and knowing why A is right and not B, for example. Pre-empting questions.

There should be some sort of logical order - start with something relatively easy. Having a single language focus helps, but I don't think it's essential. And there's no need to keep banging through everything you've planned just for the sake of it. If the students seem more willing than usual to speak, let them speak, abandon the plan at least for a while.

Your classroom manner is as important - if not more so - than planning. You need to be alert, friendly, clear and organised and encouraging.


I usually put together a plan of sorts, but it's rarely any more than a few scribbled notes to remind me of the order, maybe with a list of words that I anticipate will cause students problems, and ideas on how to help them understand them. I used to be suspicious of people who wrote more, but everybody works differently. But to be overly reliant on a plan is probably not a good thing, as students may want to steer the lesson in directions that suit them, and this shouldn't be resisted!

[coledavis]

Yes, I go for a few sentences, ordering the activities, assuming the addition of one or two to what is offered in the course book (students tend to notice if you add value). The order is of course important, as you work out which activities will reinforce which text area, which will offer a break in routine etc.

[johnslat]

Lesson plans? Hmm, interesting concept.

OK, for beginners, detailed lesson plans can be very helpful, mainly in the sense that they are likely to inspire some necessary self-confidence.

But personally, I've never had a lesson plan that "went according to plan" for more than, say, the first ten minutes of class.

Being very specific in one's plans is, I think, a mistake. What I have are the general objectives, what I'd like the students to take away with them from the class. Unless you "lecture" and there's little or no interaction between the students and you, there's no way that a detailed lesson plan is going to be of much, if any, help.

When your students participate, it can "divert" you, take you down some unplanned, but interesting, paths. As long as you impart the intended general objectives, don't be worried about any side-trips that will almost certainly pop up.

Go with the flow - but remain close to shore.

Regards,
John

[Sashadroogie]

[daniel_hayes]

Really great points on here, thanks! I decided, today, to try and do thorough brain-storming of a topic-area to start. For example we did sport. So, verbs, places, people, and adjectives to do with sport.This was a way to lead-in to the lesson, to elicit what they knew, and to pre-teach some tricky phrases. And it makes the students feel more confident that they do actually know quite a lot about the subject (this was an lower-Intermediate class)

Then I asked them to make sentences, using the vocabulary we covered. I told them the tense and they had to make sentences.This led to some TOUGH grammar questions that I just about answered. But again I think the Ss felt like they were revising their grammatical knowledge in a useful way.

That and some serious Super Stop The Bus action (my own variation on the theme, with extra categories, three letters at once, and them in teams) took-up around one hour from the 2 hour class.


Then I did the coursebook for 40 minutes, homework for 15 and that was it.

I planned far less this weekend, and I think my lessons today were pretty good. Yes, I need to start building up a large armory of games/tasks etc. AND I need to improve my grammar knowledge! But all is going well. I even had time to invent a new game, but that is in the idea-stage for now.