So, our courses start next week and teachers are all getting their first lessons ready. It’s also the time of year when we end up dealing with the stream of calls and emails from parents whose child has come back from his/her first lesson and said “That course is too easy for me”.
It made me think.
Do we plan our first lessons for our students’ learning, or for fun, ‘win ’em over’ sessions? Believe me, in my experience, if it’s the latter, it’ll all end in tears … the teacher’s.
This year I’ve made a decision to raise the bar and push my B2 teens right from the first lesson. Here’s what I’m going to do in my first lesson (1hr 30m). They are a group of 14-18 yr olds (14 of them) who are likely to take the Cambridge First exam in June 2017) As you will see, it’s not a lesson plan, just a brief running order. It’s not even properly finished, it’s very much in progress (and I wrote it on the train ride home, hence the hastily-edited typos!)
1. A short dictagloss using some personal/general info about me (no, not ego-centric, just practical) and a level-appropriate range of structures and vocab you’d expect at entry B2 (dictagloss: listen, write key words, repeat once, collaborate in small groups to re-construct the text in small groups, check). Sts reflect on skills this activity helps to develop and how/why relevant to real life.
2. Students then investigate how many questions they can generate from the info in the dictagloss, e.g. “How long have you been living here?” Or “Why did you decide to work in Italy?”
3. Students change groups and now review questions to make them relevant to their peers and context. E.g. “Why did you decide to study English?” (Teacher monitors and feeds in necessary language).[I am not sure about this part yet. It might be difficult to make some stuff appropriate for the life experience gap so I need to make sure the text in 1.is adaptable, or maybe get them to talk about how to adapt it to their lives first, then do Qs? Hmm…]
4. Students then pair up and ask/answer the questions they prepared and take notes on partner’s answers writing key words (ask why key words are important). Repeat with another st.
5. The notes can then be used to write a short text comparing the two people they spoke to, e.g. “X started learning English before Y”, “X spends his/her free time doing Karate, whereas Y prefers playing computer games”. Reflect on role of key words to construct meaning.
This could easily be recorded on Mobile phones and integrated as a peer listening task if using an online platform. Peers listen and decide who is most similar to them and why.
Sts reflect on what they learnt, how they learnt it and why it’s relevant to their own learning needs.
I’ll be teaching this on Monday, so I’ll update on how it went sometime afterwards!
Part 2. Reflections
- The students did everything planned and demonstrated a good awareness of how to use verb tenses and a wide range of vocab.
- They really explored options when working with the key words to ‘re-create’ the text. Lots of ‘it has the same meaning, but it’s not what she actually said‘ type convos.
- I got them to drag out questions from the text first, and then transform them into more appropriate peer-relevant ones, which worked (see doubts in part 3 above).
- The lesson was fast-paced but I think that if I hadn’t swapped groupings like did, it would have been a bit tedious. I need to look at livening it up a bit.
- There was lots of time given to talking about why we were doing certain things and the class reflection at the end really highlighted what they’d achieved (not just linguistically) by the end of the lesson. I really want to do a poll after a month or two on their impressions of this reflection.
I felt like they worked hard and they said they felt like they’d done a lot.They got to know about me and about each other and, most importantly, I got to see their knowledge, how they worked together and get an idea of classroom management issues.
Oh, and we all enjoyed it and (shhh…) maybe even had fun.
The Teacher Trials 
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