exercise 8

[Sandra]

1. Read the three teachers' quotes again. Whose planning style is most like your own – Deniz's, Paolo's, Erika's or none of these? Why?

My planning style is most like Deniz's, as I am also a secondary teacher. I follow a coursebook and it's more less already planned. I add different activities, but always following the same routine.

2. Which qualities do you think are most important in planning a unit of work? Give your reasons. Choose from this list, and add others if necessary:

I think cohesion is the most important, the whole unit must be organised around a topic and a grammar point.

3. When you plan a lesson, do you...

I plan a series of lessons, I try to plan the whole unit.
I start with the aims
I use the coursebook all the time.
I do not plan in great detail, I've been using the same coursebook for some time now and I have different activities in mind depending on the group and their mood.

4. What advice would you give a new teacher who says, "I spend hours and hours planning a scheme of work: I seem to go round and round, not getting anywhere"?

I would tell him/her that the class has to flow, you won't know if an activity will be beter than another until you are there with them.

[Admin]

Thanks for writing Sandra! Yes a course book can be a really great help with structuring a course. It sounds like you were lucky with your book in that the materials and activities are appropriate for your group. I have had to work with books where practically none of the materials or the activities were usable without re-writing texts and adapting the tasks, so that meant a lot of extra hours preparing. I agree with you that the lesson should be constructed around one topic - every time you have a new topic, the related vocabulary will be different, so that doesn't make much sense. As for sticking to one grammar point, that's fine for very controlled activities. But as soon as you have an activity that is more about students communicating their own meanings, then the single grammar point would really limit what people can say. In freer production activities I would say it's good to let them say what they want and feed in the necessary grammar to express their ideas as the need arises, even if it's not "in" the lesson plan. No?