Balancing our lesson
Now that you have a rough idea how you want your lesson to go, it’s time for the gentle finishing touches. The first one is its balance: the balance of skills, the different group formats and where my students look. Ideally, you should focus on the four skills in a roughly equal amount, in an alternating order. Also, you should include most of the group formats as always working alone or with a partner gets as boring as always having to listen to the others or the teacher. The last one I learnt about in a conference from John Hughes. When he’s planning the course books he’s writing, the final “touch” is the “Heads up, heads down, heads together” approach. It is kind of similar to the group formats, but takes into consideration where the students should look, this way moving their heads and exercising their necks so that they don’t focus on only one point throughout the lesson. So even if you have different group formations, you should still make your students turn their heads somewhere else (e.g. looking at the board / screen, into their books, at their peers), not just looking at you all throughout your lesson.
Our lesson should also have a rhythm, with smooth transitions between the certain tasks. Ideally, a quicker task should be followed by a more relaxed one; a shorter one after a longer one. These short tasks can function as the transitions from one longer task onto the next demanding one. The first time I felt really proud of achieving a higher perspective into teaching was when I could find the smooth transitions from one unit to the other, being able to continue with a task that somehow closed off the previous topic and started the new one. Most course books are built around different topics so within a unit they will lead from one to the next quite smoothly, but sometimes you need to include some extra tasks to make this transition less jumpy, especially when you finish one unit during the lesson and want to move on to the next one straight away.
Giving instructions
Most teachers are afraid of silence, and tend to make up for the quiet periods with talking. Also there’s a tendency that teachers repeat their instructions in several different ways without really checking whether they were clear enough for the students or not. This way it is more difficult for our lower level students to follow our instructions, because they have to find the key words (basically, the words they already know) in your long (and mostly over-complicated) “bubbling” and try to find out what the task is for themselves. With higher level students, you take away their precious time to do their tasks. With a simple equation, if teacher talking time (TTT) grows, student talking time will shrink. In short, a lesson should not be the teacher’s stage for his / her monodrama, but a practice ground for the student.
A good way how you can make your instructions simpler is imagining an everyday situation: you’re having an online lesson with your students and because your mic and your laptop aren’t working, you can only use the chat function on your telephone. How easy is it to type on the tiny little squares on your phone? For the younger generation it might be less problematic, but for us who grew up without these gadgets, it is quite complicated. So, before you start your very long and complicated speech called instructions, think about your phone and chat. How much could I write in half a minute to make my lesson quick and students don’t have to wait for a long time for my next instructions? Basically, just a few words, like: “book, p.25. task 5. read&answer the Qs.” Will your students understand it? Definitely, as they’re used to using such a language in their real-life chat. Do I need to say more when speaking? Definitely not. They will understand and do the task easily. This way you can reduce teacher talking time, and focus on the more important issues that come up during the lesson.
Another good practice opportunity I’ve had is being an examiner. At most language exams the interlocutors get the script of the whole exam and their only task is to read the instructions and questions out loud and then measure the time the candidates spend on answering. This way the examiners have to be patient and only listen to the candidates. You can work similarly with your course book, as they contain very simple instructions that very rarely need further explanations. You can even ask your students to read out these instructions themselves and only discuss the problematic parts.
So, instead of talking a lot, just give simple instructions and ask meaningful questions to guide them through the learning process. Don’t want to do everything instead of them, because from that they’ll never learn anything. Make them work and just monitor how they do it. If they need your help or want to hear your opinion, they’ll ask and then you can have a longer chat with them.
Timing
And now we’ve come to the most critical part of our lessons – timing. I think it is the hardest part to master (though there are some people who are born with a kind of innate timer and their lessons are mostly spot-on in this respect). What I’ve realized throughout the years is that when I plan the activities I only consider how much time I’d like to give my students to do the tasks but tend to forget about the time needed for giving instructions. Also, at the beginning of the lesson we would like everyone to “arrive”, to find their places, so we can plan with 3-5 minutes (depending on the age group of your students or other discipline issues) at the beginning of the lesson for this “getting ready” stage. Also, don’t forget about the transition from one task to the other. I started to plan my timing more realistically when I started to count the time the following way: if we finish one tasks at 10:35, I planned to start the next task at 10:36 – this way I realised that we really needed that half a minute to move on from one task to the next and I could keep to my planned timing more accurately. Also, if your lesson lasts for 45 minutes (as they do here in Hungary), the best is to plan with 40 minutes, the rest is needed for administration, starting, saying goodbye, etc., or any kind of unusual circumstances. However, it can happen that everything goes much more smoothly than you’ve planned, so don’t forget to have one or two extra tasks up your sleeve.
Warm-up questions:
Some simple questions like “How are you feeling today?”, “Have you had an interesting / tiring day today?” or “Has anything interesting happened to you that you’d like to share with us?” help them “arrive” at the lesson and leave the problems that are bothering them “outside”. For me the most important factor in teaching is creating a kind of atmosphere where my students can feel safe and forget about their other problems for a short while, and I find these simple questions highly useful in creating this kind of atmosphere. One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received from one of my students is that he liked our lessons because there he could relax. It didn’t mean that he didn’t work – on the contrary, he was one of the best and fastest-developing students –, but that he didn’t have to worry about having to do things he didn’t want to, and could do things he really enjoyed in a relaxed atmosphere.
Finally, with these questions we can learn a lot about our students – their hobbies, families, and perhaps fears and problems, on which we can build even deeper communications later on. For example, I have a quite introvert student who says about himself that he is very antisocial – and he really is, people really bother him and likes to be alone –, but when we talk about his hobbies (and we have a shared one, fishing), he opens up and starts to talk more.
I still remember one of my pedagogy teachers telling us how important it is to create a kind of relationship with our students in which they can approach us freely. However, he didn’t give us a “recipe” of how to do so. Now, after teaching adolescents for over 20 years, I have come to develop my own “recipe”, which now I realise is quite simple. Ask them questions about themselves, listen to their answers and show interest with either asking them further questions or simply stating how much you understand their problems or how thankful you are for them for sharing these with you.
Extra tasks
If you don’t have too much time to prepare for a lesson, let alone create extra tasks you might never use, just have some simple ideas that you can always come up with when you have a couple of minutes left at the end of your lesson. It can be a quick Hangman game with the new words that students always love or an activity-type game again with the new words. If you have about 5-10 minutes left, you can make your students create gap-fill tasks with the new words. They write 2-3 sentences leaving out the new words / expressions, and then the others have to find out the missing words. If you don’t have time to finish the whole activity within your lesson, you can take away these little slips and start the next lesson with it as a warm-up.
Other tips
Before starting planning you lesson, take a look at the Teacher’s book. With most course-books you get a very detailed Teacher’s book with lots of ideas and well-built lesson plans, but as we teachers are different all around the world, as are our students and their needs, so these plans are just guides showing you what works in most cases, but not in all of them. Also don’t forget, that these books are not specially written for your country but used worldwide, and the difficulties students face while learning a foreign language will mostly depend on their mother tongue. So what might be confusing for someone coming from Japan, will be natural and really easily understandable for a German-speaking student.
Also, with the widespread availability of computers and the internet in schools nowadays, you would like to spice up your lessons with something really authentic, which a course book can rarely provide. There are millions of good ideas, prepared tasks, colourful pictures you can use. Mind you, keep a balance here as well as it’s not your task to write a new course book based on the one you’re using, just to take in something extra from time to time – I’d say no more than one or two per lesson.