When we teach writing, we always teach our students to start with planning before they start writing. We teach them to brainstorm, to group their main ideas, to divide their work into paragraphs, to support their ideas with about three examples and / or arguments, to use linkers for smooth transition from one thought onto another, etc. But honestly, how often do we follow these steps when we plan our lessons?
There’s a text I really like working with in one of the course books I use entitled “How to eat an elephant?”. When I ask this question from my students, they mostly come up with answers like you first have to catch it, cut it up, carve the meat, cook it somehow, etc. Some of them even question why we would want to eat an elephant, whether the meat is good enough, or how to find an elephant as where we live there are no wild elephants roaming around. However, when they read the text, they find the very simple answer: “One bite at a time.” So, basically, I recommend following this simple answer with planning your lesson and guiding your students through the learning process: take one step at a time and don’t want to wolf down the whole elephant in one go.
In the brainstorming part you can consider the following questions:
- What do I want to teach?
- Why do I want to teach that? If your answer is “Because it’s the next lesson in the book”, you’re most likely not going to have a very interesting or communicative lesson. However, if you consider how your students will benefit from knowing it and how they will use it later on, you’re a step closer to communicative teaching.
- What’s my main goal with this lesson?
- How much do I want to teach? Do I really want to teach them everything there’s to know about e.g. the passive voice in the very first lesson, or is it enough to look at some simple sentences and get familiar with the whole concept (especially if it is not so much present in the students’ mother tongue)?
- What kinds of tasks do I know that will help them understand and / or practice it?
- Are the tasks in the book good and meaningful enough or should I choose something else? Are the tasks really interesting for my students or should I spice them up somehow?
- Which tasks do I want to do in the lesson, and which ones should I set as homework? (After all, it’s kind of relaxing for me when they only have to complete different tasks in their books and workbooks, but do I really want to watch them do things they can do on their own at home instead of practicing things they can only practice here, i.e. listening and speaking?)
- What do I want them to take home at the end of the lesson? What do I want them to be able to do at the end of the lesson?
After answering these questions (or any questions that will help you plan your lesson), you can start organising your ideas into a lesson plan.