Lesson Plans

Clair Hattle

Clair Hattle had 13 students in the Upper-Intermediate class she did this 50-minute role-play lesson with. The lesson was observed and assessed as part of her CELTA course by course tutor Lynn Durrant . We chose it because Lynn felt that it had been a particularly good lesson.

Each observed lesson assignment involves completing a number of forms, which give the trainee's view of the lesson "before and after", as well as the lesson plan itself. There is then the material itself, as well as the evaluation form that is completed by the tutor - all of which goes into the trainee's course dossier.

Thinking about the lesson afterwards

Clair ran through the lesson again for us a few days after having taught it. "The idea of doing something on advertising came from flicking through some course books," she says "but I made up the material myself. I wanted to experiment a bit in a safe environment - get some feedback on it while I could, before going out into the real world of teaching."

Taking a few risks, experimenting, with your teaching is to be commended; teaching is something that you learn to do, and you learn by experimenting. Perhaps not everyone, however, would want to run any risks over an observed lesson, it should be said.

"I'd looked for stuff on the Internet but ended up with just so much information I just didn't know what to do with it." One of the things that you want to do with any lesson plan is ensure an excess of material doesn't mean that it ends up being material- rather than student-centred. Clair's material was sufficiently minimalistic to ensure that that didn't happen.

One factor that probably made the lesson a success was the fact that Clair had spotted what her students were like as people (to be successful as a teacher, that's something you want to take a real, active interest in). "Everyone watches TV and I thought that anyone could get into the role-play, and advertising is a subject relevant to everyone," Clair says. But she'd also seen that in the class there were several who are "very anti-commercial" - and so, as a discussion topic, it was bound to succeed.

Another factor was tying it in with what the previous trainee had done. The students have a two-hour lesson, and are taught back-to-back by two trainee teachers. The previous lesson had been on advertising, too, but they'd focused more on skills other than speaking.

Planning a lesson: where do you start?

How does Clair go about planning a lesson, we asked? "I start by asking myself 'What's the aim of this, why am I doing this?'," she says, "You can't really go anywhere without that."

And when it comes to timing the lesson (something which had perhaps gone a bit wrong this time) Clair suggests "working out where you want to be at the half-way stage of the lesson" and either speeding things up a bit if necessary, or else "making a decision on your feet" and changing plans - though that's something your tutor may frown on and say you should have thought it out more carefully.

Success!

Was it successful as a lesson? Clair felt so. She'd done lots of monitoring during the activity (that's going round and assessing when help was needed, and not providing it when it's not - which we teachers sometimes find hard to avoid!), lots of pronunciation work.

It had also been successful because it carried on from where the previous teacher had left off, recycling vocabulary and providing an opportunity for it to be used in a freer fashion, as well as leading to some new language input.