Lesson Plans

Clair Hattle

The lesson... as the tutor saw it

Lynn Durant, Clair's tutor, shied away from the word "outstanding" when we asked her about the lesson. Outstanding, no, but very good it certainly had been. "They had something precise to talk about, a reason to talk," Lynn said, "that's what was outstanding about it."

Lynn had also been impressed by what Clair had actually done in class during the role play. "She was monitoring, listening, helping, shaping their language," she says, "and acting very naturally, conversing with them."

A combination of plan, material and good classroom management

The lesson plan itself had been good ("she'd correctly anticipated lots of things, knew what the problems were likely to be", which was a "solid start"), and the material had been good; but it was the combination of those, together with what Clair had done in class, that made this lesson a good one.

"She was watching and listening to what was being said," Lynn says, "which for a CELTA trainee can be hard - they've got this lesson plan in the back of their mind all the time, and unfortunately that can sometimes distract them from what's actually going on in the classroom."

Room for improvement?

If you sit in the back of virtually any class there are things you pick up that you would criticise - and there a couple of things Lynn found fault with. That's part of her job, to detect what's going wrong in a lesson, a draw the trainee's attention to it, for the future, you know.

Clair had overrun her time a bit, and not had the 15 minutes for the writing that she'd noted on her lesson plan. Another ten minutes and she could have (importantly) focused on some of the errors. "That always happens with trainees," Lynn says "they tend to over-plan because it's a safety net for them - they won't be left with nothing to do". No, she hadn't "marked her down" for that, but certainly had mentioned it in feedback - for next time.

Giving the instructions as to what the students had to do was something Clair had messed up a little - some of them hadn't really understood what they had to do. Lynn suggested using the role cards as a mini-reading comprehension might have solved that one.

The other thing that had perhaps gone wrong was that the target lexis ("giving opinions", Clair had had on her lesson plan), had not made much of an appearance. Providing a model, or eliciting one - or an OHP transparency, perhaps, with gapped phrases, Lynn suggested might have helped there. Amazing, sometimes, how a good tutor will come up with three different solutions with hardly a pause for breath!

Actually, those were, to her credit, things that Clair herself had clearly known had gone wrong. One of the things that makes a good trainee is the ability to analyse yourself and what may have gone wrong - and learn from that.

But all in all...

But, on the whole, again a very good lesson, Lynn thought. Clair had definitely achieved her main aim of getting them talking, and it was the way she'd reacted to things that came up - including things that weren't necessarily on her lesson plan - that Lynn had been really impressed by.