Lesson Plans

Helen Shelton

There's more to a successful lesson than just the lesson plan itself. Thorough preparation helped Helen Shelton produce a good lesson on a tough language point...

For teaching practice, most CELTA course groups are split in half, with one half starting with the Elementary students, the other half Upper-Intermediate. The tutor will then probably call for volunteers to do the first class and you will then get your "teaching point", which come from the syllabus the students are following. The teaching point (or points) then gives you the basis for your lesson.

Rather by luck of the draw, you can end up with teaching points that, at least at first sight, can look harder or easier than others. Helen Shelton got " dynamic vs stative verbs " and so probably had at least some cause to feel "scared to death", as she puts it, "that the students would know more than I did about the subject" (though in the event that didn't prove to be true).

In fact, the lesson came midway through the course and so there was the additional factor that it was the first class Helen had done with the Upper group. Half way through the course, you see, the two teaching practice groups swap over, so that you do your teaching practice with both levels.

Sound choices, solid preparation

However, with a couple of sound tactical choices and some solid preparation, the task at hand becomes a little less daunting. For her class, Helen took a text that in fact the students had seen before with a previous teacher. "That meant I didn't have to spend too long on introducing the text and teaching the vocabulary," Helen explained afterwards, "and could concentrate on the language point I was teaching."

To some extent the whole thing is made easier by the way they go about lesson preparation at IH Barcelona, which involves completing a fairly extensive "booklet" [see image, top of this page] for your full, observed (and assessed) lessons.

Taking it step-by-step

The booklet takes you step-by-step through the whole process of lesson planning, from establishing your communicative and linguistic aims, to consideration of what skills development (e.g. reading skills) you will be working on, and to anticipated problems and the solutions you plan for them.

With lots more to be filled in, and handed in to your tutor, on how you are going to convey and check the target language, that adds up to quite a lot of paperwork - and that's even before you start to write the lesson plan itself.

The paperwork is something some trainees say they hate, but it probably pays off for them all in the end, as it ensures, apart from anything else, that you go into the lesson really prepared for it. And, in this particular case, Helen's tutor certainly saw the through preparation as being one factor in what was a very good lesson.