Lesson Plan: Rachel´s Comments

We noted in the introduction to this section that our intention "is not to provide you with lesson plans that you can download and take straight into your class and use just like that." What we would like to do is "provide some examples of lessons and look at what worked in them and why they worked and in what ways, if any, they might have been improved."

This lesson, given to an Elementary group, is a good example of that.

We talked to Rachel Malachi right at the end of the four months the part time CELTA course lasts, about a lesson which she'd given right at the beginning of the course. "It was only my second lesson," Rachel explains, "and it didn't really go 'wrong' but at that stage of the course I just didn't really appreciate the effect a good lesson plan could have on a class. I was stumbling through it, basically, rather than thinking about each stage, as you should."

Another thing that it can be hard to appreciate at first is what you can expect of learners at a given level. The group Rachel did this class with was "Elementary" and where the lesson planning perhaps did go wrong was that, at least at that level, the learners probably needed a language focus stage, perhaps using the timelines Rachel showed them to explain the use of past simple and past progressive tenses, much earlier in the lesson.

Rachel showed the timelines to the class at the end. "By that time," she can now see, "they were useless. Well, not useless - but certainly useless for doing the task."

Providing the tools for the task

Teaching is something that you learn to do. One of the things you learn about on the CELTA course are what are called "pre-tasks". "The word 'Pre' makes it sound less important," Rachel says, with the benefit of four months of the course behind her. "In fact, it's probably the most important stage: it's about arming the student with the tools they need for the actual task."

And at the end of the course, what would she say was the secret of writing a good lesson plan? There isn't any one secret, Rachel feels, "but you've got to put yourself in the place of the students and ask yourself what you would want to get out of the lesson and take it from there."

She gave the example of doing a listening task. "If you just put the tape on and they don't have a reason for listening, they just shut down and stop doing so - it's too difficult, especially at Elementary level. Rather than just doing that, you can help them with vocabulary that may prove difficult, or get them to predict what is going to be said" - things which in fact Rachel did do, as you will see from her lesson plan.

Making it learner-centred

And if the course had taught her one thing, Rachel felt it was that it's the learners that should be at the centre of it all. Which can be a help when you're actually standing up there in front of them: "If you think about them, you stop worrying about yourself and your lesson plan."

"Did I sound smug, as if I knew it all?" Rachel asked when we met the day after she'd run through the lesson with us. Not at all: she sounded, rather, as if she'd learnt an awful lot about teaching.

Just as it should be, in fact.