Lesson Plans

Roger Hunt comments on Rachel's lesson

Roger Hunt, the tutor who observed the class felt that, particularly at such an early stage in the course, it was overall a successful lesson. True, it was "rather illogically staged" and "without much of a rationale, or clear aims for each section" and in that sense hardly a model lesson - though again that is not what we are trying to provide in this section.

"It's a fairly typical, understandable error at first," Roger says, "for trainees to not really get their aims clear at each stage of the lesson". Roger clarified them for us on our version of Rachel's lesson plan.

Strengths...

"What she did provide was a context, which was good, as another typical error is to decontextualise the language. Her students also had a reason for reading the text she provided, to find out if their predictions were correct, and it's also a common mistake to ask students to do things for no apparent reason."

... and weaknesses

Any other errors to avoid? "Saying 'I'm going to tell you about the past continuous' or whatever," Roger says. "You want the students to discover things for themselves, if possible. It's an error compounded by long verbal explanations many of the students, especially at lower levels, just won't understand."

You've heard of the acronym KISS, right, for giving presentations? "Keep it short and simple." Well, the same applies to your classroom instructions and explanations. (It wasn't, it should be said, an error Rachel tended to make.)

Learning from what goes wrong

Part of your teaching practice on the CELTA course is observed but not assessed - like this lesson. What is important is that you learn from the lesson, from where it went wrong, and from the feedback that you get on it.

That is not always easy on the intensive course, as it has to be taken onboard immediately and applied, sometimes the next day. Rachel, on the extensive course, had rather longer but, says Roger, in any case she saw immediately how the lesson could have been improved, and, at least as far as lesson planning was concerned, "didn't require much further help" and, indeed, went on to get an "A".