Lesson Planning!

I haven't forgotten that I need to post regarding your lesson plans coming up, but I will return to that a little later today.

Okay, here we go!

First, decide on the contexts relevant to your teaching.  Recall that you have a final project that you will be doing for this class.  While it's not a requirement for your mini-lessons to be included as part of your project, double-dipping and including them should work to your advantage.  So, I suggest that you first think about the contexts (age level, proficiency level, type of class, any other relevant contexts) in which you will set your project, and then choose a mini-lesson that will fit within that in some way.  While it's not required reading, chapter 9 of the book discusses curriculum design, so you might consider at least glancing through it.

Second, choose what you want to teach about.  Try to choose your topic by communicative function, and not by grammatical point.  If you choose by grammatical point, then you will still need to find a way to make your mini-lesson focused on communicative, real-life English.  In other words, don't plan to teach a lesson about how to create passive sentences from active ones unless you are going to give the students practice in real-life communication that requires the use of passives.  Please do not simply teach us a grammar point without making it relevant.

Third, once you've decided on a general topic, you will need to plan for a 10-minute lesson, start to finish (with the number of people in the class, this first lesson just cannot be longer).  Suggestion:  take the time to read through any comments on Question #4 about ideal teaching situations.  See if anyone else commented on a preference for the same contexts that you are interested in.  If so, consider discussing team teaching with them.  On Monday, we'll be discussing many issues related to lesson planning, but reading chapter 10 of the book ahead of time could be extremely helpful to you!

Fourth, you will need to write up a formal lesson plan to turn in.  In doing this, you will need to realize that your mini-lesson is only 10 minutes of what would normally be a much longer class.  When you write up your lesson plan, you will need to tell what the larger goals and objectives of the class period are, as well as give some description of what comes directly before and directly after the 10-minute portion of your lesson, and how you transition into and out of the mini-lesson.  In addition, you will need to give step-by-step details of what your mini-lesson will include.

Please note that you should NOT plan to summarize your entire hour lesson during your mini-lesson!!!  You should actually actively teach a 10-minute lesson as if we were a group of ESL/EFL students that you were working with. Make sure that YOU are actively teaching (don't give us a handout and make us work on it for 8 minutes).

We'll definitely talk more about this on Monday, or you can email me if you have specific questions.  Meanwhile, I'll be emailing you tomorrow with the lesson plan format, which details the expected components of your lesson plan.  But you can preview it here: