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Real Lesson Plans

It’s official. We’ve been told which groups we’re going to teach on Monday, and we’ve been given our topics so that we can start doing our lesson plans. Even though the reason everybody is on the course is to learn to teach, we do all seem to be rather worried about our first lessons - especially as our lovely tutors seem to think it’s best for us to learn from our mistakes, even if that means delivering 45 minutes of completely rubbish teaching to the poor students who turn up on Monday! I think the thing that’s worrying most of us is that nobody is going to check our lesson plans before we deliver them - they’re just going to assess us as we teach the lesson - so we’ve got no chance of putting it right. At least, not until we try to correct some of our mistakes in the lessons we teach on Wednesday. I guess the idea is for us to learn and improve over the six teaching practices we will do. Which is all very well for us, but I’m beginning to feel very sorry for our poor students!

Actually though, it is quite a good deal for the students too. Most of them are au pairs who live near the college, and they come in two mornings a week for free English lessons. Sometimes they’re taught by our tutors (with trainees observing and joining in), and sometimes by trainees as we progress through the course.

A lot of people seemed to find today hard. Perhaps because it’s Thursday. Perhaps because we had a very long session this morning with lots to take in and only a short break. Perhaps because our homework is starting to get a lot more serious (that is, how well we do it will affect the learning experience of real students). I’m glad it’s Friday tomorrow…

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response to this entry.

One Response to “Real Lesson Plans”

1. Antony Says:
   February 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm

   Kate, I sympathise. I remember my first teaching practice. I had to create a 20 minute practice activity and it took me about 3 hours to do one evening! I remember that I’d been told to get feedback at the end of the activity. I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about that, so I just asked the students “What did you think of that activity?” In the session with the tutors afterwards, I realised that what they had meant by feedback was to get students to give me the answers for the activity, so that I could check how they had got on.

   The point is that it was a VERY steep learning curve - it’s designed for you not to know what you’re doing and to learn fast from mistakes!! Remember everyone’s in exactly the same boat.

   Good luck!

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