A TEFLtastic link up
If any of you guys are feeling as tired as I am this morning (even those of you who didn’t discover a reasonably priced source of German beer last night), I can see why the page hit stats take a dive on a Saturday. The great thing with this writing lark is that, unlike teaching, you can put all the effort in when you are feeling energetic and then when the mood leaves you just read Dibert .com and pretend that it could be useful for Business English classes.
Anyhoo, all my efforts recently have been going into what I hope will be a very productive future partnership. I’ve been writing a whole bunch of worksheets and lesson plans for www.usingenglish.com , and they have been doing the technical stuff which I neither like nor understand so that you get a nice and easy to print out version without all the terrible formating problems I have unwittingly unleashed on these pages. You can find the fruits of my efforts at:
http://www.usingenglish.com/lesson-plans.html
All the stuff marked “New” is mine.
Here is an extract from the explanation I provided for the site:
“Most of my worksheets and lesson plans have been produced over the years due to the common daily teaching situation of “What can I do? I can’t find anything good to practice (telephoning/ make and do/ the Past Perfect Continuous)!” As the years have gone by a few things that the lessons that work really well have in common have emerged, though. I now strive to make as many of my lessons as possible:
- Fun
Intellectually stimulating
Active
Based on speaking
Flexible (in terms of timing, order of tasks, missing bits out etc.)
Personalised
Student centred
Both controlled and free
Easy to use both with a textbook and without
Suitable for large and small classes
Easily adaptable to different teaching approaches (PPP, TTT, TBA etc)
Suitable for mixed levels”
Feedback on whether I have achieved all this gratefully received in the comments box below:
October 10th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Just what is a ‘lesson-plan’? I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years now, and I’ve never come across the phrase before…
Sandy
October 11th, 2007 at 2:27 am
It’s something like asking a mother to plan how many times their baby is going to shit, puke, burp etc. at the beginning of the day, and a DELTA lesson observation is like judging them on whether it really happened that way.
Or alternatively, it’s like the sheep pen that you are trying to get your dog to herd the sheep into. Doesn’t really sound like teaching, but could be good practice for the teacher and students (and dog if you are taking that bit literally) for when the real teaching starts…
Or it’s like a to-do list. The people who should make one are far too lazy and disorganised to do so, and the people who do so and insist on sticking to it should just try to chill out and go with the flow a bit more instead.
Or it’s like a filing system for your CDs. It starts out as a way of making them easier to organise and saving time but then takes on a life of its own and can lead to tears and tantrums if anyone messes it up and use up more time than it saves.
Or it’s a crutch. Useful for making sure you don’t fall over, but not much use if you want to dodge, dive and dance around. Although possibly useful again when you have done your improv bit and need to get your breathe and inspiration back.