The Teacher as Narrative: Part Deux
Another way to use yourself and your life experience is to tell the class a story about your life. It can be any story. One of my stories I like to tell is about my 2-month bike trip around Turkey. It’s a good story because the students find it interesting, it establishes rapport because the students learn more about you, and it’s about Turkey, so they can relate to it very well. You can find the full lesson plan here.
The students are always interested in stories about their teachers’ lives, especially stories about their teachers’ experiences in their country. This is a good way to introduce yourself to a class in your first week and practice some English at the same time. Plan out which story you are going to tell and then devise a listening around it. You can simply create a bunch of questions that students have to answer, have them order photos, hand out true or false statemetns, or you can focus on a grammar point. Grammar points like “Before/After”, “When/While”, “Past vs. Past Perfect”, and “Relative Clauses” are just a few that can be pulled from almost any story.
I think it’s best to include a story that you have pictures for. This makes the listening more interesting and the students have visual images to connect the events to. These images can be posted around the room and students can follow them as you relate the story, they can be mixed up and the students have to order them, or the students can take notes related to the images or fill in gaps in information you have written under them.
Again, this is a lesson that starts out with the teacher as the story and the teacher remains the center of attention while the story is being related. Most likely the students will want to do a Q & A with you about details they missed or extra information they want, and this should be encouraged.
After the story is finished the students can be put in pairs or groups and they can do a number of things . Perhaps they can tell the story back to each other. Or the pics can be used to elicit your grammar focus, i.e. “Nick got hit by a truck after he left Hasankeyf”, or “This is the boy that spoke five languages”, or “Nick saw the sheep while he was biking from Hasankeyf to Mardin.” If you have the students write the sentences on the back, they can be used as flashcards afterwards. Maybe you can do a game where they get the card if they can say the sentence on the back correctly and the person with the most at the end wins. There’s a lot of possibilities here.
Finally, the students can tell their own story. You could have students write their story the next hour and then present it to the class. Personally, I like to set this as a homework and have the students bring in their own pictures. It makes it more personal and interesting.
As you do these types of lessons where the teacher starts out at the center and ends up only as an observer you can transition more and more to the latter. After a week or two of lessons in this format, students will become accustomed to a learner-centered classroom and you can make the transition. As you do this make sure you are always including your students in the hows and whys of your method. Keep them involved at all points and as they see the benefits of the methods you are discussing, they will be much happier with shifting fully over to this style.
Do you ever use stories from your life in the classroom? If so, how? What stories do the students enjoy the most?
Lesson Plan – My Bike Story
Lesson Ideas, Teaching Strategies | turklis1 | 
October 10, 2009 10:59 am
4 Comments
Other Links to this Post
-
Red River Press News » ESL-Library » From the Archives: TurklishTEFL on The Teacher as Narrative — September 24, 2010 @ 11:24 pm
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Subscribe
By Diana, October 11, 2009 @ 12:27 pm
Okay, it’s settled. I’m doing this lesson plan as soon as I get the chance! I need to gather some photos…
Thanks so much!! By the way.. you must tell us about you getting hit by a truck and biking around Turkey. Hilarious..
By Karenne Sylvester, October 19, 2009 @ 7:44 am
Brilliant lesson Nick – I enjoy storytelling with students and it’s usually as riveting as watching youtube (re your other post, which obv I like too).
Another idea for the teacher as the narrative is actually for the first day of class: a getting 2 know you / question forms practice.
You simply bring in random pictures, associated to your life, and get students to ask you questions about their significance.
Take care,
Karenne
By admin, October 19, 2009 @ 8:00 am
Thanks for the comment Karenne
That’s a good idea for an intro lesson. I’ve actually never done that. I’ll definitely start though.
I usually do something similar that I believe is a TEFL classic. I bring in my wallet with pictures, credit cards, cards from hostels I’ve stayed in, pics of the wife & family, money from various parts of the globe, and some special people in my life. I divide the material up among the class and then they have to tell the class what they learned about me and ask questions to clarify or elicit extra information.