Save Time – Make the Students Do It

Wanna here a funny story? I thought so. Well, this one is about a trainee on a TEFL course. We all know many of us make quite a few blunders during that time and nights are lost stressing and sweating over our lesson plans.

Well, this particular trainee seemed far more worn out than most. She was almost ready to quit so it was time to step in.

Trainer: “What are you so stressed out?

Trainee” (almost in tears) “I’m up until 3am every night preparing my lessons.”

Trainer: “What exactly is taking so long?”

Trainee: “The pictures.”

Trainer: “The pictures?”

Trainee: “Yes, they take forever to draw.”

You see, this particular trainee was an artist. She was hand-drawing every single picture for her lesson. Gorgeously detailed and colored owls, tigers, horses, you name it.

Here’s what she did with them for her Beginner class.

Trainee: “Class, what’s this?” (holding up a picture)

Class: “It’s an owl!”

Trainee” “Good job. What’s this?”

Class: “It’s a tiger!”

Yep, she was spending hours drawing these wonderful pictures and using them for about 5 seconds in the class.

Moral of the story – don’t spend all night preparing an activity that will last 5 seconds .

While her story is a bit extreme, many teachers do this, especially newbies. Far too much time is spent preparing an activity when it’s usefulness in the classroom doesn’t warrant the time.

And usually, someone has prepared something similar before. That’s what the Internet is for. If you can find it on Flicker in two seconds, don’t bother drawing it.

Very related to this is a point Michelle Worgan brought up not too long ago on her blog. In fact, rather than preparing anything at all yourself, have the students do it! It will save you loads of fun and actually often improves the activity.

Having the students create the material will often foster more of a need to use English in the class and the students will have a greater investment as the material being used is coming from them.

A simple example is the TEFL classic, Celebrity Heads. This is the game where students put the name of a celebrity on their back and they have to go around the room asking yes/no questions until they can guess who they are.

For such a simple activity, it can take a long time to prepare. First you have to come up with celebrity names. Seems simple, but then, as a new teacher in a foreign land, you’re unsure who the students know. And then there’s the age difference if you’re teaching younger learners. Then you probably have to go ask a local. Then you ask for some additional local celebrities to show just how culturally sensitive you are. Finally you have to type them up, call up the IT guy and wait five hours to fix the printer, and finally cut them up into little pieces. And if you’re really unlucky, it’ll turn out that the celebrities the local teacher gave you were ones no one in the class actually knows.

The thing is, this can all be avoided. Simply ask the students to do it. That’s right, make ‘em work instead of you. Bring in a bunch of cut-up slips of paper and ask them to write a famous person on it. They’ll be more interested in the activity and it’s much more likely that everyone in the class will know who it is.

I have my students come up with the material for many of my activites. I’d say a good 70% of activites in Rewards books can be improved simply by having the students come up with the language rather than being given it. Role-plays, drawings, example sentences? Again, my students usually do it.

So next time it’s 3am and you’re on your 5th cup of coffee, ask yourself, “Couldn’t I just have my students do it?”

Happy planning

7 Comments

• 

  By Michelle Worgan, December 19, 2010 @ 5:53 pm

  Wouldn’t it be better if training courses showed teachers how to make a lesson out of nothing, dogme style, encouraged them to think of how to create effective activities without having to cut up hundreds of tiny bits of paper, instead of making them spend hours writing out pages of lesson plans that include timing (which can never really be accurate), interaction (is this really necessary?) and so on? A professional training course should train people to do a job well, but it should be realistic and train them to make the best of the situations in which they will actually find themselves – meaning that spending hours on plans and materials for a one hour lesson should be discouraged rather than encouraged because this is not possible in the real world. I’ll stop the rant now!

  Great post with nice examples of how to make your lessons more personal for the students by getting them involved. And thanks for the mention

• 

  By turklis1, December 20, 2010 @ 2:14 am

  I agree Michelle. Actually, my original TEFL course and TESOL courses I’ve run always encouraged planning smart and going with the flow.

  I honestly think the DELTA is the place where far too much emphasis is laid on planning. 2000-word lesson plans covering every minute detail are not any better than general outlines drawn up in ten minutes in my opinion.

  Like PPP, detailed lesson plans are often a sort of safety net for some teachers and I think deviation and reaction to the immediate classroom is ultimately more beneficial. From a training perspective the questions then becomes, “How do we teach that” as teaching lesson plans is so much simpler

• 

  By Darren Elliott, December 22, 2010 @ 9:51 am

  Nick – I agree that it is silly to over prepare, but I don’t think that is what the DELTA is about. I don’t need to spend hours on every lesson NOW, but that might be because I put those hours in on the DELTA and internalised a lot of that good practice. Of course, once you have tightened up to DELTA standard, it takes a bit of loosening to become a functioning and flexible teacher…..

• 

  By turklis1, December 22, 2010 @ 3:42 pm

  Good point Darren. I would say though that there is too much emphasis on the plan. All that reflection is great, but I think it could be seen as more of a DELTA task rather than put forward as a lesson plan. Bit picky I know

• 

  By David Warr, January 13, 2011 @ 2:41 pm

  Excellent post and comments by Michelle and Darren. I hope the artist teacher recovered.

• 

  By Cameron, February 23, 2011 @ 4:14 am

  Hi Nick,

  I think my experience in teaching has taught me how to just to have an idea before hand and then naturally develop while teaching and make sure that the flow hits all the important information. Sure I have a plan before hand, but experience tells me where the students are at the moment and how to get them to where they have to be to hit their learning objectives. Or even when to scrap an idea and then try a different strategy without missing a beat.

  I had a mentor teacher I worked under in the States and he said when you begin teaching 30% of your lesson plans work out, but as you get 20 years of experience 70% do. Wise words indeed!

• 

  By turklis1, February 23, 2011 @ 4:41 am

  Hi Cameron,

  Fantastic comment, I think this is exactly what good, experienced teachers do well. They have a general idea of where they should or can go and then naturally help to guide the class there based on the interactions that develop. Scott has a nice post up on the importance of flow here http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/f-is-for-flow/ that is well worth a read.

  This is also the reason rigid curriculums become more of a hindrance than a help to good teachers.

  Very interesting comment from the mentor. I would also hazard that a teacher’s conceptualization of a lesson plan is quite different at the beginning and later stages of their careers, which would factor greatly into perceiving how much of it worked and how much of it didn’t.

  Hope to see more comments in the future

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