 This presentation is going to cover this section on lesson planning, and what we're going to do is to have a look as to why we go about planning a lesson, what do we actually put in it, we'll create an empty lesson plan pro forma, and then having done that, what we'll do is to fill in that lesson plan for a particular teaching point. So our starting position is going to be why do we plan lessons at all. There are a number of reasons why we mynd i bwysig y ysgol ymlaen. The first and foremost, perhaps, is that it's going to create a logical sequence for our lessons. If we didn't have a lesson plan, it is quite possible that we could go all over the place and it would become confusing for the students. By having this plan, what we've created is a structure that we can work from. So in effect, the lesson plan itself is a working document, then we can refer to it at various times in the lesson, if we're never quite sure what we're supposed to be doing next, we can just take a quick look at our plan and it tells us where we should be going. Another important reason for planning your lessons out is that it creates a record, a document of what has actually been taught and this can be very useful if wherever questioned as to whether we've covered the syllabus in all its details, then we've got this lesson plan that shows that that has been done. The final reason, the main reason why we plan a lesson is that it can be used for someone to cover your lesson, for example if you created your lesson plans for your next week and for some reason you can't get into work then somebody else could use your lesson plan to make sure that the students don't lose their sequence of lessons. So these are some of the reasons why we plan a lesson, what do we actually put onto that plan. Basically there are two areas that we need to cover on our lesson plan in order for somebody else to be able to take that plan and adequately cover our lesson. Firstly we need to put some general information about the class that is being taught, so how many people are going to be there and so on and so forth, and secondly what should happen during the actual lesson. So what does our lesson plan actually look like? So let's have a go at creating a lesson planning document. So the document itself needs to contain some general information about the class, for example the name of the teacher, the date and time of the lesson, what level of class is being taught and in what room, how many students are we expecting, this is important when we've got things like photocopying and materials to do, what is the context of the lesson, in other words what is the lesson actually about, what vocabulary or grammar point is this lesson covering, and sometimes it's also useful to write out what the focus of the lesson is. So in effect the context of the lesson is telling us the grammar point, for example that might be the present continuous tense, whereas the focus is telling us how we're going to go about teaching it. Another example to illustrate this, let's imagine that we were teaching a starter class about colour, then our focus could be the way in which we're going to teach them about colour, so we could be using clothes or we could be using fruit and vegetables. So here the context would be colour and the focus would be fruit, vegetables, clothes or whatever. Then we have a set of objectives and aims, here the learner objectives relate to what we're hoping the students are going to be able to do by the end of your lesson, and quite often that can be a useful way of writing out what the objectives are. So we would start the sentence, by the end of the lesson the students should be able to and then a list of two, three or four items that we're expecting the students to be able to do by completing this lesson. The learner objectives are different to the teacher aims, the teacher aims are what you are expecting from that lesson itself. Now when you first start teaching quite a normal aim might be to complete the lesson successfully to get through the whole thing without having any problems. As time goes on and you become more experienced then what you would expect is that these teacher aims become more and more specific. So some examples of things that might be in your aims here might be things like to improve my board work, to increase student talk time, and to reduce teacher talk time and so on and so forth. The next section is going to relate to what we might call anticipated problems, and they'll be anticipated problems for both our students and for ourselves. The types of problems that we may anticipate from our students is that they will have difficulties with pronunciation, they may have difficulties with the level of the grammar and being able to put it into context and so on and so forth. Anticipated problems for ourselves, types of problems that we can put in here would be things like making sure that we stick to the plan, making sure that the focus of the lesson is maintained throughout the whole lesson and so on and so forth. So a set of problems, anticipated problems for the teacher and for the students. Now because this is part of the planning process, if we've anticipated problems then it's fairly reasonable to assume that we thought about what we can do if those problems do occur. So one of the examples we had here was that we were anticipating problems with their pronunciation. So a solution to that problem would be to do some form of drilling to help them with the pronunciation problem. One of the problems we had with the anticipated problems with the teacher was that we wanted to make sure that the lesson flows smoothly and so we need to refer to our plan throughout the lesson. Now this doesn't mean that we stand with a piece of paper in our hands, that doesn't generate any confidence from our students whatsoever, but there's no reason at all why we shouldn't have a set of bullet points on a piece of paper on the desk in front of us that every now and again we can just refer to quickly to make sure that we're following our plan in sequence. So these are some of the things that might be on our lesson plan. What we're going to do now is to fill out an actual lesson plan using this particular form. Okay so we're going to use this pro forma as our lesson plan and we're going to fill one out as though we were planning for an actual lesson. So we start off with some basic information about the class, so the name of the teacher, date and time and the class level. In this particular case our class is going to be an elementary class and the room, the room three. Having looked through the registers we see that the expected number of students for this particular class is going to 10. This will help us in creating our worksheet copies. The context of the lesson for this class is going to be present continuous tense and it may well be the first time that this particular level of class has been introduced to this tense. So our focus is going to be fairly general and it's going to look at actions that are happening around now. The teaching aids is basically anything that we bring to the lesson that will help us to teach it. So we know that in our study phase we're going to be using some worksheets and during the activate phase we're going to be doing an activate activity. So here you can fill in worksheets and activate activity. Then we've got our learner objectives and personal aims. If you remember the learner objectives are what we are hoping the students are going to be able to do after the lesson has been taught. So we're hoping that by the end of this lesson the students are going to be able to both recognise and to be able to use the present continuous tense. The personal aims for my particular lesson are that I'm going to improve upon a couple of things which are both my board work and my elicitation techniques from the students. A couple of anticipated problems for the students pronunciation first of all and secondly using the present continuous tense in a real context. Anticipated problems for the teacher. I'm afraid that I may get drawn away from the actual lesson plan itself so following the sequence of the lesson and the solutions to both of these for pronunciation as we've mentioned would be drilling and for the students using the tense in context that would be part of our activate activity and one of the things I can make sure that they can do to overcome this particular problem is to have a strong study phase. By having that strong study phase I can check that the students do understand this particular tense and its context before they actually try to use it. For the anticipated problems for the teacher following the sequence of the lesson again is to have my plan available throughout the lesson. So now we're going to fill the actual procedure of the lesson plan out itself. We mentioned at the start the first thing we do is to get some general information about the class that we'll be teaching and then in order for someone to be able to cover our lesson we need to present enough information in our lesson plan that they can actually carry it out. What I'm going to do is for each stage of the lesson I'll indicate what I'm going to do in the lesson and then we'll cut away from that to have a look to see how that will actually be achieved. So our lesson is going to be based on a 45 minute lesson and the first phase is going to be the engage phase and it's going to be a straight arrow ESA lesson. I'm going to take approximately five minutes on my engage phase and in the interaction box what I'm going to do is to put down what I think is going to be the major overall interaction during that particular part of the lesson. There are three choices that we can use in this particular one. Either the students will be talking mainly to the teacher, the teacher will be talking mainly to the students or the students will be talking to each other. For my particular plan the students on the whole will be talking to me. So what am I going to do in my engage phase? I'm going to ask the question what are you doing right now to generate the subject verb agreements between a number of different subjects and their verbs. So to cut away from that if we imagine that we went around the class asking various people what are you doing right now then we may generate some sentences that could possibly look like this. So John says I am listening to you. Kate says I am sitting. What I can then do is to ask another member of the class okay what is John doing but you can't use his name. So I may get the answer and what is Kate doing and you cannot use her name. What I could then ask the students is okay could you give me another example of using this with somebody else and I can then ask them what are both Kate and this other person doing without using their names. So I get an answer like that. So ask the question what are you doing right now and I get a number of subject and verb agreements for that particular thing using these sets of verbs here and we can then move on from that to the study phase. For the first part of my study phase is going to be the board work and I'm going to use the information that I generated in the elicitation part of my engage phase to move on to the actual board work. What I'm going to do is to show the structure of this particular tense. So the phase is study. I'm expecting to take about 10 minutes on this particular part and again the interaction will mainly be the students talking to me. So how am I going to achieve that with this information? Well we could ask the students to have a look at the sentences themselves and to tell us what they can see. If we look at each of the first words in here then at this level I should hopefully be able to elicit from my students what each of these words have in common and they may well give an answer that each of those words is actually a subject. What I can then do is to elicit those subjects that are not already here for example we and it and those subjects are followed by this second word am is and are and we should be able to elicit from our students that each of those words have something in common in the English language which are they are each of the verb be. Finally we can look at the third word in each of these and find out what they have got in common and the most obvious thing that they have in common despite some spelling changes is that they end up with ing. The thing that goes before those ings is some form of verb to sit to listen and so on and so forth. And so the third word is the verb plus ing. So in this way I'm showing the structure of the present continuous tense in the form of this model subject plus verb be plus the verb ing. So having elicited this particular structure what I'm now able to do is to move on to the actual study activities. Typically they will be in the form of worksheets to check that the students actually understand this information. So I might prepare three activities they may not do them all but for example I could prepare these three study activities so their first one is going to be a fairly straightforward matching activity where perhaps they match the subject to its correct verb to be in that part of the sentence. The second one is going to be a gap fill for example I might use this verb here and ask them to complete a sentence using that verb so that I can check that any spelling changes that take place are correct and the final one is going to be an unscramble where each of the sentences themselves are put into the wrong order and they have to recreate the correct order following this particular structure. So the activate activity is going to try to get the students to use this particular present continuous tense in a realistic setting. Let's assume that we used five minutes up during our engage phase ten minutes for our board work study another ten minutes for them to do the study activities that we mentioned then that would leave us with about 25 minutes for this particular phase. One of the reasons why there is such a long period for this particular part of the lesson is that it's when the students are actually going to be talking to each other using a language in a realistic way so our interaction is mainly going to be student to student and then they will feedback that information to us in completion of the task so it will also be student to the teacher. This particular activate activity has to be something that will allow the students to use the language in a realistic way. So an example here each student is going to get an activity picture card and on there will just be a simple cartoon type picture showing some form of action taking place so for example it may show show someone fishing it may show someone playing football and so on and so forth. They're also going to get a questionnaire and on that questionnaire there's going to be two questions that they're going to ask each of each other what is your name and what are you doing right now and each student will get up and it will be a mildrial process where they find out the person's name and what they're doing right now. What each student will report back is the picture that they have what activity is it showing and so for example they will say I am playing football or I am cooking a meal and so on and so forth. What we could do here is get the students either to write it in that way or they can use the person's name so John is playing football or Kate is cooking and so on and so forth and the students will then feedback those results to the class in the form of sentences. Just to finish off this particular section on lesson planning we're going to go through a couple of procedures that should take place during the study phase periods particularly when we're doing the activities. It is quite important that before we actually go into a study activity that we go through a process of showing how that activity is going to work and one acronym that is often used for this is DEGO. The D part of this stands for a demonstration of the activity. Now it's very important that you don't try to explain how the activity is going to work but rather you actually demonstrate the process. An example of the demonstration of the process of the activity could be something as simple as taking the first question and using it and writing it on the board. This will show the students what it is that they're actually going to do. Having demonstrated the process of the activity you need to make sure that the students can answer that question and so we elicit a correct answer for that particular question. Having done that we can then give out the material. If we've gone through this DEGO process correctly there shouldn't be any reason for the teacher to actually say anything else whilst the activity is taking place. The students should be working through the activity talking to each other and that then frees the teacher up to actually do some other things. Whilst the activity is taking place you as the teacher can actually monitor what is going on. Well what do we actually do whilst this monitoring is taking place? You can actually go around the class whilst you're doing this however it's very important that you don't stop the students from working. So monitor from a distance so that you're not actually interrupting anyone and some of the things that you can be noting down whilst you're monitoring is their progress. It's useful to monitor their progress because once the activity has been stopped you're then going to feed back their answers and it's important that you know who has done what. You don't want to be asking a particular group for their answers to question 7 if they haven't completed it. So check to see what their progress is ready for when you get to the feedback. As you go around you should be able to pick up on some common errors either in what is being said or in what is being written down and again leave that until the feedback stage in order to be able to cover it. So you need to monitor the students. Before you get to the process of feedback it's very important that you actually close the activity to make sure that nobody is still working whilst these answers are being given back. So settle everyone down make sure that they're all paying attention and you can then start to feedback the answers. As you feedback hopefully most of our answers or all of our answers will be correct but we are going to get some errors and mistakes. If those errors and mistakes take place then they need to be corrected. When our answers are not correct then obviously they need to be corrected but it is quite important that we go through a process of correction that will help the students. Quite often they've made a mistake simply because of something like reading the incorrect answer out or misrepresenting what they've actually written down so always give the opportunity when a mistake has been made for the student to self-correct first. We can often do this in a non-verbal way to show them that they're not actually correct. We might repeat back what they've said to us in a questioning manner or we may just make a gesture to make sure that they understand that they're not correct. So we allow for a process of self-correction. It may be that the student has actually got the answer wrong and so we move on from there. Is there somebody in the class who can give us the correct answer so moving on to peer correction? Again it may be possible that it's not we're not able to get the correct answer from anybody in the class and then we can step in as the teacher so the teacher will correct. So we actually go through a process of allowing them to correct themselves if possible. If they can't can one of their peers correct them and if they can't the teacher corrects. It is important that we go through this process and that we don't just immediately go into teacher correction. John, no that's wrong, the answer is x, y or z. Try to allow this process to take place. In conclusion to this particular presentation we thought about how we can go about planning an individual ESA lesson plan. Obviously when we're teaching we're going to be needing to plan for every day or every other couple of days with any particular class. So we have to create a sequence of lessons. Just a couple of things to consider when you're doing your lesson planning for a sequence. Firstly what are the goals or the aims of this particular course that you're teaching? Does it lead to an examination? Is there a particular syllabus that you have to cover and is there a particular route through that syllabus? So when you're planning a sequence of lessons have a look at what the students are supposed to be able to be able to do by the end of your course in terms of the syllabus and any examination that's taking place. Whilst we may be working towards some particular end it is important that when the planning a sequence of lessons that we remain flexible. In other words can we adjust that sequence to their needs? We may say that I'm planning two particular lessons on the present continuous but the students are finding difficulty with it. Is it possible within your sequencing to allow for three or maybe even four lessons and will that still fit into the overall scheme of things? Finally it's important to add some variety into the teaching and quite often within all of these requirements there will be the actual skills that the students have to pick up and those will be the productive skills and receptive skills so make sure that all the elements of speaking, writing, reading and listening are covered in your overall sequence of lessons. So what we've covered here is the reasons why we plan how to go about planning, what should actually be inside it and we've also covered an actual lesson plan to show you how it's filled out. Hopefully by planning your lessons you will give yourself a clearer focus as to where your classes are going and it will present much more straightforward classes to your students.