Unit 4Lesson Planning

Unit 4Lesson Planning

Module 1 Classroom Management and Assessment

At the end of this module you will:-

a)understand the overall aims of TESOL

b)know basic management techniques that can help you to facilitate communication in the classroom

c)know how to increase participation and make students ‘active learners’

d)have considered ‘differentiation’ as a key part of teaching

e)have considered formative assessment as a part of everyday teaching and planning

Part 1. Classroom Management

Aims

Our aim as teachers of English to speakers of other languages is to involveall the students all the time. We want to have active learners who are following the lesson, building on what they learn and feeling that they are achieving something.

If you come from a teaching background where everyone is supposed to be getting on with work quietly then this may be a bit of a shock for you. But think of it this way: you have very little teaching time, and the students need to learn a great deal if they are to achieve any degree of fluency or if their goal is to pass an exam.

If we adopt a communicative approach, we are to teach communication. This means we want our students to talk (in English of course). Many of your students, if they are living in their own country, have an opportunity to speak English only in class so you need to maximise their interaction time.

If you have a class of students who are preparing for a writing or grammar test, want to expand their academic vocabulary, etc, then the role of oral communication will be less significant. But even so, keeping the students involved and encouraging their active participation will be absolutely essential.

In order to achieve your aim of involving all the students all the time and making them active learners, you must be able to 'manage' your class. That means to organise teaching and learning in the most efficient way, where every participant feels that his or her needs are being met and where everything you and your students do works towards achieving the objectives of a lesson or course. An important part of classroom management is being able to control your students' concentration and behaviour and to prevent discipline problems.

Every teacher develops his/her own style of classroom management. That's because our behaviour as teachers is linked to our personal preferences - how much noise or silence we can stand, how good we are at organising paperwork and so on. But whatever your personal style is, one useful statement to repeat to yourself might be:

‘TEACHING’ IS NOT ‘LEARNING’.

There is more to real teaching than standing at the front of the class and passing on knowledge. Telling people things is no guarantee they will learn them.

Real teaching involves constant interaction with students, so that learning occurs as part of communication. If your students are learners in an active sense, taking part in what is happening in the classroom, then they will get the most out of their lessons - much more than by listening to you.

Do you remember what L.T.T.T means – we discussed it in Unit 3 Module 1?

If you have forgotten, go back and remind yourself.

Having a well-planned and engaging lesson, in which the principle of L.T.T.T is followed, goes a long way towards keeping your students' participation levels high and preventing discipline problems.

There are a number of basic techniques which good ESOL teachers use to manage their class in a professional and skilful way.

The ‘basics’ of everyday class management

1. Look at all the students in the class.

Switch your gaze from side to side and back to front of your class. It is so easy to stick with an area of friendly faces, but this is unfair on the others who will then not be so involved in the lesson. Call on different students – try to avoid the temptation of calling on the same most active ones all the time. Another mistake is calling only on those who are silent assuming that the students who have raised their hand know the answer anyway – this is discouraging for the active students.

2. Move around the class.

Try to move around the class sometimes - not only to check what the students are doing but also to deliver input from a different direction. For example, if you have done some board work that you want the students to focus on, you can move to the back of the class and explain the diagram from behind the students, so their gaze is on the board. It encourages them to listen and also allows you to assess how clear your writing is.

If you are talking about flowers and trees, move to the window! If you are teaching classroom equipment, move around the room picking up the pens and pencils of different students, don’t just use a pile on your desk.

Don't overdo it: a non-stop teacher may come across to students as a prowling lion and they may feel uneasy if they never know when you are going to pop up behind them. But a teacher ‘glued to the board’ can be easy to ignore - ‘she’s never going to come over my way….’

3. Make sure your board work is clear and tidy.

It is essential to write clearly. Make it easy for your students.

It is not as easy as it looks to write on a black/white board and keep it straight, so you may need practice. Print wherever possible. This is especially important if any of the students you are teaching use a different script in their own language. Don't write everything in capital letters. (Remind yourself of the discussion on board work in Unit 3 Module 4)

4. Remember students' names.

Make an effort to remember their names. Pronounce the names of your students correctly. It is no excuse that their names are very difficult to remember let alone pronounce. You would not like it if you were always called the wrong name or your name was always mispronounced. Getting their names right as soon as possible shows your respect for them as people.

Make yourself a seating plan/chart and write their names phonetically. Involve them in your learning of their name. Ask them to correct your pronunciation. Ask them if they know what their name means. Be careful: you may inadvertently change the sex of the person by changing one letter in their name!

5.Think about the seating arrangements

Group students rather than seat them in rows. No communication can take place when students are looking at the back of someone's head. In many cases, the best arrangement is a circle or semi-circle (horseshoe) - all students can be involved and they become a community. With a horseshoe it's easy to see both all your classmates and the demonstration on the board. If the class is large, put them in small groups, each sitting in a circle. Often you will need to rearrange the furniture. Do not be afraid to do this and to explain that you are doing it to aid communication.

Whilst you cannot be moving the furniture around all the time in a lesson, getting students to help you set up as they come in and put the tables back at the end of the lesson will only take a couple of minutes and can really stimulate an activity.

Make sure that all the students can see the visual aids. If you make your own, think of the student with poor sight!

You may be unable to move the tables around as they are fixed to the floor or have desk-chair combinations. This is getting rarer but can still be the case in older buildings. Chairs are also sometimes joined to the desks. Then there is the room where there is very little space to move the furniture. The least you can do is divide students in side-by-side pairs as they sit. For information gap activities, a pair might be able to turn around and work with the pair of students sitting behind them as a group of four.

If you want each student to change his or her partner, tell the student at the end of each row to move to the opposite end and begin working with the new person next to them. This way, all the pairs will be new.

If the number of students is odd, you can have a group or groups of three along with the pairs, with a clear role given to each person in the triad.

Alternatively, you can plan in advance who will sit next to whom and, at the beginning of the lesson, have each student pick a piece of paper with a number. They will then walk around the classroom looking for their partner who has the same number (and of course, asking questions only in English). The partners will sit together and carry out pairwork activities as they sit.

Now consider the following extract:

(*) This part is omitted from the printed textbook due to copyright protection. Please refer to the digital file of the textbook where you will see an excerpt from the book, The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer 2007, Longman. That will help you complete the tasks. - INTESOL Japan

Below are a few more basic techniques of classroom management.

5. Encourage and praise your students

Your students need encouragement. Even if the answer you get is completely incorrect don't say 'NO!' but try intonation which means 'No, but...', then allow someone you know will have the correct answer to give their version. Don't be afraid to use 'good' frequently, even if it has to be 'Good, but let's hear X's answer' (when you know that his/her answer will be better). This will encourage student Y to try again another time. 'NO!' may discourage. Don’t be afraid to show gently that an answer has not been given clearly and that you don’t quite understand. A puzzled expression from you gives the student a chance to practise reformulation - rephrasing something in a different way - and this is a very valuable skill. It may also be that a class member can pick up on the idea and help to explain.

6. Use a natural voice and never shout

It's easy to yield to the temptation of speaking at an above-normal range. That's a way to lose your voice. That will not necessarily get your students' attention, either. They will mirror your voice level, so you will end up shouting over each other. If we want students to talk at a normal, pleasant volume, we must do the same. Remember to differentiate your tone, eg if you give an instruction, use a declarative tone; if you ask a personal question, use a 'warmer', more conversational tone.

Instead of telling your students to quiet down, just don't say anything, stand in front of them and wait, and then wait some more until they are all quiet. That really works.

7. Use hand signals and other nonverbal communication

You can also keep your hand raised as a pre-agreed gesture meaning that you want silence. Have a repertoire of gestures to control the class and respond to students' contributions. Make sure the students understand what each gesture means; discuss this at the beginning of the course.

Seeing a teacher standing or sitting still all the time is boring. When you move your body, you are more likely to succeed in grabbing their attention.

That having been said, keep in mind the cultural aspect, as some gestures that are perfectly normal to you may be offensive in your students' culture. This can be a good occasion to discuss cultural differences with your students.

8. Bring the outside world into the classroom

This is a key classroom management technique. We should be, as much as possible, linking what happens in the class with what happens in the outside world. Graded readers are available from most publishers at most levels; newspapers are always available in English, some are written for the ex-patriate community and contain useful articles. The internet is a virtually endless source of trivial and less trivial information.

The days of the teacher having to say: ‘I’ll find out for you’ are numbered in many parts of the world - students are more and more able to find things for themselves and indeed should be given the responsibility of doing so.

Ask your students for the latest news each morning - this will get them into the habit of finding out on their way to school, listening to the BBC World Service, accessing news websites and so on.

There is a marked difference in the learning skills of people with a wide general knowledge - it helps them so much with understanding languages and concepts.

An active learner is one who bounds in saying ‘Have you heard about…..?’

SELF-CHECK 4:1 1

Most of your students actively participate in lessons. However, there are a few others who refuse to participate. They sit silently throughout the class. What could be the reasons for their not participating? What solutions can you suggest? Think of at least 3 reasons and 3 solutions.

Reasons

Solutions

The comment is after the extract from Harmer below.

Now consider the following extract:

COMMENT on 4:1 1

Your reasons for students not participating might include:

They are shy

They are of a different level

They are used to a different teaching style

They come from the tradition where each student is expected to work quietly on his/her own

They don't understand your explanations and discussions

You never call on them so they feel discouraged and excluded

You never praise them so they feel discouraged

They find lessons boring

Your solutions might include:

Alternatewhole class work and group work with pair work. Pair work is less daunting than group work.
Give lots of preparation for a spoken activity to ensure students have the language they need.
Before the lesson, make it clear what is to be learnt. At the end of the lesson, emphasise what goals have been reached andpraise students for their individual achievements.
Give clear instructions; step to the back of the class and see if your board work is clear.
Call on all students equally.
Talk to the quiet students after class; you can explain your teaching style, the importance of communication and ask them what could make them participate more.

Questions

Questions are a way of compelling attention from a sleepy student in the corner, but they are also a very important factor in learning. Teachers ask phenomenal amounts of questions and yet do not always think about the kinds of questions they ask!

Who to ask and how to ask

Don't start with the name of the student you are addressing, eg "Panayota, what was the name of the driver?" As soon as you say "Panayota", the rest of the class will switch off. Instead say, "What was the name of the driver?" Pause, look around. Everyone will work out the answer, not knowing who you will ask. When you finally ask Panayota, the other students will listen to see if her answer corresponds with theirs. In educational jargon, this pause is called ‘wait time’. Wait time has been shown to be very effective in encouraging independent thinking and getting the class to work out new information.

You can extend this with younger pupils by asking them to put their hand up when they know the answer and wait until all or nearly all the hands in the room are up before asking for the answer.

Particularly make it a rule not to ask comprehension type questions in a fixed order so that the fifth student along knows he will get question 5 - he will spend all his time working out the answer to question 5 and will not hear or read the text nor will he hear anyone else's question or answer.

Instead, dart around with your questions and sometimes go back to keep everyone on their toes.

A good technique, especially with more open questions (see below) is to get pairs to discuss an answer before giving it to the class - for example ‘What word or words could I use in this space and why?’

Make sure everyone is called upon equally. This is particularly difficult when you are darting around with your questions. Students at the back and in the 'wings' must not be forgotten. This is one area where moving around the room will help you to get a different ‘camera angle’ on the class!

What kinds of questions to ask

Think about these two kinds of questions:

Type 1 questions usually have one right answer. Everyone in the classroom could know the answer. They are often called ‘closed’ questions.