Formal plan

Jungle path

Vague (corridor) plan

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Planning notes

Follow the coursebook exactly

The actual form a plan takes is less important than the thought that has gone into it; the overriding principle is that we should have an idea of what we hope our students will achieve in the class, and that this should guide our decisions about how to bring it about. However, written plans (both sketchy and more detailed) do have a secondary function as a record of what has gone on, and in the lesson itself they help to remind teachers of what they had decided to do, what materials they need, and how long they had planned to spend on certain activities.

Making a plan

The following example of making a plan exemplifies how a teacher might proceed from pre-planning to a final plan.

Pre-planning background

For this lesson, some of the facts that feed into pre-planning decisions are as follows:

• The class is at intermediate level. There are 31 students. They are between the ages of 18 and 31.

• They are enthusiastic and participate well when not overtired.

• The students need 'waking up' at the beginning of a lesson.

• They are quite prepared to 'have a go' with creative activities.

• Lessons take place in a light classroom equipped with a whiteboard and an overhead projector.

• The overall topic thread into which the lesson fits involves forms of transport and different traveling

• environments. In the course book this will change next week to the topic of 'avoidable disasters'.

• The next item on the grammar syllabus is the construction should have + DONE.

• The students have not had any reading skills work recently.

• The students need more oral fluency work.

Pre-planning decisions

As a result of the background information listed above the teacher makes the following decisions:

• The lesson should include an oral fluency activity.

• The lesson should include the introduction of should have + DONE.

• It would be nice to have some reading in the lesson.

• The lesson should continue with the transport theme - but make it significantly different in some

way.

The plan

On the basis of our pre-planning decisions we now make our plan.

It should be emphasised that the following lists are not examples of any planning format since that is a matter of style unless we are planning formally (see below).

The teacher has made the decision to have the students read the text about a space station, and build activities around this. The text does not come from their course book, but is one the teacher has used before.

The probable sequence of the lesson will be:

1. An oral fluency activity with 'changing groups' in which students have to reach a decision about what

2. five personal possessions they would take into space.

3. Reading for prediction and then gist, in which students are asked to say what they expect to be in a

4. text about a space station, before reading to check their predictions and then reading again for detailed understanding.

5. Ending the story, in which students quickly devise an ending for the story.

6. New language introduction in which the teacher elicits 'should have' sentences and has students say them successfully.

7. Language practice in which students talk about things they did or did not do, and which they should not or should have done

8. A space job interview in which students plan and role-play an interview for a job in a space station.

However, the teacher makes (or thinks of) a list of additional task possibilities, for example:

• Interview Cathy years later to find out what happened to her.

• Students write a 'newsflash' programme based on what happened.

• A short extract from a video on future space exploration.

• Students discuss the three things they would miss most if they were on a space station.

The Formal Plan

Formal plans are sometimes required, especially when, for example, teachers are to be

observed and/or assessed as part of a training scheme or for reasons of internal quality control. A formal plan should contain some or all of the following elements:

Class description and timetable fit: a class description tells us who the students are, and what can be expected of them. It can give information about how the group and how the individuals in it behave, as in the following example:

CLASS DESCRIPTION

The students in this upper intermediate class are between the ages of 18-31. There are 21 women and 10 men. There are

PAs/secretaries, 5 housewives, 10 university students (3 of these are postgraduates), teachers, 2 businessmen, a musician

a scientist, a chef, a shop assistant and a waiter.

Because the class starts at 7:45 in the evening, students are often quite tired after a long day at work (or at their studies). They can switch off quite easily, especially if they are involved in a long and not especially interesting piece of reading, for example. However, if they get involved they can be noisy and enthusiastic. Sometimes this enthusiasm gets a little out of control and they start using their first language a lot.

Depending on the circumstances of the plan, the teacher may want to detail more information about individual students, e.g. Hiromi has a sound knowledge of English and is very confident in her reading and writing abilities. However, she tends to be rather too quiet in group-work, since she is not especially comfortable at 'putting herself forward'. This tends to get in the way of the development of her oral fluency. Such detailed description will be especially appropriate with smaller groups, but becomes increasingly difficult to do accurately with larger classes.

However, a record of knowledge of individual students gained through such means as observation, homework, and test scores is invaluable if we are to meet individual needs.

We also need to say where the lesson fits in a sequence of classes (the before and after) as in the following example:

TIMETABLE FIT

The lesson takes place from 7:45 to 9pm on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. In the past three lessons the students have been discussing the issues of journeys and travelling - how people adapt to different travelling environments. They have listened to an interview with someone who lives in a bus and travels around the country looking for places to park it. They have been looking at vocabulary and expressions related to travelling. They have revisited a number of past tenses, including hypothetical past (third) conditionals ('If he hadn't lost his job, he wouldn't have sold his house'). Next week the class will start working on a 'crime and punishment' unit with includes a courtroom role-play with work on crime-related lexis, and passive constructions.

We will also include information about how the class has been feeling and what kind of activities they have been involved in (eg: controlled or communicative, pair-work or group-work). All these factors should have influenced our planning choices for this lesson.

Lesson aims

The best classroom aims are specific and directed towards an outcome which can be measured. If we say My aim is that my students should/can... by the end of the class, we will be able to tell, after the lesson, whether that aim has been met or not. Aims should reflect what we hope the students will be able to do, not what the teacher is going to do. An aim such as to teach the present perfect is not really an aim at all- except for the teacher.

A lesson will often have more than one aim. We might well say, for example, that our overall objective is to improve our students' reading ability, but that our specific aims are to encourage them to predict content, to use guessing strategies to overcome lexical problems, and to develop an imaginative response to what they encounter.

Aims can be written in plans as in the following example:

AIMS

1. To allow students to practise speaking spontaneously and fluently about something that may

2. provoke the use of words and phrases they have been learning recently.

3. To give students practise in reading both for gist and for detail.

4. To enable students to talk about what people have 'done wrong' in the past, using the 'should (not) have' + 'done' construction.

5. To have students think of the interview genre and list the kinds of questions which are asked in such a situation.

Activities, procedures, and timing

The main body of a formal plan lists the activities and procedures in that lesson, together with the times we expect each of them to take. We will include the aids we are going to use, and show the different interactions which will take place in the class.

When detailing procedure, 'symbol' shorthand is an efficient tool to describe the interactions that are taking place: T=teacher; S=an individual student; T→C=the teacher working with the whole class; S,S,S=students working on their own; S←→S=students working in pairs; SS←→SS=students in discussion with other pairs; GG=students working in groups, and so on. The following example shows how the procedure of an activity can be described:

	Activity/Aids	Interaction	Procedure	Time
1	Group decision making Pen and paper	a T→C B S,S,S c S←→S d SS←→SS (GG) e T←→GG	T tells students to list five things they would take into space with them SS make their lists individually In pairs students have to negotiate their items to come up with a shared list of only five items to take to a space station Pairs join with other pairs. The new groups have to negotiate their items to come up with a shared list of only five items to take to a space station The T encourages groups to compare their own lists	1’ 2’ 4’ 4’ 3’

Specific language that is to be focused on should also be included, as in this example:

	Activity/Aids	Interaction	Procedure	Time
4	Language study Space station Text/board	a T→C b T←→S,S,S	T elicits sentences based on the previous ‘problem identification’ session e.g. ‘She shouldn’t have been rude to Cathy.’ ‘She should have looked at the record book.’ ‘She should have told the others where she was going.’ T has students say the sentences, and may do individual/class work on the pronunciation of the shortened form /ʃɚɖɚv/ e.g. should’ve, and /ʃɚɖntɚv/ shouldn’t have.	1’ 10’

Problems and possibilities: a good plan tries to predict potential pitfalls and suggests ways of dealing with them. It also includes alternative activities in case we find it necessary to divert from the lesson sequence we had hoped to follow. When listing anticipated problems it is a good idea to think ahead to possible solutions we might adopt to resolve them, as in the following example:

Anticipated problems	Possible solutions
Students may not be able to think of items to take to a space station with them for activity 1	I will keepmy eyes open and go to prompt any individuals who look ‘vacant’ or puzzled with questions about what music, books, pictures, etc. they might take
Students may have trouble contracting ‘should not have’ in activity 4	I will do some isolation and distortion work until they can say /ʃɚɖntɚv/

Where we need to modify our lesson dramatically, we may choose to abandon what we are doing and use different activities altogether. If our lesson proceeds faster than we had anticipated, on the other hand, we may need additional material anyway. It is therefore sensible, especially in formal planning, to list additional possibilities, as in the following example:

ADDITIONAL POSSIBILITIES

Extra speaking: If some groups finish first they can quickly discuss what three things from home they would most miss if they were on a space station.

News broadcast: Students could write an earth 'newsflash' giving news of what happened at the space station starting 'We interrupt this programme to bring you news of...

Video clip: If there's time I can show the class an extract from the 'Future of Space Exploration' programme.

Interview plus: Interview Cathy years later to find out what happened to her.

Planning a sequence of lessons

Planning a sequence of lessons is based on the same principles as planning a single lesson, but there are number of additional issues which we need to pay special attention to: Before and during

However carefully we plan, in practice unforeseen things are likely to bare themselves during the course of a lesson, and so our plans are continually modified in the light of these. Even more than a plan for an individual lesson, a scheme of work for weeks or months of lessons is only a proposal of what we hope to achieve in that time. We will need to revisit this scheme constantly to update it.

Short and long-term goals

However motivated a student may be at the beginning of a course, the level of that motivation may fall dramatically if the student is not engaged or if they cannot see where they are going -or know when they have got there. In order for students to stay motivated, they need goals and rewards. While a satisfactory long-term goal may be 'to master the English language', it can seem only a dim and distant possibility at various stages of the learning cycle. In such circumstances students need short-term goals too, such as the completion of some piece of work (or some part of the programme), and rewards such as success on small, staged lesson tests, or taking part in activities designed to recycle knowledge and demonstrate acquisition.

When we plan a sequence of lessons, we need to build in goals for both students and ourselves to aim at, whether they are end-of-week tests, or major revision lessons. That way we can hope to give our students a staged progression of successfully met challenges.