The Language Teacher
06 - 2001
Planning Lessons and Courses*
Tessa Woodward
I was asked to write an article for The Language Teacher giving a clear idea of my current interests in the field of TESOL teacher training, connected to the topics I plan to talk about at the PAC3 at JALT2001 conference in November 2001 in Kitakyushu and in the workshops on the Four Corners Tour before the conference. Thus, I have chosen to give an introduction to the topic of planning lessons and courses. I have been thinking about this topic for the past few years, and have just published a book on it, Planning Lessons and Courses (2001). So this will be my overall topic when I come to Japan.
A Working Definition
By planning, I mean what most working teachers do when they say they're planning their lessons and courses. Thus, I take planning to include: considering the students, thinking of the content, materials and activities that could go into a course or lesson, jotting these down, pondering quietly, cutting things out of magazines, and anything else that you feel will help you to teach well and help the students to learn a lot. I do NOT mean the writing of pages of notes with headings such as "Aims" and "Anticipated problems" to be given in to an observer before they watch you teach.
I also take it as given that plans are just plans. They're not legally binding. We don't have to stick to them come hell or high water. They are to help us shape the space, time and learning we share with students. We can depart from them or stick to them as we, the students and the circumstances seem to need.
My Own Definition of Good Lessons and Courses
I've said that planning is something we do to ensure our lessons and courses go well. A good lesson or course, to me, is one where there's plenty of language learning going on and where the students and I:
- feel comfortable physically, socially, psychologically.
- know a little about each other, why we are together and what we want to get out of the experience. (We also know these things may keep shifting slightly as we go through the course)
- are aware of some of what there is to learn.
- are aware of some of the things we have learned.
- have a notion about how we learn best.
- accept that language is a mixture of things (part instinct, motor skill, system, cultural artifact, music, part vehicle for content and part content itself), that it changes all the time and thus that we need to teach and learn it in a variety of ways.
- learn at what we consider to be a reasonable speed.
- know why we're doing the activities we're doing.
- do things in class that would be worth doing and learn things that are worth learning for their own sakes outside the language classroom.
- become more capable of taking the initiative, making decisions and judging what is good and useful.
- start useful habits which will continue after we have left each other.
- follow our plan or depart from it when necessary in order to bring about the criteria above.
What are Teachers' Concerns about Lesson and Course Planning?
As teachers, our concerns about preparing lessons and courses tend to differ according to the amount of experience we have.
A beginner teacher's concern -- planning takes too long. "It just doesn't seem right! I stay up 'til one in the morning preparing for a 45 minute lesson the next day! I can't see how I can keep this up. What happens when I start a real job and have to teach six hours a day? I mean...does it get any better?" This is what a beginner teacher asked me recently. I remembered when I started my first teaching job. I used to spend all evening planning lessons for the next day. Why does lesson preparation take inexperienced teachers so long? I think it's partly because there are so many variables for a starter teacher to consider as they think about the time they will spend with a class.
An experienced teacher's concern -- it's getting boring! "Oh that was so boring! Well, actually I don't think THEY were incredibly bored. I mean they were working all right but I bored MYSELF rigid! I've done that lesson too many times." These remarks, which I've heard in staff rooms or said myself, point to the dilemma of experienced teachers. Planning and teaching have gotten easier. They don't take up much mental space anymore. Experienced teachers can switch into autopilot, do things they have done many times before and use their energies in other parts of their lives such as bringing up their children, learning fencing or falling in love again.
Autopilot is really useful. It can get you through times of fatigue, personal happiness or distress, but it can be boring for the pilot. It's good to be able to cut corners and have more time for yourself, but it is not so good to succumb to the temptation of using old ideas and materials again and again.
Whatever our ideological position on lesson planning, we have to admit that most students come to class expecting something to happen and most experienced teachers put some thought into how to structure time spent with students. Most experienced teachers can do that thinking a lot more easily than when they started their jobs. What's more, they can do it before, during or after lessons. We may not know how we got to be able to do this, but most of us, looking back, can sense a distance has been traveled.
So what does happen in between the time when planning takes all night and makes you miserable and the time when you can do it easily and enjoyably while washing or driving? What makes it possible for me now to write lesson notes for Wednesday's class while I'm still teaching them on Tuesday?
How do we learn about planning?
The first way: Considering our past learning experiences
When we are students ourselves in class we absorb
a lot of information, often quite unconsciously, about types of
groups, content, activities, sequences, materials and routines.
By considering past learning experiences we can recover very useful
routines.
The second way: Using course books
Another
way of getting better at preparing is by using course books. A
beginner teacher using a course book will absorb routines from
it, especially if there is a helpful teachers' book to go with
it. The tendency to pick up content types, activities, lesson
types and course models from course books will be reinforced if
the same books are taught several times with different classes
and especially if a part of every unit is the same.
The third way: Learning as we teach
There
are many other ways that we gradually get more effective at our
course and lesson planning as we teach. We do so by:
As we do the work above, we'll start to understand that lessons are composed of lots of different elements that affect each other and which can be used as starting points for planning. We'll gain the experience of personal examples of individual students, types of classes, and timings of activities. We'll then be able to call up these examples in memory for comparison in the future. We'll also get a repertoire of exercises and sequences of exercises. I believe that it is also partly the ability to call up practiced sequences or chunks that make lesson planning easy for the experienced teacher. If inexperienced teachers could be helped to acquire these, how much easier their lives would be.
On the darker side however, it's also these same chunks, partly, that make trying something new difficult for the experienced teacher. The sight of a text, for example, suggests an almost automatic set of activities that can be applied to it and away the experienced teacher goes, down a useful but rather well worn path. Useful chunks have been learnt by the experienced teacher over the years and they can now lead to a rather stultifying, over-routinized way of working. If experienced teachers could be helped to wander off these paths, how much more interesting our work might be.
Hopes for the Tour and Conference
If you're a starter teacher, you could probably do with picking up a repertoire of new teaching chunks so that you can piece together lessons and sets of lessons swiftly and effectively. If you're a teacher who's settled into your career, you may be looking for new repertoires to help you make the experiments you want to make. If you're a very experienced teacher, you may need to put some of your well- worn routines to one side and try out new ones in order to keep awake personally and professionally. I hope very much that my talks and workshops while in Japan will be useful to you, wherever you are in your career cycle, for they will be full of chunks and repertoires of all different kinds.
*This article represents an abridged version of the introduction to Planning Lessons and Courses by Tessa Woodward, recently published by Cambridge University Press (CUP). Information regarding CUP ELT can be accessed at: <http://www.cambridge.org/elt>
All materials on this site are copyright © by JALT and their respective authors.
For more information on JALT, visit the JALT National Website