Thursday, May 9, 2013

Lesson planning?

I have recently discovered the iTDi Blog with wonderful posts on teaching and great blog authors. At the moment I am reading about lesson planning and how important it is.
All bloggers do have a point. From what I see everybody agrees that we teachers do need a lesson plan, when we go into a class. We HAVE to be prepared. Prepared what to say, what activities to use, what we can do with our time with the students.
How detailed should a lesson plan be? Should we write every single activity, time, purpose?
Well, to tell you the truth, I have stopped doing that for years...
When I started teaching, I used to spend hours and hours preparing, writing, estimating time... And yes, it has helped me a lot. But from my experience I can say that none of my plans have been completed the way I wanted to. Why? The answer is simple: There will always be somebody who has a question, maybe you need more activities about a structure, because he students didn't quite get it the first time you've explained it, there is always the "entertainer" of the class who will say or do something to make the others laugh, or maybe you have to discuss something different with your class, such as discipline problems, evaluation, etc... Or the opposite happens an you do everything planned and you still have 5 minutes left....
What I do is keep notes of what I want to do every time, always more activities than needed. I always have extra stuff with me. Teacher's book does give me ideas, but I never stick to the plan.
Yes, lesson planning is important. You have to know what you are doing! But always be prepared to adapt to students needs....

Thursday, May 2, 2013

My Failures


After watching this amazing Failure Fest from the latest IATEFL Conference, (which was lots of fun BTW) I couldn't stop thinking that I should write a blog about my failures as a teacher and what I have learned from them.
I remember two particular cases.
Some years ago, when I was still working at a language school in my neighborhood, I got a mixed-ability, mixed-ages class (second year German). First of all the school owner refused to have two separate classes because of the limited number of students, a few people learn German anyway so why bother and pay the teacher extra, but this is another matter and I shouldn't get into it right now.
My problem was not that I had to deal with two different age-groups. It had to do with discipline. The two teenagers (15-16) I had in class were extremely "lively" (I don't want to express myself with more "powerful" words)
They were not interested at all in the language, although I tried and tried to come up with new activities that could intrigue them. They never did homework, they never wanted to participate in any kind of game, exercise etc. All they did was noise, laughter and mocking the other kids.
I tried to deal with it on my own, read books on discipline techniques, talked with the school owner, talked with the parents, who admitted that they couldn't even discipline their children  themselves and that they were both "thrown out"of a couple of schools already.
School year ended without any result or progress, I don't know what happened to these children, because they changed schools again the next year.
I consider it a personal failure because I believe that I could have done more for these children, if I had searched deeper.
Second failure is when we started a class blog. I was all enthusiastic about blogging, I created one with my students. The mistake I made was gibe them free access to write whatever they want! As a result, instead of doing their "homework", they used the page for chatting!!!!!
This was of course something I could correct. So I deleted their free blog and let them use mine for publishing assignments and articles ONLY and this was a big success.
What I wanted to say is that of course we ALL make mistakes. It's only human. How we use these failure experiences is what defines us as teachers and as a person!!!

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Pecha Kucha evening TESOL Macedonia Thrace Convention 2013

I would like to take part in a Pecha Kucha - I consider this the ultimate challenge for a speaker!




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