Being able to adjust on the fly

When planning a lesson, teachers need to anticipate potential problems and solutions, both with the target language and with the delivery of the lesson. Let’s take a simple example. Teachers often find it difficult to gauge how long different stages of their lessons will take – especially if they are new to teaching or if they have a new class. Perhaps your students will know more (or less) about the target language than you expect. Perhaps it will take more (or less) time to introduce the target language than you expect. Perhaps the practice tasks will be harder (or easier) to set up than you expect.

For this reason, it’s helpful to consider potential problems with time management when you are planning the lesson and build some flexibility into your lesson plan. This way, rather than forging ahead when students are struggling, or desperately trying to fill in time when they are flying through material, you can ‘… teach the learners, not the plan’. In other words, you can be ready to respond to your students’ needs and adapt your plan as necessary.

Look back at the basic plan at the start of this module, and you will see that the last stages of the procedure are ‘optional’. There is a suggestion for making the second practice task shorter by just interviewing two classmates instead of three. There is also a suggestion for making it longer by folding over the paper and interviewing one more person. If you have a few minutes left, extend or shorten an activity rather than starting something completely new.

If you finish your lesson much earlier than you expected, you might need a ‘filler’. As the name suggests, a ‘filler’ is usually a fun activity which teachers use to fill in time at the end of a lesson, and it’s always good to have one of these up your sleeve! A good filler should be easy to set up. A quick activity or game which students are already familiar with can work well in this situation, and rather than selecting a filler at random, plan ahead so that the filler links smoothly to the content of the lesson and is as useful as possible. Looking at different stages of your lesson, visualizing how they will unfold in the classroom and asking yourself, ‘What could go wrong with this?’! may not sound like a very optimistic approach but in fact it’s a great way to help ensure that a lesson runs smoothly.