Course Planning

One important criteria to have in mind is that we want to provide variety for our students because, as soon as they become bored, we have lost the crucial attention that students need to learn. However if we were to constantly spring new ideas & activities on them, students might feel disorientated and confused. Therefore, we should also aim to use familiar routines and activities that students already know, in order to provide a familiar structure to the lesson.

A recipe book:

One way that the teacher can plan for variety, is to have a recipe book of these ideas to refer to - that's a personalized recipe book that the teacher builds up over time. The recipes are tried and tested lesson activities, that can be noted down to refer back to in the future. It’s easy to find that you incorporate new ideas that you have heard from colleagues, or seen being done in a conference, only to find that a few months later, you’ve stopped using that activity and in fact you’ve forgotten it.

Another way to vary lessons is to incorporate content from a range of sources. The textbook might be used as the main content for the course, but it can be supplemented by material from other sources.

Lesson planning with ‘threads’:

Planning for variety means that we can keep ourselves and our learners interested and engaged in our classes. At the same time, the opposite concept, routine, can also be an important element in the class to add harmony and balance to the learning experience. 

Threads are activities & routines that students are familiar with, and which they will have no trouble picking up again. For example, if students start most lessons with a review of vocabulary using a word bag which the class regularly updates, they will know what to expect at the start of the class, and this will help to provide a structure to the learning experience. In this way, threads are ‘horizontal’ links that are created across the individual lessons of a course, threading together the experience in such a way that there is continuity.

How can ‘threads’ help the teacher to plan lessons?

Full-time teachers will probably be teaching anywhere between 20 – 30 hours of classes per week. It can be very challenging to plan effectively for such a lot of time. If we use ‘threads’, however, we already have a good idea of what will constitute about a third of the time in our classes. The remaining two thirds becomes far more manageable to plan, and we can concentrate more clearly on the specifics of this remaining content.

Notes on the topic from other sources: [Under construction]

• I particularly like the idea of the students being 'co-conspirators in their own learning".

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