miércoles, 19 de agosto de 2015

Second Entry: Lesson Plan and Class Objectives




Thinking as a teacher, what do you think is missing in these two situations?










6 comentarios:

  1. ANYTHING can happen in a classroom. Planning randomly only drives to insanity, why do I say that? Because if me as a teacher, don't pay attention in what I am suppossed to do, my class will end out of control, following a book or repeating. I believe that if we have a good lesson plan the hard part of the work is done, which is..to be confident.

    Now, about the plan a, b, c. We should have other options of activities to adapt if something goes wrong, another video, other examples, other exercises, songs, materials, etc. I'm a preschool teacher and in preschool nothing goes as planned (and when that happens I get very unconfortable) and that's why I have many other activities which I can use to replace the one that failed. It's not to change your whole lesson plan is to have some other ideas. Some of them are so simple you don't have to plan or explain.

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  2. 1st: Maybe the oral production part because if they could not develop this in class, the lesson would be incomplete. All the competences must be united in one lesson, at least to me.
    2nd: Everything is absolutely wrong because you must have many activities to catch the attention of your students and a video beam is not a good idea, it is boring and at the end of the day your students will repeat the lesson but they won’t learn anything. You need to wake up their ideas, and need to be creative in the way you manage your class.

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  3. I agree with Estefanía that planning is very important. I also would like to add that when it comes to lesson planning objectives are one of the most important aspects. Even though we as teachers come up with really good ideas for activities in the classroom, the lack of clear and well stablished objectives will lead the classes nowhere.
    Regarding the second situation, my practicum taught me never to rely on technology only. It is true that the use of ICTs in the L2 classroom is a must in the current era because of all the benefits of teaching and learning a second language; however it does not always work as we expect. Therefore, my plan B always seeks to replace the phase of technology in order to fullfill the requirements of the lesson planned.

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  4. 1st. Planning a lesson should not be done randomly, but in my opinion it also should not be so rigid. A lesson plan is a guide a road map that can be followed but a teacher should also be able to deviate from it.

    When I started my practicum I also got swallowed by a rigid lesson plan and at some points of the classes I had to no idea what to do. In the end I improvised sometimes, but what I learnt from the in-service teacher i helped was that the activities inside your lesson plan should be first enough for a full class and second, they should be 'swappable' which means that any of them could be a warm up or a wrap up.

    In that manner, as for the second image we cannot rely on technology on a 100% we should always have a plan c or d in the case that everything fails.

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  5. 1st. Guidelines are always useful ! That's what a lesson plan is, a guideline. It is not a rigid path. However, as a teacher, it is very frequent to think about what I would like to teach or what I think students need to learn, so we plan every single detail in order to avoid any problem . By thinking that way, we forget about a very little detail: our students. In my opinion, when we plan it is mandatory for us to consider what our students would love to learn and how they would like to get to know that information. It is clear that doing so may be too hard as we depend on what our bosses say or what the curriculm states. Even though, we may not be the ones who choose what to teach, we MUST to create a really good path for students to follow by thinking on how they learn.

    In my practicum, I got to see those previous ideas work properly when my classes were focused on topics that I knew they would love. For instance, I developed a focused on graffiti in order to state whether it should be considered vandalism or art. Not only did the students get to know how to express their opinions (lesson goal), but also reflected on values such as respect towards their mates, and also towards private property.

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  6. On the one hand, it is evident that lesson plans are necessary in the classroom because the teacher needs to know what is he/she going to teach. Besides that, throughout experience teachers think that lesson plans are not necessary. However, since every language class is not the same even if you teach the same topics, lessons plans are always necessary. What if most of the students don’t understand what the teacher explained? You might need to explain again the topic and you will need to do more examples and exercises so as to students understand. On the other hand, if we talk about materials, there will always be a way to create new things in the classroom in order to have a better environment and to let students learn from them.

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