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First Lesson Aims: Dave Tucker Guest Post!

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:30:23 GMT

If you’ve had time to look at recent posts on this blog, you’ll have noticed a series of “first lesson” ideas and activities… after all, it’s September, we’ve all got “back-to-school-itis”!

Stepping back from the plethora of great teaching ideas to fill the class time, today our guest blogger, Dave Tucker, looks at some broader learning and teaching goals that we might want to think about before we start planning!

First Lesson Aims

I love first lessons. I tend to approach first lessons with new groups feeling uniformly nervous but excited. I come out of first lessons feeling variously elated, charged up, determined, sometimes shocked, but never despondent. A whole school year ahead to make the most of the medley of characteristics and quirks the students have, in the same nervous mindset as me, laid bare in the first moment of meeting! Lots of activities have in mind exactly this opening and sharing: “getting to know you” is the general term applied to these jolly bare-alls, but different ages, levels and group-types have different aims and needs.

Rather than focus on actual activities which are two a penny and available from anyone who has been through at least one year of this sort of thing, I instead choose to list here the possible aims for my first lessons and encourage people to sculpt accordingly. Not all the below can be achieved in the first lesson, of course, but I would suggest that most of them should make part of your aims in the first several lessons. Otherwise the rest of the school year could well be missing something that would help preserve that glorious sense of nervous excitement and stop it from so easily shading into despondency…

Possible aims for first lessons

Achievement / challenge – students should leave feeling they have learnt something and extended themselves right at the outset
Get to know each other & the teacher – fosters a sharing, supportive atmosphere in the classroom
Get to know the course/book/exam format – gives objective and direction for the course
Establish ground rules (conduct, homework, English, hands up) – removes need for later harrying, lets everyone know where they stand
Set patterns for future lessons (signals, speaking positions, greetings, etc.) – why waste the first lesson? Get into it now and make your life easier!
Establish a positive atmosphere – we want them to enjoy their learning from the outset – we want shy or reluctant students to want to come back for more!
Provide something for learners of all styles – cater for everyone at the beginning, get new students used to new styles
Analyse learning styles – get students to start making the most of their own strong learning channels
Use the discipline system – let students see that it’s not just for show, that rewards and consequences do actually work!
Give rationale for course & methods – students like to know why they’re doing what they’re doing: sometimes the reason for movement or guided discovery isn’t as obvious as we might believe
Needs analysis – help students realise that you are willing to be flexible enough to cater for their needs from the beginning

Have fun! Above all, have fun.

Dave Tucker has been in ELT for 24 years: as a teacher with a particular focus on Young Learners, as a teacher trainer on Young Learner development courses and also as Director of Studies of International House Coimbra (Portugal) for 15 years. He is the author of three Teacher’s Editions for the Primary Macmillan Series Take Shape.

Acknowledgement: Teflgeek has simply copied Dave’s author biography from his profile page on the Macmillan website. This does not represent an endorsement of Teflgeek by Macmillan or vice versa.

First Lesson or First Week Ideas

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:30:14 GMT

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix:

Recently, the 24th Edition of EFL/ESL/ELL Blog Carnival : A Journey in TEFL got posted on Eva Buyuksimkesyan’s “A Journey in TEFL” blog. I strongly recommend taking a look here if you’re in need of inspiration – Eva’s collated over 40 (I lost count) posts from different contributors.

The Lesson Plans Page also has a wide range of back to school resources and materials, though these are aimed more at native speaker young learner classes than a language learner class – and I’ve not tried any of them, so can’t vouch for them personally!

First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last summer!

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:30:07 GMT

A very quick alternative to the standard composition task “What I did on my Summer holidays”.

Essentially, you ask the learners to write the composition (100 words? I guess length will be age & level dependent) about somebody else in the class.

I think I’ve blogged a similar activity at some point before, but not sure when. Anyway, the key to the activity, is that if John is writing about Amy’s holidays, John can’t talk directly to Amy. John has to ask the other learners in the class, Frank, Marta and so forth to ask Amy the questions that John wants to know the answers to.

Thus through a constant process of questions and answers John eventually gets enough information to write Amy’s composition for her. Of course, Amy will be writing Marta’s, Marta Frank’s and Frank John’s, so it all evens out eventually.

This is intended as an alternative for classes where learners do know each other – but it also works really well as the final part of a lesson with a class where nobody knows each other, as John will constantly be explaining to his classmates WHO Amy is, thus meaning everyone should have a much better idea of who everybody else in the class is by the end of it!

Having gathered together all the information during the lesson – the actual writing up of the composition can either be done in class or as a homework task. What can then be interesting is for the writer and the subject to check how close to the truth the composition is. The subject can then feedback and edit both the content and language of the composition for later revision – though this would be an optional stage depending on the abilities of the class.

First Lesson: Find Nobody Who…

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:30:58 GMT

This is an alternative approach to the inevitable “what did you do on your holidays” conversation. Many first lesson activities and ideas are based on the premise that nobody knows anybody else but often the students in your classes have come up through the levels together and the only new person in the group is you…

It should also combat those conversations with teenage classes that go: T: “Hey, how was your summer?” S: “Alright.” T: ”What did you do?” S: “Nothing.”

The basic objective is that the learners have to find stuff they did over the holidays that NOBODY else did.

So a simple procedure might be:

Ask the learners if they had a nice summer and lead into a REALLY boring description of what you did over the summer. e.g. I watched TV and I played computer games and I did some laundry and stuff. Ask the learners if they did anything similar. Establish that pretty much everybody in the class watched TV and played computer games. Then tell the learners about something slightly more interesting and less usual – for example taking a plane trip – and find out how many people did the same. Finally, describe something really interesting that you did – or alternatively make something up (e.g. rented a Ferrari and drove up the West coast of the USA). Find out whether anyone else did the same.

Thus having established the exclusivity principle, ask learners to find something that they did over the summer that nobody else did. Check that they understand they need to talk to ALL the other learners in the class.

Feedback: Find out from the learners what interesting and relatively exclusive things they did over the summer. You could also do some reformulation of any language areas that came up during their mingle activity.

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children

Anonymous — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:54:20 GMT

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook…..

There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, and what could be done to change the situation….

Who knows – we could start a social revolution right here?

But information transfer tasks are good ways of processing information and creating a meaningful context for language learning to occur in, so designing tasks around the huge pile of data that Save the Children provide would all give a good reasons for learners to develop their linguistic resource. Poster tasks, presentations (with or without powerpoint), charts and graphs all spring to mind. Of course for IELTS candidates, there are a lot of graphs and charts just waiting to be described in the data!

There’s also a documentary available on the website which could provide the basis for both listening tasks and discussion afterwards (though maybe not a good idea to watch if you’re expecting, or have just had, a recent addition to the family).

These are all just some initial ideas – if you have any plans, materials or ideas you’d like to share to develop this topic, please let me know!