Module 6: Thinking About Lesson Planning
Sometimes lesson planning can be - or seem to be - easy and straight-forward. However, when we get into planning, it can start to feel complex. In these videos (Learning Objectives - 3:52 and Scaffolding - 4:32), four experienced teachers and teacher trainers talk about their thought processes on lesson planning. They offer some pointers and ideas that will be helpful for you in your lesson planning assignment for this course and also in your day-to-day planning. After you finish watching the videos, or reading the transcripts (provided below or downloadable here 
), you will take a comprehension quiz.
Dr. Kara McBride | Dr. Radmila Popovic | German Gomez TESOL Education Director World Learning | Andy Noonan Language Training Specialist Peace Corps |
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Transcript for Video 1: Learning Objectives
Kara McBride (KM): We’ve got some specialists here who have worked in ESL for a number of years and we just wanted to share with you our thought process when we do lesson planning. So guys, when you do lesson planning, where do you start?
Andy Noonan (AN): Radmila, why don’t you kick us off here.
Radmila Popovic (RP): The most important thing for me is to start with the students. Yes, of course, we have to have the bigger picture in mind, we have to think about the syllabus, or program goals, outcomes determined either by the school we work at or by the ministry of education. But it boils down to the students. I would call it student-centered lesson planning. Who they are, how old they are, what their interests are, their education background, why they are studying English, what they want to achieve…
KM: What do you do when you’re thinking about a lesson plan in terms of formulating the learning objectives for the lesson?
German Gomez (GG): Well, I always think about – in terms of the objective for the lesson – what are some of the challenges that students may encounter in trying to reach the objectives for the lesson. First of all, having really gone through and thought, “Yes, this is an objective that could be achieved in the time that I have for the lesson, whether it’s 50 minutes or an hour.” But I do think of what are some language challenges that students may encounter? How can I scaffold activities to help them overcome those challenges? Not only language challenges, but there might be cultural aspects that my students may not be familiar with that may pose a challenge to reach an objective. There might be issues that I need to address with prior knowledge, what they already know and what they bring to the classroom, or to this particular lesson. And so I think a lot about that and how to plan a lesson that will help many of these students or some of these students actually overcome these challenges.
AN: Thinking of one lesson plan, after I’ve kind of considered what my students are, where my students are in the term, then I want to think about where do I want to be by the end of the class? What do I want them to be a little more proficient at? What do I want them to be a little more accurate at? A little more fluent at? And then I construct my lessons kind of backwards. So I think about my end activity, usually some sort of communicative practice activity where they have a chance to really use the language – as much as they know of it – with hopefully that target language in mind, and then I build backwards. So I’ll start from that communicative task that comes at the end, I think of a couple of practice activities – hopefully that will be in pairs or small groups that will feed into that – and then I think back to what is my input going to look like? And I’m not thinking input as in me telling students what this target language is. I’m thinking of how am I going to draw that out from them? What sort of maybe authentic texts can I show them that we analyze to bring that target language out of? But that’s how I’m scaffolding my lesson to meet those objectives, so my objectives end up being – we’ve heard the acronym SMART, or even SMARTA, so specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound, and some people throw in adjustable.
Transcript for Video 2: Scaffolding
Kara McBride (KM): So scaffolding is basically helping them to be able to do something more independently, but helping them when they can’t quite do it on their own yet. How do you know what challenges students are going to have and how you think of ways to help them along as they’re gaining that new proficiency?
Radmila Popovic (RP): Well, it’s not that easy at the beginning. Now we have a lot of practical experience in the classroom, I know, still I get surprised over and over again. I have to plan for all kinds of contingencies – what if… But scaffolding is just offering proper support at the proper time. It’s very similar to when you teach or support a toddler who is struggling to walk and you want that toddler to be able to make several steps on his or her own. So you might really hold that child very tightly at the beginning so that – not that the child necessarily needs it, but just so that he or she feels safe – I’m not going to fall. So sometimes the students have to gain that confidence.
KM: How do you structure things and figure out beginning, middle, end and how much time everything takes?
RP: Again, it depends on the students. It depends on how much they know. So say they encounter the past participle for the first time, then I would probably need more time to help them become familiar with the form or become confident that they can use the form – making mistakes doesn’t really matter, they won’t get it right from the start – but that comfort and the willingness to take risks and use that to express their ideas. So, they might need more time or scaffolding to lead them gradually to that.
GG: One thing that comes to mind is also that oftentimes my timing of the lesson can be determined by what the week looks like. Meaning that it might be a lesson where this might be the first day that the students are working with the particular language structure, for example, or target language and so I know that I’ll have more time during the week to provide more practice. And so my lesson is likely to be more focused on helping them develop more accuracy, more controlled practice in that sense, with the knowledge that later in the week they’ll have more time for free practice. The timing itself, or the time that I assign to each of the lesson stages, also depends on where I might be in that week.
KM: Yeah, good point.
AN: One other thing I guess I would add to that is within each lesson or each day’s worth of lessons, I’m going to have time dedicated to recycling – the old language they’ve looked at before, maybe it’s from last week or the week before, we’re going to go into our notebooks and quiz each other on that for a little bit. And at the end of the class, there’s going to be some time dedicated towards giving them feedback on what we heard during the day, both really positive aspects of the language we heard and then maybe some errors that we heard. So that they’re getting kind of this bookend of “okay, we’re going back in time to bring these other things back up, but also let’s look at what happened today to see where we’re at” and this will help decide what the future lessons are going to look like.
KM: Okay, so to wrap up, it sounds like we really need to be thinking about who are our students, where are they at, how do we connect with what they already know, and gradually get them to be more and more independent users of the language.
To cite this page:
World Learning. (2019). Thinking about lesson planning. In "Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into the Exploration of Culture in an EFL Setting" [Online course].
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