7.

Getting down to the preparation

What is planning?
Everything a teacher does when she says she is planning, for example, listening to
students, remembering, visualizing, noting things down, flicking through
magazines, rehearsing.
Why would we want to plan courses and lessons?
There are several reasons why we would want to plan our courses and lessons,
including:
 Thinking things through before you teach helps to reduce feelings of
uncertainty or panic and inspires you instead with a sense of confidence and
clarity.
 It can inspire confidence in students who pick up a feeling of purpose,
progression, and coherence.
 It helps you to understand what research you need to do.
 It reminds you to marshal materials beforehand and makes it easier for you
to organize the time and activity flow in classes.
 If at least some of the planning is shared with students, they too will be able
to gather their thoughts before class.
 Plans can be used in lessons to get things started, and prompt memory, and
can help us to answer student questions.
 Working on planning after lessons, as well as before, ensures that the class
you are teaching gets a balanced mixture of different kinds of materials,
content, and interaction types throughout the course.
 Course and lesson planning help you to develop a personal style since they
involve sifting through all your information, resources, and beliefs, and
boiling them all down to a distillation for one group, time and place.

What would we not want to plan courses and lessons?

Despite its general usefulness, planning does have its drawbacks, including these:
 Thinking about your lessons and courses too far ahead and in too much
detail can be a waste of time. This is because things change once you get
settled into a course. Things you prepared earlier can turn out to be
irrelevant or unsuitable.
 Planning in too much detail can also cause inflexibility in a program,
crippling the teacher’s ability to respond to students. An ‘I’ve prepared it now
so I’m jolly well going to teach it’ mood can set in!
 If the planning is written down for an observer or examiner who has set
ideas about what should be covered and how, rather than an understanding
 of the language students or the teacher’s development, the result is a
display lesson with attached documentation rather than a learning event
prompted by a useful working document.

Who can you do your planning with?

On some pre-service courses, groups of teachers are encouraged to do their
course and lesson planning together. It seems that, as with everything else in life,
some people are loners and prefer to work on their own and others feel that two or
more heads are better than one. The options, theoretically, are to plan alone, with
the teacher you share the class with, with other colleagues including more
experienced ones such as mentors, with students, or with friends and family
members who have nothing much to do with your job. Students would have to put
up with the classroom equivalent of receiving two serves at a time or watching
shots fall between you. If you’re not sharing a class, it can still sometimes be a
great help to talk a lesson through with someone else.

When can you plan your courses and lessons?

Most teachers will put some thought into a course before they teach it and once,
they have found out a little about the students, what they want or need and the
time available for classes. Beverly Langsch-Brown likes to make a course outline.
The course outline that makes sense in her situation usually covers 10–20 lessons
and culminates at a holiday period or achievement of a learning goal. The goals
can be externally set by, for example, the date of an exam or may coincide with the
completion of a topic or a unit in the coursebook.

Specifying objectives
Perhaps you have been trained to think you must start your planning from a
specified aim or objective such as ‘By the end of the lesson the students will be
able to make a phone call to a travel agent asking for dates and times of flights and
be able to understand and write down the replies.’ You may have been taught that
only after this should you think about the material, activities, grouping possibilities
and so on. Perhaps you’ve been taught to write ‘Aim’ at the top of your lesson
notes and headings such as ‘Steps’ or ‘Materials’ below. Perhaps your teaching, in
the past, has been assessed on this type of thing. If so, then we need to consider
the matter of specifying objectives right away.
There are a lot of possible terms we can use here, e.g. ‘goal’, ‘aim’ and‘objective’.
Different people use these terms in different ways. Roughly speaking, most people
think ‘goals’ tend to be broader, then come ‘aims’ and finally, the narrowest in
focus, ‘objectives. People do, however, talk about broad, specific, and detailed
goals, aims and objectives.
A very broad goal would be ‘to improve their English’. Another broad goal might be
the name of a course, ‘Improve your conversation skills’. Try substituting ‘aims’ or
‘objectives’ in those last two sentences, however, and you will see that they sound
just fine too!
Many teachers, however, first concentrate on materials and activities, crafting
useful, interesting lessons without thinking too much about goals first. After
teaching they may reflect on what happened in the lesson and thus draw
conclusions about what goals the students have achieved. The many teachers who
start from materials, topics, or tasks, would probably say something like ‘This week
I’m going to use material M, topics T and activities A’ and then, when asked why,
would be able to say ‘Because I want the students to be able to ...’ in reply.
The traditional view
If you feel that language learning and teaching are like this, then when you plan
you may well tend to ask the following questions: ‘Where do I want my students to
go? How will I get them there? Will my route map coincide with reality? How will I
know if we’ve arrived?’ Put another way, you will want to find out what your
students can do, specify broad and detailed goals, break these down into a ‘logical’
order, select learning activities and materials which are designed to bring about
change, put these in place, and then test to make sure that the changes have
occurred. This is the view of language and learning presented on many assessed
training courses, which is under-stand able since working with teachers this way
makes assessment of their work easier! The problems with this view are that
students may have objectives of their own, language may not be this kind of
subject matter, the value of unintended outcomes may be discounted, and the
planning may lead to inflexibility.
The ‘starting from different angles’ view
Specifying testable, short-term goals and then creating step-by-step procedures for
moving students towards these objectives is NOT the way many teachers
instinctively work. Many teachers use a different component of the teaching–
learning encounter first, whether materials or activities or something else, to get
them started and as a trigger for ideas. This may be because they view language
and learning more organically. You too may feel language learning is a slow
process that happens gradually as perception shifts, as knowledge and skill slowly
improve and are refined.
The students
The students are a logical place to start since the more we can use students’ own
ideas and requests as our starting point the more relevant and motivating classes
can be for them.
Time
If you’re conscious of time and often ask ‘How long are the classes and how many
weeks have, we got?’ then this will be a major way of structuring your thoughts.
You may jot down the start time, finish time, rough timings for activities and so on,
as in the lesson notes below.
Content
In Chapter 3 we took perceptions of what there is to put into a language lesson as
the starting point for planning. The trigger here is not just thinking ‘What have they
done already?’, ‘What do I normally teach?’ or ‘What is in the textbook?’, but also
considering the students’ perceptions of what there is to learn and what you or the
coursebook usually leave out!
How people learn
In Chapter 3 we looked at the sorts of things people need to do to be able to learn.
If this interests you, you’ll want to make sure your lessons contain chances for
students to meet new language, notice things about it, remember it and use and
refine it.
How teaching can be handled
In Chapter 4 we looked at some of the ways of working in the classroom. We saw
how you can set up activities so that students can find out for themselves, have
things made plain to them or absorb them via periphery learning. You can use
Chapter 4 in conjunction with Chapter 3 as a starting point for planning lessons
since it contains common instructional sequences applicable to any content you or
your students choose.
Materials
Materials have been implied in every chapter so far, for example, letters and
questionnaires in Chapter 1, texts, and interactive dialogue journals in Chapter 2.
But materials can be the starting point for planning as well. Many teachers will find
a poem, a page or even a seashell and this will spark off ideas for whole units and
projects as well as individual lessons
Before individual lessons
The zero option
This is when you walk into class with some ideas in your head but having written
nothing down at all. You may have to do this at some time if there’s been a disaster
in the school. You may even choose to do it when you’re really experienced just to
see how you manage when forced to work totally from memory. There are also
times with small, high level, highly motivated classes when you never have the
chance to use your written notes or plans because the students have so much,
they want to work on.
Writing lesson notes
Although you can make your lesson notes mentally, many teachers, whether
novice or experienced do write them down. The act of writing or typing helps many
to organize their thinking. The physical act and the sight of the page mean that
you’ve usually partly memorized your lesson steps by the time you’ve finished
writing. One important thing to remember is that no teacher writes absolutely
everything down. We also all differ in how much we refer to our lesson notes while
teaching. Writing a complete ‘movie script’ would not only be very time consuming,
it would also lead to you clutching your ‘lines’, reading them out loud in class and
being unable to respond to real events.
The design model for planning
This chapter has been about some of the starting points for concrete advance
planning. Most teachers probably, at heart, consider that language is partly a skill
that can be trained, partly a subject matter that you can know about, partly an
instinct, and partly a natural organic system that grows slowly over several years.
To be able to encompass this mixed view, we need to use different starting points
for our planning on different days. Sometimes we’ll identify language items as our
goals and expect the items to be learnt to a certain degree of accuracy within a
certain time. Sometimes we’ll encourage students to do tasks and to notice what
they’ve done, and we hope they get better at the language in the process.
Whatever your starting point, you may want to write some notes, do some mental
rehearsal and then, after teaching, have a ponder to make sure your classes are
getting a varied and balanced diet. Since starting points, lesson notes and planning
behavior all depend on your personality and what you think language, learning,
teaching, and people are all about, we need a course and lesson planning model
that can encompass differences.