Planning decisions

Ininitialteacher training, teachers are generally encouraged to develop lesson plans for every lesson that they teach. The lesson plan is intended to help the teacher organise the lesson efficiently and effectively. It usually includes a description of the aims or objectives of the lesson, the activities students will carry out, the time needed for each activity, teaching aids to be used, teaching strategies to be used, grouping arrangements employed for each activity, possible problems that might be encountered, and alternative possibilities. E.g., in a grammar lesson the teacher’s objectives might include the following:

Students will be able to write a short paragraph about themselves using verbs in the present tense, including the verbs ‘go, live, study, like, be, have’, with no more than 3 mistakes of grammar and spelling.

For a lesson on speaking skills, one objective might be: Students will practice short conversational exchanges involving greetings and leave taking. They will take part in classroom role-play activities involving social situations and will exchange greetings with other classmates and with the teacher.

D.Nunan(1988) points out that making course or lesson objectives explicit in this way achieves the following:

· Learners come to have a more realistic idea of what can be achieved;

· Learning comes to be seen as the gradual accretion of achievable goals;

· Students develop greater sensitivity to their role as language learners and their rather vague notions of it is to be a learner become much sharper;

· Self-evaluation becomes more feasible;

· Classroom activities can be seen to relate to learners’ real-life needs;

· The development of skills can be seen as a gradual rather than an all-or-nothing process.

Sometimes teachers tend to state objectives in terms of what the teacher will do and what language content is to be presented, rather than in terms of what learners will do. This kind of teachers’ use of objectives is classified in the following way (G.P. Brindley, 1984):

1. Instructional goals. Many teachers express objectives in terms of the teacher’s role. Examples of such objectives are:

· To develop learners’ confidence in speaking and listening.

· To activate the learners’ comprehension of what it is to be a learner.

· To develop learner autonomy.

· To help students become aware of their individual problems and to help them to cope with them.

2. Descriptions of course and language content. Teachers sometimes express course objectives in terms of topics to be covered and activities which will be carried out:

· To concentrate on listening skills.

· To provide input in real, relevant and realistic English.

· To teach the language of apologising in English.

· To teach the idea of ‘going to.’

· To give learners practice in using the present perfect.

3. Quantity of learning content. Some teachers describe their objectives in terms of how much material they want to cover, for instance:

· To cover the relevant exercises in the course book.

· To get through most of the textbook.

4. Learning materials. Teachers also express objectives in terms of the course book or materials to be used:

· To use taped material from the radio to present students with authentic speech.

· To teach students the sounds of English by using their assigned pronunciation textbook.

· To present an episode of a story from the class reader.

All the above information shows that teachers do not usually plan their lessons around the kinds of behavioural objectives, which they are often taught to use in teacher training programs. Teachers are more likely to plan their lessons as sequences of activities (tasks for students to perform in the classroom) or teaching routines (how teachers present and manage instruction), or will often focus on the needs of particular students. Some teachers report that when they plan a lesson they are likely to visualise a particular class and specific groups of students rather than think in terms of objectives. In other words, the planning options a teacher employs reflect his beliefs about teaching and learning. In any case teacher planning decisions are made after a process of reflection (Neely, 1986), during which the teacher has to consider questions such as the following:

· What do I want my students to learn from this lesson?

· Why should I teach this lesson?

· How well do I understand the content of the lesson?

· What activities will be included in the lesson?

· How will the lesson connect to what students already know?

· How much time will I need for each activity?

· How will I organise the lesson into stages or sections?

· How will I begin and conclude the lesson?

· Is the lesson going to be too easy/ difficult for this class?

· How will I deal with different student ability levels in the class?

· What attention do I need to give the other students while I’m working with this small group?

· What students have special needs that should be attended to during the lesson?

· How will I check on student understanding?

· What role will I take on during the lesson?

· What discipline and management techniques will I incorporate?

· What grouping arrangements will I use?

· How will I handle interruptions to limit interference in this lesson?

· What are my alternative plans if problems arise with some aspect of the lesson?

· What will I do if I have too little time or too much time?

Teachers differ in the extent to which they plan lessons and in the kind of planning. Some teachers develop ‘macro-plans’, or overall goals for the course or a class, and use these to help them develop the lesson plans they use on a day-to-day basis. So, the teacher can use instructional objectives to guide and organise lessons. He has to formulate what the lesson is intended to accomplish and the way its goals are to be achieved. The objectives serve as a way of clarifying and formulating the teacher’s own intentions and selecting appropriate learning experiences. Other teachers work more at the ‘micro-level’, planning more on a day-to-day basis without necessarily making regular reference to their course goals or objectives.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13