Week 5


 

Week 5: Planning Lessons

 

 

February 11-17, 2008 

 

 

 

Putting it all together: Hands on Projects

 


 

Objectives

 

By the end of week 5, we should all have:

 

 

 

Activities

 

Thinking about our classes

 

 

 

 

Welcome to this week's session.  Before we start, let's think about some of our classes.  Have you ever had a course with two classes where you used the same lesson plan.  Then you got to class and everything was perfect, just the way you wanted it to and happily you went to the next class and disaster!  Can you think of the reasons why?  Was it your plan? the class? the environment? or you?? Tell us about it, by writing in our blog at lessonplanning.  We'd like to hear your experiences.

 

 

 

 

Reading what others say about goals and objectives

 

 

 

Sometimes its a good idea to take a look at what other people have to say about lesson planning.  There is a lot of material on the web but we thought that these short articles summarise the main points very.  Not all the articles in our Lesson Planning folder are specifically related to English language teaching, but then again lesson planning isn't only done by English language teachers. If you find any other articles that you think are interesting and relevant to this discussion, please upload them into our folder Articles participants will like to discuss on our Yahoo group page.

 

 

Click on the individual links to go to the articles we have chosen here, or access them all from our Lesson planning folder in our Yahoo group page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking about our own lesson plans

Based on your experience as a teacher and also as a learner, do you agree with the views expressed in these articles?  Do you think that other aspects should also be taken into consideration?  Do your lesson plans reflect the process put forward by these writers?  Let us know what you think by writing in our Lesson planning blog.

 

 

 

 

Looking at examples of Lesson plans

 

It's always a good idea to look at other teachers' lesson plans as they can be a source of ideas.  We've choosen two out of the large number of online sites where you can find ready made lesson plans.  Go to either one, or both of these sites, and look at the lessons plans created by the teachers.   Are the plans you've chosen similar to the ones you write?

 

 

 

Looking at a video on Direct Instruction.

 

 

 

Have you heard of Direct Instruction?  Here are four videos, the first one is embedded below, which cover the basic principles of this method.  Look at the first video and then click on the links which follow it for the other three.  Then we'd like to know your opinion on the content.  Is this an antiguated (old fashioned) method of teaching?  Does it have any relation to Goals and Objectives? Is there anything beneficial we can get from it?  Add your comments, as usual, below the post for Goals and objectives on our motime blog.

 

 

 

 

 

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Video  2                       Video3                         Video 4

 

Writing your own goals and objectives

 

 

Now it's time for us to write our own lesson plan.  Let's do the following:

 

As we've suggested before, working in a group gives you a chance to share ideas and learn from each other.  So, you can decide to keep working in your group, or work with another participant or on your own.  It's entirely up to you.  Here's what we're going to do.

Keeping in mind the goals and objectives you wrote in Week 3, write a detailed lesson plan for one class.  Once that is done, upload your plan to your Yahoo folder or the Google documents folder.  Invite other participants to check your plan and give you feed back.  Based on feedback, revise your plan and upload it into your individual folder or, if working in a group, to the Google documents  folder.

 

 

And for those interested in integrating technology into lesson planning, here is a video clip taken from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

 

 

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