How much time do you spend on planning & prepping your language classes?
I love teaching my French classes. And I bet you’re the same too!
But of course you’ve got to have something to teach!
You’ve got to have the resources and the powerpoints and the handouts.
You’ve got to have a mix of activities - covering all four key skills.
You’ve also got to have differentiated resources - for different levels and skills and abilities within your main group.
And audio resources to save your voice.
And you have to gamify your activities to keep the interest going (this doesn’t necessarily mean playing games to entertain, but to assist with learning)
Oh and you have to also make sure you’re teaching your language in a useful and insightful way
How exhausting is it before you even start?!?!?!?
So what does a great set of lessons actually look like?
Of course it is well planned, with progression over time, and with enough stretch and challenge built into each session to challenge the higher achievers but also without overwhelming the weaker candidates.
It’s a juggle!
And what if you’re not “hamstrung” by a curriculum? What if you’ve got the whole language, culture, traditions to work with - where do you start?
Having a set curriculum can be restricting but it can also be comforting - you know what you’ve got to teach, roughly when you’ve got to teach it, along with a structure that you can work within.
But when you’re an independent teacher, like me, where do you start?
It’s an embarrassment of riches - there’s so much to choose from that you don’t know where to start.
I’ve been doing this for a fair few years and I’ve got a few tips for you.
Start with what you know already - you can tweak as you go along, nothing has to be set in stone
Use the activities you already have, but amend them for the age and ability of the learners. If you’re teaching adults, they don’t want to be able to say who their favourite teacher is (you, of course!) or what’s in their pencil case. When they talk about their family, they want to know the words for grandchildren, son-in-law, mother-in-law etc, not the usual brother, sister, grandmother etc.
Vary the activities so that you can gauge what works best for your groups - I’ve found that my verb games work well with my older learners but battleships doesn’t if they haven’t played it before (I find I take too much time explaining and they don’t get much learning from it)
Have a set routine - I find that my learners like to know what they’re doing roughly in each class. For instance, in my more advanced groups I set aside 15 mins for a collaborative writing exercise, 15-20 minutes for a conversation exercise, 10 mins for homework review and the rest of the time is devoted to new learning and consolidating what we’ve already learned. (For reference my classes are 1 hour 30).
Tell them what they’re going to learn in advance - I always give my learners a programme for the full half term in advance with general headings and dates so that they know roughly what they’re going to cover each week. But to be honest, I don’t always stick to it because other learning needs arise and I can divert onto them. So be prepared to be flexible.
If you’d like some help with the planning side of your teaching take a look at my done for you planning service, it might save you some of your precious time
