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5 Top tips for lessons that really work
 Course Director, William Bradridge shares his experience
How do I get students interested ?
How do I keep them talking ?
I’m stuck for ideas, can you help?
Just three of the many questions we get from new or existing teachers every day.
Addressing all aspects here would be impossible, but I have condensed some of the bigger ideas into my personal top 5, which I hope are useful to you new and existing teachers everywhere…
1. Engage your students from the first and link this to your lesson theme
This should get all students involved and communicating and set a strong context for the rest of your lesson. E.g. planning to practice question forms in English? Find out what they know by having them guess the famous person in your picture by asking ‘yes/no’ questions.
2. Plan plenty of pair and group work activities
This ensures students get plenty of practice time and it probably means you as the teacher are not talking too much. As a new teacher, a common mistake is to ‘tell’ everything and so dominate with too much Teacher Talking Time (ttt). Cut it down! You rarely need to say as much as you think.
3. Stuck for an idea for a whole lesson
Find one strong communication activity and build a lesson around it. I love an exercise from Pair work 2, (Watcyn-Jones, Longman). Person A has floor plan of a living room filled with furniture, B has a blank floor plan of the same room with the furniture printed around the outskirts. Working together but without showing their respective plan, B has to draw the furniture in the room so it matches A’s complete picture as much as possible. If you don’t want to buy the book, you could do something similar by having students sketch out floor plans of their bedrooms. As a starting point for this lesson, teach prepositions of place, such as ‘next to, in front of’ etc.
4. Use ‘real’ objects
If you are setting up a shop or restaurant role-play, bring in a table cloth, shop items etc. It helps set a strong context and most students respond well to visual stimuli. Start collecting English leaflets, application forms, tourist brochures, song tapes and jazzy pictures now.
5. Create a real reason for students to communicate
Don’t fall into the trap of saying ‘now class, discuss animal cruelty’. You’ll probably be met by complete silence. Instead try one of the following techniques to get students talking:
a) Create a ‘gap’ so that 1 person has information which their partner needs to know, such as in the pair work example at 2.
b) Use consensus seeking activities. Get students individually to select and rank items from a list in order of importance. These could be items to take on a desert island such as a tin opener, water and matches etc. Alternatively, they could be tourist sites from a London brochure. In pairs, students then have to try and reach a consensus, justifying and agreeing on a new ranking together.
c) Create mini-debates rather than whole class debates, as students generally feel less inhibited speaking in small groups. Give students time to formulate their arguments beforehand: ‘John and Anna, you believe circuses are cruel, but Alice and Paco, you believe they are great fun. Write down 4 reasons to support these individual views.’ Afterwards, they can debate.
If you have any more tips, questions or resource ideas, please contact me on wbradridge@global-english.com
Further excellent tips and resources can also be found at http://www.english-to-go.com. All Global English graduates get a 1 month free subscription to English-To-Go’s gold level programme.
To really learn how to teach and to pick up the techniques for perfect lesson planning, Enrol on one of our Certificate courses today.
  
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