TEFL Day Two - An Introduction to Lesson Planning

Today was a little different, first of all – I didn’t miss my train! Secondly, we started later at 2pm. This meant that I could spend the morning going through our first assignments and tasks (watching lesson demos and reading texts relating to vocabulary) and so on.
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Arriving at 2pm we met Lynn who had arrived in Florence yesterday to join the course today. Having another person to join in during discussions and give ideas was really good, I  really think that having someone else’s input can help you to see situations in different ways and stimulates your imagination...

Today’s session with Kristin was focused on Lesson Planning and all of the different stages required to complete one thoroughly. Now I have planned lesson plans before and I feel that was really useful today, to have that experience and insight, but there is so much more to it that I learnt today.

There were a few words and phrases added to my vocabulary today and it’s interesting when you have a group of people together from different nations who interpret words differently. This is something that will come into it when I am planning lessons for language learners. Some words have different meanings in some places, and some languages won’t have a word that represents the same thing.

We went through a whole powerpoint presentation relating to Skills Lesson Planning. Sometimes powerpoints can be dull but this one was so informative. We went through each slide and stage of the planning a discussed it too with Kristin giving some really good information in the way that we would understand. I particularly enjoyed looking at how to write your lesson’s aims and objectives, especially the Terminal (main) Objective. We had to come up with a few of our own using the right language and to make sure there was a point and a process visible. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Verbs came out and having used this before I think it is helpful to see the words you can use to help describe what the students should be able to do by the end of the lesson.

We came up with a really good one based on the topic of weather in different regions of Italy and how the students would eventually be able to describe (using the right words and phrases they have learnt during the lesson) the different weather that may happen across the different regions. Once we started brain storming together we came up with some great ideas like supporting the students to eventually be able to give their own weather report in English. A great idea…. I wonder if one of the other guys will use it on Thursday?

I learnt a lot today about how to write a thorough lesson plan and how we can use them to aid us as teachers to help the class run to time and with a purpose. Today’s session will help when planning my first class on Thursday…. However I still have NO IDEA what topic to focus on! I’m hoping inspiration will come tonight when I am dreaming about Tuscany and all the of the lovely food here!

Tomorrow is a full day at the school so it’ll be an early start to get the train (fingers crossed I won’t miss it….). We will be going over more lesson plans and demos that will help us to understand it all. I am really looking forward to it.

Lynn travelled with me on the train back to Florence and we spent the whole 40 minutes talking about our hopes for the future and what we will get out of this course. It’s an exciting time!

We had a lovely dinner not far from the station before we headed in for the night. I had a platter of various things that was of course, delicious. On the walk back past the Duomo there was a women stood there signing Opera on her own and oh my goodness, it filled the whole area like you were in a theatre. I stood there watching thinking you definitely wouldn’t get this back in Chelmsford city centre back home!

Time for bed now, a long day tomorrow. Let’s see what it brings!
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Nicola xx