I spent the last couple of weeks not recording my lessons with the argument that I don’t have time to prepare a lesson well enough to justify recording them. Sure, I’ve been thinking about CIs and MIC but not enough to make a good, watchable video. Turns out I was missing the point.
This week I subscribed to an alternate philosophy and just record my damn lessons, whatever my level of preparation. That means that when I turned up to work this morning with no lesson plan I recorded the lesson anyway. I had about twenty minutes to think up a lesson about the past tense and the language I’d use to help my students out as much as possible. And so here we have an example of a teacher on the back foot, and a real glimpse at how I teach these days:
The biggest shock I had after considering my lessons today (I did the same one four times) was the amount of language I assumed my students would remember. At one point I had a list of eight letters on the whiteboard which were supposed to give the students a clue about the past tense verbs we used last Monday. Even though I got them to discuss the answers in groups before I called on students most of them found this activity really hard; I hadn’t made the input comprehensible! I duly changed this in later lessons by giving them an example along with the full present tense verb which they had to change to the past tense.
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| Must make... input... comprehensible... |
Following this, I think I am generally doing a better job of making input comprehensible. I noticed that I’m consciously trying to slow the heck down. I’m using much more gesture, though still not enough. I’m also using the whiteboard much more effectively.
For example, not so long ago I would open the class with the same greeting and answering sequence in the hope that the repetition would allow students to get the hang of it. But at no point had I made it clear how they could answer or what we were saying; I just assumed they would get it. Some of them, it would seem, hadn’t got it. So today I wrote up an introductory question on the board, took them through it (with some choral repetition and comprehension checks here and there to help them out) and then got them to ask each other in pairs before calling on them individually and getting them to ask each other questions in front of the class. They seemed to get it more easily.
Hopefully these techniques will mean there’s more chance the language will stick this time around!
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