MOTIVATING STUDENTS

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GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF MOTIVATION

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LESSON PLANNING PROCEDURES

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CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT. Teacher’s concerns:

Language teachers are familiar with the intended outcomes of communicative Language teaching, namely, for students to use the new language in speech and in writing for a variety of purposes and in range of contexts.

Teachers also have access to many textbooks setting out activities for doing this. What they often struggle with in their own classes is how to manage classroom learning to achieve these ends.

The following comments are grouped into three broad categories: motivation, constraints, and the teacher’s role.

Some teachers are concerned about student’s motivation:

• Students are learning English because they have to. It makes motivation really difficult for the teacher.
• Students do not want to use English in class when they can say the same thing faster in their own language. What do other teachers do if one or two students refuse to speak?

For other, constraints are things that teachers believe are stopping them from managing an ideal learning atmosphere:

• How can we organize group work when the desks are all fixed to the floor in rows?
• Our classes are huge. Whenever I organize tasks, things get messy, such as some students finishing ahead of the others and wasting their time.
• How do experienced teachers manage when all the students are at different levels?

Finally, some comments relate to new roles for teachers in language classrooms:

• In schools the tradition is for teachers to be at the front by the board all the time, but now it is supposed they walk around the room. How could we keep control if we did that?
• We were trained to teach in a traditional way and now the government has decided to introduce Communicative Language Teaching.

HOW TO PLAN A LESSON. THIRD STEP: Evaluating the plan.

The final part daily lesson planning happens after the lesson has ended (although Brow, 1994, reminds us that evaluation can take place during the lesson too), when the teacher must evaluate the success (or failure) of the lesson.

Ur (1996) says it is important to think after teaching a lesson and ask “whether it was a good one or not, and why”. This form of reflection is for self-development.

Of course, both “success” and “failure” are relative terms and their definitions will vary according to each individual teacher´s and student´s perspective.

HOW TO PLAN A LESSON. SECOND STEP: Implementing the plan.

It is the most important and difficult phase of the daily lesson planning cycle. In this face, the lesson plan itself will retreat into the background as the reality of the class takes over. The plan was designed with specific intentions in mind and the plan was based on the teacher´s diagnosis of the learning competence of the students. Teachers may need to make certain adjustments to the lesson at the implementation phase, and when the lesson is not succeeding, they should make immediate adjustments to the original plan.

There are two broad reasons for teachers to deviate from the original lesson plan:

1- When the lesson is obviously going badly and the plan is not helping to produce the desired outcome.

2- When something happens during the lesson and it is necessary the improvisation.

HOW TO PLAN A LESSON. FIRST STEP: Developing the plan.

An effective lesson plan starts with appropriate and clearly written objectives. An objective is a description of a learning outcome. Objectives describe the destination, but not the journey, we want our students to reach.

Clearly well-written objectives are the first step in daily lesson planning. These objectives help state precisely what we want our students to learn, help guide the selection of appropriate activities, and help provide overall lesson focus and direction. They also give teachers a way to evaluate what their students have learned at the end of the lesson. Clearly well-written objectives can also be used to focus the students because they know what is expected from them.

After writing the lesson objectives, teachers must decide the activities and procedures they will use to ensure the successful attainment of these objectives. Planning at this stage means thinking through the purposes and structures of the activities. This step involves planning the shape of the lesson.

Although there are many models of language lesson plans, with their respective phases where the teachers and the students have their roles, teachers can make variations on the different generic components of their lesson plans.

As time passes in language lessons and as students gain competence, the students can gradually take on a larger role in choosing the content and even in the structure of the lessons. English language teachers should also realize that language lessons may be different from other content lessons because the same concepts may need to be reinforced time and again using different methods.

MODELS OF LESSON PLANNING

There are a number of approaches to lesson planning. The dominant model of lesson planning is Tyler’s Rational-Linear Framework. Tyler’s model has four steps that run sequentially:

1. Specify objectives
2. Select learning activities
3. Organize learning activities
4. Specify methods of evaluation

Tyler’s model is still used widely in spite of evidence that suggests that teachers rarely follow the sequential linear process outlined in the steps. Taylor (1970) studied what teachers actually did when they planned their lessons and found that they focused mostly on the interests and needs of their students. More important, he found that teachers were not well prepared in teacher-education programs for lesson planning.

Research on what English language teachers actually do when planning lessons shown that many teachers, when they do write lessons plans, tend to deviate from the original plan. Also, when English language teachers do write daily lessons plans, they do not state them in terms of behavioral objectives, even though they are taught this method in preservice teacher education courses. Instead, English language teachers, especially more experienced teachers, are more likely to plan their lessons as sequences of activities, teaching routines, or to focus on the need of particular students.

Bailey’s (1996) studied some of the reasons why teachers deviate from the original lesson plan:

1. Serve the common good: In this case, teachers are willing to deviate from the original lesson plan because one student raised an issue that the teacher perceives to be relevant for the other students.

2. Teach to the moment: Sometimes, teachers may completely abandon the lesson plan to discuss some unplanned event because the teacher thinks it is timely for the class.

3. Further the lesson: Here, teachers make a procedural change during the lesson as a means of promoting the progress of the lesson.

4. Accommodate student’s learning styles: Teachers may sometimes depart from their lesson plans in order to accommodate their student’s learning styles if the original plan has not accounted for them.

5. Promote student’s involvement: Sometimes, teachers eliminate some steps in their lesson plans in order to have more student involvement, especially if the students are not responding.

6. Distribute the wealth: This last principle has teacher changing lesson plans to encourage quiet students to participate more and to keep the more active students from dominating the class time.

These findings show that teacher decision making is a dynamic process involving teachers making choice before, during and after each lesson.

WHY PLAN?

Daily lesson planning can benefit English teachers in the following ways:

1). A plan can help the teacher think about content, materials, sequencing, timing and activities.

2). A plan provides security in the sometimes unpredictable atmosphere of a classroom.

3). It is a log of what has been taught.

4). A plan can help a substitute to smoothly take over a class when the teacher cannot teach.

A daily planning of lessons also benefits students because it takes into account the different background, interest, learning styles and abilities of the student in one class.

LESSON PLANNING

“The success with which a teacher conducts a lesson

is often thought to depend on the effectiveness with

which the lesson was planned”. (Richards, 1998)

Successful classes depend on lots of aspects. Teachers may wonder “Which way they ought to go” before they enter a classroom”. This usually means that teachers need to plan what they want to do in their classroom. That is a lesson plan.

A unit plan is a series of related lessons around a specific theme such as “The Family”. Planning daily lessons is the end result of a complex planning process that includes the yearly, term, and unit plans.

A daily lesson plan is a written description of how students will move toward attaining specific objectives.