Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No. 18 Language & Skills Lesson Planning Guidelines

One of the most common complaints on the CELTA course is that of trainees finding it difficult to plan coherent lessons. Thornbury (1999) says that this is due to the fact that novice teachers lack experientially-derived lesson schemata. Although this is more often than not the case it is also due to the fact that many teachers come to the course with different levels of experience and as such they need to both learn and unlearn behaviours which may not have been the most appropriate to address their students' needs.

With the above in mind, I decided to make a screen cast on lesson planning while on the University of Cambridge CELTA course for which I am a tutor and assessor. The idea is that of giving trainees general guidelines which will help them get started with their planning of receptive skills lessons or language lessons by looking at the PPP and Guided Discovery frameworks. While on the course trainees also look at Text-based, Test-Teach-Test, and Task-based Learning frameworks, but focus on PPP or Guided Discovery for their Teaching Practice as 'it is better that they become proficient at executing and automating a limited repertoire' (Thornbury 1999).

Please note that these are guidelines and therefore I do not claim them to be the only frameworks available, the best ones or anything along those lines. The idea is to provide trainees with the basics for lesson planning while constantly underlining the fact that whichever framework they choose should always revolve around their making of informed decisions while planning to address the students' needs. This screen cast is designed to support trainees before, while and after the course by providing a checklist they can refer to until they feel confident enough to unleash their creativity by adapting, meshing, re-creating, designing whenever necessary these frameworks.

Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No. 17 Lower & Higher Order Thinking Skills

Lower and Higher Order Thinking skills have been a recurrent theme in all my conversations and reading lately and so I thought it was a good idea to create a PowToon on it. I drew on different sources from the internet and so all the content is traceable and obviously not mine! This video has helped me consolidate and what I knew and also think more carefully about LOTS & HOTS so I hope you find it as useful!

Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No. 16 Skills Assignment

This is the latest of my public videos created with Powtoon. As with Pill No. 15 Focus on the Learner, this Pill is about the Language Skills Assignment CELTA candidates have to complete while on the course. Again, I wanted to try and provide trainees with a quick and concise visual coverage of the assignment as I believe that exposure to the same content in different formats and media can help increase retention and trigger reflection and renewed understanding. Hasn't it happened to you that sometimes you are listening to the same talk or lecture or watching the same film for the umpteenth time and you realise that you hadn't noticed x detail, or hadn't thought about that was said and then you find yourself thinking or reflecting about it all? Well, I do hope this short video has a similar effect!

Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No. 15 Focus on the Learner

It's been a very hectic period and so it's been almost a month since the last time I blogged. Well, I'm now enjoying my Christmas holiday and so it means more time to do the things you like, in my case, catch up with blogging and creating those materials I'd been thinking of but had not had the time for! 

This brings me to this post on my Methodology Pill No. 15 Focus on the Learner. I really wanted to create a quick video which would help trainees on my CELTA courses think and reflect and check the different parts of the assignment in a short, visual way. I have also created a podcast which addresses the assignment, we have a session at the end of which the assignment is set and also they are reminded of it throughout the course at different stages, but I believe that being exposed to the same material in different formats can help increase retention and also touch different learning preferences. I'm very visual and so I personally find these videos help me, more than anyone else, continue to think and reflect on the contents of the assignment itself. I hope it is useful even if you're not on a CELTA course. I think the main ideas can help you remember to reflect on our own students as we (including mysefl first and foremost!) sometimes forget about them when we get tangled up in a heavy work load and teaching commitments.

Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No. 14 Lesson Planning Check List

It's been three months since my last post and it's been this long because unfortunately, one of my siblings fought against cancer and lost! This led to our family coming closer and since we are all over the world, it's also meant traveling a little. Anyways, on a much happier note here is a post on a short video I created on Nov 3 on Lesson Planning.  This check list suggests taking into consideration all the different resources which I have created so far e.g. the different Methodology Pills available in my YouTube channel and my Lesson Frameworks eBook which I can send you if you email me asking for it.

Bye for now and I hope you find this video useful!

Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No.13 Productive Skills - SPEAKING

Right, here's the last one to complete the productive skills suite. As can be seen from the summary at the end it actually follows a PPP framework which we have said before was more appropriate for language based lessons. Now, you may be asking yourself why and here's a plausible answer. Speaking is a language skill and as such if you think about the what you would cover in a purely speaking lesson then, then you start realising that the sub skills we want to help ss develop are usually embedded inside functional language and so being language systems it seem appropriate to approach it through a PPP framework. Obviously this also means that it can be approached from a guided discovery angle as the sub-skills work you want to do when dealing with speaking (connected speech, appropriacy, specific areas of pronunciation, target audience, etc) is more easily done when embedded in a text, spoken or written. Ok, so here we go - enjoy!

Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection No. 12 - Productive Skills (Writing)

Right! So, here's another methodology pill on Productive Skills - WRITING- this time. It's been an incredibly busy time but it seems I get a lot more done when under pressure! This framework is obviously a suggested framework for a writing skills lesson so if you've been helping your students develop their writing skills in English doing something totally different, there's nothing to worry about. You may want to try this approach and see how it goes. Remember: Variety is the spice of life and so if you realise your teaching has become a bit of a routine why not liven it up? Of course, I speak from experience so no judging anyone here.

The whole idea behind these video clips using PowToon is that of simply providing trainees, teachers and anyone interested with a quick way of checking they're following a cohesive and coherent framework in their writing lessons.  This framework is in line with the input session on writing I do on our CELTA courses. Ok, I think that's it! Enjoy!