Planning is often one of the most fun aspects of teaching. I tend to get lost in authentic sources or good stories, fantasizing about how to engage students with such interesting ideas, and getting more input for myself. I fantasize about how units and lessons will go, and dream of the day I have “covered” all the things I mean to “cover” every year. (A loud “gulp” is heard.)
But then the summer ends, or I am brought back to reality by the ringing of the bell. I have 165 students this year, teach levels 1-4, am managing 7 students doing an independent study of their 4th year for the first time, and have a student teacher. The time needed for creative, expansive planning thinking is not exactly abundant.
Then I go to conferences, and Everyone Is Doing Something So Interesting and Cool That I Am NOT Doing. I get a burst of pedagogical energy, but still don’t have enough time to follow through on the zillions of creative ideas that other teachers have devised in their contexts. There is a certain measure of guilt that comes with not being able to do Absolutely Everything I Know Would Be Good / Cool for My Students.
I have heard this described as picking up activities like candy. New, creative ideas from conferences are enticing and look sweet, but they are not always the healthy foundation for most of what we do. Things can sound amazing during an energized 45-minute conference session, and be an absolute mismatch once you are back in your own context.
So, what makes up the healthy foundation for language classes? If I were to try to save myself time by limiting my planning focus, how would I do that? The way I see it, it’s just:
1) Loads of input
2) Interaction – with the input, and each other
So, I created a planning menu that focused on effective ways for providing input, and a variety of ways to interact with that input. I found that the fewer choices I gave myself, the easier and quicker it was to plan for interesting content – cultural, or a curriculum-directed Can Do. Instead of having to plan for content and delivery simultaneously, I was just slotting interesting content into a consistent framework. There was just enough variety to keep things novel for me and my students, without having every activity be some new procedure to teach. Less truly was more!
I share it here with you in the hopes that it will inspire you to make your own menu, and to really pare it down to just the activities that you know you can do consistently and efficiently. Using Write and Discuss can be useful to generate the texts you need for many of the activities, but they all also work well for working authentic texts, comprehensible novels, and so on. I have linked some blog posts to help learn more about some of the activities. I hope this helps you free up some time and space in your mind – it certainly has helped me!
Spreadsheet of Lesson Planning Ideas