Lesson Plan

The lesson practices reporting skills and encourages speaking practice between students.

Suitable for JHS3 and up.

Lesson Plan

This is a simple trivia quiz about events that happened over the summer break. I always find these types of activities really good for the first lesson after a long break. Students tend to really enjoy them. It gets them talking as well as listening to English when they probably haven’t done so in quite a while.

There are 3 categories: Sport, World News, and Japanese News. 

Each category has 5 questions with question 1 being worth the least amount of points, and 5 being worth the most.

This quiz is ideally suited for Junior 3 and up but can be adapted for younger students. 

Typically, I like to split students into teams for these quizzes, but there are a multitude of ways you can administer this activity.

Google Docs Link

It’s originally designed for junior 2 students, but of course, directions are so important that this can be used as a review, or adapted, for older/more advanced students.

The lesson includes A & B pair work maps, and slides of common things you’ll find around town (station, museum, coffee shop, etc).

Lesson plan

Map A

Map B

Pictures

The lesson is suited for junior high 3rd grade students and focuses on speaking and listening. The worksheet includes examples of Japanese pop culture from movies, anime, to fashion. Students are encouraged to describe examples of pop culture they like as well as ask about favorites, likes, and dislikes with peers. There’s also a listening test towards the end.

Lesson Plan (doc)

Lesson Plan (PDF)

Good for you planning a game.  (Good, at least, if the game actually stimulates English use, and keeps the kids in their Zone of Proximal Development.)  But even if it’s a good game that you have planned, if you have a group discussion … or a drill … or some other sort of elicitation activity underway, and that activity has momentum, then there is only one thing that justifies ending that ante-lascivial activity.  There is only one reason why such an activity should stop.  It should stop when it is finished.

At ProGEN, we encourage (I would say we require, but the reality is that many of our otherwise brilliant teachers get away with not doing it) — we encourage our teachers to conceptualize a lesson as a succession of actions (actually, we call whatever recipe you are using to guide your lesson an action bucket); and we encourage them to define each of those ACTIONS in terms if the action’s completion conditions.  “This action will be complete when I can hear the students volunteering variations of the target language to each other, and they are at peak engagement with this challenge.”  This means … (a) don’t cut it off if you can still feel the activity building towards your completion conditions (or if you feel the student’s engagement pushing beyond what you had anticipated its potential to be), and (b) don’t kill time by letting it drag on and on, long after the kids have gotten the point.  Conclude your action where it naturally concludes.

You wrote a lesson plan, and it’s purpose is to serve you, not the other way around.

“I would have used a different model conversation than what is in the book; but that’s what’s expected.”

I love how ESL teachers that took an expository writing course in college or high school, which exhorts them not to over-use the passive voice suddenly find it so useful when it comes to decisions they make concerning the use of a textbook.

“We are expected to cover these pages.”

“I was told that the exercises on this page are important.”

“It was decided that this would be the primary textbook.”

And that’s fine if you need blame to fall elsewhere on the question of whether or not whatever material you have is the right material.  But in my experience of observing many, many schools, there is only one textbook that I find to be truly harmful and that would be Expressways.  I said it, now let’s move on.

Even in the case of Expressways, I have never seen anybody teach a bad class specifically because of the textbook.  In fact, a book like Expressways (I’m not moving on, am I) forces you dig deep, glean what is most useful and then shape it into something that really meets the students where they are.

No matter what the book, the mistake is the same.  Even the best textbooks do not know your kids.  You know your kids.

You (or somebody big and powerful) bought this textbook (perhaps even with your input, which is often the case with our teachers), but that book will kill any value that you might otherwise potentially bring to the room unless first you make the material your own.  It’s purpose is to serve you, not the other way around.

 We blew through the quick-draw speaking quiz a lot faster than I had expected, and I think perhaps I wasn’t ready to make good use of the remaining 15 minutes.  Need to look at expanding my pocket list.  [A list of words and phrases that I keep in my pocket and use for impromptu moments when I want to throw the kids off balance and boost their responsiveness.]  Nakamura seems really to have come around.  If I give him the time he needs to formulate a response, he steps up.  Sato is marked triple-F, and should instead be a Tripple-C….

… and then I enter a series of numbers:

• VIBE 76
• EMPOWERMENT 72
• IMPACT 86
• VALUE PROPOSITION 88

These are my self-assessment criteria.

These days, it’s pretty easy for me to ramble off a somewhat meaningful string of words that captures the essence of what happened in the room, but if I am able to assign those four numbers without staring off into space too much, that tells me a lot about how with-it I am on that day.

I can’t control all the variables that contribute to whether each of those four data points creeps upwards or downwards. What I can control is me and the effectiveness of the decisions that I make, and to make the best decisions, I need a systematic method for assessing the decisions that I have made thus far.

For years, I struggled to get some perspective on my own teaching.  And then as a manager, I struggled to figure out why even my best teachers seemed to lack self-awareness.

As a foreign teacher in Japan, you can’t go a day without somebody describing you as “a great teacher.”  You can’t take two steps without kids giggling and waving and high-fiving.  You reach the end of the year and the school still wants to continue with you, and you can’t imagine why.

You are just one more passive spectator of yourself; ipso facto, you are a clown….  UNLESS you can develop a systematic approach to assessing yourself.

If today was a good day, do you care what part you played in that?

How is what made today a good day different from what made yesterday a good day?

Is what worked today going to work tomorrow?

And if you were to somehow to make tomorrow a better day, do you even know what that might entail?  Or will you just assume that what worked today will do just fine for tomorrow?

The key is to develop a few solid criteria that you are going to isolate and track from student to student and day to day.  These are a little like when a doctor asks “how does it hurt on a scale of 1 to 10.”  It’s not that 8 has some unchanging in-the-eyes-of-God meaning.  The point is that you can begin to get some quantifiable grasp of your changing perceptions by gathering multiple entries over time.  To give you some idea of what that might look like, I’ll discuss the four criteria that I use….

VIBE – This is the criterion that I have been using the longest, so I will describe it in a bit more detail than the others.  VIBE is the extent to which the room is pulling in the same direction as you, and given an extent to which the students have developed expectations, the extent to which you are satisfying or exceeding those expectations.  Below 50, the energy in the room is trending away from you.  There is an element in the room that is so disruptive that unless you change the dynamics of what is going on, your control of the activity in the room is going to continue to get away from you.  Below 30, the room is a place of physical peril.  My work at the struggling charter school in Nashville, Tennessee, was like this at times.  At the Nashville school, I scored myself above 50, for VIBE, whenever I had most of the kids humoring me.  Above 70 (which I never reached in Nashville, but which is often possible with an agreeable group of Japanese teenagers) there really isn’t anybody pulling against you, and there is a vague general sense in the room that it’s worth their while to be there.  If you are teaching Japanese junior high school classes of forty kids, and you are consistently in the high 70s, you’re not doing that bad.  Above 80, the students come with expectations of some sort, and you are satisfying some of those expectations.  Above 90, you are blowing away expectations.  If you are calibrated right, it should be impossible to constantly score yourself above 90 on VIBE because each time you surpass expectations, expectations rise.

These are OF COURSE arbitrary and subjective judgments you are making.  The point is, over time, to look back and notice trends in what you have perceived and judge those against the tangible facts of what went on – the materials you chose, where you put different kids in the room, the kind of time you spent on certain actions that you were taking.

EMPOWERMENT – This measures the extent to which you can say that the students are moving towards developing independent learning skills.  Over 90, means the students see you as a resource, make progress on their own, and are justifiably confident that they know better than you do about what the right point of focus is for them at any given moment.  Justifiably is an important qualifier here — simply wanting you not to bother them doesn’t constitute empowerment.  I have seen many teachers make the mistake of giving students “free study time,” thinking that this, per se, constitutes student-centered teaching.  No.  Below 70, they require your guidance to make any kind of meaningful progress.   Below 50, they have trouble seeing English learning as being worth their while.

IMPACT – What is the scope of what you are doing?  Are you pushing a rock up a hill, 60?  Are you creating meaningful moments, however, still feeling that you are mostly reacting in the moment, 70?  Do you have course objectives that match your sense of the students’ Zone of Proximal Development, and can you feel that you are deliberately moving towards those objectives, 80?  Are you permanently changing lives, 90?

VALUE PROPOSITION – What exactly are you selling?  The students are investing time and energy in you – where they could invest their time and energy elsewhere.  You score over 90, if you are connecting with the students in a way that no one else could do.  You score in the 70s if you are doing things that a Japanese English teacher could probably do as well or better.

If you are using a new textbook, you need to invest time in evaluating what its value is, how best to use it.

If you are using an interactive white board for the first time, you need to make sure that you really understand its capabilities.

The most vital piece of equipment that you have in the room with you is you.  A human being is a powerful, intricate, and ever evolving piece of machinery.  Knowing how you works, and knowing how best to use you, should take vastly more time than any other aspect of your professional development.

Even the best clowns are self-aware.

Not only does slime mold have no nervous system, but it is not a single organism.

Slime mold’s intelligence does not reside within a single being. Rather, the intelligence of the slime mold belongs to the relationship between these beings. It is the network that is intelligent. It is the network, not the individual, that is adaptable, that is dynamic, that is creative.

So what? I’m not a slime mold. I have ideas. Slime mold doesn’t have ideas. I enjoy a free will and a unique identity that not one of these slime mold nuclei will ever experience.

Yes, probably, to say that slime mold have experiences at all would be ludicrous. Yes, humans do have the ability to cultivate a kind of uniqueness in themselves. And yes, slime mold can probably not be said to harbor ideas.

But what is an idea? How do you know when you have an idea? What makes it an idea, and not just a flickering of synapses in your head?

For one thing, you may still feel that you “have it,” that it is somehow “yours,” but you are more likely to feel that you have an idea if you are able to articulate it in a language that at least one other person can understand.

And your idea is certainly not much of an idea until you can implement it in some context and watch it solve a problem. That is to say, it’s the network of beings in the world around you that makes your idea an idea.

We humans had one kind of collective Genius when we moved in bands of 30 to 100, another kind of collective Genius, when we settled in communities of over 1000, still another when we learned to write, still another when we learned how to preserve and distribute printed text.

At every stage, what changed was not the aptitude of the individual, but the vastness of the network to which the individual belonged. This is why we have schools, and not “contemplation rooms.”

As teachers, we need to embrace our slime mold heritage. We need to seek more and more opportunities to feed our discoveries back into the network, and seek more and more opportunities to draw upon that network.

There is one key reason why the best teachers in the world are kindergarten teachers; followed a close second by public middle school teachers.  Both populations will, for very good reasons, punish you for wasting their time.  Kindergarteners cannot AFFORD to let you teach them a lesson that overshoots their interests and fails to find ways to connect their intrinsic motivations with the challenges of school.  There is a similar desperation in the circumstances of a middle schooler — who gets this short window of time in which to safely discover what adulthood means and what it means to prepare oneself for adulthood.

I recently worked in Nashville and taught a population of seventh graders that were desperately in danger of missing that window of discovery.  Boy, you better BELIEVE they were brutal.  Everything that we foreign English teachers deal with in Japan is a cakewalk compared to what a public middle school teacher typically deals with in America.

That’s why it drives me batty when foreign teachers decide its alright to coast.  Sure, a room full of lawyers and accountants isn’t going to humiliate you the way only teenagers can, but still there is still the danger of wasting time — time that they could have spent replying to emails, calling home to their spouses, digesting their lunches.  (That’s not fair, unchallenging English lessons are probably very good for the digestion.)

But imagine … “I could fly this plane in my sleep.” … “I could perform this open heart surgery in my sleep.” … “I could build this bridge in my sleep.”

Don’t.  Don’t be irrelevant.  Worse, don’t blithely assume you are relevant.

Wake up everyday ready to seek joy in the challenge of innovating with the learners that have invested their time in working with you.

Speaking of things that I thought I could do in my sleep….  Third-Year, Senior High School, DEBATE SEMINAR, Lesson #5

[Very nervous about today because I really do need to take a run at doing some kind of real discussion activity.  That is what they signed up for, and we need to at least try it as a class and fall flat on our faces so that we can figure out what the barriers are and move forward from there.]

#GENERALNOTES

• For the last two classes, we invested a significant amount of time and energy working on #ARMP (authentic rhythm melody and pronunciation).  We need to pivot back to Listening/Speaking confidence.
• #HOMEWORK was for them to practice delivering their 4-Sentence Assertion, where they explain what job they want on the deserted island (see the case study below), why they would be qualified for that job, and what they would do if they had that job.

#MATERIALSANDPREPARATION

• Three pieces of candy.  [I KNOW … I know … but I don’t have any grading authority.  I need to get at least three kids to model for the rest of the class.]
• Orestes Lorezo — 9 Copies https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5CUYGaByd1Pdjd4OEdqM3A4U2c/view?usp=sharing
• Lord of the Flies Case Study https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5CUYGaByd1PaDV1d2JEUjVRdWc/view?usp=sharing

#Action Refresh Listening-Speaking Confidence #Completewhen I am able to elicit understanding of the story, where the students communicate that understanding in full sentences and can handle very easy follow-up questions.

• Tell the students the story of Orestes Lorenzo –https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5CUYGaByd1Pdjd4OEdqM3A4U2c/view?usp=sharing
• Elicit understanding from the students.
• Try to get everybody to say something about the story.

[The listening/speaking confidence of these boys is PAINFULLY low, so any “authentic” discussion activities need to be bolstered by a warm up that isolates listening/speaking confidence.  The tough decision, at this point, is do I risk having the listening-speaking confidence portion of the lesson take up so much time that there is no real time to run the discussion activity?  And what I have decided is that that is framing the problem in the wrong way.  Listening-speaking confidence is a prerequisite, so there’s no way to skimp on that.  The challenge is to design the second portion of the lesson in such a way that even if we have only about 10 minutes at the end, we can accomplish something meaningful.]

#Action Reciprocate Effort on Homework #Completewhen I am able to get at least two kids to stand up and deliver their assertion.

• Announce that the one that goes first gets a piece of chocolate.  (Et cetera et cetera until I have gotten at least two boys to present.  (Don’t five away the third chocolate.)
• Without damaging speaking confidence too much, push for #ARMP when boys are presenting.
• Give LOTS and LOTS of positive feedback.
• And where a boy volunteers a clever use of English, draw attention to it and do a little bit of Target-Structure Drilling off of it so that the boys that are not presenting are not COMPLETELY passive.

#Action Preliminary Discussion [WITH WHAT TIME IS LEFT] #Completewhen there has been some independent discussion as a class about.

• “We need a discussion leader … a facilitator.”  Announce that whoever volunteers to be the facilitator will get the last chocolate.
• THE TASK … nobody has volunteered to be the Prime Minister.  You must work as a group and decide who will be the Prime Minister.  ENGLISH ONLY!

And now I have to go teach this lesson….

I always tell teachers that they need to think like managers, to try toconceptualize the decisions that they make in the room, and the larger curriculum decisions that they make, in terms of how those decisions fit within the context of the larger institution.

In this video, I zoom out even further and discuss the concept of a four-year career lifecycle.  This is a concept that should only scare you if you have come to see your job as a static “position” — as a thing that you are hoping to hold onto.

In order to stay relevant, you need to embrace the dynamism that is a necessary component of any healthy educational community.  The perfectly executed project is one where if you have done your job right, you no longer own after four years.

Creating institutions that out live us is what makes us human.  Don’t hold on to anything except to belief that there are always new frontiers open to you, and that it is your duty to seek them out.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhfU9eFyXhI