Lesson Planning - Part 8 - Process For Study Activities
Just to finish off this particular section on lesson planning, we're going to go through a couple of procedures that should take place during the study phase periods, particularly when we're doing the activities. It is quite important that before we actually go into a study activity that we go through a process of showing how that activity is going to work and one acronym that is often used for this is D-E-GO. The D part of this stands for a demonstration of the activity. Now, it's very important that you don't try to explain how the activity is going to work but rather you actually demonstrate the process. An example of the demonstration of the process of the activity could be something as simple as taking the first question and using it and writing it on the board. This will show the students what it is that they're actually going to do. Having demonstrated the process of the activity, you need to make sure that the students can answer that question and so we elicit a correct answer for that particular question. Having done that, we can then give out the material. If we've gone through this D-E-GO process correctly, there shouldn't be any reason for the teacher to actually say anything else whilst the activity is taking place. The students should be working through the activity talking to each other and that then frees the teacher up to actually do some other things. Whilst the activity is taking place, you as the teacher can actually monitor what is going on. Well, what do we actually do whilst this monitoring is taking place. You can actually go around the class. Whilst you're doing this, however, it's very important that you don't stop the students from working. So, monitor from a distance so that you're not actually interrupting anyone and some of the things that you can be noting down whilst you're monitoring is their progress. It's useful to monitor their progress because once the activity has been stopped you're then going to feedback their answers and it's important that you know who has done what. You don't want to be asking a particular group for their answers to question seven if they haven't completed it. So, check to see what their progress is ready for when you get to the feedback. As you go around you should be able to pick up on some common errors either in what is being said or in what is being written down and again leave that until the feedback stage in order to be able to cover it. So, you need to monitor the students. Before you get to the process of feedback, it's very important that you actually close the activity to make sure that nobody is still working whilst these answers are being given back. So, settle everyone down, make sure that they're all paying attention and you can then start to feedback the answers. As you feedback, hopefully, most of our answers, or all of our answers, will be correct but we are going to get some errors and mistakes. If those errors and mistakes take place, then they need to be corrected.
Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.
