-Biblical Proverb
What the schools are really after is not office hours. Sure they like to see you are trying and putting ten minutes in per class is pretty much a minimum but they don't really care if you do hours of prep. What they really want is for you to have really good lesson plans that are both effective in teaching English and fun for the kids (most prep time involves preparing stuff for the younger kids like kindergarten and elementary age levels). So what do teachers do for lesson plans? They usually go to the teachers manual which tell them how to construct beautiful, elaborate and UNIQUE lesson plans for individual lessons. These lesson programs which can take a hugh amount of time to create, like up to an hour, are only good for that one lesson. For the next lesson you will have to create a completely different program with all that goes with it, the cutouts, the games etc etc. And on and on it goes for all the lessons.
Now what I am saying is that this is a fundamental mistake that is leading to an enormous waste of time that could be far better spent actually teaching the kids. So what is going on here? Basically the authors write up such lesson plans in the teachers manuals because the publishers pay them to. And the only reason the publishers pay them to do this is because it gives them an extra book to sell. Well guess what? There is another completely different and far better way to design lesson plans. How? Instead of creating unique and non adaptable lesson plans its possible to build up an extensive repertoire of techniques that can be adapted for teaching all the new language that you want to teach them.
Lets start at the beginning. The gist of your lesson is going to involve the three P's (those who have done the CELTA course will know what I'm talking about here) of Presenting, Practice and Production. Presenting is introducing the new language that you want them to learn. Practice involves drilling them on the new words. There are many types of drilling you can use to give variety but basically it involves getting them to repeat the target language over and over, typically out loud. Note this is for children and by junior high school age this is usually not effective. The third step is Production where you get them to produce the language in a correct manner but more naturally and preferably in a way that is fun. For this purpose you use games that can be adapted for each new lesson. There are hundreds of games that can be adapted in this way (look at Daves cafe) to keep it interesting.
Just to give one simple example take the common game Tic Tac Toe. For each of the nine spaces you can write in a word or target phrase that you want them to reproduce. To identify the space that they want to mark they call out the identifying word/phrase. A better and more productive version is to divide the class into two teams and then give one person from each team a unique number. You ask a question and call out a number for one person from each team to answer. The first person to answer correctly gets to chose a space. Its simple, they love it and they are learning at the same time! It really works. You can play several games in each class. Learning doesn't need to be serious and boring and the kids will adore you. Also management will absolutely love you. Best of all once you have built up your repertoire you should be able to design a perfectly effective and fun lesson plan in under five minutes (although its still a good idea to put in ten for appearances).
Think of how much time you will save!!! You will then have more time to actually teach or perhaps do other things like see a bit of Taiwan. Happy teaching!
