This chapter reminds us that objectives and stating clear desired results are fundamental when planning our lessons, due to the fact that are many aims that that have an important role when teaching, in this case a foreign language. Of course we are not going to have just one goal, but many; the important thing is to know how to set clear objectives, to have priorities and make choices on what are we going to teach and how are we going to do it.
One of our responsibilities as teachers is to be creative and flexible. We need in some cases to adapt our lessons to our own students’ needs and learning styles. Of course this is not easy, sometimes we have many hours teaching per week and we do not have enough time to plan in a proper way, and we don’t have the time to think about every single student we have. Sometimes a lesson seems to be very good, it looks like students are learning and that at the same time they are enjoying what they are learning, but we do not have clear priorities so at the end we stop and think: “yes, this is what I wanted them to get from the class”.
After being teaching for a while, I can say that I’m able to think and plan beforehand what goals my students are supposed to achieve and what is the best way for them to do it.
It is essential to think about the contents, sometimes there is an impressive amount of things we want to teach, but it is fundamental to set priorities and make choices around assessments, assignments, tasks and teaching strategies. The best teacher is not the one who teaches lots of contents but the one who thinks about their students’ needs and who cares for their learning.
In order to set clear priorities it could be very useful to think about what is worth being familiar with, what is important to know and do and what are the big ideas and core tasks. Once we have set clear goals and priorities, our teaching will be more engaging and will cause and impact on our student, which is in many cases, what we want to achieve at the end.
Yes, I absolutly agree in the sense of time. In my case I work 46 hours a week and is hard for me to create different things for my students. I really like to do it and I have many many ideas but I don`t have enough time, so as a result I do what I can do.
ResponderEliminarI agree, we need to have our goals clearly set and, knowing our priorities can help us to do a better job.
ResponderEliminarIt's definetely essencial to have clear priorities, however it is also fundamental to have the time to prepare our lessons according to thsose priorities... and that's what we lack the most
ResponderEliminarSetting priorities, as you stated, is the key to succeed in engaging students to learn, and therefore, they will be able to transfer the new knowledge.
ResponderEliminarof course...the first thing we need to do is to clarify our goals. If we don't know what our aims are, it will be imposible to teach because we wouldn't have any idea about what we want to get with our students....what we want they learn.
ResponderEliminarAs you mentioned in your post, making our classes more engaging and enjoyable will definitively
ResponderEliminarcause an important impact in our students.And that impact is undoubtedly our final goal.How to obtain the expected outcomes? Establishing priorities, setting clear goals and providing core tasks seem to be key aspects to take into account when we teachers have to face lesson planning.
I totally agree with you, but remember that there is no lesson plan that can make lessons more engaging or motivating. That is all up to us! If you really love what you do, your students will be motivated! It's all about physics and transference of energy!
ResponderEliminar