08/02/2021
๐ Learn or Refresh ๐
Every Monday, I'll be posting one word from ELT terminology. Hopefully, not only will beginning or future teachers find it useful, but also it will help more experienced teachers reflect on their teaching.
Although I've been teaching English for seventeen years now, I regularly come back to basics, methodology books.
Checking my experience against the theory, shedding new light on it, refreshing my knowledge is a crucial part of my everyday work and helps me in my lifelong learning approach.
Therefore, as a strong advocate of lifelong development, I'll be posting one word every Monday either to learn or to refresh.
Today's word is: aims/objectives
1. The first thing to do when planning a lesson is to set lesson aims/objectives. What do I want my students to learn by the end of this lessonโ
2. The second question that immediately comes up after the first one is "What techniques and strategies I'm going to use to make sure students will learn new material effectivelyโ" (Some important aspects to consider here are: age, level of proficiency, dynamics, type of a lesson: f2f/online/hybrid etc.). Differentiation could be a keyword here. When teaching in England, we would differentiate every activity to match students' needs ( usually we used three levels of difficulty for every student to succeed in doing activities). Loads of work for teachers, but it worked well during our lessons.
3. The last but not least: How will I know whether the objectives have been metโ How will I execute this knowledgeโ Will that be the end of the lesson quiz, a project at home or mini whiteboards quizโ In terms of online lessons, it could be a short ICQ sent to every student individually.
โโDo you find setting objectives a daunting part of your teaching lifeโ How do you check students' understanding of a new subjectโ