13. Requirements to the English lesson

A lesson must:

- be built in concordance with that system at which students are taught;

- be planned subject to communicative direction;

- provide a complex realization of educational and developing purposes;

- have a favourable psychological climate for learning language;

- whet students’ motivation of learning language;

- prepare students to self-reliant work off hour;

- include necessary features which would help students to create studying situations and use real situations for developing oral speech and also would help in learning writing and reading;

- include different learning games to take off tiring and pressure;

- to be hold in normal but not in slow rate.

The profession of a teacher binds him or her to be always hip to all the important events taking place in the country, to feel continuous deficit of knowledge, and so he or she must have an endevour to full up them for successful strategy of teaching.

The lesson must have a plan. It must be carefully thought over for every lesson to help developing of some skills at students.

A teacher should clearly find out the aim of the lesson and correlate it with the plans of further lessons. All the plans must be saved and time to time checked out and analized what will surely help to make the quality of the lessons better. Besides, it would become clear which parts of the lesson were too difficult or too easy for students, on which material must be paid more attention in future.

The main mistake of a teacher-beginner is his trying to hold all the lesson by the same plan.

A well-planned lesson contains different types of work, including review exercises which must be repeated in some time, what will make studying process more effective. A lesson mustn’t be built on the same kind of work even if students like it. A big amount of training exercises must call out tiring and slack work.

14. Lesson planning functions and important items to include

Lesson planning is a special skill that is learned in much the same way as other skills. It is one thing to surf the Net to retrieve lesson plans from other sites and adapt them to your needs. It is quite another thing to have the skill to develop your own lesson plans. When you are able to create your own lesson plans, it means you have taken a giant step toward "owning" the content you teach and the methods you use, and that is a good thing. Acquiring this skill is far more valuable than being able to use lesson plans developed by others. It takes thinking and practice to hone this skill, and it won't happen overnight, but it is a skill that will help to define you as a teacher. Knowing "how to" is far more important than knowing "about" when it comes to lesson plans, and is one of the important markers along the way to becoming a professional teacher. It is also in keeping with a central theme of this site that you should learn to plan lessons in more than one way. The corollary is, of course, that there is no one "best way" to plan lessons. Regardless of the form or template, there are fundamental components of all lesson plans that you should learn to write, revise, and improve.

What follows is a compendium of thoughts I have on the subject of lesson planning. As I want to make good use of this document when I start teaching again, I specifically formatted it like a “quick-look” reference sheet. In fact, its format speaks volumes about how I will apply what is listed below in the future.

A good lesson:

• Has a sense of coherence and flow (i.e., it is not just a sequence of discrete activities)

• Exhibits variety - with some elements of predictability (e.g., text, classroom routine, etc.)

• Is flexible (i.e., it is not immutable, nor does it dictate how and what I teach) (Jenson, 2001)

When planning a lesson, I must consider:

• My own beliefs and principles about teaching and learning

• My students’ needs, interests, wants, and expectations

• How it will connect to what my students already know

• My students’ backgrounds – to include different learning styles and how to address these

• The proficiency level of my students and the lesson’s level of difficulty

• The main goal of the lesson

• The reasons why I believe it should be taught

• The skills to be taught, what I want my students to learn, and my intended outcomes

• What will help my students’ learning and what will hinder it

• How well I know the content and what steps I need to take in order to teach it confidently

• How I will communicate the purpose of the lesson and activities to my students

• Ways to involve all my students actively

• The way it will be structured, organized and sequenced

• How I will begin and conclude it

• The activities and reasons for using them

• The materials and how I will use them

• Transitions between activities

• How much time I will need for each activity, as well as how much time my students will need

• The grouping arrangements I will use

• Where the lesson may break down and what to do about it if it does

• Unplanned lesson changes (unanticipated directions) and any alternative plans