Activities
When planning, it is vital to consider what students will be doing in the classroom; we have to consider the way they will be grouped, whether they are to move around the class, whether they will work quietly side-by-side researching on the Internet or whether they will be involved in a boisterous group-writing activity.
We should make decisions about activities almost independently of what language or skills we have to teach. Our first planning thought should centre round what kind of activity would be best for a particular group of students at a particular point in a lesson, or on a particular date. By deciding what kind of activity to offer them -in the most general sense -we have a chance to balance the exercises in our lessons in order to offer the best possible chance of engaging and motivating the class.
The best lessons offer a variety of activities within a class period. Students may find themselves standing up and working with each other for five minutes before returning to their seats and working for a time on their own. The same lesson may end with a whole-class discussion or with pairs writing dialogues to practise a language function or grammar point.
Skills
We need to make a decision about which language skills we wish our students to develop. This choice is sometimes determined by the syllabus or the course book. However, we still need to plan exactly how students are going to work with the skill and what sub-skills we wish to practise. Planning decisions about language skills and sub-skills are co-dependent with the content of the lesson and with the activities which the teachers will get students to take part in.
Language
We need to decide what language to introduce and have the students learn, practise, research or use. One of the dangers of planning is that, where language is the main focus, it is the first and only planning decision that teachers make. Once the decision has been taken to teach the present continuous, for example, it is sometimes tempting to slip back into a drill-dominated teaching session which lacks variety and which may not be the best way to achieve our aims. But language is only one area that we need to consider when planning lessons.
Content
Lesson planners have to select content which has a good chance of provoking interest and involvement. Since they know their students personally they are well-placed to select appropriate content. Even where the choice of subject and content is to some extent dependent on a course book, we can still judge when and if to use the course book's topics, or whether to replace them with something else. We can predict, with some accuracy, which topics will work and which will not. However, the most interesting content can be made bland if the activities and tasks that go with it are unimaginative. Similarly, subjects that are not especially fascinating can be used extremely successfully if the good planner takes time to think about how students can best work with them.
When thinking about the elements we have discussed above we carry with us not only the knowledge of the students, but also our belief in the need to create an appropriate balance between variety and coherence. With all of these features in mind we can finally pass all our thinking through the filter of practical reality, where our knowledge of the classrooms we work in, the equipment we can use, the time we have available, and the attitude of the institution we work in all combine to focus our planning on what we are actually going to do. Now, as the figure below shows, we are in a position to move from pre-planning to the plan itself.
Pre-Planning and the Plan
The
Plan