Assisted Lesson Planning (ALP)
Prior to teaching your teaching practice sessions on the CELTA course, you will be given assisted lesson planning (ALP) time, where your tutor will try to ensure that your lesson plan for the next TP has a good chance of resulting in a satisfactory lesson. As I say to trainees on the first day of a CELTA course, we want and expect you all to pass. Assisted lesson planning is a way that we try to ensure that you have every chance of doing so.
If you really want to get the most out of these sessions, the following tips should help you to do so.
Look at the TP Notes
Depending on your course provider, you may have TP notes that you are expected to use to plan your lesson. If you have these, make sure you look at them before the assisted lesson planning session and know what you are assigned to teach. Make sure you know what has been assigned to you, and what the teacher before and after you are supposed to be doing too.
Although your tutor will have put these together (usually), they probably do not know them inside out. It will save you, them and your colleagues a lot of time if you know exactly what you are supposed to be teaching.
Know What you Want to Teach
If you have the TP notes, look at the materials you are supposed to be teaching from. Make sure you know what type of lesson it is going to be (e.g. vocabulary, grammar, speaking, etc.). This may sound obvious, especially if you have a course book that says very clearly. Sometimes it is not so clear, and you may even be asked to use a listening section to do a speaking lesson, for example. It could be the case that you have a reading or listening text, but this is actually the context to introduce vocabulary or a grammar point.
If you don’t have TP notes and therefore have the freedom to choose what you want to teach, you need to have some idea. This shouldn’t be too difficult. Pick a coursebook at the level of the students and choose something that you think would be relevant and interesting to them.
Have a Plan Already
Your tutor is not going to plan your lesson for you. When you get into the assisted lesson planning, you should already have some idea of how your lesson will look. You may not have worked out every last detail, but you should know the stages of the lesson at the absolute minimum.
The more you have done towards the planning of the lesson, the more your tutor can help you to elevate the lesson plan. If you’ve hardly done anything, your tutor will be mostly concerned with the framework or shape of the lesson, whereas if this is clearly in order, the tutor can focus more on aspects of micro-staging (i.e. the more detailed procedures for delivering the stages).
Assisted lesson planning time is limited, so the tutor may only be able to spend 15 minutes per teacher. You want to spend those 15 minutes talking about higher level issues, not the things you should have already got figured out.
Look for Problems
Before assisted lesson planning make sure you think through all of the activities you are planning. Think about what students are doing at every stage and how you will manage materials. If possible, get other people to do the activities you want to do, or at least do any exercises you can on your own.
Your tutor will be looking for problems so that they can help you to address them. They don’t want to see a lesson fail, so they will be trying to guide you to address these problems in your planning. If you’ve already found these problems, you can point them out to the tutors, who can guide you towards a solution. If you already have a solution, your tutor can focus on other issues.
Be Alert and Ready
Make sure you are listening and ready to take part during the assisted lesson planning, even if your colleague is presenting their lesson to the tutor. The tutor may throw out questions to the whole group and one of the criteria you are being graded on is working constructively with colleagues in the planning of teaching practice sessions (criterion 4m).
Not only does your performance contribute to this criteria, but it can also show you have taken onboard feedback from your tutor. For example, if your last teaching practice was reading, and the tutor is now concerned about whether you understand how to teach a reading lesson, commenting on your colleague’s upcoming reading lesson might show to the tutor that you have understood the feedback.
Present Coherently
Sometimes, it is easy to get excited about a lesson we are going to teach. I’ve had trainees who are so excited that when they explain their lesson plan it comes across jumbled up and confused. It may not be a bad lesson plan or a bad idea, but unfortunately, it is very difficult to understand what they are planning to do and I have to spend a lot of time unpacking it.
Cover the basics quickly. Tell your tutor what type of lesson it is and what framework you are using. Then tell them what the target language is and the aim.
When going through the plan, it is tempting to go through it in chronological order. That’s fine, but remember that the lead in is something we plan last and is only going to be about 10% of your lesson. You don’t want to spend a lot of time describing this or asking questions about it when the tutor doesn’t know what the main stages of your lesson are going to look like.
You also shouldn’t spend a lot of time explaining the things you are lifting from the coursebook, unless you are changing it in some way.
What I want to hear most about are stages where:
- you are clarifying language
- students are doing a productive practice
- students are using the focus skill
Be Ready for these Questions
On an older version of this post, I referred to these as obvious questions. I realise they are obvious to me as a CELTA trainer, and maybe less so to a trainee. Nevertheless, once you have read them, you know the questions that your tutor is very likely to ask you in assisted lesson planning.
- Will students work individually, in pairs or in groups?
- How will students check their answers?
- When/how will you give students the materials?
- Will they listen/read once or more times?
- What will the students do while they listen/read?
- Which of these words do you think students will find difficult?
- What do students find difficult about this grammar structure?
- Do you think students are meeting this grammar for the first time?
- Could the instructions here be unclear? Why?
- What are you going to do while the students are speaking together?
- Will there be any language feedback? How?
- Could you hand that over to the students to do?
- What will you do if students find it too easy/challenging?
