Writing Lesson Aims
One of the most important aspects of lesson planning, in my opinion, is defining a clear aim. Good lesson aims define what you want students to get from coming to your lesson. If you have a strong understanding of your lesson aims, it is easier to make good choices about what happens in the lesson, both at the planning and the teaching stage.
Writing Good Lesson Aims
Generally on a CELTA course, your tutor will expect you to write communicative lesson aims (or as Jim Scrivener calls them in Learning Teaching, achievement aims). A communicative or achievement aim describes what communication a student can have because they came to your lesson. The main lesson aim should not be merely procedural, i.e. it should not be a description of what students will do in the lesson.
Let’s look at some lesson aims and see if we can make them more communicative.
Some Not-So-Good Lesson Aims
Look at the five lesson aims below. Why do you think these lesson aims might not be so good?
- Students will have a good lesson and enjoy the activities.
- Students will learn the present continuous.
- Students will complete a doctor-patient roleplay.
- Students will learn some now words about transport.
- Students will read a text and be able to understand it.
- This aim is something you should be hoping for in every lesson. If you don’t want students to have an effective and enjoyable lesson, you probably shouldn’t be teaching. Of course “good” is a very broad term, and if you could define what you meant by it, perhaps this would make a personal aim for the lesson.
- This aim is focused on the grammar point that you are trying to get across to the students, but it is weak because there is no reason why they are learning this. I would also ask how you know they learnt the present continuous? Is it enough that they can recognise it in a sentence, or that they can form it in a de-contextualised sentence, or that they can use it in an activity without thinking about the fact they are using it?
- The third aim focuses on what students will do in the lesson, but it shouldn’t be the completion of a role play that is the target, but what that is preparing them for in the real world.
- This aim is similar to the second in terms of its weaknesses. What does it mean that students will learn some vocabulary? Will they recognise the words, be able to put them into some sentences or actually be able to use them? We also don’t know what this vocabulary is going to enable them to do. For example, modes of transport (e.g. bus, train) might help them to ask someone where to get one of these, but external parts of a car (e.g. bonnet, wing, bumper) might help them to report an accident.
- The fifth aim also shares weaknesses with the third aim. The teacher has described what students will do in a lesson, but hasn’t even told us anything about the text. Even telling us this is a menu or short story would improve this aim considerably.
Identify the Benefits of your Lesson
As mentioned above, a better aim focuses on what the students will get because they come to your lesson. Think of it this way, you are going to attend a seminar on how to get the highest paying English teaching jobs. There are two seminars and you are presented with the aims for both of them beforehand.
- You will learn about how the speaker got their highly paid English teaching job.
- You will be able to find, apply for and secure a high-paying English teaching job.
Which of the two seminars would you go for? Well, personally I would go for the second because it promises me something beyond the seminar. It promises to change my life, in fact. Maybe a good English lesson can be life-changing too?
In some teaching contexts, students will have a choice whether they come to your lessons or not. Let’s imagine that was the case for all students, and you have to tell them your aims before the lesson. Let’s also imagine that they could just as easily go to another lesson if they wanted to and if they do, the other teacher is getting paid, not you. Now your lesson aims have to tell them the benefits they will get if they come to your lesson.
Framing Lesson Aims
Since we are trying to describe the improvement in a student’s communication, there is a common way we frame lesson aims, which is to start with this wording:
By the end of the lesson, students will be (better) able to…
After this, we describe the improvement to a student’s communicative competence. The following could all complete this sentence:
- describe what is happening in a picture;
- identify and describe modes of transport in their city;
- visit a doctor and explain their symptoms;
- read a newspaper article about alternative medicine.
As you can see, these aims do not describe what students will do in the lesson, although it is not difficult to imagine some of the activities they would do. For example, the third aim they would like do the doctor-patient role play, and in the fourth, they are surely going to read an article.
We could also add the language that we intend for them to use. For example:
By the end of the lesson, students will be (better) able to describe what is happening in a picture using the present continuous.
Not the use of the word “better” in these aims. Unless students are at a low level, they may well have attempted this before, or would at least have some competency to do it. But if students have never done something before, then you could leave “better” out of the aim.
Objectives
In addition to a main aim, you may be asked to provide a sub aim or objectives for the lesson. Different tutors and centres may use the words aim, objective or goal differently, but in any case, you will likely have one main aim/goal/objective, and others that are secondary.
Your sub aims are likely to be more procedural aims, i.e. they will describe parts of the lesson. For example, in the case of the lesson aim above about visiting a doctor, the students will likely learn the name of some symptoms and conduct at least one role play of this scenario.
How do you Know the Aim was Achieved?
Another box that you might find on a CELTA lesson plan is one that asks you what evidence will tell you your aim has been achieved. In most cases this will be the final stage of the lesson, which will generally give the students an opportunity for productive practice. That said, in receptive lessons, it will be the stages where they are reading and listening, although the productive follow on will also tell you something about what they understood.
Some More Communicative Lesson Aims
Here are some more examples of communicative aims:
By the end of the lesson, students will be (better) able to:
- make small talk about the weather;
- order food and drinks in a cafe;
- interject in a conversation with important news;
- boast about their achievements;
- listen to a news report about crime;
- write a postcard.
Personal Aims
Personal aims have also been mentioned above. Many CELTA centres will ask you add some personal aims onto your lesson plan. These should be quite simple as they come from the feedback on your previous lessons.
Some centres will give you an unassessed lesson first, or if you have some teaching experience you might have some idea of things you should work on. If not, for your first lesson it may simply be your personal aim to survive without injury or critical incident. However, from TP2 onwards, your tutor will expect you to take the feedback they have given and pick some of these points to work on.
You will need to decide which points are relevant to each specific lesson. For example, if your tutor told you that you needed to do something differently about teaching pronunciation, and your next lesson is about writing, this may not be the best lesson to work on that particular point.
It depends on how much you have to do in working on a particular aim, but I wouldn’t advise having too many at once. It’s often better to focus on 2 or 3 key areas, rather than having a laundry list of issues to be thinking about at the same time.
Stage Aims
As a final type of aim that you will be asked to include in your lesson plans, we also have stage aims. You will find more about these in my post on staging.
