What makes a good session title and a good session plan?
In unit 6, we discussed effective session design, produced a plan and evaluated the plan of a colleague on the course.
I actually used my plan and materials in a training session. Many thanks to the teachers who attended to help me practise. 😊
Framing the session title as a question seems to be a popular option. My title was: How can I help my students improve their speaking skills? The focus was on different tasks and procedures, as well as ways to scaffold speaking activities.
What I tried for the first time
1.Approach: participatory. My presence was mainly facilitative.
2. Asking teachers:
- what makes a good session
- to come up with their own criteria against which they would evaluate the session at the end.
3. Using an activity to uncover teachers’ beliefs about teaching speaking. There were three possible answers.
- I agree
- I disagree
- yes but..
4. Input: Using a handout with 6 speaking activities.
Asking teachers to choose 2-3 activities, read the procedures and evaluate them.
Would they change anything?
What? Why?
5. Reflective task: Suitcase, freezer and wastebasket. Inspired by Wright & Bolitho and Martyn Clarke’s cognitive freezer!
6. Emailing teachers a summary of what they talked about, after the session.
- Choice of topic and task – needs to be relevant and motivating.
- Using controversial topics to generate discussion.
- Scaffolding the activity, using videos, flashcards, PowerPoint or questions to guide students.
- Getting students’ full attention when describing the task-giving instructions.
- Choice of hot (on the spot) versus cold (delayed) feedback, depending on level, task complexity and students’ expectations.
- Facilitating discussions. Standing back and letting them “do the work”.
- Feeding in some useful language when necessary to avoid breaking their “flow”.
- Encouraging an it’s ok to make mistakes atmosphere, supporting students to take risks.
- Asking students how much support they need. Differentiating support.
- Activating what students already know about the topic/language with brainstorming activities.
- Pushing students to go beyond their comfort zone. Demand high.
- Encouraging students to use lexical chunks, e.g. adjective-noun collocations, phrasal verbs etc.
The main challenge
..was time management. I hadn’t allocated enough time for group tasks. It was the first time I was using this approach and I realised it is more time-consuming.
The best part
..was that there was no flow of knowledge from me to teachers. There were group tasks, pair tasks, and change of partners, which really helped teachers learn from each other. Everyone played an active role and had control over the process. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot by experimenting.
Special thanks to: 💚
Louay Mohammad, Despina Anagnostou and Farida Khan Begum for their support!
The TEFL Zone 
Really interesting, Rachel. It sounds like the session was a great success – good work.
I really like the idea of teachers defining the success criteria for the session! I imagine you presented them with the topic of the session and then they created the success criteria based on their thoughts around that, or did you do something different?
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Thanks, for the comment, Jim. The teachers who attended had already voted for their favourite topic before the session, so they knew we would focus on speaking activities. When I created the zoom meeting, I wrote the session title in the description and also stated the aims before criteria-setting. I think I should have been more specific, though. I asked a general “what makes a good training session”, and maybe it’d be more useful to ask “what do you expect from this specific session”.
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I stole your idea and used it in one of my CUP sessions the other day. They had chosen the workshop and then I got them to define their personal success criteria for the session. I found it really insightful to see what each teacher wanted from the session. It helped me move through what I had planned and make it more relevant to ‘hit’ as many of the success criteria as possible. I got them to share their met or not met at the end and I was happy to see that most were met. The criteria that wasnt met was built into the next session. It’s funny because I use success criteria, both teacher-geneated and learner-genrated, in my classes but I had never thought about teachers defining their own success criteria for the session. I found that doing this really helped get them aware of what they want and also how it matched with their beliefs and principles regarding the topic we were looking at (flipped classroom), which we looked at in the next part of the session.
Thanks for sharing and keep the good ideas coming…I will no doubt steal more!
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Sounds like it worked well, thanks for letting me know! I also stole it from Wright&Bolitho’s Trainer Development book (p197). We’re all idea thieves here 😇
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