So much excitement about it and time really goes much faster than we expect. Thinking, designing, preparing and implementing my lesson has been a clear “get ready, get set, go!” of fours weeks of exclusive work and dedication that, in the end, have rewarded me with an enriching experience, an experience which sets up now an open door to my future.
If the objectives of my lesson plan had been very clearly established from the very beginning between my tutor and me, thinking about the content of my lesson plan was not an easy work. It was the first time in my life I had heard about competences and basic competences, dimensions, methodologies and strategies, ICT activities, skills, addressing to diversity, initial, formative and summative assessments, etc. with respects to designing didactic units. It took me long to assimilate all these new concepts and to understand how they interact in the design of a lesson plan. Then, you have a couple of ideas. You find out the way to relate them. Suddenly, the ideas are four. Then, you think of how to relate them. You think of the objectives and the contents you already have. Then, you come out with the idea of the format… it is an ICT format! You start thinking of what you need for the design. All of a sudden, there you go! Two more ideas…. Then, you start considering how to improve the design, on how to make the activities more interesting. By the time you analyze all what you already have in your hands… Surprise! You accomplish all the requirements!!
Let me introduce you to my lesson plan: www.willyfogswiki.wikispaces.com. Through a total of eight didactic activities and Willy Fog, a traveller of the world and the main character of the animated series Around the World with Willy Fog, the students have been able to increase their lexical knowledge related to twenty-three countries of the world, their architecture and monuments, their natural beauties, their peoples, their traditions and cultures, etc. And from a grammatical point of view, they have learnt the formation and the uses of the present perfect and the difference with the past simple, together to the use of related words such as ever, just, already, yet, always, never, for, since, etc.From a pedagogical approach, I designed these activities in order to:1. Increase their communicative competence through a series of activities specially created to focus on the five main skills which take place in the process of learning a foreign language, this is listening, reading, speaking (including pronunciation), writing and interaction.2. Increase their knowledge of the world, their peoples, their different cultures and traditions... Therefore, to increase their respect for the plurilingual and multicultural diversity of the world in which we live.3. Encourage their literary competence in their both dimensions as a reader and as a writer, creating a motivating atmosphere around Willy Fog and Jules Verne's classic Around the World in 80 Days and their own literary contribution to this wiki.4. Increase their Audiovisual competence in all its dimensions: receptive, productive and critical through their comprehension, engagement and contribution to this wiki, encouraging them at the same time the use of the internet for research and creative purposes and to increase their self-learning strategies.5. Encourage their analytic skill and their critical thinking about the use of the foreign language, its linguistic and grammatical content and his/her own learning process directly through interaction and writing activities.6. Encourage team work and team learning and, therefore, their cooperation and solidarity behaviours in the process of learning a foreign language and as human beings.It has taken me a total of five classes to implement my lesson plan so far (I will need a sixth session for the assessment, as the students are working during their Christmas vacations on a composition and its recording). It has been great to see all my work finally in action, after the though time thinking of potential activities for my lesson plan and considering how to get them all together.
The first class started on time, as I was already waiting at the door when the previous bell rang. I must confess I was very nervous this time, maybe more for the implementation of my own work rather than being in front of my 23 D2 3rd of ESO students. The class was in famous room number 28, so I knew we were save for the day. This classroom has an overhead projector and a screen, which were all what I needed for this first session. The first thing my tutor did is letting the students know I was going to do the next classes. So, she has asked for respect, as this was an exam for me too. I think this calmed down the students, as they were quite quiet in this first session and they tried to participate and interact as much as possible throughout the class. While she was speaking, I wrote a sentence on the blackboard. It was my warm-up activity: “Have you ever been abroad?”. When my tutor finished her speech, I checked attendance. Then, I started to speak: I made a short presentation on the reasons why I was going to teach the next classes, what was expected from me and what I, therefore, expected from them. After this, I made some comments on contents they had previously learnt during this year (present, present continuous, past simple and past continuous) and I proceeded to introduce the new topic: the present perfect. I began by presenting the activity of the day and the starting point for my lesson plan: an interaction activity using a Power Point called The World in Images, which took me ages to prepare and where I was presenting twenty-three countries of the World in Images. Through this power point, I was able to ask the students about their past experiences and to make them us the present perfect with questions such as “Have you ever been to France?”, “Have you ever eaten Thai food?”, “Have you seen Moulin Rouge?”, “What films has the Australian actress Nicole Kidman starred in?”, etc. This questionnaire has taken me to be able to explain the grammar relating the present perfect, such as its formation and its several uses, and the difference with other verb tenses, such as the present continuous (“Where has Ronaldinho played?” and “Where is Ronaldinho playing now?”) and the past simple (“What songs have Kylie Minogue sung?” and “What type of music did Pavarotti sing?”). I was able to explain them the use of related words such as “ever” and “never” and the position of the adverbs in the sentences using the present perfect too. This activity was the right tool for an initial assessment. As my tutor had already informed me, the students knew already a lot about the present perfect from 2nd of ESO. This has made the teaching much easier and we have been able to concentrate more on the power point and learning vocabulary about the countries, their monuments and architecture, their peoples, their food, their dances, etc. When I was preparing my lesson plan I was a bit afraid this activity would not be enough to fill the sixty minutes of a lesson, but between my tutor’s introduction, the presentation of the new topic and, then, the activity, the bell rang earlier than I expected.
The second class, tough I wasn´t so nervous, was not easy to organize. As we had to work on the wiki I had organized for my lesson plan and we had to carry out a couple of activities from there that day, we needed a computer room. This is not an easy job in the schools nowadays. IES Bernat el Ferrer has a couple of computer rooms, but they are mostly occupied by the computer students of Professional Cicles Formatius. While my tutor went to see if one was available, I stayed with the students in classroom 15, which was the one we had been assigned for that lesson. In order not to waste time, I called roll and introduced them the contents of the lesson and why we were requiring computers. When my tutor arrived short afterwards, we moved to one computer room, which, fortunately, was available. After making some new remarks on the use of the present perfect, I made a presentation of my wiki, including contents and objectives. I had to explain what a wiki is in advance, as some students did not know what it was. For this aim, I made some students participate and asked them to clarify his/her colleagues what a wiki is and what it consists of. Fortunately, there is always the clear example of Wikipedia to make them understand what it is! Afterwards, we proceeded to do activities one and two of my wiki. The former is a listening recorded in my own voice with the text on page one of my wiki. This text is about the animated series Around the World with Willy Fog and its origin based on Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in Eighty Days. There is a summary of the story too, but I decided not to reveal the end so that we could do another activity watching the last episode of the series in another class. We heard the text once and, then, I asked the students to write on the blackboard words or sentences they had understood from the listening. I played it for a second time and used the same procedure. The text was difficult for them. I explained them it was real English, it wasn’t a text adapted for ESL classes. So, that was the reason why there were some ideas they couldn’t take out. In the end, with the cooperation of the whole class, they were able to extract the main ideas of the listening, so I felt satisfied. When we finished, we continued with activity number two. We started reading the text student by student. Afterwards, I made them identify those sentences using the present perfect, what was my excurse to explain the use of “already” and “since”, which were being used in the text. Finally, we checked vocabulary and, definitively, there were many words they didn’t understand. The bell caught us in this process, so I asked the student to read the text again at home and to check on the dictionary those words they hadn´t understood.
The third class was in classroom 28 again, as it had been assigned, because the computer room was not available. Due to this reason, I opted to do session number four instead of number three, as in session number four we could do without computers. In this class, we made activity number four of my lesson plan (I expected to do activity number five too, but as the students did not understand very well the last episode of the series, corresponding to activity number four, I decided to replay the episode instead of proceeding to activity number five). I started the class checking attendance, as usual. And after a short introduction about what we had listened and read in the wiki the previous day, I explained the situation about the computers and the change I had made in the lesson structure. Afterwards, I simply proceeded to project through the overhead projector the last episode of the animated series called “What a Difference a Day Makes”, in which Willy Fog and Regodon realize they had arrived in London one day before the expected day because they had been travelling eastwards. As I knew this with the computer room with occur sooner or later, I had copied the last chapter of the animated series in my pen drive. Since the very beginning the introductory soundtrack of the series was played, the students were quiet watching and listening to this episode (though I heard a couple laughing at the music). The introductory song was Activity number 3 of my lesson plan, which we would be doing now in session four. So, hearing these two boys laughing made me wonder two things: if the song was probably too childish for these students and if this activity might be too short to be implemented in one whole session. Throughout the projection, some students were looking at me as if they weren’t able to understand what it was being said. As I had thought, it was not easy for them. The characters were represented as animals with different accents, one coming from France, another from Italy, another from India and, finally, Willy Fog from England. When the episode finished, I asked some questions about the chapter and I saw only three or four of them had understood why Willy Fog had won the wage. So, I had a look at my tutor and, when I saw her nodding, I decided to play it again instead of proceeding to do activity number five. This activity could be done in the following session together with activity number three, the introductory song, which would not last enough time to cover the whole session. On the second projection, I asked the students to focus on a couple key conversations to understand the chapter and, at the same time, I paused the projection three or four times to make some comments and to repeat some dialogues. This time, almost the whole class was able to understand why Willy Fog had arrived to London one day before and why he had won the bet. We were not able to make other comments on the episode when I finished the projection. Not even one minute after the end of the projection, the bell rang.
For session four, my tutor and I had reserved a computer room in order to be able to carry out activity number three, Around the World with Willy Fog’s introduction song, which I had only in the wiki, not in printed paper. Once in the computer room, while the students were boosting their computers, I checked attendance. There was one student missing. He is a boy taking part of an external course. His case is very peculiar. My tutor explained me his story afterwards. He fails in all the subjects and he has very clear he does not want to study in the future. So he is doing an external course working in a garage and the remaining hours he is obliged to be in the school. Despite what others would think from the stereotype, cero conflicts: he is very kind and helpful and, though his level is very low, he is a quiet and peaceful boy in all his classes. He has never caused any conflicts. So, after checking attendance, I made an introduction to the two activities we were going to do in that session: to work on the introductory song of the series, which they had already heard in the previous session, and to open a debate to compare the animated series of the 80s to those which are produced nowadays. To avoid laughs, I started by saying the song might be a bit childish for their age, but that our aim was to learn some English out of it. It seems it worked. I did not hear any laughs this time. After listening to the song a couple of times and asking the students to write on the blackboard the words they had understood, we heard the song twice more with the lyrics on their monitors. I thought of making them sing the song, but I thought they might feel a bit ridiculous, so I proceeded to introduce Activity number 5, the debate. The topic was to compare the animated series of the eighties with the cartoons produced in the present times. My objective was working on their interaction and speaking skills. I organized the class firstly in pairs so that they could answer to the question “What have you seen on the episode?”. Then, we worked all together around the answer and the kids were able to take out very nice conclusions indeed! I was very surprised: the sense of discipline used, being Willy Fog a punctual gentleman, the use of animals as the main characters of the series, as in some cartoons nowadays, that this series has its origin in a novel, what rarely happens in today’s productions, etc. When the bell rang, I asked the students to stay one more minute. I wanted to suggest them to have a look at the links I had introduced in the wiki about Jules Verne and his works and also about his book Around the World in Eighty Days. I had even included a link to the complete book, so I proposed them to try to read the book during their Christmas vacations or to have a look, at least, at some pages so that they could see how much they were able to understand.
For the fifth session we required the computers again, so we reserved one computer room in advance for this class too. As in the previous class, while the students were boosting their computers, I checked attendance. The boy doing the external course was missing again. After this, I made a small summary of what we had been doing in the previous classes and I a short introduction of what page 2 of my wiki was about. Willy Fog was back to the present times to have a new challenge. We have stated by reading out loud, one by one, about this challenge. When we arrived to an email Willy Fogs sends Romy from Paris, I have asked the students to turn their monitor off, as we were going to listen to this email first. I had previously recorded the text with my own voice using the software in www.audacity.com It was me who had written this text, so it was easy for the students to understand. When I asked them about the main ideas of the text, they were able to take out most of them. Then, I played the listening of the text for a second time. Finally, we have read the text of the email aloud, student by student, in order and, when we checked the lexical content, there were only five or six words they hadn’t understood. Up to that moment, including all the previous sessions, I could say most of the students had participated in class. All of a sudden, they all got silent and showed faces of worry when we started reading the three activities they would have to do during their Christmas vacation and all the instructions I had written in the wiki in order for them to carry them out. They started asking questions about the activities, what I thought was very positive. But I got a bit stressed when I saw the time in one of the monitors. They had many doubts and the bell was about to ring. I would have needed another class to explain them all these three activities thoroughly and even how a wiki works! When the bell rang, I asked the students to stay two more minutes while we finished clarifying all their doubts. But two minutes later, my tutor said some students had to go to catch a bus, otherwise they will miss it. The rest of the class stayed ten more minutes asking questions about it. These were activities six, seven and eight in my wiki. The first consists in writing an email to Romy on behalf of Willy Fog, from a different country each time, as I had written in the example from Paris. So, each student would have to select a country from which they would write this email. All together, with 23 emails from 23 different countries, they would be able to achieve Willy Fog’s new challenge of going around the world in 23 days and, writing, all together, a nice new story for Willy Fog. The main objective of this activity, apart of working on their writing skills, is to foster their literary competence as writers. This is why I insisted on how to make a correct composition, with an introduction, a body and a conclusion. I tried to foster their self-learning too, by suggesting them to use the internet to search information, as well as to check new vocabulary in online dictionaries. I have assigned a percentage of 50% of the final mark of my lesson plan to this activity, as it is the main course of the lesson plan. I have assigned a 25% to activity eight, in which the students will have to record their email with their own voice and post it in the wiki. The main objective of this activity is making them work on their reading, pronunciation and intonation skills with the use of an ICT such as www.audacity.com. I have assigned the remaining 25% of the mark to their participation in class, in the wiki in general and particularly in activity number seven, which is about cooperative learning (addressing to diversity, I might consider to increase this percentage in some particular cases). In this activity, the students will have to help their colleagues with their emails and their English, identifying their mistakes and helping them to improve their compositions this way. The objective, a good new story for Willy Fog made up of the contribution of the whole group D2. We will have to wait to see what the students come up with after their Christmas vacations!!
From the experience of implementing my lesson plan, I could come up with dozens of ideas about teaching strategies, teaching procedures, etc. out of which I must share with my at least four of them:
1. Be ready for the unexpected. From my experience in this practicum, the unexpected happens more often than the expected, so… better being prepared for this with alternative resources, materials or even alternative activities!
2. Classes must be well structured in advance. You must know where you come from and where you are going to. A warm-up or an introduction is basic.
3. Therefore… check the time! This is by far my main problem, I must admit. Not wearing a watch in my whole life is making me pay the price now!
4. Keep a relaxing, smooth and participative climate in a real learning environment. For this aim, it is imperative to agree with the students on the rules of the game. And here comes my question, following one of my main worries: is it better the students interrupt the teacher to ask eveeeerything or should we allow the students to speak to other colleagues in class if we know it is about the topic and in a low voice?
Teaching is a matter of experience. So, up to what point are there right answers to all the questions?
