TESOL update - Terrible timing!

Things are getting hotter in the CertTESOL kitchen. We've been teaching for a few weeks now and I think all of us are getting used to it. My timings are still atrocious, though. In the last lesson I taught, we didn't even get to the final production activity because I took too long on the others. I was upset with myself as I had spent ages on youtube sorting out some spooky music to play during it. The context was 'mysteries' and I had planned a fun activity with the students reading a 'make your own adventure' story that also asked them questions that needed to be answered using past modals of deduction. It was going to be great, but the trouble was that the class was double the size of classes I had taught before, and I didn't modify my teaching to take that into account. I gave each student individual attention, which ate into the time I had allotted each activity and meant that some students were waiting for me to come round to them and, consequently, took longer on the activities than normal. Ah, well. I learned a valuable lesson and this is exactly the reason why we teach so many real classes before we qualify.

I also got a bit adventurous with one lesson I taught the Copper class and decided to try task-based learning. This is our director-of-studies' favourite method of teaching, and I've always been intrigued by it so thought that this was the perfect opportunity to give it a go. It also meant that I would definitely get to do the fun bit of the lesson as it is at the beginning, not the end! I actually chickened out slightly and tried a watered-down version with some pre-arranged grammar shoehorned into the middle. This wasn't entirely successful as, despite copious scaffolding using the target language, the students weren't able to produce it themselves. I think I was being a bit ambitious with my pre-intermediate group. They seemed to enjoy the task though. I asked them about their favourite holidays, then lead into an activity to plan their dream holiday. I split them into groups, gave them a budget of £1000 and various pieces of paper with different accommodation, catering, transport and activity options, all priced with costs that would mean it would be difficult to have everything they wanted, to encourage discussion. I asked them to say why they chose the options over others, attempting to get them to use "I prefer" and "I'd rather."

They all did very well with their planning. I monitored their discussions and was really impressed that even the quieter ones were getting involved. I then switched to teaching the grammar of "I prefer" and "I'd rather," which is totally cheating in task-based learning terms, but, to be fair, it was my first attempt, so I'm not being too harsh with myself! I asked them to present their holidays to the class using the target language. Originally, I had intended to have them all present a little bit of their holiday as at the beginning of the task I had asked them to each pick an activity that is special for them. However, due to me getting very excited when Sunao told us that her favourite holiday was when she went to see the Northern Lights (something I've always wanted to see), asking her lots of questions about it and explaining to the rest of the class what the Northern Lights are, I had run out of time again! I thought I had planned it so well, too! Ah, well - at least I'm enthusiastic. I had to severely truncate the rest of my lesson so my poor class could finish in time to have a break and asked each group to choose one member to present their holiday. This had the effect that only the presenter got to practice the target language, which was such a shame as the rest of the lesson had gone well and I know that if only I'd reigned myself in at the beginning of the lesson, it wouldn't have ended so badly. Timing is obviously something I've still got to work on, and I hope to one day conquer it!