Lesson Planning: Anticipated Problems

Lesson Planning: Anticipated Problems

If you're taking CELTA at our centre, you'll be asked to submit lesson plans for every lesson you teach, and you'll be asked to anticipate a variety of problems and solutions related to classroom management, developing skills (reading / listening / speaking / writing) and teaching language systems (grammar / vocabulary / functions).

A lot of our trainees have been struggling with this - we often see things like 'students will think that 'concrete' means 'specific' because of L1 interference' as a problem related to classroom management, whereas this is something we indicate in our language analysis.

I'm hoping that this activity will help clarify which problems should be indicated on the cover page of a lesson plan (those related to classroom management and teaching skills), and which ones should be part of language analysis (problems with teaching grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation)

Below you'll see a list of potential problems. Before you move on, decide which of these problems are related to Classroom Management and which are related to Developing Skills (Reading / Listening / Speaking / Writing):

1. 
   language presentation / controlled practice / reading for detail might take too long
   
2. 
   one of the students may become disruptive during the lesson
   
3. 
   some of the students might be late which will result in problems with lesson stages and grouping
   
4. 
   stronger students might dominate and want to answer / speak out at most stages of the lesson
   
5. 
   student X and students Y don't work together well
   
6. 
   students don't know how to check answers in pairs and will want to copy from each other
   
7. 
   students might be of different levels (mixed ability / mixed level group)
   
8. 
   students might be reluctant to write / talk about personal topics
   
9. 
   students might be reluctant to write / talk about topics which aren't directly related to their immediate needs / interest
   
10. 
    students might be tired / sleepy
    
11. 
    students might be unable to keep up with the group dynamics and lose track of what's going on
    
12. 
    students might be unable to note down answers to all of the questions during listening for detail
    
13. 
    students might be weaker than expected and therefore the reading / listening text will be too difficult 
    
14. 
    students might get bored
    
15. 
    students might get stuck with some new words while reading the text and therefore be unable to find answers to detailed questions
    
16. 
    students might lack ideas for speaking / writing
    
17. 
    students might not have pens and / or paper
    
18. 
    students might not understand my instructions
    
19. 
    students might run out of ideas very fast at the stage of writing / speaking
    
20. 
    students might want to read every word at the stage of gist reading
    
21. 
    students might want to understand / memorize every word at the stage of gist listening and therefore get lost
    
22. 
    students will want to talk to the teacher rather than their partners
    
23. 
    students won't like the topic / will be reluctant to talk about romance and relationship
    
24. 
    technology (computer / projector) won't be working
    
25. 
    there might be an even number of students (if you want students to work in groups of three)
    
26. 
    there might be an odd number of students (if you're planning pair work)
    

And here's our cheat-sheet for you (answers are in white - please highlight the lines below to see the answers):
Especially in the early days of teaching, figuring out what is going to be problematic for students is one of the more challenging elements of lesson planning. If we haven’t had much exposure to students, we may feel like we are making wild guesses. In the first of two posts about potential problems and solutions, we’re going to focus on the things you are normally asked to consider on the front sheet of your lesson plan – problems related to classroom management. (Part 2 focuses on problems with teaching language.)
It’s a good feeling when something happens in the lesson and not only have you predicted it, you have a solution ready to go. Conversely, it can really difficult when a problem appears that we hadn’t considered and the lesson begins to feel out of our control. While we certainly can’t, and probably shouldn’t, try to anticipate every single, tiny thing that could go ‘not according to plan’, (this may turn us into a bundle of nerves and insecurities!) – we can be aware of which areas present the greatest potential for problems, and be ready to respond to these.
h) i) l) m) o) p) s) t) u) v) w)