Practical Teaching
Introduction
Welcome to the Practical Teaching portion of the website. If you’re a new or aspiring TEFL teacher, I recommend you start with the TEFL 101 pages first before reading these pages. I make that recommendation having worked with many new or inexperienced teachers.
You see, the information you find here will probably seem more useful initially. And if you’ve just started teaching and need the information here just to get through your first lesson, then, yes, it is. If you’ve got class staring you down the barrel in an hour and have no idea what you’re going to do or how to do it (and I can practically guarantee it will happen to you at some point because it happened to me several times early in my career), this can be a useful resource to planning and teaching a good lesson.
However, it won’t be a great lesson. That’s not a dig against you; it’s because you won’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. There should always be several things running in the back of your mind as you plan and teach a lesson, and those are built upon foundational knowledge.
So, if you’re new and you don’t have a class you have to teach in the next couple of hours, check out the TEFL 101 pages for that foundation. If you do have something coming up later today, then by all means use these tools and ideas for planning, building and teaching your lesson. Just be sure to come back later, after class, to get that foundational reading in.
If you’re an experienced teacher, it’s probably still worth a look, either as a refresher or a reminder (and you might even find some things you hadn’t known or considered!).
But, ultimately, it’s your life and your classroom; do what you think is right for your and for your students.
On to the Good Stuff
As you may expect from the title Practical Teaching, here we cover the more practical aspects of teaching a TEFL class. This includes articles on lesson planning and classroom management, ways to introduce topics, activity ideas, and more.
You can teach a good lesson without lesson planning skills, but it’s very hard and more up to chance and the students themselves than anything you as the teacher will do. Lesson Planning is all about give you the tools to plan a good lesson.
You can have the best lesson plan in the world, but it doesn’t mean much if you can’t manage your class. Now, if you’re teaching an adult lesson, that’s mostly taken care of; in a TEFL situation most adults are in class because they want to be. Working with kids, however, can be very different, and so while there will be some articles on managing an adult lesson, most of this will be directed towards teaching children.
Of course, you have to have activities to have a lesson; in Activity Ideas you’ll find a bunch of activity ideas for use in different levels and age groups. Note that because one might be aimed for kids, doesn’t mean you can’t use it with adolescents or adults, just that it’s primarily targeting children.
Other Ideas is, as you may have guessed, a catch-all for everything else that I write up that comes under actually teaching. As this expands there may be other categories spun-off as I come up with them. And of course, if you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know. I’d be delighted to hear them.