Lesson planning and classroom management online course

Sarah Longfield
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Professional Development  Technology and Digital 

This week, we’re looking at how one of our online professional development courses can help you with lesson planning and classroom management, when you introduce a new activity to your learners. This ties in with one of the principles for teachers’ professional development: ‘E for Evaluated’.

INSPIRE: the principles supporting your professional development

The word INSPIRE explains our teacher development principles.
The ‘E’ in INSPIRE = Evaluated. This means that our online courses allow teachers to evaluate their knowledge throughout: for example, by doing tasks and then checking their answers against the actual answers; or providing opportunities for self-evaluation.

Example activity: giving clear instructions

Below is a way to evaluate giving clear instructions, when setting up tasks for your learners. The activity is taken from our Lesson Planning and Classroom Management online course.
Step 1 First, let’s think about how you introduce an activity to learners:


When you set up an activity or task, it helps to:

  • use the imperative
  • use short sentences
  • pause to allow learners time to process information
  • give a specific task
  • give a time limit
  • use ‘signalling’ words to get learners’ attention, e.g. Look, Listen.

It doesn’t help when you:

  • use colloquial/idiomatic language
  • give too many instructions at once
  • add ‘if you want’ or ‘you can, but you don’t have to’ to your instructions.

We can improve instructions by making them simpler and more graded.

Step 2 Once your learners have done the activity, you can evaluate how successful your instructions were. Fill in the gaps below with the correct word:

grading            imperative        stage          gestures             demonstrating       
worksheet         pause       feedback               time           monitor

How do I study the Lesson Planning and Classroom Management online course?

There are three steps to studying one of our online professional development courses:

You can find a list of online courses and full instructions on how to register, on our website.

  • Step 3: Once you’ve registered and logged in, you can either join an online ‘class’ or select ‘self-study’ mode.

For the Lesson Planning and Classroom Management course: if you decide that self-study mode is the right option for you:

  • On the My Learning screen, simply select the Self-study tab
  • Select Content next to Lesson Planning and Classroom Management Self-study.

 

Next week:

We’ll look at Alan Maley’s 50 Creative Activities with another sample activity from the book.