Do less, with more impact.

Do less, with more impact.
Teach less, elicit more.
Not everything needs to be scripted and planned ahead.
Learn to disappear, go and stand/ sit at the back and observe from there.
Sit in the back row, next to a student. Connect with your students, connect with their learning.
Take a step back, sit back and relax, take a moment to recharge your batteries and assess your next move.
What do the students need right now? Nevermind your plan and PPT.
What key questions and reflections will go well with the activity they are working on? What questions can you ask to enhance their learning at that stage? Create connections with prior learning and enable learners to create bridges between topics, grammar points, vocabulary, cultural knowledge.
And most importantly, allow yourself to have that space for clarity of mind, in the middle of the lesson. Not every minute of the lesson needs to be filled with activities, worksheets and extension activities. Use questioning as retrieval, to deepen understanding, to keep students engaged and repeat/ re-use the same questions from one lesson to the next.

Allow yourself to be spontaneous in the lesson, to plan live, to go off topic because you’ve noticed some misconceptions that need to be addressed before you can carry on. Be switched on and ready to react, to practise adaptive teaching!

Re-use and recycle your ideas and resources. Use one text or activity for your whole lesson and exploit it in different ways.

Add some spontaneous mini retrieval activities after each main activities. “Let’s stay here for a minute and review what we know so far” then ask a series of questions about grammar, order of words, adjective endings, adapting the language etc These two extra minutes at the end of each activities will have more impact than an extra slide with extra exercises. If it is used as routine, students engage in “automatic pilot” mode and it alleviates the cognitive load on them, making more space for thinking about what really matters. If your presentation has 30 slides et different instructions every time, students spend more time thinking about what they need to do and how rather than actually practise the language. It’s exhausting and makes them “forever beginners”.

Make them feel competent, support their learning.