PTLLS – Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector

The PTLLS certification is a preliminary qualification that all post-compulsory instructors must now undertake from the 2007-2008 academic year. It’s a very elementary qualification. Nevertheless, the teaching component was actually pretty hard, and rather nerve-wracking.

The teaching practice, dubbed a “micro-teach” by the university Education Department, involved looking at one aspect of English (above word-level) and putting a small lesson together on that topic. The lesson is aimed at your classmates. Almost all of mine are native English speakers. Here’s the killer aspect of it – why I called it difficult: you only have twenty minutes to deliver a three stage lesson! I was given conjunctions and connectives in general as my topic.

The actual planning of the lesson was problematic for me. We were asked to design a lesson plan template which takes into account issues that might seem surprising to teachers in private schools outside the UK. Equal opportunities issues (physical disability, gender discrimination, learning disabilities) and Health and Safety issues, for example. You can find a preliminary copy of the lesson plan template I’ve devised here. It’s in OpenDocument Text (.odt) format. This is due to issues I have with MS Office – I see no reason to buy it or steal it when there are perfectly good free alternatives out there. Using the software I do, I could save the work in .doc format, but this tends to lead to formatting errors which aren’t present in OpenDocument format. Anyway, I have a post in the works about this, so I’ll leave it at that.

Something that gave me trouble, but which I’m just going to have to get my head around, is the language we are expected to use on the lesson plan. Instead of “aims” we are expected to use the term “learner outcomes”, and instead of a “Main Aim” and “Subsidiary Aim” – two terms I’ve used since I did my CELTA three and a half years ago, we are strongly encouraged to use the term “General objectives” and “Specific” objectives. This confused me, since the new language doesn’t seem to be immediately compatible with the way I’ve always formulated my aims, and requires me to think about them in a different way. I’ll get used to it eventually, but it’s illustrative of a problem that many students of foreign languages have: assimilation of entirely new concepts is not a simple process. On reflection (does that make this a recursive blog?), I think it implies that assimilation of a new paradigm may, in some cases, cause extra problems for a student at first, before expanding their potential language. I’ll continue this thought in a later post, as it ventures too far off-topic here.

The planning was difficult, as I’ve had to leave my planning comfort-zone and reassess my language. The biggest issue was that I found it practically impossible to get what I wanted into twenty minutes. Even if I had gone against the instructions I was given, and focused purely on conjunctions, it would have been practically impossible to give anything more than the most basic information – “This is a conjunction, this is how it works” – and then have the students do an exercise – “Find the conjunctions in this text”. It was illuminating how teaching an unfamiliar target to a learner group I never thought I’d teach (native speakers of English) really made errors surface that might not have, had I been teaching “students” in a familiar setting and format.

I indulged a little in my most common teaching error, which is a tendency to over-teach. I included connective adverbs in the lesson, but my first activity was too long, and because the presentation included connective adverbs, it was too long as well. This took up all the time earmarked for my third activity. In truth, I think I went about the micro-teach in the wrong way – my activities were too fine-grained or they were too long. If I’d had half an hour for the session, I might have been able to achieve the outcomes I’d set, but not in twenty minutes. I wanted to communicate the complexities of the grammar to my classmates, many of whom have never taught English before, but lost sight of the outcome in the details.

In future, I’ll need to pay more attention to the timing of my lessons.

Explore posts in the same categories: reflective practice, teaching

Tags: ESOL, PGDE, Skills for Life, Teacher Training

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