06 Jul Putting Purpose Back Into Your Lessons

As a teacher trainer and a teacher who has taught for more than 15 years (not a long time, I know, but long enough) it has become quite easy for me to notice the gaps between what experience and training has taught me and what my students don’t know and haven’t learnt yet.

Does that make sense?

There are quite a few weaknesses that pretty much all teachers have when starting out and there are two which are my pet peeves: TTT and purpose. I’ve spoken about TTT before so here we’re going to talk about purpose.

What do I mean by purpose?

Well, whatever we would like our students to do in the classroom, they are basically doing because we are the teachers and we have asked them to do it. They would (probably) not normally do grammar exercises to practise the past perfect, listen to two students from New Zealand discussing their presentation on seaweed, or practise using a dictionary, but these are some of the things we ask our students to do.

Because there is a bigger picture, which usually only we can see.

Can you see the problem?

Often our students are not aware of why they are doing certain things but they are following our lead blindly, so they end up doing things for the sake of doing them and not really investing any interest in it. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

I’m not saying you need to explain the reason for every activity that you do, but for most activities you can add in an element of purpose to give your students a reason for doing an activity.

In other words, when choosing an activity, give a reason for your students to complete it.

For example:

Talk about your weekend X

Find out who had the most boring weekend   √

Find out who did the most this weekend   √

Find 3 people who slept more than you did this weekend   √

And that’s it.

Nice and simple. By adding in this one extra element you are forcing your students to pay more attention to the activity but also helping them be more interested in what they are talking about because they are not only listening passively but trying to solve a problem.

I must admit, this is not my own genius idea. It is one thing from my Delta which I will never forget. After one of my teaching practices, my tutor asked me why the students were doing a particular activity. I gave him the teaching philosophy behind it but he looked incredibly bored by what I was saying and told me he wasn’t interested in why I was doing it but why the students were doing it.

And just like that, the penny dropped.