Survival Guide: How To Teach ESL Brilliantly When You Lack A Curriculum
Teaching English abroad is an incredible chance for aspiring travelers to see the world while helping others improve their English.
Even if you decide to stay home and teach those in your community or online, it’s always an honor to be chosen as someone's teacher or mentor.
In certain situations, you’ll not always be given a curriculum to help meet your students’ needs, in which case you’ll have to create your own.
This process is not as difficult as it might seem. This post will give you a five-step framework that will help you build a highly effective curriculum for your ESL students.
Step 1:
Look at the big picture
I always tell aspiring teachers to look at teaching the way you’d look at a long road trip. You don’t just get in the car and hope you’ll magically find your way to your destination, do you? Of course not. You first see how long it’s going to take to get from where you are to where you want to go. After that, you’ll decide what items you’ll need for your long trip, where you might stop along the way, and so on.
The same must be done if you don’t have a curriculum.
But don’t worry. You won’t need an immaculate design, just something that helps you see where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.
For example, if you’re assigned to teach an intermediate English class of adults who want to improve their conversational skills, but you haven’t been given anything that helps these students achieve that goal, here is how you would start.
First, get clear on the students’ goal. Saying “students will improve their conversational skills” is the same as getting in a car and saying “we’re going to California.” They are both destinations, but where exactly are you going and how will you get there?
Conversational skills encompass a variety of abilities.
For example, do your students want to learn how to strike up conversations and keep them going? Are they business students who want to learn how to be persuasive? Are they public figures that need to captivate large audiences? What kind of skills do they want to learn?
Once you have that information, you will need to calculate how much time you will have with the students. If you only have one month, you will plan differently than if you have three.
Step 2:
Meet your students where they are.
One of the interesting phenomena I find in ESL teaching is that students are often placed a level higher than they actually are. This boils down to them either being overly confident in their English or the school having limited space for the student.
In any case, it’s important that as their teacher you have a full grasp on the range of abilities in your classroom. Don’t just take the word of the student or administrator.
Your assessment doesn’t need to be complicated; a simple snapshot of where your students are will suffice.
Let’s use one of the examples from above to understand how this might look.
Imagine your students are businessmen and women who speak at an intermediate level and want you to help them sell their first product in English. What do you need to know about your students in order to build a curriculum that will help them achieve this goal?
First, you have to understand what skills a person needs to sell. These skills could include an ability to
define a customer audience
learn how to find and use customer pain points
understand the difference between a feature and a benefit
understand nuance
build vocabulary for negotiations
etc.
When you look at this list, you don’t have to test for everything, you just need to know what will go first. If you want the students to define their customer audience, what English will they need in order to do that?
They’ll need to know descriptor words like working class, educated, single, DINK, etc. Therefore you can begin your first class using the Test-Teach-Test model that will help you determine what they know and where they need your help.
Step 3:
Begin with the end in mind.
By this point, you know where you want to go, how long you have with your students, and what your first lesson/assessment should be. Now it’s time to plan how you’ll execute your curriculum and the best way to do that is backward planning.
If we continue with our example and your students want to sell their first product in English, you have to ask what success in achieving that goal looks like. There’s no way, for example, your students will suddenly become the Donald Trump of their respective businesses.
So, what will they be able to do?
If I were teaching this class, I would want my students to be able to pitch their product with complete confidence and without sounding like a robot and without pausing or hesitating.
Depending on how long you have with your students, your goal might be loftier or more simplistic than mine.
Let’s say I have two months to achieve my goal. I meet with the students once a week, which means we will have eight classes together. My outline might look like this.
Session 8: Present your product
Session 7: Create and practice your elevator pitch
Session 6: Develop your speaking style
Session 5: Practice explaining what you do
Session 4: Define your product goal
Session 3: Build vocabulary of emotional and power words
Session 2: Research and reuse customer frustrations
Session 1: Learn to define an audience
Step 4:
Create Assessments
This final step will be the most involved of them all. This post can easily become several pages if I get into everything about assessments, so I’ll save that for another post.
The simplest way I can put this without launching into a whole lecture is that you need to find a way to make sure that your students are digesting what you’re teaching.
These assessments don’t have to be full-on tests, they can be simple formative assessments that give you a good idea that your students understand what’s been taught and can move on.
What’s important is that you’re assessing what has been taught, which is why you do this step before you create any learning material.
Also, note you don’t necessarily need to assess every time you have a lesson. You might only need to assess once or twice over the duration of the course.
Step 5:
Create lesson plan materials.
Now we’re at the meat and potatoes of your entire curriculum, and because you’ve done all the other work, this should be fairly straightforward. In this section, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
First, you don’t need to create all the curriculum up front. In fact, I would advise against that.
You should first get a sense of what your students respond well to, and what they have a harder time grasping. Once you learn what your students are most comfortable doing, you can create material that plays to their strengths.
Second, if your students want to improve their conversational skills, you’ll need to think of authentic ways to help them improve.
You don’t want to bog them down with a bunch of worksheets and very little opportunity to practice speaking. There is nothing wrong with a worksheet, but if your goal is to get your students to speak, the worksheet should play a minimal role in the bigger picture.
Finally, create lesson plans with your assessments in mind.
Make sure you’re covering key criteria from the exams. You don’t need to teach to the test, but use your assessments to help stay on track.
And that’s it!
This may sound daunting, but trust me when I say you can get everything - apart from the daily activities - done in just a few hours of solid focus.
And a word of caution: don’t look at this and say things like “I don’t get paid enough to do this!”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You don’t get paid enough to not do this.
Planning this way when you’re lacking a curriculum will save so much time and energy that you’ll have loads of time to do the other things you love.
Even better, you can package up your materials and upload it to one of the many websites where teachers sell their lesson plans. Once you make it, you can use it over and over again and possibly make money from it. Not bad!
What do you do to organize your curriculum when you don’t have anything to guide you? Comment below.
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