Letting go: Changing lessons that don't work

From time to time we all come across the situation where we have planned a great lesson that's chock full of interesting activities and planned down to the last detail; a lesson that we are completely sure will wow the kids and work like a dream.

Then we deliver it and realise that it just doesn't work, that the lesson is falling apart before our very eyes. The temptation is to just tinker with it, make a few adjustments around the edges and hope for the best. That can be the wrong strategy. We have learn to let go.

It happened to me this week and I realised it would be a useful lesson for the teachers that I trained to take a look at the process of adjusting a lesson until it does work.

So here it is.

The lesson, according to the schedule was to be about robots and I had the idea of making it more interesting by basing it on the TV show “Robot Wars”. For anyone who doesn't know what this is, it's a show where teams build remote controlled robots and then battle them in an arena until one of the robots is destroyed or incapable of continuing.

The outline of my lesson went like this.

1. Show a short section of the show including a battle between two robots and a shot of the statistics that are shown for each robot. (These include size, weight, power source, type of locomotion and weapons, strengths and weaknesses.)
2. Divide the class into groups and give each group a handout of pictures of different types of robot from the show.
3. Elicit vocabulary of the shapes, capabilities and weapons of the various robots and make lists on board.
4. Get groups to design and draw own robots using the new vocabulary. While they work let more robot battles run with the sound down.
5. Select some groups to come and draw their robots on the board and present the statistics and descriptions.

Seemed, on paper to be a pretty good lesson. Of course, as I always keep stressing, I had a back up plan. It was straightforward. If the computer wasn't working I would start with the pictures, and write the table of characteristics on the board. We'd develop the vocabulary from there and then proceed as on the first plan.

So. Lesson one on Monday. Started up the computer and plugged in the file and... and nothing. After a few minutes fiddling about with it I got pictures but no sound. And the pictures weren't that great as the classroom was too bright.

So I went to Plan B but that didn't work too well either. The students found it too difficult and confusing and it was clear that the lesson lacked a focus or a purpose.

There was no time to work on it before the second lesson so it had to be done the same way. The computer in that room also didn't work but this time I cut my losses quickly and went straight to Plan B. The result was the same. Too confusing, too difficult, no focus.

In the third and final lesson of the day I went straight to Plan B but this time started with vocabulary. I split it into shape words (cube, cuboid, sphere, cylinder, cone, pyramid), locomotion words (wheels, legs, tracks), weapons (gun, spike, hammer, axe, saw, claw). For each word I drew a picture and tried to elicit the word from the class, adding the word as I got it. Then I handed out the pictures and explained the design task. The pictures, I explained, were to give them ideas. The rest of the lesson followed the original plan.

This worked better but took too long.

And so we come to day 2.

I had a new variation on the plan. I shifted the focus to the shapes, changed the introduction, redid the timings, lost both the video clips and the handout of pictures and planned a new section. And it worked. And that plan will be the next thing I post. The kids all loved the lesson, got behind it, had a lot of fun, learned a lot of new vocabulary and discussed a lot of stuff in English. Twice in the week I actually had kids videoing part of the lesson on their phones. All in all a pretty good success but if I had doggedly stuck with the original plan, not been prepared to dump things that weren't working, the whole week would have been a disaster.