Please send us your own written evaluation (+/- 500 words) of the effectiveness of the lesson you detailed

above,
with particular regard to the strengths and weaknesses in your teaching, and how this lesson has informed / will
inform your teaching in future.

Generally speaking, I believe the lesson plan would have been effective and its aims might have been fully
achieved had more time been devoted to it. The timings were overly ambitious and the activities felt slightly
rushed at times. Realistically the students needed more time to absorb what had been presented and also to
experiment with the language.
The staging of the activities was logical and managed to engage the students throughout, but more time should
have been allocated to the freer practice stages. During these stages students make an effort to express
themselves using not only the target language (1st and 2nd conditional in this case) but also other language which
they might not have yet mastered. Therefore they needed to be given the time to think about usage in order to
connect all the dots. The immediate lesson aim of contrasting the conditional forms seemed to have taken over
from the overreaching course aim of communicating effectively deploying students recently acquired language.
Additionally, one of the final stages where I demonstrated that use of a conditional form depends on speakers
perception of how probable they believe something is could have been left out and elaborated on in another
lesson later in the week, when the students began to feel more comfortable with using both conditionals together
(not separately). Despite the lack of time this personalised activity was effective although next time I would
probably assign a writer in each group to present their sentences afterwards, enabling me to check their sentences
and giving other classmates an opportunity to peer correct. Next time I teach this lesson I will aim to spread the
plan over 1.5 sessions with more time for controlled practice, speaking, whole class feedback, and delayed error
correction.
Due to the fact that most of the questions that I elicited from students were part of the grammar revision, the
stronger students tended to dominate as they were especially prompt at answering. Nominating would help only
to some extent as the pace was relatively rapid. Perhaps it would have been more effective to give each student a
coupon, which would be collected from them after theyve given an answer. This would reflect the average
understanding in the class better and prevent me from going with the strongest students, a potential weakness to
the lesson I became aware of during its course.
On reflection I have adapted some of my marker sentences e.g. What will you do with the money if you win
tonight? How will you celebrate tonight if you win the lottery? This helps prevent repetition of prior
answers. I also realised that reusing the same marker sentences in the chart would have been less complicated
and confusing for students.
In conclusion, I think that by displaying contextualisation of grammar features, providing clear examples and
explanations and guiding students with appropriate and well structured concept check questions, the lesson
managed to elicit most of the answers from the students and achieved my main objective of clarifying how we
can convey meaning using particular grammar, something which the students then experimented with using.