Time and again we have resided our only hope of surviving the school year almost solely on the use of supplementary material. There is no denying that there are a lot of us out there who prefer to follow the course book and almost never deviate from its guidance, either because it feels safer, or perhaps it saves us the trouble to lesson plan more meticulously than what the extra effort requires when we actually use additional material in the classroom.
However, one must surely admit that even the educators who prefer to teach from the book have implemented at least some kind of extra sources at one point or another throughout their teaching career. There is always a reason to add some extra sparkle in our lesson. Maybe the book is simply not challenging enough to a certain crowd, maybe you got a few extra minutes on your hands before the bell rings and you decided to use some short activity so that chaos is avoided in class. Or better yet, you just want to provide your students with that extra boost of knowledge, that magic of seeing them getting excited over something that they can actually relate to that feels more familiar to them than mere chunks of information and lukewarm grammar rules.
Whatever the reason, teachers who truly wish to make their lessons pop almost always use extra sources. That little something you add to your teaching provides support, first and foremost to you as an educator. This way you never have to worry if you run out of time in one lesson or have too much spare time for the other. Time management is pivotal in our profession. Not that all supplementary material needs to be tangible of course, especially nowadays where almost everything is one click away and you can easily get access to an abundance of sources without having to spend half a day above a jammed printer, cursing and getting all environmentally conscious over all that wasted paper.
Online material helps us remain relevant as teachers and up to date with all the latest trends, this way students might actually skip the occasional allotted nickname given to such ‘dinosaur’ teachers, it also makes our teaching methods more relevant to the students, thus maximizing the chances of them genuinely paying attention when we deliver. When they actually care about what we present in class, it enhances their overall motivation to learn and it simultaneously encourages long-term goals, meaning that the learning objectives become clearer to the students, something that is not always a given at the beginning of a course.
An experienced educator oftentimes waits till after four or five lessons to get a better sense of the room, a glimpse of the students’ interests and their learning attitudes and then proceeds to enhance their teaching procedure by adding extra material that will hopefully help students with their learning and make lessons fun and engaging. There is no doubt that most, if not all, course book series these days come accompanied by a lot of extra material that has proven to be rather useful. This could be printed, digital, or online, such as apps packed with extra game-like activities or e-books that are much more appetizing to read than an actual printed book is, at least to the younger learners.
There is however, one aspect in all this that is undoubtedly of vital importance, and that is the teacher’s intrinsic motivation to apply such techniques in their classroom. If one considers their job as nothing short of a calling, then they should be using any kind of extra material they can get their hands into. This also means that they have to always stay informed of new trends, ready to renew their content so as to make it appealing to the learners, regardless of the teacher’s or the students’ age.
All learners need to find the content intriguing and interesting in order to absorb it better, after all our brains are programmed to retain information that we consider useful. Similarly, all educators should strive to provide up to date, relevant material, and that means that they should go the extra mile and become familiarized with procedures they might not be very well acquainted with, such as technology, social media or AI.
One particular example I recall from previous classes for instance, is when I assigned a social media project to a group of older teens (16-18 years old). It was a chance for them to show off their digital knowledge, but also ask questions about the correctness of the language that is being used in these platforms. In addition, it also sparked their curiosity about the past, as they kept asking questions about how things worked before the digital age. Similarly, when I assigned the same project to an older group of learners (40–50 years old), they were eager to understand how social media operates to strengthen their connections with their children, move away from outdated methods, and embrace the present. This demonstrates learners' readiness to engage, practice, exchange ideas, and converse in the target language. After all, there are days when we set aside the textbook entirely and choose to teach authentically, drawing from personal experiences and resources.
Most of us do make a rather extensive use of such material firstly, because it is an efficient way for students to practice theory with stimulating activities and secondly, because it makes the lessons more interesting, providing long-term benefits such as the fact that the knowledge acquired through practice and play, is almost always the one that sticks with learners forever. By that, I mean that the students will not just try to recall specific information only to pass a test or an exam, but this knowledge will have become part of who they are. They will have made it their own, and that is by definition I think, the meaning of mastering a language.
‘Sup(p)’ people? Everything OK teaching by the book?
