Common mistakes teachers make
1. Inadequate Preparation
Making up lessons as you go is a waste of your students’ time and money. It is also more stressful for the teacher.
Take some time to think about what you are going to teach and how you are going to teach it. Think of the vocabulary you will cover.
What tasks and activities will you use? Make sure you have extra games on hand in case one activity bombs.
It doesn’t take much longer to properly prepare for a class, but the quality of the lesson will be substantially better.
2. Teacher Talking Time
The more a teacher talks, the less opportunity there is for the student to talk. Especially in an EFL class, students need time to talk.
More importantly, they need time to think, prepare their thoughts and decipher how to say it out loud. Give your students time to think and talk.
3. Complicated and Unclear Instructions
This is a problem that can easily be fixed beforehand while lesson planning. Poor planning and loosely structured instructions can be very confusing to English learners.
Even for a fluent English speaker instructions can be hard to grasp. Try to be as clear and concise in your instructions as possible. In this case, less is more.
4. Not Checking the Understanding of Instructions
“Ok class, ready…begin!” Ending your instructions with something like this will often leave you with a classroom full of whispering students, marked by looks of bewilderment.
A simple way to double-check they understand is to ask a few students to repeat the instructions. If the activity includes a question set, do the first question together as a class.
5. Echoing
Student: I went to the park...
Teacher: Good! You went to the park. Okay great. You went to the park.
Quite simply, you want the student to talk more than you. When you echo what they say, it gives them less talking time. In addition, when you echo, they start to learn that they don’t need to listen to anyone but you (the teacher who repeats everything).
