My first truly dogme lesson

So every Monday and Friday, I teach a pre-intermediate lunchtime class which I share with a colleague on the other days of the week. Our institution requires teachers to complete a weekly scheme of work every Monday for the forthcoming week (running Tuesday to Tuesday). The downside to sharing a class is that often the teachers have conflicting schedules and as such do not have much of a chance to talk. In this case, it was a Monday lunchtime. I had selected a lesson from my repertoire so that I could enter the classroom and comfortably run it with minimal difficulties. Upon arriving to the class, I realised that not only had the students done a similar lesson that week but that an original lesson that I had written had been used. I had not given the materials for this lesson out to anyone for over a year so it must have circulated through the staffroom. I was angry, I was upset. My knee-jerk reaction was to delete everything I had created from the school’s computers. I was also one minute into a ninety-minute lesson with nothing planned. Now, some days I am comfortable with ‘going with the flow’ with a low-prep lesson, however on this occasion I wasn’t in the correct mindset to teach the lesson.

So I thought I would follow in the footsteps of Thornbury and teach a full dogme lesson. Since undertaking the Diploma, I have been experimenting with a pseudo-dogme approach to my lessons; having a core skeletal structure but leaving the journey towards the learning outcomes down the the needs of the students in the moment. So I was very much in the deep end here and decided to go with it and see how much I could spontaneously create for the students. What started as a small conversation about the weekend evolved into a lesson which focused on pronunciation and intonation, listening and note taking and question forms.

I started by telling students about my weekend trip to London in five stages (see pictured above). For each stage, I made a small drawing and gave them basic details, including recommendations for tickets, lunch, etc. After this, I elicited the events of my day trip back from the students, asking CCQs along the way. I then invited them to do the same with their city as a sort of nice day out for tourists. Before feeding back, I then elicited three adjectives to describe each stage (making sure each was different in order to reinforce the importance of synonyms), after which they wrote two for each stage of their own day out. When explaining their suggestions to the class, one student spoke, one made notes and the other listened. This was an exercise practised during a seminar in the ELT Methodology module, which encourages students to remain on task whilst practising different language skills. The roles would rotate, feedback would be given and then the class was rounded off with ‘backs to the board’ to revise vocabulary. The students worked hard throughout the lesson and personally thanked me for a great lesson at the end; and I hadn’t even prepared the topic or any materials for the lesson. It worked!

It was such a good feeling to have read about a particular approach, write an essay about it and then actually implement it in practise in the class. I am not sure if it was a fluke or the correct application of a particular strategy but it was successful and something I would wish to try again in the future. This was a fairly low-level class but how would things have differed if it had been my morning Upper Intermediate class? I think I will experiment with a higher-level class to see if a similar outcome can be reached and report back on the findings in the comments section below.