Lesson Records (LRs) are one of the most important things we do for students.
Three guiding principles:
- LRs are emailed to the student, so they should be a pleasure to read.
- LRs must be clear and succinct. They should aid in review and self-learning.
- LRs are not a stand-in for a lesson—they are for review, not new things.
Students need their time with TEF to have a through-line. Skills and habits take many lessons to establish. So, ideally, your lesson will build on the previous one, rather than be disparate. Imagine we are building a sandcastle—you should build your part of the castle in and around the last teacher's so it ends up a unified, amazing structure. Don't always work on different things from scratch.
If you teach a great lesson but ignore the previous lesson or flub the handover to the next lesson, it hurts the students' learning experience as a whole. It also makes the next teacher look bad!
Good lesson records make everyone’s job easier. They give exactly the info the next teacher needs to succeed with near-zero prep.
Essentials
At a minimum, the LR has to do these things.
- Next lesson
- Where to pick up in the course
- Keep working on
- Which specific points to work on at home and/or in the next lesson
- Message to the next teacher
- Frank assessment of ability, interest, or teaching material, as well as any necessary information to smooth over the handover to the next class
- Today’s lesson
- The theme or the headline of the lesson
- We did
- Things learned by the student—what is the thing of value that you derived from this lesson?
The difference between Todays Lesson and We did:
- Today's Lesson is the name of the restaurant;
- We did is the menu.
If you get those five things right, congratulations. Your LR has met the minimum standards.