Our class experience

Curious about how my classes work?…

…About what happens in them? …

…What they look like from the ‘inside’?

Well then, this is the page for you!

This page is divided into 8 parts and will explain what happens before, during and after a class.

Page contents:

1. Before your class
2. Welcome to your class: entering the classroom
3. Inside the classroom
4. Class format
5. What you’ll be doing during your class

6. What I’ll be doing during your class
7. After the class: we haven’t finished yet
8. A behind-the-scenes perspective

1. Before your class

Before your class, you’ll have received some material or a task to work on.

This could be to prepare a short presentation on a topic, read a text or listen to a recording, find something to show during the next class or to review a specific grammar point.

All the tasks and activities will usually also include some vocabulary that you can use in our class when you are speaking about your activity.

2. Welcome to your class: entering the classroom

Classes are on Google Meet. You’ll have a lesson link to keep and reuse for all your classes.

3. Inside the classroom

I take my own notes during class. Classes are not recorded, and no AI transcripts are made.

4. Class format

If this is your first class,

We start with some activities to hear you pronouncing some different words in English, and then move on to some speaking activities to assess your grammatical and lexical level. This sounds complicated, but honestly it’s not.

To assess your pronunciation, I’ll ask you to read some sentences from your computer screen. After this activity, I’ll ask you some questions and to encourage you to use some different grammatical tenses and structures. Also, you’ll talk about different topics so I can see your range of vocabulary.

In the next stage of the class, we’ll discuss some questions that you have looked at before the class. These questions are about your aims, objectives and expectations for your classes.

With all this information I can plan a personalised course for you.

Finally, as with all classes, we’ll finish with some feedback from the class.

After your first class

Our classes start with a review of key points and ‘takeaways’ from the previous weeks feedback.

We then move into the main topic for you to talk about in the class. Activities can range dramatically depend on your aims for the course.

During the main activity in the class, you may also be trying to reuse some of the vocabulary or language that was included in the material you completed before your class.

If there is still time, we continue to personalise the topic with further questions and discussion before moving into the finial feedback phase of the class.

For the finial 5-10 minutes of the class, I’ll offer you some delayed verbal feedback on your pronunciation, areas for correction, achievements and vocabulary.

Finally, we discuss the topic for the following class and introduce the optional activities you can complete to prepare it.

5. What you’ll be doing during your class

During the class you’ll be the main speaker.

You may be using the screen sharing features of my classroom to show me things on your computer, such as an image or webpage that you are explaining. Alternatively, you could be demonstrating something to me.

Activities used in class often include:

Presenting a topic
Explaining a series of news stories
Explaining and comparing a group of images on a topic
Creating a narrative around one, or a series of images
Explaining a text that you’ve read before the class, or a podcast you listened to
Role plays
Discussing and answering questions on a topic
Practising a presentation
Explaining a product and comparing it to others in the market

The focus is on you actively using your English productively and practising the areas – grammatical and or lexical – that we’re focusing on in the class and that you’ve been preparing before the class.

6. What I’ll be doing during your class

During the class, primarily I’ll be monitoring your language. I’ll be making notes and also managing the resources for the class.

If our aim for the class is fluency, I’ll be taking notes to feedback to you in the closing stages of the class. If there is a repeated or critical error, I’ll interrupt you to offer some correction on that point.

If we’re working on an accuracy point – for example practising the correct form of conditionals – I’ll give more immediate feedback on that topic.

7. After the Class: we haven’t finished yet

As I mentioned in the section discussing class format, Our classes usually finish by preparing the next class. I offer you some option activities and material to work on before the next class,

After class, I share your written feedback and lesson material in our Google Classroom space.