Make the most of your teacher’s book and use it selectively

Well, the teacher’s book is a lifesaver, isn’t it? We all use them, we all love them, especially the ones that have many additional resources and detailed lesson idea suggestions. However, sometimes we get lost in them, at least with the ones that we don’t know very well. So, what are some common things that teacher’s books have and how we can use them selectively to save up time?

Read the lead-in part of the lesson

Almost all teacher’s books have interesting ideas of how to lead-in the students to the topic of the class. This is a quite useful section to always pay attention to, as sometimes it can be quite challenging to come up with something new and not to bore the learners. Similarly, there are quite often useful optional tasks and exercises for weak and strong learners which can be very nicely integrated in differentiated instruction.

Skip the lesson description

In contrast to the lead-in section, the lesson procedure is mostly put in a quite plain and simple way — what the task is, followed by the key. As we normally adapt these suggestions and rarely proceed as the book says, it’s better to save our time and skip this part.This refers to cases when you’re ready for the lesson and have prepared your LP as well as you have enough experience to make impromptu decisions while a situation presents itself.

If, however, you are a newbie and have not got enough teaching experience yet, it’s a must to read the LP provided by the book as it teaches you how to grade your language, how to set up tasks and how to proceed with the flow of the session to end up with a logically organized lesson. Following the suggestions in the book can surely get you through the day.

Save the keys

Well, all teacher’s books have the keys to the tasks and exercises covered by the book. Make sure you save them by screenshotting and saving as, for example, p. 12 ex.4a_Answer key. This way it will be easier to share the key with your students when needed rather than scroll through the book to find what you’re looking for.

Use the scripts

Another nice resource is the scripts for listening tasks. All the ESL/EFL books have several listening exercises where students need to listen for general information, complete more detailed tasks, like gapfills, T/F tasks, etc. In these cases having the scorpio of the track is very useful, as it can be distributed to the students if needed and used by the teacher as well as a key for instance.

Check the additional resources

Almost all the teacher’s books have interesting activities for grammar and vocabulary revision as well as a communication section. Make sure you bookmark those sections so that you can jump to those pages when needed. Also, before overwhelming yourself to think about what extra exercise or activity to assign, check those pages first. They are mostly quite exhaustive and well-designed.

Use it as a learning tool

With the development of teaching methodologies, teachers are constantly facing new and emerging ways of session delivery. Teacher’s books are mostly equipped with recent trends and comply with its ‘rules’. Using teacher’s books as a source of learning new information can also be quite productive and time-saving.

Let us know how you make the best use of teacher’s books and how they save our day.