Materials Evaluation and Design - Week 8 - Sharing Our TDA Lesson Plans

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 8 of the course Materials Evaluation and Design. In this class you will share your Text-Driven Approach lesson plans with your partners and give and receive feedback. You will also reflect on what you have learned about this way of working with texts in a language class. 

Today's Goals:

• Share your TDA lesson plans with your peers.
• Reflect on your experience and offer feedback to your partners.

Guiding Questions:

• How can I use texts in innovative ways to increase student engagement and reduce teacher workload?
• What have I learned about working with texts from this experience?

Exploration: Share Your TDA Lesson Plan

Take turns sharing your text and lesson plans with your partners. Then use the framework below to offer feedback to your peers. 

• Summarize: What are students asked to think or do in the following stages?
• Readiness Activities
• Experiential Activities
• Intake Response Activities
• Development Activities
• Input Response Activities
• (optional) Development Activities

• Recognize: Point out aspects that made this lesson effective.
• What aspects made this a potentially engaging text?
• How did the text and lesson activities attempt to engage students cognitively (intellectually/mentally) and affectively (emotionally/personally)?
• What else did you find effective about this lesson plan?

• Suggest: Offer suggestions for improvement or variation.
• What potential challenges does this text contain?
• What suggestions do you have to help students connect with and respond to the text?
• What other kinds of activities can you suggest for the various stages in the lesson plan?

Wrap Up Discussion: Strengths and Challenges of TDA

Discuss these questions with your partners.

• What are your overall thoughts about TDA?
• What are its strengths and challenges for the teaching-learning process?
• What do you think were Tomlinson's motivations for creating this way of working with materials?
• How might you incorporate these ideas into the way you work with materials and texts in your classes? In your textbook unit project?

References:

McGrath, I. (2016). Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press. 

Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) (2013). Developing Materials for Language Teaching. Bloomsbury Academic.