New Lessons: BTS Industriel here in France

It may have been a long time since I've posted anything in this blog, but that certainly does not mean that I have stopped planning lessons -- au contraire! 

At the beginning of September and despite previous promises to myself, I decided to accept a teaching position in a BTS (post-high school, 2-year technical degree) school, training students to become Opticians. They will have to take the BTS Industriel which I found a bit silly, but it makes more sense than taking a commercial BTS degree when only a part of their responsibilities will be commercial and the rest will be quite technical. 

To sum up the program, I'm teaching four kinds of classes: One group of 2nd year students who are apprentices, two groups of 2nd year students who are full-time students, one group of "prepa" students who weren't accepted into the first year but after a year of catch-up courses should be admitted next year, and two groups of first-year, full-time students. 

I only have an hour with my apprentices and my prep-class kids per week. Otherwise my lessons are an hour and a half long. 

I've decided to structure my lessons as follows: 

1. Corrections of the previous week's quiz (graded every week -- yes this sucks, but I think it will be truly beneficial for them in the long run to see their mistakes on the board and to participate in mistake correction as a group). 

2. A quiz: use last week's vocabulary words in a sentence or correct the mistakes, and this week I'm going to try a listening quiz with multiple choice questions. Again, the idea is to correct the mistakes as a class & continually assess their needs and my methods.

3. Listening practice: For the BTS exam, students will have to listen to a text and be able to sum it up in French (I think). My goal is to have them summarizing texts in English so that when they have to do it in French, it'll be a breeze. I always try to over-prepare my students so that when it comes time for the exam, they'll be more than ready. 

4. A grammar or a vocabulary point. We've already covered vocabulary about school (trainee, apprentice, a graduate, a diploma, etc.) and we've covered adverbs of frequency (1st years) and modal verbs (2nd years). Either I ask them to write or discuss a topic that I give them, and then we do a class brainstorm. 

5. Reading or writing: This is either an article or an excerpt of an article, either followed by a presentation or group work. Normally there is some kind of writing or speaking preparation involved and I try to switch it up every week.

and finally:

6. Presenting. This is where they either individually or in pairs/small groups present whatever they have prepared in the previous step (or 2). 

By the time we've made it through all the steps, they've done a little bit of everything -- listening and speaking, reading and writing, and hopefully assimilated a number of new vocabulary words. This method requires a lot of work outside the classroom on their end, but I feel like our time in class is pretty well spent. 

As the semester progresses, I'll share some of my lesson plans (beyond just my structure) and the links I've found to various listening exercises and articles. My goal as a teacher is to be able to construct well-prepared lesson plans every week and to consistently keep up with my grading in order to have corrections to give them. I also like to take the time to write corrections on their homework rather than just giving them a grade and handing it back. I want them to be able to read over it, think about it, and ask questions if necessary.