You have now completed your 60-minute lesson as part of your teaching practice. This is a valuable moment to reflect on what went well, what challenged you, and what you learned about your teaching style and your students’ needs.
Share your thoughts with your peers:
- What was the class level and topic of your lesson?
- Which two language skills did you focus on, and why?
- What aspect of your lesson do you feel was most successful?
- If you could teach this lesson again, what would you keep the same and what would you change?
Write a short post (approx. 200 words) sharing your teaching experience. Respond to at least one classmates' post. Offer encouragement, ask questions, or share a similar experience.
For my 60-minute teaching practice, I delivered a B1-level lesson on the topic of Sustainable Travel and Ecotourism.
I chose to focus primarily on reading and speaking skills. Reading served as the receptive base to expose students to authentic vocabulary and complex sentence structures in context. This naturally scaffolded the subsequent speaking activity—a role-play debate on eco-friendly holiday choices—where learners could immediately recycle the new target language in a communicative, real-world scenario.
The most successful aspect of the lesson was the interactive jigsaw reading task. Grouping students to analyze different short texts before regrouping to exchange information generated genuine information gaps and high engagement. It shifted the dynamic from teacher-led instruction to peer collaboration, lowering the affective filter.
If I were to teach this lesson again, I would definitely keep the communicative role-play stage, as it generated high learner talk time (LTT). However, I would adjust the time management for the post-reading vocabulary focus. I realized I allocated too much time to explicit feedback on the reading comprehension questions, which slightly rushed the final error-correction feedback stage. Next time, I will use peer-checking for comprehension answers to preserve time for a more thorough language feedback session at the end.
Designing a B1 lesson around Sustainable Travel is such a smart choice—it’s an engaging, real-world topic that gives students something meaningful to actually deliberate over.
I completely agree with your choice of a jigsaw reading. Using an information gap task is one of the best ways to get B1 learners talking naturally without feeling put on the spot, and it sounds like it paid off by lowering their affective filter and boosting peer collaboration.
Your reflection on time management is also spot on and something I’ve definitely struggled with myself. It’s so easy to let whole-class comprehension checks eat into crucial stage time. I had a very similar experience during a lesson on urban planning: I spent way too long going over the reading answers, which left me with barely three minutes for delayed error correction! Switching to peer-checking for the reading stage made a world of difference for my timing in later lessons.
How did the students respond to the role-play debate? Did you notice them naturally using the target vocabulary from the reading, or did they need a bit of extra prompt cards to get those new structures flowing?
Overall, fantastic self-awareness—your plan for peer-checking standard answers next time will give that final feedback stage the breathing room it deserves!
Great reflection, Ilenia! Using a jigsaw reading to create an authentic information gap is an excellent strategy for lowering the affective filter and fostering peer collaboration. It seamlessly scaffolds the subsequent role-play debate, ensuring students feel confident recycling target vocabulary in context. Your insight regarding time management is very relatable. Transitioning to peer-checking for comprehension checks is a smart way to preserve those critical final minutes for delayed language feedback without sacrificing Student Talking Time. Fantastic work on designing such a communicative and student-centered lesson!
In my 60-minute lesson for an upper-intermediate B2 English class at a scientific high school, we explored environmental sustainability and technology. I focused on listening and writing because listening to authentic, complex perspectives helps students synthesize ideas, while writing allows them to organize their arguments clearly using domain-specific vocabulary and advanced grammatical structures. Overall, the interactive listening task was the most successful part of the lesson. Students engaged enthusiastically with the material, generated insightful discussion points, and applied new expressions accurately during the initial pair work. If I could teach this lesson again, I would definitely keep the collaborative pre-listening activity, as it effectively activated their prior knowledge and built confidence before approaching the text. However, I would adjust the timing of the final writing task to give them more time for self-correction and peer feedback before submitting their work. This practice experience helped me better understand how to balance timed exercises with meaningful reflection. Classmates, how do you usually manage time constraints when integrating detailed writing tasks into a single 60-minute lesson? I would love to hear your strategies!
