Session Planning

Dear Kay,

Introduction

Planning does not necessarily require you to sit and think hard but some thought you should give to the different varieties of activity and how they can be used to stimulate the student and give him, little by little, the skills of literacy. Two maxims you should keep in mind. One is "Repetition with variety" prevents boredom and the other is "Means are ends".

Beware Simple Repetition But Use Repetition With Variety

Have you ever had the experience of repeating to yourself a word over and over again? If you haven’t, try it. The result is that the word becomes drained of meaning and you have to think of something else until the meaning as it were drains back into the word.

The application to our work is that it is necessary to use drill but simple repetition will defeat its own ends. For instance, you want to reinforce the ‘-at’ sound by listing words with the same feature, e.g. cat, sat, fat, mat, bat, hat. Encourage your student to make such a list, by all means, but follow that with making up sentences containing the words or giving him sentences with gaps for him to fill from his list.

Context For The Lesson Plan

Back to our lesson-plan. First, remind yourself about your student. How old is he? Have we established that his sight and hearing are good? If he has glasses does he remember to wear them? Is his health good? Is his attendance regular? What do you know about his family, his job if any, and his interests? What is his rate of progress up to now? What are his aims in literacy? If it is possible to widen his horizons, how will we choose to do it? There’s no need to dwell on the picture but a brief reminder will keep your literacy aims realistic and in keeping with his. Then remind yourself of the different kinds of activity: talking, listening, writing, reading (including silent reading), and homework. Which activities require the most concentration or are hardest for your particular student? If he is more tired than usual or excited about something, can you vary the activities or their order so that you allow for these circumstances?

By now, you must feel that I am throwing too many ideas at you too fast. That is how your student will feel if you go too fast for him.

When you started; when you were about to sit down for the first time with your student, you probably said, "What shall I do?" and your Supervising Tutor would have said, "Talk to him and get to know him. Try to make sure that he wants to come back next week because if he doesn’t come back regularly we’ve no chance at all". Progress is likely to be slow so he must be sustained in what for him is a considerable effort. You will be his special person, the one who is always on his side." Your student will do things for you and tell you things because you are that special person.

The Backdrop of Social Support

What he tells you is confidential between the two of you. This does not mean that you should not confide in your Supervising Tutor if your student needs help that you cannot give. Social support is part of our policy and means that where there is a need for specialist help we liaise with the appropriate services, for example, housing, medical, other educational facilities or even the simple friendly help say, of going with him when he wants to be measured for a suit. Similarly, your Supervising Tutor will confide in you anything you need to know about your student. You may discuss freely with the Tutor or, under guidance, with any other volunteer working with your student on another evening but obviously you don’t tell your friends about any of the information that is confidential.

Planning for the Session

Back to the evening’s programme. What to do first? Greet him and ask how he’s been during the week. Give time to this according to his need. Sometimes there will be something on his mind that won’t emerge till later in the evening so be alert for this and give him the opportunity to volunteer things at any time during the session. If all is OK, what next? Homework, I think: writing, prepared reading, exercises, photos or cuttings he has collected or whatever he has done between sessions. By this time you should know what his interests are; football, pop music, his family, his friends, TV, films, holidays or something unexpected. For instance, one of our students works in a firm that makes and markets prosthetic devices, and is a member of his church choir with which he travels widely.

At an early stage it is a good ploy to choose a piece of reading in line with your student’s interests and read it aloud to him, taking care that the text is placed squarely in front of him and that you point to the top of the text as you read. Whether he knows he is doing it or not your student, following the text as you read, makes an effort to realise the word and has his guess immediately corrected by your voice. When he reads aloud to you, don’t make him sweat to try and work out a word before he has word-attack skills. Just tell him and push on so that you don’t break the sense. When you reach a natural pause, the end of the page for instance, talk about the text and try to develop a question that requires further reading to answer it. This reading with a question is vital. It is possible to read the words without any understanding of their meaning, e.g., when I read about computers I can pronounce the words but quite often the meaning escapes me.

Before the coffee-break try to manage some word-study, of a word that was new to him, for instance. Make sure the meaning is understood and let him write the word and enter it in his index notebook, in pencil until he is sure he knows it and then he can ink it over.

After the Coffee Break

The Coffee Break is a subject for a whole new set of notes but after it is a good time to settle down to some work based on his experiences or interests. If he can write down what he has told you that is fine but you may need to help him quite a bit. This activity can lead on to him keeping a diary between sessions and would be very valuable. But anything can form a basis for written expression: the words of pop songs, tongue-twisters, films he has seen or stories he has read. One of our students came to us able only to copy a few lines in a whole evening. How we did it I don’t know but after a while he cut loose and turned out short stories, some of which we have published. This is the most effortful part of the evening and should give your student (and you) a sense of achievement, after which it is time for a relaxed time to close the evening.

And Finally; Back to Homework

That is the time to discuss the activities of the next week and to set some homework.

One way is for you, your student’s special person, to record a story he is interested in but cannot manage unaided. He can take home the book and the tape and follow the text as your voice reads it for him. Try it and see how well it works.

Gladys Glascoe