Inside Out Upper Intermediate Unit 12 (“Student“)
Your partner is going to speak for between 2 and 4 minutes about one of their teachers. As they speak, tick off the topics that they speak about.
Your teacher Presentations and discussion
Inside Out Upper Intermediate Unit 12 (Student)
Your partner is going to speak about one of their teachers for between 2 and 4 minutes (without looking at the list below). As they speak, tick off the topics that they speak about.
- Name
- Gender
- Position
- Age (at that time or now)
- Period they taught your partner
- Period they were in that job or school
- What they looked like
- What they were like, inc. character (= personality)
- Who they were like (i.e. similarities and differences to other teachers or other people- real or fictional)
- Clothes
- Possessions
- How well they taught
- How they taught
- Other jobs that they might have been good at
- Relationship with your partner and other people
- Rules they imposed
- Punishments and other classroom control techniques they used
- Knowledge of their subject
- Interests
- Personal history
- Popularity
- Good points and bad points
- Ticks and bad habits
- Things they often said or did
- Favourite topics
- Memorable things they said
- Things they said about your partner
- What things they said turned out to be true or not
- How they have influenced/ will influence your partner’s future
After they finish speaking, ask them questions about any topics they didn’t speak about, such as unticked topics above.
| Useful language for answering the follow-up questions “Oh sorry, didn’t I mention that?…”/ “I had meant to talk about that…”“That’s a good question…”“That’s connected to what I said about…”“I didn’t really notice”/ “That’s not the kind of thing that stands out when…” |
Switch roles and do the same, not looking above when it’s your turn to present.
Discussion questions
If you haven’t discussed the last two points on the checklist above, discuss them now. Then move onto these questions:
- Do teachers in your country tend to predict or give advice on their students’ future careers? What do they tend to say?
- What kind of advice and other comments would be most useful for a child and/ or their parents to hear from their teacher?
- What positive and negative impacts could comments like this have on a child’s future? What other things that a teacher does could influence children’s future?
- How well is it possible to predict a child’s future from their personality, behaviour and/ or performance at school?
You are going to read three people’s experiences of teachers predicting their future and/ or giving advice on their future. What did they say, and what effect did it have?
What future tenses are in the texts? How are they similar and different to each other (in structure and/ or in meaning)?
Make your own predictions about the future of education in your country, and advice about what should be done about it. Does your partner agree?
Possible future of education topics
Cheating
RE
PE
University entrance tests
Streaming
Student loans/ student debt
The proportion of students going to university
Truancy
Violence against teachers
Corporal punishment
Use of technology in classrooms (Interactive Whiteboards etc)
Robot teachers
School hours
Cost of education/ tuition fees
Mature students
Foreign students
Financial support for students
Cram schools
Old school tie (connections)
Oxbridge/ Ivy League universities
MBA
Rote learning
Continuous assessment
Being put down a year
Single sex schools/ co-ed
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