While developing a 3-hour workshop (“Caffeinate Your Lessons: Dynamic Activities for Sleepy Students”) for preservice Korean English teachers, I thought about how they could orient their classrooms in ways that would help their students flourish. I reflected upon my successes and failures in my own classroom over the years. And in doing so, I discovered there were some common threads to my most effective lessons, threads that were often absent in lessons that fell short. I tried to boil down my reflection to a one-page best practices checklist.
What you see here is the handout I shared with the group. It is also the list I refer to when creating, developing, tweaking – or deciding altogether to scrap – my lessons. As with any summary or short list, it doesn’t offer specific answers. Rather, it encourages you to ask yourself important questions, to first play the role of a ChatGPT user by coming up with calculated prompts and then to play the role of ChatGPT itself by answering your questions with solutions tailored to your population of students, in a way that nobody else can.
Busan Teacher 