They say the older students get the more attention span they acquire. I don’t really know if this is a true fact. Especially now with all my lessons having being moved online, I get to witness even the good students not wanting to focus in on me presenting something to them for even four minutes. This I found out yesterday when I had a group of four EFL students at a B1 level for a two-hour writing session. I had planned to do a writing session with them and planned to make it as interesting as possible, and mind you, even though I should get others to vouch for me, I myself was impressed with my own lesson plan which was quite impressive to say the least.
This lesson plan incorporated a nice warm-up activity to engage my learners on the topic of Mobile phones and young children. We watched a video about the use of mobile phones by young children where brainstormed ideas about the pros and cons of students using mobile phones were written on a padlet wall. Thereafter we reviewed a rubric from a model answer before we started reading and analysing a model answer. Sounds good so far? Well, after getting them engaged in the topic, getting them to collaborate on the padlet and all together read the model essay, which I found went well, all I had to do after getting their attention was to show them a few key points in the main body paragraphs, giving emphasis to cohesive devices used by the author to link ideas together. (see image below) After at the most four minutes of presenting and underlining I started asking CCQs, that’s when it hit me that one of my students hadn’t been following me. He found my presentation time to switch off and let his mind wander which meant he didn’t pick up enough about how to structure a for and against discursive essay.
At the time, I was pretty disturbed. I found his behaviour upsetting and disrespectful, I put so much effort into this lesson plan and he just switched off. Then I thought, wouldn’t you switch off if you had something more interesting to think about? Especially, being in your own home, in your bedroom with your PJs on? Being honest, I probably would.
So this is where I had to differentiate. What I did for the following write up stage of my lesson is I uploaded the topic to a Google Doc and got them to write a paragraph each. They didn’t know that this could be done so they found it quite captivating. Below is an image which shows my students working on a google doc together. What I did was allocate a paragraph to each student depending on what I thought would benefit each of them. I got the weaker students to concentrate on the main body paragraphs and got the stronger ones to be more creative when writing the introduction and conclusion.
I put a copy of the rubric in the Doc and wrote the titles of the main parts of the essay of I wanted them to write. After I shared the doc, they opened it on their pc and one of them directly on their mobile phone.
It took them about twenty minutes to complete the task and in the meantime, I had time to scaffold the structure of the main body paragraph to the student that had listened to me in the presentation stage.
The overall outcome was reasonable, and they were actually quite happy to get to write another essay in their own time. 
Finally, I took their essay and plugged it into analyzmywriting.com which measured lexical density and got an average scale of around 50% which I explained that this was reasonable at the B1 Level. They like the idea of analysing their text using tools so I found this a chance to explain some more details about this analysis and promised them that we will do more with this tool in the near future.
Overall, the practical part of the lesson was really interesting for them, but sometimes if a student wants to switch off while you present something, even though you think it’s very important for them and try to make it as interesting as possible for them, they will. Quickly, when this happened to me yesterday, I had thought, I should’ve flipped the presentation stage of this lesson plan and gave it to them to complete in their individual learning space and at their own pace. That way we would’ve got even more done in the group learning space. So flip it, is what I’m going to do with this for my next class.
Transformations of an EFL teacher 