Seven objectives, forty-five minutes
Over the half-term break a maths teacher plans a 45-minute CLIL lesson on the area of composite shapes for 30 fourteen-year-olds at CEFR B1. Her plan lists seven objectives, including 'understand area', 'learn maths vocabulary', 'work in groups' and 'improve speaking'. The activities are: a 12-minute video, a card sort of formulae, a group poster, a textbook exercise, a peer check and a plenary. In the lesson the video runs 15 minutes, the card sort is cut to four minutes, the poster is dropped, the textbook exercise is set as homework and there is no plenary. In the debrief the teacher says the lesson 'ran out of time' and asks for a shorter video next time.
1. The teacher's diagnosis ('ran out of time') names a symptom, not a cause. Identify two planning decisions that produced the lesson's failure and explain how each caused it.
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Decision 1 - seven objectives, no priority order. Because nothing is marked as essential, the teacher has no criterion for deciding what to drop when time runs short. In practice the dropped items (poster, plenary) are the ones that carried the higher-order thinking and the assessment, while the lowest-yield item (an overlong video) was protected. The plan has no 'must / should / could' hierarchy, so the lesson defaults to the activity that is already running.
Decision 2 - an activity-led rather than outcome-led plan. Six activity types, each with a different interaction pattern and transition cost, are packed into 45 minutes with no time buffer. The 12-minute video alone is over a quarter of the lesson, is placed first (no pre-viewing task, passive start, no link to the objectives) and has no planned exit point. Nothing in the plan says 'at 12:00 I stop whatever we are doing and move to the plenary.'
Consequence: the plenary - the only point at which the teacher could check whether the content and language objectives had been met - is the item that disappears first, so the lesson cannot be evaluated and learning is not consolidated.
2. Rewrite the language objective so that it is specific, teachable and assessable, and aligns with one content objective.
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Original: 'learn maths vocabulary' / 'improve speaking' - unmeasurable, unaligned to any content, and gives no indication of what will be taught or checked.
Content objective: Students will calculate the area of composite shapes by decomposing them into rectangles and triangles.
Language objective (aligned): Students will explain their decomposition, orally and in one written sentence, using 'I divided the shape into … and …', 'the area of … is …', and 'because … the total area is …'.
Evidence the teacher will collect: in the plenary, each student states their decomposition to a partner in two sentences, and writes one sentence on the board or on a mini-whiteboard.
Why this is better: it names the exponents (the language for learning) rather than the topic; it is tied to the content operation the students actually perform; it can be heard or read in 30 seconds; and it uses a model that can be displayed as a substitution table during the lesson.
3. What would you cut, and in what order would you sequence the remaining activities? Justify with reference to CLIL lesson design.
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Cut or compress:
- The video to a 2–3 minute silent clip or a single labelled image on the board - enough to contextualise, not enough to consume the lesson.
- The group poster - it duplicates the textbook exercise and adds a production demand (poster design) that is not an objective.
- The peer check - fold it into the plenary instead of treating it as a separate stage.
Sequence the rest:
- Activate and elicit (5 min) - show one composite shape, ask pairs how they would find its area; elicit 'divide', 'rectangle', 'triangle' onto the board.
- Model (7 min) - teacher works one example aloud, thinking aloud in the target exponents, leaving the model visible.
- Guided practice with the card sort (8 min) - match shape → decomposition → sentence frame; this is the content–language bridge, not a warm-up, so it should not be cut to four minutes.
- Independent practice (15 min) - a short textbook exercise, differentiated: some students calculate, some calculate and write the explanation.
- Plenary (5 min, protected) - two students explain a decomposition; teacher collects the evidence named in the language objective.
Principle: comprehension before production; guided practice between modelling and independence; and the final stage is protected because it is the only assessment point in the lesson. A plan should state the time at which each transition happens, so 'running out of time' becomes a decision rather than an accident.