This was a 12-week syllabus that I negotiated with my learners in February 12th 2014 and it ran until June 11th 2014.
To be honest I was absolutely exhausted after putting so much effort into the first syllabus, planning all the lessons, writing a blog post every week and collecting feedback – it was a lot of work!
So syllabus 2 could have been better, primarily for this reason. But the first syllabus was a real crash course in planning and executing an entire syllabus without using a coursebook and I think my teaching really improved. I learnt a hell of a lot and the feedback from learners was great, so I’m still glad I did it.
In syllabus 2, we also fell back on using some coursebook lessons, as it just made planning easier. I picked up some new teaching contracts at this time which I knew would take up a lot of my time so I knew I wouldn’t have as much time for planning this time round. But there’s only 8 activities taken from a coursebook (Advanced Business Result), and the learners chose these themselves.
To my surprise, with this syllabus almost all the participants left during the course and were replaced by a whole new group of learners. The joys of working at a startup!
So after 10 weeks we decided to organise a totally new syllabus. It isn’t really fair to ask a new group of learners to do a syllabus decided by a completely different group of people.
You can download the syllabus here.
| Week | Activity | Comments |
| 0 | Evaluation Syllabus 1Plan syllabus 2Reading on ‘Fairnopoly/ startups in Berlin’’ | homework – prepare brief report on one startup |
| 1 | Small Talk – Socialising in English‘The Onion’ news videos+discussion | |
| 2 | Twitter ‘The Economist’Introducing Yourself (1)Reported Speech | |
| 3 | Teamwork – Negotiating/ ‘Dealing with conflict’ Case study (5) | |
| 4 | Leadership /Depersonalising using the Passive | |
| 5 | Managing discussions (2)Performance: Using questions (8) | |
| 6 | Appraisals Motivation | |
| 7 | Expressing dissatisfaction (7)Taking part in a teleconference (7) | |
| 8 | Case study (3) Planning Office Space / Showing Understanding (3) | |
| 9 | Read (at home) and discuss articles from around the worldSpoken grammar – how NS really speak. Famous short stories/ discussion | |
| 10 | Intercultural awareness/ Grammar – small bits of grammar combined w/ discussion | |
| 11 | Practically speaking: Dealing with misunderstandings | |
| 12 | Discussion: Interns/ The future of work Topics of the week/ discussion Evaluation |