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Dear Reader,

There's an interesting expression I've been mulling over this week: a balancing act.

Metaphorically speaking, a balancing act is a (challenging) situation in which you have to dedicate yourself roughly equally to two ore more things. Also known as being pulled in different directions, and in more extreme cases, being spread too thin, a balancing act requires you to, well, balance how you distribute your attention and energy.

Why was I thinking about this, you ask? Well, first, because what life of a millennial working woman is not a balancing act? I ask you.

Second, because this week I've been reading a report by Ofsted¹ (the INVALSI equivalent in England) about teaching vs. play in early years education, which they coincidentally call a balancing act. Children in England can start school as young as 4 (!) years old, so it's no wonder people wonder about the balance between teaching and play (spoiler: yes, it's a balancing act).

Third, because seriously, will you take a look at the weather forecast for the next fortnight?

It will be a constant balancing act between my faith in science and my desire to ignore it all in the hope it's wrong, in a "stick your fingers in your ears and chant la-la-la" fashion.

The idea of a balancing act also inspired one of the strategies we will be teaching in our new exam coaching sessions, individually and in small groups: how to be concise in your lesson plan presentation and domande disciplinari answers².

Conciseness doesn't mean being too short: after all, you want to put your knowledge and skills on display - and I know you have those, in spades! Being concise means getting to the actual point in a way that satisfies your audience's needs. Close your eyes and think about it for a second: how often have you sat in a meeting or lesson wishing that a speaker would just. get. to the point? Now you know what I mean.

The good news is: we've seen it all, including the good, the bad and the ugly, so we know how to help you strategise. Other examples of things you will learn in our live sessions include:

• How to structure your answers (incl. useful phrases)
• How to handle interruptions from the committee (including those not very nice but still common instances when they interrupt you to disagree with you)
• How to answer follow-up questions probing into your lesson plan

Now, many of the lessons for the next few weeks are either fully booked or almost: if you've been sitting on the fence, it's likely time to get off the fence and join us while you can (i.e. this and next month).

Book your live lesson

All of this talk of balancing acts made me think of something: how do you reach a balance in your lesson? So today, I will share with you 5 ways to balance your lesson - from how you organise the work to how much guidance you give.

I hope you're ready, and I hope to god it's not been raining incessantly for weeks where you live, but either way, a steaming hot beverage might help: let's get started 🏁

Balancing priorities: what I'd like to see

As you know very well now if you've read a few of my newsletters, I am not a committee examiner. Far from it: I don't think I could ever muster up the discipline, the diplomacy, and the many other qualities needed to be one. However, I have observed very many live lessons and many lesson plan presentations. So, what would I have wanted to see in those lessons? This should be useful whether you're just planning your lessons, you're planning for the concorso exam or you're already looking to the percorsi abilitanti exams.

Here are 5 main points to consider:

1. A balance between free and controlled practice

As a teacher, I'm not a huge fan of controlled practice, i.e. activities in which learners practise a language point in a limited form, such as gap-fill or matching exercises. Free practice activities offer the opportunity to practise more flexibly, so the learners can choose how (and whether) to use the language. So, say you've done a lesson on daily routines, in a free practice activity like a roleplay or a designing a poster, learners might use the language you taught them (including, optionally and tragically, the third person -s), but they might also... not, because they're using the language freely. Ideally, you would want to have a balance of controlled and freer practice activities: too many controlled activities and the lesson becomes boring and teacher-centred; too many free practice activities and the students lack structure and guidance. One possible yardstick: the younger and lower level the students, the more you might like to have controlled activities, and vice versa.

2. A balance between guided discovery learning and guided instruction

I don't think it will surprise you that I came of age as a teacher, as it were, at a time when the fashionable thing was for learners to work things out for themselves. You might call this guided discovery, discovery learning, or other names, but the point stands: we are geological eras away from the dear old lecture, where students sit and listen to the teacher. However, with age comes wisdom (eh, sometimes) and if you're lucky, a healthy dose of eating your words. This is what I've been doing these past few years, as I've been exploring evidence that direct instruction, defined as "providing information that fully explains the concepts and procedures that students are required to learn", actually does foster learning. I'm still hesitant to declare that one always works better than the other; however, in a lesson plan, I'd like to see a balance of teacher guidance/explanation and students discovering things by themselves. You may think of this as a mixture of, for example, grammar explanations and strategy training, and inquiry- or project-based learning.

3. A balance of individual, pair, group and whole-class work

If you want your lesson (and your lesson plan) to be successful, you want to remember to alternate between all these modalities. Bonus points if you can connect these to inclusion needs: for example, might a student with a disability find group work useful? Could a student with a neurodivergence use a bit of individual, quiet time?

4. A balance between learning about, and learning how to

One key difference that is easy to understand and helps me when I'm wondering if my lesson is complete rubbish is the one between declarative and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge means learning about something: for instance, learning about the present perfect. Procedural knowledge means learning how to do something: in language teaching terms, it means using the present perfect. Especially if you get an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) or civic education topic at the exam, it may be tempting to teach the students a lot about the topic (since you yourself may be learning about the topic!) through videos or reading texts. However, remember to balance this with activities in which the students put that knowledge to use and do something. I talk about this in the new updated course on lesson planning.

5. A balance between fun and... not fun

I'm as fond of games as the next person; however, not everything has to be fun in the classroom. Games certainly have their place, particularly if they're educational, but I recommend balancing them out with less upbeat but still valuable activities. On the other hand, if you haven't experimented with games so far, they can make for a great warm-up, end of the class, or even central activity: explore some of them in this post.

As they say, all good things must come to an end, and it is indeed time for me to love you and leave you!

Wishing you a lovely Sunday with your loved ones.

Take care, dear teacher ✨

¹ I am very tempted to write a whole separate newsletter about Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education. I said it's the equivalent to INVALSI, but I will be the first to admit this is a gross oversimplification. Indeed, Ofsted actively and routinely inspects all educational settings in England and awards very influential and consequential ratings. Schools and nurseries get inspected quite formally and with very little, if any, notice. Based on the official inspection, which may last a few days, they then receive a grade: this used to be on a 4-point scale (Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate) and it is now going to be on a 5-point scale (Exceptional, Strong standard, Expected standard, Attention needed, and Urgent improvement). You can see how a "required improvement" or, god forbid, "urgent improvement" rating might not play in a school's favour. If you're curious, you can a) read this BBC News article about the new ratings and why they're controversial and b) reply to let me know that if I write a newsletter about this, I will not be boring you to death.

² Although, having sat through my fair share of rambling conference presentations that went well over the allotted time, lessons that were supposed to end 15 minutes ago but somehow were magically still ongoing and networking sessions from which I came away knowing the names and, rather shockingly, surnames, of people's cats, may I suggest that conciseness is a gift we could do with in many areas of our lives.

P.S.: My weekly suggestion for things to listen to/watch/read to improve your English while relaxing: In slightly underwhelming news from across the pond, the new documentary about the US First Lady, Melania, came out this week. I won't spoil the reviews, mostly because I think you can easily imagine them, but I will encourage you to read this article about the movie premiere because I hardly ever see examples of sarcasm that make me laugh out loud, and this one did. A bittersweet laugh, mind you, but a laugh nonetheless.

P.P.S.: If I ever manage to get my workload under some semblance of control, I'm think about doing a free webinar for those preparing for the oral exam. Would you be so kind as to take 5 seconds to click on your preference below? I shall forever be indebted to you! (I know, I know, too much Bridgerton).

If I did a live webinar open to all, which of the following would you be more likely to attend? Ask me anything about the oral exam: live questions and answers Creating lesson plans together: multiple tracce, brainstorming ideas with and without AI Something completely different: please tell me via email

✨Cool things I heard this week

I prepared for PNRR1 and PNRR2 by myself and spent so much time finding stuff that made sense that the stress became too much. Then a colleague told me about your courses on lesson planning and I can't tell you how much time you've saved me! And how much mental health.

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