A designer lessons ESL Lesson plan developed by George Chilton
This is a short lesson, with lots of potential to be expanded upon. It give you the opportunity to really engage your class and get them talking about what makes them unique. Let me know how you use it and how you follow-up afterwards in the comments.
Lesson Aims:
- Discussion
- Comparison
- Presentation
Stage one
Ask your students to discuss the following questions in groups – make them think about the whole world, not just their country.
Useful language – will for prediction.
I think the average person will be 30 years old.
- How much money does the average person make a year?
- How tall is the average person?
- How old is the average person?
- Does the average person have a mobile (cell) phone?
- Are there more men or women in the world?
- Which is the largest ethnic group?
Once they have finished they can share their predictions, give them corrections at this stage.
Stage two
Show the following National Geographic video. Ask them to compare their guesses with the research. They should also take notes to gather any other interesting information.
After the video ask if they found anything surprising.
Now get them to draw a table comparing themselves to the average person. At this stage you can give them useful phrases for comparison.
Image via Wikipedia
I am 17, whereas the average person is 28.
I am left-handed, but the average person is right-handed.
I am 1 metre tall, which is a little shorter than the average person.
Stage three
Pairwork – design the average person from their country (if you have a class of mixed nationalities, get them to design an average person from the country you are in).
The groups can present these ideas to the rest of the class – and see if people agree or disagree with one another.
Follow up with error correction.
Designer Lessons by George Chilton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Creado a partir de la obra en designerlessons.wordpress.com
designer lessons 
Great lesson George, thanks, I’ll definitely use this.
Have you seen the 50 people One question videos? (sure you have) I’ve used these for a lesson and they went down well.
Gemma.
Hey Gemma, thanks for the video, that’s awesome. I’m definitely going to do something with it in class & put the plan up.
How’s Korea? I just saw Matt’s post about french fries on Pizza. That’s one thing I don’t miss. I also experienced whipped cream on jacket potatoes and cornflakes in my ice-cream.
Hope you’re both good 😀
No probs, glad you could use it. I’ll definitely be using the lessons on your blog a lot this year!
Korea’s great thanks, we’ve just re-signed our contracts so staying for another year! Haven’t had the pleasure of cream on jacket potatoes yet but there’s plenty of time!
Hope everything’s good in Barcelona x
Ahhh, what about a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream…on your green salad? Tasty…sort of. ^_^ I’m looking for a project I can do with one of my classes. I think I might try this one. Will let you know how I get on.
Hi thanks I just used this lesson as the base for my class in a Korean highschool and it worked fantastically. I’m making it last two lessons so I also added a mafia game where the students have to find the ‘typical person’ and a conversation activity. The full lesson is on http://www.highschoolesl.com. Thanks for the inspiration!
Hi,
I just did this lesson with my FCE teenagers.
I watched the fifty question video first and asked ther sts to listen carefully to the first man´s answer and to then try and work out what the question could have been?
After eliciting the answer, I asked the sts to think about how they would answer the question. After feedback, we watched the remainder of the video and I had the sts answer 3 simple Qs.
1) What is the funniest/best answer?
2) What answer would you use to replace your own answer?
3) What answer is used the most?
Again after feedback, I focussed on the last question and asked why they thought it was the most common answer. I asked if they thought the people in the video were average everyday people because the answer they gave was the same?
I then asked if they thought they were average, normal people? After some discussion we followed your lesson plan, but at the end when coming up with the average Spanish person I got the students to research the actual statistics on their phones and then we boarded all the information.
Thanks for this lesson. It was very useful.
Adam