Selecting Engaging Topics for Your Virtual Lessons

Welcome back educators! Thank you so much stopping by to get all the details on how you create engaging virtual lessons for your ELLs. If you haven’t already please take a moment to subscribe and share this website with other ESL teachers. This helps spread the word about the strategies and tips. You are also helping other ESL teachers make their classroom streamlined.

Most of us are distant learning and have the same problem. We are searching and wondering what we are going to teach our students? A lot of us know how we are going to teach our ELLs. Rather that is through a lesson on Nearpod or Quizlet. Some of us are using Zoom and Teams to teach PowerPoint lessons to our ELLs. For me the struggle was what am I going to teach the students. I was going back and forth between two simple questions that I was asking myself. “Will I stick to the same topics from the school year or will I cater more to their interests?” These questions are important to ask yourself because you want your students to have buy-in with the lessons. Also, engaging lesson topics excite the kids which mean they are more likely to engage in the lessons.

I knew that I needed some buy-in from my students so I decided to get their input and pick up on clues of what they were talking about among themselves. For example, in class the students would get off topic and chat about video games all the time. I knew immediately that this was a topic that they were interested in. When I started planning my lessons I kept that in the front of my mind because I wanted the students to be excited and engaged during the online lessons. This helped me determine topics that would be interesting to the students. Also, I noticed that students had a lot of questions around the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a topic that the students are interested in because they are asking questions. Next, I found articles, videos, photos, and books that my ELLs were interested in. This helped me prepare close reading lessons and interactive activities since I had a topic.

First determine what are some of your students’ interests. You can do this in a few ways:

• Listen to the students conversations and pick up on some of their interests.
• Use current events for lesson ideas. Most students are curious and want to know more about what is going on in the world.
• Ask the students to complete an interest survey. In the survey you can ask students what ate their favorite video games. You can explicitly ask your ELLs what they would like to learn about this school year.

Once you have this data around lesson topic ideas, find articles, videos, books, and audio around the topics.

Here are your next steps:

• Reflect on what are some of your students’ interests.
• If you need to send your students a quick survey asking what they would like to learn this school year.
• Once you have that data start planning your lessons around those topic ideas.

What are some of your favorite lesson topics that you have taught in your virtual lessons? Share those in the comments below. Thank you so much for stopping by!