Lesson Topics: high school, academic vs practical skills
Skill Focus: Listening, Speaking, Vocabulary
Approximate Class Time: 1.5 hours
Lesson Plan Download: high-school-reform-upper-intermediate-022025.docx
- The lesson starts with warm-up questions about school experiences.
- Next, students watch a 2:06-minute YouTube video entitled Did high school prepare you for life?" The video features comments from adults who generally complain that high school wasn't practical enough.
- The video is followed by comprehension and follow-up questions.
- Next, students review the 10 vocabulary items by matching them to their corresponding definitions.
- After vocabulary matching, students form discussion questions with the target vocabulary.
- There is one debate topic on whether, overall, high school does a fairly good job at preparing young people for life.
- This is followed by an activity in which students suggest modifications to their high school curriculum. A list of core and suggested courses is provided. Students, in groups, must make suggestion to their superintendent on how they'd like the course offerings changed.
- The lesson has one role-play activity between a teenager who has dropped out of school to work and his parent.
- Next, the lesson presents a few famous quotations about taxes and tariffs.
- Finally, the lesson ends with a review of vocabulary and collocations before presenting some final discussion questions.
UPPER-INTERMEDIATE (B2/C1) Lesson on School & Life
Warm-up-Questions
- What are your favorite memories from school?
- What are the most important life skills a person needs to succeed as an adult?
- What were the most useful things you learned in school? What were the most useless?
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This lesson plan was created by Matthew Barton of EnglishCurrent.com (copyright). Site members may photocopy and edit the file for their classes. Permission is not given to rebrand the lesson, redistribute it on another platform, or sell it as part of commercial course curriculum. ChatGPT was used to generate answer keys and some famous quotations. For questions, contact the author.
Comprehension Question Answer Key
1- ...
2- Taxes, budgeting, cooking.
3- It means schools focus mainly on preparing students to pass standardized tests rather than teaching useful skills for life. ...
4- ...
Vocabulary: 1-struggle, 2-budgeting, 3-rights, 4-practical, 5-standardized, 6-retirement, 7-relate, 8-set (someone) up for (success), 9-funding, 10-insurance
Top exports: The United States-petroleum, Canada- petroleum, Mexico-cars, China-communication devices, Brazil-soya beans, The U.K.-cars, France-aircraft, Germany-cars, South Korea-electronic circuits, Australia-coal, Greenland-fish, Russia- petroleum
Collocations 1-e, 2-b, 3-a, 4-c, 5-d