Day 18: What is your real challenge?
A reflective activity where students pause, synthesize the week's topics, and identify one meaningful challenge to focus on. It's calm, personal, and works as a counterbalance after the heavier lessons earlier this week.
Goals: reflect on what matters most right now, create awareness around patterns and responses to challenges.
Timing: 15-40 minutes.
If you only have 10 minutes: skip the sorting activity and just do the discussion questions (10-15 minutes).
Timing: 15-40 minutes.
If you only have 10 minutes: skip the sorting activity and just do the discussion questions (10-15 minutes).
These activities may seem a bit abstract or “airy-fairy” at first, but this lesson is extremely helpful whenever you want to develop learner autonomy.
When we teach language, we also teach transferable skills. With this lesson, you’re helping students build metacognitive skills such as prioritising, goal setting, and reflecting on their learning. Inviting students to narrow their focus is a powerful transferable skill in itself. Talking about anticipated challenges and difficulties helps them prepare for moments when motivation drops. And when you work with prompts like “I’ll know it’s working when…”, you’re helping students create an imagined future self (their L2 self), which strongly supports intrinsic motivation. The more vivid this imagined self becomes, the more likely students are to keep going.
When we teach language, we also teach transferable skills. With this lesson, you’re helping students build metacognitive skills such as prioritising, goal setting, and reflecting on their learning. Inviting students to narrow their focus is a powerful transferable skill in itself. Talking about anticipated challenges and difficulties helps them prepare for moments when motivation drops. And when you work with prompts like “I’ll know it’s working when…”, you’re helping students create an imagined future self (their L2 self), which strongly supports intrinsic motivation. The more vivid this imagined self becomes, the more likely students are to keep going.
Lesson ideas
Say something like: "This week, we talked about many different challenges: habits, health, consumption, money, social pressure. But here's the thing : trying to work on everything at once is a challenge in itself. Our energy is limited. We need to focus on what's really important right now."
Discuss:
Discuss:
- What is difficult for you right now?
- How do you feel about it?
- What helps, even just a little?
Introduce the activity: "These are all important areas of life. But what feels most important right now? Choosing 'Not Now' doesn't mean you'll never focus on it. It just means it's not your main priority right now."
Some of the categories I included: Exercise / movement; Money / financial health; Career / work; Habits / routines; Family & friends / relationships
Rest / downtime; Productivity / getting things done; Creativity / self-expression; Learning / personal growth; Travelling; Learning; Health / taking care of your body.
You may want to invite your students to add their own categories!
Allow sufficient time to sort. With Miro sticky notes, students can move items around until it feels right. If you teach 1-to-1, then you and the student both do the sorting, then compare and discuss.
Some of the categories I included: Exercise / movement; Money / financial health; Career / work; Habits / routines; Family & friends / relationships
Rest / downtime; Productivity / getting things done; Creativity / self-expression; Learning / personal growth; Travelling; Learning; Health / taking care of your body.
You may want to invite your students to add their own categories!
Allow sufficient time to sort. With Miro sticky notes, students can move items around until it feels right. If you teach 1-to-1, then you and the student both do the sorting, then compare and discuss.
After sorting, students complete these sentence stems (5-10 min). Circulate and offer support. Some students may need help narrowing down or making their challenge more concrete.
- Stems for lower levels
- Stems for higher levels
Bring the class back together and discuss:
- Did anyone find it hard to choose just one challenge?
- Did anyone's "NOW" surprise them?
- How does it feel to give yourself permission to focus on one thing?