| LESSON OVERVIEW
This time, instead of a TED talk, the lesson plan is based on a part of a TV show that hosted a renowned motivational speaker Simon Sinek. When this video hit YouTube in December 2016, it quickly went viral. His speech, and thus the lesson, focuses on the issues connected with the millennials and their situation on the modern labour market, as well as the reasons behind the problems of coping with the work life.
The 2-page handout mainly aims at stimulating students to talk about the millennials generation in the work environment. The warm-up questions concern the differences between various generations. This is followed by a 4-minute comedy video that looks at the stereotype of millennials through the eyes of previous generations. Then there are two conversation practice tasks that focus on Simon Sinek’s speech video: one based on describing the key terms from the video and the second consisting of a few discussion points to be discussed in pairs or small groups.
I recommend asking the students to watch Simon Sinek’s video at home (15 minutes). Otherwise, just follow the lesson plan and watch it after exercise 2. The video itself is not very challenging and should be understandable for B2-level students.
The second page of the handout is a reading section that looks at some changes that the millennials can bring to corporations. The text has a pre-reading speaking prediction task and a post-reading gap-filling lexical exercise.
Very interesting and I am planning to use it with my business students. However I seem to be unable to find the 4 minute comedy you mention…
There is a link in the pdfs. It’s the second exercise. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz0o9clVQu8
Thanks! got it!
This is great. thank you. Is it possible to get hold of the transcript please?
Hi Eleanor, I don’t think there’s any transcript prepared for that. What you can do is go to Youtube and get an auto-generated transcript but the quality of that is mediocre – you’d have to correct it yourself because sometimes it’s just gibberish. To get the transcript, click the elipsis button in Youtube and then click “open transcript”
In the gap fill exercise, “…they also want to access their personal life during work,” says Espinoza. Gone will be systems that lock employees out of their personal lives while they’re at work…” What does “Gone” in the text mean?
In a nutshell, the phrase “gone will be sth” means that something will no longer exist / disappear.
Hi ~
I’m a great fan of Simon Sinek, but as I was checking out some responses to his take on Millennials, I came across Crystal Kadakia, a millennial author and TED Talk speaker who has a very strong rebuttal to the interview and comments that were shown in your “Millennials in the workplace” activity. Her article (below) and book The Millennial Myth might make a good counterpoint activity.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-millennials-cant-stand-simon-sineks-viral-interview_b_59a423cce4b0a62d0987b0cb
Nice! Thanks for sharing. We need to check it out and maybe update our worksheet 🙂
It’s a super nice lesson plan. I’m about to try it out with Business students. There’s one thing I can’t make out in the funny video on Millenials in the workplace. What’s the second girl’s excuse for taking extra three weeks off? “Argentinian soul quest”?
it’s a three-week Argentinian surf-spirit quest 🙂
There are some grammar mistakes in the lesson overview.
The presentation needs to edited for such mistakes .
Examples :renowned
different generations
their impact on the modern workplace
I recommend asking
that focus on Simon Sinek’s video
some discussion points to be given to groups
Hi! Thanks for your comment! Truth be told we wrote this description 4 years ago and it seems that nobody really had a look at it. I’ve just fixed some of the issues you mentioned and will review it more thoroughly soon.
There are also some mistakes in the worksheet so check it carefully before you give it to an advanced class.
This worksheet was proofread not so long ago but it seems something must have been missed and nobody is perfect. I found two typos that you might be referring to ‘you comment > your comment’ and ‘buzzword > buzzwords’. IMHO, there are no grammatical mistakes in the worksheets but if you think otherwise share them with us at [email protected] and we’ll fix that quickly.
The first video has changed on this lesson! I did the lesson today with my students, and pulled out the teacher´s notes from last year, the ones I have always used only to find the first video has changed and was terrified mid lesson that the rest would be changed too! Thankfully the second video remained the same, so all was good.
That sounds weird – I don’t remember changing the first video in this lesson. It always was that “Workplace Training” sketch on millennials. Can you send us the link to the video that you had in the older version of the TV? Please send it to [email protected] .
More lessons from Simon Sinek Please. Thank you so much, what a fantastic piece of work.
Actually, there will be one based on a video featuring Simon Sinek soon, so stay tuned 🙂
Very interesting lesson but can you update it for 2024?
Sure, I guess we could. It’s a pretty old lesson (one of the first ones, to be honest), so we would definitely need to update it methodology-wise, however, I feel you want us to make it more ‘contemporary’. What do you think has changed in the millennials vs baby boomers dynamic since 2017 that we should include in 2024?