| LESSON OVERVIEW
This lesson plan about education is prepared for B2 students and is based on a video presenting differences between Finnish and American education systems. Students will have a chance to learn some new vocabulary as well as express their opinions connected with education and schools. As the video is part of an American documentary, you will find many American English words in this lesson plan.
You can do the whole lesson with your students in class but remember that the video is 9:27 mins. Decide yourself whether you want to use this worksheet as a flipped lesson or not.
This is a Flipped Classroom lesson plan. In a nutshell, it means that the first part of the lesson needs to be done by students at home. Learn more about flipped classroom and how we implement it in these lesson plans in our post.
PRE-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Before the class, students need to do two exercises. First, they need to match words to create pairs of synonyms. All words from this exercise appear in the video. Next, students watch a video which a segment from a documentary “Where to Invade Next” by an American filmmaker, Michael Moore. As they watch the video, they need note down the differences between Finnish and American education systems.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
This is a lesson plan about education so the in-class worksheet starts with a short discussion about education and schools (questions include words that students matched in exercise 1). Then, there is one vocabulary task in which students have to choose correct words to fill in the gaps in the sentences provided. The activity involves such words as timetable, principal, tuitions, extracurricular, etc. It’s a multiple choice task (you’ll understand the irony after watching the video).
Discussion and asking for opinion
The last task on this page looks into different phrases used for asking for opinion. Students have to fill in the gaps with the words from the box to create a few different expressions that they will use in the last task.
Equipped with the phrases from the previous activity, your students will now work in groups to practice using them and have a discussion about the school system. You can approach this activity in a more or less controlled manner. If you choose the first option, one student will pick a topic from the list (you can also cut it out), read it and tell what they think about a given topic, whether they agree or disagree and why. Then, he or she needs to choose another student from the group and ask them to express their opinion on the same topic. Afterwards, next student chooses another topic and repeats the process. Of course, they need to use questions from the previous task. Make sure to give them set amount of time (90-120 seconds) for expressing an opinion and another 30 sec for the response of the other student. If you prefer a more open task, treat it as an open discussion task and just remind your students to use expression from the previous activity.
WORKSHEETS
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Hello, I’d love to do this lesson again but it looks like the video clip has gone. Could you resend the link, please? Thanks again for your great lessons.
Thank you, it’s back!
Emma, thanks for letting us know about the broken link! As you saw, we fixed it on our website and in the e-lesson plan. We’ll update the pdfs in a few minutes as well.
Awesome lesson plan! Thank you so much, Justa!
Thanks 🙂
I found that your link is no longer active. I was able find the video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpy7qkfx4HE My students are intrigued with these schools which are drastically different from the Hungarian educational system.
Hi Carolina! Thanks for sharing the video and making us aware of the issue. The video you shared is a slightly shorter excerpt from the documentary so the answer key might be invalid. However, we found exactly the same excerpt and replaced the links here and in the teaching materials.
Hello! I’ve previously used this lesson and really enjoy it, but it seems the link has stopped working again as the video no longer exists.
Hi! We’ve just checked the link and the video works fine on our side. Please, check again as there might have been a temporary glitch.
I just saw that it’s blocked in my country (Luxembourg) 🙁
I’m sorry to hear that. The only solution I can think of is to try using VPN and see if it works.