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.