LESSON OVERVIEW

This ESL lesson plan is based on the TED Talk by Ruth Chang titled “How to make hard choices”. In her speech, Chang explains why it is so difficult to take some decisions and helps us to understand the approach to a decision-making process.

VIDEO AND DISCUSSION

The lesson starts with a short general discussion on making decisions and hard choices students face. It can be done in pairs or as an open discussion. Next, students watch the video about making hard choices. Their task is to answer questions concerning the speech.

VOCABULARY

Then, students move to one exercise on idioms used when talking about something difficult and easy. They learn such phrases as a child’s play, dead easy, a tough row to hoe, an uphill battle, etc. After that, there is one more exercise on vocabulary for expressing opinions, which students are supposed to use in the last task. Therefore, they have to complete sentences with the words given to create correct expressions.

MAKING HARD CHOICES

Finally, the lesson finishes with the speaking task when students need to use new vocabulary and make some hard choices Encourage them to justify their decisions.