How do I make great teaching materials

so to teach you need materials you need materials you do so how would you how do you know what to use how do you choose what material material do you use so when lived in Japan one of the most interesting jobs that had was actually teaching in junior high school and so this is ages like 11 to 14 and was fairly new teacher and would go into these junior high schools four or five days week and would teach like the actually the same lesson to four or five different classes in that one year group back to back and everyone has this image of Japan as everyone being extremely you know polite and well behaved junior high schools are not like this at all it's absolute chaos they haven't they haven't been molded into the Japanese society yet so in these classrooms are groups of 40 students so you can imagine there's me walking new teacher didn't speak much Japanese yet at that time walking into classroom 40 11 12 13 year olds sitting there staring at me in rows of desks so you know how on Earth do you do you teach kids kids like this who don't want to be there don't see the point of learning English one of the things learned very very quickly in that environment because had to figure out very quickly how to keep these kids entertained how to get their attention because they would just be sleeping on the desk otherwise literally because in this environment they would learn most of their the stuff that they really needed to learn from the education system they were learning cram school Dooku as they got it in the evenings and the teachers knew that they would do that so they would let them sleep during the day because they knew that the real learning would happen it was just it's really crazy so had to figure out how to keep them entertained and what and what you know what to do in the class and the the the golden lesson that learned from that is that materials need to be based on the interests of the students so whenever try to do my kind of standard stock English lessons they would just fall asleep they wouldn't pay any attention so thought wow what are they what are they interested in what are they like and after few few months of being in the school started to get to know what the students were interested in so we're talking manga we're talking famous Japanese Baseball Stars pop singers in Japan so would start to design lessons based on these topics these things that they knew about so would would start to for example would would hold up picture of manga so comic Japanese comic book that they all knew and I'd ask them what's this they'd all shout out it's one piece or whatever it may be and then might tell them the outline of the story who are the characters who's this what are they doing and they would be so interesting like for them to for me to be holding up comic book and it was just great for them and they were motivated to then to engage with me in English and so pointed by designing lessons based on things that they were interested in finding materials that they knew and they liked it was if you could motivate them you could motivate anybody so on on sealed obviously materials are big part of it we're not going to throw the trainees in at the deep end in terms of materials so they're not going to be teaching classes of 40 Junior High not at the beginning or at any point so we'll kind of ease you in gently with material so at the beginning of the course actually we'll provide you with the materials that you'll be using with your students that makes it quite easier and you know materials are kind of broadly you know interesting for all students as the course progresses the the amount of detail in in those materials and in the notes will will decrease just to encourage you to become more independent and start planning and creating your own materials and by the end of the course you will be designing your own materials which are really tailored to your students so there is there is journey then absolutely of us providing the materials that they'll use to teach at the beginning and that gradually gets taken away and then by the end they have the opportunity to design the lesson and choose the materials exactly so you have that model at the beginning and then you know we reduce that by the end and then beyond the course when you when you you set up your own business and you're teaching your own lessons there's balance there so you will inevitably sometimes create your own materials but as we know you can't if you're teaching however many hours week you can't create all of your materials from scratch there's just not enough hours in the day so you will be selecting choosing materials from from different places as well that's something we'll talk about on the course but as you said the key thing is finding materials which your student is interested in or you know as relevant to them relevant to their real life needs and announcing the big wide world where you are getting you know teaching students from from all over you get used very very quickly you get used to figuring out what students are interested in what topics they want to learn about and then there's so many places you can get materials from whether it's you know you can build an entire lesson from BBC news news article or or video on YouTube and and on seal you will learn the skills to take anything and make lesson from it exactly and as you build up this Bank of materials there will be times when you have different student who has very similar interests or needs and you can reuse that again potentially yeah well that's it know because over time once you have this Bank of materials if you're smart you you save that material you keep keep it in the folder on your on your computer and then you know very experienced teachers over time hardly ever need to make new materials because they've just you've got so much to choose from yeah so lots of planning and materials there's really nothing to be afraid of and it's often the most fun part of teaching as well isn't it's like what material how can choose materials that are going to be that are going to motivate the student