The importance of Opening the Lesson

Teacher needs to be competent, creative and innovative since they need to face students almost every day. Students are sometimes highly motivated and unmotivated at all in the other time. This becomes teacher’s crucial concern to get students put their willingness to study and be involved in the learning activity. That is why teacher should be as creative and innovative as possible to find the way out to maintain students’ motivation in learning.

It is necessary for teacher to be able to bring out interesting and meaningful lesson. One of the ways to do it is by doing attractive opening of the lesson. Opening is the most influencing part of the learning activity. When teacher can attract students’ attention and interest in the opening, then they will be involved along the learning activity. In contrast, they will not put any attention if they think the lesson will be boring or less meaningful for them.

Based on language teaching theory, the most meaningful learning for students is when they feel they need it. Then, it is important to use contextual and authentic material for teaching them. For example, when teacher is about to teach present tense, teacher can open the lesson by asking about students’ real daily activity since present tense is used to describe habitual action.

Reflect on my last School Experience, I did the opening by relating it to their real life. As the result, they were willing to answer some of my questions and being involved along the learning activities. However, when it was the first time I did teaching practice alone, I did not know about doing the opening yet. Then I felt like it was very hard to get them involved in the learning activities or even just to answer my question. This shows how opening part gives crucial influence to the learning activity.