Lesson plans for EFL teachers

Ready-to-use lesson plans for private EFL teachers.

Welcome to our private Beta! We’ve spent the last six months designing, writing, redesigning, rewriting and testing and are happy to welcome our first users.
First, a bit of background. As founders of Off2Class, we’ve been teaching EFL/ESL on a number of continents for over 20 years. Like many EFL/ESL teachers, we’ve always substituted our day jobs with private English lessons. Whether teaching in Istanbul, Dubai or at home in Sydney, private EFL lessons have always been a lucrative way to top-up our day incomes. With 10-15 hours of extra teaching a week, we have often doubled our full time salaries. What teacher wouldn’t teach private English lessons? Now, with the advent of online teaching, you don’t even need to leave your house!

Preparing lesson plans for private lessons can double your teaching hours

The biggest catch to lucrative private lesson income is preparation. Preparing for private lessons can easily turn 10-15 hours of private EFL lessons into a 20-30 hour commitment.
Where do you find your lesson plans/lesson content? The easiest approach is just to ‘wing it’. Take a purely conversational approach with your student and discuss topics that interest them. The conversational approach can work quite well with adults but it always tends to dry up after 5 to 10 lessons. Eventually, even the most energetic and worldly EFL teacher will run dry of new conversations to weave useful vocabulary and grammar into.
You can find lesson content online. There are some impressive user generated communities that have sprung up over the years such as Dave’s ESL Cafe, OneStopEnglish and ReadWriteThink. There is a treasure chest of resources available within these communities. The problem is that most of it is designed for a traditional classroom. Group exercises, exercise sheets and class discussion prompts have little use for a private lesson. The lesson plan organization is also a challenge. As these communities have grown it can be increasingly hard to find just what you’re looking for. Since most of the sites are user generated, there is very little consistency in quality and style. Most of the content is organized as PDFs so you often need to resort to printing your content before lessons. Not overly helpful if you’re teaching online.

Our solution: ready-to-launch lesson plans designed to minimize prep time

We’ve spent the last six months designing and testing lesson content intended to reduce your prep time. We’ve loaded the content onto an easy to use web platform and we’re currently offering it for free. Check out our video to see a basic product demo.
Our mission is to reduce your prep time. Each lesson plan comes with an adjoining set of teacher notes. The notes are there to aid you in teaching the lessons. As you move from slide to slide, the notes move with you. You can always hide them from your student by clicking the full screen button. (and share your screen if you are teaching online)
We’ve also added student accounts. If you want to teach using two devices (let’s say you are on your laptop and your student has an tablet), add a student and then have them log in. The student will take a passive view of the lesson only seeing the slide that you are currently on. As you move forward in the lesson, so will his/her slide while the teacher notes remain private to your device.
For now we are focusing on grammar and vocabulary (the two areas where we have had the most pain in finding lesson plans in the past). We’re working on a set of IELTS lesson plans and are considering tackling common literature. If you think you’d find our product useful, please request a log-in on our contact form and we’ll get you set up via email.

Of course, all comments are extremely appreciated (whether left here or via email). As a beta user we may request you from time to time to fill out a short online survey to help make Off2Class more useful for you. Happy teaching!