Getting to Know - and Evaluating Teaching Materials

What makes a teaching material good or useful? Who is the one to evaluate the materials used in the classroom? And what kind of materials should we, as teachers, use in the classroom? These are the questions I have been trying to answer these days. Here is the reason why I have been thinking a lot on this issue:

Yesterday, we had a class with Hanna Thomsen from Teachers Resource Center Roskilde. The whole lecture was about English teaching materials and evaluating them. First, Hanna Thomsen started her presentation with some information about  English course books. Then, she presented some of other kinds of teaching materials including story books  ( Read Away ) , and games ( Grandma's Purse - A purse with full of different objects in ) and also some web based materials. After that we chose one of the materials and tried to make a ten minutes presentation about that material. There weren't many people in the classroom  so we could only have a very few presentations. However, we could have a deep look at the materials presented.

Grandma's Purse ( one of the teaching materials presented )

Even though some of the materials were prepared for teaching English in Denmark ( including English - Danish glossary and so-on) , I found some of the materials quite useful, in fact. Some of them were including Teacher's guide book, which is one of the things that should be in a good teaching material for me. Since  it is important to know how to use the material, a good teaching material should definitely have some instructions for the teachers. For instance, in some of the materials, there were some suggestions about  the ages of the learners with whom you can use the material. Of course it is also important to know your own learners and adjust the teaching material accordingly but if there is a guide included in the material, it takes some of the pressure on the teachers and makes it easy for the teachers to use the material effectively.

Also, a useful teaching material is the one which is adjusted through the years. As the teachers uses the materials, they get feedback from their students and then they have an idea whether to use the material in the same way or not. Then, it brings us to the point that it is also important to take our pupil's feedback about the material into consideration.

All in all, choosing the teaching materials is a hard job and there are many points to be taken into consideration so the teachers should think twice before choosing a mterial.