Hey, it’s Robbie.

Yesterday I shared one of the biggest changes I made to the way I plan lessons:

I stopped building lessons around vague goals like “improve your speaking” and started building them around real situations learners needed to handle at work.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve used that same idea to give my Job Interviews and Business Meetings lessons a major update.

So today, I thought I’d show you some of the thinking behind the changes.

The Job Interview Lesson

One of the tricky things about interview prep is how little notice you sometimes get.

A student messages you:

“I’ve got an interview on Friday. Can we practise tomorrow?”

Now you need a useful lesson quickly, but it still has to feel relevant to their role and experience.

So I wanted to make it easier to help a learner go from “I don’t know what to say” to a stronger, more personalised answer.

In this lesson, learners look at what the interviewer is really trying to find out, use simple structures such as the STAR method where it fits, adapt model answers to their own experience, then put everything into practice in a final mock interview.

The idea you can borrow: before asking “What would you say?”, ask “What is the interviewer really trying to learn about you?” It helps learners choose better examples and give more relevant answers.

The Business Meetings Lesson

Meetings can be tricky to prepare for because a learner may have perfectly good English, but still struggle with the moments when they actually need to jump in and use it.

Things like disagreeing without sounding too blunt, interrupting politely or asking someone to clarify a point.

So I built the lesson around those moments, with useful language first and plenty of realistic practice afterwards.

Learners gradually move from supported examples to meeting situations where they have to decide what to say for themselves.

The idea you can borrow: instead of teaching a long list of “meeting phrases”, start with a specific moment in a meeting and ask, “What would you need to say here?” It gives the language a clear purpose and makes the practice much easier to adapt to different jobs and industries.

The thinking behind both lessons is pretty simple:

1. Start with the real situation.
2. Work out what the learner needs to say or do.
3. Give them support, then give them a realistic chance to use it.

That approach helped me plan faster, reuse what worked, and still keep each lesson tied to what the learner actually needed.

If you like the approach but don’t want to spend a few hours building the lessons yourself, both finished lessons are included in the Teachers Pay Teachers sale today.

Both lessons are fully editable, so you can teach them as they are or quickly adapt them to a particular student, job or industry.

The lesson structure, examples, practice activities, slides, images and animations are already done. You can open the lesson, make any small changes you need, and go into class knowing you have a complete lesson ready.

The sale runs from August 25 to 26.

If you pick them up, I hope they save you a few hours of planning and make those interview and meetings classes easier to walk into.

Talk soon,

Robbie

P.S. If Business English is something you teach regularly and you’d prefer a longer sequence of lessons ready to go, my full Business English Communication Course might be a good fit.

It gives you a structured 10-lesson sequence covering interviews, meetings, presentations, professional email writing, workplace communication and pronunciation, with editable PowerPoints, homework tasks and a video teaching walkthrough for every lesson.

It’s included in the TpT sale too.

​Take a look at the full Business English course​