Lesson Plan: Gender Stereotypes!

Happy women’s day! Continuing with this topic I have prepared a lesson for my intermediate course on men and women role stereotypes that I would like to share with you.

I have found a good lesson plan in English-4u, a webpage where you’ll find lesson plans based on news and hit songs, to introduce the topic. The title of the lesson is “Jobs About the House” and it is a reading activity based on some statistics by the UK Office for National Statistics. After doing the activities proposed there, we can discuss whether we live in a man’s world and who is expected to do all the household chores.

To finish off the lesson, we can work on an episode from friends (season 9, episode 6): “The one with the male nanny”. Here, we will be able to discuss stereotypes at work. Are there jobs for women and jobs for men?

Here you’ll find some activities you can do with your students while watching the video:

1. Make a list of things the men that appear in the video do, that are not generally associated with the male sex.

2. How’s Ross feeling when he talks to Sandy? Why?

3. What reason does Ross give for firing Sandy? Is it the REAL reason? How do you know?

4. Does Sandy need recommendations? Why?

5. What’s Ross problem? What happened to him when he was a kid?

6. Is Ross a stereotype of the “Macho Man”? Why?

Hope you find it useful. Looking forward to your comments…