Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan helps B2 students master daily stand-up meetings. This business English class material uses a video and role-play to build practical communication skills for the modern workplace. The lesson guides students through the structure of a daily stand-up meeting, covering warm-up discussions, vocabulary, video comprehension, grammar for reporting progress, and culminates in a structured role-play. This ESL material is perfect for business English classes.
Activities
- A warm-up discussion where students activate their existing knowledge by discussing what makes meetings effective and learn key terms like 'facilitator' and 'blocker' through a matching exercise.
- Video comprehension: Learners watch a video about stand-up meetings and complete two tasks: a true/false exercise for general understanding and a note-taking activity to identify the three key questions.
- A grammar and phrases section focusing on using past and future tenses to report progress. Students complete a gap-fill exercise and learn useful phrases for participating in a professional meeting.
- Guided role-play scenarios where students work in groups to role-play a stand-up meeting. With assigned roles and a clear scenario, they apply the new phrases, vocabulary, and grammar.
Whether you work in a formal methodology of Scrum, in another form of agile project, or indeed a predictive plan project management approach, the idea of the morning standup or the daily standup is something you can benefit from.
So in this video I want to look at how to hold a daily stand-up meeting.
Daily stand-up meetings are short. For a small Scrum team of no more than half a dozen or so people, it's typically 15 minutes. But the essence is on keeping it short and sharp. 15 minutes is good.
And we stand up to stop us relaxing and taking our time over it. What's important is pace and energy, making sure everyone concentrates throughout the short meeting and contributes fully.
There are two styles of daily stand-up meeting that are commonly used. These are the round robin, often associated with the three questions, and the working the board or walking the board approach.
Let's start with the round robin. In a round-robin daily stand-up, the facilitator of the stand-up will go around the room, working through each member of the team and asking them a set number of questions and getting their responses.
And the common set of questions, often referred to as the three questions, are these: Question one, what did you achieve yesterday?
Second, what will you be working on? What will you be aiming to achieve today?
And third, what are the blockers that you'll be facing today? The impediments to your progress.
This is a chance for the team member to identify problems and to look for help from the team. This may be a little bit of general advice from the team in the meeting, or it may be a specific offer of help, or maybe a request made for help for an individual team member.
Team members should keep their answers short, precise and businesslike.
The walking the board approach starts with a Kanban board. It starts with work in progress and moves from the right to the left.
For each task, the facilitator will identify who owns it and ask how progress is going. In particular, they'll focus on the blockers or impediments to making progress, and then open up the discussion about the support that the group can give to unblock progress.
In both styles of daily stand-up, the team is expected to flag any conversation which is off-topic to bring it to a halt.
If that conversation is valuable, if it's going into a topic in depth, then individual team members can schedule time after the stand-up to go into that topic in the level of detail they need to.
And finally, in the spirit of agile approaches to project management, you should have an agile approach to your daily stand-up meeting. Constantly review how effective it is and look for ways to refine and improve the process of the meeting.
And as new members join the team, as other members leave the team, you may find that you need to shift the way you facilitate the meeting to get the best out of the individuals who are present.
I have never worked on an agile project, but I have worked on many projects that follow predictive planned project management approaches.
On many of those I have been part of or facilitated daily stand-up meetings. It is not an artifact solely of the agile paradigm. It's a technique that you can use on your projects to better control the project and to allow everybody to work as effectively as possible.
Please do give this video a thumbs-up if you've enjoyed it. I'll be creating loads more great project management content, so please do subscribe to the channel and hit the bell so you don't miss any of that content. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
Vocabulary focus
This lesson focuses on key business and project management vocabulary, including terms like "facilitator," "blocker," "impediment," "round-robin," and "off-topic." Students will also learn and practice essential phrases for reporting progress, stating plans, identifying problems, and keeping a meeting on track.
Grammar focus
The grammar section concentrates on using different tenses to talk about work progress. Students learn the nuances between the Past Simple for completed tasks, "will" and "be going to" for future plans, and the Future Continuous for describing ongoing actions in the future, a common professional form.