I was talking about Dunlosky et al. just the other day during my workshop on learning Strategies at IATEFL Brighton!!
So if you were in my talk, or in fact if you’re interested in how to help students learn better ( – which I guess you are!) then this will interest you:
Strengthening the Student Schoolbox
Dunlosky obviously explains it much better than me 🙂
… and teach our students how to learn instead. According to Alvin Toffler “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
We often hear how most of the jobs younger students will do in the future don’t exist yet, and while this is not necessarily true (teachers, doctors, judges have been around a while and show no signs of fading away), what is clear is that whatever students learn at school or university, they will need to update their skill set as time goes by. If I was still teaching with what I knew when I did my CTEFLA ( yes, I’m THAT old!!) then I don’t think I’d have mastered the photocopier yet!
You might remember Sugar Mitra talking at a plenary session at IATEFL a few years ago about a project where, by giving children access to computers they taught themselves English as well as other skills. if not you can see his TED talk here.
So, if our learners need to constantly update their knowledge then it makes sense to teach them the skills needed to do just that. Even when learning a particular curriculum, it is clear that some students are ready, whereas others will need to approach the material again at a later date.
This is where learning strategies come in. It is my deep-seated belief that by teaching students HOW to learn, the WHAT will take care of itself.
I’ve been teaching learning strategies as an integral part of my lessons for years now, an activity on self-motivation or mindset here or there, a class discussion on how to “do” a listening that leads to the creation of a checklist. The biggest benefit I’ve noticed is for the students with different learning needs, and especially those who lack confidence and are convinced they’re “rubbish” at languages. What I love is how my students take away the skills they learn in “English class” and use them elsewhere, to revise for history tests, to motivate themselves on out of school projects, etc. I’ve even found myself putting into practice what I teach about setting goals and work organisation to become more efficient, although that’s definitely work in progress!
I was lucky enough to be able to collect many of the activities I use in class together in this book by DELTA.
Let me know what you think, do you teach learning strategies? I’m sure you do even though you’ve never thought about it. What activities do you find particularly useful for your students? Please share all your ideas and thought below:)
I’m very excited to announce that Activities for developing Learning Strategies is finally out!! You can get it here and Delta publishing have kindly provided a wonderful free sample activity on goal setting here, which is perfect for this time of year!
Last week I had a last minute replacement, so I pulled this lesson out of the hat! Simply I asked the students to tell me why they would be Time Person of the Year in 20 years time. They had great fun telling each other and it was really interesting to see their “reasons”, amongst the typical professional footballers and chart-topping singers were scientists who had cured cancer, astronauts who had stepped foot on Mars, and the creator of a new social media platform that would only post positive comments!
Once they had finished deciding why they will become world famous, they wrote the article about their future selves on this sheet.
Everyone agreed they’d have to speak fluent English in their future career to be interviewed by Time!
Hi! for many people around the world this is the season of giving, so I have some activities based on that theme for you, and an opportunity for you to do some giving of your own!
It can be hard buying something for every student, with so many of them and teachers’ typical salaries even giving each one a Christmas card requires a budget so I’ve been looking at free “gifts”.
Wordclouds: Write each student’s name on the top of a piece of paper and send it round the room asking students to add a positive adjective. Then use a word cloud generator to make a pretty, coloured word cloud of all these words (and add a few if necessary). Laminate if you’re feeling flush.
Secret Santa: If you’re uncomfortable asking students to buy each other presents they can make decorated cards, or mini-posters using motivating quotes to give each other.
Get out of homework free cards: You can offer your students useful “gifts” that don’t cost a penny, giving each one a “joker” to be used for homework for example, or giving them the right to ask for a word of vocabulary during a test for example.
Your chance to give!
As you may know I’m training to run the London marathon next April. My aim is to raise 3,000€ for Macmillan, a charity that helps people with cancer and their families. It was thanks to Macmillan nurses that we were able to keep my mum at home at the end of her life, and I promised her I would try and raise as much as I could for them.
Many of us give to charities at this time of year, and if you’re planning on doing so then please consider giving to this cause through my site here.
Finally, and most importantly – remember teaching is hard, so the most important thing to give is yourself a break for time to time!
Get the students to write down 4 things about themselves on a card that you hand out, then mix them up and hand them back, the students then have to find the person on the card. When they do they have to interview them and find the five things that are most important to them. Five is a good number because after the obvious things like my job, family, reading, we get onto more outlying interests.
For homework/ a written activity you could get the students to write up this information for you, so you can both check their written level at the start of term, but also keep this information to get to know your students better.
When I tell my class of teens we’ll be studying Shakespeare this year there are usually groans all round, he’s boring, dead, old, irrelevant.
So “before” we start the dreaded bard we do something else first, sometimes I say it’s an oral lesson, a bit of philosophy or even practising the conditional; it depends on the class.
We discuss the questions below:
Would you marry someone who was a different nationality or religion from you? What if your family hated them?
How would you feel if one of your parents died and the other one remarried? – after a month?
What would you do if you thought someone had murdered someone you loved? – Would you take the law into your own hands? Would you forgive them?
Do you believe in prophecies? If someone told you that you would win the excellent prize this year, what would you do?
How could you be sure something is true?
Is justice more important than forgiveness? Is it possible to have both?
If the person you fall in love with turns out to be someone else, with a different name and life, can you still love them?
And then later, when we look at some of Shakespeare’s work the penny drops and one of the students calls out “but we’ve already talked about this!” These are the golden moments that are one of the reasons I love my job so much 😊
I was asked this question on Instagram today (obviously sending my energy into a downward spiral there!) and it got me thinking.
Where do I direct most of my energy in teaching? And is it where I can make most of a difference? If I actually stopped to think about it, my teaching time would look something like this…
30% Interacting with our intranet system– uploading results, filling in lesson plans and homework, reading messages from admin and colleagues… especially looking up homework I put online last week to show students that… I actually put the homework up last week 🙂
20% Reading and Answering mails– to and from admin, and parents (to tell them yes, I put the homework up last week, follow this link…:)
10% Marking, a drain but must be done, TBH if I had a robot that could do it I wouldn’t let it, I do need to see for myself how my students are getting on, I just wish we didn’t need to do so many draining written tests (draining for us all:)
10% Planning– I should probably spend more time and effort, but as I usually wing something completely different in class anyway depending on how we’re all feeling or what’s going on in the world, I’m a bit loath to.
0.00001% CPD: Reading books and articles & stuff, doing action research…
Oh, and then I suppose there’s Actual Teaching, which must take up the rest.
I don’t know about you but I tend to dash into life head first, putting out (and probably causing) fires around me, I’m coming to realise that slowing down and acting with more intention would probably be more effective – in many areas of my life.
So what’s the solution? Well here are a couple of ideas I’m going to try.
Maybe you’re familiar with the Eisenhower matrix…
As you can see, the idea is to separate your tasks into this grid Urgent-> Non-urgent and Important -> Non-important. It feels great to dump all your jobs onto paper and helps deliver a little clarity to what probably looks like a big mess of stuff to do.
Unfortunately I can’t delegate all the things I’d like to so I prefer this second version…
It helps me avoid putting on a wash when I’m reading an article, or clearing a cupboard when I should be marking.
I’va also decided to make use of when I have most energy during the day to block out time in my planner according to the 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the matrix. Being a bear (what on earth is Rachael talking about?) I’m more efficient in the morning, but not first thing, so that’s when I do should be doing my FOCUS tasks for example.
So that’s my plan for the next few weeks, I’ll let you know how I get on and in the meantime please share your suggestions for making time count below.
This year I’m making a big effort to really teach strategies in depth. I’ve always felt strategies were essential in learning in general, but especially in encouraging learner autonomy and with supporting students with learning difficulties; because, as with so many things in the classroom, many of the strategies I teach are automatic for some students – but not for all, and these are the ones who really need them to succeed.
So, I thought I’d share with you how I do this.
This lesson plan and worksheet is about vocabulary, our school has a policy of learning weekly vocabulary lists, I don’t necessarily agree with it, but that’s a story for another time. I ask the students to think-pair and share all the reasons WHY learning vocabulary is important and note them on the board. I then do the same with HOW they can learn their vocab, if necessary I suggest a few to start them off. If the group needs more support I give them the accompanying worksheet at the start, rather than at the end. Then once they have a few ideas, I ask them to choose their own and as you can see on the worksheet, they write their top two or three in the box provided and then either cut it out or rewrite their top 3 reasons somewhere they can see regularly – at the front of their books, on a post-it on their desks, etc.
Please feel free to download and use the worksheet above, as you can see I’ve left it in word format so you can play about with it if you like. If you’re wondering about the think bubble – that’s where the students write the lesson number so they can file it easily in their folders, for example this is S1 – Skills lesson number 1, and goes in the SKILLS section of their folder. I tend to give quite a few worksheets to avoid students having to copy too much from the board, which means we have to rise to the challenge of organising, and not losing them!
Do let me know what ideas you’d add to the lists, and also watch this space for more strategy lesson plans – let me know what you’d like to see in this section!
2. What would you like to be doing in 5 years’ time?
3. How would your biggest fan describe you?
4. And how would your worst critic describe you?
5. What’s your favourite charity?
6. Describe your role model who is NOT a member of your family.
7. If money was no object, how would you spend your life?
8. Why are you in this class?
9. What is going to be challenging for you in class this year? How are your going to deal with that challenge?
10. What support do you want from me, your teacher, in order to succeed this class?
Please add your own suggestions in the comments box!
Fab English ideas 