Fab English ideas

Carol gave this fantastic plenary at TESOL France this weekend.

She started her plenary with the story of a woman who, furious that her plumber had charged her £50 for tapping on a pipe, asked for a detailed invoice…

INVOICE – tapping on the pipe = £5

• knowing where to tap £45

I just loved this metaphor of the teacher’s job! I also enjoyed her remark about how we don’t suffer from information overload, but more from filter failure.

Carol added a fifth element to this conscious learning model:

-complacence.

She went on to talk about how teachers are 20^th century beings, teaching in a 19^th century environment, to 21^st century students, and described the change in teaching methods as a glide from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side”.

Carol then presented her teacher development wheel, which looked something like this:

M-MINDSET

The teacher’s mindset about how they see themselves as a teacher, but also developing a growth mindset with students by encouraging creative thinking.

R-RAPPORT & RELATIONSHIP

Matching and mirroring student behaviour in the classroom to create a positive relationship that is essential for learning to occur.

E-ENGAGEMENT & FLOW

She showed us this diagram:

Where we can see high challenge and use of skills is necessary for flow, high but not impossibly high, a difficult balance to get right, especially in a group class.

S-SCAFFOLDING & SUPPORT

For both students and teachers

I-IMPACT

“They won’t remember what you said but they’ll always remember how you made them feel”, this quote from Maia Angelou is essential in my opinion, especially in the teen classroom.

L-LANGUAGE OF LEARNING

Quantify and describe learning, of the students and of the teacher.

E-EXPECTATIONS

Beware the self-fulfilling prophecy and always ‘demand high’ from all your students.

C-COLLABORATION

Between teachers, between teachers and students. Teaching cannot occur in a vacuum, nor can teacher development.

A very well-crafted and thought-provoking talk.

One of a series of workshops I saw this weekend at TESOL France.

Billed “to kick boredom out of the classroom” and “to motivate students to internalize the language” Esra showed us loads of fun activities, and woke us all up on a cloudy Saturday morning!

Magic Bag

Put a variety of objects in a bag, students tell a story involving the object, taking it in turns to pull an object out of the bag and continue the improvised tale.

Knot Story

A similar idea but without prompts, instead the students unwind a ball of wool, when the student comes across one of the knots that the teacher has previously added to the wool they hand it to another student to continue the story.

Don’t Step out

A fun activity for students who get on well together, put a couple of sheets of newspaper on the floor, enough so four or so students can stand (closely) together, give them all a flashcard of a recently studied lexical set, food for example. They should try to stand in a line, and as the rest of the class call out their favourite “carrot”, “beans” etc., they must shuffle around until the favourite is front of the line.

Find your partner

A great way to recycle phrases from a story or vocabulary, give out pairs of storycards or flashcards, students wander around repeating their phrase or word to each other until they find their “pair”.

Cups Tower

I’ll definitely be trying this idea out. Bring in a load of plastic cups, students balance a flashcard/storycard on the cup and say the word/phrase as they do so, another student comes up, places another cup on top of the card and adds another card, repeat until collapse!!

Only one word

The teacher asks a question and students can reply with only one word. I would suggest quick fire questions around the class, or pairwork to practice question forms.

No Yes, No No, No Nodding

A traditional favourite, but a great way of practicing question forms.

The flashcard games Esra illustrated made me regret my ipad flashcards, here are a few of my favourites:

STOP!

The teacher says a phrase including a word from a pile of flashcards, holding up the cards in front of her, she then put one behind the pile at a time, the class yell “STOP!!” when they see the word, if the teacher has that card still in her hand the class win a point, if not it goes to the teacher.

Post-it

Give a couple of students a pack of little post its, use different colours for each student. Stick up flashcards around the room. When you call out a word the first student to get his post-it on the flashcard wins, you can also do a variation of this using fly swats.

Bit by Bit

Turn over the top flashcard and slight it down very slowly, students call out when they think they know what the flashcard below is. You could turn them upside down to make this game more difficult.

Ostrich

Students stand in pairs facing each other, give each one a flashcard that they hold in both hands behind their back. The objective is to see and call out your partner’s word before they see yours.

This game was great fun, I can’t wait to try it!

On the whole a great workshop that really woke us up  and a perfect start for my TESOL France 2014.

Today I went to a workshop led by Jane Maria Harding da Rosa who blogs at jmhdr.wordpress.com.

When she said we learn by teaching, I knew she was talking to me! So here are some of the things I learnt today:

The workshop was entitled “Engaging Young Learners with Content, Language and Learning Skills”.

The objectives of this workshop were to familiarize teachers with the idea of using content and learning skills to aid language development, to provide practical ideas and activities for using content and learning skills in the classroom, and finally to link these activities with Cambridge YL examinations.

Jane used a variety of activities that were new for me, including a ranking diamond (more effective than a list as it allows you to choose “best” and “worst” but leaves equal positions in the middle) and wall stations (which I do use, but these were folded sheets so the team members had no choice but to explain to their team, instead of the rest of the group looking over people’s shoulders and reading for themselves!) to explain to those present what was meant by deep cognitive engagement.

She illustrated activities such as chant creation and flashing images (that students must memorize) that could be used to develop this in the young learners’ classroom. We discovered the difference between function words which tend to be learnt incidentally, and content words that are taught in more planned ways.

Learning skills were introduced by looking at how children learn their first language, and the mnemonic device CREAM reminded us that language learners need Context, Repetition, Experimentation, Association and assimilation Meaningful input.

Jane explained the difference between homework and home-learning, I thought this was great and she also gave some useful examples of the latter, for example asking students to think in English for five minutes, by looking out of their window for example and naming all the things they can see, adding adjectives, verbs, etc. Another fun practice activity she presented involved drawing a face on one of our fingers and creating a personality and background for this new “character”, we enjoyed creating discussions between our new “friends” and it was easy to see that this would be a popular classroom activity that could be extended in home-learning time.

One of the key points Jane made was the importance in encouraging fluency in what our students know, rather than continually giving new language to be learnt, I really agree with this and then she suggested many simple and effective activities involving word cards that did just this, such as labeling, a version of happy families called Go –Fish, as well as memory games, etc.

In the final part of the workshop we put into practice the many activities that had been presented, choosing which were most suitable for the various parts of the Cambridge Young Leaners’ examinations. I particularly enjoyed the idea of cutting a small hole in a piece of A3 paper, placing it over an image, and moving it about so the students can slowly guess and describe the subject of the image.

I particularly appreciated Jane’s methods of “reflection on reflection”, whereby throughout the event we were encouraged to think about what we had learnt so far, not only did this anchor the many new ideas for us participants, but it was a great example of what we should be doing in class to recycle and anchor learning. She also used a “thumbometre”, where we did thumbs up-midway-down to show our understanding of the concepts she explained. This activity could easily be done in class, with thumbs on chests this could be quite discrete, showing the teacher where we are in our learning without letting the rest of the class know.

To conclude, this was a well-organized and information packed workshop (thank you ETAS/Cambridge Geneva-Vaud!), with plenty of group work and games to motivate the tiredest of teachers on a Saturday morning, and I’ll definitely be looking at Jane’s blog jmhdr.wordpress.com for even more ideas!

Today I watched Puchta’s webinar on the Cambridge English teacher site, if you aren’t already a member of this excellent organisation the I would advise you to join it, they have courses, webinars and advice from experts in various fields including Nicky Hockley and Penny Ur.

As always, I learnt best by telling someone else about it afterwards, so here is what I learnt today:

Motivation is probably the single most important psychological factor in learning, especially for teens.

Puchta described various psychological experiments that I was familiar with from previous studying, including Glucksberg’s famous incentive experiment involving a candle, a box of drawing pins and a box of matches.

These various experiments show that while external incentives are effective for mechanical skills, the opposite is the case for cognitive skills.

This basically means that carrots and sticks work with dogs, dolphins and pigeons, but they don’t work with language learning. Students need to reward themselves and in this their brain’s emotional system plays an essential role.

Positive emotional experiences produce dopamine (pleasure), adrenalin (excitement) and seratonin (calm) in the brain. Negative experiences ignite the “fight or flight” reflexes in the amygdala area of the brain.

Language learning is cognitively challenging, this means success will set off the brain’s reward systems, while failing to communicate in a foreign language will lead to frustration and set off the negative emotional system.

Fortunately we can influence intrinsic motivation and Puchta went on to explain 4 key principles to do just this:

1. Understanding– this is necessary for survival, and leads to a feeling of satisfaction.

2. Relevant content – It is important to choose topics relevant to students’ lives.

3. Give students a sense of control

4. Action/movement – it is important to set achievable goals and for students to feel they are moving towards these objectives.

Practical Implications of these principles:

This doesn’t mean teachers should never praise students, everyone needs recognition and rewards are a useful first step towards self motivation. However not all praise or forms of rewards are useful.

1. Use positive feedback rather than praise

Explain what was good and why, be specific “I liked it when you used adjectives such as…” I also think it is important to praise work and effort, rather than just the finished version and always make a point of shouting out to students who work hard. Puchta referred to Dornyei’s suggestion to thank students for their participation and to celebrate their efforts – any excuse for a class party wins my vote!

2. Help students become aware of their learning progress

Puchta mentions Jim Scrivener’s suggestion (from his excellent book Classroom management) to make achievements visual using wall displays, checklists, posters etc.

3. Engage Students in goal-orientated action and give them the opportunity for anticipated movement.

I agree that it is important to share lesson’s goals with students, I do this by writing up the day’s objectives on the board and referring back to them during the class to keep students on track (it also lets them know how long to go until the next break!)

4. Help students feel they have ownership 

When answering questions at the end of the webinar Puchta came back to this point,  problems can occur in the teen classroom because the teacher is boss, and students resent their lack of power. This doesn’t mean letting them do what they like, but when possible let them choose – “do you want to do the reading comp or the listening first?” In my classes I always offer the choice of the day for the test or to hand in an essay, it makes no difference to me if it is Monday or Tuesday for example, and it means I only rarely have a student asking to change the date – after all, it was their decision.

5. Use Relevant content

Obviously students work better with topics they see as interesting or important, recently we’ve been looking at how to give directions on the London tube, one student asked if it was the real map we were using, he was very motivated to find that it was and that I could tell him which stop he needed for the London Eye and Mme Taussaud’s.

6. Challenge them, but not too much

As previously mentioned failure is frustrating, success is rewarding in itself.

7. Use incentives in a light-hearted way

This part caught my attention as I give each student who gets 20/20 a sweet, at first some sneer, but don’t worry, they are quick to reclaim their prize when they get 20! However Puchta suggests giving rewards after good work as a surprise, rather than before, to avoid  ineffective if…then… extrinsic motivation.

I found this webinar informative and interesting, it’s always reassuring to hear you’ve been doing something right in class, while at the same time learning more about background theory and practical uses for it.