Back to school

This is a very personal post.  From a different side of the learning fence.  It’s about the challenge I face as a parent at the beginning of the new school year.

I have two kids, 8 and 10, who are very happy in their schools.  They have great classmates and so far – OK it’s only day four! – getting ready for school in the morning is a happy and positive affair.

They go to local Spanish schools following a traditional curriculum taught in a pretty traditional fashion.  Rote learning, memorization, accuracy and constant testing is at the basis of the teaching philosophy.  That’s not the full picture of course.  Individual teachers and their individual approaches bring a breath of fresh air, they look for creativity where they can, but the kids still end up filling pages and pages of activity books and worksheets, ticking the correct answers, counting the mistakes , being graded once a month.

This is their day to day learning reality. And I find myself having to support it.  Even on day three my 8 year old daughter already had to memorise (verbatim) a punctuation rule.  And I helped her.  Of course we discussed the how and the why and the where – the bigger picture as it were – but in the end she insisted on being tested, on repeating the rule word for word.  She was only happy when she could parrot it comfortably and confidently.

Don’t get me wrong – I think memorization and rules have a role to play in learning – I’m just worried that the over-riding philosophy, the message about learning, that’s coming across is one of pleasing the tester, ticking the boxes, getting things right, which brings me to my question and personal challenge (a repeated, yearly, constant challenge but one that changes and shifts all the time as the kids get older, as the “learning” load increases):

How can parents help bridge the gap between traditional schooling and creative learning? 

I guess it’s mainly an attitude, a mindset, letting them explore and learn on their own terms, in their own time, offer opportunities, be there to discuss questions … but that takes time, and once they’ve finished the worksheets and the memorizing all they really want to do is take it easy, which is fair enough, right?  But still … I wonder … am I doing enough?

I wonder if any of you are facing the same situation?  I guess I’m not really looking for easy solutions, just airing a quandary …

But it does lead me to another question, related to another aspect of learning/teaching and my day-to-day life and that’s constantly present in my mind at the moment:

How can published materials help bridge the gap between a static syllabus and the dynamic process of language learning?  

Now that’s a biggie … and one I’m going to be coming back to, but not in this post!

a learning experiment

thanks to Bob Doran on flickr for his light experiment

Earlier today the twitter-based #eltchat group were discussing experiences of, and opinions about, some “alternative” teaching techniques, namely the Silent Way, TPR (Total Physical Response) and Suggestopedia. I mentioned a method I’d experimented with years ago – an Accelerated Learning self-study course, loosely based on the principles of Suggestopedia – and how I’d been amazed by the results. 140 characters certainly weren’t enough to be able to go into it in detail and as the conversation moved on I offered to write a blog post about the experience. So here it is!

I was studying for an MA at Reading university at the time and preparing to tutor on a teacher training course preparing Thai secondary school teachers to set up self-access centres in their schools. As part of my preparation I decided to follow a self-access language learning course myself, to put myself in the students’ shoes and use the experience to feed into the course. My plan after finishing my MA was to look for work in Latin America and I wanted to start studying Spanish. At the time I was a confident and fluent user of Italian, so it wasn’t that challenging and my motivation was certainly high. In order to counter these very positive factors I decided to opt for an approach that I had no experience of, and had some reservations about its efficacy. It was the hype more than anything else that made me skeptical. Anything that promises such amazing short term results seemed too good to be true. So my mindset as I approached my first Accelerated Learning lesson was far from perfect.

But I was also ready to give it a fair chance. I was going to follow the rules to the letter, do as I was instructed, no matter how skeptical I felt and see where it led me. I was amazed by the results.

Now this all happened a long time ago, when self-access centres were language labs, with tapes and print books and a lot has changed since then, including the courses offered by the Accelerated Learning company. I have to admit that my memories are patchy too, and the learner diary I kept is gathering dust in a box in someone else’s attic far away! But I’ll try and describe that first lesson as well as I can.

The course was story-based and the first part of the first lesson consisted of listening to the first episode of the story. Although the language was obviously graded and the dialogue included basic greetings and the functional exponents you’d expect in the first unit of a coursebook, the story itself was narrated in the past, using simple, continuous and perfect verb forms. There was a lot of repetition and images to support understanding and the first impact with the language was purely passive. I spent an hour in the language lab and didn’t have to say a word. The emphasis was on exposure and absorbing the language. The same story was told in three different ways. Firstly with music in the background and read by one narrator. My task was to follow the script and the images on the page. This is where my knowledge of Italian came in handy. There are so many cognates, so many similar structures that I could pick up a lot simply from reading and comparing with Italian. And the obvious comparison also helped me notice differences as well as similarities. I think this L2 hook helped as much as anything.

The second reading was dramatized, with voices for the characters. I can’t remember their names, but the basic story was a mystery based on a journey. A man travels from the States to Mexico, I can’t remember why, but he’s carrying – or receives – a package that he has to deliver to an unknown person at an unknown address. Sorry, all a bit patchy more than15 years later! So the story includes very simple, core functional exponents for greetings, exchanging names, asking for personal information, but the context of the story lifts it above a banal first meeting. There’s a love interest too, of course, as in all good stories!

So far, so good. Nothing too way out. I’d listened to and understood the story and was ready for some form of testing or production or practice. But the third stage was yet another listening. I was asked to close my eyes, make myself as comfortable as possible, preferably in an armchair (not possible in the language lab unfortunately) and listen to the third reading, concentrating on the music and not the words. This time the background music was foregrounded, the narrated story was very, very quiet in the background. This was getting a little out of my studying comfort zone, but I followed the instructions as well as I could. When the third reading finished I was told to close my book and go away and do something active for at least an hour and not to come back to the book until the next day.

I followed the first part of the instructions. Walked home to my student flat, bought some food on the way, got home and cooked, chatted to flatmates. I hadn’t brought the book home with me, so I couldn’t cheat on that count, but what I did do was sit down and try and write the story text from memory. And that’s when I was amazed. I had retained whole chunks of the story. I was able to write down at least 80% of the text in one sitting, with hardly any effort to recall whatsoever. When I compared my text with the one in the book the next day I found that a lot of what I’d written was word perfect. I think the support of Italian played a huge part in that, but still, the story must have been at least 300 words long. I wonder whether any other approach would have furnished me with the confidence and structure to reproduce a whole text, including narrative verb forms and dialogue after just one hour.

Now, I have to admit that once the training course got under way and we’d explored the pros and cons of learner diaries I dropped the experiment and didn’t get much further with my self-access learning course so I can’t comment on long term effects.  One year later I was living in Madrid, immersed in a very different form of accelerated learning!

Still, some food for thought I guess. And a lesson in not judging by appearances and hype!  But was it just a flash in the pan? Was it just a typical example of the Hawthorne effect?  Or is this something we should be learning from and taking into our classrooms – online or off?  What do you think?

Do you have any interesting learning experiences to share – alternative or not – I think the crowd over at #eltchat would like to know … and me too of course!  Leave a comment, or if you write about one on your blog, could you send me the link?  Thanks!

eltchat – change of address

Various commitments, both personal and professional have kept me away from my blog and other online activities for almost four months.  The usual – classes, deadlines, family visits, kids’ holidays.  And I think I would probably have kept away until September and the end of the long summer break, had it not been for the news that  eltchat has lost its .com domain, through no fault of their own.  (To find out more read Marisa and Shaun’s blog post. )

Like so many others (Ceci Lemos, Ty Seburn , Dave Dodgson, Fiona Price, Chiew Pang Tamas Lorincz, Lesley Coccarelli to name just a few) who have blogged about this news, or who have tweeted about it or flagged it on facebook,  #eltchat is an essential part of my elt world.   An incredible resource, a motivating meeting place. And luckily the loss of the domain is only a temporary glitch.  The team are working on getting everything uploaded onto their new domain – eltchat.org.  It may take a little time and it will certainly be a mammoth job, but everything’ll be back up and running in time for September.

And last,  but obviously not least, I’d like to repeat Ty’s request for anyone who’s linked to eltchat. com in their blog posts in the past, to go back and update their links as soon as the new domain is up and running.

Good luck to everyone involved – and see you all back on #eltchat in September!

 

 

 

Sharing …

shared by JunCTionS on flickr

I teach speaking classes with groups of teenagers at a local High School once a week.  There’s a team of us all doing the same thing and to cut down on our workload, and to offer continuity across the classes, we share lesson plans. We take it in turns to plan the lessons and all the groups at each level are taught from the same plan.This week it’s my turn to plan for the 4th grade in secondary.   Ironically, because of the way the May day holidays fall, I won’t actually be teaching from this plan. So I thought maybe I’d share it on my blog. Maybe you’ll try it out and let me know how it goes. 

  

Lesson no. 14 (wk starting April 23/ wk starting April 30)

Lesson aim: to practise describing images (in this case the images are in their own heads but hopefully the tasks will help them prepare for the oral exam) 

Materials:  pencils/pens, blank paper, otherwise none – though if you want to show a photo of a) the view from one of your windows  or b) a photo of your living room that might help.  I’ll attach photos of mine (feel free to pretend they’re yours if you want!)

Here are the photos:

1 view from my window

My living room:

Suggested procedure:  word of warning:  the lesson calls for quite a lot of imaginative effort from the students, I’m scaffolding it in a way that I think will work with my current group (noisy but cooperative) feel free to do with it what you will for yours stage 1 visualisation/ picture dictation: the view from my room 1 ask the students to draw a large empty square on a piece of paper – explain that the square represents a window and that you are going to describe what you can see from the window 2 on the board draw a square and briefly model the activity using one of the windows in the classroom (if you’re in the “dungeons” it’s pretty easy – possibly too easy!).  Label your square as you do using phrases like:   directly in front of me I can see a wall, to the left I can see a wall, to the right I can …,  if I look up, I can see the sky …. In the top left hand cornerI can see the stairs.  You might want to ask a student/students to act as scribes and add the phrases to the board.  Ask ss NOT to write them on their paper for the moment.   They can make a note of it at the end of the lesson (or you can play Kim’s Game with it ie rubbing out bits and they have to remember until it’s all gone, or they have to reuse it in one of the optional writing tasks). 3  describe the view from one of your windows to the class, using phrases like the ones on the board, ask the ss to listen and sketch the view in the square. 4 ask ss to compare their sketches and either retell your description or write it (choice dependent on classroom management/dynamics I guess) – you may want to follow up with some  comprehension checking e.g. where do you think I live? and if you have a photo to show them they can compare their sketch to your photo.

stage 2 students dictate views to their partners Note: You can either ask them to describe the real view from a window at home or choose one of the following - the  view from a holiday home or hotel the view from one of the classrooms the view from their dream house 1  they’re going for they’ll need preparation time.  To focus the prep ask them to write down between 5 and 10 words they think they’ll need in English or Spanish – help with the words they need, and use peers to help too (or they can look for translations on their phones?) 2 as they perform the task, make sure they’re drawing what their partner is telling them – award points if you want: one point for each detail included, to be awarded by their partner at the end of the task. 3 feedback: show the sketch to the whole class, explain how many points awarded, ask the class to say which kind of view (from the choices given above) they went for (optional written follow-up, write a description of the view, their own or their partner’s) stage 3  two options here (I’m going to go with the flow in class) option 1 a guided tour of my living room If you went to Jane Arnold’s session at ACEIA you’ll know this activity.  You hold out the palm of your hand and ask the students to imagine they can see their living room on it.  Model it and ham up the visualisation, showing them that there’s an invisible 3D model perched on the palm of your hand. Give the students a guided tour of your living room on the palm of your hand.  Then the ss do the same.  (You could do a guided tour of the classroom if you prefer?) (optional written follow-up, write a description of the room, their own or their partner’s) option 2 (the outdoors option) Very much following Chris Roland’s lead. If your class respond to working outside the classroom take them out to the playground. Show them how to frame a photo with their fingers, then in pairs they find a spot in the playground, frame a photo from that spot and then write a description of what they can see.  They come back into class, read out their descriptions and we discuss whereabouts in the patio they were standing. rounding off : could go back to the language on the board and play Kim’s Game (see notes above) or drill or do anything else to focus on it for a minute or so before finishing.

 

Following from afar

click on the image to go to IATEFL online

This week the annual IATEFL UK conference is being held in Glasgow. I’m guessing I probably didn’t need to tell a lot of the visitors to this blog. For the first time I’m following from afar.  It isn’t the first time I haven’t attended – obviously –  but it is the first time I’ve been able to follow the conference online, on the livestream, on blogs, on twitter.  And it’s an interesting experience so far.

OK, it’s only day one, and I didn’t manage to catch the plenary streaming live, but I did manage to catch a couple of sessions – in fact three or four at the same time at one point – and there was one session in particular that really came alive through the tweets and the comments of my twitter contacts and friends.  (Big thanks to @CeciELT @vbenevolofranca and @jemjemgardner.  It almost – well kinda – felt like I was sitting in there with you!)

It was Jim Scrivener‘s session on Demand-High Teaching.    I was aware of the new blog Jim and Adrian Underhill had recently set up, I had read the first posts introducing the concept and the underlying issues, so when the tweets started appearing in the top right hand corner of my screen, I already had a context for them.   I was sitting at the kitchen table (as I am now in fact) helping – or maybe better – accompanying my daughter as she did her homework.  I was open to distraction and found my attention called back time and time again to the nuggets being tweeted from Jim’s talk. ( Golden nuggets by the way, not McNuggets).

There has been a lot of discussion in blogs about the value (or not) of tweeting from conference sessions.  It obviously doesn’t replace the experience of being there, but the responses and reactions of the people who are there – people whose opinions and viewpoints you know and value  - are interesting in themselves.  They open up windows of curiosity.

Part of the distance conferencing experience of course is that you can let day to day life flow on around you. You dip in and out, as and when.  This can be frustrating, but it can also be liberating.  Part of me wishes I was there, but quite honestly, another part of me is happy that I’m at home. Travelling to conferences always entails quite a lot of  underlying guilt – guilt about not being around to fulfil family duties, guilt about workloads and looming deadlines.  So I turned off tweetdeck, shut down my computer, we got out our bikes and cycled into town for my daughter’s flamenco class.   That easy. From online professional development to day-to-day life.

When I got back those windows of curiosity were still open.  I checked back into twitter, touched base with the conference, answered a couple of tweets and then remembered that I’d noticed an interview by Jim Scrivener on the iateflonline livestream.  The interview had been recorded shortly before Jim gave his session.  The timing was all a bit upsidedown. But that didn’t matter at all.  This was not a linear experience – it was kind of conference hypertexting. (On a total tangent, I loved Jim’s comment in the interview on hypertext and readers as hunter-gatherers).

I listened to the interview as I washed up and laid the table for dinner.  I went back to the blog again, re-read the first few posts, read through the comments and the discussion, found the slides from the session I’d “attended” earlier.  It was fascinating piecing it all together.  There’s a disclaimer saying that the slides probaby don’t make sense it you weren’t actually at the session.  But I’m not so sure. Or maybe it’s that I was there.  Just following from afar.

Looking back at Bilbao (1) teen angles from Chris Roland

Here’s the first in a series of posts inspired by the TESOL Spain conference in Bilbao. Which in turn was inspired by the ever photogenic Guggenheim building right opposite on the other side of the river.

photo taken on my phone as I walked to registration

After the conference one of the people I talked to there tweeted a great post conference motto:

But rather than consciously trying things out, I found things myself getting flashbacks to ideas and impressions that had struck a chord.  This is  the first conference flashback story. The flashback was to the first session I attended on Saturday morning.  At 9am.  A great session by a great speaker and teacher, Chris Roland.  If you know him, you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t, you really have to check out his blog.

Chris’ session was wonderful. It made me laugh, it made me cry. As with all the sessions I enjoyed over the weekend, what came over more than anything else was a strong imprint of a teacher with a clear teaching philosophy and personality, and underlying energy applying itself creatively to real teaching situations.  Click on this link to find out more.

The week after the conference I was back in class. Well, not quite.  A change in schedules meant that me and my class were actually without a classroom.  That wasn’t too big a problem. The sun was shining and the big, wide schoolyard was almost completely empty. As I made the decision to adapt our lesson to the freedom of so much space, I was taken back to Chris’s delicate balance between creativity and control. Using space and controlling it at the same time.

It was totally fortuitous that the lesson I’d planned suited an open air class perfectly.  Chris had presented various ideas for using the space in and around class to structure student creativity and his ideas gave my lesson (written before the conference) a new framework.  We were talking about malls and shops and the main task was to design a small mall near the school.  There was a simple handout and a ground plan to complete.  Here are the notes and handout I shared with the other teachers teaching the same year.  Build your own mall.

In my original plan I’d earmarked a site where there have been plans for years to build some kind of sports/social/shopping centre. All building plans are shelved at the moment, but the students are familiar with the spot and it’s just round the corner from their school. But of course, there we were in the playground, and the obvious thing was for them to draw up a plan for a mall to be built on their playground, in the space around them.

We did the first few controlled activities sat in a row on a low wall.  The fact of being outdoors meant that I had to exert more control than usual over the class.  There were no containing walls, so the containment had to be my – and their – ability to centre their attention on the activity in hand.  I upped my schoolmarm persona, they upped their behaviour. It worked beautifully.  They concentrated, they listened, they discussed,  with the promise of being allowed to roam the yard in the second half of the class as an incentive to good behaviour.

And when it came to roaming they didn’t actually roam that far.  I let them choose where they wanted to go to plan the transformation of the playground into their ideal shopping centre. They all settled down in small huddles on the ground, cross-legged, lying on their bellies, sprawled … but intent on their task. In fact a lot more intent and focused than they usually are.  We managed somehow to strike a perfect balance between the freedom of the space around them and the discipline of the task.

And they performed well in the task.  They took it seriously. Some needed a little nudging in the right direction. I sat down with them on the floor to talk things through, question some decisions and the novelty of working cross-legged together on the floor seemed to work some kind of magic too.  Again the novelty factor I guess.

And throughout the lesson little flashbacks to Chris’s session kept me focused and interested too.  An internal monologue of reflection running quietly in the back of my mind.

Thanks Chris!

A short footnote

I’m in Bilbao this weekend. And I’m loving it. Here’s an image I found on flickr before I travelled up. It was so good to find the exact spot where it was taken and compare the image with my reality.

I used the image in the sessions I’ve been presenting over the weekend. I’ve given this workshop before, it’s a variation of the session I gave at IATEFL UK last year. Many of the core activities are the same. But in revisiting the workshops and tweaking it for its new context, it opened up a new train of thought.

I suddenly realized that my interest in images and, in particular, close-ups, is actually relatively recent. And it’s digitally- mediated.

Before the advent of digital cameras, I was a pretty poor amateur snapshot-taker but digital display, and more importantly, the focus and attention that comes from sharing photos, means I now take more photos – and take more care.

I’ve always used images in class.  Ten, fifteen, twenty, years ago they would have been laminated colour copies of pieces of art, jealously guarded and used and re-used over and over again.  But it wasn’t until I had a projector and/or my laptop in the class that I really realized the power of images.  The impact of a beautiful image projected onto the classroom wall is powerful. Amd of course, if it comes from your life, your world, if it was taken by one of your students, or hunted down online to represent the thoughts and feelings in your head, so much more so.

So, not a particularly big thought, but definitely one that refreshed my desire to share my personal take on the power of images and their role in the language classroom.

You can click here to see the Bilbao version of the presentation Unleashing the Power of Images.