CPD

Front-loading: the enemy of learning

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There is one movie trope above all others that really bugs me. You’ll see it occur in almost ever film set in a school. The students are in class, the teacher is explaining some crucial aspect of the lesson, the students are all slumped over their desks or tapping their pens, and then it happens…right in the middle of the teacher’s key input stage the bell goes off and just like that the lesson is over. The students pile out of class while the teacher shouts something along the lines of, “Read pages 40 to 400 and we’ll pick this up tomorrow!”

Then my poor wife has to pause the film and listen to me rant for the next ten minutes:

“But, but, they knew the bell was coming! The lesson is presumably the same length every day. It wasn’t a surprise. Why are they so bad at planning that they are surprised by the bell every day?! What happened in the first half of the lesson that caused them to be so off on their timings that they’re only getting to the main input stage in the final moments of the lesson! HOW IS ANYONE MEANT TO LEARN ANYTHING IN THESE LESSONS?!”

Then we carry on with the film and I silently seethe. Sometimes I ponder one question from my rant: what happened in the first half of the lesson? And sometimes I reflect on my own teaching and realise that while I was maybe never as bad as this movie trope, I was often guilty of front-loading my lessons to the detriment of my lesson objective.

Especially in my early years of teaching, I had a fear. A fear that informed how I planned and taught my lessons. It was a simple fear but if I’m honest, it had a serious impact on my students’ learning. What was it? It was the fear of running out of material before the end of my lesson. This fear of dead lesson time causes me to front-load.

What do I mean by “front-loading”?

If we imagine the average English language lesson will include the following major stages:

  1. Schemata activation discussion.
  2. A reading or listening text.
  3. Comprehension checking questions.
  4. Vocabulary input and practice.
  5. Grammar or skill input.
  6. Controlled practice of the grammar.
  7. Freer practice of the grammar.
  8. Feedback.

Front-loading occurs when a teacher spends the majority of their lesson time on stages 1 to 4, often supplementing with extra readings, listenings, or activities that relate to the topic. While these stages are important, it could be argued that they are the set-up for the input, practice, and feedback stages in which the real learning of the lesson occurs and learners will see real progress. This is not to say that the first stages are unimportant in any way, that set-up and schemata activation is hugely important but when front-loading occurs, it tips the balance of importance in favour of the set-up.

Where does “front-loading” come from?

Much like my early years of teaching, it is born from a fear that we will be left with empty lesson time and nothing to fill it. It comes from the belief that the material we have is not enough for the time we have. In my case this fear and belief persisted despite constant evidence to the contrary, despite always having to squeeze the most important stages of the lesson into the time left over.

How can we avoid “front-loading”?

Simple: plan less, teach more. When I am planning a lesson, I have to force myself not to front-load, not to spend too long on that opening discussion just because it’s interesting. The discussion is not my objective. The second half of the lesson is where the real learning occurs The first half is the set-up for the learning, it is just the context.

Below are some tips I employ to avoid front-loading:

  • Tip 1: I try to avoid supplementing with topic-based material. My learners might need more input or practice on the target language or skill but they probably don’t need another reading on the topic or another topic-based vocabulary exercise on top of what is already there. Any necessary lexis can emerge throughout the lesson.
  • Tip 2: Comprehension checking tasks aren’t always crucial to achieving my learning objective. If my objective isn’t to improve reading or listening comprehension, then maybe my lesson time is better spent on practice and feedback. I will often instead focus on the language within the text that will help my learners achieve their objective.
  • Tip 3: I remind myself constantly that it is ok to have time left over at the end of the lesson because:
    • Giving students the chance to repeat an activity and improve based on the feedback I’ve given, is an excellent use of class time.
    • Reflecting on what has been learnt in the lesson is worthwhile and my learners will benefit from this discussion.
    • Giving students time to consider how they will use the language they’ve learnt outside the classroom can help bridge the gap between the lesson and the real world, which is something I am constantly trying to achieve.

So, if you find yourself spending two thirds of your lesson on the set-up and squashing the actual learning into the final third, then avoid becoming a film trope and plan less, teach more.

What do we even mean by “marking” writing?

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I was in a school recently chatting to a teacher and I keep going over something they said. I can’t get it out of my head so I thought I would write a cheeky blog and see if I could pick it apart.

I don’t give writing homework because then I just have loads of writing to mark.

I think we’ve all expressed similar sentiments over the years. After all, when you factor in planning time and post-lesson reflections, and CPD, and admin, a large pile of writing submissions doesn’t seem super appealing. And, while I was obviously frustrated that this issue was stopping students from getting writing practice and feedback (more on this later), it wasn’t this sentiment that stuck in my mind. It was the word “mark”.

Below are the questions, I would like to consider in this post. In the discussion that follows, I am considering General English classes as opposed to specific writing courses, EAP, or Exam Skills classes.

  • What do we actually mean by “mark” when it comes to a piece of writing?
  • Should we be marking our students’ writing?
  • What feedback should we be giving them to encourage development?
  • Can we somehow save ourselves from doing all the work?

What do we mean by “mark”?

I think what the teacher and our industry in general means by marking a piece of writing is one of two things.

  1. Highlighting and correcting the student’s errors.
  2. Indicating errors and the type of errors and encouraging the student to correct them, or rewrite it without errors.

When I was a slightly younger man, I was learning Spanish, and I was a proper beginner. Outside of “hola” and “una copa de vino por favor”, I was pretty useless. I decided to start by learning some key verbs I might want to use, and seeing as how I liked writing I chose to write a story. It was not a good story by any stretch of the imagination but man, I was proud of it. “Andy y los Animales” it was called. A single paragraph about Andy and the myriad animals he had, allowing me to use a range of verbs and a lexical set of animals I’d just learnt.

Like any good student, I wanted some feedback so I gave it to my then girlfriend to mark. Well, Jesus, I have never been so demotivated in my life. I got a back a paragraph covered in green (she’d been kind enough not to use red) underlines and corrections. Some errors she’d left for me to correct. What did I do? I thanked her, popped it in the back of my notebook, never looked at it again, and went off to eat jamon and queso in an attempt to quash the feelings of demotivation I had. To this day I haven’t written another story in Spanish. Sad but true.

What did I want in that moment? I’m not entirely sure but I think I wanted some positivity and something manageable that I could improve upon.

If you take the marking approach to writing feedback, take a minute to reflect on these questions:

  • Have you ever received similar feedback to the story above? How did you feel? What action did you take? Was it developmental?
  • When you mark your students’ work, do they take it on board? Do they submit corrections or rewrites?

Should we be marking our students’ writing?

I think it is clear from the story above, where my feelings lie but I want to think about this from another side. When we correct our students’ errors, are we actually marking or are we editing? I would argue the latter. Editing is a specific skill and something that people pay for. What do our students pay us for? It’s not an editing service. I would say they pay us to help them develop their English language, and learning skills. When we mark or edit, do we achieve this? I would argue no.

What kind of feedback do students want?

Well, that depends on the task itself. Before any feedback is given, everyone in the class (including the teacher) needs to be clear on the point of the exercise.

Writing for Fluency

If the aim is to encourage a love for writing, or merely to encourage students to write more, then feedback should reflect that. One example of this would be asking students to write a message and then replying to that message naturally without highlighting errors. Development can come later by identifying common writing skills or linguistic issues and dealing with them in class at a later point.

Writing as a vehicle for language

Very often writing is used as a vehicle to test language that has been learnt in a lesson or over a number of lessons. Feedback in this situation only needs to focus on the language that has been learnt and should not on other areas of writing or language that arise. Again, these can be focused on in later lessons. As this is all learnt language, there should be no need for a teacher to correct the language. There is an expectation from learners that they are being assessed on their use of specific language and that they will have to correct it. The content is more or less meaningless as long as the language is used correctly.

Practising a specific writing skill

If a specific skill has been developed in class, then obviously writing practice is the way to asses it. Maybe the teacher has taught their students about referencing, avoiding repetition, organising a text, writing a cohesive text, writing an effective paragraph, or any other writing skill. In this situation, the feedback can focus entirely on how successful the student has been with this skill.

Can we save ourselves some work?

I still understand the teacher who doesn’t want to set writing. They were starting from the point of view that their job is to edit their students’ work, or facilitate an edit by highlighting all the errors. However, as seen above, if the aim is to engage students and see development in a specific area, then feedback can be focused and doesn’t have to be extensive.

That said, even when it’s focused, feedback still takes thought and time. And, it is flawed as the responsibility is still on the teacher to identify any issues. Don’t we want our learners to be identifying their own issues and dealing with them before the piece of writing gets to the teacher?

Creating an extra line of feedback.

As mentioned above, the key to setting up a writing task effectively is that everyone knows what is expected of them in the task and what feedback they will receive. In the examples given above, a single area of language or a single skill are being practised/assessed. However, very often teachers will want to practise a number of different skills and language points at once, in a single cohesive piece of writing.

The fact remains, clarity of expectations is key. Clear success criteria enable students to assess their own writing and that of their partner’s before it reaches the teacher. Imagine a class in which students have learnt to write an essay on the environment. They have learnt to organise an essay, to write topic sentences for each paragraph, and to use sign-posting so that it is easy to follow. They have also learnt a range of lexical chunks related to the environment. In this class, the teacher provides their learners with the success criteria below:

Because of the clarity of the criteria, students can assess their work and their partner’s, giving each other feedback and upgrading their writing before handing it in. This can happen inside class time, making it even more likely that rewrites and edits will occur…and it saves a bit of time outside, which is always nice.

Conclusion

Sometimes we all get wrapped up in this is what we do and this is what it’s called. I think it is important that we challenge these norms and if they don’t hold up, then it’s time to put them in the bin. Is there a place for marking? Probably, but I’m not sure it’s a General English classroom. We’re teachers, not editors.

Post Lesson Outcome-Mining

/ textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

Recently I wrote this post on aims and objectives and as always with this topic, there will be those that agree and those that disagree. It really seems to polarise our industry in a way that it doesn’t seem to in K-12 teaching (or at least that I’ve come across). I thought it would be interesting to think about that and consider some of the common arguments against knowing and communicating what you want to achieve and it seems to me to boil down to one main issue. The belief that:

Having aims and objectives locks us in and an English language lesson should be free to go wherever the students need it to go.

Now, there are a lot of things I could pull from that. The two sides of the Great Objective Debate could spend hours arguing back and forth with neither giving any ground, like academic Brexiteers and Remainers. But where would that get any of us.

Instead, I mentioned it to my wife and she mentioned that in her industry (grant-giving/management in the charity sector) they always have clear objectives for a project but afterwards they like to sit down and carry out an activity called outcome mining in which they pull out and discuss all of the unintentional outcomes they achieved throughout the project. And as she said it, I wondered if maybe this was a bridge between the two camps.

I in no way believe that one should teach their aims/objectives blindly without thinking about the students in front of them or dealing with interesting language that comes up as a matter of course. I fully believe that the job of the teacher is to react and manage what happens in front of them, ensuring that what they’re teaching is relevant and accessible for the specific students in front of them. But I also believe they (and their students) should know from the beginning of the lesson what they are trying to achieve.

Maybe the perfect world is:

  • Knowing what you want to achieve
  • Communicating it to your students and discussing how you intend to achieve it
  • Being open to your students wanting to achieve it in a different way
  • Being open to unintended outcomes that arise throughout the lesson
  • Spending time at the end of the lesson reflecting on:
    • the achievement of the objectives
    • the unintended outcomes that were achieved.

Outcome mining…food for thought. Thanks Louise.

For Student-Facing Textploitation, Click Below:

For whom do aims and objective toll if not for thee

/ textploitationtefl / 3 Comments

I LOVE clear aims and objectives in a lesson. When I see a group of students and a teacher who know what they’re learning and why they’re learning it, I go all warm and fuzzy inside. But I hate useless admin, admin for the sake of it. I can’t stand the statement “we’ve always done it this way” it makes me the opposite of warm and fuzzy inside…chilly and smooth?

Recently I had a conversation with a teacher that made me go a bit chilly and smooth but I do not think this is an isolated occurrence. In fact I remember feeling this very way in my early years as a teacher. We were discussing aims and objectives and he said:

“I don’t know if anyone else feels this way but I always write my aims and objectives because I know I have to but I don’t know who they are for? Are they for me, are they for my students or are they for the British Council?”

And there it is…I’m chilly and smooth. The one statement worse than “we’ve always done it this way” is “we do it for accreditation” or in the UK, “we do it for the British Council” [shudders]. Because yes of course there are things that we do in a school that when our accreditation bodies arrive, we will display proudly. And there are things that accreditation bodies will look for in a school. And one of those things will be aims and objectives…but not so they can tick a box, not so we can tick a box, but because behind every accreditation criterium lies a very good reason, a justification for its existence.

Aims and objectives for aims and objectives sake are not a good thing…but a learner who knows what they are learning and how it will help them in their real life is most definitely a good thing. Aims and objectives are one way of achieving this.

So to answer this teacher’s question (and I should add here that this was an incredible teacher who was just trying to figure out how best to use aims&objectives in their lesson) I said:

“Aims and objectives are for your students first and foremost and should never be a tick box. They should be a talking point.”

From Tick Box to Talking Point

First of all a few tips on writing effective aims and objectives:

  • Write them in student friendly language. Remember who they are for.
  • Begin with your objective (what you want them to be better at by the end of the lesson)
  • Work backwards to write your aims (what do they need to learn to be better at this objective by the end of the lesson)
  • Make your objective real-life and relevant for your learners (“be able to use the present perfect & past simple” is not real life but “be able to describe your career” is)
  • Focus on function over form: Consider the difference between “learn to use the present perfect” and “learn to describe ongoing situations in my career using the present perfect”
  • Follow a pattern: Don’t change up how you write your aims & objectives every lesson. Follow a recognisable pattern and display them in the same place each lesson. This reduces the amount that learners need to process. They can focus on the key message.

If you follow the above, you should find yourself with effective aims and objectives but if you don’t do anything with them, then they are little more than a tick box. We need to move them to a talking point. They should be the basis of a discussion with your students. Consider the following:

At the beginning of your lesson:

Use the some or all of the questions below to open up a discussion:

  1. How will this objective help you in your real life?
  2. Which of these aims will be most challenging for you?
  3. Which of these aims are you already confident in?
  4. How confident are you?
  5. Is there anything else you think you’ll need to achieve this objective?

During your lesson:

Keep the conversation going. Learners will always focus on what’s in front of them. Just because you know why something is relevant, doesn’t mean it is immediately apparent for the students.

  1. Why do you think we learnt this?
  2. How will this help you achieve the objective?

At the end of the lesson:

The ideal situation is a learner who can take what they’ve learnt in the lesson and bring it into their real lives but too often the lesson ends at the door. Keep it going:

  1. How well do you feel you achieved the objective?
  2. How will you practise this in your real life?
  3. How will you apply what you learnt to your real life?
  4. Is there anything you need more practice on?
  5. How will you practise it?

Using the word “will” can be more powerful than “can” or “could”. It’s not about what is possible, it’s about them making a promise, a commitment to try this outside the classroom…and then it’s on you to follow up with them.

So if you’ve ever felt like you were writing aims and objectives for the British Council, try out some of the ideas above and remember who we should be writing them for.

The Virtual Challenge

/ textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

Here’s the thing…pretty much everyone in the modern world has years of experience of learning successfully in a classroom. Even if I think back to my worst teachers (and there were numerous):

  • Tommy “the dog”, my Leaving Certificate Maths teacher who decided we didn’t need to cover the entire curriculum before our life-changing exam date.
  • Miss Kennedy, my French teacher whose approach to teaching could be summed up by the sentence “there’s a page, do it!”
  • Mr Highland, poor Mr Highland, who carried on teaching us business studies while we bounced a tennis ball off the blackboard

But again, here’s the thing, even in those classes, I learnt. I was successful. I passed those exams because at the end of the day, learners for the most part are gonna learn if they want to. It’s hard to actually stop them.

So when it comes to choosing an English language course many prospective students arrive at their decision safe in the knowledge that they can learn in a classroom as they have previously done so. In general, they didn’t really investigate online learning options and so learning English online (outside of 1:1 lessons and gamified learning apps like DuoLingo) never really took off. That was until April 2020 when the old world ended and a brave new technological age of learning began.

With the arrival of COVID, students and teachers all over the world were forced to move online almost over night and experienced teachers had to learn entirely new skills. The internet was awash with blogs, training sessions and videos on the importance of keeping cameras on, which platform to choose, what online whiteboard apps were the best. Suddenly words like synchronous and asynchronous became part of our everyday vernacular. I watched in our schools as students and teachers grew in confidence in online platforms but also in their own ability to learn and teach online.

So what now? Well, now a whole new world has been opened up for both teachers and students. Many of the major English language schools like mine now offer online lessons as a product in its own right. It’s not a stopgap until the world rights itself, it’s a viable English language product. It is now entirely possible to learn online and thanks to COVID (not a sentence I often say, I promise you), thousands of students have first-hand evidence of learning successfully in an online classroom. When it comes time for them to choose their next English language course, it might not be in a physical classroom, it might very well be a flatscreen school they choose.

But where does that leave Virtual Reality?

Well, the challenge here is that not as many people have any real experience of learning successfully in Virtual Reality and so are more likely to avoid it. They don’t currently have that prior knowledge that makes VR a viable option for them. But will that always be the case? Will online and face-to-face lessons remain the only options for our students?

For me, the answer is a firm no. Apps like Immerse, Engage and Remio are already quite advanced, providing teachers with a range of classroom management tools that mirror and in some cases expand on the classroom experience. There has already been a lot of research carried out into how VR can lower the affective filter and provide a more immersive classroom. There is a lot more research being done into retention on VR versus flatscreen and in the classroom. 2021 has seen a rise in the sales of Oculus headsets and everywhere we turn we hear about Meta and the future. Accenture, a Fortune Global 500 company, recently purchased 60,000 Oculus headsets to help train their employees. It feels like this might be the beginning of a move to VR and with a number of English language schools already flirting with the technology, including EC launching an entirely VR course in January 2022, we may soon have more and more students with first-hand evidence of learning successfully in a truly virtual classroom…let’s hope so.

The Post-Covid Classroom & Our Empty Teacher Toolbox

/ textploitationtefl / 1 Comment

So, the mad rush to get online has subsided. The barrage of webinars on how to set up breakout rooms on Zoom have ended and the conversation is turning once again. It’s crazy to think all of this only started a few short months ago. It feels like days ago that our teaching context was turned upside down and we scrambled to bring our courses online and now, with restrictions being lifted in various countries around the world, it looks like it’s all about to be turned on its head again.

The question on my mind is:

what does the post-covid classroom look like?

Now, I’m not talking about 2022 when all this is done and dusted (fingers-crossed, touch wood and all that lark) and we can go back to the way things were before. I mean the classroom between now and then.

Many schools will take a blended approach, carrying out some lessons in a physical classroom and some online. Undoubtedly, we will have smaller class sizes. Schools will consider staggering start times and closing public areas. Hand sanitiser will, of course, feature heavily in any reopening. Depending on government advice, masks might be a pre-requisite or they might be discouraged. Depending on your country, your borders might be open to new students and there may / may not be a quarantine period.

But let’s assume that all the above has been taken care of by school management and the government. Where does that leave you, the teacher, when it comes to your face to face lessons in a physical classroom? Is it business as usual but with fewer students?

I don’t think so.

Let’s take a close look at our teaching toolbox, our tried and tested techniques, the bread & butter of teaching in a communicative classroom. What happens to them in a socially distant classroom?

  1. Pairwork: sadly, this is probably done and dusted for a while. We won’t be casually leaning over and checking answers.
  2. Group discussions: Unless it’s a whole-class discussion, which has its limitations, we won’t really be able to conduct group chats with a metre between each person.
  3. Hand-outs: You won’t be moving around the classroom giving your students a beautiful photocopy. Depending on school guidelines, you might not be able to give any material that the student didn’t bring with them.
  4. Monitoring: while it won’t be impossible to monitor, sneakily looming over a student’s shoulder and offering advice & encouragement is going to be frowned upon.

 

Unfortunately, a socially distant classroom is going to leave us without our go-to teaching techniques but all is not lost. If we’ve learnt anything over the past few months, it is how quick our industry is to adapt to the situation and adopt new techniques that better suit the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Adapt and adopt, we shall.

When deciding how to adapt, we must consider what we are losing and how we can try to replace it.

Mentimeter:

One of the main reasons, I use pairwork in class is to give students thinking time, to allow them to learn from each other and help each other to formalise their opinions before they bring them to the class as a whole. Often, having a moment to share an answer with a partner will give a student the social reassurance they need to then share it with the whole class. This is the beauty of pairwork and something we really don’t want to lose.

One way to give students the thinking time, to give them confidence in their answers without having to share them with the whole class is by using poll / survey websites like Mentimeter. It allows students time to think and to answer anonymously; they can very easily see how the rest of the class feels or is answering and then stand by or alter their answer before bringing it to the whole class. It encourages the quieter student to get involved and gives them an easy communication avenue.

Text Discussions:

Much of how I communicate is via text messages or social media. There are people I speak to regularly that I haven’t talked to in person for years. This is the same for many of our students yet in a communicative classroom we tend to focus on speaking. Most schools will by this time have chosen an online platform to deliver their lessons be it Teams, Zoom or something else. For Zoom, students could simple start a meeting, turn the cameras & audio off and use the chat box.

By using these same tools or even WhatsApp, students can still carry out discussions in a meaningful way before sharing the outcome of their discussions with the rest of the class in whole-class feedback.

The nice little by-product of these types of discussions is a written record. The chat box can easily be screenshot and shared. Students can reflect on what they actually said/wrote and analyse how well they used the target language. And you have a concrete source to reference for feedback.

Displaying:

If handouts are behind us, that’s no bad thing. They’re great, don’t get me wrong, but the environment won’t thank us for all of the dead handouts that ended up in bins around the EFL world. In the socially distant classroom, we will be forced to abandon them and use the tools we have. So what do we have?

  • IWB: many of us will have an IWB. Apps like Microsoft Lens allow us to scan in resources; the snipping tool allows us to chop them up and deliver them to our students one piece at a time…as the writer no doubt intended.
  • Phones: our students don’t need to have a piece of paper they never look at again, they have cameras. Cameras that save photos in clouds according to their dates. Photos that they can access forevermore without having to sift through crumpled, wrinkled, ragged remnants of lessons long-forgotten.

If we don’t have IWBs, we have phones, which means we can send photos / documents via online platforms, WhatsApp, email, etc. Our learners can zoom in, they can edit, they can engage with it however we see fit.

Support over Presence:

Something that I’ve really found in online teaching is that support is more important than presence. In the past we have relied upon the fact that we can monitor closely and be on hand to answer every little question. In breakout rooms, this became impossible and in a socially distant classroom it becomes trickier.

All this means is that we need to spend more time setting up an activity. Learners need to know what exactly they should be doing, why they are doing it and what success looks like. Instructions are more important than ever and checking instructions is crucial. With students potentially working more individually or on their phones and you unable to loom over their shoulder, checking they are on task becomes more challenging. The answer may be to spend more time on giving and checking your instructions and getting buy-in for the activity from the students.

 

Above are just a few of the issues we may face in the socially distant classroom. No doubt there will be others that we haven’t even considered yet. Some of the above ideas for coping with these issues may turn out to be unworkable depending on your teaching context but we have proven our ability to adapt and adapt we will. I am excited to see how we tackle these issues and to hear your ideas.

Send them along!

Help I’m in a breakout room! Using success criteria to enable peer to peer feedback

/ textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

For the foreseeable future it seems we’ll be teaching online and apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are going to be our classrooms. But is this just a stopgap while we wait for our schools to reopen? Maybe…but I personally think that online teaching is here to stay. That’s not to say it was never here before but by the end of Covid, I would say online English language teaching will have carved out its own space and will sit side by side with full immersion.

Assuming that’s the case, it’s not about weathering the online storm, it has to be about doing it as best we can. It can’t be just replicating what we did in the classroom and making it work, we have to adapt to this new environment.

One of the first issues I came up against was pairwork. How do we make it work? Well, the answer came quickly: we use breakout rooms of course. Fantastic, problem solved. Or was it?

Feedback from teachers:

Breakout rooms are great but you can’t monitor effectively. The students are chatting away, or not chatting at all and you have no idea because you’re in another room.

Feedback from students:

We just chat but we don’t get feedback. I don’t know what I am saying wrong.

Both valid issues but both issues we had in physical classrooms, but now in the harsh glow of the computer screen it is much more glaringly obvious.

So what can we do? Students have to practise. We don’t want to be the conduit for all communication in the classroom.

The students must become the masters!

We have to accept the situation and adapt. We cannot be in every room at once listening and giving feedback so we have to ensure someone is

But our students aren’t equipped to give feedback! And they don’t want to hear it from another student

Well then let’s equip them.

Success criteria:

By giving clear success criteria for a speaking task, learners can give each other meaningful feedback and, it’s not as subjective because it’s been laid out clearly beforehand.

But what are success criteria and where do we find them?

Essentially it is what you have taught your students that day. If you want them to discuss their careers and you’ve taught them:

  • To use the present perfect to describe their current situation
  • To use past simple to describe past jobs
  • X,Y,Z vocabulary related to careers
  • The natural pronunciation of present perfect

Then successfully discussing your career means doing the things above.

Some tips:

  1. Negotiate the criteria with your students to increase engagement
  2. Ensure they have a written record of them during the task
  3. Allow students to choose which of the criteria they will focus on and therefore which they want feedback on
  4. Repeat the activity again, giving them the chance to upgrade.

Our learners can take a more active part in the learning process…we just need to give them the tools to do so.

Pre-lesson Tasks: the great equaliser

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It’s a crazy time right now but out of the madness there are lessons to be learnt. We’ve already written about some lessons we learnt for creating and setting up effective post-lesson tasks but what have we learnt about the pre?

Well, in the many blogs and articles on online teaching, I’ve read since Covid kicked off, I came across someone (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t remember their name or where I came across it to credit them) who referred to them as the great equaliser.

It really struck a chord with me as this was exactly what I was seeing in our school and classrooms. The learners who were responding best to the move from physical classroom to online classroom were the shyer students and those that were at the lower end of their levels. Suddenly they were being given two of the most precious things for a learner: time and guidance. They were able to focus on their weaker areas and come to the lesson prepared. They weren’t playing catch-up in the lesson because they’d done it beforehand.

Now, there’s not a learner out there (at least none that I’ve encountered) with the same competence in every area. Spikey profiles are par for the course in the language learning world. With this in mind pre-lesson tasks offer a unique opportunity to give our students guidance and support to focus on their specific needs. Imagine a world in which each student comes to the online class having focused their preparation on the area they struggle with. Imagine a world in which our students are coming to their lessons having turned their weaknesses into strengths.

Ladies andgentlemen, I give you the world of online teaching.

The question is, when all this is over, what other lessons will we have learnt and will we take those lessons back to our physical classrooms?

Post Lesson Tasks: Your tech is sorted…time to focus on learning

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It’s been a crazy few weeks. Weeks in which, we’ve seen our entire industry turned on its head, and the mad scramble as we all tried to adapt and keep up. I think for the most part, we’ve done incredibly well. Schools moved online in days, amazing teachers adapted to new class”room” environments in their own homes.

For many of us the first step was finding a platform. Our emails and Twitter feeds were awash with communication from Zoom, Teams, Swivl and countless others offering their help in these difficult times. Once that was sorted, it was on to training. There were literally more webinars than I could keep up with as we all tried to figure out what a breakout room looked like on various platforms.

It was all a bit crazy but we learnt so much in such a short period and to our credit, classes continued. A truly amazing example of need driving innovation. But now the dust has settled…somewhat, and we have chosen our platforms, our breakout rooms are set up and we’ve, hopefully, carved out a section of our houses in which we can deliver lessons without dogs, cats, children or partners. Now that the tech is sorted, what’s next?

Now, it’s time to move our discussions back to the teaching and learning.

But isn’t good teaching good teaching regardless of online or in a classroom?


Well, yes, of course it is. But for our students, when it comes to online learning, there is a lot more responsibility on the student. Autonomy is no longer something a nice-to-have, it is essential. It’s not quite so easy to set up an activity and then move around the room guiding learners and ensuring they’re on task.

I read an interesting blog post earlier that encouraged me to write this one. Russell Stannard wrote that in his language learning experience, it was the work he did outside the classroom that really helped him to learn. He admits that this was guided by his teacher but it was he who put the work in outside.

This rang very true for me and now more so than ever our learners need clear guidance on post-lesson tasks. With that in mind, below are 3 tips for setting up effective post-lesson tasks. I am no expert in online learning but this is what I’ve gleaned thus far. I’m sure we all have much more to learn.

Tip 1: establish clear partners and guidance on how to chat

This is all new for us but it’s equally so for our learners. They might be used to chatting online socially but doing so for educational purposes might not immediately feel natural. We have to take their feelings into account and make it as easy as possible. Much like happened in my classroom once. I was being a little lazy and my instructions weren’t clear. I realised after a minute into a pair-work activity that one student was working by themselves because their partner had decided they were in a 3. It had become too socially awkward for the student so they’d chosen to work by themselves. Imagine that in an online scenario where someone has to make the first move.

Remember:

  • Give partners and put it in writing
  • Explain how and when they should carry out the task (e.g. immediately after the lesson / on Zoom)

Tip 2: Post-lesson tasks are not the same as homework.

A lot of the post-lesson tasks I’ve been seeing have been similar to traditional homework. While self-study homework is important for consolidation, the beauty of online study is the opportunity for post-lesson collaborative tasks.

These tasks can’t just be straight grammar or vocabulary exercises, instead consider the following:

  • Reflection discussion questions:

Encourage your learners to consider some or all of the following: how what they’re learning is relevant for their lives, how it is different or similar to their language, how it can be applied to the current situation, what else they need to know or learn on this topic / skill / language point.

  • Production tasks:

Once they’ve considered how what they’ve learnt us relevant to them or thought about what else they’d need to learn to make it relevant, it’s time to practise. These tasks should ideally include some practise with their partner(s) and something that is recorded and can be sent to the teacher for feedback, be that a screen-grab of a chat conversation, a recording of a spoken conversation or a written task.

The idea is that learners can practise and get feedback from their partners before they send it through to the teacher.

The issue with this is always how can we expect students to give any meaningful feedback? The answer is Tip 3.

Tip 3: Give clear success criteria for the production tasks

With clear success criteria, students know exactly what to listen/look for in their partners’ production. They’re based on what’s been learnt in the lesson so it’s not new information but the criteria serve as a reminder of what to look for.

An example of success criteria for a production task would be:

Have a conversation with your partner about your plans for the weekend.

A successful conversation will:

  • Begin with present continuous (e.g. what are you doing this weekend?”)
  • Use “be going to” for plans
  • Use the natural pronunciation of “be going to”
  • Have natural replies (e.g. “oh that sounds nice”)

The above ensures that students can give effective feedback without it verging into offensive as it boils it down to what was learnt in the lesson, which makes it that bit more objective. Students can even use them to ask their partners to focus their feedback on a particular area they struggle with.

It’s not a bad idea to spend some time in the lesson discussing how to word effective feedback (e.g. “you used be going to for your plans but you didn’t say gonna like we learnt in the lesson. This could make it sound more natural”)

Hopefully these tips will help you to set up post-lesson tasks that help to consolidate and extend your already wonderful lessons.