CPD

I think we should discuss learning…but MY students can’t do it!

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Mark and I write and speak a lot about Overt Teaching. If you’d like to know more about what that is, you can read our blog post here or check out our handy dandy book, available on all good book websites and probably in the dark corner of a bookshop where they keep the rest of the EFL methodology books.

The core of Overt Teaching is that we believe we should be involving our learners in the discussion of learning throughout our lessons. We should be discussing the objectives of our lesson and helping learners to relate it to their lives and goals; we should discuss why we do what we do with our students, what our aims for a task are; we should give students the tools they need to reflect on their own success and give their peers feedback. And why? Because a more aware and invested student will be more engaged and make more progress.

In general when we talk about this at conferences or just one to one, our points and ideas are met positively. We’ve met very few teachers who really believe that it is a bad course of action or who do not want learners engaged with the learning process. However, we do often encounter some push back and it tends to be in the form of:

This is great but my students couldn’t do this.

There tend to be a number of reasons why teachers believe that their students would not be able to discuss learning but below are some of the most common, and a summary of some of the discussions we’ve had.

This is fine with higher levels but my students are too low. They don’t have the language you need to reflect.

Of all the levels, learning is most tangible at the lower levels. It can sometimes be as simple as “at the beginning of the lesson, you couldn’t talk about the past, now you can”. Very often reflection is viewed as a complex abstract topic that must be delved into in great detail. However, at beginner, elementary or pre-int, reflection at the end of a lesson can be a simple discussion:

  • What vocabulary did you learn today?
  • What grammar did you learn today?
  • How will you use it outside class?

Success for a task can be laid out as using a specific piece of grammar or a number of items of lexis. Students can easily give peer feedback with short tick-boxes. The below can be easily used so students can choose their own lexis and their own level of success. It can be used as a peer-assessment or adapted for self-assessment.

This is fine with lower levels but my students are advanced and it is harder for them to see progress and reflect.

100% agree with the core of this statement. At higher levels it is more difficult for students to see their progress as it’s much less tangible. This, however, makes it even more crucial that learners are given the opportunity to reflect on and discuss what they’ve learnt. Without these discussions, students may come to the conclusion that they are not progressing because it is less tangible and visual.

At higher levels, students can converse easily on a range of topics. They can draw on their known, safe language and complete communicate tasks with relative ease. It is important therefore that we give them the opportunity before the task to make decisions about new language and skills they want to attempt, encouraging them to move outside their comfort zones. And then to reflect on how successful they were and what they want to try next time.

This is fine with adults but my students are too young to reflect and discuss their learning.

Most of my experience has been with older students, and while I have taught younger students, it is a number of years ago now. However, recently I got the chance to sit in on my 5-year-old son’s lesson. He was writing some words about a picture they had drawn. They were learning to write words to describe body parts. The teacher modelled it and then checked success criteria:

  • Where do we write? Chorus: under the picture.
  • How many words do we write on each line? Chorus: one.
  • Which words are we writing? Chorus: body word.

Students went off and wrote their words. Afterwards the teacher asked them to give their partners feedback using thumbs up or down while she moved around. She called out the success criteria again and students gave their partners thumb-based peer feedback.

Like anything, we grade the task. It’s all possible but needs to be scaffolded for the age or level. Here’s a nice idea for teaching writing using images of cupcakes the visualise layers of success.

This is fine but my students are from an educational background where they expect the teacher to give input the whole time. They’re not able to reflect.

There are so many things that we take for granted in an English language lesson that are not standard in every educational background. Depending on your age or culture, working with a partner may not be something you expect in class, but we do it because we know the value. For many students, being taught lexically might jar with their expectations but many teachers will persevere, confident that this is the best way for their students to learn.

Like anything, given the support and scaffolding, students will learn what is expected of them in class. Patience and understanding will often be necessary but if you feel that the discussion of learning is worthwhile and beneficial for them, then it’s worth spending the time helping your learners to develop those skills.

This is fine by my students want to focus on grammar and vocabulary input. There is not time for reflection and discussing learning.

As above really. If you value it, then it’s worth spending the time on it. The expectation of many students is that their lessons should be full of input so they can fill their notebook with notes which they may never look at again. What’s more important than every student knowing how much they’ve progressed in a lesson and knowing what they need to work on. Without discussing learning, this won’t happen. We’ve got to value these discussions and make the space in the lesson.

This is fine but I tried to do reflection tasks and my students couldn’t do it.

Giving peer feedback, reflecting on success or discussing your progress are not easy skills. However, they are skills that will help our learners in language learning but also in their lives beyond the classroom. They are valuable skills. The first time you try it with your students, they may struggle or balk as reflecting on input isn’t as easy as receiving and recording input for many. My advice would be:

  • Scaffold it carefully.
  • Do it little and often.
  • Don’t be put off if it’s tricky the first time. Persevere…it’s worth it.

This is fine but there are 50 students in my class so I can’t do this with them all.

The bigger your group, the more crucial it is that your learners are developing the skills they need to self-assess, peer-assess, reflect, and give feedback. With a large group, there is no way that a teacher can be expected to give meaningful feedback to everyone or assess their progress. The best we can do is develop the skills above and help our students to become more autonomous.

Let’s bring it all back home.

It’s not that we disagree with any of the above challenges. They are all challenges. However, if we believe in the value of these discussions and so we urge you to persevere and make it possible for your learners. They can all do it…they might just need your support.

Intercultural Communication: Greeting lesson

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I’m always interested in not just the language we use to communicate but the cultural ideas behind them. I remember the day that I learnt I had an understood sphere of acceptable personal space when I was communicating with others. I had just moved to Spain and was teaching 7-year-olds. Parent-Teacher meeting day came around and my Spanish was terrible. I had only been learning for 3 months. I worked hard and prepared my reports in Spanish with the help of my colleagues. I learnt them all off by heart and prayed that nobody asked any follow-up questions. One of my students, an amazing girl by the name of Lucia, was doing great in my classes but not so well in her English classes in her primary school. Understandably, but unfortunately for me, her mother had lots of questions.

She came in and caught me at the end of the meeting. I was standing in the corridor and she walked up stopping at a point that she felt comfortable and we began to have a conversation in my very broken Spanish about her daughter. My unconscious understanding of personal space kicked in and I took a step back. She then took a step forward and I took another back. By the end of the conversation when our odd dance had ended, I was 5 classrooms down the corridor with no idea how I’d gotten there.

From that point onward, I’ve been fascinated by all of the personal and cultural aspects of communication. It’s the little things that we assume is the same for everyone. But unless we discuss it, we often remain unaware that what is understood for one person or culture, can be offensive or shocking for another person. For that reason, I always had regular conversations with my students about how people communicate in their cultures. I never saw it as our job to teach this as such. More to facilitate that conversation so that our students can learn from each other and learn to communicative effectively with people from around the world.

This lesson focuses on greeting and encourages students to reflect on how they greet in their culture and to learn what others expect from a greeting. It’s designed for lower levels (elementary / Pre-intermediate) but as it’s an awareness raising lesson, it could be carried out with higher levels.

Intercultural Communication: Greeting

  • Level: Elementary / Pre-int (& above)
  • Time: 90 minutes
  • Objective: to raise awareness of how people greet in different cultures so that we can greet and have short conversations with people from around the world.
intercultural-communicationDownload
intercultural-communicationDownload

Harness the power of Learner Goals to increase engagement.

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Let’s begin with the picture for this blog. I promise it’s not a beer-related blog. I was going to Italy on holiday for a week with my family recently so I decided to download a popular language-learning app to learn some key phrases in Italian. I was super motivated to learn the phrases I needed to get by for a few days…but unfortunately, that didn’t last long.

We began by learning the Italian for “a man”, “a woman”, “a child”. Now, this is technically what my family is but I’m not sure it was necessarily what I needed at that time. Not to worry though, my motivation was still high so I persevered. Next I learnt to say “a man eats”, “a woman drinks”, “a child speaks”. Again, I definitely expected these three things to occur regularly throughout the week but I just didn’t see myself needing to describe the individual habits of my family to Italian passers-by. My motivation dropped and I abandoned the app.

Instead, I stopped and thought about what my goal was for the holiday. I had very simple needs…you might be able to guess what some of them were from the picture. I wanted to be able to:

  • Order beer, wine and juice.
  • Order food.
  • Ask where the toilets were (very important when travelling with a 6-year-old).
  • Ask for the bill.
  • Say “please” and “thank you”.

Armed with my goal, I was suitably re-motivated but this time I took my learning into my own hands and with the help of Google Translate and a few Google searches, I had the phrases I wanted. In the end, it was all for naught as I was in an all-inclusive resort and if I tried to speak in Italian to anyone, they just ran away and returned with an English-speaking colleague.

My lack of Italian aside, this experience got me thinking about the impact learner goals have on motivation and engagement. For the most part, when someone is learning a language, they have a goal. Mine was quite narrow but for many they will be broader. Perhaps it will be to study at a university, to travel to a country, to improve job prospects, to migrate, or to converse comfortably with friends or family members. Whatever the goal, this is what drives them. It drives them to pay for a course or a private tutor; sometimes it even drives them to travel at great expense to a country where they can fully immerse themselves in that language. If we can help our learners to see how each lesson chips away at their goal, we can get real engagement.

How can we harness the power of these goals?

I work for EC English, where students are encouraged to set goals before they begin their course. Recently a student set their goal. It was a simple, real-life goal. They wanted to be able to understand football match commentary. The student was coming to our school for a month. Here’s the issue, much like my Italian experience, this student is very quickly going to realise that not all of their lessons are related to football. And, unless they have the good fortune to join a class during the unit on sports and games, it’s quite likely that football will not be mentioned at all in that month. This student’s motivation might not last the first week, let alone the month.

Unless…

Step 1: help the student to break their goal down into meaningful steps to achieve it.

To be able to understand football commentary, one doesn’t just need to know football-related vocabulary. On top of that, if this learner is interested in football, they probably know a hell of a lot more sports language than I do (my friends still get frustrated when I ask if their chosen team has won their sports game). So what else might they need? Perhaps:

  • Decoding weak forms & fast speech.
  • Understanding intonation and shades of meaning.
  • Present tenses (simple, continuous, perfect).
  • Will / going to for prediction.
  • Certain stock phrases (e.g. “at the end of the day”, “they gave it everything”).

None of which are crazy or out of the ordinary in a general English class.

Step 2: give the student space to reflect

Very often we encourage students to reflect on what they’ve learnt in a lesson or in a week of lessons. We ask them what vocabulary, grammar or skills they’ve acquired. But perhaps we’re missing a step. Perhaps the question is not just “what have you learnt?” but “what have you learnt that will help you to achieve your goal?”.

By keeping our learners’ eyes on their goal and constantly highlighting how what they’re learning in class chips away at that goal, we can harness their motivation and turn it into lesson engagement.

What’s next?

Consider book-ending your lessons, or your week of lessons (or an appropriate number of lessons depending on your context) with this two-step discussion. The first is helping them to refine their goals and the final is asking them what impact your lessons have had on those goals. The resulting conversation can help inform your future lessons as well as ensure engagement from all your students.

And, as the picture shows, I can order beer in Italy…even if I didn’t get a chance to do it in Italian. Next time…

AI: don’t fear it, embrace it! Take that first step.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been speaking to a lot of teachers about the emergence of AI and its impact on our industry. Reactions have ranged from fear to acceptance to excitement. It’s a really interesting time to be a teacher. I have to say, I understand the fear. For the majority, it’s not about machines rising against us or homicidal interactive whiteboards. For many it’s a fear of the unknown, we just got used to teaching online and now there’s another new piece of software we need to get to grips with, another tool that our students will be more familiar with than us. And that is very understandable.

In answer to that fear, I would say just try it out. Start small and take it from there. You don’t need to be the expert. It’s all about the first step. In this post, we’ll look at making that first step as easy as possible.

What problem can AI help to solve?

An easy first step is finding something you do regularly and explore how AI can help you achieve that more effectively. As a teacher, I remember spending hours scouring the internet looking for the perfect texts to use in my lessons, the perfect dialogue, story, article, etc. I’d come across one and it would be almost perfect but not quite. If you’ve ever had this issue, Artificial Intelligence is going to become your best friend.

For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to use Chat GPT. It’s free, easy to sign up to and easy to use.

Step 1: Sign up to ChatGPT

Step 2: Decide what kind of text you want

What is the objective of your lesson? What kind of text would help you to achieve that objective? Is it a short story, an article, an anecdote, a poem, a dialogue, a text conversation? Whatever it is, Chat GPT will help you to write it.

Step 3: Get your prompt right

The key to getting the text you want is feeding Chat GPT the information it needs. For example, if you say “write me a story about a night out”, you might get a story that’s 1000s of words long or you might get a very short one. It might be a love story, a horror story, or a combination of both. You’re at the whim of Chat GPT. It’s all about the prompt. To ensure success, include:

  • Request:
  • Genre:
  • Length:
  • Student profile:
  • Level:
  • Key grammar points to include:
  • Key vocabulary to include:

Step 4: Edit your text

The beauty of Chat GPT is that if you don’t like your text, you can just click “Regenerate” and you’ll immediately get another version. You can also ask Chat GPT to refine your text by feeding it further prompts. For example, you could say: “please make this story shorter” or “please make the vocabulary a little simpler” or even “please rewrite this story in the first person”.

In my experience, you’ll probably still need to edit the story slightly to make it perfect for your specific group of students, but Chat GPT will do most of the heavy lifting for you and will do it in seconds.

Let’s look at an example:

I want to teach a lesson on telling stories using a range of narrative tenses. My topic is nights out. I asked Chat GPT to create a text for me. Using the prompt structure above, I fed it the information it would need.

Chat GPT created the story below, which is a pretty good start but I felt there was some vocabulary that wasn’t really appropriate for this level.

I asked Chat GPT to replace the vocabulary with simpler vocabulary and got the following. This was pretty good but I wanted my students to tell their stories from the first person to better mirror how they tell stories in their real lives.

I asked Chat GPT to rewrite it from the 1st person point of view and thankfully it obliged.

I’ve now got a pretty decent text, at the level I want, in the format I want and the beauty of this is that it took about 2 minutes from start to finish.

A Final Thought:

AI isn’t perfect in any shape or form but it can save you a lot of time when it comes to lesson planning and materials creation, even if it’s just to give you some inspiration. So, before you go scouring the internet for the perfect text, why not take that first step and give AI a go. It’s not as scary as it might seem.

Let us know how it goes.

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

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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.

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The Post-Covid Classroom & Our Empty Teacher Toolbox

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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!

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.