Search results matching tags 'reading', 'teenagers', 'writing', and 'teacher development'

Working with Project Classes

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:02:14 GMT

This is an entry for everyone currently working at an ELT summer school somewhere in the world! It’s not always easy and there’s a lot of hard work – hopefully this post will help out a bit! I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy my summer school experiences immensely over the years and one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing most has been the project classes. This post takes a look at what’s important to remember before the project class kicks off and gives some ideas for different projects and how to stage them.

There are a number of advantages to doing project work with learners – projects can be (if done right):

Collaborative – they encourage learners to work together to generate something personal and meaningful
Communicative – by their very nature they put learners in a situation where communication is necessary in order to achieve the goal.
Cross-Curricular – they don’t have to be based solely in the language classroom but can draw on learner knowledge from other areas
Cross-cultural – they can be used to develop learners intercultural awareness and intercultural communication skills, both towards the target language culture, but also across the classroom cultural spectrum.
Task-based – there will inevitably be a set of linguistic items that learners need to perform the task successfully. Projects can provide a “real” need for language in order to successfully accomplish the goal.

For me, any project needs to follow five main stages: OUTLINE – PLANNING – GATHERING – CREATION – OUTCOME.

OUTLINE: obviously in a summer school context where the projects might involve more than one class, the decision as to what type of project or what topic area to be investigated might be taken out of the learners’ hands. The OUTLINE therefore needs to be discussed amongst colleagues or decided by the teacher in advance of the class. If you’re only doing a project with one class, then you can involve the learners in this discussion stage, thus making it a bit more relevant to their lives, a bit more consensual and less imposed. At this stage te.achers will also need to think about what the OUTCOME of the project might be, to make sure that they have the relevant materials or technologies available. Sample OUTLINES for six different project ideas are given below.

PLANNING: Once the project outline has been decided, it can (if not already) be handed over to the learners for further development. With younger learners, or in the summer school context, the main role of the teacher is one of restraint! You need to make sure that what your learners are planning is achievable in the time frame or with the resources available! In essence, you need to make sure someone thinks about the practicalities. Keep asking those questions like: ”That’s a brilliant idea! So where are you going to find the elephants for the parachute display?”

GATHERING: Most projects will involve a degree of information gathering – but not all. So depending on the project, this can be an optional stage. But you could also see this stage as a deeper exploration of the ideas generated in the planning stage.

CREATION: Where it all comes together. Break out the scissors, glue and cardboard. Book out the computer room, make friends with the art department. Throw the relevant supplies at the class (making sure there’s not too much glitter) and stand back. If you have identified learners in your class with tendencies towards perfectionism – make sure they’re working together so that you only have one unfinished group at the end of the class and so that everyone else is more likely to contribute!

OUTCOME: It’s worth remembering that not every project needs to involve glitter and glue – in fact the more memorable projects might not involve any. Arts and Craft is great, but at a summer school the kids get arts and crafts lessons separately – they probably don’t need more of the same. In other words – the primary outcome of the project should be linguistic. One of my proudest TEFL memories is watching 150 students do a whole school survey mingle (details below). A colleague recalls watching a student shine during a poetry recital (the student in question is now part of the administrative staff). The most important thing about the OUTCOME is that somebody else should see it. Not just the class that made it – but everyone else in the school! Or the teachers’ room, or parents. But somebody and that these people should have the chance to provide feedback in some way. After all – what’s the point in spending three days making a poster on global warming if it just stays up in the classroom? The students know what it looks like – they made it!

So the outcome should be primarily linguistic and highly visible. If possible, some sort of competition or vote by and amongst the learners on the work performed by their peers?

So finally – here are some of the ideas that I’ve worked with over the years:

PROJECT:	LESSON 1:	LESSON 2:	LESSON 3:	OUTCOME:
Interclass Surveys	SS decide what they will survey and generate a questionnaire	Whole school mingle (somewhere!) and SS ask and answer each other’s questions	SS collate the data from their surveys and prepare their displays	SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc. Other SS view the displays.
PhotoStory	SS plot their stories and decide which scenes need pictures taking	SS take their pictures out and about. (NB – need sufficient digital cameras?) Teachers print pictures	SS organise their images and write text captions / plot synopses.	SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc Other SS view the displays.
Performance Poetry Festival	SS research some poems they like and choose one	SS dramatise the poem into a mini play?	SS gather to watch and perform	Performance based
Board GameBattle	SS plan and design a board game (on any topic / idea) and request materials	SS use the materials to create their board games. T feeds in “game” language etc	The SS and the games gather somewhere and play each others games and vote for the best one?	Demonstrations and playing of different games
Class Newspapers / Magazines	SS research news stories, either from their own country or elsewhere	SS incorporate / edit their stories into a single “newpaper” / magazine.	SS gather somewhere, swap their efforts and read each others – vote for the best?	Written / typed newspaper (copies to take home?)
Shopaholics	SS spend half the time finding out how much they can buy for 50 pounds and half their time planning and designing their own shops	SS actually create their own shops (online pictures of items / shop catalogues?) T teach polite requests & Shopkeeper argot.	SS then go shopping. The idea is to buy the highest number of things for 50quid without buying more than one of the same item	Whole school roleplay / “controlled” language practice

If there’s any clarification needed of any of these ideas – let me know!

Help with Homework

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:54:30 GMT

“Teacher No!” “Teacher, I have three tests this week!” Chances are, you’ve probably experienced the chorus of protest and dismay as you blithely announce the homework task of the day. Or alternatively as you ask your learners to present the task you set last lesson, you find that half the class hand it in while quarter of the class hand in something approximating what you asked for and the remainder present a litany of excuses: “I’ve done it, but I didn’t bring it.” “I didn’t understand what to do.” “I had no time.” Or possibly even, “I did my homework but I was kidnapped by aliens who took my homework to help with their intergalactic language comprehension project.”

Homework is a tricky area and I think if we’re all honest and think back to the days when we were in the learners’ shoes, we can perhaps identify with the way our learners feel when they get given yet something else that takes them away from their busy lives.

As a language teacher, I’m acutely aware that the homework I set is in fierce competition with a whole range of demands of my learners’ time. There are of course the non-educational demands: learners’ interests, from basketball to surfing, music to art, chilling out, socialising, facebooking, texting and gossiping all play vital roles in their lives, as indeed they do in ours. Equally, learners who work have to find the time in the schedule when they aren’t juggling sales orders or invoices or preparing for the meeting on Thursday. And those poor souls still in school have it even worse: a vast range of subject teachers who all set their charges weekly homework tasks that must be completed sometimes on pain of failing the grade.

There are any number of reasons why learners might not do their homework – Alex Case lists 14 reasons in an article for UsingEnglish.com. The trick of course is in finding ways to try and make sure they do it.

Purpose

The biggest question is why bother setting homework in the first place? Generally, I would expect most homework tasks to fall into three categories: Consolidation / Development / Assessment.

Consolidation – you set the task because it helps learners get a better idea of something you did in class (or helps you figure out which learners don’t have a better idea).
Development – the task helps the learners to improve their knowledge or skills in some way.
Assessment – particularly used with writing tasks (I suspect), you set tasks that will in some way contribute to learner grades or reports.

The question then becomes – do the learners know why they’re doing the task? Just as you might choose to communicate your lesson aims to the class via a lesson menu, why not do the same with homework tasks? Generally, if learners understand why they’re doing something they are more motivated to do it. Or if they choose not to do it, at least they will have made a more informed decision! Either way, informing learners that the task they’re doing will help them understand better something they did in class, or that what they’re doing will be used in the next class, might help underline the need for them to do it. Of course, it might also underline to them the pointlessness of any task that hasn’t been thought through!

Involvement

Get learner input on the homework process. Learners are often very aware of their strengths and weaknesses and talking to them or doing needs analysis with them might help you to tailor the homework tasks to them. You could also get a better idea of what external time commitments they have and find out how much homework they can realistically cope with in any given week. Working with learners schedules and negotiating homework quantities with them can help them realise that you are taking their needs into account and thereby make them more willing to take yours into account. Learners are often informed when their tests are scheduled, in some cases their homework tasks too, and by giving you this information, you can help avoid overload during particularly busy periods, thus increasing the likelihood that your tasks will get done.

Integration – Routines & Consequences:

Integrate the homework process into your classes more effectively. If learners know that you are always going to check the homework, they are more likely to do it. If they see that your commitment to homework checking and marking wavers, theirs will too. A routine check at the beginning of lessons, where whether the homework has been done is seen by the learners to be noted down may help here.

This leads onto the consequences of doing it and of not doing it. Many teachers employ a carrot and stick approach where learners who do the homework consistently are rewarded and those who do not are punished in some way. There are any number of ways in which you might implement such a system and in many respects these are probably best left to individual teachers in their different contexts to decide. Your school might well have views on this, or already have such systems in place. Reward systems I’ve seen used have ranged from star charts, computer room tokens, stamps and stickers, or the ever popular “homework pass”. I’ve even heard of one teacher who took the best homework contributors out for pizza! Punishments vary equally, though in schools I’ve worked in, homework is either treated as one aspect of misbehaviour in a wider discipline system, or is basically ignored until report card time when the student gets a “0” and the parent then comes storming in to find out what’s going on… but more on this last aspect in a moment.

Activities, warmers or lead in tasks that borrow from homework tasks (but do not duplicate them) when used at the start of lessons can reinforce to learners the benefits of doing the homework as those who’ve completed the homework will perform better than those who did not. For example the target items from a vocabulary homework exercise can be used as part of a revision game.

Organisation

It might be worth finding out from your learners what approach they take to doing their homework. What, for example, are their study habits? Do they do it on the bus on the way to school? Do they just copy from the one student who actually did it, just before the class starts? Do they have an organised rota system in place with answers being emailed or texted to everyone else? Or do they have a quiet place at home where they can sit and focus on the task in hand?

Getting this kind of information from your learners and having a discussion about what constitutes good study practice and how they can help themselves might be useful. Suggesting, however abhorrent the idea may be, that they turn off their mobile phones while they study so as to avoid distraction could be useful. Allocating a specific study time to their days for however long they need and organising a study area for them to work at might also help. Many learners might already have something like this in place, others might not. Opening up a discussion in the class would allow for the sharing of experiences and the working towards some form of “best practice”.

Parents

From a teacher’s perspective, getting the parents involved can be a tricky proposition. Some parents are heavily involved in their child’s education and others feel that this is the teacher’s responsibility alone. The general view amongst teachers, from what I’ve read, seems to be that parental involvement is a welcome thing – in moderation. As far as homework is concerned at least, it should be possible to set up a framework for the parents to best support the way their children do their homework. If you and your class have a working system in place, it can be worthwhile communicating that system to the parents so that they can contribute meaningfully to the process. For example, giving learners a “homework planner” which they can stick into their folders or into the front page of their coursebook, gives them a place to write down the tasks (which you can then check for accuracy) and which the parents can then check for completion.

Bringing parents into the dialogue that you’ve opened up with the learners about quantity, quality and organisation of homework can help them understand what and why you use homework for and how they can best help – even if that help only extends to leaving their kids alone for an hour or so a week! And it might help prevent the irate father showing up in the school reception to demand an explanation for the “zero” on that report card.

I hope this helps!

There is quite a lot to take on board here and quite a wide range of different things to try, some of which will work while others will not and some might not even be necessary. The key, though is the dialogue between you and your learners as to what you all think will work best for your situation. Try having that conversation, because if you do, the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll all understand each other a little better, even if you still don’t get much more homework handed in. Best case scenario? You’ll have a lot more marking to do!

Giving Feedback – 20 ways to do it!

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:56:44 GMT

Giving feedback on classroom tasks is a tricky thing to come up with ideas for. Broadly, I think methods can be broken down into Collaborative / Competitive / Partial / Full. The four methods can interact, so you can have competitive partial feedback, followed by collaborative full feedback – or vice versa.

Collaborative methods might involve learners checking specific answers with you and boarding correct versions – or you can monitor and ask stronger students to board the odd correct answer. Thus all the learners eventually, by a process of deduction and copying, end up with the right answers. Or they might involve giving learners specific answers and asking them to show the answers to each other (as per the silent mingle).

Competitive methods will inevitably involve a certain amount of movement, energy and the occasional broken limb. Board races, team games and points allocation all play a part.

Partial feedback methods will often involve allocating points, but not actually correcting the answers. With multiple choice, you might say “you need 4 As, 2 Bs, 1 C and 3 Ds”. Or my favourite is “you’ve got six wrong”. Partial feedback methods should ideally be used for one of two purposes – either to provide additional support for a difficult task, or possibly to slow down the faster finishers, or those learners who focus more on task completion than on accuracy.

Full feedback – essentially this is making sure everyone has a correct set of answers. It does however go a little beyond that, as you might want to check that learners understand why the answers are correct. Concept questions and checking questions are useful here.

The twenty different ideas listed below all arose from contributions made by everyone who was at a seminar I ran at International House Coimbra on March 22^nd 2011. My thanks to the participants (Jo, Jenny, Dave T, Kate, Jessica, Vera, Alexis, Dave C, Anna, Neil, Stella, Judy, Patricia, Marta, Michael, Daniel) for their contributions.

The notes given are my understanding of the different methods that were described – if I didn’t get any of it quite right or if you have an alternative way of doing it, please let me know!

A pdf version of this post is available to download here: teflgeek – giving feedback

1. Horse Racing:

Learners are in teams, each team has a “horse” (picture cut out) stuck to the board along a “track”, presumably with the same number of squares as there are questions. For every question a team gets right, their horse moves further along the track to the finishing line.

2. Gambling:

Learners are in teams, each team allocated a certain number of points / amount of fictional cash to gamble with. If they get the answer right, they win more cash – if it’s wrong they lose their stake!

3. Connect Four:

As with the popular game (which you could use if you have it available), the object is to get a horizontal or vertical line of four. The size of the grid can vary depending on how many questions you have to answer. A correct answer allows a team to “drop” a token into a column that they choose. A full explanation of the original game can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four. An online version of the game can be found here: http://www.fetchfido.co.uk/games/connect_4/connect_4.htm

4. Board Race:

Learners in two or three teams, which line up in files. A relay race then ensues with one learner from each team running to the board and writing up an answer before giving the pen to the next person in the team and going to the back of the line and so on. Points can be awarded for the fastest team to finish, then for correct answers and deductions made for spelling mistakes and so on. I’ve found it useful to have a chair marking the “start” line, beyond which only the learners with the pens are allowed, so as to prevent crowding and cheating at the board.

5. Group Comparison

A peer-teaching method where learners compare and correct their answers in groups. This also means that it allows the teacher to focus on the really difficult questions as most of the easier ones will have been dealt with at the group level.

6 Changing Pairs

Similar to group comparison, but done in pairs, though different pairs to any pairwork that occurred while learners were completing the task. A thought I just had was that you could also do this by allocating A and B to the learners and every two minutes the A’s stand up and move clockwise or the Bs stand up and move anti-clockwise. Thus all the learners would interact with each other eventually.

7 Answer Votes

Learners vote for the answers they think are correct.

8 Read out loud:

Learners read through the text one sentence at a time, providing the answer they think is correct as they get to a gap.

9 This many wrong

When examining a completed learner exercise, don’t tell the learners which questions they got wrong, only how many questions they got wrong. An extension of this – when a learner has got all the questions right, they can become the teacher and tell their peers how many are still incorrect.

10 Stand Up Sit down

As the teacher reads out possible answers to the question, learners stand up if they think the answer is correct and remain seated if they think it is incorrect. Possibly easiest to run this with multiple choice tasks.

11 Mini-boards

By laminating blank A4 paper (pastel shades or white paper work best for this), you can create mini-board which learners can write on with standard board pens. Pairs or teams can then write their answers on the boards and hold them up at the same time to show their answers. If you don’t have laminated mini-boards available, this is a good way to make in-roads into the scrap paper pile by the photocopier.

12 On the board

You can give learners the answers on the board in a number of ways – either just writing them up in order, writing up the number of different multiple choice answers (e.g. “there are 3 A, 2 B, 1 C, 4 D”), or you could just write up the answers in random places across the board. You could also include some distractors here, wrong answers that learners try to avoid!

13 Noughts & Crosses / Tic Tac Toe

Simple enough – learners in two teams and a correct answer wins learners a chance to take a square!

14 Round the Room

Put the answers up on the walls of the classroom, learners mingle and work out what goes where. A variety of this might be to put the answers on the learners (post it notes / sticky taped to their backs).

15 Jenga

If you have this game available, it can be a fun way of doing feedback. Teams with a correct answer can either elect to remove a block or make the other team remove a block. A full description of jenga can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga. An online version (requires FLASH) can be found here: http://www.unoriginal.co.uk/jenga.html

16 First Letter Last Letter

As a partial feedback technique, give teams the first and last letters of each answer.

17 Bin Basketball

Teams with a correct answer win the chance to throw a paper ball into the rubbish bin. Make sure they don’t through away the handout! An alternative for multiple choice tasks might be to have four bins, marked A, B, C & D and learners throw their paper balls at the correct basket (might need different coloured paper balls?).

18 Coloured Tick method

Learners are in different teams, allocated to a different colour board pen. Question numbers are on the board. As learners think they have a correct answer, they check it with you and are either told right or wrong. If they are right, they get a tick in their team’s colour next to the relevant question. That question is then gone and can’t be answered by other teams.

19 The square game.

For this you need to put a dot grid (i.e. three rows of three dots) on the board. Each team is allocated a different colour board pen. On giving a correct answer, each team gets the chance to connect two of the dots in their colour. The object is to complete a square. Squares can be made of different coloured lines, but the team that draws the line which completes the square gets to colour the square in their team’s colour.

20 TPR answers

Give each learner one of the answers and learners put themselves in the correct order for the text.

If anyone would like any further clarification of the tasks or actitvities listed, please let me know.

A pdf version of this post is available to download here: teflgeek – giving feedback

Search results matching tags 'reading', 'teenagers', 'writing', and 'teacher development'

Working with Project Classes

PROJECT:

LESSON 1:

LESSON 2:

LESSON 3:

OUTCOME:

Interclass Surveys

SS decide what they will survey and generate a questionnaire

Whole school mingle (somewhere!) and SS ask and answer each other’s questions

SS collate the data from their surveys and prepare their displays

SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc. Other SS view the displays.

PhotoStory

SS plot their stories and decide which scenes need pictures taking

SS take their pictures out and about. (NB – need sufficient digital cameras?) Teachers print pictures

SS organise their images and write text captions / plot synopses.

SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc Other SS view the displays.

Performance Poetry Festival

SS research some poems they like and choose one

SS dramatise the poem into a mini play?

SS gather to watch and perform

Performance based

Board GameBattle

SS plan and design a board game (on any topic / idea) and request materials

SS use the materials to create their board games. T feeds in “game” language etc

The SS and the games gather somewhere and play each others games and vote for the best one?

Demonstrations and playing of different games

Class Newspapers / Magazines

SS research news stories, either from their own country or elsewhere

SS incorporate / edit their stories into a single “newpaper” / magazine.

SS gather somewhere, swap their efforts and read each others – vote for the best?

Written / typed newspaper

(copies to take home?)

Shopaholics

SS spend half the time finding out how much they can buy for 50 pounds and half their time planning and designing their own shops

SS actually create their own shops (online pictures of items / shop catalogues?)

T teach polite requests & Shopkeeper argot.

SS then go shopping. The idea is to buy the highest number of things for 50quid without buying more than one of the same item

Whole school roleplay / “controlled” language practice

Help with Homework

Giving Feedback – 20 ways to do it!