teacher development

A Glorious Failure

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:56:03 -0400

This is the last post on this blog. It’s been an interesting journey, but ultimately didn’t achieve what I wanted it to. A failure, then, in some ways. But a learning experience nonetheless. Why didn’t it work as I’d hoped?

I think the best way to put it is that it wasn’t organic. From the outset, I tried to put together a group of people to participate in the project very much on my own terms. I was excited to work with people from different contexts and countries, but to round up a group on the internet, arbitrarily, and to set up fairly rigid guidelines for setting up linked blogs was, in hindsight, not the best way forward. Consequently, participation has been very limited, with most barely getting past the first post.

What I have learnt is that there are many great blogs out there already, and rather than starting a community from scratch is is better to join them with some worthwhile content of your own. So that`s what I’m hoping to do over at

http://www.livesofteachers.com/

Please get over and have a look soon..

Summer reflections part one - speaking

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:28:15 -0400

The first semester is far enough gone to look back on with an objective eye, and the second semester is fast approaching. Time to look back on what worked and what didn’t, and to figure out where to go next.

The first thing I want to fix is the assessments for my oral communications classes. For the non-English majors, I want to do the following things.

1. Use the language and skills we have focused on in class.

Sounds obvious, but it never hurts to remember the obvious. I chose textbooks which hone in on conversation strategies, classes are centred around pair work, discussion and debate, even the lower level classes. So the assessments should reflect that.

2. Incorporate Reflection

I want the learners to think about their successes and failures, and use that knowledge to improve subsequent converastions.

3. Incorporate elements of the students’ majors

I would like them to use what they are learning in their other classes, to see a link between English and the “real world”. I am not sure if this needs to come out in assessment or if it should just be a part of my curriculum, but it occured to me now so I`m putting it down. It’s my blog so there.

I have the following obstacles.

1. Large classes

Not ridiculously so, but large enough to make one to one interview tests, or even two interviewees/one assessor style tests (a la Cambridge ESOL), logistically challenging.

2. Technology shortfall

We have a lot of cassette recorders for recorded conversations and transcription. We have “computer rooms”. We don’t, as yet, have digital voice recorders for every student. But I am not personally opposed to technology, so if anyone has a good suggestion I`m prepared to see if I can work with what we have.

3. Novelty

I have actually been using (what I think) is a very effective method, courtesy of Duane Kindt (I’ve already blogged on this, and his templete is here). Trouble is, so are most of the other teachers here… and nothing kills reflection dead like familiarity.

So, what are my alternatives?

Xtranormal and the Perils of Technology This is the winner of...

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:12:00 -0400

Xtranormal and the Perils of Technology

This is the winner of the class oscar ceremony, best movie and best script categories. (Click through to see it in xtranormal). OK, so it’s not David Mamet, but it’s actually quite witty…and by two sweet girls, rather than dirty boys.

From script writing and practice (one 90 minute class), through the movie making process (about two classes), to final viewings (one class), this took up quite a lot of time. Was it worth it? I think so, on balance - although if I only had them once a week instead of twice I might be more sceptical.

Xtranormal (http://www.xtranormal.com/) is a site which allows us to put together animated movies simply. For this class of young adults, I gave them free reign regarding location, topic, language… pretty much anything went as long as it was three minutes long and featured two characters. In the first class, I had the students prepare their characters, location, scenario and script and then act it out for another pair. Then we went to “the computer room”, and I gave them a brief tutorial about the application, led them through sign-up to first steps in scripting and directing, then kept an eye on them as they worked. They finished off in the next class, then as our end of term “treat” we had a viewing, made speeches and awarded prizes (cardboard cut out oscars).

Thoughts

It took a long time, and it was hard to keep students in step (especially in the early stages). However, in retrospect it was better to have a bit of confusion - figuring something out in English never does anyone any harm.

Students are generally more technically adept than we give them credit for. If they don’t understand, they can teach each other. If none of than understand, they can figure it out together.

As some students finished faster than others, I had an extra activity in which they researched the vocabulary we had been studying via flickr, youtube and so on… this was actually quite enlightening in itself.

As a final class treat, I didn’t want to do anything too challenging, so I just asked them to take notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each movie and to vote in three categories - best director, best script and best movie. With more time, I`d like to have students analyse the areas in which xtranormal has trouble generating accurate emphasis, pronunciation and intonation. For a computer programme, it is actually pretty good, but not perfect. So why not use that to our advantage?

Now, the rant……

I haven’t yet come across a “computer room” that fits the late twentieth century, let alone the 21st. Do you remember the old typing pools, where ladies sat in rows, typing, head down….

Well, that’s what many computer rooms look like now. Add in the security and firewalls that make everything take six years to load, and the trouble getting fifteen machines to run the same programme simultaneously (frequent crashes) and the special trip to the computer room is murder. Where are the round tables where students face one another across small terminals? Easy to navigate rooms full of well-connected, powerful, wireless machines which can be moved around as necessary? I realise this costs money, but would it really be much more expensive than the banks of machines in lockstep rows facing the teacher that we see now?

Is there a paradise on earth? Where are these “normalised” technological classrooms?

Student blogging notes part two

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:44:12 -0400

Two thirds of the way in to the semester, and how are things moving? Well, I’ve learnt that these blogs can become unwieldy, and that different teachers have different ideas of the directions they want to go. The initial idea of posting extra material has proved unsatisfactory. Aside from video links (for example, we showed “The Meatrix” in class when we were working on our food theme, and then posted it for student reference), we have pretty much stopped posting articles, songs with lyrics and so on. I think this is for two reasons. One is practical; items just got swamped and eaten up without response. Despite the tag cloud and the search function, I don`t think students were looking past the first page… partly due to the limited service on their mobile phones (text posts only, with no comment function). Secondly, my feeling is that I didn`t want to feed the learners everything, nor force them to check material we provided. How to encourage without demanding? The age old autonomy problem.

What the blog has become is an arena for collaboration on presentations. Students are required to prepare a presentation for each topic. They do this together in groups of four, then we mix up the groups and they make a solo presentation to members of the other groups.

The students have posted their titles to the blog, then used the comments section to post ideas, links and research for their peers. Some are becoming adept at this, and have begun organising one another. Others are making very limited use. It has been an interesting experiment, but if it is to be used this way it may have been better to use wikis…..

I am interested to find out how the students are collaborating beyond the forums dictated by their teachers. I think it’s likely that they are using their mobile phones to coordinate via text. I am preparing a reflection for the end of term to get a better idea of the learner conception of the project.

My next idea, as the summer approaches, is to open it up. The difficulty has been working with so many students whilst trying to keep the content of the blog on fixed lines tied to the classroom material. To keep the students busy over the summer, I`m thinking of a free-for-all; post one thing a week (video, news story, song, photo…whatever), and comment on two more. I`ll also point them towards things like spore, xtranormal, pixton etc. It`s a limited requirement, but totally free choice regarding content. I can get into the dashboard to tidy up messy links and add tags, but other than that it`s up to them. If it works, we might continue the approach next semester.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090605010334703 This took...

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0400

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090605010334703

This took next to no time to knock up (as you can probably tell). It gets quicker as you figure it out, too. I will certainly be using this one with some of my students.

http://www.xtranormal.com/

Metaphors for teaching and learning

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:50:00 -0400

We have a mini-plenary at the end of most classes in which I throw the students a slightly left-field question based on the theme of the class (for example, if we were looking at “Family” the question might be “What would your family think if they watched you in class?”). But at mid-semester we do a broader reflection to assess progress and attitudes to learning in general. The students interview each other, with a questionnaire I designed based partly on the chapters in the excellent book Lessons from Good Language Learners (http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780511381058). So there are questions on strategies, motivation, vocabulary etc…. As the questions require a bit of thought they usually take an hour or so and come up with some good stuff.

Probably the most interesting questions, for me, were those on metaphor. It has been very enlightening to see exactly how students view the teacher / student relationship. I have grouped them into three categories.

1. Nuturing. Teacher as gardener, parent etc. Student as flower, child….

2. Controlling. Teacher as dog trainer, god etc. Student as dog, disciple…

3. Utility. Teacher as map, encyclopedia etc. Student as traveller, researcher…

Just these few words can tell us so much about the students’ view of the learning experience. I saw an excellent presentation at JALT last year (and subsequently read the paper) about the relationship between student perceptions of autonomy and their levels of language proficiency. I would be curious to know how these metaphorical views condense wider beliefs; I suspect that there is a correlation between metaphor and autonomous activity. Some students expect to be led, some guided, and some to use the teacher as a resource.

But what do we as teachers do once we have this understanding of the learner’s beliefs? Do we adapt to fit their metaphors, or try to change the students metaphors to fit our own? Does changing the metaphor have an effect on autonomous action? Rob Batstone (in http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/isbn/0-19-442250-X?cc=global) highlights the impact of classroom discourse on the choices students make; attention is a limited resource and we can direct students focus towards form or meaning depending on the words we select. Can we influence learner’s metaphorical views too?

Bear in mind, blogs are for half-formed thoughts, but this is something I`d like to look at in more detail…..

Autonomy and Vocabulary (part two)

Tue, 19 May 2009 08:27:00 -0400

As I explained in an earlier post (http://teacherdevelopment.tumblr.com/post/90787284/teaching-and-learning-vocabulary) one of my little projects this year was to innovate the way students learnt vocabulary (you’ll notice I didn’t say the way I TEACH vocabulary…). Previously, I felt they were just memorizing lists in order to regurgitate them on test day. This year, I require them to learn the “whole” word, then ask them to give me a collocation, a synonym, a word family or an example sentence for each word. I’m running this in three different ways. Some classes are continuing in the old way, learning the lists as they chose and putting words into gap fill sentences in the test. Some are learning the “whole word” but still recieving a list from me, based on words from the textbook which I think they ought to know but probably don’t. Reading classes are creating their own lists which I then mark with a code (c = collocation, es = example sentence…) which they get back on test day.

The first tests are done, and the “control” group performed significantly worse than the other two. This is not a scientifically rigorous research project; I can’t say if some tests are easier or more difficult than others, and I know that classes have different workloads in other areas. I can’t be sure that students will be able to use the vocabulary accurately and flexibly in future. However, overall I think the new way is working.

Two problems have arisen. in the self-selected group, students had a tendancy to pick words which I felt were too easy, or too hard. I think it was clear to the students how they could learn more about each word than just a translation, and even why it is a good thing to do. But I have had to reiterate the importance of picking the right words in the first place. We went through a few dictionary exercises looking at the handy codes that many supply these days (S1 = spoken English first 1000 words) at the beginning of the course and in again feedback after the test.

Some thought provoking stuff over here on the theory of teaching vocabulary…. I’ve joined in the discusion with a few more ideas too http://teachingaffordances.tumblr.com/post/109604213/on-teaching-well

can - soup

Sun, 10 May 2009 05:40:32 -0400

can - soup

Dream Sequence

Sun, 10 May 2009 05:40:00 -0400

1. Divide students into groups A and B.

2. Group A watch “Soup” whilst group B just listen.

3. Each student writes as much as they can remember about what they saw or heard in ninety seconds (or so).

4. Group B watch “Casserole” whilst group A just listen.

5. Each student writes as much as they can remember about what they saw or heard in ninety seconds (or so).

6. A students compare notes, B students compare notes.

7. A pairs up with B to describe what they saw to one another.

8. Watch both videos once more together, check notes.

I’ve been working on “dreams” with one of my oral communication classes, and I wanted to do something a little different. They students had a great time, but I felt a little dissatisfied. I think it highlights both my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher – I’m quite good at sourcing or creating quirky and interesting materials, but not so good at exploiting them to the fullest. Based on this rough outline of what we did, and bearing in mind that this was for a speaking class (they take writing classes with another teacher), how else might you have directed the language use, taught particular skills or vocabulary, or incorporated more “teaching” into the lesson? or is it fine to keep it loose and see what comes up?

dream casserole

Sun, 10 May 2009 05:38:00 -0400

dream casserole

Alfie not Britain’s youngest dad An addendum to the story...

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 09:01:00 -0400

Alfie not Britain’s youngest dad

An addendum to the story below - I wonder if I should let my student know….

Student blogging - (long) notes so far.

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:55:27 -0400

I’ve set up a tumblr for my advanced oral communication class; two weeks in, what am I thinking? My main purpose was to share videos and links, something tumblr is well suited for. Our class is themed and we cover about five themes in a fourteen week semester. Last year, I used a lot of newspaper articles and youtube videos in class but a) photocopying / dvd conversion was a pain in the arse and b) giving the students a chance to absorb the material and react to it later was very difficult. I gave out tinyurls, but very few students seemed to be checking up (or if they were, I rarely knew about it. Tumblr gets over these issues by putting everything in one place, tagged and searchable. In addition, I really wanted the students to add their own material. They can do this in two ways; comments or posts. For the first weekend I asked the students to look at the content I had posted (articles, music videos, movie clips), choose one and make a comment. About fifty percent did so, which I am satisfied with. This week the students have formed small groups to prepare their first presentations (on the topic of family). Each group “leader” sent their group’s title to the blog by email, from their mobile phone, at the end of Wednesday’s class. Then this weekend the students have been posting research via the comments section under their group’s title. I’ve been watching them drop in, and watching the nacsent interaction between students. One group member has suggested changing their title, and a small discussion has opened up. For a first year class in their first month of study things are going well. I had far more difficulty getting students to share research last year, perhaps because they were isolated between classes. This gives them both an opportunity and a responsibility. I also note that all the research has been in English - or at least, that which has been posted. Last year, a lot of students were bringing in prinouts of Japanese websites which they then translated to present. We got out of the habit after a bit of pushing. Perhaps somehow the teacher’s presence on the web is keeping them focused… One mistake was to post too much early on. Partly because it got buried and no one saw some of the stuff. And partly because the students need to find more themselves. A case in point - one of the students mentioned the famous 13 year old dad Alfie Patten in class, and my initial thought was to find a link to the story in The Sun and post it up on the blog. I resisted, and sure enough the student has found the exact link herself and posted it this weekend. I am also ambivelent about a few other things. There are eight classes in this programme, shared between four teachers. I had initially been encouraging other teachers to promote the blog amongst their classes, but in retrospect it might have been better to separate them. I had hoped that cross-class collaboration would occur, but the volume of material generated by 160+ students might get out of hand. I am still thinking, too, about how to encourage the students to use the blog without making it obligatory. So far, it’s not a major issue. Most of them can at least view the main posts with thier mobile phone browsers, and make their own, although I have discovered that we can neither make nor view comments with a mobile. Considering the importance of mobile technology in Jpan in particular, this is a little disappointing. But so far, I’m very happy ; )

(via bobby stokes) There are two celebrations for children in...

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:06:00 -0400

(via bobby stokes)

There are two celebrations for children in Japan. At the beginning of March we have Girl’s Day and display pretty dolls. In the picture, you can see a Boy’s day Kabuto (this one belongs to my two year old son).

The message is pretty clear. This is how boys should be. But as I suspect most parents will tell you, boys are like that whatever you do. I read a very smart pop-science book on the hoary old “Nature vs. Nurture” debate (find it here) which came to the conclusion that, well, it’s a bit of both…. boys are like that because it’s in their nature, and because society brings it out.

To the nub of the question. How does this effect your interactions with students? Do you treat male and female students differently? Should you?

We are dealing a couple of quite commonly held beliefs, at least in the wider world. The first is that girls are better at languages than boys. The second, that boys are being left behind in education.

The latter point does have a little more evidence to support it than the first. But should either influence us in our language teaching?

Assessing Speaking

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:41:00 -0400

I teach a number of oral communications classes, and I’m fortunate enough to have freedom to set my own assessments (to a well thought out set of class aims). So what to do?

With higher level classes, which tend to hang around themes, we do presentations. I like the fact they have to go off and research (and we work hard on finding alternatives to wikipedia and analysing the sources). I favour the test / teach approach; I like to let them try first then help them get better, rather than just telling them what to do. Because of that, students usually start out terrified; locked to a script, voice barely above a whisper…. but end up feeling great and knocking ten minute presentations out of the park with barely a note card. I like that feeling too - I don’t think you can underestimate confidence. I also have peer and self-assessment activities and here, too, I can see the students grow in their understanding of what they are doing and how they can improve.

Misgivings? Well, how often do people give presentations? (EFL geeks aside ; P). The vocabulary they learn, the critical thinking skills they hone… all great. But we spend a lot of time working towards these assesments of an oral communication skill which, actually, they probably don’t need. One might argue (and I do) that not everything learnt in the classroom needs to be vocational. Nonetheless….

In other classes, I’ve been doing a lot more of these conversation transcription activities. The students record a conversation, take it home and listen to it, transcribe it, correct mistakes and assess performance. Duane Kindt has an excellent template for transcription here (in fact, have a look around his whole site). What I like about this, apart from the reflective element and the multiple learning styles recycling, is the fact that the students are assessed on “real” communication. Throughout the semester, we focus on backchannel, interjections and the other little conversational gambits we use to keep the shuttlecock in the air. In fact, I took to giving them a check list of “really“‘s and “so I said“‘s to tot up from class to class. One danger is that the students over rehearse and end up scripting the whole tranaction, missing , and the point. It is important to get across that the assessment is not (just) of the conversation itself, but of their own assessment of the conversation.

Aside from this, I’ve had some success with role plays. We looked at poverty in one class, but it was only when the students really had to play a role as a homeless person, telling their story from research, that I think the seriousness of the day to day difficulties of the very poor became real. Again, aside from the language benefits I liked the social element.

What I would really like to do is some kind of interview assessment, but with classes of about thirty that looks challenging.

How do you assess speaking? Is fluency, accuracy, “communicative commpetence”, pronunciation, content, or something else the most important element?

To Comment or Not to Comment: Blogging to Confirm vs. Blogging to Learn

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:58:00 -0400

To Comment or Not to Comment: Blogging to Confirm vs. Blogging to Learn:

I think comments are vital, otherwise I might as well write in my moleskine journal. However, I absolutely agree with his concerns about confirmation bias in comments. Thinking about my flickr account, I get so many comments which say “nice”, then go and do the same elsewhere. Inevitable really, that users tend to gravitate towards likeminded people and confirm one anothers “rightness”.

I have learnt a lot about photography from flickr, but very little from comments. Part of that might be due to the visual nature of the medium, and the difficulty in expressing our (my) reactions in words. Perhaps the exchange about teaching will yield different results….

These are the cherry blossoms on my campus, which means the...

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:11:00 -0400

These are the cherry blossoms on my campus, which means the academic year is about to get underway. New blossom = new students. Of course, although the students might LOOK the same every year, like the cherry blossoms they are actually quite different….

Is language acquisition a good analogy for teacher development? | IATEFL Cardiff Online 2009

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:35:54 -0400

Is language acquisition a good analogy for teacher development? | IATEFL Cardiff Online 2009:

Very smart…. I like this analogy very much indeed ; )

adVancEducation

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:31:00 -0400

adVancEducation:

Click on the title. Great blog… there is an awful lot of interesting reading on here. Why is there so much to know, and why is my brain so small? I`m off home to watch zombie movies….

Actually, though, it doesn’t matter that my brain is small, as long as I know lots of other people who can keep other stuff in their brains. This is known as connectivism, the teenage son (in my opinion) of constructivism. You can read all about it here, as linked to in Vance Stevens’ blog.

• Downes, S. 2001-2008. E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine, retrieved from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1

• Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Elearnspace, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

I wrote about it myself here

http://wirelessready.nucba.ac.jp/Elliott.pdf

but looking at it now it already seems a little naive and behind the times. The internet is growing like topsy, and in very, very different ways to anything we’ve been used to. Look at twitter…it’s gone through the roof. I don’t know why, exactly, but the kids love it. I wonder if the technology is leading us in some cases, rather than the other way around. Do people get excited by the novelty and find ways to use all this new stuff? Is it a drive to creativity, or an unecessary distraction. Well, that’s enough of a stream of conciousness for this evening. Back to the zombies

classroom 2.0

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:20:00 -0400

classroom 2.0:

I`ve just joined classroom 2.0 (click the title to link). Apparently, it`s a “ning”, a bit like facebook but for specific groups. Strangely, this log is in an RSS feed on my ning front page…everything is interconnected and chasing itself. Please be careful not to get sucked into a technological black hole and bump into your own mother like Marty McFly. Ah, I remember web 2.0, it was so quaint! I`m not going to look for it, but no doubt some wag has used the “web 3.0” tag by now (probably right after “web 2.0” was coined). But all this stuff does seem so much more multi-dimensional and interconnected now… the way your flickr, twitter and tumblr posts can all pop up in other platforms via rss feeds - the technology isn`t brand new, but the ways of using it are. Even the fusty old BBC lets us choose which content turns up on the front page, and where.

Which Platform?

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 03:38:58 -0400

Which Platform?:

It`s interesting how people promote and defend their particular platforms of choice. This is the discussion that arose on another teacher forum (a very good one, actually) on which I was promoting this enterprise (click the title to see how it unfolds). I felt that tumblr in particular would work - and in many ways I still do, but I wonder if it might have been easier to network amongst existing blogs and build relationships that way.