What makes a lesson GREAT? Pt. 2

This is the second instalment of a series of five posts that I have started in order to expand on a short answer I gave to Mike Harrison over on the IATEFL Facebook group page in response to the question what makes a lesson GREAT?

It was the capitalisation that gave me the idea to fit my ideas on this into the letters composing the word at issue – GREAT. The first post, on Group Dynamic, you can find here. In writing it, I noticed that far from being an answer, it threw up a whole load of questions around the idea that I had blithely posted earlier.

This is one thing I love about these short professional development exchanges on the IATEFL and IATEFL SIG facebook pages, and I encourage you all to take part here and here for starters.

But onto what I thought was the second component of a GREAT lesson…

R for Relevance to learners’ lives

relevant |ˈrɛlɪv(ə)nt|
adjective
closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand : the candidate’s experience is relevant to the job.
DERIVATIVES
relevance noun
relevancy noun
relevantly adverb
ORIGIN early 16th cent. (as a Scots legal term meaning [legally pertinent] ): from medieval Latin relevant- ‘raising up,’ from Latin relevare.

Fascinating: I had no idea that the term relevance was coined by Scots lawyers, did you? Anyway, the idea of being closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand seems straightforward enough. “the matter at hand” – for a language learner – would seem to be the gaining of mastery in a target language. It would suggest that for a lesson to be relevant, its content and or process would be demonstrably linked or linkable to the learners’ search for mastery in that area.

“If she knew what she wants/he’d be givin’ that to her… (The Bangles and their relevance to ELT…)

This raises a few issues (appropriately enough, as the root of the word relevance meant “raising up” in latin, as I’ve just learnt!)

For a start, how can we as teachers be sure that the linguistic content of our lessons is as closely connected to the learners and their matter at hand as possible? Needs analysis?

Well, needs change, and – if complexity theory really has any relevance to language acquisition – they do so unpredictably, so how often can/should needs be reassessed? Every month? Every week? Every lesson? Before or after the lesson? During it?

Naturally, teachers in the real world need to strike a pragmatic and effective balance – but how are we to know that we are managing just that? Progress testing is the usual yardstick, I suspect, but performance on tests and performance in real-life do not always correlate.

And how often have you found out what your learners really need in terms of language from a pre-course needs analysis? I mean, really? More often than not, the language that my learners really found germane was the stuff that came up in passing, and it rarely had its roots in anything they mentioned during a needs analysis. I’m jumping the gun here with my next post (E for Emergent Language) so I’ll leave this for now.

“Ask a silly question…”

You might counter this with “that’s poorly done needs analysis” and maybe you would be right, but this doesn’t change the fact that needs change over time and this point of change is unpredictable – how to manage that? Further, if tests are based primarily on pre-determined content as defined in a syllabus or course programme, and if the tests are not adapted to allow for this incidental learning also to be weighted, then the learners’ learning is only partially being given credit.

Keeping and sharing learner and teacher journals may be a help here, as they are as concrete a form as any of capturing learner interlanguage and point-of-time interests and occupations as I can imagine. Do you have any other ideas?

Teaching as cartography – mapping contour lines onto lessons

The idea of relevance of being a quality of “raising up” suggests to me that for a lesson to be relevant, it also has to have a distinct profile, it needs to be accentuated, needs to be marked somehow for relevance so that the learners’ radars have as easy a job as possible of noticing its potential relevance, thus increasing their chances of engagement with it.

A positive group dynamic may lead to learners creating their own lessons and thereby making sure their lessons are relvant (see the postscript to my last post on group dynamic for a case study and Brad Patterson’s comment as well) but short of this, using what you know of your learners (professional or personal) lives as a starting point may be the simplest thing to do.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that published learning material such as coursebooks cannot or should not be used, but that it is approached via the learners’ lives, rather than the other way round. Coursebooks used to leave so-called personalisation activities to either the last corner of a unit or – worse – the teacher’s resource book. Coursebook writers have done good work in recent years in making the people in the room the starting point of their units and modules, reflecting in the process a move away from materials driven to learner conversation driven teaching – but teachers can do more than this to make their lessons truly relevant for their learners too – and I mean truly, not just making a best fit between the contents of a syllabus drawn up by ministries etc and the realities on the ground in class.

Any ideas how?

Christmas ELT Appeal: Worst Case Scenario Survival Toolkit

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I got an email a few days ago from a teacher in Australia called Rufus. She works with teachers in parts of the world where resources that many of us take for granted can be scarce, and where others that we may occasionally get our hands on are pure pipe dream.

She asked me to contribute to some upcoming training she would be leading in Cambodia, with teachers whose local resources were limited and whose confidence in their own English proficiency may also be limited, and who may not have been fortunate enough to have received much in the way of formal teacher education in the recent past.

In particular, she asked me what I considered my essential teachers’ toolkit: what, as a teacher, I considered a bare minimum of resources with which I could imagine working effectively with groups of students more or less anywhere.

Bare-naked teaching?

I recall that Jeremy Harmer tweeted out basically the same question earlier this year (it was something like: “what is the minimum you need to teach in terms of resources?“); at the time, I flippantly replied: “students“. While I still stand behind the sentiment, when push comes to shove,  I can’t imagine working with no materials or resources to facilitate, if not mediate, learning work for any protracted period of time.

And it seems I am in good company: even Scott Thornbury, not one who needs to rely on materials to do his teaching for him – even when on his home turf – doesn’t bowl up empty-handed to class…

This hoopy frood always knows where his post-its are...

I’d bet we all go into class with much more available to us than we realise, and, like Scott, most of us also always go in with something – even if it’s just a board-pen – or a post-it.

Now the attraction of teaching unplugged is, at least in part, for me the important job it does of refocusing us as teachers on the richness of that potential in the resources around us even before we reach for a coursebook or switch on an IWB or insert a multiROM…

But, as Madonna said, “we are living in a Material world” – and while I am not a Material Girl, I can’t ignore the reality that some raw materials are not only useful, but actually essential.  After all, even Adrian Underhill’s impressive countermovement against published materials is predicated on having some blank canvas on which learners can paint their own masterpieces.

Be Prepared

So Rufus’ request offers me a chance to make good on my earlier sleight of hand while replying to Jeremy Harmer. it also offers me the chance to relive a childhood passion: creating emergency survival kits that fitted in a matchbox was something I used to love doing, and this is a natural professional extension of that. Naturally, I won’t get my toolkit into a matchbox, but it will still fit in there in spirit.

Yer not on the list, yer not gettin’ in…

Before I describe my toolkit, though, I should lay out some criteria for inclusion. I’m aiming for extreme minimalism here – and to be clear, I have never taught under circumstances where I would have neededto have such a kit with me.  So for me at the moment, this is a thought experiment, but hopefully it may be of som epractical value to some teachers doing admirable work under more challenging conditions than I normally face.

The toolkit should be small so I’m setting myself a maximum of 5 items (you could have more or less if you wish). In addition, anything in my toolkit needs to be:

portable
By this I mean small, easy to transport and light. It also means that you won’t get stopped at airports or by security because of it.

(relatively) cheap
Teachers aren’t exactly rich, and if you are worried about a toolkit like this, you probably can’t rely on a school or third party replacing stuff for you when it runs out or gets lost. This also suggests that most of the contents of the toolkit should be locally sourceable. All of my tools will be, with one possible exception.

hard-wearing or long-lasting
Teaching needs to be sustainable. and in part this means getting a lot of use out of limited resources. For teaching unplugged, this means squeezing every conversation, every text, every moment in class dry; for an unplugged teaching toolkit, this means recyclability and durability. Nothing disposable makes it in – or at least, jsut because it’s designed to be disposable doesn’t mean it will be treated as such!

multifunctional
How many uses can you think of for a paperclip, for example? It’s designed to be a single function device, but with imagination it can serve a range of purposes. So should everything else in the toolkit.

OK sir, empty your pockets…

OK. Those are the benchmarks. Here is my suggested toolkit, in no particular order:

• pencils (2B or softer) & chalk
• a dictionary
• safety pins
• a BIG ball of string
• a small photo album

pencils (2B or softer) & chalk
OK, cheating a bit here by counting these as one item, but a couple of pencils or pieces of chalk are small, light, handy, and extremely versatile. If I don’t have a board to write on, I might have paper, and failing paper, I could use either soft-lead pencil or chalk on most walls or flat surfaces. If push came to shove, I could use the pencils to write and draw in the earth!

But writing is only one function, you may say, so what other functions can chalk and pencils serve? If you know Cuisinaire rods, you know how flexible variously coloured sticks can be. A few colouring pencils or chalk can serve at a pinch for the same kind of purposes.

a dictionary
Dictionaries are worth their weight in gold. A good learners’ dictionary (such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, my current favorite) provides me with a vast range of support: a core lexicon, corpus-sourced examples of the langauge in use, definitions, grammatical information including collocation and colligation, picture support, style guides – in fact, good learner dictionaries almost make a reference grammar redundant. I would love to have space in my toolkit for a basic reference grammar, but something had to give and the dictionary won.

But apart from research language, what can you do with a dictionary? It can serve as a screen, a stand, or (in large classrooms) as a useful way for me to gain a few inches height to be seen in the back row!

safety pins
I’d pack about 50 of these, in 5 sets of 10, sorted by colour. You can do a lot with these.

For example, they would help manage grouping in large classes, so people could quickly identify their team-mates or the people they should seek out in mingle activities: just look for the person wearing the same colour safety pin.

Or you could use them as place markers in board games. I know, I have not packed any board games, but you can make those yourself.

You can also use them to pin up examples of students’ work – but for that, you might also need…

a BIG ball of string
Organise a washing line with some twine or string and you can use the safety pins to hang up student work in art gallery fashion. The students could unhang the work easily and go to talk about it with other people who have work with the same colour pin attached, or form pin-colour buzz goups with representatives from each colour group, as you wish.

You can also use string to create designated areas in whatever space you have available, by laying ot out on the floor or by cordoning off. This could be useful for creating little “performance spaces” or for recreating other locations (for example, laying out a students’ bedroom or office, which then could be filled with other props in place of their furniture – other students act as delivery people while the learner describes where the things should be put (over an imaginary phone to make it trickier ).

Speaking of phones, do you remember having “phone calls” when you were a kid by stringing two plant pots or plastic cups together with a length of string?  While at the moment I exploit skype, flatrates and ubiquitous mobile devices to make telephone skills lessons more authentic, I could replicate the same sense of distance with these – and the connection might even be better!

a small photo album

Photos may more generally live inside people’s phones and laptops these days, but that’s no help when the juice runs out.  A few photos from home (apart from staving off homesickness) can be used for all kinds of class activity, such as:

• visual stimulus for teacher input (live listening, generative situations, introducing or eliciting words…)
• raw material for production tasks (students describe what they see, form questions, hypotheses, opinions etc about what they see; they can talk about this, write it down, or both)
• additional “classmates” during 121 lessons, giving the learner other “people” in the room to address than the teacher
• and so on…

So that’s it – my suggested minimalist teaching toolkit.  I’m sure I haven’t even begun to find out what could be done with even these poor tools, so now it’s over to you to help Rufus further.

The appeal is to make the following donations by way of comment or link:

1. What other teaching uses for the items I’ve packed can you think of?
2. What would you pack in your own survival toolkit, and why?
3. Do you know of any other “teacher Toolkit” discussions like this online?  If so, where are they?

When you reply (as I hope you will!), please contribute practical ideas as well as having fun with the appeal (a teaching toolkit is for life, not just for Christmas ), and also please allow Rufus to share your ideas with her colleagues in Cambodia when she gets there in February (perhaps by including your suggestions in any handouts she gives them – with you properly acknowledged, of course

Go On, Be Generous – It’s Christmas!

ELT BITES Materials-Light Lesson Challenge!

Richard Gresswell over at ELT BITES posted a low-materials challenge for teachers recently – you can find the challenge and instructions here.  I thought I would try, so…

Lesson Idea: “What’s up?  There’s been a powercut”

Acknowledgement: Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshab/ for this CC licenced image

True story – I arrived at work one morning many years ago to find the school in darkness and dismay – there was a powercut and nothing was working.  Our morning courses didn’t have coursebooks assigned but there was a course plan.  I had nothing prepared yet.

I was scheduled to review “present perfect 3″ (if you know what that means, you’ve been in ELT too long!). I walked into the darkened classroom with 6 confused students and did the following:

1. ASK students “Hi. Why is the light off? What’s up?” ELICIT “the lights aren’t working“. Ask for reason. ELICIT “There’s been a powercut – nothing is working“
2. BOARD EXAMPLE/CHECK UNDERSTANDING (So when did this happen? Do we know exactly? Is there still an effect now?)
3. UNPACK FORM (POS: S + have/has + 3rd form verb etc…) and MODEL/DRILL contractions/sentence stress
4. WRITE 4-5 SIMILAR SITUATIONS ON WB in de-grammared form (e.g. A) “What/happen? B) THERE/ACCIDENT. TAKE/TO HOSPITAL”). Students re-grammar examples.
5. CONVERT TO “DISAPPEARING DIALOGUE”, removing key grammatical elements, students recall and perform each dialogue with partner with decreasing scaffolding until performance is entirely from memory.
6. ASK STUDENTS TO CONCEIVE AND SCRIPT OWN DIALOGUES. Repeat steps 4-5.
7. STUDENTS MAKE LESSON NOTES

Materials light?
YES. Only used the whiteboard present and the students’ notebooks (paper ones!)

Conversation driven?
YES. The situation in the school was leveraged but not contrived (I didn’t cut through the power lines just for the opportunity to do this!)

Focus on Emergent Language? Innovative? UNPLUGGED?
NOT REALLY/NOT REMOTELY!/ABSOLUTELY!!! I had a clear agenda so this wasn’t very Dogme in this regard. However, the students provided the working language and later contributed their own ideas/language to the mix.  The approach is pure Old School PPP but considering it was entirely on the fly, involved no materials and was a response to “the situation in the room” that fortunately coincided with curriculum requirements, I am still happy to consider this as my first Unplugged lesson.

What do you think? Did I meet Richard’s challenge?  Go to http://eltbites.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/5/ and see what others have posted in response to the challenge or take up the challenge yourself!