We love to try new things in the Hub and today we launched a new feature, Speakers’ Corner: a space for people to come along and share a short presentation, thought or query followed by time for participants to chat around a question the speaker proposes. Our aim is to give people a stepping stone towards preparing a talk for a conference, to have space for them to get feedback on a potential presentation or to offer people who don’t feel ready for a longer presentation the chance to share their thoughts. And we also wanted to provide people with a space to discuss the topics which come up, hence having a five-minute presentation followed by ten minutes to chat in small groups. The notes below aim to share a couple of key ideas from the speakers, as well as the questions which they posed for us to discuss, so please feel free to add comments in response to any of the topics. Here’s a link as well back to the post about this blogpost on the Facebook group as there are some interesting comments there too. And huge thanks to everyone who came along to our inaugural event!
Tracey kicked off the event by talking about growth and fixed mindsets, following her research into the topic. In her talk, she mentioned that that your mindset can differ depending on the task and that people with a fixed mindset often feel that things are innate so if you’re ‘not good’ at something, you’ll never get better. She also suggested we should do more to praise the process of our language learners rather than only the result, before asking us to think about how our classroom practice might (inadvertently) promote a fixed mindset. To find out more about the power of yet and developing a growth mindset, you might like to start by watching Carol Dweck’s TED talk on The power of believing you can improve.
What are we doing to promote a fixed mindset?
Next up, I talked about eye dialect – dialogue written to represent a character’s accent. In its origins, it was often used to show the speech of uneducated characters and I also came across this idea: “writing about non-mother-tongue speakers can seem bigoted or prejudiced because a writer can try too hard to mimic the ‘otherness’ of a ‘foreign’ character’s speech”. My thoughts were evolving around whether we form an unconscious bias towards the speaker when it’s used to represent the speech of a second language English user, as well as what it does to perpetuate linguistic stereotypes.
To what extent do you feel that eye dialect of non-mother-tongue users of English has a negative effect?
To round off our inaugural event, Simon talked about a topic he’s developing for an upcoming conference. He’s planning on presenting various ideas for how we can create a more inclusive classroom and having conference participants discuss how effective the ideas would be. His ideas included stand-alone lessons on a particular topic, using neurodivergent-friendly materials, using published materials such as Raise Up! as well as incorporating authentic materials such as The Owl House and characters created by Rick Riordan.
One thing I was thinking about related to Tracey’s question was differentiation. I think that if differentiation is done badly, it can make weaker learners feel that they’ll never be as good as their classmates which is why I love the idea of offering learners choice in which task they complete (going back to Claire’s webinar!) or tasks which require learners to do ‘at least…’.
In relation to Simon’s question about creating an inclusive classroom I think we can try to educate ourselves about different ways of being. I know I still have to learn a lot about LGBTQI for example . With regard to neuro-divergent students, we can be aware that they may experience the classroom in a different way to us. For example a fan on a computer that we can’t hear may really be bothering the student, or, they may need to flick their hair about their face for the sensory stimulation it gives them.