Teresa – Page 20

Teaching chunks and solarpunks

March 29, 2024September 21, 2021 by Teresa

After a quick hello, we kicked off this morning’s session with Andrew sharing his thoughts about coursebooks and the restrictions around lexis. If we are tied to providing students with lexis at a particular level, certain topics will be excluded from the book. He also argued that low-level coursebooks aim for students to achieve ‘accurate fluency’ through a grammatical syllabus, which doesn’t always allow them to have the conversations they would want to have. This led on to some interesting discussion about how we can help learners to dreate their identity in the classroom with the language the coursebook provides as well as what we can bring in to enable them to have more natural conversations.

If you’re interested in finding out more about a lexical approach, check out Teaching Lexically and Lexical Lab also runs a course on teaching low-level learners.

How can we support lower-level learners and create a more authentic language learning process?

Next up, Michelle introduced us to the idea of solarpunk as she had been looking into it for some artwork in a coursebook she’s working on. Solarpunk is an art movement which imagines a utopian future in which we have created the best society we can and is heavily influenced by ideas around social justice and environmentally-friendly lifestyles.

From this, we chatted a little about whether solarpunk could be considered a PARSNIP – the ‘punk’ in the name refers to the anti-ism of the movement, which might be seen as a sensitive topic in some ELT contexts.

We chatted a little about some of the constraints put on coursebooks; Raise Up! got a mention as a project which is trying to introduce more diverse themes into ELT materials and we also chatted about the ‘happiness’ of ELT materials.

Do you think solarpunk is a sensitive topic in ELT?

Hub digest – 17th September, 2021

September 17, 2021 by Teresa

Happy Friday everyone! Hope you’ve had a good week and it’s been a bit busier in the Hub this week. There was some interesting chat in Tuesday’s Monthly Management Meet Up about the pros and cons of freelancing and that led on to a Wednesday Question about when you’re most productive. There was a question about storytelling along with a wonderful lesson plan from one Hubster and Thursday’s coffee breaks were a catch-up with friends from around the world.

We also set up a new page on the website for those who would like to support the Hub and help to cover the costs of maintaining the site and using vidoconferencing for our live events and webinars.

Coming up next week, we’ve got Speakers’ Corner on Tuesday and a webinar with Chris Walklett of Teaching Tracks on Thursday.

The benefits and challenges of being your own boss

March 29, 2024September 15, 2021 by Teresa

As with anything in life, there are pros and cons to freelancing as well as to owning your own business and managing others. In this chat we focused more on working on our own and for ourselves and here are some of the ideas we came up with:

Advantages

Having the flexibility to choose what to take on is definitely a benefit…as long as there is enough work to choose from. One participant mentioned that around the pandemic they felt that having a stable job might have been better.

It allows you to focus on your priorities at different stages in your career and at different points in life.

It can give you the freedom to develop your own projects – though it’s important to find the balance between paid work and setting up / running other ventures.

Disadvantages

One participant talked about the isolation of working alone. Whilst the internet gives us many opportunities to interact wth colleagues – and the pandemic forced us to much more – it’s very different to sharing a physical space with someone. That said, there are lots of ELT communities online on Facebook (like the Hub!), Twitter (with #SIGTweetMeet or various #edchat meet-ups) and many ELT professionals also set up WhatsApp groups to keep in touch.

For those of us working from home, inding a suitable working environment can be tricky, particularly in these pandemic times when many of us find ourselves sharing a homeworking space with other family members. Co-working spaces are not always appropriate for teaching. A couple of suggestions for dealing with distractions if you’re working on projects were Coffivity which Rachael Roberts mentioned in her webinar on time management and binaural beats. This also led on to some chat around when we’re most productive…which became this week’s Wednesday Question. One participant mentioned finding the Pomodoro Technique (also mentioned in Rachael’s webinar) particularly useful around deadlines and that having a physical timer on the other side of the room meant that you would definitely get up to turn it off.

Another distraction which was mentioned was procrastination and the ease of going down numerous rabbit holes which turn into endless research on a project.

Speaking of projects, we chatted a little about online learning platforms. One participant has a couple of courses running through Udemy which provide a source of income without requiring much work after the initial set-up. We talked about these massive online course providers, such as Udemy and FutureLearn and identified that whilst they are very good for transmitting and receiving information, they’re less appropriate if you’re looking to build or join a community. When courses require commenting as part of the requirements, these comments tend to be rather perfunctory rather than engaging and one participant mentioned that these courses tend to have a low retention rate – perhaps because they are often free or very cheap.

It seems that some might now be trying to introduce a keyword search functionality in forums so that threads become more of a mindmap than a linear conversation.

This led us on to thinking a little about how education might change post-pandemic (if we ever get there). It feels very much like many institutions are still seeing this as a reactive period after which we’ll get back to the way things were before – but the pandemic has shown many of the failings and possibilities in education…here’s to hoping we can take some of the positives away with us.

An Introduction to Transformative Pedagogy

September 21, 2021September 13, 2021 by Teresa

We were really fortunate to have Elizabeth Coleman join us for this webinar on transformative pedagogy. It was a new term for me and it has nothing to do with butterflies! We started off with a trip down memory lane, thinking about our own experiences in education: enjoyable, difficult and memorable were some of our ideas. Elizabeth’s colleagues had said competitive, challenging, eye-opening, character-building and one poor person said painful!

Once upon a time…

Teachers taught with the didactic method in which the cognitive function is attaining basic knowledge. We have to meet specific educational goals and we develop basic skills. There is absorption and memorisation, with a very teacher-centred approach and passive students.

Over time, we’ve moved to centred students more in the learning process. The first step along from the didactic method is towards authentic learning: a contructivist approach with a focus on real-world learning. Because there is more of a link to the real world, knowledge comes through experience rather than memorisation. There is also space for different perspectives as opposed to just the teacher being the source of input.

We went on to think about what our learners need: support, space to question, permission to make mistakes – a safe space is vital for all of us to thrive. Again, Elizabeth had asked her colleagues as well and some of their ideas included enthusiasm, passion, a stimulating environment and easy exam questions!

Transformative Pedagogy

It’s someting which we might have been practising for a while without knowing what it was called. It’s a very humanist approach, seeing learners as individuals within the world.

It allows us to think about the affective factors in the classroom and our learners’ intersectional identities: all the components of yourself overlap.

It’s a great methodology to tackle -isms as it’s anti-discrimination and is an equitable approach, allowing each person to receive what they need to get them to the same place. Recognising each learners’ identity is very empowering, giving learners much more of a voice and place in the classroom.

Paolo Freire wrote about these ideas in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was first published in 1968. One of his main ideas was a criticism of the ‘banking’ model of didactic learning with the student as an empty vessel to be filled by the teacher. He said that this model “transforms students into receiving objects [and] attempts to control thinking and action, leading men and women to adjust to the world, inhibiting their creative power.”

This move towards a deeper cognition liberates learners to think more freely, rather than simply absorbing information. It allows everyone to become a learner, as we all learn from each other as a part of the process. And, as the approach allows for criticism and critique, we can tackle oppression, debate and challenge the status quo (if you’re in an environment where you have the freedom to do so and your learners are comfortable to do so).

However, although Freire introduced these ideas fifty years ago, we haven’t seen a huge amount of change in education. We still use a number of ‘old-school’ methodologies and the materials we use don’t see our learners as individuals.

There are still so many educational systems which rely on these methodologies and although we are hearing about some changes, for example in Scandinavian countries, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Education as a force for good

Transformative pedagogy has also been called an activist pedagogy as it seeks to help those who need it. It also draws on ideas which aren’t necessarily seen in materials; for example, we might start to think more about the background of the character in the coursebook: who is he? What’s his educational, professional or socio-economic identity? Does he have any health conditions which prevent him from doing certain things? As well as seeing our learners as whole beings, we can make the people on the page multi-dimensional too.

To get started, let your learners know that they can take control in the classroom by giving them supportive feedback and a safe place to make mistakes and take decisions.

Allow them to teach each other as well – perhaps even in their L1 if learners share a first language. They can teach things about ELT, but also allow them the space to share their interests.

Allow them to debate, discuss and share their opinions as well.

Ask critical questions to make them think.

Huge thanks to Elizabeth for joining us!

Hub digest – 10th September, 2021

September 10, 2021 by Teresa

It’s been a webinar-filled week in the Hub, with Riccardo Chiappini joining us on Tuesday to talk about mediation and Elizabeth Coleman coming along on Thursday to give an introduction to transformative education – which has nothing to do with butterflies!

There was also a request for ELT professionals to join a weekly show on Teachers Talk Radio and a query for tips and advice for working with 3-year-olds in a socially-distanced or online classroom.

In this week’s Wednesday Question, we took a moment to imagine back to pre-Covid times and talk about our favourite classroom layouts and there was also a question about creating courses with an inductive approach.

Coming up next week, we have a Monthly Management Meet Up on Tuesday and our regular coffee breaks on Thursday. See you there!

Mediation from theory to assessment

September 21, 2021September 7, 2021 by Teresa

It was wonderful to have Riccardo Chiappini joining us for the rescheduled webinar on mediation – and thankfully we didn’t have any technical problems this time! This is really a passion for Riccardo and he’s written numerous articles and presented on the topic of mediation many times. He also has a new book out now, written with Ethan Mansur, called Activities for Mediation: Building Bridges in the ELT Classroom. Check it out on the DELTA Publishing website.

As we mentioned during the webinar, mediation may seem like a relatively new term in ELT, but it’s actually something we’ve been doig for many years. However, there has been a recent push to make mediation more of a focal point and as one Hubster commented, “…mediation helps us REfocus on the communicative act. My own feeling is that tech and the bells and whistles of video, etc, has distracted the profession from this central part of language use. Ss need to be much more active agents when mediating.”

As Riccardo pointed out in the introduction, there is an intrinsic social aspect in mediation: the sharing of information, communication and building bridges. The information we’re sharing can come from any type of text, whether it be visual, audio, written or multi-modal. For example, a podcast would be audio input, an infographic combines a mixture of visual and written content and a film could contain all three if there are also subtitles or chunks of language to read onscreen alongside the audio and visual input. As well as mediating texts, the CEFR also talks about mediating communication and mediating concepts – areas which Riccardo gave sample tasks for as part of the webinar.

Mediating texts (5:30)

In this section of the webinar, Riccardo shared three ideas for working with texts: an art exhibition leaflet (written), a podcast (audio) and an inforgraphic (multi-modal). The tasks he suggests are carefully designed for the classroom and they give the learners a real-life reason for mediation and realistic target texts. For example, with the art exhibition text, you have to send a voice message to a friend to convince them to visit the exhibition with you.

For each task, Riccardo identified the strategies which learners will need to use and one key feature he mentioned of mediation during the webinar is that these are all transferable skills which learners will need to use in their own language as well: selecting and omitting, summarising, paraphrasing and taking notes, to name but a few.

Mediating concepts (26.00)

Here, Riccardo shared a task in which they have to transmit information from a subject in mainstream education to a younger audience. Riccardo mentioned how this is often seen within families – the way older siblings talk to their younger brothers and sisters by grading their language or changing the register.

In a group, each person is a mediator – sharing knowledge or reformulating the ideas of others within the group – and there may also be a ‘lead’ mediator who manages the discussion and task, bringing the group to a final decision.

Mediating communication (32.00)

In this case, we are helping two or more people to understand each other. There could be a difference in customs, values, languagues and so on and so a third person is needed to help mediate the situation.

For this task, which you can find in Activities for Mediation, Riccardo presented a role play in which there are three students staying in a host family. The host family member plays the role of the mediator and the other three students are each given a role: each one is from another country with particular food preferences and eating habits. The students must talk with the host family member to arrange what they would like to eat and when. The mediator then manages the interaction between their guests.

Riccardo also pointed out that we can support our learners either by pre-teaching the strategies they’ll need or by doing remedial work and providing opportunities for them to reflect on how they completed the task.

Assessment (48.00)

There’s no standardised method for assessing mediation as yet, but Riccardo and Ethan have outlined some ideas in their book. In the webinar, Riccardo expanded on what and how you could assess mediation. He suggested either the teacher or the students themselves could answer questions, refer to a rubric or analyse the CEFR level to evaluate their mediation skills.

One aspect of mediation that Riccardo highlighted was that it is communication and so learners will need to use language in any mediation task. However, he suggested that at the start, the focus should be more on the mediation aspect of a task rather than on using a task to incorporate particular language points. However, there may obviously be times when a linguistic problem impedes communication, in which case the mediation task won’t have been effectively completed.

As Riccardo mentioned in his conclusion, mediation is everywhere so it’s something authentic we can bring into our classes. If you’re looking for more ideas, Riccardo and Ethan’s book is jam-packed full of practical activities, as well as how you can adapt mediation tasks to the online classroom and ideas for setting up your own activities. You can also read more ideas from Riccardo in this article on mediation tasks for young learners or if you have a subscription to Modern English Teacher or English Teaching Professional he and Ethan also have articles published there.