Teresa – Page 34

Zooming Around – online games for all ages

September 21, 2021January 28, 2021 by Teresa

Harry is another ELT professional whose passion for teaching shines through. As well as teaching and being involved in the Pearson BBC Live lessons, he’s recently set up his own website – Renewable English – which looks at ways to be more sustainable in our lives and how to introduce those ideas to our learners.

In Harry’s session, he shared lots of engaging ideas for games which can be used online or tweaked for the socially-distanced classroom. Times in brackets are rough estimates and not necessarily exactly when the activity starts! Here’s the link to Harry’s blogpost where he shares these ideas and a few more.

Show and Tell (8.30)

Although this is something which we’ve often done in the classroom, the joy of being online means that learners can share things they might not otherwise be able to bring to the lesson. It’s a lovely way to find out more about our learners and works with all ages – for example, Harry shared his certificate for swimming 25m which he got as a child. You could have a theme for what to bring (something you’re proud of, something you collect, something someone gave you, etc.). There were comments in the chat about how it’s nice to have this home-school connection and to enable learners to share more of themselves.

Treasure Hunt (11.00)

We’ve talked before about using ‘Find something yellow’ with younger learners and Harry had some awesome ideas to extend this activity. Aside from using it to work on the vocab for the lesson, he also suggests:

Find something that rhymes with…
Find five things with five letters

It might be worth letting parents know the learners will be doing this in case they wonder why their kids are running around the house during their English lesson!

If you’re working in a hybrid environment, the learners can work in pairs, with those in the classroom giving instructions to those at home.

City Race (13.45)

What’s the capital of Rwanda? You could ask learners this and then have them use their digital literacy skills to race to find the answer. When they have it (Kigali), have them write a word with each letter. In his example, Harry had key, iguana, go, antelope, leftovers, Ireland. Learners then have to make up a sentence or short story using those words. You could say they have to include certain parts of speech, such as an adverb.

It’s a nice way to introduce different places into the classroom as well as Rwanda probably doesn’t come up in a lot of coursebooks, so you could then share some information about the place as well.

Guess who said it (16.10)

Another activity we’ve done before in class but so easy to replicate online: ask the learners a question and have them reply using the private chat function so only you know their answer. You can then give an answer and learners can speculate about whose answer it is.

Depending on your chat settings, you can also let one of the learners lead this task. You may have disabled chat between learners, but making one of them a co-host should mean that the others can private message that person.

Songversations (18.40)

This is an amazing activity which allows learners to be creative. You can find a blogpost where Harry shared more info about it here (along with lots of other great ideas!). Learners choose a song and then create a conversation with the singer – it’s great as it encourages them to think about real interaction and what they can say so that the lyrics are an appropriate response.

Spot the difference (23.45)

A nice idea to keep learners on their toes! Whilst we were watching Harry’s songversation with Taylor Swift, he changed his shirt, put on a hat and put up a poster behind him.

Breakout Investigations (27.00)

This is a good way to get learners using their digital literacy skills to find out about a person. You could either have them choose the person they want to investigate, or assign people to them. The benefit of assigning people is that you can give stronger learners a more obscure person to investigate – great for differentiation. After they’ve researched the person, they can come back together as a group and be interviewed, also giving them a chance to work on question formation.

If you’re wondering who to bring into the classroom, there were suggestions to use the Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls to introduce strong females into the class. You could also check out biography.com

YouTwitch (29.45)

Leading on from the idea of an interview about a famous person, you could instead do a presentation, which introduces learners to a different skillset, both as presenters and viewers. Whilst one person is presenting, the others could be adding comments in the chat box or using the reactions to respond to what the person is saying, and even nominate a learner to be the chat moderator.

The other option is to do it like HotSeat, with questions from other learners being fired at the presenter. Having them write the questions in the chat box has a couple of benefits – 1. it stops them shouting over each other and 2. helps them practise their writing.

How to… (33.25)

This is another nice way to bring learners into each other’s homes. However, do make sure learners are happy to share their personal space away from their usual zoom environment – as was pointed out in the chat, learners can sometimes accept our authority as teachers and may do things they aren’t overly comfortable with.

The idea of this is for learners to share a tutorial about something they enjoy doing. Harry shared the example of making a cup of tea – it’s an easy way for learners to be introduced to new lexis in context, such as kettle and in this case you could also use it to talk about culture.

Mannequin Challenge (36.45)

This was a craze a few years back; however, I’m sure that many of us were doing statues in the class before that happened! Harry suggests making it a bit more challenging than just action verbs…why not have your learners hold a pose of a personality adjective? a type of weather? a day of the week? Another suggestion was for them to use a scene from a coursebook story – classmates then have to guess which scene it is or remember what was happening in the scene.

Armless fun (40.30)

Ever tried playing charades without using your hands? Another fun way to challenge your learners and get them thinking creatively

TikTok time (43.45)

This is similar to Show and Tell in that you can use it for learners to share the people they follow and ask questions to help build rapport. However, you can also use social media to set your learners homework – have them follow your teaching account, set a task with a specific hashtag for your group and then have them tag you and add the hashtag when they’ve completed the activity. If you encourage them to look at each other’s work, they can get extra views and likes. A wonderful way to take homework out of the book and into their lives.

On the theme of social media, Harry also mentioned using memes in class – you can find lots online which they can add a caption to.

Mind your language!

July 8, 2021January 21, 2021 by Teresa

Do I want students to say what they want to say or what I want to them to say?

This is such a great question, it pretty much goes across all of the conversations in one way or another and is certainly the one that’s got me thinking the most!

It was fabulous to see so many people at the Coffee Break, it shows it’s something that we all value and enjoy. Is it sustainable in this way with these numbers of participants? We’ll pop a questionnaire on the Hub and we can see what everyone thinks.

There were two main topics of conversation; the Wednesday question about swearing and the other a look back at Chris Roland’s session on Young Learners.

We started off looking at the Wednesday question which had already provoked quite a response in the chat; “How do we feel about teaching swear words?” Here’s the main points people made…

Students are interested in it. It’s part of the language so we shouldn’t ignore it.
Not with younger learners, “obviously”… but they use swear words a lot, even in class. (Thank you, Fortnite et al!)
We don’t need to teach it, it’s there in society. But do we need to teach appropriate use? It feels horrible hearing students use the N-word in class, for example. The challenge is how to incorporate it.
Does swearing sound just wrong in a foreign language?
Are we as teachers, and perhaps living out of predominantly English speaking countries for a while, up to date? Check out History of Swear Words on Netflix
“You can use it out of class but I don’t want to hear it”, like a parent might to their children.
Swearing adds colour and flavour to language… maybe we need to teach the severity scale. See Swan, M, Practical English Usage, 1995, as he also touches on grammaticalised swearing.
There’s also a book from 1996 by Sterling Johnson called English as a Second F*cking Language: How to Swear Effectively, Explained in Detail With Numerous Examples Taken from Everyday Life
We can also have fun with pron, for example “bitch/beach”.
Have some of these words lost their strength? “What the f*ck?”, “It’s so f*cked up”, etc.
Does a lack of alternatives for our students indicate a lack of other vocabulary?

And then the focus switched to materials…

Writers have to avoid certain subjects. It’s all about sales. Would Rinvolucri et al be published now?
Is ELT too clean? We need to reflect reality. Is “anodyne” a better word? Does ELT publishing go for an all-acceptable world view based around western values of attainment and end up in a glossy, magazine-like portrayal of the world? ELT fails to reflect so many realities, including uncomfortable realities.
The Raise Up series of coursebooks was mentioned as a counterpoint. https://raiseupforelt.com/
And of course, current materials weren’t written for a COVID world and so much seems so silly now!
We can ask questions of our students at all ages to help them engage in a more real world view.

We then switched topics completely to look back at Chris’s sessions about teaching younger learners and the questions that had emerged in the chat in the threads on the Hub. The main question was about Chris saying that he didn’t really do routines with his little ‘uns and why that might be.

Children need reference points, routines give moments of confidence, especially to weaker learners.
Routines shouldn’t be boring and just time-consuming, although they often are. How helpful is it for students to spell their name in every class?
Do we miss opportunities for natural exchanges and personalized language development if we stick to our routines? Do we want children to say what they want to say or we want them to say?
Routines need to change and develop, we need to change things up.
Routines can be really helpful in reviewing and previewing future language.
What is a routine? Maybe it’s a structure of a class… a connecting stage, homework check, input and closing stages.

The teacher might be bored but is the student? They might be really into it. We need to react to our students.
Try “Good day, bad day?” as a routine. Learners really express themselves, build personalized vocabulary through an appropriate use of translation and supporting learners.
A note on translation; try a “sandwich” where learners tell the teacher what they want to say, the teacher translates and then encourages students to repeat the words or writes new vocabulary on the board. What happens to the language then? This depends on teacher skill, we need to decide what’s worth coming back to, which of the emergent language should we recycle? The teacher become the “archiver of useful stuff”. The acknowledging of and listening to the students is a great way to build relationships too.
Do routines just access Lower Order Thinking Skills? Need to use routines to activate Higher Order Thinking Skills too.

Following on from the Coffee Break, Chris added a reply to the question about using routines:

“My three main objections to routines (activities that YL’s do again and again) are: 1. Some kids just hate them. There are always one or two who you can see are bored by doing the same thing every lesson. 2. The language connected to routines often stagnates, not going anywhere over the course of a term or year, sometimes to the point that it is rendered meaningless to students. You can sometimes tell this because they have no idea where the word boundaries are between the different words that accompany the actions they are performing. 3. I feel that in some situations, routines might be a bit of an easy option used to fill up class time when students could actually be being pushed further or engaged on a more personal level.

On a more technical level, I feel that routines often regulate action rather than language. To move away from an events management paradigm and towards a linguistic one, I prefer to talk about ‘scripts’ which I define as sentence length utterances connected to recurring classroom events, but not necessarily activities. I also do rely on routinised transitions, as covered in the session, using these to give me greater flexibility to lead in to the unexpected. So there is an element of routine there.

I cover scripts, classroom events and transitions in more detail in the first 5 chapters of the main book, Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom (the big one rather than the smaller volume for online teaching) but that’s about the nuts and bolts of it. Having said all that though, it’s not a stance I defend vehemently, just a preference, and I think if a teacher looks after their routines and updates or adds to the language a little bit now and then, and maybe builds on the actions systematically, then they can be a useful strategy.”

Teaching little ‘uns in socially-distanced and hybrid classes

September 21, 2021January 14, 2021 by Teresa

It’s an absolute joy to watch Chris Roland in action, so if you missed the session, I highly recommend watching the recording rather than simply reading through the notes. He has such enthusiasm as a teacher and his passion for making learners comfortable, engaged and confident in their language learning is clear throughout. All his ideas are there to support his learners, to get them communicating using natural chunks of language and to push them to produce more.

TEFL in the time of COVID

Chris suggested making masks of your own face for the socially-distanced classroom to show whether you as the teacher are smiling or frowning. These can cover just the mouth and nose, or be a full face.

If you’re checking learners’ temperatures at the start of each class, have them say the number. It introduces them to using ‘point’ and also as they will hopefully all be in the 30s, gives them good practice of what can be a tricky number to say.

With hand gel, you could teach learners the phrase I’ve got my own if they don’t want to use yours. This gives them a reason to learn the phrase and a lot of Chris’ ideas play on the idea of ‘vested interest’ – getting learners to be enthusiastic about the language through a need to use it. He also suggested using flavoured hand gel, or adding essential oils to the standard one. This could then introduce phrases such as I think it smells of… and if learners decide to change their opinion after hearing what a classmate says, I’ve changed my mind. Can I guess again?

How old am I?

Rather than the standard How old are you? with learners – as they will generally all be roughly the same age in the class – he suggests flipping the question. A couple of people suggested this would be a good way to introduce some comparatives: higher/lower, older/younger.

Routines

Chris admitted to not being a fan of routines as such, but shared some great ideas for learner training and what he called ‘routinised transitions’. He talked about coding hand gestures, so that with a flick of the wrist, learners know to say What’s next?, Which book? or What page? This requires some organisation from the teacher to prepare these standardised gestures and then some time to introduce each one effectively to the class.

He also shared some fabulous stories through gestures, which would be wonderful to use as a transition between activities or to keep learners energised. You can see these around the 17-minute mark of the webinar.

Pre-teaching vocab and stories

A fabulous idea for learners to see language before it comes up in the book is through votes ahead of time. For example, in an Around the town unit, we see vocabulary such as bus stop, bins, playpark, etc. Long before learners start work on the unit, Chris suggests introducing two of the key vocabulary words and having learners vote: I prefer the … or I’m not sure which of them I prefer. Whichever wins the vote goes on the next round of voting the next day. It’s also a great opportunity to localise your target language – take the time to find images which learners can relate to, rather than the coursebook images.

Stories in the coursebook can also sometimes be a little overwhelming for the learners: understanding the characters and their relationships, the setting, picking up new vocabulary, following the plot. Chris storyboards the plot with his learners before they see the story in the book. He draws it on the board (and also on a piece of paper for learners to see the size of things), and the learners copy it onto their own papers. This means they can work through the story more slowly, looking at key vocabulary, and then retell the story to their partner after drawing.

CLIL and Culture pages

As Chris said, these can often be thrown into a coursebook and unrelated to the rest of the unit, sometimes introducing more complex vocabulary than the learners are familiar with. He suggested playing the accompanying audio and pausing to ask What’s the next word? This will help keep all learners focussed on the text and gives you the chance to again look at new lexis. There was a similar suggestion to read the text yourself but make mistakes – another way to see if everyone is following the text.

Emojis

A nice idea for building rapport with learners is for them to choose their own avatars for the lesson. You can find some fun emojis in Word using the SEGOE UI Symbol or Emoji script (scroll down for the emoijis when you open the Insert symbol tab and choose the font). If you have a table of these as a visual, when learners come to the lesson, they can tell you to go up, go left, scroll down, and so on to choose the emoji they want. If two people pick the same emoji, it’s a nice way to introduce the phrase, Can I have the snowman too?

3 in a row

A really easy game to set up and play, and a great way to get learners producing full sentences if you organise the chart effectively. Also, keep the game going so learners don’t just win one line of three, but as many as they can. Here’s an example which Chris shared:

House points

Rather than having a points system which doesn’t mean anything, Chris gives each of his learners an empty house, which they can then furnish as they earn furniture through the lessons. This is a fun way for them to produce something personalised as they can collect the items of furniture through the lessons and spend time decorating their house and then describing it to others. People suggested they could trade their furniture between themselves or trade individual pieces for something better – lots more opportunities to teach them useful language like, I’ll swap you this for that.

Video tutorials and Snap Camera

Whatever your teaching environment, look for ways to give yourself a break and preparing videos before the lesson are a great way to do this. You can record dictations, answers to exercises or make tutorials for an activity (Chris shared an idea for drawing Halloween characters on broad beans). He also shared a tool called Snap Camera which you can download and use to give yourself a different face. Be careful though as the software can affect Zoom filters and you probably don’t want to have an online meeting with bunny ears!

All in all, it was a wonderfully energised session, with lots of easy-to-implement ideas for younger learners. Huge thanks again to Chris for joining us!

Our response to feeling fragile

June 26, 2021January 7, 2021 by Teresa

“not ready to start again!”, “demotivated”, “the world seems so fragile”, “it’s all a bit scary”

These were just some of the comments to get us going. In classic staffroom style lots of things got a mention and some things were dwelt on longer than others; COVID, of course, then Trump and the storming of the Capitol building with Brexit thrown in for good measure; all things which were playing on people’s minds. All adding to a sense of general unease and “trepidation” for the weeks and months ahead.

Will it be more of the same? Are things going to get worse rather than better? Do we feel motivated? Is it going to be manageable? Are we hopeful? Do we feel positive? 51% optimistic?

Why do we come to the Coffee Break?

People come to the Coffee Break because they are looking for a professional space to make connections, especially now with more remote working and more isolation (even more acute freelancers). We hoped the conversation would leave us feeling supported and motivated heading into 2021.

We talked about the personal and the professional; our New Year’s Resolutions (or maybe better New Week’s or New Day’s or New Lesson Resolutions) including making more connections, being more involved with our own children’s schooling, running and about getting into not just going through the motions and approaching things differently.

Eco-warriors?

One area to make changes could/should be in our treatment of the environment. The Climate Crisis and our possible roles as ELT professionals got a good amount of discussion. The need to normalise the discussion within our classes was discussed; to not wait for the inevitable unit on the environment, to look for ways to engage with the topic in a “non-intrusive and non-eco-warrior” way, to move away from preaching towards asking questions.

ELT Footprint, ELT Sustainable, and Renewable English were mentioned; all are great sources for lesson ideas, courses, inspiration and much more! Hub members are heavily involved in all three. Well worth checking out.

The never-ending rollercoaster

There was general agreement that the rest of the academic year was unlikely to see much change to our situations. We thought that this term would probably be another rollercoaster ride with a little more optimism for the summer term but realistically people are looking at September before things might return to “normal”. The virus is mutating and the situation is unrelenting leaving us all – writers, trainers, teachers and students alike – with varying levels of motivation and tiredness.

Let’s try to make it lighter. Let’s go for mini-resolutions, mini-challenges on weekly, daily or lesson-by-lesson levels within the uncertainty and the associated difficulties with longer term planning. Let’s try to celebrate the little wins and then build up a bank of little successes. Suggestions and ideas started to flow. People talked about the danger of slipping into “just going through the motions” and the associated boredom and disillusionment with the job. We talked about the effect of peer-praise and self-praise. One positive idea was about choosing an area to focus on, play with and extend during our classes, possibly a fortnightly focus; it could be anything: communication, group dynamics, pronunciation and where we just look for opportunities to do little bits of something new. Journaling was suggested as a way to give ourselves perspective and cultivate kinder self-talk where we talk to ourselves as we might talk to a friend or a colleague rather than the habitual sharp criticism. Another idea was about the potential of the TEFL Development Hub creating a space for mutual support through small groups where we could add in a level of accountability for ourselves and other members. Watch this space for news on that!

Two more super-relevant and helpful resources were mentioned here…Views from the Whiteboard and Life Resourceful These are also run by Hub members, check them out when you can.

The sensitive teacher

The talk turned to teenagers and their particular motivation issues often illustrated through a lack of homework and patchy attendance amongst other things. We talked about empowerment and compassion, that the class can a safe space for students to talk about their experiences and to know that we, as their teachers, are there for them. We can add into our plans, perhaps at the beginning of the class, a time to share and the good, the bad and the ugly of their situations. Of course, they may not want to share, but we can open the door for them to do so. Small actions of this kind will, we hoped, build rapport and in turn motivation.

Almost inevitably we looked at the issue of L1 use in the classroom. Students, especially at lower levels, run out of vocabulary pretty quickly, and at this point we want them to feel able to share in any language. We touched on how to work sensitively with emergent language and to think about recycling that language in an appropriate, helpful and constructive way, not like in the following clip…

What’s next?

It was fabulous to see so many people at the Coffee Break… some familiar faces and some first-timers too. See you at the next Coffee Break, 11am (CET) on 21st January. And before then the next webinar on 14th January, at 11.00 (CET) is with Chris Roland where he’ll talk about “Teaching little ‘uns in socially distanced and hybrid classes”, it’s bound to be a cracker!

Adjectives, adverts and a fresh look at Project Based Learning

June 26, 2021December 17, 2020 by Teresa

Welcome to the TEFL Development Hub Coffee Break, this is not a webinar! It’s a space to meet, to share and to develop, it’s a bit like a staffroom vibe, sitting around between classes, round the photocopier… cup of tea in hand! Exclusively for Hub members.

It’s done through a Facebook room which can accommodate up to 50 people for unlimited time and is super easy to join. It does however have the drawbacks of no written chat (though as Lucy suggested during the first coffee break, we can comment on the ‘Room open’ thread on the mainpage) and no breakout rooms. It worked pretty well and of course, if you have suggestions about alternative ways of doing things, please do share them with Simon or T or just leave a comment on the Hub.

We started off by just asking how we are. A proper TEFLy start! “Bored”, “tired”, “grateful”, “excited”, “busy”, “webinared-out”, “proud”, “exhausted”… were some of the replies. We are all looking forward to a break.

Proud of the work we have done as teachers, schools and as the TEFL community when so many others have struggled. We should all be proud of our achievements this year as we’ve moved through the challenges. For some the shift from a paper-based teacher to an online teacher has been nothing more than miraculous.
Grateful for the upcoming holidays and not needing to plan anything, for having a job to do and to earn a living.
Bored of the restrictions.

We talked about our approaches to the last classes of the year…

the “party class” with our Very Young and Young Learners having a chance to sing, dance and play party games, albeit this year with appropriate social distance. There was again an interesting discussion about whether or not all activities need to have a language focus and possible parental objections to “wasting” time.
the need to connect with our students, to show our human side by sharing a bonding moment of fun. Now more than ever fun is important. A seasonal pandemic joke was shared:

Why couldn’t Mary and Joseph join the video-conference?
Because there wasn’t any Zoom in the Inn.

Word play like that can work for children too!

to recognize the huge efforts our students have made coming to class and continuing to work hard. We talked about personalizing the praise, “Jorge, thank you for always being happy!”
to acknowledge that this year things are not the same as usual, to share something of ourselves; photos of family far away… a bittersweet Christmas.
the holiday advert classes; several were mentioned. Supervalu, John Lewis and the World War I truce advert all received honourable mentions as did the All at C blog with really good, ready-to-go lessons. The “spikey hedgehog” can be a wonderful writing activity for teens and adults as they imagine what the hedgehogs are thinking.

Thoughts then turned to the coming year with people sharing a gamut of feelings from positive to fearful; positive about new possibilities and fearful of the sustainability of the current situation and that things could get worse again.

will we and our students be able to keep the enthusiasm going? Are the darker months of January and February going to be even tougher? Will there be subsequent waves? March 2020 was tough, of course, but it was spring

short-term goals to work towards which can maintain enthusiasm for us all! Learning a language is a long process, not like scoring a goal or winning a football match. Are people now into shorter-term thinking in general? We need to create a sense of achievement for ourselves and for our students.
Project based classes could become really helpful; creating a class/school magazine or maybe a new lockdown club. One wonderful example was shared by a teacher working in a pretty rural community. The students were complaining that there was nothing to do, they did small group projects to create a pandemic club, the local town hall took it on and are turning one of the clubs into a reality – it’s starting in January! Huge congratulations to all those involved. We can and do make a difference!
and what of New Year’s Resolutions? Is “resolution” the wrong word? Is it too big, too easy to fail, too unrealistic? Is it better to have short term objectives, to keep nudging things along? Maybe we should make “new day resolutions” or “new class resolutions”.

And with that our time together came to a close. The coffee break was over. Seasonal salutations and best wishes for a better new year were exchanged.

A few people stayed for the afterparty… we reflected on several of the discussion points and were particularly happy to note that several meaningful connections were made; some possible online work, an Oceania connection as well as all the connections made between us all.

Developing relationships with students and colleagues, near and far

September 21, 2021December 10, 2020 by Teresa

Introduction

Simon talked about how “there’s a whole new world defining and redefining itself as we go through this experience of the pandemic” and in this webinar we wanted to think about the way that our relationships are developing within the classroom during these times – whether we’re teaching behind a mask or in an online environment. Simon also mentioned the fact that this is a shared, global phenomenon and so we also wanted to think about ways we can connect with other ELT professionals outside the classroom – to share experiences, both positive and negative, of these challenging times. “Through sharing and connecting, we can feel less alone and we can feel more accompanied” – and this idea of connection if one of our main aims for the TEFL Development Hub.

Ideas for building relationships with and between learners

Emotional literacy

One of the issues a lot of us are facing now is with ‘reading the room’ – it became more complicated in the online environment, but as well now it can be tricky with everyone wearing masks.

Make use of emoticons (you can get lots of free ones from pixabay.com) as these can give us a wider range to work on. Paul said that one of his students has printed off her own set of emoticons and put them on sticks so she can show how she’s feeling, which is a lovely idea and also allows learners to personalise their own classroom materials.

Simon talked about creating a space to allow learners to share – or allowing them not to share, as well. Often with the communicative approach, we always want to ask follow-up questions, but actually allowing learners to say how they’re feeling, without needing to explain why. Lisa said she’s taught her students to say, “just because” which is a wonderfully genuine response to the question too.

Other ideas from the chat included using anonymous polls for learners to share how they’re doing (Paul), an emotional thermometer – having scales for different emotions (Borja) and getting students to play a song which sums up their mood of the day (Olivia).

For younger learners, you can create characters using fruit and veg – ideas stolen from Chris! – as this can allow learners to express their creativity. And Angie suggested using the Mr Men and Little Miss books as well.

When we’re teaching from behind a mask, it can be useful to help learners develop their emotional literacy with their eyes and body language. This is also helping learners to develop skills to use outside the classroom.

Fiona and Vicky mentioned using sign language or Makaton – another way that we can communicate with our learners non-verbally.

Learners’ responsibilities

Our younger learners love to feel involved in the class and have a job to do. Think about the jobs you can have in a socially-distanced classroom, such as changing who sits nearest the teacher each lesson or a handshake creator – someone who creates a little 4-move action to do during a brain break. This again allows the learners to bring their own ideas into the class and be responsible for creating something everyone will do during that lesson. Adam suggested Mask Police as well – you may have had a class sheriff in the past who checked people were on task or not speaking L1 unnecessarily, the job evolves too in these changing times!

Virtual journals

This could be an option for learners who want to share, but don’t feel comfortable doing so in front of the class. Set up an individual google document for each learner and ask each person a personalised question at the start of the class. It could start out as a part of your lesson routine and then see who’s interested in continuing – even if only one person wants to, it’s another opportunity to connect on a personal level. Please remember to check your school policy about communicating with learners on an individual basis in this way.

A rose, a thorn and a bud

Idea 1 – students write three things: something they’re happy about (rose), something they’re unhappy about (thorn) and something they’re looking forward to (bud). Their partner then guesses which is which – and this might be very easy to do, but it allows them to learn more about their classmates and develop conversations from it.

Idea 2: write as many things as you like (that you’re happy, unhappy or excited about) and your partner identifies which category each falls into. This gives the learners more choice as to what they share, rather than being forced to have one thing in each category.

Class connections

Have learners think of a way they connect with every other person in a class – but their connections can’t be things everyone has in common (e.g. we all speak English or we’re all at the same school). They can be very simple connections, such as sharing the first letter of their name or something about their hobbies, where they live…anything.

Carmen asked about getting feedback on activities like these and as it’s important to show we value the activities that we set our learners to do, the feedback on this task could be, “Tell me about one of your connections”, rather than forcing them to say everything.

Other bits and bobs

One question which came up was about the use of L1 – should we allow learners more space and time to use their own language to express how they’re feeling?

Also, we did a webinar before on Building Rapport – ideas for the start of term and activities to use throughout the year. This is now only available on the Hub in the Videos (Media) tab.

Tim suggested learners share where they are (if they want to) or a picture of a place which means something to them and make use of the virtual background.

Ideas for connecting with other ELT professionals

Padlet

This is a great place to save links to websites or leave documents. This is the one created by some of the Active Language teachers. You can set up the wall in different ways – for example, this one is organised in columns so you can store ideas within different categories.

Lisa said that they use Google Drive as a space to share and store ideas.

PD Winter Festival

This is something happening at Active Language this year, as a way for teachers to think about their personal professional development over the term. Each teacher will be sharing an idea – something they’ve done in their lessons this term, or something they’ve learnt about the profession. Although this is being organised through the school, you could easily get together with a few colleagues to create your own PD Festival.

Finding places and spaces to connect

Within the Hub, we’ll be holding a live event every Thursday but there are also other opportunities to connect with other teachers in different environments.

For example, on Twitter, there’s a #SIGTweetMeet every Tuesday – different SIGs take turns to ‘host’ the TweetMeet for three weeks (thanks Ceri for confirming details!) and whilst there are questions to focus the chat, there’s also lots of freedom to just pop along and say hello.

If you’re into teacher training, there’s a monthly #CELTAchat on Twitter, again with a focussed theme for the chat. A lot of what they talk about is also relevant to the Trinity CertTESOL (and to teacher training in general).

ELT events calendar

Are you missing the free pens from conferences this year? I know I am! But also really miss the buzz of attending a conference in-person. However, one of the benefits of the pandemic is that many organisations have moved their conferences online, meaning that we can attend many events that we wouldn’t have been able to go to before. That said, we also need to be wary of FOMO – we don’t need to attend everything that’s on offer!