Webinars

Teaching Tracks: using songs to explore themes and language

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Using songs to explore themes & language - with Chris Walklett (webinar)
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We had a wonderfully creative session this week with Chris Walklett, who joined us to talk about using songs in the classroom. Chris started off by saying how much he’s always loved music – so much so that he chose using songs in the ELT classroom for his MA dissertation topic. He went on to talk about the topic at IATEFL in 2014 and later worked together with Carol Samlal to create resources which looked at songs in greater depth. They started out working on ‘singles’ and then worked on an ‘album’ – which is about 200 pages worth of content to use ten songs. There is a second book on the way, looking at social issues, and also a top 30, with 5 songs at each level of the CEFR. Keep track of all Chris’ publications on his website Teaching Tracks.

Poor usage

Chris started out by identifying three potential problems with using songs in the classroom.

Firstly, it can be challenging to choose the right song for the classroom, with lots of learners clamouring for a trending song – but does that do what you want it to? 

Secondly, he highlighted that books often end up doing a lot of biographical work on the artist. He suggests that buying into celebrity culture isn’t the aim of using one of their songs: judge the art itself, rather than the artist.

Finally, he talked about the gap-fill trap, saying, “what takes place is little better than random ‘tippexing’ out of words – achieving what exactly?” 

His concern is that poor usage of songs discourages teachers and learners from using them, when there are so many good reasons to use them, such as their length, use of authentic grammar and lexis and their thematic content.

Golden Rules

Care and consideration: make sure you know the song thoroughly and respect the creative process that the song has gone through. Bear in mind that songs can take months to come about and treating them as a five-minute throwaway is a bit of a waste.

Check out the lyrics: there are lots of resources to find the lyrics to avoid misheard lyrics or Mondegreens – though these are a great resource for connected speech!

Relevance: think about whether you’re using the song for the linguistic or thematic content, or both.

Mood: you could work on how the song makes learners feel before even starting to look at the lyrics.

Video: there are plenty of songs with music videos, but consider whether this is a useful addition. In some cases, it might set the scene well; in others, it could be misleading or confusing.

Order and staging: think carefully about the different aspects: when will learners see the lyrics? Will you listen to the song in one go the first time? 

Linguistic possibilities: think about what stands out in the song and how you can use it.

Boundaries: think about how you want learners to access the song to avoid learners grabbing their phones, listening to the song and reading through hte lyrics before you’ve started.

Student-focused: keep this as the forefront when choosing and planning activities, as well as considering the level of challenge.

Exude confidence: learners are likely to remember these lessons if they’re done well – and if we move away from the formulaic approach which ELT has adopted with songs in the past.

Chris went on to share some practical ideas for working with songs and around the 26-minute mark, there’s a slide where he shares QR codes for the lyrics and the videos of the songs he talks about.

Money – Pink Floyd (27.00 – 37.00)

Ideas include a general discussion on currencies to activate learners’ schemata; finding texts related to the themes of the song (greed, capitalism, philanthropy); identifying the main message from each verse; watching the video and making note of things which are related to wealth; working on the second conditional for learners to think about what they would do if they won the lottery and leading on to moral dilemma discussions, such as “What would you do if something was incorrectly priced in a supermarket?”; looking at how we talk about money in different places, e.g. kidnappers ask for a ransom, charities ask for a donation; or thinking about looking at idiomatic language arouns money.

Space Oddity – David Bowie (37.00 – 45.00)

Chris suggested things like starting with a chat about the moon and what learners know about it; reading a text about the 1969 lunar landing; looking at David Bowie as an artist, given that he had such an eclectic and long-lasting career; watching astronaut Chris Hadfield’s alternative version; working on reported speech following the conversation between Ground Control and Major Tom; a closer analysis of the lyrics, such as what is meant by the line “tell my wife I love her very much”; or imagining being an astronaut lost in space with a discussion of what it would be useful to have with you.

We didn’t have time to work through the other songs – Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop and The A Team by Ed Sheeran – but Chris flicked through the slides so you can pause and see the ideas he has.

Chris rounded off the session by talking about how songs enable us to bring culture into the classroom, saying they are “the best way to educate and enlighten learners of all levels, abilities and backgrounds to the different perspectives of others and to see a rounded picture of the world – through the eyes of songwriters.”

He shared his new projects: 20/20s Vision which will use songs with a focus on social justice, personal and more controversial issues as these are the areas we should be focusing on.

Chris has a Facebook group, Creating uses for songs and song lyrics in EFL. Please fill in the entry questions if you’re joining the group. He’s also available for training and if you want to check out any of his other sessions, there are some on his YouTube channel.

Huge thanks again to Chris for such an engaging, ideas-filled session!

An Introduction to Transformative Pedagogy

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An Introduction to Transformative Pedagogy - with Elizabeth Coleman (webinar)
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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!

Mediation from theory to assessment

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Mediation from theory to assessment - with Riccardo Chiappini (webinar)
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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.

Huge thanks again to Riccardo for coming along to talk to us and share some practical ideas for how we can work on mediation in the classroom.

Using poetry in the classroom to promote creativity

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Using poetry in the classroom to promote creativity - with Claire Thom (webinar)
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It was really wonderful to be joined by Claire Thom, who is a very experienced ELT professional and author of Ever Forward. She’s from Scotland and currently works as a teacher in the south of Spain. Her book is a collection of fourteen haiku, with watercolour paintings by her dad, Colin Thom. All profits from the self-published book are going to the UK Guide Dogs association. Claire was also kind enough to share a handout with all the ideas shared in the session, including some ready-to-go worksheets.

She started the webinar with a little bit of background from Yasemin Kirkgöz, who defined creativity as ‘the ability to come up with new ideas that are surprising yet intelligible, and also valuable in some way.’ This led on to Claire saying that poetry is a personal activity and whilst we may try as much as possible to personalise coursebook and lesson content, working with poetry encourages them to view language, and the world, in a different way. She added as well that it’s easy to get bogged down, particularly in exam preparation classes, and creativity through poetry encourages a playfulness with language which it’s nice to return to. She later added that haiku can easily be graded to work with different levels.

What is a haiku?

Interestingly, the way we have adopted haiku in English is slightly different to the original Japanese: whilst we measure haiku in syllables, with a standard 5-7-5- pattern in the three-line poem, originally they were measured in sounds or ‘breaths’.

Claire highlighted how haiku often have a seasonal link and are about the natural world around us. She then went on to share a number of very practical ideas for working with haiku in the lessons. These are all outlined in the handout.

Watercolour by Colin Thom

It was also wonderful to hear about the positive experiences of using poetry in the classroom: Claire mentioned how it can transport learners to a completely different world, especially if they’re given time to brainstorm the location and what they might see, hear, smell, touch and taste there. One Hub member also mentioned how using a restrictive task, such as limiting the number of syllables, really encourages learners to think about the words they use. Claire says that once students are familiar with haiku, they can easily be used as a warmer or end-of-the-lesson activity, and suggested creating a prompt bank of words chosen by students as a starting point; alternatively, you could give them an image as a starting point.

When Claire talked about doing a chain haiku, another Hub member commented that ‘collaboration changes the direction and forces the writer to bring it all together somehow. Really inspiring!’ Claire also mentioned how proud her teenagers were of the haiku they produced – despite orginally regarding the task with some suspicion. She had some wonderful ideas for ways that students can share their work too: Haiku Corner, a Haiku Poetry Slam or even publishing a collection of their work – all wonderful ideas to acknowledge their creativity.

She chose the title Ever Forward for her own anthology of haiku as it reflects the strength and determination that animals show of always moving forward and highlighted how in our classes we’ve become much more aware of nature and the climate crisis. Claire says that most students are very appreciative of the natural world and are keen on taking steps to improve the current situation.

One Hub member asked about working with different levels: Claire talked about working with a C2 group of adults, as well as working with B1 teens. Some of the feedback from the students was the¡at it allowed them to forget about everything else and just focus on the creative process. A lot of the activities, particularly the gapfill, could easily be adapted to working with lower levels or younger learners – and the fact that they are such short pieces of text means they hopefully won’t be overwhelmed by creating a piece of poetry. There was also a suggestion – to make the haiku a bit more TEFL-y – of using the haiku to work on pronunciation, perhaps y saying words must have a particular sounds or should rhyme.

Stories to transform challenging behaviour

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Stories to transform challenging behaviour - with Romina Muse (webinar)
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It was such a pleasure to have Romina Muse join us in the Hub for the webinar this week. Romina is passionate about working with young learners and using stories to develop their emotional literacy. Romina started off by sharing two different images of challenging behaviour: on the one hand, an incident of bullying and on the other, a child who is very withdrawn. It was really interesting listening to Romina talk about how we deal with challenging situations and how we can use stories to manage and redirect their behaviour through the use of stories.

FLIP

This is an idea from Rachel Wagner, an early childhood mental health specialist. When a child demonstrates a challenging behaviour, we need to identify what the underlying FEELING is – it could be anger, boredom, frustration, and so on. First we should acknowledge that it’s OK to feel this way as we can often try to ignore challenging emotions. Then we can LIMIT the emotion by explaining why it’s not OK for the feeling to manifest itself through violence.

It’s OK to feel angry, but it’s not OK to pull someone’s hair.

The third stage is INQUIRY and encouraging our students to be curious about other ways they can express their feelings. We can then move onto the fourth stage and PROMPT – taking the creative possibilities the students have identified, we can help them redirect their feelings in a different way.

Before we looked at the stories Romina shared with us, she spoke about why stories are such a useful tool for the classroom: they have familiar characters and settings, there’s often a conflict to resolve and solutions are provided in the story to deal with these problems, encouraging them to replicate the solutions in their own lives. As Romina said:

The power in stories lies in the buttons they push in our own selves.

We then went on to look at some wonderful stories – four from Romina and also some great suggestions from the audience.

The Color Monster (Anna Llenas) encourages learners to think about their feelings and to think about how they manifest them. Romina shared some lovely ideas to work with the story, including having them pull different faces in a mirror or create a feelings booklet. There are more ideas from the 15-minute mark in the webinar. 

Next up was When Sophie Gets Angry (Molly Bang), which focuses on how students can deal with anger. An important point which Romina highlighted here was that anger can be a mask for other emotions, such as embarrassment, stress or helplessness. She also warned that when we are feeling angry, we aren’t able to listen to reason as our reptilian brain goes into a fight or flight mode. When we’re in this state, we aren’t able to move onto the inquiry or prompt stage – we need to give ourselves space to calm down.

Accompanying this story (from about the 30-minute mark) were lovely creative ideas such as an anger thermometer, creating a Calm Corner in the classroom and having them share in a storybook the strategies they have to calm down. We can also avoid learners feeling uncomfortable talking about their own anger by having them think about other reasons why Sophie might be angry.

The next story was The Huge Bag of Worries (Virginia Ironside) which can help children who are feeling stressed or anxious – emotions which are sometimes more difficult to deal with as they tend not to manifest themselves through aggressive behaviour. Thre are lots of great suggestions for working with this stry (around the 45-minute mark) including writing or drawing your worries and putting them into a balloon, then inflating the balloon and popping it (as long as they’re not scared of loud noises!). 

Romina also shared a great technique for dealing with anxiety, which involves focusing on the present.

Image credit: https://weheartit.com/articles/332231979-anxiety-grounding-techniques

The final story was The Knight and the Dragon (Tomie de Paola) which teaches children to deal with conflict. From around minute fifty-five in the webinar you can see Romina’s suggestions for working with this story, including a conflict escalator or having them use the structure of the story to recreate it with their own characters.

Here were some other story ideas:

Romina has a wonderful YouTube channel with lots of activity ideas for younger learners and read-alouds of other books which she’s used in her classes.

As Romina mentioned, we’re not just working with stories or English, but providing them with tools that they can use in life. As they become emotionally involved in the sotires, they are able to show perhaps hidden emotions and replicate the characters’ ways of dealing with those same emotions.

Claude Steiner who coined the phrase ‘emotional literacy‘ said that stories can be used to:

  • Respond to feelings and emotions
  • Recognise triggers
  • Repair damage
  • Release emotions safely
  • Redirect behaviour

You might also like to read about Vivian Paley who did a lot work on early childhood and storytelling and said:

Pretend is the child’s real and serious world, the stage upon which any identiity is possible and secret thoughts can be safely revealed.

An important point that Romina made at the end is that if we introduce different emotions to our students in these ‘pretend’ way through stories, they’ll be more equipped to deal with the emotions when they arise for real. She also shared some good tips for working with stories: ask students to bring a cushion so that they associate sitting on the cushion with storytime. You might also find that you can’t tell the story in one go as students may identify so strongly with the characters that they want to interrupt and share their personal experiences. She also suggests having learners do pre-reading tasks, such as drawing a similar situation to the one they’ll see in the story as anticipation can make them feel safer.

Huge thanks to Romina for such an engaging webinar – wonderful stories and beautiful ideas to bring emotional literacy into the classroom.

 

Reflective Skills: making theory (more) practical

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Reflective Skills: making theory (more) practical - with Zhenya Polosatova (webinar)
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We were really lucky to be joined by Zhenya Polosatova for this webinar as she’s passionate about the topic of reflective practice and teacher development. In fact, she even has a mantra on her blog: inspired teachers inspire learners.

This was the third time which Zhenya has presented about reflective practice recently and you can read more about all three sessions on her blog:

Zhenya started by asking some key questions about how we currently reflect and mentioned how reflective practice has affected her own work as a trainer, a teacher and a materials writer. Some participants mentioned blogging as well as recording their classes and reading the transcript as ways of reflecting on their practice. There was also a suggestion of thinking about one aspect of the lesson, such as TTT, which can help you to focus your reflection. Later in the session, someone mentioned the idea of giving each lesson a score and then working out your average for the day – this can help you to see more balance if one particularly bad lesson has knocked your confidence. Another suggestion was to add notes to your plan as the lesson progresses and one participant mentioned having specific sections on their plan for ‘what went well’ and ‘what I’d do differently’.

We chatted very briefly about how reflection is a big part of most pre-service qualifications, but that we often stop doing it so well when we start teaching full-time.

After sharing a wonderful anecdote about her experience trail running and ways she reflected afterwards, many other participants commented on how “‘failure’ moments are an opportunity to grow and learn if we take the time to reflect” and “mistakes are learning opportunities”.

Zhenya has kindly shared her slides from the presentation, so you can see the experiential learning cycles which she refers to. Below is one of the more popular and Zhenya also shared Gibbs’ reflective cycle, which encourages a reflective moment on our feelings as well as an analysis of what happened and how well it worked. On the CertTESOL course at Active Language, trainees do bullet point reflections immediately after the class and then have time to reflect more deeply later and we talked about how when you reflect can have an impact on what you see. Zhenya raised the point that expressing feelings in feedback can be a culturally sensitive issue and that as trainers we need space and time to help our teachers to develop their reflective skills.

Another reflective tool which Zhenya shared was Farrell’s framework, which is less of a cycle but more areas to consider when reflecting. He also suggested dialogic reflection – a critical friend – who can offer another viewpoint. As Zhenya mentiones, Farrell has shared lots of his resources through his website, Reflective Inquiry, so if you’re interested in learning more, check it out. There were some other great resources mentioned in the comments:

Zhenya is a huge fan of reflective practice groups, which is a way of not only sharing your reflections on your own teaching, but stealing ideas from your peers as they describe what happened in their lesson as part of the process. There was then a lovely group reflective practice process in the world of art, with the idea that people take on different roles in their assessment of a piece of art in the same way that different people can approach reflection on a lesson in different ways. 

There was another lovely comment in the chat: “cycles and systems are there to guide us when we are new to reflection. The more we practise reflection, the more we start finding our own different ways”. And Zhenya shared a fantastic variety of tools we can use to help us reflect (on the left).

Here are some more incredible resource which Zhenya shared at the end of the presentation:

So many things to think about and reflect on from the webinar. As always, we like to include some questions for you to think about:

  • How easy will it be to build reflective practice into a part of your schedule?
  • Which of the tools Zhenya proposes would you be most interested in trying?
  • Would you be interested in a reflective practice group facilitated by the Hub? Let us know!