Webinars – Page 14

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!

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!

Teaching little ‘uns in socially-distanced and hybrid classes