Hub digest – 14th January, 2022

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It’s been a while since the last Hub digest as we took a bit of a break over the festive season. However, there was a calendar of ELT content to keep everyone busy, as well as our Wednesday questions around thunk questions, laughter, ELT goals for 2022 and ELT highlights of 2021.

Then we kicked off the year with a fabulous webinar on graphic facilitation with Emily Bryson and chatted about bringing nature into the classroom in this week’s Wednesday Question. There have also been tips for using Wordwall in the classroom and a thought-provoking chat hosted by Simon Pearlman on whether our classroom can ever really be inclusive.

Coming up next week, Nergiz Kern will be joining us for a conversation about the metaverse and virtual reality language learning…can’t wait!

Graphic Facilitation

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Graphic facilitation in ELT - with Emily Bryson (webinar)
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Emily Bryson joined us to share how graphic facilitation – using simple visuals with our learners – can really help with communication in the classroom and beyond. Emily uses simple graphics in a huge variety of ways: doing social media posts, lesson planning, making Christmas or birthday cards, getting students to reflect – there are lots of ideas on her blog for how to include more graphics.

After a quick introduction (using visuals, of course!), Emily shared her ideas as to why drawing is such a handy skill for the classroom:

  • it aids memory
  • it’s great for facilitating peer feedback and checking understanding
  • it’s supportive and stimulating
  • it uses your whole brain
  • it’s fun 😁

As Emily mentioned, it’s particularly useful for students who are perhaps illiterate in their own language or who are learning the Roman script alongside learning English. It’s also great for helping develop fine motor skills and building your students’ visual vocabulary. You can start with very simple, basic icons and then build on them to develop a visual dictionary.

Feel the fear and draw anyway

There are a lot of visual templates available online as well as the Noun Project which has a huge bank of simple icons. The quality of the drawing is less important than the communication of the idea, so Emily says you shouldn’t worry about creating a perfect visual representation of something. Emily shared a couple of activities to highlight how much more visually appealing notes and the whiteboard can be incorporating drawings into them.

In terms of drawing during the lesson, Emily mentioned using a visualiser, an app called CamScanner or using a whiteboard or flipchart – the benefit of which is that you can reuse some pages, such as your classroom rules.

Then we went on to try out some activities. This one on the right is a simple relfection activity that students can use to think about different things that happened to them in the previous year. Alternatively, you could change the date on the signpost and use it as a looking forward task for students to think about what they hope to achieve this year. On Zoom, students could annotate the image or you could share it on Jamboard and have them add sticky notes for each point. Emily also suggested giving them more choice: allowing them to choose which areas they would like to reflect on or giving them the topics and having them design their own icons.

Another template she shared was for students to think about goals for the year and then their bigger dreams and ambitions. Again, very simple with a bullseye (circles) and then arrows or stars. She also showed a stepping stones template to think about one goal and what you need to do to get there.

We did some drawing then, with Emily highlighting how all drawings are made up of simple lines and squiggles. She noted that the alphabet is made up of lines and squiggles, so if you can write the alphabet, you can draw 😁 And as she says, when you do something for the first time, it’s unlikely to be amazing, but with a little bit of practice, your icons will become much easier and quicker to draw. We looked at drawing a couple of animals and then thought about some classroom icons, such as a lightbulb, reflection, read, listen, write and so on.

Emily is running a six-week course to help teachers and other ELT professionals to develop their graphic facilitation skills and it’s filled with live sessions, video tutorials, tutor support and lots of practical ideas for the classroom. The next course is starting Monday 17th January, but check out future course dates on Emily’s blog too.

You can also develop your drawing skills and get ideas from peers with #drawingELT on social media – Emily posts a theme every fortnight for people to share their ideas.

A wonderfully creative and inspiring session to kick off the year. Thanks Emily!

Can our classes ever really be inclusive?

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Can our classrooms ever really be inclusive? - with Simon Pearlman (webinar)
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Simon Pearlman, co-founder of the Hub, joined us this morning to lead a discussion on the topic of inclusivity in the classroom. He started by highlighting five areas the conversation might look at:

  • the issue of inclusivity in general
  • the conversations we can have and must continue to have: where to have them, how to have them and how to keep the topic on people’s radars
  • the classroom and how we can help everyone feel included and represented
  • implementing change on a broader level, for example on teaching training courses and sharing good practice between ourselves
  • on levels beyond the classroom – with schools, exams, publishers 

Bhavna kicked off the conversation by mentioning a conversation she had a few years ago about the fact that she always referred to teachers as ‘she’ and how that made her more aware of the language she uses. This was a topic which Bhavna talked about later as well with words like master bedroom and mentioned we can introduce our students to a wider range of language everyday (check out for example nibling and pibling as some other gender-neutral family terms). Gender is an interesting topic within ELT and within education in general and this led on to Simon asking what other things we might have on out radar. Catherine mentioned fixed expressions which may have been a staple of the English language for many years but the original meaning of which may have links to slavery, gender stereotypes or other things. Lisa went on to talk about the importance of raising our own awareness in order to deal with these issues and mentioned a similar comment to Bhavna’s: she noticed that she assumes the author of any text in a coursebook is male and uses male pronouns as a default, even though the text could just have likely been written by a woman. 

Simon mentioned a book worth reading What White People Can Do Next as a way of recognising, acknowledging and moving on from some of our in-built prejudices. The word feminism also came up and Bhavna raised an interesting point that this can sometimes be seen as an attack on men, when rather humanism would be a better term to use. 

Is the classroom the place for these conversations to happen with students and trainee teachers?

Some teachers are becoming somewhat aware of these topic but we might assume they will learn this on their own and Bhavna highlighted teachers need more support. Teachers need to be trained and taught how to foster inclusivity in their own classes. She went on to suggest that working with the students, inclusivity should be integrated, but in training it should be more explicit and include stand-alone sessions on incorporating inclusivity into their own lessons. Catherine said she felt there could be more done on pre-service qualifications as although she is now more aware of these topics, it hasn’t been an explicit focus on recent courses she’s worked on. However, she’s noticed that when she makes conscientious changes – such as changing an image from a coursebook to something more inclusive – it encourages the trainee teachers to do the same. If you’re looking for royalty-free photos to include, Francesca shared this handy list in the chat. Another suggestion to raise awareness was to include a box on lesson plan proformas to focus on inclusivity.

Simon went on to talk about recent experiences of talking to the mainstream schools he works in, which tend to be religious (Catholic). He said they’d had positive responses from the schools about introducing more diverse family models into the materials, both around the idea of divorce, single-parent families and families with single-sex parents. He said that it can sometimes be easy to assume certain people will react in a certain way to some topics, when in fact they were equally interested in reflecting the reality of their students in the materials they use. Lisa talked a little later about the importance of understanding how to have conversations with people who may feel their opinions are being questioned and the importance of not negating another person’s experiences or beliefs.

Who we are thinking of when we talk about inclusivity in education?

This was an interesting question in the chat from Dan. We had touched on some topics (gender, sexuality, face setups) and he suggested another couple: race and disability. T mentioned including a range of narratives in materials, rather than portraying English as a language spoken only by Brits and Americans we should be incorporating stories from other countries and cultures. Claire had a similar case with some materials she was working on for Scandinavia and had been sent pictures of tall, blonde-haired and blue-eyed people. Bhavna mentioned age as an area of inclusion as well.

Simon talked as well about some other aspects of inclusion within the classroom: the students who are quicker or slower at writing need to feel included; students who enjoy pairwork or prefer to work alone; even the height of our students – if we’re doing a boardrush or similar activity, can all the students write on the board comfortably? A couple of alternatives to slow learners were mentioned: late achievers or methodical learners.

Claire mentioned how inclusivity is a form of differentiation and also about the importance of respect – you’re respecting people’s situations, choices and differences. Simon highlighted how this leads onto a bit of a conundrum: if we respect everybody, where is the line when certain beliefs become unacceptable in the classroom? Lisa talked about playing devil’s advocate in some conversations as a way of opening students’ eyes to other people’s points of view.

Claire said that she has sometimes met some resistance with her students (older, business English students who all tend to come from a similar background) when trying to introduce more diverse opinions into the lesson as they tend to have quite fixed mindsets. Simon highlighted that often during a conversation, it can be difficult for people to have their opinions changed as they don’t want to back down from their standpoint, but that they may go away and reflect on the topic. Lisa said as well that sometimes human responses come from a place of fear – whether a fear of change, or losing a position of privilege.

As Bhavna said, it won’t happen overnight, but is rather a journey on which we will all make mistakes. It’s important for us to be aware of what we’re doing right and what we can still do better. It’s also all an evolution and she said that just as some of the language we used ten years ago isn’t seen as acceptable today, similarly there may well be commonly used phrases which in ten years’ time are unacceptable.

We chatted a little bit about generational changes too, with Claire mentioning how the older generation in her Business English classes were far more reluctant to use a more inclusive (non-religious) out-of-office message than the younger employees. Bhavna talked about reactions in India to recent plans to introduce gender-neutral unifroms in some schools and Lisa talked about how TV programmes have changed a lot and there is a far more diverse range of characters than when she was growing up. This led onto some talk around normalising (or usualising which s sometimes seen as a more appropriate term as what is normal?) diversity, rather than making the diversity an issue. Similarly, the idea of incorporating diversity into our lessons rather than focussing on inclusion as something which needs an explicit focus.

Simon rounded up talking about the challenges of differentiation in the classroom: having an awareness of difference and looking for ways to move forward with those differences. It can be realy tough to manage all the individuals in the class at the same time as trying to get through the material, keeping everyone on track, dealing with classroom management and so on. Claire highlighted the importance of learner choice (check out her webinar on the topic here) and how it can allow for a lot of differentiation to happen in the classroom.

Catherine said that at a very basic level, we want people to be comfortable and there may be times when people are on the periphery but then next lesson we might be able to involve them in different ways. Bhavna mentioned as well that at times we do things with the most innocent of intentions and that’s where training can help raise teachers’ awareness of how their actions might make people feel uncomfortable in the lesson. Lisa added that we can do a lot as teachers to demonstrate different strategies to deal with people which our students will then hopefully mimic.

We had a final quick chat around the challenges of coursebooks as Dan wrote in the chat that he had sometimes been asked by publishers not to focus on ‘ugly’ topics such as inequality, unemployment and poverty. T mentioned that it can be challenging as an author to know where your materials will end up and the sort of support the teachers using them will have, whether they’ll be able to deal effectively with any questions which come up and what might trigger students.

Awareness, action and power were Simon's three key words to end the session.

Huge thanks to Simon for leading the conversation and for everyone who joined in.

Hub digest – 10th December, 2021

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On the countdown to the end of term here in Spain, but we’ve stll been busy in the Hub with a webinar sharing some revision activities, a lesson plan on a popular Christmas song and a Wednesday Question about your go-to festive lesson ideas. Last week’s Wednesday Question about what you call the people you work with got a lot of interesting responses as well.

There were also questions around how flexible we can and should be in adpating the in-class experience to different learners’ needs and a request for ideas to help B2 learners who are hesitant in speaking.

Coming up next week, we’ll be hosting an open webinar on inclusivity with Simon Pearlman. See you there!

Revision Games

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Revision Games - with Teresa Bestwick (webinar)
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Here are some easy-to-adapt activities for your classroom which can be used at any time of the year.

The Bomb Game

A fantastic game I picked up from a colleague, Matt Walker, many moons ago which is easy to play online and in the in-person classroom. Here’s a link to a blogpost about how to play if you want to make a set of cards. One of the benefits of playing a digital version is that you can have the questions written on the board – this is particularly useful if you want to use it for word transformation or gapfill activities where it would be better for learners to be able to read the sentence. As this is a team game, one other thing I mentioned in the webinar is about how to confer, as you don’t want to be sending learners into breakout rooms for each question if you’re playing on a video conferencing platform. A workaround could be to set up a Google doc for each team; in this way, they can chat to their group easily on a backchannel, as most videoconference chat will only allow you to message an individual or the whole class, not just a selected team within the group.

4 in a row

Another activity which can be adapted for just about anything is 4 in a row. It’s good to have three teams for this as it means learners have to have a bit of a strategy and there’s still a chance one team will win (having four teams makes it much easier to block other colours which takes away some of the fun of playing as it becomes obvious more quickly that nobody will actually win). In the example you can see in the link, I used it for a B2 level class practising word formation. However, I think it would be better for the learners to have more ‘authentic’ practice and have a sentence with the word in brackets but no clue as to what type of word fits the gap.

For young learners, you could have a grid of flashcards / images and have students make a sentence about the image to win that square. Alternatively, you could fill the grid with questions and students have to give a full answer to win the square. As I say, very versatile!

8 Way Thinking

Next up is an idea stolen from Anne Robinson who has a fabulous blog with lots of ideas covering different ages and skills. This is less of a revision activity, but I wanted to include it as I know sometimes our students who are preparing for exams with picture descriptions can get a bit bored of just describing what they can see and this activity gets them being a bit creative, using their critical thinking skills and practises question formation. 

The idea is that students write three questions for each of the eight ways of thinking about the picture. They could write one question for each way and then compare in groups of three; or they could write three questions for two ways and compare in groups of four – lots of ways to practise writing questions!

Devil’s Advocate

Another idea I’ve pinched is Jim Fuller’s Devil’s Advocate, which is an easy filler to revise the typical functional language of discussions learners are often expected to demonstarte in exams: asking for and giving an opinion, agreeing and disagreeing, interrupting, rephrasing, summarising and so on. 

This is another activity that gets students using their critical thinking skills as they may have to argue a point that they personally disagree with. 

Some topics which could be used for discussion include:

  • Cats are better than dogs.
  • Netflix is better than HBO Max.
  • TikTok is better than Instagram.

Also, if you haven’t checked out Jim’s Sponge Chats, I highly recommend giving them a watch and his blog is also full of really interesting posts about teaching and training.

Retrieval Grids

Another prolific blogger and all-round awesome ELT professional is Pete Clements and I nabbed this next idea from one of his recent blogposts (and he in turn got the idea when reviewing a book on his blog).

For this activity, you’ll need to draw a grid and give students two dice (or use an online dice spinner, thanks to Stephanie for posting a link to this one during the webinar). Students roll the two dice twice to get the coordinates of two words, which they then have to combine in a sentence. 

Again, easily adaptable for all sorts of different vocabulary. For example, with younger learners you could fill the grid with animals, body parts and actions or with furniture, parts of the house and actions.

Jeopardy

This is a great website where you can easily create game boards with different topics and questions worth different amounts of points. You could get students to write their own questions about different topics, use it to review phrasal verbs, word formation activities – anything goes!

Dice Games

On my blog, there are a number of dice games to download to review everyday personal information questions. 

Battleships

There’s also a post about vocabulary battleships, which is a fun game to review emergent language and could also be used for topic vocabulary.

Last thoughts…

A couple of fun sites which I wanted to mention as well: autodraw is really handy for adding simple clipart to your digital worksheets and presentations if you’re not particularly artistic. And when I was trying to remember the autodraw site, I came across quickdraw which is a really fun pictionary game you play against AI – one to recommend for your learners to try outside the classroom. And, on the topic of fun, I mentioned Sarah Priestley’s Innovate plenary from a few years ago, which I think is always worth re-reading.

Hub digest – 26th November, 2021

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Happy Friday all! Starting off with an announcement about a small change to the Hub: we won’t be running events on Tuesday mornings in December as we haven’t had any takers to the last couple of events! However, there’s still lots going on in the Hub and we’ve had a couple of interesting chats over hte past couple of weeks with Wednesday Questions on device use during lessons and project-based learning. There was also an interesting post from one of our members about machine learning and how that might affect the future of ELT.

We also had a demo of a lesson planning and management resource platform in last week’s webinar – you can read the notes and check out the recording here. In next week’s webinar, I’ll be sharing some ideas for review activities.