At #IHTOC9 on Friday 19th May 2017, I gave a thirty minute presentation called ‘The Key to EFL – Exploit the c**ts!’. The video of the talk and the talk slides are both available on the conference blog:
as well as right here:
Enjoy!
And it’d be great to hear what you think of the talk and how you exploit the c**ts in your context!
Saturday May 1th 2014 saw me presenting a spanking new talk at MAC2014 – the annual Macmillan conference in Montevideo, hosted by the Anglo institute. It’s the third time I’ve talked at the Macmillan Montevideo conference and it was great to catch up with old friends and make some new ones.
#2014mac
The talk has been a long time in the making since it was inspired by Jeremy Harmer’s talk at the 2010 International House DoS Conference – ‘Speak the speech, I pray thee’, which discussed improving students’ fluency by helping them to think and prepare inside their heads first. It was an inspiring talk, but a little short on practical ways to get the students actually doing this in the classroom. So I set about trying to motivate and inspire my students to think much more in the class, alongside their development of the other four skills. It’s taken me a few years to put what I’ve done into a talk, since it’s very much a case of small steps and slowly, slowly catchy thinking student. As the Macmillan conference was focused on developing Life Skills, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to make myself write the talk and bring together my ideas on the topic.
#2014MAC Life Skills tree
The results are here, in the form of the slides for the talk in PDF:
and a video of them too:
as well as the video I used at the end as a way of having the students reflect on the ideas we discussed during the talk and think about how they could create more thinking space, structure and sensitivity into a lesson using this video. Unfortunately during the talk the sound was dodgy, so the great lyrics couldn’t be heard beyond the front row (and apologies to the audience that I had to resort to singing some of them myself!
I also hope to put a lesson together myself using this text as a launching ad, so look out for that here too!
Next up is the example text-based guided discovery lesson I used. You can read more about Guided Discovery and this lesson here if you’re interested.
And then here are some lesson ideas to use at the beginning of your efforts to inspire your students to think in English:
A reading based on a text about why to try and think in English when learning the language, with a worksheet that has built in space and structure for thinking.
Encourage your students to do some thinking for homework and then discuss what they’ve done in class – the flipped classroom turns your students flipping (if they talk to themselves 🙂 ).
Anecdote feedback sheet An example of how the students can reflect on each others’ work and tech each other a little more about anecdoting.
In full flow at #2014MAC
This is the second of a series of blogposts focusing on some of the best songs of the last fifty years and looking at how we can use them in the classroom and how they can help us as teachers to remember how we can survive in the classroom and reflect on our practice.
You can read the introduction to this series here.
One of my fave songs of the sixties (just as International House Teacher Training was getting in to the swing of things) was ‘It’s My Party’ by Leslie Gore.
We have already looked at how we can use this song in the classroom, so now let’s have a look at what the song might say to us as teachers and how it inspires us to reflect on our teaching.
As the slides to the talk outline
(Surviving Through Song – Words of wisdom for EFL teachers)
this song helps us to remember that:
It’s not our party! and We shouldn’t cry in class!
What this means to me in reality is:
•Put the students first, don’t talk about or plan ‘your’ lesson, plan theirs!
If you have a problem class or student for example, you might find it easier to deal with them if you have them in the forefront of your thoughts when you are planning ‘their’ lessons. This simple change in attitude / approach to planning, can help you to focus on what they need rather than what you (or your course book, perhaps?) want to do. Which brings us onto:
•Do what the students want to do and need to do
It’s their party, so always have their wants and needs in mind when you plan your lessons and as you move through the class, don;t set the agenda yourself or be led by your institute or an anonymous course book writer who’s never met your students, if it’s going to be to their detriment.
•Listen carefully to what your students are saying
Make sure you respond to them as human beings first and language learners later. Make sure you listen to how you can improve the language their using – and also the language they’re not using – are they avoiding using any more natural or better ways of saying something and so need to focus on it?
•Always be in a good mood
Your job is to also be positive and to ensure the students are provided with entertaining and challenging classes that allow them to learn and motivate them to do so too. Don’t bring in any downsides to your life (be it an argument with a colleague just before you go to class or your grumbling about your lack of a pay increase) to the classroom. The students want and deserve a happy teacher in a good mood. If anyone cries in the classroom it should be the students’ tears of joy.
The third of these four points inspires the observation task that goes with this song – you can either use this to self-reflect on your own lessons or use to observe a colleague during the peer observation process. We use this task each month on our CELTA courses at IH in Buenos Aires.
The Sixties – For Observation IHTOC50 NM TO Errors & Correction
I hope you enjoy these ideas and I’d love to hear yours – how does It’s My Party inspire you as a teacher?
How helpful do you find the observation task? Do you have any similar or better to share?
This is the first of a series of blogposts focusing on some of the best songs of the last fifty years and looking at how we can use them in the classroom and how they can help us as teachers to remember how we can survive in the classroom and reflect on our practice.
You can read the introduction to this series here.
One of my fave songs of the sixties (just as International House Teacher Training was getting in to the swing of things) was ‘It’s My Party’ by Leslie Gore.
First of all, let’s have a look at how we can use this song with students.
It’s My Party by Lesley Gore
I suggest a straightforward Text-Based Guided Discovery lesson in order to compare and contrast real and unreal conditionals, which both come up in the chorus. This means you can use the song as a straightforward listening lesson and then come back and do the language lesson another time (or not at all) if you want to.
So the lesson starts with a lead-in about parties you can find some suggested speaking tasks here in the first handout:
IHTOC50 NM HO Lesley Gore – It’s My Party Handout 1
Then we have a gist listening about why the singer is crying and then more detailed listening about the facts of the party and the situation the singer finds herself in. You could just follow this up with a speaking task about when people cry, the last time they cried or perhaps write a letter from the singer to Johnny breaking up with him or form Johnny to the singer asking for forgiveness. However, both of these writing tasks might also include conditions and results, so why not have a look at the language of the song first?
IHTOC50 NM HO Lesley Gore – It’s My Party Handout 2
Our guided discovery focuses on the meaning of the two structures in the chorus which are made up of conditions and results:
‘I’ll cry if I want to’
and
‘You would cry too if it happened to you’.
What I really like about this song is the context gives us a clear difference between real conditions and results in the present and unreal conditions and results in the present.
The singer is clearly singing about now (rather than the past) when she imposes her condition ‘if I want to’ and her result is also clearly
It’s My Party by Lesley Gore
in the present ‘I’ll cry’. The context also makes it crystal clear that it is very likely that the singer is in the crying mood and tears are on the way.
Which contrasts really nicely with the second condition she puts when she addresses her listener ‘…if it happened to you’. This is clearly again based in the now but this time is an unreal (imaginary or hypothetical) event. And once more, the same clarity goes for the result of this condition and the fact that it is unlikely to happen.
All of this clarity can be used to let the students discover for themselves the different forms used to express the conditions and results by asking them the questions in the guided discovery handout. There’s no overt pronunciation discovery here though, so don’t forget to drill the structures and other similar ones before you feedback on the form-focused questions (which begin with In real present conditions we use…). And then of course it’s time to practice!
IHTOC50 NM HO Lesley Gore – It’s My Party Handout 3
These two practice activities are fun, challenging and involve lots of personalisation. They also challenge the students to use the correct conditions and the correct results in the correct contexts. The learners always have a choice between real and unreal and that’s where the success of a practice activity and its focus on meaning and use as well as form really lies. I particularly like the freer practice since it’s simply a little different to what students are used to and at the same time clearly shows then how and when they might use conditions and results in their own lives. It also isn;t so free that they can avoid the structures all together. Just beware that the students might need lots of examples to understand how to arrive at conditions they are under (hence my multiple examples!).
I really hope your students enjoy the song, the guided discovery and the practice activities. If you do use the song with your classes, please do let us know how it went down and whether you added anything or your students had any trouble with anything. And if you have any questions about how I’ve presented the language and created the guided discovery do let me know and I’ll get straight back to you.
Next time out we’ll look at the message Lesley has for us as teachers and how we can look at our teaching through the message of the song. See you there!
Last Wednesday evening I was standing in for my Director, who has a Post-Proficiency literature class once a week here at IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training.
He asked me to do so last Thursday and low and behold on Friday morning I was moderating Ratna Ragunathan from IH Malaysia’s Live Online Workshop ‘Weaving the magic of literature circles’ and I quickly found my standby lesson staring me in the face.
The idea of literature circles is that each learner takes a different angle towards the book / story they are reading and leads a discussion of that angle when the circle meets in class.
The different roles:
The story we read:
The Story of An Hour – Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Since I didn’t know the learners it was difficult for me to assign them roles I thought they would get into, so I asked who would like to be the Illustrators and then gave out the other roles at random. In the end there were eight students, so I ended up giving out the first four roles to pairs, who then helped each other prepare the role in relation to the story and then the class split up into two circles to discuss the story.
To be honest I was expecting more discussion to come out of the roles, I felt students at this level (post-proficiency) should have been able to mine the text for more ideas and have more interesting responses to it. Perhaps a combination of things played against my expectations for the activity being fulfilled:
Actually, by the time they had got through the four roles about an hour of the lesson had passed, so the circles had taken a good 30minutes, which is actually an excellent amount of continuous speaking in a normal kind of class – it just didn’t seem that fluent and engaging as they were doing it.
Then I gave out the last two roles and each circle discussed one role in preparation fro swapping over and, in pairs, leading the discussion of their new role with a new pair of partners. This lead to more good conversation, and as before I had trouble finding anything to give them constructive feedback on language-wise, so I didn’t.
And then finally I gave each of them a part of Kate Chopin’s biography and they had to discuss the story in light of her life, thus sharing with each other more details about the author and the time she lived in. It would have been good to have more time for this stage of the lesson, since it ended up being the most interesting discussion for them.
So, all in all, a successful first attempt at using literature classes and I will definitely go back and use them again, although perhaps with more concrete texts, particularly at lower levels.
At #IHTOC50 (International House Teachers Online Conference) on Friday May 25th, up to 500 IH teachers from around the world came together to share their experience, knowledge and love of teaching, as well as to celebrate fifty years of teacher training at International House.
I was lucky enough to be heavily involved in organising the whole conference, in my role as Academic Coordinator for Resources and DoS Support, but I also gave one of the plenary sessions on the day.
I then gave a slightly different face to face version of the session at the Anglo conference in Montevideo on Sunday 19th August, with the kind support of Macmillan Uruguay. This session included the observation tasks you’ll find below, but I left out Ask by The Smiths as the song of The Eighties and left that up to Just Like Heaven by The Cure.
Surviving Through Song – Words of wisdom for EFL teachers
The idea behind my session was to give some sound advice to Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) about how to survive in their early years of teaching, based on my experience as an NQT myself back in Prague in the late nineties, and then as a senior teacher and DoS helping new teachers settle into their new careers, and most recently as a CELTA trainer sending new teachers off out into the wide world of ELT, and also as a DELTA trainer, welcoming not-so-new teachers back into the fold for further teacher development.
Since we were celebrating 50 years of International House teacher training (the first teacher training course took place at IH London in June 1962 and would later develop into what we today know and love as the CELTA), I thought it would be fun to look back over the best music of the last fifty years to find some inspiration. Then it occurred to me that using song was a great way of ingratiating yourself with your students in your early years of teaching, so why not pass on a few ideas about how to use my chosen songs in the classroom at the same time?
And then during the planning stage and with some great input from people (mainly my former IHCAM and DELTA trainees) commenting on my previous blog post ‘Turning CELTees into successful NQTs’, I realised teachers may also appreciate some help with reflecting on their own teaching, both through self-observation and peer / DoS observation.
So I ended up with a song from each decade of the last fifty years and one for luck. And for each of these fab songs, I had advice for new (and not so new!) teachers, a lesson for using the song as listening practice and as a springboard for speaking or language activities, and also an observation task that can be used to help teachers improve in the area inspired by the songs.
To go through each of them here would make for one incredibly long blog post, so instead I’m going to try and post about one song/decade/idea on a regular basis over the coming weeks. And as I do so I’ll add links to each of the posts here below so you have an index to all of them in one place.
The Sixties – For Observation IHTOC50 NM TO Errors & Correction
The Seventies – For Students
The Seventies – For Teachers
The Seventies – For Observation IHTOC50 NM TO Critical Moments
The Eighties – For Students
The Eighties – For Teachers
The Eighties – For Observation IHTOC50 NM TO On The Podium
The Nineties – For Students
The Nineties – For Teachers
The Nineties – For Observation IHTOC50 NM TO Successful Stages
The Noughties – For Students
The Noughties – For Teachers
The Noughties – For Observation IHTOC50 NM TO Going Round In Circles
The session seemed to go down very well and people said they found all three aspects of it useful, so I hope you find something useful in there too. If you do, please let us know with a comment.
And then if you have other songs you’d like me to dish out the same treatment on, do let me know about them too! Enjoy!
With the second IH Teachers Online Conference approaching rapidly (Friday May 25th), as well as trying to arrange all the sessions and get the speakers up to speed, I’ve been mulling over what to talk about myself on the day. Since we’re celebrating 50 years of teacher training around the IH World (the first four-week course was held in June 1962) and as I’m an almost full-time CELTA trainer, I think what I’d like to discuss is how CELTA trainees can transition from the intensity of the course to a full-time teaching position, maintaining all the good habits they’ve formed on the course, while continuing to develop into more rounded teachers.
Which is where you come in! Thinking back to your early days as an NQT (Newyl-Qualified Teacher), what helped you most to get to grips with a full timetable, a wider variety of coursebooks, completely different types of students, the need to inspire and motivate your learners, not to mention the paperwork this all entails? And what would you change looking back over your first years of teaching. What did you need that you didn’t have? What would you like to take back and do over again?
I’d love to hear from you about your experiences and also what advice you’d give to today’s NQTs coming off CELTA courses and starting off in the wide world of ELT. And as a little incentive, all contributors will receive an invite to the session on May 25th, so get commenting!
A Muse Amuses 
The Game’s Up!
7 12 2012The Game’s Up! was my plenary session on Saturday morning at IHTOC3. The aim of the session is to review the use of games in the classroom over the last 50 years or so and discuss whether games are still relevant in the language learning classroom today.
Along the way we played a few games from the past and the present and looked forward to the future of games as well (with a little help from my private student, Sergio).
On the link you will find a recording of the session, the session slides and all of the handouts of the games used in the session – enjoy!
The next step is to create a handout for teachers to use while watching the video to make watching it a more hands-on exercise – watch this space.
What are your favourite games to play with your students? Do please share them with us. Do you stick to old faves or are you at the forefront of gaming technology use with your students. As always, I’d love to hear from you, both about the session and your ideas too. Game on!
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Tags: #IHTOC3, 2012, activities, comment, CPD, ELT, Football, games, handout, IH, International House, Neil McMahon, Share, slides, Students, video, workshop
Categories : Lending Lessons, Reworking Workshops