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 a talk that I first did at the Macmillan Annual Conference at the Anglo on Saturday May 11th 2013. I then repeated it as a workshop at International House in Buenos Aires on Friday 31st May 2013 at our weekly interschool teacher development meeting.
They were two very different and very worthwhile experiences and they both showed different ways in which using the ‘Demand High’ meme (as Adrian and Jim suggest we call it) can be a very powerful reflection tool for teachers of all experiences in all contexts.
A little meme example for you – is this what A&J meme?
First of all, in Montevideo, Hitting the Heights was much more of a talk, since there were around 300 people present and we were in an auditorium at a conference, so the set up was very talk-oriented. Hence the use of the following slides, which you can access here: Hitting the Heights
But let me talk you through them a little, in case you’d like to join us on our reflection journey up the mountain, or would even like to give a similar workshop yourself.
I started by explaining where my mountain metaphor came from – my wife wanting to climb Aconcagua while I wanted to go to the IH Dos conference in London. Since I ended up not being able to go, I ended up enjoying the videos of the talks on the IH World website.
Jim’s ladder of teacher stages
First of all Jim Scrivener takes us through the reasons for Demand High and uses a ladder to explain why teachers can use Demand High as a way to continue developing their higher skill sets.
and then Adrian gives us some practical examples of putting Demand High into practice.
What I did in the talk was summarise these two talks and blend them together with another by Steve Brown, the slides for which he makes available on his blog for others to use – and so I did! Here are the aims for Steve’s session (click on the slide for a link to his blog) – he nicely splits them into Low Demand and High Demand. The aim of my talks (and this blog post) were very much to allow the audience to reflect on their teaching…
One main tenet of Demand High is the focus on three areas of teaching and the teacher – our attitude towards our students, where we focus our energy and whether we are continuing to improve our techniques.
The attitude shift they call for is key to the whole concept of Demand High – are we really pushing our students to do the best they can? Are we demanding enough of them? Or is our attitude more lax than that – ‘They’re doing enough’, ‘I doubt they can do much better’, ‘That’ll do’. Most of my audience agreed that we do fall into this trap too often and we do need to keep ourselves focused more on pushing our students (and also getting them to push themselves).
In order to do this, we also need to focus our energies on high demand teaching and this is another key point that Jim & Adrian ask us – are we actually running away from the real teaching that needs to be going on in our classrooms? Are we afraid to get our hands dirty? Learning a language is a messy, difficult job and we need to be putting in the detailed ‘grimy’ work to get it done. The Communicative Approach in particular has led us (allowed us) to facilitate the students communicating, doing things (mechanically?), but are we getting involved enough in teaching forms and giving constructive feedback that ensures they are really making progress and improving step by step?
And finally, in order to do this, are we using the best, most effective techniques to do so? Are we armed with ways of helping our learners learn? Are we equipping them with the best techniques for learning by themselves away from the classroom? Are we continually striving to explore new ways of doing and reflecting on the most effective ways of teaching in the different contexts we find ourselves? Are there enough ‘nudging interventions’ in our classes?
Most of us seem prepared to answer No! to most of these questions, which is why I find this session such an excellent reflective tool. It makes us ask the questions of ourselves, and hopefully as we now move into the detail, provides some possible answers too. Jim goes on to compare received contemporary ideas with their suggestions for Demand High teaching. In the workshop we tried to match these up ourselves, but here you have them in their full glory.
First of all consider the left hand column – do you agree with Jim that these are part of the status quo? Do they happen in your classroom?
In the talks, we had a mix of yes and nos, which shows that most of us are a little further up the mountain than Jim and Adrian give us credit for (or perhaps they felt the need to start below sea level in order to include everyone and not lose some less able / experienced climbers along the way). And when we compared them with the right hand column, there were lots of knowing nods and ‘yes that happens in my class’ and ‘yes that’s always my aim’, but it was good to see some ‘I’d like it to happen even more’ ‘I don;t always achieve this’ and ‘I hadn’t thought of that’ or ‘I’ve forgotten about that one recently’ in there as well. So wherever your starting point, be it base camp, halfway up the mountain or even below sea level, there’s definitely something in here for you and this task opens us up and prepares us for some more detailed reflection on our teaching. Which brings us back to Steve Brown…
Steve suggests some areas which we might already consider as Demand High teaching :
but then asks if they really are such good ideas after all. This is where things get rather controversial, since Steve takes a very ambitious view of Demand High teaching. In fact, he gave me some…
so I had to talk to the mountain to see where I stood on these matters. So in the slides you have the original wisdom, Steve’s Demand High turn around, and then my middle ground. One example here to show you how to interpret this section of the slides…
Steve suggests and we probably mostly agree that it’s received wisdom to plan your lesson. But Steve asks us to consider what the Demand High results of not doing this might be, listed in the above slide. I then take these to the wisdom of the mountain, and come up with the responses in the slide below. Sometimes I completely agree with Steve, sometimes I think he goes a little too far to elicit a reaction and sometimes I think he’s missed a point. As you work through the slides and compare the two views, you can make up your own mind, but the idea of the activity is to help you see where you stand on some fundamental concepts of classroom practice.
Plenty of theory to be getitng on with then. But what about putting it into practice? Jim and Adrian don’t suggest too many ways of actually Demanding High in the classroom. Adrian has a pronunciation suggestion (of course!) which is an excellent drilling technique I’d never come across before and it does work really well. It simply involves getting the studnets to hear your model of the language before they repeat it themselves, to hold on to their mind’s recording of your voice and repeat it as many times as they can before they lose it (normally after around five seconds) – try it out in class, it’s quite a powerful technique.
To finish up I suggest a few ideas of ways I’m going to try and Demand High in my own classes, which you can enjoy below…
Differentiation is an area I’ve not thought about too much since I tend to teach monolingual classes which are pretty well levelled, but I know it’s an area I should be considering more even within this context. I found a helpful self-reflection task on how differentiated your teaching is, which also gives some practical ideas about how to go about doing it. Are you more to the left or the right of the differentiation clines? As with all these ideas I could blog a separate post on them, so keeping it brief here.
Early finisher exercises are another area I’d like to widen my repartee in. I give one simple example here, but want to spend time and perhaps a blog post leading to a workshop on how to engage and push the fast finishers. I obviously need a lot more time to Demand High of myself…
And as a teacher trainer, I always like to encourage observation, since I consider it the most effective development tool. So here are a couple of Demand High peer observation tasks for you to try out when watching and being watched.
Hitting the heights observation
And finally, giving the learners more motivating, realistic/authentic and Demand High homework tasks is an area I feel I can improve in. Again I share just one simple idea here, but hopefully more will be on the way someday. Learners had to go and watch youtube videos and find examples of unreal past conditions and results to share with their classmates. Then they brought them into class and their friends had to guess where they were from. We ended up showing them in context on mobiles to check their predictions. The blank one is because some didn’t find any – but they had lots of intense listening practice anyway as they tried to find them…
It’s a very simple idea with very little teacher preparation, but really engaging and personalised for the students. One I’m going to use again and again, tweeking here and there of course. So we’ve reached the summit of the mountain and the view looks pretty spectacular. We’ve had some tough times on the journey and had to look inside ourselves to find the attitude, energy and techniques to get to the top, but with a little help along the way from Jim, Adrian and Steve we made it!
Now all that’s left is to share the tale of your journey with friends and family once you get back home. How are you Demanding High of yourself and your students? Which areas are you going to choose to work on? What Demand High techniques and activities are you adding to your teaching? Please do share with us here, we’d love to hear from you.
Congratulations on Demanding High, enjoy the view, and remember by Demanding High, you’ll Hit the Heights!
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?
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!
A Sporting Chance is a workshop I’m presenting on Sunday 25th March 2012 at the ABS conference ‘Challenge Your English’ – a conference for non-native teachers of English to boost the level of their own English.
ABS Challenge Your English
The workshop focuses on English idioms from the world of sports, starting with sailing, then baseball, cricket, cards and finally a free-for-all called guess the sport.
As they are introduced to the idioms, the teachers play sports themselves which can be used in the classroom.
Abstract:
Do you find yourself behind the eight ball when idioms come out of left field? Are you out of your depth when idiom-loving friends call the shots? Give yourself a sporting chance to cover all the bases as we dive headfirst into the world of sport-inspired idioms, exploring their meaning and background to give ourselves the inside track in the idiom race, allowing us to paddle our own idiom canoes and put a new vocabulary arrow in our language quivers.
Realising Reading - Macmillan Montevideo 2012
Realising Reading – Handout from Macmillan Montevideo 2012
Here are the slides from my talk ‘Realising Reading’ which I gave for the first time at the Macmillan Conference in Montevideo on February 29th 2012. The talk is about how we can keep reading real for our students at the same time as getting them to realise what they’re reading, thinking about it critically and noticing the language in the texts.
Look forward to hearing what you think about it. Enjoy!
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