Tag Archives: Learning and teaching

Lessons from Lockdown⤴

from @ My Languages

Lockdown is continuing to be very hectic and intense for teachers. I have asked my online teacher network about what lockdown has meant for them and this is what I was told…

Lockdown has highlighted the importance of students’ intrinsic motivation and home support and the large impact they have on students’ achievements. It has also shown that teaching needs to facilitate independence. For instance, some of the quietest students have been seen to produce amazing work that they would never have produced in class for fear of drawing attention to themselves.

However, lockdown has also sparked creativity in many teachers, parents and pupils and in some case made parents realise what teaching really is about.

It has also created many opportunities for teachers to upskill, learn about blended learning, online learning and reflect on our practice.

Pedagogy and new tools-A few pointers

Focusing on fewer aspects of the language and guiding students’ practice to ensure complete mastery and success has come out as the biggest priority

Acknowledging the need for more repetition, practice and pace when learning vocabulary.

Understanding what it looks like from a learner’s perspective, keeping things simple and along a linear organisation allowing the teacher to reduce undue technical difficulties for pupils.

Developing a principled approach like the one adopted by @BarriMoc : retrieval, short video presentation, practice tasks (dictation, translation, gap-fill based on the content), reading task and a writing or speaking task using Flipgrid . Everything is then put in one document with any resources hyperlinked to avoid needing to open and flick between multiple tabs including Textivate  or Quizziz .

Exploring the use of Bitmojis and sharing on the Bitmoji Craze for Educator FaceBook group 

Taking time to test new tools, like Genial.ly 

Turning a book-based IGCSE SoW into a skill-driven one so that learning objectives and assessment align

Twitter conversations

Lockdown and teaching remotely have highlighted …

The importance of high impact, low stakes testing for informing planning as well as improving student retrieval and retention.

That the children love to be able to “pause” the teacher on Loom  so pace of explanations during direct instruction may need to be adapted.

That learners benefit from creating sentences and actively applying vocab and grammar rules along with their own creativity. This gives all they/we are doing a sense of value, purpose and meaning. It creates a bond and link of learning trust between us even though we are remote.

That in online lessons, it is a good idea to include table of language chunks that pupils can use as a writing scaffold. Pupils can add in suggestions too. Extension vocabulary and structures need to be labelled explicitly. A simple example of an activity is to get pupils to read out their Target Language phrase. Teacher highlights (on zoom) . Another pupil translates. Creative follow-up is then offered for further practice.

That your instructions are never clear enough! It has confirmed more than ever the importance of quality instruction, explanations, and modelling with a lot of comprehensible input and chunks instead of single words. Voice record pro  is great for making own listening.

Finally, the CPD…

There have been so many opportunities for all teachers and especially language teachers to upskill themselves to deliver effective language lessons remotely. I have collated many of them in a Wakelet here, with the most prolific sources of CPD being ALL, the Association for Language Learning , Linguascope, Joe Dale’s MFL Twitterati group (#mfltwitterati on Twitter) and the Global Innovative Language TeacherFacebook group  created by Gianfranco Conti  and Dylan Viñales.

Time to join the conversation!  


Translation for all!-Linguascope Webinar, Thursday 16 April 2020⤴

from @ My Languages

I had a great time doing this Zoom seminar for Linguascope.com on Thursday 16 April. Thanks for having me!

We had attendees from Austria, Canada, Czechia, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US.

As highlighted in the title, the session was on one of my favourite language activity, translation.

Are translation exam questions ‘real’ translation tasks? What about online translators? Can translation activities be used to motivate pupils?

Yes! I believe Translation can be used effectively and creatively in and out of the classroom to get pupils to understand idioms better and the culture from Target Language countries.
Amongst other things, the session presented a wide range of translation activities to develop pupils’ knowledge of syntax, the complexity and accuracy of their sentence-building as well as their cultural awareness. (KS2 to KS5)


The Line⤴

from @ EduBlether

On the back of thinking about all the small things that lead to successes in a school, I thought it would be apt to consider the other side of this. One of the seemingly small things that add to a considerable amount of disruption and wasted learning time, in all of the schools I have ever worked in, is the line. I’m going to discuss the various problems I see with this accepted norm, and then I will try to consider some alternatives.

One of the main issues I have with this is the wasted teaching and learning time that could be better spent doing anything else. The time it takes between a bell ringing and children getting into a classroom is huge. Let’s do some quick maths on this. A conservative estimate (based purely on my own experience, with admittedly no scientific rigour applied), would be that it takes at least 5 minutes once the bell has gone to have a class ready to come in at the start of the day, after break and after lunch (at least!). So this is potentially 15 minutes each day, which is about 70 minutes across the week, taking in to account the half-day! That is over 44 hours across the school year.

I don’t want you to think I am ever condoning counting minutes and seconds and making sure every possible part of time is accounted for. This would be dangerous for a large number of reasons. But when there are so many other issues, it begs the question, why are we wasting our time on a bizarre and old fashioned custom that gives nothing back?

Ordinarily, children have been playing in an unstructured and child-led way, then a bell goes (quite abruptly) and they have to stop immediately and form a line, one behind each other. We often scorn them for not being straight enough or for continuing conversations. Quite militaristic when you think about it? But this is quite difficult for a lot of children to do (I think I would struggle to be honest) especially if they have been engaging in high energy play. What are we achieving by standing in line? Efficient management of people cannot be an argument here due to the amount of wasted time. Compliance?

I don’t like the idea of continuing to do something one way just because it is the way we have always done it. I want to know what the alternatives are.

Comment below with any suggestions on alternatives to lining up.

All the small things⤴

from @ EduBlether

I have been thinking a lot recently about all the small things that I do in my job as a Depute headteacher. Now, there are a lot of high-profile strategic things that I do which are of great importance (I’m a very important person do t you k ow?). Things like having an overview of attainment for example, or working through complex pastoral concerns. Yet for me, this is not what my job is really about.

I would argue that the most important part of my job is a collection of small and seemingly insignificant things. The things that go unnoticed and can’t fit nicely on a spreadsheet. I am talking about things like standing on the school gates in the morning and saying hello to as many people as you can. Or the times I play football with the children who just want to tackle a teacher, but then I somehow managed to avoid their lunging feet and score a wonder goal. Or even something as simple as noticing when a child gets a haircut and giving them a compliment. In fact one of the easiest things, yet the thing with such a profound impact is the simple act of smiling. We don’t measure how many smiles we have managed to raise at the end of the school year, or how many times we made a child laugh, but it is exactly these things that are so important to me. I am not for a second saying that I want to start measuring these things, all I am saying is I want to spend time recognizing how important they are.

These things are so important to me because they build relationships. It is these daily interactions that build a culture in a school. It is these small moments in time that collectively add up to so much more. So it is for this very reason that I am going to embrace my misspent youth listening to Blink 182 and spend more time celebrating all the small things that I do in my job. I feel that this will allow me to appreciate the tiny successes that happen every day.

What are the small things that you do that you would like to shout about?

Do grades really matter?⤴

from

This week marked the start of the a level results being issued whilst over a week ago the Scottish higher results were issued. And if as predicted, it leads to a greater focus on the number and type of candidates gaining entry to university, is it now time for a rethink?

Interestingly, English students go to school to collect their results, knowing that if things don’t go quite as planned there is support at hand with advice and back up plans able to be put swiftly in place. Conversely, the Scottish system has evolved where most young people receive a text or letter through the post. Any support and advice is generally provided by skills development Scotland rather than school based staff. Although most schools will retain a support offering for students to discuss course choice changes and provide advice.

However, as various announcements are made by political parties about the suitability of the university entries system and suggestions made on how to improve it. Labour propose students receiving an offer based on actual grades once the exam results have been published. Presumably, this would lead to university terms starting later or exams being brought forward into March or April to allow time for results, offers and university places to be accepted.

But isn’t there a better way? Should students who want to go to university simply be allowed to attend, assuming they have provided evidence that they can attain. Maybe not necessarily requiring a grade to join. This would mean universities changing their competitive approach to higher education. However, would quality be reduced? Or would students from disadvantaged backgrounds be more able to gain entry to university?

Would this lead to the suggested devaluing of the National 4 qualification which has a pass/fail approach. I’m not sure it would. I think that have an external, final exam was retained then we would retain the integrity of the qualification.

Would this also ensure that all students continue working hard right up until the end. Reports suggest that some students do not exert the same effort when they receive an unconditional offer. This is despite the fact that the university is making the offer based on the application submitted and the subjects studied being detailed on the application.

Overall, we should consider refocusing the timings of exams, results and university offers so that offers are received towards the end of the academic year. I am not sure the Scottish education system is quite ready yet for a pass/fail approach to higher and subsequent entry into university.

EduBlether

Episode 16 – An EduBlether with David Cameron⤴

from

In this wide ranging interview, David Cameron shares his thoughts, experiences and wisdom. An exhilarating interview.

Listen to Episode 16 – An EduBlether with David Cameron.

Episode 13 – Professional Learning⤴

from

Listen to this episode on spotify, apple podcast, soundcloud or any other podcasting app. You can also click on the picture above to listen to this episode.