Notes from Oxford seminar, 4th November 2013

Here follow my notes from Oxford Professional Development seminar for secondary teachers from the 4th of November 2013, MZK in Brno. More about the seminar and the speakers can be found here.

Learning to Fail - Failing to Learn

Gareth Davies


How can we teach students how to fail?

• marking is not the end of the process but in fact the beginning
• reward and praise good attempts
• change our language (don’t use the same phrases constantly - fail, mistake, wrong,…)
• allow “cheating”
• students decide what is good enough

Marking

• focus on the wrong answers as much as the correct ones
• why did the student make the mistake? what was his conjecture? this helps the teacher to understand his students’ thinking

Praising

• there should be equality among students in one classroom, even though the weak students usually need more encouragement and the good ones might feel discouraged for receiving less praising by doing a better job
• over praising can be dangerous if misplaced, if it’s justified and the students have good results and the improvement is apparent, it’s fine

Cheating

• students shouldn’t cheat the process of thinking and simply wait for the correct answers
• finding out the answers any other way (internet, answer sheet, copying from a friend) is a part of the process of learning and therefore ok

Activities

• reverse activity - teacher fills in gaps with some correct and some incorrect words and students are asked to find the mistakes
• information gap - students work in pairs, As get a text with gaps, Bs have the full text, their goal is for the student A to fill in the gaps with the help of B student
• come up with a mistake - students will receive a correct sentence, they will need to make a mistake in it and then give it to other groups to let them find the mistake

Classroom management ideas

• espionage - during a brainstorm or an activity, students will go spy on other groups in order to come back with the correct answer
• mistake day - have a given day when you won’t be correcting mistakes but only praising for good things
• Points for effort - let students know they will be rewarded for wrong answers as much as for the right ones
• quantity, not quality - more is more, the more the better
• I won’t accept your first answer - tell students they have more than one go for the exercises

Activities that Work

Jeremy Bowell


Students don’t speak English if

• they aren’t used to speaking in English
• they make a lot of mistakes
• they don’t have enough preparation for a task
• they don’t know what to say
• they are worried about their pronunciation

Activities

• Characters - students first come up with words or numbers, then these are given meaning (name a fruit –> this is your first name, name a female movie star –> this is your wife, etc.), based on this meaning you practice phrases, you talk to other people and find out stuff about them, communicative activity, students ask real questions but don’t feel embaressed to speak because they are not themselves, they are in the character, it builds confidence, a lot of practice (name a fruit, name a vegetable, name a number from 1 to 100, name your favorite movie star, yes/no question

• Coat of Arms - present the students with a number of objects or pictures and ask them to figure out the story or link behind them (ticket from a city, a postcard from different country, birthday postcard, cinema ticket, a medicine, a photograph, 

• Prove it! - present students with several statements (Everyone had breakfast this morning. Two students went to bed later than 11pm last night. No one went to the cinema last week. More than 50% of students have done their homework.), then let them prove they are correct by mingling around and asking others.

• show students answers and their goal is to come up with the correct question related to you (Pálava - What is your favorite place in the Czech Republic?, 11pm - What time did you go to bed last night? etc.)

• particular topic, e.g. Food in the UK - three columns, what they know (Fish and Chips, Afternoon tea, Cottage Pie), what they want to know (What do they eat for breakfast? What do they eat on special occasion? What is the most popular food in the UK?), what they learned (a place to put down all new information)

• Make your own crossword (practicing vocabulary) - name something you read (BOOK)

• Break it up (looking at texts) - break up the text into paragraphs and let the students guess some words in the text

• Reading circles - students read a short text and each has a different role and task afterwards (summariser summarizes the whole text in 50 words, word master underlines key words and new words in the text, connector relates the text to local issues, questioner asks additional questions about the text), in addition, there can be a role play (selecting ideally the strongest of the students) with a character related to the text, the rest of the class asks the character questions

• Cartoon stories (speaking activity) - provide a short cartoon without text and let students come up with a story to the pictures, interpret each individual picture in turn, describe and interpret the events in each frame

• fly-swating - this can be used for teaching vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, basically anything; words are either right on the whiteboard or on stickies, students form two lines and compete, you provide definitions of words, antonyms, phonetic form of the words on the board etc. or read a text and they need to grab the words as soon as they see it