#classroommanagement

‘It’s tricky! It’s tricky!’ Back to school classroom management

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About some ridiculous expectations

Well, it is not my first rodeo and, actually, it might be actually a good point in life to count properly how many rodeos aka Septembers there have been so far (I really don’t know) but, it turned out that I had been a bit naive about what to expect in the classroom on the 3rd of September. Or, in other words, my students managed to suprise me once more! Hooray to that. I suppose)

I knew that my students would come back having forgotten a lot and that we would not be able to pick it up where we left off, not after three months of no-school life. However, naively, I was hoping that they will remember something and that our September life will not involve starting off a brand new blank page. I was wrong!

The funny thing about it is that a few minutes into a lesson that was not necessarily bad but also not my dream come true, I kind of split my attention. There was a part of my brain that was solely responsible for the lesson taking place and the other one stepped back and started to look at the events the way a trainer would, connecting the dots and making mental notes about ‘the things to improve’. That was an interesting experience, I have to say.

This post today will have a format different to every other post in this series. I will try to analyse the things that did not go to plan and the solutions I already decided to put in place.

Things that I liked on the first real day

  • We talked about the things we did on holiday and it was great
  • We kept our Months Improvisation Song and now we are singing about ‘September’, I did my verse and the kids did theirs.
  • We did an introductory reading task and I was really happy with how it went. The kids really wanted to read (already a reason to celebrate) and to find the mistakes in the song.
  • We played our numbers spinner Maths game (‘I want…’) and it was very productive.
  • We made a mural about our favourite things that we will put up on the wall, Our Solar System. We sat together on the floor around a sheet of paper and we went on creating.
  • Even in the first lesson we had a good variety of interaction patterns: whole class, individual work, activities led by kids, collaboration on the project.
  • We have a special board where we keep the plan for the lesson.

Things that I didn’t like on the first real day

  • In one line, the kids were over-stimulated and out of control.
  • It was the first lesson in our new classroom, out of the previous set-up, associated with good habits and routines and there were too many new elements.
  • I allowed the kids to sit the way they wanted, with the friends they wanted to be around.
  • I decided to include the rules revision during the second lesson (for a reason) but I had to pay for that
  • I decided to include one of our favourite Maths games, to balance ‘the new’ with ‘the familiar’ but, I have to admit, there were better solutions, something else than a game would work better.
  • We used some of the favourite songs but I also included a new song, ‘Back to school’ but, in hindsight, I think it was not really necessary. It could have been left for a bit later.

What has changed since the first day aka Solutions

  • Nobody is sitting where they want anymore. This was my plan and I announced it in the first lesson that during the month of September we are going to have a different seating arrangement every single day. I prepared some September vocabulary cards and glued them onto the desks and a set of cards with the same words. Everyone coming into the room picks up one card and then looks for their place to sit. I want to experiment with different seating arrangements (especially that I am still working on the arrangements of the desks, too) and I want to check which combination works the best. There are some dangers involved, some tricky combinations to be avoided at all cost, but I am willing to take that risk, in order to learn. It was only yesterday that I saw a meme or a video on the social media in which teachers were saying that they let everyone to sit the way they want on day 1 specifically in order to find out who shouldn’t sit with whom. Plus we are also going to learn some cool September words)
  • Our rules have not been printed, laminated and displayed on the wall above the board. We have been reading and revising them at the start of every lesson. There are only few, my basic set: I sit nicely, I listen to the teacher, I speak quietly, I raise my friend, we are friends and Russian is beautiful but I speak English here. If we need, we will add to the list.
  • I have also decided to add another poster ‘How are we working today?‘ to help kids understand the different interaction patterns and modes of work. You can see all of them in the poster underneath and these are the terms that I am using to describe what the lesson is going to be about. They also help a lot with giving instructions to particular tasks. The most important differentiation at the moment is the one between ‘follow the teacher step by step’ and ‘you can make your own decisions’.
  • I reinstated the tool that we already abandoned, namely, the final stage of the lesson with the official announcements of the grades for the lesson, for work and for behaviour. We did not quite abandon them because I still needed my notes to add comments to the electronic journal for all my students but making formal announcements of praise and of not-so-good feedback was not necessary at the end of the previous academic year. This is back and it helps to summarise the lesson, to highlight once more the superstar behaviour and to explain why some grades are not very good.
  • We have a new call – response and last we used ;Autum leaves’ (teacher) – ‘falling down’ (students). They have already customised it and some of them respond ‘falling up’, just because it is funny. I need one more of those.
  • We sang a lot of our favourite songs during the other two days and I am planning to keep that trend for another week, without repeating, until we go through everything in our Songbook.
  • With one of my groups, I have put the games on hold for now, we are not ready yet. With the other one, the games are at the end of the lesson plan, in the ‘if time’ section. We need to get back into the school mode, back into the focus, before we start doing something more entertaining.

What’s next?

Not much, just the everyday and helping my adorable monster get back to the proper working mode. We will sing our songs, we will definitely do a story next week. We are still working without our books, rationing resources. We already have the beautiful notebooks, though, so there is a place to keep all the notes. Step by step!

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Seven months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This is the part of the lesson that is always the same: we say hello, we talk about how we are and we introduce the new students aka all the new toys that the kids have brought to school that day. It is a lot of fun to see how they are getting better at it and how much smoother it is now, compared to what it used to be a few months ago.

Songs

Our song writing at the beginning of the lesson is getting better and better. We started with the official versions of the song, ‘March, March’, but it went on for only a week or two and then it took a new direction. Nowadays, we sing two versions of it. The first one could be labelled as ‘my favourite month’ and some kids sing a verse about Christmas and Santa coming (presents, presents!) or about their favourite month. The second one is just a long and musical answer to a question ‘How do you feel today?’ and everyone is becoming more and more creative. This is definitely one of my favourite parts of the lesson these days and we usually have six or seven variations. And the language that is coming out of it! I am over the moon!

Another song that we started to sing in March is another hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. It is not a very new song, it was published a year ago but I have just found it while I was looking for something about spring. I love it. The lyrics are great and not so easy and the music is uplifting, a perfect song for the morning. We have been singing it for about a week now but soon I would like us to write our own versions of the song. I am hoping there will be different things that we can sing and love about the spring, not only the flowers…

Rules and classroom language

I have come up across an interesting problem related to rules and classroom management and I am now in the middle of considering all the implications and the steps I will have to take to sort it out.

I have realised that for some of my students our interactive lessons, so different to their ‘typical’ national curriculum classes and the approach of their national curriculum teachers have given an idea that the English lessons are not serious and that, for example, they don’t need to think about the rules that much or that they can simply op out of the activities as they would opt out of a game…I am not sure what it means yet but I know that I need to do something and introduce some changes. More on that later.

Story

We did a lot of storytelling in March. We were practising jobs and that is why we watched an episode of Steve and Maggie and turned it into a role-play. We also read and listened to our first story in verse from our coursebook, Lenny, Jenny and the Jumperoo. The story was quite long but the kids were really involved and with all the illustrations and proper staging, we made it into a good lesson.

And, after the success of the Wocket in the Pocket (which we also read again in a shared reading session), I decided that we are ready for the Green Eggs and Ham. We read it together, properly and it was a lot of fun. Our copy is a collection of five or six Dr Seuss’ stories and once my kids saw the other ones, they immediately made a plan for the next few weeks and the order in which we will read them all. I think we can say that Dr Seuss will be a frequent guest in our lessons!

Socialising

We kept working on our class friendships. We have done a lot of pairwork (surveys with different partners), we have played bamboozle, ‘Tell me’ and Wordwall Quiz, as one big team, collecting the points for our class. We have done a few ball games and we have even tried some Maths multiplication boardgames. The kids also had a chance to cooperate with each other during the treasure hunt activities as they could choose to work in pairs or small teams.

Creativity

Since our February was not the most creative on months, I tried to make up for it in March:

  • we wrote a lot of songs and this way we produced a lot of langauge
  • we read a poem and we wrote our first poem in English
  • one of the topics in March was ‘Inventions’ and we created our own inventions
  • we had a great lesson about Alfonso Pomodoro, a ghost and we used his interview with Miss Viola as a model for our own interviews with characters and we role-played these later.
  • we acted out our versions of the Steve and Maggie conversation from the video

Teacher

It has been a good month. We did our third milestones test in Maths and English and it was just great to see that so many of my students got excellent results. Although, all of them worked hard and I am proud of every single one of them! It is really a pleasure to look at how they work and get better and I even had to write a whole post about it!

A few months ago we started our dear diary project and some of the kids still continue writing and I get so much pleasure from reading them and replying. Especially when they give the notebook to me, then pester me to read it straight away and keep asking whether I have already replied or not and then they get their answer, read it as soon as possible and try to reply within the same day. We ARE communicating!

We have just started division in Maths and we are about to start unit 6 on Dinosaurs in English! Exciting!

Also, I bumped into Santa and managed to get out of him a pile of handwriting erasable notebooks and this is why I could give my kids the most amazing present that, within minutes, they started to use to write, in English and in Russian, to draw, to create stories, to take notes, to calculate Maths…

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #78 Making our own songs with kids.

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A paintbrush, that took us all by surprise with how beautifully it caught and preserved the paint. We all kept staring at it for a few minutes, in admiration.

I have already written a lot about things to do with songs. Here you can find a post about the steps to take to properly un-sing a song and to make the language your spoken language and another one on creating your own songs for the use in the YL classroom.

Today, I would like to share with you a project that we have been a part of for the past two months and that I am hoping will continue until the end of the academic year: our own month song.

Ingredients

  • a song and a melody that will be used as a model, in my case it was January Song from Sing Play Create.
  • a group of kids and a teacher to manage
  • optionally: an audio of the melody, ours was Frere Jacques, it was easy to find.

Procedures

  • First, a story: Our lessons in December, with my year 1 kids, started with different Christmas songs as we had already abandoned the regular Hello songs somewhere in December. When January arrived, I wanted to devote a part of the lesson to a chat about things that we do in that month. And to introduce that slot, I was looking for a song. I found it and quite easily and it was perfect – short, call and response style and with a relatively simple melody. We sang this song throughout the entire month. Then, February came and I started to look for a song that we could sing. I did not find anything that would work for us, something easy and short, without too many cultural references that are not at this point relevant. I didn’t find anything that I could use. I decided we are going to create our own.
  • In the first lesson of February, I explained to my students the song situation and encouraged them to think about our own song. They made a real effort and we ended up with a song in 1 a and a slightly different song in 1b. I wrote the songs on the board and we photographed the board. Every day, at the beginning of the first lesson, I would take out my phone and start singing for the kids to repeat. Some of the phrases were familiar to kids, the others I helped to translate.
  • We repeated the procedure in March and ended up with two verses in both groups that we sang for a week.
  • The next step was of course the kids’ versions. I did not prepare them for that in any way and on one of the days, I simply asked: Does anyone have an idea for a new song? And they did. Right now we do it every lesson and there are always some kids who are willing to share their ideas.

Why we love it

  • The song is a perfect choice for creative singing (and speaking). It has got a simple melody which we already know very well. The song follows the pattern of call – response so whatever idea the leader comes up with, the group responds, by simply repeating the line.
  • The lines are short, easy to create and to repeat even for beginner children. It is an advantage, too that the verses of the song follow two patters: either a simple phrase or a short sentence so pretty much anything can be used. Some of the verses we created were like that: ‘March, March’ (only two words repeated), ‘Make snowmen’ (an imperative), ‘Birds and bees are flying’ (present continuous), ‘Flowers grow’ (present simple), ‘We are very tired’ (personalised sentences with the verb to be).
  • Some of my kids have an idea but they don’t have the language and that works, too. They sing the first line, in Russian, and I respond with the equivalent in English. It also helps with some verses that are not appropriate but are, at the same time, a result of my students experimenting with the language. We have had a few cases of a line like that appearing as a call and me replying with ‘La la la’ or with ‘Sasha is not singing’, to signal that some things are not be accepted.
  • Kids love this part of the lesson and, on a typical day, we have about 4 or 5 verses, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. Some of the kids sing the verses, some prefer to say them already and it all works.
  • I am just overjoyed because they are producing the langauge and in this previous week, we have seen an interesting new trend or even two. Some kids (following my example) started to create songs about how they feel on the day (‘March, March. Sunny day. I am very happy. But I want to sleep’) which is their extended and musical answer to ‘How do you feel today?’. Some children sang a song about their favourite month (usually related to their birthday). We had also a few crazy versions of snow in July and another Christmas in the summer. One way or another – lots and lots of language creativity.
  • Another thing that makes me really happy is that this creative activity appeals not only to my stronger students but also to some of my struggling students and, in general, is great for mixed ability groups. It is easy to create your song, for example by changing one or two words in the verses that your teacher or friend sang. That’s easy to do. Plus, all students are creative, even my beginner beginners. They have an idea and they want to share and since some of the ideas are shared every day, they stay. My student Sasha came up with the idea of a sick rainbow two weeks ago and now he remembers himself and encourages us to sing ‘The rainbow is sick’. We do.
  • Last but not least, this is our little tradition, our routine, something that we do as a community. And that makes it precious, too!

I am quite curious what is going to happen to this project in April and in May. It is already good and exciting and worthy of sharing but who knows what else is there for us…I will definitely be writing about it in the future!

Happy teaching!

Alisa and Petya, my new invisible students.

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Image from www.bullionstar.com

It might be the best way of closing the blogging year, with all these invisible kids. Better than ‘the teacher in distress’, why-has-this-year-been-so-difficult and if-I-stay-in-teaching-it-will-be-because-of-the-kids-and-if-I-leave-it-will-be-because-of-the-adults (after Bored Teachers) that I have been in recently. Let’s try to stay positive, let’s try to give the floor to Alisa, Petya and Pasha instead.

The concept of an invisible student is not a new one…

I have had one in my classroom for a few years now. Long enough to have collected enough material to write a post about, four years ago. Pasha, because that is the name of the first and the original invisible student, has been long enough to have collected his own experiences and now he could write his own resume and tell stories of his adventures in the various classrooms. You can read the original post here. Btw, this is one of top ten most popular posts ever on the blog.

This year has been a fun one also because I started teaching in a new environment and in a new context and a real life Pavel has appeared in one of my groups. It is unavoidable that, after all these years, whenever I say ‘Pasha’, I feel like addressing my invisible student. And I giggle. That also meant that I had to give up on using that concept in that same form in my everyday teaching. It was not an issue because we had other things to worry about. I did not need an invisible student. Then, one day I did and the Invisible Student came back. Two of them, actually.

Enter Petya and Alisa

This year, apart from everything else, I also teach English and Maths according to the British National Curriculum in a bilingual school. I love it but there are also certain challenges that I had not had to deal with before September. One of them is definitely extending the range of ways of encouraging and motivating children to work and to be involved in what we are doing. I have noticed that, apart from the fact of the specific requirements related to the specifics of the subjects (that are different to the regular ESL or EFL), there is also the question of the specific challenges related to teaching Maths in English or to having classes (almost) everyday and having to come up with different approaches four times a week. Which is a higher demand for creativity than in your typical twice-a-week EFL classes. Among others.

Over the last few weeks, I have been teaching some more demanding topics, such as punctuation (English) and subtraction with regrouping and I have been bending over backwards in order to trick my kids into getting excited about these (if we are to perfectly honest here).

During one of the 1-1, me and my brain, brainstorming sessions, I decided to go for ‘play the teacher and find a mistake’. English was first and it was relatively easy to prepare a handout for my kids to trace, to find mistakes and to re-write in the correct from, with all the punctuation marks and capital letters. I set it up, gave out everyone a red marker and asked them to look for things that were ‘not so good’. Everyone got a red marker and we worked beautifully on it.

However, I have two groups at school and when I got to my second lesson with that material, I already knew that it has a certain potential and, feeling inspired, I decided to upgrade it and the lesson started with ‘Listen, there is this boy called Petya. He has a problem…’ Of course, before making copies for everyone, I signed the paper with ‘Petya’. This tiny little adjustment made a huge difference. I was looking at my kids, working dilligently and reacting to the content and I was making mental notes.

Naturally, when, a few weeks later, I decided to use this same approach in my Maths lesson, I knew that there would be a student and how I am going to set it up. Here are a few notes about it, in case anyone wants to use it.

Alisa, the girl who struggles with Maths

  • The first step: to prepare the set of tasks. In our case it was a double-sided handout with sums, addition and subtraction, up to 1000, two- and three-digit numbers, with and without regrouping, as the final task of the unit and the final task of the year. All of these had solutions, as if Alisa had done them, some were correct, some were incorrect, with small and huge mistakes. On the top of the page, there was the student’s name (Alisa) and the room for the teacher’s name, to sign by those who were to check the test.
  • Step two: we could hide it under different, serious-sounding names (‘setting the context‘, ‘involving the students’, ‘generating interest’) and they all apply but what I really did was to tell the kids a story. In one of the groups we even played the monster game (aka ‘hangman’) to guess the title of the story (Alisa’s problem). I told the class a simple story about a girl from year 1 (year 3 in KS3) who is a nice girl and who is trying hard but who still has some problem with Maths. And, most importantly, how we want to help her with checking her test and looking for all the mistakes and, maybe, the things she did well.
  • Step 3: we outline the procedures. On the one hand, these were the three simple steps (‘We check it’, ‘We correct it’, ‘We give a grade’) because I wanted to ensure that they really do go over all the sums and correct them and do the Maths, instead of just ticking and crossing things. Together we also put together a set of symbols to mark with, for example: a tick (V) = it’s OK, a minus (-) = it’s not OK, three exclamation marks (!!!) = very bad and a star = excellent.
  • Step 4: the real work, the hard work: we give out red markers and we get on checking Alisa’s test, individually or in pairs, depending on the personal preferences. The teacher is circulating, monitoring and helping.
  • Step 5: a spontaneous add-on, just because we had a few minutes left: a role-play, in which Alisa’s mum (me) calls the teacher (all kids, in turns) to find out how her daughter is doing. We had smaller groups because some kids had already gone on holiday and we could actually do it with all the kids.

My Oscar-worthy lesson or why I loved having Alisa, the invisible student in my class

A few days have passed since I taught this lesson twice and I have had a chance to reflect and to talk about it with a few colleagues and I think I can safely say that if there was ever a lesson taught category at the Oscars, I would submit our adventures with Alisa and I would definitely hope to win or at least to make it to the list of five nominees. Here is why.

  • The kids were fully involved, every single one of them, my Maths-loving kids and my oh-no-Maths kids, too, the strong learners, those who are just learning and even those who are struggling. Everyone. I was moving among the tables, supervising and helping and eavesdropping on what they were saying to themselves or to their classmates and I was giggling and welling up and beaming, rejoicing their enthusiasm and patting myself on the shoulder for the idea.
  • The reason for that was the story that I told and the context that was this way created. It was not just a handout, just a piece of paper with a set of tasks on that miss Anka brought but a real adventure that everyone was taking part in, with a real girl that we were helping, with red markers and the power that comes with it, with the responsibility the kids were taking for marking Alisa’s efforts and for assessing how well she did.
  • The activity involved the whole child, all the students as humans and as learners, as people who were given a serious task and serious responsibilities and who were also taken into the set-up, for example through accepting their ideas as regards the set of symbols for marking or the grades that they had to make a decision about and, in the follow-up activity, the fact that they were given a chance to be the teacher, during the whole activity and during the follow-up role-play.
  • The exercise was a very effective tool to get my students to do Maths. They zipped through the addition sums (which was not surprising) but they also worked very well with the more challenging problems i.e. subtraction, especially subtraction with regrouping. High five to me for mixing the tasks, addition and subtraction, with and without regrouping. There were different levels of difficulty and the more challenging tasks were beautifully smuggled with the easy-peasy ones.
  • It worked very well as an assessment tool for my kids’ Maths skills. After all, in order to be able to check something, you need to have enough knowledge and skills, and not on the basic, superficial level. Especially that the task included a mix of correct and incorrect tasks that they had to read, check and correct. And they all did! I was so proud of them (and of myself) especially that when they were commenting, they did say things (in their L1), such as ‘Oh, no, Alisa, how could you not notice that!’ or ‘But, no, Alisa, it is easy!’ or ‘No, why did you do this?’. I am not sure if they were aware of how their skills have developed and I think I will have to include this element of noticing own progress as part of the lesson in these kind of lessons. However, even without it, this element, my little kids have learnt. They have learnt. I was touched.
  • In the days after the lessons, I could not decide (and still can’t) what was more touching or inspiring, the skills that were proved to have developed or the fact that during the entire lesson, my kids showed a huge potential for empathy and understanding for Alisa’s problems with Maths. They were not only dealing with the task to help her but I loved eavesdropping on how they were reacting to it. There were plenty of comments along the lines of ‘Oh, but look, she tried to do it, here and here’ or ‘Oh, she almost got it right!’, trying to find something positive in her test. On the other hand, they were just so genuinely happy when they found a sum that was solved correctly. Here and there, now and again I heard cheering and ‘Miss Anka! She did it! from different corners of the room. They were like real teachers celebrating their students’ achievements.
  • And one more thing that made me just laugh out loud was how the kids were grading the overall Alisa’s effort, beautifully out of sync with her actual progress and the number of tasks complete. Some of them were overly optimistic and appreciative, the others overly critical. I just let it be. For now.
  • And the role-plays, that made me laugh, too. We have not done any phone conversations language so it was just jumping in at the deep end and using the language that we know. But I loved it, as I could see how my students tried to communicate in a new situation, wtih limited resources (communication strategies, hello!) although, all in all, our poor Alice is in trouble. In 99% of cases, her parents will have to come to school to talk to the teacher. Which just shows that that is, in my students’ world, the worst that can possibly happen.

I don’t know why but I have a feeling that both, Alisa and Petya will be back in our Maths lessons and in our English lessons…

Happy teaching! Happy New Year!

Setting up the routine. Two months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This stage of the lesson is almost exactly the same as it was in September. The only real difference is the fact that we take the roll call, we talk about how we feel and we share what we have got today, on our tables and in our bags and only later we sing the hello song to make sure that the song is really this unifying element after which a proper lesson starts.

How do you feel today?

We haven’t added any new emotions as such but our beautiful cards are on display in our classroom, in both of them, and children refer to them when they reply to the question at the strat of the lesson. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything new at all. We have been working with the phrases that we have but the kids became very creative with them and these have been my favourite replies: ‘I miss my phone’, ‘I want to sleep’, ‘I miss my bed’, ‘I miss my puppy (at some point confused with ‘papi’ aka dad) and I miss my daddy’.

Songs

In the recent weeks the greatest hit was everything related to Broccoli Ice-cream. We have been doing food and ‘do you like?’ and the song quickly became a hit, especially that it has four different versions and we could beautifully extend it over a month. It has become a part of the routine itself with looking at all the foods in the beginning of the video, attempts at predicting the combinations and then singing, of course, followed by our own game played with paper flashcards or a wordwall spinner. Naturally, we have already played this game in the dinining room, in the playground and in the hallway, during the break, with our own made-up versions.

The other great songs have been all the songs from the Dance Freeze series that we started in September. They work amazingly well for our brain breaks and I am hoping that all of the verbs will stay with us, too.

The other new songs are also our two new hello songs, Every day I go to school and Hello, nice to see you, and we use one or the other, in different lessons, depending on what we feel like.

After I have found a song about what plants need to grow, I believe that there is a song for absolutely everything!

Rules and classroom language

The system is go. This is how I could describe the rules in our life at this point. We didn’t need to add any more rules, since the end of September, which, of course, doesn’t mean that there will be no new rules in the future. These rules that we have, we have been using to remind the kids how to behave and how to survive the lesson.

That is not to say that all days, every day are smooth and that everyone is a little angel. It is not the case. We have had a few situations in which I had to put the lesson on hold and spend some lesson time on a serious conversation about how we should behave and why. And how we should not behave, too. It is still only the second month of their school life in year 1 and they are still at the stage of figuring out how to be.

Rewards chart and Time

This element of our routine has not changed at all. I am keeping track of kids’ behaviour and we still put up the lesson time (and the number for the clock) on the board, too.

Story

We have had such a good run with all the stories! My storybook library is basically just round the corner so I can just just pick up our next adventure just walking to the teacher’s room or the office.

Over this last month, I have been experimenting with different stories, some of them my real favourites, and I have been also experimenting with different follow-up activities, too.

‘Marvin Gets Mad‘ was a nice follow-up to our lessons on body parts, emotions and Present Continous. The follow-up task was devoted to reading and Present Continous about all the sheep and what they are doing.

‘The Crocodile Who Didn’t Like Water‘ was a blast. This was the story that not only read and listened to but that we also managed to retell, with very simple phrases.

‘Barry and the Fish With Fingers’ was an opportunity to practise ‘I can’ and it was also the first time we took notes about reading, such as a set of simple sentences about the character and the story as well as our opinion about it.

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • kids have been nominating themselves ‘Who’s next?’
  • I have been a little bit more flexible regarding the seating arrangements for some of the activities, allowing friends to sit together and to work together
  • we have done a few projects in which the kids were working individually but sharing the resources such as the cards (on the board) or the stickers, learning how to take turns, how to share, how to wait. I was really proud of the children because it all went well.
  • we have had a lot of activities in which one student was leading the game, especially our riddles
  • we have also played lots of phonics games, as a whole group, individually and in teams
  • kids are also taking turns to give out and to collect materials and resources
  • it is also our everyday feature that when I am writing the lesson plan on the board, there are always some suggestions from the room, most of the time regarding the favourite games or songs, sometimes also regarding the surprises (which, most of the time is synonymous with ‘Can we have some stickers, please?’)

Creativity

Our creative projects in October were related to Halloween as my school decided to celebrate. Apart from decorating countless pumpkin, bringing spiders and coming to school in fancy dress (a few days before the actual Halloween), we have

  • used the Halloween theme in our Serious Maths Classes, with Halloween Maths Stories, Halloween Puzzles and colouring pictures
  • we created our monsters posters to practise body parts
  • we had a great Stickers in the Park project
  • we had a drawing dictation mini-project in our ESL classes, too
  • we had a lot of fun in the miming-drama activities in the ESL classes

Teacher

As a teacher I have been working on including the electronic journal in my daily school routine, especially as regards finding the time to fill it in effectively and as regards taking notes in real time to remember what to put in later on.

I had to step down as the Science teacher because my workload was just impossible to handle. I am sorry because I liked teaching Science but the kids have a great teacher now and I have a few hours to deal with the admin tasks so hooray to that.

I am very proud of all the kids because they are making progress in English and Maths and they are better and better at being students. I hope they are ready for all the new developments. The light term has come to an end and beginning November we are going to start using the coursebooks and notebooks, getting homework and we will start dealing with slightly more serious material. We’ll see how it goes. I am keeping my fingers crossed for all of them!

I will be back with more notes at the end of November!

Happy teaching!

The end of the world or Surviving the bad lessons with YL

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A folding surprise by Kolya (Renamed as: Teachers in September)

This post, like many many others, starts in the classroom when yours truly spends countless hours every week. Some of those hours are happy hours, some are very much not. Sometimes, no matter how passionate and dedicated you are as a teacher, no matter how much time you have dedicated to preparing amazing lessons, resources and activities, it is just not coming together and it does feel like it is the absolute end of the world. But, definitely, it is not. But it feels like it.

In the sessions devoted to classroom and management behaviour, there is this one activity that we do: ‘Look at the picture of the classroom. What is wrong with it?’ My trainees usually have lots of great ideas but where I am trying to get them is the fact that, beautiful as it is, this photo, a real class and a real lesson does not really look like that 100% of the time. So google, with all its amazing visuals, this time helps us create unrealistic expectations regarding our professional life.

Pre K Peoria IL | Reliable Childcare for Peoria IL Children (palschools.com)

I am not saying that it does not happen, that kids never get fully interested and involved in the task or that the teacher never has the full attention of the group. They do and when it does, it is the best thing ever, cloud number 9 and the top of the world. But, to be perfectly honest, a day like this one in the Kindergarten Cop, this is also a part of the teacher’s life.

Those bad days are perhaps more likely to happen when you are less experienced and somewhere at the start of your teaching career but (and I am sorry to be saying that), no matter how many years you have been teaching for, bad days can still happen. Although, indeed, as experienced teachers, we are more prepared for them and better equipped to deal with them, on the spot and in the long run. That is why, in this post, I decided to share how I resuscitate myself and get myself back on my feet from having crumbled into pieces after a bad day at school.

Prevention first

Apart from lesson planning and keeping your resources organised, it is very important to remember that a teacher needs to be alive and feeling well in order to remain happy, smiling and passionate about the lesson and in order to be able to give a good lesson. That means that a teacher needs to eat and drink, breakfast and lunch and snacks, and, a teacher must find time for her / his own breaks.

I know very well how easy it is to skip breakfast, lunch or the mid-lesson snacks (or, even more impotantly, the mid-lesson toilet runs) because, well, because things just happen. Kids lose things, kids need help, kids have a bad day and a meltdown and a teacher, more often than not, just brushes off her/ his needs and does whatever is necessary to help the kid. It’s just in the blood.

Then there are the unplanned meetings with the headmaster, the admin, the parents and sometimes it is possible to put them on hold or to reschedule them and sometimes it is not. Again, the break (whatever its purpose) gets cancelled or cut short. The teacher goes on teaching without food, coffee, water or worse and, naturally, that has an impact on the level of tiredness and / or stress and on the lesson.

When the bad day has already happened…take time out.

Most of the time this will be a very short time out slot, a few minutes in the teachers’ room, or even in your classroom, looking out of the window, wasting time, listening to your favourite song, or, if you are really lucky and the breaks are long enough to allow for that, you will be able to get out of the school to pick up a coffee somewhere round the corner or simply to take a walk, somewhere in a slightly different environment.

This will help to see the world from a different perspective and, naturally, to regain the peace and quiet for the teacher.

Talk to your teaching buddies

As soon as the opportunity arises, chat to your teaching buddies. It doesn’t matter if they themselves had a good day and will be able to act as the source of the energy or if they had an equally disastrous day and there will be there for you to compare the levels of the educational catastrophy. The most important thing is that this will be a chance to talk to someone who fully understands how horrible it feels to have to walk home after a bad day at school and who can offer an ear if not a real solution, although the latter is also an option, too, because the school life is full of fiascos, tragedies and all kinds of situations and, quite likely, your friends have it already happened to them and might be able to tell you about how they sorted it out. In any case, listening to their stories will help to understand that you are not on your own and that’s a lot!

Talk to your VIP, whoever they are

For me, personally, equally important is talking to my Very Important People, not only because that is what they are, but, also, because they have absolutely nothing to do with education, teaching English and teaching children.

Getting valuable advice or even having someone to talk to, in order to relate all the horrors of the day is not the main aim of these conversations. On the contrary, these help me get a completely different perspective and go back to basics, to everything else in life that matters an that is as far as possible from the young learners EFL/ ESL. Just to check that the world outside of it still exists and that it is doing great.

I love my job and I cannot imagine not teaching kids but, on some days, I need to forget about children, parents, child development, methodology and everything related to it, specifically in order to recover and to recharge my batteries, physiological and psychological.

Get a hug (real, virtual or metaphorical)

Well, yes, just that! The hug can be real, the hug can be virtual as not everyone huggable might be available physically but it can also be any way of pampering yourself and doing somethinggood for your body. A nice meal, a pint of beer, a quiet evening, an evening with your favourite music, a piece of chocolate, a walk with a dog, a bunch of flowers, a cup of coffee, a sports game, a round of your favourite computer game, exercising, a combination of a few of those or all of them together. Whatever it is that makes you feel good and that brings a smile to your face.

For example, I am a real public transport supporter but, on those really difficult days, I like to take a taxi home and being in the backseat, driven home, with my favourite city in the world blinking on the other side of the window, it really does calm me down.

Sleep on it

Or, in other words, not being too harsh on yourself and taking time to reflect and to see the whole day and everything that happened from a different angle and from a distance.

The world looks a bit different after a proper night’s sleep and only then it is possible to reflect on the day, to connect the dots and to understand better the reason behind the kids’ behaviour or the explanation why the activities fell flat on their face. Finally, this distance will also help to see the good things that also happened because they always do, although, admittedly, they are easily overshadowed by the disasters.

Try again!

Last but not least, there is always tomorrow, another lesson and another day to have another go and see what happens. With young learners especially, the first time we play a new game or try a new activity, in a new format and with a new set of rules, the very first attempt is just a reconnaissance, for the teacher, for the resources and for the kids. It is almost bound to be a failure and it is a big mistake not to give it another shot.

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. A diary, week 3

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This is the third episode in this series. Don’t forget to check out week 1 and week 2 first. There is the week 4 post, too!

Starting the lesson

Nothing has changed here and I have to say it is a lovely feeling to have it ‘just happen’, at least for a few minutes of the lesson. It is a confirmation that things are happening and according to plan and that, eventually, we are going to extend this ‘law and order’ to the other stages of the lesson, too.

How do you feel today?

According to what I planned, we added two more feelings ‘I am ill’ and ‘I am scared’, one to describe how we really feel in class (Hello September, Sneezing and Coughing!), the other one because I want to have it ready for all the stories to come. It might be also a nice phrase to use when we talk about emotions, also to say ‘I am not scared’, which is a very positive affirmation to make anyway! At the end of week 3 we have a total of 13 adjectives and phrases to use to answer this question and I have two more expressions, as suggested by the kids themselves. There is more to come soon!

Apart from that, I decided to let the kids take over and to take turns to ask the question to each other. At this point we are still doing it in a very closely-monitored way, with the teacher supervising and the kids simply answering a question from one student and then asking another one, in a chain. It took some time of the lesson as the kids were taking their time to choose the following child but it was definitely worth it! I was observing the children and I did notice how seriously they took the task and, actually, how much pleasure it gave them, too, to be involved in such a way.

Songs

We have practised all the songs introduced before and since we already have quite a few, it is possible to ask the class to choose a song to sing: ‘Do you want to sing ‘I can count to 20’ or ‘Count from 10 to 100′?’ to give the students an opportunity to make decisions about the lesson. That is what we did.

We also sang ‘Pete the Cat, I am rocking in my school shoes’ and during some of the lessons, this turned into almost a theatre, because all the kids wanted to sing and to perform all the actions, to sit at the desk, to eat something (they quickly reached out to their bags for a snack) or to read a book, in exactly the same way as Pete does, lying on the floor…This was definitely the song of the week for us!

From the new song, we only introduced ‘Have you got a pet?’ which we needed to introduce and to practise the verb and the structure which was the theme of the week. We also played the game with the spinner from wordwall, in which we sing the song for students, one by one, spin the wheel and the child in question answers ‘I’ve got a tiger. I like it. It’s a good idea’.

Rules and Classroom Language

We have been revising all the classroom verbs and phrases we introduced in the previous week and we devoted one of the English lessons to introduce and to drill some more advanced classroom language that include:

  • Can I go to the toilet, please?
  • Can I drink some water, please?
  • I sit nicely.
  • I listen to the teacher.
  • I am a good friend.
  • I have a question.

The two new phrases include: I don’t fight and I don’t shout, because this is exactly what was happening. I normally try to avoid using this kind of a language and to focus on a positive way of formulating the rules but one of my groups needed a very serious reminder.

Rewards chart

There have been not to many changes here. With my group A, the chart is no longer necessary, we only need to revise the rules and bring them back, to remind the kids about the behaviour we want. My group B need the rewards chart constantly but with the use of the chart and the rules, we are slowly moving towards the point where we want to be. I have some students who struggle with managing their emotions but there has been some progress in that area, too.

Time

Not too many changes here. We keep using the system we have created and it works. The kids are more familiar with the lesson plan, the different length of breaks, the changes of teachers, work in progress, nothing else.

Story

This week I decided to introduce a phonics story and, because of the theme of phonics, animals and have got / has got, I went for ‘Hen’s Pens‘. Overall, it was not as exciting or popular as the other two we have done so far but because it is a different style, without a song but it worked well.

What we did:

  • introducing the new vocabulary and reading
  • describing the picture on the cover
  • looking for dots and zigzacs around us
  • listening and talking about it
  • doing one wordwall activity on rhymes together on the screen
  • a reading activity done individually, on paper
  • a colouring picture for those students who wanted it

Accidentally, just before this lesson, one of my students found our paper copy of Usborne stories and he brought it to the classroom and looking through the book, he found there our story. This way, he created a link to our following lessons because I want to use the story in a few shared reading activities.

Socialising

These are the things we did in the previous week to faciliate the community building:

  • we continued doing everything we have done so far: making decisions, choosing songs and activities, helping with the resources.
  • we added a little bit of student – student interaction during the first stages of the lesson (How do you feel today, see above)
  • we did a few activities in Maths and Science to help the kids work in teams. We had two team activities with one student working for the group – two treasure hunts. In Science students took turns to find clues what to draw in a picture (types of plants), in Maths, similarly, tasks (addition and subtraction to 20) in order to uncover the secret phrase (‘Maths is very interesting’). In another Maths lesson we also played with subtraction and posters and small objects. In this game, kids had to work in small pairs to solve the task (put the hands on the poster to leave the required number of animals visible and take out the small objects out of the box).
  • we also tried to play ‘I spy’ in one of the Maths lessons, this time in pairs. It was mildly successful as a speaking activity but they did get a chance to sit together and work on a task together. It was a necessary step and I would like to repeat it again in week 4.

Creativity

We have had some opportunities for creativity in this week, too!

  • we created a beautiful picture of different plants in a Science lesson. It was guided (my instructions) but the execution was up to students. Of course, they really wanted to take them home.
  • in our final Maths lesson, we decorated the first page of the notebooks that we will start next week
  • there was a follow-up colouring picture for the story, for those kids who wanted to get one

Teacher

This is only very much Anka-relevant and it might not work or be important for all the other teachers in the world. I decided to take a note here, though, to remember and to see how these things will be changing because they also affect how we work as a group and how I feel, too.

  • I managed to convince my fellow classroom dweller to rearrange the tables in one of the classrooms so now we have a beautiful U and I am happy.
  • I am planning my lessons with the resources and boxes online, in order to be clever about all the carrying things around.
  • Tuesday was quite difficult in terms of behaviour, very jagged and patchy, hence annoying and tiring and I went to school the following thinking that, no matter what, ‘I will have a good teaching day and the kids will have a good learning day!’ and somehow we all did. Partially, it was due to this approach, partially, because I prepared activities to help me achieve it. I noticed that I have been setting my expectations and the level of challenge a bit too high for my kids, without taking into consideration the fact that it is still only week 3 of our adventure and that we spend together 20 hours a week, some lessons are early in the day, some lessons are late in the day and they all simply cannot be just amazing. Although they can be good and they can be better if all these factors are taken into consideration. I did and Wendesday and Thursday were much better.

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine in primary. A diary, week 1

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The academic year has started and this September I have found myself with a new group of children, in a new school and, in general, in a completely new environment. It is a bit of a whirlwind and how else? Greenday’s song with the most amazing title and line ‘Wake me up when September ends’ was not written for teachers but it surely feels like it was. However, primary school kids, a new academic year and a new course means only one thing: working on the new class routine. This still stands true.

All of it might a blessing in disguise. A teeny tiny bit uncomfortable because I am literally out of my comfort zone (and my classroom) but how beneficial! Instead of bringing the kids into my world and my kingdom (aka my classroom), I get to take what I know and believe in and to organise a new world and a new kingdom (and a classroom!) accordingly. These new circumstances are an interesting opportunity for me to reconsider what the class routine means for me, what are its main elements and how they can be translated into a new environment.

I decided to keep a diary of the first month to see what is going on and this way create a mini-series on the blog.

Starting the lesson

Where I teach at the moment, the kids have their classroom and they can go in and out of the classroom, outside of the lesson time, whenever they want. For that reason, we cannot do the line-up outside that I like so much. What is more, the school does not have any bells or any signal system as there are primary and pre-primary classes, with a slightly different timetable and that means that anything ringing for one would be a distraction for the other. However, that also means that we have no official start of the lesson.

For that reason, as soon as it is time to start the lesson:

  • I put the hands up and we count down from 10 to 0, while I am counting on my fingers to give the kids a few seconds to calm down
  • We exchange hellos (‘Hello everyone!’, ‘Hello, Miss Anka’)
  • We do the roll call (‘Let’s check who’s in today!’ ‘Sasha?’ ‘Here’) – this is not only for me to mark everything in the register and to learn and to practise the names of all my kids (after two days, I already remember all of them, phew). This is also for me to check who is sitting where (as this can change) and we connect it with ‘checking’ that everyone’s names are on the board which is especially important for the kids who do not yet recognise their name in English.

How do you feel today

This was something that I knew I wanted to be a part of our routine from the very beginning and for many reasons, too. It is always a good idea to gauge the mood of the audience, regardless of the age or level and I like to know how my students are feeling on the day but it seems to be especially important for the younger kids in the beginning of the course and super super important for the year 1 students who are getting used to the routine and who are also getting used to being away from mum. All these emotions can help with dealing with different behaviour issues and they will be necessary to help the kids develop empathy towards their classmates. Plus, a lot of useful language that we will need to tell stories.

Anyway, we started the week with the six basic ones (happy, sad, angry, scared, sleepy, OK) but more adjectives and phases followed and by the end of the week we also had ‘hungry’, ‘tired’, ‘thirsty’, ‘not so good’, ‘energetic’ and, suggested and created by one of the kids, ‘I miss my mummy’ (in the photo above). Which, by the way, is an absolute treasure – my student not only noticed the need for this flashcard / emotion, he decided to share it and to produce the card following the conventions of the genre (aka all the cards I produced), including the colour, the size, the style and the choice of the symbols. He also insisted on my writing the English version of it and on displaying it on the board. And you know what? He read the audience exceedingly well! This is now one of the most popular way of answering the question…

I have them all on very simple foam flashcards and they are displayed on the board in the beginning of the first lesson. We go over all of them, ‘reading’ them and using the accompanying gestures i.e. even if the flashcard has only ‘happy’ written on it, we say ‘I am happy’ and I demonstrate the gesture for that.

Afterwards, I ask all the kids, in turns, ‘How do you feel today?’ and the kids answer. This stage is followed up by a song, which we sing together and which creates a nice balance, an individual task / production followed up by a group, choral activity. At this point we are using ‘Hello Song‘ from Super Simple Song.

We also write on the board the following: the day, the date, the weather, the subject and the time slot.

Songs

We have only started the course so there aren’t many songs that we know or that we have managed to choose as our favourites. However, I try to include songs as punctuation marks because we have a long day and although the kids get their snack and movement breaks, they still need some stirrer in the middle of the lesson. So far we have included the following: A is for Apple (English), I can count to 20 (Maths) and Who Took the Cookie from the Cookie Jar (as our final game in the Maths lesson, which, at this point, is the end of the English day. This will have to change in the following week).

Rules and Classroom Language

Speaking of rules, I think I have broken a few myself. I HAVE NOT introduced any rules in the first week. The teacher and the trainer in me are appalled at such a negligence. Or, rather, they should have been but they are not. Oups, sorry not sorry.

As I said, I am in a new environment and I decided to act on my intuition and now, after the first week is over, I am actually having a blast trying to analyse what I did and what I did not and why.

I introduced a few basic gestures – expressions in the first lesson and we have been revising these since but I have chosen only the few basic ones that help us navigate around the lesson and the classroom and these are: Yes, No, Stand up, Sit down, Stop, Quiet, Wait. A very, very basic set indeed, to help us survive but not to overload the children.

As regards the actual rules, things to do and things not to do, I took things easy because I wanted to see the kids first, to observe them and to analyse them in order to figure out what are those 5 basic rules that we need first. Again, to help us survive but not to overload the children. Now I know and we are going to be introducing them in the upcoming week, together with more advanced classroom language.

Rewards chart

Our rewards chart was another area that I started to introduce rather cautiously, almost hoping that I can get away with not using it at all. Alas, after two days it turned out that we will need it after all, as one of the tools to help the kids regulate their own behaviour. I am planning to use it temporarily only. I have already written about this kind of an approach and about all of the advantages and disadvantages of rewards charts in general. If you are interested, please follow the link here.

So far I have been using the names on the board, however, because of many different reasons, from tomorrow, we are starting with the hand-held chart.

Time

This is a brand new element that I did not use to think of much before or to include in the routine framework. Until this summer and until this academic year. Here are the two tools / tricks that we have used this week with my kids.

  • Lesson plan, or, a list of activities we are planning to cover in class. You can read more about it here. The points keep disappearing as we complete the activities. This helps the kids see the passing of the lesson and to manage their time and behaviour in time. Naturally, all the elements such as ‘songs’ or ‘games’ create something to look forward to in the later stages of the lesson
  • A clock on the wall: we started the week without a clock and I lasted two days, upset, confused and angry. This is how I realised that Anka, the teacher adores a clock on the wall, to start and to finish the lesson on time and to understand how and if the pace of the lesson needs to be adapted. On day three the clocks were already on the wall and we used them for the benefit of the kids. One of the things that we put on the wall is the names of the subject (English, Maths, ect) and the time slot of the lesson, for example 9:00 – 9:45. Afterwards, I say: the lesson finishes when the big hand gets to number 9 on the clock, while pointing to the hand and the numbers on the clock. I have noticed that children started to respond to that. We will continue.

Story

I have also decided that our last lesson of the week (Thursday) will be a story lesson, in order to finish the week on a high note, to do something lighter and to be able to take advantage of everything that a storybook can offer. This past week my story of choice was ‘Too Loud’ a story by Kay Widdowson about a cat mum who walks through the garden asking everyone, bees, frogs, dogsg and ducks, to keep quiet and only in the end do we find out that it is because her kittens are sleeping and she doesn’t want them to wake up.

We used the story to practise reading the names of animals, CVC words and not and to read and the kids were involved through the phrase ‘Stop. You are too loud’. This phrase is an adaptation of the line that features in the story, although I adapted it a little bit. I decided to use only ‘too loud’ instead of ‘too loud’ and ‘too noisy’ and I have developed it into a full sentence that we can use in the classroom on daily basis.

Socialising

Turning a group (or a class) into a community is a long-term project that will take us a large part of the academic year. I have already written a bit about it here. We have already started to work on it and in the first week:

  • we have done a lot of activities whole class, to give us all a sense of one organism
  • I have tried to use the kids’ names whenever possible and to keep them on display all the time, to give us all a chance to learn them. We have also done a few rounds of ‘Can you read that name?’
  • we have tried to play a boardgame, for me to see to what extent the kids are ready to take turns, to obey the rules, to work in small pairs
  • I have been observing how different kids work and interact with different partners although they hasn’t been a lot of mingling yet because I did not want to introduce anything mess-inducive before the kids are ready.
  • we have worked a lot with markers because it is fun and markers are an easier writing tool but it also helped with the simple team work as the groups of two or three students were given a box of markers to share and to take care of
  • I have started to involve the children into taking control of the classroom and the lesson i.e. inviting them to be the teacher, assigning a student to give out and to collect resources.

Don’t forget to check out the next episode in the series, at the end of the week! There is more to come! Here you can find the story of week 2, week 3 and week 4. You can also check up on us after four months in the classroom. Here is the newest addition to the series.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #64 ‘What time is it?’ aka Classroom management tricks for primary

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Ingredients

  • A board and a marker, with two phrases written on the top: ‘What time is it?’ and ‘Time left:….min’
  • A watch for the teacher.

Procedures

  • Drill the question with all the kids (‘What time is it?’)
  • Every time you hear from the classroom the same or similar question, most probably in the kids’ L1 (‘What time is it?’, ‘When is the break?’, ‘How much time we’ve got left?’) etc, point to the question on the board and elicit it from the group or from one student and only when they do, check the time and write the number of minutes left until the end of the lesson.
  • Repeat every time someone asks the question but insist on them asking the question in English.

Why we like it?

  • First of all, this trick gives kids an opportunity to learn to control their behaviour in class. I use it with my pre-primary and primary students in a situation in which they cannot tell the time using the clock and they do not have their mobiles to do this using their digital clocks. Not to mention that at the moment we work in an unusual context and each part of the 4-academic hours-long day has a different length. If the kids understand better how much time is left or, in other words, for how many more minutes they are required to ‘work hard’, they are better prepared to manage their behaviour in the time left. Also, it is of a great psychological help to see the minutes disappear and then even if the day is long, even if the weather has an impact on the kids’ energy levels, even if the activities today are not amazingly exciting for everyone, there are fewer and fewer minutes to go through until the next break time, snack break, the walk, the playground and so on. It has been of a great help in all the summer classes.
  • The kids are likely to ask this question anyway, directing it at their teacher or their peers so giving them a chance to do it in English is an opportunity to learn and to practise some useful language in a natural context.
  • To be perfectly honest, it is a tiny little bit irritating to hear this question and to have to answer it a few times during the lesson BUT the very fact that the question is asked and the frequency with which it is asked is a great source of immediate feedback for the teacher and a signal that, perhaps, some changes need to be introduced in the original lesson plan. Maybe an activity took too long, maybe on that particular day the kids are too energetic or too sleepy for whatever is going on and they need a settler or a stirrer. Perhaps even an activity needs to be abandoned asap, for whatever the reason…Knowing is is much better than not knowing it and proceeding when your audience is not ready for it. That also means that on some days and with some activities, the kids will completely forget to ask the question and that is for the best reason of it. They will be so involved in the activities that the lesson length and the clock will not matter at all.

Happy teaching!

What an old dog learnt… A YL teacher goes back into the adult classroom

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Me and one of my best friends, Roman B. No old dogs in this photo. Only the amazing ones (The photo: courtesy of Yulia. The doggo: courtesy of Jill)

Back to the future

It just happened: a dedicated YL teacher (and a teacher who spent the last ten years doing her best to stay away from teaching adults (minus the trainees!) all of a sudden found herself in the classroom with some serious corportate clinets and their Business English, General English, English for Finance and Banking, A2 – C1. Full time.

It has to be said out loud: that was not a direction that this teacher dreamed of or the developement that the teacher planned or solicited but, at the same time, there is absolutely no need to wring hands or shed tears over such a giggle of the Fate. After all, the teacher is an experienced one, with an oh-dear number of years in the classroom (and different types of classrooms, everywhere) so the teacher will be just fine. After all, teaching is teachings, the students are great, the fun is being had. All the details are here just to set the context.

The old dog aka the adult classroom through a YL teacher

This particular started with a most random thing. I don’t even remember what we were doing and with whom, but, suddenly, I caught myself thinking ‘Blin, even my kids can do THAT‘. There was no anger in it or desperation, only curiosity and bemusement. I started to analyse the details and bits and pieces of this THAT and the reasons for that. It started with a sigh but it got interesting very quickly.

Here is a new post and an attempt at looking at the adult EFL learners through the eyes spoilt by her young students.

One. Inhibitions

This is something that is almost non-existant in the YL classroom. Minus all these cases in which the kid have had a negative first experience with English, at school, with the tutors or parents or when they are naturally introvert and shy and they simply need more time to settle in the group and to feel comfortable enough to talk. Most commonly, the kids enter the room, eyes wide-open, ready to discover and to enjoy the world of the English language.

Then, there are adults, a completely different picture. Naturally, there are quite a few factors that can contribute such as a lower level, a long break in learning or using the language, some negative previous learning experience or studying in one group with colleagues from the same company or being a low-level speaker of English when you are already a top manager.

The result? Silence in the classroom.

I guess that is the silence that is the time they need to think about their answer, to choose the words, to gather the courage to let them out and, naturally, they get it. They do have the right to the freedom of silence. For me, the teacher, it is also an interesting exercise in patience. I realised that I have been spoilt with hands shooting up into the air and the opinions voiced almost instantly. Here, I am getting used to breathing more and waiting for the students to be ready.

I am beginning to think that building up the students’ confidence suddenly gets the priority among the lesson and the course aims as regards the adult learners of English. Everything else, the vocabulary, the structures and the skills development will follow. Hopefully.

Two. Teacher-oriented communication

On the one hand, the YL classes are definitely more teacher-centred than the adult classes. That is, to some extent, fully justified. Students, especially the younger ones, are in need of the teacher and the adult as the lesson leader. But only to some extent. I strongly believe that this should be one of the main aims of the course to create the conditions in which the students will be learning to interact with the teacher BUT also giving them a chance to learn to interact with each other. After all, whatever happens in the classroom is only a warm-up, only the preparation, only the training before the real life interaction. In which, most likely, the teacher is not going to take part. For that reason, the students should be given the tools and opportunities to talk to each other, to lead the activities, to take part in pair-work. There is no need to wait with it until they turn ten or fifteen. Some elements of that can be introduced even much earlier and pair-work is feasible in pre-school.

Somehow, it is not a given with the older students. Adults, either because they are more inhibited or because they see it as a sign of respect towards the teacher, they hold back, they wait, for the teacher to call their name out or for the teacher to at least signal that it is their turn to speak. I have realised that sometimes I have to specifically highlight that I am stepping out of the conversation, that the students, in pairs or as a whole group, have to take responsiblity for the interaction and that I will not be encouraging, keeping it up and, of course, leading it. We have been studying together for about three months now and I can already see some improvement in that area. Hooray to that!

Three. Communication strategies

Communication strategies is one of my true professional passions and that is why it was chosen for my first research within the MA programme. Inspired by Haenni Hoti, Heinzman and Mueller (2003) (or, rather ‘taken aback by the comments of’) that claimed that young learners use a very limited range of communication strategies, basically limiting those to translation and code-switching (aka using a combination of L1 and L2), based on the gut feeling from the classroom, I decided to check it out. And, to prove them wrong. Hopefully.

Although my research was a very small scale and low-key and by a beginner researcher, I found out enough evidence to get me even more interested in the topic. My little students proved to be already effective communicators who work hard and who have a good range of different techniques to get the message across such as all-purpose words, approximation, direct appeal for help, indirect appeal for help, self-repair, other-repair and mime. The range was much wider. Translation and code-switching were used, too, and they were the most frequent ones, however, they were not the only ones.

Then, there are the adults and guess what, these adults, ‘Come as you are’, before I get to work on them, they know only one communication strategy and that is ‘translation’. falling back into their L1, straightaway, whenever something is unclear, unknown and uncertain. I am not even sure why it is assumed that the learners (let alone the young ones) will use these strategies of their accord. I haven’t researched that properly, yet, but perhaps it has got nothing to do with the age of the student or, rather, not only with the age of the student, and more with the learning experience and the opportunities to be acquainted with and to develop these strategies.

The adult students (my adult students) struggled in that area and if they didn’t know, they would immediately switch to L1 and they would expect an answer. Working around that by delaying the translation, encouraging them to try something else or, also, providing both, the L2 only and the translation was quite a challenge and I know that some of them were surprised that I don’t just provide the required service aka translation, that I am trying something else. They had it written all over the face. I can’t say my job is done here, far from it but we are working on it. And it is a bit better now.

Four. Sharing ideas

Teacher beliefs are a slippery topic and most of the time we don’t even think about them. It was only last year (and somewhere by the end of it) when I realised why I am a teacher and what I want from my lessons.

Everything happened thanks to one Sasha who joined our group and who, despite the eight months spent with the rest of the team, in a very welcoming and friendly environment, despite the fact that she got on with everyone, Sasha still would keep quiet in class unless I asked her a question and unless I called out her name. I had never even thought about it and only then did I understand that I want to create such an atmosphere in the lesson in which my students feel free to talk because they have something to share with the rest of the group, not because they have to, not because the teacher made them, not because the teacher asked the question or because the teacher is testing them. They talk because they have something to say. And I want them to feel that they can. This is something that we have been working on from the very beginning.

It was one more thing that was ‘not so obvious’ for my adult students. They stalled. They do, still, sometimes. Again, it might be due to a whole range of factors, the natural shyness, the lack of confidence, the level of English, the relations in the workplace, if they come from the same company, or even the natural politeness. It is not a given that everyone will be speaking during the lesson time because speaking and developing the communicative skills is the reason why we come to class.

Five. All ideas are good ideas.

That is a sad fact: adulthood and reality kills creativity and imagination. Long gone are the days of fairy tales and fantasy travels with Frodo or magical battles with Harry. Well, in most cases. For that reason, if the question is about playing football and the student does not play football, the rest, dramatically, is silence…With kids silence never ever happens, and that is especially amazing, because, more often than not, we do things that have nothing or very little to do with the real life. All these menus for the monster cafe, all these school trips around the world, or to the moon or, our life as pirates…Silence is a rare event. Thank heavens.

This post is not to be read as a huge, one thousand word, complaint about my adult students. It is certainly not. I am doing a good job, I like them and we are making progress. I am just positively amazed that with my young learners, we have done SO MUCH (and to be honest, so much we have done by accident, unwillingly, joyfully, just for laughs) to enable the kids and to ensure that they are effective communicators.

I would like to think that my kids are not in danger of being scared to scared, inhibited, with a strong affective factor. This ship has sailed.

This line, so frequently used in my kids classes, started to appear in my adult classes.

See this is basically what happens when you send a YL teacher into the adult classroom. There is a lot of dedication, professionalism and lots of good lessons are happening. But the teacher has a one track mind and everything is somehow YL-related:-)

Bibliography

A. Haenni Hoti, S. Heinzmann and S. Mueller (2003), I can help you? Assessing speaking skills and interaction strategies of young learners, In: M. Nikolov (ed), The Age Factor and and Early Language Learning, De Grutyer.

Happy teaching!