It can be very difficult to get and keep the attention of very young learners. I was once teaching a class about toys when a boat sailed past the classroom window. How can you compete with that?! Whatever you do to get the attention of your very young learners it has to be more interesting and fun than just shouting “sit down” or “look at me”. Below are my four favorite refocusing strategies. Each of these packages “sit down and look at me” in something more fun than whatever is distracting your class. Start whenever you feel your students’ attention is beginning to wander. Everyone will join when they see the fun.
How long can you pay attention for? Will you make it to the end of this blog post before you get distracted? You’re an adult, so it should be easy. But what if you were four years old? How long could you focus for? Young children have short attention spans. If you’re teaching very young learners (three, for and five-year olds) it’s very unlikely then can pay attention for more than five minutes. So what can you do to keep them engaged for an hour long class?
A lot of what occurs in our classes is a mystery to us. Several years ago, I did an action research project on group work. Beforehand, I thought I was a great teacher. I was sure my students spoke English all the time in class, even when my back was turned. As part of the project, I recorded two of my students during a running dictation. These two young learners were meant to be using the language they’d learnt in class to describe a picture of a monster posted outside the classroom. After class I listened to the audio. I expected to hear “It has three eyes.” “It has blue teeth.” “It has green hair.” What did I actually hear? Chinese. My students didn’t speak any English at all during the activity. My perceptions of what was happening in my classroom were the opposite of reality. This is apparently true of most teachers. Jack Richards and Charles Lockhart say “Much of what happens in teaching is unknown to the teacher”. So how can we make more of these unknowns known? Here are five ways of uncovering hidden truths in your classroom.
The concept of teaching English in English is so common, we rarely stop to think about how unconventional and challenging it is. No other subject is taught so immersivity. Can you imagine receiving instruction on interpretive dancing through an interpretive dance? Or getting taught to code by reading java? Probably not.
Teaching English in English would be impossible without one key skill - grading language. Here are 5 strategies to help you help your students understand. And to help you remember them, they spell G-R-A-D-E.
Cognitive biases screw up everyone’s thinking. They make us more afraid of flying than driving. They stop the U.S. enacting universal health care. And they convinced Tony Blair and George W. Bush that the Iraq War was a great idea, even when we knew it wasn’t. In short, cognitive biases make us less logical, less rational and less efficient decision makers. All of this applies to teachers too. Here are five cognitive biases that screw up your thinking in the classroom and why they stop you from being a better teacher.
Your PowerPoint slides are a masterpiece, your materials are back from the printer’s and the opening speech you drafted would put Martin Luther King to shame. But wait a minute, is that good training?I don’t think it is. ‘Less is more’ in art, design and architecture, and I think that less can also be more in training. Here are five principles that will set you on your way to becoming a minimalist trainer.
We’ve all been in there before. Pieces of wood strewn across the floor. Packets of seemingly identical (but vitally different) nails encircle you. At the center of this carnage you sit with furniture assembly instructions on your lap which require the Rosetta Stone to decipher.
Is this also how our students feel in your class? Listening to instructions in a foreign language can be every bit as confusing as assembling those bookshelves. Next time you give instructions for an activity, G-I-V-E instructions.
Picture a class of six-year old’s learning English. What do you see? Dancing? Coloring in? Flashcard games? Face-to-face lessons are naturally kinesthetic, meaning more blood flow to students’ brains, more engagement, and more variety. Online ESL classes can be the opposite: fidgety students struggling to overcome the compulsion to move. As online English teachers, we need more movement in our online classes. Where to start? The 5 ‘i's.
“Please email us your training."
"What do you mean? How can I email you interactions, epiphanies, questions, reactions, reflections and learning?”
"Just send your PowerPoint deck".
When did people start to think that “PowerPoint” is a synonym for “training”? Do they think the “T” in “PPT” stands for “training”? Training is so much more than a series of slides, handouts and bullet points. If your new year’s resolutions included cutting down on fats, sugars or caffeine, here are five reasons to add PowerPoint to your list of things to avoid in the new year.
When I was a first-year teacher, my lesson plans looked like this.
"Warmer (game)
Grammar
Game
Book p14-15
Game
Review"
Games were great at entertaining my classes. Much later I realized that some games were also great for learning English. The challenge was figuring out which games.
If you want your games to be more than a break between grammar drills and book work, check your games against “GAMES” (Group, Appropriate, Motivating, English, Skills).
Maybe you hate your school. Maybe you’re working undercover for a competitor. Maybe this is your next gig after hacking the American election. Whatever the reason, you’re in good company; there are a lot of people dedicated to destroying teacher development. Little has been written about the field of destroying teacher development (or “DTD” for short), so to make your work easier, I have compiled this list of the highly effective DTD techniques. Go forth and destroy!
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln (via Penny Ur),
You can teach some of the students all of the time, or all of the students some of the time. But you can’t teach all of the students all of the time.
Why not? Because most classes are mixed level. Some students learn faster than others, some write better than others, some are quieter than others. So the question we need to ask ourselves is…
How can we teach more of our students more of the time?
We can teach more of our students more of the time by making our mixed level classes “MIXED” (by using Materials, Instructions, eXpectations, Evaluation, Discipline).
Moses Chilufiya once said, “A school without teachers is like a ship without a sail.” Great teachers can set schools and students on a course for success, but finding great teachers is easier said than done. Do your new recruits have more in common with Alfie Vickers than Socrates? Here are three simple mistakes to avoid in teacher recruitment.
There are so many things to think about when you’re being observed, it’s easy to forget the obvious. Here are seven ways to make sure you rock your next observed lesson.
I used to be a civil engineer. On construction sites, there were two ways people stayed safe. There were safety regulations to prevent accidents. But no matter how many safety regulations there were, everyone wore a hardhat. If something went wrong, a hardhat improves your chances of survival. Managing behavior of pre-primary school age children is similar. Teachers can prevent behavior problems from happening by planning engaging classes where children are engaged and feel valued. But when behavior problems happen, we also need tactics to deal with them. Here are two sets of strategies for encouraging positive behavior and dealing with negative behavior when it occurs.