Troublesome and Intolerant: Part One

 

He would fit in well with my class!

Every teacher has one of those classes. You know the one I mean, the class that you come out of with feelings that range from slight dejection to outright depression. The class that makes you feel like a bad teacher because it doesn't go as you'd hoped. The class that makes you react in ways that you wouldn't have dreamt of doing when you were training and may have even got you thrown off the course. Now don't worry, I'm not talking about anything violent here! I mean reactions such as raising your voice, getting into useless discussions with students, sticking to your guns when you know it's best to change tactics or move on.

Every year there seems to be one of these groups to spoil your otherwise perfect timetable. And the funny thing is, that the class in question isn't a group of bad kids, their previous teacher thought they were a lovely group, but there is something invisible that prevents you from gaining their respect and trust. Maybe you started the year on the wrong foot, maybe they preferred last year's teacher, maybe they have just changed over the summer. Maybe, as teachers, we know that the year is not going to be perfect and that there will be one group that will ruin things and we unconsciously stick a label on this group in the first week. Yes, this is going to be my dreaded group this year! I would hope this wasn't the case, but it is a possibility.

For me, this class changes as time goes on. Once upon a time it was very young learners that made my life difficult. Four year olds that I couldn't keep on a chair for more than five minutes. This year it's a group of thirteen year olds. Hormones all over the place, these kids are giggly, touchy-feely (with each other!) and would be much happier if they were allowed to sit chatting in Spanish all lesson. It may not help that I am no longer a "playing games" type teacher. It certainly does not help that they are in that in-between stage of mental and emotional development. They want to  "play games" but they don't want to get up from their seats or actually do anything. They definitely don't want to "do the book"!

So, I try (I really do) to find more fun things for them to do. They have been reasonably responsive with a couple of lessons based around activities from the Timesavers Speaking Activities book of resources. They particularly enjoyed the drawing activity but get quite bored with the "opinion" type discussions. They all profess to prefer "grown up" activities like the previous type, but don't really have the maturity to do them effectively. Sometimes they come out with things they have seen on TV and show some interest, so last week I took in a simple copy of the summarised Declaration of Human Rights and the following lesson we looked at what was happening in Libya. They didn't complain as such about the content, although I could tell it went a bit over their heads. A few of the students had never heard of Libya. Only one knew where in the world it was and could easily locate it on a globe. I wasn't particularly surprised as Spanish education focuses on mainly just that: Spain. Spanish history, Spanish geography and so on. I'm sure I had never heard of Libya myself when I was thirteen, but the again it wasn't on TV twenty-four-seven. Very few had heard of Gaddafi, but when we read a short article and discussed briefly what was happening, they were at least showing some interest. Maybe this was because I had promised them a game after we had finished!

Some of the students have showed an interest in history. I'm wondering whether to try a few lessons on historical events. I'm not particularly well-read on history myself, so I would have to do some research first, but if it keeps them happy...

I am open to any ideas on how to keep this group motivated. My main concern is to get them speaking, as I can focus on vocabulary or language features that either emerge or that I can smuggle into the activity itself.
If anybody knows of any resources suitable for teenagers with an elementary productive level (but pre-intermediate receptive skills) please add a comment below.

This post is a two-parter - this is the "Troublesome" part. You can find Part Two "Intolerant" here.

First Lessons: Teaching T(w)eens Part 2 - What they came up with

In my last post I spoke about an activity to use with a new group of young teenagers, where they are given the opportunity to tell me what they are interested in. Here are some of the results, in no particular order:

Likes and Interests

Sports          Computer games          Shopping          Reading          Watching TV          Talking to friends

Drawing        Listening to music         Girls                Chatting on MSN                          Football

Basketball      Justin Bieber               Technology       Art                   History

Preferred Class Activities

Playing Combiletter (a word game)
Listening to songs
Talking to my friends (one can imagine that this would be in Spanish)
Watching a film/video
Talking about interesting things (whatever they are!)
Speaking to girls (Yes, a new obsession has appeared over the summer for one boy!)

Topics to study in class

Art
Famous People
World news
Technology
Science
History
Conversations

Problems

Grammar
Pronunciation
Writing

The Doodle Space didn't give too much away, but I did discover that we have a very talented artist in the class! I also got the impression that quite a few of the kids like drawing Manga style characters. Being allowed to draw while they worked seemed to give them the impression that the activity was more fun. I monitored closely to make sure they were all actually working and not just doodling, helping out with ideas where necessary.

Hopefully I will be able to draw on this information to provide more motivating activities to use to supplement our course book.

Motivating teenage exam classes: an autonomous approach

A few months ago I wrote an article about learner autonomy, which, for those of you who subscribe to MET magazine, appears in the July issue. One of the practical ideas I spoke about for encouraging learner autonomy is a take on "peer teaching".
Peer teaching means that the students are the teachers for a period of time. This could be ten minutes at the beginning or end of a lesson up to a whole lesson. The idea is that the learners choose the lesson focus, possibly from a list that you give them, and find a way to present and practise this content.

With teens, who may be going through a difficult period of self consciousness, this type of approach has to be considered carefully. It really depends on the learners themselves: How shy or outgoing are they? What kind of relationship do they have with one another? Are there any particularly reserved members of the class?

As the typical answers to these questions would generally make it difficult for students to get up in front of the class and present a lesson or activity, the best way of going about peer teaching with this age group is to put students into groups. Ideally the groups should have a healthy mix of different types of learners such as boys and girls, stronger and weaker students, shy and more outgoing people, students with different interests and learning styles. Having variety in a group helps the dynamics and creativity of the results.

I am going to present the following idea to my group of FCE teenagers tomorrow in their first lesson of the new school year.

Each group of students is going to be responsible for one lesson per term.
Each group will choose a different subject as the basis for their lesson. It could be based on a grammar point, a vocabulary topic, or a specific exam skill (e.g. Use of English Part 2).
Each group will spend some time in class to prepare their lesson.
Each member of the group will have a role to fulfil and an area to work on.
Each group will receive a valuation for how they have worked both as a group and individually, as well as a mark from the other learners.


The idea is that including the students in the design process of their course will highly motivate them. They will feel great when there classmates have understood something they didn't before thanks to their presentation or explanation. They will become more involved in decision making and take responsibility for their own and their classmates' learning. They will also improve cognitive skills such as evaluating, decision making, explaining, planning and summarizing.

Would anybody like to try this out as a parallel experience with me and discuss how they get on?

Praise

I recently watched an interview with the wonderful Carol Read on the subject of praise. Carol is in my opinion THE authority on young (primary age) learners and so when I saw her name on the interviewees list, I clicked straight on the video link (http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/sessions/2010-04-09/interview-carol-read-spain).

Carol focuses on the use of praise with young learners, explaining about how to use praise in order to give encouragement and to build up children's self esteem as well as to help with classroom management and deal with behavioural problems, without going overboard and using too much praise, making it empty and meaningless. I don't want to go into too much detail, as you can see the video for yourselves.

However, this interview got me thinking about the use of praise with teenagers and adults. When we think about praise, we automatically think of children, since they seem to need a certain amount of praise and they are constantly demanding it, by asking the teacher if their work is OK, if they can have a tick and so on. But what about older students? You will rarely find a sixteen-year-old directly asking for praise, but there may be indirect signs which we as teachers must learn to interpret. For example, a teenager who answers questions when no-one else does may secretly be hoping for a "good" from the teacher. I find my FCE students looking for a "well done" when I give them back their writing tasks, and see their disappointment when they see a "good effort" which they interpret to be a mediocre result.  Most teenagers have many insecurities and lack self-esteem and confidence in  their abilities and therefore maybe need some sort of praise more than any other age group. Nevertheless, we must be very careful not to make the praise too obvious or selective since this can have the opposite effect. Peer pressure may make it uncool to be a model student, so I think private praise could be the solution. On written work, think carefully about the comments you write as using the right words can be an excellent method of encouragment. However, as Carol mentions in her interview, it can be much more effective to praise the different elements of a piece of work such as the planning and ideas, as well as the linguistic aspects. Give praise for good paragraphing, or the use of different vocabulary and structures. Notice the work that has gone into the piece; with practise you will be able to quickly tell when an essay has been rushed and when some thought has gone into it at the planning stage. As for other types of work, if you do not want to openly praise your students, write them little notes at the end of the lesson mentioning anything they did especially well. They will probably want to compare them with their classmates but if everyone gets one, there should be no problem with this.

Now, what about adults? I feel that we neglect adults because we think that they don't need praise, but surely this isn't true. I am convinced, when I think about it, that adults need just as much praise as younger learners, they just don't show it. Think of an elementary group of adults. These learners don't have enough English to express themselves well; they get stuck, they get frustrated when they can't understand or make themselves understood, and all we do is tell them not to worry, we try to encourage and motivate them to keep trying and we may even put words in their mouths for them, but how often do we say "excellent" or "you are doing really well!"? And as we go up through the levels, we give less and less praise. With an advanced class, we already have high expectations (maybe too high) and assume that these learners know how well they are doing and don't need to be told so.

Adults are actually the biggest drop outs of evening classes. We must understand that they have many other commitments like work and families and they could be making sacrifices to come to their English lessons. When these people feel that they are not progressing enough, or that they are simply not good language learners, they drop out. It is then, more important than ever to show learners how they are doing and give them support and praise when necessary.