TEFL Tips #5: Proactively sequence group presentations

New semester; renewed insights; fresh panic. I teach a first-semester module called ‘English for International Management’ and I like to hit the ground running with a punchy first lesson culminating in student groups pitching improvement measures to a sceptical company boss. Bit chaotic but good energy by the end. TEFL Tip to be gleaned from this: lock down the sequencing and timing of group presentations at the earliest opportunity. Why? Because if you don’t, you’ll not only suffer the agonising ‘OK folks, who’s going to go first?’ situation, but every transition will be hampered by reluctance and task avoidance by each group waiting to take their turn. My preferred method is to write 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc on folded pieces of paper and have groups pick one while the task is being foregrounded. Once you’re about to begin, a quick moment to unwrap and reveal the order is enough to set up expectations and acclimatise groups with what is going to happen; you can nail this down even more tightly by writing down precise timings on the board if necessary. The important part: once it is time for groups to start presenting, the order is there. No need for negotiations or energy-sapping nagging on your part. Win.

TEFL Tips #4: The accuracy/fluency dilemma

“You can’t let errors like that go uncorrected!”

“You can’t destroy students’ confidence by constantly interrupting them!”

I’ve got either one of these distressed voices bleating in my head at any given point during any given lesson. It’s a quandary.

One approach worth a look is creating a accuracy/fluency scale somewhere in the room, then positioning an arrow somewhere on that scale according to the task being attempted. A pendulum works, as does an approximation of a car speedo or even a straightforward slider drawn on a whiteboard. 

Quickly, groups will learn to look over at the slider before they attempt a communicative task; actively deciding where to put that arrow will become part of their thinking. Group discussions on how to balance accuracy/fluency for different scenarios are a fascinating gateway for intercultural communication topics. And there’s nothing stopping you explaining your dilemma as a teacher, and putting the power to determine the right balance of fluency and accuracy in the hands of your learners.

Try it.

Facebook

This is my thinking: Facebook, like everything apart from Wikipedia, is supported by advertising. Getting your eyes on as much targeted content as possible. Same as most media. But – as Mark Z keeps insisting – FB is a tech company, not media. Doesn’t produce content per se, just acts as a conduit. So where other media companies bind themselves to some kind of editorial standards (not always high standards), FB sees no need for this. 

OK: that’s enough to leave right there. It’s just disingenuous. FB has more reach than just about any other company, allowing it to accrue monumental advertising revenue, and yet it sidesteps the obvious responsibility it wields.

Next thing: I think FB makes you feel angry. And envious. And shit. That struck a chord, right? I think Facebook’s algorithms have worked out that insecure, upset, worried people click more and stay longer. So they serve you up content designed to engender these emotions. It’s making the world feel bad about itself. Another reason.

Third, connected to the above. A consequence of this manipulation is the rise of echo chambers – but I’m not sure most folks really understand the metaphor. I think most people think an echo chamber is somewhere that echoes a lot. But the point is that the echo chamber reflects your voice back at you millions of times. That’s the point. You shout, then the same words come back at you in thousands of waves; they’re warped and distorted but it’s still your voice even if you don’t recognise it anymore. That is posting on FB.

Here’s what I want: Facebook as a social Wikipedia. Open-source, non-profit, transparent. Wikipedia could be a bloated, advertising-driven monster making Jimmy Wales millions a minute. It’s not.

So until that happens: Fuck Facebook.

TEFL Tips #3: Copy Eno’s Oblique Strategies

For me, lateral thinking has always been a term I half understood. Something to do with solving riddles right? It tended to crop up after the fact: Someone who had already determined a solution would implore you to ‘come on, do some lateral thinking’ until you thought what he or she thought. Hmmm. File with ‘thinking outside the box’ and do some proper work.

But a reappraisal is necessary, and in my case it was triggered by trying to work out how to teach English for Academic Purposes. With EAP more than any other specific purpose language teaching I’ve done, a learner’s capability to grasp the discourse of academic enquiry is utterly dependent on his/her ability to actually think in empirical terms. You just can’t bolt it on afterwards, because if you try to, you get bizarre paragraphs in which students dutifully avoid personal pronouns and deploy passives while being fundamentally unscientific in the way they develop and link ideas. OK, I suppose in an ideal world only students with a solid grasp of academic methodology would be grappling with EAP. Pffffft, as the steam escaping from a stoppered flask above a bunsen burner might say.

But it is in tackling this problem that I have come to enjoy a fascinating rediscovery of scientific method and discourse, always the dark side of the moon for a post-GCSE humanities graduate. Big Google sessions on formulating hypotheses, reasoning inductively and deductively and applying logic have provided great lesson material. And my students seem to be appreciating the knock-on effects of this back-to-basics approach on their other modules.

I should point out here that I teach students of international business. They are not scientists, but they do have to conduct an extended piece of academic research to get their Bachelor’s degree (they’d call it a dissertation in the UK). And clearly the German university system expects them to have somehow acquired the requisite skills to achieve this, despite the fact that these are simply not embedded in a curriculum explicitly geared towards the applied skills of accounting, business law, business maths and statistics.

So there’s a painful shortfall to be dealt with here, and it is cruelly exposed in our EAP lessons.

To come to the point and the title of this post: one Google session led me to lateral thinking and Edward de Bono, and that triggered a memory of an interview I’d read with Brian Eno about some sort of cards he used which displayed abstract messages designed to spur creativity in the various era-defining artists he’s worked with (and Coldplay). The details are all here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies and a quick read will instantly highlight for you the potential of creating your own set of cards for your learners. Just to get the gist, here are mine:

Is that it?
Where are the hidden gems?
Is this the start or the end?
Can you feel it?
Why so blurred?
Heart or head?
Better safe? Or better sorry?
Who’s not being honest?
Where is the love?
Is it a man thing?
What’s the point?
What aren’t we seeing?
Who is (really) in control?
Is this a con?
What would the parents think?
Why so serious?
Where’s the catch?
Where did it all go wrong?
What if it’s a trap?
Bit boring?
Should we just start again?
What’s taking so long?
Is this the time?
Why did we stop believing?
Smoke or fire?
Are there walls?
Who has the key?
Do words matter?
Would you touch it?
A dime or a dollar?
Whose round is it?
Why are the gates locked?

Now, I’m guessing this isn’t for everyone, but maybe it is sparking off ideas with some teachers. I printed off a few sets of cards, put one deck on each table, and just asked students to turn over a card whenever they felt they were getting stuck. At the very least, that moment of disassociation as your brain tries to make the question fit snaps the group out of a discursive dead end. In some cases the cards opened up whole new aspects which hadn’t been considered. And the cards are reusable and pretty flexible for use in stimulating discussions or analysis on a range of topics. They also seem to have a positive differentiating effect built in: More capable students will think farther in order to find meaning in the questions and this offers useful and in my experience relatively unforced modelling of abstract thinking patterns to students who may not be quite there yet. So, if you dig it then go create some cards, or feel free to use and amend mine.

Now, if only I had an oblique strategy for bringing these TEFL tips in at under 800 words …

TEFL Tips #2: Use dynamic manager/consultant groupings

This really stretches the definition of a ‘tip’ and it’s only the second one … But never mind, maybe someone will find it useful. I use this method every week and can’t really remember how I managed without it.

So the basic idea is you have four groups, each representing a different organisation, all of which have some kind of problem that needs solving. Each group needs between 3 and 6 students; the groups don’t have to be exactly equal.

Within each group, you nominate or self-select between 2 and 4 people to be consultants. The remaining group members automatically become managers. Throughout the activities, managers always stay in their home group while consultants travel to other groups.

Over the course of the next 2 – 3 hours, students are confronted with repeated high-level genuine communication scenarios requiring them to analyse, explain and persuade.

Phase 1: Analysis

Initially, materials are distributed and each group learns its individual identity. This should be some kind of organisation with some kind of problem(s). Students can use SWOT/Porter/PESTEL/rich picturing/any other analysis to explore their situation, though at this stage they are not looking for solutions – that comes later. The emphasis here is on the managers being able to explain the issues, as this is what happens in stage 2. Depending on the learner level/time constraints/expectations the materials can be brief or highly complex.

Phase 2: Briefing

This is where it gets slightly complicated; a visualisation of the required classroom movement is useful here. Basically, each group needs to send consultants to 2 other groups in such a manner that each group now contains the original managers plus consultants from 2 other groups. Depending on the overall group size, the consultants will be travelling alone or in pairs, it doesn’t matter. The managers now have to explain their group’s organisational identity and problem to the visiting consultants. The more clarity, depth and detail they bring to this the better. Depending on the nature of the organisation + problem, it may also be appropriate for the managers to give the consultants materials to take away, or even to have prepared their own materials detailing the problem(s).

Phase 3: Development

The idea is that the consultants now return to their home groups and, together with the managers (who for this period forget their original role and help the consultants), develop some kind of solution to the problem/s they have been hearing about. The first challenge is for the consultants to relate what they have discovered (don’t forget that the managers are entirely out of the loop on this, having just been explaining an entirely different problem to entirely different consultants). And lest we forget: each group has two solutions to develop, as their two consultants visited two different respective groups. The groups would now normally split in two, with managers joining consultants to work on the potential solutions.

Phase 4: Pitch

It’s action time again as the consultants head back out on the road to pitch their solutions to the organisations. Theoretically one could now swap roles so that those students who were previously managers now become consultants and get to travel, but in practice I prefer to keep the roles static so that the students who received the briefing are the same students who make the pitch. Now comes the climax of the activity: each group contains two consultants who are making two different pitches to the organisation against each other, having no idea what the other consultants may have created. This creates genuine tension as one consultant has to listen to the other’s pitch and then try to better it. The natural and unforced competitive element is undeniable. Ideally the consultants have also produced some written materials which they can leave with the managers.

Phase 5: Debrief

Ok, back to the home groups for the debrief. This time it is the managers doing the explaining as they outline the two pitches they have just heard to the returning group members. Some kind of scoring system can be developed (with basic criteria referencing if possible) and the whole team should then evaluate the competing solutions and allocate points. Finally, each group can give feedback to the whole group level explaining their scoring while the teacher notes down the overall points and awarding the winning team with a prize (the team whose consultants collectively accrued the most points).

I’m not sure how this reads – maybe it sounds like duh, that’s group work, big deal. Maybe I’m not explaining it clearly, maybe the communicative implications of the various group constellations aren’t immediately obvious. But I’m telling you: it works, and it is almost entirely self-organising. As a teacher you’re at liberty to walk around offering intervention and differentiating without having to dash to the front and engage in teacher talk. Keep each section timed tightly and you’ll have some of the most relaxed lessons ever.

TEFL Tips #1: Hand out sheets face down

Even in the age of blended learning and smartphone-based classroom management apps we’re still rocking the photocopies. There’s something immediate about working on paper and I guess it remains a kind of ‘media franca’ for the language learning space. So like it or not: we’re all handing out sheets.

Here’s the downside: the time spent handing out sheets kills energy and opens up an irresistible vacuum for learners to jump on their social media. If you’ve just spent time foregrounding a task and building a sense of anticipation, then it’s annoying to feel that dissipate as you squeeze round the room, repeatedly dead-legging yourself on desks as you try to prise one sheet off a stack of 25.

The solution seems obvious: get those sheets out early before the class starts or by discretely distributing them during a previous activity. Problem solved!

Yes … but now we have another problem: You can’t ‘foreground a task and build a sense of anticipation’ if the group have already looked at the sheet and decided (before you could engage in any anticipation building) that it doesn’t look very interesting. Not so much dead-legging as shooting yourself in the foot – now your foregrounding feels to them more like a desperate attempt to make your mundane task seem interesting. In an effort to plan ahead, you’ve ended up putting yourself on the defensive from the start.

So here it is: distribute the sheets early, but always FACE DOWN. The first few times learners will automatically turn them over, but with a little shocked play-acting you can indicate that they are not supposed to do this. The pattern is established very quickly and by the third time no-one will touch those sheets.

It is surprising how intriguing a face-down sheet of A4 can be – for learners it is redolent of exams or similar high-stakes scenarios – and by starting your task build with the phrase, ‘You all have a downturned sheet of A4 in front of you. Do not turn it over’, you have imbued the upcoming task with a palpable sense of intrigue. OK maybe that’s going too far, but at least the learners are not actively shutting down on you having reached their own conclusions with insufficient information. You remain in the driving seat.

And once the teacher talk is over and it’s time to begin, then the instruction: ‘OK, turn over the sheets’ has a nice snappiness to it, and you get the added energy boost of all learners engaging in a synchronised action which lends an important kick of impetus to the activity.

No upper-thigh bruising, no paper cuts: just a crisp and focused intro into the learning.

Understanding levels of abstraction

Happy new year … it’s not too late is it?

I want to take PeriodOne back to it’s didactic roots for a moment and write down a concept which just occurred to me on the way to my class today. I have spent the last two days performing oral exams for my course in English for Academic Purposes and now – rather too late it must be said – I’ve realised what is so often lacking in situations where students are required to explain complex ideas: an awareness and control of levels of abstraction. The more I think about it, the more clear it is to me that this should form the backbone of any course purporting to teach academic writing or discussion. Don’t get me wrong – we have talked about this in my lessons, but it’s never had a name as such, and that means that it’s never really been anchored in students’ minds in the same way that – say – connective phrases or use of the passive voice are.

If it is to be easily and accurately understood, every complex idea must be explained progressively through its different levels of abstraction. Many students are able to name and describe theories; many others can think up enlightening examples of such theories applied. Few can confidently move between one form of explanation and the other. And even fewer can actively organise their thoughts into levels of abstraction and then consciously deploy these in the order and manner which best explicates their point: moving from theory to example, from abstract to concrete, may be the most conventional way of getting an idea across, but it is not the only one.

David Mitchell and male grooming

David Mitchell’s regular video podcasts are often quite funny, even if you frequently finish up wanting to give the man a tequila, or at least a good shake. This week’s agonies focus on the unbearable difficulty of paying females compliments – and appropriately, the podcasts are sponsored by a company manufacturing male grooming products. Obviously I’m in no position to speculate on David Mitchell’s use of hygiene items, but I think it’s safe to say he’s not exactly a gleaming example of perfectly-groomed metrosexuality. And the people – like me – that enjoy his podcasts are probably overwhelmingly similar. Maybe market saturation has forced male grooming companies to search for lucrative new niches among the achingly awkward and self-conscious (the mumblesexuals?), but I fear they may be out of luck on this one.

Rockin’ and Rollin’

I’m one of those awful teachers that play in a band. I make no apologies for this fact, for unlike ALL the other teachers’ bands in the world, my band is extremely brilliant. Check out our Myspace site for undeniable objective proof of this fact (please note: depending on your taste, you made find us incredibly rubbish).

As we all know, the music industry has experienced a few changes of late. As an unsigned indie-rock outfit, we have no allusions as to what the future holds – and it doesn’t involve six album deals with major recording labels, that’s for sure.

What it does involve is getting to the stage where we are selling thousands of records as downloads via itunes and other digital providers, and selling out venues in our local town i.e. Berlin. And doing this alone, without proper management, studios, producers or promotion. Or any money. The cool thing is, this is actually nowadays very possible.

The recordings we have online were produced by us alone, and they sound pretty good. Deals can be made which get well recorded music onto itunes without huge amounts of money changing hands. Email lists, Facebook events and a fair bit of word-of-mouth can usually mobilise 100 – 200 people to get down to the gigs, and if you’re playing a decent venue at the weekend then twice as many will come along anyway to see what’s going on (we had 130 in last night, but that was a Tuesday, so fair play). Forget the sixties, the punk revolution, Madchester – there has never been a better time to be in a band than right now.