Tag: tefl tips

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 #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.