Reflection - Ana - 1st Session

We started our session with Ana with some more examples of warmers, both in this case for learning students’ names.  It seems obvious, but it’s of the utmost importance to learn students names if you want to create any sort of rapport with them.  Ana also advised us how the first few days of a new school year are vital.  We must be clear on our expectations from the students, on the rules we set, and importantly, what the consequences of their actions are.  Whatever we promise, we must follow through with, otherwise we quickly lose the respect of the students. 

Ana then explained the difference between an exercise, an activity and a task.  After so much theory on the subject, it finally became clear to us!  I think we all also breathed a sigh of relief when Ana advised us on the reality of doing projects.  Over the course of this masters it seemed that Project Based Learning was the only way to go and something we’d be expected to undertake right from the word go.  It stands to reason that taking on a project is not something to be taken lightly, it requires tremendous effort and coordination on the part of the teaching staff and is not something we’ll likely be involved in right from the beginning.  Projects are of course wonderful, but it’s also important to learn about the day to day reality of a language class. 

One really intriguing thing that Ana mentionned was about ‘learned helplessness’. This is a vicious cycle where students come to believe that they have no control over their learning.  Perhaps they have had a string of bad results in homework and in exams, the danger is that they will become resigned to the fact that they simply can’t do it, and as a result, give up trying.  

One thing that contributes to ‘learned helplessness’ is the feeling of being powerless, I’ve talked in my first blog post for Luz about the Paradox of Choice, and I think the same principle applies here.  We must offer students the chance to be autonomous in their learning and make their own choices, but we must also be careful not to make the decision so voluminous and unwieldy that students don’t know what they should do. 

Praise where praise is due is also important and even more important is how we praise.  I’ve also mentioned this in another blog post, talking about a video from Carol Dweck about the Closed Mindset and the Growth Mindset.  In short, she says how important it is to praise students for the process and for effort they make, and steer away from any sort of praise which refers to intelligence.  We are all capable of learning more and it’s only through persistence and effort that we can grow.  The video is fantastic, so I’ll post it again. 

Building on what was said earlier about learning names, it’s also important to find out what motivates and interests students, so that we in turn can attempt to make our classes more motivating.  If we’re really lucky we’ll achieve the holy grail of intrinsic motivation. 

The tasks we set as teachers are also important in avoiding ‘learned helplessness’. Tasks should be challenging but attainable.  Scaffolding and support are also vital.  Furthermore - and here Ana and Luz prove just how much they are two sides of the same coin - our objective isn’t to stump our students, it’s to help them achieve goals.  We shouldn’t set exams that are going to be ridiculously difficult for them, we should facilitate the process as much as possible, even if that means simply thinking carefully about how we set out an exam to make it easier for students to actually do the task. 

Speaking of facilitating learning, listening can often be a stressful experience for students.  If not adequately prepared, they have no idea what the listening is about and quickly get lost; if they have nothing to do while they are listening, it becomes overwhelming.  Pre-listening activities, therefore, are vital.  A pre-listening activity could simply be  predict the content from a picture or the title.  For the first listening, students need gist questions to get a general sense of the meaning.  I’ve sometimes combined Pre-listening and gist activities by playing Listening Bingo.  I choose a selection of words from the listening and write them up on the board in two columns.  The first column has words from the beginning of the listening and the second column has words that appear near the end.  (This is important!)  In pairs, students predict what they think the listening might be about, based on the words.  They then choose a selection of words, half from one column and half from the other.  The teacher plays the listening the first time around and students cross of their words until they get bingo!  Students also check their predictions to the contents.  Students are then ready for a second listening and more detailed questions.  It is also important to include a post-listening activity. Listenings are rich in language and learning opportunities and we as teachers must exploit these possibilities rather than checking answers to the detailed questions and moving on. 

In the session, we then turned to dications and how to make them more interesting, I think we all thoroughly enjoyed the running dictation activity and I love doing it in my classes. It’s such a wonderfully simple way to make an otherwise boring activity exciting.  I’m also a big fan of picture dictations and Dictogloss.  Another technique that I really enjoy doing is a sort of video dictogloss.  Any video with plenty of movement and action is perfect, half the class sit with their backs to the screen, the other half sit opposite them where they can see their partner and the screen.  The teacher mutes the video and plays a section, the student who can see the video explains what is happening and his partner makes notes.  Students then swap places for another section of the video.  After, they work together to reconstruct what happened in the whole video, then watch again to check.

We finished off the session looking at how to use songs.  I loved the idea of using a variety of different types of activity in the same song.  I admit that I usually fall back on ‘fill in the gaps’ but I will definitely be using the activities that Ana suggested in the near future!  

At this early stage of the classes - and unfortunately we have so few of them - I’d like to say what a privilege it is to be taught by Luz and Ana, who bring not only a wealth of expertise and insight into the craft of teaching but also passion and seemingly bottomless energy and enthusiasm!