Download lessons? Or get ideas...?

Print out, photocopy and cut up... But is that what you really want?

On the support group we have for our CELTA course trainees, someone recently asked where they could find sites from which they could download lesson plans.

You can find such things at sites like TEFL.net, ESL-kids.com and Splendid-Speaking.com.

Some of the publishers also have excellent resources sites, such as OneStopEnglish and BusinessEnglishOnline.net (both from MacMillan)

What would my tutor think...?
Remember, however, that there's an awful lot of rubbish out there in cyberspace. I'd suggest, before you download material, that you should ask yourself (among other questions) what your CELTA course tutor would have thought of it?

You might also consider the source of the material. The publishers give you some guarantee of quality lesson plans, as does the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk, and the British Council kids site.

Whether or not the site carries Google-is-Evil ads is another consideration I might make. It does? It may be that its primary interest is to make money, not to improve your teaching...

Don't search, have things come to you
Personally, as I prefer to have things come to me, rather than having to search for them, I'd really recommend the free materials by email the ELT publishers will send out to you (in the image above, materials in my mailbox from OUP).

Is it lesson plans you really want...?
My doubt about such things is whether or not downloadable lesson plans are actually what you should be looking for.

It would be nice just to be able to get free, ready-to-print, ready-to-use stuff and not have to think further about the lessons we are teaching. But I think there is -- or there ought to be! -- a lot more to good language teaching than that.

Do you want to print and photocopy vocabulary worksheets -- or is really the ideas, how to teach vocabulary that you really need...?

Using the Board

Another new article, on Using the Board, on my favourite ELT site: teachingenglish.org.uk.

They probably taught you most of what the article says on your CELTA course, but it's an important enough issue to look back at.

Blogging, Storytelling, Video links

Two great sets of links, both of which came from recent additions to Larry Ferlazzo's amazing collection of links:

• Using Blogs to Promote Authentic Learning in the Classroom
• Digital Storytelling

Note also this link, which I discovered by exploring from the second of the above:

• Video in the classroom

How should you use technology in the classroom? Your learners should create things with it. It shouldn't just be you finding and printing stuff for them, or displaying it to them on an interactive whiteboard.

Make your learners creators of content, not merely consumers...

I don't remember who first said that, or where I heard it -- but that's the secret of using technology I believe.

What a Dogme lesson feels like

The (approx.) monthly Pilgrims' Humanising Language Teaching newsletter is one I subscribe to (free).

Among the interesting articles in its back issues is one on "What a Dogme lesson feels like".

In case you wondered:

"...like a group of people freed from their expectations of the traditional teacher-student, them-and-us, relationship"

And in case you wondered what Dogme is, it's -- among other things -- a fascinating discussion group that will be of interest if you think your learners more important than your materials.

Things like the HLT newsletter coming to you, rather than you going looking, is one way to save yourself wasting time on the Internet, which is a good thing. Belonging to a discussion group like Dogme is one way to ensure you continue to think critically about what you and your learners are doing in your classroom.

That's a good thing, too...

Creativity in the language classroom

The excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk website has started a new series today, the first of which is Creativity in the language classroom.

Among other questions the first article raises is why creativity is important in your classroom, including:

• The fact that "some people cannot learn at all if they are not allowed to be creative. They do not understand the point in doing a language activity for its own sake, for only practising the language without a real content, purpose, outcome or even a product"
• "(...) most people become more motivated, inspired or challenged if they can create something of value"

Apart from creativity, another thing which is important for teachers is that we continue to question what we are doing, and don't just settle into a routine. "Am I creative?" the article asks us, "Are my students ever creative in my classroom?"

It looks like an interesting series...

Updates

>> Article 2, Features of creativity
>> Article 3, The essence of creativity
>> Article 4, Creative Environment

Good teaching

Oh, no! It's Monday...! A good teacher, they say, makes children glad it is...

A good teacher, good teaching... There's an article here that has 10 "requirements" for what good teaching should involve...

• It's about not only motivating students to learn, but teaching them how to learn, and doing so in a manner that is relevant, meaningful, and memorable.
• [It's] about listening, questioning, being responsive, and remembering that each student and class is different.
• [It's] about not always having a fixed agenda and being rigid, but being flexible, fluid, experimenting, and having the confidence to react and adjust to changing circumstances...
  

No mention of "technology", no mention of "computers" (or "grammar", for that matter!)... but there's still a lot there that would apply, no matter how much technology you might be using in your classroom.

What (doesn't) make a good task in the computer room?

Barcelona, as seen on satellite image provided by Google Earth

In a previous post, I provided links to three articles on what makes a good language classroom task.

There ought to be a lot of overlap between that and what makes a good task if you are taking your learners to the computer room, and I think there is.

Here's an example of a task that I think is poor, which comes from the Winter 2006 issue of a magazine I like a lot, iT's for Teachers (which incidentally has a lot of good things online).

The task (the fourth for a lesson plan that began by looking at five aerial photographs of historic sites, including the Great Wall of China):

Get your students to use Google Earth to search for places around the world, including one or more or the places they have seen in the photographs. Can they find an aerial picture of their school or home?

What's wrong with that as a task...?
My doubts are as follows. I provide only questions -- if you want to suggest answers, that's what the "comments" feature is for...

• What is the aim of the task?
• What language are they going to learn or practise in doing the task?
  
• What are they going to do with what they produce?
  
• What's the return on investment?

I'd ask pretty much the same questions of most computer room language tasks, and one of my answers to the third would almost invariably be "Well, I guess they could blog it...!"

Barça's Nou Camp stadium, pictured via Google Earth. Wow...! But what language do they learn from it.

Technical note
Google Earth requires (free, easy) installation: note that you might not be able to do that on your school's PCs.

And -- again, importantly -- does the amount of language they are going to learn from the task really compensate for the time it's going to take to install?

What makes a good task?

What is a task, anyway? A task is "any language learning activity that the students do in their classes" (game, comprehension questions, gap-fill exercises, etc), says this article by Andrew Littlejohn.

I like some of the questions the article poses:

• What is the aim of the task?
• Where do the ideas and language come from?
• How personally involving is the task?
• What happens to what the students produce?
  

We might also ask who the ideas and language come from -- from the teacher or the learners?

In a second part of the article, Making good tasks better, Littlejohn suggests that we can "improve a task if we can increase the amount of ideas and language that the students are expected to produce" -- in other words if it's not the teacher providing all of it.

In a third article on Language Learning Tasks and Education, the same author asks other questions that I think we should ask ourselves when designing classroom tasks.

What should teachers know?

Interviewed in the Spring 2006 edition of It's for teachers magazine [website], and asked "What should English teachers know to be good at their jobs?", Melanie Williams answers:

They should know about the language they are teaching, they should know some different ways of teaching language, they should know about learners and how they learn. They need to know about lesson planning and how to manage the classroom to make learning as efficient and effective as possible (...) and they need to know about resources and materials they can use in class.

In the same piece, her colleague Mary Spratt adds:

"Knowing how to have an open mind and a willingness to learn are very important, too."

From many years of experience in English language teaching, I can say that I wholly agree with all of that -- if anything particularly with the addition Mary Spratt makes.

What about technology?
Technology doesn't get a mention -- and I think it should.

Assuming that technology does make your life easier (for example to find materials, to store them...); assuming that it is used to its full potential, in order for your learners to communicate... then I think you should know how to use technology.

It it doesn't, forget it -- let's not bother adding it to the list.

Where do you sit or stand in the classroom?

Where do you sit (or stand) in the classroom -- and what difference (if any) does it make?

There's an interesting article on precisely that subject on the wonderful TeachingEnglish.org.uk site. See also the comments (link, below) on the picture above, taken in IH -- and feel free to add your own.

Classroom management in the computer room

You are about to take your class to a computer lab....

Apart from taking with you a good lesson plan, plus your "Plan B" in case it turns out that there's no Internet access at all, or that the site you were going to use doesn't seem to be there any more, there are a number of classroom management issues that you might consider.

How would you answer the following questions:

1. You get to the room first (before your students) and turn all the chairs round to face away from the PC screens -- why?
2. Which is best, and why: 1 student per PC; 2 students to a PC; 3 students to a PC; or more than 3?
3. Your students are busily engaged on doing their "task" -- and you want their attention. How do you obtain it (not easy, when you're competing with the Web!)
4. What percentage of the lesson do you think your learners should spend looking at their computer screens?
5. What other classroom management issues do you think might arise?