Remote Teaching and COVID-19

Times of Change

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

At this point in time communication is changing in unprecedented ways that have yet to reveal themselves clearly. The COVID-19 crisis has brought this home to educators in an abrupt collision with the accepted norms of teaching and learning carried out in a physical classroom with technology used mainly as a supplement . Not being able to physically meet and interact “in the classroom” has plunged teachers and learners alike into digitally distributed communication, where the only possible social interactions have moved online. What shocked many was the realisation that the “serious business of teaching” carried out in physical groups had disappeared from one day to the next, or rather had had to adapt and take tentative steps into the new socio-digital world where communication takes place online and the machine either distributes and enables this or blocks it.

Whilst we were all already familiar with information technology and the ways it is shaping our communication, these changes, in the past, have come about gradually. With the first Internet generation, we, the public simply received information which was fed to us top-down across the web. Then, with Web 2.0, an enormous change came about as we began to create our own content either individually or collaboratively. We learned how to interact online with each other through the lens of social and supplementary interactions such as email, social networking sites and apps and finally we began to make the digital world part of our very beings with the Web 3 devices and wearables and the ubiquitous smartphones which we can no longer live without.

It is incredibly easy nowadays to write and comment on a blogpost like this one, or to contribute to news articles in comments, share information and in this way to shape the movement of the “newsworthy”. None of this is new, and the dangers of fake news or of a lack of digital literacy are all to well known to us, but it has been a gradual evolution and to some extent for most of us the digital has always been peripheral to the “real” face to face communication which went on at work, at school and even in sports, entertainment and religious gatherings. The two girls in the image above are sharing an experience which is digitally mediated by means of the smartphone but the real communication in that image comes from their sense of physical being together. The technology is key but is not central.

Social distancing, which here in Italy at least, has been the norm for over two months now, took this physical “being together” away from us, and, in fact, David Crystal recently remarked on Twitter that “social” is a misnomer in the compound as it should really be “physical distancing” that we talk about. Human beings crave social support and when the physical  was suddenly removed from us the digital world moved forward into the foreground to give us a context where we could support each other. The ways this may change our communication in the future have yet to be seen. In the teaching world, however, it was immediately clear that things had to change. Thousands of educators who had previously not used remote teaching, or had used a very limited version of it, were now faced with the very tall order of transforming all their teaching from one day to the next. Thrown in at the deep end and told to sink or swim, many are saying that although it has been a steep learning curve there have been valuable lessons in the process as well. How much of this will stay with us going forward is less clear but I would like to share with you the story of digital teaching in the University of Verona and how it is developing at the moment together with my reflections on the importance of teaching through not to the machine when working at a distance.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

The shock of COVID-19

In Verona University, where I work, students and teachers were informed just a few days before the beginning of the lockdown that teaching henceforth would be “remote”. This led to a certain amount of panic and confusion as to just how this was going to be done. The second image has several layers of meaning apart from the obvious “wear a mask” message which seem to illustrate the feeling of being crippled by having to use a system that was largely unknown. Many teachers’ normal teaching practices had been stripped from them with very little time to adapt to the new conditions. To me the image above communicates the symbol of the mask which has robbed us of expression and communication in the traditional ways, and the sensation of being gagged by invisible forces beyond our control, or the initial horror of realisation that we would not be allowed back into our classrooms at the beginning of March.

March 9th, in Italy, was a decisive date as it marked the nationwide lockdown. Movement was allowed within your local area for three purposes:

1. to go to work
2. because of medical emergencies
3. for basic daily  food shopping

Every time you went out of the house you had to have a form with your personal information on it and a declaration of where you were going and why, which you signed. If stopped by the police those who were not where they had claimed they were going (and evidence such as a shopping receipts or a declaration from the workplace had to be produced), could be fined up to €3000. Many have been unable to work and have lost their jobs, and many others have struggled to reinvent their work. This is what happened in Verona University with the teaching.

The 9th March was a Monday and this was when students were suddenly expecting all their teaching to be provided online. Many, both students and teaching staff, had no or very limited experience of distance learning and those who did have experience of e-learning, on the other hand, were called on to help their colleagues, often working into the small hours of the morning to help kickstart it all. Educators began to support each other all across the Internet and the teaching community in the ELT world, to name just one field, immediately started to provide a host of useful webinars etc. aimed at helping teachers who had not been trained in remote teaching and were suddenly expected to be able to.

Two useful examples of these are:

The British Council TeachingEnglish series.

This was a a very practical webinar held by Lindsay Clandfield and Carol Rainbow to help those approaching distance teaching for the first time, and it shows how to organise learning as emergency measures for those who are completely new to it all as well as providing a series of activities that can be done in Breakout Rooms.

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-online-using-your-coursebook-ideas-breakout-rooms

The IATEFL LTSIG

Joe Dale has also done a series of webinars to help educators “get started” with remote teaching such as this one for the Iatefl LTSIG:

https://www.iatefl.org/events/89

Teaching to the Machine

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Expecting those with no background in distance learning, however, to suddenly teach all their courses online was tantamount to telling someone who had always walked everywhere that they were now going to be riding a bike instead, even though they hadn’t used one before. What happens when you first start to ride a bike, of course, is that you focus on the mechanics of balancing, and the whole process of moving around, the structure of the machine itself. You are aware of what is around you but you do not have the mental space to look up and enjoy the view or think about the finer aspects. The same was true of remote teaching. Many were so involved in the process of setting up the video conferencing tools and learning how to use them that the teaching was, to some extent lost along the way. Educators who often had a wealth of practical classroom experience were preoccupied with the new channel of delivery rather than the teaching. They were literally teaching to the machine rather than teaching their learners through the machine. This meant that, as with the bike analogy, they were focusing on the mechanics of using the video conferencing tools rather than focusing on the interaction between them and their learners. Teachers who would normally provide a warmer, for instance, to ease everyone into a lesson, suddenly forgot about this and just began speaking. Many felt they had to speak and for the whole lesson, suddenly transforming their classes into highly teacher centred lessons, or they were afraid to “let go” of the learners and let them work autonomously, even though the feedback I have received from learners is that working in small groups in breakout rooms is one of the aspects of remote learning that they find most useful.

Teaching through the machine

Teaching through the machine

So, what does it mean to teach through the machine? In 2003, Stephen Bax wrote an article which introduced the idea that technology, in order to be successful, should become invisible, and this idea of “invisible technology” quickly spread through the elearning world. What it means, in a nutshell, is that technology like the zip you use to fasten your jacket is no longer even thought of as technology but has just become part of the clothing and is invisible. It helps you to carry out the purpose of efficiently and quickly closing your jacket. In the same way, if technology is to be effective in teaching it must move into the background so that its affordances are used in the best way possible to support teaching and learning. The focus should be, as always, on the teaching, the learning and the individuals themselves who are involved in the process. Reaching through the screen to interact with others has become a key skill at this moment in time and has shown us just how important social contacts are. This is just as true of the learning process. In this reflection, therefore, I would like to share some very basic tips to help those who are still struggling with the whole process.

ORGANISING and blending THE PROCESS

Firstly there needs to be a clear organisation of teaching tools and practices, just as there would be in the physical classroom. One useful framework for this is blended learning (BL). BL in the past, at least in the world of ELT, referred to the blend of the physical face to face (f2f) context, and what was done there, with the technological support, which could be combined in different ways. Now the definition of BL is shifting to a mixture or the synchronous with the asynchronous although the element of f2f or autonomy is still there even when f2f means remote learning by means of video conferencing.

The first step in organising this is to look at your and your learners’ needs, what is provided by your organisation. Essential ingredients in the process are some kind of learning management system (LMS) like Moodle and Blackboard, Canvas Instructure or Edmodo and Google Classroom or even simply a shared space such as a Google Drive or a Dropbox, where materials, announcements and messages can be managed. This may be enough, if all the learning is to be asynchronous but if not then some form of video conferencing is also required. In Verona the university provided teachers with two options. Lecturers could either simply record their lessons on the Panopto platform and make them available for students to access on their class Moodles, which have been an integral part of many courses for quite a few years now, or we were encouraged to use Zoom, which was integrated in its Pro version. Zoom meetings could be set up directly through the class Moodle, meaning that it was only available for members of that course, and the lessons could also be recorded and were automatically saved on Panopto as well. This is quite a streamlined system and in my case worked well, because I already had my course Moodles which look something like this:

It is used as a platform which is used both in class and outside of class. Learners can access it for information about the course and to contact the teacher or each other and can also download and interact with materials both during lessons and independently. What is important, when organising such a space is that a) it does what you need it to do and b) that the structure is clear to all the users. In the image on the left, for instance, which comes at the top of the page (or the start of the course) learners are firstly told what they can do on the space and then provided key links to the noticeboard, links that are useful for them and the first meeting. The next block moves straight into the first module. Time needs to be spent in the first lessons going through the layout, where the messages are etc. until this is clear to everyone. Taking the time to do this means avoiding problems further down the line when learners cannot understand how to navigate the resources.

I opted to blend this resource with regular Zoom lessons which were held at the normal lesson times, in order to maintain a semblance of normality. I consider myself to be quite lucky, in fact, because I had already had quite a lot of experience with remote teaching so the transition was not painful for me, although the sheer number of hours spent behind a screen during the past two months has taken its toll, another aspect to consider going forward. I have decided, therefore, to provide a few reflections and ideas about how anyone, even those with very little experience of video conferencing can make the most of online teaching.

basic tips for remote teaching

Preparation for a video conferencing session

1.Use the synchronous video conferencing space as a «classroom»

2.Use a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle for outside/in class materials access.

3.Use your desktop and share your screen to use other apps during the lesson to provide a change in pace and to use the resources available to do what you want to do. If you want your learners to write or brainstorm something and then comment on it, for instance, Padlet is an excellent choice for this. Kahoot, on the other hand is an excellent tool for reviewing content in a motivating gamified way.

4. Prepare documents and files you want to use in advance so that you do not waste time waiting for them to load whilst you are teaching. This can be stressful for you if you cannot find something or it takes your pc a minute to load a document. The learners may not notice particularly that it is taking time but it is stressful for the teacher.

5. Plan your lessons and have notes to help you as usual, you do not need to memorise every step of the lesson, but it is useful to visualise what you will be doing and what your learners will be doing at any stage of the lesson.

Ten tips for the remote lesson itself

1. Provide some work to prepare in advance. As was mentioned above, hours spent in front of a screen lead to stress and burnout so the actual synchronous lessons may be shorter than usual with a ten minute phase at the beginning where learners are asked to read something or to do an exercise: a type of quiet time. This may also be done at the end of the lesson too.
2. Create a warmer just as you would in a “physical class”. learners are coming from different contexts and need a few minutes to switch into lesson mode. The chat box can be a wonderful resource for this. During the COVID emergency, I once asked learners simply to share with us a moment of “joy” from their weekends, to raise the emotional level in the class. At that point many were frightened and frustrated with the lockdown. I started by saying that the quiet outside my window meant that I could listen to the birds singing as I had my morning cup of tea. Students wrote about baking with their family or going back to painting and one student showed us his artwork. A warmer may also simply be a quick review on the whiteboard (or if you do not have a whiteboard use a Word document) of vocabulary that came up in a previous lesson or other content. Polls or brainstorming can also be done and Mentimeter is an excellent tool for this. These are just one or two ideas but the possibilities are endless.
3. In long lessons ask students to get up and move for five minutes. You can even integrate this into your lesson, asking them to find an object in their home which is memorable to them, for instance and then bringing it back and telling other students about it.
4. Provide work to do outside class such as project work to do collaboratively by means of Whatsapp groups. IN my translation course different groups worked in different sections of a text during the week like this and then posted their translations on Padlet before the lesson, so that the work they had done could then be integrated back into the synchronous lesson.
5. Pace the lesson. A change in pace can be introduced simply by using the chat box for learners to answer simple questions or by organising small group activities in breakout rooms. When doing this, however, it is important that everyone knows what the task is and what their role is. Activities can be demonstrated in the main room before learners split up. It is useful to check whether everyone has found the exercise they are to work on etc. You can simply ask them to type “yes” into the chat box if they have got the exercise. If they need to share their screens check that they know how to do this before they go into the breakout rooms, and monitor their activity in the usual way.
6. Vary activities and activity types. A regular structure can be reassuring to learners who come to expect certain rituals such as a warmer at the beginning of the lesson, but it should not always be the same one.
7. Record lessons to put on the Learning Management System (LMS) later if this is permissible in your context. In my context university students are adults and the recordings were only provided on their specific Moodle courses. They will also be removed at the end of the course. In this way privacy is respected but the recordings have proved to be very popular with students both when they miss a lesson and when they wish to return to a lesson to review content etc.
8. Use your common sense Sometimes we look for complicated technological solutions to problems like how to embed an audio file into a particular online space when it would be just as simple to play the file on your telephone and let learners listen to it through your computer’s microphone.
9. Take the stress out of the process by trying out the things you want to do in advance and take things slowly. If you have never taught online before you will be getting used to the technology so introduce new things slowly, one at a time until they just become an invisible part of your teaching practice.
10. Pace yourself as well as your learners creating spaces in your lesson and your day where you can get up move around and leave the screen.

concluding

To conclude, I have to say, that despite the stress and exhaustion of this emergency period I feel a sensation of hope when it comes to remote teaching. Something that in the past was looked on often as an added extra has now moved into centre stage. I do not mean that I will not be happy to finally get back into the classroom. In fact I promised my learners that when that does happen we will meet “in the flesh” and have a party, but I feel that the affordances of technology have come into their own and perhaps will be integrated in a different way in the future.

Blog as a book: “keeping the essence” is out this week.

The idea for a new book: why turn the blog into a book?

A few months ago, over a cappuccino with my friend, the idea of taking some of my blog posts and turning them into a book began to take shape in my mind. A book and a blog are two quite distinct things. Blogs are fluid, they move, can be edited and some read them regularly,  others just dip into them from time to time and there are those who stumble across your blog when looking for something very specific like, Halloween teaching ideas, for instance.

A book from a blog

A book is more of an object even when it is an ebook. It is  a much tighter product than a blog, it is an entity in its own right and serves different purposes. The main aim of my book was to discover and highlight some of the main themes that flow through the blog, such as exams or professional development. The book is designed both for professional educators already working in elt and also for those who are perhaps just starting out, or are doing training courses. The structure or  frame of the book revolves around questions, the questions teachers often ask or want to ask but don’t know who to ask. A question is followed by an adapted blogpost from this very blog you are reading right now, and the section concludes with discussion questions. A classic structure, perhaps but ine that can be used by individual readers thinking about their own teaching, and can be adapted by teacher trainers too. 
At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I’m writing about it here because, you are reading my blog and it is only fair that you should know about the book too. 🙂 This blog is all about reflecting on your teaching practice, and that is just as true of the book. Reflection, I believe, is key in all areas of life.

Revisiting reflection and cake baking

 

Revisiting a Short Reflection from 2010

What follows is a reflection that I posted one rainy September day in 2010, and I have decided to revisit it seven years later to expand on the idea of reflection, something we increasingly leave behind as we hurtle through our daily lives.

Facebook can lead to Reflection

“It’s raining quite hard in Verona this morning so rather than going out and busily “achieving not very much” I decided it was the perfect time to sit down and reflect, or at least to write what I was thinking on Facebook. Feeling irritated, like so many people these days, with the overload of information we are all bombarded with, all the time, I wrote that information without knowledge and wisdom is like the ingredients without the cake. This sparked off a little discussion which made me reflect a bit more. (So, yes, Facebook can be used in all kinds of ways 🙂 ) In fact, making a joke, I added that cakes are also very dangerous, as we all know.

On reflection though this is not a joke because the power of the cake lies with the baker rather than  with the person who eats it. The baker decides what to put into it, and therefore what the effect will be. This is true of many things in life, not forgetting, of course lesson planning and teaching (Two of the many points in the learning  process. )

The person who eats the cake, or goes to the lesson, also contributes to the process though, by exercising choice. You can choose which cake to eat, how much of it etc. but we have to think about what it is that leads us to choose one particular cake and not another…. This opens it all up for even more thought and discussion.

In any case, reflection is the essential part of the process. If we just throw in the ingredients without thinking, or if the cakes we eat are mass produced by unthinking machines, for instance, the results will be questionable, at the very least.

So, I’m off to meditate now… and then I might bake a cake…”

Thoughts ten years later

My initial reaction is that not much has changed. We are still bombarded by too much information, in fact, even more so, and we are also struggling to process it all in the different ways we encounter it every day . The second is that reflection can be a one sided process, which would be like baking a cake that nobody eats.  If it leads to insights, though, and if those insights are shared, or applied in practice in the classroom, observing, reflecting, experimenting and then observing again, perhaps we can all learn from each other, build on our experience and the cake can only get tastier and tastier.

24 Hours a Day are not really enough…. or are they?

One of the biggest problems when it comes to reflection is that many of us don’t think we have enough time to do it. Or rather, we get caught up in so much daily activity that stopping to step back and observe it all, is something that we simply don’t take the time to do.

I recently asked a group of university students what they would most like to do if they could do anything they wanted in that precise moment. What do you think the answer was? Well, no, they didn’t want to escape to a tropical island. They wanted to sleep. This says it all, in a way. Getting enough sleep is one of the most important ways of staying healthy and lucid, and yet here we all are, working too late, feeling stressed and carrying on anyway, and on top of all this I’m asking you to ‘reflect’! Well, when are you supposed to do that?

Digital Distractions

When I’m researching something, simply looking for ideas for my next lesson or even planning a trip, I tend to spend a lot of time navigating manically from one article or website to another on the Internet, without focusing to any great depth on any of them, always hoping to find exactly the ideas, flight or research I’m interested in the next one… The next one, after all, is only a click away. I can save them all and come back later, when I have more time. It’s a vicious circle, in fact, because it might have been better to sit and read one article through, rather than spending half an hour cataloguing articles that I am not reading. This is the siren call of the digital world and it takes up a lot of time. Taking time to do something like reflecting seems to be a waste of time. It isn’t productive. There is so much else to do. Strangely enough, though,  I find that taking the time to sit down and meditate, be mindful or simply breathe deeply stops my brain spinning round. It stops me multitasking and actually expands time. That’s the mental space that opens the doors to some of my most significant reflections and insights.

Recently, for instance, I was planning a lesson on discourse analysis which is quite a complex topic. I had been struggling to think of ways of simplifying it all without dumbing it down, and was not being very successful. I did not want to simply lecture students. I want them to be able to understand the basics of systemic functional grammar (in 8 hours at the most!), and I want to motivate them to find out more. Defeated, I left it and went to bed, and the next morning as I was walking down the street, after a good night’s sleep the image of clause complexes as planets came to me, all moving around their own systems, ‘process’ planets with satellites of ‘participants’ and ‘circumstances’ (I apologise for the jargon, but it is central to systemic functional grammar) so I made a Prezi which I called the universe of transitivity and suddenly just ‘knew’ how I was going to teach this subject. For all those who are interested, here is a link to the prezi :-).

None of this is new, of course. We have all experienced the way a good night’s sleep can help us to see things in a different light, and by taking the time to stop and  slow down, in fact, you actually do create more time for yourself, and you work better. Suddenly, you are doing something like writing a blogpost, for example, because you want to, because you have something to say, and not simply because it is on a list of goals that you have set for yourself. Suddenly you find yourself planning an activity to do in class with your students because it is meaningful, fun and relevant to them, rather than because it is simply the next lesson you have to do.

Finding time to make reflection part of your own professional development

This is a tall order, I know, for many teachers who are working heavy weeks, and barely have enough time to plan their lessons, let alone stop and think about them. I remember one Celta trainee I was working with, who said that our course was really good, and that he was learning lots of amazing things, but it was a pity that he had 40 hours of teaching a week and simply did not have the time to put it all into practice.

My advice to him was to “put it into practice’ for one or two lessons a week, rather than for all of them. I mention this because I know that writing a reflection journal, or even a blog, takes time. You don’t always have something specific to reflect about either. You may not have any insights for a few weeks, and then one episode in an exam, or a lesson, for instance, will start you thinking. That is when you can stop and take the time to think about it, and why it is memorable to you.

Reflecting by Asking Questions

Reflection is a skill that can be learned just as any other skill can. One or two moments of quality reflection can be invaluable but if you are not used to it, it may not be easy at first. You may feel that you have nothing to say or write. One way to start is by asking a few  WH questions:

What happened?

Where did it happen?

Who was involved?

When did it happen?

What did this make me think?

What might I do differently next time?

What are the implications?

Planning a little time once a month, even to sit down and take stock in this way can soon become a habit that can actually help you to put more into your teaching. You find that you are no longer simply baking a cake, but you are baking your own quality masterpiece and you and your students are having a feast. Personally, as you can see in the image below, I’ve moved on to waffles at the moment, since it was Pancake Tuesday this week, but I was still quite proud of my creations, just as I was proud of my transivity prezi.

I’d love to hear about your reflections too, and where they take you 🙂

Can you use that image?

photo credit: Sharon Hartle

Well, I’m back from Iatefl, and am gradually settling back into my normal Italian life. One of the highlights of the week, last Wednesday was a lesson I did on ‘Intellectual Property’ with my advanced C2 class, who have to do presentations as part of their final exam. Many people use resources such as prezi or emaze to do this, which are public, open platforms, freely accessible by the world and his wife. As we live in a world where remix is the norm and images, video, music and other media are shared at the speed of lightening, often without much thought for ownership, it is important, I think, every now and then, to stop, take a deep breath, and question all this.

I have added a photo credit to my own image above, which I would probably not normally do,  (This is my photo, by the way, ) in a rather ironic way to make the point, but for many taking time to think about who owns ideas and content really did seem to be a wake up call, that meant looking at their practice, if not their lives, with new eyes.

What did we do?

Part One: Discussion and Reflection

The lesson began with reflection and the discussion of these two questions:

1. “We live in times of theft, intellectual theft. When you can download just about everything and make it your own what incentive is there for artists to create any more?”
2. “A remix is actually an original reworking of someone else’s idea, so as long as credit is given where it is due, it belongs to the remixer.”

This gave rise to various points such as the distinction between piracy and theft, which was not immediately clear to everyone. There is also a fine line between plagiarism and intellectual theft which we also explored, and it seems, at times, for some to be difficult to distinguish between expressing their own ideas and expressing someone else’s. This may seem obvious but when does an idea become so commonly accepted or shared that it is no longer necesary to cite its author? We, obviously, cannot cite everything so in our comunity, for instance, we  refer to ‘scaffolding’ because everyone knows what it means, without having to cite Vygotsky every time we do this.

Part Two: So, in practice?

So far, this was all rather theorectical, however, so the next stage reinforces what this actually means in the way we use technology. I had created a Facebook exercise for the Student Group (which is a closed group on Facebook), with an image I had created by adding special effects to my own photo of an art installation, inspired in fact by J.J. Wilson’s plenary at Glasgow Iatefl.

//www.viddler.com/embed/1b29327f/?f=1&player=arpeggio&secret=84815357&make_responsive=0
During this motivating plenary one of the things he asked the audience to do was to look at differnt classrooms and create ‘I wonder……’ ideas with each other. I asked my learners to do the same, (and there are  prizes for the most ‘liked’ ideas). This time, though, I asked the class to look at this video and to say whther or not they thought it was intellectual theft. (I had added a link to an article about the original installation as well, both for those who were interested in reading about it and to give credit to the author.

Reactions

The class decided that this was not intellectual theft because the installation was in a public space and I was using my own photo, not claiming that the installation was mine. The power. however, of this exercise, I felt, was that it really made people think about how they use Social Media and the content they post. Some went away from that lesson looking rather worried and talking about closing accounts, a reaction that they would probably not have had from simply taking part in the discussion.

So, why is all this important?

Reflection

Well, reflecting on what you do before you do it is a skill that often needs to be relearned in our world where everything can be shared at the speed of light, by the click of a mouse. I personally believe that respecting other people’s work, ideas and insights is etremely important and I hope that they will respect mine too. When you have experienced your own work being plagiarised or stolen in some way you will know how hurtful it can be. Why do we need to steal other people’s work when we can give them credit for it, ask them for permission to use it or…actually, even better, use our own work? Oh, and by the way, the reflection image above is my own photo taken in Glasgow, just in case you were wondering :-).

 

 

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to one and all.

I hope you are having a good holiday wherever you are and however you are spending these days:

By the way, if you want to make your own image like this (and in lots of other fun ways) I used Photofunia to make it :-).

Iatefl Glasgow 2017

That time of year…

It’s that time of year again when thoughts turn to travel towards the UK. Normally this is one of my favourite events in the year and this year, I am once more one of the official Iatefl bloggers.

These days, however, we are living in uncertain times what with borders being closed and EU citizens being treated as little more than pawns in UK negotiations with the EU, I feel that we are living in a dark world. Even so, Iatefl shines a light into my teaching world and each year I go home afterwards with a wealth of new ideas and renewed energy for the classroom so, despite fears that they might not let me back into Italy, once I’ve departed for Glasgow, I am bravely preparing to leave tomorrow.

Ten tips for a successful conference

Whether this is your first or tenth Iatefl conference you have to know that attending an enormous event like this takes a certain amount of planning so here are my ten tips for a successful conference.

1. If you are a speaker, prepare well in advance. This may seem obvious but Murphy’s law applies to conferences as well as other events. Do not rely on the wifi connection working, and make photocopies etc. in advance. If you have asked for 30 minutes, make sure that you can complete your presentation in 30 minutes, which requires forethought and practice. Having said that, the audience at Iatefl is generally extremely supportive so if problems do arise they will be on your side. I think the most important thing to remember when your nerves threaten to overwhelm you is that you have ideas that you believe in and you would like to share with others. That is ultimately what counts.
2. Don’t try to go to everything. There are so many things on, so many parallel sessions, the book exhibition, posters, evening events, etc. that sometimes you just get carried away by it all. This means that by Day three you will be exhausted. Remember every now and then to take time out, have a coffee, wander along the river or just take some time to sit down and relax. Then you will come back with renewed vigour.
3. I find it helps if I have one or two topics I am interested in. This year my topics are EMI (English Medium Instruction). writing and Lexis. That way you don’t get too distracted by all the parallel sessions.
4. Don’t be too rigid though. Sometimes you just need to go with the flow, and be ready to go to something that looks interesting even if it wasn’t on your original list.
5. Check the type of presentation it is. If a presentation is aimed at young learners, for instance, and you don’t teach them it might be something you are interested in precisely because you don’t teach them or it might not. The important thing is to know in advance.
6. Remember that some events will be available on video, so if a videoed event clashes with something else you are interested in, you can always catch up later.
7. Remember that Iatefl is also a very social conference, about meeting up with old friends and making new ones. Do not be afraid to go up to people and just talk to them, most people are very friendly.
8. Don’t forget to explore Glasgow as well. You can actually spend your entire time at the conference but that would be a shame, if you have travelled thousands of miles to be there. A walk into the city centre is a must, and the conference arranges excursions too, so check them out when you arrive.
9. The evening events are also generally very well organised and include parties, receptions, storytelling, theatre events etc. etc. The last time we were in Glasgow we had Scottish Country Dancing too, I think.
10. Finally, I think it is important to make the most of your time at the conference. Put your everyday worries on hold for the next few days and focus on professional development and FUN. See you there. (Please say ‘hello’ if you see me) 🙂

 

Free resources and guides for corpora

A very useful post for any teacher wanting to start integrating corpora into classroom teaching by Jennie Wright.

teflhelper

Thanks to everyone who came to my IATEFL session on making trouble-free corpus tasks in less than ten minutes. Here are the free guides and resources from the session as requested. I’ll add more later.

The ultimate guide to freely available corpora: http://www.corpora4learning.net/resources/corpora.html

The most popular corpora:
The British National Corpus (BNC): http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
The British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE): https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/
The British Academic Spoken English Corpus (BASE): https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/

Guides for using corpora:
Lamy, M-N., & Klarskov Mortensen, H. J. (2012). ICT4LT Module 2.4: Using concordance programs in the Modern Foreign Languages classroom. In Davies G. (Ed.), Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers. Slough: Thames Valley University. Retrieved from http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-4.htm
TheGrammarLab. (2012, July 12).

COCA 01: Introduction to Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English. [Webcast]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCLgRTlxG0Y

COCA Bites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bvpERRkEIQ

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Assessment is in the air at Iatefl Birmingham 2016

 
Formative assessment is all around us in almost every aspect of everyday teaching. 

 

 

Time for Tea: or testing, evaluation and assessment. 

I have been lucky enough to attend the Iatefl conference for several years now, and each year I like to select various themes to the sessions I choose to go to. This year, for the first time, I have been involved in The TEASIG webinars, and so one of my main themes for this conference was assessment. At the risk of seeming pedantic I am going to explain briefly what I mean by assessment in this article. My interpretation is perhaps a little broader than the more orthodox understanding of the term in the world of education. Testing, evaluation and assessment are often used almost interchangeably when it comes to exams but there is a difference: in a nutshell, a test is the practical method we use to measure our construct, the assessment is the whole process of measuring, which may include tests or other tools and evaluation, as it is often applied, is related to judgements about something, often before we use it , so that we might evaluate a digital tool to see if it is what we need to teach our learners to engage with lexis, for instance. The focus of assessment in our field is generally learners’ knowledge, skills and performance, but one thing that struck me in this conference was that actually teachers are surrounded by assessment, especially when it is a formative part of the learning process, they breathe it in every day in almost every interaction both with learners, teaching tools and with texts. In the PCE this year we touched on both formative and summative assessment but the main focus was what teachers need to know about summative test production and application. That is why I decided then to focus rather on the formative aspect when attending other presentations during the rest of the conference and I would like to share a few impressions about this with you here.

The PCE: What teachers need to know about assessment

The Teasig Pre Conference event provided us with a wonderful opportunity to discuss what teachers really need to know about assessment. Neil Bullock asked some searching questions that gave us all food for thought such as “If learning is so important why do assessment and teaching seem to dominate?” Or “why is so little attention paid to assessment on training courses?”, which was echoed on several occasions throughout the day. Neil works in the world of aviation and he also asked who would like to fly in a plane with a pilot who could not communicate with e air traffic control tower! This definitely gives you a very practical reason to advocate effective summative assessment.

Evelina Galaczi and Nahal Khabbazbashi followed on with a rich but practical session which provided us with six key questions when designing a test: “Why, who and what am I testing?”, “How am I testing and scoring and how is my test benefitting learners?” A key concept in this was that the test you design should not only be valid but also fit for the purpose you are designing it for. A perfectly valid test, for example, if used in the wrong context for learners who need to do something that that particular test does not assess, will be worse than useless for that purpose, even though it may be fine if used for the purpose it was designed for. Their focus was speaking and, to illustrate the point above, if your learners need to give formal presentations, then a general test that assesses conversation, interacting and giving opinions, may not be the answer for you.

Assessment Literacy

Later in the afternoon Vivien Berry and Barry O’Sullivan explored the concept of assessment literacy, which they said had been mistakenly interpreted to mean “testing for literacy”. Assessment literacy, however,in basic terms, means how literate you are when it comes to assessment. It is a very wide area and few of those present considered themselves to be at all literate but after the day’s discussions we felt that we were beginning to get an idea of what we didn’t know, which is, after all, the first step. Once again the feeling was that more training is required for teachers who are often required to develop tests of various types.

How educators feel

Speaking to various people at the conference I got the same negative reaction fairly often, which confirms the initial PCE idea that there is little training done on teacher training courses and despite this everyone needs to be involved in the assessment process at some level. Tests in fact,have negative associations for many of us, possibly because of our past experiences of stress related to high stakes test-taking.Throughout the conference, however, my initial feeling that assessment is in the air we breathe every day, was confirmed albeit indirectly by many of the discussions I took part in.

What about the rest of the conference?

When it comes to formative assessment the separation between teaching and testing i is by no means so clear as it is in summative testing, where, despite washback effects, the two processes are usually conceived of as being different. Formative assessment is inherent in methodologies where tools such as test-teach-test, or contrastive analysis are used, and teachers assess learner performance on some level every time they interact with them. Everyone attends different events, with a different focus, in a conference like this and my own focus tend to be related to lexis and corpora, so here is a taste of some of my impressions.

Looking at assessment in general and formative assessment in particular

On the first day David Crystal talked about language change, which led me to think that teachers need to assess the language they choose to focus on with their learners or to consider acceptable or appropriate for their needs. If many Internet users write “who would of thought it?” Does that mean automatically that this is an acceptable form for our learners or should we simply draw their attention to the fact that such changes are underway? Obviously teachers have to assess their learners and make sensible choices, but the question is when does a language change become an acceptable norm? Should discrete elements be assessed analytically in llearner production or should discourse be looked at holistically? Perhaps the answer is “both”.

Marcel Lemmens, who comes from a translation background, advocated an interesting approach to the formative assessment of writing. He held up a standard translation that had been marked, and was covered in red ink, saying, most of his learners would not even read the painstakingly detailed corrections, but would go straight to the mark. He called for the need to familiarise learners with the assessment criteria before dong the test itself And suggested a more holistic approach to marking an email, looking at stylistic features which would help learners to write more effectively, such as cohesion, register and perhaps choosing one or two specific language areas to focus on, such as the use of articles, so that the assessment would then be recycled back into the learning process, and the corrections would actually help learners to achieve their aims. Whilst this was thought-provoking, learner expectations also need to be considered. My learners, for instance, expect their tests to be “corrected” and any change which is introduced is generally better if it is gradual. So,for instance, this term,in one group, I introduced one assignment which was “corrected” in the traditional way, with a detailed correction code, followed by individual one to one interviews where the learner could discuss their self corrections with me. I also did activities that were labelled as discussions which were rated holistically and others where a general analytical scale was used that rated, task achievement, coherence and cohesion, clarity of lexical and grammatical expression, and comments were provided as feedback in these categories rather than detailed corrections. The beauty of work like this is that it can all be reintegrated into work being done in the classroom.

Diane Larson Freeman pointed out in her plenary that aspects of learning that are becoming increasingly sgnificant at this point in time are learner agency, relationships and interactions and the patterns that emerge from such complex interactions. By integrating the aspects noticed in formative assessment and reintroducing them into the classroom we are providing our learners, I feel, with exactly the sort of multiple affordances that will lead to different learners having the opportunity to exploit this work in different ways.

Corpora

Corpora and lexis are always areas that interest me so I attended several sessions on this topic and once again assessment in various shapes and forms kept rearing its head.Jenny Wright, for instance, gave an introduction to the use of The American Corpus (COCA) in the classroom focusing on such areas as adverb + adjective collocations, and providing a range of activities that teachers can produce very simply to sensitise learners to such areas and to practise them. Teachers may, for example:

1. Elicit learner intuitions abut the adjective collocate that follows various adjectives such as “bitterly”, “sincerely”or “deeply”;

2. Training can then be provided to show how to do a corpus search for colocation frequency;

3. Concordance lines can then be cut and pasted to provide a concordance line gap filler where the key word is missing.

 It is this activity which is interesting from the point of view of formative assessment as it is often seen as practice but what it is actually doing is testing comprehension or recall, particularly if it is done in a later lesson or part of a test-teach-test sequence. Activities such as this one are used in classrooms all over the world where they are considered to be practice… but they are part of assessment, in fact, since they provide tachers with knowledge about what learners can or cannot do.

To continue with the topic of corpora tools, Stephen Bax introduced his amazing tool Text Inspector, (http://www.textinspector.com/workflow). This tool assesses the difficulty of a text giving it a percentage score from zero to native speaker and a detailed analysis of the elements that make it so. It is freely available online and has been developed with links both to the English Vocabulary Profile which classifies lexical items with reference to the CEFR levels. It can also be used, of course, as a means of assessing learner written production, so once again, assessment enters the picture. Although Bax advised the audience to err on the side of caution, this is a tool which can be used both by teachers as an initial assessment of learners’ work and by learners who want to assess their own levels. This is an opportunity for learner oriented assessment in the purest interpretation of the term, perhaps, then, in that the individual learner can take assessment into their own hands and use it to develop their own power of expression.

Let’s not forget technology

Technology, of course, in the shape of corpora or many other tools such as the wonderful English Vocabulary and English Grammar Profiles (EVP and EGP)which are being developed to measure the level of various items with reference to the Cambridge Learner Corpus (for the EGP) and various corpora (for the EVP). This means that when developing reading tests, for instance, we now have tools to help us gauge the level of difficulty of lexical items, which in turn, can help us make mor valid and reliable tests. It is not only teachers, of course, who can use these tools but learners too and,in a world where user content reigns supreme, our learners can create their own “revision tests” or “progress tests” very easily and post them online to share with the rest of the class or even… with the rest of the world. So even though teachers do not seem to particularly warm to the notion of assessment, it seems clear to me that we are all talking about it and at Iatefl in Birmingham, assessment was definitely in the air.

10 Ted Talks Every English Student Should Watch

Very useful post here on how to use TED talks at home 🙂

IELTS Advantage

TED is a series of informative, educational, inspiring and sometimes jaw-dropping talks that present ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. Ted has attracted many of the world’s most important thinkers such as Larry Page, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Ken Robinson, and a few winners of the Nobel Prize.

There is an emphasis on informing, educating and opening people’s eyes to new ideas, making them perfect for the classroom. Students love these talks and really appreciate it when you take the time to make a lesson out of them. Teenagers, being the ‘YouTube generation’, also find them highly engaging and motivating. They come with transcriptions in most common languages, allowing students to read what they have listened to in English or their native tongue.

This post will list 10 TED talks I have found work particularly well in the classroom. I will also outline how students could use TED to improve their English at…

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Motivation and Teaching with technology.

This year I’ve been doing quite a lot of teacher training both in university language centres and in secondary schools, here in Northern Italy and the topic I’ve been working on is training teachers to use blended learning in a principled way. This may not be new for those who are interested in technology but for many teachers it is still a bit like going into a dark forest where you’re not quite sure of the dangers or of where you might lose your footing.

Motivation

Motivation is a complicated thing, as we all know, and there are so many different things that come into play for teachers, but I would just like to mention a few of them, by relating them to a series of five questions about the use of technology in the classroom.

1) Intrinsic v. Extrinsic:

Do you want to use technology in class because you actually believe it enhances your teaching or is it an instituational imposition?

2) Identity

Do you see yourself as a teacher who is comfortable experimentinig with new technologies and learning how to use them?

3) Agency

Do you feel personally involved in the process of using technology with your classs, and are you investing youself in creating something meaningful for them and for you?

4) Competence

Do you feel able to use technological tools easily to help your learners?

5) Autnomy

Do you feel able to work autonomously with the tools or are you afraid that you are not using them as well as you might, or as well as some of the traditional tools you are more familiar with?

Changing your point of view

The power of investing your own self into discovering new ways of working.

These are important factors, I think, that are sometimes overlooked and teachers in training courses become learners and need to approach new skills with their eyes open. Our motivation, as Zoltan Dornyei says in his theory of L2 selves, is closely bound up with our sense of who we are.

A Fixed Idea of who we are or an openness to growth?

Making the most of texts: each one a world to discover

I recently read an article which described two frames of mind, which tie in very closely I think to the idea of identity. Some people have very fixed ideas of what they are and if you tell yourself you are a “X” teacher (substitute what you like for the “X” traditional, tolerant, innovative etc. etc.) then that is what you will be.

On the other hand there is also the “growth” mentality that does not see identity as being so fixed but sees life as an exploration of potential in whatever field you may be interested in.

In a recent session I asked teachers to think about 3 stages in lesson planning:

1. What can your learners do before the lesson?
2. What will you and your learners be ding during the lesson?
3. What can they do after the lesson?

The idea was to think about work that could be provided online for learners to do in advance, such as vocabulary preparation for a topic they would explore in the lesson. The “during” phase was designed to help participants think about what technological ools they could use in class such as images, polls, collaborative writing etc. etc. and the “after” phase was to think about work learners could do online after class such as discussions, writing, questionnaires.

One teacher, who was tryng to plan his online work said to me as I monitored their work:

“I don’t know how to do this. It’s not the way I work. I usually go into class and present my lesson. I wish I could do this and I’d like to see what others are doing.”

This showed me that the feeling of agency and competence were missing. This way of working, which to me seems very normal, was not at all normal to him and yet he was open to learning something new. He wanted to get to the stage where his identity was tied up with the lesson he was preparing, and that means, I think, being open to the “growth mentality”. I was quite humbled because it made me see that motivation and fear has to be taken into account much more than I had been doing.

Concluding thought

This all provided me with quite a lot of food for thought, anyway, and made me decide to talk about learners, teachers classrooms and materials in the Manchester Iatefl conference. I want to explore how technology used in a principled way can help us to  beyond our boundaries, both as learners and teachers. If you want to know more I will be speaking about this on Monday 13th at 5pm, so I hope to see you in Manchester.