Get More Bang for Your Lesson Planning Buck

One thing that I love about the principles of Back to the Well is that both teacher and student get something out of it. If you're interested in what the students get out of it, you can read a whole whack of posts on this blog under the category label of 'Back to the Well.' You can also read A Year of Slow in the Spring 2015 issue of Contact, an article I co-wrote with John Sivell, recently retired from Brock University's Department of Applied Linguistics.

What I want to talk about today is one of the reasons it is teacher-friendly, namely that it increases the ROI of my lesson planning time and energy.

This week the seniors, for example, were studying The Battle of Vimy Ridge. This topic was being explored in response to their request for more lessons about Canada. They also have requested more field trips, and I thought that studying an historic event like the victory at Vimy would be a great way to prepare for a trip to Jackson Park, where they will encounter many war memorials and monuments.

I invested my time in the creation of a short text about the battle. It is a simplified combination of two texts I found on the Internet. It was not easy for me to get the story down to five short paragraphs with pictures. It took the better part of an evening.

But now that we have it, there are so many ways we are able to milk this text for many types of linguistic affordances. Here is how our week played out in a class. (It is for the most part a listening/speaking course.)

Monday we did a KWL warm-up followed by my pre-teaching new vocabulary and introduction to the text. We did choral repetition, which they repeatedly ask me for. I threw out some discussion questions to give them their daily dose of oral practice and to up the student talk time.

Tuesday they read the text again individually and for a partner. After break I circulated some trench image cards that I had been able to download for free from the Internet over the weekend. In groups of 2-3, students had to ask one another, "What's happening?" The lower level students were able to participate easily since pictures were of familiar activities (a soldier is cutting his friend's hair in the trench; a soldier is eating bread in the trench; the soldiers are washing their feet in the trench).

Wednesday I distributed one trench image card to each student and gave them 15 minutes of dictionary time. Next I gave them ten minutes to practice telling a partner about a photo card. Finally I had each student come to the front of the class to tell about his/her card. NB: I took all cards away from students so that they would give their full attention to the person at the front of the room instead of nervously continuing to look at their translators, study their card, etc., in preparation for their turn. As each student came up, I held up his/her assigned photo card for all to see.

Thursday before the break we went back into the text with two discussion questions and two vocabulary exercises:
1) When we studied Confederation, we learned that Canada's birthday is July 1, 1867. So then what did Brigadier-General Ross mean when he said that at Vimy he had seen 'the birth of a nation?'
2) Can you think of a historic event that contributed to a sense of nationhood for your first country? What is it? (Not all compatriots will agree.)
3) Choose 3-5 useful words or chunks from the text and use them in new sentences.
4) Choose one interesting word from the text and look up its synonyms. Can any of the synonyms be substituted for the original word? Discuss your answer with a classmate.

Higher level students tackled all four items while lower level students skipped the abstract discussion questions and did the vocabulary study.

After break was a dictation with short, simple sentences on this now very familiar topic. For example: The trenches were cold, muddy, and full of rats. Soldiers could get trench foot. German prisoners helped carry out the wounded. And so forth.

After taking up the dictation, I then had them do another activity with the same sentences. Students got into small groups and I gave each group of 3-4 students one die.

On the board I wrote, "Start with the first sentence. Take turns rolling the die. According to your roll of the die, do one of the following:
1 - Read the sentence.
2 - Change positive to negative / negative to positive.
3 - Change the tense of the sentence.
4 - Make a question that the sentence answers.
5 - Change one word in the sentence to a synonym that works as well as the original word.
6 - Say "Really?" and then the sentence with surprised, questioning intonation."

Friday we had to postpone the field trip due to rain. Instead students used Flipgrid for the first time. I enticed them to give it a try by offering them a video tour of my apartment that I had created on the weekend. Each student recorded an introduction under that thread and then moved on to reflections on the week's learning. I wish there was a quick and easy way to convert the URL of our grid to a QR code for inclusion in their portfolios.

Seniors can use Flipgrid!

In short, not only does going 'Back to the Well' allow students' brains to make more neural connections with the lexis, but it frees up many evenings for a teacher who wants a life outside of eternal lesson preparation.

A Speaking Assessment Set-up My Students and I Love

Do you dread having to find a way to be able to take students out into the hall or into another room one by one in order to assess speaking? If so, you might enjoy what I call the speaking gauntlet. Of course I didn't invent it, but PBLA has helped me to put a new spin on it. I'll use the theme and modules my seniors are working on right now as an example to illustrate how it works and will then offer ideas for other ways it could be used.

This month my seniors are studying health, a theme they request over and over. After reviewing parts of the body and body systems, we are now exploring a journey through the healthcare system that involves seven steps (this number is not random, as you'll soon see).

1) Make an appointment. Ask to be squeezed in earlier than the date / time the receptionist initially offers.

2) Interact with the receptionist on arrival. Take a number, sit down and fill out a health history form.

3) Interact with the nurse, follow instructions such as "Step on the scale, put this under your tongue." Answer health history questions verbally.

4) Talk to the doctor. Describe symptoms (of diabetes). Given a requisition for blood work, acknowledge instructions regarding how to prepare for the fasting glucose test and where to go.

5) Interact with the lab receptionist and tech. Follow instructions such as "roll up your sleeve, make a fist, hold this cotton ball on there." Answer questions such as, "Are you allergic to iodine?"

6) Return for a follow-up visit with the doctor. Receive (or give, depending on role) advice regarding lifestyle changes, diet, exercise. Receive a prescription.

7) Interact with the pharmacist. Be able to read the label and follow instructions.

Whew! Needless to say, the modules comprising this thematic journey will take several weeks to complete. I have provided links to many of the resources we used on my classroom blog HERE.

One reason I don't do very well with module planning frameworks is that I never know in advance how long the seniors and I will take to cover a set of modules around a theme. They let me know when we need to slow down, revise, go Back to the Well, etc. But that's another blog post.

Okay, so here's the groovy activity that my students LOVE to engage in every few weeks. After we have familiarized ourselves with a number of dialogues and role plays around a given theme, they put them all together in one massive review to solidify their learning and prove to themselves that they really can do it all. We move the tables and set up a number of A-B stations equal to half our class count. So a class of fourteen gets seven stations. Very large classes could either split up and borrow an empty classroom or travel in teams.

red = teacher, brown = A, black = B

The stationary As take the role of the clerks, professionals, etc., and are given scripts or reference material. Higher levels can handle picture prompts with no text, depending on the complexity of the tasks and corresponding vocabulary. Just remember the rule of thumb: the harder the text, the easier should be the task. The easier the text, the harder the task can be.

To prevent As from helping the Bs cheat or peek instead of using their ears, I use masking tape to secure the reference sheets to the edge of the table in such a way that A can see them while B cannot.

The travelling Bs take the role of the consumer, patient, passenger, etc. If the class has an even number of students, the teacher can sit where it's easy to listen in on one of the pairs, a stack of rubrics in front of him/her. If there's an odd number, the instructor can become one of the As and still tick the rubrics as the Bs come along, assembly line style.

Depending on how many minutes you have in your session, you have to judge how often to ring the bell for Bs to move clockwise around the circuit. I can generally give them between four and seven minutes at each station. If you want to, you can also use this formation to allow students to practice the SAME question or questions again and again with a number of conversation partners. If this is the case, I recommend starting off giving them more time and then speeding it up as they warm up and become more fluent.

With my stack of rubrics, I can choose where to position myself. Before we start, I take a look at who is coming my way and put names at the tops of the rubrics so that I'm ready when the next student arrives. After all the Bs have travelled through the entire circuit, we switch roles. As become Bs and vice versa. With my class of 15, I can assess half of them in an hour and the other half after the break in the second hour. A very large class might have to take two days for this. (This might be a good time to mention that absent students do get a rubric, but I mark ABSENT across it. It still goes in the portfolio.)

I find there are benefits to this system for both instructor and learner. The students prefer this speaking assessment method over being pulled out of class one by one because it gives them time to warm up and feels like a casual conversation lesson on which the instructor just happens to be eavesdropping. I like it because I don't have to arrange for a T.A. to watch my class while I pull students out. Mostly, I like it because it's a fun activity I was already doing periodically before PBLA came along. The only difference is that we now put the rubrics in their big white binders instead of in file folders in my file cabinet.

In addition to using this long gauntlet during our health modules, we used it not long ago after studying air travel. Bs were provided with realistic e-tickets, boarding passes and passports. The stations were:

1. travel agent or friend who knows how to buy tickets via the web (partner A had a diagram of the aircraft in order to offer seat selection)
2. check-in desk / airline agent
3. security ("empty your pockets, turn on your laptop," etc.)
4. boarding area (announcements)
5. pre-flight and in-flight announcements, interacting with fellow passengers
6. customs ("Any animal products? Have you visited a farm...?)
7. lost baggage claim office

Students really get a feeling of accomplishment when they can confidently navigate an entire journey like this. When we break things down into bite-sized pieces and spend enough time learning the dialogues that make up each step along the way, even a very long process like travelling by plane or being referred to a medical specialist becomes doable. Assessment day can be fun rather than nerve-wracking.

To download for free a good portion of the materials I used during all the modules that make up the air travel theme, including some rubrics, visit my website - FREE - Settlement Themes - Travel. I will also post materials used during the health modules after we are finished with them, so stay tuned.

Do you already do something like this? If not, might you try this with your learners?

Teaching Small Talk

My multilevel class of a dozen or so Chinese and two Iraqis--all over the age of 60--has embarked upon the task of learning how to chat up strangers.

We began the unit by defining small talk and brainstorming together why we do it, when / where we do it, and HOW.

They correctly guessed that we use this superficial blather to break the ice, fill silence (with which we in this culture are not always terribly comfortable), and offer a bit of chatter to pass the time at the bus stop, train station, in line somewhere, in our apartment building or office building elevator, and so on.

We spent a couple of days learning these conversation starters, but in order not to be overwhelmed, decided to select no more than FIVE conversation starters, making sure we had at least one for a party, one that could be used to comment on any sort of weather, and one to use while strolling at the riverfront this summer when we encounter people with pets or babies in strollers. We noted that many of these could be used in multiple situations by substituting the word RAIN for SNOW, and so forth.

The next couple of classes were spent mastering TAG QUESTIONS, since they are so often incorporated in small talk. (Nice day, isn't it?)  Our reference text for this was Azar's blue book.

It wasn't difficult for me to find some nice colour photographs on Google images for us to use as practice prompts. I found a woman walking her Golden Retriever, a well-dressed man standing alone at a cocktail party, a man with a stroller at the park, someone with an umbrella waiting on a train platform, a fellow shovelling the snow from his driveway, a woman waiting for a bus, and a young lady basking in the sun at a park. These I distributed to groups of 3-4 so they could practice starting conversations in each imagined encounter.

Another grammar point I tied into this unit is that of situational ellipsis. 

"Do you think Canadians always use full sentences and full questions when engaging in small talk?" The learners let me know that they are completely aware that native speakers often communicate in one- and two-word phrases, but they don't know how to do it themselves.

This was a great time for us to delve into Scott Thornbury's little dialogue called "The Train to Oxford." The students had little trouble adding the punctuation and needed only a bit of help with intonation. (Up for Y/N questions such as "Married?" and down for wh- questions, such as "When?")

They took turns performing this role play for the class, then we spent about 20 minutes of paper and pencil time trying to reconstruct the elided elements. It was fun comparing the various versions of re-built grammar. Some turned "Oxford!" into "Oh, we've arrived at Oxford Station!" while others preferred, "This is the Oxford stop." It's all good.

For their next task, I chose to put together a dialogue between two strangers engaged in small talk at the park using artificially complete sentences and questions. If you would like a copy of this, just visit my website - Free Resources - Grammar and scroll down to Ellipsis (grammar points are arranged alphabetically).  Their job is to strip it down as far as they think possible while remaining natural or NS plausible.

After taking up the worksheet, we went back again to the photo prompts. These seniors really like to take things slowly and revisit the same material in various ways. In order to change things up a bit, this time we moved the tables and chairs out of our way and stood in two rows of seven.  I gave each A a photo prompt. We stood face-to-face, seven As and seven Bs. I explained that Bs had to initiate the conversation with this stranger, and that after about a minute, I would signal Bs to move up the row on person, with the last B coming around to talk to the first A. We did this until each B had visited every A. Tomorrow we'll repeat that, switching roles. Also to add a bit of variety, I threw two new photos into the mix: a woman with a child in a clinic waiting room and an older person with arms full of grocery bags.

I hope you can use these ideas with your group. Let me know if you do. :)

Store Returns (Part I)

My class of 15 seniors (over the age of 55) are currently doing a unit on returning something to the store. We like to take things very slowly, doing a LOT of skill-building, visiting and revisiting the same lexis again and again in an engaging variety of activities.

Our first week's worth of lessons were built around LINC 3 Classroom Activities - "Returning Faulty Merchandise." This material provided a great introduction to the needed vocabulary. We took it nice and slow, so we are going into next week just now feeling ready to write our own customer-clerk role plays.

Friday is always a bit different. The students have unanimously voted for an "easy, interesting story" that ties into the topic. The text should be so easy that they can focus entirely on the prosody and pronunciation while reading aloud without being distracted by unknown words (narrowed cognitive burden). So I usually pull something from our school's LINC 1 teacher's cabinet, such as Very Easy True Stories. The lower level students in this multilevel class appreciate having a text closer to their level, and those who read at a level 5 and up are not bored since we are focusing on pronunciation.

This week I wasn't able to find a related true story, so I cut up a picture story for pairs to order, coming up with their own language for the story of a woman who buys a shirt that is too big for her husband and has to exchange it. Picture activities are IDEAL for multilevel classes.

After the break, we adjourn to the computer lab. Here are the listening links I provided this week relating to store returns. I especially love the video on the English in Vancouver blog.

Once we have written some very simple dialogues and acted them out, the next step will be to study some real stores' returns policies. I have already photocopied the returns policy that was included last week in a delivery I received from The Hudson's Bay Company. I distributed that before the weekend--retyping it in a much larger font for compliance with the OADA. The fourteen Chinese students in the class appreciate having a text at least a day ahead of time so that they can go to town with their electronic dictionaries. I like that they do their dictionary work at home, as this frees up class time for speaking and listening practice.

At this point I envision that the culmination of this unit will be a role-play activity in which the class is divided into roles of clerk and customer, as follows:

• Each clerk will be provided with a store returns policy.
• Each customer will be able to choose among three scenario cards.
• The scenario card will state what was purchased, the date it was purchased, the tender used (store credit card, other credit card, cash, debit, etc.), and the problem with the item.
• The problems will range from spoiled milk to shoes that proved to be poorly constructed after a week of wear. Some items will be eligible for refund, others for exchange, and still others will not qualify for any action on behalf of the supplier.
• Desks will be re-arranged in a big U shape.
• Clerks sit on the outside of the U and remain stationary.
• Customers sit on the inside of the U and move clockwise.
• Teacher will facilitate the movement, allowing about seven minutes for the first pairing, but speeding things up as the students move around the U, becoming ever more fluent at expressing their ideas.
• The whole exercise will be repeated the following day with former customers becoming clerks and vice versa.

Mind you, this is going to take A LOT of prep and skill-building as I do the task analysis and break it into its component competencies. We will need to learn many chunks of language, focus on pragmatics and much more to achieve this goal. Right now I'm not even sure if this will take one or more weeks. In my usual habit of letting formative assessment shape the unit as it rolls out, the students and I will work together to determine how far and how to break down the objectives.

I'm looking forward to it!

How about you? Do you have any suggestions for me as I enter week two of our store returns unit?

Martine's Rule Number One

Muffled inside my backpack, the ring of my cell phone was just barely audible as I walked from my parking spot to the building where I'd just been hired to teach for four hours a week--a lunch hour pronunciation class.

I grappled with the zipper pouch in the middle of the sidewalk and managed to answer before it went to voice mail. It could be one of my colleagues calling me to supply for them, I thought. Covering for absent teachers was another role for which I was hired at the same time. My third hat was that of teaching assistant, which was why I was headed into work hours before my class time.

"Hello?"

"Kelly?" A weak and raspy voice came through from the other end.

"Yes?"

"Can you cover for me today? I woke up with a migraine."

"Sure I can," I said, already starting to feel ill at ease with the notion of zero prep time. "What's the topic?"

"Oh, there's no particular topic. Do anything you want with them."

"Thanks a lot," I said, hoping my voice didn't betray any trace of sarcasm.

She had given me no advance notice nor had she prepared anything like the other instructors always did. There wasn't even a topic to inspire me. Fortunately, I had spent a recent weekend compiling a few emergency lesson ideas for just such a circumstance. I would try out "student-made tests."

Thank goodness I'm a nervous Nellie an early bird; I had time to grab a ruler and create a simple table-style graphic organizer and make twenty copies. (Grab the free template on my website.)

After introducing myself and explaining their teacher's absence, I polled the class to find out what grammar points they had been covering over the past week or two. As they all began to chime in, I scribbled quickly, capturing their answers on the board.

Next I asked them what topic they had covered. They told me they had just finished reading The Piano, a slender chapter book abridged for ESL learners. Great.

I explained that their task would be to think up six good questions to test their classmates on the material covered over the past week or two: three about grammar and three about the novel. I would come around, I said, to help them find any errors in their questions. I then would circle what I thought were the best four out of six, and they were to copy those onto the graphic organizer.

That took us to break time.

After break, we pulled half the chairs from outside the U of tables to the inside so that pairs were facing each other.

"Partner A has five minutes to ask partner B four questions. When you hear my beeper go off, it's time to switch roles: B then has five minutes to quiz A. Then I'll ring the bell and Bs will move clockwise while As stay put. Got it?"

They got it. With five pairs, this took exactly fifty minutes, leaving us ten minutes for a debriefing before the end of class. They were supposed to rank their classmates and report at the end who had done the best job answering each question. But during the plenary discussion, something serendipitous arose from this technique. The students all said they had come to understand the material so much better. Their classmates had elucidated formerly cryptic grammar points, helped them understand the book's plot twists, and had taught them new words or given them a fuller grasp of terms already touched on in class.

As the students filed out into the hall with smiles on their faces, still abuzz with the energy of the activity, I heard the voice of my TESL prof in my head. "RULE NUMBER ONE," she said so many times that it can never leave me, "Whenever possible, have the students do the work."

Yes, Martine. I think I see what you meant.

The next time Martine's rule echoed in my mind was when I was acting as teaching assistant, observing and helping the literacy teacher. The class was about to play BINGO. How many times had I toyed with the idea of using this game in class only to reject it as too time consuming for the teacher? After all, each BINGO card has to be different since you can't have every students shouting BINGO at the same time. But this teacher did something that had never occurred to me. He put the bank of twenty-four words at the bottom of the sheet and had the students COPY them one by one into the BINGO grid, reminding them not to copy them in order starting with the top left cell, but encouraging them to scatter the words around the grid in a random way. Not only did this save the teacher prep time, but these students got an opportunity to practice copying--a skill most of them were still developing. Value!

That was over five years ago.  Now I have two classes and continue to remind myself several times a week of Martine's Rule Number One. Today in literacy class, for example, I decided to start our food unit in a way I never have before. Instead of warming them up, activating prior knowledge, yada yada, and then presenting twelve food staple words of my choosing, I passed out grocery store flyers and had the students cut out five items they buy every week. From posters each team of two created, I then told them they had to decide on the twelve terms we would learn and practice with this week. Well, we ended up with a list almost identical to the one I usually give them, but I noticed that the level of engagement seemed much higher than usual. These are the words THEY chose, the ones THEY say they need when shopping.

So, how about you? How do you feel about Martine's Rule Number One? Do you embrace a similar philosophy in your teaching? If so, how? And if not, why not?

Peer Surveys

I promised a while back (after posting a peer survey template in my freebies area) that I would blog about how I use them.

Peer surveys are a mainstay of my classroom practice. They work for any level from ESL Literacy to CLB 7, and can also be used in EAP courses. With a peer survey, you offer your learners an opportunity to use the week's target structures or concepts with a number of their classmates. I always participate in the surveys, so this gives students a chance to converse one-on-one with me, as well.

So what is a peer survey? Since a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at a sample peer survey for the literacy level below.

This survey was part of our unit on food staples. We had learned words such as rice, tea, milk, eggs, bread, chicken, fish, and juice. We had learned to ask, "Excuse me, where is the _____?"  We had taken a virtual tour of the local grocery store and had set up our classroom with aisle signs identical to the ones found in that store. We had practiced telling each other on which aisle we would find tea, rice and pop. We had learned to write out simple shopping lists.

Then we had learned "Do you like _____?" along with affirmative and negative answers, practicing them as a chain drill around the class, or in a more random and fun way by passing a ball around the classroom to tag each other. 

Once students feel confident in their ability to ask and answer a couple of basic questions relating to the week's topic, I give them a graphic organizer like the one you see above. I provide the questions just above the table, e.g.,

Question 1 - 

A:   Do you like chicken?

B:   Yes, I do.             OR            No, I don't.

etc.

They know they are to walk around and talk to five classmates. They know I don't want them simply to copy classmates' names onto the form, but rather want them to ask each other, "How do you spell your name?" They know, too, that they should be able to spell their names aloud for their classmates. Weekly peer surveys ensure learners get lots of practice with this function--one they will need daily as they navigate doctor visits, school enrolments, and so many more activities of daily life in Canada.

Peer surveys can also be used with higher levels in so many ways. I recently experimented with using them to give my intermediate learners an opportunity to use lexical chunks (expressions, idioms, phrasal verbs, etc.) that we had encountered in that week's text. The text was about how to use an Automatic External Defibrillator or AED. This activity was a huge hit! (See below.)

The best part of this activity is the energy in the room when it's going on. Students seem to really enjoy the interaction and chance to put the new language to use. When the surveying is done, I help them digest what they've learned. For literacy learners, this can mean producing sentences in the third person to capture what they learned about classmates. For more advanced levels, this can mean the teacher asks students to summarize what they learned about others.

This is also a great activity for speaking assessment time. The teacher can mill about taking notes on rubrics while students circulate and complete their quota of five or however many peers they are to survey.

Do you already use peer surveys? If not, I highly recommend you give them a whirl. If you try them out and/or use my template, I hope you'll leave a comment to let me know how it went.