Learn English

Writing about thinking about thinking about a lesson

Photo by xrrr on flickr - fotopedia

I've had discussions before with people about whether David Beckham is intelligent or not. Personally, I will defend his dignity and not just because he was a Manchester United player, honestly. What it all comes down to is how we actually evaluate intelligence.

This thought entered my mind today for no particular reason, in fact it was while I was making a cup of tea. I starting to imagine a lesson based around comparing some famous people and deciding if they were intelligent or not and ranking them in order of intelligence. In this post I am going to share what I came up with, but it isn't a lesson plan, it's a description of my thought process, through which you can choose something to use in a lesson, that is, of course, if you actually want to. Basically, it exists and you're reading it, so make of it what you will!

The context in my head as I am writing this is a smallish class (up to 15 students) in a private language school, or a UK summer school. I'm thinking of teenagers from 14 years upwards and at least a lower-intermediate level. This is the context I am most familiar with and I'm sure that these ideas could be used in other contexts, perhaps with further adaptation, but this is what is in my head as I write. If you do think of areas for improvement or adaptation, particularly for a different context, please comment below.

I first thought, ok, that's a good idea. Which famous people could I ask the learners to compare? In addition to Beckham (although I wondered if he was a bit 'out of date' now) I added Heston Blumenthal (self-trained über-chef) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook bloke). I then started to think of the students researching these people on wikipedia to find out about them, in order to make their decisions and present them in some sort of way. Then I thought, why did I choose three people? I thought of Lindsay Clandfield's 'Group of 3' reference at IATEFL! Then I thought: not only are these all men but they are all English speakers, which is fairly typical of much textbook material, the native speaker thing, not the gender; as far as course books go, I don't think there's a gender imbalance, but I may be wrong. I suppose the choice of male celebrities is probably down to the fact that I am one, a male, that is, rather than a celebrity. Anyway, my thinking moved on to women (not like that, behave yourself) and I thought of Lady Gaga and Zadie Smith (I don't know, alright?!) before remembering that I felt uncomfortable with the chosen people all being from Britain or the US, although I know that Zadie Smith is half-Jamaican and I think that influenced my brain into thinking of her in the first place.

At this point, I started considering that the students might wish to speak about famous people from different contexts, not just the imperial centre of English language teaching course books. In fact, I realised that they might like to discuss people from their own context and how would I know who they could be, if I don't know their context? Aha! They can choose the people themselves (amazing). However, I couldn't just get them to brainstorm famous people randomly (well I don't think so at this point in time, maybe you disagree), there needs to be some control that would bring out a balance of intelligences (remember the purpose of this exercise?). Ok, I thought, why don't they choose some categories of famous people first, let's say five categories, for example; they might think of sports stars, TV celebrities, singers, politicians and film stars. That would be a good start and then they could think of some famous people to go into these categories before deciding as a class on the five that they want to focus on, without having been told the objective of the exercise. At this stage the teacher could impose some light control over the choices of the categories, if desired.

I had thought of this being a simple activity in a dogme style (whatever that is), but I decided to brainstorm the whole process and think about a variety of possibilities and it was then that I conceived the idea of writing a post like this about it on my blog. I thought of three questions (three again, maybe there's something in this song after all).

Can you rank these people in order of intelligence?
What criteria should you use to decide?
How do you define intelligence?

All the while, I was thinking about the idea that critical thinking is an important part of education, whether in an evening class at a language school or in a more formal state school context. Lindsay Clandfield's talk on this at IATEFL was really interesting, by the way (btw I've looked at the Brighton online website for a link and can hardly find any mention of him, it's almost like he wasn't actually there).

Cartoon from www.fallingfifth.com

As I started considering the outcomes of this activity and the length of time it would take, it was definitely roaming further away from a simple conversation. I decided it could definitely take more than one lesson and that research on the chosen celebrities could be done as homework. However, in doing this you lose control over the students' choice of online material, e.g. would they really use wikipedia in English at home in order to make notes?! However, would that actually matter? If they are asked to prepare notes in English then the exercise in translation from their L1 could be a worthwhile experience. Also, it's always a danger that you ask groups to do this stuff for homework and the ones that don't can cause organisational problems. There's an element of classroom management and discipline here that would be going too far off topic for this, I reckon, suffice it to say there are ways of attempting to ensure homework gets done.

In terms of productive outcomes, I thought of a presentation, given by each group to the rest of the class, attempting to persuade the other groups that their ranking was the best one. By doing this they'll have to structure a solid argument with reasons to support their decision making. Then I wondered about language (this is more or less the chronology of the process, but all this thinking took about 5 minutes while I was drinking tea and eating cake, so it wasn't entirely linear). Hang on, I thought, this is moving towards a task-based approach, if I'm not mistaken.

(Ok, I also realise that this post is long. Very long, in fact, it's going to carry on for a while yet. You may decide to bear with me, or just move along, you can always rate it one star on the widget below if you really want.)

What about we start, I thought (after the choice of celebrities stage) by asking: are these people intelligent? Why, or why not? This could be a group or pair discussion and could allow for a task-based framework, this task as a diagnostic of language to be scaffolded, after which relevant language could be elicited or introduced along with help with relevant language structures. Following that, the students could do their research and prepare a presentation. Of course, if the students all knew enough about the famous people they had chosen, then maybe they wouldn't need to do any research after all. However, despite 'knowing' the celebrities, there are usually new things to be discovered.

I thought about the stages required to prepare for their presentation. The groups would first have to discuss the people and rank them into an order they could argue for, this could even happen before research and after, in order to re-evaluate and allow for the research to 'hit home' and affect their thinking, either confirming or contradicting their original thoughts. Actually, the original thoughts could provide a framework for them to use to do the research, perhaps giving rise to disagreements that new information could clear up.

I supposed that the presentation itself could be done with a powerpoint (or similar) presentation (although this is a bit 'obvious' my students, or at least some of them, have tended to know how it works, so no IT training required), or obviously just orally, without the visual support. However, using the technology is cross-curricular and allows for students to demonstrate their IT skills, perhaps encouraging weaker (in English) students to get more involved if they are better at IT. This made me think of the groups themselves, who would choose the groups, the teacher or the learners? There are benefits to both, but I would often prefer to choose the groups unless the groups the students choose had a reasonable balance of skills. Also, for the presentation, another idea I like to use is to get the students to write some (maybe 3!) questions for the other students, to try to ensure that they are listening and focused during the talk. (It did cross my mind that the students could produce a mini-TV or radio programme based on a documentary format discussing intelligence, although for most classrooms this would be a bit much, at a summer school it would be perfectly possible as a longer project).

At some point I decided that the presentations could be video-recorded and shared with another class (on a blog), perhaps from another school, or country and those students, perhaps having done the same activities, could award points for each one, in order to determine winners (no, there doesn't have to be competition, but I think it tends to focus this age group). They could also write comments on the blog which could continue the discussion, perhaps out of the classroom (hey, learner autonomy!). This could mean also spending time on how you can evaluate a presentation, which would provide ideas for the students on how they could evaluate their own work as they are preparing it. This learner training could feed into future presentations and as my students have often had to prepare these for their main school, this could help them out there as well. Also, (aha!) I realised I could get the students to write some thoughts on the process in a learning journal, which could be shared with me (as the teacher) so I could respond, as part of a continuous process of reflection taking place throughout the course. I also considered that the students could do this project as an assessed piece of work and (wholly or partly) self-evaluate based on criteria that they could choose, not just on the presentation (I mentioned criteria for evaluating that earlier) but on their language use (their learning?) and group participation during the process.

After all that, I thought about how the idea could simply be used as a discussion topic for a dogme lesson. It would have been much simpler, but this was a process not a product approach for me!

Image from www.stupidfresh.com

I suppose that this post is a reflection on action, through being a reflection on a past process, but also in action as I was further thinking of possibilities as I wrote the post. There's a whole lot of cognition and metacognition going on here, I can tell you! This felt like gathering think-aloud data on myself, which is a bit odd. All I can say is that this process has been very interesting for me on various levels, the main one being the metacognitive process of reflecting on how my thinking proceeded during the lesson planning. (I have realised since finishing the post that there isn't much talk about language points, what does that betray about my thinking?! Is it important?! In many ways I'd rather work with what emerges.)

As a blog post, I thought it would be nice to get some further ideas on what could be done with this idea, also to get some feedback on the idea and to allow my thought process to provoke your own thinking about how you come up with ideas for lessons. I'd love to hear some thoughts from other people on this idea and my reflections. Maybe somebody might take up a challenge and write a post like this about their own lesson planning idea?However, perhaps you have a job (and a life) and don't have time for such things. I suppose I've only done it because I'm procrastinating about reading for my MA assignments and avoiding the media attention of a certain wedding. Ok, that's it, must do some work.

If you've read all of this, I say 'awfully well done', wish you a good day and I hope you might have gained something from the experience.

- From The Screen To The Classroom. Part 2.
Last week, I introduced the amazing work that some great teachers are producing to work with films in the English class. They are really inspiring to encourage other teachers to create their own video activities and improve their teaching practice. This...

- Anti-rules
I saw the other day that Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings had done a session at IATEFL on subversiveness in the classroom and that there is also a publication. I love being subversive and I find that being creatively subversive with teenagers can...

- I'm Not A Dogmetician, I'm A Teacher
I wrote a post questioning dogme and what exactly it was some time ago now and revisited it recently. You can read the original here. Here are some current thoughts, which I think demonstrates my continuing state of 'being critical'. There...

- Reflections Of A Language Learner #1
I've recently started attending a Spanish class once a week. It's pitched at pre-intermediate level, which seems fine for me, although I'm a bit of a 'level-freak' really. I've decided to write some thoughts on my experiences of...

- The Grandma's Duck Hatches
During this last week I took the first steps towards starting a blog with a group of my students. I've wanted to try it for ages, but never got around to it, for various reasons. I considered it with various classes but always thought that 'it's...

Learn English