In ESOL we often get our students to work on intonation, but I'm beginning to wonder whether mine needs some work as well.
Occasionally, when I am talking students through a particular activity, I ask them a question and they genuinely don't realise I'm asking, not telling, them something. Is it to do with tone of voice or is there another reason?

The peer observation I carried out yesterday was both inspiring and depressing. At the risk of a value judgement, which I of course will not use in the assignment write-up, I must say that the teacher I observed had much better classroom management than me. I suspect that if I tried right now to change the way I manage my classes I would have little success. However, I do have a golden opportunity presented by my leave of absence, which begins next week. My hope is that the students will, by the time I return in the new year, forget how I taught them completely, and so when I come back, I will have a clean slate- or a cleaner slate- to change the way I manage the classes and hopefully make some headway in the constant battle against shouting out.

I suspect that I will be pulled up in the feedback session from my college observation for using sarcasm. But I've been reading a book by a man called Frank Chalk, who says it is one of the "PGCE No-No's That Work". According to him, the secret is to "practice until you can sound absolutely sincere, as in "My word...that's a lovely tattoo you have on your neck. I might get one done myself."" (From 'It's Your Time You're Wasting' by Frank Chalk). Of course, he teaches at a rough, tough inner city school. My classes are somewhat different. That said, the shouting out and poor behaviour does occasionally present itself. Hopefully my time away will give me a chance to read more on classroom discipline, and to ruminate on the lessons I've learned from observing my peer.

My classroom management was all over the place, I wasn't teaching in the way I normally would, my mind went blank, I had a permanent sense of my own shortcomings, things went off topic and I panicked, I was convinced learning was not taking place...

Yep. It was my first observation. Of course, none of the 7407 observations are assessed. Except that this one was combined with the college observation, which IS graded. Knowing that you're being marked for something changes the way you do things. The first 7407 obs is meant to just find out what your teaching style is etc etc. Except it wasn't just doing that, which really didn't help.

Add to this that everyone wants a piece of me at the moment because I won't be here from next week, and the result is a stress, stress, stress. It's all the administration that Must Be Done before I go that's getting to me. And everyone who asks me to do something seems to think they are the only person who has asked me to do anything.

But to go back to the professional development- since knowing you are being assessed changes the way you work, I think I must make more of 'this is being marked' or 'there is a reward for the best one'.

I'll save further reflection on the lesson itself for the Reflective Practice form I have to fill out. Oh good. More admin.

Timing...

It's something of an irony to me that one of the things I was best at on my CELTA course- timing a lesson- is something I'm quite bad at now. Unless I really concentrate during the planning stage, things never take the time I think they will. Usually, they do the less terrifying thing- taking longer than anticipated. It's much simpler to choose something to leave out in a lesson that's over-running than to think of something to add in to a lesson where the class are racing through the work.

I underestimated the timings on the numeracy class today- though I did better than I usually do, and had fewer activities planned. The stop-the-clock game I played lasted about as long as I thought it would. The explanations would have lasted longer if I'd been more careful about drilling- this is something I need to work on. But I had underestimated the time taken by student-centred spelling feedback (as in, how long it would take them to mark one anothers' work, and then write down their corrections). That said, I feel like I'm getting better with that class, and I was very proud of the Smartboard Notebook that I used- this is something I want to do more of- all the work I needed, including blank screens, all ready to go, including flashcards, and a hyperlink to the flash game. It made my life considerably easier.

I would absolutely love timing to be something I was good at- both in terms of the class as a whole, and also in terms of being the kind of teacher who knows that an activity is going to take some students less time than others, and plans in differentiation accordingly.

Speaking of differentiation (did you see how neatly that segued?), it's something I find hard work. I don't want to be in a position where the reward for finishing work is more work. I do want to challenge the brighter students and not make the weaker students feel left behind. Pairing them up can work, but pairs/groups have (as I've said before) to be monitored closely to ensure they're actually working together. There must be a better way to do this.

On a brighter note, I've redesigned the lesson plan template that I use to divide up what the students are meant to be doing, and what I'm meant to be doing, at different points in the lesson. It brings the whole thing closer to the planning forms I used on my CELTA course, which I found very useful, and I've gone back to having my plan in front of me at all times so I know where I'm going with things. And that's an advantage to timing things well- you have less to write (if you're estimating accurately, rather than overestimating the amount of work), and thus you have less to remember in the classroom.

On group work, part 2

There is a danger in placing stronger and weaker students together in group work. Yes, it can be a great teaching tool, in that those who know more can reinforce their learning by explaining it to the weaker students, but the danger is that they will get on with their own work and ignore the struggling student in their midst.

One issue I have yet to find an effective way to deal with as a teacher is that of students in groups not actually communicating with each other. It seems that when they are in a team, they will work together, but when they are in a 'group', they remain more isolated. I, as the teacher, need to try and encourage interaction more. On Wednesday, one weaker student was, as in the paragraph above, left to struggle by her peers. Either I need to put her in a group where the others WILL help her, or I need to work with the two people she was meant to be in a group with, and make sure they include her.

Part of the issue may be that the brighter students, or at least some of them, consider the weaker students as being beneath them in some way- not worth bothering with. I am doing my best to foster an environment where everybody is supported by the group. There has been some success, but a couple of disruptive elements (the two class members who always shout out the answers no matter who I ask to give them- I am doing my best to deal with this but need to be stricter about drumming the idea that when I ask someone else to give me the answer, I MEAN it) are hindering this. It was perhaps less bad this week, but only because a third disruptor (perhaps it is worth it to note that these three poorly behaved students are the only men in the class) was absent.

This is clearly a classroom management issue, and I'd love to try rearranging the room. Some more activities in class that require the students to move and sit in other places would, I think, be effective, and I will try to take this into account when planning my classes.

Interesting Uses of the Smart Board part 1...

When students are role playing in front of the class, draw a set of theatre curtains (complete with theatre masks) on the Smart Board behind them. They seem, as a result, to be more willing to get up and perform in the Class Theatre.

And I feel very proud of having thought of this just as we were about to do role plays. Inspiration is a wonderful thing.

I think finding interesting ways to use ICT in classes is important, be it fun websites that can be used (for example the BBC's touch typing lessons website), or bringing up pictures to answer vocabulary questions- this is great for students with a low level of reading as they can see immediately what is meant- with low levels of English, a picture is worth 1000 words that students might not understand- because you can guarantee that there will always be some students who pretend they know what you're talking about when really they're confused. Of course this links to the first post I made- being a teacher has in part to be about knowing what questions to ask to check understanding, because students will almost never tell you when something is wrong. I gather from investigating the Smart Board notebook software that there's a section for pictures and another for attachments- this means I should be able to prepare everything that's going to go on the board ahead of time, without fussing about opening up files. Excellent! The Smart Board is growing on me- when it works. I'm about to go into an ICT lesson where I can't use it because someone stole the projector from the classroom.

That said, with particular groups, there will be students who do nothing but complain, and their attitudes have to be taken with a pinch of salt, though they should not be ignored. When a student says "this is boring" they might mean they're stuck and don't want to say anything. But "aw, Miss, that's long" (a phrase I've heard often this past half term) is often, and certainly was in the context that I heard it, indicative of a very short attention span.
"That's long" they say. "Yes." I think, "A whole paragraph! What a terrible person I am for making you read."

On Group Work

Group work. It can be a wonderful thing. But how to deal with a class where there is one student who, probably through no fault of their own, irritates the other students?

Assigning groups yourself is most effective and makes sure that people mix and get to know other class members, and of course prevents the group a little from just chatting about anything and not working, but there's still the problem where you assign a group who don't get on.

I found this yesterday morning when being put in a group myself- what we were supposed to do was have a discussion- but I didn't make an effective contribution owing to the prickling sense of annoyance felt at one of the other members of the group. It must be the same for other students.

So this afternoon, when I have some group work planned, will be most interesting.

Some days it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps...

There is nothing quite so frustrating as preparing for a lesson, as fully as you can, only to discover that there was something that you hadn't thought of that knocks the entire lesson for six.

On Tuesday, we were offered the chance to muse upon this after the lack of a DVD player, and then the lack of speakers, on a PC, totally threw out the plans of our ITT trainer, despite their being the best-laid they could be.

Today, it was the computers again (why is it always the electrical equipment that lets us down?), only this time, I discovered fifteen minutes into a class on Blogs that the college internet policy for students won't let them access any online journal sites. And yet last year, they were able to do this just fine.

It may well be that the person who did the Scheme of Work last year neglected to note that they had had to obtain a particular permission for it, but whatever the reason, it left me standing in a class of 15 people all staring at a white page with a swirly college logo announcing "Access denied". This problem was exacerbated by the fact that the control of ESOL students over the realm of IT is tenuous at best, and any error message (or anything they THINK is an error message) will confuse them beyond measure. Take the fact that the system now appears to want to use Microsoft Wordmail, but for some reason there are a whole slew of macros to be disabled. I waste enormous amounts of class time (and I say enormous because the time spent on this WILL add up by the end of the year) instructing student after student on how to get rid of the dialogue boxes that appear, in order for them to be able to use the program they need to, and it happens for no reason I can discern.

Let us also add into this cocktail of stress the fact that almost all of the students had totally forgotten how to open their e-mail accounts.

And then let's pour in a dash of the following conversation:
Me: Look at the mouse.
Student: (looking at the PC screen) Yes.
Me: No, look at the mouse.
Student: (looks briefly at the mouse and then looks back at the screen). Yes.
Me: No, keep looking at the mouse, look at the two buttons...

This is a class who are using e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, Powerpoint- some challenging things- and yet they haven't done the basic thing of right and left mouse buttons.

As you can probably imagine, all of this, and the repeated need to explain the same thing over and over, led to me finishing the lesson about ready to head to the nearest bar and set up a private tab for gin and juice.

But I'm veering off the point, which is that as a professional, I should have had a back-up plan, but I relied on past performance as an indicator of future performance, and got burned. Future IT lessons need to take into account the fact that the computer system can, and will, play merry hell with what I have planned- my internet lessons, in particular, need to have a back-up plan if the internet isn't connected, or sites are banned.

I guess the upside of this horror of a lesson was that I learned something valuable myself- you can't prepare for everything, but you should, as a professional teacher, be ready for as many eventualities as you can- and one of the main ones to be ready for is The College Computers/DVDs/Videos/TVs/Other Electrical Equipment can, and will, let you down.

A very good place to start...

Just a quick musing: It's quite astounding how much class time can be wasted due to a badly written worksheet.
I'm wary, now, of using worksheets with examples on them for lower level classes, particularly where they have to come up with their own work.

Example: An Entry 2 IT class was learning to use e-mail, and had to write a message telling a friend what they had done at the weekend. I got tired very quickly of repeating "That's good English but [insert student name here], did you go to Brighton to visit your family? No. So you need to write what you did at the weekend, not what it says there."

Then there was the endless fun of the example filled-in Outlook dialogue box with a fake student number- it took the students as long to get the program set up on their computers as it did for them to do the rest of the exercise, or so it seemed.

I think perhaps it may also be down to the vocabulary we think to teach classes. After the experiences of the last couple of weeks of IT, I feel that pre-teaching 'example' and 'copy' (and 'don't') would be a very helpful precaution to take. As a developing professional, working out what a class needs to know before they start work is very important. I'm still learning. Of course this doesn't get past the fact that students of particular cultural backgrounds will not be used to reading a worksheet with a normal UK layout (not that I mean that the UK layout should be the norm, or that it's the only one that IS normal, I mean a layout that you find everywhere in the UK, right or wrong), will start in the wrong place etc.

Also there's the whole issue of getting the students to read the instructions in the first place. This is not a comprehension problem, this is a problem of the student assuming they know what the activity is, and failing to see the instructions that tell them to do something else, for example the students who ignored the instruction that said to carry out an activity in Microsoft Word. Intervention from me would solve this, but to an extent I want the students, in IT at least, to get used to reading instructions carefully for themselves. This of course may be something I change my mind about later on. Smartboard* demonstrations are all well and good, but they don't help everyone.

In my other classes, the way of working is different- there are no worksheets with long sets of instructions on how to do something.

And speaking of Smartboards, for all they are useful, they cause me untold problems, as my feedback techniques often involve students- more than one student a lot of the time- coming up and writing on the board, as a method of achieving inclusive feedback which also gives me an extra way to monitor the students' spelling, grammar and punctuation. How am I supposed to do this when
a) You can't use more than one pen at a time on the Smartboard.
b) You can't rest your hand on the board when you write, and most students are used to doing this.
c) You can't actually see what you're writing unless you know where to stand and how, and again, most students (quite understandably) have no idea about this.

I'm all for E-learning and feel it can be very valuable, but it's not long since I learned my whiteboard techniques, and I'm just not willing to let them go quite yet. Clearly I need to find new ones that I can use with the new hi-tech equipment.

Let's start at the very beginning.

I'm keeping this journal for an assignment for my teacher training. There's a lot to think about, but I'll start with a classroom reflection while it's fresh in my memory.

We talked today about teaching style and learning style, which brought to mind one particular class I have, an Entry 2 IT class. Last week, we did some work on using the mouse, as a lot of the students find this difficult- particularly considering that many of them have never used a computer before. At the end of the exercises I had planned, I gave them some games to play to get them using the mouse for different things (double-clicking, drag and drop and other things they often have trouble with). It seemed to go fine, but then this week the course tutor told me they'd moaned to her. Or rather, some of them had. I shouldn't be surprised that they didn't say anything to me- students in our department are always very polite. I think the trouble stems from the fact that many of them are used to very 'traditional' teaching, and my teaching style tends to be not so much about that. Of course part of the problem there is that my teacher training was all about new and current methods- the traditional methods were discussed but usually rejected as not as effective as other newer ones. Even teacher training concepts used by some of my colleagues were dismissed- ones still in use at other colleges training people on the same course. My college used the 'Engage, Study, Activate' model of lesson planning, but colleagues of mine use 'Presentation, Practice, Production'. I shall have to look at how the two map together. But back to the class- I think I need perhaps to look at the old methods- the ones that many of these students got when they were last in a learning environment, but I'm not convinced by the argument that says I should teach these students in this way because that is what they expect. Then again, it may be that if the class isn't how they expect it to be, they won't learn as effectively because they're too busy getting bothered by the fact that it's different to how they've learned in the past.
Though I have to say that one student, in particular, who was, according to my colleague, the most 'worried' about what my lesson would be like, took a dislike to me on day one, when I gave the class a diagnostic test to do.
M: "You tell them what these things are [indicating a label-the-picture task] and then they will know!"
Me: "M, this is a test to help me find out what you know and don't know, so I can plan what to teach you. If I tell you the answers, how will I know whether you knew them already or not?"
Of course in terms of my attitude to her, hearing that she has moaned about the lessons not being what she expects didn't exactly endear her to me.

The lesson yesterday (game-free) seemed to go fine, Smartboard death and no-whiteboard-pen notwithstanding. But so did the other class, so perhaps one thing I need to work on as a teacher is being able to judge things like that from the point of view of the students, because evidently they won't tell me if something's wrong- why would they? I never would have done when I was at school.

As for learning styles, apparently I'm a very visual learner. But I wonder whether some assessment of the different types of intelligence students have would be valuable- as in the longer 'multiple intelligences' list which of course I can't remember offhand- but contains things like logical/mathematical and musical as well as the Big 3 (visual, audio, kinaesthetic). Clearly I need to root out my notes on that and see what I can see.