Revision thoughts

Firstly, I'd like to thank Barbara for her comment left after my last Post. It's good to know someone is reading this blog.

I've spent a little time thinking about my students' inability to revise adequately by themselves. My last class didn't seem to understand how to revise, as well as not understanding the need to spend sufficient time doing so. I may not be able to convince them to spend as much time revising as I would like them to, but I should be able to help them to prepare for revision.

With this in mind, I have decided to begin preparing for revision throughout the year. My September starters have completed the first topic, General Physics. I designed a revision sheet for the students to complete, covering the most important points, but only using one side of A4 paper. I gave one copy to each student and told them to complete it for homework. They were allowed to add anything of their own choosing to the sheet, so long as they only used one side of A4 paper. I want the students to learn how to make their revision notes compact and easy to use. Most importantly, I want to discourage them from trying to re-read the whole of their textbook.

In order to provide an incentive for the students to complete the task well, I told them they could use the sheet in their end of topic test.

Some revision sheets were completed well, usually by the more able students, but some were still done poorly or not at all. There were mistakes on many, indicating some misunderstandings, so that made the task worthwhile by itself.

After their test, I handed out a revision sheet I had completed correctly. I would have preferred to review the sheet in class and have the students work out where to make corrections, but I just couldn't take the time to do so. Nevertheless, the reason for the task was appreciated and commented upon by some students and I will repeat it for each topic. Maybe, now they have seen the effect that having the sheet in their test, those students who did not make much effort the first time around will be encouraged to do so next time................. At the very least, they have seen an example of how to precis a topic into one side of A4 paper.

Once they have a complete set of revision notes, I will try to encourage the students to use them to answer past exam questions. It is not going to solve the whole problem of revision, of course, but it is hopefully a start.

The Moodle lesson, based around James Bond, was a success. Students commented that having a story to read as well as questions to answer made the task much more enjoyable. Some said they didn't feel as though they were working at all! They all liked the idea that the young James Bond was studying for his IGCSE Physics exam at Bellerbys! The personal touches, especially the humour involved, were appreciated by the students.

I intend to write another story along similar lines, but possibly based around Harry Potter!

End of course reflections

My January starters have finished their exams now so it seems a good time to reflect on our time together.

This was the first class to have all of their lessons properly prepared beforehand on an IWB and I introduced many new ideas from the books on CLIL that I've read this year. Some ideas have worked better than others, but I've devoted more time to this class, by way of preparation and reflection than to any other I've taught, certainly for several years.

Ok, the good:

• CLIL has made me re-evaluate everything I do.
• I'm much better at supporting my students' language leaning now.
• Asking questions instead of presenting students with facts, has ensured that more of the class is engaged at any time.
• Students are not afraid of asking their own questions - I've noticed a huge increase in questions asked and many questions are far more involved and interesting than I've ever been asked before. I've realised just how good students are at interpreting Physics, taking information and owning it, using it to think at much higher levels than I'd previously been aware of.
• Confidence levels among some students has increased.
• Students seem to enjoy my lessons more than previously.
• I enjoy teaching much more than previously.
• My own confidence in my teaching has improved no end.
• I expect more from my students now.

The bad:

• My students were still not independent enough to revise on their own. If anything, they expected more from the revision lessons and were disappointed that they were expected to get their heads down and work on past exam papers.
• Therefore, I need to think more about revision and devise new ways to engage the students in revision, so that they do not realise they are working hard. At least, not all of the time. They do need to realise and accept that passing exams necessitates hard work. How can I convince them that just reading their textbook is not the best way to revise? Despite all my efforts, they kept on falling back on this as their preferred (often only) method of revision outside the classroom.
• I can't change the world by myself. I'd like to include some cross-curricular work in future but I'm not sure how well, if at all, that would go with other teachers. Do I have the energy and persistence to be able to convince others to try a few joint projects?

Did all of my efforts this year make a difference to the students' outcomes? Will it have helped them to pass their exams? I'm not sure I can answer those questions with one small class. I do know that I would not wish to return to a more traditional way of teaching. I hope and do believe I am a better teacher now and hope that I will continue to improve in the future.

I'll keep you posted!

Ups and downs of the week.

I've had a few successes and a few failures recently. Successes include setting students tasks to read a paragraph in their textbook, then use the information to explain how to answer a problem to the rest of the class. This task was given to a new class of September starters. Some of the student presentations were better than others, but they all participated and seemed to gain confidence from the task. A few were surprisingly good and the task helped me to evaluate the level of English of each student.

The revision class, who take their exams in the next few weeks have not been so successful. I don't seem to have been able to motivate that class to revise thoroughly. Despite repeated nagging from me, they have either ignored all revision tasks or have just resorted to reading the textbook. Students do not know how to revise. I've given advice over and over, set tasks using past exam papers, but unless we go through these in class, they are just not using past papers at all. Then they complain about not being able to understand the questions in the papers!

Today, I gave them a task to precis some already short revision notes I made a few years ago. 14 sides of A4 were to be reduced to just 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes on the "waves" topic. After much agonising, they all started the task and seemed to cope quite well. I think it was easier for them to precis an already shorter version of the topic than to start from scratch using the textbook. I went through the original notes before they began the precis to make sure they understood the content. At the end, I reminded them of the difference between "active" and "passive" revision. I hope I have time before their exams to review whether they found it useful or not.

Student research

I've had an interesting couple of lessons with my January starters class, this week. We are still at the start of the radioactivity topic, thinking about isotopes and leading to the 3 kinds of radioactivity, alpha, beta and gamma.

I decided to try a different approach and after a discussion about what made isotopes different from each other, asked the students to imagine we were the ones making discoveries of new atoms and radioactivity. Going back in time and taking the place of Marie Curie, so to speak.

So I asked what properties we should investigate if we had a jar containing a new and unkown element in front of us. To be honest, I thought it might be asking too much of the students, but they coped surprisingly well. M, typically leapt in immediately, suggesting we should find the mass of the atom. This wasn't too surprising as we had been looking at the masses of atoms in the periodic table, but he then said that if the mass was small, we could assume that the number of protons and neutrons (constituent parts of an atom) would be equal as he had spotted that was the case with the smaller atoms.

Wow! That showed a depth to his thinking that I had not been aware of. The rest of the class joined in then and although M was by far the biggest contributor, with the best ideas, I was able to elicit a fair amount of conversation from the others as well. They all worked hard to consider the ideas and were engaged in the task throughout. We managed to revise earlier work on electrical charges as a bonus, during the discussion.

After this success, I tried to push my luck further by setting them individual tasks today. I asked each to do their own research, giving each a different type of radioactivity to find out about and report back to the group. As there are 4 students now and only 3 types of radioactivity to investigate, I gave the 4th student the task of investigating background radiation.

Time is short now and exams are looming, so we only had one lesson for this. The students were given just 20 minutes for their research so they chose to read their textbooks, instead of going to the computer suites or library. I'd given hints on the back of their instruction cards and directed them to find some specific properties, but not too many, I hope.

The tasks were done fairly well, with a few misunderstandings as expected. It did show me that they are still finding it hard to access a textbook written for English-speaking students and that I need to continue to support their vocabulary to a large extent. I asked them to write, on the IWB, the most important points (in their opinion), which we can compare with the information I want them to learn and remember in the next lesson!

I hope that these lessons will have helped them to take ownership of the topic and will make the 3 kinds of radioactivity more easily understood and remembered. Anything else is a bonus really, but I've certainly enjoyed this approach much more that the traditional delivery of facts by teacher to student.

Winners and losers

Term started this week, with 2 new classes and one returning class, who take their exams in November.

The returning class consist of 3 students - M, D and P. I had a fun lesson with them yesterday as we started the final topic about radioactivity. We were discussing atoms and I was trying to find out how much they remembered after the holidays or from previous work. At one point I asked what they thought we call atoms that have gained or lost one or more electrons (ions). M suggested "losers", to which D replied "what would you call those that have gained electrons then - winners?".

Apart from the obvious humour there, it was brilliant to hear the students bantering with each other so comfortably in English and having such confidence that they didn't hesitate to speak out. I'm not sure I can take too much credit for this, but the CLIL methods for teaching and my asking many more questions in class to lead students to answers instead of lecturing, certainly foster an environment where students feel able to take risks with the language. I would not have been able to hear this kind of discussion before, even if the students were capable of producing it.

James Bond!

James Bond has completed his mission! Or rather, I finished my James Bond story/lesson activity for my Moodle course. This has been a monster of a task, I had the idea for the activity almost a year ago, but it has taken me until now to distil my original ideas into a workable form and reach this stage.

I wanted to make an activity for my students to reinforce and deepen their understanding of energy, energy types, resources and transformations. I also wanted to make this a fun activity. A workbook I'd used for years had a "short story" about a secret agent and an evil Physics Professor, which involved energy transformations. I used to read this story to my students and have them shout out the energy types etc. However, I found that many students didn't understand what "secret agent" meant until I said "James Bond". Everyone knew about James Bond.

So, it seemed to make sense to try to make up a story about James Bond and put this into my Study Smart (Moodle) course. I'd already made one "lesson" as a revision exercise and though it was a long process to make the activity, it worked well and students enjoyed it.

In my story, the young (Junior) James Bond has just failed his IGCSE Physics Mock exam. "M" sends his to revise on a remote Island, where the evil Professor Heinz Stein captures James. In order to escape, James, helped by my students, has to answer many past exam questions about energy.

I've tried to make the story fun and personal to my students by including quips about the College as well as poking a little fun at myself as "Q", who is more interested in a football match on TV than in helping James. I've tried to make it a challenge to read as well as in answering the Physics questions, so that they are helped with some English as well as the Physics and I've included some language that crops up in exams and which often confuses students. I hope that I've been true to the ideals of CLIL by including language in this content lesson. At least I tried, very deliberately, to do so. I'm sure this activity is better for the attempt and just shows, once again, how much I've gained from my reading this year.

I hope the students enjoy the lesson, I've reached the stage where I need to try it out with them, ask for feedback and then reflect and act on that to improve it.

Enlightenment

I finally finished teaching for this term. At last I may have some time to think about my lessons, the IWB material, other material and projects for my Study Smart (Moodle) course and catch up with some reading. I'm trying to read 4 books at once, probably not such a great idea, but hey, why do things the easy way?

Also not easy working with my dratted computer which seems to be on a mission to annoy me tonight. If it gets any slower, I swear it is going to end up going through the window. I hate it when it sits there for several minutes at a time, with a blank white screen except for a message at the bottom which says "done". It is NOT done, it's done **** all, how dare it tell me it's done?

Ok, now I have that rant out of the way, I think I can maybe start to think again about how "Uncovering CLIL" has helped me.

There is a huge amount of advice in the book, some of which I found useful, much of which I found thought-provoking and also a great deal of which I didn't feel applied to me or to the college I work at.

The book does focus a lot of attention, naturally enough, on schools where the students are primarily taught in their first language but with the CLIL course taught as an extra. In our college, all students are International, they have all come to England from their home countries and all lessons take place in English.

Nevertheless, I did find the book useful for generating ideas to try out in my classes and it did make me reflect on my teaching in a way I hadn't for a long time. I started to think about the use of language in my lessons, how to help students acquire the necessary language to understand and be able to articulate their knowledge, how to provide the support and repetition they would need.

There are many ideas I've yet to try out, but intend to do so next term. One idea I'm keen to try is a precis exercise for students to do, maybe in groups at first as I think this is one they might find really challenging. I need to find a suitable piece of text to base the exercise on, perhaps I can find a report on the Chernobyl disaster to use in the radioactivity topic?

I did try out an exercise where I made some cards which had electric circuit diagrams on, gave one to each student and had them describe the circuit to another student, without using certain key words, such as "battery", "lamp", "voltmeter", "ammeter". The student who was listening had to draw the circuit as described. I hoped this would make the students think more about the function of these components when describing the circuits to each other. The exercise was partially successful, though they did become frustrated with each other at times and it was hard for me to watch and to force myself not to intervene or to give advice too readily. I will definitely use that one again, though I need to think a little more about how I present the exercise in the first place. There were some interesting non-scientific descriptions of circuit symbols which did not help the understanding of the Physics at all!

I might have continued in this way, making small changes here and there, trying a few ideas and making slow but steady progress, I might even have lost interest again in the book, if time had become an issue again, were it not for one one quotation which stunned me. It was in Chapter 5 on Opening windows for personal achievement and under the heading "Fostering creative and critical thinking". That section started with a story about Albert Einstein, so my attention had been grabbed, then continued with a discussion on Bloom's taxonomy of higher and lower thinking skills. Hmm, yeah, ok fine...............so.....? Then

On page 154, set in a box and entitled "A word to the wise", is the following:

"Of the approximately 80 000 questions asked on average annually by teachers, 80 per cent are at the lowest level of thinking - factual knowledge" (Gall 1984, Watson & Young 1986, as cited by Echevarria et al, 2000)

Isn't this shocking? 80% of all questions asked by all teachers? Was I guilty of this too?

As I thought about it, the answer to that last question had to be a resounding YES. How many times do I ask if a student can remember something? Or if they understand what I've just said, even if I phrase the question in a slightly different way?

This had to change. From that moment on, my lessons, my approach to lessons, my preparation and IWB slides have changed. That one single fact, above all else I have read, persuaded me to change my style of teaching.

All about today

I finally used the safety IWB lesson today. It worked really well, the students enjoyed the lesson and chatted so much! They remembered the bit we had covered yesterday, including the differences between mains electricity and that from a battery, wiring of plugs, overloading plugs, damp conditions and a few other hazards. Today, we worked through fuses, circuit breakers and RCDs. P talked more in this lesson than he has throughout the rest of the year, I think! The 3 students worked well together today, nominating each other to answer questions and complete the activities. P seems to have the role of completing gap-fill exercises, whilst D and M took turns at a hotspots activity and answering past exam questions.

They correctly worked out for themselves that a fuse should be chosen with a slightly higher rating than the normal current as well as deciding why that should be. I was impressed with their reasoning abilities and was able to give directed praise as a result, something else I've learned from the CLIL book. Being able to ask a student how he had come to a correct conclusion really does show how much their work is valued and as such is so much better than a bland "well done". I can see the effect on their faces, it does mean so much more to them.

These new lessons are sooooooooooooooo much better and much more enjoyable for all.

I had an added bonus today, after teaching a Foundation class. Since I've only taught them for 4 weeks, I've not been able to devote a great deal of time to the IWB for them, though I did at least type out what I wanted to present and tried to add questions, diagrams and pictures throughout. One student lingered at the end of the lesson and asked if I would show her how to use the IWB as she thought it looked intriguing. She then said that she thought it all looked so easy and natural in my lessons and made the lessons flow so well. She even said how good the lessons looked, that everything looked slick and professional.

Wow! Doesn't this show the power of the IWB in class? As well as showing the value of spending just a little time in preparation. I can't imagine ever wanting to walk into a class without an IWB again or ever thinking that I don't want to bother preparing a lesson beforehand. We have an amazing tool at our disposal to help us to motivate and inspire these young people. It doesn't always have to be complicated linked pages or animated objects, though these are fun to prepare. Some of the simplest ideas can still impress and more importantly, they can help students to think for themselves and gain so much more from a lesson.

That's all I have time for tonight. CLIL thoughts, ideas and my own learning will have to wait for another day.

Return to CLIL

Well the IWB lesson on diodes and a.c. rectification went really well. Maybe the fact that I had not spent too long on this one meant that I had not over-prepared for it, something I am apt to do on occassion. Keeping it simple, asking lots of questions and helping the students to work things out for themselves really does make a huge difference to my lessons now.

P, a quiet member of the class, managed to offer more by way of discussion today, though I did have to ask M to stop talking for a while to give the other 2 a chance to speak. I must try to find a better way to handle this. If I do nothing, M dominates all discussion as his English is much better than that of the others, but giving him more responsibility, having his act as "teacher" sometimes, just goes to his head and he starts to be ultra-critical of the others. I need to think harder about this problem and to try other tactics to see if anything else will work. I should probably speak to his other teachers too, to see if they have any suggestions.

Anyway, I'd like to return now to where I left off, in my journey from barely using an IWB to where I am now, via Barbara's book on CLIL. For some months, I'd been too busy preparing IWB lessons, trying to keep just ahead of my September starters GCSE class, to be able to read any of the book at all. Then one horrible day, the unthinkable happened. Barbara asked for the book to be returned.

To be fair, she did ask if I could lend it back to her, briefly, for her to use and then return it to me. Fortunately for me, she found another copy and didn't need "my" copy back, but the near miss gave me the jolt I needed to pick up the book again and start reading it again.

Naturally, I'd forgotten all that I'd read the first time around, so started again, though I did skim through the early chapters. I started making notes whenever I came across something I thought particularly useful and found myself trying more than ever to incorporate some new ideas into my teaching.

Some recurring themes struck me most forcibly. I should involve the students more in lessons. I should stop talking so much and ask the students to talk more. Much more. How, when their level of English was so poor? Answer - provide the language they need. Help them. Involve them. Help them to take more responsibility for their own learning. Let them set goals. Stop talking so much.

How to stop talking so much? I started taking mental note of how much talking I did in class and was, if not surprised, then definitely concerned. I talked far too much. For too long and too often. I wasn't teaching, I was lecturing. I was tempted to tell myself that it was due to my enthusiasm for Physics, but if I was to gain anything from this book and this whole exercise, then I had to be brutally honest with myself and not make excuses. I had to change the way I teach. Sure, I am enthusiastic about Physics and I had to retain that, but I had to go about my teaching in a different way.

As I read on, through sections on active learning, scaffolding, chunking and repackaging as well as a host of other sections, I began to pick up ideas to use in lessons. I reflected much more about my lessons and made myself think about my delivery before each lesson to see if there was a way to cut down on my talking time and to increase the students' talking time. At this point, I had begun to teach a new class, my current January starters GCSE class of just 3 students. They would be the ideal class on which to try out new ideas. If this didn't work, I'd plenty of time to change back, but if it did, I'd plenty of time to observe any effects. I could learn along with my students.

This was going to be fun.

another hiatus

I shall be glad when this week is over and I can finally take a breather from trying to keep my IWB lessons up to date and just in time for my class. Another teacher takes over my classes next week, which will seem wierd as I will still be at work, just not teaching. I'm hoping to use the time to prepare more lessons. Time is my biggest enemy.

Even the second time around takes time to prepare each lesson. Now that I am using a different technique for teaching (more of that later) I am finding that each lesson I had prepared for the September starters, is no longer suitable for the January starter class. Aargh! Why am I putting myself through these agonies? I've still to finish a lesson on electrical safety, though it is not far from completion now. I have just finished preparing a short lesson on using diodes to rectify a.c. to d.c. which I will use tomorrow. As I've prepared this one at the last minute, it isn't particularly exciting, no activities, though we will be using an oscilloscope in class, so I'm hoping that be enough to keep the students interested for now. They do enjoy practical work.

Another enemy of mine, well problem at least, is my ancient desk-top computer. I still have trouble accepting that computers are old after a few years - machines should last a good ten or so years. At least! (My washing machine is still going after nearly 20 years................... ) Until I can replace said creaky pc, I live in fear of losing all my work in one of the increasingly frequent crashes, so I have developed a habit of saving every IWB lesson in several places - at work, at home and on USB sticks - a different colour stick for each topic to make it quicker and easier to locate. I also tie the sticks to different larger objects too - keyrings, a tape rule and assorted ribbons for hanging around my neck or wrist. Most of these were freebies from the BETT exhibition - a great place to pick up all sorts of useful items as well as ideas. My USB sticks have to be tied to something highly visible, otherwise they are way too easy to lose inside a bag of books, homework, sandwiches etc.

Even so, I am going to have to develop a better way of organising the increasing number of lessons I have. I have folders with "old stuff" i.e. highly embarrassing early efforts at using the IWB; "modified stuff" - mostly not great but material I'm not yet ready to ditch "just in case";"ok stuff" - lessons I used last year but am not entirely happy with now and which need modifying; "good stuff" - the smallest category of all - the lessons I am presently happy with.

I hope to return to the tale of my journey soon, if grumpy old pc behaves long enough to allow coherent thought to take place!

Interlude

What a hectic week! The Summer is meant to be a quieter time, but I seem to be at least as busy as ever. At least my GCSE class was peaceful today. I had one student absent out of the 3 in total, so didn't want to go too far, then have to set work for 2 while I do catchup with the missing one, next week. So, they did some consolidation questions this afternoon, which is no bad thing anyway.

Thought I'd pause today and tell you about some practical tips that I have found that have worked, as well as some that haven't, while I was using the IWBs. While I was too busy to read more of the CLIL book I tried out various ideas in order to produce IWB lessons quickly, trying to keep pace with my September starters.

The good stuff:

• Anything humourous. Students do like to be entertained and it helps to keep them focussed on the lesson, especially during the "graveyard shifts". 4-6pm lessons can be tough on everyone. A title banner that read "Oh no, hard stuff!" almost backfired on me once, though, as I'd forgotten that I wrote it, didn't read the IWB page as I advanced from the previous page, then wondered why my class started falling about, laughing. Once they had calmed down, they did concentrate and cope with the hard stuff, so I guess even that worked!
• Anything personal. A scrolling banner which read "That's the end of the course. Good luck with your exams!" brought about a round of applause from the students and a lively discuss about revision.
• Short activities from the Interactive Toolkit, but not too many of the same type in too short a time. I try to vary the lessons as much as possible and try to have as many different activities available to use as possible. I don't use each one. Each class is different, some students like one type of activity, others do not. I have to try to remember to cater for all tastes.
• Pictures. They can help students to think of the right words, guide then towards answers and give them confidence that they know what it is I'm talking about (well, sometimes anyway!) Photos of pieces of equipment can aid memory and vocabulary. We have a wonderful technician at Bellerbys, Eva, who is a keen photographer and has taken many photos of the Physics equipment I use in class. These are invaluable in IWB lessons as there is nothing quite like seeing the actual equipment they use, rather than a picture which doesn't look anything like it. Besides, a page with just text looks boring.

This list is only a beginning, but I don't want to stay up all night writing, tonight, so I'll leave it there for now.

Bad stuff:

• Too much writing on a page. It is a dead cert to turn off students and have them stare into space instead. Or else they are so busy trying to read everything, they don't listen to me at all. Worse, some try to copy everything down and that takes forever, holding up the rest of the lesson. I'm currently going back over some of my lessons, which I thought were fine, stripping them down to the absolute minimum of words per page......but that's part of the latest phase of my journey, so I'll leave it at that for now
• Scrolling banners which ask students to hand in their homework now, please. These are invisible to students, so are a complete waste of my time to prepare. I've stopped doing so.
• Scrolling banners or any text intended to offer instructions to students to do anything while I fill in the register at the start of a lesson. These are also invisible to students and are not clever. Now I just tell them.
• Anything which forces students to leave their seats. Most just want to be entertained where they sit. They are willing to take part in activities, so long as they can call out the answers and I move the text around etc. Some students do like coming out to certain activities - ones involving anagrams, for instance.
• Coloured backgrounds, especially grey. I used to like this, but the IWB lamps tend to become less efficient after a time and a dark background makes it too hard to read text from the back of a class. Now I stick to white.

Again, this list is far from exhaustive, but is typical of my own learning, by trial and error, during those exhausting few months at the start of this year.

Beginning CLIL

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for reading this blog. It came as an extremely pleasant surprise to me to find I have "followers" (quite what I expected, I don't know - probably that I'd be writing to myself, which would have been a bit of a waste as I already know the story, lol!)

Secondly, my new lesson on potential dividers and control circuits worked really well, woo hoo! I have a small class at present (just 3 students) and they all managed to progress from the potential divider to understanding and explaining circuits to control a heater and a light. M said he thought the circuits were much easier to understand than he was expecting - I'd shown the class a PCB with the circuit on at the beginning and told them they would be explaining to me how they worked. M is naturally cynical and asked why I couldn't just tell them instead. I said that I thought it would help him to better understand the circuit this way, explained (yet again!) the difference between passive and active learning after which he either agreed or was so tired of hearing it, that he stopped moaning and completed the work, so that was quite a result when he claimed it was easy. We even moved onto capacitors and timing circuits, which didn't faze them either.

Anway, enough of the now, for now. I will return to the point where Barbara lent me a book entitled "Uncovering CLIL" by Peeter Mehisto, David Marsh & Maria Jesus Frigols.

I started reading the book with an open mind, not necessarily expecting any great revelations, but prepared to accept advice and hoping for a few new ideas to try. Barbara had seemed enthusiastic about it and that was good enough to persuade me to invest time in the reading. I trust her judgement completely.

The first few pages didn't seem too promising. There was a lot of discussion of the background of CLIL, history, the rise of CLIL, blah, blah.......... but every so often I'd read something that would strike a chord or make me stop and think.

"...CLIL is a tool for the teaching and learning of content and language. The essence of CLIL is integration." Yes, but wasn't that what we were already doing, had been doing all along?

"...CLIL also calls on content teachers to teach some language." We do that as well, surely? But hang on, if I'm honest, how many times have I written a comment on a student's report about their "lack of English" and how it was hindering their learning of Physics? Whilst that may be true, was I using this phrase as a way of shifting some blame for a lack of progress onto the English department? Even a tiny bit? Should I be making more of an effort to help my students to learn the English necessary for an understanding of Physics? I do try to help them, of course and I do go out of my way to point out vocabulary peculiar to Physics, but could I do more?


"In particular, content teachers need to support the learning of those parts of language knowledge that students are missing and that may be preventing them mastering the content"
Hmm, yes, well that sort of confirms what I'd begun to think for myself. Maybe this book really did have a lot to offer me. Certainly, it made me feel uncomfortable. It's not an easy thing to admit you may have made mistakes and are continuing to make them. How much more would I learn that I may not like, about my teaching?

"Content from subjects is used in language-learning classes." That's better - see, it's not just my fault, the bloody English department aren't doing their jobs either! They're not teaching Physics to my class!

I started to enjoy reading the book - not for comments like those above, but because it made me really think about my teaching. That held the promise of improvement, something I genuinely desired. Not that I thought I was doing a bad job, my results have been good after all, but I felt I could improve - I still do - and I wanted to do the best I possibly could for my students. This was an opportunity worth grasping with both hands. I've always enjoyed reflecting on my lessons, trying to decide what I have done well, what I could do better. This book provided a brilliant way to reflect on issues I had not considered before.

After a bright beginning, though, the early chapters in the book became less interesting to me, lots of talk of how CLIL was set up in various schools, how it was used in other countries, that didn't seem to have much to do with Bellerbys. My progress slowed as I became more involved in producing lessons in order to keep up with my September class as they approached the end of their year and exams began to loom on the horizon. Time for reading was very limited as my IWB lesson preparation tended to end late at night. "Uncovering CLIL" became "open the book, read 2 sentences and fall asleep."

Eventually, I didn't even pick up the book before falling asleep. I would need another prompt before continuing with it.

Stumbling around

The lesson on potential dividers worked well today, with the students managing to work out for themselves the relationship between the resistance of the 2 resistors and potential difference across one of them. Tomorrow, I hope to move on to more complicated control circuits, where they will have to put their new knowledge to use. This will test my new IWB lesson to the full.

Returning to my journey though...........

I found advantages and disadvantages to my latest style of IWB lessons. Good points - lessons flowed more quickly as students didn't have to wait for me to handwrite on the board, I was able to move seamlessly from talking/discussing to showing You Tube clips and using software from "Absorb Physics". In addition, I was able to print out my lessons which, although not ideal (yet more paper being used!) at least helped move things along at a reasonable pace as I had one student who was incredibly slow at copying notes from the board.

Bad points - it made my teaching more difficult! I found that I wanted to say EXACTLY what I had written on the board, I had almost "pre-played" the lesson in my mind as I had typed the night before. It was difficult not to stand by the board and simply read aloud what was written on it. Granted, there were the other clips, animations and simulations from Absorb etc, but in some ways, my lessons had become predictable and boring. Eventually, my students stopped being pleased at the handouts for saving them written work and started complaining of the extra weight they were carrying around with them.

Was I just going around in circles? I felt frustrated by it all - I knew I was close to the answer, my attempts at using the IWBs had improved immeasurably and I was now producing material that looked good. Some of my ideas were working, my students were happy with the lessons and were gaining something from them but there was still a vital ingredient missing, something fundamental yet so elusive. I was trying to catch an invisible mist.

I might have continued in this way, if it were not for Barbara. I don't know why she chose to lend me a book on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), nor at the time did I appreciate the implications of reading this book. What I do know now is that it changed the way I approach every lesson, whether I use an IWB or not.

I cannot say that I had a "burning bush" moment of enlightenment. The book did not change me overnight and I do not agree with every word in it. It did make me reflect more, both before and after lessons. It helped to lead me towards my own answers and solutions to problems that I had not realised were problems. Above all, it helped me to stop lecturing and to start teaching.

Falling down and standing up again.

I've been working on something this evening, that I'm quite excited about. I want to try to make a difficult part of the "electricity" topic a little easier and more accessible for students, so I've been making an IWB lesson based around practicals starting with simple potential divider circuits, then leading towards much more complicated control circuits. I may try to modify what I have done today, at a later date, using the facility to link pages, that Barbara showed me a couple of weeks ago. However, I am getting way ahead of myself in the telling of my journey to this point. So returning to where I left off..........



After a while, I felt it was time to leave the comfort of the Interactive toolkit activities and to start preparing whole lessons on the IWB. At this point, I took a look at the material I had saved, to see if I could re-use any and to decide on a plan to make my lessons consistent with each other.

I also felt very guilty about one of our training days. I'd been asked to take the lead in a Science department session where we should plan an IWB lesson together, but I'd had to admit that I wasn't using the IWBs at that point and as no-one else in the department was doing so either, we spent the time on Study Smart instead. This worked well for us, but I couldn't help feeling that I had let Barbara and Ross down by not using the IWBs as intended in lessons, after they had worked so hard to bring them in and into the Physics lab in particular. I needed to buck my ideas up.

When I took a look at my existing material, I realised just how far I had to go to make anything at all worthwhile. Little wonder I'd had that complaint from a student much earlier. My material looked dreadful, terribly amateurish. I had different sizes of fonts, too many different colours of fonts and far too many "lessons" hadn't been changed from my handwriting into legible text.

It was a tortuous, intensely humbling but very necessary exercise to review all of my previous work. I had to learn where I had gone so badly wrong, admit my mistakes and above all, I had to think about what I really wanted to achieve before I could start to move forward. It sounds pretty obvious to me now, but making a good IWB lesson isn't about making something that looks pretty or "flash". I also had to think about what I needed to do to help my students to gain something useful from my efforts.

I could type the usual notes so that my awful handwriting wouldn't be an embarrassment any more (the IWB REALLY does make it obvious that I can't write in a straight line!) I already had some software I could use in lessons ("Absorb Physics" from a company called Crocodile clips), I had material in my Study Smart course that I could use and I knew how to show clips from You Tube and the like. This would help, but I needed a plan to help me to focus on the reasons behind each lesson.

I started to develop some really simple ideas that have worked well for me. I used the "theme" facility in the Smartboard software to make a coloured title banner across the top of every page. Each topic has a different colour for this banner. I adopted the font "comic sans" throughout as it is not too formal but is easy to read. Basically, it suits me and my style of teaching. Size 36 for the title, 28 for just about everything else. It is easy to set up a "theme" and save it so that it saves untold amounts of time that would otherwise be spent changing fonts and sizes of font for every new page.

I started saving my new lessons in a different folder for each topic too, otherwise the number of new lessons would make finding the right one quickly almost impossible.

To create a new lesson, I had to think about what I would normally do for each lesson, what I would say, what I would ask the students to do. I used a lot of the book I had written a few years ago, at this point. It helped me to create lessons quickly by copying and pasting text and pictures. I felt confident and happy that I was using new found skills alongside material that I knew worked. At last I was producing material that I could be proud of. It was probably just as well I didn't know how much further I still had to travel or the revelations that awaited me very soon, or I probably would have given up and used my time to watch more football or re-runs of Star Trek on TV instead!

Baby steps

I guess I need to go back to the beginning (or close, anyway) to explain what I'm doing now and why. By the way, I wasn't sure what to use as a title for this - I wanted to write "the prologue" but it sounded too Frankie Howerd and "Captains log, stardate 04 07 2010" sounded too pretentious! Anyway........

I'd had a few ups and downs using the IWBs at Manor, but had pretty much stopped using them for a while at the point where my current journey begins. I suppose I was still sulking after a few bad comments from a student about feeling as though she was being treated like a 5 year old, having to come out to the board to move text around. Feeling a little miffed myself, after spending some time preparing that lesson, I went back to the old white boards for a while, but did feel that I was missing an opportunity by not using the IWBs. I was also being silly to let one bad experience put me off - after all, I'd been dead keen when the IWBs were first introduced. I'd been hiding behind the excuse "it takes too long to prepare material" for far too long.

So, a few months ago, I decided to have another go. Only this time, I would prepare some material well in advance, rather than just in time. I picked a topic I was not teaching at the time, "waves", and looked at the lesson activity toolkit for inspiration. I found I could prepare activities really quickly, in a few minutes, so I set myself a goal of preparing one activity every evening. This meant I could build a bank of activities in a short space of time as well as trying out a different type of activity every time.

By the time I was teaching "waves", I'd prepared crosswords, used "tiles", "anagrams", "wordbiz", "keyword match", "word guess", "category sort" among others. I used some in class, though not all - there are only so many times you REALLY can recap the same information in a short space of time! It had been fun preparing though and gave me confidence to move on as the students seemed to like the activities - provided that they could stay put and call out the answers. I didn't repeat my earlier mistake of asking students to come out to the board unless they really wanted to. I found that students like to be entertained, they enjoyed the competitive nature of some activities, particularly is they were used to break up a lesson. I tended to use one short activity at the start of a lesson as a recap of the previous lesson, one at the end as a recap of vocabulary used in this lesson and sometimes one or two in the middle, to test understanding before moving on.

I was also using the IWB to handwrite notes and sometimes had my scribble "recognised as text". This caused some amusement in class as the IWB tends to change the size of font randomly, so that one word might appear much smaller or larger than the rest. It became a standing joke in class, which at least kept everyone awake!

I saved most of those "lessons", intending to go back at a later date to tidy them up, make them look a little more professional, but felt that however lame they might be now, at least it was a start. I'd no idea how shocked I would be later, when I reviewed those awful scribbles and how that would provide the motivation to radically change the way I prepared my lessons.

Welcome to my blog!

This is my first ever blog! I'm going to share my ideas as I try out new ideas for teaching my IGCSE Physics class. I use an interactive white board (IWB) and Moodle as part of the teaching. I've recently read a book about CLIL (content and language integrated learning) which has inspired me to try new ideas.