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.
Friday 23 July 2010
Wednesday 14 July 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday 13 July 2010
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.
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.
Monday 12 July 2010
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!
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!
Thursday 8 July 2010
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:
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.
Wednesday 7 July 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday 6 July 2010
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.
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.
Monday 5 July 2010
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!
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!
Sunday 4 July 2010
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.
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.
Friday 2 July 2010
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.
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