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.