My own pedagogical to-do list this year…

Inspired by the amazing Tom Sherrington’s post here on his own pedagogical to-do list I thought I’d write about my own areas that I wanted to work on this academic year…so here goes,

1) Testing as a means of improving learning. I want to include more ways of incorporating these ten benefits of testing and how they can be applied to languages.  

2) Using more live modelling. In Fun Learning Activities, with FLA 28 ‘Seeing Double’ I have recorded myself doing ‘live modelling’ and played this to the class and I now want to do more live modelling as referred to in the excellent ‘Making Every Lesson Count: Six principles to support great teaching and learning’ and talk through what I’m doing as I’m doing it; starting with paragraph-building will be the first step.

3) Finding ways to use metacognition on listening past papers; the blog that I’ve read a good dozen times I reckon was John Tomsett’s blog on metacognition. I’ve been doing some of this on a past reading paper (the AQA 2015 higher reading paper if anyone’s interested, am happy to share this…) but what I’d love to do is to focus on the sounds, breaks in utterance and model my own thinking of what is being said on the paper while trying to predict what mistakes the students will make and why).

4) Trialling some ‘Micro-listening enhancers’ as referred to by Dr Gianfranco Conti in his wonderful blog. The listening paper has often been a paper I’ve always felt was a little less under my control as I wanted it to be in terms of preparing students more effectively on the phonological level of the target language so I’m going to be starting more of a phonological focus sooner rather than later in the students’ learning.   

Four things will do for now I think, any more than this and you just end up not really doing any of them as effectively as you want…

Progress in MFL-UKEd Chat Mag Article...

My article from July's edition of UKEdChat Magazine...

When I was an NQT I remember getting into a flap about having to cover the course. I must make sure that I have got through the textbook! I must make sure that I have covered all of the language on the scheme of work (which was the textbook), including that language on transport! What happens if ‘gare routière’ comes up on the reading paper? I must teach them this content. It was a familiar pathway; make sure I cover the curriculum. At that time I wasn’t aware of the difference between learning and performance (there’s an excellent David Didau blog on this, with reference to Soderstrom and Bjork); just because students showed me at the end of the lesson that they could recall vocabulary knowledge or apply knowledge of a grammatical rule I had imparted during the lesson didn’t necessarily mean that I had done my job. ‘Great performance in today’s lesson guys!’ I used to shout as the students were leaving, not really understanding the true meaning of performance and just applying my own brand of teacher cum pseudo football manager encouragement-speak by using this language. In other words, just because the students could recall and apply language I had taught in that lesson there and then didn’t necessarily mean that they would be able to retain this knowledge and then apply it later on in the course. I was as far away from Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve and the fluency illusion as referred to by Carey as those students who had been taught ‘gare routière’ in Year 10 and were expected to recall the meaning of it in their Year 11 GCSE reading paper. 

Nowadays, though, we talk about spaced practice, testing students’ retrieval as a means of learning, nothing having been learned if there has been no change in long-term memory, interleaving different topics and vocabulary instead of teaching using massed or blocked practice strategies.

All of these strategies involve practice and testing, so that students can retain language in their long-term memories and apply it. It is how we get the students to practise and how we test the students so that they can do this over the longer term that is key. Hattie refers to being ‘motivated by knowledge gaps, but put off by knowledge chasms’.

With low A level and GCSE take-up in mind, the MFL Twitterati are after you!

The wonderful MFL Twitterati, being the army of like-minded practitioners that they are, have shared some excellent apps about how to get students to both practise and test their retrieval of the language. Apps like Memrise, Quizlet, Duolingo, Zondle etc. work well as a means of testing the students with the view to making longer-lasting and more durable learning. I am enjoying incorporating these more and more into my own practice. I’ve also been using VFLAs; Vocab Fun Learning Activities which involve immersing students in as much vocabulary and short phrases as possible, practising all the language in ways that engage the students before then covering up their meanings and testing students’ recall. VFLAs like Penalty Shoot-Out, Verbal-Volley and Bob-Up are designed to get students to practise in a competitive environment before testing students’ retrieval all with the aim of moving the focus away from students’ performance to their learning over time.

Spaced practice and spaced retrieval of key long-term memory essential language will give students the confidence to avoid a case of the ‘gare routières’ which befell and befuddled me in my NQT year. Have a look at the new draft GCSE specifications, which language do we want students to recall with automaticity by the time they sit the exams in the summer? Interleave the practice and testing of this language no matter what the topic is.

Motivating for Memory... (Part 2)

The potentially self-efficacy diminishing and consequently demotivating scenarios in the MFL classroom and potential strategies to ensure that students are being motivated by knowledge gaps and not demotivated by knowledge chasms…

Potentially Demotivating Scenarios In The MFL Classroom	Potential Motivating Strategy
Students not knowing where to begin on a written piece.	Use the ‘Break It Down’ technique7 as described in Teach Like a Champion (Lemov, 2010:88-92) to ‘Provide the missing (or first) step.’8 (Lemov, 2010:91). Depending on the written task, ask something like, “Well, what can we always start with to build a paragraph, the infinitive or a time phrase first?” Give students the option of one right, one wrong as a choice. Then practise the procedures to build a paragraph and get the student to repeat the procedures back to you. Ensure that the student has enough supporting material to help them build language .
Students finding a reading text too hard.	Make the content more accessible to the students to build their confidence and reduce cognitive load. A range of strategies could include; getting the students to write down a set number of words that they do know the meaning of before completing the task (with the teacher emphasising the words that the students do know) and looking the meaning of these up in pairs beforehand, getting the students to complete the task in pairs or as a FLA, practising VFLAs (my own term from Fun Learning Activities for MFL!) with some of the more demanding items of vocabulary to feature in the text beforehand and then practising retrieval until students have more knowledge.
Students finding a listening exercise too hard.	Again, make the content more accessible to the students to build their confidence. A range of strategies could include; playing the sound file more than twice, pausing more often, writing some of the key vocabulary and English on the board as the listening exercise runs so students see what they hear, practising VFLAs with some of the more demanding items of vocabulary to feature in the exercise beforehand and then testing students’ retrieval, using a range of ‘micro-listening strategies’9 (as referred to in Dr Gianfranco Conti’s blog) with the content on the listening task.
Students getting a word meaning wrong, a verb ending wrong, pronouncing a word incorrectly etc. in front of the class.	Use a similar technique to those of the ‘Rollback’ and ‘Eliminate false choices’ techniques10 (Lemov, 2010:91) as described in the ‘Break It Down’ strategy in Teach Like a Champion to repeat back the student’s language errors to them. Lemov says, ‘…hearing your own error in another’s words is often revealing.’11 (idem) So if a student in French who was learning about infinitives for the first time found ‘boulanger’ in the dictionary and mistakenly thought that it was an infinitive, then eliminate some false choices. For example, saying, “What does ‘boulanger’ mean in English? If it were an infinitive, what would the English meaning always start with? Is there a ‘to’ at the start of the English meaning of ‘boulanger’ in the dictionary? If ‘boulanger’ means ‘baker’ then can I ‘to baker’? Can I go and say ‘I am going to baker’? I can say ‘I am going to bake’ but that’s a different word and it’s got a ‘to’ with it. Does ‘baker’ have a ‘to’ with it in the dictionary? So, therefore, can it be an ‘infinitive’?”
Students receive disappointing feedback on a test.	Avoid letting the student develop the mindset that failure is embarrassing or totally negative. Move the student’s focus on from ‘not being very good at languages’ to perhaps ‘not having been able to recall and apply the language in the correct way this one time’. Model your own past failures when learning languages. Model the skills that you also found difficult. Share in the fact that you also found this part of language-learning difficult when you were their age. Refer to the following line from Willingham, ‘When you fail-and who doesn’t?-let them see you take a positive, learning attitude.’12 (Willingham, 2009:185)

 
All of this motivating for memory comes back to providing a task with the right level of support which is centred on students plugging their language knowledge gaps and not having to struggle to fill their knowledge chasms. An appreciation and awareness of the students’ language knowledge chasm would seem to be an essential factor in motivating students to learn languages...   

Notes (continued from Part 1)

⁷ Lemov, D. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students On The Path To College, Jossey-Bass, 2010, pp.88-92.

⁸ Lemov, D. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students On The Path To College, Jossey-Bass, 2010, p.91.

⁹ https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-using-often-enough-in-your-lessons/

¹⁰ Lemov, D. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students On The Path To College, Jossey-Bass, 2010, pp.91.

¹¹ Lemov, D. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students On The Path To College, Jossey-Bass, 2010, pp.91

¹² Willingham, D.T. Why Don’t Students Like School?  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009, p.185.

Motivating for Memory…(Part 1)

Motivating for Memory…(Part 1)

“I don’t know, I can’t remember.”

“Ok, that’s fine. No problem. How do you say ''I don’t know, I can’t remember.” in Target Language?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

In 2012 Dr Florentina Taylor and Dr Emma Marsden of the University of York undertook a study on students’ perception of MFL lessons and GCSE uptake and carried out a research report called,‘Influencing the perceived relevance of Modern Foreign Languages in Year 9: An experimental intervention 9’. In the summary conclusions of their study they stated that,

‘…Uptake appeared to depend mainly on pupils' perceptions of their usual MFL lessons at school.’¹ (Marsden and Taylor, 2012)

In the Team MFL/MFLtwitterati, ALL-conquering and ALL-supporting environment we are in it is wonderfully reassuring to note the number of amazing initiatives to promote languages across the entire country. The numbers of events and staggering support is phenomenal; from Routes into Languages 2 to the World Languages project there are enough positives to shake a baguette at.  

I’m not dismissing all of the wonderful ways that promote languages in schools as a way to motivate students to opt. After all, a research report, entitled, Languages at key stage 4 2009: evaluation of the impact of the languages review recommendations: findings from the 2009 survey, also found the following, 

‘…factors thought to support uptake were extra-curricular activities (such as theatre visits, exchanges and trips), the availability of ICT resources, and promotional activities at KS3 (such as assemblies, language days and outside speakers).’² (Filmer-Sankey and Marshall, 2010:19)

However, this piece focuses on certain aspects of what happens in the classroom to motivate students.
I’m not going to claim that we should all wear a Barcelona kit while we’re teaching and pretend to be Lionel Messi in the classroom to get students into languages though. (See the article on the ‘Lionel Messi effect’ in The Telegraph³ in 2014).

Before getting to what happens in the classroom let’s look at the current curriculum ahead of the 2016 changes as a demotivating factor for students learning languages. Taking the 2012 Language Trends’ survey as a starting point,  

‘By far and away the strongest message emerging was the dislike of existing ‘controlled assessments’ for GCSE speaking and writing (68 respondents from the state sector and 15 from independent schools – the largest number of comments from this sector). Respondents believed they were time-consuming for teachers, demotivating for learners and not a genuine test of linguistic competence:’⁴ (Board OBE and Kinsley, 2013:60)

Findings from the following report; Language Trends 2013/14 The state of language learning in primary and secondary schools in England also painted a worrying picture for motivating students to continue learning a language under the current system as one respondent in the survey put it,   

‘As the demands for memory skill in GCSE is so high, the least able have simply given up.’⁵ (Board OBE and Tinsley, 2014)

Here we go again. The demands for memory skill. It must be some form of irony that the complaints about the current system are forcing their way into our own long-term memories.
Agood job Controlled Assessment is going then, isn’t it?

Well, yes it is…but it doesn’t mean an end to teaching as a means of ‘motivating for memory’.

In Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn Hattie refers to Willingham by discussing that a reason why students don’t like school is because school makes students think and that our minds are not geared towards thinking. Hattie refers to thinking needing a lot of effort and goes on to say that this is related to how much we can recall from our long-term memories.⁶ (Hattie, 2014:5-6)

If ‘We are motivated by knowledge gaps, but put off by knowledge chasms’ (idem) as stated by Hattie then, put simply, why some students don’t like languages can be related to students’ suffering from a lack of enough language in their long-term memories and subsequent cognitive overload that their self-efficacy is undermined.

With all this in mind and my obsession with all things Doug Lemov and practice-related I’ve put down a few potentially self-efficacy diminishing and consequently demotivating scenarios in the MFL classroom and potential strategies to ensure that students are being motivated by knowledge gaps and not demotivated by knowledge chasms. These will be in the next post!

 

Notes

¹ Taylor, F., & Marsden, E. (2012). Influencing the perceived relevance of Modern Foreign Languages in Year 9: An experimental intervention (Research report). York: Centre for Language Learning Research, University of York.                                                        

² http://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/KLFZ01/KLFZ01_home.cfm

³ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11048295/GCSE-results-Lionel-Messi-effect-drives-rise-in-Spanish.html

⁴ http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/lang%20trends%202012.pdf (accessed 9 July).

⁵ http://cdn.cfbt.com/~/media/cfbtcorporate/files/research/2014/r-language-trends-2014.pdf

⁶ Hattie, J. and Yates, C.R.G., Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Routledge, 2014, pp.5-6.