One size does not fit all!

Day 3 Session 1 (Friday, 10 October 2014, 8.30 - 10 am)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LESSON: ENGINEERING

Trainer: Carole Allsop

In today’s lesson, the trainer; Carole, demonstrated how to implement differentiation in our lesson. The topic chosen was an engineering topic; Hand Biometrics Technology. In this lesson, I could see how differentiation was carried out: the differentiated learning outcomes and differentiated tasks.

First and foremost, the lesson’s learning outcomes were differentiated for more able learners. Yes, this is something that goes missing in most lessons, I suppose. Teachers would normally set ONE general aim for their lessons without much consideration on ‘differentiation’ – oops, sorry! I must not say that in general.

Okay, I admit that I have never thought of ‘differentiation’ – not until it was brought up my home tutor, Ms. Katie, during our first session last week. Now I learnt that there should be a number of aims to be set for the students as there a number of differences between the students: language proficiency, ability to understand and work on the given content, learning styles and preferences, and their pace at which they learn.

It is understood that ALL students will be able to achieve ONE general aim set for the lesson, however, other students might achieve higher than the general aim due to their proficiency and ability.

Thus, differentiation in task would also be one of the aspects which should be taken into consideration. In this lesson, Carole provided CHOICES to the trainees. The trainees were asked to determine their own personal hand geometry code. In doing so, trainees were given two sets of instructions to choose from: a complex and a simpler instruction.

This was an example of differentiation that one could carry out. In this instance, students can choose between the two sets of instructions in order to determine their hand geometry code. As for classroom practice, a teacher may assign different sets of instructions to different students i.e. the complex instructions set assigned to more able students while the simpler instructions set would be given to the less able students. Hmm, during the lesson, most of the trainees chose the simpler task – easy, quick and simple, I suppose!

In short, I learnt that differentiation is the key in a CLIL lesson or should I say any lessons. Learners are different, so, do them justice by having a variety of activities, materials, learning support that can facilitate them towards achieving the differentiated goals set for them. Remember, ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! 

Written by,

Masniza Mansor

Port Dickson Polytechnic

Negeri Sembilan

p/s: Oh, here is a link to a sample lesson on ‘teachingenglish’ website that I found as I conducted my web search. I hope that it would be useful to all readers when planning lessons.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/clil-citizenship-recycling

Hot about HOTS!

Day 8 Session 1 (Friday, 17 October 2014, 8.30 - 10 am)

Cognitive skills and HOTS

Why?

A main goal of educators today is to teach students the skills they need to be critical thinkers. Instead of simple memorising facts and ideas, students need to reach their fullest potential. Practising HOTS can give students the "tools" they need to understand, infer, connect, categorise, synthesis, evaluate and apply information they know to find solutions to new and existing problems. 

How?

As a teacher I do many things to foster HOTS in my classroom:

1. After reading a book, I can ask open-ended-questions to the students because answering questions that do not have one "right" answer can give the students confidence  to respond the creative ways.

When reading a book:

(a) What do you think might happen next?

(B) Does the main character/ main event remind you of anything from your life?

(C) Can you tell me what intrigue you the most in the story?

(d) Why did he/she act that way?

2. When making an important decision:

(a) How would you rank _____?

(b) How do you imagine ______ would look?

(c) What do you think a solution might be?

(d)Why did you choose _____ over ______?

3. When asking students to predict outcome:

(a) What would happen to ______ if _______?

(b) If you could do it differently, how would you change it?

(c) Suggest other possible ways to change it.

ZURAIDA DZULKAFLY

BACHOK VOCATIONAL COLLEGE

"Are my lessons that bad?"

Day 2 Session 3 (Thursday, 9 Oct. 2014, 2 – 3.30pm)

Classroom Language and Higher Order Thinking Skills by Andrew

Have you ever experienced the situation whereby your students did not give you the desired answer to your questions? Perhaps there were also situations when you did not receive any feedback at all accept a long awkward silence? Well, I will answer these two questions myself, yes and yes!

I have been wondering about this for so long and keep on asking myself “was the task too difficult?” and sometimes “are my lessons that bad?”. Finally, I got the answer, in Andrew’s ‘Classroom Language and Higher Order Thinking Skills’ class. At times we tend to ask the wrong questions. In order to get the desired responses, we really need to reconsider our questions.

From this class, I have rediscovered two types of questions: closed questions and open questions. Closed questions yield short answers such yes and no whereas open questions require learners to respond in more depth.  I am planning to ask more open questions to my students so that I can promote higher order thinking skills in my classroom. Instead of asking “do you understand?” or “do you have any questions?”, I would ask more questions like “what do you understand about…..?” or “could you explain the concept of…?”.

Allow me to briefly share with you some of the tips for effective questioning:

1.    Plan the questions to be asked in advanced

·         Prepare different types of questions for different stages in the lesson such as questions for set induction or questions to check understanding. We can always refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy in preparing the questions.

2.    Use more open questions in the classroom

·         Open questions will encourage more participation from the learners as open questions allow them to provide less-restricted responses.

3.    Avoid asking ‘guess what’s in my head’ questions

·         This type of questions might limit the learners’ responses just because they think we have the specific answer that we want from them thus limits their creativity.

4.    More ‘wait time’ please?

·         When given ample time to respond, learners would be more motivated to participate because they know that their opinion matters too!

5.    One question at a time

·         Allowing learners to focus to one question at a time would yield better responses. According to the Bloom’s Taxonomy, different (level) questions require different language style. If the questions are mixed up, learners might not be able to offer the desired response.

6.    Practice ‘no hands-up’ approach

·         This approach is useful in involving all learners in classroom as anyone might get ‘lucky’ and chosen to respond to classroom tasks. Learners would have to at least try to prepare a response.

7.    Don’t answer your own questions!

·         If learners know that a teacher will always give the right answer, they might just wait for the answer.

8.    Create an environment which learners feel safe and become  risk takers

·         Encourage learners to give answers that still need more work (by emphasizing that it is not wrong, since that is not the point here).

9.    Acknowledge ‘off beam’ answers by always finding something positive.

·         When learners come up with something which is not quite accurate, positively help the learners to improve the answer.

I really look forward to try these tips in my own classroom, which I am positive that most of it is applicable in our classroom, or at least in my own classroom. I am positive that with the application of these suggested tips, I will be able instill the idea “learning English language is not difficult, but interesting”.  

MOHD NAZRIE HASSIM

MERLIMAU POLYTECHNIC, MALACCA

Which baboon are you?

Day 8 Session 2 (Friday, 17 Oct. 2014, 10:30-12pm)

“Are you a dominant baboon or an ordinary baboon?”

Session: Consolidating Learning with Differentiation and Mixed Ability Groups

By: Bill Bowler

Are you a dominant baboon or an ordinary baboon? That was the sentence Bill said to us. I was captivated by the words and I cannot help but to laugh aloud with the rest of the class. As we sat there in the class listening to Bill’s explanation, my mind digested his words. The reason why he uttered the sentence was because of how differentiation was done in a normal classroom. Majority of us as teachers take for granted of the importance of differentiation. We simply group our students according to their sitting position or maybe just let them group themselves. This kind of grouping always happens every time during class time. I am no different from the rest of the bunch.

The issue about the dominant baboon symbolises the active student who always answer the teacher’s questions. The ordinary baboons, on the other hand, refer to the rest of the group who are passively listening to the discussion without any contribution.  

The question that may arise from this issue is “how this will affect the students?” Well, sadly to be told, I silently agreed that the ordinary baboons will stay ordinary and the dominant baboon will always be dominant unless we do something about this.

Throughout the session, Bill made me realised that we should not overlook or take this matter lightly. This is because it does not promote any learning, at least not to rest of the ordinary baboons. He emphasised that differentiation should be done in a mixed ability class so that each student will learn from each other and take a different role every time during an activity is carried out. The students will benefit much more from this kind of learning as the weaker students will be motivated by the stronger students.

Here I can conclude that, there is so much more to be done for the students. It depends on us to facilitate the learning and let the students discover the lesson themselves. After all we do not want them to be just another dominant and ordinary baboons right?

BABOON FACT:

Baboons use around 30 vocalisations which range from grunts to barks to screams. Non-vocal gestures would be lip smacking, shoulder shrugging & more.

SUZANNIE STEPHEN GALAUT

KOTA KINABALU POLYTECHNIC

Day 6 Session 3 (Wednesday, 15 Oct. 2014, 11:00-12:30pm)

SUPPORT STRATEGIES AND MEETINGS THE NEEDS OF ALL LEARNERS BY PETER

Being assessed on subject content in a non- native language can be a challenge for our learners. In the midst of understanding the content itself, they have to acquire the language in order to grab everything. Here, teacher plays an important role to ensure that the learners are well aware of the learning outcomes and criteria for their assessment. In order to do so, the teacher should know how to provide ample support before and during assessment plus the appropriate or inappropriate moment to do so.

In Peter’s class; Support strategies and meetings the needs of all learners, we were exposed to the ideas of support strategies. Support is essential for learners especially when they have to learn the subject content through non-native language. Therefore, what the teacher can do here is to try to modify the assessment and provide suitable support strategies. It is very crucial as they would be able to express their answer in writing or even orally. Teacher’s role here is to accommodate learners to suit their need plus to move towards learner autonomy. According to Peter, the best and basic way to accommodate the learners is through task differentiation itself.

There are so many examples of activities applicable to support the learners. We could do sentence paraphrasing, providing glossary, adding visual and giving simpler instruction for the weaker learners. Something new that I learned from this topic is the teacher is allowed to use L1 to explain the instruction. For five years of my study in TESL, this is quite surprising. We had been conditioned to try as much as we can to not to use the L1 in teaching language. Entering the real deal in teaching, I realize that sometimes I have to use the L1 to deliver the instruction and I thought I had done it wrongly. Apparently, it is applicable and it is not wrong at all! Peter added, it can be done in order to save time explaining the instruction and gets into the real business ASAP but bear in mind, it needs to be under control and limited or bilingually.

One example of support strategy that I have always used in my class is giving feedback. It is very crucial for us to know the focus and the purpose of feedback. We need to guide the learners and provide space for them to improve. To know our focus and purpose of feedback is to give them a definite and specific feedbacks or comments so that they know what to improve, where to change or how to do it. Having a specific and definite feedback will enable them to be fully aware of what to do next. I realize that sometimes learners keep on doing the same mistakes over and over again. It seems like they never learn. We have been doing it the wrong way perhaps. Having low proficiency learners, I need to take this matter into serious consideration. Learners are unclear of their mistakes. We don’t explain it well enough and we don’t provide them with enough support to improve and change for better. We can’t simply blame them now for not making any progress.

So, I learnt a lot in this class. Talk about motivation specifically, our learners can easily give up and refuse to accept the knowledge we give them. Basically, they do not receive a proper support. Failing few times, making mistakes and keep repeating it can be a frustrating experience. Thus, teachers have to make sure that learners don’t simply get the test paper, look at their grade given by the teacher, put it in a file and throw it away...

PREPARED BY:

ZAM ZARINA MD ZAIN

SELANDAR COMMUNITY COLLEGE, MELAKA

Day 6 Session 1 (Wednesday, 15 October 2014. 9 - 10.30am)

FOCUS ON ASSESSMENT AND EFFECTIVE ERROR CORRECTION

As educators, we are using assessment to evaluate our learners and it has become a method for us to observe their performance. The education system is mostly exam-oriented and learners are expected to produce results with zero defects. However, in this lesson conducted by Bill, we were taught that it is okay for students to make mistakes because it is the mistakes that are going to tell us about future lesson that we could plan for them. It’s just a matter of how we correct them effectively.

In the first part of the lesson, we are exposed to the focus of assessment which tells us what aspects we are looking for when doing assessment. By this, we would know whether to assess in terms of the content, the language or both the content and the language.

For the first task, we were asked to classify some samples of assessment questions according to each focus. We used a die (singular for dice) to select the questions that we have to answer. By doing this task, we found that it is a bit tricky to classify if there are both content and language in a question.

Then we moved on to the Key Concept and the CLIL Classroom. There are three skills involved, namely Communicative Skills, Cognitive Skills and Practical Skills. In this part we learned about the importance to teach learners to select information (cognitive skills), how to demonstrate them (practical skills) and not just give them the information. For further readings and activities on developing cognitive skills, one can visit ‘TED Talks’ and Ken Robinson’s webpage over the internet.

For the second part of this topic, which is ‘Effective Error Correction’, we were first told to think of a skill we have learned as an adult. Then we had to recall with who did we learn those skills, did we make mistakes and how did we feel about making those mistakes. Well, we managed to go through all the obstacles in learning those skills and it is a sign that we are very motivated and not afraid to make mistakes.

This is why we have to bring out that positive side of us and encourage our learners to feel motivated and make them feel positive about English. Here we can make use of ‘Short Term Motivation’; grabbing their interests by using subject and real materials which related to their field of study or their interests.

After they did their practice, here comes the part where the right technique in correcting mistakes takes place. We can’t simply blame the students when they are wrong, but we have to make them take the mistakes in a positive way by using indicators which will not downgrade them, for example by using gestures to indicate the mistakes or we can get other learners to correct the mistakes.

As a conclusion, we as educators need to be clear what our focus of assessment is. In addition to assessing content and language, we can assess other skills as well, for example their cognitive skills. We also have to realize that having zero-defects result is not everything, but making mistakes is actually a part of learning. As said by Albert Einstein “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”.

Prepared by,

NURUL  JIHA BINTI JAYOSMAN

KOLEJ KOMUNITI PAYA BESAR

Day 5 Session 2 (Tuesday, 14 Oct. 2014, 11:00-12:30pm)

LANGUAGE DEMANDS OF SUBJECT CONTENT AND ACCOMPANYING TASKS

This lesson was conducted by Andrew where he put the focus of this class on genre-based approach. Language demands of CLIL subjects can be used in integrating genre-based approach because in most subjects, there are different genres (text types). Therefore, genre-based approach facilitates students to widen an awareness of the principles of various genres in different text types.

At the beginning of the class, he explained about genre which means a speech event/ a written text of a particular type such as presentation, lecture, letter and report. Then, he highlighted that each genre has:

·         A communicative purpose

·         A typical method of communication

·         A typical type of audience or target reader

·         Particular conventions such as structure, style, content and language features.

Then, he moved on to the first activity where the participants were instructed to identify features of text at ‘text’ level and at sentence or word level. The text given was about linear dimensions of Airbus 380. The participants were suggested to discuss among their friends in order to complete the task.

Next, the activity conducted involved a cross-check activity where participants needed to complete the blanks in the tables of the purposes of genres. Participants were divided into pairs with A had the answer while B had the blank purposes. Thus, the participants who were B must ask their pairs who had the answers (participants who were A). It encouraged communication among participants in completing the task given.

After that, Andrew introduced the Academic Word List (AWL) which is an important source of vocabulary. It is very useful to help participants in preparing lessons for students.  Other than that, the last exercise given was an individual task where participants had to complete some blanks in a process of writing a report. This lesson was very valuable to the participants because it helped us in gaining knowledge on genre-based approach and features of different genres. Moreover, participants were also attained information on the AWL, the process of producing different genre-types and self-assessment of genre-based work. 

-          Rosilawati Muhamad Ramli (Kota Bharu Polytechnic)

-          Normazliza Zahid (Kangar Vocational College)