Who dares to teach must never cease to learn

"But Miss, doesn't that make you a rubbish teacher, then?"

This was a genuine question from my year 9 dual linguists today. They were set the challenge of labelling a scene with as many items of vocabulary they could, using their newly acquired dictionary skills. These beginner Spanish students, were somewhat surprised shall we say, to hear that I said I always loved tasks like this, as my students usually ended up teaching me new vocabulary, words for things I hadn't ever needed before (wing mirror being a case in point). The pupil I quoted wasn't being intentionally rude; she really thought that as the teacher, I ought to know everything. Everything. Every single word in the Spanish dictionary. What followed was an interesting discussion about vocabulary and having an active working memory of words that are applicable to us as individuals, but it raises an interesting point, and one which I gave some thought to following this weekend's TLT event at Southampton University.

As teachers, we should be modelling the behaviour we expect of our students. For me, that's a positive approach to learning. I attended an excellent session on Saturday afternoon with Chris Moyse who talked us through the approach to lesson observations at Bridgwater College Academy. A gem of an idea I have taken from his talk is one that I am hoping to implement in my own practice. Teachers at his school share their short term target on a poster outside their classroom, so that the students can see what their teachers are working towards too. 

This approach to learning, this open attitude to continual professional development really resonated with me and I hope that as professionals, we would all have a commitment to our trade. After all, to continue to learn doesn't make you a bad teacher.

I've taught you everything you need to know... Now you know nothing

Some #TLT15 inspiration

I attended Teaching and Learning Takeover at Southampton University and as ever, came away feeling refreshed and ready to take on the remainder of the term.

Chris Waugh's morning session was first on my list and it really struck a chord. The theme was planning and he titled his session 'The Wonderful Now'. I took my notes out from the weekend to help me write this post but I wasn't surprised to see I hadn't made many - Chris is a captivating speaker and I was taken in immediately, so I'll rely purely on memory

The main thing that came through to me was that we need to be giving our pupils an authentic experience of education. As a languages specialist, this is my daily challenge - how can I bring Spain / Germany / wherever to the classroom and encourage my pupils to feel as passionately as I do about this? I believe we do a good job of this, I have long thrown out the textbooks and favour creating my own resources to inspire and motivate but I came away from the session knowing we could do more. At Chris' school, they don't assess for assessment's sake. They don't write a letter to get a level 4. They don't do anything unless it has real value. 

Value. Worth. Purpose. A point. That's what I need to bring to my classroom. And I'll seek to do it from here on in. After all, ask someone what they remember from GCSE French and they'll probably tell you they like football and going to the cinema...

7 Monkeys - An old #ililc idea revisited

A couple of years ago at the annual ICT & Languages Conference at the University of Southampton, (affectionately called #ililc among the #mfltwitterati) I was introdcued to an idea called 7 monkeys.  Being that the session was a couple of years ago now, and my memory not being the greatest, I had a little google and luckily found a very good explanation of the activity here. 

The 7 monkeys themselves are not in fact primates causing havoc in your classroom but rather 7 stages of an activity. This can work well in language lessons, or in fact any lesson, to deliver a completely new concept, grammar topic or vocabulary. It works best when sharing something completely new, as each stage demands students to become more and more familiar with the content on offer and in going through the stages, decipher for themselves the meaning or key point that is being demonstrated. I have uploaded the slides I have created which I have used to share this idea with staff during our Teaching & Learning Tuesday slot. 

7 monkeys: An Explanation by Sadie McLachlan from Sadie McLachlan

Monkey 1 asks students to read a description. This could be an explanation of a key term, as in the slides above, or for language teachers an extract demonstrating some new vocabulary or a new grammar point. Once students have read and digested, Monkey 2 asks that students highlight the key words, enabling them to pick out the new vocabulary or key points. Monkey 3 allows students to start to engage on a deeper level, by drawing a representation of what they have understood. You can see my beautiful doodle of Code-Switching in the example slides! Monkey 4 is the stage of the activity where students seek to explain their drawing, and hopefully through this dialogue with their partner, the two students can start to establish what they think is the key idea and pick apart any misconceptions. For Monkey 5 you would introduce an activity to enable students to practise the skill they have hopefully been developing, perhaps via a reading comprehension task or a card sort activity in MFL and then the final two stages consist of students having  go themselves. At Monkey 6 students will attempt to answer a question themselves using their newly acquired knowledge and Monkey 7 is the assessment of that answer, perhaps peer assessment if it suits your subject area. I'm sometimes unconvinced as to the merit of peer assessment in languages unless it is for a quick reading or listening comprehension task as sometimes students are lacking in the language skills required to pick out what is necessary to make an accurate judgement, (but we will save that for a whole other blog post!).

Thank you to Rach (@lancslassrach) for reminding me that it was in fact Tom Hockaday's session that we discovered this little gem!

Creating independent learners... Step 1! #ililc5

The gorgeous @lancslassrach delivered a thought provoking and intuitive session all about creating more independent learners in MFL. I have a million and one #ililc5 ideas that I will share, but as always after a conference, I like something I can do quickly and get going with straight away, so here is my poster! 

Rach's first slide asked if we had ever felt like a walking dictionary - unfortunately for me that was all too familiar. I had been thinking just last week that my class are constantly waiting for me to answer their questions, particularly KS4, so following Rach's example I intend to reinforce that pupils are welcome to, and in fact encouraged, to try and make sense of something they are trying to create themselves before they ask me for help or assistance. 

I shall keep you informed as to my progress... but there's always a good excuse to download a cool new font, right?

The Madness of the Translation Joke

In the department, we were trying to come up with ways to bring a taste of translation in to warm the kids up for the big MFL GCSE changes. We had all recently become a little bit hooked on Pinterest and after a little think (and many hours browsing) came up with a little competition...

The hallways of the MFL corridor have been decorated with colour printed and laminated images such as the ones in this post. A notice went out in the bulletin to all tutors and my head of department went to Costco and bought 200 lollipops. Luckily too, since the little translation competition has really caught on and we have been inundated with faces knocking the door at break and lunchtime, proudly sharing the joke or pun they have managed to translate from Spanish, French or German into English. We picked images of varying difficulty and just left them up on display, the pupils then have to come and find us if they manage to correctly translate one and explain the joke. Year 7 have been just as excited as my year 11 classes, who too have smugly declared their answer and delighted in taking a lolly in front of their peers!

If you didn't want to go crazy and decorate your whole corridor, perhaps you could just stick one up as a starter now and then? 

Hampshire MFL NQT Training Day Presentation, Nov 4th, 2014

See below for an updated version of my presentation on New Technologies for the Hampshire MFL NQTs, from November 4th, 2014. Feel free to download and share.

Using VOKI in lesson... without a computer!

This week I was observed in my new school for the first time. I wanted to use some new technology in the lesson, despite the lack of iPads available in the department, as it has always been the thing that people ask me most questions about with my teaching, particularly since I made the switch from a very Apple centred school to where I am now. The problem, however, was thinking of a way to incorporate the technology into the lesson without actually having devices for each of the pupils to use.

With my year 9 mixed ability German class (pre-option group as KS3 is years 7, 8 & 9 here), we have just begun the topic of School. Having revised school subjects and basic opinions in the previous lesson, this lesson was focussing on use of varied adjectives to justify opinions and to revisit comparison structures. At the beginning of the lesson, pupils matched some new adjectives and practised these before going over the formation of a comparison structure.

I decided I wanted to do a listening activity to enable the pupils to do some self assessment (and hopefully show to my observers that progress had been made in the lesson: tick!) so I quickly created a VOKI, incorporating the structures from the lesson that we wanted to practise, so comparisons and complex 'weil' clauses. You can see the VOKI avatar here:

We completed a simple listening comprehension worksheet where the pupils had to select the correct option from three given choices for 8 questions. Once we had been through this and marked it, it was time for the pupils to move on to producing a text of their own. I gave the pupils a transcript of the listening and we came up with a checklist for their own text - things they wanted to include to make theirs better than mine. Now it was time for the tech without the tech bit!

I gave pupils mini whiteboards and a 1 minute timer. They had to draw an avatar on their whiteboard before the time ran out. Once the time was up, I played the theme tune to countdown, whilst they played 'pass the parcel' with their mini whiteboards. As soon as the music had ended, whichever whiteboard they had ended up with became their avatar. Pupils then listened to one another's texts in pairs whilst holding their avatar up in front of their faces. This was just for fun but also within this mixed ability group I think it served a real purpose - we took the emphasis away from the awkwardness of speaking a foreign language in front of our peers and moved it towards enjoying the moment of being silly. Every pupil in the room spoke their text out loud and I'm convinced that we had longer responses from some pupils than perhaps I had had before. I really enjoyed the lesson and it seemed that the pupils were motivated and engaged too - fingers crossed my company enjoyed it as much as we did!

New Technologies for the MFL classroom - presentation from New Horizons Conference at University of Winchester, 12/09/2014

Below you will find my presentation from today's conference at the University of Winchester in which I talked about some of the technologies I use in my MFL classroom. It was a speedy summary of just a few tools I really enjoy using, do get in touch if you have any questions as I am happy to answer any questions.

QR Code Speaking Homework

I just wanted to share a quick post as a few people had asked on Twitter about the speaking homework I set my year 9s. We are building up to the BA Language Flag Award (information can be found here)and the majority of the test is graded on their spoken language. With a class of 28 I can't give them the individual attention they deserve on 5 hours a fortnight (well maybe I can, but I don't feel like it is ever enough when it comes to individual feedback on pronunciation, intonation and fluency, which the test is marked on) so I set them a little task. 

Part one of the test requires a general conversation element - we had a discussion in class as to what they thought might be useful to know in order to be able to cope with this part of the test and brainstormed some vocabulary. I didn't guide them too much - one because the guidelines state you can't but also I wanted them to produce something really personal. They created a draft and then for homework went away and recorded it using Vocaroo.com. I absolutely love this website as it is so user friendly and despite being basic, has some great functionality. The students recorded themselves reciting their draft on the site and when it came to save, hit the QR Code button and it produced a code that they printed and stuck in their books. I took these in and listened to each student individually, marking and giving pointers on their fluency, pronunciation and intonation and pointing out key phonic mistakes. 

Whilst I marked their drafts for glaringly obvious errors, I didn't correct every single one as I was keen to keep this a speaking activity. I didn't want to put them off producing something that wasn't near perfect as I think the main problem for their year group is the fear of speaking aloud in the target language. I made sure to acknowledge this and leave a positive comment referring to the audio clip too so that it wasn't just a series of things to do better. 

I have just taken the books back in, having asked students to reflect on if they liked the task or not and why and it made for really interesting reading - most could see the value in the task but many commented on how awkward it felt. I'm hoping to continue to amp up the speaking practise in lessons so eventually we lose that awkwardness and develop into confident speakers of Spanish.

'Crowdsourcing' for MFL - QR codes, translate, Google forms and Miley Cyrus

I realised last half term that in between trying to get my year 11s up to scratch for their final controlled assessments and 'flipping' the learning quite so enthusiastically with my Spanish classes that somewhere along the line I had lost the spark with my year 8 dual language class. I have started to get a little more creative with them of late, (one lesson was centred around a local ice cream parlour that had opened up which I must share at a later date) so Monday morning, first lesson back after half term it was time to invite Miley Cyrus into our classroom...

This is an exceptionally bright class who learn 2 languages in 5 hours a fortnight. I have them for 3 hours, cramming in as much as possible to stretch them yet still keep them enthused in the hope they might opt next year. Our current unit of work is Austausch (Exchange) which leads nicely up to our annual German exchange trip on 30th March of which a number of pupils in the class are attending. The pupils had already covered the basics of introducing yourself to your partner and their family so this lesson centred around making polite requests. The starter was a simple picture hook:

The QR code was a link to a one-question Google form. Pupils had to compose a question / request they might have at their exchange partner's house in English, ready for us to have a go at translating later once we had mastered the question forming skill. I then quickly copied all the responses and put the words into a Wordle so that pupils could see the language they would need for the lesson. I had told them to make sure they include 'May I...?' as their sentence starter, so this was our most frequent and therefore largest word in the Wordle. We elicited as a class that we needed to figure out how to ask the question so I presented the key questions from the scheme of work on the board with some cleverly placed colour coding. Pupils had to discuss briefly what they thought each question meant in English and see if they could see any patterns:

We then revealed the rule hiding under the stars referring to what an infinitive is and reminding ourselves that when we have two verbs in a statement the second one is kicked to the end. It was then time to refer back to the Wordle to translate some of the questions. Pupils had to pick 5 English questions, with 3 being silly and 2 being sensible. We had a wide variety of creative questions being suggested and in the same way, using another QR code, pupils typed in their German translations and I watched their responses come in on the Google form. This was great as a quick feedback tool as I could say to pupils when they had missed a spelling or if their word order was wrong and they could resend their question. Our plenary consisted of using a random name picker to select students to translate back to English some of the questions that they had generated. "Darf ich deine Abrissbirne reiten?" was a common question - asking Miley if they may ride her wrecking ball as she famously did in the video for the song of the same name! I love that the Germans call it a 'wrecking pear' as opposed to a 'wrecking ball' (or at least that's what we found in the dictionary!).

I have been thinking a lot about the SAMR model here when planning lessons - and upon explaining the lesson plan to a colleague who wanted to do something similar but who was feeling less confident with the technology, it dawned on me that this perhaps wasn't use of new technology for redefinition of a task. I could just as easily have used post-it notes to gather a range of responses quickly therefore I feel the starter and development of the lesson is probably in the augmentation stage - using new technology to change the way in which we do things in the classroom we have already been doing. However using Wordle to visually show key vocab by frequency is completely new for the classroom and I couldn't have done this without the internet or my laptop - besides copying out all the words countless times. My aim was to do something fun and silly but also creative and that would allow the pupils to develop their question forming skill and I feel using the technology in this way was an efficient way of doing this not to mention motivating as they saw their answers pop up on screen in 'real' time.

#ililc4 Musings - Samantha Broom's SOLO Taxonomy in MFL

SOLO has been somewhat of a hot topic in education in recent years (during my RQT training 2 years ago we were asked to look at it and it came up again during a school inset day a few months back). The problem I always had with SOLO was that I found it was just a case of creating labels for something that most of our lessons do, or at least I felt that way about MFL. The nature of teaching our subject means we have to start each topic, each scheme of work, right back down at word level, build it up to forming sentences and then eventually text level to show some progression. That is quite frustrating for a KS4 class and demands a lot of a teacher in terms of creative ways to introduce vocabulary. I guess that is another reason why we have been experimenting so much with flipped learning lately.

What I really appreciated about Samantha Broom's (@spanishsam) talk at the #ilic4 conference last weekend is that she said right from the outset that she doesn't bother too much with the labels. I am absolutely useless at names for things (don't ask me to explain the difference between the imperfect and preterite, you will have to remind me which one is which first) and I hate the idea of creating a contrived classroom situation in which you would have to break the flow of a target language led lesson to explain to pupils that we are now moving from 'unistructural' to 'multistructural'. The pupils probably don't care too much about the name of what they are doing as long as they are learning (and then again there are some who don't partiulary mind if they aren't doing much of that either!). After explaining what the labels meant, Sam gave us a chance in pairs to describe a grammar point using the stages of SOLO.  Eleanor and I come up with this for regular present tense verb endings:

Prestructural: No idea what a verb even is or why I need one

Unistructural: I know a couple of infintives

Multistructural: I know there are some endings I need to use but I haven't tried that yet

Relational: I can apply my newly learnt pattern of endings to verbs that you give me

Extended Abstract: I can apply my endings to a number of regular verbs and use these correctly

We discussed that for us in MFL, vocab learning puts us frequently among the first three stages of SOLO Taxonomy - 1. students have to cover a set topic; 2.they don't know the vocab they need for that topic so we teach them it; 3. they begin to commit this vocab to their memory and finally; 4. we remove the scaffolding and let the pupils use the new words creatively by themselves. Personally, I feel that SOLO is much more valuable to the teacher toolkit in terms of planning for progression as opposed to engaging pupils with the terminology, in MFL at least. I will keep the stages in mind when planning lessons but I don't feel it is appropriate to share this with the students at the expense of target language in the classroom, especially if colleagues around school are using the techniques anyway. That is not to say that I believe we shouldn't share the aims and objectives of a lesson and / or series of lessons with a class, I do this on a daily basis, just that I won't be pointing out the name of the thinking processes behind it.

I really like this graphic for a more detailed explanation - interestingly, we are shown the 'verbs' for learning instead of nouns; a theme resonating the whole weekend at #ililc4. Apologies, no image credit - just from a Google search.

You can find Samantha's presentation here.

#ililc4 Musings - Joe Dale, Putting the Pedagogy into the Technology Sat 8th Feb

I think it is great that as teachers, the element of accountability we have means we seek to justify everything we do, every experiment we take part in with hard evidence, numbers or research to prove its worth. Joe Dale's session at this year's ILILC conference at the University of Southampton was all about the proof in the technology pudding, as he sought to whizz us through some of the theory behind the work a lot of us MFL teachers have been doing the last few years in introducing new technology to our classrooms. I'll summarise a few bits here.

Interestingly, since we had been discussing this at our lead practitioner's meeting this week, the work of Dr Carol Dweck came up. For those unfamiliar with her work, Dweck argues that there are two types of mindset; fixed and growth. A person of fixed mindset believes that our qualities are set; Growth mindset believes that we can ‘cultivate’ and change our qualities through effort. Does this explain student attitudes to learning? Students ‘believe’ their ability/intelligence, and therefore work only to fulfil the potential they think they have? And again, does that resonate with some teachers' views of technology in the classroom? There are those of us who are embracing the technological change and others who are resisting it, although of course I appreciate not all of those who aren't technology geeks like the rest of us are necessarily resisting it because of their mindset - some schools aren't as spoilt for choice with fancy gadgets like us. I really like this popular graphic by Nigel Holmes who has summarised the key differences.

But then for those of us that are of a growth mindset, what difference does it make if the tech we are exploiting isn't having an impact on the learning? Joe shared an image with us that I had seen floating around on Twitter before (the image appears to be attributed to a chap named Bill Ferriter, though I can't be sure). What do we want kids to do with the technology?

There has been many a debate on Twitter of late as to the role of teachers in the classroom and the stance they take - traditional chalk and talk or Web 2.0 and all the shiny whizzy new things happening. Whilst I can't claim to belong in either camp, feeling as I do that I have had the benefit at Wildern of outstanding colleagues with experience to both extents, I do believe we shouldn't be using technology merely for the sake of it. The above graphic serves as a good reminder that the learning process is more important than the file that ends up in your inbox after a lesson with the iPads booked out. This links very nicely to a post about SOLO Taxonomy in MFL which Samantha Broom led us through later that morning...

#tmwave2 #tmuk National TeachMeet Day - Teach Meet Wave 2 6.2.2014

On Thursday 6th February 2014 we held our second Teach Meet at Wildern School, affectionately 'hashtagged' #tmwave2, to coincide with National Teach Meet Day. Please find below the presentation we used on the evening with the names of presenters and the slides they used. A summary will follow later, in the meantime do check the tweets from our evening here or indeed from across the country here. The organisers of National Teach Meet day have been blogging here. Can't wait until the next one!

Teach meet wave 2 from Sadie McLachlan

#ililc4 Presentation: Flipping the Learning in MFL - The story so far...

Please see below my presentation from #ililc4 (ICT MFL conference at University of Southampton, 7-8 February 2014) all about our experiences with flipped learning so far at Wildern.

Flipping the learning in mfl #ililc4 from Sadie McLachlan

Thank you to those of you that joined me for either session, I hope you took something useful away from it. Do get in touch if you are flipping or if you have any questions.

The first ever TeachMeetWave!

Thursday evening saw the very first TM or TeachMeet at Wildern School in Hedge End. Kate Broadribb and I organised it, nicknamed after the lecture theatre on site, and were excited but a little unsure what to expect. We were blown away by the number of people that took time out of their Thursday evening (and for Wildern teachers, that was after a staff meeting too) to get some free CPD and have a chat with colleagues from other schools. We welcomed 20+ colleagues from near and far and heard a combination of nano and micro presentations (3 and 7 minutes long, don't ask me to remember which is which). The event kicked off at 5pm in the LRC and luckily we finished right on time at 6:30, our handy stopwatch beeping to warn those that dared go over their time limit! We used the hashtag #tmwave to collect tweets about the evening and will hopefully be using it next time round too. 

Find below a summary of the presentations.

Ben Bishop - Green Pen (pre)Marking 

Students self assess their work in green pen, before submitting it. They then reflect in the usual way after teacher has marked.

Penny Langford - Talking like a book

Encouraging writers to talk aloud when forming sentences, rehearsing orally what they want to get down on paper.

Georgina Sculthorpe - Number Day

NSPCC Number Day hit Wildern this week - Georgina told us all about the numeracy starters, the number cake sale and the number hunt which raised over £200 for NSPCC.

Joseph Birch - Socrative (www.socrative.com)

Socrative is an online quiz website Joe uses with handheld devices in class to test pupils. You can also download results to see common errors.

Selina Plowman - Creative Design Ideas

Selina introduced us to how she encourages students to step away from 'drawing' in the design process and how she combines these techniques with snack learning.

Ali Gregory - What's the question in the room?

Ali's idea for a starter puts the students in control of guessing what the topic is using just a key word on the board. A student must hide outside first, whilst the class provide answers to any questions he asks when he comes in, but tailoring their answer so that the student can guess the keyword. Perhaps you have to see it in action for it to make sense from my explanation!

Javi Rodriguez - Flipping the MFL classroom

Javi and I introduced our new blog and explained our experiences so far with 'flipping' in MFL.

Helen Winter - PEEL (Point, Evidence, Explain, Link) paperchains

Pupils write a response in the usual PEE way, but using paperchains to write out their answers and linking them up for a visual way of developing answers.

Sophie Bullivant - Progress using Post-Its

Objectives are divided into colours - students work through colour by colour, encouraging them to aim for higher order responses. Post-Its become visual marker of progress made in their books.

Me - Kahoot (www.getkahoot.com)
See my blog post here for more info. 

Pam Rymill - Blogging (www.pamelarymill.co.uk)

Pam talked about how ICT are using blogging with teachers and students and introduced us to her site as a taster.

Lauren Vary - Doughnut Thinking Circle
Lauren's doughnut design was a clear way to show students how to link together and develop writing, by breaking it down in to manageable chunks. It was also good fun as Joe showed us by leaping up to help model an example!

Corinna Payne - Source Talk
Using sources in history but encouraging better engagement with the material through structured questioning. Source can be printed in middle of page with questions around it, pupils work their way through.

Iggy Rhodes - What is the Whole Education Network?
Iggy introduced us to what the Whole Education Network is about and how we as teachers can engage with some of its ongoing project work.

Thank you for attending and making it such an enjoyable and successful evening. And thank you for the kind comments!

Flipped Lesson 2 - reflections

Today saw my second flipped learning lesson in MFL take place and I'm learning something new from each experience. Unfortunately, due to the completely restrictive nature of the controlled assessments at GCSE, I am off timetable Tuesday for speaking exams with my year 10 class, so this lesson was perhaps a bit rushed through so that we could have another go. Rhiannon couldn't take part in this lesson as she now has a student teacher taking her year 8 class but she helped us with the planning process and we were all happy with how the lesson was to take place. Pupils were set the video homework Thursday for completion for Monday - perhaps cutting it a little fine but most pupils had completed the homework by the deadline (a clear sign of their motivation, perhaps?).

We cut down on the differentiated activities this time as we felt that there was just a little bit too much going on in the first lesson. For a number of reasons, I felt that today too that was the case. It was a period 4 lesson, just before lunch and the pupils were a bit rowdy. Coupled with the fact they were arriving in dribs and drabs from swimming, we didn't get off to the greatest start, but I should add that we completed all the activities we set out too. I say 'we', as the flipped model does feel more collaborative with the students. The teachers put the work in and the students do their bit by completing the homework tasks so that they are ready for the lesson; if one of us didn't fulfil our expected role here, the lesson just wouldn't work.

Anyway we hit a couple of stumbling blocks in that today was a theme day so there was not one single piece of ICT equipment up for grabs, which meant the few pupils who hadn't completed their homework had to share my laptop. This wasn't practical - the class were a little on the noisy side and 6 pupils around one laptop wasn't going to work so they went and sat in the foyer. Rather than facilitating, I ended up crowd controlling somewhat. However, as soon as they had all seen the clip they joined us again and set about completing the rest of the lesson's activities.

Sentence ordering cards

We asked pupils to sort some sentences into the correct order as they were cut into cards. For some of the tables this was easy, so we had three sentences for them to have a go at. I think what the students, and indeed I as well found difficult was the 'checking' this activity was right. They are so keen for instant feedback the first time they complete an activity. Rather than having a couple of goes and seeing which way fits best, they simultaneously wanted me to check each of their sentences. I explained to them at the end of the class that they are going to have to learn to trust their judgement and go back to what they learned - where did Miss have a time phrase in her video? Have I made sure that's where my time phrase is too? I think they might need some training to get the concept of independently going through the lesson's activities - but I do feel it's worth the effort to persevere.

When asked, the students could articulate the purpose of the activities they were completing in relation to the work completed at home. They could identify that this was a skill needed in order to get them higher NC levels (not that they are set to be around much longer, but that's another blog post) and had retained the grammar structure well. They openly said that they enjoyed the video because it was fun to see the writing happening 'live' as it were but in this instance the video was too long, as we suspected. Some preferred the acting from their first flipped lesson but then who wouldn't want to see their teachers making a fool of themselves?  The only other thing I think we need to reconsider for next time is how to structure the tasks for those who don't complete the homework preparation task. I don't want to make it a punishment as I still want to engage those pupils but as might be imagined, the pupils who consistently don't complete their homework are usually the ones you might not want seated together! Perhaps catching up on the video is not the best way to start the lesson with those pupils - something I need to reconsider for the future.

Flip Lesson 2 - planning!

So we have one lesson down in our Flipped Learning experiment! Not ones to slack off, we have set about planning lesson two for early next week. The main reflections from planning the first lesson were that although the flipped model enabled us to effectively differentiate for mixed abilities within our groups, we perhaps took this a step too far and created too many activities for pupils who were too similar in ability. We are fortunate that in this particular population, the pupils are set in to four classes. We had aimed for four mini groups within each class of our flipped lesson -  on reflection, this time we will go for three.

This is because, as expected, pupils require varying amounts of time in which to complete activities, ending up at slightly different points depending on how long it takes them to complete a reading, writing or speaking task. Having many activities to then get them through and have to micro manage only creates more confusion and in actual fact more work on the teacher's part. The concept of flipped learning is that the teacher should, through careful planning and structuring of the lesson, become a facilitator to the learning (or hopefully practising) taking place and therefore pinpoint their attention more accurately to those who need it. A lesson should effectively run itself, or at least that is how we envisage it in our planning stages. This is probably the part that as a languages teacher I will find more difficult to get to grips with and I suspect some of our students will feel this way too. They are so used to us being the expert, the source of knowledge in the class, that to have to rely on their own brains and the information available to them from a previous task will require a shift in attitude. I'm hoping this will build independence and, here's that Ofsted word again, resilience. 

So this time through we are planing three groups - Purples, Ambers and Greens. The context of the lesson is future tense with year 8 Spanish on the topic of La Comida.Using the Explain Everything app for the iPad (that took a while to get to grips with, I'll be honest - this 'flipping' is nothing if not a steep learning curve!), we created a video demonstrating using the future tense. We introduced time phrases to stretch our most able and their preparation task was to complete a Google doc matching the translation of time phrases Spanish to English and then manipulate the language independently to create some future tense sentences of their own. We will then use the lesson itself to build confidence in using the future tense through reading and speaking activities. 

As before, purples will be those who didn't complete the homework task and will start by watching the video on iPads. Ambers completed their homework but perhaps not grasping everything without some additional support and greens were those who from the Google task were most able to use what they have learned with some success. The tasks this time will be a card sort activity, putting a sentence into the correct order (we have prepared 3 to varying degrees of difficulty), a reading activity consisting comprehension questions and a verb finding task and finally some speaking practise. We are hoping to encourage those more able pupils to offer support to their peers in listening to pronunciation or peer assessing reading. Watch this space!

The first flipped lesson in MFL - Reflections

As part of our ongoing work with New Technologies for our School Improvement Group, members of our MFL dept at Wildern are experimenting with flipped learning. If you aren't entirely sure what Flipped Learning or FlippingYour Classroom is, see this video here or follow the #flippedclass #flippedlearning hashtags on Twitter. You may have seen me blog some time ago about wanting to start the flipped classroom this year - I had big plans as the Summer months left me with ambitions for the new school year, some of which I have been able to get my teeth into, others not so much!

Unfortunately I don't have a year 7 class on my timetable this year so it wasn't an option to embed the 'flipping' from the outset as I had first intended. Actually what I hadn't anticipated was quite how long it would take me to decide just who we would flip the learning with. I worked with Rhiannon and Javi in my department as we decided not to duplicate (or even triplicate, is that a word?) workload and we set about going back and forth deciding whether to flip with year 8, 9 or 10. Year 10 was ruled out due to the restrictive nature of Controlled Assessment - it just wasn't feasible to experiment at such an early stage in the term when pupils were due to start their first speaking task and it didn't seem fair to throw their learning up in to the air without knowing how it would pan out and risk losing their engagement as such a crucial time. Our year 9 scheme of work is quite unique with art modules, beauty modules and British Airways Language Flag Award assessment at the end of the year. Some of the units we are teaching are new to us this year, so again we thought it best to settle with the material first rather than start mixing up two things in one. That left us with year 8 - fortunately we all had a year 8 class studying Spanish and with different abilities so it would just be a case of differentiating our materials for our individual classes. 

We are currently studying a unit of work loosely based on Listos 1 Module of La Comida (food). We have so far covered basic food vocabulary as well as giving opinions so we decided to schedule in our flipped lesson in the context of buying fruit and vegetables at the greengrocers. We created our own video using a FlipCam, where we presented vocabulary and then demonstrated a mini role play taking place between customers and the greengrocer. This video can be seen here. It was quite simple to edit the video using iMovie on Mac so that we could add subtitles. We chose not to subtitle all of the speech - just the key vocab or key phrases we wanted to teach. The video was embedded in to a page on our school VLE (virtual learning environment) where students usually collect their homework from. In order to ensure pupils had actually watched the video and to help us set groups for the flipped lesson, we asked students to complete a Google doc. We also managed to embed this on the page too so that pupils could scroll down and complete the answers in the Google form immediately below the video they had watched and thus ensuring they didn't need to remember lots of links (and therefore forget them, meaning they weren't prepared for the lesson!).

When it came to the lesson itself, we had the results from the Google form to support group setting. We divided pupils into four groups - Purple if they hadn't completed the homework, then Red, Amber or Green depending on how well they appeared to have understood the material from the video. The activities they completed were as per this lesson plan:

As a three, we reflected on the lesson immediately after. Rhiannon had a dual language accelerated set and the initial feedback was that her class really were on board with the lesson and went with it, feeding back that they enjoyed the task and as a teacher Rhiannon commented that it ran very smoothly. She had no Red group - the pupils in her class coped well with the stimulus video material so perhaps next time we will think about whether to subtitle or not, or perhaps run two versions of the video. My class were the set below - mid to high ability pupils - and seemed to engage well with the task. There was no doubt that seeing their teachers on film was enjoyable and motivating as a homework task. I felt like my class required a little more micro-managing; pupils were on different tasks at different times as we had anticipated but to keep this working either needed more intervention from me or perhaps none at all. Javi felt the same from his class and with his lower ability set they didn't get on to the final written aspect of the task. We are hoping that as pupils become more familiar with the concept they will start to develop independence which will see them through the running of the lesson and ensure as teachers we can be used as facilitators to the learning taking place. I did notice there was far less off task behaviour or opportunities for it to take place - there was no point in playing the class clown or trying to distract other people as they were all doing something completely different anyway.

We are now setting about introducing a second flipped learning lesson next week, looking at using the future tense to say what you are going to eat and drink. We welcome any comments or questions!

Online tools for MFL learning - Kahoot

The second website I want to share can be found at www.getkahoot.com and was recommended to me by a couple of members of the #mfltwitterati. If you are familiar with Socrative, then Kahoot is a brighter, noisier and all round funkier version. The idea in its simplest form is that it allows teachers to design their own quizzes which students access and answer in real time via any device they connect to the internet, making plenaries and quizzes a lot more fun. The questions are projected on to the interactive whiteboard and pupils access the mobile site via kahoot.it on their devices, give themselves a nickname and tap the correct answer to the question displayed on the board.

I trialled Kshoot today with a year 8 class, testing the rather dry topic of verb endings. After an active lesson, using actions to practise the different conjugations of comer, beber and tomar in the present tense followed by a quick table game of Otra Vez por favor, it was time to consolidate pupils learning of the verbs from the lesson. I always hate teaching verbs -  a mass of different endings wind up blurred into one and pupils leave the lesson only to have jumbled them up ready for the next time you need them, thus ensuring you revisit them all over again. I can only hope that our rather kinaesthetic attempt at miming them out would help get them into their short term memory, but in order to check this was the case I set up a 'pop quiz' of 10 questions.

Kahoot is really user friendly. I think I prefer it to Socrative as it has the ability to personalise your quizzes with an image, and not just questions. Teachers can save their quizzes publicly so sharing among departments should be quick and easy. Adding questions to quizzes is as simple as clicking 'add question' and typing your next choice in until you have had enough and can save your quiz as it is. The colours are really eye catching and the fonts are fun. It screams 'look at me', whereas I felt Socrative perhaps could do with 'jazzing up' a little - that's not to say I won't continue to use both. 

Pupils really loved the colours too and having tried both, some preferred Kahoot whereas others liked the simplicity of Socrative. Kahoot plays 'lobby music' as users wait for the whole group to have answered the question - this really added to the atmosphere and tension and made the plenary really engaging. What was ultimately the most exciting was the competitive element. Kahoot gives users a score depending on how quickly they answer a question and a leaderboard is shown after each question, and again at the end of the quiz. This was so much easier for me as a teacher, as deciphering the Socrative answers was a bit hit and miss at time (perhaps that's just me however!). 

I would critique that as with any online site, it can be problematic if pupils lose connection and get kicked out, so have that in mind and maybe book some laptops or computers with a decent connection rather than using mobile phones. I would also add that pupils thought it would be easier to have the question displayed on their device as well as the projector - but perhaps they just wanted to gain extra points by answering that split second quicker! All in all, a really fun end to the lesson and after the positive feedback from year 8, I shall be trialling it with other classes this week. It will be hard to forget the buzz in the room today, and all for learning present tense verb endings!

Online tools for MFL learning - Memrise

This academic year i have found myself trying to exploit the new technologies we have in school to boost language learning. I thought today I would share a couple of websites I have been using with various classes with some success. I should add that neither are subscription based, nor are they MFL specific, but my classes seem to really enjoy using them.

The first of which is www.memrise.com. Memrise (not a typo!) is a website dedicated to committing items of vocabulary, facts or figures to our long term memory using the neat metaphor of watering a garden. Pupils choose a course of vocab to study (handily, some kind soul has already uploaded specification lists for the AQA exam board for German, French and Spanish) and plant seedlings, which through watering, develop into flowers, and hey presto - vocab learnt forever! 

Each vocab list is learnt two words at a time which are tested immediately. Correct answers gain points; the quicker the answer, the higher the point scored. Students are encouraged to revisit topics frequently, and reminders to 'water' plants they may have planted some weeks previously ensures that old content can not be forgotten; it is always revisited. The memrise strategy is based on the three concepts of science, fun and community for 'effortless learning' and as they put it:

"we've turned learning facts and language into a game where you grow a colourful garden of memory. You grow and water your memories in a garden of memory, you zoom up the leaderboards, and you learn alongside your mempals. It's like a guiltless video-game"

www.memrise.com 

It's this video game style and the competitive element of the leaderboards which has boosted my set two year 10 class into really learning their homework. I have set up an account and I 'follow' the pupils in my class - this gives me the option to see a leaderboard, organised into weekly, monthly and 'all time' top scores. We have created quite the competition in class and prizes have been awarded for particularly impressive results - be it reaching a certain score in a certain time frame, moving a certain number of places up the leaderboard or simply gaining 10,000 points in a 30 minute lesson. 

The brilliant part is that pupils can pick a topic which matches a context of work as the lists are sorted to the exam board. I can even set up my own lists of vocab for them to learn, which I will be exploiting more nearer exam time by creating lists of tricky exam words. I can only speak from my own first hand experience but with three classes using this now, all of different abilities, pupils find it a very quick, motivating way to complete homework. There are corresponding free apps for Android and Apple devices meaning pupils can learn on the go. Points tot up very quickly, pupils can see their progress in real time and if they choose to follow one another, seeing their position on their very own leaderboard spurs them on to study for 'just another 5 more minutes' in order to beat their friends. I really recommend giving it a go - or at least telling pupils about it so they can try it out for themselves as independent study.