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.

Fostering independence in writing in MFL

After marking 3 sets of books today (go me, how efficient, god bless PPA), I began to get increasingly frustrated with the number of homeworks I marked enhanced with a little sprinkling of Google translate. First of all, let me say that I am not against Google translate as a tool for learning - it's just simply that I haven't dared explored such capabilities with my classes yet, and let's be honest, in the majority of cases it isn't necessary to use it.

I've decided the three main reasons pupils use Google to translate for homeworks are probably 1) laziness; 2) a genuine inability to complete the task set of them and 3) a lack of confidence in their own ability. What I find most frustrating about this is that I feel as a department, and indeed as a school, we give pupils an awful lot of the tools required so that they can create meaningful pieces of work of their own accord. It seems that when it comes down to it, they either can't or won't. Our KS3 and KS4 pupils in languages are all provided with a vocabulary booklet with vocabulary and structures in for them to produce writing at home. There are grammar sections at the back. Pupils complete pre-tasks, in which they practise vocabulary, sentence structure and building paragraphs. A writing task for KS3 homework should be a culmination of classwork and previous homework - an opportunity for pupils to show themselves off, prove to me how much they have learned. Of course, that's on the basis we have a good working relationship and they want to impress, but I like to think that with most of my classes, we do have such a positive working environment. 

With the implementation of a flipped learning project, we will have a chance to experiment with homework and hopefully measure any impact on results and attitudes to out-of-class work.I really believe in our new KS3 homework set up of prep, draft & redraft so I am keen to make it work. I'll put this one down to a first attempt - iron out the creases and try again.

So in the meantime, it's back to the drawing board... a reinforcement of the idea that we don't NEED to use Google, our brains work and it's good to be in our challenge zone sometimes. A chance for me to reflect on the way I set out homework tasks - should I have differentiated more? Do I need to do more confidence building in class? How else can I encourage my learners to be (here's the Ofsted buzzword...) resilient? Or perhaps students are just overwhelmed; to expect writing to be done independently is just the straw that breaks the already-heavily-laden-with-homework-camel's back?

Flipping the MFL classroom

As a member of our school's New Technologies School Improvement Group, I have been thinking recently about what the next step would be. We have looked at a different project each year for the past 3 and I can say that due to the action research projects we undertake as part of membership of the SIG groups I am now confident in using Twitter, blogging and QR codes in my teaching. After talking to colleagues (both in the flesh and on Twitter - follow the hashtag #mfltwitterati if you don't already), it seems Flipped classroom needs to be brought to MFL!

If you are not familiar with the concept, it's basic principle is that the learning happens outside of the classroom - freeing up class time for discussion and enabling the teacher to become the facilitator as opposed to the fountain of all knowledge. See infographic here.

There are lots of people experimenting with this at the moment and some very helpful twitterers have pointed me in the direction of some great blogs on the topic - but I thought I would trial the concept with a class from September next year. This coincides perfectly with the launch of our new VLE platform for pupils, something as staff we have been working to populate over the past few months. The new VLE has a gret number of functions which will support the Flipped classroom demands, including posting videos and enabling students to 'drop' their homework on to the Assignments page in order to hand it in.

The plan:

Class: Year 7 Spanish or German, depending in timetable

Why: Train them up early! I won't be using an accelerated set as I want to measure the results in comparison to another class. I also don't want to risk losing valuable lesson time with the dual linguists if the activity doesn't work out and I need to revisit something (timetables at Wildern mean that languages classes have 5 lessons per fortnight - if the class is accelerated, they are therefore dual linguists, meaning they have 3 lessons of their first language and 2 of their second across the fortnight).

How: A series of tutorial videos concentrating on key skills - pupils will watch these for their homework task and then complete an activity based on what they have learned in the classroom. We could then make the most of AFL opportunities and complete some peer and self assessment. 

Why this way? I'm of the opinion that this style of learning lends itself well to skills rather than vocabulary retention as I feel it is too demanding to expect pupils to learn a number of words and then reproduce them in the classroom. With grammar, we can practise and hopefully iron out any misconceptions as a class - enabling me as the teacher to become a facilitator to their learning and pick up on their train of thought once they have had time to digest the information, rather than expecting them to remember what I may have just presented to them 5 minutes before. I'm open to trying presenting vocabulary and more content to Key Stage 4, but would like to experiment with KS3 first and reflect on the progress there. 

I'm interested to hear anyone else's experience with flipped classroom particularly any top tips. Either way, watch this space come September for some reflections along the way.

Building on literacy in MFL

I have had two low ability year 8 groups this year in Spanish which has encouraged me to be a little more inventive in the support I offer these learners in order for them to reach their target grades by the end of the year. Having had high ability sets the year before, it was a question of more than just adapting my SMART board Notebook slides as it become apparent, assessment after assessment, that they weren't making the progress I had expected.

I chose to have a bit of a push on literacy skills and here are a few activities I tried out. Certainly none of these are anything new or particularly exciting, just a reminder of some tried and tested activities we may have forgotten about.

E S P A C I O S - I gave pupils a short paragraph (2 - 4 sentences max) with all the spaces removed. Armed with coloured pencils, they had a go drawing wiggly lines in where they thought the spaces should go, which was incredibly useful for the Spanish phrases they often squeeze together such as 'porque es' (because it is...) and 'me gusta' (I like). We then replicated the activity on the interactive whiteboard using the pens to come up to the board and draw on the lines in different colours. This could be an activity they do themselves on mini whiteboards with a partner.

3 COLORES - In order for pupils to concentrate a little more on the range of vocabulary they use, I gave pupils a text and this time, again with colouring pencils, they had to underline adjectives, connectives and opinions each in a different colour. We completed the activity as a class on the interactive whiteboard and spoke about why we needed to use lots of different examples and then prepared a 'Help page' in their exercise books. They divided the page in to 3 and wrote down any new adjectives / opinions / connectives they hadn't come across that they fancied using in their next piece of writing. They then had a ready prepared bank of words to save the hundreds of questions 'How do I say this in Spanish?' like we usually get come assessment time!

Competitive Writing - For this activity you need a SMART board Notebook slide ready prepared with the categories of words you want pupils to include in their writing. For example, with my year 8 it was an opportunity for them to use connectives to link sentences as well as opinions and reasons the reach their high level 3 - low level 4 targets in writing. I gave each category a points system, with some bonus points on offer for using fancier phrases such as however. I left the slide on the board with a timer and pupils had 5 minutes to write a short text using the vocabulary on the board. It was then time to get the green pens out, swap books with a partner, and award each other a points value. I offered prizes for the highest number of points but this could be incorporated into lessons later in the year by revisiting the activity within a different context and seeing if pupils can better their score. The boys in particular responded really well to the competitive element of this activity and the quality of what they produced was far superior to that if I had just asked them to write me a paragraph on a given topic.

Let me know any thoughts.

La música española

Really enjoy using music in lessons, particularly in the target language, but more often than not I enjoy it more than the pupils. I have recently discovered an artist on youtube, Kevin, Karla y la banda, who rerecord pop songs in Spanish. These are brilliant for Kagan activities - I frequently reinforce question and answers in the TL by getting pupils to prepare a response (or if they are higher ability, improvise their answers instead) and dance around the room to music. When the music stops, they must ask the person nearest to them to answer their question. I am known to shout "Now tell a fib!" to get pupils used to using more vocabulary rather than just their set response to a given question.

This is a current favourite - everyone loves a bit of Rhi-Rhi...

 We Found Love - Kevin, Karla y la banda en español