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.

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.

#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.

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!

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?

Bringing languages to *real* life

As a department, we much prefer to create our own listening and reading materials for classes instead of using textbooks, unless something really fits a particular topic well or exploits a certain point. With my year 10 this week, covering what is perhaps usually a quite mundane topic, I tried to engage them with images and photographs instead and tailor my activities to suit. 

Reading - We are on the GCSE context of relationships and we needed to revise family and physical description, so I wrote a short description of both of my parents and showed them photos. The pupils then had some time to read the texts from the board and try to remember as much as possible. I gave them a memory test whereby they had to tell me how much they could remember about my parents from the written descriptions. I was quite honest and matched the pictures to my description for my mixed ability class - if you were testing a high ability class this would be a good way for them to prove their reading skills! It was a really nice activity for them to practise their reading as they actually cared about the answers instead of reading from a textbook about fictitious characters and they wanted to get to know me and find out more about my family. It was a also a lovely way to build positive relationships with what has been at time a tricky group to get to know. 

Speaking - We then went on to discuss what makes a good friend. After brainstorming some qualities of a good or indeed a bad friend, we did a bit of group talk about some famous people and whether they would make a good best friend. I picked people which would generate some discussion and argument for the tables - Chris Brown, Nicole Scherzinger, the Queen, Jeremy Clarkson - before summarising some key vocab that came out of our discussions as a class. It was then time to practise some listening.

Listening - I chose to use a Voki character (www.voki.com) instead of reading aloud to my class. It provides a visual animation to your voice recording, or if you don't have access to a mic on your laptop, it has a handy function where you can convert text to speech in a number of different accents. I recorded a short piece (the limit is 60s) describing my friends with a random little pink bunny rabbit character. They then had to decide which friend was which from a photo I gave them and answer some simple listening comprehension questions. Again, this was a nice way for them to find out a little bit more about me, whilst using vocabulary from the topic in a real context. I could also adapt the text to include certain structures that I wanted to exploit before setting them up with a transcript to have a go at writing their own text about their own best friends.