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 - 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?

Homework for the MFL student

As my marking pile grows ever larger just 3 and a bit weeks into the term, it's natural to query what is the point of it all. But with our prospective 'flipped learning' experiment in the pipeline, I really do need to reconsider where homework / homestudy fits in with this new model of teaching and learning.

Having read a little around the topic online (don't be silly, it couldn't possibly be extensively... where would I find the time?) it seems the great debate around homework is setting a task for the sake of it, or actually setting something that consolidates the learning in the classroom and has a measurable impact on progress. How we measure that progress is perhaps another question all together. Our school has recently redesigned our Virtual Learning Environment and with the introduction of the fancy new site this September came the chance to purge all the rubbish that had accumulated on the old one. In MFL we took it upon ourselves to not only redesign our homework tasks for KS3 (our policy is to have all tasks pre-prepared online for students to access at any time, avoiding 'finish this at home' type tasks) but also to rethink assessment of a unit of work. We came up with a three pronged approach - Learning, Preparation and Drafting. Pupils will complete 3 homework tasks each half term, in preparation for an end of unit assessment. Learning tasks will consist of learning vocabulary for an in-class mini test, Preparation tasks will require pupils to complete a worksheet of consolidation activities designed to test vocabulary recall, reading and writing skills and the Drafting tasks give pupils the opportunity to submit a practise piece of writing and receive formative feedback before the final assessment. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the process will affect the quality of the writing of our KS3 pupils because, as the department discussed, correcting adjective endings for what seems like the bazillionth time is soul destroying.

But in considering 'flipping' my teaching and learning, how am I going to approach homework? The system we have in place is working, is great preparation for our assessments and will hopefully have the desired affect on writing skills. But it won't work with the flipped learning model. Am I going to simply be able to swap this around and bring the homework tasks into my classroom for completion? I suspect this is a lazy way out and I won't get off that lightly. Likewise, flipped learning ought to provide me with more opportunity to differentiate for more able pupils and those with particular learning needs. Every pupil in my classroom needs to leave having felt a sense of achievement from the flipped learning task - I can't afford to have a pupil complain the homework was a 'waste of time' and to the same end I don't particularly want to feel the same way when marking the outcome! The problem I have with homework is probably the same one the pupils have - unless properly and carefully planned out, it feels pointless a lot of the time. We are all led to believe that it's a necessity, that it has to be done, that it proves a point. Yet all to often it achieves the opposite - nothing more than to prove that the thing you thought you had taught...  32 of your pupils didn't get it. Not a great self esteem boost for teacher or pupil. Will research based tasks feel more worthwhile? Will pupils gain more from the independent enquiry that flipped learning demands of them? Will this in turn be building those resilient learners that Ofsted beg to see in our classrooms? Time will tell, but I'm hoping it's a big fat yes. 

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.