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!

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. 

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.