I’ll be back!

Students: 12

One thing that went well:  Jigsaw reading.  In my attempt to not over-use it, I’ve been under-using it.  This time, I used two readings that were fairly long and hopefully high-interest.  The students read independently and worked on comprehension questions.  Then they got together into two same-story groups to discuss their stories: 1) main idea, 2) new words, and 3) what surprised them.  Then they split into different-story partners and shared about their story using the same three questions.  One or two groups finished early, so I had them compare and contrast the two stories.  That proved quite interesting – I wish I’d had everyone talk about it!  Two particular victories: I didn’t talk much, and it ended our class on an energetic and communicative note.

One thing to improve:  Eliciting student opinions.  I actually do it a lot – that’s not the problem.  The problem is that I’m usually met with ringing silence.  I’m clearly not framing it as well as I could, both leve-wise and culture-wise.

One surprise:  I gave a quiz in passive voice today.  I mostly left transitive vs. intransitive verbs off of the quiz – they’re important, but the class was simply not ready for a quiz on them.  However, I wrote a bonus question asking them to write a passive sentence with the verb “sleep.”  This is a trick queston because you can’t use “sleep” or other intransitive verbs in the passive voice.  My happy surprise?  Several students got it right!  It was very exciting.

In a One-Question Survey, each student has one slip of paper with a single question on it.  These questions are generally related, often by content.  They’re generally yes/no questions.  Each student is to ask each other student their question and tally up the results.

This is similar to my beloved Grid Activity, but with a One-Question Survey there is little writing, no record of how an individual answered, and it’s a much faster process.

The purposes can be to have students practice asking the same question repeatedly to work on their pronunciation and/or fluency, to reinforce key points of a lesson (i.e. vocabulary, grammar, content, etc.), or to gather data to aid in a math, Excel, writing, or conversation lesson.

Process:

• Decide on your purpose.
• Based on that, write as many different questions as there are students.
• Model the process of asking the same question to everyone and tallying the results.
• Give each student a different question.
• Tell them to ask everyone, answer only Yes or No, and keep a tally of the results.
• Debrief as a class.  How depends on your purpose.  Leave plenty of time for this – it’s the real meat of the activity.

Example (from Level 3):

Yesterday, we used a One-Question Survey in my Level 3 class in the context of our unit on cars and driving.

First, I modeled.  I took a slip of paper out of the pile in my hand and told them, “This is my question.  I’m going to ask everybody, including myself.”  I wrote it on the board, asked each student, and kept my tally on the board.

Then, I told them it was their turn.  I handed out questions we had talked about during the unit, such as “Have you ever gotten a ticket?”, “Do you speed?”, and “Do you cut people off?”  You can see we used all sorts of grammar.  This was for two reasons: a) it’s Level 3, so they already know a lot of grammar, and b) our focus was not on a grammar point, but on the content and vocabulary.

I asked them to ask all students, including themselves, and also to ask me.  I said that the only answers should be “yes” or “no.”  And I asked them to keep a tally.

When they were finished, we went through the questions and put them into an Excel spreadsheet that automatically calculated percentages for us.  This was to reinforce some of our computer lessons from last month.  At this point, it was time to go home.

Next time, I’d be more careful to make sure that each student understood his/her question.  In a few cases, students thought they understood, but they were mistaken.  We easily cleared this up during the debriefing time, but it would’ve been more powerful if students could have accurately explained to each other during the survey time itself.

Next time, I’d also like the debriefing to be more than just an Excel demo.  It could be a full-out Excel lesson, or even better, fodder for a conversation and/or writing assignment.  So, I recommend leaving plenty of time to work with the survey results.

Other content possibilities:

• Warm-up: have students ask innocuous personal questions.
• Graphs: use the data to practice graph-making, either analog or with Excel.
• Academic writing: using the survey results, students can summarize, compare and contrast, predict based on, and explain the data.
• Grammar: all questions should use the same structure.
• Content: cut up a practice test with multiple-choice questions and have each student tally up answers A, B, C, and D.  Look at the results as a class.  Go over right answers and identify weak spots together that the students should study.
• Google Docs: send students to the same Google Spreadsheet and have them enter their data simultaneously.

One thing that went well: Yesterday’s lesson.  And I still had abysmal attendance today.  Although I hope that if I taught horribly my students would stop coming to class, I just really can’t take it as direct correlation between bad teaching and low attendance.

One thing to improve:  Actually, today was pretty good too.  Even in terms of talking too much – I stopped myself several times.

One surprise:  Realizing for myself that English spelling rules for -ed verbs and pronunciation rules are both pretty simple and pretty consistent, but are 100% unrelated.  It’s so crazy!

One thing that went well:   Yesterday felt very choppy, but today we were more focused.  We still worked on three different topics, but today the topics were related (-ed vs. -ing adjectives, pronouncing -ed endings, and reading a story that was mostly in the Simple Past).  I also did a much better job of having them practice rather than just talking at them.  One of the topics was in response to a pronunciation question they asked yesterday.  Though it wasn’t perfect (see the next paragraph for more on this), it felt good to teach a solid lesson based on something they asked about yesterday.  So I guess I felt that several things went pretty well today.

One thing to improve:  Although I think the lesson on the pronunciation of regular past tense verbs (think of the -ed in fixed vs. studied vs. interested) was pretty effective, I think I needed to more clearly tie what we were talking about to verbs ending in -ed and to pronunciation (as opposed to spelling).

One surprise:  We were reviewing the difference between adjectives for feelings that are made out of verbs.  There’s usually an -ed form and an -ing form and they mean different things.  Just think of “bored” and “boring.”  To help them practice this, I drew them a picture of me walking up a really long staircase.  I labeled myself “tired” and the stairs “tiring.”  Then I had the students draw pictures and label them.  Half the class did “interested” and “interesting,” and the other half did “embarrassed” and “embarrassing.”  I was surprised at just how useful it was for bringing out questions that solidified their understanding.  I was also surprised at how vehemently a couple of students either couldn’t or wouldn’t draw anything.  Incredibly useful but incredibly controversial.  Very surprising!

One thing that went well:  I busted out a grid activity at a good time in our really exhausting grammar lesson.

One thing to improve:  There were so many incredibly picky questions, and most of them were not actually on the topic of our grammar lesson, which was Past Continuous (i.e. Grammar was driving us crazy.).  Transitive and intransitive verbs came up in one of our examples and there went 20 minutes (The chicken was roasting. vs. I was roasting the chicken.).  I did manage to avoid slipping into an impromptu lesson on Active and Passive Voice (I prepared the chicken. vs. The chicken was prepared by me.), but only because I’ve been revving up to dive into it in our next unit.  But anyway… grammar basically engulfed the whole class period.  And this was after I refused to answer half their questions (the Passive Voice ones).  How harshly should I reign things in?

One surprise:  How easy Past Continuous (you know, our official grammar point of the day) was compared to all the questions they were asking.

One thing that went well:  We’re on our second big writing project, and this one is much easier for the class.  They’re writing letters.  I think it’s more concrete than just an opinion piece, so it’s less nerve-wracking, less academic, and possibly more useful.  Note to self: start with this one next time.

One thing to improve:  I’ve kind of stopped writing the daily plan on the board (i.e. 1. writing, 2. reading, 3. computers), but I think I should start again.  I just think it’s better to give the class a bit of a road-map of where we’re going on a given day.

One surprise:  The computer lesson.  Today’s topic was judging Google results.  I stated the goal (to judge Google results).  I demonstrated.  I checked for understanding.  We repeated the goal together.  The class had a sparsely-worded assignment to refer to.  But it turned out that a few people still had no idea what we were doing.  I discovered this when they emailed me answers that had nothing to do with judging Google results.  Sigh.  I shouldn’t have been surprised – my less tech-savvy students were the most confused ones.  Leveled computer classes, please!

One thing that went well:  Today’s long reading was about comfort food.  I think it went well from beginning to end: it started with students’ experiences with comfort food, modeling and practice of figuring out confusing words from context only, and munching the cookies I’d brought in.  The timing of the lesson was pretty good too, and we ended class with a nice, up-beat feeling.  No complaints from me!

One thing to improve:  Making writing less stressful to students.  I’ve been trying with process writing (as opposed to one-shot, get-it-right-or-fail writing), examples, and pointing out my own writing’s shortcomings in said examples.  But I think I need to focus on it even more, especially framing writing stress as something the students can exert a degree of control over.

One surprise:  I thought that a few students in particular would struggle with today’s writing assignment, which was basically to map out the purpose and main points of the letter they’ll be drafting tomorrow and perfecting (inasmuch as writing is ever perfect) next week.  I kept an extra eye on them, so I can proudly report that they did just fine!

One thing that went well: Mad Libs.  We’re starting a letter-writing project, so I wrote a sample letter.  Then, on the other side of the paper, I made it into a Mad Lib by removing some words and replacing them with a blank and a note about the part of speech.  I modeled it a lot (a lot), and then handed out one copy to each of four small groups.  They got a good grammar review (students were reminded of comparative adjectives, infinitives, and irregular plurals) and got a chuckle out of the ridiculous letters they created together.  When we were finished with the game, I made sure everyone had a copy of the paper and then we read the real, complete letter on the back and commenced with a pretty normal lesson.

One thing to improve:  I talk too much (I list this one pretty often.  Perhaps I should, you know, actually improve it.)

One surprise:  “Condo” and “condom” sound awfully alike.  I’d never really noticed before today.

One thing that went well:  Jared did a voice recording for me yesterday.  He really did call me yesterday evening to tell me that his bike pedal broke off mid-commute and that he needed a ride home.  The recording he made for me was the message he would’ve left had I not been able to pick up the phone right when he called.  The class seemed impressed that it was really him and about a real situation.  And we all kind of got a kick out of it.

One thing to improve:  I talk too much.

One surprise:  Our long reading was about tomatoes.  (Apparently, in French they used to be called “love apples.”  So the title of our reading about tomatoes was “Love Apples.”  It was weird.)  It was surprisingly engaging.  The pre-reading questions, which are so often lame, actually led to some really interesting conversations and a debate as to whether tomatoes were fruits or vegetables.  Then, once the reading explained the biological definition of “fruit” (it contains the seeds), we had a great time thinking up surprising examples, for example, peppers and cucumbers.  I guess I would’ve thought the article about tomatoes would be mind-numbing, but it wasn’t at all!