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Navigating the New Classroom Landscape – Sharing Experiences of Mixed Cohorts and Emerging Challenges (ELTC/USIC TD workshop)

On Thursday 8th January, I was able to participate in this session, which brought together ELTC teachers (both those who teach Academic English Skills and some who don’t!) and USIC subject teachers, as it had been moved online due to potential adverse weather conditions. (Would have had to call in sick if it had been F2F but could manage attending by computer with lots of hot water, hot drinks, paracetamol and tissues!)

The goals of the session were:

  • Addressing recent shifts in student demographics
  • Sharing collective “tried and tested” strategies
  • Producing a collaborative “Tips and Strategies” summary

We were given four scenarios designed to stimulate discussion, based on some specific areas of concern that teachers have reported, and put into groups to discuss them, and add ideas to a google doc. The format of the session was to spend a chunk of time discussing scenario 1 in small groups and then coming together for each group to share ideas in turn, and then going back into small groups to discuss scenarios 2-4 followed by a similar but briefer feedback plenary. As such, I also found the online format beneficial because when discussing in small groups, being in breakout rooms, I could only hear my group rather than a wall of noise from all the other groups talking simultaneously! Thank you, weather!

The scenarios are laid out below, and beneath each one I will share some of the ideas that came out of the discussions as well as my own thoughts.

Scenario 1: The “Dribbling” Effect (Attendance & Transitions)

The Situation: It is 10 minutes past the start of your session. Only half the class is present. Over the next 20 minutes, students “dribble” in one by one. Later, after a 10-minute coffee break, three students do not return for nearly half an hour, claiming they were “just using the restroom”.

Discussion Prompt: How do you manage the disruption of latecomers without stopping the flow of the lesson? What strategies can be used to ensure break times are respected?.

For context, in 2hr lessons, it is common to give students a 5 minute break halfway through the lesson and the lesson attendance policy is:

  • if students arrive at the start of the lesson, they are marked present
  • if they arrive within 10 minutes of the start of the lesson, they are marked L (does not negatively impact visa requirements)
  • if they arrive more than 10 minutes after the lesson has started, they are allowed in and marked U (absent for via purposes but has been seen by the teacher)
  • if they do not attend, they are marked absent (also absent for visa purposes but unseen by the teacher).

It’s a new attendance policy this academic year (used to be if students arrived more than 5 minutes after the start of the lesson, they weren’t allowed in) and has given rise to situations like that described in Scenario 1. There were lots of ideas but they all basically boil down as follows:

  • Before the class:
    • Be aware of the students’ timetable – their previous lesson may finish just before your lesson.
    • Set expectations from the start of the course, e.g. within a class contract, and be consistent thereafter.
    • Plan for the issue – plan your lesson so that you don’t start on core material straightaway e.g. do review/standalone tasks initially.
  • In the class:
    • Have a system in place for dealing with the latecomers – e.g. a buddy system set up from the start of the course which directs certain students to help certain other students to catch up if they are late.
    • Have task instructions displayed on the board so that students can catch up independently. Such systems enable you not to have to interrupt the lesson repeatedly.
  • After the class:
    • Follow up with the students in question to ensure there isn’t a welfare issue going on and to raise awareness of the importance of taking responsibility for arriving on time.

As for ensuring break time durations are respected:

  • Write the time students are expected back on the board so that it is clear
  • Have consequences (e.g. no break next time or not allowed back in class after the break)

My thoughts:

With my class this year on Wednesdays in Semester 1, they had a 9 -11 lesson and then my lesson 11-1. We negotiated that they would have a ten minute break and then we’d start the lesson at 11.10 (the cut-off time for attendance being marked such that visa requirements are not affected). I think that’s fair, as no one can concentrate for 4hrs in a row with no break. Even a 10 minute break is minimal.

The other 11-1 slot (Thursday) is their first class for the day and they tend to be on time if they are going to attend. On the other hand, I need a few minutes to set up the lesson (get the computer going etc) and I’ve found that on Thursdays they respond well to scanning a QR code and carrying out a review task while they wait, though something paper-based works just as well. The key is making sure whatever it is won’t take too long, so that it doesn’t end up displacing something more important.

The timetable will be slightly different this semester, so there will be some renegotiation of how things will work. I tend to think treating the students like people and developing a positive and inviting learning environment at the start of the course will hopefully mean that problems are less likely to arise. One tricky thing in our context is that our module is often seen as less important by students than their subject-specific modules. This means that when the stress piles on, it is the first thing to ‘give’ as far as the students’ motivation and capacity are concerned. I think all we can do is do our best to make the relevance of the material clear, make our lessons as engaging as we can and beyond that just accept that the students are people rather than taking it personally.

Scenario 2: The Ideological Clash (Difficult Interactions)

The Situation: During a seminar discussion on global systems, a student begins pushing a specific ideological agenda, suggesting the inherent superiority of their own political or religious system. The comments are culturally insensitive and clearly make other students in the room feel uncomfortable or upset.

Discussion Prompt: How do you intervene to maintain a safe learning environment while handling “unpopular” viewpoints? How do you redirect the conversation back to academic inquiry?

The suggestions usefully group into the three categories used in Scenario 1:

  • Before the class:
    • Make sure that the global community is highlighted at the induction stage, including policies regarding tolerance, equality, diversity.
    • At the start of a course, in the classroom, make expectations clear regarding acceptable behaviour and respect for others (again, a class contract can be a vehicle for this).
    • Plan to use frameworks to ground any discussions (e.g. case studies, theories).
  • In the class:
    • At the start of the activity, remind students about expectations regarding communication in diverse groups.
    • Intervene early and calmly, using professional language to defuse the situation.
    • Reiterate the importance of academic objectivity and supporting views with evidence – this is something students in our context need to develop skills in: views should be evidence-based rather than unsupported or dismissive in order to be academically valid.
    • Point out that while free speech is part of academic culture, expressing views which marginalise, insult, discriminate or intimidate people is not acceptable.
    • Emphasise the importance of clarifying misunderstandings and apologising to maintain positive relationships.
  • After the class:
    • Check in with any students who were upset during the class to make sure they are ok.

My thoughts:

I think this is one where building and maintaining positive group dynamics goes a long way to avoiding such issues arising. Students need to both see the other students in the class as people and be seen as people by the others in the class. If that can be achieved, then they are much less likely to do or say things that might upset others and if they do it will be unintentional and therefore more easily able to be resolved. So, it’s important to have your strategies for how to handle it but equally important to try and ensure that it is unlikely to arise in the first place.

Scenario 3: The Wall of Silence (Engagement)

  • The Situation: You have set up a collaborative task. In the physical classroom, several students sit in silence, refusing to engage with their peers or the task. Simultaneously, your online students have their cameras and mics off and are not responding to prompts in their breakout rooms. No one has completed the preparatory work assigned outside of class.
  • Discussion Prompt: What teacher-led strategies can reignite engagement in both F2F and online environments? How do we address a systemic lack of out-of-class preparation?

For this prompt, the thoughts and ideas put forward can be grouped nicely into two categories: considerations and responses. In that, there can be different reasons for the type of behaviour described above and we need to keep that in mind in order to respond effectively to it.

  • Considerations:
    • What is the reason behind the silence? Silence does not necessarily equal disengagement or defiance or insolence or unwillingness to do tasks.
    • How long has it been since you asked the question or given the instruction? Students may still be processing what you are saying or figuring out what they need to do for the task.
    • What stage of the course is it? Early in the course, we may still be setting expectations and the students may still be adjusting to a new learning style.
    • Perhaps they have done the preparation but are shy to speak up?
    • Or, it could be a lack of understanding that is behind their silence.
    • Perhaps it could be due to personal issues or other external factors. It might be that they are having trouble with their group.
    • Might there be unmet special educational needs at play?
  • Responses: There are lots of levers we can pull in a situation like this. No single one is lightly to be a silver bullet solution and different ones may work better on different days with different students. As with the previous two situations, the early weeks of the course are important for acclimating students to the new learning situation.
    • Online
      • Establish expectations for audio and camera use at the start of the course, provide easier practice opportunities and follow up.
      • Use Google docs so there is an output to provide a focus for collaboration but praise participation not only output so that the process is recognised as important rather than only the product.
      • Use commenting on Google docs to show that you are monitoring their participation.
      • Group students strategically to maximise the chances for participation. Use polls.
      • Encourage students to share answers in the chatbox.
      • Provide sentence starters to scaffold production.
      • Nominate – students like to be recognised as individuals and are likely to respond better if you treat them as such.
      • Give thinking time – be comfortable with the silence of cognitive processing.
      • Spend time building rapport at the start of each lesson e.g. getting students to switch on their cameras and say hi.
    • Face to face
      • Give thinking time.
      • Check understanding of the task and provide repair instructions where needed.
      • Follow the think, pair, share format to build up participation.
      • Gently encourage students to participate.
      • As with online lessons, nominate students.
      • Spend time building rapport at the start of the lesson e.g. warmers.
      • Give students study tools and tips to support their participation (e.g. suggest that they research concepts online to help their understanding).
      • Using gentleness and sensitivity, encourage a culture of not having to be “right” so that students are more confident to participate.
      • Assign specific roles within groups so that students know what they need to do.
      • Create an information gap: have groups carry out different tasks which they then need to share with each other.
      • Recognise students’ time constraints and workloads – where possible integrate activities into lesson time rather than expecting students to do too much (in addition to all their coursework) outside of class.

My thoughts:

I think this is a scenario where there are a multitude of influencing factors. Therefore, curiosity is important rather than automatically assuming the worst. I also think that some of the factors can be mitigated to some extent again by developing and maintaining positive group dynamics such that students are comfortable working with one another and expressing their ideas to one another. As such, I highly recommend reading Sandy’s blog post about group dynamics as well as Dornyei and Murphey’s Group Dynamics in the Language Classroom (unaffiliated link) on this topic.

Scenario 4: The “Second Screen” Distraction (Low-level Disruption)

The Situation: The class is technically “on task,” but you notice a constant hum of whispering and giggling in L1 (first language) in the back row. Several other students are completing the work, but they are constantly toggling between the lesson and multiple tabs on their laptops (social media, shopping, or messaging).

Discussion Prompt: How do you address the “split attention” caused by devices without banning technology entirely? What are effective ways to pivot students away from L1 whispering and back to the whole-class activity?

This has become an issue mainly since the pandemic, as during the pandemic we switched to digital learning materials rather than a printed workbook and since the pandemic, we have had a period of readjustment to the physical classroom (with initial discouragement towards using paper because of infection risks). While now we are able to use the same range of activities as before the pandemic, our core materials are still all digital. Students all bring a laptop or tablet to their lessons.

The ideas resulted from the discussion prompt were mainly a mixture of considerations and responses, which were divided predominantly between pre- and in-lesson responses. So I shall use those categories to group them:

Considerations:

  • Technology
    • screen-based translation tools can be part of the problem, by creating a constant pull on students’ attention.
    • The development of AI which may or may not be used for unfair means is another draw.
  • Multitasking
    • students may think they are skilled at multi-tasking but a multi-tasking test (such as the gorilla test) may surprise them.
  • L1
    • This is another resource for students and is not necessarily problematic/suggestive of inattention/disruption.
    • Students may be on task while speaking in L1, especially as academic tasks are complex and involve complex cognitive processing which may be easier to achieve in L1.
    • If they are disrupting other students’ ability to concentrate/carry out a task or preventing students in their group from carrying out a task then it may be problematic.

Responses:

  • Before class:
    • Plan to have students use pen and paper for tasks which require deeper focus e.g. brainstorming, note-taking, short exercises, reflection activities. That way there will be less temptation to get distracted during these shorter, more demanding tasks.
    • Plan clear outcomes and timings for activities.
    • Think about where L1 use might be beneficial and where using English is essential so that you can guide students accordingly.
    • Plan a variety of tasks and interaction types to maximise student engagement.
    • Design tasks that require purposeful use of devices (e.g. Google Jamboard, collaborative writing in shared documents, live polls, vocabulary searches, timed grammar challenges) so that technology supports learning rather than distracting from it.
    • Adapt lessons to be as screen-free as possible, including movement, writing on whiteboards, spoken communication.
    • Think about whether you will need individual copies of a handout or whether one between two or three or four would work better. (This can save on printing and encourage collaboration!)
  • In class:
    • Monitor actively so that students are encouraged to stay on task and so that you have a better idea if they are on task or not.
    • Highlight that giving full focus is a sign of respect (caveat: this should not require them to be looking into your eyes, which may be uncomfortable for neurodivergent students)
    • Ensure that instructions regarding use/non-use of technology for a given task are clear. E.g. “Close your computers for this task./Phones down for this task.”
    • In lessons where this is relevant, make it clear to students initially that there will be an ‘open’ period of the lesson where they will be able to work on an assignment (which could include work for other modules if this is more urgent) IF they are able to achieve the lesson aims/complete all the lesson activities first.
    • Be clear about timings and keep these snappy so that there is less temptation to get distracted.
    • Use humour: say that you will confiscate phones to sell on ebay to raise funds for teachers or have a bell jar of liquid with an old phone in it to show what will happen if phones are used at the wrong time. Suggest that students don’t need to be there if they have more important things to discuss but they will of course be marked absent if they leave.
    • Use another language: speak to students using another language so that those who don’t speak it can feel how it is not to understand what is going on.
    • Use whiteboards/running dictations/post-it notes etc to get students moving.
    • During longer tasks, accept that students will take brain breaks and that’s ok.
    • If students are using AI inappropriately, emphasise the importance of acquiring the skills and understanding the lesson content.
    • Change the groups around so that students work with different classmates (mixing up language backgrounds where possible).
    • Make it clear where L1 use is and isn’t acceptable. Rather than trying to keep it out of the classroom for the whole lesson, isolate time frames/parts of activities where students should use English only.
    • Allow space for L1 e.g. let students use L1 in task preparation and encourage English only in task execution.

My thoughts:

During my last observed lesson (we have an annual lesson observation where we get feedback on our teaching), my line manager suggested I could have used paper for a particular activity rather than the digital document, and it might have worked better. And I’ll be honest, I was like “oh yeah, so I could have!” – since then, I have been making a conscious effort to think about what format to use for different activities, what could be more engaging, and have been doing a lot more that is paper-based/mini-whiteboard-based/main whiteboards-based. In my last lesson, we had a laugh when I brought out some A3 paper, to the effect that it wouldn’t be an AES lesson without some A3 paper!! (That has been an experiment this year, using different paper sizes!) It definitely keeps the lesson moving better.

I think as with many things, what you do ahead of the class thinking/planning-wise has a big impact on how the lesson unfolds and what issues arise, and gives you more flexibility for dealing with known potential issues. I also think that getting students to close their computers when not in use is important so that there isn’t that physical barrier between them and the other students, and there is space for paper etc to bring them together.

Lots of ideas and lots to think about. This was a great workshop to do at the start of a semester!

Do you experience any of the issues discussed above in your context? Do you have any suggestions not mentioned above? Please do comment and share, I’d love to hear from you!

They show a group of students working individually and a group of students working together. The students are a mixture of genders and nationalities. There are five students in the first picture and four students in the second picture.

Pictures above are both free stock photos!

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Happy New Year – 2026!

Well, 2026 appears to have snuck in. Happy New Year, everybody! Thus far it seems to mostly consist of having the flu (“but you are upright!” I hear you say…that’s because I got vaccinated, fortunately!! Hurrah for vaccines!!) but being ill is par for the course this time of year! I was ill this time last year too, though it was covid that time if I recall correctly!

Anyway, in 2025, I started with visions of doing far more blog writing than I did in 2024, but in the event I actually did exactly the same amount both years – 7 posts. I’ve just gone back and counted. I’ve also gone back and read my blog post from around this time last year in which I made a bunch of most excellent New Year’s Resolutions. I do love a good new year’s resolution. (Not that I fulfilled the one about blogging more in 2025 than I did in 2024! It started so promisingly and then there was the voluntary severance scheme at work, and there was going from 2 coordinators for the January cohort down to only me, and then I moved on to co-coordinate the September cohort, and that was combined with delivering a new syllabus…all in all, there wasn’t a spare moment. Usually in the September semester, I was not actively coordinating, as active coordinating was January – August. This past year I’ve kept going and going. I will finally get downtime from active coordinating during the semester starting in late April 2026, with the last time of starting active coordinating following the usual downtime period being January 2025! I think I can cut myself some slack…!)

Resolution 1

Channel my brain into positive and creative pursuits (rather than only using it for worrying).

  • More writing: yes, in the first part of the year (both blogging and creative writing!)
  • Malorie Blackman course on BBC Maestro: yes, completed this and it was great!
  • Being curious about my students/teachers and using that to feed innovation in how I support/teach them: yes, in particular I have learnt more about group dynamics and consciously use it in my planning. In end of semester feedback from my students, there was specific mention made of “the positive learning atmosphere” and “the tutor is very supportive” was also said. To me that is a win, to be built on this semester.
  • More piano: yes, in the first part of the year – last semester I was working overtime just to keep up with work and piano got squeezed out (it requires concentration so if my brain is tired it doesn’t work). I’ve picked it up again this year though
  • Learning/CPD: Again, more in the first part of the year! No crochet (yet…)

Resolution 2

Prioritise physical wellbeing. I’m no spring chicken and am at that delightful age and stage where I’m actively losing muscle if I’m not working hard to maintain it! Physical health and wellbeing also have an impact on mental health and wellbeing.

  • Do a regular bouldering session: yes! We went every Tuesday except when either away or ill.
  • Do an additional strength training session once a week: nope. Again, a time and energy thing. Might change this year as I plan to work with a running coach so will learn how best to fit strength training in in a sustainable, progression-ensuring way.
  • Keep running 4 times a week: yes! Other than when ill or away.
  • Do yoga regularly: it came and went and came and went, I will continue to encourage it to come…it’s better when it does!!
  • Do lots of gardening: did a fair bit! Am not very good at taking breaks though, I go into hyperfocus for long periods instead. This is something to work on!

Resolution 3

Put time and effort into my marriage.

  • Support my wife’s goals: of course!!
  • Prioritise spending time with her: of course!!
  • Continue team-working everything: of course!!

Probably the most successful one!! 🙂

Resolution 4

Make time for family and friends.

  • make the effort to get in touch with friends/family: I did try!
  • make the effort to see friends/family: I did try!
  • balance this with my need for solitary downtime/recovery (I need to recognise this need because otherwise I will inevitably burn out!): getting better at this! (It became easier once I got my autism diagnosis in April last year, as I felt more justified in recognising it as a need not a cop-out!)

So, I didn’t do too badly really! As for this year? Mainly I am going to follow the same set of resolutions as last year! They stand. And to whatever extent I meet them, they bring positivity into my life. To quote last year me, “a pleasure rather than a rod to beat myself with” – I was referring to piano, but honestly the same applies to all of them, and to life itself, including, as I put it back then, “mental, physical, emotional/connectional areas and [….] personal, social and professional domains”. Who knows, maybe this year I will finally get round to crocheting and write more than 7 blog posts (6 more to go after this one! Fun fact: my blog will be 15 years old on the 8th May this year!). And if not? There is always 2027. 🙂

Have a peaceful 2026 everyone, I hope it is kind to you.

Free stock photo (Public Domain Pictures) – look at all those lights, definitely not suitable for Lizzies! 🙂

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A getting to know you activity that worked!

Last week was the first week for the September cohort and in my first face to face lesson with my new group, I did a substantial getting to know you activity.

Step 1: the name game

The first step was getting them better acquainted with one another’s names (also indispensable for me getting their names down off the bat!) – I did my old reliable standby in which I start with “My name is Lizzie and I like running” and then Student 1 says “This is Lizzie and she likes running. I am X and I like y.” Student 2 says, “This is X and s/he likes y. This is Lizzie and she likes running. I am A and I like b. And so it goes on. With 15 students, it was a good challenge! And by the end of it, I knew all their names and they knew more names than they did before.

Step 2: the interview

I gave each student a sheet of paper with some questions printed on it. The questions had gaps in so that the students could complete them with their own ideas provided they fit grammatically. They were free to discuss their ideas together as they did it. Once they had done this (preparation), I moved them around so they were working with a new partner. With that partner they asked and answered questions and made a note of their answers, knowing they would be reporting to the whole class subsequently.

Step 3: the reporting

Before starting this stage, I gave each student a piece of paper with a table on it – one column for student name and one column for notes. Each student took a turn to introduce their partner. Those who were listening had instructions to write each student’s name in a new row and in the notes part, they had to note down anything in the report that was the same for them. So for example if the report said “Student x’s favourite animal is a dog” and the listener’s favourite animal was a dog, they’d write down “his/her favourite animal is also a dog!”. The purpose for this part was two-fold: one, give them a reason to listen, two enable them to find things in common with everyone in the class (useful for helping them on the way towards becoming a cohesive group).

Step 4: Filling in the gaps

Once they’d finished, they might have gaps next to some students’ names (either because they had missed what was said or because there was nothing in the report which was the same for them). The final part of the activity was for them to fill in those gaps. They had to do this by approaching the students for whom they had gaps and finding something in common with them so that they could write it in the gap.

At the end of the final lesson of the week, I had them complete short reflection handout (What I learnt this week… Good things for me this week were…because… Bad things this week for me were…because… Next week I would like to…) – prompts adapted from Dornyei and Murphy’s Group Dynamics in the Language Classroom. And the most commonly repeated good thing was around making friends and getting to know new classmates. This activity was a part of that.

It was a 2hr lesson and I think it probably took somewhere in the realm of 1.5hrs in total. There wasn’t time for a lot else in the lesson (just my sequence where they brainstorm ideas for studying effectively while they are at the college, I feed in a few more that I feel are important and often missed, and then introduce them to mindfulness meditation using a short video which explains what it is, how to do it and the benefits of it. Then we do an example one together. In future lessons we will start the lesson with that short meditation to give them time to draw breath after rushing in from their previous lesson.). Obviously the length of time it takes corresponds to the number of students.

If you try it, let me know how it goes! 🙂

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End of 2024-25!

Today is my last working day for this academic year. Sort of…I am back for a week w/c 18th August to do resit marking and resit speaking exams (presentations and seminar discussions) but other than I am freeeee until 18th September. It has been a year of unexpected change – restructure, voluntary severance scheme, colleagues leaving – and I find myself finishing ADoSing/coordinating the January cohort for the final time (in theory – nothing is set in stone…) with a view to switching to coordinating the September cohort from when the next academic year begins. I feel like looking back and looking forward as a suitably calm and organised way to round off a chaotic year!

What I have been learning about and doing this year:

  • Generative AI (somewhat inevitably…): I’ve attended a number of development sessions both internal (ELTC-based) and external (webinars and the like) – thus a number of my recent blog posts have focused on it. This has fed into the course development I’ve been co-doing ready for the September semester, when we will be rolling out the new syllabus with integrated focus on ethical and effective use of AI.
  • Instructional Design for Language Teachers: That 10 week course I did in the September semester (seems approximately 10 lifetimes ago…!). I’ve not made any Articulate RISE or Storyline content since then, but it’s been helpful from the perspective of giving feedback on the content that the TEL team have been developing to support the new syllabus (focusing on a new formative assessment, focusing on ethical and effective use of AI in relation to each of the assessments the students will have to do). The focus on effective use of Google slides has also been helpful in terms of the materials development I’ve done for the new syllabus.
  • Group Dynamics: Thanks to Sandy Millin’s Delta Newsletter, I read her blog post about, and watched her recording of a talk she did about, group dynamics. My interest was sufficiently piqued as to acquire Group Dynamics in the Language Classroom (not an affiliate link, I’m not that clever) by Zoltan Dornyei and Tim Murphey. I was aware of its existence but had sort of forgotten about it, and the newsletter was a timely reminder: our groups of students have changed quite a bit in the last few years, from consisting predominantly of students from mainland China to a more diverse demographic, including a number of students from the Middle East and an increasing number of first language speakers of English from a range of countries (African countries, Asian countries, the U.S…). This has posed various challenges to teachers, including in this last January cohort, which had some “difficult” groups in it. I shall continue to read the book over this summer, in the hopes that if I get a challenging group I will be better equipped to work with it, and if one, or more, of my teachers does, I will be better equip to support them with it.
  • Neurodiversity: I’ve done a lot of research into Neurodiversity in the last few years, and this year in April was ‘diagnosed with autism’ (or better, identified as being autistic). One of my students in my most recent group was neurodivergent and I feel I have been better able to support her due to my increased awareness. I have a research idea relating to neurodivergence and autism which I am exploring with a view to starting an Ed Doc possibly in 2026-2027 academic year (that sounds like an impossibly high numbered year for being next calendar year’s academic year beginning!).
  • New Blackboard: We are moving from old Blackboard to Blackboard Ultra in September, so I have been doing a self-study course (piecemeal, when I could find time) to try and prepare for that. There was a selection of new vocabulary to get to grips with (e.g. “document” has a new meaning in the context of Blackboard Ultra!) as well as how to do all the stuff on it that we were accustomed to doing on old Blackboard.

What lies ahead:

  • Navigating the new cohort and syllabus: After all our work on it, it will be awesome to roll out the new syllabus and content, and I get to be in the ADoS/coordinator (our name is in flux, can you tell?!) role for the first cohort of teachers and students to use it! I’m excited!
  • A change in contract %: I am going down to 80% starting next academic year. I will have Tuesday morning and Friday afternoon off (splitting it up like this enabled more timetabling flexibility and lets me spread out my workload while also enabling slightly earlier finishes on campus). Hopefully this will be a positive move for my work-life balance and working with my autism rather than against it.
  • New AI policy: The times of “You must not use it. The End.” are now over. Hopefully our new syllabus will enable us to teach our students how (not) to use it and the value of engaging with sources and the process of writing themselves. (I remain optimistic!!)
  • Applying for the Ed Doc: Hopefully…maybe…Semester 1 will give me a good idea of how amenable my new contract percentage is to my energy levels and possibilities of taking on something like an Ed Doc.

The above lists aren’t exhaustive but they are what I’ve picked out in the time I have available! I won’t now say goodbye till next academic year because my extended, if slightly fragmented, break means I might actually have time to write the odd blog post – stranger things have happened! Including this post, I’ll be on 6 for this calendar year, last year in total I managed 7, so I am likewise optimistic about increasing that total for this calendar year. Watch this space! 🙂

And to finish, for now, one of my favourite memes, because it is about right:

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“Let me hear the real you” M.E.T. webinar by Mark Heffernan and David Byrne

This double-act webinar was done by Mark Heffernan and David Byrne. You may have come across this duo at IATEFL if you attended. They also have a column in Modern English Teacher, who hosted this webinar. I haven’t encountered them before, but it was a really good webinar – if I were to attend an IATEFL in the future, I would totally look out for a session of theirs in the programme!

If you are they, or you attended the webinar, and see any mistakes in my notes-based summary, please comment and let me know!

The outline was as follows:

David particularly highlighted the idea of “Help your learners to find/make decisions”, saying that the role of teachers has changed over the years. We used to be arbiters of right and wrong, but now, we are facilitators of learning and discussion, our role isn’t to say what is right or wrong but to show possibilities and allow learners to make choices.

Writing

  • Has AI changed how we write?
  • Has AI changed how students write?

Yes.

Everyone (well, many people) uses it, to varying degrees of success, appropriateness and responsibility. If you don’t use it responsibly and effectively, it does wash out your personality/voice. In order to maintain your voice, you need to know what your voice is.

We have to train our learners on responsible, appropriate, effective use.

Questions we need to ask are: Who is the audience? What is the need (Why are you writing this?)? What role do you play in it? What role should/could AI play in this process?

E.g. a letter of complaint – if you will be all hedging/not cantankerous enough, you could use AI to write it and prompt it to add in some extra cantankerousness. If you are, you probably want your voice in there and will write it yourself. You have choices.

If we’re doing a test, AI is not appropriate unless it is built into the test. However, you could use it for brainstorming, ideation, feedback, suggested language chunks. It can be a learning tool. Most universities acknowledge and accept students using it in that way. What is generally prohibited is using it to produce text and submitting that. This is a change from two years ago and shows how things have evolved.

How do writers come across? How do you want to come across? It’s all about tone and voice.

The question becomes not did you get the grammar/vocabulary correct but is the text produced undeniably written by AI? If it is, it is not successful. If you have just pulled little language chunks from AI, then it could be.

You can teach a whole lesson on voice/tone but David/Mark suggest that is better to embed it throughout the course. Syllabuses tend to be spiral-shaped. Give students chances at multiple stages during the course to reflect and make choices. If we give them chances to do that, they have choices. It’s not a one and done lesson, appropriateness and AI can’t be a one off. It needs to be woven through. It needs to be scaffolded. The rise of AI has made it even more important than before to do this (teach about voice) but it was always important.

Speaking

When you speak, you portray a version of yourself, you make choices.

English learning and using depends on context: I need to be able to… so that I can… .

There is more than one correct way to structure an essay but we teach maybe the most foolproof way, the easiest way.

Hedging – it’s partly using modals, so it’s grammar but it’s also functional (you signal how sure or unsure, how strongly or otherwise you feel towards what you are saying).

David and Mark shared some possible activities for working with voice/persona by weaving it into existent activities:

If you don’t show interest in what someone is saying, so you just listen and don’t say anything/interject etc, the speaker may feel lack of interest and lose confidence. If you see this happen in a discussion between students of yours, facilitate discussion of these kind of moments – e.g. this happened (X didn’t say or do anything while you were talking), why is that, X? How did you feel about it Y?)

My take-away:

We have seminar discussion exam preparation and then the exams coming up, and I want to try taking this approach to evaluating the example discussion recording (e.g. how did x respond, or not, how do you think y felt?), and to feedback on students’ discussions, and link it back to the language we teach them in order to enable participation. Get them thinking about what kind of persona they want to portray in a seminar discussion exam (e.g. engaged, knowledgable etc) and how to achieve that, as well as get them thinking about how to participate effectively in a real seminar. I might get them to repeat a practise discussion while playing different personas, to give them a chance to experiment.

In terms of writing (we are about to embark on extended essay writing on Monday!), I want to include more discussion of voice and, again, showing them that they have choices over how to express themselves in their essays and how those choices affect the outcome.

I feel I’ve come away with a load of ideas for how to slightly tweak what I already do, and hopefully thereby increase the value of it to my students: I call that a win! 🙂 Thank you Mark and David!

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Teacher Identity

This blog post was inspired by Sandy Millin’s write-up of an IATEFL 2025 panel on the subject of Teacher Identity…

I think opportunities to discuss and reflect on teacher identity, such as the IATEFL 2025 panel written up by Sandy, are invaluable, as identity is constantly evolving and growing. In the first talk Sandy summarised, the speaker, Robyn Stewart, adapted Barkhulzen and Mandieta’s (2020) facets of language teacher professional identity to highlight the influence of the world on identity, external influence on it. It also shows the interplay between personal and professional identity and the elements that can be considered to be part of our professional identity:

Via Sandy Millin’s write-up of Robyn Stewart’s talk in the IATEFL 2025 teacher identity panel.

There are so many things that influence who we are in the classroom! One of the lessons Robyn Stewart drew from her dissertation research was “Don’t underestimate the role of context”. I’m inclined to agree:

On a personal level, I’m not that interested in generative AI, generally distrust it, disapprove of the resource consumption it represents and feel the amount of money, time, expertise and so on being ploughed into it everywhere could be better spent elsewhere (e.g. use of AI in medical contexts) rather than generating infinite quantities of text.

As a language learner, if I had the time, energy and spare brain, or was as driven as summer 2014 me, such that I could overcome the lack of all the afore-mentioned (and could override my concerns about unnecessary resource consumption!), I would perhaps explore the possibilities of communicating with it in Italian/French/German and using it to help me improve my production. I could get *well* in to a project like that. (And if I were teaching general English I could use the knowledge and skills I might develop in the process to help my students benefit from using the English version.)

However, my professional identity has the greatest influence on my interaction with AI: I have to embrace AI’s existence and figure out ways to work with students in a world which it is now very much a part of. In terms of context, I work specifically in higher education, preparing students to study at university by teaching them an Academic English skills course which they do alongside subject modules. Assessments are high stakes in terms of scores but they also need to ensure that students develop the skills necessary to succeed, including that of correctly treading the line between fair use of tools and academic misconduct regulations – a line that has been evolving with the evolution of AI. We used to mutter about Grammarly and translation tools, but ignore them other than prohibiting students from using them and putting a handful forward for misconduct each assessment cycle, and then generative AI came along and blew all that out of the water and onto a whole other level. We have been grappling with it ever since. However, it will only be come September of this year that I will engage with it fully as a teacher in the classroom beyond warning students off it (rather than only from the perspective of course coordination, course/materials development – as in, integrating teaching AI – related skills into our materials, currently in progress, rather than developing materials using AI – and misconduct evaluation).

The young Vietnamese participants in the study carried out by Hang Vu, the third speaker of the IATEFL 2025 panel on teacher identity, demonstrated a high level of insight and awareness into the issues they face in developing their professional identity as teachers in a world dominated by AI, and what kind of training they need in order to do that successfully. Sandy described Hang Vu’s idea of “emerging identities”, as summarised on the slide below:

Via Sandy Millin’s write up of Hang Vu’s talk in the IATEFL 2025 panel on Teacher Identity.

There’s a lot to think about there! I suppose I have mainly been teacher/coordinator as AI inspector in professional terms, but also teacher as learner as despite my personal misgivings: I have made an effort to attend (whether live or via recording) all the training available to us regarding AI. I have been teacher as AI user when I have used it to generate discussion questions (and then teacher as critical thinker when I have deleted half of them as unsuitable and edited/adapted others!). Teacher as AI instructor/facilitator, of course, as mentioned above, is still in the “coming soon to a classroom near you” stage. I suppose will have to be “teacher as AI supporter” within the “teacher as instructor/facilitator” side of things – regarding what we decide are acceptable uses of AI…but I predict it will be more along the lines of channeling inevitable use rather than encouraging use vs non-use! And I think alongside that, I will definitely be encouraging critical discussion in my classroom regarding the use of AI and surrounding issues. It will be interesting to see what the students think. It seems to me that just as much as the youngsters in the Vietnamese study, us old fossils who have been teaching a good while also need to regularly engage with our professional identities and figure out how we are going to move with the times professionally, regardless of (although obviously also interlinked/connected with/influenced by!) our personal feelings towards the various changes (which as Catherine Walters’ plenary discussed, have been many and varied over the last 50 years!)

Sandy’s post finished with some of the questions posed by the audience, one of which was “Should we proactively work with learners about how to do AI? Maybe we should ask learners for the whole AI conversation, not just the final result.” – It’s an interesting one. I definitely want critical discussion and to find out the students’ take on it, and as with other things potentially their feedback/ideas/thoughts can feed into future iterations of the course, but ultimately, in terms of assessment, what is and isn’t acceptable has to align with university and college policy on AI use. One thing I do hope is that I will be able to persuade students of the importance of developing their own voice, as I think if I can do that, then reasonable/acceptable use (with the appropriate guidance on how) will be a natural progression. For sure, all this thinking I am doing at the moment (I’m on annual leave – I have time to think!!) will be a useful form of preparation for the task ahead!

This blog post is plenty long enough already, yet I haven’t even scratched the surface of identity, personal and professional, and the interplays between identity and classroom. But, another time… 🙂

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Generative AI and Voice

I’m a writer. I am writing right now! I have written journal articles, book chapters, (unpublished) fiction, (unpublished) poetry, materials, reflections (blog posts), combination summary/reflections of talks/workshops (blog posts) I attend, emails, feedback on students’ work, the occasional Facebook update, Whatsapp/messenger/Google chat messages, and so the list goes on. It is a form of expression, as is speaking, and drawing. These, including all the different kinds of writing I have done and do, are all forms of expression that AI is now capable of approximating. However, until fairly recently (when suddenly it was showing up everywhere!), I had not explicitly considered the relationship between AI generated production and a person’s ‘voice’. Examples of ‘voice’ vs AI can be seen in the two screenshots below:

Via an email from Pavillion ELT – abstract of a forthcoming webinar.
Via Sandy Millin’s summary of Ciaran Lynch’s MaW SIG PCE talk at IATEFL 2025.

Both of these screenshots set voice against AI-generated content. The first one (which looks like an interesting webinar – Wednesday 14th May between 1600 and 1700 London time in case you might like to attend!) seems to be about helping learners develop their own voice in another language and suggests that this aspect of language learning is of greater importance in a world full of AI output. The second is in the context of materials writing, and highlights an issue that arises in the use of AI in creating materials – “lacks teachers’ unique voice”. The speaker goes on to offer a framework for using AI to help with materials writing while avoiding the problems listed in the above screenshot. (See Sandy Millin’s write up for further information! The post actually collects all of her write-ups of the MaW SIG 2025 PCE talks in a single post – good value! 🙂 )

I teach academic skills including writing to primarily foundation and occasionally pre-masters students who want to go on and study at Sheffield University. In the last year, we’ve been overhauling our syllabus, partially in response to one of our assessments being retired and partially in response to the proliferation of generative AI. Our goal is to move from complete prohibition of AI to responsible use of it. And I suppose, one thing we hope to achieve from that is reach a point where students may or may not choose to use AI in certain elements of their assessment but actively avoid it in others. This, I think, has some overlap with Ciaran Lynch’s framework for writing materials:

Via Sandy Millin’s summary of Ciaran Lynch’s MaW SIG PCE talk at IATEFL 2025.

Maybe we need a similar framework/workflow for our students that succinctly captures when and how AI use might be helpful and when it is to be avoided. And I think voice is part of the key to that! But what exactly is voice? In terms of writing, according to Mhilli (2023),

“authorial voice is the identity of the author reflected in written discourse, where written discourse should be understood as an ever evolving and dynamic source of language features available to the writer to choose from to express their voice. To clarify further, authorial identity may encapsulate such extra-discoursal features as race, national origin, age, or gender. Authorial voice, in contrast, comprises, only those aspects of identity that can be traced in a piece of writing”.

[I recommend having a read of this article, if you are interested in the concept of voice! Especially regarding the tension between writers’ authentic L1 voice and the constraints of academic writing in terms of genre and linguistic features (which vary across fields).]

In terms of essay writing, and our students (who are only doing secondary research), if they are copying large chunks of text from generative AI, then they are not manipulating available language features to express meaning/their voice, they are merely doing the written equivalent of lip-synching. I think this is still the case if they use it for paraphrasing because paraphrasing is influenced by your stance towards what you are paraphrasing and how you are using the information. I suppose students could in theory prompt AI to take a particular stance in writing a paraphrase or explain how they plan to use the information but they would also need to be able to evaluate the output and assess whether it meets that brief sufficiently. In which case, would it save them much time or effort? Would the outcome be truer to the student’s own voice? I wonder. Of course, the assessment’s purpose and criteria would influence whether not that use was acceptable.

On the other hand, if students use AI to help them come up with keywords for searches and then look at titles and abstracts, and choose which sources to read in more depth, select ideas, engage with those ideas, evaluate them, synthesise them and organise it all into an essay, using language features available to them, then that incorporates use of AI but definitely doesn’t obscure their voice and the ownership of the essay is still very much with the student rather than with AI. They could even get AI to list relevant ideas for the essay title (with full awareness that any individual idea might be partly or fully a hallucination), thereby giving them a starting point of possible things to consider, and compare those with what they find in the literature. This (and the greyer area around paraphrasing explored above) suggests that a key element that underpins voice is that of criticality. Perhaps we could also describe it as active (and informed) use rather than passive use.

Another issue regarding voice in a world of AI generated output, which I have also come across recently lies in the use of AI detection tools:

From “AI, Academic Integrity and Authentic Assessment: An Ethical Path Forward for Education“

If ESL and autistic voices are more likely to be flagged as AI generated content, then our AI detection tools do not allow space for these authentic voices. These findings point to a need to be very careful in the assumptions we make. I’m sure we’ve all looked at a piece of work and gone “this was definitely written by AI, it’s so obvious!” at some point. Hopefully our conclusions are based on our knowledge of our students, and their linguistic abilities, previous work produced under various conditions and so on. However, for submissions that are anonymised this is no longer possible. I think, rather than relying on detection tools, we need to work towards making our assessments and the criteria by which we assess robust enough to negate the need for such tools. Either way, the findings would also suggest that the webinar described in screenshot no. 1 may be very pertinent for teachers in our field. (I wonder if the speakers have come across instances of that line of research too?! I increasingly get the impression that schedule-willing, I may be attending that webinar!)

Finally, this excerpt from a Guardian article about AI and human intelligence I think provides perhaps the most important reason for helping students to develop their voice and not sidestep this through use of AI:

“‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?” – Helen Thomson writing for The Guardian, Saturday 19th April 2025

We want those Eureka moments! We want the richness of what diversity of thought brings to the table. (It is baffling to see Diversity, Equality and Inclusion initiatives being dismantled willy nilly in the U.S. – everybody loses out from that. But then, so much of what goes on these days is baffling.) Maybe something small we can do is help our students realise that their voice, as every voice, is important and that diluting it and losing it through ineffective use of AI makes the world a poorer place. I haven’t even touched on AI and image production or AI and spoken production but this blog post is long enough already (maybe I should have got AI to summarise it for me! 😉 ) so I will leave that for another post!

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Using Adobe Firefly for Image Generation

Have you used Adobe Firefly before? Me neither. But we have free access to it via the University and the TEL team has used it, and so did a session for us on it. It can be used to for images to put in lesson handouts and slides, but also online platforms like Wooclap and Quizlet.

You write a prompt in a box and it generates images.

This was a scenario given to us:

Prompt 1: an image of 4 students in a discussion. This was the result:

Issues: There are 3 students and teacher. They look quite young while we teach university age students. Three of them are blonde so it isn’t a good representation of our students. So this is an example of the bias that exists in AI in an automatic result with no detail prescribed in the prompt.

Prompt 2: an image of 4 university students from diverse background in a discussion. This was the result:

Problems: They are not in a classroom.

Adding “seated” (to be more typical of a classroom):

Not a perfect picture (looks a bit like an airport…) but better than the first picture! In terms of the purpose of generating the image, this would probably work. Prompt writing/editing for Adobe Firefly tends to take multiple iterations before you get something you might be happy to use.

We were given the following tips:

  • add more detail to get better results;
  • be aware of bias as you engineer prompts and evaluate the outcome;
  • be picky – it may take several iterations to get what you want. Sometimes a fairly simple prompt immediately yields a satisfactory outcome but usually it takes a bit more effort. Particularly to produce an outcome that is suitably representative for an international student population.

Adobe Firefly has a lot of stock images that it draws on which means the quality is better than similar counterparts.

Once you have generated an image you can also edit it to a certain extent. Which is good as the first images you get can have arm melds, funny shaped heads and so forth! It’s not very good with limbs. A central human image may be fine but anyone in the background or if you require groups/more people, then problems abound! Despite these issues, Firefly is better at it than Gemini.

So al very cool but actually stock images like Pixabay (and creative commons licensed like Flickr – in particular ELTpics – if the context is suitable), i.e. human generated, are much less resource-intensive to use. So, don’t get too carried away by the “it’s so cool” thing. I tend to use Google image search and the appropriate level of license filter, personally.

My general impression: I can’t currently see an Adobe Firefly – shaped hole in my life that needs filling. I wonder if in 5 years time I will look back on this post with an “oh you innocent child” type lens or not?! Time will tell! It was a good session though, after being shown the prompts and pitfalls, we went into a breakout group and had to come up with prompts for another scenario. Unfortunately in my group, none of us had access sorted out yet so we couldn’t test the prompts we wrote.

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Looking forward: My Resolutions/Goals for 2025

In the interests of starting 2025 on a positive note, I thought I would set myself a few goals/New Year Resolutions. Before starting to write this post, however, I had a look at previous years and what I have blogged about at the start of the year, wondering what past goals had been, and noticed a handful of things:

  • I have actually tended to do more goal-setting at the start of the academic year rather than the calendar year in most instances, when I have done it.
  • Burnout at various points has impacted my goal-setting (before the pandemic: driving a shift from working 5 days to working 4 days which began in September 2020 but was initiated pre-pandemic; during the pandemic: well, obviously….and thank goodness for the afore-mentioned shift part way through; and since the pandemic: the combination of house-buying, house-renovating, wedding planning and moving – the latter 3 all in 2023 and interspersed with ill health – did for me quite comprehensively.)
  • When I did do it at the start of 2017, I drew on this slide from a presentation I had done for EVO (quoting EVO via that blog post – Every year in January and February, the Electronic Village Online (a project of TESOL’s Computer-Assisted Language Learning Interest Section) brings together English language educators from around the world to engage in free, collaborative, online professional development sessions, – not sure if it is still running now!):

So I suppose this blog post, once complete, will be fulfilling the grey italics regarding motivation at the bottom of the slide.

Coming up with something that is “challenging and difficult yet realistic” is, itself…challenging, I feel! Hitting that sweet spot requires both a good degree of self-awareness and, perhaps, of humility. It’s so easy to aim too high and miss realistic. On the other hand, if one lacks awareness and confidence, it might be equally easy to aim too far the other way and pick something that you duly achieve but is perhaps less satisfying than it might be. This time last year, “challenging” was simply surviving and carrying out my job duties. Nevertheless, I managed to do quite a bit of CPD last year, which goes to show that you don’t necessarily need goals in order to achieve things! It can be a more organic process. If we consider our minds and bodies as our primary tools, they won’t be good for getting anything done if we don’t look after them so that has to come first before the rest can follow. Last summer holiday was certainly much-needed recovery time for me.

So what of this year? Well, so far so good… I had an extra week of leave which meant that as well as doing the famiy Christmas visiting marathon (1 week) and being ill (10 days), I did have a couple of days of real down time and didn’t have to start work while still poorly. This makes a huge difference wellbeing-wise and motivation-wise, the latter because I have actual energy and, also important, ability to generate positivity. This year is going to be very challenging due to external factors but things will unfold as they unfold regardless of what my brain is doing. Which leads me to…

Resolution 1

Channel my brain into positive and creative pursuits (rather than only using it for worrying). Too fluffy? Well what it looks like is:

  • doing more writing: blogging – I’ve not done much blogging recently, up until the second half of last semester when I got started again. I want to do more this year!
  • doing more writing: creative writing (fiction) – I’d done no creative writing since about 2016 or so until last week (life has been a LOT) but oh the joy it’s brought already in the short time I’ve been back at it. 🙂
  • creative writing development: I’ve started a course by Malorie Blackman on BBC Maestro about writing YA fiction. My sister gave it to me for my birthday in 2022 and I’ve only now got round to using it!
  • being curious about my students and my team of teachers and using that to feed innovation in how I support them.
  • doing more piano, while not linking success or failure to specific quantities: this may seem to fly in the face of measurability but I have realised that in the past I have set myself time-limited goals e.g. do a bit every day, or x days a week or whatever, and then when I’ve missed sessions I’ve been more likely to then not do it for a spell because missing the session felt like failure. So this time, I will count each time I do it as a success, regardless of whether it’s day 10 in a row or the first day in 2 weeks. After all, it is a pleasure not a rod to beat myself with!
  • learning: doing CPD always brings me great satisfaction and so does learning new things outside of work. I want to do both whenever I can (albeit not simultaneously)! Within this lies continuing preparation and exploration for my future Ed Doc. As well as information-based things, I’d like to learn how to crochet but I’ve never done it before so it needs maybe a holiday in which I am not ill to have the brain space possibly… We shall see!

My next resolution, to balance out no.1, will focus on the physical:

Resolution 2

Prioritise physical wellbeing. I’m no spring chicken and am at that delightful age and stage where I’m actively losing muscle if I’m not working hard to maintain it! Physical health and wellbeing also have an impact on mental health and wellbeing. Too fluffy? Well, what it looks like is:

  • do a regular bouldering session at the bouldering wall: once a week on a Tuesday is doable when I have my NAW
  • Do an additional strength training session one day a week.
  • Keep running 4 times a week (on 2 x work days I go out before breakfast! Which is a lot more enjoyable in daylight once the days get longer!!)
  • Do yoga regularly – I predict being able to manage this approx 5 times a week (my timetable on Thursday and Friday isn’t so amenable to it!)
  • Do lots of gardening (great for getting fresh air and bits of exercise; a short burst of weeding or digging could be a perfect 10 minute break…)

So, that’s me…but something is missing and it is the basis of my final 2 resolutions…

Resolution 3

Put time and effort into my marriage. Too fluffy? Well, what it looks like is:

  • Support my wife in achieving her own goals.
  • Prioritise spending time with her regularly.
  • Continue team-working everything effectively!

I am lucky in having a wonderful marriage but I never will take it for granted!

Resolution 4

(On the topic of not taking things for granted…) Make time for family and friends. Too fluffy? Well, what it looks like is:

  • make the effort to get in touch with friends/family
  • make the effort to see friends/family
  • balance this with my need for solitary downtime/recovery (I need to recognise this need because otherwise I will inevitably burn out!)

So, that covers mental, physical, emotional/connectional areas and encompasses personal, social and professional domains. Circling back to the diagram, these resolutions/goals deliberately don’t have any completion dates as such, because they are ongoing, regular things rather than one-offs. They don’t appear clear and specific on the face of it but I have a clear and specific idea of what they look like in practice, which suffices. Being ongoing things, they are all both proximal and distal. In terms of measurability and ability to be evaluated, I can do this simply by looking back on each day/week/month and seeing what I’ve done. I think they are definitely realistic…are they challenging and difficult (enough)? Well, all the examples require effort to do, but they are positive and uplifting so it is effort I will be happy to make! I do think if our resolutions/goals are uplifting and/or inspire us, we are more likely to carry them out! I would add that as a principle. 🙂

What are your goals/resolutions for this year? Whatever they are, Happy 2025 to you! Let’s hope it is as kind to us all as it can be.

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Gen AI and Independent Learning

This was the title of the English with Cambridge Webinar that I watched today (linked so you can watch it too – recommended!) It’s divided into 3 parts – what autonomy is, activities learners can do with Gen AI to learn autonomously and risks to avoid. This post will offer a brief summary of that, followed by some ideas and thoughts of my own.

The first activity is to design an autonomous learner, sharing ideas in the chat. The usual kind of things came up – motivation, confidence, agency, enthusiasm. These wre compared with the literature e.g. Holec (1981) – “the autonomous learner can take charge of their own learning” but the speaker said we need to unpackage and update this. So that, it does involve the ideas that were put in the chat, as well as ability to manage their time and resources, awareness of learning strategies, resourceful (e.g. would think to ask an AI chatbot) but also critical (won’t just accept the response without evaluating it). However, teachers are also very important in the process – autonomous learners aren’t born but are made, with support from teachers. This is important because if you are autonomous, you will achieve better results and improve more quickly. Also, autonomy is important beyond language learning, in the work place, in personal lives etc – it is a lifelong learning and living skill. It goes hand in hand with critical thinking, which is also a key skill. You are also likely to be have better confidence and self-esteem.

The other speaker reminds us that most AI tools require users to be a certain age. E.g. ChatGPT is not for under 13’s and 13-18 year olds need parental consent. So, if you do any activities with students, ensure they are old enough to use them and whether you need parental consent. Then some activities:

  1. Using the Chatbot as a writing tutor. This is a back and forth process, where the student asks the Chatbot to highlight the mistakes but not correct them. The student then tries to correct the mistakes and repeats the activity. They need to tell the Chatbot explicitly not to correct them. This could go through several iterations until the learner has had enough, at which point they prompt the Chatbox to explain the mistakes. “What about this sentence? What is wrong with it? <sentence>” NB: the Chatbot can make mistakes – it can say there are mistakes when there aren’t.
  2. We were shown a sort of tabulated study plan for improving writing and asked what we think the prompt might have been to generate it. Critically: if you want something useful, you need to be very detailed in your prompt to get something useful back from the Chatbot. It was something along the lines of “My teacher says my writing has xyz problems, and I want to take a B1 writing test in 4 weeks. I will have to write x and y. Can you make a study plan for me in a table. Can you include information about what I should do and what resources I should use.”
  3. Similar to the above, we were shown a visual idiom guide and asked what we thought the prompt was. It was something along the lines of “I have to learn these phrases for next week. I’m not a patient student and I think I have dsylexia. Can you suggest some study guides. <Phrases>.
  4. Intonation – Voice chat in ChatGPT. You speak into your phone and you get audio back. “I’ve got to do a presentation. I think my intonation is flat. Can you help me? <Short extract from presentation> And ChatGPT can make suggestions. You can keep going back and forth. Say it again and ask for further suggestions.

(I recommend watching the webinar to receive a full presentation of these ideas!)

The final part of the webinar deals with the risks of using AI and how to avoid them. There was a poll asking “Has AI ever misunderstood you?” – There were a lot of answers with “yes”. AI is not faultless and doesn’t always understand. Then we are asked to think about what overreliance on AI might look at. Lack of creativity, quite formulaic answers, repetitive were ideas that came up from the audience. To avoid these risks, we need to train learners not to use AI too much. This is also where critical thinking comes in – learners need to be able to make effective choices in use of AI. We want learners to be confident users of AI but in a critical way. We want them to be thinking and reflecting on things like is AI useful, is it doing what it needs to do. Questioning them regularly, getting them to keep a journal of keeping it – when they used it, why, the result, would they use it again – to get them to think about how effective it is. Offering yourself as a resource in terms of support in using AI, that learners can talk to you and get advice when they want to. Cambridge Life Competencies Framework was talked about – there are freely available activities to use with students.

An example activity from this:

This can be used on a text that Generative AI has produced, to encourage students to question what is produced.

Another activity was to ask students to use for a chosen stage of a task. They should explain where they will use it, why they decided to use it for that stage of the task and then reflect on the outcome. This should be a supportive, encouraging environment. The key thing is encouraging reflection.

The final question was “Are you an autonomous learner?” directed at us teachers. We need to build up our knowledge and understanding of things like AI. This will enable us to be able to give support and advice to students. Turn activities into your own, adapted to your own context. We should also be a learning community in terms of AI, as it is new for us all. This would create a supportive environment rather than one of fear for using it in the wrong way.

The webinar concluded with 3 things to keep in mind: Purpose – you need a reason for using AI, don’t use it for the sake of it or because you think you should. Have a plan. Make it sure it fits the purpose. Privacy – any data that you put into GenAI chat becomes part of the data that the Chatbot uses. So anything you put it can be repeated to other users. Therefore don’t enter personal data about you, your learners or anyone else into it. You should also not put copyrighted things into it if you don’t own it. Planet – the use of GenAI has an effect on sustainability in terms of the environment and society as a whole.

My thoughts and ideas

The first thing that I couldn’t help thinking was that when I was learning Italian intensively and autonomously in the summer of 2014, I would have LOVED to have had access to GenAI! Being able to get instant basic feedback on my writing would have been very cool. I wonder how competent I would have been at handling the feedback i.e. at identifying which parts were valid and which parts were sketchy.

There’s also an AI tool we learnt about in one of the AI professional development sessions delivered at work, Google Notebook, where you can feed it a bunch of content and it converts it into a podcast which is a discussion between 2 “people”, in passably natural spoken language. It is called a “Deep Dive”. The usual AI caveats apply, in that what it churns out in the podcast may not be accurate to what was fed to it and it might make stuff up. Personally, I would have loved using it for Italian learning though. It would be really good for generating content to listen to, using topics and vocabulary that you have some familiarity with. You could read the texts in preparation. I don’t believe this is the intended purpose of the tool (it is supposed to be a research assistant, and you are effectively outsourcing reading and summarising texts to AI) but it would be a very good use of it! It would also mean the issue of accuracy was less acute, given the purpose of listening to the podcast/summary would be to practise listening rather than to make high stakes decisions based on that output!

Where I work, we’ve mostly been coming at it from the perspective of how to conduct assessments in a world where AI exists and students use it in the production of their written work. Being part of a university, the first stage was waiting for there to be university policy on it. Now we are at the stage of being able to integrate the policy into our programme. It is still a slow process as there is a lot of procedure to follow when you bring in new things. We are shifting from a zero tolerance policy, which obviously was not very effective but all we had to be going on with, to identifying how and when AI could be used effectively in students’ learning and where the boundaries are. We want to integrate positive use into lessons, which echoes what this webinar was saying. By modelling effective use and giving students opportunities to use it with support, and highlighting its limitations, we hope to help them become more AI literate and therefore less likely to use it in detrimental ways. Maybe at some point we will have to teach them about Google Note and the limitations of it, since it is likely something that they could use at university as part of their process.

It is nice to be moving towards a position in which we can acknowledge the positive elements of AI. Of course, as quickly as we adapt, so quickly will it continue to evolve. (The tools we learnt about in the session where we learnt about the “Deep Dive” – wow! I may turn my notes. or at least some of them, from that session into a future blog post…) I think, going back to the webinar at the root of this post, one of the great things about it (the webinar, that is) is that the skills and criticality, and ideas for teaching those which were presented, will continue to be equally relevant even though the ideas for using the AI itself will change and evolve. As for the part about learner autonomy, in my view they nailed it – it was so good to see them discussing it as something to bring into the classroom and develop (I have done a lot of work on that in my career – through classroom research, through publication, through conference presentations and webinars) rather than something that learners are or aren’t. So, as I said before, it IS definitely worth a watch! Also worth taking some time to look at the Cambridge Life Competencies framework and resources attached to it.