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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.

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Tracking Professional Development

How do you keep track of your professional development? Where I work, we have a log (a Google sheet) which is shared with us at the start of each calendar year and which it is our responsibility to keep up to date. There are two elements (each with its own tab on the sheet),

1) Training log (mandatory) – “21 hours per calendar year, with a balance where possible between centre-wide development, programme-specific development and external development. These activities may include online or face-to-face training courses, talks, and workshops.”

2) Scholarship log (optional) – “…scholarship can be defined as broad and varied activities which are personal, but structured and reflective in their nature. This could be done by further qualifications or research. […] The definition of scholarship is knowledge acquired by study. In the context of learning and teaching, it might mean evaluating the impact of new approaches in your teaching or carrying out projects to answer specific pedagogical questions.”

I think it is good to have this framework for recording development, as otherwise I’ll attend stuff/watch stuff/do stuff, blog about some of it, but not have an overview. Recently 4C in ELT posted asking “How often do you actually seek out recordings to talks you missed and watch them?” – I was able to look at the log and identify at least 12 (there’s another session I watched via recording too that I haven’t yet added!) for this calendar year. I like accessing sessions via recording because then I can pause them whenever I want to (for a wee, to get a cup of tea, to have a thinking break…). Anyway, in total, in this calendar year, to date (it’s not over yet, for all it’s December already!), I’ve logged 129hrs in my training log (!)

The biggest chunk of that, weighing in at 50 hours, is the Instructional Design course I have completed this semester. 10 weeks, at 5hours per week. (The course reckons 5-6 hrs per week so I took the lower bound for logging purposes.) It includes synchronous tasks and a weekly one hour Google Meet session. There is also an optional assessment, creating materials using one of the tools which I did in a race against time, while I still had access to the free trial of the tool in question! It wasn’t a rush job but there were definitely extra hours squeezed into those weeks! I have been fitting the course in around everything else, piecemeal – Google Calendar and Google Keep have been my very good friends this semester, for keeping track of everything going on. (There are two more weeks of the course, but I’ve logged the course as one entry using the lower bound of the time, as otherwise there would be a million mini-entries of time spent! Suffice it to say it is unlikely to be *less* than what I’ve logged, much more likely to be more!)

The second biggest chunk, at 48hrs, was a FutureLearn Expert Track (which is a set of courses on a particular theme) – Autism: Developing Knowledge of Autistic Experiences:

I completed this Expert Track during the summer holidays this year – 4 courses, 4 weeks each, 3hrs per week. However, I did them in a more compressed time frame – more hours per week, fewer weeks. Hyperfocus is a wonderful thing!

So, those two, between them, account for nearly 100hrs out of the 129. It’s inevitable that a course is going to represent a larger number of hours than one-off things can. A distant third, in terms of chunks of hours, is the ELTC Away Day which accounted for 6hrs: A morning of talks and an afternoon of workshops, all F2F. For me the highlight of the day was the session in the afternoon about the EdDoc run by Sheffield University’s School of Education. In an ideal world I’d like to start doing one in the academic year 2026-2027. Since that session, which took place in late September, I’ve come up with an idea and started doing some reading around it – though the Instructional Design course temporarily moved further reading/preparation to the back burner (time is finite, however hard I hyperfocus!). Close behind the Away Day, in terms of hours, was a “slow conference” called Feminism X EAP, which I spent 4hrs on, not consecutively but over the course of a week or so. It seems a long time ago now, but it took place between the 9th and 15th May. It was really interesting, Story – by Bea Bond. It was Activity 2/3 on Thursday 9th May::

I recommend having a read! I hope there will be another slow conference next year, I’d never participated in one before but it is a format that really appeals to me.

The remaining hours have mostly been made up of watching recordings of various sessions and attending a small number of live online sessions too. Many of the recorded sessions I found via MyDevlopment which is our university professional development portal, combining internally made content and curated external content. Through it I discovered a treasure trove of webinars hosted by CareScribe – and in seeking out this link, I notice that there are a number of new ones which I am keen to watch when I can! Carescribe focus on neurodiversity and was founded by an NHS doctor, strategy consultant and software engineer in 2020, and the tag for their events page goes thus: “We run free online events to raise awareness and support neurodiversity in the workplace. See what talks are coming next and sign up below.” Highly recommended.

I wouldn’t have known about them without MyDevelopment, where some of the recordings are linked to as part of the curation side. I suppose one of the challenges of development is finding the sessions to attend (or watch via recording) in the great jungle of the internet. We are quite lucky in this regard. We have MyDevelopment, as already discussed, but it is a university-wide platform so it doesn’t curate ELT-specific content. However, our TD team put out a weekly bulletin via Google Workspace highlighting external opportunities amongst which webinars and recordings. There is also an internal one highlighting sessions the TD team is hosting and also sessions that University are running relating to education in general e.g. about AI, about Blackboard Ultra, about how to teach inclusively etc. Examples of sessions I’ve attended live online via MyDevelopment are Supporting Dyslexic Students and Students with SpLD and Supporting Students on the Autism Spectrum.

In terms of ELT-specific online sessions and recordings, there has been plenty of AI-focused content delivered and recorded by the ELTC TEL team, which I have accessed via a mixture of watching recordings on our ELTC TD portal (separate from My Development, just for our department) and attending live online when I can. I have also watched an older recording about pronunciation teaching in EAP by Gemma Archer (of Strathclyde University, at least at that time). In terms of external content, there was a recording of a Penny Ur session called “Getting them to talk in English” which lives on YouTube, recommended by Sandy Millin in one of her TYT Delta Newsletters (you don’t have to be doing the Delta to benefit from them!).

All in all, it has been a good (calendar) year for development, though I’ve not done much blogging. I think I’ve ended up instead with bits and bobs of notes – in the development log, in google docs linked to in the development log. Thank goodness for the development log, without it I would be like “ehhh I didn’t do THAT much development this year really, did I…how remiss of me” because it all becomes part of the blur of everything else we get up to at work (or in the summer holidays in the case of the Expert Track!) – but all evidence points to the contrary! Perhaps one of my New Year’s resolutions for next year will be to write more blog posts linked to the things I do for development/my reflections on it! (Perhaps I could put some of the links in the other tab of the scholarship log, which for this year is rather empty…)

Anyway, circling back to the question at the start of this post (and congratulations if you made this far!) – how *do* you keep track of your development? Do you have an effective system for it? And also do you have any links to cool stuff you’ve read or watched that you could share with me so that I can have a look too? 🙂 I look forward to hearing from you via the comments!

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My list of in-house workshops

On my Talks page you can find links to all the talks/workshops I have done externally i.e. at events like conferences (both online and face to face), as a guest speaker, and as webinars. In this post, I have finally got round to listing and, where relevant linking to, all the workshops and scholarship circles I’ve led or co-led as part of in-house CPD programmes, both in my previous job at IH Palermo and my current job at the University of Sheffield’s ELTC. 

ELTC

IH Palermo

  • Fostering Learner Autonomy
  • Take-away from IATEFL 2013
  • Error correction workshop
  • Using Edmodo
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Instructional Design Course

I am 8/10 weeks through the Instructional Design course (link) run by some of the good ELTC TEL team folk. Their site is called The Training Foundry and on it you can find information about the courses, but also webinar recordings and blog posts. It’s pretty cool. This is the subtitle for the Instructional Design course (IDC):

“Our Instructional Design for Language Teachers course can help experienced teachers design flipped and asynchronous materials.”

It is a 10 week course and I would quite happily recommend it to anyone who is interested in principles of online learning and learning to use a variety of tools to design asynchronous content. It has a weekly live online session (using Google Meet), and each week there are also a series of tasks to complete. There is interaction between students (sharing output, commenting on others’ output etc) via a forum.

Most of the tools that we’ve learnt the basics in were actually new to me (with the exception of Google Slides [Week 1] but even with that I learnt new things about it!):

  • Wordwall

Wordwall (link) is a very user-friendly tool. It is subscription-based but I haven’t taken out a subscription, just using the limited free version for the purposes of the course. You can make the usual array of ELT activities. One I particularly like is called Word wheel. You input words and it creates a wheel in which each word is a segment of the wheel (looks sort of like a pie chart with equally sized segment). You can “spin” it and it will stop at random on one of the words you have input. You could then get students to define it (as we had to do in one of our online lessons, using vocabulary from an article we had read), for example.

Another online-based tool for making asynchronous content. Also requires a subscription but it offers a free trial which served the purposes of the course. It is pretty versatile. You input information into a form and it spits out an activity. You can also e.g. create a voice recording tool that you could embed into a page on your platform, or whatever asynchronous content tool you were using, for students to use for an activity, make interactive video activities, activities using pictures and much more.

As you can see, my free trial is coming to an end. I’ve had a good play with it though and really like it. But it is EXPENSIVE! So it is something that a business/institution/self-employed person might invest in rather than an individual. Our TEL team has access via institutional subscription, for example. I find it really visually appealing and quite intuitive to use. Interactive elements are built in, if a little limited. But limitations are lifted because you can also embed interactive content from e.g. H5P, Quizlet or its sister tool Storyline (see below for more information about this one!).

  • Storyline

This one, you have to download a programme onto your computer to do it rather than using it in a web browser. It is part of RISE so you can find it there. No screenshot because it only runs natively in Windows and I decided therefore to use an old spare Windows laptop (creak creak creak!) rather than subject my even older Macbook to “Parallels” which is required in order to run it. (Said macbook makes enough take-off noises for using Google meet, so! But for as long as it limps along, I shall use it!!) However, it effectively looks like powerpoint when you open the programme. The area you are working with is slide-shaped/screen-shaped. But unlike powerpoint it has a lot more power in the interactivity department. It has a timeline, it has “layers”, it has “triggers” and all sorts. The newest version also has AI stuff inbuilt. All of this stuff enables you to create a lot of interactivity in various ways. It gives you a 2 week free trial before kicking you out in the absence of a giant pile of moolah. We spent two weeks of the course on it because there is a lot to learn. You would use this if you were creating materials for a course that you were planning to run multiple times because it is a big time investment that is required to create stuff. At the ELTC it is used a lot for flipped content for the summer school and at the bit where I am (USIC) it is used as the basis of most if not all of the interactive content that we embed onto Blackboard for learners, to support the learning done live online and F2F.

In terms of using the interface, I struggled because using it on a computer that hasn’t got strong processing powers and hasn’t got a big screen, it made it even more time-consuming than it should be. Everything is tiny (the parts where you control the “layers”, the timeline and all that jazz) and you have to generate previews to check what you did works properly on a regular basis, and the computer had to strain really hard each time!

The rest of the course

This week we’ve been working on using video in online learning. Which, again, is very time-consuming and requires decent (probably fairly expensive) equipment to produce high quality stuff. We have learnt a bit about video editing (which I have done a little bit of myself in a hobbytastic kind of way!). Still to come in the final two weeks is zooming out to consider more about designing a whole course rather than sub-parts of it and then a final wrapping up and moving forwards week.

It’s been really nice to learn how to use all these different tools and challenge myself in this way. The final assessment was creating a storyboard and run of lessons in Articulate RISE and I am happy with what I have made for that (I have completed it early because of the whole free trial running out thing!). I based it on an AES listening exam lecture. It was also of course interesting to study some of the theory around online learning, as well as focus on making content accessible (which is a legal requirement!). Overall I think the course works really well, building each week on previous content and progressing logically, and the live online sessions definitely complemented the tasks and forum part.

Have you used any of these tools? Which ones do you favour? Do you use any other tools which I haven’t mentioned? There is a lot to keep abreast of, isn’t there!

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Supporting autistic students (Carly Miller, Leeds University)

On 29th November 2023, I attended a webinar, “Supporting autistic students”, run by NATESOL and delivered by Carly Miller, who is a disability coordinator at Leeds University. This post will use the slides she so kindly provided to summarise the session and reflect on what she said, relating it to my own experience and practice.

These were the aims and objectives:

Carly started with defining the social and the medical models of disability:

In the medical model, the disability itself is the barrier, while in the social model it is the environment and society that create the barriers. Of course the session being delivered by Carly ascribes to the social model given that it is to raise awareness of autism and how to make there be fewer barriers for autistic students.

Next was the definition of autism:

Here is a very helpful explanation of how the autism spectrum works, explaining that it is not linear (and nowadays labels such as “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” are increasingly being moved away from) and illustrating how someone with autism usually has a spiky profile in terms of challenges and strengths. There is thought to be a genetic component but not a straightforward “this gene makes this happen” one. There is no cure. Going back to the disability models, in particular the social model of disability, many problems experienced by autistic people arise from trying to operate in a neurotypical world with a brain that perceives things differently from neurotypical brains. Hence this session.

Next Carly explained the diagnosis process in England:

As is clear from the above, it is difficult to get a diagnosis. Carly told us that she has been on the waiting list since she got on to it after the pandemic, having noticed during the pandemic various aspects that made her suspect she was autistic. As with everything NHS-related, it takes a long time. For example, I saw my GP on the 7th November and got referred to be assessed, but at the time of writing have yet to know whether I have been accepted on to the waiting list! Fortunately, at the university, despite not having a diagnosis yet, I have been able to request and get a reasonable adjustment in place to alleviate my sensory sensitivities (one of the possible elements of autism). Carly also suggested that depression, anxiety and/or trauma are frequent consequences of being autistic and may lead to it being diagnosed but that they are not autism, they are just the result of the way in which autistic individuals must operate in a neuronormative world, in which we are viewed through a medicalising lens:

So…what is autism then? Here is Carly’s summary of it:

Autism is a type of neurology/neurological system. Autistic brains take in more information and they process it differently, resulting in different output. Different rather than worse/broken/disordered. Diagnostically, however, the criteria are framed as deficits/viewed negatively and that is linked to the historical evolution of autism and autistic brains as a concept. (Asperger and Kanner are the earliest people to have worked on it scientifically, and at the time Eugenics was very dominant…). According to Carly, approximately 1 in 100 people are diagnosed as autistic but that is potentially a huge underestimate. (Somewhat unsurprisingly given the barriers to getting diagnosed.) Part of the underestimate relates to what she discussed next – autism and females:

The stereotypical autistic person is a white, cis-het young male. (I believe this is at least partly due to the early work published by Asperger and Kanner focusing on boys – at the time, girls were more likely to be dismissed as “feeble-minded” and institutionalised for being different – though they did also work with girls, and diagnostic criteria developing accordingly.) However, there is no ‘female autism’. Rather, the spectrum of traits associated with autism is broad and autistic peoples’ ability to mask is also varied, regardless of their gender. Of course, masking also contributes to diagnostic barriers. For example, if the person doing the diagnosing observes an autistic person making eye contact during the diagnosis, that might count against them being diagnosed when in fact they have learned to make eye contact in order to be acceptable, and carry it out with discomfort. Carly summarises thus:

(For anybody who isn’t aware, “stims” are usually repetitive movements which autistic people do either because it feels good or as a coping mechanism when overstimulated. The stereotypical one is rocking backwards and forwards but autistic people often find ways to stim that are less noticeable when around people e.g. tapping a foot, twiddling hair, fidgeting with an object.) Eye contact is an important one to think about in the context of teaching. We are taught that eye contact and sitting still shows that someone is paying attention. For an autistic person it more likely means they are working hard on doing the eye contact thing and sitting still, but therefore have less brain available to actually take in what is being said/the content of the lesson. So as teachers we need to accept that traditional images of what good learning looks likes do not apply across the board. This is an example that leads nicely into what Carly talked about next:

What this slide illustrates is that generally, when a neurotypical person is talking with another neurotypical person, and when an autistic person is talking with another autistic person, communication is generally successful. However, when a neurotypical person and an autistic person communicate, there is a much higher chance for communication issues/breakdown/misunderstandings. (Diagnostically, this is framed as an autistic deficit, of course!)

A personal example of things going wrong that fits nicely here: We were unpacking the car and I was holding the keys and a bunch of other stuff that had been in the car. My wife asked me to put everything inside. So I did. Came back out, we got some more stuff and she asked me where the keys were, in order to lock the car. They were inside, in the place where the keys go! Taking things literally is common in autistic people. (I now know that “everything” doesn’t apply to keys in this situation!) A teaching example that also fits nicely: I always did a brief meditation at the start of class with my students, setting it up as a routine at the start of the course. On one occasion, the second time I did with a particular group of students, after the “and then when you are ready, you can open your eyes” at the end, one student sat with their eyes closed for markedly longer than everyone else. “You said ‘when you are ready'” they said afterwards. Fair!

So, speaking of teaching, Carly next moved on to talking about what issues might arise in the higher education environment (NB much of it is applicable to any other teaching environment!):

It’s not first on the list but I am going to lead with “navigating the sensory environment” as that is something that neurotypical people do not typically perceive as a potential issue. Autistic people often are hypersensitive, hyposensitive or a combination of the two to their environment/what is happening. So, hypersensitive is when you are overstimulated by elements of the environment e.g. light (fluorescent lights in particular!), sound, smells, temperature and hyposensitive means experience low levels of sensory feedback. For example, I attended a work training day that took place in a room with lots of fluorescent strip lights and with lots of people who at times were all talking simultaneously (group work!) and at lunchtime instead of attending the lunch provided, I crept off to an empty classroom with the lights off and waited for it to stop hurting. (Spoiler: it didn’t fully stop hurting until the following afternoon!) In our classrooms, I usually switch some of the lighting off so that it is less overwhelming (fortunately most of the rooms enjoy a lot of natural light so it doesn’t mean we are sitting in semi-darkness! Obviously in winter this is trickier…).

Anyway, Carly focused on the common issues as follows:

Starting with processing:

If you are neurotypical, for “interference from sensory stimulation”, imagine you were trying to be a student in a language lesson that was taking place in a night club (ugh) or in a supermarket (ugh) at busy time. Imagine how it would feel trying to concentrate on what you were being taught and asked to do. How long might it take you to complete a task? For a student in your classroom, as well as hearing you, they hear (at the same volume) whatever is going on outside an open window/door, the air system, the lighting (yes lights are loud!), the noise of other people existing in the same space, possibly whispering, typing etc. So focusing on what you are saying/asking them to do is hard work! So how can we help? According to Carly:

What do we notice about this? Yup, it’s general good practice for the most part! But this is even more important for autistic learners and also any learners who are neurodivergent in whatever way. I would add: consider that the classroom doesn’t actually *need* to be maximally bright… Also, let students wear noise-cancelling earphones for individual tasks if they want to. And remember silence can be golden – as in, don’t be afraid of it! Pause for longer between instructions, allow longer thinking pauses before eliciting ideas. At the start of a task, give students a chance to get started before deciding they weren’t listening and approaching them. Also, don’t hint at what you want them to do because they probably won’t do it and it won’t be because they are being bloody minded!

Group work can be very hard work for autistic students. (If we think back to the double empathy thing) For starters, at school, you were probably the kid who nobody wanted to work in a group with because you were ‘weird’. You have to achieve a task, but you also have to figure out how to contribute while dealing with the noise of all the voices in the surrounding groups. Figure out when is the right time to try and say something without being rude e.g. for interrupting. Process what your group-mates are saying and be able to respond/contribute before they have moved on to another part of the task. All of which is compounded if the purpose of the task isn’t clear in the first place! These are Carly’s suggestions for addressing the issues:

So obviously task set-up is important. I think that is something that could also be helped by consistency – having a routine around how tasks are set up, started and brought to an end so that students know what to expect and what’s going to happen. Being clear with timings could also be helpful. Maybe at the start of a course, explicitly talking about group work and how to do it effectively. Maybe at the start of group work tasks, reminding students to find out what everybody in the group thinks about each element/idea/question/answer before moving on to the next.

Have you heard the saying “the perfect Ph.D is the finished Ph.D”? I imagine you can see from the above list that these students are likely to be the ones who don’t submit an assessment draft because it’s not finished/perfect enough, or who spend all the time on one part of the task (and do it really well!) but then don’t manage to finish the rest. The ones who worry a LOT about Everything. The ones who struggle when something unexpected happens and disrupts the usual way of things. Here are Carly’s suggestions:

I think an example of this from my teaching last year would be at the first draft of a 2500 word coursework essay stage. Students submit a “first draft” and get feedback on it, which should help them improve before the final submission. This time, because I had pre-masters students and they are notorious for being completely overloaded with assessments, I was very explicit, in multiple lessons and end-of-week emails, about my expectations for first draft submissions:

All students submitted a first draft (result!), drafts were widely varying degrees of complete (from the “at least” to the “best”). They all had at least an introduction, a conclusion and one body paragraph. The “at least” requirement was doable, even with all the drains on their time. It also hopefully helped all of the students who would otherwise have potentially submitted nothing rather than submitting something incomplete. I also did explain why “best” was best (maximum feedback potential) but that “at least” is also good/a success, not a failure, and so much better than nothing. Also, emphasising that “if you don’t submit anything, I can’t give you any feedback help you improve it” (I guess this is clarifying consequences and dealing with “what if I haven’t finished” type thoughts!). Anyway, back to the session:

Here is a good explanation of monotropism. (Note: it can also be positive!) In terms of challenges, changes of attention/focus (so transitions in lessons, transitions between lessons) can be difficult. Carly offered some strategies for dealing with perseveration when it becomes a problem.

I think it could be helpful, in addition to making sure task timings are clear ahead of the task, during the task (especially for longer tasks) give a good lead-time to the end of the activity. So firstly, making it clear when a task is a short task, a medium task or a longer task. With a short task (5 minutes), saying when two minutes are left, one minute. With a medium task (up to 15 minutes, say) 5 minutes, 2 minutes. With longer tasks, depending on the length, give a warning half way through, 10 minutes before the end, 5 minutes, 2 minutes. So that there is time for the student to take themselves out of that activity and be ready for the next. Depending on the type of task and the desired outcome, where relevant reassure students that it is ok if they haven’t finished by the allocated time. In terms of looped thinking and anxiety, personally I have found mindfulness meditation to be a game changer. This is why I persevere and will continue to persevere in introducing it at the start of a course and doing the short meditation at the start of each lesson thing – I wish someone had introduced me to it when I was a student! I think also it really eases the transition from the previous lesson to the current lesson as brains are all over the place when students come into the room.

Finally, Carly finished with her 10 top tips for working with autistic students:

I suppose a lot of this comes back to challenging our assumptions about what good learning looks like and what a good learner does and doesn’t do. Maybe when we are planning tasks, think also about how we expect the task to look when being done ‘right’ and then applying the double empathy lens. How else could it look? Is the student who isn’t talking much or who isn’t looking at me actually disengaged? What could we do in the task set-up to enable participation for those who struggle to participate? How might that participation look? What evidence of engagement can I look for outside of habitual ones? What problems might occur? How could we address them? Is there a way to set up the task so that students have more choice about how to participate? And when reflecting on tasks and lessons during and after the event, “are my students learning? how can I tell? how can I find out without viewing them through a neurotypical lens and judging accordingly?”. Then, of course, clarity. Be explicit and don’t assume knowledge! I think possibly also providing opportunities and being supportive, but accepting when students decline those opportunities because they are exhausted/overwhelmed. E.g. building in opportunities to speak, scaffolding/enabling them, but not taking it as a failure if students don’t use it quite as you’d hoped. Maybe having a more flexible framework for mentally evaluating that. Looking at the bigger picture, if you imagine students doing multiple lessons in a day in their various subjects, if we are all demanding speaking and group-work and whatnot, repeatedly, that’s exhausting. I suppose at university, there may be more of a spread of lectures and seminars/practicals, so in some lessons, students can just sit and listen/make notes (which brings other problems for autistic students e.g. around sensory sensitivities), others require more active participation. Maybe within a lesson, don’t assume that they have to be speaking/collaborating to be learning. Quiet tasks are valid too. Maybe all of this also comes back to getting to know your students. Rather than jumping to conclusions, learning about how they learn and what they look like when they are learning/confused/enthusiastic/worried etc.

That brings me to the end of this post (finally, I hear you say!). Here are the links that Carly left us with at the end of the session:

Feel free to share your comments of your own experience as an autistic person or from working with autistic students/people.

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Mindfulness for ELT Professionals by Trish Reilly 27 May 2022

This session was hosted by Rachael Roberts/ELT Freelance Professionals Lightbulb Moments/Earn, Learn, Thrive. (Link is to the Facebook Group that Rachael manages, where this session was advertised.)

Trish started with a little breathing exercise, breathing in and out 3 times. 3 breaths stop. Take 3 deep breaths, releasing each one fully. A little break from where we were to the present moment. Any time you need a quick reset, you can do your 3 breaths, without anyone even noticing. A quick, simple technique to learn and use – before a class, before a meeting.

She asked us “Where is your mind?”. We are often on autopilot. She told us a story of how she drove from home to ballet on autopilot and had no recollection how she got there. It’s very easy not to pay attention to what is happening. And before you know it, you’ve had 5 chocolate biscuits from the packet. Regular tasks can be done without fully engaging brains but it doesn’t help us with fully living our lives. Our bodies are here but where are our minds? We live in the story of me. We might be in the past thinking about regrets or anger or frustration. Going over and over things. Or we might be in the future worrying about something that will happen, or fearing it. The story of “what if…”

The mind is its own place and in itself can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell (John Milton). We can be in a tricky situation but if we can give ourselves space to be with what is, it can be a situation that we can gracefully take ourselves through. Our minds create our reality. How many thoughts do you think you might have in a day? is the next question. Research says we have up to 70,000 thoughts in a day, which is incredible when you think about it. Most of our thoughts are not real. Mindfulness helps us become more aware of our thoughts and emotions for what they are, thoughts and emotions not facts.

John Kabat-Zinn – “Mindfulness means to pay attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgementally.” We did a short bodyscan and I nodded off, oops. It is also a simple practice moving your attention from one body part to another to another and focusing your attention on it non-judgementally. Next she asks us to remember a stressful moment. That creates stress in our bodies. Our brains can’t tell the difference between imagining difficult things and having to deal with difficult things. So we get the same stress response by thinking about things as by experiencing things. The stress reponse activates the nervous system.

We take a few minutes to deal with that stress before we move on, by doing a short breathing practice called the 3-6 practice. Breathe in to the count of 3, breathe out to the count of 6. The parasympathetic nervous system is activated by this and activating it tells your body that it is in a safe state. Making the outbreath longer than the inbreath calms the stress system.

Next she wants to talk about stress. She asks us what comes to mind when we think about stress. All the comments are about the negative aspects of stress e.g. time pressure, anxiety, overwhelm. But the stress system actually evolved to keep us alive. It gets us active in order to deal with a threat. Short term stress is fine, long-term stress can be a problem. Short term it energises us, focuses us; it is a short cycle after which we can return to balance. Long term stress is when it becomes chronic and then it can lead to illness, exhaustion, low performance and you can’t see the big picture. In the modern world, the stress system is triggered many times a day by external stressors e.g. deadlines, meetings, tricky people, pandemics and internal stressors e.g. our thoughts and emotions. Usually a combination of both. We are hard-wired to seek out the negative/danger. If there are a dozen good things and one bad thing, we will tend to focus on the one bad thing.

Oh, brain!

Mindfulness helps us break the stress cycle and avoid getting into a chronic stress state. We pay attention, notice, things like tension in shoulders and jaw, and take a few minutes to do a body scan or some 3-6 breathing and break the cycle by returning to a calm state. The strategies are mindfulness techniques. If you regularly practice mindfulness, you are more able to respond more positively to stressful situations and you create a muscle memory which is able to become your parachute. You don’t want to start trying to do mindfulness practice when you are super stressed, you want to develop it when you are calm so you have more tools to choose from when you are stressed, in order to respond.

Breaking the stress cycle

Research shows many benefits: being happier, better focus, being able to return to calm more quickly, improved relationships, deal better with strong emotions, be better able to learn, plan, think and remember. Mindfulness is any time, any place for anyone. It’s not a religion, you don’t need to be in a particular place or do particular yoga positions, you don’t need to empty your mind. It is simple, practical techniques you can use. It is not a cure for serious depression. It can help anxiety and stress and generally improve our quality of being.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery but today is a gift and that’s why they call it the present. Mindfulness is all about being present with what it is, without judging it. The question we want to ask ourselves is do we want to be mind-full or mindful?

Mind-full or Mindful?

John Kabat-Zinn has videos you can look at. Tricia wants to run a course for ELT professionals, which she will post more information about it in the ELT Lightbulb moments group in due course. Mindfulness increases the connections between the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortext so practising is literally ‘weaving the parachute’ – do it on a daily basis don’t wait til you need it! NB it doesn’t need to be an hour a day, 10 minutes on a regular basis will have a positive effect.

And that was the end of the session. My attendance was serendipitous as I hadn’t realised it was on until a minute before it started when I happened to notice an announcement about it! None of it was new to me but it’s always good to be reminded and I’ll be interested to hear more about the course too. I liked the image of not waiting until you are jumping out of a plane to weave a parachute. I.e. develop mindfulness techniques when things are calm so you can use them when things are not calm.

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Woah, we’re half way there…

Woah…living on a prayer!

This popped into my head because we are just reaching the end of Week 6 of 12 teaching weeks this semester! 🙂 [Edit: it has become the end of Week 7 – the small matter of some coursework marking to take care of, you see…] And, what with the whole Covid situation and negotiating blended learning and the complications it entails, the “living on a prayer” bit is not entirely untrue either! About 5 weeks into the semester, I remembered I have a blog, and this week I am finally getting round to actually using it for a change. WordPress seems to have changed again since I was last here, as far as how the post drafting page looks. In particular, the font and size; not in a good way either (kind of uncomfortable on the eyes!), but here we all are. I’ve slightly mitigated by figuring out how to make the font bigger and making the background sort of orangey, which makes my eyes feel like they are straining less, though this seems to work per paragraph block rather than the background as a whole. Also not sure how it will interact with the finished product/my website “look”! Will I need to finish by getting rid of these changes? Time – and preview – will tell! [Edit: Preview suggests that things stay very big and orange if I leave as is!! Good to know!] (If anyone has any handy workarounds for making the drafting stage more visually friendly e.g. being able to choose the font/size/background, without it affecting what comes out the published end, please let me know! (Previous iterations of WordPress blog drafting have been annoying sometimes but not uncomfortable so I am not au fait with changing everything up.)

So, blended learning. Our blended delivery works as 2 x 1hr lessons delivered online and 1 x 1hr lesson + 1 x 2hr lesson delivered F2F. In terms of materials, that works out as 3hrs of core material and 2hrs of supplementary material. In practice, I tend to spread the core material over 5hrs and do 1hr of supplementary (usually listening or speaking lessons) each week. Part of the reason I have been so busy is that as well as prepping the new core materials each week and making or adapting new material for the supplementary hours, and working on the development team for the Semester 2 materials, is that I have also been going back and reworking things in previous weeks of this semester, based on this semester’s experience of what is and isn’t working. Overall, being able to spread the core materials out a bit and having more class time to work through the content is working really well and the structure of the week (1hr, 1hr [online], 1hr, 2hr [F2F]) means that the 3rd hour is usually the listening/speaking skills lesson, which breaks the week up a bit and allows a bit more time for homework tasks to be completed between core lessons. I’m really enjoying it all – the teaching and the materials development – but it is keeping me VERY busy (hence forgetting about the existence of this blog!).

Timetabling has been….interesting…this academic year (I am eternally grateful not to be in charge of it!). – Hence “living on a prayer“! We started out with part of our student population already in the UK and another part still abroad at home. So that translated into a mixture of blended and online-only groups. However, that is not static – students are drifting across to the UK in dribs and drabs continually, so it was decided that there would be entry points into the blended learning classes for students arriving in the UK. (To do it as and when would be a timetabling nightmare, apparently it is bad enough with entry points!) So, at the beginning of Week 4 and the beginning of Week 7, our classes have had the potential for change. Mine maxed out in Week 4 so I had no further changes in Week 7 but the shift in ratio of students abroad and in the UK has meant some online classes being closed, some combining and more F2F ones opening. Under 18s do have to be slotted into F2F classes straight away, but for the rest the next entry point is at the end of Week 10 (or was it the start of week 10…). Next semester, we will also have the January cohort doing something similar. By April, all students should be doing blended classes due to visa requirements changing at that point (but we shall see – we had that thought would be the case in September and it was pushed back!), so possibly less chaotic then?!

Nevertheless, being back in the classroom has been brilliant. I and my students all wear masks at all times (other than to have a drink of water from time to time), which makes it harder to hear what they are saying at times but it does push them to speak up in order to be heard! Monitoring speaking activities is particularly challenging because apart from the masks, the classroom layout is not conducive to monitoring (rows of desks) which in one of my rooms I can go to either end of the front row and one end of the remaining rows and the other only one end of any of the rows except the front row. Nevertheless, I just do my best. One thing I noticed at the start was while I could still easily learn their names and faces despite their masks being on all the time (eyebrows, hair, eyes etc.), when they first came in without a mask on (sometimes they get in the room and then put it on), it threw me because I hadn’t learned the usually masked up bit of their faces! It was grand to be able to do the name game (I am _____ and I like_____. This is ________ and they like________; I am________ and I like______ ….and keep adding on student by student) and so nice to get them to do stuff in pairs and groups without breakout rooms coming into it.

One of the things I have been able to start up again is the start of class meditation I instigated a year or so pre-pandemic. I am only doing it at the start of face to face classes, but it does have a positive effect on their focus in those. Mid-semester student feedback has also been positive. I have also brought back the Homework log I used to use with the addition of an in-class materials tab because we no longer have paper workbooks, just electronic handouts. I started out using Padlet, but while visually appealing it was limited by not being unlimited (!) – that is, I couldn’t use a different padlet each week, I had 2 in rotation, so one served odd number weeks and one served even number weeks, which meant there was no fixed point for students to come back to and find their handouts. This means that being able to refer to documents would rely on them having a sensible system of saving them to their Google drives. So, in Week 6 I switched to using the Homework log, with new added in class materials tab on Google sheets. Less visually appealing but more useful in terms of the materials links being in one place, with more added each week, and thereby building up a sort of workbook. The next problem, of course, has been getting them to use it. I’ve yet to get all 19 of them to open it in a single class. (It would have been the same with padlet but is just more immediately obvious with Googlesheets!) Which of course means they cannot participate actively. Well, less “cannot”, more “will not”. (I put the link in the chatbox, literally all they have to do is click on it!) I get it, they are in a new place, there is a lot going on, they have a lot of subjects to follow, they want to party all weekend (away from home, “post-pandemic”, no restrictions here!), and as the loooong semester wears on they become ever more tired etc, but it is still frustrating. Of course the coursework quality is very much divided along the lines of participation – that is, those who don’t participate (and by participate, I am not demanding chatbox interaction/breakout group interaction, I mean, I am, but I would settle for opening the handouts at the relevant time and following quietly if that is all they can cope with on a given day!) have done more poorly, those that do have done much better in terms of what they have produced. Yesterday, I talked to them about it at the end of our F2F class, so we shall see what happens next week. I anticipate they will have forgotten by then, so I will need to incorporate some kind of reminder slide…

Now that I have built up some experience of blended teaching and discovered some of the strengths and pitfalls, it is time to work out how to make it better, beyond what I have already tried to implement and discovered in the process. As such, I am about to embark on two recently published (April 2021, September 2021) books about teaching online:

(My teenagers are older teenagers but teenagers nevertheless! 17-18 year olds.)

My goal: make the second half of the semester better than the first half. I did my best during the first half but my best can get better! Hurrah for more learning.

What books/articles about online teaching and learning would you recommend? NB those with digital editions preferred! Also those geared towards an EAP context!

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End of (another) academic year

Somehow or another, another academic year is drawing to a close. I said goodbye to another group of students today (lovely group, they were!) and all that remains is some writing exam standardisation, a pile of exam marking, and some coursework misconduct meetings next week. (Also next week, I will be getting my second dose of vaccine, woohoo!) It seems the appropriate point to reflect on the goals I set at the start of the academic year and look forward to next academic year.

I finished last year in a pretty sorry state in some ways – poor health, feeling burnt out and uncertain about continuing in my role as ADoS. A good long break helped and I came back to work with the following goals:

  1. Be curious! By being curious about everything that I encounter, all the newness that is ahead, I can open up lots of opportunities for learning and growth. 
  2. Be patient! With myself, with my colleagues, with my students. It won’t be an easy year and that is ok, it can still be a positive one.
  3. Be grateful! Look for the positives and appreciate them. Smile lots. 
  4. Be open to challenge! It’s ok, good even, for things to be difficult, challenge leads to discovery and growth. 
  5. Be kind to myself! Look after myself appropriately, maintain a good work-life balance (easier with the 4-day week!), keep meditating, eat well, exercise regularly, spend quality time with my girlfriend regularly. 

In the end, I decided to continue in the ADoS role and so now have another year of that under my belt. It has been a year fully spent working online/remotely. It has also now been a year and a half since I last worked in our building, which seems extraordinary to say the least! So, how I have done with the goals?

  1. I have learned a LOT this academic year. Amongst other things, I have put myself in online class student shoes by participating in Italian language classes once a week. I have done courses with two different providers and continue studying with the second provider. Each provider gave a very different learning experience, both of which I have blogged extensively about. What I have learned by being a student, of course, I have also been able to apply to being a teacher. I think I have become a reasonably competent online teacher, comfortable with this way of teaching. However, there is plenty of room for improvement. Use and monitoring of breakout rooms comes to mind. With a class of 20 students, I struggled with this. Feedback from my students, obtained through group discussions of a list of questions which they summarised their answers to in a Google doc will be useful going forward, as will the feedback from my line manager’s observation. I was lucky, they were a great group and I enjoyed teaching them. Other learning opportunities have included attending online TD workshops, from which I came away with ideas and food for thought, and reading – journal articles, blog posts, books. Finally, due to the high standard of my own application, I have been a fellowship assessor for two application cycles, so when people have submitted applications for becoming Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Authority (AFHEA), FHEA, and Senior FHEA (what I achieved in May last year), I have been one of a large group of people who have assessed those applications. I sat out the most recent round (as a voluntary role, you can elect to sit out for a cycle when you need to and I decided for this one I needed to!) but in the two that I did do this academic year, I learnt more about what my colleagues across the university are doing, which was fascinating. I would say yes, I did open up some good opportunities for learning and growth. May this continue.
  2. I think I have been more patient this year and allowed it to be the year that it was. I have tried to meditate more regularly but it has been sporadic. That said, I am nevertheless getting better at pausing rather than reacting, which also helps on the patience front. One of my goals for this holiday is to really get into a proper regular meditating habit as I very much believe it will help me next academic year when things are all change again!
  3. My gf and I keep a gratitude calendar together. Every evening before bed, we add in all the things we are grateful for from that day. It’s just a google doc with a table. Some days it is harder than others but on all days we can find stuff. And that in itself is something to be grateful for! (I recommend keeping a gratitude calendar – I kept one alone before my gf and I got together; we only started doing it together during the first lockdown when we were apart, as a way to continue to bond – it is a great way to cultivate a mind that finds the positives and very simple and quick to do. You could use a notebook, a word doc, whatever works for you.)
  4. Well, this was rather a vague goal wasn’t it. But here we all are. Could almost argue that by doing my job for this academic year I was by definition open to challenge! I think getting fully to grips with online teaching (last academic year was just one term and we were doing a very limited amount of live stuff) has been a big challenge, in particular how to look after my students, how to make the lessons accessible to them, how to support their learning and assessment effectively. I feel I have come a long way since September 2020 when we kicked off. In terms of ADoSing, it was my partner teacher’s second year of doing it so it has been solid. Good teamwork, pretty smooth. The odd hiccup but dealt with effectively. Next year, I will have a new partner ADoS as the current one is going on maternity leave. I think I have been in the position that much longer than last time I was in this position and hope therefore to be a better mentor – it is certainly something I will be focusing on. I will also hopefully be making SMARTer goals… 😉
  5. Ah yes. The first year of 4 day weeks. 🙂 I can say without doubt that it was definitely the right decision for me. I am in a MUCH better state than I was this time last year. While it has been a markedly less stressful academic year than the previous one, in which we were throwing down the train track as we hurtled along it, I am in no doubt that my quality of life has improved significantly with the change from 5 days to 4. The balance is just much, much better. Working from home has continued to be positive, also since I moved in with my gf. Being able to cook and eat lunch together has made eating less monotonous and we manage to do it healthily. Exercise is MUCH easier with a 4 day week because I can do my long runs or bike rides on my not at work day, while she is working, and therefore not be choosing between spending quality time with her and doing substantial exercise. At the weekends we do things like swimming and paddling together and I fit in shorter runs/bike rides sometimes too.

While I was writing this, I just received, in my email inbox, a recognition award:

Not just me, all the ADoSes. Honestly, I reckon the entire centre deserves one. Everyone has put such a lot in since this pandemic started. These awards were put on hold for a while due to financial constraints but it seems they are back again. It is always super nice to be appreciated! Very motivating.

Looking forward to next year, it is going to be a year of great change. After a year of being fully at home and online, it is back to the college for us! Something that is both scary and exciting. However, I am going to treat myself to having my holiday before I think about my goals for next academic year. That will be a job for nearer the time of The Great Return. For now, I will wrap this up and with it academic year 2020-21 (minus the final marking week, of course). Overall, I would say, a definite positive one. Hurrah!

Creative commons licensed https://www.flickr.com/photos/54724696@N07/24160789397 feels fitting for the culmination of this year, made it to the top of another academic year mountain of learning, challenges and life.

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Upper Intermediate Italian Lesson 8

I actually finished this course prior to Easter, finally catching up on the blog posts!!

I was bang on time, on the nose, no time to spare. Gf and I were watching Star Trek downstairs ’til I noticed it was 1829 and legged it up to my computer! Still first though, and by a good way. The first student arrived (to our relief) at 1837. And another soon after.  So I had five minutes of talking to the teacher again. I wasn’t very good at expanding on my answers! Nevertheless, we talked a bit about lockdown easing and my time in Sicily. Then once the others arrived, the second arrived soon after the first, same two as last week, we started talking about International Women’s Day (which is today). That was cool.

Newsletter thingy. Oops I had misunderstood. The other student who I thought had also done it already last week actually hadn’t. So when the teacher asked who wants to do it this week, I said her name, because I didn’t want her to miss out two weeks in a row but instead I guess she felt put on the spot, oops. Instead, we are asked to ask the five W’s to the third student and he should reply and that should form his contribution (as not already done also). I haven’t done another one but I don’t think it will matter as I suspect once we finish this one that will be it for tonight and we’ll move on to something else. I forgot, but also subconsciously probably reckoned, based on how things have gone, that I have a week in hand! Really better do one this time round. Well…mayyybe. There are only two more lessons and two other students still have to contribute…hmmm!

The student is asked to write it for next week. Then we move on to reviewing combined pronouns. So I was correct about not needing it. Not convinced I will next week either, or the one after, but I will TRY and do one. Then it’s ready for when it does arise, if it does in the last two lessons that remain after this one! Also because it is good practice.

Reviewing pronouns takes the shape of the teacher reading the extract to grammar book to us.  In English cos it is slides made from that book that has explanation in English. Haiya.

p.93

A grammar controlled practice. We do it with no prep time. I misunderstand the task on the fly, oops. But correct myself easily. Straightforward, then, despite no time to do it before going through it.

Then we move on to a review of the imperative. We haven’t done the imperative so far this course but ok. Again, the teacher reads us the grammar book. Ahh, the point is what we do with pronouns and imperatives e.g. Marco, mettiti la giacca. The pronouns go after the imperative, attached.

P99 – Verbi monosillabici all’imperativi + pronomi

=We had to take it in turns to read the forms aloud e.g. I had fa’ fammi fallo fammelo.

Then I got lost again, turned out the activity we went to next was ABOVE the grammar box not after it. I still got mine right though even though I still hadn’t found the task, based on the teacher saying it to me (the teacher hadn’t realised I was lost, they used this approach with all of us). Lots of grammar tonight.

Then we move on to do some reading on p.103.  Joy of joys we get time to read alone – it is a longer text and we are allocated a third each to read and then summarise. Then we discuss the topic of the text. Which was cool.

Io sono dell’idea che… (This, the teacher said in an incidental kind of way and I noted it down because it is a nice phrase for expressing opinion)

Next we move on to a film “il mostro” with Roberto Benigni. There is a long description in English and then some tasks in Italian, including watching the film extract. I mistakenly answer directly for the first one but for once in a way we aren’t supposed to, oops.

  1. Sono troppo stanca. Mi fa male la testa.

^^We have to make up common excuses. Then watch the extract and try to pick out any excuses that we can. 

  • Sto male, sto molto male
  • Scusi ho un altro impegno

B. Now we have to try and hear what the amministratore says.

  • Ma che dice?
  • Signora aspetti
  • Un giorno gliela farò pagare
  • Pagherà tutto

C We have to compare what happens in Italy when someone calls in sick to work with here.  There, someone might go to your house and check.

darsi malato – call in sick

Dobbiamo solo presentare un certificato medico se stiamo a casa più di 5 giorni

And finish! As we are finishing, the teacher asks us if we would like to do more with films next time. I said yes! It was nice to be asked about future lesson content.

Reflections

  • I only have two more lessons left, eeek! However <drumroll> I have finally pulled my finger out and found another course to do. This time it is with International House. I did the entrance test and got 41/48 = advanced. The levels are broken down into numbers (just like they were when I taught at IHPA so I guess that is maybe an IH thing as this is not IHPA!). Advanced goes from 17 through 22 (more numbers than there were at IHPA, but the courses are shorter too) and in consultation with them I am going to enter 19. (Mostly because the day/time of the class is suitable – as in, same as the current one!) It is a six-week course, one a week for two hours. I am excited! It starts in mid April so I get a little break after this course before starting the next, which is also nice.
  • Thinking time. Having been in the student position, I am getting a lot better at giving students thinking time! Not being afraid to wait that little bit longer. Some of the activities in our materials are ‘do as you go along’ type ones but they tend to be chat box based – which reminds me, come to think of it, we have used the chat box very little as students in this Italian class. The teacher uses the chatbox a fair bit but we students use it much more infrequently – the main time I remember is when we were doing the chain stories thing. The ‘do as you go along’ activities tend to be done verbally, one at a time. I suppose this is also due to difference in class size. The Italian class is small enough that you can do that, with generally about 3 of us, and at most 5.
  • If there is the freedom/scope to do so, involving students in the choice of lesson content is motivating. It really was nice to be asked. Honestly, for this course, I am still not sure what, if anything, is core/required content and what is teacher choice. The grammar points? <shrug>
  • When we did the reading activity, I read the whole text in order to make better sense of my bit (I had the final third). I think for information gap type activities, the information each student has should be able to stand alone in terms of meaning/coherence. I suppose it’s about making sure the text and the task are well-matched. It was fantastic being given time to read quietly though, rather than doing the read aloud thing.
  • We do a lot of controlled practice grammar activities but a lot less in the way of freer practice. Which is frustrating because I know the grammar but I need practice using it communicatively. Hopefully will get more of that in the next course I do. It would also be nice if the grammar was more rooted in a context.

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Upper Intermediate Italian Lesson 7

I arrived first (as usual!) and for five minutes was chatting with the teacher. Was quite nice actually.  They’ve been in the UK for 5 years and are from Rome. Then another student arrived, which was nice too. A relief for the teacher, methinks 🙂 (Well it would be for me if I were in the teacher’s shoes!) I feel quite relaxed tonight. Nice and calm.

Intendersi – to be understood/to be knowledgeable about

Another five minutes, another student arrived. We’re talking about how to find a nice house. One of the students is between houses, staying at a friends.

  • bisogna accontentarsi
  • non ci sarà mai la casa perfetta

Oooo newsletter. My two weeks ago homework, perhaps. Yes…one of the other students has also done it so it seems more likely we will do something with it. Yep. So I suppose this means I will have to do homework this week to make another one in case we do it in a future lesson again.

Quest’anno a gennaio, 582,538 persone di 209 paesi SI sono iscritte a uno sfida globale – Veganuary. Questa sfida richiede a ciascun partecipante che l’accetta di evitare l’uso di ogni prodotto animale, cioè, provare di  a vivere vegano-a modo vegano. Lo scopo di questa sfida e di proteggere sia gli animali che l’ambiente e, faccendo cosi faccendo, migliorare persino la salute dei partecipanti. Questa volta la gente pensano anche a Covid perché si vogliono anche evitare altri pandemici pandemie. UnA gran parte di loro continuano a seguire uno stilo di vita vegano.

Not bad! Especially given how hastily done it was and how tired I was at the time. We didn’t use the other student’s this time so actually that will likely be for next week, meaning it is less urgent for me to make another one! We gave mine a title Veganaio: come ti salvi il mondo. Wow, turns out one of the other students is vegan too. Another doesn’t have eggs or milk but has meat sometimes.

Cacciatori-raccoglitori – hunter-gatherers

Course we end up having a discussion about veganism hehe. Good fun.

Un essere senziente – a sentient being

As ever, I feel sad that I haven’t been able to CHAT with the other students during this course. Even with just the limited exchanges through the teacher that there have been, I am getting quite fond of them!

Avere a cuore – hold something close to heart e.g. avere a cuore gli animali

p.17

Funnily enough it’s the facing page to the one with the fridges from the first lesson! Short text. No read silently time and I didn’t bother to ask again for it this time. Just cope! Ooops I was so busy trying to get my head around the text I am not entirely sure what the follow up task is – to make questions or to answer the ones below the text!

BREAK TIME

Am back a minute or two early it seems. And it is create questions (I used the time to ask). I thought it was but then I wasn’t sure. I should have more faith in myself!

Qual è il problema secondo Alberoni?

There we go.

My fellow vegan isn’t back yet.  But the other student is so we ask our questions through the teacher. And discuss the topic a bit.

The teacher feeds in vocab (like the above) in the chat box as we go.

È importante avere una diversa percezione individuale.

Ah! Now we are returning to those pronouns that we started at the end of last lesson! We do a series of grammar exercises of the sort that are in grammar books like Murphy’s English Grammar in Use for Italian but with explanation in English rather than Italian. The other student and I are asked in turn to answer. But we don’t do them by ourselves first. Which is ok because this is familiar ground.  Then we have to complete a table in the course book.

P. 92

Not quite the above but similar! The one in the course book has also ce and ne. We actually got some quiet time for that one! But then we didn’t go through it all and skipped to the next exercise of using combined pronouns to replace the nouns in bold. But no time to do it quietly first. But we managed!

We finished with three minutes to go and the teacher asked what we’d like to do so I said talk because there’s no time to start anything new. The teacher agreed, fortunately, and asked us how we felt about combined pronouns. And that took us to the end of another lesson! The third student didn’t attend the second half and the other 2 didn’t show up at all.

Reflections

  • Being relaxed from the outset made a huge difference. Where a week ago it was the Monday after an intense week involving the first aid course, this time I had both shifted the backlog created by the course and had a lovely, restful weekend. I was better able to enjoy the lesson for what it was. And the two students who attended were the two I feel more rapport with (because they attend most regularly out of the total of 4 apart from me in the group), which also helped me feel relaxed. It was also nice when we did the discussion about veganism and I learnt something new about them, which was something we have in common as far as one was concerned. Oh to have done a getting to know you activity involving finding things in common and more personalisation activities throughout! I think, particularly in courses like the one I teach on which are very time-limited and all the more in the context of online teaching where students can’t chitchat at the start of the class while they wait for the teacher or when they finish an activity early etc, it is important not to underestimate the importance of getting to know you activities at the start and scope for personalisation throughout. I will be mentioning it in our imminent meeting about planning the course structure for next year (we are going from three terms to two long semesters). Being comfortable and relaxed makes a big difference to being able to learn and we can facilitate that to an extent (not entirely – some of it also depends what else is going on in students’ lives etc!).
  • You can get used to anything (and it is a lot easier to learn when you have adjusted to a greater extent) but it takes time to adjust. I think that is true of life (to an extent!) as well as language classes! Adjustment takes time. I think changing education systems (/learning in a way that is different from how you have learnt – or taught! – previously) is a form of culture shock. Which makes it make sense that each week I do get a little closer but it also isn’t quite linear. I have already mentioned this idea of adjustment previously but am repeating it because each time I have a sense of “oh I thought I had already got used to it but actually in comparison to today, I wasn’t as used to it as as I thought” or I think I’ve got the hang of it but then something happens that throws me off balance again. More and more I think it would be really helpful for teachers to incorporate an element of transparency around how and why things are done, particularly early on in a course so that students get a clear idea of how things work and why in your lessons. I think that would probably help with the process of adjustment. Obviously the lower the level of the language learner, the harder this would be. I suppose course books provide an element of this if they are used systematically. I think if you only draw on them for the odd activity and jump about, or you don’t use a course book at all, then you need to be more explicit to fill that gap.
  • Doing this course is making me think a lot about course design and delivery. Our course (the one I teach on, I mean), for example, is heavily skills-based and assessment-driven. Students are time-poor due to huge workloads so it is critical for us to make it absolutely clear how each lesson helps to prepare them a) for assessment and b) for university (with the assessments being designed/intended to teach and test skills needed for university study). Our students are motivated by requiring certain scores in order to progress onto their chosen degree course. They will do what is required to achieve that but they mostly don’t have time to go beyond. Which is fair enough. We can help (including to maintain their motivation to keep doing all the tasks) them by making clear links. This Italian course is VERY different, obviously. It is not assessment driven (that I am aware of), there is no particular end goal other than improving our speaking/listening/reading/writing skills in Italian. This means that there is a lot more freedom in the lessons for the teacher to do whatever they want with us. Which is lovely in theory but in practice is, I think, a lot more of a challenge for the teacher to do well. Even in IH Palermo, so another private language school context, there was more structure to the language courses. There was a set course book, or half course-book, for each level and we worked through that with the students. They had mid-course tests to check progress and end of course tests in order to progress to the next level. Of course creativity within that framework was encouraged. For the Italian course, we do have a course book but it is used somewhat randomly so if there is any recycling or progression built in, we lose that. Which means the onus is on the teacher to build it in. Likewise with learning outcomes. I think if I had to teach a course of this nature, I’d use a chunk of the first lesson negotiating learning objectives for the course and topics of interest. I’d want to know the students’ motivations for doing the course as well. So that there would be some framework to work within and so that the students would know about that framework and have a vested interest in it. That could also be revisited, added to etc. I wonder if that would make attendance less patchy. Maybe yes, maybe no. Depends entirely on the reason(s) for it!
  • We have used very little in the way of authentic materials so far. This has occurred to me in thinking about the above bullet point. There was that love song, that’s the only thing I can think of. The course book has some authentic material in it – extracts from Italian literary texts and the like – but we haven’t used those. I think that’s a missed opportunity, given we have a reasonable level of Italian (Upper Intermediate/aiming towards that or within it, in theory) and given there are no apparent course book usage requirements (in terms of how much is covered or in what order or to what end). Again, though, I suppose it is challenging to do that well (though if we have no objectives we need to achieve then perhaps it would be enough to use it in whatever way?!).

Think I’ll leave it there for this time – now managing to fairly contentedly trundle through the lessons yet plenty of food for thought still. It’s been such a learning experience. 3 more lessons left! Still not got much further with investigating a follow-up course… I need to do the IH level test to start with, to know my level according to them, so that I can then find out when courses run. Of course with things opening up, there is a question mark over whether there will be an online course still to join! My gut feeling is yes, though, as schools will want to have a wide portfolio of offerings to get as much business as possible. It’s whether I can do it when I want to do it (Monday nights because Tuesday is my NAW!)! We shall see when I have enough brain to do the test… ! 🙂