Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte

Languages Show 2009 - Are we thinking? Then I'll begin...

I am on the train for the third time this week. My beautiful wife and I had a fantastic weekend at the Teaching Awards last weekend. The only pity was that there were no languages National Winners ( I won a national award in 2004 - them were the days!) apart from that, it was great to meet some old friends and the new winners. Anyhow, less of my galavanting -the wife and I are on our way from Newcastle to London again today to attend the Languages Show 2009. I have the privilege to be presenting a seminar on Saturday describing how we have remodelled our languages curriculum at Cramlington Learning VIllage. In my last post, I embedded a video describing our FLIP lessons at school and it has caused some discussion. Isabelle Jones, after watching the video, grilled me on the ins and outs of our approach to the curriculum which goes much deeper than just FLIP lessons and you can read her resulting blog post here.

...I am now writing in pain as my wife has just (deliberately?) poured half a cup of (thankfully) luke warm National Express Train coffee all over my leg. She thinks it is hilarious, I on the other hand...

Anyway, below is my presentation for Saturday outlining, in a little more detail, our curriculum model. I am off to try and deal with my wet leg...

FLIP - a model for developing independent language learners

FLIP - Flexible Learner-led, In-time intervention, Personalised. Last year was the first year that Cramlington Learning Village had a full KS3, previously having been only a high school and we were faced with the challenge of starting from scratch within the creative auspices of the new secondary curriculum. So after much discussion and thinking, we decided that the only way to get some truly independent language learning was to get rid of 1/3 of our content. Excessive content is the enemy of effective learning so we decided to make 1 out of 3 lessons a fortnight content free but learning rich! Rather than trying to explain this in text, I have embedded the video below to let you see it in action. I would love some feedback, so please leave a comment!

 

FLIP Languages Model from charte on Vimeo.

South Tyneside MFL

Only minutes from the hospital where I was born and in the school I did my 3rd Year (Year 9!) work experience, I have the pleasure to come and meet with some lovely languages teachers from South Tyneside at St Wilfrids school. I am talking about technology again, but I aim to make it clear that technology is not the be-all-and-end-all and that designing a languages curriculum with creativity and real communication at the heart of it is key. Technology can be a fantastic enabler but ir will never make boring content or poor pedagogy better!

Michel Thomas - 5 weeks in

So, after 5 weeks of doing Michel Thomas with year 9 I set a piece of creative home learning - go off and use some of the language you have learned this module to make a comic strip. So here is the outcome from one girl...

 

Despite a couple of mistakes, this was done entiirely unsupported and what strikes me is the ability to manipulate simple verbs to say what she wants to say as well as well as using what she knows to be creative. Not a bad effort I feel. What do you think?

Northumberland MFL Conference - creative teachnology

A frosty  yet sunny morning in Northumberland, a beautiful country house and a bunch of my favourite kind of people (enthusiastic language teachers). What a lovely day. As promised, here is my presentation, you just need to click on the arrow to navigate through it. Also, don't forget to add your ideas to www.wallwisher.com/wall/northumberlandmfl and/or www.etherpad.com/northumberlandmfl . Enjoy!

Etherpad - building a joint vocabulary list

Year 13 and I are busy translating a James Lovelock article on climate change from English to French. We have worked hard on some French texts and used every trick in the book to find neologisms like carbon offsetting (we did this by looking at Air Canada's site in English and then switching to the French version - la compensation de carbone) It is hard. The translation has to be in by Wednesday so yesterday, we decided it would be really useful to pool our vocabulary on an etherpad (www.etherpad.com/y13clam). Etherpads are really simple web pages which allow up to 8 users to type concurrently. To create one you simply open a web browser and type in www.etherpad.com and follow it with /whateverIwanttocallmypad - we had been talking about clams (great pollution detectors) and decided to call our pad/y13clam but you could call it a class name or whatever. The website then tells you that this etherpad does not exist and would you like to create it. Once you create it, students can go to your etherpad and they are assigned a different colour so you can see who is typing what. 

It was great to watch the vocabulary list grow and grow but better still was to watch the students correct other students' mistakes and or suggest different translations. I can also access the etherpad and make sure that any typos or mistranslations are corrected. Hopefully (if the little blighters are doing their homework...) the list should grow over the weekend and end up being a great resource for all of the students when translating the article. Once done, I will cut and paste the etherpad and print it out so the students can also have a hard copy. Etherpad is really simple and can be done on the fly but beware - it does not require a log in or password so the students can overwrite each others' work and you cannot recover changes, so it does require a certain level of responsibility from the students. 

Converted sceptic? Michel Thomas at School

In order to support our professional development, each department at school goes through a 2 day OFSTED style inspection with a bought in inspector. In the languages inspection last year, the inspector raised a concern that the students found it difficult to manipulate the language when speaking spontaneously. Based on this, we set ourselves a target of researching methodology which would help us to achieve more spontaneous classroom talk.

I remember in the year leading up to my marriage with my beautiful French wife that my Dad got his hands on a copy of "Teach yourself French with Michel Thomas" in order to be able to converse with his future belle-famille. Being a French teacher in a school, I was sceptical about what my Dad could learn from a CD course where there is "no writing, no homework and absolutely no memorisation". I was impressed when after a few weeks my Dad said to me "Que pensez-vous de la situation économique et politique en Iraq?", of course, when I replied to him he struggled to understand I smuggly told him he should have tried harder in school. Nonetheless, my curiosity was pricked by this idea and this year year, we have bought in the Michel Thomas method for French as the first unit across Key Stage 3. The materials during the summer - a bulky folder of paper resources as well as listening materials and computer based games and I started putting lessons together in preparation for this week.

Yesterday was my first lesson using the materials with my year 9 classes and I must be honest, but I was blown away by the progress the students made in the lesson. I had year 9 boys wandering around the class and bumping into other students saying "au contraire, ce n'est pas possible pour moi" in a variety of styles from angry to whispered to being in love. I am not easily impressed but after one lesson, I found the methodology effective and the students challenged. If this continues, I will be delighted and maybe just have some spontaneous, relevant and genuine target language discussion with the students. We shall see...

You can see the materials for yourself by ordering a free sample here.  

Distance learning.... Teachnology

Just finished a session on teachnology (have I just invented this word?) with a group of teachers in Warrnambool, Australia. It is 7am here in sunny Gateshead and 4pm for them. I used prezi to put together a presentation, SKype to communicate and www.livestream.com/chrisharte to broadcast live video of my computer desktop so I could take the group through the presentation my self. I say live, there was about an 11 second delay between me moving and the group seeing it but it worked quite well. Anyway, as promised, here is the presentation and it was really lovely to work with you all! Big thanks to Greg and Emma for organising this!

Highlight heaven... rainbow assessment.

 If there are two things I like they are simple and effective. Unfortunately, lots of things in life are neither simple nor effective. An example of this would be comment only marking. I am all for it, constructive detailed feedback to students which does not pigeon hole them into a 5/10 or worse a level 4c. However, despite rumours to the contrary, I am only human. Comment only feedback takes a long time and should be confined to one piece of marking per class per half term (in my opinion). So upcries from leadership and parents - but why are you not marking Joe's book every week (because most of his work is online - please join the 21st century...) how do you know he is completing his work? Well if you flick through Joe's book, you will see no red pen (not though some hippyish aversion to using aggressive red) but rather you will see highlighter - hopefully lots of it. A very simple and effective approach to marking an exercise book - highlight all bits of language which are correct/good and should be recycled. This take very little time and can be done when you are circulating around the class if you want to avoid taking marking home. So rather than having a red pen record of all of your mistakes and things you have done wrong, your exercise book becomes a rainbow like record of good language that should be recycled and reused.

How lovely....

Dear Reader,

thank you for nominating my blog for a place in the top 100 language and technology blogs! It is a real honour. To be honest, I selfishly blog because it really helps me to crystalize my ideas and then share them into the blogosphere. So if you like my blog, please click on the above button to vote for it! - Learner Evolution - Chris Harte

many thanks

Chris