Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte

Language World 2011 - #lw2011

As promised, my presentation from Saturday's Language World talk or as I like to call it, my Jerry Maguire moment...

Languages:Reboot -full version on Prezi

Languages:Reboot

In my last post I ranted and talked about the state of the languages nation, so here I am going to share some of my thinking into how I think it could be done! Any of the good ideas I have are mainly stolen and at best blended with the ideas of such wonderful thinkers as Derek Wise, Michael Wardle, Darren Mead, John Connor, Ewan McIntosh et al and I must confess that anything that sounds rubbish is inevitably a 100% me, but here we go. The following is the introduction from an essay I am writing which form the basis for a presentation (see the handout at the top of this post) I am giving in Southampton on Sunday (which if you would like to watch it live streamed and probably see me trip over or faint you can tune in here at 9:45am GMT Sunday 13th February). If you think it is interesting, then tune into the broadcast or catch up with the blog post next week. 

Languages : Reboot

It is 2011 and we are in danger. By we, I mean those of us who may have an interest in the following ideas; learners and teachers of languages. Danger may seem a strong word, but I do not use it lightly. We are in danger of turning our children off languages. The current government has put in place the English Baccalaureate which will encourage “more rigourous, academic study of language” and like it or not this concept will inevitably lead to a rise on the numbers of language learners continuing to study languages up to the age of sixteen. The great caveat is that if we continue with the mundane, memory based, rote learning and nullifying contexts of the current GCSE, we will lose any sense of developing linguists and we will continue to keep only a very small proportion of those who study a language up to the age of 16 studying languages up to A-level and beyond once they have achieved their baccalaureate.  The current government’s plan with the Ebacc is not to develop a new generation of great linguists, it is to create a new generation of learners who see languages as an elite subject which marks the academically bright from the proletariat. This will, in the long run, lead to continuing decreases in the number of languages undergraduates and a languages deskilling of the general population, including those in the business and commerce sector.

Most believe that the cause of the general apathy towards learning a “foreign” language in the UK is the globlish phenomenon. Everyone speaks English so why should I bother learning anything else? To a certain extent this is true but you and I have rehearsed the arguments against this a thousand times in defence of our subject and we know them to be true; intercultural understanding, employability, improved communication skills, the prevalence of the BRIC economies etc. And the real  downer about the globlish situation? There is nothing we can do about it. In our ever shrinking world, with all of its inequalities, problems and vast opportunities, you probably can get by on English and we certainly can not halt the growth of English as a global language. 

So are we impotent in the face of this danger? I do not believe so. We can change the hearts and minds of our children towards language learning. We do it every day. We work incredibly hard to create engaging and powerful learning experiences in our classrooms despite all of the barriers we may face (reduced curriculum time, learner or school apathy, poor examination system, boring contexts and text books etc). Some of these barriers are not within our power to overcome, yet, I am going to argue and exemplify, we can definitely make moves to re-empower ourselves and our profession, we can make language learning such a rich and holistic learning experience that we are not only developing great language learners but as importantly great 21^st Century learners. We can show learners, school leaders and the rest of the educational world that learning another language is not only a fantastic way to develop effective learners but it is probably the best and most flexible tool to develop learners who can “learn, unlearn and relearn”. (Tofler, Alvin)

The models and ideas I am proposing are not revolutionary, they are simply evolutionary. We are now at a point where, although our system of language learning and teaching is not entirely broken (there are fantastic examples of truly effective practice happening every day) our disk drive is fragmented, we have a lot of old and now corrupt data which has dragged our approach to a grinding trudge. We do not need to reinvent the wheel or throw out the baby with the bath water, but we do need to do something to pull together powerful, purposeful pedagogy and ensure we remould language learning into a relevant and holistic learning experience. Ask any ICT technician what to do and he or she will give you the answer “turn it off and turn it back on again”. Well, they are right, it is time for a Languages : Reboot.

 

Pedagogy later = Apocalypse now

 It has been lovely, thanks for asking. The break I mean; I have reined back on twitter, have put my blog on the back burner and have been focussing my time on family, friends and writing. So what has cause me to rupture my silence, to burst the bubble of summer fun? Mainly anger and disbelief. I am devastated by the decline in languages in England. I was embarrassed by the front page of the Independent which loomed up from the newspaper stands in my local supermarket yesterday  - languages in schools in crisis. Children are not opting to take languages because they are perceived to be hard. This is bollocks. The real reason children are not opting to take languages is because, despite the best (?) efforts of the new secondary curriculum, Links into languages and the exam boards, the current trend in language learning is that of trying to disguise the same old, disengaging (I hesitate to use the word) pedagogy that is boring, transactional, rooted in contexts which the students will never use, vocabulary-list-tastic by making it whizz bang and fun (at least our perception of fun...). Well, for want of a less vulgar expression, you can't polish a turd.

Do not misunderstand me, there are shining examples of innovative and excellent practice out there which put pedagogy at the heart of everything they do, but this is not reflected in the national picture. My proof? Look at the decline in numbers - French has dropped out of the top 10 subjects at GCSE for the first time since 1066. German is faring worse and Spanish has gone up 1%, but 1% of a paltry figure is not a lot. Only 1 in 4 teenagers in this country are taking a language post 14. This is a disgrace.

The not-so-new secondary curriculum is brilliant, in that there is nothing in it, we are not to be dictated to in terms of content which has led to a growth of CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) which is being heralded as the Messiah of languages. I think CLIL is a positive move, but I have observed a number of CLIL lessons where History is taught entirely in French or Fair trade is taught in Spanish, however, the history lesson and the citizenship lesson in themselves lacked really effective pedagogy. We are on the right road with CLIL, but we need to rebrand it as CLPIL (Content, Language, Pedagogy Integrated Learning - not so easy to say...)

Do not get me started on exam boards. Ridiculous. I lost all respect for publishers and exam boards when they started getting into bed with each other and branding textbooks as "the only AQA/EDEXCEL endorsed book". In other industries I am sure this would contravene competition laws. The message from this is "buy this book, learn it off by heart and your exam results will go up" which head of department in a struggling school would not do this? The exam needs to be rethought to test skills not content and let them have a bloody dictionary for at least part of the exam where they are dealing with unknown language - reading and listening. We should be examining how learners cope with language, not how much of the vocabulary they have learned.

So let us turn to the sources of language teacher professional development in this country and see what is happening to carve a consistently better pedagogical approach. Well, I was on a nationally rolled out CPD course a little while ago which consisted of drawing stick people in powerpoint and adding voice overs. Some people did not know how to do that so in one sense it was useful to them but I kept asking myself, what is the pedagogical purpose? (I actually felt sorry for the presenter because he was obliged to stick to a script written by someone else). At no point was the reasoning behind doing this activity discussed, assessment rubrics were not mentioned, scaffolding activities were not explored, feedback and feedforward did not come into it. It may as well have been a session on how to make finger puppets without ever mentioning the why. The focus was on (not very) shiny output and little on the input. I might be able to get my students to make vokis, podcasts, talking powerpoints, films and animations but if they are all about asking where the post office is (get a map) or saying what is in my pencil case (get a life) then it is a waste of time. Our children are prolific consumers and,today, creators of media, they can create things we cannot and I am guessing they would never use powerpoint to do it. In all cases, the shiny output is only one part of the puzzle, how best do we input language, link it together, set up assessment rubrics (when will there be a national languages CPD on SOLO Taxonomy?), practice, demonstrate and review learning? En gros, when are we going to get back to the basics of what good language teaching/learning pedagogy looks like?

I hesitate to criticise because I love languages and language teachers. Ne'er a finer bunch of people will you meet, but rather than putting time into crystalising and sharing a new and effective pedagogy and investing in training teachers in situ, we expect languages teachers to PAY to go to evening or residential events, where we roll out rushed off, outcome focussed CPD. It is a disgrace. 

I am sorry if this upsets anyone, this is not a personal attack but rather a rally to say we are at rock bottom and we as a language learning community need to really take stock of what we are doing because if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got; in this case a crisis.

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.

Cramlington Teaching and Learning Conference 2009

284 delegates cam along to the 8th annual Cramlington Teaching and Learning conference on Friday - a massive crowd for what turned out to be a fantastic event. I was asked to lead three sessions. The first one was about how we had developed our new KS3 curriculum. This seemed to go down well with the delegates and I have embedded the prezi I used below.

After that, we looked at how technology could help make language learners in to language creators using simple and free technology such as Audacity, GoAnimate and Glogster. We created an etherpad (a simultaneously editable web document for collaboration) to keep our collective notes - click here to see the etherpad.

Finally, the final session was all about developing higher order thinking skills in language learners and Miriam Barrachina and I demonstrated the use of mysteries, venn diagrams and fact or opinion resources. We did not even get onto looking at living graphs because of the in depth discussion we had about the impact on target language and what the learning objectives of this style of lesson might look like. You can see the presentation here.

I ad a great day and enjoyed hearing Alistair Smith talk about learning generations, even if it was from the corridor where I was assigned to usher in late comers!

Are your students emotional truants? A discussion point...

I firmly believe that technology is one of the best ways of hooking children into language learning. The use of blogs to promote creative writing, podcasts, vokis, glogs, video editing software etc opens a whole new world for language learners and language teachers. Despite all of this, I do have one huge reservation with a number of technologically fabulous pieces of exemplar languages teaching - not the how but the what. Why do we think it is still appropriate to be teaching children ten items they have in their pencil case, 14 different types of animals and how to book a hotel room. Most of them don't have a pencil, never mind a pencil case, can look up the nouns they need if they really want to talk about their pets and to be honest very few 15 year olds book hotels in France (and even if they were to do so, they would inevitably book online and simply follow the signs to the restaurant...). Where is the emotional and intellectual challenge in the tasks we give them - especially those tasks upon which their GCSE marks are based. I quote from a religious studies GCSE paper "Explain why Christians believe that both prejudice and discrimination are wrong." Now let us contrast this with a French GCSE question "Role Play - You are speaking to your French friend about your sister - say what her job is, say she is divorced, say how many children she has ask your friend if he/she has any brothers or sisters."  Perhaps if we were to further unpick the idea that your sister is another exampe of a single parent struggling in modern society then we could get some thinking going but as it stands, this is factual recall of vocabulary and of no real intelectual or emotional challenge. And we wonder why students do not engage with languages, why, although they do everything we might ask them to they are actually emotionally truanting our lessons. In RE, Humanities and PSHE they are doing sex drugs and rock'n'roll and they turn up to their languages class to be faced with giving directions around a town they will never visit and even if they did visit it they would just use Google Maps on their iPhones to find the directions   ...I told you technology was key!

There are tons of excellent resources available to help us achieve this, look at the fantastic resources from plan-ed here . for KS5 material on how girls around the world suffer from war, slavery etc and here, also from plan-ed are a Spanish and French scheme of learning on climate change. Also look at the great videos here from Learning and Teaching Scotland, check out the Allons en Haiti materials I blogged about recently from Action Aid - so much more rewarding for both us and them! So what do you think? Up for taking the new curriculum by the horns and throwing out the old content? As they say in the Corsa ads...c'mon!