Category Archives: teaching

School holidays: Gove is doubly wrong

Last week, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove made a speech saying that school hours and holiday plans were based on our agricultural past and that we were being left behind by the work ethic of the East Asian nations who had longer school days and shorter holidays.

Colleagues in teaching may be shocked to hear this, but Mr Gove is wrong on both counts.

Liberal England the TES team up to prove that the pattern of school holidays is not derived from our agrarian heritage.

In fact, schools took their holiday plan from… politicians! In the 1800s, longer summer holidays became a feature of parliament and the courts, and at the time, many in education were the sons of lawyers and politicians so it suited all concerned for the holidays to match.

The TES reports parents have been kvetching about the length of school holidays and how teachers have it easy, since at least the 1890s:

A letter to the Daily News in 1892 noted: “Little by little, the holidays at most of our schools have increased from an average of eight weeks in the year to something like 14. This gradual change has been entirely in the interest of the masters, for the school fees have not decreased in corresponding ratio.”

Another correspondent wrote: “I am convinced young boys, especially those with no real love of learning, lose in the long holidays much of the knowledge and discipline received in the short terms.”

That last complaint from 1892 is the rationale behind Nottingham city’s attempt to introduce a five term year with shorter summer holidays.

Just as Gove is wrong about the reason for school holidays, he is also wrong about the comparison between the English education system and East Asia. A blog post on the Local Schools Network crunches the data available and concludes:

English pupils spend more hours in the classroom than those in Korea and Japan. They spend about the same as those in Singapore, less than in Hong Kong and Shanghai (although pupils in Shanghai get a longer lunch break and more holidays which offset the extra hours).

Indeed, as a commenter later points out, most of the nations that beat the UK in the PISA rankings have less contact time with students than we do.

Of course this latest is just one pronouncement on which Gove is clearly, factually wrong.

Other interesting thought experiments teachers have been trying out on Twitter this week: if performance related pay for teachers is the answer for school improvement, why isn’t it the answer for secretaries of state? If parents are to determine teachers’ pay, perhaps teachers should determine Michael Gove’s remuneration package? And more generally, perhaps constituents should set MPs’ salaries.

Teaching tip – write on the desks!

The student desks in my classroom are fully sealed plastic units with a smooth surface.

Which means you can write on them with a dry wipe marker – a board pen in other words – and it rubs right off.

In fact, doing so makes less of a mess than a whole class activity with the mini whiteboards.

So when a class is settled on a writing activity and they ask for spellings, or “how do you say this in French?”, where before I’d grasp around for a spare pen, or a mini whiteboard from the cupboard, or a piece of paper, or even return to the whiteboard at the front of the room to make a cluttered confusing resource still worse… now, since I am almost always clutching a boardmarker when I am on walkabout anyway, I just write the answer to their question directly on their desk.

The first few times I did it were met with horror, and a bit of pointing and whispering. OMG, sir is writing on the tables. Then it improved engagement – more students asked questions if they thought the answer would get written on their desks.

We have posters in school that say “Stop! What are the rules about this?” and so a common reaction from students is “Sir, are you allowed to do that?” And the next question is “Sir… are WE allowed to do that…?” So you do have to be fairly clear that yes, I can do it, but no, you can’t do it, unless you have permission and you are using the correct type of pen.

I don’t always write an answer. If the question is something I think they should know (differentiated by who they are of course) or something we have laboured recently, I will signpost. Dictionary. Board. Check your book. Here, let me check your book. There. And sometimes it’s bloomin’ obvious – in a glossary on the sheet they are using, for example.

The idea came to me from this article about an English teacher removing barriers to writing and I discussed it further with colleagues this week at an inspiring school literacy training event chock full of ideas. Talk turned to mounting a mini-whiteboard on the classroom door on which to write a hook to catch students’ imaginations on their way in. I wondered whether maybe chalk pens might be the answer – write directly on the door?

Now wondering about writing up some of the common irregular verbs on my classroom windows. Crayola 5 Window Crayons FTW!

Speedy mini-plenaries and AFL

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On the amazing, but busy, mfl-resources mailing list, someone asked for ideas about how to do assessment for learning (AFL) whilst keeping a lesson pacey. Here were some ideas I gave in an answer. The point of AFL is to check that ALL learners are making the appropriate level of progress, and to test progress against learning objectives. These things should help you to do that.

Mini-quizes

“Turn to the back of your book. Write the numbers 1-5. Write the French for dog, cat, fish, mouse, tortoise. You should have le chien, le chat, la souris, la tortue. Mark your own work. Show me on the fingers of one hand what you got.”

(even quicker if you have the test and the answers on slides, which you can quickly type up during another activity or have ready before. Ofsted don’t need a lesson plan, just evidence the lesson is planned. Having mini-plenary tests up your sleeve is a clear sign you knew where the lesson was going in advance)

Whole class multiple choice activities

Teach your class the sign language for A B C D – you can do this pretty quickly the first time you do it, and subsequent times they will know it already and only need a little reinforcement. Then you can run through multiple choice questions on the board very fast and see instant feedback whether they are getting it right.

You can generate multiple choice questions on a set of vocab using Task Magic and then use them as a whole class activity this way.

I have seen class sets of coloured laminated cards with A B C D on, held together by treasury tags, which is also a good way to do it, but I still prefer mine with the sign language (it’s also “citizenship”)

Get feedback from routine tasks

For listening exercises out of eg 20, you can get a “numeracy across the curriculum” tick on your observation with “Take your score. Halve it and round up. Halve it and round down. Show me on the fingers of one hand what you got.” (this takes a lot of practice before most of them can do it and an awful lot of niggly questions about basic maths)

How are you feeling?

My PGCE tutor in almost every university session we had would do something along the lines of “show me how you feel – thumbs down if you are not getting it. Thumbs sideways if you are starting to understand, thumbs up if you think it’s time to move on to the next thing. Everyone show me altogether now!

You can also give the thumbs a numerical score: thumb up if you got 15-20, sideways 7-14, down if under 7.

What do the walls think?

I’ve started to do pointing at walls – left wall if you think the food item I mention is gesund, right wall if it is ungesund.

Similarly, a series of sentences on the projector: “Many of these sentences have a fundamental mistake. Read the sentence quickly then work out the error. When I say so, altogether, point at the left wall if the mistake is word order. Point at the right wall if the mistake is to do with the verb and point at the ceiling if the verb and time phrase do not match properly. Fold your arms if the sentence is correct.”

(the altogether is key otherwise the weaker ones take their lead from the stronger ones)

(copy where to point onto every slide so they have no excuse for misremembering which wall is which)

(a friend invested in a clicker with a laser pointer so she can do activities like this from the back of the classroom facing in the same direction as the kids for the avoidance of left/right issues.)

Mini whiteboard – les ardoises

Mini whiteboards, obviously, so long as you don’t spend longer distributing resources than you do using them. “I know we haven’t done family members since Y7 so some of you will have forgotten this, but I want you write the French for ‘my dad’ on the mini whiteboards and hold them up. Yours is wrong. Yours is completely wrong. Yours is just missing one teeny tiny accent. Yes, perfect” – for correct answers take a board off a kid and show it to the others.

Le and La on different sides of the mini-whiteboard, then students can just flip them – chat is it le or la, souris is it le or la? Ditto mon and ma. This can also be done with walls.

(you have to be careful with “le on one side, la on the other” or they write the words on different halves of the same side. I now model what I want with an overly dramatic flip of the board.)

Groups or rows in your classroom?

Two colleagues have decided to move from rows to groups this year, mainly because it makes resources easier to deal with. Each group table can have a pile / basket with glue, MWBs and pens, dictionaries. One friend even has a stock of cheap biros with her name stuck onto them so that kids who come without pens don’t even need to tell her, they can just get on with it. Phil Beadle things that if sitting in groups, plan to have higher ability boys paired with slightly less able girls – high girls with low boys will mean the girls do all the work and the boys nick it, the other way around the machismo will mean the boys work and then help the girls.

Do please comment if you find these posts useful. I find it strange to hear that people are sharing my ideas with their departments, when I rarely get any feedback myself.

Cartoons for feedback #mfltwitterati

I’m planning a series of lessons feeding back on performance from recent assessments, and I’m wondering about how to get my students to pay attention to what I say.

I read a recent blogpost (but didn’t save the link, sorry!) that suggested cartoons might be a fun way to do it.

After a bit of googling, I’ve spent half an hour on ToonDoo creating a series of fun ways of looking at National Curriculum levels.

Level 4 in MFL ii

This is turning into a series of worksheets! Shout if you want me to share the completed work.

NB the “Check the box for examples” is so that I can do one set of cartoons for both languages. I can lay these onto an A4 sheet and then amend the surrounding boxes.

Here are two PDFs – one for L3 and on the second page for L4.

I’ve also created a CORN display – I now have a CORNwall in my classroom. Here is the Word document of the words I have up now.

Six new teaching activities I think worked #mfl

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Here is a short list of six types of teaching activities that I tried for the first time last term that I think worked for me and my classes and that I will definitely be doing again.

Quiz quiz trade

I found out about this from this blogpost by MonsieurM and immediately thought it was an ace idea and put it into some of my lessons. I’ve used it in observed lessons and those who saw it liked it to, and awesomely I’ve started to hear about it being used in other MFL teachers’ lessons at school now too. If anything I might have used it a bit too much last term, and I have to rein it in a bit.

The idea is simple. You make a set of cards. Each student has their own card with a French phrase and the English translation. Students need to be familiar with the vocab before starting. Students stand up and find a partner. A reads the French phrase, B has to respond with what that means in English. A uses the English on her card to verify and to nudge B in the right direction. Once guessed, B reads her French phrase and A responds with English. Once both have done this, they swap their cards and go off and find another partner to begin again.

The activity lasts 8-10 minutes and you can then ease them into writing sentences of their own, starting with the last card they had, and then putting the vocab together themselves.

An example set of cards is here on the TES for teaching “In my bedroom” in French. It’s easy to make up the phrases you need – if you have 10 items of vocab in a lesson, plus 3 sentence stems such as “In my room I have”, “In my room I don’t have”, “In my room I would like” you can easily get to 30 unique cards.

You can also play quiz quiz trade getting the students to start off by writing their own cards, but you have to accept that not all of the cards will be perfect…

Dice writing

There’s something about giving dice to students that makes them suddenly more interested. If you gave them a vocab sheet and said, “randomly pick a sentence from each category and write it in your book,” sure, some would do it, and most would not settle to it. But if you give them a vocab sheet where the items are numbered and let the dice choose how to put the paragraphs together, somehow they are magically sucked into the activity, calm descends, the room goes quiet, and you can walk around the class watching children who definitely do not yet know how to write in the past tense in French, magically putting down perfect paragraphs into their exercise book. Once you remove the dice and support again, no-one will ever know from looking in their books, that they didn’t come up with the paragraphs themselves!

An example sheet is here on the TES – we were doing “describe a past weekend in town”. There are 1-5 items to choose from – if they threw a 6 they had a free choice of what to write.

There is a tiny danger that completely random selection of sentences meant slightly nonsensical paragraphs, for example: last weekend it rained so I went to the beach and sunbathed. The kids were delighted at some of the combinations and quite aware of the nonsense.

Differentiate up by giving a selection of mid-to higher level connectives and asking able students to include them in their paragraph.

I followed this activity with a paragraph of their choosing after the random one, and a homework where, having written the paragraph, they had to learn it off by heart to reproduce it under test conditions in the next lesson, as a skills practice for both their end of term assessment, and longer term, the sort of controlled assessment currently done at GCSE. (Although by the time these students reach KS4, who knows?!)

This idea was something I got and simplified from Vincent Everett. I can’t now find the exact resource, but he had a writing activity about a murder mystery, and who had killed whom with what was decided by dice.

Crossword reading comps

This came to our department from an NVQ languages training course and all of us have used it since. You take a text, and set the language teacher’s staple activity of “Find the French for…” Then you make a crossword out of the answers. The students will know they have got the answers right if the crossword works, so the activity is essentially self marking.

I have uploaded one I did – again from the KS3 topic of describing a past weekend. This one, I think, was pitched wrong – this was much too difficult to use to introduce the past tense, and even my most able students struggled to complete the activity.

You can make the crosswords using Puzzlemaker – once you have the grid, you can copy and paste it into a Word document. If the answer is a multi-word phrase, you have to delete the spaces when you input it into the crossword compiler: jemesuislevé I got up

Snakes and ladders

Another example of giving them dice… There are tons and tons of snakes and ladders grids on the TES, and using them in a language context is fairly easy. Groups of four students play snakes and ladders, and the squares without either snakes or ladders have pictures which they have to turn into a TL phrase.

Trichez!

Another idea I got from Monsieur M that I first thought would be limited to able older students, but realised could be used with younger, less experienced students too so long as the topic was strictly constrained.

You have a deck of cards some of which have French phrases on them, and a few have “Trichez!” (Cheat!) on them. Students draw a card. If they have a phrase, they read it out and place the card face down on the discard pile. If they have “Trichez!” they have to make up a phrase and say it and place the card etc etc. The challenge of the game is that they have to make up the phrase and say it without the other players spotting what they are doing. I gave them plastic counters as a way of keeping score, and played this with year 7 as part of a series of lessons on telling the time.

You can see how if you were doing this as part of revising ready for a speaking assessment you’d use a wide variety of different phrases from the topic. If you doing it with younger students, you just need to use only a very narrow set of phrases. Time telling was ideal. You might want to explicitly model strategies for playing with them, eg explain most people will get a trichez card at some point, so before you start playing, have a time phrase in your head and use that when the trichez card comes up.

Simple dice game

Having decided to use dice, I had been borrowing them from a colleague. I thought a needed a set for my own classroom to avoid having to borrow them too often, and bought a set on Amazon. The day they arrived, I didn’t have a lesson planned to use them, but I did have a lesson that ran short so I quickly invented a simple game.

As it happened, I had vocab lists on the board divided between four boxes, so I numbered the boxes 2, 3, 4 and 5 and set the rules. Throw the dice. If you get 2-5, you have a say a German phrase from that box, and your partner has to say what it means in English. If you throw a 1 you have to stand up, if you throw a 6 you get to sit down. (and then, to clarify – if you throw a 1 when you are already standing up you stay standing up; if you throw a 6 but you are already sitting down, you stay sitting down.)

Now all I need to do is think of some strategies to make them be more careful about not throwing the dice stupidly so that they fall off the table.

Oh, and they love the dice and there seems to be a tendency for them to go missing, so I have to be careful to count them out and count them in so I am not losing them.

And finally…

So here are some lovely activities I did last term that I enjoyed and I think my students did. They were new to me, but they might be old hat to you.

Strangely there are a bunch of things I did on teaching practice last year that I assumed I would use regularly and have just fallen out of my routines. Must bring them back! Battleships is the obvious one.

French mnemonics

When I came back to seriously working on my French after many years of neglecting, I found there were some words and phrases I could not get correct without checking every time, and so I started to try making mnemonics for myself to get acceptably consistent.

Of course there are some I was taught that still stick in my mind.

And there are one or two I am trying out to see if it improves my students’ accuracy, especially when it comes to tenses.

Here’s my top five for starters.

je m’appelle

I couldn’t get my head around the spelling of this so made up a rhyme:

When you spell
qui s’appelle
It’s got two Ps
and it’s got two Ls

(My students now always spell it with two Ps and two Ls, but still manage a dazzling array of different combinations of other letters, spaces and apostrophes, so we are not out of the woods yet. Gemappllle!)

vingt

Never sure of the spelling of this one, especially the n and the g. You just have to remember you can’t get to 20 without having some vin.

There’s an R in futuRe

Almost universally we teach the futur proche these days instead of the real future tense, and students need to use the correct form of aller along with the infinitive: je vais faire mes devoirs or je vais jouer au foot. There are many ways of getting it wrong but a common one is to use a conjugated form of the verb: je vais joue. So I tell them you can’t have futuRe without R – you need the form of the verb with an R at the end. A little complicated by RE verbs, but if they’re far enough through to be using those as well, they can probably cope.

Where wears a hat

Ou and où get mixed up. They are or and where. But which witch is which? I was taught that the longer word (in English) has the accent but where wears the hat is quite nice too.

I prefer wears a hat too

Je préfère needs accents either side of the F that form a hat. This gets messy when students have both je préfère and ma couleur préférée in their Wortschatz.

Have you got any awesome mnemonics? Feel free to add them in the comments.

Sit properly on that chair or you might die

I have a good friend who believes that teacher training mainly consists of getting the trainees in a room and showing them a video of a student tipping on a chair, falling off and dying.

Once the trainees have seen this, they can truthfully go on and tell their students they saw someone fall off and die once, as part of the daily patter of the things we tell kids not to do.

I have been reading through this forum on TES this evening (why? should be either planning or sleeping!) and it seems tales of woe resulting from chair tipping are never far away, whether or not you need a snuff video in your training year to underline the point.

Tales of falling and cutting heads, falling onto sharpened pencils, falling and biting through lips, and tripping others up are commonplace. Many traumatised teachers recount tales of the injuries they have had to deal with and the damaged children and staff that have resulted.

The bits I like best were the strategies when telling a child to sit properly has not worked. Sit on the chair properly – or stand – or sit on the floor. Sit on the chair properly, because I don’t want to spend my afternoon mopping up your blood when you fall and break your head. Sit on your chair properly because I can’t have a new carpet for another 10 years and I don’t want this one stained. Sit on the chair properly because the last thing I need is to have to fill in another “child injured” form. Sit on your chair properly because if you fall out and fall unconscious, who do you think in this room is going to have to give you the kiss of life?