This is my presentation from this year's Language World conference (#LW2019) which finished yesterday. My PowerPoint was a series of images and so posting it here would not be a great deal of use to you if you weren't there 'live'. Read on to find out what "goosebump learning" is!
It’s well known that when a piece of music particularly
moves you, you get goosebumps and your hair stands on end. But have you ever had this happen to you in
the classroom, and with language learning rather than music? Sometimes in the classroom we get a strong
reaction from the learning that is taking place, and that manifests itself in
goosebumps.
The dictionary says that goosebumps are “caused by cold,
fear or excitement”. Well in most
classrooms it’s unlikely to be because of cold, as many are heated to tropical
temperatures, and hopefully it is never a result of fear. It can be, though, a result of our thrill at
seeing the learning go just right.
We can explain this state in other ways too. This reaction can occur “when the stars align”
– when all the conditions are correct. I
think we can all agree that these reactions are quite rare, but are they in
fact unexpected and nearly impossible?
Are they down to pure luck or is it something we can control and/or
nurture?
Engineering this kind of reaction for the teacher, and
indeed for the students, can be seen as some sort of alchemy – “a process that
is so effective that it seems like magic”, apparently. Let’s think about what we need to do, what we
need to put in place in order to maximise our chances of the learning being
this good.
Our students’ success, achievement and obvious enjoyment is
what gives us goosebumps. Their learning
can be affected by the weather, by the time of day, by what’s happened in the
corridor before the lesson, by there being an R in the month…. The
culture of the languages classroom is very important. They need to feel “emotionally secure and
psychologically safe” (Paul Ginnis) Is
the languages classroom a place where children feel safe to have a go, to make
mistakes and to learn from them? Is it a
place where their peers will be supportive of their attempts?
This poster from bsmall publishing, free to download from
their website, illustrates some of the things that we want the learners to be
able to do in our classrooms without running the risk of ridicule or getting
told off by other students or from the teacher. Two of the articles of the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child state that children have the right to be educated and have
the right to express themselves freely, including in the classroom. It’s worth laying the foundations, I think,
by looking at the rights and responsibilities resources that are used by Rights
Respecting Schools:
- everyone
in school has the right to learn, to be safe and to be happy. Therefore, it’s everyone’s responsibility to
listen to respect others’ views and opinions, to show them respect and to be
polite and helpful to all in the room, including adults. It’s learners’ responsibility to behave in a
mature and sensible way.
- Children
also have the right to be educated and they therefore have the responsibility
to learn as much as they can and to help others to learn.
- All
children have the right to make mistakes and the responsibility
to learn from them.
This is the sort of culture that we want in our classrooms,
where students feel that they can have a go, safe in the knowledge that they
will be supported and not ridiculed by their peers, and that the teacher will
acknowledge their efforts and support them to improve.
Part of learners’ feeling comfortable in the classroom is
for them to be comfortable and supported where they are sitting. In the primary
sector, the seating plan is often pre-determined by the class teacher, and
usually comprises ability tables. If you have the freedom to decide your own seating plan,
what should you be taking into account? The
seating pattern you choose contributes to the atmosphere of the classroom. Rows suggest a controlled environment where
interaction is perhaps not encouraged, while a U shape, for example, indicates
more of a feeling of equality between the teacher and the students, and
promotes discussion and interaction. Grouped
tables are like little communities for the learner to operate in and gives them
that safe area.
In an ideal world, and this is something that we talked
about in my Local Authority about 20 years ago, language classrooms would have
American-style seats with integral tables, which could be moved around and
re-arranged very easily. With our
traditional tables and chairs things are usually a bit trickier.
We need to strike the balance between discipline issues and
the need for facilitating pair and group work.
We don’t want anyone to have their back to the main focus of the lesson,
which is usually the whiteboard area. Once
we’ve decided on the table pattern, do we seat according to ability or in a
mixed-ability pattern? Even a set class
is going to have a range of ability within it, of course. According to research by Montana State
university, mixed-ability seating shows a huge attainment increase for the
lower ability, with no detriment to the higher ability. This type of seating encourages peer to peer
learning, where students reinforce their own learning by helping and supporting
others. Rachel Hawkes advocates mixed
seating where students have a partner of a different ability with whom to work
in a pair next to them, and then they turn round to interact again with a
different partner.
I’m a big fan of the Itchy Feet cartoons, and love this one - View from the top - because of its depiction of language learning as a mountain to be climbed. You climb one slope and celebrate having
achieved something, but then there is revealed yet another climb. And we never stop climbing, however adept we
are. In order for students to have a
successful climb to whatever the arrival point may be that we have planned for
them, we need to have some routines in place so that students know what to
expect and what they’ll need to do at each step along the way. This often involves careful use of the target
language. Do we always introduce the
same activity in the same way so that students know exactly what they need to
do? Do we habitually colour-code words
or clusters of words to provide a secure shorthand to students? Do we use actions to aid understanding and to
maximise student involvement? Do we, and
indeed should we, begin each lesson in the same way to breed familiarity, to
make students feel secure before they start?
Should we have an activity for students to do the moment they arrive in
the room, before the lesson has officially begun, to settle them and get them
in the right frame of mind?
If we are going to reach that magical goosebumps stage of
learning, something else that we need to do is to ensure that the learning is
built up in small, manageable, scaffolded steps. Students will lack confidence and
understanding if we go in too high too soon.
We want them to feel secure and supported as they gradually build up the
language to the top of the slope that you have planned. We also want to build learner confidence by
getting them to do things, to have those interactions with others that will
help them to practise what they are learning, to support their peers and to
learn from each other.
So we’ve talked about some of things that we can do to
encourage goosebump learning, to maximise our chances of it happening. Allow me to share with you some of my recent
and not so recent goosebump moments. While I was preparing this, I was racking my brain trying
to think of things from teaching years past, those moments that made me feel
really pleased and happy to be a teacher.
I have a feeling that a lot of them have been lost in the ether. We should make a record of our goosebump
moments, I think, as proof to ourselves in the dark days that yes - we can do
this! That’s one thing that social media
and LiPS (Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group) in particular is great
for – for sharing and celebrating our successes.
- In 1997 I met for the first time a Year 7 Spanish group,
who I ended up teaching all the way through to Year 9. I also taught a lot of them for GCSE. When they were in Year 9, at the turn of the
century, I was part of a working group in the Local Authority about Thinking
Skills, and it became part of the KS3 Strategy.
We developed a number of Thinking Skills materials in the Local Authority. This is a mystery activity where students
have to use the clues they are given to find the answer to the big
question. In this case, it’s “who is Sofía’s best friend?”. The class worked
in groups of four or five and first of all worked through some scaffolding
activities to support them when they came to read and understand the clues and
work out their answer to the big question.
The point of thinking skills activities is that there is
rarely a clear cut correct answer. There
can be multiple correct answers, but students have to be able to explain and
justify their choice. With this mystery
there were four friends to choose from, and two of them were more suitable than
the other two. Towards the end of the
lesson, most groups had fed back about their choice and the reason behind their
choice, and finally we came to the group of four girls sitting near the
front. There ensued a stand-up argument
between two pairs in the group “THEY think it’s this one but WE think it’s that
one” complete with quoting from the text and justifications left, right and
centre. They were so involved in the
learning.
There must have been more from my secondary days, but I
can’t remember any specific examples apart from individual GCSE speaking exams.
- The next is the story of a girl currently in one of my Year
6 classes. In Year 1 and Year 2 the only
time she ever spoke to me was answering her name in the register. She didn’t join in with singing, usually
didn’t take part in the speaking, and shook her head quietly if I asked her if
she wanted to have a go at an activity that involved choosing something for the
class. When Year 3 started, she was still very quiet. Then after the first term the children
started working in pairs on dialogues using language that we had learned so far
in Year 3, namely saying hello and goodbye, saying and asking their name and
saying how you feel. We video the
resulting work and the children choose a puppet to do the speaking for
them. She was working with her best
friend, and when I videoed their work, there was this great big voice making
the puppet speak. It was a real
breakthrough and she has never looked back.
- A couple of years ago I did my French flag unit with my two
Year 2 French classes. It involves
putting together sentences which describe the colours and shapes on flags, and
uses actions to aid memory and to assist with understanding. It always works well (in both languages) and
the children enjoy practising some unseen flags and then making and describing
their own. One of the girls described her flag brilliantly for the
rest of the class, and then, completely unexpected for me, got up in the show
and tell assembly and did it for the rest of the school later that same week.
- This is the numbers song that Year 1 learn pretty early on,
and we use it as the musical accompaniment to various games like pass the
parcel. One day last term I was
practising it with my current Year 1 and they sang it very well. Because in hymn practice the same morning we
had been practising a round, I suggested to the children that we try to sing
the numbers song as a round in two parts.
We split the class into two and they sung it perfectly as a round, first
time. Proper goosebump moment! We then tried to record it five times, but it
didn’t work again. One of those alchemy
moments!
- In one of my schools the children have only been learning
Spanish for two years, having done French before that. To move the Year 6s on quickly I’ve created a
unit about animals to introduce gender, singular and plural, and some
adjectival agreement. We read Los limones no son rojos, and I used its
format as a basis for this sentence-building activity. The idea is that they work in pairs to create
grammatically correct sentences using the word cards given. There are lots of correct answers, but the
answers have to be grammatically correct, in particular the adjectival
agreement. There was total immersion in
the activity, great learning conversations.
- This is from the Ofsted report of one of my schools, from
November last year, when the school moved from Good to Outstanding:
The
curriculum is used innovatively to explore cultural methods of addressing and
dispelling fears where appropriate. For example, some pupils were intrigued by
the ‘worry dolls’ they made while learning about Spanish cultures. Pupils’
welfare needs are high on everyone’s agenda.
The two inspectors spent two days in school, looking at
every aspect of the curriculum. I still
don’t know which child it was who mentioned to the HMI the worry dolls that we
make in Year 2, but they will get a special reward when I find out! The children are always very interested in the concept of
worry dolls, which we look at as part of our Guatemala project. We make one to put in the Guatemala bag which
we also make, and the children do take them home and use them. Year 5 and Year 6 often tell me that they
still have theirs and that they still use it.
Goosebumps for the way that Spanish crosses the curriculum and something
pretty deep happens.
- And finally the one that was the inspiration for this
presentation. Year 4, September, days of
the week. Some speaking and listening
with an often tricky class, and somehow it just all went right. All focussed, all engaged, all taking part. It hasn’t happened since with them, and I
spend the odd idle moment wondering what it was that made the stars align on
that day!
These are some activities that have always been successful
for me, and that you might like to try, to see if you get goosebumps!
· - Battleships
· - word mats
