Saturday 14 March 2020

Language World 2020: Harnessing the Hive Mind


I had a great time at this year's Language World conference in Manchester.  I spent yesterday and today in the company of old friends and new friends, attending inspiring sessions and generally putting the world to rights.

My session yesterday was Harnessing the Hive Mind.  If you couldn't be there (for various reasons!) here it is for you now:


What is the 'hive mind'?  According to the OED, it's “a notional entity consisting of a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence”.  My working definition for our context is here:



A lot of us in the primary sector are lone practitioners, and a lot of us can’t access CPD for various reasons, so using your online community, your personal learning network, is often the way to go.  

This image represents my personal learning network.  You will be hearing about how I have used them to harness the hive mind.  Members of LiPS (the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group) are going to get the biggest mentions, hence the image.



Rather than list things that you could do, I’m going to tell you the story of how I’ve harnessed the hive mind during the last year or so in four different ways.  Hopefully this will give you some ideas of things that you could do or ways that you could contribute.

Joe Dale (@joedale on Twitter) and Noah Geisel (@SenorG) started the MFLTwitterati podcast, of which there are now 10 episodes.  I found Episode 4 (April 2019) particularly interesting.  Have a listen to the takeaway section, which features US Spanish teacher Martina Bex and her online Spanish magazine, Revista Literal.


I had a look at Revista Literal, and here’s an example of one of the pages.  The students’ writing is printed out and has a vocab list at the side, so that it becomes a reading resource as well as a celebration of writing.  I could immediately see how this model could be adapted for primary languages, to celebrate the writing that our children do, to raise awareness of the standards that children are reaching in Key Stage 2, and to give children the opportunity to write for a real audience.



I blogged about it the same day and shared the post to Twitter and to the LiPS Facebook group to see what others thought.  Reactions were overwhelmingly positive.

So, to start things off I put together a short survey on Google forms, which I blogged about and then shared the links for as before.  The responses indicated the direction that the magazine was to take – which Key Stages it should be for, how often it should be published, if the pieces of work should be originals or retyped, if children’s illustrations should be included, and if background information from teachers should be included.  After this there was a vote to establish the name of the magazine.  GDPR and safeguarding was a minefield to navigate.  Twitter friends especially were very helpful in this regard.



Then on 1st May last year I fractured my wrist.  I couldn’t do much, especially drive, so I couldn’t go to school.  But I could do one-handed typing, so I worked on the paperwork and asked people for feedback on that and the design, logo and layout.  I put together the web page and so was able to put out a call for the first submissions in May.

I published Issue 1 at the beginning of June.  The contents and guest language appear on the opening page.  The pages are numbered using the guest language.  The structure is based on Revista Literal, with vocabulary lists at the side of the page, and photographs (from pixabay.com) where the children don’t provide illustrations.


Teacher’s Corner follows the children’s work.  Teachers tell the story of how the pieces of work came to be.  They say how long the children have been learning the language and how long their lessons are, then describe the sequence of the teaching and learning leading up to this piece of work.  They describe the support that the children had, and say why they particularly like the pieces of work that they have submitted.


The final part of the magazine is Puzzle Corner, where the puzzles are about languages and you get the answers to the previous one from the previous issue.

The deadline for issue 5 is Thursday March 26th, so please visit the webpage for more information and to read previous issues if you'd like to celebrate your children's work in this way.


Phrases of the day were conceived to give language teachers some meme-type picture resources to use and to display.  The first ones were phrases that I chose, but then I asked people via Twitter, LiPS and Secondary MFL Matters if there were any they’d find useful.  I did them in French, Spanish and German using the Canva app.  I published one a day in each of the three languages from 11th March last year until 5th July.  They’re all on the website (see the links on the homepage) if you want to download and use any of them.  There are a lot of classroom instructions and phrases, and also examples of plurals, adjectival agreement and so on.


The phrases of the day morphed into the #LanguageLinks, which started on 5th July last year, and there’s been a new one every day since, on the Light Bulb Languages Twitter, Facebook page and also on the new Instagram page.  Every week or so I upload a batch to the website.  They’re in French, Spanish, German and Italian. 

The links are something I’d thought about for a while, and which I had blogged about, in the context of improving English vocabulary.  I find it difficult to teach another language without comparing the words and structures in the new language with English.  For example, colours are often one of the first things that we teach new learners, and with my classes I look for clues, tips and hints that will help us to remember the words.  One of the most common ones is remembering blanco/blanc by thinking of the English word blank.  Quite often these clues, tips and hints lead us to high quality English vocabulary that I recommend to my students that they use.  In recent weeks we have mentioned azure, stupendous and phantom. 


This also links very well with the curriculum for English, where there is a big emphasis at the moment on improving and building English vocabulary.  The links are designed to stimulate interest in other languages while building English vocabulary and showing links to help students to remember the new words.



The L2 word on each poster is a translation of the first English word.  Then the second English word is linked to the L2 word (sometimes they are cognates but not always).  The two English words are always linked in some way.


Lots of people have sent me their ideas for links, for which I’m very grateful as my own ideas are starting to run a bit dry.  If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them!  I’ve also been sent a lot of pictures of the posters on display in different schools and colleges, which is great.

In November last year I saw this tweet from Samara Spielberg, who is a teacher in New York.  She asks colleagues to write short texts which incorporate certain set phrases, verbs and structures. Then her students read and analyse them before using them as a model for their own work. 


The following is a close-up of one of the texts that Samara made. I could see straightaway that this was something that could be adapted for Key Stage 2, with different teachers contributing texts to make a teaching resource.


I had just started gender with my beginner Year 4s, and decided to crowd-source some texts for them to use as a writing stimulus.


I put together a sample text with the key language that I wanted to use, and asked colleagues via my blog and via LiPS to contribute.



This is the resulting resource which I worked on with my Year 4s.  We looked at the genders of all the nouns mentioned and used a glossary to find out the meanings.  We then used the colour coding to help us to collaboratively build a text on the board.  Then I let them loose with a dictionary to write their own.  They had to make a list of their nouns and genders first, and then build them into their text.


This is an example of the work produced.  The majority of the children enjoyed using the colour coding to help them to build their sentences.  Colouring blocks like this was more successful than writing in colours, mainly because yellow writing doesn’t show up!

I did a similar thing for French.  All these resources are on Light Bulb Languages.


This is one to practise opinions of infinitives for Year 6.  We did this activity with it.  There are lots of other possibilities for texts like this – if you can think of one you’d like, let’s do it!



Deep dives won’t have escaped your attention.  As they’re new this academic year there’s been a lot of brainstorming and sharing on the forums and on social media.


In September a number of us received this in a marketing email from ilanguages.  I posted it in LiPS as I thought it would be of interest to members of the group in the light of the new Ofsted framework.  Jane Birtwhistle and I decided to post one of the questions each day for people to contribute their responses so that we could all help each other out.  Over the seven days of the seven questions there were a lot of really helpful contributions.  Of my three schools, two of them at the time were expecting Ofsted imminently, and the third, an outstanding school, was potentially going to get one of the special visits for languages, history and geography.  So these responses were very useful for me.  I went through the responses and pulled them together in a document, which I posted back into LiPS.  It meant that each member would have the basics which they could then shape to their own school.  The document covered the 3 Is and more.  All the posts can be viewed by searching the hashtag #ofsteddeepdive in LiPS.

I made the information specific to my school and shared it with my headteacher. This all led to a positive few weeks for me at school.  We had a “meet the governors” day, where a team of the governors spent the day in school talking to the children and also the leaders of various subjects and projects and so on.  Because my headteacher knew I had been doing this work into the 3Is and other aspects of leading the subject, she asked me to come to speak to the governors about Spanish.  During the meeting, the governors asked me about CPD, and came to the conclusion that other staff would benefit from some input on languages.  So in January I did a staff meeting for Spanish.  This is the message I shared about it on LiPS afterwards.


This is a brilliant example of what people can do when they all put their heads together.  More than one person has said that in their school languages are leading the way with this.  Maybe it looks like it's just me blowing my own trumpet but this could be you!


So as you can see I’ve had no qualms about using my online contacts and personal learning network for my own ends, but I have shared the outcomes with others as well.

What can you do?  How can you harness the hive mind to enrich your offering to your students or to make a resource that will be of use to lots of colleagues?


When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion – together we are invincible!


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