Switching on the lightbulb - getting students to come up with ideas

This was the title of a recent webinar hosted by Macmillan Education and presented by Lindsay Warwick.  Having just completed two years in Vietnam, where generally students had few thinking skills, this was a topic of great interest to me.  What follows is a summary of what Lindsay had to say.

Sometimes the problem isn't how to say something in English, but, rather, what to say.  For this reason, it's extremely important to scaffold activities properly.

Assessing knowledge

Sometimes students don't have ideas because:

• they don't have a background in thinking at all (if they have been in an education system where all the learning was by rote, for example)
• the topic isn't relevant to them and they have no knowledge of it

To assess knowledge of a new topic, put pictures pertinent to the topic around the room and pin a blank piece of paper under each one.  Ask students to walk around the room and write questions about the pictures on the sheets of paper.  They're not allowed to repeat any questions so they are pushed to come up with less obvious ones.  Then put the students into groups and give each group one of the pictures and the accompanying list of questions.  Ask them to discuss the questions and speculate on what the answers might be.  Give them some useful language to help them with this:

• Perhaps/probably/possibly
• It might/could be ...
• I guess ...
• It's likely/unlikely
• I doubt it's ... because ...
• I think ...
• I'm pretty sure ...
• I'm not sure but ...

As the students are doing this, monitor them to assess their knowledge of the topic.  Things they don't know could make a good homework task - students have to go away and do the research.  Students are much more likely to be able to discuss things if they have the appropriate background knowledge.

We can use this version of Bloom's Taxonomy to ask the right questions and help our students to be better thinkers:

 

 

This helps us to plan better lessons.

 

A practical example

 

Consider the question:

 

What are the pros and cons of a formal national identification system?

 

First, give students a quiz to test their knowledge of the subject.

 

 



This encourages students to speculate and opens their minds to the issues involved in the topic.  (Answers - 1. F - not the USA, 2. T, 3, T, 4. F - 11 million, 5. T)

Next, give students a list of points and ask them whether or not they are relevant to the question under discussion:

 

In this case, B, D and J are irrelevant to the discussion - they are not pros or cons.  This is a challenging activity to be used with higher level students.

Next, get the students to sort the points into pros and cons.  Give half the class the pros and the other half the cons and ask them to rank them in order of importance.  Get them to do this individually first, then with a partner, then with a small group, and so on up to half the class.  After doing this, students will be better able to discuss the question and better able to come up with their own ideas when the next discussion question comes along.

Debatabase

This is a great website for finding out about debates and discussions.  It lists points for and points against for discussion topics and is a really useful resource  for teachers to help us prepare for in-class debates.

Scaffolding

It's extremely important to give our students guidelines.  For example:

How has our relationship with the environment changed?
Give at least five examples.

We need to push our students and encourage collaboration.  For example:

What do you consider the main causes of disease?
Work in pairs and consider economics, lifestyle, emotional well-being, as well as medical reasons.  Think of at least two examples of each.

Good scaffolding is the means by which we support our students and guide them in the right direction.

What's the question?

Give students five answers to the same discussion question and ask them to come up with the question.  For example, these answers:

should lead to the question:

What would the world be like without energy?

Five caps

This activity encourages different ways of thinking by asking students to consider things from different perspectives.  We do this with role-plays in the classroom and we can do the same thing with discussions.  Give the students a question.  For example:

How has social networking changed the lives of young people today?

Then give each student a 'cap' - teenager, parent, teacher, employer, government think tank member - and ask them to debate the question from their character's point of view.  Invariably, the conversation will last much longer than it would otherwise have done.

Five minute Guardian debates

These are five-minute videos, created by The Guardian newspaper in the UK and made available on You Tube, which can be used as the basis for in-class discussions for B2 level students and above.

Problem solving: reverse brainstorming

Here, we take a problem and reverse it.  By looking at an issue from the other direction, we can often see it more clearly and so generate more ideas.  For example, if the original question is:

How do you think the problem of over-consumption can be addressed?

Consider instead:

What do you think the causes of over-consumption are?

Decision tree

This is a good way to push students to think harder about the solutions they propose - what would the impact/results be?

In the example above, for instance, the consequences of an education campaign might be a) that it's expensive and b) that it only reaches young people.

Mindmeister.com is a good website for creating all kinds of mind maps.

Prove it!

We're constantly making assumptions and sometimes these are wrong.  Give students a list of generally held truths and ask them to prove them to be true or false.  They have to go away and research, leading to a whole new discussion on where to find good sources (digital literacy).

In the examples above, only 3 and 5 can be proved to be true, and then only in a limited way.  These are great discussion topics!

Connections

Give students some pictures and ask them what the link is between them.  For example, here there could be a connection in each column:

 

1. Dutch, 2. the future, 3. water, 4. man-made inventions.

 

Then you could mix the photos, or ask students to make connections across the rows or diagonally.  The idea is to get students to think creatively and come up with whatever connections they can think of, however tenuous, as long as they can explain their reasoning.

 

I wonder

 

Students have to think of a question based on a theme represented by a picture.  Here, for example, the theme is 'old and new':

 

 

Questions could be things like:

 

I wonder what the builders of the old tower would think if they saw the modern office block?

 

I wonder how much taller the new building is than the old one?

 

I wonder if these two buildings are in the same town?

 

Thinking time

 

Use a site like tricider.com to get students thinking outside of class.  Post a question on the site.  Students answer it and then comment on each others' ideas.  This is great because it gives students time to formulate their ideas, something which is not always possible in class.



 

 





 

Creative pedagogy, language learning and technology

This was the title of a recent Cambridge English Teacher webinar presented by Graham Stanley and what follows is a summary of what he had to say.

Creative pedagogy

The idea of creative pedagogy was introduced by Andrei Aleinikov in 1989.  He said:

'Creativity should be a central part of what you do with learners to motivate them and better promote lifelong learning.'

Creative pedagogy is:

• Helping learners how to learn creatively.
• Transforming the classroom into a creative and flexible learning environment.
• Allowing learners to innovate, to create.
• Taking risks and thinking imaginatively.

Role of the learner

Help learners to develop:

• self-motivation
• confidence
• curiosity
• flexibility

Components of creative pedagogy

• FLUENCY - generating new ideas
• FLEXIBILITY - shifting perspectives
• ORIGINALITY - doing something new
• ELABORATION - building on existing ideas

How do we link creative pedagogy with language learning?

Here are some ideas for activities:

1. Island project

• Put students in small groups and get them to design an island, using the lexis of geographical features and places.
• Put the islands together to form a group of islands where students can be creative.
• The island in the middle can be an unknown island - the teacher's island for students to explore.
• This activity can be combined with the coursebook, with the island in the centre being used as a kind of narrative to what is going on in the core text.
• The islands can be revisited throughout the course and added to - places, currency, social issues, government, crime, etc.

2. Werewolf

This is a roleplay game based on 'Mafia'.  You can read the rules here.  The teacher acts as the narrator or storyteller.  The students are 'werewolves' who have to eat the villagers, or 'villagers' who have to eliminate the werewolves. Each night, one villager is devoured by the werewolves.  During the day, the werewolves try to hide their identities and the villagers try to discover who they are. 

The aim is to promote fluency and encourage the students to speak a lot.  It is an exciting game which really engages the students.  You could personalise it by getting students to write themselves a role - baker, teacher, etc. - so that they have more to talk about.

3. Creative writing prompts

Writing prompts can come from a variety of sources, but a favourite would be storycubes.com.  Here, students have a set of dice with images on them and they have to make up a story from the images.

Scamper

In his book on creative thinking techniques, 'Thinkertoys', Michael Michaelko came up with this acrostic:

Substitute it

Combine it

Adapt it

Modify/magnify it

Put it to some other use

Eliminate it

Reverse/rearrange it

In our teaching, we can use this to look at activities we've always used and change them in some way.

Gamification

We can take some of the ideas embedded in games and adapt them for ELT.

Graham gave us the example of a questionnaire carried out at the beginning of a school year which showed that students felt that writing was boring and they didn't like it.  To overcome this, he gave writing an element of gamification by introducing speed writing.  Not only does this engage students, it also improves quantity and fluency.

• Give students ten minutes in every class in which to write (it's a good idea to use a special notebook for this).
• Set a timer.
• Students have to write as much as possible on a given topic.
• Students have a table in the back of their notebooks giving the date and the word count (you can also have a chart on the classroom wall giving the results for the whole class).
• Students count the number of words they've written.
• The teacher circles the errors.
• The score is recorded as word count minus the mistakes.
• Students self-correct afterwards and can ask the teacher questions if they don't know what the errors are.
• This is a competitive activity, with students competing both against themselves (to do better than their previous score) and against each other.
• Introduce different levels that students have to reach.
• Give extra points for special achievements - most original writing, fewest mistakes, most creativity, best introduction, etc.
• Display the leader board prominently and award small prizes - badges, stickers or 'class money', for example.

Promoting speaking with an online game

Using computer games can be very engaging for students, but we must keep in mind a clear language aim every time we do so.  Here is a good idea for an activity to promote speaking:

• Use screenshots of images from a computer game.  Students will be immediately engaged by the content of the pictures.
• Show them to the students and ask them to remember as much detail about them as possible.
• In pairs, get students to describe what they saw, using full sentences.
• Ask one pair to share their ideas with the group.
• Ask the group to improve on what they have heard.  It's important to push the students to be the best they can be.
• Get the students to look at the pictures again and describe them again. What can be added to the original descriptions?
• These activities generate lots of vocabulary.
• You can extend by showing follow-up pictures and ask students to describe what has happened, what has changed, thus forcing the use of present perfect.
• As homework, you could get students to write about what happened in the game.

Examples of screenshots you could use:

These are from the computer game, 'Droppy'.

Creativity in ELT

This is a summary of a recent webinar presented by Antonia Clare.  She shared so many good ideas that I need to record them here for future use in my classroom and in my training sessions for other teachers.

In a creative classroom, students are active participants and are fully engaged in the learning process.  The aim is to shift the responsibility from the teacher back to the learner.

Creative thinking is about:

• FLUENCY - generating lots of ideas.
• FLEXIBILITY - the ability to shift perspective and come up with a variety of ideas.
• ELABORATION - building on and expanding existing ideas.
• ORIGINALITY - coming up with new ideas.

'Creative' versus 'Critical' thinking

How can we encourage creativity?

We need to use a framework to trigger creative thinking.

Examples of this are:

• writing without using the letter 'e'.  (This is something that I've done with an upper intermediate class, using this British Council podcast and worksheet.)
• using writing prompts.  For example, http://writingexercises.co.uk/ has a first line generator for creative writing.
• using Flickr five card stories to encourage inventive narratives.
• giving students the first lines of proverbs and getting them to invent the endings.  Then they can think of stories in their own lives that prove or disprove the proverb.
• 'My Life in Film' - encourage learners to write their life story as a movie trailer using prompts (in the beginning....., then...., later......, a big decision......, now........, etc.).

Ways to use your emotions

There are six basic emotions:

• fear
• anger
• distress
• joy
• surprise
• disgust

We can:

• look at pictures and discuss these emotions.
• talk about situations when we've felt these emotions.
• write some 'emotions poetry'.

       For example,   Distress is like ____________.

                                It tastes like ___________.

                                It smells like ___________.

                                It sounds like ___________.

                                It looks like ____________.

                                It feels like ____________.

This is good for all levels, from pre-intermediate upwards.  The lines could be made to rhyme, but they don't have to.

Using the five senses

When it comes to the senses, try getting students to think about evocative smells, for example.  To get the ball rolling, tell them an anecdote from your own past.  For me, this would involve the aroma of warm tomatoes growing in my Grandad's greenhouse when I was a very small child!

You could also use a website like Talking Memories and encourage students to think about memories of their childhoods.  They could record an oral account or write a description of an event, adding details of how they felt and why it was special, remembering to include all the senses.

Thinking outside of the box

• Take students outside of the classroom.  The effect is often very liberating and gets the creative juices flowing.
• Use a website like Voxopop to get students talking.  You could, for example, ask them to talk about their 'perfect day'.
• Make a film.
• Use a video to stimulate discussion.  For example, you could use this video about Banksy to trigger the debate, 'Is grafitti art or vandalism?'

Using images

• Show images of people and ask, 'What kind of person do you think he/she is and why?'
• Choose images to create a 'Museum of Me' - include pictures of clothes, food, drink, books, places, etc.
• Use eltpics - get students to choose pictures which are indicative of them  and write a story or do a presentation around them.

Finally, we need to be.......

Creation of stories and poems

Response framework

Engagment of the emotions

Activation of the senses

Thinking time

Imagery as a prompt

Video

Elaboration

Thanks to Antonia Clare for a great webinar!