Role playing

What are some different ways you can use role-playing in your class?

Strangely, although I have a degree in Drama, it's one teaching method I've explored very little.   The reason is that most role-plays for EFL students are scripted.  For example, there's not much you can do in a scene between a customer and a waiter (although I did post earlier on how to turn that into a game).

Today I'm teaching a 2 hour lesson on my favorite play ever: "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry.   Obviously it's impossible to do it justice in a two-hour lesson, but one way around that is simply to provide the scenes and have the students role play them. 

First, we'll watch the first scene of movie to get a sense of the characters.  Then the students will divide up into groups to act out different scenes based only on a short summary such as "Walter tries to convince Mama to give him the money".  The rest is up to the students.

It will be interesting for the different groups to compare what they did, and for those who are curious, they can go and get the play or the movie and compare what they did with that.

Note-taking

How do you take notes?

• whatever the teacher repeats more than once?
• whatever the teacher tells you to write down?
• whatever you think sounds important?
• just theory or just examples?

Note-taking is an art.  Good students seem to know how almost instinctively, but students who can't master it will never be able to do well in lecture-based classes (or, as they call them here, "clases magistrales"). 

How can we teach students to take good notes?
One way is to help them do it in our own clases: by repeating key points, speaking s l o w e r or LOUDER when we say something important.  But not all teachers do that, so we need to give them "tricks of the trade", such as learning to write key words (usually nouns) rather than entire sentences, or using different colors, arrows, signs or drawings to note down ideas. 

Information: a look backward and forward

In the past...

Information was scarce. If you wanted to know something, you asked your teacher or someone in your community. If you wanted more than that, depending on where you lived you could go to the library and maybe you’d find just enough information to leave you thinking “is that all there is?” Usually you’d give up at that point.

In the future…

There is already an information overload. You can find out anything about anything…and some of it might even be true!

In the past…

There were very few news sources. You had the morning and evening news programs on whatever basic TV channels you could get. The newspapers all got their stories from the same two or three sources, usually the Associated Press or Reuters. Some magazines or news shows had more in-depth reporting and novels were even written about intrepid, courageous journalists risking all to get the scoop. You read or listened to answer the 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, why and how.

In the future…

Anyone with a cell phone can photograph, tweet, blog and post whatever they consider news, from a child who got bit by a dog in Pifo to suicide bombs in Jerusalem. They also add their own point of view to their photo, tweet, blog or post. Your job is no longer only to find out the 5 Ws because that’ll be everywhere, but to analyze the source and critique the content and find the same news written from other perspectives if you want the complete picture. In political speeches, the main job of reporters is fact checking: if a politician quotes a number or a source, s/he instantly has an army of amateur and professional reporters fact-checking his/her every utterance…and woe betide them if they are off by so much as a single misattributed word or figure!

In the past…

In common conversation, spoken language was unlike written language because of the difference in time delay between the sending and receiving of the message. A letter took days or weeks to arrive.

In the future…

With email, instant messaging and the nearly 24 hour surveillance we put on our social networks, we can receive an answer in minutes or less, which makes written conversations happen almost in real time.

In the past…

Reading books was considered a vastly superior way of spending one’s time compared to staring at the “idiot box”, but both were fairly passive, and even solitary activities. You read, you thought, you went to bed. No wonder many kids hated it.

In the future…

Via social networks, wikis, and other online communities, you can interact in a much more meaningful way with your reading material, which itself has become far more multimedia. The Harry Potter craze in the first decade of this century not only succeeded in making kids andadults read novels the size of doorstops, it also spun off into an incredibly successful movie franchise, a series of online games (some multiplayer) as well as wikis, fan fiction and fan sites visited and participated in by millions of people worldwide (here we have, among others, www.facebook.com/HPotterEcuador). The author J. K. Rowling has her own website http://www.jkrowling.com/. Internationally there are many charities and volunteer organizations done around Harry Potter themes (check out the Harry Potter Alliance http://thehpalliance.org/tag/charity/)

In the past…

The teacher’s job was to pour information into her students’ heads…and the students’ job was to pour it all back out onto the exam paper. Any form of co-operative learning was called cheating (“In the real world” my teachers used to say “Johnny won’t be sitting next to you giving you the answers and then what will you do?”)

In the future…

The students have all the information they could possibly want literally at their fingertips…if they know how to find it. The teacher has now becomes the navigation guide. In one study, American students found it difficult to locate Iraq on a map, but when sat in front of a computer and told “find Iraq”, not only were they able to do so, but they were able to find street views and aerial views, they were able to focus in on specific locations, use satellite imaging and more. The older generation unused to such possibilities calls this cheating, “taking the easy way out” and worse…but this is the future.

Stalker stories: using pictures

Why would we teach our students to write fiction? For one thing it can often be more interesting than fact. For another, fiction has a great deal to teach in the way of emotional intelligence because it allows you to see the world from a different perspective. Thirdly, being creative is one of the few things technology cannot do for us, and is therefore one of the most important qualities companies look for in a professional no matter what field they’re in.
There are many different ways you can introduce your students to fiction writing.
"Stalker" fiction is where you observe a stranger (either in a photo or in real life) and try to guess what their life is like. The structure of a stalker story is to first describe the person and the setting and then imagine the story.
In the following two lessons, the students look at photos, the first one a famous one, the others just ordinary people in different countries. The first lesson below is just about imagining the character and comparing it with reality. The second has the students develop multiple characters until they are ready to put them into a story where they interact with each other.

Lesson 1
A) Go online and find the photo of the Afghan girl made famous by Steve McCurry in the September 1984 issue of National Geographic.
B) What do you think her life was like when that photo was taken? Where was she from? What was she thinking?
C) Imagine and describe what she usually does at

·         6am

·         10am

·         12pm

·         5pm

·         8pm

Compare with your partners: did they have similar ideas?
D) Now look at the photo of the same woman 15 years later at
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text . How has she changed? What do you think has happened in her life since the first photo was taken?
E) Imagine what has happened in this girl’s life. Write out the events on a timeline such as the one used on Facebook.
E) Now read the article:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text and compare it with your own story.

Lesson 2
A) Go to www.lberger.ca and look at the photo pages. Select a photo of a person or people and describe it to your partner and see of your partner can find the one you’re talking about. Then switch roles.
B) With your partner, choose one of the photos of a person or people. Write a story about the subjects of the photo:
1. Start by describing the setting: Where are they? What time of day is it?
2. Describe the person or people in the photo: How old are they? What are they wearing? What are they doing? How do they feel?
3. Imagine the story that led up to the moment the photo was taken. What happened? Why?
C) Post your story up with a selection of 5 photos including the one that inspired your story. Have your classmates read your story and try to identify which photo inspired it.
D) Put all the stories and photos together in a book for your school library or create a website with all of the photos and stories.
 
 
 

Real-time research conclusion

Today, my students presented their real-time-research. 
The task was:

• Make the presentation no more than 3-5 minutes long.
• Present in any way you want EXCEPT powerpoint.  (They used posters, videos, powtoon and comics...really creative!)
• Include all of the information you got from the interviews or surveys
• Include some of the information you got from your readings and videos

The other group listened to as many presentatiosn as time permitted and for each they had to answer the following questions:
1. What were the 3 most interesting/important points of the presentation?
2.  What did you think of the presentation style?
3.  Can you suggest further avenues of research?

They gave their answers to the presenters who then had to compile them and answer the following questions:
1. How well did your audience understand your presentation?
2. How was your presentation?  Would you have changed anything?
3. What avenues of further research did they suggest?

All in all a solid hour of excellent speaking practice.  I saw spectacular creativity and (last-minute) collaboration!  Congratulations!

I hate exams

After many years, I'm back in the student seat and I hate it.  I'm trying to study for exams worth 81% of the course and they involve (UGH!)  memorising names and dates.   I can't believe in this day and age at such a pretigious university (studying education no less!) they're still doing this to us!  I find it hard to believe they can't find a better way to assess what we know.

3 questions to judge a source

How do you know what to believe on the internet?  How do you tell fact from opinion from pure b.s.?

There are three questions to ask:
1. What is this speaker or writer saying that helps me to answer my research question?
2. How is this person qualified to speak to this topic?
3. What is this person's motivation for speaking to this topic?

Most students find it easy enough to answer the first question.  The second isn't hard either, but probably requires a google search at the very least. 

The third is tricky because it speaks to different kinds of motivation.  Is this person being paid to say what they're saying?  Most likely, yes.  Does that invalidate what they say?  It depends.  What other motivations might they have for wanting to speak or write about this topic? 
There are two kinds of motivation commonly referred to in the literature which often overlap, enhance or even undermine each other: extrinsic motivation which usually means external rewards such as money or prestige, and intrinsic motivation which usually refers to the idea of doing something "for fun".  For example, I'm paid to write this blog in the sense that I work for a salary at the university and part of my job is to do research and this is one way in which I carry out that mandate.  That doesn't mean that I "do this for the money" (which honestly isn't all that great).   I also have intrinsic motivation in that I'm genuinely interested in what I write about and enjoy sharing it. 
Why am I interested in the topics I write about on this blog?  Well, if I were to probe, I'd have to say it's because I teach and I hate staring at a classful of bored students, so it's in my interest to learn about motivation and what causes or undermines it.

A researcher can't always find out all of this psychological information about a writer or a speaker online, but what they can do is eliminate any possible sources of unethical bias.  In my previous post about the Kuwaiti girl who started the first Iraq war by spreading the story of the incubator babies killed by Iraqi soldiers, it's essential to understand that as the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., she obviously had a vested interest in spreading the lie. 

When you read my blog, on the other hand, you can see that even if some of my information is unclear or misguided, I have no vested interest in deliberately lying.

Or do I?