Game: "killing room floor"

One of the most horrible jobs in the world has to be cleaning up the slaughterhouse.  Not only does it have the worst hours, usually from midnight to 5am, but it also has the lowest rate of pay and is most likely to be given to undocumented workers without benefits.  The dangers are horrifying: each worker has a hose shooting out a toxic mixture of near boiling water mixed with chlorine.  The fumes alone cause headaches and neurological damage.  Because of the steam, visibility is reduced to nearly zero, which means that workers often accidentally spray each other.  They need to hose out the catwalks and vats, but because they can't see, the number of accidents and even deaths is shockingly high.  For more information, check out this excerpt from Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation" at http://wesclark.com/temp/worst_job.html.

The game:
Use a wet slide covered with liquid soap mixed with red food coloring.  Give each player a hose and glasses covered over with paint or tape so their visibility is limited.  If you fall or get wet, you "die".  If you spray another player, he or she "dies" and you go to jail.  Whoever is left standing wins.  The game should take less than three minutes.

At the end of the game, provide players with an explanation of the game along with space for their comments. 

learning vs completing assignments

How does the teacher know the difference?

Communication

Communication only really happens when there is a possibility of communication breakdown.  Think, for example, of the last time you tried to give someone directions to your house, or the last time you had a disagreement with someone: you chose your words very carefully to make sure that you wouldn't be misunderstood.

One of the problems with so-called communication tasks in EFL course books is that no-one really cares whether or not they understand the other person, or for that matter whether they're being understood.  In a "dialogue" between a customer and a waiter, the students both know that since no food is being served, it doesn't matter if the waiter understands the order or not.

This is one reason why games are useful: when you're playing a game, the game world matters to the players.  When you watch the World Cup, think about what the players are saying to each other, what the coaches say, what the referee says: there can be no room for misunderstanding or the game is lost!

assessing EFL projects

This is a tough one, but fortunately, it's been done.  In the United States, the Partnership for 21st century skills has a list of elements that should be considered when developping projects

• communication
• critical thinking and problem solving
• creativity and innovation
• collaboration

 Specifically with language learners, projects need to be assessed on:

• communication
• cultures
• connections
• comparisons
• communities

In additon, they focus on interdisciplinary themes such as

• global awareness
• financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy
• civic literacy
• health literacy
• information literacy
• media literacy
• technology literacy

http://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/21stCenturySkillsMap/p21_worldlanguagesmap.pdf

What would each of these ideas mean in your teaching context?

Choices: how to ask questions

There are lots of ways to give students listening or reading questions. 

The easiest and fastest is just to give them as a handout.  However, there's not really much extra learning going on there.

Many teachers write the questions on the board.  The danger is that takes too much time and you lose the students.  Copying is also a waste of time, unless you're teaching small children how to write.

Another way is to read the questions out loud for the stduents to answer.  The problem there is that the fast ones have to wait for the slow ones.

My favorite is to dictate the questions.  It's excellent for listening practice, and all students go at more or less the same speed.  They can check with each other and with you to make sure they've written them correctly, then they can go ahead and answer them.

Differentiating questions

There is a myth going around that there is such a thing as an average student to which all lessons must be aimed.  There are students who are stronger and others who are weaker, but they're just aberrations.

If you believe this, then you probably have a lot of problems with the faster students who finish quickly and get bored.  You've probably tried giving them extra activities, which they naturally resent because they don't see why they should have more work.

However, if we go in assuming that different students have different abilities, which change depending on their moods, and we designed lessons that catered to these strengths, maybe we wouldn't have to worry.

The secret is in differentiating the questions. 

Let's focus on Reading and Listening lessons.  Differentiated questions would look like this:

• For the slower students, the questions would be focussed on making sure they've understood the text.  The response type would avoid asking for too much language, so for example they would underline or draw the answer which they would find directly from the text.
• For the higher level students, the questions would slowly climb up Bloom's Taxonomy which means that you could start with the assumption that they've understood the basic information and ask them to analyse, evaluate and create based on what they've heard or read.

If you do this right, the higher ones won't see this as an imposition.  On the contrary, they won't want to answer the "easier" questions because they'll be boring.  In fact, you might have the opposite problem: the slower ones will be anxious to try the "tougher" questions.  They might not do them very well, but that's ok because they'll be failing on their own terms and willing to improve.

On the negative side, this sounds like a lot of extra work for the teacher, but again, it depends on how it's done.  I see teachers routinely asking their students to answer 12-15 questions.  What if you only ask each student to answer 6 but have 12 choices ranging from easier to more difficult?  It's not the quantity of questions, after all, but the quality.

Teenagers: conflicting aims

The problem teenagers have in class is that each one wants to do as much school work as possible while looking as cool as possible. 
Unfortunately, these are two conflicting aims.  The coolest kids are usually those who don't worry too much about school, yet manage to effortlessly get decent (not top) marks.  They need to know what the teacher said, but without really appearing to listen.  Ideally they can go right back to their clandestine conversations with their classmates right after the teacher's finished giving instructions.

How can we, as teachers, address this conflict?

Two words: creativity and sharing.

If the tasks have a certain amount of creativity, then the stduents have the freedom to be ironic and playful and impress their friends with how witty they are.

Example: I had to teach the fairly boring structure for sequences ("first, then, next, after that...finally") and I had my students write instructions for how to do something.  Now, this could be a reasonably dull task, but since my students know that they are always asked to read each other's work after, they decided to have some fun with it.  The usual suspects wrote boring stuff like how to make coffee. 
Then there was Ricky.  He chose to write "How to write graffitti"  ("First, think of something offensive to say.  Then, find a nice blank wall in your neighborhood...")
Another student actually explained how to roll a joint (I won't repeat those instructions here).