At the dogmeholics anonymous meeting…
My name is Mike Harrison, and I didn’t have a plan today…
No, I had no plan. Aaaah, you were just winging it, weren’t you, Mike? Isn’t that what dogmeticians do – no plan, irresponsible and wayward? I’ll hold my hand up – that was the most unplanned I have been on paper for a while. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t prepared. I had a question in mind and an idea of the kind of language I wanted to guide my learners towards. I was ready. Here’s what happened today.
Morning workshop (9.30-10.30) and lesson (10.30-12.00)
Bad traffic and an accident meant we were not at full operational capability in the workshop first thing this morning. Usually, there’s myself and a workshop supervisor, so the class can be happily doing something (we have a bank of resources and PCs available) monitored while I take them one by one for brief tutorials.
I set the class a listening task from elllo.org (a fantastic resource – lots of online recordings for listening practice) – listen to something, make notes, talk about it in pairs.
Then on to the lesson proper, and my question.
How do you keep fit and stay healthy?
Having seen Luke Meddings do something similar last night, I asked the learners to write down their answer to the question on a post it note. From this we extracted a fair amount of language:
Lots of nice vocabulary , eliciting the imperative form by recasting/reformulating the learners’ texts (those little yellow post its), and some pretty complicated words thrown in by me on the right (digestive tract). We followed this with a quick ranking activity – What is the most important thing to do? We also touched on the difference between make and do (the same verb is used for both of these in Portuguese), as well as the impromptu vocab teaching of ‘sneeze’. This was done in groups, and the groups of learners shared how they had ranked the different things you could do to stay healthy. The last moments of the morning’s lesson were filled by asking them to take back their post its and correcting their errors from the boardwork.
Afternoon lesson (1.00-3.00)
Following the theme of the morning, I asked the learners to talk to each other about keeping fit and staying healthy, giving them a framework for making questions (you can see this explained in more detail at Karenne Sylvester’s blog here):
I set them off asking each other questions and just listened, later asking them to write down what questions they had asked each other. I then asked for some examples, tidying them up as we went along, and we ended up with this on the board:
Spot the difference
We noticed that in these questions you always have do, which is a big deal, as learners at this level often leave out auxiliary verbs when speaking and asking questions. Hopefully, some explicit annotating on the board drew this to their attention. We listened to a recording from a practice exam, on what people do in their free time, and then the learners spoke about what they like to do to relax. We ended this activity with a quickie from Teaching Unplugged, where the learners in groups write a text (in this case, about the best way to relax), which is then reformulated into a more target-like form by the teacher. Learners then look at both text and spot the changes, of which I asked them to note down the three ‘most useful’ for them.
Topping off the lesson with a bit of paper for my learners to take away: What We Did Today
A dogmetista is never without pen(cil) and paper
Good.
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Excellente, Mike. I really miss you lot. What a lovely record of your lesson. Do your students copy down what is on the board? Do you get them to record the lesson in any other way?
C
Hey Candy, nice to ‘see’ you here!
I forcibly (spelling?) told them to copy down things at times, but need to be better at this. And transferring language on the board into other productive tasks. Still learning, still developing, not perfect yet, but on the road. I sometimes encourage them to take pictures if they’ve got cameras or smartphones as well, especially as over the course of a lesson (2-2 1/2 hours) I have to wipe the board completely.
Mike =)
This is cracking Mike. Never plan again!!! I’ve had the same pre-lesson travelling problems many times but if you prepare in your head like you did it seems to go well. Far better than photocopying an entire book the week before.
Totally agree re the photocopying. Try and do it as little as I possibly can.
Mike =)
Hi Mike. I have to say, that’sa great set of notes your students have. Definitely something I need to get my learners to do more often. Do mind if I steal that idea from you, dividing the page into four and asking learners to write things down in this way?
What is about Dogme teachers and great boardwork too? It’s immaculate. I guess it’s our main resource in the classroom, the most important way of capturing language, so we need to make sure it’s neat. In fact, I had some feedback the other day saying “the most important thing is that we have an accurate writing of the board, we can remember and repass”.
I’m going to take a look at the listening website for some resources. One of my points to improve is listening. I admit it, I don’t do enough!
Dale
Have to confess, those aren’t my learners’ notes, but something I wrote up and photocopied quickly at the end of the day. Not my idea to steal – it’s in Teaching Unplugged in the Teaching From Lesson To Lesson section.
Elllo looks cool. I haven’t used it extensively yet though, so may blog about it in a future post!
Mike =)
I used it in my lesson yesterday evening and ended up helping my one-to-one with segmentation of words in speech. Classic lesson… the guy said it was like someone has given him the secret to listening in English. Keep it up MIke!
Dale
Good stuff, Dale. That is good to hear. I’ve still to use elllo more explicitly in class. I did a support session with two students using a mixer of people talking about favourite sports stars. In the lesson above, they were listening to the conversation bits on elllo, so I might follow up with a bit of dialogue building next week.
Mike =)
You forgot something, teacher Mike … take a flower to get a good atmosphere
Great lesson, I’m a learner of English. Thank you!
Thank you, Nadiyah. It would be great to have flowers or plants in the class to make it a more relaxing place. Sitting in a green environment is good for the soul!
Mike =)
What a great idea with plenty of variety – 2 1/2 hours must be pretty demanding and it seems like you covered a lot. I’d love to know if you get back to them next week and they are still using ‘do’ so well. It seems to me that the recurrence here will have ‘drilled’ it into them much better than more traditional grammar exercises!
Louise
Thanks Louise, and welcome to the blog.
I’ll admit, 2 or 2 1/2 seems too long to me at times, but seeing my group all day on Wednesdays does allow for a good amount to be covered in terms of topic, or uncovered if grammar. We’re preparing for speaking exams, so these questions will come up again – we’ll see how much they remember!
Mike =)
Hi Mike,
Looks like a great lesson! I want to echo what Dale says about the note-taking format you have there, it looks really useful. Can I steal it too?
I find my students all take notes a lot, but I don’t think there’s this much organisation to it. Just to clarify, did you write the notes to photocopy and give to them? Or did they all do their own? If the first one then did they help you create the note? I think it could be really useful to get them involved.
Keep up the good work!!
Jem
It’s an idea in Teaching Unplugged, not mine. I wrote them myself. Involving the learners in making notes would be a good next step. Will try and do that if I can.
Mike =)
Hello Mike!
Your post is such an enjoyable read, really! Great lesson, nice approach, I can clearly envision myself following the path! I’m late on catching up ( only reading Teaching Unplugged now) but can I be kind of dogmeic (?) already? I really have to blog some ideas of my classes, your post is inspirational, thank you do much!
I loved the idea of lesson recap in this form, looks attractive , simple and logical to me! Concerning students putting down things: I do not usually ask(force?) them to do this, though sometimes have to if I feel the importance is left behind by them;) forceful guidance? Yet They do take pictures on their smartphones quite often! Without my prompts to, which is nice.
Thanks for the listening resource! Hope to read more unplanned lesson plans from you!
Cheers from Moscow,
Ann
Thanks, Ann, and YES, blog! Just do it! We need to hear some voices from Russia.
Great stuff, Mike.
For a fellow dogman, this is both a lesson and a comfort. Hadn’t seen elllo before, but will be back to it again.
Slainthe.
Ta muchly, Alan. Elllo is a recent discovery for me too. Looks like it could be well worth exploring.
Your board pens are gonna run out with all this repetition of “do”!
Mike =)
Yes, just click on the “Have a Go” button at http://www.languagegarden.org
David =)
Hi Mike, this is really great stuff.
What I’d like to focus on here is that you *had* a plan of how things would / could go even though you hadn’t decided on the specific resources. This is a mark of good teaching as much as anything else. You knew of a nice, appropriate, reliable source of input material, you knew of a specific set of tasks that would work well in a particular order. You had recognized beforehand a language structure that you thought might come up, or that you could guide the lesson towards. You managed to do all this without restricting the input too greatly and this sounds like it was a truly democratic class to be a part of.
Now… my questions:
- Why did you focus on this particular structure?
I’m not saying it was a bad decision, far from it. Was there a specific – assessment-based – reason for this?
- Where did the exam recording come from?
Was this something you’d planned to use or did it just come up?
- Could this – :-0 – have been done more efficiently had you used a coursebook?
I’m not saying that this would have been better, but basing a lesson on scientifically analysed language, as you’d find in a coursebook unit, might have served the purpose equally as well, if not better.
- Are you, like me, worried that the unplugged approach could turn into ‘bag of tricks’ teaching?
Will we all end up thinking, ‘Oh, let’s churn out that activity that I saw at the end of ‘Teaching Unplugged’ again.’ I genuinely worry that dogme could become as formulaic as PPP in that we head into class not thinking ‘let’s see what emerges’ but instead thinking ‘I’ve got these great activities up my sleeve and let’s let them unfurl into a supposedly unplanned class.’ Will we see a generation of teachers all doing the same activities from ‘Teaching Unplugged’?
This was a great lesson, Mike, don’t think I’m saying anything other than that. I’m merely using this excellent post to air some issues I think need discussing.
It sounds like everything went swimmingly. =) It always seems whenever I see examples of dogme-style lessons, they’re always with levels intermediate and below, something that lends itself to language that emerges for conversation necessary and useful for learner’s immediate lives. I’d like to see this applied to an EAP context or at the very least, an advanced reading and writing class. Maybe I’m just blind.
Great stuff, Mike.
Must have missed the note-taking quadrant illustrated in your last image. Very nice. Consider it pinched.
Wish I could claim that myself, but it is a thing from Teaching Unplugged – I think it’s in the ‘learning from lesson to lesson’ type-y section.
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