I have chosen the following competence aims

Language learning:
use basic terminology to describe grammar and text structure
describe and assess his/her own work in learning English

To help the pupils reach the first aim I have focused on teaching them past, present and future of verbs. I have explained and shown examples of the different tenses on PowerPoint and given them exercises to solve. Sometimes they have handed in the exercises so I can give feedback and see if they get what I’m trying to teach. I have been focusing on this aim more or less the whole five weeks, so there has been a lot of repetition involved. When I explain it on the blackboard or with help from the PowerPoint I use a timeline to explain the different locations of the different tenses in time. I also try to drag the answers out of the pupils and make them explain it to each other. I think I have succeeded to a certain degree, but as I have tried to cover a lot of different things in my lessons, I haven’t given exercises I think are good enough in retrospect. The pupils now manage to see some patterns and they are familiar with the terminology, they are on their way, but most of them are not able to describe grammar and text structure. I have mostly focused on fill-in-the-blanks and underline-the-verbs exercises. If I could start over, I would have given more exercises based on the pupils creativity as I think it makes them more aware of the structures when they are creating them than when they are merely recognising them.

The second aim was to assess own learning. The pupils are working with a textbook and I give texts for reading as homework every week. I hear them read out loud every week. Sometimes I hear them one by one as they read a couple of sentences each, other times I let them read in pairs and walk around and try to listen to most of them. I have gradually introduced the «two stars and a wish» concept for them so they could learn how to assess themselves. First off they had to note down two stars and a wish for themselves when they read out loud, then for their reading mate and give feedback. I have had them assess me, and an assistant with a French accent that has been helping in class. When they were familiar with the concept we went through some important aspects of pronunciation that I am looking for when I am assessing them and had them consider these points when assessing themselves or their reading mates. I found this made it a lot easier for them as it was more concrete than just to say «you read well», and I could have introduced it a lot earlier in the process. The whole point behind two stars and a wish is to put more focus on what they manage than what they don’t manage. This gives the pupils a sense of success while at the same time they are aware of what they need to work on. I find that most of the pupils are aware of where they are in the learning process and from collecting their notebooks to check their homework every week I can see that their comments to each other have gotten more reflected over the weeks.

I have also worked with lots of other competence aims, and now I realise that I maybe should have focused on fewer so we could have gotten a bit further. But on the other hand, I value repetition, and I think to work with multiple areas over a long has positive effects that I wont see in the six weeks I am here. To have 60 minute lessons as we do here is both a blessing and a temptation to cover too much ground..

During week two of my practice at Grimstad Upper Secondary both of my English groups  started working on a group-based digital presentation project on South Africa. The competence aims I chose to focus on were «communicating through digital media» and  «present and converse on relevant and interdiciplinary topics».

The teaching plan involved choosing between making a film, or making a photostory of roughly three minutes. These presentations would then be uploaded to itslearning and later shown in class. Initially they had two full school sessions to work on the project, but one of my groups missed out on a session. Further, they had to choose between four different assignments to base their film or photostory on. The assignments were:

1. Present the Boer War.
2. Contrast the South Africa of today and the South Africa during the period of apartheid (1948-1989).
3. Present the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
4. Make a timeline of South African history.

The main challenges I faced during this project were:
–  In the English group that missed out on an entire school session, only two out of six presentations were handed in by the end.
-Challenges in working on the project outside of school as students live in different places and have a full schedule with activities after school.
– Apart from assignment two, none of the assignments give room for reflection, and thus effectively stops students from getting a top grade.

Time is always an issue, and for one of my two classes more so than the other as the Friday of week three was a teacher’s planning day and they missed out on their second English session of the week. This turned out to be far more troublesome for my pupils than I had feared. I would have thought that they were extremely competent on social media and group-based work over the internet simply from being young and living in what one could call the internet era. This is not the case, and making such assumptions is grave misjudgement and very naive on my behalf. They have no more experience in working with digital media than anyone else. Their digital competence lies in other areas, especially communication.

My initial plan was for the pupils to handle the distance between them by working through facebook, twitter, skype and e-mails. This worked for the groups that had already done most of the work while under supervision at school, but for the groups that missed out on an entire session, it simply did not. It is hard to measure wether it is from a lack of time, effort or ability, but considering this was the group with the highest average English grade of the two I would have thought they could cope with the task they were given.

Initially I wanted to upload the projects to youtube, but I later dropped the idea. This had many reasons, but the most important one was that my pupils themselves opposed the idea for varying reasons and that I did not feel that forcing my will through on the matter would be doing anyone any good.

The reason I consider my own assignments bar the second poor, is that they are too broad and not spesific enough. Especially the last of the four really only offer a chance to repeat what you have learnt in a timeline. And this showed in the presentations that were handed in; most of the pupils made presentations on Nelson Mandela, and they answered when, where, what, but not why, not what consequences the when, where and what had for South Africa. But the single group that did assignment number two presented a contrasted view of old and new, black and white, apartheid and true democracy, racial hate and reconciliation. And they did this in a very visually moving manner.

Stian

I teach a small class at an upper secondary school. The students are attending vocational studies at VG1-level. The school is offering these student to be taught in a small class because they need adapted education.

As a group they are facing some common challenges that entitle them to be taught in a small class: They are not used to producing longer texts in English or to speak solely in English. They also need  to enhance their vocabulary and mastery of grammer in order to speak more fluently.

We need to work with various parts of the language in short and varied sessions. It’s not difficult to see when the students are bored or unconcentrated. This means that working with this class probably represents one of the more efficient ways of learning what works in class and what does not, given that we as teachers can generalise our experiences in this way. Of course, teachers do generalise their teaching experience, a phenomenon that in Norwegian pedagogic literature is referred to as “praktisk yrkesteori”. This term was coined by Handal and Lauvås in 1983 and refers to the sum of both the generalised experiences of a teacher and his or her general values (see Lyngsnes and Rismark 2010).

The competence aims that we’ve mainly been focusing on, are these:

Write formal and informal texts with good writing structure and coherence based on themes that interest him/her and which are important for society.

Present and discuss international news topics and current events.

Discuss social and cultural conditions and values from a number of English-speaking countries.

The students have been reading different sorts of texts and producing different sorts of text. All of the texts, both the ones they have read and the ones they have produced, are shorter types of text.

Sometimes they have answered questions to show that they have understood the text. This works fairly well, as they are used to these kinds of tasks. As they have also expressed their impatience concerning longer pieces of texts, both when it comes to what they are supposed to read and what they are supposed to write.

Although the students do their work, I can’t help but wonder if these kinds of tasks will turn out meaningless in the long run. The question arises: Can I tempt them to do some bigger projects after a while?

At other times, the students have produced informal texts, for instance on themes as:

A presentation of your best friend (imagine that someone from abroad would come to stay with you, and you wanted to tell him/her about your friend in advance)

One of your best holiday experiences – what happened?

The students are all able to communicate and tell a short story, but the texts have some basic grammar mistakes. They swap between different verb tenses, and there are other basic grammar mistakes as well.

As they all seem to loathe traditional grammar lessons, and seem to learn nothing from it, I’ve decided to try to practice on very specific tasks related to grammar – particularly on verb tenses – by introducing station teaching. As the students are easily bored, but still need some basic skills work, I hope this might represent a varied way to do it.

Literature:

Anvik, T. C., Burgess, R., Fuhre, P. and Sørhus, T. B. 2009: Tracks 1, Fellesbok, Engelsk for yrkesfag Vg 1. Oslo: Cappelen Damm

Lyngsnes, K. and Rismark, M., 2010: Didaktisk arbeid. 2nd edition, 4th impression. Oslo: Gyldendal

Dear PPU students,

we hope that all is well and that you are learning a lot !

Please remember to post your first 600 word reflection document by the end of this week  (week 44) ! ( See Fronter for details). This will allow the others in your group to place their comments/reflections on your experiences.

Best wishes – Agnes and James

This week both of my English classes have started working on a group-based digital presentation project on South Africa. The competence aims I have chosen to focus on for this are «communicating through digital media» and  «present and converse on relevant and interdiciplinary topics».

The teaching plan involves choosing to either make a film or a photostory of roughly three minutes length. These films would then be uploaded to itslearning and from there put on youtube from an account administred by the teacher.They have two full school sessions to work on this project in addition to working at home. Further, they had to choose between four different assignments to base their film or photostory on. The assignments are:

1. Present the Boer War.
2. Contrast the South Africa of today and the South Africa during the period of apartheid (1948-1989).
3. Present the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
4. Make a timeline of South African history.

Working in groups of three or four and having access to mobile phones, laptops, library resources and software for movie editing and photostory (windows software) they got going pretty quickly.

The challenges so far include, but are not restricted to:
-Legal/privacy issues with uploading film and pictures by/with pupils on a public website.
-Challenges in working on the project outside of school as students live in different places and have a full schedule with activities after school.
-Groups organized by pupils sometimes cause unwanted work-ethic developing in some of the groups.
– Apart from assignment two, none of the assignments give room for reflection, and thus effectively stops students from getting a top grade.

The legal/privacy issue I have planned to handle by setting up the youtube-account to restrict viewing access and comments entirely for anyone but the pupils themselves. But there is also a chance I will drop youtube from this project entirely after reviewing the films. If that is the case then I will make a point out of explaining to them how their movies could have been a great educational resource for other students, and how youtube is not just a website to watch silly cats or music videos. Another alternative would be censoring videos that gave away pupil identities.

Time is always an issue, and for one of my two classes more so than the other as this Friday is a teacher’s planning day and they miss out on their second English session of the week. As for handling the distance between pupils when working from home I have suggested facebook, twitter, skype and e-mails to communicate and send media files back and forth for editing. This seems largely to have helped, and one girl even told me she had finally got permission to make a facebook account from her parents if she used it for school-work.

I should have picked groups myself. While I can see clearly now that they have started working that many groups are doing very well, there are a few that fall a bit behind. To circumvent this problem I have spent a bit more time with these groups in order to guide them onto the right track and to speed up their work.

Because I realized the assignments should have been better and allowing more from the students, I will not be grading them, but giving comments and feedback to each group through itslearning.

Next week we’ll see what we end up with and I hope I get to add a great success to this blog.

Stian

I’m glad you have managed to set up your blogg and I’m looking forward to reading it when you are all out on your practice placement.
best wishes, Agnes

Thanks for inviting me in 😉  James

Velkommen til home.uia.no.