by aeu04117
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” I just read a post that got me thinking a lot about my preferred teaching style which is strongly grounded in what the article would refer to as “Art.” My lessons tend to be creative and imaginative but, as the post points out, an over reliance on art can create lessons that are interesting to experience, but that could lack learning.
That rings true for me. It’s easy for me to put together a leasson filled with easy to experience content (art). My favorite ingredients: TED videos, or Harvard Blog posts around issues that are meaningful for my students. The classes go great – students engage easily and quickly with the material, lively discussion ensues and then class ends.
Great content. Great conversation and interaction. But did learning REALLY take place? Not necessarily. The sort of class work mentioned above is great when you’re helping students meet fluency development objectives. (Example: B1 Spoken skills: Can understand the main points of clear standard input…” Common European Framework of Reference for Languages )- Standard input: a video or blog post of interest to the student. But just staying in this kind of class mode will not make much of a difference on the student’s grammar or vocabulary development, for example.
Yes, new words will be encountered when you’re dealing with authentic content, but without careful planning and task time, you will fly over a natural opportunity to include “science” in your lesson.
Effective learning designs then, happen most when that elusive combination of art, science and craft come together. (Instructional Design: Science, Art and Craft by Tomgram)
I need to focus a lot of attention on making sure that my classes have this combination. Today it worked wonderfully for me. I have a B1 level student, and we’re working through a TED video about employee motivation. One of my student’s greatest weaknesses is being able to understand specific details in natural English speech. He’s pretty good at getting the big idea, but if you ask him for details he quickly falls apart. So here’s what we did:
1. Listen/watch 3 minutes of the video. Before we began, I let him know that we were going to listen only twice. The first time, his task is to listen for gist. (And any points of personal interest.) The second time, specific information.
2. End of first 3 minutes we talked about what he liked, and the general idea of what was heard.
3. Listen/watch again – focus: specific details, and exact words said. I did a combo of a) letting him know what to listen for, and b) after watching a segment, pause and ask him to repeat back to me – word for word – what was just said.
4. Discussion.
How the elusive combination of Science, Art, and Craft happened:
Art: The video.
Craft: At each pause point, the student had to try out a skill we have been working on: summarizing. I asked him to imagine that I was a coworker who had no idea what was being watched. His job: explain it in his own words. At the start, his attempts at this were painful (both for him and myself.) But as we repeated the process, his confidence and ability soared. Instead of taking 4 to 5 minutes to summarize a 30 second segment, which was the case the first time through, he was packaging it up in 2, and then adding a riff or two of his own to boot.
Science: While not the main focus of today’s class, we did step into the realm of vocabulary development. New words: Intrinsic. Meaningful. We wrote them up on the board, together with the sentences they lived in during the video, and explored their meaning and how they could be used. By the end of the class, my student was throwing around intrinsic as if it was a word he had mastered ages ago.
It was a very full class, and both teacher and student left confident that learning had happened. (Student said so. Teacher knew so.)
Note to self: Effective lessons are balanced lessons. What do you think?
