Sexist lyrics (4º ESO)

On the occasion of International Women's Day on the 8th of March, I designed an activity that would make my students use their critical thinking skills to decide whether some popular songs have sexist content, whether hidden or not. The aim of this activity was, in a way, to activate the 'sexist radar' in my students and to be aware of sexism in our society.


I chose some current hits but also some older songs, in an attempt to show that these issues are not new. Terms such as infantilisation, objectification and banalisation were discussed and we looked for instances of them in order to create awareness of how they can be put into words and images. If there was something I really wanted to achieve was to promote feminism as an equalitarian movement, which favours equal rights and equal treatment between the genders, and that a wrong is a wrong regardless of who does it.

This activity encouraged a lot of debate in class- students helped each other understand the difference between healthy behaviours and attitudes (for example, a feeling of sadness after a relationship breaks up) and unhealthy and potentially dangerous ones (jealousy, manipulation, stalking). We also touched on the role of social media in human relationships, but did not explore this in a lot of detail as this alone would make for a long and complex project.

The assessment rubric was quite simple:



I definitely think this activity works well for older groups of students. Some of the songs and videos chosen were quite explicit and this needs to be taken into consideration in order to choose whether to show the videos in class, or to just talk about the lyrics. The most interesting presentations were, unsurprisingly, about the songs which attempt to hide sexism and about the ones which display deep-rooted sexist behaviours that have, to quite an extent, been normalised to such a point that a lot of people do not perceive them.

I would definitely like to repeat this activity in the future.

Thanks for checking in! See you in the next post!

Maite

Songs of Innocence and of Experience Project (4º ESO)

One of my favourite works of literature is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Published in 1789 (Songs of Innocence) and 1794 (Songs of Experience), in the middle of a buzzing period to say the least (the French Revolution, the conflict with the American ex-colonies, the Englightenment, and more importantly for this particular project, the industrial revolution), these poems encapsulate the duplicity of progress, society, human relationships and many other issues which, over 200 years later, are still relevant.

As usual, I made a presentation to show my students:



Although all of them knew about the industrial revolution, as they had recently covered it in History (this is the beauty of inter-disciplinary topics!), none of them had heard of Blake and only a few of them had considered the artistic output inspired by it.

Connecting the 18th Century social issues with the 21st Century was a bit of a revelation for part of the class and triggered a fruitful, improvised class discussion on the effects our lifestyles are having on developing countries. My aim was to focus the issues on childhood, and the impact that adult decisions and actions have on children.

Although writing creatively isn't always received positively by students (most of them wanted to make a short film about this), because of time constraints, it is often the most sensible option. The visual part of this project, in the end, had to be abandoned because of the same reason; if I do this project again, I will certainly try to involve both the History and the Art teachers to fulfil its potential.

You can read the students' stories clicking on the Stories at Base blog.

Thanks for reading this post!

Maite

Year Zero (2º ESO)

Making students question their reality is part of their education if we want them to grow into critical thinkers. This doesn't mean making them question everything just for the sake of it. It means making them aware that there are other ways of doing things apart from the mainstream way, and that there may be a lot of valid reasons for doing so.

Usually, debates are productive class activities to encourage students to consider different points of view. However, I wanted students to produce some individual work this time, and I created the following activity, which I called Year Zero. You can have a look at the presentation here:



I showed my students the excellent 12,017 In a Nutshell video, in which the authors argue that using our current calendar is misleading and gives a distorted vision of History. If you haven't watched it, I recommend it, as I would many other videos in the same channel. My point was that our calendar is just one of our cultural conventions, and that conventions can be changed if there is a strong enough reason for it.

My students, then, were given the challenge to choose an alternative 'year 0' from any point in history. They had to explain why they had chosen it and the advantages of using it as the starting point in history. The aim was to make a 1-minute long video using Spark Video or Shadow Puppet Edu explaining their choice.

The students had to write their script and then, after arranging the pictures they wanted to use in their video in the correct order, they recorded their voices over the pictures. To ensure sound quality, I asked them to do this part at home.

The assessment was done by rubric, taking into account (1) Grammar and vocabulary, (2) Pronunciation and intonation, (3) Correspondence between images and text, (4) Originality and creativity.

The final part of the activity would have been to show all the videos in class and to have a vote for the best videos. Because of time constraints, we never did it- maybe next time!

With an activity like this, students develop their cultural awareness, their digital competence and their communicative competence--first, by reading information on a topic; secondly, by writing a script; and finally, by reading it out loud while recording it over a video. They also develop their critical thinking skills.

This activity definitely took a lot of my students out of their comfort zones!

Thanks for popping in!

Maite

A Christmas Carol (1º ESO)

Who doesn't like Charles Dickens? There's no doubt of Dickens's significant contribution to world literature, or of the effects some of his works had on popular culture even today. His works are still relevant, still alive, still connect with audiences far and wide, and that is why I thought it was a good idea to get to know him and his works in a little bit of detail.

Not long before Christmas, I asked my 1º ESO students to research the figure of Dickens, as we were going to read an abridged version of A Christmas Carol.




It is important for learners of English to read authentic material, even if it may have simplified language, written for younger native speakers. It gives them a sense of accomplishment, it makes them realise the usefulness of their learning and it also pushes them out of their comfort zone, which usually is to conduct research in their own language and then translate it into English (with varying degrees of success... ).

Their posters were interesting, although some of students limited themselves to copying and pasting text and pictures. The students had to present their posters to the rest of the class, drawing attention to the facts that had surprised them the most.

After reading the simplified version of the story and doing some comprehension activities about it, the students had to design infographs on each of the characters. They also had to present these posters to the rest of the class. 

I used a rubric to assess the students: 

We rounded up this activity watching the 2009 film version directed by Robert Zemeckis. 

In an activity like this, students develop their reading and speaking skills, their digital competence, their cultural awareness and expression, and since they have to work as part of groups, they also develop their social and civic competence and their teamworking skills. It was a great activity which the students really enjoyed. 

Thanks for popping in!

Edgar Allan Poe: Short Stories (1º ESO)

The master of horror, the father of detective fiction, the main contributor to the obscure and the macabre... Halloween wouldn't have been completed without  Poe. Last year, I got my Advanced students to read The Raven collaboratively. Because of technological glitches, I haven't been able to upload the recording anywhere... so this time I approached the task differently.

It was my 1º ESO students this time. First, we had a look at the following presentation, which I created specifically for this project:




The students were given a calendar to help them plan their work:


Then, we split the class into two groups, and having a close look at the (adapted) text of the two stories, the students began to unleash the performers within and finally... we made two recordings, added pictures and... voilà!

The project was complete.

In a task like this, students learn about literature, read a creative story, practice pronunciation and intonation, and develop their digital competence by putting together an audiovisual product. They also work as part of a team and develop collaborative working skills.

The assessment was done by using this rubric:




As expected, this project involved quite a lot of hard work, but the students really enjoyed it.

Thanks for popping in! See you next time!

Project: news stories (2)

And we're back after the Easter break!

My 4ª ESO students showed their news stories projects on the last day before the holidays began. As the group is so reduced (only 11 students), there were only 3 projects to present, but the experience was really positive for everyone. 

The first group had chosen a kids' programme. They adapted the topics to children and included songs and a dance to highlight the importance of taking care of the environment; interviews with experts to talk about the importance of health and vaccines (no doubt an important aspect of every child's life!), and they gave news of a celebrity baby in the most tender way possible. The students wore animal onesies as well, so they definitely had the target audience in mind. 

If anything could have been improved, I think it would have been the setting in which the programme was recorded, as it was fairly obvious that it had been filmed in a classroom and no attempt was made to hide desks, chairs, and other school paraphernalia. I guess that if we do this again next year I'll have to make students think of this aspect as well, and bring easy-to-use decorations and props to dress up the classrooms a bit better. 

The second group had chosen a standard news programme. In this case, the main difficulty was to adopt the right formal tone usually found in this kind of show. The students had to work a bit to remove opinion and bias from their news stories, achieving a more neutral register. This group used Touchcast Studio, and they benefitted from more professional-looking backgrounds and format for their videos. They thought their project lacked spark in comparison with the previous one, but I think that they still produced a decent news programme. 

The final group had chosen gossip, and this was a bit harder to adapt as there are few TV shows that combine gossip with current affairs, so they reached a compromise by producing a talk show with guests who were commenting on news stories, including dramatic fall-outs between them, heavily opinionated contributions and the hostess trying to keep the peace. It was fun and there definitely was a lot of thought behind it, but I think this group could also have made a bigger effort to make the classroom elements less obvious. They used the IWB to project a background for their programme, including a picture and their logo, but this could have been done more 'professionally' using a green screen as the background. 

The students had a lot of fun making these programmes, and they said they also learned about different reporting styles, apart from practising writing, speaking, audiovisual skills, teamwork, critical thinking... 

Have you done anything similar in your classroom? How did it work? 

Project: a tutorial

This week, in my 1º ESO class, we have been working on conditional sentences. We have discussed '0' and 1st conditionals. In order to practice, I have asked them to create a mini-project. These are the instructions,




It's just a short activity in order to practice a specific grammar point. I didn't want to use the typical activity in which students are presented with a 'condition' and have to come up with a consequence or result (we practiced that orally as a chain kind of activity), and I wanted the students to write down sentences, so I came up with this. Not a genius idea, or completely original, but effective (once the students understand they have to move away from just giving instructions).

I asked them to use Snapguide because it's really easy to use and the final product is really eyecatching. This contributes to the students' feelings of achievement and satisfaction... an important element for students!

Thanks for checking in! See you next time!

Project: news stories

Last week, we started working on a new project in my 4º ESO class. In this project, the students have to research a journalistic style and report three news stories according to their chosen style.

Here you have the presentation I used in class:

First of all, the students got into groups, and before choosing a style, we discussed some common characteristics of each of them together. We discussed things such as bias, neutrality, focus, the importance given to personal commentary by the person reporting the news, the general tone, the role of the audience, and some other generalities. Then, each group chose a style and they started working on their scripts. 

Although I have given them three stories to report and examples of raw news to my students, I've actually given them the freedom to develop their stories as they like. In other words, they all have to talk about an oil spill, a new vaccine and a celeb becoming a mother, but the stories described by each group can differ. 

I am really excited about this project because, although we are working on fictional news, the students will gain a deeper understanding of the role of the media in news reporting, and hopefully, this will make my students a little more critical when they read or hear the news, by asking themselves the same questions we discussed at the beginning of the project: is this biased? What political agenda does it have, if any? Is this news or opinion? ... 

All the groups have decided to record a video, and one of them has asked to use Touchcast. As I write these lines, however, we're still at the script-writing stage of the project. I shall update again in a few days. 

Thanks for reading!

Project: a survey (2)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the surveys on role models, which my 4º ESO students had made. These surveys were filled out by other students at school. Once enough responses had been received, the authors collated and analysed the data and presented the results to the class. 

Google Forms is great because it simplifies this job for you. It makes pie charts and and bar charts, so it makes the job of interpreting data easier. The open questions (short or long answers) yielded different results, sometimes unexpected or even wasteful, as the students who took the surveys didn't always take the questions seriously. I think my students learned a lesson there. 

Finally, the results were interpreted and analysed. My students used Google Slides to make their presentations, using some of the graphs provided by Google Forms, and conclusions were drawn in insightful ways, which made this part of the project meaningful and informative. 

The general feedback from the class was positive. They had never done a project like this and they relished the challenge. It was nice to create a questionnaire that was treated like a real one (by most people, anyway), and not like a classroom activity that stays within the same four walls where it was created. 

They did say that making three different surveys about the same topic (role models) was a bit samey, though, and that it would have been better to have used different topics instead. I have to say that I agree with this, and for next year I will probably ask my students to make surveys about a few different topics, such as stereotypes, independence, the rights of young people, and so on.  

The next step is to do a writing on the back of this. We're working on reports and proposals at the moment. I'll write a post about this once we get there. 

Thanks for checking in!

Project: a survey

Last week I started a new project with my 4º ESO class. The project consists in writing a survey, analysing data from answers and presenting the results to the rest of the class.

Here's the presentation I used for this project:



One of the conversation topics for ISE III is role models, so I decided to use this as the topic for the survey. I asked my students to create a survey in order to find out what their peers consider role models and how they choose their role models. To make it a bit less abstract, I established some areas in which people normally find them: sports, entertainment and close personal circle. Within these categories, I allowed them to use sub-categories, such as the world of cinema, music and technology/design. 

The first step was to get my students familiarised with the term 'role model' and to give them a more neutral point of view. I gave them links to several sites so they could read about role models and what it means to have or to be a role model. These are the links I gave them:

Article on female role models

Link to Diversity Role Models, a non-for-profit organisation that promotes role models from diverse sexual orientations.

Rolemodel.net, a website about the importance of role models in general, focusing on celebrities and their influence on others. 

A class discussion about what they had read ensued. The students had realised that having a role model meant something slightly different to what they had initially thought, and their understanding of the influence a role model can have on young people was deeper. 

Then, the students were arranged into groups. I used TeamUp for this. I asked each group to choose a team leader, who would be in charge of keeping time and assigning jobs. I usually find that students don't always make the most of the time I give them for projects, so a tight deadline, a reporting system like Team-Up and a manager within each group normally take care of all this. As usual, the students had the assessment rubric at hand, so they had a fairly clear idea of the quality that was expected. 

They used Google Forms to make their surveys. I love the Google suite because its apps enable collaboration, and since I always ask my students to share their documents with me, I have visibility all the time. I can check progress, praise students, make comments and so on. 

At first, the students weren't very clear how to start making their survey. I had asked them to include some questions for statistics (age, gender, background ... ) and then, I suggested grouping their questions into sections, each section dealing with a particular sub-topic of their chosen category. This would allow the students to interpret answer results more easily. 

The students could use all different types of answers, but most of them used multiple choice, tickboxes and short answer. I helped them fine-tune the range of answers available, reminding them that surveys are purposeful questionnaires-- this proved a bit harder than I had expected, but then again, making surveys isn't an easy task. 

When they were happy with their questionnaires (and so was I), I suggested adding pictures to the questions in order to make them more appealing. After all, students from all different year levels are going to take the surveys, and teenagers like to look at pictures as well as reading questions. 

This is how far we've come. Once the surveys have been answered by enough people, the students will complete part 2 of the project, which will consist in analysing the answers and presenting their findings to the class. 

I'll update you once this is done. 

Thanks for reading! 

Project-based learning in the English classroom

http://blog.teacherspayteachers.com/project-based-learning/

One of the current trends in education is Project-based learning (henceforward PBL). For those who aren't familiar with the term, PBL is "a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge" (www.bie.org/about/what_pbl). Therefore, it integrates different skills and disciplines, and as a result, learning becomes more meaningful to the student, making it longer-lasting and ultimately enabling them to develop key skills for lifelong learning. I'm a big fan of PBL (who wouldn't be?), but I also think it is a bit limited when it comes to language learning, which is why I have never designed a course solely based on PBL.

To begin with, in order to incorporate PBL successfully into your course, your students should have reached a certain level of proficiency. In other words, you would have to design a fairly basic project for absolute beginners. It is possible (I'm not saying it isn't), but language instruction would far outweigh project work. It is a lot easier once your students feel confident reading, listening, writing and speaking, and you can give them increasingly complex projects that involve extracting information, summarising, paraphrasing, using language for a particular purpose and other valuable skills necessary for academic success across all different subjects.

Another reason why I have never designed a full-on PBL course is that I believe guided language tuition is necessary even when students already feel confident with the language. A lot of them take external examinations, which require a lot of time and preparation. I believe that PBL works well when you are helping students with practical skills, but not so well when a certain level of accuracy is necessary (particularly when writing and speaking). This could be partly because you don't assess projects as a language product alone--you take into account other components, some of which may have little to do with English language skills. 

However, PBL is great in the sense that it poses a challenge for the students. For one, it forces them to work as part of a team, in which each member plays a different role. Second, I normally ask students to research something and create a product resulting from their research (for example, looking at the differences between living in a small town and in a big city, and creating a poster to summarise their findings). This means that students have to read, understand and rephrase using their own words, transforming source material into a different product. Finally, I normally have my students present their projects to the rest of the class orally.

The process of working on a project is complex, and if my students lack maturity, I guide their work by breaking down their tasks into steps, providing them with checklists and ensuring they understand every step. If they are a bit older and are already used to the method, they make their own checklists and work more independently.

As far as English is concerned, the benefits are multiple. Students read authentic material, and very often encounter words that are part of the same semantic group. Context helps students learn vocabulary, and unfamiliar words are identified and their meaning elicited. They are exposed to live English. Of course, each student is different and weaker students need more help, but the exposure to authentic material together with (online) dictionaries, teachers and teammates takes some of the pressure off. 

Have you tried PBL when teaching English? How was your experience?