Students appear on a x-y grid for me, x being whether they work hard, and y being whether they learn fast. It bothers me tremendously to see someone working hard (doing all the homework, participating in class) and yet not performing as well as someone who does no homework and doesn't pay attention in class, but is just a quick learner. In almost every class I have at least one student who spent a lot of time on the homework before class, whereas another student breezes through it without having ever looked at it before. If the latter has the answers mostly correct, what can I do? The student certainly doesn't see the value of writing it all down. By accepting this, I have a double standard, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing since all students are different. However, I think it also might mean that the smart student is losing out.
It's bad with homework, but what's even worse is when we do an exercise in class. In one of my classes, two of the students will diligently write down the questions, while the third quietly distracts herself somehow. She will then get the answers right just as often as the other two despite her lack of work. Clearly there is a problem here. Some students are simply not being challenged.
This is the premise of a current movement in TEFL called "Demand High". The movement is headed by Jim Scrivener and another TEFL superstar. While I agree with their premise, their practical suggestions would, I suspect, cause me to lose my job. But in one of the seminars given in Moscow, the presenter gave her own view about challenging students, which was much more helpful.
First we talked about Bloom's taxonomy, which charts the cognitive power required for different tasks in learning. So at the lowest level of cognitive engagement, there is the task of remembering, then becoming more difficult there is understanding, applying, analyzing, (synthesizing), evaluating, and creating. While a student might be able to breeze through exercises of remembering, understanding, and applying, the other tasks require considerably more engagement.
Actually this idea is over 50 years old, and I've encountered it before, but the way it was presented this time really clicked with me. I had an observation this past week in which the bulk of my material was limited to a somewhat boring text that I would normally go through in twenty minutes or so. As a challenge to applying what I had learned in this seminar, I tried to have an activity for as many of the cognitive processes as I could. The result was that the students (I think) learned a lot of vocabulary, seemed comfortable using it, and they found the text fairly interesting. Although I thought the lesson wound up being a bit dry, my observer complimented me on it and thought that the students actually found it fun.
Also this week I implemented a reward system in my youngest class of 4-6 year-olds. Two of the boys in that class are quite wild, doing anything and everything to make mischief. If they see that they don't have my attention for more than 1.5 seconds, they sneak around and turn off the lights, turn on the water, push buttons on the CD player, or steal magnets, pencils, balls, or any other props I happen to have. When I give them a task and keep them busy, they're mostly good students though.
So my improvement plan for this class was to keep them engaged at all times and to cut down on the mischief. First I wrote each student's name on the board. When they completed a task well, or answered a question well, I drew a part of a smiley on the board. If they started to do something mischievous, I would say "no" or "stop" or "sit down" (all of which they understand), and put my eraser over one of the smileys. If they continue, I erase it. I only had to erase once, and then they got the picture and I had no more problems with the boys. I also gave them all stickers at the end, but interestingly they were willing to do anything to keep their smileys intact before they knew about the stickers. I suspect this was due to competition, though.
The four-year-old girl in that class is a bit more difficult to deal with. If she doesn't have approximately the same amount of smileys as the boys, then she takes her chair, sits in a corner, and pouts. Threatening to erase her smiley doesn't always work to get her back, so I need to find something different for her. Also, she's too young to understand exactly what we're doing in the books, so while the boys and the older girl zoom through the exercises, I have to stand over her the entire time that we're doing book work and tell her exactly what to do. I'm not sure what I need to do to improve this situation, so that's a problem for the future.
The other problem I want to work on is engaging my ISpy class. This class consists of seven boys ranging from six years old to ten. The oldest boy learns faster than all the others and likes making as much trouble as possible. On the other hand, there's an eight-year-old who is quite slow, doesn't study outside of class, and gets teased because he's also a bit socially inept. He has failed the past two tests and he becomes very frustrated in class and often gives up. There's also a boy who is probably the smartest of them all, but he isolates himself from the others and also doesn't do any work outside of class. Trying to juggle the needs of all the students is probably my greatest challenge at the moment, and though the test results of the students (aside from the one) have been decent, this class often makes me feel like I'm just filling up the students' time with low-quality teaching. This too will be a puzzle I attempt to solve in the near future.
First we talked about Bloom's taxonomy, which charts the cognitive power required for different tasks in learning. So at the lowest level of cognitive engagement, there is the task of remembering, then becoming more difficult there is understanding, applying, analyzing, (synthesizing), evaluating, and creating. While a student might be able to breeze through exercises of remembering, understanding, and applying, the other tasks require considerably more engagement.
Actually this idea is over 50 years old, and I've encountered it before, but the way it was presented this time really clicked with me. I had an observation this past week in which the bulk of my material was limited to a somewhat boring text that I would normally go through in twenty minutes or so. As a challenge to applying what I had learned in this seminar, I tried to have an activity for as many of the cognitive processes as I could. The result was that the students (I think) learned a lot of vocabulary, seemed comfortable using it, and they found the text fairly interesting. Although I thought the lesson wound up being a bit dry, my observer complimented me on it and thought that the students actually found it fun.
Also this week I implemented a reward system in my youngest class of 4-6 year-olds. Two of the boys in that class are quite wild, doing anything and everything to make mischief. If they see that they don't have my attention for more than 1.5 seconds, they sneak around and turn off the lights, turn on the water, push buttons on the CD player, or steal magnets, pencils, balls, or any other props I happen to have. When I give them a task and keep them busy, they're mostly good students though.
So my improvement plan for this class was to keep them engaged at all times and to cut down on the mischief. First I wrote each student's name on the board. When they completed a task well, or answered a question well, I drew a part of a smiley on the board. If they started to do something mischievous, I would say "no" or "stop" or "sit down" (all of which they understand), and put my eraser over one of the smileys. If they continue, I erase it. I only had to erase once, and then they got the picture and I had no more problems with the boys. I also gave them all stickers at the end, but interestingly they were willing to do anything to keep their smileys intact before they knew about the stickers. I suspect this was due to competition, though.
The four-year-old girl in that class is a bit more difficult to deal with. If she doesn't have approximately the same amount of smileys as the boys, then she takes her chair, sits in a corner, and pouts. Threatening to erase her smiley doesn't always work to get her back, so I need to find something different for her. Also, she's too young to understand exactly what we're doing in the books, so while the boys and the older girl zoom through the exercises, I have to stand over her the entire time that we're doing book work and tell her exactly what to do. I'm not sure what I need to do to improve this situation, so that's a problem for the future.
The other problem I want to work on is engaging my ISpy class. This class consists of seven boys ranging from six years old to ten. The oldest boy learns faster than all the others and likes making as much trouble as possible. On the other hand, there's an eight-year-old who is quite slow, doesn't study outside of class, and gets teased because he's also a bit socially inept. He has failed the past two tests and he becomes very frustrated in class and often gives up. There's also a boy who is probably the smartest of them all, but he isolates himself from the others and also doesn't do any work outside of class. Trying to juggle the needs of all the students is probably my greatest challenge at the moment, and though the test results of the students (aside from the one) have been decent, this class often makes me feel like I'm just filling up the students' time with low-quality teaching. This too will be a puzzle I attempt to solve in the near future.
