Asking a teacher about professional development is a bit like asking fish about the water they swim in. PD seems to be everywhere. It is often assumed and taken for granted, and the reasons for doing it can at times be transparent and at others pretty unclear. Sometimes, professional development can seem like an obligation, like something that is expected as part of being a teacher. Other times, it can feel like a natural extension of teaching. Continue reading
The world is changing at a rapid pace and it is hard for educators to even imagine what kind of skills and competences their learners will need 10, 20, 30 or even 50 years from now. What is clear, however, is that traditional academic subjects alone will not be enough. Many curricula across the globe already include some form of life skills education. It has increasingly become the norm that many educators are expected to integrate the teaching of these skills into their subject teaching. Yet, the support and training educators receive varies widely. This is where we hope our Position Paper can help ELT teachers, in particular, to reflect on and find ways to teach global skills alongside their language aims in sustainable ways.
After having examined many diverse frameworks for global skills, we have distilled them into five clusters. These are:
How an ELT teacher approaches the teaching of these skills will depend on their own interests, competences, resources, and local curricular constraints. There is no one single way to approach this. We have proposed a range of teaching approaches stretching from single activities to extended projects. Each teacher will select ideas as suits them and their learners. Here are a few ideas to consider and if you would like to know more, please download our free Global Skills Position Paper.
1. Compare different media sources:
In the era of ‘fake news’, critical thinking skills are more important than ever! You can help older learners develop these skills as part of a longer activity, by asking them to analyse different news articles.
Choose a current topic in the news to discuss with your learners. Give them a newspaper article or a news bulletin on the topic and ask them to share their response with a partner. Then, with the class, examine the same story in different media sources. Ask them to consider the author, the intended audience, the emotions involved, and the strategies that are used to engage the reader.
Do you want to develop your students’ digital literacies at the same time? Ask your students to fact check one of the articles online, using more than one source of information. They should think about which source is the most reliable and which to trust.
2. Create digital reports:
Try asking your learners to create a digital report on a global issue like endangered animals or inequality! They should work in pairs, and use their mobile devices to video or audio record a short news report about the issue, describing the problem and offering suggested solutions. Learners can share these reports with each other online, and give each other comments and feedback. The project could also be extended, and you could ask learners to create a detailed proposal for solving the issue. This will help them think critically and learn to solve problems.
3. Ask open-ended questions:
Simply changing the style of your questions can help your learners develop their creativity and critical thinking skills. Open-ended questions encourage students to interpret and analyse information, helping them to practice these essential skills. You can easily integrate these questions into your everyday teaching by asking questions about classroom topics – or you could ask questions about important issues to help your students develop their citizenship skills. For example, you could ask older learners questions like:
You could ask younger learners questions like:
This kind of activity provides a good foundation for deeper work on critical thinking in longer activities. It also helps students to practice their language skills by encouraging them to respond in detail.
4. Encourage project work:
Project work is one of the best ways for learners to develop their global skills. By working in groups, setting their own agenda, and personalising their approach, learners feel more engaged and develop multiple skills at once.
One example involves asking students to design their own project to address a problem in their local or global community. Secondary school learners could design projects around:
These examples will encourage older students to develop skills like communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Learners will also develop their citizenship and intercultural competence by investigating global issues and thinking about which groups of people need support. They will learn to think about their local and global communities, and learn how to address important issues.
Learners can also report on the project online to develop their digital literacies encourage others to engage in similar projects.
5. Start small:
Are you unsure how to begin teaching global skills like communication and collaboration? Try starting small! Every lesson, integrate a short language-learning activity that includes a focus on one of these global skills. Later, you can begin to integrate larger, more focused activities and sequences of tasks which allow for a more in-depth approach to developing the skills – including project work.
Sarah Mercer is Professor of Foreign Language Teaching at the University of Graz, Austria, where she is Head of ELT Methodology. Her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience, and she has written and edited prize-winning books in this area.
Nicky Hockly is the Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online training and development consultancy. She is a teacher, trainer, and educational technology consultant who works with teachers all over the world. Nicky writes regular columns on technology for EFL teachers in professional journals and has written several prizewinning methodology books.
Both Sarah and Nicky are lead authors of the position paper, Global Skills: Creating empowered 21st century learners.
Effective feedback is the key to successful assessment for learning, and can greatly improve your students’ understanding. So how can you ensure that your feedback is as effective as possible? You need to understand what level your students are at and where they need to improve. Your students will also find your feedback more useful if they understand the purpose of what they are learning and know what success looks like.
Try these 5 tips to improve feedback in your classroom:
Most questions asked in the classroom are simple recall questions (‘What is a noun?’) or procedural questions (‘Where’s your book?’). Higher-order questions require students to make comparisons, speculate, and hypothesize. By asking more of these questions, you can learn more about the way your students understand and process language, and provide better feedback.
Did you know that most teachers wait for less than a second after asking a question before they say something else? Instead of waiting longer, they often re-phrase the question, continue talking or select a student to answer it. This does not give students time to develop their answers or think deeply about the question. Try waiting just 3 seconds after a recall question and 10 seconds after a higher-order question to greatly improve your students’ answers.
Asking questions should be a two-way process, where students are able to ask the teacher about issues they don’t understand. However, nervous or shy students often struggle to do so. Encourage students to ask more questions by asking them to come up with questions in groups, or write questions down and hand them in after class.
Students perform better if they understand the purpose of what they are learning. Encourage students to think about why they are learning by linking each lesson back to what has been learned already and regularly asking questions about learning intentions.
If students recognise the standard they are trying to achieve, they respond to feedback better and appreciate how it will help them progress. Try improving students’ understanding by explaining the criteria for success. You can also provide examples of successful work and work that could be improved for your students to compare.
Did you find this article useful? For more information and advice, read our position paper on Effective Feedback:
Chris Robson graduated from the University of Oxford in 2016 with a degree in English Literature, before beginning an internship at Oxford University Press shortly afterwards. After joining ELT Marketing full time to work with our secondary products, including Project Explore, he is now focused on empowering the global ELT community through delivery of our position papers.
Assessment for learning (AfL) is a catchphrase with which many teachers may be familiar and yet may not feel confident that they know what it means in terms of classroom practice. Here I outline the basic ideas behind it and the kinds of classroom practices AfL may involve.
At heart, it’s what good teachers do every day:
The evidence is that, done well, these practices are among the most effective ways of improving learning and outcomes.
Assessment in this process is essentially informal, the information teachers gather comes in many forms, for example, through classroom dialogue, following up on unexpected answers, or recognising from puzzled looks that the students have not understood. Tests play a part, but only if they are used to feed directly into the teaching and learning process.
What would we expect to see in an AfL classroom?
Diagnostics. There would beevidence of teaching and learning that is active, with students involved in dialogue with their teachers and classmates. This goes beyond simple recall questions and will include seeking out students’ views (‘what do you think….) and giving them time to think about their answers – often with a classmate (‘pair and share’).
Clarity about learning intentions. This requires teachers to be clear about what is to be learned, how the lesson activities will encourage it, and where it fits in the learning progression. They then seek to make this clear to their students by linking it to what they have learned already and showing why it’s important. Expert teachers will use imaginative ways of introducing the learning intentions (‘why do you think we’re doing this?’) rather than routinely writing out the learning objectives.
Teachers will also clarify what a successful performance will look like, so that the learners can see the standard they need to achieve. Teachers may do this by negotiating with the class about what the learners think a good performance might involve (for example: ‘what would you look for in a good oral presentation?’). Another approach may be to exemplify the standard by using examples of work (best as anonymous work from other students). A teacher may give the class two pieces of work, she may then give the class the criteria for assessing the work (no more than two or three key criteria) and ask them, in groups, to make a judgement about their relative quality. This also provides a vital step in being able to evaluate the quality of their own work and become more self-regulated learners.
Giving effective feedback. Providing feedback that moves learning forward is a key, and complex, teaching skill. We know from research that feedback is hard to get right. Good feedback ‘closes the gap’ between a learner’s current performance and the standard that is to be achieved. Some of the key features in quality feedback are:
In all this, the aim of assessment for learning is to encourage our students to increasingly think for themselves, and have the ability and desire to regulate their own learning.
Gordon Stobart is an assessment expert that has contributed to the latest Position Paper for Oxford University Press, ‘Assessment for Learning’. Download the paper today to learn about effective feedback, close the gap between where your learners are and where they need to be, and get access to exclusive professional development events!
Gordon Stobart is Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford. Having worked as a secondary school teacher and an educational psychologist, he spent twenty years as a senior policy researcher. He was a founder member of the Assessment Reform Group, which has promoted assessment for learning internationally. Gordon is the lead author of our Assessment for Learning Position Paper.