Teaching Narrative Tenses 2: the Post-It Timeline

Most teachers will at some point have used Post-Its in their classroom. Whether they’re used for a game of Who am I?, to review vocabulary or as a classroom management technique, these versatile office staples are a favourite with a good few of my colleagues. I think this is my new favourite use for them.

Inspired by my previous post ‘Teaching Narrative Tenses: that Time I would have Killed for Cuisenaire Rods’, when reviewing narrative tenses with the same group, I also decided to recycle and refine the student-created timeline using the humble Post-It. As I said in the same previous post, the story told in Speak Out Intermediate wasn’t particularly accessible to my students, so this time I decided to use a video that would clearly illustrate the events. This helped the students to have a clearer idea of the sequence of events, they were also able to refer back to it to help in creating the timeline. For this, I used the augmented reality app Aurasm.

Here’s a rough outline of the lesson up until Post-It timelines:

  • Students given screenshots from the video. In pairs, arrange and tell story.
  • Watch video. Tell story.
  • Dictagloss of my version of the story. This ended up being changed to a slower read through while students took notes and retold the story orally. They picked up on the TL from their own stories.
  • Students given printed copy of story to read.
  • Language focus.students identify tenses from the text.

Post-It Timelines

  • Students given Post-Its with verbs from the story. I made sure these were colour-coded to help students to identify the tenses/for clearer visual effect.
  • In pairs, referring to video and written story, students arrange the Post-Its into a timeline. T can offer extra guidance/ask questions to focus students’ attention during this activity. 
Students explaining their PositIt timeline

Students explaining their PositIt timeline

  • Students had to then explain their choices and how the actions linked together. Some specific questions were needed at this point. The intention had been for students to look at each other’s timelines, but this wasn’t possible as the pairs finished creating the timelines at different stages. Since the idea was to help the students to understand the TL more, I wasn’t afraid to let this overrun, and the next task is flexible enough to allow for this eventuality.
  • Following this, each pair had to tell/write the story for another different video.  Students had to complete this for the following lesson.

The next lesson

In the following lesson, the class reviewed the TL by retelling the story and highlighting the links by recreating the timeline.

PostIt timeline on the board with added detail

PostIt timeline on the board with added detail.

Pairs then revised the writing they had prepared for homework, and wrote their own PostIts with the verbs from their story. They then gave the story and PostIts to the other pair who was able to successfully create a timeline, identifying the order of the actions and links between them. Students then checked the story (and use of TL) using the videos.

One pair's story recreated as a PositIt timeline

One pair’s story recreated as a PositIt timeline.

The follow up, homework was for SS to write a story about a time they worked in a team using the TL. Students showed a much better understanding of the TL than from the first lesson on narrative tenses and reported that they felt more confident in using the language thanks to the Post-It Timelines technique (I didn’t even have to pay them!).

 

 

Designing a worksheet

This week we had to make a worksheet, so I decided to work on one that I’d already used with a class and had created myself about a month or two ago. This worksheet was created for a class of students at a pathway College, so they’re working on their English and study skills ahead of joining the university. This worksheet is for the Language for Study 2 module where the exam involves describing a graph and speculating on the reasons behind the trends. In the formative exams, my students had difficulty speculating on reason for the results shown in the graph. So this worksheet was created with that in mind, and for the students to practice and review the language needed to fulfill this part of the assessments. This task is conducted both orally and written so the worksheet needed to reflect this.   I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to remind the students of what is the best approach to this part of the exam.

So in this analysis of how I put together the worksheet the first time and it changes that I made before version 2, I’m going to refer to the Jolly and Bolitho (2011) framework for materials writing below. This framework shows how to work through creating materials in a logical fashion from identification of the problem that needed to be solved by the materials, through exploration, contextual realisation, pedagogical realisation, and finally physical production of the materials.

Jolly and Bolitho framework (

Jolly and Bolitho framework (2011)

I think that in hindsight when I first created these materials I did go through the stages.

  • As I described above I identified a need based on the students performance in the formative exams.
  • I then explored how students could solve this problem by focusing on the use of modals and adverbs for cautious language.
  • The realisation of context was actually really easy because the context would of course be exam
  • The pedagogical realisation was equally easily identified because this would also be closely related to their exam, and more so because I wanted students to also focus on their approach to the exam.
  • In terms of physical production the lesson had these materials:
    • a PowerPoint presentation;
    • a worksheet with the graph and description but missing the speculation (worksheet 1);
    • some cards for the board which contained adverbs and modals used for cautious language;
    • a second worksheet on which to record this language (worksheet 2);
    • another worksheet that looked like the oral exam task to use to practise the language.

Edit: After reading Dan’s blog on this topic, I realised that this is definitely not the process I would always take when creating materials.  It normally starts at different points in the process and jumps between the steps, but generally I think all would be covered at some point.

The original materials

 

Presentation Worksheets

Worksheet

Worksheet 1

Worksheet5

Cards for the board (printed large, one phrase on A4)

Worksheet2_Page_1

Worksheet 2

Worksheet3_Page_2

Worksheet 3

The first version of the worksheets was not designed to be worked through independently, but to form part of a lesson that had additional parts and instruction that did not appear on the worksheets.   In the delivery of the lesson with the first worksheets there were a couple of issues which needed to be addressed when reworking the work sheets, for example the inclusion of gaps for students to complete with the speculation lead to some confusion when first students just had to read through what was written on the paper. They were anticipating having to write something based on the lines but this didn’t fit with the instruction. This reiterated the importance of layout and how it contributes to students’ understanding of what to do, and guides them through the tasks.

So the first thing I did when rewriting was to make notes on the original version of changes that I’d like to make. These included

  • adding parts of the PowerPoint presentation and board activity to the worksheet,
  • adding boxes around certain sections to make them clearer,
  • changing fonts,
  • adding clearer staging of the activities in response to the issue mentioned above.

I set out to complete this exercise with creating an improved worksheet in mind, but I found myself hating the process and the result. I felt that it really took away from the lesson as a whole.  By adding the extra instructions and by streamlining the lesson into one form of material, I felt that the communicative/interactive element had been entirely lost and as such the materials lost their focus on the main aim of providing practice for both written and oral exams.   As a teacher I would truly hate to use this new worksheet in class, and as a student I would wonder why I wasn’t completing this at home for independent study.

After reaching this conclusion I wanted to get the opinions of my classmates, but given the format of the workshop that week and the detailed look it would require as well as my classmates’ limited knowledge of my context and the exams involved,  I didn’t find this fruitful as I’d hoped.  Some did comment that the second version was ‘decidedly clearer’ and I would agree that when seen outside of context (and not having created the materials) it might be. I also found that some of the additions and revisions would work well alongside the original combination of materials.

The updated version

I reached the conclusion that a worksheet does not have to be the entire lesson. It can be just a part of it.  Of course this means that it would require teaching notes that the original version had. So my original worksheet may not be ‘pick up and go’ like many of those produced by my classmates, but it is suited to my teaching style, the needs of my students, the aims of the lesson.  I also find that guiding students using a PowerPoint means that I have more control over the speed in which they move through the tasks as well as what they are focusing on at any specific time (I can imagine this new version being printed double sided and the whole first page being ignored/the tasks undone by students eager to look at page 2). Barbara suggested the PowerPoint is actually a form of worksheet. I would agree, and tend to prefer this method, particularly when teaching an approach or process such as this where I want to closely monitor the steps students are taking.  I think it’s a good idea to provide a shorter – perhaps more concentrated – takeaway document for the students to keep and easily review at a later stage, but not make that the focus of the whole lesson.

The next step was to evaluate my worksheet using the frameworks that we designed in week 3. Check out it out to see how it fared.

Evaluation - My worksheet_Page_1

Interesting to note that in my original and even revised versions of this worksheet, it would score low for the criteria ‘Do the visuals and overall aesthetic engage and motivate learners?’ (and I was probably being a little generous due to bias – let’s face it, a graph isn’t exactly engaging and motivating to most people even if it is the basis of their exams!). Thinking back to my analysis of the use of image in the Skills for Study series (see my post on Images), I appear to have produced materials that aren’t much more visual. This raises a question I’ve asked before: is this simply because there are too many other things to think about? I know that when I was creating my worksheet – and probably more generally when I create materials – yes, layout was important, but did I really think about my use of colour and including visuals? It was probably the last thing on my mind, but since colour printing is still seen as a luxury, aren’t materials suitable for black and white photocopying more useful? You can see that even in the original version of my worksheet where the graph is in colour, I cut up the key so that it matched up with the lines to make it photocopy-friendly. I don’t remember thinking about it too much at the time, but it sure does make a difference…

Adapting and Supplementing 2

Following my post about reasons for adapting and supplementing materials, here’s how I adapted a couple of pages from Fletcher, C., (2012), Skills for Study Level 3, Cambridge: Cambridge (pp68-72).

Background

The students were upper intermediate to advanced.

Part of the assessment for this module is a poster presentation on one of the following subjects

  • in vitro meat
  • artificial intelligence
  • tourism
  • globalisation
  • entertainment media.

In the previous lesson students had their formative poster presentations, where they were required to produce a poster and present their introduction and at least one of their key points (argument – counter-argument – refutation), give a short conclusion, and to answer questions from the audience formed of their classmates.

Prior to using these materials, students were encouraged to reflect on the posters they created and their performance in the formative presentations (or their classmates’ performance if students did not give a presentation). They also looked at posters produced by last year’s students, and saw a video of a good student presentation.

The purpose of these materials was to focus on the types of questions students could/should ask following presentations as the questions posed by audience-members in formatives were not always relevant or constructive, some were quite pointed and mean.

The original materials

 

A+S1

A+S2

A+S3

Adapted and supplemented materials

PowerPoint Presentation

Handout 1

Handout 1

Handout 1 (supplementary material) to add personalisation using students’ own questions from the previous session and to highlight the relevance of the lesson.

Handout 2

Handout 2

 

Handout 2 (adapted) an extra task to raise students’ awareness of the types of questions they could (be) asked after their presentations and to add a kinesthetic element.

Handout 3

Handout 3

Handout 3 (adapted) – same task as in coursebook with different layout.

Handout 4

Handout 4

Handout 4 (adapted) – simplified version of what is found in the coursebook, selecting the most pertinent parts and removing the listening task which I feel requires students to focus on too many things at once, clouding the purpose of the lesson.

Students then wrote questions for the presentation they had watched earlier on PostIts.  This meant that the subject was much more relevant to them.  Since I had them look back at the notes from watching the presentation and the poster while coming up with questions, this was perhaps a little more realistic than the listening from the book, and more relevant as it was a student’s video.

How it went

Having taught the lesson first with the course book and supplemented practice, I reworked the coursebook content into a more user-friendly and personalised set of worksheets and activities. The reaction of the students in the two classes from my point of view was night and day. The new version was one of my lesson observations for Teaching and Reflection, and was well received both by the observer and the students (I think!).