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Show Notes

1. 1. Problem: Learners resist giving presentations and many other aspects of school-related activities, tasks, and performances.

• Teens Are Protesting In-Class Presentations

• According to a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, oral communication is one of the most sought-after skills in the workplace, with over 90 percent of hiring managers saying it’s important.

• a tweet posted by a 15-year-old high-school student declaring “Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to” garnered more than 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes. A similar sentiment tweeted in January also racked up thousands of likes and retweets. And teachers are listening.

• “Nobody should be forced to do something that makes them uncomfortable,” says Ula, a 14-year-old in eighth grade, who, like all students quoted, asked to be referred to only by her first name. “Even though speaking in front of class is supposed to build your confidence and it’s part of your schoolwork, I think if a student is really unsettled and anxious because of it you should probably make it something less stressful. School isn’t something a student should fear.”

• It feels like presentations are often more graded on delivery when some people can’t help not being able to deliver it well, even if the content is the best presentation ever,” says Bennett, a 15-year-old in Massachusetts who strongly agrees with the idea that teachers should offer alternative options for students.

1. Students are resisting in-class presentations… by Annabelle Timsit
   1. According to the American Psychological Association, “When people are fearful of something, they tend to avoid the feared objects, activities or situations. Although this avoidance might help reduce feelings of fear in the short term, over the long term it can make the fear become even worse.”
   2. In her piece, Lorenz quotes a 14-year-old student named Ula, who says that “Nobody should be forced to do something that makes them uncomfortable.” But the best available science tells us that, if they want to be successful in life, maybe they should.

Participatory Call to Action: How do you encourage learners who resist participating in your class?

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Show Notes

1. Problem: Working in isolation - teacher burnout...
2. Personal learning network: How do you engage in your own personal learning network?
   1. Define PLN: collection of social, material, and ideational connections or nodes designed for a specific (professional) purpose that has both historical (over time) and specific value.
   2. Twitter (@bnleez)
      1. Bidirectional/unidirectional communication
   3. Feedly/Buffer/Pocket
   4. Facebook Groups: In the Classroom |
3. Workflow
   1. Ferrite for audio
   2. Lumafusion for video
   3. Google Docs: Show notes
   4. iPad Pro 10.5/Android smartphone
4. Participatory Call to Action:  As an instructional leader, how you work against isolation?

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Show Notes

1. Problem: backwash effect: how assessment can influence instruction
   1. Readings in Methodology: A collection of articles on the teaching of English as a foreign language (2006) (pp. .
2. What is portfolio writing assessement
3. Self-regulation through portfolio assessment in writing classrooms
   1. Relationship between PA and the four phases of self-regulation (Figure 1, p. 5).
   2. Phase I: instruction and scaffolding
   3. Phase II: self-assessment, peer assessment, teacher feedback (first draft)
   4. Phase III: Teacher feedback (second-final draft) - cycles back to phase I
   5. Phase IV: error log and reflection; publish to eportfolio (decision-making process)

     4. Participatory Call to Action: How do you incorporate portfolio assessment in your current teaching practice?

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Show Notes

In this episode, I provide an excerpt of a class that is designed to assist English language learners - at an A2 level - to complete a story (one paragraph long) that is inspired by an image (painting or a picture) of a cabin in nature. 

Content Objectives

• Build vocabulary related to nature: objects, animals, emotions, five senses, etc.
• Gain awareness of paragraph unity (staying on topic), coherence (organizational patterns), and cohesion (transitions)
• Gain awareness of sentence types: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex
• Gain awareness of parts of speech, types of phrases, and types of clauses
• Gain awareness of comma usage: serial comma, compound sentence, complex sentence, sentence connectors, introductory phrases (five words or more), and appositives

Language (Linguistic) Objectives

• Rheme and theme
• Transitions
• Comma usage
• Descriptive texts using adjectives and prepositional phrases
• Simple, compound, and complex sentences

Pedagogical Notes

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Show Notes

1. Problem: Lean Teaching… how efficient, effective, and engaging is our teaching practice?
2. Workflow...
   1. Keep in mind the following three things when considering one’s workflow: learner to learner engagement, instructor to learner engagement, and learner to outside expert engagement.
   2. Google Classroom
   3. Google Docs
   4. Google Gradebook
   5. Google Photos
   6. Eportfolio

Sources: Lean Manufacturing - Wikipedia; Lean Thinking (Womack & Jones, 1996)

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 Show Notes

1. 1. Instructional-learning episodes: knowledge-skill; metacognition-cognition; far (new context)-near (similar context) transfer; reproductive (less complex)-productive (more complex)
   2. Class
      1. Essential question: How does a song communicate with you? (far-near transfer)
      2. Brainstorm individually: emotions, people, events, etc. as a list. (knowledge - writing to understand)
      3. Convert brainstorming list to Mindmap and take a picture (Cognition, learning strategy, knowledge)
      4. Convert Mindmap to first and subsequent drafts
      5. Work/Upload information to Google docs
      6. Feedback - few students uploaded their paragraphs until the very end

Sources: Elshout-Mohr, Hout-Wolters, & Broekkamp, 1999; Volman & Ten Dam, 2011

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Show Notes

How can a teacher decide whether to break down the input into step-by-step activities or start by challenging students by asking them to perform a task where input proficiency is required? (Bottom up, top down, task based, structural content based)

• Task-based supplementation: Achieving high school textbook goals through form focused interaction: Conclusions: “Results” have historically been defined and measured by “objective” language tests - standardized tests.  However, focusing strictly on form (not meaning, use, discourse, culture, etc.) ignores the fact that we have no true way of knowing exactly what a learner does specifically that leads to language acquisition. Also, a learners’ internal grammar goes up and down… down in the case when internalizing new content.

• • Conclusions: Task-based learning extremely effective when attending the personal, affective, and social development of the learner.
  • Instructional-learning episodes: reproductive (less complex)-productive (more complex), knowledge-skill, metacognition-cognition, far (new context)-near (similar context) transfer

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In the Classroom: Why In the Classroom?

In many ways, episode #25 is the “first” in the informal reflective discussions I have planned for this channel related to curriculum, assessment, instruction, and educational technologies.  My intention of this channel is to provide the means for me to share with the public my interests and perspectives around what I read (theory, research, internet, etc.) and my own teaching practice.  My hope is that others will voice additional perspectives on similar topics by addressing through line questions related to each episode.

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In this episode we discuss instructional-learning episodes (task-based learning) by way of example.

TLC Socials

• Piry Herrera
• Benjamin L. Stewart
• Facebook | TLC playlist | TLC Classroom

In this episode we discuss different models of teacher reflection.