Elevator to the future: English skills

“Would it be safer to take the stairs?”

The question came to mind in Montreal last week when I visited a 1929 apartment building and came face-to-face with its equally ancient caged elevator. An elderly woman shooed me inside the polished brass and oak confection and, as we ascended, confided that there was still an elevator operator when she first moved into the building.

Ah, an elevator operator – it’s a career and skill set we’ve almost forgotten. But just as hard as it is for us to imagine doing a job that only involves opening and closing doors and pressing buttons, an elevator operator from 50 years ago would find it impossible to imagine much of today’s work. And, in turn, we may not be able to imagine the jobs our students will have in the coming years. Fortunately, imagining the education that will take our students there is less difficult.

To educate today’s students, we should heed the advice of Ali ibn Abi Talib (599-661 CE): “Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time”.

Today’s students are different in five key ways: visual learning, collaboration, critical and creative thinking, digital involvement, and control of their learning.

1. Developing visual literacy

Today’s learners grew up with the rich multimedia of computers and are used to exploring ideas independently. They’re less dependent on teachers for the information they want, and often find it in surprising ways. For example, avoiding dictionary definitions and instead doing image searches to understand new words.

What you can do

Develop students’ visual literacy. Do they know the differences between bar charts, pie charts and Gantt charts? Can they interpret the data in line graphs and Venn diagrams? Can they apply what they know to present and explain ideas in dynamic ways? Expose students to a range of visual formats, from illustrations to diagrams, and give them tasks where they have to use them.

2. Encouraging collaboration

Schools were traditionally organized around competition, aimed at separating the most able students from the least able. But teachers today can’t ignore those who seem less able; we need to be more like doctors, devoting the greater part of our time and resources to those who need it most. Our aim should be to bring everyone up to the same level.

What you can do

Collaboration involves offering more tasks where students can help each other, particularly getting more able and less able students to work together to benefit from peer teaching. More able students may resist, but remind them that one who teaches learns twice.

3. Facilitating critical and creative thinking

Critical thinking has become far more important than schools’ traditional focus on memorization. Employers expect that students will become problem solvers. Gone is the factory model of employees doing repetitive jobs; those are now more efficiently and effectively done by machines.

What you can do

Traditionally, teachers have asked questions for which they know the answer and for which there is only one answer. Try to ask more open-ended questions for which there may be multiple answers. Ask questions to which you don’t know the answer. Encourage creativity. Ask students to brainstorm, and then use analytical skills to determine the best answers.

4. Leveraging the digital environment

Today’s students are digital natives. They first learned to type on digital keyboards and, since then, have embraced phones as a key resource. English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said there were two kinds of knowledge: knowing a thing or knowing where to find it. For today’s students, finding information has never been easier.

What you can do

Many teachers dread phones in the classroom, but they are powerful computers that let students connect to online learning resources and learn what they want, when, and where they want. Steer students toward using their phones to improve their English but also teach them to be reflective about the sources of the information they choose to use.

5. Offering autonomy

Today’s students are too often referred to as clients, suggesting that the teacher-student relationship is no more than a business arrangement. It’s wrong to think so but, at the same time, we recognize that today’s students are savvy about assessing what they need to learn and how they would prefer to learn it. They have grown up with ideas about multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993).

What you can do

Open a dialog with your students to see if they have learning preferences and whether these preferences can be accommodated in the classroom. Give more individual projects letting students choose topics based on their needs and interests.

Even among elevator operators, there were those who were better or worse at their jobs. Perhaps the greatest skill for students today is a sense that they need to take responsibility and examine the needs of any task or career that interests them, and figure out how to learn the skills that will get them there.

Reading in English can be one of the most challenging activities for young learners and teenagers, especially when they don’t get much enjoyment from reading in their own language.

These four reading strategies are fun, high-energy, and educational ways of getting even the most reluctant students involved in your reading lessons.

1. Bring outside interests into the classroom

Many students find it hard to get enthused by the reading texts used in their classrooms; they might feature complex vocabulary, be too generic, or just not resonate with their interests. An effective way of reaching out to the more reluctant readers in the class is to use reading materials related to the media they enjoy engaging with in their leisure time.

Pearson’s Marvel series of graded readers provides an ideal opportunity for bringing popular movie culture into your learners’ reading skills development. All of the readers are designed specifically for use in the classroom and feature an integrated skills approach that reinforces vocabulary and helps develop language skills. The readers come with activities to complete throughout the book rather than at the end, and key vocabulary is highlighted and defined.

Excitingly, most of our readers come with downloadable audio files (MP3s), so the students can listen along and hear the stories come to life. The audio can help students model pronunciation, get used to different accents and dialects, and make it even more accessible for students who are still less keen on reading.

2. Gamify the reading experience

By adding simple game dynamics and mechanics to your reading activities, you can add a competitive and fun element to your classes. This could help maintain the interest of learners who might otherwise lose enthusiasm.

The “dictogloss” activity is a good way of adding that extra element as it uses a countdown timer and peer-to-peer interaction to make the reading more of a competitive game.

First, find a good level and age-appropriate story for your students. Before you begin reading the story, tell your students to pay close attention because they are going to re-tell it themselves later.

You will need to read the story to the students in an engaging way, occasionally stopping, and asking students what they think will happen next.

Afterwards, allow the students five minutes to write as much of the story as they can remember in their notebooks.

When time is up, put the students in pairs and allow them to compare stories and correct each other, combining their stories, so they have a complete version. Help students by writing key vocabulary on the board as they request it.

Finally, hand out the original story for students to compare. Get feedback to find out what new vocabulary they have learned and help them make corrections in their stories where needed.

3. Experiment with high-energy activities

Reading doesn’t have to be a sedentary activity. Make use of the classroom space and use movement as a way to motivate and engage your students.

Add a dash of physical activity to your reading task by turning it into a running dictation competition. At the same time, they will practice a whole range of skills; reading, listening, pronunciation, and writing.

Before the class, stick some level-appropriate reading materials to a classroom wall; ideally, you should space it out well and have one reading sheet for every two to four students (the material should be identical).

Put your students into pairs and tell them they are going to have a reading race. Nominate one student to write and another student to dictate.

Students who are writing must sit at a table on the opposite side of the room to the reading material. Students who are dictating must go to the text on the wall, memorize as much of the text as possible, come back to the writer and dictate what they can remember.

Pairs must write as much as they can in four minutes, and when you get halfway through the activity, students should swap roles.

Finally, ask the students to swap their papers and listen to your dictation, making corrections and asking questions as they go. The pair with the longest text and fewest errors is the winner!

4. Go beyond the text

Taking a text and making it into something entirely original can also be a powerful motivator for creative students. Those who complain that reading is boring or too hard will have an extra reason to get through a story if there’s a promise of creative fun at the end of the task.

Tell students that once they have finished reading, they must re-imagine the story and characters and adapt it for a radio show, complete with sound effects, music and scripts.

Depending on how creative your students are feeling, they could write a sequel or a prequel, or adapt the existing story – ideal if you’re using a superhero reader from the Marvel series.

They will need to review vocabulary and pronunciation, remember the details of the original story, explain the characters and their motivations, and plot and write their own scripts. Students can find sound effects on YouTube and record the whole thing on their mobile phones, or a school computer.

By turning a book into a creative project, not only can you motivate students to read, but you will reinforce vocabulary, pronunciation and have a lot of fun doing it.

How to help your students improve their general listening, speaking and understanding

Do your students ever display poor communication skills?

Most teachers will answer with a resounding ‘yes’. In fact, communication skills do not always come naturally to many people. Let’s look at some of the most common and egregious errors people make when speaking and listening to each other. I’ll also give you some valuable ways to help your students improve.

1. They don’t even stop to breathe

If you find one student doing a LOT of talking, it’s probably because no one else can get a word in edgeways. It can be tempting to assume that this is because the chatty student thinks their ideas are better than anyone else’s, but, in fact, it is often a sign of nerves.

Look more carefully and see if they appear breathless or anxious. Whatever the reason, this kind of student may benefit from a more structured approach where students are given time to prepare what they are going to say, and everyone is expected to contribute equally. Or make it into a game where students have to make sure that they speak for 50% of the time each, as would be expected in an exam situation.

2. They aren’t really paying attention to each other

Whether your students are looking at their phones, staring out of the window or can’t wait to interrupt each other, poor listeners make poor communicators. Deal with this by always requiring the listener in any pair to do something specific. For example, tell them they will need to summarise what their partner said, or they have to think of three questions to ask their partner at the end.

We usually have a reason to listen in real-life communication, so make sure you give them one. Otherwise, they may assume that only the teacher needs to pay attention when another student is talking.

3. They ramble and it’s difficult to follow what they’re saying

Students may ramble because they are unconfident about the target language. It’s fine for students to struggle a bit to communicate, but it’s sensible to set achievable tasks, or they may give up.

It could also be that they would benefit from more rehearsal and practice. Being able to speak fluently ‘off the cuff’ is very challenging, particularly in front of an audience. Try giving students time to plan what they are going to say first. They shouldn’t be reading off the page, but writing it first can help with confidence and fluency.

Repetition is also invaluable in building fluency. Try doing speaking tasks more than once, and see how the quality and quantity improves each time. You can ring the changes by swapping partners or changing the format from pairs to small groups, to the whole class.

4. They don’t treat others’ feelings with respect

This can show itself in different ways. Maybe your students just completely ignore the feelings the other person is demonstrating or telling them about. Or maybe they dismiss them in other ways, ‘Oh, exactly the same thing happened to me! I was just walking along…’

You can model better ways to respond yourself. For example, “It sounds as if you feel quite angry about that?”, “That must have been really difficult.’

This teaches students the kind of phrases they can use to validate, empathize and talk about emotions.

If you can deal with these problems, your students will be well on the way to becoming master communicators.

What is the coding mindset?

Over the past decade, the ELT industry has placed more emphasis on soft skills. The focus has been on developing personal leadership qualities, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork and communication and collaboration skills. These are all essential skills for the future of work – and especially useful when students need to work better together and solve unexpected issues.

A coding mindset encourages students to develop these essential soft skills – and practice them as a coder would. Teachers can use activities and tasks in the classroom that are based on this mindset to help students develop strategies to analyze, understand and solve problems.

This is integral to computational thinking and is how computer programmers think when coding. Yes, the coding mindset is a way of thinking, but it does not directly relate to computer science. Instead, it follows the skills and mentality that coders and programmers use in their work. Following this mindset can help learners to become more resilient and savvy when faced with challenges in their learning or daily lives.

Four benefits of the coding mindset

There are several benefits to developing this mindset:

1. Gain creativity skills

One significant benefit of this way of thinking is that students learn that not everything they try will work out just as they expect. In fact, it’s normal to fail several times when trying to solve problems.

In working to find new strategies to work through challenges, students are also developing their creativity skills.

Creativity was once synonymous with art, such as drawing or painting. However, this now means coming up with new ideas and is a skill that is particularly sought after by employers.

2. Learn how to cope in difficult times

We live in a world where we experience constant change – and we need to be able to find ways of managing. A coding mindset teaches learners how to build resilience.

By openly communicating with others, evaluating ideas and discussing a range of options, students will be able to work through uncertainties and confront challenges.

Not only will this help students when coming up against stumbling blocks in their learning, but it will also benefit their day-to-day lives.

3. Create risk takers

We can all recognize that learning English isn’t easy and that students are bound to make mistakes.

However, a coding mindset encourages students to take risks when approaching difficulties. It also helps language learners spot their mistakes and experiment with different options to find solutions.

Ultimately, learners become more willing to take risks which they need to do to reach a higher level of proficiency.

4. Develop the ability to overcome obstacles

When approaching a task with a coding mindset, students will learn how to focus on the important information. They will filter out any irrelevant details and find ways around barriers.

For example, if learners have to write a text about their last holiday in class, they could hit a wall if they don’t know how to use the third conditional to explain something. Rather than giving up, students with a coding mindset would use the grammar they do know to complete the task. For instance, they can continue with the past simple or past continuous, explaining their story in a different way.

This encourages learners to focus on their strengths rather than weaknesses to overcome obstacles and keep going.

Practical activities for use in the classroom

There are several activities that teachers can use in the classroom to develop the coding mindset for their students. These include:

Recognizing patterns

If you teach in a classroom with a whiteboard, you can draw a series of colored circles on the board. The colors should follow a pattern that students must work out in small groups and then continue on the board.

This simple exercise can be adapted for all levels and ages. You may even want to use flashcards with vocabulary, letters or number combinations.

Giving instructions

A great way to develop troubleshooting and problem-solving skills is by asking students to direct one another across the classroom. Put the learners into pairs and ask one of them to give directions and the other to follow.

They can practice imperatives and language for directions, while they break down problems into smaller, more manageable parts.

Treasure hunts

Creating treasure hunts works particularly well with young learners. If you have access to an outside space, you can hide classroom objects or flashcards around the space and give students clues as to where to find them.

You can also do this around the classroom or school if you cannot access the outdoors. This will help them to think systematically and follow instructions.

Pixilation of pictures

If you have access to an interactive whiteboard, another way to develop problem-solving skills is by selecting some pictures from the internet and blurring them with a pixilation tool.

Choose vocabulary you’ve been working on in class, so students are already familiar with the topic. Show the pictures on the whiteboard and ask students to work in groups to guess what the pictures are.

Teaching beginners can be daunting, especially when it’s a monolingual group and you know nothing of their language, or it’s a multilingual group and the only common language is the English you’ve been tasked with teaching them. Nevertheless, not only is it possible to teach beginners only through English, but it can also be one of the most rewarding levels to teach. To help you succeed in setting your learners firmly on the path to increasing proficiency, here are seven tips for teaching English to beginners.

1. Keep instructions clear and simple

When addressing a class of students, especially ones you’ve just met, it can be tempting to explain activities in your politest language. After all, no one likes to be rude. However, a student who has only a few words of English, if any at all, won’t appreciate the courtesy of (or even understand), “OK, so now what I’d like you all to do, if you don’t mind, is just to stand up for a moment and come to the front of the class. Oh, and please bring your book with you. Could we all do that?”

Instead, make instructions crystal clear by using as few words as necessary, gesturing whenever possible, and breaking down a series of instructions into smaller units. If you want to be polite, “please” and “thank you” will do. “Everybody – take your book, please. Stand up. Now, come here, please. Thank you.”

2. Let them listen first

Your students will likely want to start practicing speaking from the get-go. However, it takes a while for one’s ear to acclimatize to the sounds of a new language, and not everyone will be so keen; don’t pressure students into speaking before they’ve had lots of opportunity to listen to you using it (which doesn’t mean you should just be rambling on at the front of the classroom – with beginners more so than with other levels, you really have to consider what you say and grade your language accordingly).

3. Drill, repeat, drill, repeat, drill…

Beginners need lots of repetition and drilling, especially as they get to grips with the sounds of their new language. It might seem boring to go over the same sentences again and again, but it is necessary. When practicing a new sentence, try back-drilling, breaking the sentence down into manageable units and then building it back up, working backwards from the end to the beginning; this helps ensure that your intonation is natural and that you get elements of connected speech right. For example, break down “Would you like a cup of tea?” as follows:

tea > cup of tea > like a > like a cup of tea > Would you > Would you like a cup of tea?

4. Establish classroom language early on

Classroom language – Can you speak more slowly? What do we have to do? I don’t understand. What does… mean? How do you say… in English? – is usually associated with teaching children, but it also helps with adult beginners. No matter how friendly and relaxed you make your classroom atmosphere, learning a new language can still be daunting, especially when you feel you’re not entirely following what’s going on, or that you might be called on to say something that you don’t feel ready to say. It’s much better to equip students early on with classroom language that will help them navigate the lesson smoothly.

5. Avoid metalanguage

There’s no point in students knowing the terms past simple, irregular verb or adverb of frequency if they can’t use the actual structures or words they refer to. Don’t tell them how to say something: show them. Give as much context as you can (visual prompts work well).

Furthermore, make sure you check they have understood by asking questions that test their comprehension – never ask “Do you understand?” as:

a) many people are reluctant to let on that they haven’t understood and will pretend instead that they have

b) a student may think they have understood when in fact they haven’t.

6. Don’t forget that your students are fluent in their own language(s)

This may seem trivial, but it’s all too easy when listening to somebody speaking broken English to forget that behind the errors and the mispronunciation is a person with cogent thoughts, no doubt articulate in their first language, attempting to communicate their opinions or ideas.

As teachers, we not only have to be patient and proactive listeners, alert to the reasons why specific errors are being made while filling in the gaps in less-than-perfect communication, but we also have to steer clear of adopting the 'Me-Tarzan-You-Jane' approach to teaching, degenerating the very language we are aiming to teach.

Rather than degrading our language, we have to grade it carefully to keep it comprehensible while maintaining its naturalness, rhythm and spirit, ensuring all the while that, as far as possible, we actually converse with our students and listen to what they have to say. After all, even from the very first lessons, from the ‘A’ in the alphabet and the ‘am’ of ‘to be’, communication is the goal.

7. Prepare well, prepare a lot, keep them talking

Even though teaching beginners entails progressing slowly and recycling and repeating language many times, that doesn’t mean recycling the same activities, especially not during one lesson. Ensure you have a range of activities to use, and don’t go into class without having first carefully thought through how you are going to introduce a new language, how you will check that the students have understood it, how you will practice it, and how you will deal with potential misunderstandings. The possibility for confusion at this level is much greater than at higher levels, and sometimes even harder to disentangle.

Also, remember, unlike with higher levels, you can’t rely on conversations developing simply because the students don’t yet have the linguistic resources to engage in anything other than simple exchanges (though in time, they will). This means that the onus will largely be on you to keep them talking.

Finally, enjoy this level. Although in many ways the most challenging level to teach, it can also be one of the most satisfying. Seeing your learners go from knowing nothing to knowing a few words to knowing a few sentences and structures to being able to hold rudimentary conversations can be incredibly rewarding. If they enjoy their initial exposure to the language, and feel confident and inspired to continue, then you will have helped pave the way to their further success.

Critical thinking is a term often thrown around the teacher’s lounge. You often hear, “Of course, teaching critical thinking is essential.” However, in that same space, we may also hear the question, “But how?”

Teaching students to think critically involves helping them to develop a critical mindset. What exactly does that mean, and how can we do that?

What does it mean to think critically?

Critical thinking is a complex process that involves students reflecting, analyzing and evaluating ideas. Building a community of critical thinkers in our classrooms involves going beyond the cognitive domains and building the affective domains.

The cognitive domain concerns subject knowledge and intellectual skills, whereas the affective domain involves emotional engagement with an idea or learning material.

This deliberate teaching of critical thinking needs to be part of our teaching toolkit. We need to develop a mindset around it in and out of our classrooms.

How can teachers develop a critical-thinking mindset?

Consider all the questions we pose to students during our classes. Do we expect a yes or no answer, or have we established a classroom environment where students offer considered reasons for their responses?

By following some guiding principles, we can get into the practice of naturally expecting deeper answers:

1. Students need to engage in critical thinking tasks/activities at all levels.
2. Teachers need to provide space/time in the classroom to build critical thinking learning opportunities.
3. Practicing critical thinking must be incorporated throughout the course, increasing complexity as students improve their critical thinking ability.
4. Students must be given opportunities to practice transferring critical thinking skills to other contexts.

Activities to foster critical thinking in the classroom

Activity/Strategy #1: Categorizing

Provide a set of vocabulary terms or grammatical structures on the board (or pictures for true beginners). Ask your students to gather in pairs or small groups and have them categorize the list. Ask them to be creative and see how diverse the categories can be.

Example:

Desk, computer, pencil, stove, dishes, forks, novel, cookbook, sink, shelf

• Made from trees: pencil, novel, cookbook, desk.
• Made from metal: fork, stove, sink, etc.

Activity/Strategy #2: What’s the problem?

Provide students with a short reading or listening and have your students define a problem they read or hear.

Tomas ran up the steps into Building A. The door was closed, but he opened it up. He was very late. He took his seat, feeling out of breath.

• Determine why Tomas was late.
• Underline verbs in the past tense.
• Create a beginning or ending to the story.

Activity/Strategy #3: Circles of possibility

Present a problem or situation. Consider the problem presented in strategy #2 above: Ask the students to evaluate the situation from Tomas’ point of view, then, from the teacher’s point of view, and then from his classmate’s point of view.

This activity generates many conversations, and even more critical thinking than you can imagine!

Activity/Strategy #4: Draw connections

Provide students with a list of topics or themes they have studied or are interested in. Place one in the center, and ask them to draw connections between each one.

Afterward, they should explain their ideas. For example:

“Energy and environment are affected by sports. Most sports do not harm the environment, but if you think about auto racing, it uses a lot of fuel. It can negatively impact the environment.”

Activity/Strategy #5: What’s the rule?

Play students an audio clip or provide them with a reading text. Draw students’ attention to a particular grammatical structure and ask them to deduce the rules.

Activity/Strategy #5: Establishing context

Show your class an image and put your students in small groups. Give each group a task. For example:

The Jamestown settlement in the United States
“A famous historic site is the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. People from England were the first people to live in Jamestown. When did they arrive? They arrived in 1607. They built homes and other buildings. They looked for gold, silver and other materials. They sent the materials back to England. It was a hard life. Jamestown wasn’t a good place to settle. The winters were cold, and the settlers didn’t know how to protect themselves. After some time, they traded with the Native Americans, including tools for food. This helped the hungry settlers. Did many people die? Yes, many of the first settlers died. Later, more settlers arrived in Jamestown. It wasn’t easy, but in the end the settlement grew.”

Ask questions like this:

• If this were in a movie, what would the movie be about?
• If this were an advertisement, what would it be advertising?
• If this were a book, what would the book be about?

There are many other wonderful strategies that can help build a classroom of critical thinkers. Getting your students accustomed to these types of tasks can increase their linguistic and affective competencies and critical thinking. In addition to these on-the-spot activities, consider building in project-based learning.

How can you incorporate project-based learning into your classroom?

Project-based learning often begins with a challenge or problem. Students explore and find answers over an extended period of time. These projects focus on building 21st Century Skills: Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking.

They also represent what students are likely to encounter when they leave our English language classes.

An example project

Consider this project: Our cafeteria is outdated. It does not allow for food variety, or for guests to sit in groups of their desired size and activity level. Survey students who use the cafeteria. Follow up the survey with interviews. Determine how your group can reimagine the cafeteria. Prepare a proposal. Present your proposal.

You can imagine the amount of language students will use working on this project, while, at the same time, building a critical mindset.

Teaching critical thinking is all about building activities and strategies that become part of your teaching toolkit, and your students’ regular approach to problem-solving.

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes are designed to prepare students for higher education delivered in English. Students are expected to hold their own among a class full of fluent English speakers. So it’s essential that they have not only the language skills, but the academic and social skills that tertiary education demands today. And it’s up to teachers to ensure our students develop these skills – but that requires a balancing act.

Many EAP courses lack the authenticity of the college classroom experience. Lectures are generally relatively short, only 5-10 minutes long. Reading is scaffolded, and the content is very structured, even overly structured. Then, our students move into their academic courses where they encounter two-hour lectures, 50+ pages of reading, and content that is far from scaffolded. So, how do we bridge these academic, linguistic and social gaps? Let’s look at some techniques to help students succeed in higher education.

Bridging the linguistic gap

Linguistics gaps may involve content-specific language, or the informal language students encounter when they work with other students, or the connotative and denotative meanings and contexts of a word. To bridge this gap, we need to build deep conceptual vocabulary knowledge. We don’t want students only to have label knowledge. Label knowledge allows students to pass a vocabulary text where matching or multiple choice is present. But that is not enough in an academic environment. Deep conceptual knowledge means truly knowing a word.

So, what does it mean to know a word? Well, according to linguistics scholar Paul Nation, a student needs to know the following:

• The spoken and written form 
• The parts of the word that have meaning
• The word's forms and their meanings
• The concepts and vocabulary associated with the word
• The grammatical function, any collocations
• The register and frequency of the word

That is a whole lot!

To build this extensive knowledge, we need to do so in an intentional manner. We need to build various activities that develop and foster critical thinking skills and engage students.

Here is an example:

“Hello! I am so glad to see so many of you at our special lecture today. Today, I am going to describe how a mixed community is planned and built. First, let’s look at what a mixed purpose community is, and then we will discuss the planning and building. As many of you know, a mixed purpose community is a neighborhood that includes residential spaces, business spaces, services and green spaces. How about the planning? First, when planning mixed purpose communities, architects, city planners and builders work together to plan where everything will be located. Because they want the community to be a fully walkable one, they need to think about how far homes are from schools, services and other businesses. Then, they carefully look at what kinds of businesses and services are needed. Next, they must design sidewalks so people can easily get to anywhere in the community, and not worry about car traffic. Today, planners are even looking at including bicycle paths, as more and more people are riding bicycles to work. Lastly, they need to consider the different types of residential space they will need. They build homes and apartments to attract all a wide variety of residents. These communities are becoming more and more popular, but planning them still takes time and a team of people.”

The terms mixed and community are bolded. You can engage students with a simple noticing activity of how these words are used, the forms they take, the words around them, their collocations and the concepts associated with these words. An exercise like this will help students develop a deep understanding of these words. And that deep understanding will enable students to make connections and draw conclusions around these terms.

Bridging the academic gap

EAP students move from very scaffolded EAP courses to courses where they must listen and take notes for 50 minutes or read 50+ pages before class. Additionally, their professors often do not build background knowledge, or scaffold learning, as they expect students to enter their classrooms with this understanding. And this can create an academic gap.

When it comes to bridging this gap, content can be the vehicle for instruction. Exposing students to the language of academic disciplines early on can build background knowledge, and be highly motivating for students who crave more than rote language instruction.

Bringing the social gap

When students enter their university courses they will be expected to work with peers, engage in group activities, negotiate, take turns and assert their own ideas into a dialogue. These social skills require language which needs to be developed and practiced in their EAP courses.
You can do this by building instructional tasks and learning around developing and practicing critical thinking skills. Consider introducing project-based learning to your class. In project-based learning, students must work with their peers, learning how to prioritize, negotiate and assign responsibility. Bringing in these types of tasks and activities helps develop soft and critical thinking skills.

“The world is undergoing revolutionary changes, we need a revolution in education too.” - Creative Schools, Ken Robinson 

In February 2006, the late Sir Ken Robinson delivered a talk at TED titled: “Do schools kill creativity?”. This was some years ago and time seems to have stood still in education since then. 

Creativity is a key 21st century skill. Our young students need to harness it in order to be successful in further education and the workplace, especially now that technology is advancing at such a rapid rate. 

So what can we do to encourage creativity and create a safe learning environment? I’ll take you through three activities that I use with my own students to help them flourish. 

Clear and structured objectives 

To nurture and encourage creativity in the classroom, it is important to have clear, well-structured objectives and routines that give students a safe learning environment. Here’s a breakdown of a few you can try in your classroom. 

1. Monday activity 

As part of your routine, do something different every Monday and have your students guess what it is. For example, you could change your earrings or only wear one. You could shave your mustache, wear a hat, or do something less obvious. 

Students should participate too, so have them do something different every week. Select a student in the class and everyone must guess what has changed that Monday. 

This activity is designed to encourage students to pay attention to each student in the class and notice things about them during the week. At the same time, it will encourage them to be creative and think about how to do things differently and mix up their own routines. 

2. Friday team building challenge 

Every Friday, my class play a team building challenge activity which helps them set and follow rules, be respectful to one another, and work and play with students from different circles. 

Here’s a simple, energetic team building activity you could try: 

• Have students call out all the new vocabulary words they learned during the week. Write them on the board as they do so.

• Split the class into teams of four or five students.

• Tell them they have to use their bodies to spell each word (if there are lots of words, pick the top three). Wipe the word off the board and explain that they can stand up, lie down, and use their arms and legs – but they should work together to form the shapes of the letters. The first team that correctly spells the word you dictate wins a point!
  

3. "Hurray, I failed” activity 

The final activity is all about celebrating failure. Start by putting students in a circle or a line, and have them each name a color out loud. If someone repeats a color or takes longer than five seconds to answer, they must stand up, dance, and shout “hurray, I failed!” as loudly as possible. 

You can select any topic – such as nouns, countries, or, even better, your students’ interests. The intention is to create a safe learning environment for your class, where students feel supported and being wrong is fun and okay. This will enable students to participate in class without fear of judgment or criticism. 

Try it out until your students become comfortable with dancing and 'hurraying' in front of everyone in the group. 

This activity has yielded fantastic results with groups of people I’ve worked with, regardless of their age group (young, old, junior high). Participants may feel silly or shy, until one participant starts doing it for fun, and then the rest of the group will start feeling comfortable with being wrong. They will realize it’s okay, and the exercise will start to flow with greater ease. 

If your group is shyer or your students are more introverted, you can ask the person who makes a mistake to wear a silly hat – until the next person fails.

An assumption persists in the educational community that more mature teachers are much more difficult and reluctant to be trained on the effective use of educational technology. To some degree, I think this assumption has been built on by the digital native vs digital immigrant myth. But as someone who has trained teachers of all ages all over the world, I would say that, from my own experience, this hasn’t been the case.

What I have found to be the case is that more mature teachers are:

• less likely to be lured by the shiny hardware and the seemingly wonderful claims made to go along with it.
• more critical and skeptical about the way technology is used in the classroom.
• less confident when using various apps and websites and less likely to explore the different features.
• more easily discouraged by failures.
• less familiar with various tools, applications and services that have become part of everyday life for younger users.
• more likely to be able to see through “technology for technology’s sake” classroom applications.

So how should trainers approach the challenges of working with these teachers? Here are a few tips from my own experience of training older teachers to use technology.

Be sure of your ground pedagogically

So many edtech trainers are great with technology, but much less versed in educational theory and pedagogy. More mature teachers are more likely to have a more robust theoretical understanding, so be prepared to back up your ideas with sound pedagogical insights and try to relate your training back to theories of learning and pedagogical approaches. 

Make sure training is hands-on

Running through a list of tools and ideas in a presentation may have some value, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the impact of giving teachers hands-on experience and the chance to actually work with the tech to create something. 

Give solid examples of what you have done

Being able to speak from experience about how you have used tech with your own students will have far more impact than theoretical applications of “You could do blah blah blah with your students.” Sharing anecdotes of how you have used technology in your classes, the challenges you have faced and how you have overcome or even been overcome by them can really lend credibility to your training. 

Manage expectations

A positive attitude is great, but be also prepared to point out weaknesses, and potential pitfalls and talk about your own failures. This might help your trainees avoid the same mistakes and stop them from becoming disillusioned. 

Make time to experiment and explore

Don’t be tempted to cram in as many tools, techniques and activities as possible. Incorporate project time into your training so that teachers have the chance to go away and explore the things that interest them most and get their own perspective on how they can use them with students. 

Back up technical training

Learning to use new tools is getting easier all the time, especially on mobile, but it’s still relatively easy for teachers to forget which button to press or which link to follow. So back up any demonstrations with an illustrated step-by-step guide or a video tutorial that teachers can return to later. 

Make their lives easier

Using technologies that can make what they already do a bit easier or a bit quicker is a great way to start. For example, I have a link to a tool that really quickly creates a cloze test activity. Sharing tools like this that start from what teachers already do can really help to get them on your side. 

Do things that can’t be done

One of the most common remarks made by more mature teachers about technology is: “Well, that’s fine, but you can do that without tech by …” If you can show examples of technology use that go beyond what is already possible in the classroom, then you are much more likely to get capture their enthusiasm. One example of this is the use of collaborative writing tools like PrimaryPad and its ability to track, record and show how students constructed text.

Solve classroom problems

Being able to spot a genuine classroom problem and show how technology can solve it can be very persuasive. One example of this is gist reading which can be very challenging to teach because students tend to ignore time limits. Cue Prompters can give teachers control of the text and push students to gist read at the speed the teacher chooses. Problem solved. 

Plan with long-term and short-term goals

However inspiring your training session is, and however short or long it is, you should ensure that teachers leave it with a plan. SMART Plans are great if you have time to work on them with the teachers. If you don’t have time to get them to create individual SMART plans, at least get them to think about the first step or the first technology application they will try in their classroom and what they will do with it. 

Tech can be implemented in CPD

One of the reasons many mature teachers feel less confident with tech is because they often only use it in the classroom. Showing how technology can become part of their own self-guided CPD and professional practice, and helping them to build their PLN can energize their technology use and make their development much more autonomous and long-lasting. 

Make sure everything works

I can’t emphasize this enough. Make sure you have updated all your plugins, browser versions, etc., and check the network and connectivity and make sure everything runs smoothly. Nothing puts teachers off more quickly than seeing the trainer fail.

Having read this list of tips you are likely to think: “But all technology training should be like that!” Yes, you are right it should, but the truth is we are more likely to be able to get away with lower standards when working with teachers who are already more enthusiastic about tech. So the next time you walk into a training room and see some older teachers there, don’t groan with disappointment, but welcome the opportunity to test your skills and understanding with the most critical audience. If you can send them away motivated to use technology, then you know you are on the right track.