Buckland Weekly #33: Paperwork

When I worked as a teacher in college, in England, I had to spend far more time doing paperwork than I ever spent teaching. If you have worked in a school or college in a western country you will be familiar with the problem. In addition to lesson plans I had to do group profiles, individual learning plans (updated monthly), schemes of work, assessment schedules, Every Child Matters documentation, risk assessments,  exam results tables (for real and practice exams) and, it seemed, other endless forms that had to be filled in, checked, authorized and filed.

It was one of the reasons I eventually just decided to throw it all in and come teach in China. It’s the number one reason that teachers who leave the profession cite as being behind their decision to quit.

Things are certainly different for foreign teachers here in China.

The ONLY piece of paperwork that you HAVE to complete is your weekly lesson plan for each class. It’s possible that some schools will ask for other things but it isn’t common and even if they ask for everything that I have come across in six years here it still won’t amount to more than a tiny fraction of that asked for routinely back home.

With that said there are some pieces of paperwork that I find it useful to have. The school I am at, at the moment, hasn’t asked me for these but I do them anyway because they help me so I’d like to give you an idea of what I do. If you find these ideas useful then use them. If not, and if your school doesn’t want them, then feel free not to.

A Scheme of Work/Record of Work

At the start of the year I prepare, for each level that I am teaching, a scheme of work for the whole semester. Usually it’s almost the same as the one from last year but with dates and class numbers changed. It has one row for each week – there are usually fewer than twenty teaching weeks in a semester - and columns headed

Week Number, Week Start Date, Week End Date, Topic, Notes, and one column for each class at the level.

The first three of those are obvious. In the column headed topic I put the topic that I intend to teach that week. (For example: Animals, House and Home, Describing People.) In the Notes column I put anything I need to remember about what the lesson(for example: “vocabulary of rooms and contents in the house”, “lesson focus on possessives – this is my/your etc”) and other things, perhaps not directly about the lesson content, that I also need to know (for example “wider vocabulary range for class 1” or “check that quiz answers are up to date”.)

The other columns – the ones for each class – I leave blank for the moment. As the term progresses I fill them in with the following codes. Y – lesson was taught to this class, C – lesson was cancelled by the school, S – lesson was cancelled because I was sick, L – lesson was cancelled because I needed to take leave, X – lesson was cancelled for some other reason.

If I subsequently teach a lesson to a class that I missed in the week it was due I go back and change the code to R – lesson was repeated at a later date.

I find this document useful for all sorts of reasons.

                It gives me an overall plan for the semester

                It lets me see at a glance if any classes missed a particular lesson

                (And that lets me see if there is a lesson I can redo for a class if I am suddenly asked to teach an extra lesson to them.)

                It can, if needed be presented to the school both as a record of completed work and an indication of planned future work.

                The notes make sure that I don’t forget important things in the lesson.

Class Notes

I keep a short paragraph about each of the classes indicating anything that I need to know about that specific class. Are they notably stronger or weaker than other classes at their level? Do they have any discipline problems? Are there any physical problems with their classroom such as a computer that doesn’t work? Are there any particular types of activity that generally go well or go badly with that class?

I update this document as often as I need to. It isn’t something that needs to be presented to the school but it’s useful for you and will also help if the school asks you for a class by class report at the end of the semester.

Disciplinary Notes

Chinese students are mostly well behaved compared to their western counterparts but you will sometimes have problems because they are, after all, teenagers with all the attitudes and problems that can bring.

I keep a long of any major disciplinary issues that I have had to deal with.  It contains the date, class number, student name (if it’s relevant and I know it), whether or not I had to report it to their class teacher (home room teacher) and what, if anything, the school did about it.

This can, if you have to, be shown to the school, and will be evidence that you are not complaining about a non-existent problem.

Exam Documentation

You are very unlikely to be asked to do exams with your students. Unfortunately, my current school does want exams (though this year I am experimenting with a more continuous assessment style of grading). I have a couple of forms I use for this but if your school requires something of the sort it would be unlikely to match exactly with the way I have to do it.

Schools often fail to realize the logistical difficulties of doing an oral exam for a class of eighty students. Their thinking is that every other subject can be examined for a whole class in forty minutes so why can’t yours?  It can be quite hard to convince them that you need at least a few minutes for EACH student to do an oral exam – and even that is woefully inadequate when it comes to providing any genuinely useful information.

If your school wants you to do exams talk to me about it and I will help you devise something suitable.

And that’s it. That’s all that I do, apart from lesson plans, and for most schools none of that is required. It is however useful and I’d recommend that you do it (apart from the exam documentation which you probably won’t need to do, anyway.)

Buckland Weekly #3: Dictionaries and Discussion Monitoring

In this series of posts I intend to address various questions that teachers, both old and new, have raised with me from time to time. All my answers are based on a combination of my own experience as a teacher, both in China and the UK, and published studies. Because of the element of personal experience all posts should be treated as my opinion only. As they say on the internet, your mileage may vary.

An activity that I sometimes use in class for vocabulary development is to give a text (appropriate to the grade and level of the students) with several of the more difficult words underlined. I then get the students to read the text and write down the meanings of those words, in English. If they don’t know the words they are allowed to use their dictionaries to find them. This is a short activity (usually near the start of a lesson) designed to give them the necessary vocabulary for a subsequent discussion activity. By doing it in groups there is an element of speaking and listening added as they give each other the answers. It’s unremarkable and uncontroversial.

Where I sometimes run into opposition from the Chinese teachers is in allowing the use of the dictionaries on their phones. The schools often have a “no phones in class” policy and like to stick to it. My view is that we are living in an age where electronic dictionaries are more commonly used than paper ones and, after all, a dictionary is a dictionary. I allow it. More than that, I encourage it. I tell my students that dictionaries are always OK in my lessons, though I encourage them to ask me if there are words they don’t understand. Students tend not to use their phone dictionaries anyway unless I actively tell them to, though they often use paper dictionaries.

Your policy is, of course, up to you, but if you decide to allow phone dictionaries and the school raises an objection then I suggest that you explain exactly why you are doing it, tell them that you allow phones to be used strictly for the duration of the activity and ask them what they think. If the school absolutely insists or (as I have occasionally seen) does not allow phones to even be taken into the classroom, then there is nothing you can do but follow the rules. Personally, I see no difference between using either type of dictionary.

The main activity of many of my senior lessons is a discussion activity: usually with groups talking about a series of questions on the topic of the lesson. For an example, look at my lesson plan for “Charity Begins At Home”.  When planning this type of activity I always try to think of answers on both sides of the topic. If the students are discussing, say, whether a good diet is more or less important for your health than exercise, I try to think of reasons that it is and reasons that it isn't. Then when I monitor the discussions by walking round the class and joining each group in turn, I can take the opposite view to whatever they have decided. I find this “devil’s advocate” approach stimulates discussion far more than presenting my genuine views. It’s also helpful, because thinking about it in advance speeds up your response and lets the discussion run more smoothly.

I will do a longer piece on error correction later, but the approach that I take when monitoring discussion activities is that I only correct where there is an error that seriously impedes the activity. Where a student manages to express what they want to say clearly, even if it has some small errors, I don’t generally correct. There are a number of reasons for this. Practically it would slow down the class but more importantly is the matter of confidence. The students are trying hard to express themselves and nit-picking their grammar in this type of activity undermines them and discourages participation. It’s often better to allow the flow of the discussion to continue uncorrected. If there is a point that comes up in several groups, I will often take a couple of minutes AFTER the activity to go through it on the board for the whole class.

Tip #4 - Ball toss activities

One of the previous tips was called "squishy-throwy things" and it suggested that bath sponges are ideal for throwing around the class.
Here are a few tips for what to do with them.

1. Choosing students. You won't remember every student's name. You could have up to 1000 students a week and it's just impossible. So when you need to select students to answer a question, tossing the ball to them and getting them to stand is a good way to identify who you are talking to and to make it fun.

2. Letting them toss the ball to each other. When you have an activity that involves many students doing the same thing - for example if you have asked the whole class to name 'types of building in a town', toss the ball to a student and then let them toss it from student to student with each new student providing an answer.

3. Double ball toss activity. If you have a question and answer drill, for example one student asking another student "What is your favourite..." and the second student replying, you can use two different coloured sponges with students with one colour asking and the other colour answering. Let the students toss them around. If, as often happens, you end up with one student with both balls, let him ask and answer his own question before throwing them to two other students. It always raises a laugh.

4. Getting the attention of students. You will need to practice your throwing skills for this but if you see  students who is gazing down into their laps, they are probably reading  books or playing with their phones. If you can accurately drop the ball into their laps from the front of the class it startles them. The whole class laughs and then you can target your next question at them.

5. Waking sleeping students. Number 4 works just as well to wake sleeping students, though if you have belligerent older students it might be better to either wake them gently or let them sleep.

Letting go: Changing lessons that don't work

From time to time we all come across the situation where we have planned a great lesson that's chock full of interesting activities and planned down to the last detail; a lesson that we are completely sure will wow the kids and work like a dream.

Then we deliver it and realise that it just doesn't work, that the lesson is falling apart before our very eyes. The temptation is to just tinker with it, make a few adjustments around the edges and hope for the best. That can be the wrong strategy. We have learn to let go.

It happened to me this week and I realised it would be a useful lesson for the teachers that I trained to take a look at the process of adjusting a lesson until it does work.

So here it is.

The lesson, according to the schedule was to be about robots and I had the idea of making it more interesting by basing it on the TV show “Robot Wars”. For anyone who doesn't know what this is, it's a show where teams build remote controlled robots and then battle them in an arena until one of the robots is destroyed or incapable of continuing.

The outline of my lesson went like this.

1. Show a short section of the show including a battle between two robots and a shot of the statistics that are shown for each robot. (These include size, weight, power source, type of locomotion and weapons, strengths and weaknesses.)
2. Divide the class into groups and give each group a handout of pictures of different types of robot from the show.
3. Elicit vocabulary of the shapes, capabilities and weapons of the various robots and make lists on board.
4. Get groups to design and draw own robots using the new vocabulary. While they work let more robot battles run with the sound down.
5. Select some groups to come and draw their robots on the board and present the statistics and descriptions.

Seemed, on paper to be a pretty good lesson. Of course, as I always keep stressing, I had a back up plan. It was straightforward. If the computer wasn't working I would start with the pictures, and write the table of characteristics on the board. We'd develop the vocabulary from there and then proceed as on the first plan.

So. Lesson one on Monday. Started up the computer and plugged in the file and... and nothing. After a few minutes fiddling about with it I got pictures but no sound. And the pictures weren't that great as the classroom was too bright.

So I went to Plan B but that didn't work too well either. The students found it too difficult and confusing and it was clear that the lesson lacked a focus or a purpose.

There was no time to work on it before the second lesson so it had to be done the same way. The computer in that room also didn't work but this time I cut my losses quickly and went straight to Plan B. The result was the same. Too confusing, too difficult, no focus.

In the third and final lesson of the day I went straight to Plan B but this time started with vocabulary. I split it into shape words (cube, cuboid, sphere, cylinder, cone, pyramid), locomotion words (wheels, legs, tracks), weapons (gun, spike, hammer, axe, saw, claw). For each word I drew a picture and tried to elicit the word from the class, adding the word as I got it. Then I handed out the pictures and explained the design task. The pictures, I explained, were to give them ideas. The rest of the lesson followed the original plan.

This worked better but took too long.

And so we come to day 2.

I had a new variation on the plan. I shifted the focus to the shapes, changed the introduction, redid the timings, lost both the video clips and the handout of pictures and planned a new section. And it worked. And that plan will be the next thing I post. The kids all loved the lesson, got behind it, had a lot of fun, learned a lot of new vocabulary and discussed a lot of stuff in English. Twice in the week I actually had kids videoing part of the lesson on their phones. All in all a pretty good success but if I had doggedly stuck with the original plan, not been prepared to dump things that weren't working, the whole week would have been a disaster.

Time is Short and the Noise Level Rises

It's amazing how short forty-five minutes can be.

When that's the length of your lesson, time mangement is important. You need to watch the clock carefully and be prepared to curtail activities quickly so that you can move on. Throw out activities altogether if things are going slowly.

You also need to think about how long things are going to take for YOU.

Do you have a list of twenty questions that you need to write on the board?

Perhaps you are intending to get the class to sing a song and need to show the words.

Maybe you want to draw a map of the UK to show where the main cities are.

These things take time - a lot of time. No matter how fast you can write legibly on the board, it won't be fast enough. Writing twenty questions can take five minutes or more. Not only is that five minutes you can't spare, it's five minutes when the noise level rises, students have nothing to do, inattentiveness soars and discipline flies out of the window.

The solution to all of these problems is simple.

If you have something long to write or something complicated to draw do it before the lesson. Put it on a poster. It takes two seconds to pin up a poster that you have already prepared. Moreover it will be legible, can use as many colours as you like and the class find it more interesting.

I also  recommend reinforcing the edges with tape so that it is more durable. You might want to use it in twenty classes. 

It might seem like more effort to go to in preparation, but it's worth it when you get into the classroom.

Don't do this

In England if you are a teacher there is a lot of paperwork. I expect its the same in the US and Canada and probably the whole of the western world. One of the pieces of paperwork is the ILP - the individual learning plan. I've ranted about them before in other forums. I'm not going to rant here because as a foreign teacher in China your life is likely to be pleasantly paperwork-free.

They do however serve as an example. The principle behind them is that every student in your class has an ILP. In it you record that student's specific needs, set DUMB SMART targets, monitor the progress and fill in more bits of paper per month than are used in a public toilet.

The focus is, they tell us, always the indivudual, and never the group.

To do it properly would involve an insane amount of time, even for UK class sizes.

To do it in China where you will probably be teaching up to 2000 students a week would clearly be impossible.

Focussing on the individual here is a recipe for disaster.

That goes for the way you actually teach your lessons. In college, in England, I had a three hour long class of twenty students. It was perfectly feasible to race around the class and ask every student the same question.

So Fatima, what did you do at the weekend?

That's very interesting, how about you Sergei?

Jan, what did you do?

and so on.

You can have all the answers in a few minutes, providing you don't linger too long on any particular student. It uses a tiny fraction of the lesson time. Moreover in such a small class all the students can listen and respond to whatever the other students say.

It flat out doesn't — and can't — work when you have between fifty and a hundred students and forty-five minutes. Even if you restrict the exchange to twenty seconds that's three students a minute and twenty minutes for a class of sixty. But there will be some students who take a minute, or two minutes or three to formulate an answer. Suddenly your whole lesson has vanished and you haven't even asked that one question of every student.

That's not the worst thing though. The worst thing is that they are teenagers and there are a lot of them. Anybody not immediately involved in the lesson — especially at the back — is probably not listening. They will be doing homework, reading magazines, chatting, playing computer games. But not listening. They will perk up and answer when their turns come but as soon as this minor interruption to their day is over they will stop listening again and go back to whatever they were doing before you asked them.

From the teacher's point of view this is a forty-five minute lesson. From the point of view of any individual student it is a thirty second annoyance.

By all means ask questions and ask multiple students the same question. It's a good technique but for any particular question only ask a few students. Spread all the questions around so that everybody gets asked something but asking sixty kids "what did you do last weekend" and expecting sixty answers is not the right way to do it.

My technique is to always start with one of the students I know is strong and will give a good answer. This does two things. It encourages the others to join in and provides a model that didn't come from the teacher. I might, for harder questions, use a couple of strong students.

Then I select students randomly — usually by tossing a ball to them — and ask the same question. I will generally ask about six more students and then move on to something different. I never let it last more than about five minutes.

The bottom line is that focussing solely on the individual here means that nobody gets an adequate lesson and nobody learns anything. You need to find and use techniques that will simultaneously engage the whole class or you have lost before you start.

Tips #4 My Most Valuable Resource

The most valuable, and most used, resource that I have is not one that is easy to duplicate quickly, but it is one that you can build up as you go and will, if your career in teeaching is a long one, prove very useful.

It's pictures. Not just any pictures but a large bag of credit card sized pictures that have all been laminated on both sides. They have been gathered from all kinds of sources. Some have been printed from the internet, others have been cut from TV guides and magazines. Many have been taken from shop catalogues where you can find all kinds of pictures of clothing, household items, toys, gardening equipment - thousands upon thousands of things.

I have pictures of all of these things, not to mention animals, landscapes, monsters, robots, aliens, flowers, abstract paintings, interactions (TV guides are good for these). Altogether I have several thousand that I have built up over the past ten years or so. 

You can start more modestly by always making a few for each lesson.

If you do not have access to a laminator you can still do it with sellotape. Simply print (or stick) the pictures onto a piece of A4 size paper.  Cover it top to bottom on both sides with wide strips of tape. (If you overlap by half the width of the tape it takes longer but gives a much more duarable result.) Trim the edges and cut it up into the small pictures you need.

I use these pictures in many different lessons. You can use them as prompts for charades (as in my last lesson plan), for drawing or describing activities, simply to show to students as vocabulary items or (as we will see in a later lesson plan) to get the students to write or tell detailed and complex stories. 

Whenever you need student prompts it's a good idea to take the extra time to make them this way and add to your pile of pictures. You will need to make them robust enough for the rough handling they will get in multiple classes anyway so you might as well build them to last and keep them forever.

Tips #3 Art for Art's Sake

If you are a great artist, confident that you can whip up a masterpiece to rival Rembrandt in a few seconds with four colours of chalk, then you should ignore this. There's nothing here to interest you.

On the other hand if, like me, you are a fairly useless artists whose rabbits are indistinguishable from a bunch of bananas then I have a few suggestions.

You can nowadays, of course, find and print stuff from the internet. There are plenty of royalty free clip art sites around. It's a good solution but it fails to address two issues. First, you might, again like me, find yourself with a computer but no printer. That means drawing your own pictures to put on the board.

Second, and even worse, there might come a time when you need to draw something on the board, a time when your efforts to explain what something is using words have failed. A classroom of blank faces will be facing you and you know that if you could just draw, for example, a picture of a caravan they would all understand immediately.

I have two, well three really but two go together, pieces of advice.

Here is number 1. Think about what things you might need to draw in the lesson. Anticipating the need is half the battle. And here is number 1A. Practice. If you think you might need to draw a rhino on the board then search the internet for pictures of rhino, choose the simplest and draw it a couple of times on a piece of paper. Take the paper to class with you so that you can remember how it goes.

And here is, the far more important, number 2.

You don't need to be Rembrandt. You don't need to have detailed, anatomically-accurate representations of people. Stick figures will do just fine. 

You want a house? Draw the kind of house a kid draws - a box with smaller boxes for windows and door. A triangle for a roof, another box for a chimney and, for that added artistic flourish a bit of scribble for smoke.

You want a sheep? scribble down a roughly circular cloud, add a head, ears and four straight lines for legs. Presto! A sheep.

It doesn't need to be good it needs to be recognisable.

In fact the more rubbish you are at drawing, the more the kids will like it. Just put down something that is guessable. If a couple of kids seem to know what it is get them to stand up and tell the class in Chinese.

And that's it, all you need to know about art in class.

Oh yes, one more thing. If, as you will in some lessons, you have kids come to the board to draw anything, don't be embarrassed at your own poor efforts when one of them, in five seconds flat, sketches a detailed and scarily lifelike, life-size alligator.

Just compliment him graciously and don't ask him next time.

Tips #1 - Magnets

Most of the boards you will come across (in China) are magnetic.
Buy a few cheap magnets and then any long piece of boardwork that you need (song lyrics for example) can be prepared in advance on poster paper and the magnets can be used to stick it to the board. It saves time, standardises what you do between classes and ensures that you don't make mistakes on the board.