By Jemma Gardner from her blog ‘Unplugged Reflections’
In response to the challenge set by ELTbites, here’s the retrospective plan of a functions lesson which I did last week. I think you could easily use this with almost any level, but my class were C1.
I entered the class at the company with no materials except my pencil case. There is a small white board in the room. I had 3 students that day. I also had no idea what would happen over the 90 minutes: this is one class that I definitely practice Full Dogme with!
Here’s what happened:
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The students noticed that I didn’t have my usual water bottle with me, and commented on this as I always have the same bottle. I told them about how I had actually been incredibly clumsy over the last week, including dropping and breaking my bottle, spilling tea/coffee/you name it, cutting my finger/banging my head etc.. etc… Poor me. We started to share stories of other mishaps in our lives. Seemed we were all in the same boat.
We listed some mishaps on the board which involve other people (spilling your drink over someone/banging into someone on the street/etc…)
We collaboratively worked on a dialogue for one of these on the board. We drilled the dialogue and spoke about how we don’t actually say “I’m terribly sorry.” but rather use intonation (higher voice, greater range of pitch) to highlight the intensity of our apology with “I’m so sorry”, as well as the differences between their L1 and English. They practised this amongst themselves.
They chose one situation each and worked alone to write a dialogue between the people involved.
We spoke about modality for politeness. They adjusted some of their dialogues.
We worked on some more pronunciation.
They “performed” their dialogues.
Lesson done.
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Hi Richard,
Thanks for the post and the comment. Lots to answer, here goes –
I hadn’t planned anything. I went to the lesson with myself, my pens and the knowledge that my students have lives, interests, opinions, knowledge and a desire to learn more English. I literally started the lesson, as I do every week, by asking how they were and one of the first things one of them said was “What happened to your bottle?!!” Sometimes the lesson doesn’t take off as quickly as that. Today, for example, we were talking for about 20 minutes about the tests done on children at a young age for their hearing/sight etc… as one of the students had taken her son to one of these tests on Monday. That lead on to talking about spatial awareness, which I described by talking about men apparently having better spatial awareness that women, which lead on to a discussion about being annoyed by sat-navs, and then bam – into what annoys us and some great work on ranting!!
You ask about experience – I would suggest that you look at these two blogs if you don’t know them
http://languagemoments.wordpress.com/ by Dale Coulter
http://fiveagainstone.wordpress.com/ by Adam Beale
They are both tracking their progress as unplugged teachers. Dale has been teaching unplugged from pretty much the beginning of his career, and Adam is in his 2nd year of teaching and doing some great action research into going unplugged. These are just two examples of success with unplugged teaching for people without years and years of experience. I would suggest that novice teachers give it a go. You don’t have to go in with absolutely no idea, but perhaps go in with no handouts to start with. Try out one of Dale or Adam’s lesson ideas from their blogs, or use Teaching Unplugged.
Becoming more confident might be part of it, but if we started our careers with the knowledge that we could use the resources in the room – the students – to develop our lessons, rather than being fed the idea that coursebooks are the be all and end all, maybe we would develop this confidence from day one and not need to find it later in our careers? This leads me on to….
…Trainee teachers – On our Celta course, we use some adapted ideas from Teaching Unplugged for the trainees first lessons. They work really well. Of course, a more experienced teacher would make more use of the emerging language etc… but there’s time for that. We don’t prescribe coursebook material on our Celta at all. The trainees can use it if they want, but often they get an idea and change it around/adapt it until you can’t even recognise it any more. The things they create are incredible, inspiring and adventurous.
Unplugging myself from coursebooks has changed my view of the world, and the benefit to my students is that they control the show, not me. You can read more about this on my blog, but I’d be interested to hear any other readers’ ideas/views/experiences with unplugged teaching.
Jemma
Hi Jemma, thanks soooo much for this
I’m interested to know what you had planned to teach and why and how you decided to go with the flow with the mishaps lesson? Moving away from lesson plans is perhaps easier for teachers with more experience, and little repertoires up their sleeves like you show here. How do you think ‘novice’ teachers might find unplugged approaches? Do you think letting go and moving out of the controlled framwork is something that gets easier as we become more confident and experienced as teachers? Is this kind of exploratory teaching something you would encourage with teacher trainees for instance?
I know too many questions, perhaps all of you out there would like to join in this discussion and add some unplugged lessons of your own???