Some children don't like Christmas (either)

A small incident which happened on Thursday got me thinking. During the lesson with the second graders they made a very nice Christmas card, with a tree and two tabs that stuck out, where they glued Hocus and Lotus. The cover of the card had two lines, to write who it was addressed to, and from whom.

The child who cut into pieces the Christmas drawing we did the day before cut this one too straight away, so he was grounded and sent to his regular classroom with their usual teacher. Most children decided right away who they would give the card to, and chose mum & dad, or just one of them, or grandma. But there was one girl who said she wasn't going to give the card to anyone, and when I asked she said the card would be for herself. She did colour it and decorate it, but she didn't seem awfully happy. When the child who had been sent to their regular teacher came back, she also broke her card.

I found it odd, but when I started thinking about it, I thought that maybe Christmas is a difficult time for some children, and some of the things we make them do don't help. For instance, there are groups of students where roughly half of them have divorced parents. Maybe for some of those, giving them just one card and telling them to choose who to give it to is not that nice. Maybe they don't know who they are going to spend Christmas with yet, maybe the person they would like to give the card to is away.

Just like Christmas can stir things inside for adults, sometimes becoming disturbing, it can happen the same with children. But most of the time we think of them as being immune to such feelings, as if they lived in a fairy tale.

So, I thought that instead of making a card to give to somebody else, Christmas could be a good occasion to make a card for them, just to show. For instance, they could make a card where each of their classmates wrote something they liked about them, giving them a wide range of structures they could use:

• I like your... (hair, eyes, smile...)
• You are good at... (football, Math, drawing, making friends...)
• You are... (nice, a good friend, generous...)

That way, they would have something nice to keep for themselves and to show to whoever they wanted to, without having to choose anyone in particular.

Progress on my undergraduate dissertation

This past week, since we were doing Christmas decorations at school and I wasn't going to miss anything crucial, I took a day off to gather material for my dissertation and have a meeting with my school placement supervisor.

I had already collected quite a number of papers from the ERIC database before that, and the visit to both Habe's and EHU's libraries gave me a chance to collect some books on the subject. I will need to go to our university library next week to pick up some books I ordered to be borrowed from another campus, but other than that, I am quite set. Actually, I have too much to read and process for such a short dissertation (the theoretical part shouldn't take more than 12 pages).

The meeting with my school placement supervisor was also great. Having to submit drafts, extended abstracts or setting appointments is a great way to push yourself to do things. It helps you clarify ideas before you actually write or have the meeting, and it allows you to receive precious feedback from people that know more than you on the topic.

I presented my school placement supervisor the three possible topics I have chosen for the practical part of my dissertation, and I took some papers about them with me:

• Analysing the theoretical background of Artigal and Eleanitz regarding the treatment of storytelling (why is it performed first without visual support, and so forth), and coming up with a list of indicators that would allow me to measure if the objectives set in those methods are actually accomplished in the classroom. Since I have permission to videotape, this would be feasible.
• Testing the autobiographical story in the classroom, to analyse the level of engagement as opposed to "regular stories" used in Eleanitz. This would be an idea for the fourth grade of primary, since I have noticed that they are very interested in telling stories about themselves and listening to personal stories of others. I would also need to select indicators of students' (and teacher's?) level of engagement for this, and equally tape the lesson.
• Testing the use of the autobiographical story as a means for teaching improvement. This would be done together with my co-reader of the school placement diary, if she agreed to it, of course. The problem with this proposal is that I would have no way to test if teaching were actually improved, because we are not teachers, and we would not be able to maintain the exercise long enough (in the literature, these sort of activities are held over months or a whole academic year). So, it would just be a matter of testing the resource and assessing how we felt performing it.

We discussed them for quite long, and my supervisor advised me that the first choice was probably the most useful and suitable from the university's point of view. We also agreed that trying to do the three would be far too much. Finally, my supervisor asked me to produce an extended abstract of the three options, which will help me decide which is the most suitable. So, that's what I will do as soon as I get enough reading done. Nevertheless, I know myself, and I am sure that consciously or unconsciously I will try to think of a way to somehow combine these three options into something that will make sense, because I absolutely hate to give up interesting things, and the three of them are.

As a final note to myself, I should consider the possibility of having two supervisors for my undergraduate dissertations, because it seems my school placement supervisor is also going to be involved in my dissertation, so it would only be fair to acknowledge that. There will be ample time for that, but I need to bear it in mind.

Fifth week of my school placement

This week is being more relaxed, as the LH1 and LH2 groups finished all their lessons, and the HH4 and HH5 groups too. So, we have been doing Christmas decorations, and watching Christmas films, like the Smurfs’ version of A Christmas Carol. Having that in mind, I spent all day out yesterday, visiting Habe’s library, the EHU’s library and having a meeting with my university tutor for the school placement. That way, I collected a few more books on my undergraduate dissertation and got to know Habe’s library, which I found really nice and full of interesting things.

Earlier in the week I wrote on my blog about some problems in my interactions with children. At the end of the day, in all my school placements my struggles are always around the most basic aspects of teaching, which have to do with relationships, communication, understanding, negotiating, connecting. In summary, I am mostly interested on what the teacher can do to create the conditions under which learning can occur. The didactics of subjects (maths, science, English…) don’t really worry me that much; I think they are easier to acquire. It is the other part of being a teacher that I am most concerned about.

Well, and now back to what I had planned to write about. Before I started my school placement, I knew I would enjoy being with pre-primary children, because that is what our degree is about. I also thought that I would find primary students a bit of a pain in the rear end, being pre-adolescents trying to find any crack that could enable them to challenge you. But it turned out I really enjoy being with them. I don’t see that much of a difference between pre-primary students and the students of the first two primary grades, but there is quite a gap between those and the fourth graders. Fourth graders are more mature and more interested in the world, and others; they reason in a different way, and the interaction with them resembles more what you could have with adults, in some senses. They are more interested in socialising and all that goes with it, and I find them very interesting. I am experiencing the reason behind the set up of the stage into three cycles (P1-2, P3-4, P5-6), and I like it. I haven’t had a chance to visit the 5th and 6th grades yet, because I hate to leave out any of the other lessons in order to attend those, but I am sure I would see another big gap between the fourth graders and these last two as well.

I will finish the week full of homework for the holidays. In these last weeks, I have downloaded all the Eleanitz material, copied the Artigal CDs and DVDs, and during the holidays I will study the new lessons we will start in HH4, HH5, LH1, LH2 and LH4 in January. That means reading the teacher’s guides, the stories, listening to the songs and rhymes, watching the performance videos and reading the activities which we will be doing during the first six weeks of the term (each unit takes around six weeks to complete). I will also need to write a final draft of the theoretical part of my undergraduate dissertation and design the practical part of it, so I can put it into practice after the holidays. It seems like an awful lot of work to do! We’ll see how much I get accomplished.

My screw ups of the day

It is only when you actually do things that you can fail. In fact, as you do, you will inevitably make mistakes; that's life. Today I had a couple of those, not really awful mess ups, but important enough to stick in my mind for the whole day.

Both were with what most people would label as "bad students", which is no surprise, as most teacher's screw ups happen with that kind of students. I like to think of them as the "gourmets of education", following the ideas that authors such as Daniel Pennac have stated over school failure. Some students are the "wild boars of education", omnivores who will succeed at learning, almost regardless of the circumstances. Others are much more exquisite in their taste when it comes to the what, how and when of education, and those are the ones who pose a challenge to the teacher. I like that sort of students, because they force you to try your best, and they always teach you new things.

My first screw up of the day was with one of the second grade students, a 7-year-old. He teared the drawing of one of his groupmates, so I asked him to get some sellotape and fix it. He has a hard time when it comes to making up for having messed up, but during these weeks he has come to respect me and he does obey if I ask something like that of him. First, he took a piece of sellotape way too long and stuck it carelessly, which didn't fix the whole tear, so I asked him to get a smaller piece and stick it carefully. Maybe I should have stopped after that first try and call it even, but I feel that doing that would have sent him the wrong message ("that's all I can expect from you, after all"). After fixing his group mate's paper and me thanking him for that, he turned to his own drawing and started cutting it up with the scissors, ruining it on purpose. I told him not to do that, but he continued. I didn't stop him. After cutting the drawing into small pieces, he coloured it carelessly with crayons, while he had been using felt tip pens to colour neatly before the incident. Shortly after that, it was time to tidy up and finish the lesson; I asked him if he was going to store the drawing in his plastic sleeve, he said no, and he put it in the bin.

The incident lingered in my mind for the rest of the day. As I was coming back from work I thought about why I had let him ruin his work on purpose, and what I could have done instead. On the one hand, I didn't stop him because I was aware that I was saying no too many times, and he needed a break. Then, I also had doubts: should I allow him to do as he pleased with his work, since it was his, after all? Should I allow him to experience the consequences of his act and learn from it? You have to weigh all those things in seconds and give a coherent response to a child, and it's not that easy. So, at the time, I decided to let him do as he pleased. But a small voice has been bugging me all day, saying that he was taking it out on himself, and that I sent him the wrong message: "you must respect your classmates and their work, but you don't need to respect yourself". For a kid who is already labelled in school that is a very wrong message, and that alone should have been enough of a reason for me to prevent him from ruining his work. Instead, I should have sent him to the paper bin and asked him to cut into small pieces a bunch of scrap papers from there. That way, he could have calmed himself down without harming himself.

The second screw up has been in the afternoon, with a 5-year-old. This is a more difficult one, because so far I haven't come up with any ideas yet. A boy has lost his temper and thrown the colouring pencils violently on the floor, so I have asked him to pick them up. He has refused and entered a spiral where he would throw more pencils and more violently, so I have taken away his drawing from him and told him that he could have it back and continue colouring once he picked up his mess. He has even complained that one of the pencils had been dropped by another classmate, and I have asked her to pick it up, which she has done, and I have thanked her for it. He has continued to refuse and when he has started kicking the pencil case I have taken it away from him and taken him out in the corridor with me to try to calm him down. He has tried to run away, and continued to get more agitated. Since I don't know much about this particular boy, and the regular tutor was in the teachers' room just across the corridor, I have taken him there and she has taken care of the situation. The boy has run away and started to throw away coats in the corridor. I have asked the tutor what she does in those situations: "physical containment" she has answered, so now I know. She has forced him to pick up the coats and I have gone back into the classroom, where I had left the English teacher with the rest of the group.

In this second incident, I don't see a clear way to go about next time, or how I could have handled it differently. I know that having gone to the tutor has somewhat diminished my authority, but that doesn't worry me, really. I think it is better to acknowledge that you need help to handle a situation than to really mess up trying to fix it all by yourself. After all, I am a trainee, and that is part of what I am there for. I have thanked the tutor afterwards and apologised for not having been able to handle it by myself. On the other hand, I have not let him do whatever he wanted. I have kept calm as he has lost his temper. But that is just about all I can say I have done all right. I haven't managed to help him deal with his wrath, and I don't really know how I could have.

Both these boys are angry at the world, and they most probably have good reasons to be so. They should be allowed to express that anger and turn all that energy into something positive for themselves and those around them. Helping them in that journey is very demanding for a teacher, but when you encounter a person like that you can't just look somewhere else.

Fourth week of my school placement

This is being a short week too, because there was no school on Monday. Christmas is approaching, and there is a different atmosphere, even if we haven’t started making Christmas decorations and things like that yet.

This week the LH1 and LH2 groups have been doing extra things, because they finished their units last week. The teacher told the LH1 group a story about a little pig, and we have done a booklet of the story and a pig’s mask during the week. The story itself was quite poor, as a story, in my opinion; just a “sugar coating” to review some vocabulary. It was about a little pig who cried on its way home because it didn’t know where its mummy was. It gets in the house and asks “mummy, where are you?”. The mummy answers that in the living room, watching tv. Then, the little pig asks again, and the mummy says that in the kitchen, getting supper ready. Then it is the mummy who asks where the little pig is, who says that in the bathroom, taking a bath. Then the mummy asks again, and the little pig answers that it is in the bedroom, reading. And the last time the mummy asks the little pig doesn’t answer because it is asleep, so the mummy says good night. Even if the story was so bad, children quite enjoyed it, so maybe it was only bad to my eyes. Well, some of them complained when the teacher told the story again today, for the third time, this time with their help.

The LH2 group watched a video on Tuesday, and we will see what we will do today.

Well, I will do as I said last week, and write on the ideas for the practical part of my undergraduate dissertation. I have come to the conclusion that it won’t be possible to propose something out of the blue which will interfere with the lesson planning that has already been set, so I need to think on something that I can use and will be done within the normal lessons. I thought that I would like to know what kind of way to tell the story would engage students the most, assuming that some ways would be more appealing to them than others. So far, I have seen teachers tell stories in different ways in LH: dramatising small parts of the story together with a small group of students, playing a CD with a native speaker reading the story, having students read the story taking turns and using large images with a text stuck in the back from where the teacher can partly read. In HH, we have told the story in different ways too: with the teacher dramatising all roles and students repeating the dialogue of each character, using a poster with stickers for the characters that each student would move as the story unfolded and using a booklet with the story as the guide to tell the story.

My teacher has told me that when they start a new unit, the story is always told with no visual support first, dramatising it together with the whole group. The next times when the story is told they begin to introduce some visual material.

I talked to my school tutor about the practical part of the dissertation I am supposed to do, and we concluded that maybe I could do some research on the reasons behind the ways the story is told in this particular methodology, together with the goals pursued, and analyse if we fulfill those goals in our class. It doesn’t sound absolutely thrilling, but it is feasible. So, I will do some literature research on the Artigal and Eleanitz methods regarding the theoretical background behind the way in which stories are told. I have almost finished reading the teacher’s guide for Artigal, and there isn’t that much I can get out of it, so I will try to find specific articles on the subject.

If I manage to get relevant information, I will concentrate on that and start gathering data when we start working on the new units after Christmas. I might leave out the LH4 group, and attend the lessons of more than one group in the LH1, LH2, HH4 and HH5 grades, so I can watch how the teacher tells the story to one group, and do it myself with another group.

Next week I would like to return to more general aspects, and talk a bit on my expectations before I started the school placement regarding the LH stage, and what reality has taught me. In summary, I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy the LH lessons much, because I thought I liked younger children better for teaching, but it turns out I am really enjoying the LH classes, especially LH4. All grades are very different, but there are reasons to enjoy the experience in all of them, I have found.

Third week of the school placement

This week felt a bit short, because I didn’t come on Monday due to the bad cold I have been suffering. Luckily, I am getting over it and I have been feeling better yesterday and today. Although I didn’t write about it last week, we have had a dysentery outbreak in the school for the last two weeks, and that has been quite an experience too, as it has given me the opportunity to observe how the school interacts with the Department of Health and how these matters are handled regarding communication with the families and so on. Apparently, things are under control and we will soon get rid of it.

Coming back to more particular matters, I will write a bit on group work in the English classroom. The English classroom has a fixed layout, with sets of 4-5 tables and chairs forming groups. So, children seat in groups. The teacher asks them to do some tasks (book exercises) in groups, especially when she thinks the task will be difficult to carry out on one’s own. Still, students tend to work individually and refuse to cooperate, sometimes very explicitly. The regular tutors for each class tell the English teacher that children are used to working in groups outside the English class, but things are very different here. So, I have been wondering where the reason for that could lie.

On the one hand, every student has an individual coursebook, which is usually stored in the English classroom. Students know that they have to do their exercises there, and that the English teacher will correct them once in a while (by the way, I wrote about using green pens for correction in my blog last week).

On the other hand, from time to time the teacher will ask them to do an exercise individually, like it happened in the LH2 class one day this week. I will describe it in detail, because I think it is worth doing so.

The teacher lined up all the image-flashcards that had been used in the unit so far (it doesn’t make much sense to me to call them “stories” when they are really treated as “units”) on the board. Meanwhile, she showed one text-flashcard to one of the students, and asked him to read the text aloud and match it with its picture. Most students were not paying full attention yet, and the teacher added that they should pay attention, because later they would have to do “this” (as she waved some photocopies held in her hand). Students took turns matching the names with the pictures. If they didn’t know how to read it in English, the teacher would encourage them to read the text in Basque. The teacher was especially helpful with one of the students, who was clearly blocked while doing the exercise.

Then, the teacher handed out the photocopies, reminded them that they had done that kind of exercise before, and that they had to write their name on top of the page. The paper contained a column with the pictures and another column with the texts, just the same as they had done on the board. She also reminded them that the work had to be individual, that they couldn’t copy or share with their group. She told them that she would correct it afterwards, then give it back to them, so they could put it in their plastic folder. There was an exam-like atmosphere, with the teacher reminding “don’t comment!”as she gave out the photocopies. Some children put their pencil cases (those which open up like a book) in front of them, so the child in front wouldn’t copy (gosh, it brought me back to my childhood, I hadn’t seen it since then!). As children finished, they were told to take out their jungle picture and continue colouring it.

To those who struggled matching names and pictures, the teacher reminded: “you should’ve paid attention, we have just done it on the board, and I told you to pay attention because we were going to do this afterwards”. However, she did give extra help to the child who was blocked before, and each child was allowed to take their time to do the exercise.

So, as it can be seen, students receive quite a lot of pressure to do the work individually. Sometimes that pressure is not very explicit, but there are many signals which students are sensitive to. For instance, the teacher hardly takes her notebook in her hands, but when she does we all know that it is to write down individual marks. I have noticed it, and I am sure students notice it too, maybe not even consciously, but there is a constant message which tells the student that achievement is assessed based on tasks carried out individually. No wonder they are not willing to work cooperatively.

Regarding this last task which I described in detail, it reminded me of the task feedback circle again. In my opinion, and this is quite a wild guess, the teacher unconsciously felt that explaining the whole task at the beginning of the lesson (“first, we will review the flashcards in group, and then each one of you will do the same exercise alone on this photocopy”) would make it “too easy”, so she didn’t warn them clearly on the purpose of the first part of the exercise. It reminded me just of what our teacher at university asked us when she presented the task feedback circle: “when you were a child, don’t you remember having the feeling that you were told to do a reading/listening exercise, and then you were given a set of questions and you realised that you hadn’t focused your attention on the right aspects, because you didn’t know what you had to do in the first place? Didn’t you feel that the teacher was thinking “haha, this time I’ll catch you off guard!”?”. Well, that was exactly my feeling when I saw this exercise being performed in class, and things like this are what bring me to think that the traditional school is still alive and kicking among us.

In summary, the material drives students to individual interaction partly, and partly it is the use and management of that material which drives students to do so. A teacher could use that very same material differently to promote cooperative interaction. For example, when in the LH4 class children were asked to summarise the story in their own words on a draft first, the teacher could have photocopied the page of the draft and handed out only one copy per group, instead of handing out the individual coursebooks. Then, children would have been forced to produce one draft per group and negotiate what to write on it. Since after completing the draft children have to copy it on the pages in their coursebook where they keep the “final version”, they would have done the individual part of the task too.

Well, now it is time to talk about my first English lesson yesterday. It was a 30 minute lesson with the HH4 group. Since they have been working with foods they like and don’t like, I organised the lesson around that topic. My general objectives for the lesson were the following: to enjoy ourselves (both children and myself), to create a positive atmosphere between them and me, to promote the production of output (without becoming obsessed with that).

Taking into account the topic chosen and their previous knowledge, more detailed objectives for the lesson were: widen their knowledge on food, adding three more items to the list they had previously worked with, as well as adding colours and matching them with food; continue practicing with the structure “I like…”, which they had been using before. Since I wanted to maintain the structure of their lessons, I decided to repeat the puppet dialogue they usually perform at the beginning of the lesson. I also decided to keep the tasks simple, so we would be able to do them without rushing (I hate the general rushing atmosphere that English lessons have, caused partly by the fixed timetable).

I decided I would set up the lesson around the song “I like food”, because it contains three items they already knew (biscuit, cake, banana) and three items which were new to them in English (apple, pear, orange), plus the colours (yellow, brown, red, green, white, orange). The song has a simple structure, gives chances for plenty of repetitions of the vocabulary and has a very catchy melody.

This is the list of activities I planned: finger puppet story of the child who asks to go to the toilet (sometimes the teacher does it without handing out the finger puppets to students, in order to have more time to do other activities, but I decided to do it handing them out), listening to the “I like food song” sitting on the circle while I did some gestures using flashcards, matching the six food items with their colours on a sheet (one per child, sitting on their tables) after we modelled the task in the big group, and listening to the song again, this time with students having a flashcard each.

So, I prepared some flashcards to use while the song was played. I took my time to choose the images for the flashcards, because attractive and clear material is vital. Since I was going to create a sheet where the food items would appear with no colour, they needed to be images with a clear outline. I am satisfied with the images I chose, and there is only one thing I would consider changing: the red and orange should be a bit more different to prevent them from getting mixed. I also made the flashcards quite large, because sometimes we use images which are so small that when sitting on the circle children can’t see them properly. Here are my flashcards:

Here is one side of the flashcards, with the food items

This is the other side of the flashcards, the one with the colours.

Then I prepared the sheet using the same images as I used for the flashcards:

The sheet to match food items and colours

When it came to planning how each activity would be done, I had in mind my major difficulties from the experience in the previous years: momentum and rhythm. HH is about building up a sort of “bubble of interaction” with the group. First, you have to grab their attention, which is not that difficult, and that’s when you blow the bubble. Then comes the difficult part: maintaining the bubble so it doesn’t go flat due to lack of momentum, nor does it burst. The teacher needs to use the right rhythm and intensity, so the bubble will take the whole group in, and last for all the activity. I have seen it being done in the two previous years by my tutor in the school placement, but it is very hard for me to do. Most of the times my bubble would go flat, so I know that I need to pay a lot of attention to transitions between activities, and that is where I concentrated in my lesson yesterday.

I went for a simple task (matching food items with colours), which was nevertheless demanding, because children only listened to the song once before completing it (we modelled the first two matchings in the big group and then each child was given their own sheet to do all the six items). I also decided to keep it simple when we listened to the song for the second time (at the beginning I thought we could listen to it standing up and dancing), because I didn’t want to lose control of the group. So, I gave one card to each, explained that when each of them heard the colour of their card, they would stick it up on the air and sing along using the gestures and turning the card around to show the food item with the lyrics.

Finally, I recorded the lesson with a videocamera, so I could watch it afterwards.

And now, it is time for my conclusions on the lesson. The first impression was great; the lesson went just fine, we all enjoyed, we finished on time, and the objectives were all met. The English teacher helped me a lot containing children and taking care of the materials (collecting pencils, sheets etc.). So, I can say I managed to do well with her help. On the other hand, I am aware that believing all objectives had been met most probably means that I was either too lenient on myself, or my objectives were not ambitious enough.

Recording lessons is a great tool for self-assessment which I think I should keep if I ever become a teacher. It gives you the opportunity to watch yourself objectively and also to see things which went unnoticed during the lesson itself. Regarding things I need to improve, there are obviously several; for instance, a simple but important one: organise material. I didn’t keep my flashcards held with rubber bands, and as a result one of the children messed them up, which wasn’t that much of a problem, but reminded me of the importance of those small things, especially when you are the only adult in the classroom. Also, I didn’t keep my peripheral view on the classroom at some moments (when I was collecting things and so on), because I knew I had other two adults in the room, and I relaxed even if I didn’t want to. Towards the end of the lesson one of the children refused to participate singing the song for the second time. Ideally, I would have gone to her to see what was wrong, but because I was so concerned with not losing momentum, I carried on without her. In general, I would say that I played conservative, I hardly took any risks, which is ok for a first lesson (even quite advisable and wise), but wouldn’t be acceptable in the long run.

On the good side, I am happy to see that I smiled a lot. I am not very smiley (or so I think, at least), and I believe it is of great importance to smile around children. You have so much to win and so little to lose when you do so! I was also clear in my explanations (I had thought them quite carefully), I addressed children individually by their names to promote interaction, and I got them to participate.

I just did the co-assessment on the lesson with the teacher, and she said that the only thing she would have changed would have been the second time we listened to the song, when she would have had children dancing, instead of sitting down, as I finally decided. She has advised me not to be afraid of losing control of the group, and she is very right, because I have her there to help me if that happens, plus the PT who joins the group to support one of the children.

Well, this is all for this week. Next week I want to talk about some ideas for the practical part of my undergraduate dissertation, where I will be taking active part in the English classes at school in order to collect data for my dissertation. My tutor here told me yesterday that some of the LH groups have already finished the unit that was meant to be done before Christmas, and she doesn’t want to start with a new story, so she needs to think about things to do in these coming weeks. The whole week before Christmas will be used to do activities related to those celebrations, but this coming week she will set up something different.

I will make sure I learn the new stories that they will be working on in HH4 and HH5 after Christmas, so I can take turns with the teacher when we work on them. The problem in HH is that the Artigal material’s planning is designed for schools where they have 2 hours of English every week, and here the teacher only has 1,5 hours. Therefore, she is quite tight and we will not be able to insert extra lessons that maybe I could propose. Instead, I will have to concentrate on teaching the regular lessons taking her place, which will be a very good opportunity too. After Christmas, I will most probably be attending more than one group of HH4 and HH5, so maybe I can watch the English teacher performing a lesson with one group, and then do that same lesson with another group myself.

Oh, and just a final picture to show you the great teachers’ room we have:

Teachers’ room, with computers, printer, journals and magazines on education, part of the material, photocopy machine and coffee machine

Not much tell, I am afraid

This has been one of those weeks when you doubt whether you should write anything on the progress of the undergraduate dissertation; "what for? I didn't get anything done".

Nevertheless, since I intend to document the progress, I think it is important to reflect those days which feel foggy as well. Maybe the undergraduate dissertation won't be long and demanding enough for those long days of walking in a desert that others experience, but it has its ups and downs, like any other project, and not getting lost in them is an important learning which one is supposed to gain along the process.

This week I intended to have put together in my Zotero dissertation folder all the literature we have gathered on storytelling during the degree, which is a lot, by the way. I started using Zotero on my first year in the degree, and I organise my references in folders created per assignment or unit, so I need to go through all of them to pick the relevant ones. Plus, some teachers gave us articles and chapters of books which I didn't have to use in any assignment and have not been added to my Zotero library yet, so I need to go over my paper folders too.

Well, that was my intention, but I haven't been able to do it; not even in a week where the weekend stretched thanks to a bank holiday today. I guess my health is getting to its limit after having gone through the first three years of the degree and this year it is causing me more trouble than I am used to, so this week has been about a cold and back ache. Spending seven months a year leaving home at 7.20 am and returning at 9.00 pm and sitting down in front of the computer most of the weekend can't be good, especially once you turn 45! The good news is there is only a few months of that left.

Coming back to the dissertation, I have also been doing quite a lot of thinking, but that doesn't show up unless you use a resource like this blog, and that is one of the reasons why I like it so much. I have been thinking about aspects linked with my dissertation topic (storytelling) on which I would like to conduct the practical part of my dissertation (a small research project). The problem is that all the alternatives I have thought about (I don't have time to explain them now, but I will later on) don't seem feasible, taking into account the set up of the English lessons in the school where I am doing my placement. So I feel a bit frustrated, because the sort of things which might be feasible don't look too appealing to me, and the things I am curious about,I can't see how they could be done. I will talk about them with my school placement tutors, both at school and at university, and with classmates, if I can, to see if anyone can give me interesting ideas.

For this coming week, I will print out the abstracts of all the articles I have gathered so far, and read them in order to start narrowing down the topic. That will help me cheer up, since it is a task where I am bound to succeed, as it is just a matter of reading. If I manage to do that and finish putting together the rest of the literature this coming week (meaning next weekend), I can leave the visit to the two libraries for the other week and be all set to spend Christmas doing some intense reading and writing!

Green is the new red

This past week my tutor at the school placement caught up on the correction of the students' coursebooks. She told me that in the training courses and seminars she had attended regarding this methodology (Eleanitz, designed by ikastolak) they told her that the teacher wasn't meant to do any correction work on the students' activity books, but she felt better by doing so. She also told me that the number of errors she found were unbelievable, taking into account that all exercises were corrected in class after the students finished them.

On Friday afternoon, in the LH4 lesson, when the students took their coursebooks to complete an exercise on telling the hour in English, I noticed that she corrects using a green pen. I found it amusing. She told the students that they had to pay more attention in class, because she had found a lot of mistakes. By the way, often we correct exercises before most of the children have time to finish them, because we are pressed with time, because there is a programme to complete...

I had noticed that one of our teachers at university uses the green pen too. To be honest, the teacher at university mostly writes her reflections on the diaries we write, more than correcting mistakes, although she does some of that too.

Apparently, green is the new red. I have been thinking about it over the weekend, and I was surprised to see that I got really mad at times thinking things like "it's the same old bullshit, just disguised in green!". I didn't think I had that kind of resentment in me towards the red pen (in my childhood?), but there seems to be something somewhere...

I hate sugar coatings and disguises of that sort. If you are going to point the accusing finger at students, you might just as well do it openly and be honest with yourself, using a thick red marker. And if you really want to do things differently, then squeeze your brain a bit more than just changing the colour of a pen.

On the other hand, we have been told that when it comes to learning a language, fossilised errors need to be corrected, so why not use the red pen on those, and only on those? Of course, that is much more difficult than correcting all mistakes in green...

If a teacher has managed to create a positive atmosphere, the correction of errors is something that can be done naturally, because there are many ways to do it. I practised some last Friday, while students were doing their telling the hour exercises, and it's not that hard. Most of the times a question is enough ("are you sure about this?" or "if you have said this in the previous exercise, shouldn't you be saying something else here?"). Even a red pen will be taken in a good way, if you have managed to create a positive atmosphere before.

This school placement is being great, because it is creating many "disbalances" in me in a constructivist sense, and I feel a bit restless because I haven't balanced back yet. A good sign: it must be that I am learning.

Second week in my school placement

I am slowly becoming more familiar with the school, both the building itself and the staff, so I know my way around a bit better now. I also got to know another part of the “community”, the microbial one, and as a result I caught a nice cold. I guess it is the price you have to pay in exchange for the school placement.

This week I have continued attending my English lessons and I have just begun reading the Hocus and Lotus teacher’s guide for LH1 and LH2. Amagoia, my reader, and I are attending different grades in LH, so we will be able to complement each other, but we will not have a chance to contrast ways of applying the same methodology in the same grade but in different schools, which is a shame.

Well, this week I want to talk mainly about what I have seen so far in the LH lessons. One thing I like a lot about the ways of doing of my tutor is the treatment of error, for example when they use flashcards to review vocabulary. She will ask one child what the image in the flashcard represents, and if they don’t know, they are simply asked to give the chance to somebody else to guess. It is a neutral treatment of error, and that is good.

During these two weeks several activities performed in the LH lessons have reminded me of the task feedback circle by Jim Scrinever, which we learned about during the first term in our Minor. Sometimes the teacher has explained the task clearly before starting, especially in LH1 and LH2, but there was a reading task in LH4 where there was no explanation whatsoever on the task which was going to be done afterwards which left me thinking on this issue.

This is what we did in class: the teacher explained that we were going to read the story (Sorry, I’m late!) aloud taking turns. The week before we had listened to the story on the CD, and students had been working on the story previously too. So, children started reading one page each (each page has a short paragraph and sometimes a dialogue inserted in the drawing that goes with it), following the class list, while the teacher took her notebook to take notes as they read (I am sure children notice such things, because the teacher doesn’t usually hold her notebook, and I think it helped to create an “exam atmosphere”). When they finished reading, the teacher said: “now that we have the story fresh in our minds, we will do the essay activity”. This is an activity where students have to summarise the whole story in four blocks. Each of the blocks has one drawing taken from the book and some lines underneath for students to write, as well as a couple of balloons for dialogues in the drawing. The students have a draft copy in their books to do a group draft, and after the teacher corrects it, each one of them copies the final draft on their book. They had already done this activity for the previous story, and the teacher had told me that it was the most difficult activity.

So, children started writing their summary and the teacher and I monitored to give help. When they asked me for help, I realised that although I had been following the story as they read, I hadn't focused my attention in the way that this task required. So, in order to be able to help them, I had to take one of the books in my hands and read over it. Children were confused because the first block included the image in the first page of the story, where the two main characters were walking on the street with no balloons for dialogues, but in the summary block, this image had balloons. They kept on saying that they didn't know what to put there, because in that picture the characters weren't speaking. I tried to explain that in that first block they had to summarise several pages of the story, showing them the pages concerned; and that they understood.

The problem is that we did the reading without knowing what to listen to, what to look for, and we weren't prepared for the task.

One thing that struck me about the listening activity we did the previous week on this same story was the following: the CD recording has a tic-tac sound which alerts students that they have to turn the page, so they receive a guide while they are reading. Still, I would find it helpful if they actually followed the text with their fingers as they listened, because I noticed that some of them get lost and are only listening to the tic-tac sound to know when to turn the page. I must ask I tutor why they don't use that resource.

Another thing I like a lot about the ways of doing my tutor uses is the fact that students correct each other when the helper does the daily routines. The helper writes the date on the board, and the rest of students spot mistakes and correct them.

I already talked about the short role plays they perform in class, 2 to 5 students at a time while the rest watch. The teacher uses the same procedure always: after having decided who plays which role, the teacher performs the part of each character, and then she plays the CD while students perform. Children usually have masks to get into their character. What I find strange is that children only do the gestures, but don't say the dialogue along with the voice in the CD, which is a shame. Sometimes, after they have finished the role play, as students go back to their seats, they will say their dialogue, but the teacher doesn't acknowledge it. I wonder what could be done in order to promote a more active role by students in these sort of activities.

During these first weeks, as I mainly observe, even though I also monitor and give help, I have been trying to spot things which work and thing which don't work, and thinking of why that is. There was an activity in LH2 where children had to write a short dialogue between two characters of their story (the lion and the rat). The teacher performed the dialogue and she wrote it on the board (“I’m a lion. I like meat”, “Please, don’t eat me!”), but she said she would erase it in a short while (which got students very upset, by the way). After she erased it, children started writing it on their books. When they said they didn’t know how to write lion and meat, she reminded them that they had those words in their dictionary. The dictionary is a task they had done the previous week, when they cut out several images from one page and glued them on another page, which had some squares drawn, with the names of each image. Children had to match each image with the right text, and glue it. I think that part of the reason why children didn’t memorise the words has to do with the way we did the activity: first, the teacher asked them to number each square, and then she went through the images in the other page, so with the help of all we worked out which number they had to write on the back of each image. Then, children just had to match numbers. Their attention was focused on form, but not on words, but on numbers; therefore, they didn’t work on memorising words.

The last words will be on myself. I have also been trying to observe myself and reflect on that, although it is much harder to do it on myself than on others if I don’t record it. This week, one of the days I was with the LH4 class, I realised that during the monitoring of their activity writing the summary of the story, I spelled “together” twice to two members of the same group, I spelled “wave” in another group, and did some more spelling for others. When we finished, I asked to myself what I had been doing that day, and I realised it was very far from what I think I should be doing as an English teacher. I can’t be a walking dictionary, giving answers; I should find ways for students to sort out their own answers and help them on that. So, I had done no scaffolding at all (other than trying to create a good atmosphere and positive interaction). So, in the next class I had with that group I tried to change my way of helping them, while they were learning to tell the hour in English, and pointed them to using the examples they already had in the book to find out their own answers.

Well, that’s it for this week. Next week I want to talk about something which bothers my tutor: even though she asks students to do some tasks in group, they do them individually. I have been watching them and trying to think of reasons why that happens and things that could be done to change it. Oh, and I will also talk about my first lesson: I will be performing a lesson in HH4 this coming week. I have already designed it and prepared the material I need, and I plan on recording it to analyse it afterwards.

Storytelling vs. using stories

This week I have also been thinking about the question that my school placement tutor posed when we last met: what is storytelling?

I will use a couple of quotes from Daniel Pennac's book Como una novela to summarise what I have come up with as an answer:

El verbo leer no soporta el imperativo. Aversión que comparte con otros verbos: el verbo "amar"..., el verbo "soñar"...
Claro que siempre se puede intentar. Adelante: ¡Ámame! ¡Sueña! ¡Lee! ¡Lee! ¡Pero lee de una vez, te ordeno que leas, caramba!

If that wasn't clear enough:

Sin saberlo, descubríamos una de las funciones esenciales del cuento, y, más ampliamente, del arte en general, que consiste en imponer una tregua al combate de los hombres.
El amor adquiría allí una piel nueva.
Era gratuito.
Gratuito. Así es como él lo entendía. Un regalo. Un momento fuera de los momentos. Incondicional. [...]
Como precio de este viaje, no se le pedía nada, ni un céntimo, no se le exigía la menor contrapartida. Ni siquiera era un premio. (¡Ah, los premios..., los premios había que ganárselos!) Aquí, todo ocurría en el país de la gratuidad.
La gratuidad, que es la única moneda del arte.

So that is storytelling, and using stories for educational purposes is something else.

I guess my undergraduate dissertation will deal with the use of stories to teach foreign languages, especially English. What a bummer!

Continuing gathering literature

This week I have continued gathering recent articles that might be useful for my undergraduate dissertation. I must admit that some of the articles that have attracted my attention are not specifically on using storytelling in the English classroom. For example, I have been reading very interesting things on the use of the teacher's autobiography to teach English as a second language, on case studies about the use of bilingual narratives in the acquisition of English as a second language and about trilingualism.

Honestly, I don't know how these things will fit into my dissertation, but I believe that letting myself wander off a bit is good. At the end of the day, mixing the top-bottom and the bottom-up approach can be useful in the dissertation, at least the way I see it. By that I mean that not only do I have to look for literature on the topic of my dissertation, but also find links between things that apparently are not strictly linked to my topic but have caught my eye and my dissertation.

After I finish looking for journal articles, I will go to both the university's and HABE's libraries to look for books on my topic. And when I do that, I think I will be ready to start reading and writing. I will most probably need to do some more literature search after I start reading, but it will most probably be more specific.

From what I have seen so far, there seems to be an awful lot going on around digital storytelling, which doesn't look too appealing to me, to be honest. Besides, during my school placement it doesn't look like I'll have many chances to go into that. So, I'll have to see if I get into digital storytelling or I skip it altogether.

First small steps in my undergraduate dissertation (GRAL)

At the beginning of the term, we chose the topic and our GRAL tutor, and after that we got tangled in assignments and regular coursework. As a result, I haven't been able to do anything on my GRAL until this week, when after having finished this term's lessons we started our third school placement.

So far, I have read the GRAL guide again; I have read a bit of the website our teachers have created to give us support to do our dissertation; I have begun to create my document template for the dissertation (our GRAL tutor provided us with one, but since I am used to creating my own, I rather do it from scratch), downloaded the university logo and read about the university's typo (I wonder if we will be allowed to use it, as it is not mentioned in the GRAL guide); I have also installed the application which will allow me to search in our university's databases from my computer at home, something that I hadn't done in my new computer yet; and have searched on my topic in the ERIC database.

The most interesting things I found in the GRAL guide, besides the specifications for the written report and the poster of my future dissertation, were these two:

• One or more questions should be the starting point for the dissertation.
• The School of Education where I study my undergraduate degree in pre-primary teacher education aims to create reflective teachers.

Bearing in mind that my dissertation topic is storytelling (vast and vague, so far), I have been thinking about the questions that could be the starting point for it. For now, this is what I have come up with:

1. How does storytelling help language acquisition?
2. What other roles does storytelling play in children's development?
3. What are the main trends regarding the use of storytelling in English teaching/learning?
4. What ingredients must storytelling have in order to maximise opportunities for language acquisition in general, and foreign language acquisition in particular?

I am aware that while questions 1, 3 and 4 help narrowing down the topic, question number two broadens it. Therefore, it is an issue I should not develop in depth, but I think it is useful to set the role of storytelling in education, and then narrow the topic down to storytelling related to language acquisition.

I am also aware that there should be a number 0 question: what is storytelling?, which is tricky itself, because storytelling is a common word whose meaning we take for granted, and those are usually the words most difficult to define. That was the first question my school placement tutor at university threw when we met to discuss how to link this last school placement with the dissertation, and I realised I had no answer for it.

Obviously, I have not narrowed down the topic enough yet, but I hope that once I start reading the articles I have downloaded so far, I will see things more clear.

Writing the questions has arisen a terminology problem: foreign language learning?, second language acquisition?, foreign language teaching? Which should I use in my dissertation? I guess it is time to ask my teachers guidance on whether they are equivalent terms or they are related to specific points of view.

The website our teachers created around the dissertation took me to action research regarding the options we have on the methodology for our research. Now, this is a very interesting topic, which I came across in my first year of the degree. In the unit on the theory and history of education we had a really good teacher who got us involved in cooperative learning, so each of us had to learn on a particular author and teach the rest of our classmates on it. I had never heard about any of the authors then, and when it was my turn to choose, I took John Elliott by chance. It was one of those enlightening coincidences, as I found the action research he advocated very inspiring. It is on number 37 of my long list of concepts and authors which make up my personal map on education (it might be a good idea to try to complete it and give it a more appealing form by the end of this academic year, by the way). Coming back to the GRAL guide, in my opinion this is what our School of Education means when they say they want to create reflective teachers. So, there I have another ingredient for my dissertation, which I will have to bear in mind while I do the literature review on my dissertation topic.

First week in the 3rd practicum

Our practicum tutor asked us to write a weekly report on our practicum. Then, each one of us will read somebody else's week report, comment on it, and then the writer will further reflect on the comments which have been made.

I will bring here just the first part; what I write every week, because I think it should be in my blog, like the diaries of my two previous in-school trainings.

Well, there are so many things that could be said, but I don’t want to make a never ending diary, so I will try to be selective.

First of all, I will start with my planning. So far, I will be attending lessons for one group in each of these levels: HH4, HH5, LH1, LH2 and LH4. The school has three groups per level, so I have decided to choose one in each level. There are three English teachers: my tutor, who works full time and holds a permanent position for three years now, and two other teachers who work part-time (one of them takes HH4 and HH5, while the other one teaches in LH5 and LH6). The one who teaches in HH is new and is taking over a teacher who is on maternity leave.

I will maintain this planning for a few weeks, to get an overall idea of how they work, and maybe later on I will concentrate on HH4, HH5, LH1 and LH2, taking part more actively in lessons with more than one group per level. That is the plan, but we will see how things develop in the forthcoming weeks.

My tutor takes the English classroom and has all her lessons there, while the other two teachers perform their lessons in the regular classroom of each group. Here are some pictures of the English classroom, which is spacious and full of light.

This is a general view of the classrooom

Another general view, with all the students’ coursebooks stored in the back

The blackboard, with the teacher´s desk on the left

Some useful sentences and structures on top of the board

Class lists on the bottom, to keep track of the helpers; and material for the daily routines

Hocus and Lotus poster for LH1 and some other material

Characters from the reading books for LH4

Storage space to keep the reading books for all grades, LH1 to LH4

Spelling reminders on the wall

Even though Astigarraga Herri Eskola is a state-funded school, it follows the methodology set up by the fee-paying ikastolak: Artigal in HH and Eleanitz in LH. I have been taking notes about all the activities that we do in each lesson, but writing them all would be too long. Instead, I will write the things that have struck me the most in these first days.

Both Artigal and the Eleanitz material for LH use stories to structure lessons. Each academic year comprises six stories/units, so each story takes roughly six weeks. Right now, all groups in HH and LH are in the second story.

In LH, the routines at the beginning of the lesson are the same for all levels, although they are performed in a slightly different way. There is a helper each day who takes care of the routines and of handing out the coursebooks that are kept in the classroom. First, the helper says “good morning, everybody”, and the rest answer “good morning, x”. Then, the helper chooses a classmate to pose the first question (classmates who want to ask raise their hands), which is always the same: “what day is it today?”. The helper looks up the name of the day of the week, the date on the calendar, and the name of the month and the year. Depending on the age, the helper will copy or write the whole date on the board, or just the name of the week and the month. Then, it is time for the second question: “what’s the weather like?”, and the helper chooses the icon and says rainy or partly cloudy, or whatever. The third question is “who is missing?”, and the fourth question is “how are you?” (four choices: happy, sad, angry or tired, and the older ones add why they are feeking that way using “because…”). After that, the teacher sometimes will ask other children how they are feeling and why, and they have to answer “because…”.

I find these routines quite repetitive, assuming they are kept the same all year and every year, to be honest. Besides, they don’t add much to the routines children do in their regular classroom in Basque. It would be nice to at least change the order of questions in the higher levels, to test if children really understand the questions, or they just guess by the order. Nevertheless, routines take little time.

I have noticed that in LH sometimes they do an activity in just one small group (a role play, or a game), but only 4-5 children out of 25 get that chance to perform it. The rest are expected to sit quietly and watch, which is a quite unrealistic expectation. I don’t see what the rest can learn out of it, and I think I would try to implement ways to have all children performing the activity, even if that means the teacher will not be able to monitor everyone all the time. I think that, overall, that would improve their chances of learning. Besides, the younger ones find it really hard to bear such a long time being inactive, and they inevitably start to misbehave (that happened this morning in the LH1 lesson, where we ended up with most children having done no other task but sing one short song in a 45 minute lesson).

In the HH lessons, I encountered a totally Audiolingual activity, performing a dialogue with finger puppets, where children repeated the parts of each character. They are very short dialogues, so children can maintain their attention with no trouble. Of course, handing out the envelopes which contain each children’s puppets, taking them out of the envelope and putting them on their fingers takes much longer than performing the play, but children are practising other skills meanwhile, so I think it is ok.

There was one shocking thing in the puppet stories, though: the two I have listened to so far end up with a choice that the main character has to take (put the biscuit in the mouth or in the box, eat the much hated fish or feed it to the cat), and depending of which choice each child does, the teacher will ask them to come forward and either say “good boy/girl” and give them a kiss, or say “naughty boy/girl” and spank them saying “smack, smack”. Now, this spanking I didn’t like at all, I must say. It is obviously a game, and children like it, but it isn’t consistent with the message that is given to children in HH about not hitting others. When I told the teacher about my doubts on it, she said that she found it awkward too, and that one child had spanked her while she was doing it in class, and she had to tell them that that wasn’t allowed (telling a 4-5-year-old in English that they shouldn’t do what they just watched the teacher doing…).

During the week, I have made a copy of the Artigal material (one CD and 3 DVDs), and I have been reading the explanation on the principles of this method and how the stories should be performed. After having read it, I see that what seemed an Audiolingual activity to me is quite something else, as children don’t just repeat everything they have heard. When the teachers performs the story, depending on the place where they stand they will be one character or another, so children understand the plot and repeat what each character says, but not what the teacher says when standing in a neutral position and acting as a narrator who gives the word to each character (e.g. “and then the little girl said…”).

Once I get a bit used to Artigal, I plan on starting to take over my teacher in small tasks, such as performing the finger puppet dialogue, or performing the storytelling, so I start practising a bit. Both my tutor and the HH English teacher are very nice. Particularly the HH teacher has encouraged me to start practising in class and has told me that I can start whenever I feel ready for it. So far, I have been sitting beside her (except if some children in the group need an adult by their side to focus attention, when I have been sitting by them), and doing everything she does. As children are usually the most open minded kind of humans you can find, they have accepted me fine.

Next week I will start analysing the LH material, which seems to consist on one activity book and one reading book per student in each grade, plus the teacher’s guide and CDs with the listening material.

English teachers need to have an awful lot of things in their mind: they have to learn a lot of names (there are 17 to 26 children in each group and three groups in each grade), they have to memorise the dialogues, songs and rhymes of the story they are working on with each grade, and they have to keep track of how far they have gone with each of the three groups in the grade. Compared to the regular tutor work I experienced in my previous two in-school trainings, it is much harder on that side, I have to say.

Well, I think this is enough for my first week. Next week I will write about the sort of tasks performed in LH mainly.