Zero tolerance

I’m normally a fairly laid-back guy, and I am probably a ‘nice’ teacher. I see my role as being a coach, someone who can provide training, encouragement, and advice to my students so they can learn the skills of English. At university, I set clear (high) expectations and show my students how to meet them.

In children’s classes though, something wasn’t right.

I’ve been reading a lot recently. Kindle on a phone makes reading anywhere, anytime a breeze. I think I have probably more than doubled the number of books I read since I got it.

Two standouts: Teach like a Champion, which I have talked about before, and more recently Work Hard, Be Nice (about the Knowledge Is Power Program in the US).

Both of them talk about high-energy, high-expectation, zero-tolerance classrooms. I don’t have big problems with discipline in my classes, but they could definitely be better, and perhaps the techniques in these books could help me…

I want my classes to be exciting, the students to be motivated and enthusiastic, and the results to be spectacular. I have some students who end up amazing users of English, and some that don’t, but I think it is possible to increase the numbers of those that do.

Recently I have been experimenting with a two-pronged approach:

1. keep the students busy with achievable, interesting activities
2. firmly jump on any form of undesired student behaviour immediately

Examples of undesirable behaviour: hitting, verbal attacks on teachers or other students, moving around without permission, talking about things not germane to the lesson, playing with pencils or other objects, not singing, not participating in speaking activities, not doing homework, not following instructions, etc.

So far it is going really well. I think students like to know what is expected of them and what they should be doing. Being firm in enforcing the rules allows the students who are into the lessons to enjoy them more, and makes life easier for the teacher. The flipside, of course, as alluded to in number 1 above, is that it is also essential to keep students challenged and busy in class.

I am going to continue with my ‘firm teacher’ experiment and see how the students progress. I’m very excited to see how the classes go over the next few months until March.

Pair vocabulary activity

Class: children’s eikaiwa
Students: four seven-year-olds (experience of learning English 6 months-2 years)

I was teaching a group of first year elementary school age students a couple of days ago, and stumbled upon a wonderful activity that really gave me a boost.

We were practicing insect names again (for the third time), and the students were getting quite good. Each student had gaps, but as a group they could name all of them. I had two sets of small flashcards, so I had put one set in front of each pair of students. I started out calling out the names and having the students touch the pictures, but then realised I could have them work in pairs, one student being the ‘teacher’ and calling out words and the other being the ‘student’ and touching the pictures.

This is in no way a new activity, but the way my students took to it blew me away, and made me realise they are capable of much more than I was giving them credit for.

They not only did the activity perfectly, calling out and touching the appropriate pictures, but also became real teachers: helping their ‘students’ if they didn’t know the word, giving hints, waiting long enough to give their partner a chance to answer but not so long that they would get frustrated before helping…

Those seven-year-olds showed me that they are not just capable of taking on more active roles in their English lessons, but want to.

One of my goals for the rest of the year and for next year is to bring more realia, more content, and more personalisation into my classes. Giving the students a wider variety of roles in class will clearly need to be a part of this.

It’s very exciting to look at my classes and see where they can be improved: this year has been much more enjoyable since I started my self-improvement project. How about you: have you noticed anything about your classes recently?

Review of MPI’s Building Blocks Library

Full disclosure: I was asked to write some additional readers for this series last year, and they just came out. I’ll try not to be too gushy in this review.

The Building Blocks Library, published by Matsuka Phonics Institute, is a ten level series with 82 titles. The first four levels are written as phonics readers to help students start reading, the ones after that are leveled readers for extensive reading.

The good:

  • The same characters appear in many of the books, developing throughout the levels
  • Ten levels means that students can move up through the series gradually and read at their level
  • The artwork and production values are high and the books are attractive
  • Each level comes with a CD of the books read aloud: the CD is well made and the voice acting is good
  • Most of the books are interesting with varied story lines
  • The series is reasonably priced, especially considering they come with CDs

The bad:

  • There are not enough books at each level to meet student needs (this has been partially addressed with the new Level 0 and Level 1A sets, but schools will still need to supplement this with other materials)
  • The difficulty outstrips the content at the higher levels, ie they are difficult for ordinary junior high school students to read even though the stories probably appeal to students that age the most

Overall:

This is a very nicely produced series that appeals to students and is economical and easy to integrate for schools. The main drawback is that there are not enough books at each level to allow students to move up the levels smoothly -ideally students would be doing much more reading at each level before moving up so teachers will have to supplement this with other materials.

e-future Graded Comic Readers: Magic Adventures

I just received my order of a full set of e-future Graded Comic Readers (Magic Adventures) and am, so far, extremely impressed.

The series consists of 18 comic books over three levels (200, 400, and 600 headwords). The story starts off in our world, then goes into Magic Land, then comes back to the real world. The characters are children and it has a real Harry Potter kind of vibe to it. The artwork is very nice, and the production values are high. They also have exercises and a glossary in the back.

Each book has a CD (not mp3 thankfully) with various tracks: theme song, the story, listen and read, listen and repeat, key words and expressions, then a great one: read the story using prompts, making them ideal for homework or self-study.

The books are comics, so feel very fresh. The students I tried them with today (elementary and junior high school) really liked them and so did I.

This is my find of the week: great, fresh, reading material at a reasonable price (set of 18 is just over 13,000 yen before discounts).

Penguin Kids Readers

Resuming our kids’ readers roundup after a brief hiatus 🙂

I received a set of these a couple of weeks ago from the publisher (thanks!). While I appreciate the gesture, it will not affect how I review them here.

Having said that, this is a fantastic new series that has a lot going for it. There are currently 23 readers over six levels of difficulty.

Level 1 (200 headwords)
Level 2 (400 headwords)
Level 3 (600 headwords)
Level 4 (800 headwords)
Level 5 (1000 headwords)
Level 6 (1200 headwords)

As you can see, the jump between levels is fairly minimal, something that is extremely important for beginner and younger readers.

The current titles are all based on Disney films, and the artwork and covers are beautiful. The writing isn’t bad, either, in that the books actually tell coherent stories. That is often a problem with low-level readers based on films or TV content -they try to fit in too much with a minimal wordlist so the stories end up not making sense. Luckily that is not the case here. In many of the books they have taken just one scene from a film and told that. Our students found the books really attractive due to the topics, but there was enough of a spread that they had not seen all of the movies featured.

Another thing I liked were the simple exercises in the back of the books. They have pre-reading and post-reading questions that are visual and fairly easy -perfect to do in class after reading or to check out of class reading. If anything, I would have liked to see this section be slightly longer.

Apparently the series will end up having twelve books at each level, and there will be different content in the next wave of books (ie not just Disney).

Overall, this is a fantastic new resource. We ended up ordering two more sets, and I’m really looking forward to the release of the rest of the books in this series.

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