9th May 2017
We’ve all been there before: 5 minutes before class starts, the panic sets in. Will I have enough material to get me through the lesson?
You flick the photocopier on and madly scan through the activity book to see if there is a crossword, a puzzle, a reading text that you can take as back up. You make 15 photocopies, none of which get used. Instead, they sit at the bottom of your teacher’s box waiting for the next time you need scrap paper.
You ask yourself: is this really necessary?
You wonder: when will I be ready to walk into class without panicking?
The answers to these questions are simple: No. Today.
First, let’s consider why teachers might panic like this.
Well the most obvious reason likely stems from pre-service training courses where teachers are routinely told to always have a plan B. This makes sense, because there is nothing worse than getting to the end of a task and having nothing to do.
However, the easy mistake to make here is to assume that just because you’ve used something once, it’s expiry date has come.
Secondly, I suspect that a large number of teachers worry they will run out of activities because they don’t spend much time considering the point of the tasks they are doing. In a broader sense, it also helps to be explicitly aware of the rationale behind communicative language learning tasks on the whole: to give students the chance to talk and interact, not simple for the sake of practicing English, but in order to give the teacher more opportunities for providing feedback and input where students need it the most.
When you frame it like that it’s quite easy to see that rather than photocopying a random activity before class, your students might benefit more if you look for ways of giving them more feedback and revision of what you’ve just been working on.
Teaching with minimal resources: the basics
If you’ve not heard about Dogme, it is, in short, Scott Thornbury’s answer to the over-reliance on materials. Inspired by a film making movement which aims to simplify the process of making movies, Dogme in the classroom aims to remove all materials except for those that are immediately present in the classroom including learners, books, bags, clocks, pens AV equipment etc.
There are a few premises:
- Focus on the students
- Give students opportunities to share thoughts and ideas from what is going on in their daily lives (a student who comes to class late and sits down with a huge sigh might actually be the catalyst for an impromptu lesson on how to tell anecdotes!)
- Don’t plan the language, let the situations and people in your classroom dictate this.
- Listen to what the students are trying to say, make a record of this on the board, rework and improve it, and then give them another chance.
- Do not talk about Dogme
A really useful framework to keep in mind is that a Dogme teacher might go into class with an activity in mind, but not necessarily knowing what language will emerge from that. Once students have a chance to correct their errors, they then need a chance to repeat the task, perhaps with a new partner. This is called task repetition, and is a central component to developing confidency, fluency and accuracy in language learning.
But does that mean I don’t need to plan?
Not at all. In reality, if you try to use Dogme, materials-free teaching all the time, you may well find that students disengage or parents start complaining. In fact most teachers have some form of syllabus they are expected to follow.
However, it’s far more likely that the majority of teachers enjoy “dogme moments” regularly throughout their classes without evening knowing it. Think about the last time a student asked a question that you hadn’t planned for, and 30 minutes later, students were still talking about it? That’s the essence of materials-free teaching!
A few dogmetic ideas
So here’s a couple of activity types that might work to un-develop your reliance on last-minute photocopies.
Activity 1: Who said what now?
Preparation: some scrap paper cut into small wallet-sized squares
Set the context by telling students about a small problem you experienced recently. As you tell the story, add key phrases and examples to the board (remember to board vocabulary in phrases, not in isolated words!). Check students comprehension by asking them to summarise your problem in one sentence, and write this on the board.
Next, hand out the squares of paper and ask students to summarise a problem they had recently (or are experiencing at the moment) and write it on their piece of paper.
Mix the cards up and redistribute them. Have students walks around the room, asking questions to each other to find the person who wrote the problem on the new card they have just been given….not students are speaking here so you might then like to give them a short feedback session after this….one idea is to focus on asking sensitive questions and responding appropriately.
Once students have found their new partner, then ask them to elaborate on their story by explaining it in full. If you think your students would benefit from it, you might like to think back to the start of this lesson, and ensure that as you tell your story, you board key discourse markers like one day….then….unfortunately….so I…eventually….and now I have to… to give the story more structure. Encourage students to use these when retelling their own problems.
Students could then spend 10 minutes giving some ideas for advice to their partner, before sharing their experiences with the class, and, of course, feedback!
This activity works well with many different prompts and situations, so think creatively!
Activity 2: Mystery story
This was one of the first materials-light lessons I ever saw demonstrated and it works with students of all ages and levels.
Preparation: sets of blank strips of paper for each group and a stimulus (picture, business card, object) that is involved in an short story you tell the class.
Set the scene by telling students that they have to guess what you have in your pocket, but they can only ask yes-no questions.
When they finally guess the object, take it out of your pocket and explain that this object relates to story, a real story that happened to you, and you will tell them the story by writing the information on the strips of paper you have cut up. The catch is that the students must elicit the information from you by writing questions on the strips of paper, following these rules:
- They can only write one question on one strip of paper
- The question must be grammatically correct (incorrect questions will be returned for correction prior to being answered)
- Each group can only ask one question at a time (they can’t bring you two strips at once).
Allow 15 minutes or so for this to run it’s course, depending on how good the questions are, and ensure that students collect all the strips their group writes. Now ask students to read through the answers they have collected and start writing the story out.
As they do this, ensure that you collect examples from them for correction and feedback on the board (you might like to focus on linkers, discourse markers, narrative tenses, use of repetition etc. You’ll have to look at some of the interesting and common errors that come up in the lesson).
Have students then write their stories up on A3 pieces of paper for other groups to read and give feedback on.