Activities for giving your Coursebook the Coaching Twist

In the last post I argued that coursebooks may have something to offer independent learners and their language coaches (that’s you). This runs counter to a common viewpoint in ELT that coursebooks stifle independent learning. I suggested that you re-evaluate the coursebook you are using because you may well find that it provides a decent starting point for learning coaching and some good material to get your class thinking about their learning.

In this post I’m going to present five ways you can give your coursebook the coaching twist. Turn your coursebook teaching into learning coaching!

1 Behind the scenes

At the start of the course, some teachers introduce the coursebook to the students with a quiz, with questions designed to show students around what the book has to offer, eg:

What topic can you find on page 76?

What useful section is located on pages 157-158?

Find three ‘Quick checks’. What are they? Where are they?

After this, put the students in pairs or small groups and get them to prepare a list of questions for the coursebok writer as if they were going to interview them. Use the writer’s name on the front of the book to make it realistic. Then have them swap questions with another group and discuss and try to answer those questions orally.

Get them to act out the interview with the writer of the coursebook for the podcast “English Teacher Monthly”. They might do this in pairs to start, but you might want to ask the better interviewers up to the front afterwards.

Rationale – Students are unlikely to take much interest in the design and content of the coursebook, which is after all quite a dry subject, even though it concerns their learning program significantly. By wearing masks and getting personally involved in these areas, they may be more inclined to care about these things and think about them more carefully.

 

2 Yes, I can!

This series of activities is designed to help learners think about what they have learnt and how well they have learnt it. It exploits a common feature of modern coursebooks – regular checklists of learning outcomes. Some coursebooks include ‘can do’ statements like this one, which are usually found at the end of each unit or after every two or three units. Learning coaches get learners evaluating their progress in a ‘coursebook dependent’ way at the beginning but  gradually the learners get better at articulating learning outcomes for themselves.

After Unit 1

Ask the students to look at the checklist. Make sure that they understand the statements by getting them to match them up with the page number or sections where they studied and practised them. Point out that the statements are expressed in terms of what they can do and not what they know. For example, in the above checklist it asks whether they can ‘talk about what’s happening now’ when it could have expressed it as ‘use the present continuous for actions happening now?’.

Get the learners to complete the checklist. Tell them that this is for them and that you don’t need to see their answers. Invite them to come to you at the end of the lesson to discuss their answers only if they want to. Elicit some ideas for what they could do if they don’t answer ‘Yes, I can’. Some possible answers might be:

talk to the teacher about it

do extra exercises in the workbook

read the lesson pages from the student’s book again

go to the grammar reference at the back of the book

ask a classmate for help

find examples of the language with an online search

practise putting the new language into practice (speaking or writing)

Rationale – Many students have fixed notions that learning grammar or vocabulary is an end in itself, not a means to an end. By ticking boxes related to ‘can do’ statements, learners are doing two things: they are looking at the real-world practical use of grammar structures and they are underlining their achievements in discreet, manageable steps, saying to themselves: ‘Yes, I can’.

Students may find it strange to do an exercise in their books that their teacher doesn’t need to see. They may be unwilling to admit a lack of understanding to the teacher who is supposed to have taught them! By bringing this issue to the fore, learning coaches underline the learners’ responsibility for their own learning.

After Unit 2

This time, encourage your learners to think a bit harder about what they have learnt. Before the lesson, choose keywords from the checklist to gap. Create a gap fill either on the board or on a worksheet. From the above checklist, for example, you might do the following.

Can you…	Yes, I _____	Yes, more or _____	I need to look _____
1 talk about your _____ and neighbourhood?
2 _____ directions and explain _____ things are?
3 talk about what you can and _____ do?
4 give and follow _____?
5 leave a message on the _____?
6 talk about what’s _____ now?
7 talk about people’s _____?
8 get your message across when _____?

Get them to fill the gaps, then to complete the checklist as before.

After Unit 3

This time, you should begin to expect more from the learners. Ask them to fill an empty table:

Can you…	Yes, I can	Yes, more or less	I need to look again
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Put them in groups of 3 or 4 and explain that together, they should write the ‘can do’ statements for Unit 3 without looking. You might quickly flick through the pages in the book in front of the class to remind them of the lessons. Go around the room making suggestions and giving prompts. Get them to share their answers as a whole class before checking in the book.

Rationale – This is the third unit in a row that the class will have used the checklist. As a coach, you are encouraging a good habit which will hopefully become a regular part of their learning routine. If making your learners do something like this feels a bit authoritarian, consider the common primary education practice of making students write a title at the top of a new topic or lesson; as an effective independent learner you probably still do this years after being taught it. A bit of ‘teacherly’ encouragement is not anathema to coaching towards independence!

After Unit 4

Don’t make such a big deal of the checklist; this time, quickly elicit the ‘can do’ statements orally from the whole class, then let them check.

After Unit 5

Just give them five minutes to fill in the checklist on their own.

After Unit 6

Set the checklist for homework

After Unit 7

Remind the students that the checklist is there.

After Unit 8

Don’t mention it. One or two lessons into Unit 9, ask them whether they did Unit 8.

After Units 9 and on

Don’t mention it any more.

Rationale – Over the course of a year you have gently handed over responsibility for this area to your learners. There will be, of course, learners who don’t adopt this reflective practice in their learning, but that will be their choice. Hopefully, many of your students will go on thinking for themselves about what they have learnt and how well.

3 Drastic Cuts

You may sometimes find that you do not have time to cover the whole unit, depending on contact hours that month, the overall length of the course or the pace of the class. Normally in this situation, the teacher would choose which lessons from the book to cut, but the learners could do it given the chance (and a little guidance).

Explain to the class that this month there isn’t enough time to do everything in the unit and that it is necessary to cut one lesson. Put the choices on the board; for Unit 3 you might write Lessons 3.1 / 3.2 / 3.3 / 3.4 / 3.5

If possible, get the students into a ‘board meeting’ formation around a big table with their books in front of them. With larger classes you could organise groups around several tables with one chairperson per group. Ask them to look at the next unit. Invite suggestions as to which to cut; with everyone’s ideas, make sure they justify their suggestions. Also, be sure to encourage disagreement.

After five or ten minutes, wrap up the meeting and call a vote. Hand out slips of paper on which the students write their preferences. Whichever lesson gets the most votes is cut, even if it one that you would have preferred stayed in

Rationale – This helps learners to see that the coursebook is not some authority that tells you what to learn; rather it is a tool for learning, a useful guide, and nothing more. Also, it is important as a coach to encourage students to make choices about what they learn. While we cannot expect them to decide on learning outcomes from scratch (one reason coursebooks are useful is to do that for us), we can make decisions easier by presenting them with choices.

4 Why? Why? Why?

After every activity one lesson, ask the students why you made them do it:

Why did we do that gap fill?

Why did I make you say the phrases?

Why did I ask you to copy the board?

etc

Then do it at least once every lesson until it becomes a common question in the classroom that the students are used to answering.

Rationale - Coaching encourages learners to make decisions for themselves about how to learn. By repeatedly asking them to justify good learning practice in class, they will hopefully be better able to justify what they do outside of the class.

 

5 [your own idea]!

Rationale - We want to practice what we preach! Please contribute to this post and practise making coaching decisions about what to do with your classes. Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Giving your Coursebook the Coaching Twist

I’m an ELT materials writer as well as one of the authors of this blog, so I was interested to find some research looking at the compatibility of coursebooks with notions of learner autonomy. In it the authors conclude by saying that the textbooks they looked at ‘do little to foster learner autonomy and that when they do, they offer limited opportunity for practice to students’⁽¹⁾. This criticism echoes a more widespread view, not just that coursebooks do a poor job at fostering learner autonomy but that by their very nature, serving up on a platter one publisher’s vision of what learning English should look like, they cannot but deny choice: ‘the whole idea of developing autonomy may be difficult to reconcile with the use of a textbook in the foreign language classroom’⁽²⁾.This perceived fault in coursebooks lies at the heart of some teachers’ dissatisfaction with published materials.

A comparison. Just because we subscribe to one newspaper doesn’t mean we cannot dip into alternatives when we like, or watch the TV news. We choose a newspaper over the rest because in general we like its style, or the choice of news, or because it has a good crossword; we accept it has faults and we don’t read every page. Without a newspaper, we are free to read from any source (and these days this is definitely possible) but most of us enjoy the convenience of a version condensed and edited for us by experts. Does subscribing to the same paper every day limit our independence and freedom to choose as consumers of news? It doesn’t have to.

Now, I can imagine a class with an experienced teacher, using effective coaching techniques, that manages to create the sort of learning environment we aspire to in this blog, where a coursebook might just get in the way. Nevertheless, the reality is that coursebooks are an expected as well as valued element of most language courses, and they provide a convenient framework to structure learning for most teachers and students. I think that within this framework there is plenty of scope for coaching, and ways that students can take control of their learning. It may also be possible to see coursebooks as a power for good in this regard, an integral part of a learner’s road towards independent learning.

Learner coaching focuses on the inner game behind learning, the psychological side: motivation, organisation, goal setting, prioritisation and self-evaluation. For a coursebook to reflect this there needs to be a deliberate focus on the learning process in the book; it should encourage students to reflect on their progress and give students opportunities to make their own choices about what or how to learn within the book, as well as opportunities for reflection. For example, it should include regular sections for self-evaluation at the end of units or every few units:

The Big Picture Elementary, Richmond Publishers

 More explicit awareness raising of ways of learning seems to be making a comeback:

 Outcomes Intermediate, Heinle

 Space needs to be provided for learners to reflect on their needs and priorities:

The Big Picture Advanced, Richmond Publishers

Do this Coaching Coursebook Survey to find out whether your coursebook ticks the right boxes. Bear in mind that coursebooks may include the Students’ Book and accompanying Workbook and Teacher’s Book, as well as other components such as CDs, DVDs, online resources, student portfolios and online learning platforms. In each space award the book

0 stars   if you cannot find anything

1 star     if you can find it but you wouldn’t use it (and say why)

2 stars   if you can find it and you would use it, or some of it(and say why)

3 stars   if you can find it and think it would work really well with your group

My Coaching Coursebook Survey

My coursebook has                                                                  in the SB     elsewhere (where?)

activities that help raise awareness of how we learn best

activities that ask the learner to think about their motivation and needs

regular activities that ask the learner to reflect on their progress

activities that help learners organise their learning

activities that allow learners to listen to other students’ opinions and learning methods

(One activity may tick more than one box)

In the next blog I’m going to argue that many modern coursebooks have plenty to say to the learning coach but that unfortunately, the relevant sections in coursebooks tend to be ignored or underused by most teachers. I am going to outline what those sections are and how we can exploit them best as learning coaches.

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(1)‘Do classroom textbooks encourage learner autonomy?’, Hayo Reinders & Cem Balçikanli, Novitas-ROYAL (Research on Youth and Language), 2011, 5(2), 265-272

(2) Fenner, A-B. (2000). Learner Autonomy. In A-B Fenner & D. Newby (Eds). Approaches toMaterials Design in European Textbooks: Implementing Principles of Authenticity, Learner Autonomy, Cultural Awareness. (pp. 151-164). Strasbourg: Council of EuropePublishing.

Cups

In some UK primary schools they are using coloured cups as a very simple and powerful tool to help teachers and learners to direct and measure their learning. Here is how it works.

The children each have three coloured cups: red, orange and green. The teacher pauses at various times in the lesson and asks the children to choose one of the three cups to display on their desk in front of them, A red cup indicates they don’t understand what is being taught, an orange cup indicates they more or less understand but feel they need more practice, a green cup indicates they understand fully and are ready to move on and do something else. Once the cups are displayed the teacher has various options:
• to explain the teaching point again to the class
• call on a green cup child to check their understanding
• encourage peer teaching amongst the children
• Group the children by colour and for example work with the reds while the orange group do more practice and the green group do something else
• Any combination of the above

So this procedure offers the teacher an insight into how children are learning and how far they are being challenged. It helps the teacher to differentiate and cater for different learners in the group and fosters collaborative learning. In this way it supports the creation of optimum challenge or “flow” which I have referred to in The Developing Teacher (Foord, 2009). It also facilitates what Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill refer to as “high demand teaching” (see their blog).

Equally importantly from the point of view of learner coaching it encourages learners to take a pro active role in the classroom, to see learning as something they do rather than something the teacher does to them. The teacher in this set up is manifestly a facilitator helping learners to move from red to orange to green and back to red again with something new.

How can this work in the language classroom?
In stages of the lesson where students are learning new language (doing some vocabulary, pronunciation or grammar work ) some clarification and controlled practice is followed by students displaying their cups (they needn’t be cups of course, any set of three distinct objects will do) and the lesson then proceding in one of the ways described above.

It can also work in stages of the lesson where students are practising conversation more freely. After a group or pair work conversation activity students can be asked how well they feel they can have that conversation in English. Again, according to the cups on display, the teacher may decide to repeat the activity, or have some students repeat the activity and move others on to a new task.

Of course many teachers do this kind of thing already without cups, by listening to and observing their students (monitoring), they can make individual interventions and pace the class accordingly. However in this scenario, all the responsibility lies with the teacher and in classrooms with inexperienced teachers or a lot of students (or both!) relying on the expertise of the teacher may not work. What the cups do is help leverage the expertise of the learners to maximise learning, great for coaches and great for learners.

Has anyone used this approach or something similar in class?

Mission not impossible

This activity is for students of any level or learning situation. To make it more fun you can drip feed the activities to them with a daily e mail, creating some excitement about what their mission will be today. The aim is for them to to simply “exercise” their English as they go about their day, without too much concern for consciously learning new language items, though they may choose to do follow up work if they like.

At the end of the week students can talk in class about which missions they liked best and which they didn’t do. They could also be encouraged to write missions for their classmates and send them by e mail.

Here are 7 missions, one for each day of the week.

Monday
Decide a 5 minute time slot this morning (when you are walking to work or on the bus or something). When the time arrives look at your watch and time 5 minutes. During this time look around you and name as many things as you can in English.
Tuesday
The first time you read a text today (at work, at breakfast, an e mail, a newspaper, whatever) stop and translate it orally to yourself into English. Keep going for 5 minutes. Dont worry if you miss bits or don’t know words just keep going, translating what you can.
Wednesday
Listen to a song in English or two very short ones
Thursday
Use your mobile phone, computer or mp3 player to record yourself speaking English for 1 minute. The subject is “Your home”. Press record, talk for a minute and stop. Then listen.
Friday
Read a website in English for 5 minutes
Saturday
Write your shopping list in English. If you aren’t going shopping today, write a list of everything you ate and drank yesterday
Sunday
No rest today! But something easy. Watch random you tube clips for 5 minutes in English. Any ones you like.

 

FAQ: How can I study outside class?

A guest post this week from Secil Canbaz, based on her recent talk at IATEFL, Glasgow. Thanks Secil for this report on your action reseach, which illustates the kind of impact coaching can have on students and teachers.

I’m an instructor in the school of English Language at an English medium university in Turkey. So far I’ve met a wide range of students, studying at different levels with very different study skills. However, all those students had something in common as they asked the same question ‘HOW CAN I STUDY OUTSIDE CLASS?’
At first, I regarded that as an easy question; as a result I shared the same answers with the students studying at the same level. However, in time I realized that such generic answers and guidance do not mean a lot to the students since they need an individual and customized self-study program and a coach to show them direction. This led me to have individual meetings at the beginning of each course to learn more about them and their study skills. One of the striking facts I realized was that most of them were not on the right track. Another interesting fact I noticed that I couldn’t follow students’ progress as I couldn’t have follow up meetings so students had to study on their own with a lot of materials at their disposal. One size fits all approaches I shared with my students didn’t work. Consequently, I decided to have a mini action research with three of my Elementary students repeating the level.
Considering ‘meaningful engagement’ and ‘quality exposure’ outside class as the basic principles of my action research, I had the following schedule in the 8 week course.

Week Actions Taken
WK 1 Initial Individual meetings (their interests, approach to language learning, their strengths and weaknesses, outside class study habits)
WK 2 Students’ reflection
WK 3 Individual study plans for each student for WK 3 (prepared by the teacher – you could carry out our Operacion Triunfo activity first then have the learners fill in a weekly diary)
WK 4 Same individual study plans
WK 5 individual meetings
WK 6 Taking necessary actions by referring to WK 5 individual meeting, preparing study plans for WKs 6,7and 8 by focusing on their grades and their teachers’ feedback
WK 7 Following the plans
WK 8 (the final week of the course) Final individual meetings (to reflect on the course, and to get students’ final reflection

Students’ Reflections
‘I started studying regularly. Thanks to the plan I learnt that I need to study a variety of things, not grammar only’.
‘Before having a weekly study plan, I didn’t spare time to read graded readers.’
‘I didn’t study on some days at all. Now, I regularly go to CALL lab and the library at least twice a week.’
‘Our individual meetings helped me gain practical tips. Everything seems manageable now.’
‘I’ve started planning my social life as well.’
‘It’s good to have a plan but I still find it difficult to plan on my own.’
‘I study reading and writing every week but I can’t focus on all skills in a week. For example, I can’t study listening or pronunciation.’
‘This course I’ve become more aware thanks to the meetings and plans. I’m more motivated…’

My reflections.
It has been a great learning experience for the following reasons:
- learning more about my student and customizing plans accordingly
- catering for their affective needs as well as cognitive and linguistic needs
- incorporating ‘high demand teaching’ into outside class strand
- empowering students gradually by setting short term and long actions
- maximizing their potential
- asking them how many hours and what kind of outside class work they did
- analyzing obstacles together
- providing explicit guidance for goal setting and then referring to reality (acting as a directive coach)

FUTURE ACTIONS:
Based on my experience and the students’ feedback I’m planning to take the following actions:
providing them with time management tips in a more systematic way
making use of technology more i.e online organizers/ asking them to keep a log
incorporating peer feedback/ peer coaching
integrating ‘can do statements’ into mid-course and final reflection
allocating a specific in-class time for planning

As language teachers, we need to incorporate positive visualization into our day to day teaching to help students see the relevance of what they are doing in relation to their future goals. Therefore, I believe in the importance of acting as a coach to enable them to find joy in their journey.

Learner Coaching at IATEFL

There were four talks (at least) on coaching this year at IATEFL, Glasgow, suggesting there is growing interest.

Secil Canbaz spoke about her successes with what she referred to as directive coaching with university students in Ankara,Turkey. Sandy Millin, who is based in Newcastle , UK spoke on learning outside class. Check out her blog: www.independentenglish.wordpress.com
Oliver Beaumont (London) talked about coaching with group and one to one classes.

We hope to bring you posts from some of these presenters in the next few weeks. Watch this space.

A couple of talks which interested me and I think relate to coaching were Jill Hadfield’s and Jim Scrivener’s. Jill talked about motivation referring to the L2 Motivational Self System (Dornyei 2005), her activities which built on students imagining their future L2 selves were very relevant to coaching, in particular when dealing with a student’s “inner game”, referred to in a previous post here. Jill has written a series of articles on this for English Teaching Professional magazine. You need to subscribe to read them

Jim Scrivener’s main point was this: students are not challenged enough and the communicative approach may be partly to blame. Jim’s blog is www.demandhighelt.wordpress.com. Of course, he is not the first to be concerned about low challenge. I remember Scott Thornbury making a similar point in 1993 in a talk in Barcelona titled “No pain, no gain”. I thought of this as I sat on the plane home listening to the pathetic attempt by the Spanish teenager sitting next to me to use English to buy a Mars bar from the air steward. She failed. And we have probably all failed, if that’s the result of 8 years of English lessons. Can a coaching approach help her and her teachers demand more and achieve more?

Nudging towards reading

Last weekend I gave a talk at TESOL Spain on coaching learners in reading. Thanks to all of you who came. I promised to post some of the links that were mentioned, which I will do here, but I also wanted to use reading as an example of a laissez-faire, or weak approach to coaching that may be more effective than it seems at first.

One role teachers sometimes fulfil is that of librarian. Teachers who realise the importance of reading often create a bank of reading material for their students and some schools have books, magazines and newspapers available to their students in a self-access centre, very like a library in function and design. I’d like to think about how learners are encouraged to make use of these resources, and whether the best approach is to urge them to do so or to use more gentle, subtler methods.

One school I worked in had an extensive self-access centre with CALL (computer-assisted language learning) materials, colour-coded books and laminated master copies of worksheets. Teachers had to bring their class down there once a week and recommend a course of study for each student. The idea was that if we forced them to use the centre during our contact hours with them, they might understand the benefits of autonomous study and be encouraged to come of their own accord.

I’m not sure such a heavy-handed approach works with most people. Ceri, a teacher friend, told me she once brought the book she was reading to class and just left it on her desk, front cover facing up. Students expressed interest in the book and an informal chat about reading ensued in which the students shared information about their reading lives. I did something similar with a book I wanted my daughter to read; I ordered it and when it arrived I just left it lying around for her to find. I felt that insisting she at least give it a go might be counter-productive. Sure enough, curiosity was all it took to get her intrigued. Some primary teachers include a ‘Drop Everything And Read’ time in their daily or weekly schedules, during which the students have time to read whatever they like. No judgement, no pressure.

‘Nudge’ theory says that people like to follow ‘social norms’; we are best influenced by what other people are doing, people we look up to, but also and especially our peers. Simply by recognising the reading habits of the people around us may encourage us to read more like them. If you’d like to get your learners reading more out of class, you could do a lot worse than simply bring a book you’ve got on the go to class and see what happens. No judgement, no pressure.

Right, those links…

In my talk I mentioned the idea of creating an online library of texts that your learners can access and contribute to. You’ll have seen bookmarking tools all over the web, such as ‘delicious’ and google bookmarks. There’s one called diigo.com which promises to be good for educators – we even get our own way in:

The idea is simple. You create a group for your learners on your diigo site. Diigo provides you with a button on your toolbar to bookmark and describe any web pages you find that your learners might like. On my Diigo group ‘LearnerCoachingELT’ I’ve started a mixture of sites you and learners might like. You should be able to access it here. Any sites I mentioned in the talk are here, too, so check it out:

http://groups.diigo.com/group/LearnerCoachingELT

Create your own. Invite your students to become members too. Share sites they might find interesting. Invite your students to share sites too.