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Community: the crux of the post lockdown classroom

Amidst national concerns about students’ academic progress during lockdown, Suzy Pett, Director of Studies at Wimbledon High, thinks about the far more essential point: that the return to the classroom – and the very act of learning itself – is intrinsically about human connection and communion.

As Director of Studies at Wimbledon High School, now more than ever I am thinking about what our classrooms will look and feel like in September. As a teacher of 10 years, I’m familiar with the end-of-summer surge of excitement and apprehension about school return. Despite the nerves, there is something ritualistic and reassuring about it. In the words of Philip Larkin, we can ‘begin afresh, afresh, afresh’.

But, with Covid-19 having forced us from our physical classrooms for so long, this time it feels different. There is, of course, the fact that classrooms will now look unfamiliar. In a throwback to times gone by, students will all be facing forward, with the teacher pinned to their white board or laptop at the front. However, the changes run deeper. I’ve been thinking through the implications of them on the very way we teach.

Concern about the lack of learning during lockdown is understandably high in the national consciousness. Exasperated parents took to Twitter, wryly pleading for “Alexa [to] please home school my child.” A study by the National Foundation for Educational Research reported that most students did fewer than 3 hours study per day. Educators worked harder than ever to engage and motivate students, with innovative online programs. Fortunately, there were many success stories, and at Wimbledon High our Guided Home Learning allowed students to maintain pace and progress in their education.

However, teachers across the country will be returning acutely aware of the curriculum content they need to cover. They will be detecting where students’ understanding might be shaky from home learning. They will employ their most winning combination of quizzing, questioning and testing to unearth – and then fill – any knowledge or skills gaps. They will be helping students to self-reflect and be ready to proffer feedback. In pursuit of maximum academic progress, classrooms will be aglow with teachers’ voices enthusing, encouraging, cajoling and reassuring their students. There will be – I am certain – no lack of ambition for what this generation of young people will achieve this year.

Though, what is uppermost in my mind as I prepare for school return in September, is the fundamental nature of the classroom as a community. With reports of students feeling increasingly isolated and disconnected in lockdown, it’s even clearer to me that learning is an act that unites. Whilst I am ardent about academic progress, I am far more attuned at the start of this school year to how my methods of teaching can forge those much-needed meaningful, human bonds.

It goes without saying that the soul of the classroom is far more than the acquisition of knowledge. Intrinsic to the very process of learning is human connection and communion. With the flimsy and chimeric relationships on social media, our classroom spaces – and the way we teach – can be a salve for young people needing to feel part of a more stable community. Lesson rules become shared customs. Rigorous class discussion allows every student to have a voice that is heard. Opinions and ideas are shared and probed so that conversation is far more nuanced and rich than social media sound bites. Judging the right challenge and pace of learning creates trust as students rely on each other and their teacher to problem-solve and move forward.

In lessons, we metaphorically go through the woods and come out the other side. Together. Connected. No one is left behind. And, it is teachers’ careful planning and pedagogy that enable this. Online learning went some way to recreate this, but nothing will beat the power of in-person learning to rekindle that sense of togetherness for young people.

Here at Wimbledon High we’ve always believed in the intertwining of pastoral and academic care. They are not separate. As I start this school year and think about my teaching practice for the months ahead, I am convinced of this more than ever.

 

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Friday Gem #13 – emoji vocab retrieval practice

Teaching and Learning Gem #13 – emoji vocab retrieval practice

The final Friday Gem of the year comes from the Classics Department and is a great one for linguists. Mark Wilmore did a digital learning walk and shared with me a fun and fast-paced vocab retrieval game from Dan Addis. Whilst waiting for students to join the live lesson (not wanting to waste any moment for learning), Dan posted a Latin word in the conversation space. Students had to post an emoji/picture that represented it.

Here is ‘fugit’ (he/she flees) and ‘templum’ (temple):

Here is ‘timet’ (he/she is afraid):

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Celebrating the first year of PPE at Wimbledon High

Ms Suzy Pett, Assistant Head (Teaching and Learning) at WHS, looks back at the end of the first year of the new PPE course studied by Year 10 pupils at WHS.

We are at the end of the inaugural year of our PPE course. We wanted students to look outwards and question the ideologies – political, economic, philosophical – that are influential in shaping our world. One of our school’s key objectives is for each student to “stride out’ and be prepared to “shape the society in which she lives and works’. Our PPE course has certainly helped our Year 10s become savvy and robust thinkers on important global, national and personal issues.

The course ended with students writing their own articles on a topic of their choice. The array of interests was kaleidoscopic! Articles ranged from Kantianism vs Utilitarianism; to immigration; to beauty; to Plato; to student loans; to voting…to Trump…and everything in the middle (including, of course, the impact of Coronavirus). There is no doubt that students have developed mature, thoughtful and increasingly bold voices on these matters. Their articles were hugely impressive.

Here is a small selection for you to enjoy:

Izzy S – Successes of the language of populism

Jasmine H – Student Loans: Friend or Fraud?

Amy C – ‘If Walls could talk!’ – What we can learn from the first modern artist about the value of isolation to our ability to express ourselves

Bella R – Your President

Marianne-K-PPE-Project

 

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Friday Gem #12 – meaningful personal targets

Writing

Teaching and Learning Gem #12 – creating meaningful personal targets

 

This comes from Helen Sinclair. She asked her Year 9 to write a reflection for their end of year assessment. However, as she watched them write it on OneNote, she noticed that some of the comments were rather vague. She therefore copied a range of different reflections onto the chat and asked the whole class to review them using the reaction emojis (being clear that a sad face didn’t mean it was bad, just that they thought it could be improved). Once they had done this, she then asked students to explain in the live call what made some targets more effective than others.

This is effective because:

  • It encourages students to be meaningfully self-reflective.
  • The collaborative nature of this makes it clear that all students have things to improve….it discourages perfectionism!
  • It emphasises the importance of making targets specific.
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Teaching & Learning Gem #11 – Digital Exit Ticket

WimTalks

Teaching and Learning Gem #11 – Digital Exit Ticket

Ian Richardson added me to his Year 9 Computer Science Team as a student, so I get all sorts of reminders to complete Teams Assignments, such as quick low stakes quizzes to check my knowledge. He decided to use Forms and Teams Assignments to push out an Exit Ticket to all students at the end of the lesson. This allowed him quickly to see how every student was feeling about her progress and it enabled him to adapt his teaching going forwards.

As a student, this is what popped up for me at the end of the lesson:

And when I opened the Assignment, I could fill in my self-reflection about the lesson:

This is effective because:

  • Every student gets her voice heard: it creates a one-to-one connection between student and teacher.
  • Through the Assignments function, Ian can quickly click through the responses and check who has/hasn’t completed it.
  • Ian can adapt his teaching going forwards to cater to the learners.
  • Ian can put in interventions/differentiate if it is clear that some students need extra support.
  • It encourage students to reflect on their own learning and progress.
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Learning what to do when you don’t know what to do – tackling unseen texts in English

Miss Lucinda Gilchrist, Head of English, considers the virtues of being ‘stuck’, and how this can help pupils tackle challenging tasks with more confidence.

A growth mindset and being ‘stuck’

Carol Dweck’s influential work on growth mindset has become common parlance across schools now, and we know that helping pupils develop grit, perseverance and resilience is key to supporting them in their learning. A growth mindset is one in which ability is seen as ‘changeable’, and which ‘can be developed through learning’ (Dweck, 2006), rather than innate or fixed. As teachers, we want pupils to be able to reframe their thinking about things they struggle with to develop a growth mindset. We therefore provide scaffolds and supports to ease pupils into the ‘zone of proximal development’ and enable them to see smaller successes on the path to larger ones.

However, small and incremental scaffolds may actually serve to make them more reliant on the support from their teachers than on their own reasoning. An example of this: as part of some of my MA action research, I declared ‘war’ on the PEE/PEA structure, which I knew pupils had become too reliant on and which was making their writing too mechanical, and many of them simply relied on another acronym they had learnt in the past. By easing pupils into a task too gently, we run this risk: ‘if a task does not puzzle us at all, then it is not a problem; it is just an exercise’[1].

We therefore sometimes need to remove even more of the support structures, and defamiliarise pupils even further in order to make them less reliant on the scaffolds we put in place, and make them more aware of the ways in which they can get themselves unstuck, helping them to understand what to do when they don’t know what to do. We can expose them to challenges which they might consider beyond their ‘zone of proximal development’ – be this a new style of Mathematics problem, an unusual context for a theory in the Sciences, or a piece of music unlike anything they’ve heard before.

An example from English – analysing ‘unseen’ texts

Many students of English Literature at KS4 are anxious about the concept of ‘unseen’ – the part of the examination where pupils have to write an essay about a text they have never seen before. It’s particularly challenging with poetry: a poem is often by nature oblique and abstract, resisting an easy answer. While this is what we love about poetry, it can be frustrating for some pupils who want the ‘right’ answer! Pupils who find developing their own interpretations of texts hard sometimes rely on ‘getting’ the notes about texts, and thereby the ‘right’ answer, rather than developing the habits they need to be able to respond to any text, whether one they have encountered before or not. This is understandable: while English teachers will argue that all texts are ‘unseen’ before they are studied, pupils can become used to the scaffold of discussing with pairs or small groups, and the reassurance that, at the end, the teacher would eventually confirm the ‘right’ response by guiding the discussion and asking purposeful questions.

As Angela Duckworth says in Grit, ‘We prefer our excellence fully formed’ (2016). We would prefer to show the world the successful final outcome, rather than the training and experimenting, which means that committing pen to paper and articulating an interpretation of an unseen poem, or even just verbally expressing an idea in class discussion, could make unseen poetry a locus of fear and failure where pupils may feel intimidated by the myth that some people just ‘get it’ and others don’t, rather than seeing it as an enjoyable challenge. When I surveyed my Year 10 class about what they felt the biggest challenges in responding to unseen poetry were, several of their responses focused on the idea of a fixed, or correct interpretation – they were concerned about “analysing the text correctly” or finding “the right message/s of the poem”.  While many of them commented that they liked “reading new poems” and to have a “fresh start and use things we’ve learnt from other poems”, it is interesting that the pressure to ‘get it right’ still prevails.

So I decided to give my pupils a challenge which would deliberately make them feel stuck. As a starter activity just as we started our unseen poetry unit, I gave them a poem which was on a Cambridge University end of year examination in 2014, and which consists only of punctuation[2]:

They were definitely daunted by this – in a survey after the lesson I asked them how they felt when they saw it:

  • I felt a bit out of my depth, I struggled to analyse any of it
  • Quite stuck for words… I wasn’t really sure where to start seeing as we had no context and there were no words so how were you able to deduce anything from it?
  • Freaked out, how was I meant to be able to understand a poem with no words!These phrases echo exactly the sort of being ‘stuck’ feeling I’m sure we’ve all experienced when encountering something unfamiliar. The pupils spent some time on their own examining and annotating the poem, and then in a Teams video call we discussed the kinds of clues they could look for to help them understand the poem – although there weren’t words, they gradually began to use the information they did have, and came up with some insightful ideas, utilising the ideas about the structure and clues from the punctuation marks to try and gain some meaning from the poem. Here are some of the ideas from the Meeting Chat:

They were beginning to notice some really interesting ideas: the open-ended nature of the poem because of the unfinished last section, the implications of the punctuation marks which were there, and the fact that the lines were bracketed, suggesting some sort of devaluing of whatever words might have been inside them. I then revealed the title of the poem: ‘Tipp-Ex Sonata’, and explained that the poet, Koos Kombuis, was a South African performer and writer. With additional context, and using another pupil’s observation about apartheid, they then made some even more impressive deductions:

They had got very close to what Koos Kombuis had said about the poem himself: that it’s a protest against censorship of anti-apartheid voices in South Africa. So far, so good: the pupils had proved that they could reframe their thinking and use different clues to help them analyse the poem.

I then showed the pupils a poem in German:

This, naturally presented pupils with a different problem. However, they could identify rhyme and internal rhymes, alliteration and sound iconicity, and when they heard the poem aloud they could hear the regular, almost monotonous iambic pentameter. They identified that the first and last words of the poem were the same (although one is a pronoun and the other is a verb, they were using the right sort of reasoning!), and made an interesting point about the poem having a cyclical structure as a result. We spoke about how these gave the impression of something enclosed or making repeated movements – and of course, they were actually very close! This poem, ‘Der Panther’ by Rainer Maria Rilke[3], is about a panther, trapped in a cage and moving around in tiny circles as his mind calcifies. Without realising it, and without knowing any of the words, the pupils managed to understand this poem at a surprisingly deep level.

I then asked the pupils their feelings about unseen poetry, having attempted these two poems which would have been certainly at best uncomfortable, and at worst enough to make them feel ‘stuck’:

  • I like analysing unconventional poems, because you can interpret it on a much broader range, rather than analysing the meaning of words and literary devices.
  • less confused and a bit more confident in my capability to analysis texts
  • it made me more confident in understanding different ways to analyse and use other methods to deduce a message from a poem
  • Slightly reassured that annotations aren’t all there is to a poem and you can find other key elements elsewhere.
  • After these activities, I feel like I have a better approach to unseen poetry, and am able to discover the writer’s meaning without context or the internet.
  • now I understand that there is more than just the words on the page that can be understood.
  • it makes it a lot clearer because I now know there are other ways to look at a poem, for example after looking at “der panther” it made me realise I could’ve looked at the rhyming structure or words that rhyme in order to get a sense of the poem.These pupils’ responses suggest that putting them out of their comfort zone and possibly dangerously close to their ‘panic zone’[4], actually made them understand that there were more tools available to them than the most obvious ones. (It is particularly gratifying to see that at least one has learnt they don’t need to consult Google!) Not only is unseen poetry now less daunting, because they had successfully engaged with something even more unfamiliar, but they had also deepened their understanding of a greater range of devices which poets use to create meaning.This is a really useful strategy for helping pupils engage with something which they might feel daunted by, especially when it’s a new topic. Another example is from a Year 13 lesson when we started Chaucer: I was concerned that my class would be daunted by Middle English when they encountered it for the first time, so gave them versions of a text in Old English dating from the 10th and 11th century, and then the same text in Middle English from the 14th century, at which point the pupils began to recognise trends and similarities in the language and structure, eventually identifying it as the Lord’s Prayer, before I provided a more familiar 16th century translation. Making these connections helped pupils feel less alienated by Middle English and more confident to approach Chaucer.

    At WHS, we are fortunate enough to teach thoughtful, perceptive and independent students, and it’s encouraging to see the ways that they engage with really tricky material, and begin to see that, if they can tackle an undergraduate exam text in Year 10, they can tackle any poem! The same strategy could be used in many subjects – a piece of artwork which doesn’t look like what someone might assume to be ‘art’, a piece of music which challenges the expectations of a particular genre, data which might seem to buck a trend in science subjects.  These lessons are memorable as well: one of the girls in my Year 13 class signed up for my elective module on Sociolinguistics on the strength of the introduction to Middle English activity which she had enjoyed several months earlier! By challenging pupils’ expectations and perceptions of their own limitations, they are able to see their subjects in a broader light than the examination syllabi, make connections with wider experiences, and learn a valuable lesson about what to do when they don’t know what to do.

 

References and Further Reading

Duckworth, A. (2016) Grit: Why passion and resilience are the secrets to success, Vermillion.

Dweck, C. (2006) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Ballantine Books.

https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2016/04/i-give-up/

https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2016/05/getting-unstuck/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27680904

http://www.thempra.org.uk/social-pedagogy/key-concepts-in-social-pedagogy/the-learning-zone-model/

[1] https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2016/05/getting-unstuck/

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27680904

[3] https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-panther/

[4] http://www.thempra.org.uk/social-pedagogy/key-concepts-in-social-pedagogy/the-learning-zone-model/

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Friday Gem #10 – student collaboration using Miro

Teaching and Learning Gem #10 – student collaboration using Miro


We know how important it is to find ways for students to connect and collaborate during GHL. Clare Roper shared with me some videos of her Year 10s working together in real time using Miro – an online collaborative platform. She put students in groups using Teams channels so that they could speak with each other as they completed the collaborative task online. She could see exactly what was going on, to support and give encouragement live.

  • Fast and furious team competition about pollination

Teams competed to order the stages of the pollination process. This video is so fun…I think Clare has a future as a sports commentator!

  • Multiflow thinking maps about human influences on the environment

Clare was able to watch the different groups of students collaborating on their thinking maps and give immediate feedback. Watch here.

Miro has lots of different ways for students to collaborate. Click here to watch a short promotional video about Miro.

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Friday Gem #8 – the power of digital RAG forms

Teaching and Learning Gem #8 – the power of quick questionnaires to get a picture of whole class understanding

This idea comes from Nicola Higgs, who created a digital RAG sheet for students using Microsoft Forms. Students rated their confidence about the topic of climate change (covered during lockdown) by using  ‘red’, ‘amber’ or ‘green’ . This allows students to reflect honestly on their Guided Home Learning AND helps Nicola understand which areas of this topic she needs to revisit in lessons.

Here is a link to what her form looked like.

Below are some of the results, quickly giving Nicola a sense of the whole class picture and what has been understood by students:



Here is the excel spreadsheet generated, allowing Nicola to dig down into the detail of particular students so she can support them/make interventions:

This is effective because:

  • It is quick for students to complete and gives all students the ability to share their feelings.
  • It encourages students to be self-reflective about their learning
  • It gives the teacher direction about where to focus their teaching
  • It allows the teacher to see which students need more support or intervention
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Friday Gem #9 – Rubrics for effective and efficient marking

Teaching and Learning Gem #9 – use of rubrics in Teams Assignments for effective and efficient marking

Another top tip from Nicola Higgs and the Geography department, who have been using the full functionality of Teams Assignments to collect in and mark the work from her Year 7 assessment projects. The use of ‘rubrics’ allows for the marking criteria, assessment objectives and bands to be applied easily and clearly to student work.

She has made an awesome 5 minute video explaining how her department have used rubrics in Teams Assignments, and why they are beneficial. Do take a look! Watch here.

In short:

  • You can create and reuse marking criteria which you can then apply at a click of a button to a student’s work
  • It makes it clear to the student what skills/knowledge they have shown.
  • This is a super time saving tool for teachers while at the same time helping students understand how to succeed in the assignment.
  • There is also a box to add a short, personalised comment, so you can recognise the effort/progress of the individual
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Why a teacher should never stop being a pupil: from the perspective of the MFL classroom

Mrs Claire Baty, Head of French, looks at the idea of teachers being life-long learners, and the benefits this affords in our classrooms.

It’s widely accepted that learning something new can enhance your quality of life, give you confidence, have a positive impact on your mental health and above all be fun. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever” (Ghandi). Yet learning from scratch, purely for the cognitive challenge, is something that most of us rarely do.

As a French teacher, my focus has always been on imparting knowledge; enthusing and, I hope, inspiring my students to learn this language that I have spent years studying. I encourage my students to be curious beyond the curriculum. I ask Key Stage 3 to look up extra words to extend their topic specific vocabulary beyond the confines of the textbook. I set Key Stage 4 longer, more authentic reading and listening texts to decipher, hoping to instil a desire to build upon their knowledge. I expect Key Stage 5 to indulge in research into cultural, literary and historical topics beyond the course. I hope that they do this with the same sense of pleasure that I feel when doing the exact same thing. Yet, I haven’t taken into consideration that for my students, especially those in Years 7-11, they are not yet fluent in this language. French is still new to them. When I read the news in French or look up a word from a novel I am reading, none of it is new, I am merely building on years of study, whereas my students are starting from scratch.

So to become the pupil again and experience language learning from the perspective of the student in the MFL classroom, was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed. Learning Mandarin alongside a class of Year 8 students is enlightening in so many ways. Not only have I learnt how to introduce myself and family in Mandarin, I have found myself reconsidering how we learn language and the effectiveness of our methods for the students that we teach.

The reality of learning a new language

Chinese is a fundamentally different language to the European languages that I am familiar with but, if I am totally honest, I expected to find it easy to make progress quickly, after all I am a linguist, a languages teacher and a motivated student with the advantage of knowing how to learn a language. In reality, it is proving less obvious than I had first thought!

My desire to always get it right has a direct impact on my confidence and self-consciousness when speaking in Mandarin. Even when I know the word I am profoundly aware of the lack of authenticity of my pronunciation. What is more, I was completely unprepared for how difficult it is to multi-task during a classroom based lesson. Copying vocabulary from the board, whilst listening to the sound of the word and trying to remember the meaning all at the same time as being prepared to answer a question from the teacher requires an agility of mind that is hard to achieve. But, perhaps most surprisingly for a linguist, is how hard I find it to recall new vocabulary from one lesson to the next without considerable pre-lesson preparation and sneaky glancing at notes! As a teacher, I often find myself saying to my French classes “but we saw this word last lesson in exercise X, page Y”. I now understand first-hand how difficult instant retrieval of vocabulary is, but also how important it is if you want to progress in a language.

If this is how I am feeling, when the language classroom is my ‘zone’, then how do my students feel? As teachers, do we ask too much of them each day or do they adapt to the demands placed upon them as learners and I am just out of practice?

Mandarin
Above: Mrs Dai teaching Mandarin

How is second language taught?

Due to the closure of schools in March, my experience of learning Mandarin has moved from face-to-face classroom learning to independent textbook exercises, remote virtual learning and online platforms such as Duolingo, inadvertently placing me in a good position to consider this question.

In the MFL classroom we learn by rote, repetition, hearing others, practising, being creative with the language, revisiting previous knowledge. Independent access to a textbook is valuable to a point but then you need an expert to answer questions (and I have lots of questions!). Remote learning has become part of the ‘classroom’ experience and unexpectedly for me, the sense of anonymity created by initials in black squares during a TEAMS video conference has actually helped me to feel more confident when speaking in Mandarin and more inclined to take a risk. I wonder if my French students feel the same.

But what about all the online platforms available that claim they are the best way to learn a language? These applications offer a totally different approach to language learning. Often providing minimal explanation of key words or grammar, the focus is clearly on lots of practice, which means you get things wrong – all the time! To some extent this mimics how a child might learn a language; seeing and hearing words in context with lots of repetition. Whilst I must admit that these platforms are addictive because of their gaming style, I find myself wanting greater explanation. I want to read the notes, make my own notes, learn the information before attempting the exercise, whereas Duolingo seems determined to force me to have a go and risk getting it wrong.

What about the role of online translators? I have spent most of my working life warning students of the pitfalls of ‘Google Translate’. Every language teacher can give numerous examples of student’s work containing glaring and often comical errors, yet now that I am a beginner learner of Mandarin who is frustrated that the textbook glossary doesn’t contain the word I want to use, I find myself turning to Google Translate more and more frequently and with a surprising level of success. Perhaps the key here is that I am also a linguist and language teacher and hence know what pitfalls to look out for. But this does support what language teachers have been forced to accept; that A.I has transformed machine-based translation and Google Translate is no longer the enemy it once was. I agree whole heartedly with my colleague, Adèle Venter who, in her article Approaches to using online language tools and AI to aid language learning, says that students need to be taught how to use these tools rather than being told not to use them at all.

Above: STEAM Spanish with Ms Horno Garcia

How does this affect my teaching?

What have I learnt from this whole experience, apart from being able to introduce myself and family in Chinese? Can learning a new language make me a better French teacher?

  • Knowing how to learn helps you learn. I am at an advantage over my fellow Mandarin students, not because I am innately any better than them at Mandarin, but because I know how to take notes, revise vocabulary and practise the language independently. Activities aimed at improving pupil’s metacognitive skills must be a significant part of the classroom experience.
  • It is also clear that retrieval practice needs to be a priority in every lesson. Ross Morrison-McGill (TeacherToolkit) makes an interesting link with the ‘knowledge’ test for London black cab drivers. According to his article Why do London cab drivers know so much? “spaced practice and interleaving” are the key to memory. I would also agree with Andy Tharby who comments in his article Memory Platforms that quizzing is a far more powerful tool to retrieval than re-reading notes or listening to teacher explanations. The latter create what he refers to as an ‘illusion of fluency’ – we think we know when in fact the knowledge doesn’t stick. Effective starter activities that encourage the transfer of knowledge from one lesson to another, one topic to another need to be incorporated into every lesson.
  • Students need time in lessons to reflect, to consider what they are learning, to form and then ultimately ask questions and to consolidate their learning. Being overwhelmed, tired even anxious can all stem from a feeling of busyness that comes from having a distracted mind. We feel busy because we are in the habit of doing one thing while thinking about the next (mindful.org) Giving students time to process and complete the task I am asking of them during a lesson could lead to much deeper understanding and as a result, greater confidence.

I am not learning Mandarin because I have immediate plans to travel to China, nor do I need to use the language every day to communicate at home or at work (although I can see how it would be beneficial), I am learning purely for the sake of learning something new. It’s exciting to be able to do something that I couldn’t do 10 months ago. The change of perspective that has been afforded to me by becoming the pupil rather than the teacher is invaluable and I am excited to consider what I will change about my own classroom practice as a result.

Further reading and references

http://whs-blogs.co.uk/teaching/tag/mfl/ https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/ https://reflectingenglish.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/memory-platforms/ https://teacherhead.com/ https://www.mindful.org/a-mindfulness-practice-for-doing-one-thing-at-a-time/ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language