Interviews with Plan Ceibal English Remote Teachers

Last week, we held two more training days for remote teachers working on the Plan Ceibal English project. In Buenos Aires, this was the first training day that the British Council and Plan Ceibal have organised since the project began, and this was followed the day after with the third RT training day in Montevideo. 

On both days, while waiting for the sessions to begin, I interviewed some of the teachers to find out what they thought were the challenges of teaching children English via video conferencing and what they enjoy the most about the project.

Interviews with RTs in Buenos Aires:


Interview with RT Isabel Aurelio from Graham Stanley on Vimeo.


Plan Ceibal English RT Training Day Interviews - Buenos Aires from Graham Stanley on Vimeo.


Interviews with RTs in Montevideo:


Interviews with RTs in Montevideo Sep 2014 from Graham Stanley on Vimeo.


Interview with British Council quality manager Mem from Graham Stanley on Vimeo.

 Read more about the project here 

Joan Shin Kang & the end of the 11th Anglo Congress

The final plenary of the the 11th Anglo Congress invited us to ask ourselves the question 'Are you a 21st Century Teacher?' and Joan Kang Shin started by saying that she believes the most commonly used approach to teaching young learners in the 20th Century led to separation between local and global. 

Joan shared the stunning TED Talk by Eric Whitacre, featuring a virtual choir of 200+ voices singing one of his pieces. This kind of collaboration is an example of what was beyond imagining in the 20th century.

Mentioning Kachru's classification of English as a world language consisting of three circles (1988) and in particular the importance the outer circle has taken, with English being used more by non-native speakers among themselves than by native speakers with non-native speakers, with all that this signifies when it comes to the English we teach in the classroom. 

She encouraged the audience to bring both the local and the global into the classroom through song, first leading the audience through a song about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then giving us a template for a recipe song that she had used to write a song about the Uruguayan chivito.

Among other things, Joan talked about how the tradition of map-making distorts reality and showing students this through tools such as Map fight, comparing it with information displayed on Google maps can encourage them to reflect on the information that is taken for granted and to think more critically.

Joan also suggested getting students to create a time capsule to help them reflect on what is important about their own culture.

Mark Prensky' digital natives, digital immigrants article was cited as an important reason why technology should matter in our classes.

Finally, Joan finished by inviting teachers to participate with their students in the Our Class City Country project, sharing information with students from around the world. 

The end of the Congress

Many people stayed until the very end, for the congress raffle. In the photo (left), Gerardo Vallaza from the Anglo hands out 6 copies of Language Learning with Technology donated by the British Council Uruguay. 

Before the raffle, an announcement was made about the British Council's Action Research Award Scheme, which is an exciting initiative to encourage teachers to become involved in researching their own context. There will be 6 awards across the Americas "for projects of one year duration and £2,000 for projects that last six months." I recommend you take a look to see if you are eligible to apply.

There was also an announcement made about next year's LABCI conference, which is due to be held in Montevideo on July 9th, 10th & 11th. This large conference, held every 2 years is sure to be an exciting event. See you there?

New British Council podcast - Ceibal English interview

Earlier this month I was thrilled when asked to be interviewed by Rob Lewis about the Ceibal English project for the new British Council English Agenda podcast for teachers. It was an honour to be part of the first episode and a lot of fun to do. The result can be listened to here: 

http://englishagenda.britishcouncil.org/content/englishagenda-podcast-15th-october-2013 

1. You’ve been in Uruguay for a few months now – can you tell us about the project you’re managing? 

Ceibal en Ingles (Ceibal English) is a project the British Council won after a tender was issued by Plan Ceibal for English language teaching via video-conferencing in Primary schools in Uruguay. You will have heard of Plan Ceibal as the organisation that has succeeded in the OLPC initiative. 

It started five years ago, and now each state school child in the country has received a laptop. With English, however, there aren’t enough qualified and experienced English teachers to be able to offer primary children classes, and although in the long-run the solution will be to increase the English level of the existing primary school teachers (something which we are also involved in as part of the project), the short to medium term solution is to offer the children English classes via telepresence solution using remote teachers from Montevideo, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines to teach the classes in tandem with the children’s regular classroom teachers. 

 2. A lot of people probably associate this tool (VC) with business meetings. When you talk about video-conferencing in the classroom, what do you actually mean? 

 Yes, nowadays, people either associate VC with low quality, low bandwidth tools such as Skype which work more or less well on most computers and with an internet connection…or with the higher quality video conference suite equipment, that as you mention, is most associated with international business. The latter, using fibre optic lines and high quality equipment is what is used in this project. The reasons for this are many. One factor is reliability. With a classroom teacher and 25+ kids waiting for a weekly lesson, we need to know that when a remote teacher connects it is going to work, and with this equipment you can 95% (or more) guarantee it is going to work. You wouldn’t be able to offer a similar guarantee with something like Skype. Another factor is quality of image. With this equipment the remote teacher (or RT as we call them) can see details of the children (and can also zoom into specific kids, etc) and so it becomes easier for them to learn their names and recognise them. The high quality also means that on the other end of the line, in the classroom the image is so sharp on the big screen that it is as close as possible to actually having the RT in the classroom, which makes a big difference for the kids. It is hard to appreciate how important this is without actually going and observing a class in progress. 

 3. I’m sure there have been ups and downs. What’s worked well so far? 

 Yes, of course. After a successful pilot that showed it was possible and which also proved the children were learning, we are now teaching almost 1000 classes a week (reaching around 25,000 children). This will double to 2,000 classes in 2014 and more than double again in 2015 to 4,500 groups (around 120,000 students). The best part of the project for me has been the response. Classroom teachers volunteer to join the programme and there has so far been no shortage of teachers volunteering. This is despite the extra effort and time these teachers need to have in order for the project to work well. The classroom teachers (or CTs as we call them) have to spend extra time coordinating with their RTs and are also learning English themselves, which enables them to understand the classes and also to do the follow-up practice lessons that have been built into the programme so that the kids have enough English to get them from a CEF level of A0 to one approaching A2 (we hope) after three years of classes.The reaction of the kids has also been heart-warming – English classes, once the privilege of a few who could afford to pay for private classes are now being given to primary children all over the country, many of whom live in difficult circumstances. It is a real game-changer as far as helping to level the playing field and provide equal educational opportunities to all. 

 4. And anything that’s not worked so well? 

 We are learning all of the time and changing things to help improve the teaching and learning. One thing we have discovered is the importance of coordination between the CT (local primary classroom teacher) and the RT (remote teacher). In order to avoid transmission teaching (i.e. the “teacher on the telly” syndrome) the CT & RT need to work closely together, to talk about out what is going to happen in the remote class and follow up classes. Originally we were hoping that all teachers would be able to do this synchronously (e.g. using Skype) but because of time differences, busy schedules, and other reasons, most of this coordination is by necessity being done using email. For this to work well, there needs to be a flow of 4-5 emails between the two teachers. The majority of the problems we have experienced have been due to a lack of rapport between the CT & RT and because both have not been able to do the necessary lesson coordination. 

 5. I can imagine it changes the dynamic somewhat having a CT and a RT present in classes… does it have a significant impact on the pedagogy too? 

 Yes, it does, and I have been spending a lot of time recently observing classes and taking note of good and not so good practice. Some of what is important is the same with regular YL classes. For instance, the teachers need to establish routines, pace the classes and use a variety of activities, including games and songs. The kids can’t also just be sitting down watching the teacher on TV in the same way that you wouldn’t want a class of children sitting down through a regular YL class. There are some interesting avenues that we still need to explore and which some teachers are already exploring. For instance, and this came up in a discussion during a recent visit by Jeremy Harmer, the fact there is a TV lends itself to adding an aspect of performance to the lessons. The kids can write, rehearse and act out dialogues and other theatrical routines in front of the TV, for example. We have also been discussing the role and amount of L1, which varies enormously depending on the teachers involved. We are recording all of this and developing guidelines which will end up becoming recommendations for any educators involved in this unique type of language teaching be they on this project or any other one that may appear in the future. 

 6. It must have an effect on the learning opportunities too? E.g. if a learner wants to experiment with language or has a question, how can the RT be there ‘on the spot’ to support? Or is it possible for the RT to give feedback? How have the RTs taken to it? 

 Feedback is something each RT struggles with. I have seen RTs give on-the-spot pronunciation feedback and error correction during classes, so it is possible. More difficult is giving feedback on student writing. We have set up a system of virtual classes using a Learning Management System (LMS) that requires the children to upload their written work using their OLPC laptops and which means the RT can then correct. Other RTs have used blogs or wikis as a way of sharing student work and dealing with correcting writing. We are still working on this as we are not entirely happy with the solutions we have come up with so far. 

 7. How have the CTs taken to it? Are they taking part in any training? And what about the students? 

 Yes, in general, as the CTs are volunteers, they have shown an incredible amount of passion and commitment to the project and most of them have also started to learn English themselves. There are some primary teachers that have said they are not interested, but I’m happy to say they seem to be in a minority at least at the moment. Our challenge will come as we expand and incorporate what we hope will be all of the primary schools into the programme. The students, as I mentioned earlier have very much taken to it. There has been pressure from students and parents on teachers and schools to sign up and join in the project, which has been nice to see. 

Training has been built into the project very much as an integral part. Each of the CTs need to attend a 2 day orientation course in Montevideo before they can join the programme. We are also developing a 12 hour supplementary course for CTs that will act as an online reference guide for them after the OC. RTs have a 15 hour self-access online course they need to do before teaching and we recommend that the RTs observe at least two classes before teaching one themselves. Apart from that, the RTs are connected via the LMS and can share their concerns and ideas there via a forum. We also have plans to get some of them together in December in Montevideo for a training day to share good practice. We will record this and make the discussions available to the RTs who cannot attend. 

8. What next? Long term programme? Research must be part of it? Lots of countries must be looking on with interest! 

 We are developing a model of teaching that has a lot to offer other countries and organisations outside of Uruguay. Research has been built into the project, with regular surveys of RTs and CTs and a lot of data collection being undertaken internally. We have also just finished testing the children and will be repeating this test at the end of the year in order to determine what the impact of the English classes is having. We are giving the test to classes of children not involved in the programme too, so we have a control groups. We have also been approached by different educational bodies in different countries who are looking at what we are doing with a lot of interest and wondering if it could be something they too could implement. 

Digital Play & ELTons mentioned in The Guardian

 

Digital Play was mentioned among with the other award winners in this Guardian newspaper article.

"Computer games are long-established but a book exploring how these games can be used in language teaching, Digital Play, from Delta Publishing, caught the judges' attention in the Innovation in Teacher Resources category."

 

 I wrote the following article on Extensive Reading for the British Council's TeachingEnglish website:

Extensive reading

In general, students learning to read in English do not like reading and they rarely read. This is partly due to the way reading is approached in the language class.

The reading skill is most often taught by close study of short passages followed by analysis of language. 

• Extensive reading: An alternative approach

• Aims of extensive reading

• The characteristics of an extensive reading approach

• Motivation

• The teacher's role

• Conclusion

 

The value of this intensive reading procedure, with its focus on the teaching of discrete reading skills has been questioned by some, who claim that teaching students reading strategies does not necessarily make them better readers. It is widely believed that people become good readers through reading, and that learning how to read should mean a focus of attention on the meaning rather than the language of the text.

Extensive reading: An alternative approach
Another model for teaching reading exists. This is an 'extensive reading approach' and involves students reading long texts or large quantities for general understanding, with the intention of enjoying the texts.

Students are allowed to choose the books they read depending on their interests, and there is not always a follow-up discussion or work in class. In this way students are encouraged to read for pleasure and should become better readers.

Aims of extensive reading
The principal objective of undertaking an extensive reading approach is to get students reading in English and liking it. An increase in reading fluency should be another objective. Because of this, reading should be a pleasurable activity for the student, promoted as much as possible by the teacher.

The characteristics of an extensive reading approach

• Reading material
  Reading for pleasure requires a large selection of books be available for students to choose from at their level. Here, teachers can make good use of graded readers (books which have been written specifically for EFL/ESL students or which have been adapted from authentic texts).
  
  Setting up a class library is a good way to provide material for students, and because the books are kept in the actual classroom, there is a greater chance that they will be borrowed, and teachers also have more opportunities to refer to them during class.

• Student choice
  Students choose what they want to read based on their interests. If a student finds a book is too difficult or they don't enjoy it, they can change it for another one.

• Reading for pleasure and information
  Often students are put off reading when it is tied to class assignments. In an extensive reading programme, the students are reading principally for the content of the texts. Teachers can ask students about the books they are reading informally, and encourage occasional mini-presentations of the books or book reviews, but these should not seem like obligations to the students.

• Extensive reading out of class
  Teachers can do a lot to help students pursue extensive reading outside of the classroom. Having a classroom library and regularly encouraging students to borrow books to take home are some things which can help. If books are shelved in the classroom, students can also be given class time to browse and select books.

• Silent reading in class
  Extensive reading should not be incompatible with classroom practice and methodology. There are teachers who set aside a regular fifteen-minute period of silent reading in class. This silent reading has been said to help structural awareness develop, build vocabulary, and to promote confidence in the language.

• Language level
  The vocabulary and grammar of the books that students read should not pose a difficulty. The objective of an extensive reading programme is to encourage reading fluency, so students should not be stopping frequently because they do not understand a passage. However, the books should not be too easy as this may well demotivate students, who feel they are getting nothing out of the books.

• Use of dictionaries
  Reading becomes a chore if students think they have to stop and look up every word they do not understand in a dictionary. For this reason, dictionaries should be avoided. Instead of interrupting their flow, students should be encouraged to jot down the words they come across in a vocabulary notebook, and they can look them up after they have finished reading.

• Record keeping
  If the teacher takes an interest in and keeps record of what students are reading, then this can in itself encourage students. If a note is also made of which books the students like, then the teacher can also recommend other books to the students. The teacher should also be careful to explain the reasons behind the programme, and to highlight the benefits of extensive reading to them so that they know why they are doing it.

• The teacher as role model
  If the teacher is also seen to be a reader by the students, then they will be encouraged to read. The teacher can talk in class about books that she or he has been reading, and if they are knowledgeable about the books in the class library, having read them, then they can make genuine recommendations to students about what to read. The teacher can also read aloud to students, as a way of introducing students to different genres or individual books.

 

Motivation
One of the key factors to the success (or not) of an extensive reading programme is motivation. Capturing student interest is the key. If the materials available are interesting to the students, then they will be far more likely to want to read them. These books should also be at a level appropriate to their reading ability. As mentioned earlier, the texts should not be too difficult so students experience the frustration of not being able to understand the books.

Getting the extensive reading programme off to a good start is also vital. The aim is for an initial successful experience so that students discover they can read in English and that they enjoy it. This positive experience should stimulate them to read more, increasing motivation, enjoyment and a desire to read.

The teacher's role
The teacher encourages and assists the students with their reading, which the students undertake during and /or after class. Occasional summaries (oral or written) can help with this as they show both that the students are reading and also that they understand what their books are about. The activities can also help students improve their writing or speaking ability. Another activity teachers can become involved in is individual counselling - this gives the teacher an opportunity to ask students about their reading experiences and can be done by the teacher while the rest of the class are silent reading. Above all, however, extensive reading should be a student-centred and a student-managed activity.

Conclusion
Day & Bamford (1998) highlight the benefits that have been gained by the undertaking of extensive reading programmes. These include gains in reading and writing proficiency, oral skills and vocabulary, an increase in motivation and positive affect.

Setting up an extensive reading programme should not only lead your students to improve their reading proficiency and other language skills, but will hopefully enable them to take pleasure in reading for its own sake.

Further reading
Susser B & TN Robb (1990) 'EFL Extensive Reading Instruction: Research and Procedure' JALT Journal Vol No.2 http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/sussrobb.html
Day RR & J Bamford (1998) 'Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom' Cambridge:CUP
Barnett, M.A. (1988). Reading through context: How real and perceived strategy use affects L2 comprehension. The Modern language Journal, 72, 150-162.

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Graham Stanley, British Council, Barcelona 

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