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[Miranda Hamilton]

00:00:03

Let's get started, everybody. All right, so we're going to be together for the next 45 minutes or so on the menu. So we're going to start by exploring briefly what learner engagement means and then we'll move on to look at 3 broad strategies that you can use to engage your learners. In the next section, we will briefly explore teacher workload and the impact that that can have on your well-being. And that will help us transition into the third and final section of the session in which we'll be looking at some strategies and and advice for reducing your teacher workload. So I hope that sounds good and let's get started. I'd like to hand over to you and ask you a question. Now, please can we launch our first poll? That's wonderful.
 

00:01:00

And please answer this question in the poll, not in the chat box. So I'd like you to tell us how do you feel about using tech tools and platforms with learners? So is it #1 I avoid them, it's low tech teaching for me #2 I use them now and then #3 I use them regularly or #4 I couldn't teach without them. You know, I, I, you know, they're part of my real part of my teaching repertoire. I'm going to give you just 20 seconds more to respond to that poll. OK, lovely. Maybe 5 seconds more. Let's do a countdown 4321. OK, lovely. I can see a few threes in the chat box. OK. And I'm also going to ask if we can close the poll and show the results.
 

00:02:06

OK, let's have a look. OK All right, So that doesn't surprise me too much. So we have most of you kind of in the middle section that you use them now and then or regularly. OK, wonderful. A few of you say they're really important. You're teaching repertoire, repertoire and a few of you avoid them. So I'd say today the strategies that we're going to be looking at are mainly digital strategies. So using digital tools and platforms or whether if you are a low tech teacher or perhaps in your context you're, you don't, you know, you're not able to use technology. Don't worry too much because some of the advice will apply also to the low tech classroom, and I will be providing some low tech or no tech options. All right, OK, so let's move on now to another question. So I'd like to ask you if we can please launch the poll once again.
 

00:03:00

And if you can, please everybody answer using the poll function. What's your biggest barrier to student engagement? So what gets in the way of your engaging your students? So is it #1 unresponsive, quiet students, is it maybe #2 so no time to plan due to marking or admin? Is it #3 that you need fresh or practical ideas? Or perhaps it's something else? If it is something else, can you please tell us in the chat box? All right, Georgie, you say distractions. OK, lovely. Is that digital distractions, Georgie, or something else? Hello from Spain, Rosa, Hello. Smartphones. OK, interesting. All right, all right, and I'm going to give you 15 seconds more to respond to that poll. Lovely 54321 lovely.
 

00:04:09

And if we can go ahead and publish the poll. OK, interesting. All right, so we've got quite a big range here. So I can see that the the first one is needing fresh practical ideas. OK. So if you selected that one, that's good to know because I think you're in the right place. Today. We'll be looking through a number of different strategies for engaging your learners. So we'll give you some some some some some specific tools and digital strategies. We will also be looking at some of the underlying psychology behind learner engagement and the idea is there is to help you be able to perhaps in the future be a bit more selective and creative with coming up with your own digital strategies if you kind of know or aware of of the rationale. All right, OK, wonderful. And many of you said unresponsive, quiet students.
 

00:05:01

So I'd say today quite a few of the activities are designed to give everybody to to to get everybody in your classroom involved and active in the learning process and also to give everybody, even the Shire students, more of a voice. OK All right, so let's get started. Now we're going to be talking about strategies for engaging your learners. And in terms of learner engagement, I believe that we're all on the same page. You know, we'd probably say that learner engagement, when we're talking about learner engagement, we're talking about learners who are involved and participate in learning activities. We are talking about learners that probably enjoy learning, that, you know, work on tasks, even tasks that might be challenging. And in the young learner classroom, it might be learners that have their hand up a lot of the time. So we know what learner engagement looks like, but what is the secret to keeping all of our learners engaged?
 

00:06:02

Well, Julie Duckson, in her book Designed for How People Learn, she talks about this idea of engaging the elephant. Now, before I tell you what that means, I would like you to tell me in the chat box what is the connection between elephants and learning? Yeah, have a go at guessing that. I'm going to give you about 30 seconds to do that. All right, Jimenez answered very quickly and you said memory. OK All right, let's see if you agree. OK, Elena has says huge bulk. OK, interesting. Elena, tell us a bit more about that one. What do you mean by huge bulk? OK, it's their memory. Elephant never forgets. So it's true we have like that, that that proverb, don't we, that elephants never forget. OK, but it could be memory, but it's not.
 

00:07:03

It's something a little bit different. So let's have a look. So Julie Dukson, when she talks about engaging the memory, the memory engaging the elephant, she talks about this ideal. She uses the analogy of a learner having these two opposing forces in their brain. So on the one side, she talks about the elephant having the rider. And the rider is a bit like the studious, well behaved part of the learner brain. Yeah, maybe the one that has a bit more willpower. And then the elephant is a bit more like the automatic visceral side of the brain that wants to have fun and enjoy the now. And let me talk about how these two opposing source forces in the brain can manifest themselves. Well, I remember when I was at university, some of the lectures I used to attend were not delivered in a particularly interesting way, right?
 

00:08:02

So I would, you know, I was quite a good student. I would try to concentrate, try to make notes and listen. And I'd be able to do that even though the lecture wasn't very engaging for about 30 minutes. But eventually my willpower wasn't strong enough to keep me with the lecture, and I'd start daydreaming, thinking about something else, or maybe writing notes to my friend sitting next to me. And our learners will be the same in that they will be able to for some time. Even the most conscientious, the most conscientious learners will be able to kind of drag themselves through an unengaging learning experience or activity. But it will come to a point where the elephant will take over and they won't be able to focus so well and be engaged in the task. So that's a bit of a challenge. I think these two opposing sources. And the solution here is that we need to try to engage the elephant. And when I talk about engaging the elephant, I'm not saying at all that our lessons need to be all fun and games.
 

00:09:06

They don't now they can have games in them. There should definitely be moments of fun, but they also need to be full of activities that have an appropriate level of challenge, are intrinsically interesting, and are relevant and meaningful for our learners. And the strategies I'm going to present you to you with today do exactly that. So let's have a look at the first strategy, appeal to our learners, curiosity. Now think back to about two minutes ago when rather than telling you about the elephants, I asked you to guess first. So I was trying to engage, you know, get you interested, building a bit of mystery or intrigue into that moment of the lesson rather just than just telling you. So that was really easy for me to do just with a question that I threw out there. And we want to be building in, you know, we want to be appealing to our learners curiosity by building in moments of surprise or mystery.
 

00:10:07

Because surprise, mystery and intrigue, they break the pattern that our that our brain might be expecting. And as a result, our brain sits up and it pays attention and we're more able to learn when we're paying attention. But it's not just about attention in the moment. If we are, if something that surprises us, it actually is more likely to stick in our long term memory. So something that surprises us will actually stay there in our brains and it helps learning to stick. So there are quite a few ways we can build in surprise. I've showed you one already. Let's have a look at another strategy. So let's imagine this is my course book. I'm using Macmillan Education Everywhere with this course book. And I'll show you how I might engage my learners in a reading activity. So let's head over there. All right.
 

00:11:01

Are you ready for a demo? In this demo, I would like you to be my B2 learners. OK. Are you happy to do that? Everybody? For the next minute, put your, your, your learner hat on, please. Thank you, Sheila, Elena and everybody. Amazing. OK. All right. Yeah. Thank you, Deepa. OK, wonderful. All right, Hello, everybody. Now take a look at the screen. I have a picture there that relates to the topic that we're looking at today. Please, can you guess what the picture is? So guess what the image is as I reveal it. You can. An egg. All right, good. I like your guesses already. Yeah, a brain, maybe. All right, I'm going to
keep moving down. OK, Super. There's lots of guesses, and I love that they're all so different. All right. OK, Super. So you're saying a mug? A cup? Yeah. OK, great.
 

00:12:05

Some of us are getting closer, right. It is a type of bowl. Some of you might have seen it. Yeah. And the idea it is a type of bowl. So it's called a a Kinsugi bowl. I'm going to so zoom out and let's have a little bit look. So this a Kinsugi bowl. If you can tell us what that is. Lovely. Thank you, Mira. So it's a Japanese bowl and we can see something's happened. It's broken and it's been filled in with gold. So we have these two images, the Kinsugi Bowl and the Wabi Sabi Bowl, and we have the title of the text. If you were my real learners, what I would do then is give you a few minutes and ask you to write a sentence or two predicting what the text is going to talk about. And then that prediction task would become the reading task in which I'd say, OK, take two minutes, read the text quickly and check your predictions.
 

00:13:08

So here what we've done using almost no prep, We've exploited our course book image to engage our students in this reading topic. Let's move on and go back to our presentation. And I'm going to look at just a few a few little a few more ideas for engaging our for using appealing to our learners curiosity in our lessons. So the first one is using AI. So here you'd put you'd use an AI, for example, tat GPT or mid journey, and you'd put a prompt into the AI asking it, asking it to generate an image of something that relates to the topic. Right. So let's imagine you're get going to give a lesson on the the impact of climate change on animal species. So you'd write that into ChatGPT or mid journey it would generate an image for you.
 

00:14:03

Bring that to class, show it to your learners and ask them to guess what the prompt was. Another idea, and this work one works really well with what with young learners, is to bring in an object into the lesson. So let's imagine in my lesson, my learners are going to be writing, working with a postcard and writing a postcard. So I'm going to bring a postcard into my lesson. I put it in my back pocket and I say to my learners, I want you to ask yes or no questions to guess what this object is. And 3rd and final idea. And this one is really, really versatile and applicable basically to any receptive skills task. Give our students the questions that that we're going to ask them or get or get them to answer when they listen to a text or read a text. But first give them time to read the questions and predict what they're going to read. This will generate intrigue in the, the, the topic and it will also mean that they've applied, you know, prediction or they've activate activated their schematic knowledge of the topic.
 

00:15:13

And this also means that when they come to read or listen, they'll be more effective in the process. So that was the end of our first strategy. Let's move on to strategy 2. And here we're talking about gamification and gaming psychology. And this is all about not necessarily using fully, you know, full blown games in your lesson, but we can use, you know, features that we take from games or we can frame our learning activities in a game like manner. And this idea comes from Mercer and Dawnier.
And they talk about how in gaming, which we know, you know, gaming is highly addictive and engaging. And we not, you know, not just for young learners, but for people of all ages.
 

00:16:03

And in gaming, you are the hero and the agent in your destiny. And so using games or game like elements in the classroom really makes you know, gives the student kind of a centre of attention. They are at the centre of the learning activity. They are active participants in the learning process. And games are also great for formative assessment. So for example, let's imagine you've given a language lesson and at the end you can do a little game activity to test to test how much learners have learned. Yes, you can kind of evaluate maybe what what you might need to return to or reteach or review in the next lesson. And it is also great for language review activities. So with that in mind, I want to show you a mobile, you know, this is kind of pure gamification, I would say. So this is from me, Macmillan Education Everywhere. Now, just in case you're not familiar with me, it's a digital learning platform that you can use if you, if you have, if you use Macmillan textbooks.
 

00:17:13

So you basically activate Macmillan Education Everywhere using a code that comes with your physical course book and it comes with loads of resources with that digital course book. And one of them is the mobile practise challenge, which uses a number of game like elements. I'm going to click play and I'd like you to see as you watch the first bit of the video, what gamification elements can you spot? Yeah. All right, ready to go. All right, let's go.
 

00:18:06

Thank you, Angela. OK, so we've got timing and score. Absolutely. OK, great, great timer, great super. So I'm going to kind of talk over the rest of the videos. You've correctly identified that we've got this 62nd countdown down timer. So that gives our learners the sense of immediacy and action and focus and on the game. We also have this idea of the permission to fail. So you see here in the top right, we've got three hearts. They are the lives. So it encourages students to have a go, work quickly, take risks because it's OK to make mistakes. Moving on, we've got differentiated rewards. So we saw near the beginning that we're going for the this gold medal. Now our student gets in the end 7 out of 10. So it's not bad. So they get this the the bronze medal there. Also.
 

00:19:02

Let me go back so you can see. Yeah. So they get the bronze medal there. So they still get their rush of dopamine, their reward. And then they've got the replay opportunity so they can hit try again, and this time they can try to beat their previous score. So here what we're doing is we're turning, you know, a possibly dull language review activity into an engaging game that our students will actually want to repeat. If our students repeat this game to, you know, score better and you know, and complete the challenge and get their their gold trophy, that means more language exposure. And we know more exposure more likely for the language to stick. So if you don't have me, don't worry at all because I'm going to show you a couple more features that use game like elements. So let's have a look, OK and so
you may be one of the teachers at the beginning that said that you you know, you prefer low tech options.
 

00:20:04

SO1 low tech option for gamification is flickers. Now you may have seen this before. You may have used it. Now the way it works is. Students are given a poll question or a set of questions on the board. They respond to the the poll by by showing a card that represents their answer. And then the teacher using just that a mobile device will just go around and they will scan the students and that will give them the results of the of the quiz or the poll. So that's a really great option for the low tech classroom. Something I like, a tool I really like for vocabulary review and retrieval is Quizlet. So this is something you may have used yourself as a learner. I definitely have absolutely loads. And so you've got Quizlet, which is really great for solo language review, and you've got Quizlet Live, which is a classroom friendly version which encourages students to answer the quiz questions.
 

00:21:05

And there's plenty of opportunities there for real time collaboration and negotiation. So two really great options. Now to wrap up this section on games and gamification. I wanted just to explore a couple of elements or features from gaming psychology. So those are challenge and urgency. I want to do a demo. And so in this activity, would you be happy to play the role of my B1 plus learners or B1 plus B2 minus? Tell me if you're happy to do that in the chat box. Thank you, Sheila, Christina and everybody. OK, fabulous. All right, all right, so let's get started then. So this is a language review activity. Now when you're taking part in the demo, everybody, I'd also like you to think about how am I using challenge and urgency here?
 

00:22:02

All right, let's go right now. This activity is Spot the imposter. I will show you 4 sentences that are similar grammatically. You need to tell me which one sentence is different. That is the imposter. Are you ready to go now? Also, you only have 30 seconds to do this and you need to write your answers in the chat box. Let's go. Music. Fantastic. And apologies, I was really mean. There wasn't I I didn't show you the sentence to sentences right till the end. Please forgive me for that horrible technical problem and thank you for being able to answer that question in about two seconds. Everybody say thank you. So normally I would not be that mean to to my students, would I? I'd start the timer and I would show them the sentences and give them 30 seconds to do that. So please forgive me for that mistakes. All right. And everybody, I think 99% of you have correctly identified that number 3 was the imposter.
 

00:24:02

That was the odd one out because that one, the others talk about the past and that one talks about, you know, it's a statement in the present. So in that activity, I want you to tell me now in the chat box, how did we use challenge and how did we use urgency? Yeah, tell me in the chat box. I'll give you minute a minute to do that. Great. OK. Thank you. That's lovely. So you were given a sense of many of you saying you were given a sense of urgency from the music and the time limits. Great. Super. And the challenge was, you know, so getting the right answer. But did you notice there was something a little
bit. So did you notice how that activity was presented as a bit like a, you know, a problem solving activity?
 

00:25:08

So rather than, you know, in terms of the delivery, I set it up as a as a challenge in itself, sort of a bit like a game like activity. Also, the level of challenge was appropriate for for, you know, B1 plus learners. And you're absolutely right that the timer gave us a sense of urgency. And why is using a timer effective? Well, research shows that students that are that are given a tight but achievable timeline are more likely to work faster and therefore learn more. And they'll be razor focused on the task itself. And you might be thinking, well, you know, I wouldn't be able to use a timer much in my classroom because I, you know, in my classroom we do, you know, we do longer tasks with our learners, right? It wouldn't really work. But what you can do is you can break that longer task into smaller chunks and with those chunks, give students a time limit.
 

00:26:07

And I would say, of course, we want to mix it up. There might be some tasks that you want students to work on a bit more quickly, and there might be other task like like let's say reflection tasks where you want them to really take their time a little bit more. But these mechanics can really, really help kind of pepping up the pace and giving your students a sense sense of energy in your lesson. All right, so let's move on and to have a look at our third and final engagement strategy, which is rethinking feedback with the replay button. Now, research shows that feedback is one of the most important elements that contributes to success in the language classroom. And we know that for feedback to be most effective, we need to have our learners actually engaging with the feedback. So here when we rethink feedback with the replay button, we're talking about giving learners a go, a task or a question, and then giving them the opportunity to retry that based on teacher feedback or teacher support.
 

00: 27:17

And this idea again, is from Dawnier and Mercer. And it really works because as I said before, it means learners rather than kind of passively receive that feedback. You know, like imagine we, you know, we mark some of our students work, we put red pen all over it, we show it to them and they might just say, oh, OK, all right. And they put it in their bag. So instead of doing that, we're getting them to engage with our feedback and really engage and think about how they can use it to improve. And doing it this way, making it clear that they will have a replay opportunity, means that we create a culture in which we're more tolerant of errors. And in that way, students will be more likely to take risks and try out new language.
 

00:28:05

Now a frame, a framework that I really like and the works, you know, that kind of really speaks to this use of the replay button is test, teach, test. Now this works really well, I think particularly for language practise lessons or skills or or productive skills lessons. And it goes like this. So we give our learners a test, which could be a controlled activity or perhaps a task. So let's say we say to our learners, tell your partner about a journey that you went on that went wrong. So they have a go at that task. And while
they're doing that, as a teacher, we're going to be listening in and making notes on their language. Then in the next stage, we're going to deliver a teach stage where perhaps we correct some of their language, perhaps we give them some phrases to help their stories be a bit better, and then we give our learners an opportunity to do that task again, and this time benefiting from the feedback. So that's one way to approach using that replay button.
 

00:29:07

Let's have a look at how we could do this when teaching receptive skills. So I'm going to show you how I might use the replay button delivering feedback on this task, which is from Skilful 3rd edition. So if you want to please get into the role of being my or get into the mindset of the of AB1 learner. All right, so let's go ahead and head back to this page. OK, so let's imagine that in my lesson I've got my learners to watch. They've just done a task in which they've watched a video with a lady, a Lebanese lady, talking about traditional craft techniques. And my learners have had a go at doing this listening task where they have to select the right answer. So I've come to the feedback stage now, I'm delivering feedback and my learners are not so sure on the answer.
 

00: 30:11

So something I can do is say, OK, all right, so you think it's this one, Let's see if let's replay it and see if you can confirm or perhaps change your answer. So let's go over here. We're going to replay just that section. Acta said until he was 64 years old when he died and my late father inherited it from them. He practised it all his life and developed the craft. OK, So then yeah, I might, I might see what my learners think. Yeah, but they might still need a bit more support. So I can then say, all right, let's see if this time, because it did go a little bit fast, let's see if this time we can go a little bit more slowly to give you a bit more support. So we're going to go back. OK. And let's listen again and check this answer.
 

00:31:06

He practised it until he was 64 years old when he died and my late father inherited it from them. He practised it all his life and developed the craft. So at this stage my learners might be able to tell me what the correct answer it is. And if you were listening you might have noticed it was this one. But what it can do is go a little bit further with this if I need to, so I can, for example, enable the captions. Yeah. To give up my learners a bit more support, He created new types of stitches and used new varieties of fabric. So in this way, we're using the replay button to give literally quite, you know, several replays to help to support students in noticing the, you know, decoding that language and getting the correct answer. And here we're moving away from this idea of just testing our students. Yeah, where we get them to listen and then give them the answer. And we're moving more towards this idea of actually developing the skill of listening.
 

00:32:08

All right, so let's move back to the presentation. And I would like to now wrap up this first section of the talk. So in this section, we focused on three strategies for engaging your learners. Number one, appealing to their curiosity #2 using gamification and gaming psychology and #3 in rethinking that feedback using the replay button. Now, before we move on, just a question I want you to perhaps think
about. So how can you do all of this and engage your learners without increasing your workload? Yeah. So it could be that. So one thing is that the strategies we've looked at, overall, they're quite low preparation. Yeah. But there might be other things you can do to, you know, to keep your workload low. We might also want to think about why, you know, why is it so important for us to try and keep our workload low?
 

00:33:12

Yeah, why? Why are we talking about that? Well, I want to show you ask, pose a couple of questions to to you before we kind of to to contextualise why we might want to really work on giving you strategies to keep your workload under control. So I want you to think about, and this could be about yourself or for, you know, yourself and colleagues that you know, and I want you to think about what percentage do you think the average teacher's time is spent on a teaching versus B non teaching tasks? So if you want think about your working week or the working week of your colleagues and think about what that split might be, you know, would it be, for example, you know, 5050 or something else? I'm going to give you 30 seconds to think about that and put your answers into the chat box.
 

00:34:08

OK, All right. So Elena, Elena, you're saying 40% teaching. That is really interesting. Just 40%. OK, OK, Susanna's saying a bit more teaching. That's wonderful. Susanna, if you do 80% teaching, I'm extremely jealous of you. That sounds like a wonderful setup. OK Marley says 2080. OK, interesting. So kind of really just 1% of the time teaching. OK, not once I'm, I'm sorry, one 1/5 of the time teaching, apologies. OK, All right, 5050. OK, All right. Would you like to see the, the global results some kind of a bit more information on this? So let's have a look what the data says. OK, so the OEOECD Tallis Survey 2024, which is the largest global survey of teachers based on teachers from all over the world in a range of education systems and a teaching hour of 23 hours per week revealed.
 

00:35:18

And this is teacher. This is data based on what teachers told the researchers. Just 43% of the average teachers week was spent teaching and that means 50% of their week was dedicated to non teaching activities. OK, so some of you kind of said about that, right? Some of you said, so 40 or 50% being dedicated to teaching and you might be thinking, OK, well what's the problem with that? I think it is quite, it is possibly quite problematic because if you do the maths, we're looking at a teacher teaching for 23 hours a week. If that only accounts for 43% of their working week, it means that the average teachers working week will be 54 hours.
 

00:36:08

And if you think about the amount of energy and care that that you are giving to your students, that is absolutely exhausting as a, you know, number of teaching hours. And we think if we think even more about that and you read, I'm going to give you the, the, the link to the survey. The survey talks more about how there is there is a direct link between a high number of non teaching hours and a drop in teacher well-being. So I'm going to say that again, basically in a nutshell, the higher the non teaching hours, the bigger the drop in teacher well-being. And I think that is quite problematic because teacher
well-being has a massive impact not only on us and how we feel about ourselves, but also on our students. And you may have read or you may have been lucky enough to see Sarah Mercer talk. She's a researcher and writer that has investigated the topic of teacher well-being.
 

00:37:12

And she's noted that teachers with a with good well-being are able to teach more effectively and more creatively, and their students actually manage to be more successful. So teacher well-being is really important for us, but also for our students. So we're not able, I'm not able to take away some, you know, some, you know, any of the responsibilities that you have. But we can use some tips and tricks and hacks to make our working week more manageable. So let's have a look at some of those now. So strategy. So 3 strategies for reducing teacher workload. So strategy one now, this is all about maximising your digital learning platform.
 

00:38:05

Now, the learning platform that I use that I'm more familiar with is Macmillan Education Everywhere. So I'm going to show you what this platform can do. And some of the features that I've investigated and have found are the best ones for automating my teaching tasks and offloading some of the things that I do. And so let's have a look. So here I'm going to show you play this video just to show you how I can set up a homework task for a specific group of learners using this course book. Super. OK, so I select the students book and the units. I select the homework I want them to do. I know that's quite a lot of homework. It's going to be over for for over the Easter holidays.
 

00:39:04

I can review the homework to make sure it's aligned with my learning goals. Now, if I want to, if I have a mixed ability group, I can assign that homework task to some students and a different homework task to others. In this case, I'm going to assign the same tasks to all of the students. And then I just put in the release date and the hand in date. If we go forwards. Yeah, we can see. I'm just going to Fast forward this super. This is an active homework, so my students will get a notification on their dashboard saying they've got homework to do. And here at a glance I can see if they started it or if it's in progress, etcetera. Something else that is really, really great is I can activate automated marking. So that means the platform will mark all all of those homework tasks for all of those students without me needing to do it. I can then also go into the progress area.
 

00:40:08

I can have a look at the results of my students, you know, together as a class. I can also click in and have a look at in each individual student's progress. So I can have a look at this homework task. I can see how long each student spent on it. I can see perhaps the language areas that they might have struggled with. I can see where I might need to reteach or review some of that content. And if I want, I can also add a personalised note for each student that goes along, you know, that goes site in hand with the automated marking. So those are the features of the, you know that my digital platform that help help me work a bit more effectively in my job. If you have me and you don't yet use those features yet, definitely do or make your life a lot easier. If you have another digital platform, do take the time to
investigate what it can do for you and how it can make your life easier. I'm going to move on to strategy #2 now let's have a look.
 

00:41:13

Now my second strategy is less is more. And this one is all about lesson planning. Now this idea is about bringing fewer materials to class to get your learners doing more. When I worked, I started thinking about this a lot when I worked in Mexico City and I was working as with a Celta tutor and one of the tutors I worked with, she used to say to our, she used to, you know, we used to watch how our candidate, our teaching practise teachers would create lots of handouts and materials for classes and they'd bring them in and their students would spend a lot of the class with their heads down doing these gap fills, etcetera. And they really wouldn't actually get much time to really manipulate the language to get their mouths around the language or to do much work with the language.
 

00:42:03

And as a result, you know, they were kind of a little bit passive in the learning process. And my teach and my teacher training colleague used to say, be careful about this because sometimes the more you give your students, the less they do. And I think it's true because if we are bringing in less content to our students in less content the class and getting our students actually doing more, we can get them to dedicate more time to productive skills development. So more time to for speaking, for writing, to do project work and to really use the language in meaningful contexts. And a couple of practical ways that we can do this. So rather than bringing in a handout with the content, we can get our students to create the content. So to give you an example of this, when I, I used to, when I took on a new group of young learners, I used to come in with a handout with all of the class rules.
 

00:43:08

And I get them to look at it & it like a contract. But what I did is I kind of changed that. And instead I'd go into class and I'd say, OK, working groups and I want you guys to come up with the eight class rules. And so the students would work together. They would be speaking, they would be writing and they would be using the language, you know, so using this language of, of modality, you know, modal verbs for obligation. So that they'd be doing way more. Another tip, another thing to think about is trying to minimise the gap fill now and by by by gap fill, I'm talking about like, you know, the, the fill in the blank fill in the blank activity. Now, I think gap built gap fills definitely have their place in the language classroom, right? They are useful for controlled practise activities, but I think we have a tendency to overuse them and they're not always the most challenging activities.
 

00:44:06

So rather than giving our students a gap fill, yeah to to, you know, to write the target language into, could we instead maybe give our learners the words and get them to write sentences about themselves or get them to write a story? So that way they'd be, you know, really we'd be really stretching them and engaging them and challenging them more. So that's the end of the second strategy. Now my third and final strategy is using time management techniques. So here we're we're basically talking about using techniques to help you do planning and admin work, you know, you know, to a good level of quality. So don't compromise on the quality, but do it in less time. And this all, I became interested in this area because I've always had quite bad time management skills. Yeah. So I'd always find myself working till really late.
 

00:45:03

I have a bit of a perfectionist tendency, which didn't do me any favours. And when I was looking for something to create for My Portfolio a few years ago, I thought, wow, I'll do a course on time management. So I researched and I wrote and I developed a course on time management. It, it was really helpful for me because I, I use the strategies and they've really changed my life. Now the two strategies I want to talk about today are really simple ones, time blocking and task batching. Now if that sounds new to you, don't worry because I will exemplify this. I want to tell you about a friend of mine. OK, so he started using these techniques. So my friend is called Cedehill. He's a university professor. Now, just for transparency, he is a real person, but that not is not a picture of him. I wanted to protect his identity, but he is a real person. And now Cedehill, I went to stay with him a few years ago.
 

00:46:07

He was working from home and he had some time management problems. I want you to tell me in the chat box what do you think was said? Said hew's biggest time management problem. Yeah. I'll give you a minute or 40 seconds to answer that. I love that Helena said TTT. Do you mean teacher talking time? It wasn't. I love that guess, but it wasn't that. No. OK. All right, procrastination of a fashion. I think procrastination came into it a little bit. Yeah, I'd see her. That's a good guess. Yeah. OK. Carolina, he did work too much. That's right. That is true. Priorities, perhaps.
 

00:47:07

OK, Distracting. Yeah. OK. Racks, racks. Racks, racks. Satape. That is absolutely right. The word distractions there. Yeah. OK. All right, so let's have a look. I'm going to put you out of your misery. Let me just. So there were quite a few problems he had with time management. So I noticed that he would be working and he'd get distracted a lot. So he might start a task, get bored or distracted in the middle, start doing another task. He might receive a text message and get distracted by that. And if I were to have mapped his working week and sketched it out on a calendar, it would look something like this. Yeah. So take a look. So we can see, you know, that in any one day, you know, there's a real mixture of activities going on. You know, each one is kind of started and stopped. There's a fair bit of task flitting throughout the day.
 

00:48:05

And you can see there's kind of these frequent little breaks where he's stopping to check social media, etcetera. And his working day was really long, so it was almost 12 hours. Yeah, which is quite problematic. So we spoke about what he could do to work more efficiently, to free up more time in his evenings, for him to have more energy for his students and have more energy, you know, to for himself as well. So what we did is he had a look at his calendar, he tried a couple of techniques and he was able to do this. So this is his redesigned working week. He has used time blocking, which means
scheduling blocks of time for specific tasks. So, for example, he's scheduled all of his research to take place in the morning in specific blocks. He's also used task task batching, and that means grouping similar tasks together.
 

00:49:06

So for example, he's got these dedicated blocks of time in the afternoon for admin and marking. So he will focus on doing all of that and getting into the flow with a specific admin task and working on it, you know, focusing just on that. And in doing this, he was able to shorten his working day. I think that's about 88 hours or 9 hours. So it's 88 working hours with one hour for lunch. Yeah. And some breaks. Yeah. So that's pretty good. And so he eliminated this multitasking idea. He was also able to because he gave himself kind of a finite block of time to work on a task that helped him focus on the task. We also spoke about getting his phone and putting it in a different room so he wasn't constantly distracted, which was also quite useful. And also giving himself the psychological time limit was really useful for helping him control his own perfectionism.
 

00:50:11

Yeah. So, you know, he'd get, he'd say, I need to do all of my marking of my class in this 2 1/2 hour slot. And it will, you know, I'll do it and it will be good enough. And I'll, I'll stop by 4:00. And I'd say overall, like a key thing that we're looking at here is he was able to do focused mono tasking, that being focusing on one thing at once with no distractions. So do definitely try out that strategy. I do loads of things like this, but I would say time blocking and task batching are probably the things that have had the biggest impact on my life and my on my working day. So definitely try them out. And that brings this section to a close. So here we've looked at how you can maximise your digital platform and get it get it to automate some of your tasks. We've looked at how we can use a less is more approach to lesson planning.
 

00:51:09

And we've wrapped up by looking at time management strategies that will free up more time and energy for you. And I'm going to give you a moment to have a look at those six strategies there that we've seen across the session. And in the chat box, I'd like you to tell us which strategies or ideas you'd like to try out most. And I'm going to give you sort of 45 seconds for that. Lovely. That's great. I'm very happy to see quite a range of different strategies coming up in the chat box. Wonderful. So feedback, time management, less is more, less is more curiosity.
 

00:52:04

Great. OK, I'm happy to see that. Kind of it looks like there was something for everybody here. Lovely. Thank you. I'm so happy to see that time management was quite useful for quite a few of you. Definitely do try out those strategies. Super great. Maybe just 10 seconds more to tell us what was useful. Great, fantastic, everybody. Just five more. Thank you too, Carolina. Thank you. All right, wonderful. Well, we're going to bring the session to a close, everybody. I hope it was useful. And even if you take away just one or two things from the session, I'll be really happy about that.
 

00:53:01

We will be sending out a pack with the with the webinar contents. You will you'll be able to go ahead and redo a bit of background reading if you're interested. And thank you very much for being such a fabulous and participative and engaged audience.