lost in translation

The hurdles of 1:1, LMS and school change

2012-02-05T12:18:00.000+02:00

It has been a very interesting and hectic school year so far. In September, all 130 first-graders got their brand-new minilaptops. School administration proudly named this the beginning of the BIG LEAP. At the same time, our school acquired a LMS to help teachers take the leap in practice. Having been actively involved in social media, and various online platforms for some time, I was asked to guide teachers in the use of the new platform, together with our ICT teacher, who would be the technical expert. After a lot of initial doubts concerning my personal leap outside the language teacher's "box", I decided to jump at the chance of new challenges.

In my role as a teacher tutor, I soon realized that my colleagues could roughly be divided into three groups: 1) those who already had some experience in integrating technology in their classes, and thus had specific expectations of what a LMS should offer 2) those who were ready to start experimenting with new technologies but had now clear idea of what it might be 3) the ostriches who had their heads safely hidden in the sand, and maintained that as long as students learned the facts listed in the curriculum in the old way, no technology would be needed in their classrooms. They also added that as no computers would be used in the national final exams, for the foreseeable future anyway, using them in class would be a waste of time and effort.

Unfortunately, the adopted LMS turned out to be a disappointing flop. It didn't meet the expectations of group 1, among other things because it wasn't customisable in any way. Group 2 found it too intimidating to use, and needed frequent step-by-step instructions, which in the end were too frustratingly time-consuming. As for group 3, I think they consider technology too much as a tool for TEACHING, and fail to see its potential as a powerful LEARNING tool for the students.

Personally, I may have already been biased at the start, with my experience of user-friendly and colourful social media tools. All I can say, I wasn't impressed at all by what the platform had to offer. However, I do believe that to make things move forward on the school level, a LMS of some sort might be beneficial as a starting point, in particular for teachers who, as ICT users, are inexperienced but willing to learn. But this platform needs to be user-friendly enough to help things develop with ease. If this is not the case, too much time is wasted in learning the complicated operating system, or teachers will simply give up even trying. Another problem with many LMSs is that they often guide teachers too much to just repeat the traditional methods in a digital format - ie. uploading files online instead of giving them on paper. True, it will save paper, but this is hardly the main point! Lisa Lane aptly calls this "the LMS pedagogy trap".

An instructor seeking an easy way to post word documents, assignments through a digital "dropbox", and run a traditional threaded discussion board will tend to show great satisfaction in using a LMS.

The LMS also needs to be flexible enough to allow innovative teachers to customise it and add other applications to it, when needed. These teachers are typically already quite far in their own pedagogical change into a more student-centred, 21st-century approach, and then start finding suitable technological tools to support and enhance this change.

I look forward to more colleagues finding the courage and enthusiasm to experiment with some ICT tools, and getting interested in learning more. This would hopefully give them insights into what pedagogical changes this might entail in their old classroom practices. I don't think any singular platform will be perfect and ideal for all different users. We need to learn to live with the multitude of choices, as well as with the fast pace of change when it comes to digital tools. I've heard and read countless times that "good teaching is good teaching, whether you use technology or not". I tend to disagree. I would say IT IS to do with technology in that schools cannot keep pretending that we can carry on as before, oblivious to what is happening all around. If we idly wait for the final exam procedures to get digitalised before adopting technology in our classrooms, we will be failing several generations of young people, who will enter work markets ill-prepared for what is expected of them there. There is a lot of good in our country's largely de-centralised school system, with its wide teacher autonomy. One of its great obstacles, however, is the difficulty to accomplish any fundamental, large-scale change.

Asian and European educators meet in Dundalk, Ireland

2011-11-16T17:05:00.001+02:00

Back from the 10th AEC-NET (Asia-Europe Classroom Net) conference, my mind is buzzing with ideas. After many years of coordinating AEC-NET projects, and preparing project presentations for the conference, this time round I took the backseat, to be able to observe and reflect. The Singapore admin team, together with the Irish conference hosts, had put together a hectic 5 days of lectures, workshops, presentations, and project group meetings, under the title 'Apps in Asian and European Classrooms! Unleashing Educational Creativity'.

Schools in most participating countries have definitely moved on. There is serious talk about taking action, and not just marvelling at philosophical ideas somewhere in a distant 'cloud', as used to be the case a few years ago. Many schools are technologically quite well equipped - some have even moved into the 1:1 laptop or iPad era, like my own. The hardware is there but now the question is how best to utilize it to enhance learning, and engage our 21st-century students.

The conference scene has changed a lot, too - screens of different sizes abound amongst the audience

One afternoon we had a dynamic 5-workshop 'speed data' session, with app after app presented at a breath-taking tempo. Tagxedo word clouds, Animoto videos, Geogebra, Audacity, Google apps, Vimeo, Kinect Scratch, blogging services, Etherpad... An endless list of applications and gimmickry was blast onto us, like a firework show. I wonder what the more techonogically novice teachers thought, as even I, with at least some previous exposure and knowledge, found it challenging to follow! I started to think that while it is certainly useful for a teacher to have a digital "toolbox" of various apps, for example, to visualize complicated concepts, in the end, using hundreds and hundreds of these apps all the time is not the key issue. True, this session kept us teachers awake and running, in the after-lunch sleepy hours, and would probably work to do the same for students, but something more solid is needed to shift educational practices.

One of the most interesting presenters for me, was Ms Chan Lai Peng, Deputy Director from the MOE in Singapore. Having organised some student exchanges, and virtual projects with schools in Singapore, I have realized how much our two small nations have in common, despite the striking geographical and cultural differences. Both nations, with small populations, have competed for the top positions in the OECD PISA assessments, for example. Ms Chan explained to us how they have come to the 3rd Master Plan concerning ICT in education. Vigorous programmes have been put into place to deepen the pedagogy of ICT use, and for each school to reach a base line standard in ICT integration. A lot of attention is paid to cyber wellness programmes, with student ambassadors to tutor their peers in every school. What's more, every school has a full-time technical assistant on site - something that we Finnish teachers can only dream of! Ms Chan finished her lively talk in this observation: "Technology is but a tool but it can be a powerful one when put in the hands of skillful teachers." It is our challenge now, as teachers, to keep updating and developing our skills to keep up with the fast pace of change.

A guest blog post by Lindsey Wright: EFL Beyond Blogging

2011-10-10T18:52:00.000+03:00

First ever guest post in my blog. Lindsey contacted me, and kindly offered to write about some other online activities for EFL classes, after reading about my blogging experiments. Thank you for these great tips and links!

Lindsey graduated with a degree in Public Health Administration before relocating with her family to Seattle. She is currently writing, and her favorite topics include health care, work-life balance, and travel.

Teachers everywhere are using the Internet, with its wide variety of instantly available information, as a helpful classroom tool. But did you know the Internet is useful for more than research? There are a wide variety of exercises for teachers of English as a foreign language that are available online. One of the most common exercises for teachers who incorporate interactive internet assignments into their curriculum is asking students to write a blog, but there are also other interesting activities out there for students to experience while enhancing their education. Here is a list of just a few engaging activities that you may want to explore with your students.

Webquests

One of the most useful tools on the Internet for teaching EFL students is the webquest. A webquest is a lesson plan that is based on proposing questions that students can research and easily answer on the Internet. These “quests” are perfect for students of all levels as well as students who are just learning English, and cover a wide variety of topics. This is largely due to the fact that webquests are designed to maximize the power of a lesson. They are set up so students spend a lot of time using the information they have found rather than looking for it, and use higher level thinking and build language skills as well.

Generally, students who have basic computer proficiency will be able to handle webquests, even if they are younger or are not very familiar with English. Webquest assignments may need to be adapted if the classroom only has one or very few computers, but can generally work in almost any situation.

Wikis

Another helpful tool for EFL teachers that is being used for online schooling and classroom exercises alike is a wiki. A wiki is a website that is created and edited collaboratively by multiple users. A class can select a topic of interest to them (whether cultural, historical or related to units in other academic classes) and build a website with information about the topic. Additionally, wikis help students learn on an individual level. Each student can be assigned a page that is specifically interesting them that still relates to the overall class topic, and will need to develop research, reading and writing skills in order to actually write their wiki page.

This is a fairly hands-on project for a teacher and requires a familiarity with the Internet and the creation of wikis, but it can be a really powerful tool for a class. Students will be really proud of what they've done when they see their work on the Internet, and the project will develop their language skills in a variety of areas.

Fake Facebook Pages for Historical or Fictional Characters

A final tool that may really engage EFL students is the creation of Facebook pages for historical or fictional characters. This is a really great way to develop research and writing skills while connecting your EFL lessons to other classes. You could assign historical characters from the period of history that your students are studying in their history or social studies classes, or you could assign fictional characters from novels or short stories that are being read in an English class. Alternately, you could simply choose characters that your class has expressed interest in and go from there. The creation of Facebook pages involves research in order to find out biographical information about the characters, as well as photos or artistic depictions of them. It can also develop writing skills as students have to write information about their characters on their pages.

Students will probably be really excited about this project when you announce it to them. You'll have to pay attention, though, as using social networking tools in the classroom makes it all too easy for students to goof off and check their own Facebook pages rather than working on research and writing for the assignment. Also, some school systems may block the use of Facebook on classroom computers, but a variety of offline templates for this project exist. If you can make it work, this will be a great project for your EFL students.

Clearly there a number of ways that allow you to make learning English exciting to your students. However, what is better still is that your options aren't limited to the lesson plans mentioned here. The Internet has opened up a whole world of educational opportunities for teachers and students alike, now all you have to do is explore!

Blogging with students 4

2011-09-13T18:45:00.000+03:00

One of the most useful aspects of blogging with EFL students is the interaction created through commenting. From previous experience in global collaborative projects, I know how hard it is for many students to get the hang of quality comments. Without careful guidance, they mostly use the colloquial, short social network-style (Facebook etc.) comments, such as 'wow', 'great job' or other similar exclamations, followed by a long line of smilies. To get a little bit more formal and deeper with comments, we discussed this in detail in class, and I also published specific guidelines in the class wiki, modified from the ones I used to use in international projects.

It seemed to work quite well for the first blog posts. I was glad to see clear exchange and development of ideas in the comments of this blog, for example. Some students still mistook commenting to mean the same as the peer feedback we did on the first drafts. My mistake for not keeping these two activities separate more clearly. So they would point out spelling errors, among other things, in their comments, which sounds a little bit funny when the idea was to try and build discussions on the content. I made sure that I left a comment for each student, modelling commenting for them at the same time.

Reflections

Hopefully, students will learn the importance of a personal perspective in their blog posts, in order to initiate interesting conversations in the comments.
As the blog post assignments still come from me, the whole process seems a little bit false and fake. Nevertheless, I feel we need to start from somewhere, and students do need a guiding hand at the beginning, to find their own blogging voice, and the courage to be creative. Let's wait and see!

Blogging with students 3

2011-09-11T20:24:00.000+03:00

The first student blog posts are now up. After a few, unavoidable (perhaps?), hickups, each student succeeded in publishing their post. Eventually, I am aiming at a more self-directed approach to blogging, and I hope that they will come up with their own post ideas but, to make the beginning easier for them, I opted for the same assignment for everybody - their English learning history. I wanted the first assignment to be non-threatening enough, as 16-year-olds may feel rather self-conscious, and wouldn't probably want to reveal anything too personal about themselves. At the same time, this would give me interesting insights into the ways these students learn English. We talked about the assinment in class, and I published further ideas and instructions in our class blog, together with some examples I found online.

Also, to alleviate the fear of mistakes, which especially some girls suffer from, we followed a process writing routine for the first post. They wrote their first drafts either by hand or printed their typed versions. I then guided them to give positive but constructive peer feedback, and each student assessed one of their classmate's writing. After this, I gave further suggestions, after which the papers were returned to the students. They were then to improve on the first draft, to produce and publish their final version on their blog.

Here is a Wordle cloud of their posts. One important goal of blogging in English will be to widen the students' active vocabulary. Their passive understanding of English far outweighs the vocabulary they actually use when they speak or write English themselves.

Reflections

Sticking to deadlines seems to be almost impossible for some teenagers. Should it be a requirement, or should we as teachers be more flexible? Then again, practising commenting afterwards would be difficult if everybody's work is not published first. I also feel that learning the importance of keeping deadlines will serve the students well later on in working life.
Students' typing skills seem remarkably lacking. Some didn't even know that you are supposed to leave a space after commas and full stops!
Typos were surprisingly common, even after corrections and reminders. Am I being pedantic in expecting almost 100% correct spelling? After all, they are learners of a foreign language. Still, I feel that it reflects negatively on me, as the teacher, if my students publish sloppy work. Should this matter?
Text speak - ie. no capital letters, no punctuation, needs to be addressed again and again. I do see a value in teaching them to write slightly more formal language in this type of context. Again, this will serve them well in their later studies.
Some students made a lot of effort to improve their first drafts based on the feedback given, while others didn't bother at all. I was hoping that publishing their work for peers to see and read would have resulted in more care and pride in their work, but apparently not for everybody. Maybe I need to work on positive incentives to solve this problem! Or is it that these particular students are not up to online blogging at all? Clearly, they are following the same old, least possible effort tactics of "this will do" that they have learned is enough at school. How to reach students who don't have a lot of inner motivation?
Starting student blogging for the first time is exciting but daunting at the same time. I have already had bad conscience about spending quite a bit of class time on guiding the students about some technical problems, the general guidelines of online behaviour, even simple typing advice. As essential as I find learning these skills as early as possible, to be active participants of the digital era, I can't help this nagging feeling whether I should be dedicating more class time on the traditional EFL work. After all, there are the demands of the traditional national final exams looming somewhere in the future! On second thoughts, I hope it will serve us well to take the beginning more slowly, and spend enough time to familiarise the students with the new environment and format. Surely, it will soon start running very smoothly, which will allow us to focus more on the language part. I can already see a lot of potential in blogging as a way to use the language for real communication, instead of having the students doing their writing in isolation, and for the teachers' eyes only.
All in all, I think my initial discomfort is down to stepping outside my comfort zone. All through my own schooling, university studies, and most of my working life I have formed a rather fixed idea of what foreign language teaching and learning should be. Suddenly widening that conventional language teacher role, to include some ICT coaching as well, gives me plenty to think about. But it's good to peep over the edges of your safe teaching habits, and try something new!

Blogging with students 2

2011-09-01T15:34:00.000+03:00

Two weeks into the new school year, and we have now managed to create individual blogs for each of the special EXE EFL-course participants. There are 13 Finnish students in the group, two all-year foreign exchange students, and 5 EU Comenius exchange students, who will only stay in our school for 3 months, ie. a total of 21 students at the moment.

I am very grateful for Norwegian colleague, Ann Michaelsen for her expert advice on starting student blogs. I approached her in the summer, and she kindly blogged her tips for everybody to benefit from. Following Ann's advice, I let students choose between Blogger and Wordpress. There are now links to 9 Wordpress blogs, and 12 Blogger ones in the sidebar of our joint assignment blog.

We spent one lesson on talking about writing in public, the history of it, and how today, anybody can get their message published for the whole world to read. Special thanks to Australian educator Tania Sheko for her slideshow! We also talked about online safety, netiquette, copyright and other important related issues to do with starting a blog for school work. I uploaded the main information in our class blog, too, and then sent students home for the weekend, with the assignment of setting up their blogs, and sending me the URL before the next class on Monday. I must say, I felt a little bit uncertain how they would manage but they did just fine! Some minor problems were addressed in class but otherwise, mission accomplished really smoothly. Only two of the students had any experience of blogging beforehand.

Blogging with students 1

2011-08-30T14:53:00.000+03:00

This school year, I am experimenting with a totally different approach to language learning. I will try blogging with students, either through a joint course blog, in which students will write one or two assignments, or through individual student blogs, which will eventually be a kind of whole year's online English portfolio. In the Finnish senior high school system, the groups a teacher teaches change 5 times a year, and each course with a group only last 6-7 weeks. To make it worth the effort of setting individual blogs up in that system, all my English teacher colleagues should be willing to collaborate and do blog work. Last spring I envisioned setting up an individual blog for all first-graders, which they would then keep adding to all through the 3-4 years in our school, irrespective of who their teacher was. Unfortunately, my colleagues didn't buy the idea, so for the changing groups, I will have one class blog per course. Luckily, with the favourable support of my school administration, I was allowed to design three new courses that first-graders with advanced English skills could opt for. Here is some more background information for this experiment. I now have a small group of students who will stay with me all through this first year, and they are the ones that will have their individual blogs.

I set up a system of teacher blogs on Wordpress to coordinate all the different courses. Only time will tell if my system will be feasible, and work in practice! I did draw several mindmaps for myself, to maintain some logic in the system. Yet, I have already found some pitfalls in it, and will have to keep tweaking it.

I also set up a wiki, in which I will try to collect useful links and more general EFL tips that will hopefully be valid for years to come, too.

Setting everything up takes a fair amount of time but I feel quite excited about it all. It pushes me to think about foreign language teaching and learning in a much wider context. Simply following the textbook, and the teacher's material accompanying it, won't be enough any more!

New school year - new approaches under construction

2011-08-28T13:49:00.008+03:00

Pheww, it's been a while since I've posted anything here, for a variety of reasons. Mostly it's because of a loaded spring term with this, that and the other. I should know better to learn to say 'no' at times! I tend to pile on extra work and responsibilites, without thinking of the inevitable consequences, ie. tiredness, exhaustion and no time or energy for the so much needed reflection.

But all that aside, it's the beginning of the school year, in which our first-graders will shift into 1:1 laptop learning. Two weeks back at school, and no sign of the shiny new tools yet! Also, a brand-new learning management system was to be implemented for the teachers during the summer break, to facilitate the transition into some kind of blended learning/teaching. But even that is still in the development phases, and not ready to use! It will probably be rather chaotic, introducing such big changes in the middle of a grading period, when everybody has already started off as usual. Oh well! When would anything go according to schedule in schools? What's more, the new media class, which is being constructed by covering our mostly unused inside yard, is still heavily under construction. And on top of everything, we don't even have working air-conditioning at the moment, and are suffering from the last heatwaves of the summer. Business as usual, in a school environment, I guess!

This space will, hopefully soon, be a new-style learning environment, not a standard boxy classroom

Nevertheless, I am quite excited about the changes the 1:1 environment will bring. I can feel some anxiety building amongst colleagues, though. Just today, there was talk in the staff room about doing a student poll to ask them how much and how exactly they would like to start using ICT in their learning. Although I am all for involving student in the decision-making as much as possible, I don't think following their preferences should be the sole guideline for designing new learning/teaching approaches. We teachers, as adults and educational experts, should have some initial direction in mind, shouldn't we? Many students tend to be rather conservative, and don't like to be shaken off their comfort zones (just as many of us teachers are, too). What if such a poll indicated that the majority of students are not that keen on using ICT at all? Would be abandon the whole thing then?

Last spring, some of my students reflected on their learning in their English essays, and I copied two revealing paragraphs:

I am a bit worried about the fact that next autumn every first-grade student in our high school will get their own computer and that the teaching will eventually be moved to the internet. Today's youngsters, including me, are already spending too much time online, so what will be the consequences of internet education? Will we forget individuals?

Here in our school we students use mini-laptops to "study" although what we really do is update our facebook. What kind of education is that?

Valid questions but also an indication of how much learning, UNlearning and rethinking lies ahead, for both us teachers and the students.

Support for Japan

2011-03-29T00:30:00.001+03:00

The terrible disaster in Japan has deeply touched many people around the globe. Personal connections to Japanese friends added to my own distress, and made me want to take some action to help the victims.

Social media proved its power once more. Not only could I keep up-to-date with the events more quickly than with traditional media, but educators also shared some great aid ideas for schools. Derek E. Baird's (@derekeb) tweet and blog led me to the website of Students Rebuild, and their project 'Paper Cranes for Japan'.

I used several resources to make the following lesson plan for one of my EFL groups last week.

1. Talk about the students' knowledge and feelings about the catastophe.
As Finnish young people often find it hard to put their emotions into words, I used these photos from the Big Picture as prompts. Especially the photos of children, and people in need, loosened the students' tongues to express their deep sorrow, and compassion for the suffering of others.

2. Introduce the paper crane project.
We looked at the above-mentioned website, and I was pleased to realize that even the rowdier boys seemed to take the project seriously. I had taken my own 'Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes' book to school, to introduce the old Japanese myth of the paper cranes. We briefly talked about history, the Second World War, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

3. Fold our own paper cranes.
At the back of my Sadako book, there were detailed folding instructions in English, which the students followed in pairs. We also watched the video tutorial from the link, provided by the Students Rebuild website. Unfortunately, we didn't have the nice, thin origami paper used by the Japanese, so the thicker copy paper at school had to do. At least, we had it in several colours.

It really was heart-warming to see even the clumsier 17-year-old boys carefully fold their cranes. Quite a few students hurried to fold several to put in the envelope. It was then sent off to Seattle, where the Besos Family Foundation has promised to donate $2 for each crane they receive. Our small group finished 24 of them.

4. Upload a photo to the Facebook page, with a message of support.
Some students, whose fingers just weren't nimble enough for the folding, wrote our message, which, after some joint discussion and several improvements read: Our thoughts are with you, and we wish you strength to carry on.

Reflections
I found this a meaningful English lesson for several reasons.
1. It was full of authentic language use, reading, speaking and listening.
2. It was hands-on, which is always a welcome change to the too much text-based language classes.

3. We managed to make our tiny gesture towards supporting the thousands of victims in Japan. Although our contribution was mainly symbolic, it was still worthwhile, and something our rather spoiled teenagers, here in our safe country, need every so often.

4. But most of all, as a language teacher, I want to foster intercultural understanding and awareness, whenever possible. This lesson did it very well. It truly created an atmosphere of sharing a global village, and caring for fellow villagers, even far, far away.

THE BOYS!

2011-03-03T17:38:00.000+02:00

I've voiced concerns about underachieving boys at school before (blog post from last summer). I've also been toying with ideas to improve their performance in English classes, and was reminded about some of the key problems by a TED Talks video that I came across some time ago. In the video, instructional designer Ali Carr-Chellman, highlights some of the reasons why boys are tuning out of school.

Most boys simply don't fit the obedient and conscientious girl mould of doing what the teacher tells them to do. For many of them, sitting in class, fiddling with textbook exercises, is totally boring. Even sitting still for 75 minutes at a time, and on a small hard chair, is torture for many! As a consequence, they get restless, start looking for distractions, and eventually underachieve.

One size doesn't fit all, and we can't force all learners into one mould. Why is it so daunting to stop controlling and allow multiple approaches and learning paths instead?

Writing for a purpose does make a difference

2011-01-15T13:49:00.002+02:00

In my constant search for authentic language use opportunities for my students, I engaged one English group in a small project, proposed by a colleague in Sweden. Actually old-fashioned letter exchange. We received letters, written in English, from a Swedish class before Christmas, which I then distributed to my students to read and reply to. They were ordinary introductory letters, in which the students colloquially wrote about themselves, their school and studies, family and hobbies. In addition, my colleague had asked them to reflect on the similarities and differences between the cultures of our two neighbouring countries, and insert a picture depicting something typically Swedish. All this went quite nicely with our curriculum, and the syllabus of the course we are studying at the moment.

I was positively surprised that my students seemed to take a genuine interest in this task - in contrast to the common boredom with textbook exercises. The letters they received were quite long, and interesting, and the familiarity with Sweden was another positive factor that made them read with enthusiasm. As for writing their replies, the fact that the recipient was another young student in another country, made them tackle the task differently from ordinary homework. We discussed aspects of politeness, political correctness, cultural sensitivity, and trying to be interested and interesting in general. As the letters were typed on the computer, I also reminded them about the use of automatic language check programmes to avoid spelling mistakes, for example. I also asked them to add a similar picture of Finland, and we discussed 'Creative Commons' and the preferable use of their own photographs, to make it more personal, and to avoid any issues with copyright.

Here are some reflections on the pluses and minuses of this small project.

HIGHLIGHTS

Authentic language use for a real purpose.
An assignment that required a personal response from the students - not just totally disconnected exercises from a textbook. Real interaction called for a more creative approach, sometimes also humour.

Dear Finnish random awesome person
REPLY: Dear Swedish not such a random person anymore

Most students paid special attention to writing correctly.
Many students wrote much better, and more interesting and entertaining letters than they would have done if there was no real recipient.
The realization that it does matter what you produce, and it does reflect a lot about you as a person.
I learned that the Swedish class used Google Docs and process writing for their letters. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to incorporate the full cycle of process writing this time, but will definitely look into using Google Docs in this way in the future.

CHALLENGES

In every group, there are always students who just won't make an effort - some letters were short, off the cuff, and consequently not very interesting.
Despite all the coaching and preparation of the task, some of my students produced letters filled with typos!
Some didn't bother to attach a photo.
Uneven numbers of students in the two groups - I had more, so some of my students ended up writing a reply to the same person. It didn't matter for this one letter, but having 'personal penfriends' would be difficult to carry out in the long run.
I think, interest would soon fade we the letter exchange was continued. It was a good, one-off project, though.

Hopefully we will be able to continue and develop our collaboration in some way in the future!

A mission for foreign language teaching in Finland

2011-01-09T13:36:00.001+02:00

Towards the end of last year, the Finnish country brand delegation published their report. Amongst missions and challenges set for different sectors of society, they also addressed schools and teachers. Most of all, of course, I was interested to find out what they said about communication and foreign language skills.

‘We have the best school system in the world!’ baldly boasts the report. Why is it then that the ‘products’ from these top schools in the world, after finishing their compulsory education, then struggle to keep up with the rest of the world? What happens to the smart 15-year-old Finnish students in the years between finishing comprehensive school and entering working life? The country brand report tackles these same questions:

Finland has achieved excellent pedagogical results for its comprehensive schools. The reason for this is especially down to skilled teachers. The challenge is that enormous potential is wasted because upper secondary schools and higher education institutions are not able to train enough of the world’s best students supplied to them as world-class scientists and experts.

To my mind, the PISA results only measure a very limited scope of students’ capabilities. I think one area where Finnish students, still, fall short of many of their peers around the world, is in their communication skills, both in their mother tongue, but also, most importantly in foreign languages. In English, for example, many of our high school graduates master the structure of the language and possess an impressively wide vocabulary, but unfortunately fail to use all this in active communication.

Our comprehensive schools are praised for the lack of standardized testing. Maybe one of the problems in the senior high school (or upper secondary school) level is that they prepare students for the national final exam, which in languages has hardly changed since the late 1970s. The exam is mainly multiple choice, spotting the right answer amongst given alternatives, ie, testing only that passive understanding. Indeed, spoken skills have never been tested in the final exams. If they were, obviously more time would be spent developing them at school. I am not sure what the situation is like in Finnish higher education institutions, but I know for sure that when graduates enter working life, their employers expect them to be confident in, at least English, possibly in other languages, too. But many of them are not. This essential fact was duly noted by the country brand delegation, too.

The delegation has also vowed to make Finland's strengths even stronger. For instance, Finland has a topnotch educational system. But Finnish students are not required to participate in classes like speech and debate. Encouraging students to hone their oratory skills could prevent public speaking shortcomings in the classroom from entering the boardroom.

The scenario described Mr Jaakko Lehtonen, director general of the Finnish Tourist board, and a member of the country brand delegation, in YLE news (Finnish National Broadcasting company) in September 2009 is very accurate, in my experience:

Lehtonen says Finland suffers from a dearth of confidence when communicating its strengths to the rest of the world. “We don't have the guts to go out there and bravely boast how good we are. We stand in the corner with our hands in our pockets and hope that somebody will pay attention to us, which is a pity,” he says.

It is widely believed in Finland that it is only the older generations who struggle to communicate in foreign languages, because in their time, language teaching was based on translation, not communicative skills. Yes, it’s true that some of the language teaching has changed, but I would argue that after comprehensive school, the focus is still on passive understanding. I have witnessed this ‘hands in your pockets, hoping that somebody will pay attention to them’ syndrome too many times when taking my students abroad on student exchanges. Sadly, our bright youngsters are best at understanding everything that is said to them in a foreign language, and answering simple yes-no questions. Thereby, most of them soon appear to be unable to convey their personalities in any way, in a foreign language. They rarely initiate interaction, nor do they keep the conversation going. But if their conversation partner perseveres and keeps asking them simple questions, they will politely answer. If they get more confident, some will no go on the opposite direction, and suffer from a monologue syndrome, and get very disturbed if, as is often the custom in other language cultures, anybody interrupts them with a comment or question. In effect the Finnish communication culture, simply transferred into other languages, doesn’t easily work.

How to improve this situation, then? I’m afraid I share the skepticism of the country brand delegation (from the above-mentioned YLE news article):

But changing deep-seated cultural norms could be challenging. Even if the plan works, it could take generations for Finns to become natural marketers. The delegation itself says 20 years could go by before the results of the project are known. "It is not impossible but it is a hard and demanding task. And maybe Finns don't want to change," says Jukka Hienonen, a member of the delegation and outgoing CEO of national carrier Finnair. Asking Finns to transform a central part of their identity could be calling for too much. Despite their humility, Finns are a rather proud lot.

Interestingly, I read an article about Hannu Rajaniemi in our local newspaper yesterday (Turun Sanomat, Jan 8, 2011, p. 28). After living 10 years in Britain, this Finnish mathematician and author says that his British personality is much more outgoing than his Finnish self. I think this is the crux of the problem.

We need to be more outgoing when speaking English. It’s a pity that Finns, who want to improve their international presence, either cannot or refuse to acknowledge this simple observation. But at least we should appreciate that people in influential positions have finally recognized this, and brought attention to it. We need to make our students aware of how our Finnish communication patterns may be perceived by outsiders. If you are aware, at least you have an idea what might need changing. We also need non-native teachers to challenge Finnish students to improve their communicative skills. With a classroom of all Finns speaking English, the Finnish patterns just get reinforced. Online collaboration, videoconferencing for example, might be one solution here. Secondly, employers need to understand that, with a high school diploma, and possibly a university degree, their employees’ spoken language skills are likely to be lacking. They need continuous language training, preferably with native speakers, to keep up and improve.

From teacher to 'learning coach'

2011-01-07T23:27:00.002+02:00

For a long time, I have felt that the title 'teacher' (in my language, Finnish, too - 'opettaja') is misleading or wrong in the 21st-century context. A teacher is somebody who has sole access to secret knowledge, and stands in front of the classroom giving lectures. He/she is the deliverer of knowledge, in a one-way process, which was believed to automatically lead to student learning earlier, but which we all now know is not necessarily the case. Wouldn't it be about time to think of a new, more appropriate title for ourselves - one that would describe what is expected of us, to make education more learner-centred?

Today, I came across an interesting article on the World Future Society website: The World is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning by Maria H. Andersen. And there it was - the title I've been trying think of: LEARNING COACH! Ms Andersen describes the new role like this:

As the learning coach, my job is no longer to “deliver content” to the students. ... Now I can use my time to help students search for good questions, help them to understand the content they are learning, provide activities to help them work with the concepts or connect the material in an applied way, and foster discussion with other students on these topics.

Ms Andersen's model for personalized learning sounds really fascinating, although slightly sci-fi at times, too, but that's what futurists of education should present us with, to boldly go where no teacher has ever gone before.

A system for personalized learning will not grow from inside formal education. Education is like a field that’s been overplanted with only small patches of fertile soil. Too many stakeholders (parents, unions, administration, faculty, etc.) compete to promote various ideas about how to change, acting like weeds or plagues that choke off plant growth. The fresh and fertile soil of the open Web can foster the quick growth of a personalized learning system. Then, like a good fertilizer, it can be used to replenish the soil of formal education and help us to reach that “Holy Grail” of education: personalized learning for all.

Staff room dilemmas

2011-01-04T21:50:00.002+02:00

Autumn term of this school year behind me, and things have found their routine slots and paths - it's business as usual. The only major change to last year is that from 45-minute lessons and 5-10-minute breaks, we have switched to 75-minute lessons with 15-minute breaks in between. I have already noticed how it somewhat calms down the hectic pace of a school day.

The longer breaks also mean more time spent in the staff room, as we don't have our own classrooms, and have to change rooms after almost every class. You would hope that it would mean more time spent on developing ideas, initiating team-teaching and projects to integrate classes, not to mention sharing good practices and new experiments with colleagues. In a school with a long-standing permanent staff, though, it's really rare that any of this takes place. Breaks are spent gossiping and small talking about everyday trivia, or complaining about problematic students. As important as all of this is - we all need to vent out and socialize, of course! - if staff room talk is nothing but this, I think a very important element is missing.

For me, the staff room is, first and foremost, a place to work. This puts me totally at odds with those for whom it is mainly the hub of their social lives, and work is something they do privately behind closed doors. I have resolved this situation by spending more and more time online, even at school. After all, why wouldn't I spend my time reading informative blog posts, on educational networks or Twitter, as that's where the enriching conversations are, where I learn and get inspired? I have tried to share my ideas, get others excited, or at least mildly interested, but mostly to no avail.

How to solve this dilemma in this new year? By giving up my professional ambitions and passions, and becoming one of the cackling mass? Or by secluding myself even more into "the cloud", and becoming a hopeless, anti-social and arrogant geek in the eyes of most of my face-to-face colleagues?

What did you ship in 2010?

2011-01-03T18:40:00.000+02:00

New year - time to reflect and start anew. Reading Seth Godin's impressive list encouraged me to post my achievements of 2010:

Took students to Singapore on a home-stay exchange TWICE, in February and in May.
Organised a home-stay exchange in my school for 17 students from New Delhi, India and hosted their accompanying teacher in my home.
Organised a home-stay exchange in my school for 7 students from Singapore, and hosted their accompynying teacher in my home.
Presented at the national language teachers' union autumn PD seminar.
Coordinated and completed an AEC-NET project with almost 300 students from 12 different schools in Asia and Europe.
Collaborated with teacher and student partners online, to prepare and rehearse a Prezi presentation and script on the above-mentioned WHAZZUP? 2010 AEC-NET project, with several video clips from the participating schools. It was presented by students, as one of the 6 nominees for the award, at the 9th AEC-NET conference in Gurgaon, Delhi, India. I am proud that our project was one of the 3 award winners!
Took part in the above-mentioned AEC-NET conference, and had a chance to revisit India.
Completed a 365 photo challenge on Flickr, plus the accompanying blog.
Coplanned, collaborated and completed a students' photo project, Through Global Lenses, with two wonderful colleagues in the US and Australia.
Received 3 Spanish students for a 3-month Comenius Individual Mobility exchange, and sent one of our students to Spain in return.

It was full year, overwhelming at times, but certainly worth celebrating. CHEERS and thank you all who I had the pleasure of working with in 2010!

What I didn't manage to ship, was to keep this blog active. That will be one of my first priorities in this new year.

SUKOL - resource links

2010-10-06T13:40:00.007+03:00

SUKOLIN SYYSKOULUSTUSPÄIVÄT TURUSSA:
Rohkeutta kieltenoppimiseen ja -opettamiseen

SOSIAALINEN MEDIA KIELTEN OPPITUNNEILLA, 9.10.2010
Sinikka Laakio-Whybrow, Kaarinan lukio

This is a list of links for my talk at the Finnish language teachers' union autumn PD session. My topic was 'Social media in foreign language lessons'. As my talk was in Finnish, to a Finnish audience, some of the links are only in Finnish.

1. BECOME A LEARNER FIRST
- Find interesting blogs, follow them - lurking is quite allowed!
- Here are some links from my RSS feed

OPEBLOGI
- Anne Rongas, sosiaalisen median pioneeri Kaakkois-Suomesta
BRAVE NEW WORLD
- Tania Sheko, teacher-librarian from Melbourne Australia, reflects on a wide variety of educational topics
LANGWITCHES BLOG
- Silvia Tolisano, technology integration facilitator from the US, background in Germany and Argentina
THE INNOVATIVE EDUCATOR
- Lisa Nielsen, educational technologist from the US, writes passionate posts about technology in education
TEACHING ENGLISH USING WEB 2.0
- Ann S. Michaelsen, Norwegian high school teacher blogger, her classes have student blogs, too
MY LANGUAGES
- Isabelle Jones, Head of Modern Languages (French, Spanish) in the UK, actively involved and interested in many language teaching initiatives
MS. BARKER'S ENGLISH
- Danika Barker, high school English teacher from Canada, uses class blogs for her groups

2. FIND INTERESTING ONLINE NETWORKS AND SERVICES
- Lurk at first, and join when you feel comfortable.
- Here are some that you might like to try

MY DEL.ICIO.US BOOKMARKS
- for example, I have link collections of online resources for all the different courses I teach
FACEBOOK
- Keep your own profile private ('friends only'), and start a professional page for students (they don't need to be your friends!)
- Voit liittyä myös erilaisiin ryhmiin, esim. Tieto- ja viestintätekniikkaopetuksessa
CLASSROOM 2.0
- almost 50.000 educators from around the world!
- hundreds of groups
- lots of discussions, always help and tips at hand, and a good place for networking and partner searching
SOMETU - Sosiaalinen media oppimisen tukena
- kotimainen verkosto, yli 3000 jäsentä kaikilta koulutuksen aloilta
VINKKIVERKKO
- yli 700 jäsentä, erillisiä ryhmiä kieltenopettajille
LANGUAGE LEARNING AND SOCIAL MEDIA (elearning europa)
- "A unique mix of activities exploring the relationship of language learning and social media in the web 2.0 era: Participatory debates, award-winning competitions, policy recommendations and reports, scientific publications and field studies."
TWITTER
- start following other language teachers; you will find links to good articles, videos, teaching resources etc.
- check my profile to find some language teachers among people I follow
FLICKR
- online photo sharing
- EdTech365/2010 - international educators' group to upload one photo a day for the year 2010

3. BECOME PART OF THE ONLINE CONVERSATION
- This really is the best part, and what makes it SOCIAL media.
- Start commenting on blog posts, taking part in forum discussions in social networks, updating your Facebook status, sending out tweets etc.
- And if you are brave enough, why not start writing your own blog!

4. EXPERIMENT WITH SMALL PROJECTS WITH YOUR STUDENTS
- I first started by finding a couple of interesting young student blogs, reading posts with students and then writing thoughtful comments

5. CARRY ON EXPERIMENTING AND TRYING NEW THINGS, LITTLE BY LITTLE
- You only learn by doing!
- Here are some examples of what I have done with students

LUKIORANSKAA
- Voilà-kirjasarjaan perustuva kurssiwikini, jota käytän ikään kuin 'digitaalisena kurssisuunnitelmana' opiskelijoille (oman wikin voi aloittaa, esim. vielä ilmaisesta palvelusta WIKISPACES)
SINGAPORE-KAARINA
- a project wiki done as group work in one English course - information about Finland and our town for Singaporean students who were coming for a student exchange
WHAZZUP?
- an educational network on the Ning platform (used to be free, unfortunately not any more!), with students from Asia and Europe - profile pages, discussion forums, photos, videos, blogs etc.
- blog posts also written during ordinary English courses
THROUGH GLOBAL LENSES
- photo/writing project between students in Kaarina Finland, Naples Florida and Melbourne Australia
- explanation about it in my blog
- Tania Sheko's project blog

6. TAKE PART IN WEBINARS
- This is good AND OFTEN FREE professional development for anyone!

VIRTUAL ROUND TABLE
- semi-annual online conference on language learning with technology
GLOBAL EDUCATION CONFERENCE
- November 15-19, 2010
SUOMALAISET AVO-WEBINAARIT

Photo: The Swing Carousel on Flickr

PD for today

2010-08-26T23:25:00.001+03:00

I am a member of a small school development team in my school. We meet about once a month, and bring forth pedagogical development ideas for the whole staff. We had our first meeting of the new school year yesterday, and decided that our main focus area this year would be 'new learning environments'. Tha plan is that we will look into the many opportunities of web and project based learning, among other things.

No sooner was this decided than colleagues started talking about the need for training. What training courses or seminars are available, where and how much do they cost? Which of us will have the chance to go? Will the school pay for it? It was taken for granted that training would mean travelling somewhere as a physically present participant.

How about webinars online, I suggested cautiously. Surprisingly, none of my colleagues were very much aware of this opportunity! I have found global teaching webinars very enlightening myself although, I have to admit, I am still quite a beginner in that field. The last one I participated in a little bit, was the 2010 Reform Symposium in July.

Webinars are a great way to virtually meet, or at least listen to, enthusiastic educators from around the world - all in the comfort of your own armchair at home, if you want to. Once you get a bit more comfortable with the format (an Elluminate session, for example), you will be able to get more involved with the interaction and get much more out of it than just by listening passively. And if you can't make the schedule, the sessions will usually be recorded and uploaded on a website to be listened to later, at a more convenient time.

In no way am I writing off traditional training altogether. There is still a need for carismatic speakers, who know how to inspire masses of people when heard and seen live, in person. I also believe that getting a breather away from a hectic working schedule, and networking in real life also play an important role in teachers' lives every now and then. But for the most part, why get involved in all the wasted time in travel when you can just as well lern many things online, more time- and cost-effectively?

My point to my colleagues was that to develop new learning environments, we need to have first-hand experience of new types of learning ourselves! One problem for us is that there is relatively few opportunities on offer in Finnish. It will also be a challenge to inform and motivate teachers about the benefits compared to old-style training. It takes a lot of self-directedness from teachers to seek out these opportunities, often in their own time. It is no wonder that our students wait to be spoon-fed by others if we teachers expect the same.

The difficulty to 'ship'

2010-08-22T23:54:00.001+03:00

After reading 'Linchpin' during the summer holiday, I have become a regular fan of Seth Godin's short and insightful blog posts.

The idea of 'shipping', getting things moving and done, is central in 'Linchpin'. Over the summer, I have hardly shipped anything in this blog. Procrastination, the eternal excuse of being busy with other things, or maybe closer to the truth, a certain disenchantment with my profession in general, and my personal calling as a teacher. Several reasons have contributed to this feeling, and in the end, all inspiration seems to elude me.

This week, Seth Godin's blog post 'Finding inspiration instead of it finding you' was exactly what I needed. As it's so easy for me, as a teacher, to let inspiration fade, how easy is it then for students who feel bored with school!

if you're not inspired, it's not your fault if you don't ship, it's not your fault if you don't do anything remarkable--hey, I don't have any good ideas, you can't expect me to speak up if I don't have any good ideas...

I will remember this next time a student hides behind the pretense of 'I don't know' or the 'couldn't care less' shrug. As for myself, I will remember Seth's advice on blogging:

Do it every day for a month, one new, actionable idea each and every day. Within a few weeks, you'll notice the change in the way you find, process and ship ideas.

It was good as long as it lasted

2010-06-28T09:56:00.003+03:00

WARNING: This will be a sour grapes rant!

July will start in a few days. And with that, I will finally have to make up my mind what to do with my couple of Ning networks. The latest email from the Ning Team tells me the following:

I had been led to believe earlier that the Mini deal would be free for all schools, but it now turns out that since I'm outside North America, I will have to start paying, even for Ning Mini. Actually, even free Ning Mini wouldn't have helped me with my international projects, which I have been running for the last three years, as the membership has exceeded the 150 allowance of Ning Mini. However, I was hoping to still be able to run smaller projects free, even after the Ning changes took place.

I know, I should have seen this coming. There is no free lunch. Even so, I feel I've been given a rotten deal here. My school won't pay to keep the old Nings running, nor to start any new ones. I was told to go back to the platform my school offers - Moodle. There was a reason why I abandoned Moodle three years ago, though. Ning was so much more user-friendly, and appealing to young people. I know, even more reason why we should pay for using such a slick service! But I don't think it will now be an option for many in the public school systems outside the US. In principle, I am not willing to start paying for the school Nings out of my own pocket. Many people say that it's not the tools, it's what you do with them. Quite right, but after driving a sportscar with all the modern bells and whistles, it won't be so much fun being behind the wheel of a basic saloon again. School will once again be further removed from what the real world has to offer.

Another unfortunate consequence is losing the 'digital footprint' created in the earlier projects. Naturally, I have got some screenshots and statistics, plus presentations I have made about the projects, but most of the student work will just disappear into thin air. True, the quality of all of some of the student work leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm sure the Internet is already bursting with too much 'virtual waste'. But as a teacher, being able to refer to what has been done before, might be worthwhile in the future. International school project work is a continuous process, and documentation of it an essential part of moving ahead. Not to mention the transparency factor of anybody being able to see and assess the work online. What's more, I feel responsible for all the partner schools around the world, all the hard-working teachers and students, who have invested their faith and trust in this project, and who will now see all their efforts wasted. Many of them will lose the links they have created to the project site from their school webpage.

Looking at this map, I'm now wondering if it might be different if some of our partners were in North America? There is already talk about Finns creating their own social network services, in order to keep all the copyright and other issues strictly inside our own borders. How does that support the idea of bringing the world closer together, and more globalized education?

I am not looking forward to starting to decide how much, what and in what format to save some of the work of last year's project. I could think of better things to do during my summer holiday.

Reflecting on problem solving

2010-06-23T23:33:00.004+03:00

I've made a decision to re-energize my reflection routines in this blog. So here I go with the first reflection about the just finished school year.

At the beginning of the summer holiday it suddenly dawned on me that, for the last months of the school year, probably even longer, fun had seeped out of school. David Hamilton wrote about reflection in his blog, and said the following:

In fact, it is often the emotion – whether it takes the form of doubt, puzzlement, or distress – that drives people to engage in reflection.

So true. I realize I have felt distressed for quite some time. Tired of classroom situations with big (over 30 for me is big), very heterogeneous groups that pose such a challenge, even with my years of experience.

More specifically, my problem are students, the vast majority boys, who are bright but thoroughly bored day after day, and who finally start giving trouble. They come to our school at 16 with a good basic knowledge and understanding of English, but with the unfortunate attitude of thinking that they know it all, or at least enough, and thus they absolutely don't need to do anything to learn more. I despair when I see them wasting all their promising potential, and underachieving in the end, because studying as we present it to them, simply isn't their cup of tea.

I know it seems to be a pattern in certain young boys' world that, above all, you need to be cool, and avoid being seen as a swot. With English, though, the learning never ends. It's a wonderful language with such a wide and colourful vocabulary, with a startling variety of nuances you can express with it, that the learning will never end. Yet, that kind of middle-aged female teacher's passion about the language won't stimulate these young rebels. Neither does it help that half of the class have been almost totally immune to understanding even the basic structure of a foreign language, and valuable time is spent trying to help them to at least the minimum passing level.

But all this is just old, repetitive complaints and moaning about the undesirable situation. It is not going to lead to anything. The question is: what am I going to do to make it better next year? Nobody else is going to solve this problem for me, nor is my school willing to adopt a concerted effort to change things. I need to wake up and smell the coffee, and keep reflecting to be able to move on and design a new action plan before the next school year begins.

Time for a make-over

2010-06-21T14:39:00.003+03:00

Three years on, I feel the need to do something new about this blog. I know cosmetic changes don't do a lot alone, but as Blogger now has these nice new templates, why not give my blog a new look.

So bye-bye old, static style.

And welcome this modern, more lively feel of transparent pictures. I may soon want to customize this style, though, after seeing too many exactly similar blogs around. First of all, I need to think of a different, better fitting title picture. But all that can wait.

My main priority for now, hopefully inspired by the new look, is to renew my blogging practices. I have been far too neglicent lately. Blame it on being busy with other things - school exchanges abroad and return visits to our school, to start with. Yet, it's all down to better planning and time management. I want to get in the routine of more frequent, and maybe improvised, blogging, because it truly is a very valuable and effective way of reflecting, which I find necessary in the teaching profession.

Together across continents

2010-06-11T08:30:00.003+03:00

This year's virtual AEC-NET project culminated in a grand finale, when we were lucky to receive a group of 15 students and 1 teacher from St. Mark's Senior Secondary Public school in New Delhi, India, for a one-week home-stay student exchange visit in May.

When young people from such different cultures come together, a lot of negotiation is needed to find the compromises required for mutual understanding and alleviation of culture shock. I am convinced that there is no other way to learn intercultural communication than be thrown in at the deep end, and with careful guiding and debriefing gradually become aware of and learn to appreciate other ways of being and doing things.

As always, it was the genuinely collaborative activities that were the most fruitful. Anyone organising student exchanges should remember to minimize touristy 'showing and telling' things, and rather make students mix and solve problems together as much as possible. It was heart-warming to see our student help their Indian friends who tried ice-skating for the first time.

Introducing some of the sights in town was more fun when done in the form of a treasure hunt competition, where our students were just as ignorant members of the mixed teams, and the tasks needed a lot of collaboration.

The joint assembly brought our whole school together to enjoy a colourful and diverse show of dances and music from both countries. It ended with the song 'We are the world', sung by our school choir together with one Indian singer. You may think the whole idea rather twee, but for me, at that moment, joining in the chorus made the lyrics ring truer than ever. Enjoy!

Find more videos like this on WHAZZUP? 2009-2010

IWB entered the classroom

2010-04-09T10:06:00.258+03:00

Recently, our school has invested heavily in IWBs. In principle, I am all for getting new technology into schools as it challenges me to stop and think, and maybe look at the classroom and the whole learning experience from a new perspective. In my school, teachers don't have their own classroom but share different rooms at different times. Anyone could sign up as a volunteer to start using the IWB rooms, and I jumped at the chance together with some of my colleagues.

What I like about it

I have now used the IWB for 6 weeks. It's nice, for many practical reasons. For example, a lot of the clutter on the teacher's desk is gone - among other things, the fiddly separate speakers connected to the teacher laptop. These are essential language teacher's equipment, and now the speakers are neatly on the wall as part of the IWB.

It does save my time when I don't have to prepare OHPs or PowerPoint presentations anymore to present the correct answers of textbook exercises, but can use the course book publisher's website and the curtain application to gradually reveal the lines. I can use the coloured markers to highlight certain points, or construct something in collaboration with the group - even ask the students to come to the board or use the slate to add something on the board. Mind you, it takes some getting used to the delay with which the markers work, and certain software don't allow the use of the markers at all, but all these are just little hitches that you just need to familiarize yourself with. It’s the same with getting used to any new tools.

Problems

In our school, wiring has been a nightmare. Once, I and colleagues spent a long time trying to trouble-shoot why the laptop couldn't find the connection to the IWB. We clicked every possible button, reinstalled programmes - all to no avail. Finally, we realized that one of the many extension wires along the floorboards had been disconnected - possibly by custodians, while cleaning. Just one of the many hair-splitting instances when lesson plans have had to be scrapped. One colleague complained that he had resorted to preparing OPH transparencies as plan B, just in case the IWB didn't cooperate! Teething problems, partly, I'm sure. But this uncertainty and need to learn a lot of new technical details is enough to put some colleagues off using the board at all, especially as in our school, we don't have the luxury of a full-time ICT person to help out if needed. An extra challenge is that there are different IWBs in different classroom, each with their own peculiarities to learn and get used to. I would possibly do more if I could use the same board for all my lessons.

What is pedagogically new?

As for the pedagogical advantages of the IWB, I must say I am still looking for the real 'interactive' element so much hyped about yet. And I am still waiting for the WOW effect. We have had a few training sessions with experienced IWB users or vendor reps revealing their secrets. So far, all they have been able to show is very simple exercises and games, mostly for the primary school level. I have no doubt about how the use of the IWB motivates very young students and brings lessons to life. But I'm afraid that isolated magic tricks, or funny little things you can do with all the gizmos of the board won't cut it at the high school level any more. So far, I haven’t been able to see or fathom for myself really well-planned, pedagogically reasoned high school lessons, where the IWB considerably facilitates student learning. I need a spark to start even imagining what it can do for me and my students. Straight away, I fell into the trap of just trying to force the new tool into old-style lesson plans. I often find myself just using IWB an electronic version of the old OHP, and then get totally disillusioned about the mere cosmetic changes it makes in the lessons. It's clearer, more colourful, and easier to use (when it works!), but that's all. It still boils down to reassessing what LEARNING is supposed to be today, and how to activate students to take charge of and get passionate about their own learning. The IWB is no automatic solution to this. I need to know what to do first!

Networking and some progress

To find inspiration, I started looking for online peer support groups. And as often happens, within no time I had joined the Interactive whiteboard revolution Ning, created by Australian educator Chris Betcher, whose Betchablog I was already familiar with. There are already close to 1,300 members on the Ning, mostly from Australia and the US. I spotted a discussion about IWB use in high school, initiated by Julie Lecoq from France. Julie is is doing research on the gains of IWB use in schools. I didn't really find any more concrete ideas in the discussion thread but a lot of confirmation to my initial thoughts about no magic formulas for IWB use but a need for new, innovative, creative thinking to benefit from these expensive tools.

I did have one lesson where I saw a glimpse of something new, thanks to the IWB in the class. We had been doing an online photo project on Flickr, and in the last lessons of the course, I asked students, in pairs, to give their feedback on e.g. what they had learned, found interesting, what pictures and what writing had made an impression on them. They got really involved in doing this, and I was happy to see a lot of negotiation and collaboration taking place in the computer room while they were preparing. When we got back to our classroom to share their presentations, I was surprised to see the students using the IWB very creatively, and with no teacher guidance or pre-training needed! Interacting with each other and the board really made a difference to their presentations.

Baby steps, need for patience and perseverance and a gradual learning curve in store for me.

Second impressions of school in Singapore

2010-04-05T13:07:00.001+03:00

After my first impressions, I will now write a couple of thoughts about what I observed in the lessons I attended during the student exchange, and what ideas I, as a teacher, brought back.

I was surprised to see how similar many of the teaching practices were compared to our schools in Finland. The more student-centered approach seemed to be the norm in most of the lessons I observed. Instead of sitting rigidly in straight rows only facing the teacher and listening to him/her, students did a lot of problem solving in small groups, just like I and some colleagues have started doing in our lessons lately. Our students were asked to join them in their groups, and it was nice to see the interaction start after they had managed to break the ice.

I wanted to find out about incorporating ICT, since the work my AEC-NET colleagues had showcased at several conferences was always of such superior quality. The classrooms and the whole school seemed to be very similarly equipped as our school - a data projector in most classrooms. Some teachers actively used ICT in their teaching, others not so much - familiar story. (NB. I only observed a few lessons during one week, so I shouldn't really draw any general conclusions. These are simply my personal impressions.) But when you think about it, a data projector only serves as a modern replament of the chalk board or the OHP if it is only used by the teacher to show and demonstrate things to students. I have seen this reality in schools in many countries. We think we are up-to-date and doing something new when in fact, we are just doing the same old thing in a slightly flashier fashion.

Each Pioneer teacher is given a personal laptop by the school, something that only a few schools in Finland have managed so far. Instead, we have one teacher laptop in each classroom that all the teachers using the room share.

Just like in our school, Pioneer Secondary had a separate computer room that teachers could book to use for their classes whenever they wanted, provided that the room was vacant. We attended a lesson where students were doing their AEC-NET project work. I was very impressed to see how self-directed and active the students were in their small groups. The teacher was available to help and facilitate but the students mostly worked very independently and confidently, and they were only 13-14 years old. It really showed me what education at its best could be today. The students were doing research on ecotourism, and then uploading the results of their work online to share with project partners in other countries.

Pioneer Secondary has invested in a whole school platform, called iCollaborate, which they have used for all the students' project work for many years. Basically, similar to Moodle that our school provides as an overall platform. The advantage of the whole school using one platform is, of course, that it is easier to train teachers to use just one system, and simpler to manage it on the whole. The downside then is that standard solutions don't please adventurous teachers, who soon want to jump outside the box and try something more user-friendly or versatile. Personally, I find these platforms restrictive and dull compared to what social media tools are on offer these days, but that's just my preference.

I had a chance to talk to the head of the ICT department, Ms Ling, at Pioneer Secondary to share ideas. She told me that because most of their staff are quite young, they are perhaps a bit keener to incorporate ICT in their lessons, as it is an integral part of their own lives, too. For this reason, she also said that most of the teachers using ICT are quite confident and self-directed, and thus don't need her help a lot. Yet she is there to help and assist all the teachers, which again brought home one thing I feel is terribly neglected in many Finnish schools, and which I have mentioned many times before - the fact that Finnish schools don't invest in employing a full-time pedagogically and technically qualified person to help teachers, as was the case in Pioneer. I want to add, though, that I tend to reject the ageist idea of teachers' ICT use - considering myself as an exception to the preconception that older teachers can't be 'digital natives'. But, of course, there is no denying the fact that ICT tends to be a more integral part of the lives of the younger generations, which is bound to have an effect on schools once some of today's youngsters become teachers.

I totally agree with Ms Ling's vision that you can't force any teacher to use ICT. Instead, the will to use it must spring from a pedagogical need whereby the teacher realizes that to facilitate good student learning today, at times ICT is the only means of doing it. She also pointed out that their aim was not technology for technology's sake, but a down-to-earth, sensible approach, where technology enhances student learning. Sounded very wise to me! I asked her about the use of IWBs, which my school has heavily invested in lately, but which I didn't see at Pioneer at all. Interestingly, she said they had looked into them but concluded that they didn't offer anything drastically better or different than what you could accomplish with a computer and a data projector! I have only started to learn to use one in our school, and so far I tend to agree with her.

From a teacher's point of view, one of the very rewarding and enlightening sides of organising international student exchanges is being able to see different schools, and learn from their good practices, to have something to take back to your own school. I only wish, schools would be more open to good ideas from outside, even unusual and radical ones, and not be such closed and immutable national fortresses.

It is also great to network and make friends with overseas teachers. We had the privilege of working with a wonderful educatior, Ms Yuen Chai Lin, who worked incredibly hard to make our stay comfortable and exciting - even extending her hospitality to opening her home to me and my colleague to stay in. This gave us an extra glimpse to the Singaporean culture. We can never thank her enough for all her friendliness and considerateness, and for untiringly sharing the Singapore customs with us, and explaining anything we were curious about.

Why do I do student exchanges?

2010-04-02T15:14:00.004+03:00

International school projects and exchanges have been a central part of my career for over ten years. Every so often, I start weighing the pros and cons, and questioning the point behind it. After another such exchange, this time taking eight students to Singapore on a return visit after hosting a group of Singaporean students two years ago, it is a good time to reflect and take stock again.

My philosophy behind the value of such exchanges hasn't changed in all these years. I have quoted this before, but after many more exchanges, it is even truer than before:

“Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with travelled bodies, but untravelled minds.” (Caleb Colton)

First-hand experience, even if brief, of a place always gives you a better insight than any book or virtual tour ever could. No other means so far allows you to holistically immerse yourself in the new environment, using all your senses. This is why, whenever the opportunity arises, I jump at the chance of taking students on home stay visits to partner schools ourside Finland. Getting a glimpse into the host student's home and family life, and taking part in the daily school activities opens their eyes much more, and forces them to work out a way of participating in a strange culture and getting along and collaborating with very different people. This is something you can totally miss out on, or avoid on a touristy visit.

One of the fundamental roles of such school exchanges is to sensitise students to seeing the relativity of phenomena in the world, and the fact that if something is different from what they are used to, it is not automatically stupid or wrong. It is essential to have frequent reflection sessions with the students, and try to open up new perspectives and ways of perception and understanding for them. First impressions of a new place are so often based on stereotypes, and even reinforce such preconceptions. This is where a teacher can guide the students towards a more rounded and open mindset in new situations.

Being thrown into a host family, with totally different customs, possibly religion, and a foreign language is daunting to many students. Approaching Changi airport after our almost 24-hour journey, almost palpable nervousness started spreading amongst our students. What will I say when I first meet my host family? How will I feel, will I be able to eat the food, will I feel isolated and alone? All these questions and many more were criss-crossing our students' young minds, as this was the first time for most of them to travel without their own families. In the end, they all pulled through wonderfully, even despite the age difference between them and their hosts, who were 3-4 years younger. I was really proud of all of their adaptability, and I hope they all got lots more self-confidence and a sense of being able to cope.

One more significant advantage in these exchanges is the chance for students to practice oral communication skills, which will most likely be called for in their future careers. During each exchange, students are expected to present something in a foreign language, usually a talk about their culture and background. We always prepare these presentations as a team, practice them together, and students really rise to the challenge and shine when the time comes. In Singapore, it was wonderful to see their confidence and pride after a successful performance in front of a huge audience.

Many colleagues think I must be crazy to get into so much trouble and extra work without any extra pay. Maybe so. However, I feel I'm on a mission, which can't be completed inside the closed foreign language classroom at school. It is not uncommon for Finnish people, with almost perfect passive knowledge of English, to suffer from 'a reduced personality syndrome' when having to use English. They do brilliantly in isolated, written language exams, but are totally unable to adapt that knowledge into creating a fruitful and pleasant communication situation with real people. Overcoming this disability is my mission - for me, as much as for my students. After our week in Singapore, I am happy to say that we proved that Rudyard Kipling wasn't quite right in writing: "east is east, and west is west, and never the two shall meet..." For a short period, we did bring them closer together!

As before, we kept an online travel blog during the exchange for families and friends at home. Unfortunately, it's only in Finnish.

First impressions on a school exchange to Singapore

2010-03-30T13:33:00.001+03:00

What did I know about Singapore before taking eight students there on a homestay exchange in our partner school in February, 2010? Scattered facts only, really. I was aware that the tiny city state had almost the same population as Finland, so I was expecting to be overwhelmed by crowds. The teachers I had got to know over the years of AEC-NET collaboration had struck me as highly efficient, hard-working and dedicated to their mission. Having visited Malaysia a couple of times, I had been told that the ethnic make-up of Singapore was quite similar, with the exception of English being the official language of Singapore, and Singapore not being a muslim state. Further, during a stop-over at Changi airport on my way to Indonesia, I had been impressed by the shiny, airy, well organised and extremely clean environment. No wonder, Changi was voted as the world's best airport this year! And of course, I had heard about the 'no chewing gum' law, and been warned about their strict fining culture by the local Finnish Embassy. Oh, and I had heard of the famous Singapore sling coctail at Raffles hotel.

On the first morning at Pioneer Secondary School, we were greeted by the 4 main languages of Singapore right at the school gate: Malay, Chinese, Tamil and the official language of education, English. Each student also attends lessons in their home language, so most of the students are at least bilingual, which is quite impressive.

Each school day starts in the school yard, with a tangible community spirit, often missing in our school. All students, dressed in their white uniforms, in orderly lines, watch the flags go up, sing the national anthem and say the pledge. The first morning, there was also a welcoming ceremony for us foreign visitors.

After this routine, there is a quiet reading session for half an hour, during which all the students sit on the ground, and read something in English. Teachers go round checking that everybody has the right texts, and if not, they are sent to stand and be ashamed at the back of the yard. Obedience, impeccable, gracious behaviour, knowing your role and place - at first glance, at least these struck me as driving values in this school.

Our students really stood out like sore thumbs in the orderly white crowd. In fact, they had considerable trouble seeing anything positive in school dress codes, which are almost non-existent in our school. Girls having to tie their hair back, no flip-flops, no revealing spagetti straps - it was finally beginning to dawn on them that this really was not a holiday in an exotic destination but a working trip to represent our country and to respect the culture of the host school. An excellent lesson for our students coming from an individualistic, relatively free and easy, express yourself and your individuality, do as you wish school culture.

Not only were the school values implied by the daily routines but they were visibly present all around the school. You have already seen the vision of the school - Passionate learners, gracious citizens - in previous photos. Behind the podium you can read the school mission: We provide opportunities for students to develop their potential and be competent, caring and responsible individuals who will contribute effectively to society.

The underlying school values were high up on another wall around the main school yard.

And even above the main entrance there were words to indicate what the role of this school is in society.

I liked this idea of prominent, transparent missions and values. It's in great contrast to our system, where similar words may be written in a curriculum that dusts away in a folder that nobody ever looks at. The place and role of education in our society is largely taken for granted, and only implicitly present all the time. It might not be a bad idea to try to crystallize and publicly announce certain ideals to the school community and society at large. Interestingly, our students thought that having so many written slogans around the school was rather propagandist brainwashing, and they wondered if anyone ever truly looked at them or read them. Once again, two very diffirent cultural practices collided.

The concept of learning environments is big in Finland at the moment. Our Ministry of Education is currently generously funding projects to develop and diversify the learning environment. In Pioneer Secondary, I observed many great initiatives that seemed to be a natural part of Singapore schools without any separate projects. For example, all the schools we visited had a green, open plan - for obvious climatic reasons.

As we are closed inside the school building to keep warm half of the year, being able to sit outside all through the year, seemed a lovely idea. We realized very soon, though, why Singaporeans would rather escape into air-conditioned buildings in a constantly hot and humid climate.

Singapore schools seemed to be very target driven, from top to bottom, and all their achievements were proudly displayed around the school.

Instilling the community spirit was also enhanced by allowing students to contribute to their physical school environment.

I was truly impressed by all this student team effort, and convinced that it really improves the students'

ownership of their learning environment.

One more thing that caught my attention, like in many other foreign schools before, was the involvement of parents in the school community. In a Finnish high school (for 16-19-year-olds) parents have no role whatsoever, other than coming to school once a year for a formal information session where they are, to a large extent, just passive recipients listening to the teachers' lectures. In Pioneer Secondary, we saw some parents at school every day, they came along to some of our excursions, and some of them ran their food stalls in the school cafeteria. This mother's noodles were the favourites for many of us.

Naturally, our students were surprised by the school lunctime routines, which were so different from our standard, one-course, free of charge school meals. Having a choice of all the different ethnic cuisines really appealed to them, although they did realize that the variety and choice came at a price.

In hindsight, now, I feel that despite the major differences highlighted in this post, there were surprisingly many similarities in the working cultures of Singaporean and Finnish schools. But those will be the topic of another blog post.

I miss the buzzing, lively, pastel-coloured Pioneer community that opened the door to Singaporean culture to us and welcomed us so heart-warmingly. In a week, you can only scratch the surface, so I am looking forward to another visit to this fascinating city state - to find the time to try the Singapore sling, too, which I missed during this first visit. While waiting for that chance, I can reminisce by looking at this beautiful batik painting by one of the Pioneer students, which was presented to us, and now brings colour to the wall of our school hallway.

Through global lenses

2010-02-06T18:33:00.002+02:00

February snow on the ground in Finland and in the background quite a mismatch of a business idea. Possibly an attempt at a global feel with the stereotypical Aussie icons plus the name Sydney, although I suspect this place has nothing to do with Australia otherwise. After all, they serve Italian pizza and Turkish kebabs, washed down with, whatever else than the epitome of globalization - American coca cola.

This is very much the reality in my country, where using English or global references are considered a sign of success. I can well understand the backlash from many Finns, who become very protective towards anything domestic and want to support nothing but Finnishness and Finnish products, language included.

Many of my high school students also feel this way. Although, on the surface, they love travelling, have dreams of spending some of their lives abroad, and seem to prefer many international brands and ideas, when it comes to learning English, their defenses zoom up and they strongly cling to their right to speak and use Finglish - a variant of the global lingua franca with a strong Finnish accent. And, of course, they are welcome to do so. The only problem may be that (as I have blogged before) they may be unnecessarily misunderstood among native English speakers, wrongly considered a little bit dumb perhaps, and not get out of communicative situations what they would like. I wonder if it's all to do with a certain inferiority complex we may, sometimes unconsciously, suffer from. Native English speakers have a clear advantage compared to us, and we find it hard to come to terms with it, especially if we have worked hard for years, and reached a fairly good level in English.

The photo bringing Finland, Australia and America together is very relevant for me right now, as I am just about to embark on a novel pilot project with two teachers on opposite sides of the world, but both in English-speaking countries - one in Australia and the other one in the States. We are going to run a photo sharing project with our students for 8 weeks, in which students upload a weekly photo assignment with a written description in our Flickr group and comment on other students' contributions. It will be very interesting to see how it will all work out, particularly from the language point of view. How will my students feel conversing with native English speakers, and will they be able to be sensitive enough not to label people based only on their limited EFL skills. A lot of intercultural learning opportunities for all participants, I feel.

I must say I am in awe at the efficiency, enthusiasm and initiative my two newly-met foreign colleagues have demonstrated! Setting this project up in such a short time (only about a month!) is potent evidence at the power of online teacher networks for the benefit of student learning.

Map photo by colemama on Flickr

How to assess learning - that is today's burning question

2010-02-05T00:15:00.002+02:00

At the start of a new exam week, assessment is on my mind again. It seems that it is being reviewed and discussed in Finland as well as abroad. Just yesterday I received the following comment from Susan van Gelder in Montreal:

There is a lot of talk here about assessment of learning and assessment for learning. In the latter the student also plays a role in assessment, reflecting on their learning, their strategies and setting goals.

And then today, looking through some of the Finnish educators' social networking sites, I came across exactly the same topic. Referring to my previous thoughts about standard assessment in Finnish high schools, I welcome all these ideas about focusing more on self-reflection, peer assessment and the role of assessment as a means to enhance learning. It's a clichéd statement that assessment guides what is learned. So it would make sense to assess what is worth learning, wouldn't it?

Another point that keeps coming up in connection with assessment is the use (or rather the absence!) of new technology for assessment purposes. In my 365 photo blog, I shortly touched on this topic inspired by the classroom reality during exams. We don't use technology in exams, period. It's the old paper and pencil method. For that exam photo I received an interesting comment from Marie Coleman, in Lorenzo Walker Technical High School, in Naples, Florida:

...most of our high school students exams are provided online, so laptops do replace the traditional paper and pen!

I guess I'm not convinced that the written exam is a way to assess learning - what about projects, multimedia, authentic assessment? Perhaps that is too unrealistic or unwieldy, but that is the way I would prefer to see the focus with or without technology (i.e., technology itself is not the focal point, but will likely be of use due to its ubiquity!).

On second thoughts then, I realized that we do use something new -

- these wireless headphones for the listening comprehension tests in foreign languages. But as you can see, it's the old bubble sheets for the answers. The headphones don't really offer anything new - they are just a crutch, and actually make the situation totally unauthentic - as do the structure and content of these tests and the multiple choice questions. Nothing new under the sun in the field of school assessment. Even I succumbed to the old testing format yet again, despite all my good intentions. The students did do portfolio work throughout the course, and part of the exam was their own self-assessment on this work, but that's as far as my innovation has reached.

I do agree with Marie, and so many others, that it is not the technology per se that is going to revolutionize (or even slightly improve) assessment, and education in general. Clearly, assessment needs much more time and focused and collaborative faculty planning.

EDUCA fair in Helsinki

2010-01-31T14:51:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I visited EDUCA, the largest educational fair in Finland. For two days, hundreds of vendors, educational organizations and interest groups had set up their booths to promote the latest trends in education.

IWBs were prominently displayed as a must in any classroom these days.

This particular company marketed the concept of ActivClassroom, but looking at these people here, I couldn't help wondering what was so active about it? Looks very much like a glorified version of the old teacher-centred demonstration devices. In my school, we will get a few new IWBs in February, and one of my goals for this school year is to learn to use one. I am interested in seeing if I will be able to find the much hyped, revolutionary, interactive element in it. New technology is only any good if it shakes stuck-in-a-rut pedagogical practises, too.

My most interesting insight at the fair came from a lecture by Professor Andy Hargreaves from Boston college. In his engaging and humorous lecture he went through some of the educational policy changes in the last 50 years, and introduced his latest recipe for school systems of today, 'The Fourth Way'. He had labelled each policy with different planets. So from the lovey-dovey Venus 60s and 70s, he took us through the Mars years of the 80s to the present Mercury atmosphere of imposed targets and data-driven accountability. And then he left us thinking about the fourth way, illustrated by the Earth.

He had been specially commisioned to do some research on Finland and our much praised educational system. His dream for us was the following: build on our heritage and reputation for being one of the most inclusive nations in the world (e.g. gender equality, including disabled students in mainstream classes) and extend this to be know as the world leading country of cultural diversity. That will be a challenge for a country that has been very homogeneous for so long, and is now finding it terribly hard to come to terms with the arrival of more and more immigrants in the last decade.

It's a small world

2010-01-26T17:47:00.004+02:00

It sure is a small world in this photo from a bird's eye perspective, inspired by today's Daily Shoot assignment #ds72. It seems to be that from any perspective in my life at the moment. The new year has started with a lot of serendipitious net connections - all thanks to Tania, alias @tsheko, and her legendary photoblog from last year, threesixtyfivephotos. Tania had taken part in the challenge of posting at least one photo per day for the entire year, and also uploaded them with interesting commentary in her blog. This is where I got the idea of starting my own 365-project this year. Not only did I become a member of the EdTech 365/2010 group on Flickr, but I also decided to run a separate blog alongside the Flickr collection.

Almost a month into it now, and I seem to have abandoned most of my other online activities in favour of the engaging conversations on Flickr. I haven't written anything in this old blog of mine, nor have I had more than an occasional quick glance at Twitter since before Christmas. I have had to admit that I'm not much good at online multitasking, especially with an increasing load of offline duties as well. Curiously, my online presence seems to develop in varying bouts of enthusiasm, but mostly with maximum 2 different bouts at any one time. It's good to know your limitations, as not everybody can be an almost 24/7 net communicator.

My activity in Flickr has paid off big time, though. I have made many wonderful new contacts, and right now it seems that I am jumping right into organizing a small-scare student photo exchange experiment with Tania (from Melbourne, Australia) and Marie, a.k.a. as @colemama on Flickr (from Naples, Florida). Think about it, 3 women educators from so far away, on three continents, suddenly finding each other, and, more or less on the spur of the moment, setting up a joint action plan! Isn't it amazing?

Even more amazing was that today, despite the big time differences, I managed to quickly have a real-time conversation with Tania on gmail, just by chance! It sure is a small world!

More about this endeavour as things begin to unfold.

Language teaching stereotypes

2010-01-23T19:41:00.000+02:00

We have an annual school marketing evening where prospective new students come to see what our school might have to offer them. In our school system, it is at the age of 16 that students make a big choice between a more academic senior high school and different vocational schools. In areas where there are several high schools to choose from, there is a serious competition between them to attract the best possible students to their school.

This month we organized this evening again for 2010. After a general info session in the school cafeteria, the visiting students and their parents then go around to school to see different classroom and meet all the various subject teachers to be able to learn about studying at our school. Different subject departments go into great lengths to decorate the classroom and make their subject look interesting and attractive.

All us foreign language teachers shared one classroom - English, Swedish, German, French, Russian and Italian.

For English, apart from the candles that are there just to look pretty, there is a London taxi and double decker bus, plus all the textbooks used. Doesn't give a very vibrant and modern image of language classes, does it? Wouldn't you like to know what is actually done in the lessons, how the students learn, possibly what new technology is used to enhance their learning? How could we move beyond the old touristy stereotypical clichés to present a language?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2009-12-31T21:01:00.002+02:00

Photo: Feliz / Happy 2010 by Be Tanabata on Flickr

New year - new classrooms

2009-12-30T10:39:00.011+02:00

This picture by Ben+Sam is from the wonderful pool of Great quotes about learning and Change on Flickr. It is a good reminder of the need to move forward from the old teacher-centred classroom into new learning environments that put the learners in the centre.

During the last couple of weeks of school before our Christmas break, I was part of a team of colleagues who were given the task of redesigning some of our classrooms, thanks to some surplus in the budget. Rather a challenge to be tackled in such a short time, but luckily we had preliminary plans from last spring that we could now put to use.

During the summer, the old language lab had been torn down (read the reasons in an earlier blog post) and turned into a new music class, which left the old music class empty. We had planned to turn that room into a small-group working space with some new technological solutions, too, but the funding had been missing until now.

We had three guiding principles for our plans:

1. pedagogical principles - our choices should support student-centred learning

2. downsizing - to make space for anything new in already too cramped classrooms, a lot of the old stuff would have to go

3. flexibility - the desks and chairs should be easy to move around and regroup into different formations

This is what the room looks like now. A typical desks-in-rows arrangement with the teacher, blackboard, screen etc. in front. There was also a huge TV and VCR contraption in the right-hand corner, but as you can see, the TV has already been dismantled and is on the floor waiting to be taken away, along with its metal shelving and the screen railings plus the OHP, (first part of the downsizing).

All the furniture will also be replaced by something like this:

There will be triangular desks that can be arranged either individually, in round groups of five as here, or in other formations depending on the needs of the lesson. The teacher's desk has been moved to the other end, even though the old blackboard will still stay in place. An IWB will be installed on one of the other walls, and the teacher will also have a spot table with a high bar chair- ideal to move around and use the new Airliner wireless slate on. Student laptops with some clever wiring from the ceiling will have to wait till a later date.

A small, 12-seat classroom will also get a make-over. Especially the teacher's end of the room has been a real nightmare to work in, although students haven't had much more room to move around either.

The whole room will be emptied and turned into a negotiation style space, ideal for small staff meetings, but also teaching small groups in a more adult setting, which suits our 16-19-year-old students quite well. Hopefully this will even help the students behave in a more mature way. The long oval table is put together of separate units that can also be arranged separately in a more traditional way.

We have definitely come to a point where 'a generation change' will have to take place as far as classroom technology is concerned. When computers and IWBs come in, last century equipment will become obsolete and will have to go. Or so you would think! We have already heard the first bouts of strong opposition from colleagues whose comfort zones have been shattered by these plans. I need to add that, in our school, hardly any teacher has the luxury of a classroom of their own, but we all go round the school teaching in different rooms, so classrooms will have to serve multiple purposes. Apparently, the upset colleagues' subjects are impossible to teach if students don't sit in rows of desks. In addition, they object to giving up their OHP transparencies, since learning to use a laptop and data projector or an IWB will take too much time and be too difficult. And lastly, how will they ever be able to teach that one course a year where they always show the same ONE clip on the VCR? Where their logic fails, is that it's all about TEACHERS and TEACHING!

Of course, ultimately it's not about classroom design or technology, but it is to be hoped that the new environment might open up some new perspectives. It's good for teachers to be forced to stop, think and rethink some old routines every now and then. If only we had had more time, we would have involved our students in the planning, but unfortunately school budgeting works in mysterious ways... I will post some more photos once the rooms have been completed. Let's see how many colleagues will be fighting for the chance to work in these rooms!

Ning and school - once again

2009-12-29T12:01:00.001+02:00

After closing a very promising experiment with an online project Ning and having started a new similar one, it's a good time to touch base and do a bit of reflection. All last year, my aim was to provide a lively, but to a certain degree secured (e.g. monitored membership), learning community to students in many countries. Looking back now, that's what we managed to build in a year although it wasn't by any means perfect. One of the problems was that initially, most of the students only joined because their teachers told them to, and consequently, the bulk of their community presence was in the form of teacher-led assignments. Very typically, students just went through the motions of uploading their blog posts or taking part in discussions to get their course credits from their teacher, but as soon as the assignments ended, the rest of the community members never heard about them again. On a more positive note, at the very least, they got a little bit of information about a new way of sharing information - with pictures and hyperlinks as opposed to the old static and linear pen to paper approach. Also, one of the main goals last year, apart from the obvious intercultural communication and authentic language use, was to introduce students to the idea of writing more serious blog posts in addition to the conversational chatting they are more familiar with. What I'm not so sure about now is whether this brief introduction will serve them for anything in the future, when they are more mature, and possibly have more to share and contribute.

Some time ago, I came across Dean Groom's blog post Communities just do n't happen. Reading the next quote made me question the success of our learning community.

A strong community is desirable over a collection of people using a portal, because members are less likely to want to break the bonds made between them. Portals have users, who have no bonds.

Did we get anywhere beyond sharing a well-functioning portal for a loosely connected group? To my surprise, Google analytics revealed that last year's Ning still has almost as much activity as this year's one, even after officially stopping to manage it and guiding students to join the new one for this year. Clearly, some students managed to make lasting friendships and wanted to continue the dialogue even after the project as such was closed. What is quite evident, though, is that without teacher guidance and given assignments, the students simply use the old Ning as a place to leave short chatty messages on each other's walls, and possibly still carry on some of the discussions in the forum. No photos are added, or blog posts written any more.

I can't help wondering whether it would have been a better idea to keep the old Ning running and just accept new members to it. The reason why we opted for starting a totally new Ning for the second year, was that otherwise we would have ended up having too many dormant members after students graduated and left school, or their teachers decided not to continue with the project. With Ning, members have to delete their accounts themselves, the network creator can't do it. In addition, I was afraid that the this year's new members would find it difficult to navigate on the site, if all last year's posts, photos, videos etc. were already there. To avoid this, more guidance into following RSS feeds, for example, would be needed, to keep students on track of the latest additions on the site. Not a bad idea anyway! I think it's the old control-syndrome of many teachers that makes me want to keep organizing the Ning instead of just letting it shape a life of its own. On second thoughts now, I can see that there should be some sustainability to the whole concept of our Ning. We had better rethink the big picture of creating ongoing dialogue between students across continents and focus on the process and creating a sustainable community rather than a one-year project with a one-off end product.

The underlying problem is the 'old school' setting of such a project. In particular, if project work is made part of the curriculum, where students get credit for it, it easily turns into just another assignment for assignment's sake. To some extent, you can 'force' these assignments on students, but I totally agree with Dean Groom that "Participation in groups at the higher levels is entirely voluntary" - you cannot force commitment. As the structure of traditional school systems rather works against this, I have some budding ideas to develop next year, but more about them later.

Motivational quotes for passive students

2009-12-28T00:47:00.006+02:00

Just before the Christmas break, we started our 3rd grading period of this school year. It is the last period for our graduating students, who will finish regular school in February and then start preparing for their national final exams at home. The Finnish senior high school system is quite particular (as I have tried to explain many times before). For example, I teach English, for which students study 8 courses during 2.5 years, with each course graded individually. The final English grade will be the grade point average of these 8 courses. A typical scenario is that the first 3 courses, which are considerably easier and basically only revision of earlier English studies, will give most students much better grades than the later, more demanding ones. By the time students start their 8th and last course, many know that the grade for this last course won't make any difference whatsoever to their final grade, so they just slack through the last weeks. I get quite frustrated with them, since they should really be learning more than ever now that the final exams are looming so close. But for the carefree youngsters there is always tomorrow, and "when school ends I will really start studying". Total self-deception and procrastination.

This year I decided to start 'brainwashing' them into making the most of the last lessons and taking advantage of any help and guidance I could give them before the all important exams. I looked for inspirational and motivational quotes for them, then browsed through Flickr to find illustrations for them and decided to start each class with one of these quotes. Apart from motivating the slackers, I also use them to introduce some more vocabulary, and also to start discussion in English about their relevance to the students reality.

So far they have worked quite well, and students are actually already expecting the new quote at the beginning of each lesson. The following one has produced the most discussion so far:

It was rather endearing how keen and open my students were to reveal all their secret strategies of avoidance (most of which I could guess anyway!). I don't know if these quotes will actually change their studying habit in any way, but at least the discussions we've had have been worthwhile. In their hearts, they know all of this, of course, and I know I should be looking in the mirror to find out why they have become so tired and passive, but for their last few school weeks, at least we are having constructive discussions about learning and teaching, and all in English.

For the quotes and illustrations, I have been inspired by others, who have kindly uploaded their work online:

the Great quotes about Learning and Change - a pool by several great educators

Education & Technology Quotes - 19 slides by Tony Vincent on Slideshare

Quotes - beautifully visualized by Silvia Tolisano

(and I'm sure there are many others, but these came to mind straight away)

Taking stock of 2009

2009-12-27T23:20:00.000+02:00

It seems like ages since I've last posted anything here in my blog. In fact, I haven't been much online at all for weeks. I could resort to the accepted excuse of 'being busy', but the truth is that, of late, I have chosen to give priority to offline life. When family, including a teenage daughter, started commenting about mum being at her laptop too much, I reckoned it was time to break some routines. And so I did.

However, I have missed my online contacts and pontificating about education in my blog posts. I want to make this a more regular habit in the new year, provided that I really have important issues to write about. Often I do question the value of my thoughts being online. Personally, blogging has taught me to stop and reflect, which has been crucial to my professional development. But surely I could just as well save these posts on my harddrive for my eyes only. Then again, I have met some wonderful educators through the

comments that they have left here, and I won't want to lose that great opportunity.

Other insights this year: learned a lot about using Ning for international school collaboration, and finally got to use Twitter and tried a couple of online conferences, both of which have truly been more educational than any conventional conferences I have attended in the last couple of years. I have also started taking small steps to get some shifts going on at my school. It is very slow, though.

2009 will end peacefully amidst lots of snow and enjoying candlelight during the darkest time of the year. New year, new tricks soon!

Inspirational learning environments

2009-11-15T03:13:00.007+02:00

During the 8th AEC-NET conference in Denmark, I had the chance to visit Alssundgymnasiet in Sonderborg. It's a senior secondary school like ours, with about the same number of students (400). But what a difference in the design!

I won't go into the details of the wonderful building, since it would just make me and many others green with envy. Suffice to say that entering the building was close to getting into paradise, complete with its own snake, too!

Something else about the school impressed me even more than the creative achitecture. The school was a totally wireless campus, and everywhere we could see students working on laptops - their own that they bring to school every day, I was told when I asked them.

How can they afford this? Surely this can't be a requirement for all students! I learned that students don't have to buy their own course books, but can get them from the school library instead. Books are a major cost for high school students in Finland, whose families have to fork out hundreds of euros every 6-7 weeks. In a year, that money would easily be enough for a laptop or two, not to mention the positive effect of recycling books on the environment! Publishers in Finland would no doubt go up in arms if this was proposed. I also doubt whether our local authorities could afford to supply schools with the books. The Danish students also said that for students who don't own a laptop of their own, the school has got some to lend out. However, no student is forced to use a laptop, and some students still prefer the old pencil and notebook learning.

I wish I could see something like this in the hallways of my school. No wonder there is concern that Finland is falling behind in the application of ICT at schools. In my school, for example, the accepted wisdom is that wireless Internet would be impractical and too complicated to install and maintain. How does it work in Denmark then?

We were taken to observe a class where students presented their research on their ecological footprints in English and with the help of computer graphs and illustrations. Excellent!

We don't need a new school building to adopt similar 21st-century classroom practices. What we do need, though, is the wireless internet and the laptops. I wonder how long we will have to wait for them in today's economic atmosphere! To make the rest of us feel better, the Danish colleagues explained that their school was well ahead many others in their country, and that by no means all schools were as well equipped and advanced in the use of technology.

Even so, I dream on.

Redesigning traditional classrooms

2009-11-14T22:35:00.000+02:00

Most people have a fixed idea about what classrooms should look like - desks in neat rows facing the blackboard on one wall, in front of which the teacher is supposed to teach. The industrial model, deeply entrenched in people's consciousness, around the world. Difficult to change, too, with tight budgets and old school buildings, with the traditional square and boxy classroom design. Nevertheless, I have noticed that primary and middle school teachers even in Finland have been slightly more adventurous in rearranging their classrooms, but the higher up you get on the educational ladder the more set are the rows of desks.

Inspired by a colleague, who arranged the desks into groups of four, I wanted to experiment with the same arrangement last year, with quite encouraging results. After some negotiation with the principal and the school development group, we managed to get the green light at a staff meeting to make this a permanent arrangement in two classrooms. The reason why we need to consult all the teachers, is that we are not lucky enough to have our own classrooms, but instead each teacher changes rooms all through the day and week, and consequently several teachers share the same rooms.

Since then I have had all my groups study in this format - 3-4 students together in a small group.

I must say, this suits foreign language learning very well, since we do spoken work and practise communication in the foreign language in every class. Having more than one partner to exchange ideas with leads to more active participation by all the students and wider perspectives on the topics discussed. What's more, this is a simple little change to make me throw the learning ball to the students more often in my lesson plans.

SETTING UP THE GROUPS
How to arrange students into the groups then? I have tried different ways. I had read earlier that the teacher should set up the groups, making sure that there are both boys and girls and students with varying abilities in each group. Doing this is rather time-consuming, and I don't always know the students enough in advance to be able to gauge their ability. In addition, I am often unaware of personal chemistry problems between students, which may lead to unnecessary conflicts and unconstructive collaboration. Our high school system, as I have explained in a previous post, is unique in that it is more like a university system. Students choose the courses they want to study in each of the 5 grading periods, and so the compotisition of each group changes five times a year, so in every group I teach I usually have some students that I meet for the very first time.

After a couple of failed attempts, I decided to let the students choose their own groups. Quite expectedly, this led to some disruptive groups of good friends and a few shy and quiet students helplessly standing by the door, too afraid to join anyone voluntarily. This didn't work all that well either.

My latest system has worked quite well. In the first lesson of a course, I let the students sit in pairs that they choose themselves. After that I will join up the pairs and individual students in mixed groups of 3 or 4. In this way the students are given a little of bit of choice, which they like, but I can interfere, too, with hardly any opposition from the students. Lonely students don't stick out like sore thumbs, and the noisy ones are kept apart.

CRITICISM
I don't think anyone has come up with one, universally working solution for organising classrooms and learning in a school setting. If that solution had been found, I'm sure we'd all know about it by now!

Naturally, not everybody likes the new classroom set up. Students protest because more active participation is expected of them. Sitting in rows allows them to spend more time quietly in their own thoughts, or withdraw totally from any participation in class. Not so in the groups, where they have to at least recognize the existence of their group mates in one way or another. Shy students find it difficult to sit facing others. Some also complain that when they do have to face the front of the class, with the board and the screen, it's awkward to keep moving their chairs to be able to see properly. Other complaints have been about the difficulty of moving between the groups in a crowded room.

Colleagues who share the same classroom complain that it is impossible for them teach their subject with this desk arrangement. This is especially true about maths teachers. Last spring we had rather a big conflict, where one maths teacher couldn't find anyone to change rooms and so started demanding me to put the desks back into rows for her to be able teach in the room. I didn't comply, since I had the staff meeting decision to back me up. On the other hand, some other colleagues who have been intially forced to teach in this room, have actually found it good, and have changed some of their classroom routines accordingly.

The latest criticism, just this week came from a cleaning lady. She was waiting for me outside the classroom, ready to come in after my last lesson in the afternoon. She asked me why I had the desks in groups and suggested I go back to the old arrangement, so it would be easier and quicker for her to wipe the floor. I was rather astounded by this sudden comment from an unexpected source. I considered it wiser not to start throwing pedagogical jargon about collaborative learning to her and gave a simple explanation of group work. She then went on to enlighten me that I was actually preventing students from learning properly, since most of them weren't facing the blackboard! Oh well, maybe next week I should offer her some good tips about cleaning in return...

8th AEC-NET conference in Sonderborg, Denmark

2009-11-06T00:30:00.001+02:00

Greetings from Denmark! I have more or less been 'off the radar' for over two weeks. At first there was the presentation to prepare as we were lucky to be shortlisted for the AEC-NET award again. I wanted to introduce the audience to something new, and practised with Prezi, the new presentation tool developed in Hungary. I had some trouble downloading the finished presentation and was rather panicky at one point, since the presentation date was getting closer and closer, but with the friendly and speedy help from the Prezi team, plus totally unexpected assistance through Twitter, I managed in the end. Pheww! Thank you so much everybody!

On the whole, though, It was a lot of fun learning a totally different concept of putting a presentation together. PowerPoint is so linear and predictable, whereas Prezi forces you to start from the big picture and then add surprising details and fun parts to it. I must say Prezi did live up to its novelty value, especially since all the other presenters relied on good old PowerPoint. I got a lot of interested questions. Here is the beginning 'canvas' of the presentation, where I used pictures of lego characters as part of the illustration, since we were in Denmark.

I don't think it was only thanks to Prezi, though, that we were lucky to win another AEC-NET award for our WHAZZUP? project. We did have a very lively online community last year, where students learned a lot

about the 10 different participating schools and their respective cultures. Students were also guided to more academic blog writing in addition to the popular forum discussion and chat, where more colloquial language could be used. Many of them also produced multimedia presentations on various topics that they were learning at school. Creating a positive digital footprint, and responsible net behaviour were also among our goals, and to a large extent we did manage to get the message across.

Here we are, the winning WHAZZUP? team - I and my colleague Merja plus our student Henna, who presented with us, holding the certificate, and two of our partner teachers, Geeta Rajan, from New Delhi India, and on the right Adrienne Webb from Dublin Ireland. Adrienne, our partner for many years in various projects, has just published a very nice account of her AEC experience on the webpage of the Computer Education Society of Ireland.

As good, efficient and easy as virtual communication and collaboration is these days, I still think face-to-face meetings retain an important place in building trust and motivation for lasting partnerships. All my long-term colleagues around the world are ones that I have had the chance to meet and get to know personally outside the virtual world. I feel energized and inspired after sharing ideas with so many wonderful teachers from so many countries. The new WHAZZUP? 2009-2010 is on its way - a hopefully improved version from last year. Working on intercultural projects is an ongoing learning process that I really enjoy!

Student assessment - a necessary evil or a learning tool?

2009-10-09T20:17:00.001+03:00

I seem to have embarked on a mission of explaining our rather peculiar high school system in Finland in English. The reason for this is that I haven't found any grassroots information about it in English, and many foreign colleagues often ask about 'the Finnish secret of success' based on our students' outstanding results in the OECD PISA assessments. The PISA tests involve 15-year-old students, so it doesn't really say anything about our senior high schools, where I teach, and which about 50 % of Finnish youngsters choose to attend, while the other half goes into various vocational institutions. If you are interested in the Finnish school system, you will find a lot of information on the University of Helsinki pages about Finland and Pisa, for example, or some of my explanations about senior high schools in particular in this post.

This time I will reflect on student assessment, an integral and passionately discussed part of all schooling. To tell you the truth, I sometimes wish I could forget about course assessment all together and concentrate on mere learning with my students. Pie in the sky, I know, as I'm sure assessment will always be performed in schools, in one form or another, but all the multiple purposes it can serve, is another story.

In my previous post I touched on one part of student assessment in Finnish high schools - regular exams that take place 5 times a year as part of the course-based, modular curriculum and the national final exams as the culmination of students' 12-year schooling, a kind of 'test of maturity' reflected in the often used English translation of the name of these exams 'matriculation examination'. At graduation, each Finnish student receives two diplomas - one given by the school and based on the GPA of all the exams and grades during the 3-4 high school years given by various teachers, and the national diploma based only on the results of the national exams. Both of these are taken into account when applying for university, for example.

In our system, the grade for each course is given based on the students' performance in the end exam together with their overall performance throughout the course, which may be a very subjective assessment by the teacher. In our curriculum there is a concept called 'continuous performance', which usually accounts for +/- 1 grades in the final course assessment. In reality this concept is rather vague and there appear to be as many interpretations of it as there are teachers.

Some say it means active participation in class - but how about students who may be very good learners, but are very shy and quiet by nature to share what they know in class? Should they be penalised for their personality? Moreover, what is considered active participation? Is it simply putting your hand up to answer the teacher's questions? Some students appear to be very active, but actually only want to answer the simplest questions, the answers for which they can read from an exercise book - which they may have acquired from a sibling or friend who had taken the course earlier and filled in all the correct answers. How is a teacher to know all this in a group of 36 that you only meet for some 30 lessons? Others interpret 'continuous performance' to mean some proof of the student's learning during the course, maybe demonstrated in extra homework assignments, project work, a portfolio, spoken presentations, a learning journal - there are countless options, and teachers have free hands to design their courses, as long as they make sure that each student knows exactly what is expected of them right at the beginning, and how each assignment and test is going to affect the final course grade.

About ten years ago, the situation was quite different - the structure of courses was more standardized and teachers didn't use to negotiate the learning goals, focuses or methods as much as now. Although I welcome this democratization and individualization of education, I must say I find the accompanying increased litigiousness of schools rather troublesome. For example, I have already started writing 'course contracts' with all the expectations clearly stated, which each student then signs to prove that they have been informed and that they understand it, too. Before I did this, there were always students who claimed that they hadn't been informed, and consequently weren't aware of certain extra assignments, for example, and so couldn't be expected to hand them in. I am inclined to interpret these claims as a game of avoiding learning, a total waste of valuable time, which the student could choose to spend productively. No doubt, the students may have a totally relevant justification for such behaviour. Maybe the assignment didn't challenge them enough, or was simply too boring. Why should they do it anyway just because the teacher says so?

In foreign languages, an extra assignment is most often writing an essay on a given topic at home. Cheating goes on, essays are copied from the net, friends' old essays are recycled, essays are written for others as a favour, you name it. Often none of this can be proved by the teacher, and so a cheat gets a claringly unfair benefit compared to a slacker who never bothered to write the essay, but still managed to do better in the end-of-the-course exam. I wonder if anybody else ever gets totally desperate with the challenges of school assessment? I strongly suspect that it is impossible to be 100 % fair to all students.

I have fairly clear goals of what I would ultimately like to achieve during my language courses. My most basic principles are: firstly, that students should not waste their time at school, but keep learning all the time and later be able to apply their learning outside school, and secondly, transparency and fairness of assessment. To achieve these goals I have mostly abandoned the only-for-the-sake-of-it homework writing assignments, and started doing process-based writing with peer reviews, several editing sessions and hopefully, improved end results that clearly attest what the student has learned.

Photos:
students hard at work by Susan NYC on Flickr

Should there be a 21st-century hat code?

2009-10-07T14:07:00.010+03:00

Oh, the lovely old days, when people used to dress like this and everyone knew the important hat etiquette. According to columnist Miss Manners (quoted in an article about Hat etiquette), the reason for the rule of women being allowed to wear their hats everywhere was the following:

Men's hats are easily removed, but women's hats with ribbons, bows, flowers and other decorations can be quite a production to remove, especially if they're anchored with hat pins.

According to my collegues, the same old etiquette still applies, ie. boys are not to wear any type of headgear in class or school canteen, whereas girls are exempt from this rule. Apart from prohibiting overcoats in class, this is the only dress code my school stipulates.

So, at my school this sign reads: "BOYS, no hats/caps."

In other words this boy must remove his hat at school, but the girls can keep theirs on. I really can't see why it would be any more difficult for the girls to remove theirs - hardly any ribbons or flowers here! I don't think this really makes any sense in these days of partly unisex fashion.

In actual fact, I don't even notice who is wearing a hat or a baseball cap and who isn't. I am more interested in what goes on inside the head underneath the headgear. My suggestion is to either accept that headgear is an essential part of teen fashion today, move on and abolish the archaic rules, or apply the hats off rule to everybody equally. But for saying this, I am considered a dissident trouble-maker, while colleagues continue wasting time talking about the horrible caps meeting after meeting.

Photo: Sissy and Bubba by Patrick Q on Flickr

The feared and much awaited exam week

2009-10-05T22:05:00.003+03:00

Exam week is here again, the first this school year. Our Finnish high school system is quite unique compared to many others, as our school year consists of 5 grading periods, each with their own different timetable. Basically, each student chooses 6 academic subjects for each period, each of which will be studied for five 45-minute lessons per week for approximately 6-7 weeks. On top of that students can also have a varying number of optional subjects per week (eg. sports, music, ICT), for which there won't normally be any exam. Each 6-7-week period ends with an exam week, during which students take one 3-hour exam a day in one of their subjects of that period. .

From a selfish teacher's point of view the beginning of the exam week is a welcome change into the daily grind. There won't be any classes to teach, only exams to prepare and invigilate. Of course, it's stressful to see the pile of papers on your desk getting higher and higher as the week proceeds. But if you are disciplined enough you can beat it before the next grading period starts, especially since you can finish every working day at midday, and possibly even have a day or two completely off during the exam week.

Surprisingly perhaps, even most of our students like this system. They say it's better to be able to concentrate on one subject at a time, and not to have any other distracting lessons on the exam days. They do find the approaching exam week rather daunting, and many get almost burnt out during it, but still they wouldn't want it changed in any way.

From a pedagogical point of view, however, there is a serious downside to the whole system. For too many students it leads to a dangerous cycle of 'bulimic learning'. In the long run, it doesn't seem to lead to real understanding of what they are cramming a day or two before the exam, let alone any higher order critical thinking skills. We have a considerable number of students who happily sail through the lessons included in each course, only showing up physically in the classroom, but hardly doing any work. They believe it's only the exam that counts, and that studying and learning means a rushed job the night before, in a stupefied state after too many energy drinks and cups of coffee to keep awake. On the exam mornings, you would see pale and exhausted groups of students nervously waiting to get their papers in front of them to quickly regurgitate all the fragmented bits of knowledge they still manage to remember. We all know what kind of learning this represents. Can we even call it learning?

Something is badly wrong with this system. At times I feel that all our students do is sit for exams, while there is hardly any time for any learning in between. Students who fail a course, can retake the exam, but this is no more than a couple of weeks after the previous exam, during which time the students are left on their own to revise. In practice, a student - with usually rather lacking study skills anyway - cannot hope to patch up a lot for their almost non-existent knowledge in that short time. Of course, there are students who do understand the importance of consistent learning all through the course. But for a great number - boys in particular - the system allows for a happy-go-lucky, carefree attitude that unfortunately too often backfires as disappointing underachievement in the end.

Although we Finnish teachers are privileged to have the freedom the design our own course assessment, few teachers dare to use new and innovative assessment methods. Most just repeat the same old routine, because everybody else does, possibly out of fear of protests from students, who also tend to be rather conservative and need their comfort zones. True, we do have a very clear end goal in mind - the national final exams, where students' overall knowledge in several subjects will be evaluated by the national examination board. This does have a big effect on what is taught, and how learning is assessed at the school level. Yet, nobody tells us to give a written exam after every course, but still we do. We could spend the hours set for the exam on something totally different with the group of students, if we so choose, but still we don't.

This year, I am gradually trying to move into a more balanced and continious learning process all through the period with more peer assessment and modeling of different learning strategies and what it means to really learn something. By doing project work in small groups, for example, all through the course, the dangerous bulimics will hopefully learn to plan and pace their learning to have some time for developing deeper insights into and possible connections between the subjects they have chosen. This usually means easing off the hectic rushing through all the overbloated contents of the course book. Some of that content will have to be skipped and more time to be devoted to stopping, thinking and reflecting. I honestly don't believe that I would jeopardize my students' chances to succeed in the national final exams by not covering every single page of the course book. Less with more focus, will be more, is my new mantra. I hope I won't be proved wrong!

Photo: Students Multi-task When Studying for Exams by zsrlibrary on Flickr

Stop whining!

2009-09-30T22:48:00.000+03:00

Today I remembered this slogan, which was used in an MTV environmental campaign some years back. It came to my mind after our school development group meeting. The goal of the group is to get all our teachers involved in 'a campaign' to change some of our ingrained practices to be better able to help our students learn.

Since its inception back in 2002 our development group has worked hard to tackle problems, such as students' lack of motivation and aimless drifting at school, and consequent teacher frustration and cynicism. Over the year these problems have led to a culture of teachers whining and complaining about the recurring themes of irregular school attendance, neglect of homework assignments and general apathy and low performance among students, accentuated by our aging and long-standing permanent staff. Year in and year out the staff room echoes with us listing the same problems again. Of course, every now and then, it is healthy to do a bit of complaining to vent out when you're feeling tired and fed up after a disappointing class. But to keep going through the same - largely structural or pedagogical - problems without seeking possible solutions, is useless and sets a vicious cycle of passive helplessness and shifting the blame. The unquestioned belief is that we teachers are doing the best we can, and even more, while it's the students who aren't pulling their weight.

There is an old wisdom that rings more true to me here: "if you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll keep on getting what you've always got." Why does this need spelling out? We need to break out of stuck-in-a-rut patterns. And for that we will need innovation and creativity to instill an environment of hope and enthusiasm instead of the eternal whining. Maybe it would rub off on our students, too, and we might witness unpredictable results.

In our meeting, we decided to create an online discussion forum to start actively looking for constructive solutions that would energize us all. In the forum complaints about the problems that we all recognize too well by now are strongly discouraged. I look forward to seeing the response from the rest of the staff.

Photo: IF YOU'RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION THEN... by Lulu Vision on Flickr

Should text speak be banned or allowed at school?

2009-09-27T21:08:00.005+03:00

Today a correspondent in Paris of my local newspaper wrote about the growing alarm among French academics and teachers concerning the present young generation's deteriorating spelling skills. According to the article, 2 our of 3 young French students fail their annual dictation tests these days. The finger has been pointed at poor teaching, too few lessons, the government, the influence of English or, of course, young people's texting culture, until somebody dared to suggest that it is the outdated French ortography, stuck somewhere in the 19th century, that should be blamed. French spelling is notoriously challenging, since there are, for example, no fewer than 13 different ways to spell the sound 'o' in French. As one solution to the problem, it was suggested that students should be allowed to systematically use the automatic spelling checks on computers. Oh no! That would be the destruction of French culture as we know it. Nothing must be changed!

Similar concerns are voiced around the globe. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote about generation Y and texting with the title 'It's ok how we communic8'. They give the reassuring message that rather than killing acceptable forms of language, texting and online chat forums are actually making our youngsters write more than ever. Problems arise when the text speak conventions of the young clash with the expectations of older generations, eg. teachers at school. Dr Bruce Moore, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, is not worried, though:

Most people realise that language is used differently in different contexts. Most people know that while it's OK to be informal with text messages, different rules apply when you are writing a job application.

Probably this is mostly true, although I wouldn't take it for granted. A colleague of mine was appalled by a student who, for the first time in this teacher's 20-year career, had finished her national final exam psychology answer with a smiley! It is not automatically clear for many students what style is appropriate in different contexts. The problem becomes even more complicated in the case of foreign languages. Students simply don't have enough experience and exposure to the language to be able to choose the correct register. Our Finnish students' English, for example, is mostly colloquial, spoken language learned from TV and films. Very few of them would be able to produce formal academic texts in English without a lot of guidance and scaffolding. Yet, they are expected to manage this in their final exams if they want to reach the best grades. The problem is accentuated by a lot of English text-speak entering our Finnish language, which makes it sound like part of the standard language. LOL, for example, has become part of young people's everyday Finnish. I have also heard some of our younger government ministers being interviewed in English on TV, and I must say their style of English sounded more like that of a rock star than a serious politician. Although they are quite fluent, their style and register are off-key for somebody in their position. Colloquial spoken English is ubiquitous in Finland, and Finns come to regard it as the current norm. It's a tough job for us EFL teachers to try and introduce the more formal style. Students easily write the formal style off as something nobody but we, old-fashioned English teachers, would use. I have almost weekly arguments over this with students. Are we teachers behind the times, not realizing that communication culture has actually evolved to a new level that we don't understand and appreciate?

In an earlier post I referred to the Finnish research revealing the wide gap between the types of texts students engage in in their freetime and what is expected of them at school. It is true that teachers are not familiar enough with young people's new communication patterns. If we were, it would be easier for us to help them change their register when needed. Rather than being shocked and dismissing students' texting and online communication as something bad and totally unacceptable, we should understand the changes at hand and welcome these new forms of communication. Attitude adjustments are needed from both teachers and students, I feel. Social researcher Mark McCrindle, in the above-mentioned Sydney Herald article, nicely sums up what is expected of today's teachers and students:

Generations Y and Z need to be given the tools which will allow them to communicate effectively with other generations. They also need to know when it is appropriate to use 'text speak' and when it isn't. If they are writing an essay, for example, or a job application, it's probably best to use the language they learnt at school.

In our international school projects we have solved this problem by using the Ning platform, where students are guided to use a more formal style to express themselves in their blogs, but still allowed to use their familiar, colloquial style - even text speak and smileys, if they want to - in the discussion forum. I feel this approach is working quite well, if only we teachers take the time to keep reminding and guiding students to keep editing their texts. Quite a few of them need constant reminding, even to run their pieces through the computer spell checks before publishing!

Photo: LOL by sermoa on Flickr

English teacher's environmental week

2009-09-26T20:47:00.003+03:00

While autumn is splashing all its colourful palette around me, this week, for me, has been mainly dominated by one colour only: GREEN. I have often commented on the wonderful serendipity of online connections and discoveries, and this week seems to have been filled with them. Or is it rather that once your attention is drawn to something interesting, you easily start to notice it all around you? Whatever the reason, every day this week I have come across various environmental issues, most of which have been directly or indirectly linked to the threat of global warming.

I try to be environmentally aware, and I also try to model responsible behaviour in my own lifestyle. I believe it's my duty as an educator of future generations to bring these issues up in my English lessons, too. English, after all, is the language of most global cooperation, when solutions are negotiated to our huge common problems.To be honest, though, I must say the emphasis here is still on the word TRY. But it seems this week made me stop and think what my tiny role in all of this might be.

Fair trade Monday

On Monday our topic for one group's English lesson was 'fair trade'. We studied the related text in our textbook and then watched this Oxfam video clip. It tied in nicely with the text recycling the key vocabulary and also visualizing the conditions of the farmers in the developing world.

During the ensuing discussion, I was surprised to find that none of my students' families bought any fair trade products. Unfortunately, fair trade is still in its infancy in Finland, as the choice of products is very limited compared to many other countries, but it is gradually getting better. I must say I was rather taken aback at the seemingly indifferent 'I couldn't care less' attitude of many of my high school students. Did I manage to arouse empathy and global responsibility and awareness in any of them? I have no clue. Probably I only managed to sprinkle some seeds of ideas amongst them, and can only hope that some of them will fall into fertile ground and take root one day in the future.

Mind you, I am not making much better progress among my colleagues on this front. Somebody threw out the idea of only buying fair trade coffee for the staff room at the beginning of the new school year in August. We all bring a couple of packets of coffee every so often to keep us well stocked in order to avoid ever facing the catastophe of coffee running out in the middle of a busy school day. I took the suggestion seriously and started buying the more expensive fair trade coffee for school, too, only to realize that most of my colleagues refuse to follow suit, for some reason. What a pity to lose one opportunity to model some concrete action to our students.

Carfree Tuesday

On Tuesday this week, as every year on September 22, it was the World Carfree Day. Cycling for me, and tweeting about the day was my contribution, but sadly, it mostly looked like 'business as usual' in my town. Mind you, I cycle on other days, too, and sometimes ask myself whether these annual one-off theme days really make any difference in the big picture.

Other Newspaper headlines also brought up the consequences of climate change. Apparently, winters are predicted to get gloomier and gloomier here in Finland increasing the number of SAD sufferers. Bad news for people like me, who are already seriously affected by the dark winter blues. Other than moving to a sunnier climate, is there anything else I could do to mitigate this phenomenon?

Informative Wednesday

Interestingly, both English magazines that I read featured the environment on their covers in their articles this week. Serendipitously, Time had an article on fair trade, presenting rather sceptical and pessimistic views on the future of the fair trade model. Some more reading on the topic for my students.

Even more environmental content for this week, when I stumbled upon the Edging Ahead blog, where Rob, the teacher-librarian-blogger wrote a post about his juggling between adopting new technologies and taking into account a future where electricity, for example, may be scarce. I share this dilemma of getting my priorities sorted out with so many mixed messages floating around these days. And if I am lost, my students must be even more so!

The global problems that Rob addressed in his post are rather overwhelming, and may lead to a feeling of total helplessness and despair. Personally, I would like to hold up some hope in the face of all this impending doom, though. There is too much scepticism, cynicism and subsequent indifference amongst our students as it it, at least here in Finland. In this respect, Doug Johnson's reply post to Rob especially resonated with me. He wrote:

It has always been my contention that the ONLY solution to our world's problems lies in a truly aware and engaged population. And such awareness will only come by way of education that requires, not believing, but dispassionate thinking and robust problem-solving abilities.

I would like to emphasize the problem-solving abilities - and some practical hands-on activities instead of the traditional book-knowledge-only approach of Finnish high schools. It's one thing to know a lot of facts, but quite another to be willing to take action and apply any of that knowledge.

Sustainable development strategy Thursday

The Finnish Ministry of Education has set extensive goals for sustainable development in schools.

The aim is for all schools to have an action plan for sustainable development by 2010 and for 15% to have received external accreditation or certification of their activities by 2014.

In our school, we have a team to do the background work for ideas. The problem with a lot of government initiatives is that they tend to be lengthy and wordy, and often just remain empty rhetoric in dusty documents, or rarely visited websites. That's why real concrete ideas are needed at the local level, if the initiatives are to be turned into everyday practices at schools.

Today a meeting was held to come up with our first steps towards a more sustainable direction. We chose to start with saving paper. In a school with only 30 teachers and 400 students, a staggering number of close to 300,000 sheets of copy paper have already been used since the beginning of 2009! It was decided that each member of staff will get their individual copying code to help us all monitor and keep track of our use of paper. It will be interesting to see if this will start making a noticeable difference.

Paperless Friday and environmental seminar

No end to serendipity this week, since a tweet led me to the Teach Paperless blog and the mission of Paperless Friday, which already got over 100 teachers involved after reading the first tweet about it last week. I'm always keen on renewing old practices and trying out something new, so I definitely want to jump on the bandwagon, and challenge some of my colleagues to join me. What's more, this would be an excellent start for the paper saving campaign we embarked on on Thursday.

I couldn't start this week, though, since I wasn't at school on Friday but spent the day in Helsinki to attend a seminar on 'The Social Impact of Climate Change', organized by the Federation of Finnish-British societies at the British Embassy. What an appropriate finish to my green, environmental week. We heard, for example, Mr Malcolm Keay from the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies predict a very grim future, basically telling us that it's too late already. Luckily, young Finnish Green Party MP Oras Tynkkynen emphasized everybody's personal responsibility in making choices in life. More mixed messages again, though. I didn't enjoy hearing my idealistic little everyday endeavours, such as recycling or using energy-efficient light bulbs, labeled as useless tinkering, when really drastic national and global measures are called for. "Climate chaos" instead of "climate change" was one lecturer's opinion of a more appropriate label for our current circumstances.

As a teacher, I am still wondering what message to give to my students, and how. It seems that each individual, even an informed and well-educated one, issuch an insignificant player in the massive, global corporate and political game. Or maybe I should stay on my turf, ie. focus on teaching English grammar, and leave the environment to experts.

The long and winding road to changing the practices of EFL writing

2009-09-22T21:38:00.004+03:00

This Chinese proverb has been on mind a lot this week in connection with trying to find ways of shifting the focus from teaching to learning and student involvement. In particular, I have been thinking about the writing skills of my EFL students.

On the whole, our students get a fair bit of writing practise, but the way it's traditionally done, is giving them essay titles to write on as homework assignments, with the excuse of an overloaded curriculum and too little time to focus on this in class. The submitted essays are then meticulously marked by the teacher and handed back with a grade, and possibly a few written comments to help the students improve. In practise, though, the next time the student writes another such homework essay, the same mistakes will usually be repeated, and repeated and repeated again, irrespective of the teachers' well-meaning comments and hours of hard work in correcting all the mistakes. Many students go through the 3 years of senior high school with hardly any improvement in their writing skills.

It's exactly the scenario that I read in Tara Seale's blog Enhanced English Teacher some time ago. She

quoted the following from Michael Degen's book Crafting Expository Argument:

Too many teachers merely assign a paper, provide little instruction over the methods for achieving expectations, and scream while grading “these terrible essays.”

Ouch! How many times have I screamed, although I should actually blame myself for neglecting the poor students by leaving them to struggle with the writing assignments alone at home. Is it any wonder that the results are the same – again and again? Telling them and even showing them is not enough, if students are not expected to get involved in the editing process themselves.

Another problem, of course, are standardizedl, formal testing methods. We are faced with the same challenges as described in the NCTE blog by Scott Filkings:

For the foreseeable future, we’ll measure (“officially,” anyway) our students’ ability as writers with assessments that have no authentic audience and no rhetorical purpose other than to invite efficient evaluation

Many students just go through the motions of perfunctorily producing the required number of words on a given theme only to the teacher or some other evaluator - "a nameless, faceless reader" from Scott Filkings' post - just because they have to, for their course credit or diploma. How motivating is that? This system makes many of them lazy to make any effort to edit their writing. Instead, it's over and done with as quickly as possibly, just as any tedious and meaningless homework.

This week I asked one group to write a slightly longer piece of project work on one aspect of Finnish society that they could choose themselves, according to their interests. We had been reading about different social issues and learning related vocabulary, so that rather dictated the general theme. To make the assignment more authentic, their writing was to be published on the international project Ning of our school. That means, once we start getting foreign partner groups to join the Ning, there will be a real audience to read the students' writing.

We started the work in class, so the students had a chance to consult each other or me to get started. We talked long and hard about plagiarism. Sadly, the 'copy and paste' method is quite common among our students, since the net, with all its English content, is too tempting for those who tend to leave all their work to the last minute. I would like my students to learn to produce their own material in English, because it will be essential for many of them in their future careers. The older Finnish generations have never been taught this, which is why it's not uncommon at international conferences to hear Finnish professional and experts giving thoroughly boring presentations put together with the same 'this-will-do' attitude from copied and disconnected sentences and paragraphs from various net sources. No wonder the lack of marketing skills among Finns is often talked about these days! Writing to a potential audience was also discussed and how it should affect the choice of topic and point of view. In addition, I introduced them to hyperlinking, instead of the citations or footnotes of traditional writing assignments. We also talked about the use of photos to bring some life and colour to their online work, and naturally copyright came up in this connection. Last but not least, I encouraged the students to think about the project as a process, in which they could email their first drafts to me for consultation. In the end, only 8 students out of 24 made use of this. For those who did, I pointed out some recurring mistakes in their English, and also suggested how to elaborate on their chosen theme to make their writing more interesting. Finnish students tend to write in the form of lists of unrelated facts, which is a reflection of the communication style typical of Finnish. It doesn't translate very well into English, and many students need constant reminding about the importance of linking ideas together and adding illustrative examples and their own opinions and thoughts, when they write in English. Another thing I needed to spell out to them was to remember the real audience. The impersonal, rhetorical style, which they are used to when writing assignments for assignments' sake only to the teacher, is really hard to change!

If you take a look at the different blog posts on Finland on the Ning, I have a feeling it will be easy to spot the majority of those who never bothered to edit their work once, despite all the pep talks and coaching beforehand. All in all, the results were rather discouraging again. Some even resorted to almost word by word copying from Wikipedia! As far as they were concerned, my words and good intentions fell totally on deaf ears. It's beyoung my comprehension whether they are really totally dumb to think that they won't be caught, or whether they can't understand a word I say to them. Why doesn't it matter to them what they publish online for anyone to read? Why don't they want to take more pride in their work? Or is it still the old disconnect between what school expects of them and what they, themselves, find valuable and worth investing time and effort in? Obviously, there still wasn't enough student involvement for them to understand. The requirements of writing to an audience are far from self-evident and the long tradition of isolated writing for school only is surprisingly hard to break. I foolishly took it for granted that students would automatically be able to write differently to a real audience - only a few managed this.

My next move is going to be to do the whole process at school, since most of them clearly cannot be trusted to do it on their own. We started today with some peer assessment of their first drafts. They all wrote their first drafts, then exchanged papers with another student, and with the help of my guiding prompts, then wrote some comments and suggestions to each other. Let's see if there will be any change of attitude and possibly even development in their writing this way!

Ridiculous testing of spoken English skills

2009-09-16T13:54:00.005+03:00

It's national final exam time again in Finnish senior high schools. To graduate our students will have to pass national exams in a minimum of 4 subject. The exams are prepared by a special exam board, and there are two occasions to take them during the school year, in the autumn or in the spring. Students are free to work out their own schedule when they prefer to take each exam, yet the dates are set by the board and they are always the same for every school in Finland.

Today was the date for this autumn's English exam. Instead of the conventional set of reading comprehension, structures and vocabulary and composition, they had come up with a new section this time - filling in lines in a dialogue.

Finland is remiss I would claim, for not testing students' oral language skills for the final tests in any way. I don't know many countries where language tests are solely written! I have a feeling that writing lines in a dialogue was the board's attempt at silencing the many critics of the written-only exams. You see, the board, in their great wisdom, have decided that it is impossible to design and organize national oral exams. Maybe so, but I don't think they have come up with a very clever replacement this year. Or what do you think of the following scenario?

There is a dialogue between a farmer who stops his car to pick up a hitchhiker on the road somewhere in the British countryside. The hitchhiker is a travelling Finn, and the students are asked to write what this traveller would say based on Finnish cues. After the students have been prompted to write the words of the hitchhiker to indicate that he/she would like to get off to continue his/her journey, the farmer then goes on: "Well, the wife likes to have a chat with visitors. Are you sure you wouldn't mind comin' in for a cup o' tea?" After which the cue asks the students to decline politely because of a busy schedule, or something to that effect. Honestly, is this a script from a horror movie? If I was in a situation like that, I don't think politeness would be the first thing on my mind, but rather how to get out of the car in one piece and run away as fast as possible!

Not only is the whole story laughably artificial (would you really get in a strange farmer's car in the middle of nowhere these days any more?), but do they really think that they can test what spoken skills students have acquired in 12 years of English studies by asking them to write ONLY 5 lines in a dialogue? Utterly useless, if you ask me.

Photo: Exam Hall by non-partizan on Flickr

The value of global school projects?

2009-09-10T21:50:00.019+03:00

Today I had a Skype interview with an independent monitor for the European Commission concerning the AEC-NET projects our school has been involved with. The purpose for this interview was to help the Commission assess the value for their money invested in the various projects of Asia-Europe Foundation.

For me, the value is quite clear. During every single project, whether virtual or a face-to-face student exchange, I have witnessed incredible changes in the mindsets and attitudes of many students. From monocultural, often stereotypical, even prejudiced attitudes they start gaining insights into the urgency of becoming more multicultural in their mindsets. I believe these are invaluable learning experiences for today's youngsters growing up in the globalising world. Not only isolated language training, but also authentic intercultural communication practice as an essential part of it.

All through the interview, I felt I was failing to explain this in terms that the evaluator would understand. On a personal level, yes, he could appreciate the value, but how about the stakeholders holding the purse strings? I doubt it. You can't quantify the development of somebody's mindset in any way. There is no test to prove that any of this will have any concrete value to these youngsters' futures. Deep down I know there is a lot of value in it, but it is only a hunch, a gut feeling - my biased interpretation perhaps? It is this value, however, that drives me forward and makes me invest a lot of my freetime and effort in developing these projects year after year. It is something you can't learn by reading books or listening to teachers or lectures alone. You will need to engage in this dialogue yourself, face differences with an open mind, and grow beyond the boundaries of your own language and culture.

How can we make our governments and school administrators realize the value? Too often I feel that idealism and softer values are dismissed in today's harsh atmosphere of insisting that value can only be measured numerically. In such an atmosphere, the words students and teachers wrote in the final evaluation questionnaire of last year's project, tend to fall on deaf ears:

I could meet new people of different countries which have different cultures. Here, I see that intercultural learning is crucial in order to build harmonious relationships between countries.

I enjoyed the opportunity to be able to learn and understand the students involved in the project. I am also more understanding to certain cultural practices of other countries. I could discuss and know others' ideas in the different countries.

I really enjoyed the fact that I could talk to people from other parts of the world. It gave me a chance to learn about other cultures as well as individual people. I also got to learn how to write a blog. This was something I had never done before.

I have learned about European culture and school lives. I am very pleased to have my students have chances to participate in the international understanding. My students could widen their horizons.

How would you describe the value of global school projects?

More on grammar - darned gap fills and translations!

2009-09-07T19:28:00.005+03:00

I seem to have it in for grammar this week. My previous post set me off on a real ranting path. Why is it that students, who remember all sorts of grammar rules by heart, rarely manage to relate those forms to meaning and use? They might be able to parrot a pattern in a mechanical drill exercise, but when it comes to natural use, the practised grammar is soon forgotten.

Hanna Torp, another English teacher in Finland, blogged about a recent Finnish doctoral thesis, in which it was found that

the current curriculum leads to mechanical learning of isolated pieces of knowledge

Isn't isolating grammar from the larger entity of communicative competence of a language a glaring example of this in language classes? And separate grammar exercises purely for the school context only - and apparently nothing much but busy work to keep students occupied, but with little relevance to any real communication. What is the goal in the end - for students to actually learn English, or for them to be able to explain how English grammar works?

For Finns, the English word order is a case in point. Language teachers have cleverly put together a simple rule for students to memorize: SPOTPA (subject, predicate verb, object + adverbs of manner, place and time). All my students proudly recite this whenever asked. Yet, even good students automatically go by their mother tongue when speaking or writing freely, resulting in sentences, such as "I like very much English.", or "In my school is much new student" (not to mention all the other typical Finnish mistakes in the second example!). What is the value of remembering SPOTPA when there clearly is little transfer to actual language use?

Another example. Ask a Finnish student how to form the passive in English and most will readily produce the pattern, and manage to mechanically fill in gap fill exercises correctly. The teacher then is lulled into believing that they have learned it, only to realize that in real situations many still can't differentiate between "the message should send" and "the message should be sent". It is no use then starting to repeat the grammatical terms - active, passive, auxiliary verb etc. - as they obviously didn't have any meaning for the students in the first place.

I can't help mentioning another Finnish peculiarity. Finnish students are taught English irregular verbs as a list of 3 forms - 'think, thought, thought', 'see, saw, seen', 'lie, lay, lain' and so on. They are tested on these so many times that they would be able produce the correct list even in their sleep! But when they speak or write, it's 'he thinked about it', or no past tense whatsoever. There would be an endless list of similar examples of useless rote learning of grammar formulas and rules.

I often think about the processes of learning your native language compared to the school style foreign language learning. Everybody learns their mother tongue without needing to know any grammatical terms, or understanding the, to me largely artificial, constructed grammar structure to explain how the language works. You use your language to express yourself and understand others - either in a written or spoken form. Why can't you learn a foreign language in the same way? Whenever I discuss this with colleagues, their argument, invariably, is that with the very limited number of lessons we have for foreign languages at school, the natural method simply wouldn't work. Consequently, their argument continues, we need to explain around the language for students to be able to apply the structures to whatever they will need to use the language for later. But what if we didn't, and spent all those hours practising fluency and natural use instead?

I honestly think that the types of exercises in our English textbooks are a big part of the problem. By far the most common grammar exercises are gap fills with Finnish clues, or sentences to translate from Finnish to English. In my opinion, translating from one language to another is a totally different process from using a language naturally. Typically, the sentences our textbooks present for translation focus on the common mistakes Finnish learners make, due to interference from their mother tongue. Teachers tend to believe that if they bang on these differences in the structure of the two languages, highlighting the underlying grammar rule again and again, the students are bound to get it in the end. Yet, what I see in class every day is that these translations only reinforce the mistakes, making them fossilize in the students' minds. Utterly frustrating, but great for testing!

I find it pointless, and tantamount to devious, to test students on the typical Finnish mistakes - you are just making a rod for your own back having to keep reading the same old mistakes. It's like digging holes for the poor students knowing perfectly well that they will fall into them in hordes. The Finnish board for designing the national final exams is especially keen on testing these - otherwise they wouldn't be able to create the desired normal distribution of scores every year. But national testing really is a topic for another rant later...

Photo: RANT, this way by Nesster on Flickr

Grammar and EFL

2009-09-06T10:50:00.003+03:00

Teaching grammar drives me crazy. Every EFL textbook I have used (all of them made in Finland) has contained a separate grammar section - a considerable part of each book. The grammar section always contains the same units, in more or less the same order. First course: all the verb tenses, word order, forming questions and question tags. Second course: pronouns, adjectives, expressing possession, passive.... and so on, as if there was a naturally specified sequence.

The irony of all this at the level I teach (senior high school, where students entering our school already have 7 years of English studies behind them) is that students have already been introduced to all the grammar our books deal with, and consequently should know at least the basics. Unfortunately, many students have remained surprisingly immune to all the grammar content taught to them and not acquired a sense of the basic structure of English. No doubt teachers at previous levels have taught it, and students have been exposed to all the metalanguage of grammatical terms and rules, but that must have read like mumbo-jumbo to many of them. Not even the endless gap fill and translation exercises or drilling have made it any clearer for them. They may be able to recite grammar rules word by word, but consistently fail to apply them in speaking or writing. From my experience, students who haven't grasped the basics by the time they come to our school, never will if it's the same methods and types of exercise repeated again.

I often ask myself, what is the point of teaching grammar at all in our style of senior high? As it's already been taught, surely it should only be tweaked whenever a point comes up naturally in the course of a discussion, while reading a text or practising writing, for example. Certain nuances could be added to the basics at this level, and maybe some quick revision every now and then, but I'm inclined to skip the grammatical metalanguage and rules. Why on earth do we believe that repeating the same old rules again and again is going to make a difference? Most students at senior high like English, but hate grammar lessons. No wonder, since they have had the same stuff thrown at them ad nauseam for years on end.

Is it us teachers who feel that it is our job to TEACH who insist on an overdose of grammar of this type? If a colleague of mine, who has worked in the author teams of many Finnish EFL book series, is to go by, that's exactly it. She says every so often some more progressive language book authors suggest easing on the grammar content, but publishers quickly stunt these initiatives claiming that it is grammar and more grammar that their clients - EFL teachers - want. And they are quite right. Whenever I attend book fairs where a new textbook is launched, most of the discussion revolves around the grammar sections. Are they extensive enough, or should we perhaps use an additional grammar book as well? When I try to question the dominance of grammar in language classes I get incredulous and condescending looks from my peers.

The bottom line is: we are teachers and our job is to teach. Grammar is easy to teach. Teachers can lecture to their hearts content in front of the class. They know all the rules better than any of their students. They can feel helpful and efficient. With grammar rules they get the chance to prove to those students whose fluency in actual language use may be far better than the teacher's that they don't know it all, after all! Teaching grammar makes teachers feel that they are truly earning their salaries. You could never teach vocabulary, or listening skills in the same way!

The other week I came across a post in Betty Azar's Teacher Talk blog, where she blogged about this same problem of declarative knowledge of grammar not automatically translating into procedural knowledge. She firmly believes that a cognitive understanding of grammatical concepts is the foundation on which, through practise, the natural use of a second language is built. She also mentions that teachers get frustrated too easily and determine

that teaching grammar does no good because there is no immediate transfer to internalized language

Mind you, Betty is writing about adults, which, I feel, is different from regular schools. But I would say she reflects the sentiments and beliefs of most of my colleagues. In Finnish senior high schools, though, you can hardly talk about teachers expecting immediate transfer. You'd think that if a method was good it wouldn't take 10 years of constant repetition, and still so many clueless students! One of the most often heard complaints from my language teacher colleagues is: "I have told them about this grammar rule countless times, and still they keep making the same mistakes!" In other words, the students are lazy or stupid or both. How about looking in the mirror and questioning the method instead?

Photo: grammar minibook verbs by jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr

Outsider again

2009-08-29T22:13:00.010+03:00

Two weeks into the new school year, and a feeling of disillusionment and alienation is creeping in. It wasn't until today and reading Paula White's blog post, Disconnected (And Feeling It!), that I started putting my finger on what the problem was.

I spent a lot of my summer learning about Twitter, among other things, gradually getting more and more positive about its benefits to educators around the world. So far, I've mostly been on the receiving end of wonderful ideas and links that are filling my del.icio.us account. In due course I hope to be able to reciprocate and become a more useful contributor myself. All through summer I got more and more overwhelmed by the selfless online sharing, assistance, inspiration and kindness that is hard to come by in the course of hectic daily lives at school!

Back in my 'real' school life, it's a totally different world. Many of my colleagues have spent the long summer break not giving the slightest thought to school or education. And they have every right to totally kick back and relax. As it is, though, I find it best to keep my Twitter and other online existence mostly to myself. I must admit it's hard sometimes when I've learned so many cool things from my PLN that I'm dying to share them at school. But I know that, should I ever open my mouth about it, I would only be labeled even more an alien from outer space than I am already. For the time being, my flock is not at my school.

Funny enough, apart from Paula White's, I have just recently read several other blog posts describing similar situations, both here at home and internationally. The underlying problem in all those posts has been that virtual contacts are not considered 'real' by the vast majority. For example, art director and designer, Marko Teräs, blogged about a leading Finnish business magazine's article that predicted the collapse of Twitter and Facebook in the near future, which would give people back 'their real lives' and make them read newspapers again. Prejudice, suspicion, feeling threatened, resistance, fear, dismissal... So many negative attitudes towards people, who are curious to grab the opportunities of sharing through social networks. People react in such different ways to the rapidly changing reality, denial and clinging to safe old solutions being a very understandable protective mechanism. If only these people realised what a lot they are missing out on!

In the discussion that soon followed after Paula White's post, she concludes:

I do however, feel some distress over the fact this post has resonated with so many, as it supports the fact that social networking for professional reasons is the exception rather than the norm now.
I'm looking forward to when it IS the norm!

So am I! But what can we do about it in the meantime? My approach will be to discreetly promote the sharing culture instead of the traditional working alone in isolation ethic of teachers. For example, at the beginning of the school year I introduced my colleagues to social bookmarking. Sharing my account and links has at least made some English teacher colleagues have a look at it, and hopefully realise its multiple uses in education.

Photo: The Outsider by sillysamlee on Flickr

First English lesson of the new school year

2009-08-11T13:05:00.006+03:00

I took an online 'teacher personality' quiz, which had the following question:

Which do you agree with most: It's the first week of school. This is a time to:
Allow kids to get to know you better without requiring a lot of work.
Teach the students your rules and enforce them strictly.
Get to know each student while testing them to find their level of
learning.
Jump right in and get started on the curriculum.

This made me think of my first week of school next week. I would very much like to take the first option, but I have always maintained that, in our system (which I briefly outlined in my previous post), it simply is not possible. To get through all the course content in the 6-7 weeks allocated for each grading period, I have usually had to follow the last alternative in the list - start work from the very first lesson onwards, with a little bit of diagnostic testing, and, of course, explaining my classroom rules, too.

I am not happy about this rather impersonal approach to meet my first groups of the year, though. What if this year I did it differently? During my summer reading I came across Paul Blogush's post about first impressions, which effectively convinced me not to start by enforcing my rules, or going through the syllabus and frightening especially the poor nervous new first-graders about how much more work senior high is going to require of them. In the first meeting of each class, I am going to try to meet the students more personally by engaging with them in some interactive moments of getting to know each other.

Another new revelation for me during my personal online summer studies was learning about the 'dogme' approach to language teaching, outlined in this article by Scott Thornbury. I am not surprised that we haven't heard about 'dogme' here in Finland, as EFL in Finnish senior high schools ('lukio') is taught by non-native teachers relying on set textbooks made in Finland to prepare students for the written national final exams. However, I got inspired to step outside my comfort zone next school year and introduce a weekly dogme-style lesson in all my courses. I also thought it would be a good idea to set the new tone right from the first lesson, so I am going to 'go partly dogme' with all my groups in their first lessons next week.

This is my lesson plan for my first-graders' first English class.

ENGLISH 1
- new to our school (16-year-olds, 7 years of English studies behind them)

I will leave all the rules, textbooks, syllabus etc. explanations till a later time. Instead we will focus on the people in the classroom and understanding certain underlying principles of my English lessons.

One of my principles is arranging desks into groups of 4 instead of the traditional rows. I will divide the students in the groups in advance, mainly to make sure that there are both boys and girls in each group, but also to avoid quiter students being left out or finding it too frightening to join others. I firmly believe that group seating in foreign language classes engages students, encourages interaction and communication and allows learning from peers.

Another important principle in my classes is the importance of spoken English skills, too often neglected with the traditional, mostly written, textbook + grammar approach. Instead of doing the pre-prepared icebreaker 'getting to know each other' exercises provided by the textbooks or the dozens of others easily found online, I am going to ask each group to prepare 10-20 interesting questions to ask their classmates to be able to introduce them to the others later. I want to get the input from the students to elicit meaningful and new questions rather than the worn-out and predictable teacher-prepared lists. As one of the grammar points we are supposed to revise in the first course is all the tenses in English, I am going to go through them briefly with them - probably write an introduction of myself with all the different tenses in it and project that for them for a quick recap of the grammar. Then I will ask them to use as many different tenses in the questions they prepare as possible.

Once the groups are ready with the questions, each pair of students will then work with a new pair from another group. After greeting each other, they will then in turn ask their questions and make notes. To introduce the idea of communicative skills, I will ask them to avoid a repetitive, going-through-the-motions question-and-answer style, but instead try their best to take a real interest and keep the conversation going. The problem with, at least Finnish, students is that they tend to just go through their questions as quickly as possible and provide only very short, matter-of-fact answers.

To finish the lesson, each pair is then going to introduce the two students they interviewed, and we will hopefully get to hear many interesting anecdotes about all the new people in the group. From previous experience, I have also realized that our students are usually too shy to reveal a lot if asked to introduce themselves, so introducing somebody else might make it less threatening and help us learn more about each student.

From a grammar point of view, introducing another person, and not yourself, also brings in the 3rd person singular plus the pronouns 'he/she', which always need special attention with Finnish students. In Finnish we only have one word for both he/she, and so a typical mistake in English is, for example "Do you know my mother? HE is a nurse." Rather confusing, isn't it? All along, I will make notes of typical mistakes - how to form questions, forming the tenses etc. and in the next lesson I will briefly go through the problematic points with the whole group.

Goals

With this lessons plan I hope to achieve to following goals:

break the ice in an unthreatening way and learn something about each other
engage each student in a communicative exercise, and introduce the idea that in my classes they will be expected to SPEAK ENGLISH (with each other, and in public)
keep it all in English
talk about topics that the students find relevant
start introducing the course grammar in a (hopefully!) less boring way
get the students used to the idea of working in small groups from the beginning
set a nice and relaxed atmosphere

School development project

2009-08-03T00:14:00.003+03:00

August. And suddenly the mail box is inundated with 'back to school' shopping catalogues. School thoughts start creeping in. Last night I even had my first annually recurring start-of-school-year nightmare of being hopelessly late, but not finding my clothes anywhere, and ending up rushing to school in my nightie! (Freud might have an interpretation or two about that!)

Our first day of school will involve each homeroom teacher welcoming their flock back and going through all the necessary admistrative and other details and paperwork with them. It's also an occasion to motivate and inspire students for a fresh new start.

Today I started thinking about our school development group's achievement from last year - a slideshow on guiding students how to gradually be more self-directed.

View more presentations from sinikka.

The ideas of the slides were compiled by our development team by studying literature and research on motivation, learning to learn, lifelong learning etc. and also visiting experts on these fields at Finnish universities for consultation. All the ideas were also passed through all the staff, and revised accordingly. This was done with the hope of all teachers committing themselves to applying these principles in their lesson plans by varying their teaching methods to help different students learn to learn. The visual look of the slides was developed by a group of students, some of whom also adjusted the Finnish language to sound right for teenagers (the English translation you see here is mine).

On the first day of school, each homeroom teacher is going to introduce the slides to their group in a way that they feel comfortable with - some may use drama, others more traditional class discussions. As in our school system senior high school is an optional establishment (about half of 16-year-olds choose a more practical-oriented vocational school instead, some even enter the working life at 16). In Finnish 'senior high school' is called 'lukio', which is derived from the verb 'lukea', meaning 'to read'. This clearly indicates that it is a rather academic type of school preparing many students for later university studies, and thus it is generally believed that students at this level should be capable of studying much like at college. This belief is reflected in the very structure of our senior high schools, which is rather unique in the whole world. The underlying idea is that students compile their own yearly schedules from a choice of courses, which, in our school, looks like this.

Every year students choose one course on each of the horizontal lines with the aim of getting together the required minimum of 75 courses to graduate. The number of compulsory courses per subject varies, and depending on their preferences and plans, students then choose any number of optional courses in different subjects. They can, for example, focus on mathematics, physics and chemistry and only study the bare minimum of humanistic subjects. Or they can take several courses in history and social studies, and only fewer courses of lower-level mathematics. Many different combinations are possible. In practice, it means that students don't study with the same group or with the same subject teacher all the time, but with different teachers and students and following their own schedule that changes 5 times a year, ie. we work in 5 different grading periods. Also students' school days may be very different. Because of this unusual structure of the school, I would actually like to talk about the Finnish lukio even in English, since translating it into senior high school or secondary school or anything else is rather misleading.

Most students spend 3 years in senior high school, but 4 years is gradually becoming more common, which is often due to students slacking, ie. only choosing very few courses for some grading periods. Because they can. There is no denying that it is a demanding system, and unsurprisingly, not all students can handle the freedom they are given responsibly and wisely. We developed these levels of study skills as a tool to make students aware of how they could cope and develop themselves better. Not all of them starting at senior high school at 16, are even at level 1, whereas some get stuck on that level and waste their time on rote learning their textbooks and still wonder why their results aren't improving. In my school, it's rare to meet anybody at level 5. Most students need a lot of scaffolding and guidance.

We also have a much more detailed teacher's version of the levels with suggestions on how teachers could develop themselves to facilitate student learning. The teachers' version is in the form of a wiki that is supposed to be built together once we have more experience of working with this model. Hopefully the wiki will start 'living' next year after the initial sceptical opposition of many colleagues.

Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

2009-08-02T00:01:00.016+03:00

Finnish teachers are spoiled with an unusually long summer break - this year for me a blissful 11 weeks! Frequently, a cause for a lot of envy, too. Watching non-teacher friends frantically perfect a tight schedule not to miss a minute of their precious 4-week holiday, I usually avoid talking about the length of my holiday. In summer, I wouldn't dream of revealing my profession to any strangers either. But should I really feel guilty that I can allow myself apparent non-busy days in summer?

Creative idleness

The truth is that to be able to give and inspire again in the new school year, you simply need to detach yourself and get inspired in turn. Creative idleness is what we need after the hectic and tightly scheduled school year. True, some colleagues spend a week or two in June going back to school to organize all the papers that have piled up in the rush of the year, plus go back a week or two early to start planning and preparing for the new year. Not me. I am like a horse in spring let out in a field for the first time, ecstatically galloping away, mane flowing wildly in the wind, without once looking back to the stable. Leaving the school building behind on graduation day, I won't go anywhere near it until the first day of autumn term, unless it's an absolute emergency! Summer is MY time, to do what I please with, when I please, to devote time and energy on myself, my family and my friends.

It's an eternal wisdom. "Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop", said Ovid in ancient Rome. Teachers in the last week of spring term look like wilted flowers or arid ground that has been drained out of all nutrients to be able to sustain any new growth. Their body and mind are in dire need of rest and replenishment to be able give birth to new ideas again. What to outsiders may look like laziness (a teacher lying in a hammock in the sun all day!) is actually a busy day for our brain. A bit like defragmenting the hard drive on your computer - time-consuming but essential. Summer is the time to reflect on the past school year to redevelop and refresh your approaches and practices and to find a balance in life again.

A very Finnish phenomenon is the summer cottage culture. People run away from the hustle and bustle of working life to a remote cottage by the sea or a lake to indulge in a primitive existence, filled with manual work to maintain the cottage and its surroundings. I try to spend at least some time at my brother's cottage every summer. No electricity, no computer, even mobile phone connections are unreliable. All you need is a pile of good books to keep you company while you sit on the jetty with no other disturbance than the occasional water bird or insect and the sound of the gently lapping water of the lake. Excellent revival for body and soul!

In fact, any nature-oriented activity, whether it is picking berries in our vast forests, sailing in the beautiful archipelago off my town, digging in their garden or cycling, is popular among Finnish teachers, or Finns in general. Whenever possible, I abandoned the car this summer and got from place to place on my faithful, red companion. Apart from keeping you fit both physically and mentally, also good for the environment - and your finances! A lot of these activities also bring instant, visible results, which often are rather elusive in teaching.

Personal and professional development

Of course, the long summer break also allows time for studies. According to statistics, in Finland teachers are among the keenest participants in all sorts of summer courses, professional or recreational. Or they catch up with the reading they have collected during the busy year that left no time for it. For me, summer is a good time to learn online. This year, for example, I have collected an array of valuable links for use in the classroom, thanks to twitter and other social networks. I have also read innumerable articles and blog posts, which have given me a lot of new insights that I will write about in another post soon. As for books, my summer reading mainly consists of escapist fiction. No need for early morning alarms, which makes my days very flexible. If I happen to come across a real page turner I can happily read through all the light nightless night, and sleep in the next day. Rare luxury during the school year and food for your imagination!

Travelling and cultural pursuits

Alternatively, many teachers widen their horizons by travelling near and far, or taking part in many cultural events. Finnish summer is overflowing with festival galore, even in the tiniest villages! Teachers typically flock to these. One of my summer highlights in my town was the Baltic Tall Ships races with fascinating old ships a week ago. Next week I will travel to England for some days to visit family and friends plus stay in touch with the language I teach. All this is not only entertaining, but also gives ideas for many lessons. A constantly inquisitive mind is the trademark of many teachers.

Compared to teacher colleagues in many other countries, who teach summer school or only have very short holidays, we seem to have it incredibly easy here. I sometimes think that here in northern Europe we simply need to go crazy over the short and light summer to cope with the close to 6 months of cold and dark winter ahead.

From drama to real school change

2009-07-10T20:47:00.018+03:00

During this summer holiday I have kept watching reruns of the BBC school drama 'Waterloo Road' every afternoon. Once a teacher, always a teacher I guess, but on top of that the series is simply too addictive to skip.

This week it was one episode from series 3 that made me start thinking once again about one of my favourite complaints, changing schools. A new head teacher was unexpectedly appointed to Waterloo Road, with the agenda of radically reorganizing the whole establishment. To implement any changes, she also started scrutinizing the practices of the staff, because according to her "there is no place for lazy and incompetent teachers in my school".

It dawned on me that in schools like mine, with a long-standing permanent staff, most of the teachers have secured quite wide comfort zones for themselves over the years. Although I wouldn't go as far as calling them lazy, they certainly feel they have the right to protect these zones at any cost. In our system, once teachers are given tenure, they can keep that post till they retire without having to develop or change anything in their teaching. No school inspections. Qualified teachers' competence is trusted and and they are highly autonomous, which, in most cases, gives them free hands to innovate and improvise. The other side of the coin is, of course, that the system also condones the attitude of the likes of Mr Budgen in Waterloo Road, whose "cynically disenchanted" work ethos is "I will only do what I'm being paid for", ie. I alone can decide how much or little effort I make for as long as I put in the required hours and paperwork.

Unless the head teacher, or school leadership team, or local authority strongly starts to require changes, there is the threat of a school becoming totally stagnant and isolated from the fast-paced surrounding society, with teachers stuck in a rut of perpetuating the style of their own teachers in the last century. Not many school heads are brave enough to start insisting on changes in teaching styles. Many of them are concerned about alienating their staff with the excuse that teachers would interpret their proposals as if the head was claiming that they had been doing it wrong all along, and consequently feel their professionalism undermined. Plus there is the further requirement for aging nations to try and entend people's working careers as long as possible. If it's an individual teacher who displays enthusiasm to inspire others to adopt new approaches, this is typically crushed by, if not outright resistance, at least the total indifference of the complacent majority.

A determined and dynamic head, like Ms Mason in Waterloo Road, would definitely be terribly unpopular among most of my colleagues. What I would like to question, though, is whether teachers can be competent if they don't feel the need to learn anything new about their profession after graduating from university. In the private sector, they would soon find themselves out of work! Maybe there should be more Ms Masons around to shake schools!

Which reminds me of a conversation I had with a Spanish student in June, when I visited our partner school there. This student had visited our school for a student exchange, but was currently in his first year of ICT studies at college. I had kept in touch with him as he had come across as a very astute young man, and had also helped me with another school project. Over a cup of coffee we started talking about school and education, and very soon he quite sharply pointed out that, in his opinion, there should be a strict age limit to how long one could work as a teacher. I queried his reasoning for this apparent 'agism' of his, and he maintained that younger teachers would reach students much better, as they lived 'in the same world' as them. I was quite taken aback, and took his criticism very personally. How could he say that to me, since I considered myself as still rather an 'in-with-the-times' teacher and young at heart? I tried to elaborate how school grading puts teachers in a position of power that easily leads to the 'us and them' mentality, and students failing to see teachers' good intentions of genuinely caring and trying to help them. On the other hand, I did agree that age is a problem for teachers if it turns them into condescending besserwissers unable to listen to, appreciate and learn from young people's points of view. Part of his argument was that too many teachers work rather more like civil servants than educators with a true calling. I couldn't but agree that, unfortunately, many counterparts of 'Mr Budgen' can be found in real life. Then again, should teachers be expected to be self-sacrificing entrepreneurs at the present salary levels in many schools? Why are so many clever mathematicians deserting teaching for more lucrative jobs in tech companies, for example? Where to find justification to the maintenance of the costly, and apparently outdated, state school system in the present economic situation? And so the dialogue went on.

In the end, we started laughing that actually the whole premise of the age argument had been disproved by our very meeting and fruitful sharing of ideas. As we parted, we agreed to become Facebook friends, and I started praising the user-friendliness of many new social media tools for us 'oldies'. His final comment: "You know, it takes young people like me to develop these tools so that old people like you can use them!" Touché!

A unit of French and presentation skills

2009-07-08T19:14:00.008+03:00

Presentation skills are a largely neglected area in Finnish education. Even people in quite high positions sometimes give appallingly poor presentations. This is why, I am trying to incorporate presentation units in my language classes. The chance to present at some international conferences has urged me to keep learning better and better practices myself, which I then model and share with the students. I also regularly organize student exchanges abroad, during which students are always asked to present something in the host school. What better way for further, authentic practice outside the classroom!

I teach both English and French. All of our high school students study compulsory English, but French is an optional language, whose popularity has been steadily decreasing in the last decade. It's a real pity, since, in my opinion, knowing more than one foreign language significantly widens anyone's horizons. On the other hand, I must admit, the decreasing popularity of French works in my favour at times, too. If there are enough students for the administration to give the green light to starting the group, I usually get a nice, small and highly motivated group to teach for three years. Last year I started to teach a group of only 8 girls! With such a small group, I get to know each student's strengths and weaknesses much better, and consequently am able to give them more individual attention, scaffolding and help. What's more, the atmosphere is such a class is very informal and relaxed.

In one course we were studying the French-speaking world and after introducing the concept of 'la francophonie', I wanted the students to work in pairs, choose one country and prepare a presentation on it to practice their language and presentation skills and also to share what they had learned with their classmates. I had done this before, but been rather disappointed at the outcome each time - despite a lot of guidance and coaching. Students typically consulted Wikipedia or relied on the first hit in Google, copying lots of boring and rather uninteresting statistical information, such as land area, population, capital city, its population and so on. Lots and lots of numbers and figures, which, you may know, can be rather a nightmare to pronounce fluently in French, if you are not a native speaker - and even harder for the non-native audience to comprehend! This time, I wanted to try something different that would make the project more useful and enjoyable for everybody.

I came up with the idea that, instead of a factual lecture about a country, each pair should imagine that they had made a trip to the country in question and, on return, they should show their friends their photos and tell about their experiences. We spent one whole double lesson putting a rubric, guidelines and evaluation matrix together. It was very rewarding, and the students thought long and hard what things should be evaluated and how. We decided that each student would evaluate the other pairs' presentations, but I as the teacher would have the right to decide on the final grades. I emphasized two things: the content should be aimed at the audience of their classmates, in other words should appeal to young people (ie. no lists of boring numbers!). This meant that after researching their country info, they should then apply it cleverly to tell an interesting account of their journey, while at the same time teaching the others about the country and culture. Secondly, whatever resources they used they should rewrite their script using the level of French that they knew - and their friends would understand (ie. no copy-paste of incomprehensible, long words that they wouldn't even be able to pronounce properly!).

For the presentation, each pair prepared PowerPoint slides to clarify their spoken speech and bring it more to life. We looked at Presentation Zen, for example, and I showed them some of my conference presentations as a model of avoiding text and bullet points, and concentrating on engaging pictures instead to support their story and facilitate their classmates' comprehension. Naturally, we also studied copyright and Creative Commons to help them find photos that they could safely use - even though we didn't even publish their work online. In the end, most of them ended up using the advanced CC search on Flickr, which was something quite new to most of them, to my surprise. For citation reference I used my own blog, where I often use CC photos from Flickr. I was even more amazed that some students (at 16) had never used PowerPoint before! But with peer support, they got the hang of it in no time at all. This to me, is an indication that there does exist a huge generational gap here, where most youngsters are much more open, fearless and prepared to adopt new technology and jump in to make use of it.

The students started preparing their work while I was away at a conference, and as usual, there was no money to pay for a substitute, so students had to work independently on their own without a teacher. Luckily I managed to book our small computer room for them for these lessons, so they could use the time efficiently, and contact me through email or text message in case of unsurmountable problems. I have a wiki for my French group where I post course plans, homework, sometimes extra assignments, and useful links. This time, I gave each pair some online links to get them started with their country researches. (Sorry about the Finnish on the wiki, but my French students are not yet advanced enough for me to use only French.)

Although nothing new as such, I was very pleased with this unit, and students, too, gave positive feedback. Each pair managed to prepare an engaging presentation with colourful slides. They talked about the journey there and back (how they travelled and how they felt about it), they mentioned some interesting sights, or some imaginary people they had met, talked about food, played some music from the country, described what souvenirs they brought back, what they liked and disliked, unexpected incidents and surprising cultural phenomena. All of this, could be nicely presented with the vocabulary and language level that they had reached. Apart from language, lots of different skills were practised, students were very self-directed in their work, and as the icing on the cake, it was fun, too!

In the evaluation matrix we had the following categories:
1) French language - eg. comprehensibility, pronunciation, fluency 30 %
2) Presentation skills - eg. contact with the audience, not just reading! 30 %
3) Contents - eg. telling an interesting, original and well-structured story 20 %
4) Technical realization - eg. effective use of PowerPoint 20 %

Thanks to this, and the fact that I compiled the matrix together with the students, they really knew what was expected of them, and they took ownership of the whole process - from laying the groundwork to planning, preparing and finally presenting with confidence and pride.

Communication styles and EFL

2009-06-26T12:50:00.002+03:00

Last year we organised yet another student exchange, this time with a Spanish school in connection with an EU project. While the Spanish students visited our school, I eagerly invited them to come to my English lessons to bring some life and authentic language practice to my students (the only common language for the students being English). Here is a picture of one such lesson - a Spanish girl on the right with two Finnish students.

What is wrong with this picture?

As a helpful language teacher I had prepared a board game with questions about the two countries and cultures and young people's everyday lives. I thought this would help them break the ice and get to know each other more easily. Up to a point it did. Students perfunctorily asked the questions and politely provided short, matter-of-fact answers, as is expected of them in a Finnish classroom at least. On the whole, our students tend to be rather reluctant to volunteer any information, especially in a foreign language - as many Finns in general, I must admit. But look at them! The Spanish girl is at least looking at the others, while my students keep staring at the piece of paper in front of them, too terrified to look at the person they are supposed to have a conversation with.

This is one of the big problems with foreign language classes. There is always the book, or at least a piece of paper, to hide behind. Ready-made questions to routinely go through, over and done with as quickly as possible. Again and again I keep reminding students to talk to each other and not to the piece of paper in front of them, but do they?

I started thinking about this when I came across Chris Cotter's guide to determine how advanced our students are. About participating in a conversation he writes:

At lower levels, students react to the conversation rather than fully join it. How many conversations have you had, or overheard, that progressed like an interview? One side asks a question, the other answers it, and if no further questions are asked, the conversation ends. What about the fillers? redundancies? stories? experiences? body language?

According to this, even many of my most advanced students are not really that advanced. But actually it is me, the teacher, who keeps perpetuating exactly this scenario in class too often. Fearing awkward silences and trying to make the spoken exercises easier for the students, I do too much of the work for them. No wonder students never get very fluent or natural, since they never get the chance to practise by being exposed to real language use situations, where you don't have pre-written question-and-answer scripts to follow.

In the case of Finnish learners of English, they are further challenged by our peculiar conversation culture, which is based on long monologues that others listen to in total silence, and a much higher tolerance of silence in the company of others than in many other communication cultures. I have experienced situations in class, where students simply sit together, eyes wandering around the walls and ceiling of the classroom to avoid eye contact with their partner, not uttering a single word. Partly due to the natural teenage awkwardness, but I have seen this happen even with students who are quite sociable in their own language. Southern European students, not so used to silence, start shouting out to their friends across the room in their own language, but Finnish students just mope in complete silence. This sounds very stereotypical, but these are tendencies based on observations in many real life occasions. I wouldn't say the Finnish students feel comfortable with these silent encounters, but they are unable - or unwilling? - to do anything about it.

Regrettably, at least in Finland, conversational strategies in intercultural communication are a largely neglected domain in language classes at school. Maybe it is because we non-native teachers of English aren't qualified to teach them. Even many of us feel at a loss in authentic communication situations. In class, with a non-native teacher and students, most of whom share the same communication culture, we are simply translating the culture of our mother tongue into a foreign language without ever realising it is unlikely to be the best strategy in real life. In addition, there is not much incentive to focus on spoken skills, since our national final exams only test written skills, so passive mastery of a wide vocabulary and perfecting grammar become the priorities.

How do you guide students then to confidently express themselves and who they really are in a foreign language? I sometimes get students defiantly asking why they can't proudly express their linguistic and cultural roots in a foreign language - ie. retain their accent and communication style, strongly influenced by their mother tongue. I usually tell them to by all means stick to them if they insist, at the same time warning them, though, not to be surprised if it doesn't always elicit the most positive reactions from their conversation partners. In short, being advanced in a foreign language is also, to a large extent, a question of attitude and awareness of different communication cultures.

PS.

Of course, you could also argue that what is wrong with the above photo, is that the whole situation is unnatural and orchestrated by the teacher. Did the students really want to get to know the foreign guests or vice versa? Or maybe the way they were grouped didn't match their individual chemistries. Students might protest that the conversation would have been totally different if they had met somebody interesting in real life, and voluntarily engaged in a conversation with them. Then again, you can't always pick and choose who you need to talk to, in whatever language, and you should still be able to create a positive atmosphere and take an interest.

The generation gap

2009-06-23T09:54:00.006+03:00

This spring I finally saw my first 3D animated films. I wouldn't probably have chosen to go myself, but luckily my family dragged me along, and I agreed with them that, as a teacher, I need to experience this first-hand. It was fascinating, but enough to make me feel dizzy at times. I'm beginning to suspect that my brain is wired so differently from today's young people that the generation gap between me and my students is getting wider by the second. Will it one day soon be too wide for me to reach any of my students any more?

This reminded me of a recent report on a research study at the Centre of Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In the research, fifteen-year-old students and teachers of Finnish or foreign languages were interviewed about their media consumption at school and in their freetime. What media do they use, with whom and for what purposes and what types of texts do they read? One of the interesting questions was how well school had managed to respond to young students' changing media preferences. The report, called 'Maailma muuttuu - mitä koulu tekee?' (freely in English: 'The world changes - how about school?'), was published last December.

The gist of the findings was quite predictable: students use many different media (mostly the internet), but read mainly short, visual and story-based texts, whereas teachers focus on traditional, more in-depth, printed media. At school students are expected to produce linear essays and read fiction and newspaper articles, although in their freetime they mainly read comic strips, short magazine articles or various texts on the internet. Unsurprisingly, the most important tool for teachers at school was the textbook, and even in their freetime tha majority of teachers preferred printed books (fiction or nonfiction) and the traditional press. Where is the dialogue, where is the process-nature that is inherent in the new online media? This video, embedded in Chris Betcher's blog some time ago, is very apt here.

All this, of course, raises the eternal dilemma of the school system seemingly preparing students for meeting school requirements only with little transfer of skills or knowledge to life outside school. Nothing new, but maybe in the case of the new media more teachers will start taking it seriously now that there is some academic research (printed inside the covers of a book!) to back these views up.

It shouldn't all be black and white, though. I, for one, enjoy good novels - in a paperback, not on the screen! - and my morning paper, too. At the same time, though, I am keen on different online environments and conventions to keep learning. Similarly, I know young students who are avid fiction readers. In the end, many types of media and texts have their place and serve different purposes - exclusiveness is the problem.

Photo: Generation Gap by Joi on Flickr

Hovering between languages and cultures

2009-06-22T17:36:00.003+03:00

The title of this post comes from one of my comments to Silvia Tolisano's recent post in her Langwitches blog. The post really resonated with me and made me think of where I exactly fit in in this global educational conversation - if anywhere?

I've been blogging on and off for a little over two years. I started out of curiosity, and the desire to get familiar with social media and the related tools before introducing any of them to my students. I reckoned that to have any credibility in integrating technology in my course plans, I should at least have some digital footprint myself. When it comes to using technology, my mantra is learning by doing, and getting motivated on a needs' basis. At least it has worked that way for me. I have kept learning new things to meet a particular need - find better and more suitable platforms for online intercultural school projects, for example.

Blogging urged me to read edubloggers around the world to learn from the more experienced. I am so grateful to all the marvellous teachers whose wisdom I have had the chance of benefiting from online. In these two years I have learned far more than I would have done in any in-service or other training course, simply because I have been able to find the guidance and answers exactly the moment I needed them. In addition, my net surfing has serendipitously led me to many unexpected wells of inspiration, too.

All this time, though, I have been rather hesitant about commenting on other people's blogs, nor have my ramblings in this blog attracted many comments from others. Two sides of the same coin, I'm sure. It is active participation and reciprocity that are called for in an attempt to build a lasting online learning network. Mine is still heavily under construction. Even though, over the years, I have managed to form quite a wide network of foreign colleagues through organising face-to-face student exchanges, unfortunately, hardly any of these teachers happen to be very active online, so I am starting my online PLN from scratch.

One of my problems all along has been the need to keep explaining my particular circumstances and background in a marginal (from an English-speaking perspective), rather unknown nation and culture. I keep wondering how many cues are totally misinterpreted in global educational discussions, due to linguistic and cultural differences. Speaking the lingua franca English easily creates a false sense of understanding, but as many nationally/culturally/linguistically-bound concepts and ideas are thrown in, are people really talking about the same issues?

Let me give you an example. Just recently I have been looking for people to follow on Twitter. People might mention 'my yr10 students' or 'K3 students'- which, for me, don't automatically give any indication of the type of school these students go to or how old they might be. If I was to take part in that conversation, I would find it essential to first explain how schools are organised in my country to make my viewpoint clear. This would probably make me sound like a hopelessly uninteresting babbler. Should it be taken for granted then that, if you want to participate in educational dialogue in English, you should also familiarize yourself with the school systems of the major English-speaking nations in the world? Possibly. But still, where would I fit in in that discussion, if the English-speaking world didn't see any relevance in where I was coming from? I'm even beginning to doubt whether I, a non-native English teacher, had better not butt in on native-English teachers' discussions, no matter how interesting they might appear.

On second thoughts, even when teachers from different cultures simply talk about 'students', they are not really talking the same language, are they? I am referring to my 16-19-year-old students here in my country, in a school system that is based on almost solely state schooling (ie. no private school system), learning English as a foreign language and speaking a structurally totally different mother tongue that, to a considerable extent, affects their learning and my teaching practices, plus living in a culture where TV programmes and films are not dubbed but subtitled, which means that they are exposed to authentic English and American every day. Plus add to all that the average number of English classes a week and the fact that I can only teach each group for 7 weeks, before the students are reshuffled again, because in our senior high school system they make their own timetables and change from teacher to teacher five times a school year... You see, here I go again! If colleagues, say from Germany or South Korea, talk to me about 'students' it becomes a drastically different word and concept.

Why did I start blogging in English then? It was a natural choice for me for two clear reasons: first, I am an English teacher and have always wanted to meet colleagues from around the world and second, at home I live in a bicultural Finnish-British family, and often feel slightly outside the monocultural, monolingual Finnish contexts - a feeling of 'lost in translation' almost anywhere, which, apart from liking the film by the same name very much, led to the name of my blog, too. And yes, a third reason - most of online communication is in English anyway.

However, just as Sylvia Tolisano, in the above-mentioned post, I am acutely aware of the 'missing voices'. I have tried to find my voice, but what if it keeps falling on deaf ears? It is not only a linguist barrier, but also a cultural one. The largely western, Anglo-American blogo- and twittersphere sometimes excludes not only those who struggle with English, but also many others who are linguistically fairly competent in English, but just fall outside that particular cultural sphere.

Photo: sunflowers by georgia.g on Flickr

Activating heterogeneous groups

2009-06-15T12:02:00.002+03:00

Do other teachers of English face the problem of young students believing that they already know English so well that there is absolutely no need to make any further effort to learn more? In the last few years, the number of such students entering senior high school (secondary school) in Finland has steadily increased. They have acquired a fairly good passive knowledge of the language and a reasonable colloquial spoken skill at school, but also increasingly through watching TV, listening to pop music and engaging in various online activities. All well and good, plus their attitude towards English is overwhelmingly positive. However, the next threshold of learning more formal expression appears to be too high for most of them. After effortlessly going through 7 years of English lessons with good grades, basically playing it by ear, they have no concept of how to develop their language skills further - nor do they see any point in it. "I know English perfectly, English is easy!" Consequently, they do nothing in the lessons, nor any homework, and sadly, end up underachieving and not realising their full potential.

To a certain extent, I do understand their viewpoint. Why should a teenager be able to write intelligently about global warming or nuclear power in a foreign language? After all, many of them would struggle with those topics even in their mother tongue! Yet, quite a few of these students are planning to continue into universities, and many for international exchanges during their university years. I certainly would like to help them become aware that the type of everyday chatty language they consider quite sufficient is not going to take them far in academia. How to convince these know-it-all teenagers that, for example 'ain't', 'gonna' or 'stuff like that' are not expressions to use in more formal contexts, let alone smileys or SMS abbreviations?

Many of them insist that we teachers are simply old-fashioned and have no idea of how the language is used today. Yet, they don't recognize the undeniable fact that their active vocabulary is often deplorably limited. They are deluding themselves with their wide passive understanding of English, while the more colourful nuances of the English vocabulary never enter their own English use, despite the text book authors' and us teachers' good intentions of introducing and teaching them. No matter how hard I try, most of them simply refuse to see me as a useful guide, but write my advice off as hopelessly last-century out-of-date drivel.

I am now beginning to ask myself how to efficiently guide students about different registers and persuade them that it will be worth their while later on in life to be able to give a civilised impression in a foreign language. I am toying with ideas of introducing new projects, in which students should really challenge themselves, each starting from their own level, to demonstrate something new they have learned and how their language skills have developed. I despair when I see bright young minds lazing around in class, bored with the textbooks. I want to activate everybody in the group, motivate them to keep learning, help them to make the most of their time. The problem with big heterogeneous groups is that there are those who haven't even managed to grasp any of the basics of the language, and consequently are constantly mostly out of it. Then there are the above mentioned slackers who don't realise that, with English, it's a lifelong endeavour to master even a fraction of its incredibly rich vocabulary, and that there is something for everybody to learn all the time. Finally, in between is the biggest group, the average students, who probably benefit most from traditional school language classes.

What I would like to see happen is for each student to make the foreign language their own. Instead of aiming at mastering the contents in the textbook, ie. everybody learning exactly the same vocabulary, they should each set their own goals by choosing the new words to learn that they find useful in their circumstances and at their level of learning. I believe they could achieve this by being given more open and authentic language use opportunities than the closed and routine-bound gap fills, for example. Also, they should have the chance to do these new tasks in class with the help and guidance of their peers and the teacher as a facilitator, and not as extra homework on top of all the material to be covered in the text book as well. Some units in the textbook will have to be left out or dealt with differently to give space for these new tasks.

This summer holiday I will start to design one such project unit for each course I will teach next year. I will try to be creative and use many different types of tasks (spoken, written, collaboration, cultural, interactive) and embed technology wherever it is possible (restricted access to computer classes, for example) and serves a purpose for learning.

Photo: English learning magazine in Germany by Soctech on Flickr

Graduation Day

2009-05-30T15:10:00.004+03:00

As the traditional symbol of high school graduation, 106 students put the white cap on their heads today amidst tearful and proud relatives, speeches filled with wishes for their bright futures and hundreds of colourful roses scenting the air.

The millions of fractured facts and figures from a wide spectrum of fields crammed through during the three hectic high school years will soon be forgotten. Instead, what do I, a foreign language teacher, hope they will take with them?

a hunch of their developing identity and enough understanding about their roots to be proud of them and to be able to share ideas with those unfamiliar with their culture
also the willingness to share their culture with others

a working knowledge of at least English, and a keen interest and curiosity to learn more languages later

some insights into cultural behaviour – for example, what is considered good manners may vary from culture to culture
a strong recognition that people from all cultures are equally valuable and deserve to be treated with respect
some sensitivity to cultural cues in interaction with new people – not to be judgemental or superiour or judge others based on prejudice and negative stereotypes

the ability to step outside their ethnocentric worldviews
the ability and willingness to be interesting and cooperative communication partners in all the languages that they know
the spirit of lifelong learning

realistic, but still optimistic expectations about their future

And this quote with an apparently unclear origin:

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt, Dance like nobody's watching, Sing like nobody's listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

CONGRATULATIONS graduates 2009!

Tired of foreign language textbooks - again

2009-05-24T19:50:00.019+03:00

Ever felt frustrated at set series of foreign language textbooks? It seems that this frustration hits me every year during the last weeks of school before summer. I still largely have the same concerns as almost exactly a year ago when I last blogged about this. Personally, being one of the 4 English teachers in my school, the rest of whom wouldn't even dream of letting go of their protective armour of beloved textbooks, leaves me in the minority and I simply have to conform and accept the chosen textbooks. The reason is that in our high school system the composition of the groups you teach changes five times a year, and so we four end up teaching some of the same students. If I could teach the same group all through the 3 years of high school, I could improvise more.

Nevertheless, having tested some more outside-the-book work online this year, I am inclined to start designing new units for each course to substitute parts of the book. Systematically aiming at covering all the massive contents of the textbooks is a burden and soon turns into a deadly routine for both teachers and students. Good and carefully compiled by a team of enthusiastic teachers and professors as our books are, they still tend to follow a set format and approach that is repeated in each course. What's wrong with a logical build-up of units , you may ask. In fact, shouldn't it be considered an asset in a course book series? Possibly, if you are lucky enough to share the pedagogical choices of the author team and want an easy life with everything spelled out for you in the teacher's manual. All you need to do then is to walk into the classroom, open the book and manual, and put the record on.

One of my problems with our textbooks is that they are filled with endless gap fill exercises, usually in the form of translating from Finnish to English/French or vice versa. Of course, learning new vocabulary actively requires numerous times of coming across and using the words in different contexts, so I can see the point. Yet, in reality what happens is that many students use already filled in books of their siblings or friends, and, as is human nature, don't bother to erase the answers and consequently, totally miss the benefit from these well-meaning exercises. For those who make the effort to do them, the problem I blogged about before remains - that of trying to memorize words selected by somebody else. It makes little sense for a very low level user of English to try to learn by heart highly academic and formal vocabulary, for example. I can hear colleagues arguing it's better than nothing, and in a big heterogeneous group, as they mostly are in our school, you have to pitch what you teach somewhere in the middle, you can't possibly please everyone. I know, but still I dream of more personalised language classes where students try to understand and produce the foreign language at a level appropriate to them personally at the time. Some could have positive learning experiences with more simple, everyday colloquial language, while others could aim at a more formal, academic style. One of the essential goals for each learner, in my dream class, is to learn to express who they are and what they believe in in a foreign language as well as possible, and with enough intercultural awareness and skills to be active participants and collaborators in any situation they will find themselves in.

To this end, I see a lot of potential in the use of social media, especially for the more advanced students. Having an authentic audience is paramount to really develop their communication skills. I have now set my mind to spending part of my summer holiday designing new units for each course I will be teaching next school year. I need to skip something in each course book by incorporating social media and online profiling and literacy skills, or more spoken practise and presentation skills. My argument is the old adage of 'learning for life' and not only for the final exams. Why not be brave enough to scrap the books altogether and be a real rebel then? I must admit I am still too frightened of students suddenly underachieving in their final exams, the results of which may be critical for their later studies. No matter how much I dislike preparing students for mastering the technicalities and avoiding the pitfalls of these exams and maximizing their grades, I still feel it is my duty to do it. Luckily, I have the freedom to be at least a part-time rebel in designing my courses.

Dismantle those national stereotypes

2009-05-19T12:47:00.019+03:00

We tend to think in stereotypes. They are often unavoidable, sometimes even helpful, unless whole nations are reduced to crude generalizations, often based on prejudices, typically negative about neighbouring nations, in particular. For a Finn, thinking about Sweden, our arch-rival because of historical baggage to do with them as the conquerors and us as the subjugated, instantly evokes certain associations, with a total disregard to the diversity of individuals inside each nation.

You might think that young people are more open to diversity than older generations, but from my many years of experience with intercultural school projects, this is not necessarily the case. The 'us and them' mentality is still strong even among, on the surface more globally-minded, teenagers. I can remember one instance from the time when a group of students from a partner school in Singapore visited us for a week. We had organized a whole school assembly with presentations, music, and dance from both schools. Part of the programme was also a quiz with simple multiple choice questions to test which group knew more about each other's country. Afterwards our students were up in arms, claiming that the questions unfairly favoured the guests, who beat our own team. I now realize that the whole set-up of the competition was wrong - national pride surfaces the moment you want to find the winner, be it general knowledge, sports, or music (as became evident again last weekend with the notorious annual travesty of the Eurovision song contest!).

Another example is from last week when I posted some photos of our end of school year project celebrations on our international project site. These two pictures with the caption were among them:

Kaarina Senior High School - "International group" - pot luck food from Whazzup? project countries - crostini from Italy, baguettes from France, pita break and tsatsiki from Cyprus, soda bread from Ireland, pine kernels representing Korea, naan bread, mango chutney and raita from India and orange/mango juice to represent exotic Malaysia and the Philippines.

In no time at all, this comment appeared, after which I, diplomatically, tried to widen the perspective a little bit.

I am now trying to shift my own mindset into designing true collaborative problem solving tasks for mixed teams of students, instead of each national group producing their separate work, or worse still, competing against each other. Hopefully this will bring forth the idea of us sharing the same planet and caring about its sustainable future collectively, forgetting each nation's selfish own interests. Idealistic perhaps, but then I'm an eternal dreamer at heart!

I feel with our next online project, one of the important principles to be shared among all teachers involved will be breaking out of too much flag-waving and boasting about your own country and culture. But where is the golden middle-ground - how to be proud of your culture in a healthy way, while at the same time appreciating, embracing and giving credit to other cultures, too?

Towards more authenticity in EFL classes

2009-05-14T23:04:00.012+03:00

We had our second Skype session with the students in Venice today. This time our Italian friends managed to set up their webcam, too, after some initial glitches, so we could see each other. We projected the laptop screen to the whole class, as we still only had my laptop and one Skype account to use.

It was alright, though, as these are early days and we are only slowly learning and finding out how the system might work best. Towards the end of the session we ended up having both groups of students together behind the one laptop so everybody could be seen on the screen.

Quite a lot of lively negotiations went on in both languages about what to ask and how to answer. Students also taught each other some basic everyday phrases in their own languages. Most of my language teacher colleagues in Finland would probably write this type of activity off as much ado about nothing. Their reasoning would be that they wouldn't waste time on such improvised, trivial small talk, which, in their opinion, doesn't improve the students' grammar or vocabulary. But, to me, having fun is an essential part of language classes, not to mention the unique opportunity for some students to use English in a real, or at least semi-authentic, situation for the first time ever.

But how to start developing these activities for next year, when we will hopefully have more webcams, microphones and student Skype accounts? Understandably, the novelty of English chit chat will soon wear off and students will start finding these activities just as forced chores as most other school-related activities. The challenge is to design motivating and plausible tasks that require true collaboration between students. They will need a real purpose for their call, not just talking about the weather or asking simple questions about how old somebody is, or whether they like music. What many people seem to be doing is to interview partner school students about an aspect of their country or culture that is part of their syllabus in a class at the time. I am slightly hesitant about this, since it easily reduces the partners into mere informants, and makes the conversation a one-sided question and answer session. But what would make strangers want to truly engage in a conversation in a foreign language on the Internet, is the million-dollar question. It will always be more or less staged, because that's what most school activities are, despite all the efforts of teachers to facilitate real life problem solving. What I am aiming at, little by little, is tasks requiring more holistic student participation than the traditional purely cognitive and totally out of any real context gap fill exercises to practice and build up students' EFL vocabulary, for example.

When students have to immerse their whole selves in a situation, as ours did during the Skype calls, I think we have taken a small step towards the right direction. I must say, I was surprised, and very positively so, that our students voluntarily wanted to stay at school for an extra hour and a quarter to keep on talking with the Italian students. Quite an achievement, since after any ordinary afternoon class all students can't seem to rush out of the classroom, and then the school building, fast enough at the first ring of the school bell.

There is always a valid excuse

2009-05-10T01:02:00.011+03:00

So you say we need to change our schools and the way we teach. In other words you are saying that we have done it all wrong all these years?
Who is going to pay for all the extra hours spent on redesigning courses, materials and lesson plans?

None of these new methods or technologies are suitable for teaching my subject, just go ahead and use them where they are appropriate, but I will carry on teaching as I've always done - and with good enough results.

So are you really saying that all through the previous centuries students didn't learn??

If young people are left to decide what and how they want to learn they will become lazy or learn the wrong things.

The fundamental responsibility of school as an institution is to pass on our cultural heritage from generation to generation.

Global projects - what's wrong with learning about our village/town and our country/nation?
You can't really dream of doing anything with a foreign language until you've learned all these hundreds of grammatical rules and exceptions.

We need to make sure that young people are taught and memorize the basics of as wide a variety of subjects as possible - application of knowledge will come after school.

Our main goal is to prepare our students to succeed in the national final exams.
I have got too few lessons to cover the whole course book - it is totally impossible to ever think about any project work or hands-on activities.
Theme day - not again, I can't spare any more lessons or I won't cover all the course contents!

Online exchange of ideas among colleagues - so face-to-face communication is forbidden now?

New pedagogical theories, all well and good for researchers at the university, but they know nothing about the reality of schools.

I have only got 6 more years to teach until retirement, no point in starting to learn to use any new tools, all I need is a blackboard, chalk and a working OHP in my classroom.
Those innovative ideas may work elsewhere, but we know how to do things best here in our country - let the PISA student assessment results speak for themselves!

Groupwork desks - out of the question in my classes, I insist on having students sitting in straight, orderly rows.

Paper and pencil never fail, why make things complicated with technology?

I am a dedicated teacher, I work hard, I keep preparing worksheets and lesson plans to teach the students, I tell them the same things again and again - it's not my fault if they don't learn!

We have one teacher who always introduces strange, new ideas - lucky enough he/she represents a minority, so business can go on as usual for the rest of us.
Why can't we just be left alone to teach?

Video conferencing with experts from different fields - too much trouble, and who knows, they might give the students the wrong information!
More collaboration and sharing with colleagues - how about my personal right to academic freedom?

Any changes - too time-consuming, too expensive, not part of the final test requirements.

Why should WE change anything? It's even worse elsewhere! We are quite happy with the status quo of mediocricity.

Why rock the boat, we can't possibly change the whole system anyway?

No wonder, shifting schools is painfully slow.

Photo: old school book and goodies by crunchcandy on Flickr

Traditional school assignments don't work online

2009-05-07T22:17:00.007+03:00

I and a colleague have been testing how to incorporate an ongoing international school project into regular language lessons. For this last grading period we are both teaching an English course with an environmental theme, and we have given our students some online assignments to do on our project Ning. After signing up, the students have taken part in a couple of discussions , based on prompts, watching some videos and reading certain background material. A lot needs to be learned about building discussions, as I wrote in an earlier post.

Then they were given titles for essay to be written and uploaded in their Ning blogs. About half of my group chose not to publish their essays, but gave me a handwritten paper instead. I don't know all their reasoning behind this, but some, I'm sure were afraid of negative peer feedback about their English, or writing in general. It would be a valuable learning experience to dare to put themselves out there, and strive at getting better and better at expressing their thoughts in English. I need to be clear on my pep talk next time I assign something like this. I am still in two minds, though, about whether to include all the students in an English course in online projects or whether to just offer it as an option to those who are keen. I will have to keep experimenting to formulate my philosophy on this.

One lesson I learned from this, is that ready-chewed schooly essay titles given by the

teacher don't work at all in an online blog environment. Firstly, there will be too many very similar posts that won't receive the same attention and comments as a variety of different posts.

Secondly, these topics don't really allow students to have a voice of their own. This was aptly pointed out in one student's reply to a comment to her post:

Come on, don't take this too seriously :D This is my english essay, not a "real" blog post.

Teaches me to carefully think about assignments for the next online unit. Students must be able to choose to write about something that they find important.

The old language lab will have to go

2009-05-05T20:11:00.010+03:00

All through my language teaching career we've had this language lab in our school. When the school building was new, it was state-of-the-art technology and we were all happy with and proud of the 36 separate booths, each with their own CASSETTE (what on earth is a cassette, my students ask now!) player plus headset with a microphone.

This spring finally marks the time when it is all going to be trashed and a new classroom designed in its place. The era of learning languages mainly by being spoonfed teacher-selected tapes to passively listen to is over - thank goodness. Moreover, about a third of the players were constantly out of order, making it too expensive to keep having them repaired almost monthly. Although there will probably be times when I miss the chance of silencing a rowdy group into silent listening in the last restless class of the afternoon, I am really looking forward to having a more flexible working space. Hopefully a group working space with laptops, webcams, microphones, Skype - all the world at your fingertips! Budget permitting, of course.

We received these pictures from a partner school in South Korea, and I am really envious of their table arrangement and spacious room.

I wonder what our solution will look like. All I hope is that there will be enough funds to build something a bit more than the traditional classroom setting with straight rows of desks and the almighty teacher in front. It's quite surprising how many colleagues want nothing but that, probably because it's safe, disciplined and oh so familiar. Unfortunately, these old-style classrooms lend themselves poorly to group work, for example. At the end of the day, though, it's not the space or the tools. If you want to bring the world into your classroom, you'll make do with what you've got!

Visualising project membership

2009-05-03T17:32:00.006+03:00

I got an idea of making a mosaic collage of our WHAZZUP? project members profile photos when attending the Finnish conference on Interactive Technology. The Sometu team (Social media supporting learning) had posters up with hundreds of profile pictures from the network Ning.

Why wouldn't I make a similar poster? So off I went, looking for a tool to easily compile a mosaic collage of the 256 little square profile photos on our project Ning. I ended up using Qoop, which I found through Flickr. It took me quite a few trial and error sessions to come up with this poster.

The problem was the many members who hadn't put up a profile picture and either were represented by the boring orange head or a Windows sample scenery picture, after I had set it to be compulsory to put some profile picture up. What I had to do was to calculate exactly how many of each of the pictures I needed, rename them all to be able to upload them on Flickr, and then finally reorganise the set to have these repeated photos fairly evenly distributed across the poster. I also added two AEC-NET logos at the beginning and end of the set, since I didn't find a way to have the logo with the poster title. There might be an easier way and a different tool to achieve the same result, even a company somewhere in Finland, but I really got a bee in my bonnet to get this done today.

Although far from perfect, I am quite pleased with the poster now. To me it is essential to have each of the 256 members represented on the poster, as it tells several stories:

- Firstly, about a fourth of the all the members opted out of choosing a profile picture for themselves - some of them silent, inactive members, while others must have had various reasons for this.
- Secondly, I like the fact that teachers and students are represented here as equal members of the project.
- Thirdly, the poster to me beautifully displays the wonderful diversity of our project members - reflected in their clothing, for example (school uniforms and Muslim hijabs as opposed to bikinis on the beach).
- And last but not least, having all of us together on one poster also brings forth the idea that, despite our different backgrounds and motivations, we still came together during this school year as one community to share our learning.

Paying for the postage to order the printed poster from America was quite dear, but I think it will be worthwhile framing it and putting it up on the wall at school as a colourful reminder of one year's intercultural exchange.

Photo: Oletko kuvassa by rongasanne on Flickr

Stretching students' comfort zones

2009-04-29T19:27:00.011+03:00

I have aimed at renewing some of my classroom practices with the help of social media to create authentic foreign language situations for my students, instead of the traditional learning in a void with a course book and only other speakers of your native language. I have believed that communicating in an online network/community with young people from many countries, as part of your course performance, would excite and motivate students. This week I was proved wrong, however.

Due to the lack of funds to pay for subsitute teachers, while attending a conference last week, I activated my students online. An extra bonus for them was that they didn't even have to go to school for the first two morning classes, but could 'take' their English lesson at home. They all registered as members on our international project Ning, and I posted 2 prompts with links to texts and videos plus discussion questions for them to reply. Naturally, I also hoped that some of the foreign project members would participate to make it the authentic situation I had in mind.

Today I met the group for the first time since last week. Only 10 out of 21 had written a reply on the Ning! Some pretended they hadn't understood what they were supposed to do, others simply shrugged and avoided my eyes. In other words, they had just taken the time off without doing any work at home!

Another disappointment - none of the foreign members have taken up my challenge of joining us in these environmental discussions, at least not yet. That is the trouble with asynchronous communication - our fast-paced 6-7-week grading periods don't allow for hanging around waiting! What's more, I only realised in hindsight that building a conversation online doesn't come naturally to my students. I should have provided them with clear guidelines and expected outcomes for this exercise. Next time I do anything like this I will prepare an assessment rubric together with the students, so there won't be any uncertainty about the expectations.

Mind you, it wasn't a total failure. I am just feeling rather pessimistic at the moment for some reason.Even without a rubric, some students did still do quite well, and managed to express themselves clearly and interestingly in English. It was the indifferent slackers and those who wrote very short and superficial comments, mainly just repeating what somebody else had already written, that really frustrated me. For them, it was nothing but another boring teacher-assigned homework exercise they weren't in the least interested in. I should probably blame myself for once again giving them schooly, unmotivating assignments. What should a task be like to make them want to do more than merely go through the motions to avoid the nagging of the teacher?

The next complaint came when I started showing them where to type their blog post that is due next week. Some of them started asking if they could just do it as a traditional handwritten paper assignment instead, and bring it to me in class. When I inquired about this preference they said that they didn't want anybody else to see what they wrote and maybe laugh at them! Fair point, although I tried to convince them that surely all of them were mature enough not to laugh at other people's writing.

At first all this made me quite angry, then discouraged. I feel as though all my efforts are futile. My attemps of practising what I preach, ie. being myself a model of a lifelong learner with a semi-active online presence, is making no difference to them. They probably need peers as models, and not a nutty middle-aged teacher. I'm beginning to lean again towards only offering online work as an option to those students who feel comfortable, competent and at ease with such environment, and are possibly drawn to the chance of interaction with international students. In this old blog post I felt like that very strongly last year, but then changed my mind after reading about many inspirational examples from around the world of how students enjoyed being active online participants (for example this one).

Then I started thinking that maybe it's a question of national mentality. Stereotypically (but with a lot of truth in it, too!) Finns are notorious for needing a lot of personal space, wanting to blend in and not stand out, keeping very private about their thoughts, and generally refusing to step outside their comfort zones. All this is emphasized manyfold when it comes to active foreign language use, despite all the efforts of modern language teaching focusing on communicative skills in addition to the traditional translations, grammar and deadly gap fills. I would like to push my students' beyond their comfort zones at times, because you simply have to if you are to actively engage in communication in a foreign language. The undeniable fact is that many Finns still come across as painfully awkward when speaking English or other foreign languages. They will politely give perfunctory answers when asked, but who would want to continuously keep asking if there is little input from their conversation partner? This is one of the lessons Finns find extremely hard to learn. What's more, it's glaringly obvious that they have no chance of developing these skills if all they do in language classes is read ready-made questions printed in the book or a worksheet prepared by the teacher. It's all just one-way and no real discussions are built. Question-answer-question-answer, perfunctorily do what the teacher tells you to do, but no more. The sooner you are finished the sooner you can sink back into your own private world and just sit there quietly or start leafing your diary, texting friends on your mobile phone or gossiping in Finnish. Regular scenario I encounter in class every day. Exactly the same pattern was repeated by some of my students in the online discussion.

How to activate them? How to come up with meaningful activities for them, and most of all, how to help them develop and get the point? With Finnish students another important learning experience would be to be positively supportive and encouraging towards others - we tend to be rather judgmental, negative and critical. I wonder whether this is why some students feel reluctant to publish their work online.

It will be interesting to see next week if most of them will now resort to the traditional paper version and not bother about the Ning blog? I didn't want to force them to publish anything against their will, so I left the choice of medium up to them. Now I rather regret not sticking to my convictions. I think I will bring it up again in tomorrow's class to try to discuss with them the educational purpose behind it all in more detail.

Only, I am on rather shaky grounds banging on about authentic situations, when at the moment it's only my students discussing the topics anyway - they might as well do it amongst themselves in class. In my previous project, dialogue between students from different countries didn't work, because of scheduling problems and overall the considerably smaller number of participants. This time there are 255 members on the Ning, which is more than enough, and only a handful of students from the Philippines have started their summer holiday so far. But still, I fail to get this more in-depth dialogue started outside the chatty teen-topic discussion forum. Possibly it's a question of drastic differences in curricula and the students' English skills plus the lack of tighter pre-project planning with all the teachers. Improvising in international projects can produce beautiful, unexpected results, but also backfire - as now.

Photo: 045/365 - Comfort Zone by TheRogue on Flickr