Motivational Strategies for Engaging Students in Real and Virtual Classrooms

hello everybody good afternoon and welcome to the session motivational strategies

keeping students engaged in real and virtual classrooms with our speaker joanna dossiter and

thank you very much for joining us and please remember that during the talk there's a question and answer

function available so feel free to post your questions and comments there caroline and i are also in the studio

today as moderators and we will collect and send your questions to the presenter

towards the end of the session um when they will have time to answer them so feel free to like any question that

you want the speaker to focus on and we'll do our best to field as many as we can

time permitting okay so now i'd like to introduce our speaker joanna dossiter she's a senior teacher at the british

council barcelona she has over 20 years experience of teaching and teacher training

and her particular interests are best practice in young learner teaching and in teachers continuing professional

development okay so i'll pass over to you now joanna that's great thank you very much

lisa and welcome everybody who's listening to this talk

um and if you uh were listening to graham stanley's plenary you might well have a fork that you're waving at the

screen but i can't see that unfortunately so let's get started

so this talk is divided into three parts setting off the journey and holding the vision

um what's in it for me what will you get out of this well uh hopefully ten practical teaching

ideas that you can use in your classes um i have put the hand out for the

session at this qr code you might want to take a screenshot but you can also get it at the padlet

so just firstly why motivation 2020 has been a very atypical year for all of us

incredibly challenging year all over the world and motivation is the energy that can

support resilience and optimism so i think it's a good moment for motivation so part one

setting off so i'd like to start with introduction as lisa just said i work at the british

council barcelona um and motivational quote number one this is hanging up in our hallway

my colleague gemma has put up this lovely display and nothing is impossible the word itself says i'm possible

so something briefly about me i'm originally from king's lynn in norfolk and some of the things that

motivate me are travel walking yoga and new learning in general

these are the objectives of the session and um hopefully we'll have time to cover

all of these so first of all i would suggest that um as we go through the talk you maybe have

a little notebook or you just scribble down a few things because i think being active helps helps

learning so what words come to mind when you think of motivation

i'm just going to wait a few seconds while you find a notebook and a pen scribble down a few words or just make a

mental note so here are some words that you might have been thinking of you might have

thought of extrinsic intrinsic achievement goal enjoyment journey something like that so another

um just quick activity i'd like you to think of a teacher who motivated you maybe in the past or maybe even a

teacher that's motivating you now so what is or was it about this teacher that was motivating

and here i'd like you to type something in the chat i can't see the chat at the moment

but when we stop a third of the way through the journey um i'll ask lisa and caroline if they can

tell me some of the things that you've put in the chat now when

um myself and my colleague gemma did a version of this talk a little bit earlier in the year with british council

teachers um we did a gave them a google form and the results

of the three top three factors came out like this so the ability to build positive

relationships to create a safe and stimulating classroom environment and purposeful and

um oh sorry um i was just moving something that i could

see on my screen and because i couldn't see the word relevant that's why

uh i froze there sorry purposeful and relevant teaching um you might have noted that this

teacher that motivated you showed an interest in your learning gave you feedback

was perhaps good humored funny or entertaining um explain things clearly and made you

curious and made the subject relevant so we're going to look a little bit of the theoretical framework

to motivation so one of these frameworks is self-determination theory which suggests that humans have three

basic needs and one of those is relatedness the need to have a close affectionate relationships with others

the other one is autonomy they need to control the course of our lives and the third one is

competence the need to be effective in dealing with the environment and competence i think we can also hear a

quake with confidence so there are many motivational theories we won't go deeply into any of them but

you may well be thinking of the theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation so

intrinsic is behavior driven by internal rewards or internal choice um choiceful behavior

and rises within the individual but extrinsic motivation is referring to behaviour that's more driven by external

rewards typically grades or praise or money or prestige

and these link to other concepts so the intrinsic motivation may be linked to integrative motivation learners wanting

to get to know people who speak the l2 and really be motivated by that other

culture and extrinsic motivation related to instrumental motivation of wanting to

perhaps pass past an exam or at a job or maybe move abroad and in a way we probably typically

relate adults more typically to the uh to the intrinsic

motivation and teens perhaps more to the extrinsic so adults who after all are literally

investing in their learning they have chosen to pay for it um teens their parents will be the ones

probably who've decided on on this course of action

so adults generally may be more successful at self-motivation teens may be less skilled at

self-regulation and motivation but there are similarities

and both of them need to be engaged and engagement is a really critical concept that we'll come back to in the talk

both groups can easily be distracted and they need to be kept interested and on task i would argue

both need relatedness the need to feel connected they need autonomy

to have some freedom and choice and here i think it's interesting if you uh were watching

leslie keith's i wonder talk earlier this morning she was mentioning just the importance for young learners

to have control over their environment and competence the need to feel effective and confident

about your ability to do something you know and it's kind of like this idea of this powerful message of yes i can is

this idea of self-efficacy so i would argue that the characteristics of motivating teachers

are that they build trust and relationships they empower students by helping them to feel confident and

competent and they build autonomy and they allow choices and we'll come back

briefly to this later but here is another acronym that i think is quite helpful

it's uh john keller's arcs model um and those uh acronym the acronym stands for attention

relevance confidence and satisfaction so finally the last theoretical sort of framework for this

talk is zoltan dernier and i will refer to zoltan repeatedly in this talk

i i find his books extremely readable and are very helpful in in the classroom um

and it's this book motivational strategies in the language classroom

so um one of the things that zoltan points out is that um language learning needs motivation because it's

such a long process it's uh during the lengthy and often tedious process of mastering

the foreign or second language the learner's enthusiasm commitment and persistence

are key determinants of success or failure so um darnier has

an idea of a process approach to motivation that it that covers distinct phases um first of all creating

the basic motivational conditions then generating the initial motivation then maintaining and protecting it

and finally retrospectively evaluating it and this is summarized here in this nice

image of this cycle so what are these motivational teaching strategies and

that is the title of this talk um so in this session we will look at 10 practical activities so first of all

pack packing for the journey okay creating the basic motivational conditions um

we need to create a pleasant and supportive atmosphere in class we need to demonstrate and model

appropriate teacher behaviors and we need to create a cohesive learner group with appropriate group norms

so here is motivational teaching idea number one actively learn about your students

record the information and then recycle it back into your class so this is um a nice form

or sort of worksheet that i got from a session given by the teacher trainer chris

rowland so thanks chris very much for this idea i still have this bit of paper at home

and this is very useful for just keeping notes on your students so that you you

have this information and you can refer back to it and i would say that it's it's nice to refer

back to this information and recycle it so you can recycle it into the class and as a kind of find someone who now in

the new socially distanced world i find someone who will need

some adaptation there's no question um but i think to some extent uh the teacher can highlight these or

put these up on the board and say um who is the person who and read out the things and encourage the other

students to recognize these features or these characteristics of each other and therefore that

they will learn about their other classmates it's important to involve all students

and invite them all to participate actively and this helps to develop a cohesive learner group

which is which is really important and i think i would also say here that we do have quieter students in our

classes and it's quite important to actually draw those out i think as a teacher

that is our role to make sure that all students are contributing um and i think there's an interesting

book related to this which is the book quiet um about these quieter students more

introverted and how to make sure that their voice is is also heard

so one way you can do this very simply is to use a website such as wheel of names

you type in the names of your students and you keep getting a random student to participate

and another very nice website is this one app.classroom screen which has a random name generator included in

it as well as a whole other whole load of other features and this is very nice to use online when

you're teaching online but also good to use in the the face-to-face

classroom so motivational teaching idea number three is to establish clear group norms at the start of the year

um so for example um you're as a teacher you're you're almost bound to say

everybody needs to speak in english in the english classroom um but also it's very good to factor in

choice and autonomy and ask the students for their own ideas about the class and even possibly to

make make some rules for the teacher and that might be that the teacher needs to hand

back their work within let's say perhaps a week at the very latest

so what about motivation in the virtual world how is this similar and or different and graeme was speaking

just before this about um virtual learning environments and the things to bear in mind

and some of those things are very similar to the face-to-face classroom but some of them are perhaps a little

bit um a little bit different or more emphasis so um this is a very

interesting website i would recommend i've put this link to a handout that i will

um that i will share with you at the end the the where to find the handout but there are

a number of different videos about motivating and engaging students um online and one thing they stress is

the importance of teacher presence and they say how important it is for the teacher to make your presence felt

particularly at the start of a course where there's an initial socialization period

and so that it's it's important to interact as much as you can with the students

and that might be physically when you're in your in your virtual class but also

asynchronously hi joe sorry to interrupt and we just had a couple of

people asking if you would mind just slowing down a little bit so they can take in the information

yes thank you lisa for um for saying that yes i'm aware that i'm going pretty fast

so um just because i'm probably have put too much in this talk but i will slow down i i will also say

that all of these slides um i have shared as well on the on the padlet

um so they will be there for later but i will slow down thank you for that no problem

for mentioning that no but then thank you um for the participants as well please

remember that you can watch a recording of this afterwards okay thank you

so um to come back to what we were saying about norms um it's a ground rule or a norm in a

virtual learning environment is perhaps established how much participation that you're expecting from the students

and maybe um giving them some criteria and tying this into your assessment um

and online in particular the teacher has perhaps a new role which is that of the community manager

so more than ever the role of the facilitator the teacher teacher's facilitator is really really important

to create the sense of community which really does tie students together and and and heightens their motivation and

enthusiasm to continue with with a course so um one thing about an online

learning community that is um perhaps another but different is to well not necessarily different but an

online learning community can be even more democratic in that it does seem to involve and give a voice to

perhaps a wider range of personality types um and it may be that less vocal students

may actually find it easier to participate more actively and contribute more so that's the end of

part one um i'm sorry if i've galloped through it um

but at that at this point if um lisa and caroline have any questions or comments to share

then this would be a good moment just to to look at them well joe in in response to your your

question about what motivates uh what teachers motivate them what are the qualities in a teacher a word that

comes up a lot is passion uh it's repeated several times through the chat passion about the subject

love of what they're teaching um kindness friendliness and something that you referred to very

strongly there about the can-do attitude okay it came up as well about a teacher who

makes you feel that you can can achieve yeah that's great um absolutely i think you know the enthusiasm of a teacher is

definitely carried into the class and carries the students along

kindness and caring is very important from a teacher and also this you know that the teacher

has a belief that you can do something will really help to convince the students and then they'll have this

sense of self-efficacy that um that without it they may well give up okay um we'll carry on into part two but

i will pause again after part two for more questions okay so part two the journey and here

we're going to look at generating initial motivation maintaining it and protecting it

so what's in it for me this journey um i would say that if you can successfully generate enthusiasm and motivation at

the start of a course then you're a long way towards guaranteeing the success of the students

on that language learning journey with you possibly for the next year or longer and what you might see i was trying to

do there was to basically sell it sell it to you yeah sell it to you why you might be listening to this what's in

it for you um and i think that's something that a teacher can do

is to um point out the relevance of what uh what you're doing in the class um and also

um make it engaging and uninteresting so that the students really want to to to pay attention um an engagement has

been called by different writers as the holy grail of learning um which suggests it is not the easiest thing to

to to find so motivational teaching idea number four is to increase your students goal

orientedness so how can you do this so it's important to set goals

or encourage students to set their own goals so one thing you can do as a group is to negotiate class goals

um the other thing is to find out what your students goals are and they may all have different goals

which again if you can individualize and personalize the learning that will be that will be

motivating and then to show students explicitly how the class activities are related to

their own goals because i think the problem sometimes is that learners don't really know

what the teacher what the teacher has in mind with these like with the activities that they're planning

and if you can share that with them then um they can see that there's really a point

so share class objectives frequently at the beginning of the class you can have a class menu up on the board

and also share the criteria for success which will help learners to identify when they've done

something well you can also ask learners to periodically reflect on their own goals

they might do this in a learning journal and i think one thing to say this year we've been

talking about how we're going to be teaching in a socially distant classroom this is uh we're starting our

classes uh the british council very soon and um i think perhaps this year we will find that there will be

more moments for sort of individual work or where um we might be focusing a little

bit more on students individual work so to write in a learning journal in a classroom

i would suggest is a good use of class time even though it's an individual moment

um i think there's there's work going on students are thinking and reflecting and that although you can't see it

is is actually useful learning so what about maintaining motivation so um

motivational teaching idea number five is to break the learning down into achievable chunks um and again just

to go back to what leslie keith was saying this morning um you know talk i wonder she was

talking about the kind of structured frameworks that that really help um to sort of break the

learning down and make it achievable and we can look at this as a kind of a problem-solving approach and i think

it's also worth mentioning that students with additional educational needs particularly benefit from this so

if they have attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder or asperger's or dyslexia

if the teacher provides that structure and keeps them checking what their what their what

they're doing and what their what those steps are breaking it down into the steps um it makes it a lot more

achievable learning is problem solving and neuroscience apparently shows that

similar areas of the brain activate for both learning and pleasure and this is to do with the sort of

dopamine rewards circuit because when we solve a problem

then we get a hit of dopamine which um can make us uh as another talk i was listening to earlier about habits

makes us maybe crave this but can be a positive thing obviously um but the point is being able to solve

the problem and uh this i'm sure you are familiar already with the cheek sent me high flow

theory um but it's very much about the um the key goldilocks level between um

boredom and anxiety if something is too easy we get very bored easily but if it's too difficult we get

anxious um and the kind of the the zone to aim at is the the zone between those two

and game design works very much on this theory that we we have a little problem we solve it we get the

kind of moments of mastery and self-efficacy and then we move on to a new challenge

so i think this is exploited in many times a day of games so the motivational teaching idea

number six is about the content of the course um so just to consider the nutritional

content of your instruction um in order to make this relevant and to make it varied

so i think the relationship here with food is that you know we we we need the food that's good for us

and that will um give us nutrition but if it's always the same it's incredibly dull

so variety is is super important in teaching um how can we make the learning relevant

for the students well one way is to do needs analysis regularly and this can be just simple feedback and

it can be the kind of feedback that's you know yes i like it

or i don't it can be very visual immediate like that or it can be using for example

in the online world we can use google forms we can use microsoft forms we can use surveymonkey and we can

get really excellent feedback from doing that and sometimes beautifully

graphically displayed and at which point i just highlight that i'll share this with

you at the end of the talk because i would like uh your feedback at the end i'll come

back to this slide um so how about variety how can you introduce variety in your teaching so

i'm just going to pause i'm sorry if i'm going fast again but i'm just going to pause at this point

and ask you to jot down perhaps in the chat how you can introduce variety in in the classroom

either the face-to-face classroom or the virtual classroom i have a few suggestions here so i think

you can vary the topic i think you can use games and quizzes and jokes and use humor

in general also very the the person who provides the content and you can ask students to bring in content with

student presentations and actually about three months ago one of my students online uh did a really

excellent presentation all about um the coronavirus because his parents and relatives were working in

hospitals and um it was really really well done and all of his peers were

incredibly interested and actually learnt a lot about coronavirus from it so online games that you can play to

break up the monotony of the learning kahoot i think we all know kahoot very well by now also bamboozle

is another quiz tool and quizlet is excellent also other ways we vary the skills work we

can vary settling and stirring activities again in a socially distanced classroom this may

get more difficult but at the very least we can do simon says in our chairs we can stand up we

can sit down we can um do some kind of stirring we can vary the input and we can vary

fair work group work and individual work um protecting motivation so one writer has talked about guarding against

everyday dragons and everyday dragons are things like distractions they are things like um you know other

activities that get in the way and certainly in today's world with so many um digital devices that are constantly

pulling us in all directions and i think teenagers we know are incredibly pulled in all directions

so protecting motivation is important um so motivational teaching idea number seven

is to use collaborative group work to energize students and they learn from each other

and it also develops the group's cohesion which in itself provides more motivation

and here online environments are great because there are so many tools that we can use

to group together students contributions i know a lot of teachers in the state system are using google classroom

which is an amazing tool we can create wiki pages blogs we can ask students to work

together on online presentations there are many ways that students can collaborate

and create the virtual learning community another idea which is very helpful in

group work is to give students different roles so what kind of roles could students

have if if they're working in a group and we want to divide them up

well uh i've got some examples here so for example um this role a timekeeper role is is a

pretty good one and it's helpful to have just one person in charge of that

also we can have um an ideas generator so somebody who maybe not just one person more than one

person who's who's doing that um other roles we might have our secretary

or idea generator or i'd sorry idea evaluator or somebody who's the devil's advocate

or somebody uh who's the noise monitor that can be helpful in in busy classes and busy schools

a summarizer or a graphic designer and i would suggest having the roles on a lanyard i think is is

is good because you've got a physical reminder of what your role is and then it's very easy just to swap the roles

around the next time and have variety just to come back to the idea of communities and online environments this

is an example of flipgrid and i asked a friend of mine to to to record uh her opinion about a

motivating teacher um and i'm going to build on this as well with with other friends so

um in flipgrid a whole load of different students can record um a video response

so that's the end of part two um i hope i didn't gallop through too quickly and

now is again a moment for questions or comments hi joe yeah we've got lots of

suggestions and comments again um with suggestions for introducing variety through different media

different realia as some practical examples people are interested in hearing

about practical examples like grab and grab and gab show and tell using the five senses

there's lots of lots of ideas came up there a question came up a couple of times

which which you have touched on but it's obviously a key a key question about the difficulties

because of covert uh and the restrictions and how that's going to impact on

on the fun element and and so on so that came up uh somebody who somebody sorry i can't

remember who now mentioned the difficulty even you just using masks um and that might provoke some shyness

or so that those were the comments and questions but the question we've got

here is how can we make that work with within those restrictions as well

yeah i think that's a very good question and i'd have to say i don't have the answer

and i i feel apprehensive as i think a lot of us do um it was in a training session

yesterday about this and most of us were voicing our apprehension one nice idea that one teacher had was

to ask the students to bring in a photo of themselves and put it on their desk folder over put their name

and that way um all the learners can see each other's faces because obviously they'll be covered up

with the mask but then they've got the photo there and then again the importance for the

teacher to personalize things so perhaps to to bring in photos show them on the

screen of themselves you know their families things that are important to them

and just although we we may feel anonymous because of the masks to try and personalize that as much as

possible so i think images and photos might be a good way around that yeah okay yes thanks

okay so we're going to move on to to part three and hopefully at the end of this there'll also be time

for a couple of other questions as well so this part is divided into the l2 future self

group glee and the mindset so i'm going to refer again to zoltan dernier

in this book motivation language identity and the l2 self um and this is a very nice youtube talk

that i would recommend about this topic motivating l2 learners and teachers through vision

so what is this vision idea and and how does it work exactly so dunya um

explains and argues persuasively that the use of imagery and vision is very powerful

and is currently being used in and widely used in coaching high performing athletes and sports men and women so

this is being used because it does work um and the idea is if the learners can visualize themselves as succeeding in

their ltu language journey then they're going to be energized in the present to continue and in that

sense that this seeing in the mind's eye is believing and i think this incredible example of this

is from my favorite documentary man on wire and here we see philip petit walking between the twin towers and he

actually um in in a dentist surgery saw a drawing of the twin towers

many years before and he tore out the drawing because it inspired him so much and he knew he was going to do this

um this this incredible um feat that he that he achieved to walk between the twin towers i think that just

shows the power of vision um so how again does the idea work well i think this

i believe this anyway i'm not a neuroscientist but uh the dopamine reward circuit is that

we're transported into the future and we experience pleasure in the in the present as we contemplate the vision

and in a way if we think in english we look forward to something and in spanish this idea of illusion now we've got it

in the mind um but what could this look like in the classroom itself so here i would like to

thank ollie jones in the british council madrid teaching center who

um explored this with a community of practice and a group of teachers and um so his ideas he shared with us

are vision boards visualization and future self letters so what is a vision board a vision board

is something that um that learners produce as a kind of collage

of themselves in the future so for example this learner here is imagining themselves in 10 years time

living in new york city holidaying in australia passing the proficiency exam

running their own business and all of these things that they can achieve once they've got really good english

so i think that could be a really interesting thing to try out with with your students

[Music] another idea is to do a guided visualization and this is a little bit

more touchy feely and it's not perhaps everybody's cup of tea um but i think the idea is that the

teacher would have some kind of script and would ask learners to imagine perhaps with their

eyes closed themselves in the future and very much adding sensory details of

seeing themselves projected into the future what does it look like what does it feel like

and the third idea is to ask the learners to imagine themselves in the future

writing a letter to their current cells once they've succeeded what uh letter of advice would they

would they write to themselves so i think that's also a very nice idea so we move on to the next part group

group lee so glee or happiness celebration it's it's important to to celebrate success

um and important to find and make the most of opportunities to celebrate progress and success so this is

motivational teaching idea number nine and what do we mean exactly by progress and success

um just to come back again to the dopamine reward circuit pleasure and enjoyment this is why we

get addicted to facebook likes these positive reinforcements they keep us hooked on the experience

so for example receiving positive feedback is is really important and i think one of the most motivational

teach one of the most motivational things that a teacher can do is to give positive feedback to students

and um also to recognize and acknowledge strengths and i remember a colleague of mine

saying how much she appreciated a peer observation program where her peers basically

said how good she was at certain aspects of teaching and she said she felt this was like a pat on the back that she

she didn't usually get um so if somebody's acknowledging our strengths it

definitely gives us a massive boost another thing other things we can do is to

um very simple level is we have our class goals and a menu and we we tick them off and we show

the learners what they've achieved in that lesson um doing a collaborative project and

finishing it and getting praise and feedback even if something as simple as doing well in a class kahoot

passing an exam and and playing a team game which is fun in itself even if we even

if we don't win just to come back to this theoretical model from earlier the

um arcs attention relevant satisfaction and confidence um so the last two elements

of that are i think specifically related to this idea of success breathes confidence and

satisfaction gives us that reward so holding the vision and the mindset

um this is the last part of dernier's uh process of motivation and it's this idea of encouraging positive retrospective

self-evaluation and a very influential idea here which i'm sure you are probably familiar with

already is carol dweck's growth mindset coming from her book from 2006 the new psychology of success and a

very interesting and influential ted talk the point of the growth mindset is this

belief that that we can get smarter it's not fixed innate ability it's rather that

with effort we will all get better and even if we're not there yet um we can get there it's just a question of uh

spending a little bit longer um and not not kind of feeling disheartened at all

and this relates to attribution theories of motivation so with a growth mindset um we attribute our success to effort um

rather than innate ability and this is really empowering and really really powerful

so the motivational teaching idea number 10 is to help students to develop this growth mindset

and i think there are a number of different ways of doing this first of all

introducing them to the idea if they don't know it also to encourage risk taking

you know the only mistake you can make is the one that you don't learn from perhaps you could use yourself as a

model talk about your language learning talk about maybe the setbacks you might have had

but how you've maybe persevered and kept going you can have an interesting debate in

with older learners about whether our skills are fixed or can be developed through effort

and that brings us to motivational teaching id at number 11. but i said there were only 10 so yes

there are actually 11 i wanted just to surprise you so the motivational teaching idea number

11 is to motivate yourself why well i think a motivated person is engaging

and interesting to be around and inspiring i think enthusiasm is infectious

and i think that curiosity really drives innovation and new thinking and certainly this year

has um i think been provoking many of us to think in ways that we we hadn't thought before

and coming back to this idea of engagement um so why why is this engagement idea so important

that it's the holy grail of learning um coming back to zoltan derniae again um he writes that um motivation is great

certainly important but it it's not the be-all and end-all because unless we actually do something with our

motivation we're kind of in the same the same position

and he says to be sure motivation is undoubtedly necessary for preparing the deal but engagement is

indispensable for sealing the deal and actually putting something into

action so engagement motivation plus implementation which sometimes is the difficult part

so i would encourage you to explore your own teaching uh one really great way of doing that is

to work with peers which i think is inherently motivating um try out new things and in the handout

from this talk i've put the checklist which is in zoltan's book um

and i've just taken a number of those and put that in the handout uh and and he encourages you to just to try one

out okay today i'm going to try this one out uh make notes on sort of how how it went

um and also to be kind to yourself and recognize your own strengths as a teacher

because sometimes as teachers we are actually hard on ourselves so finally just to conclude here uh

motivational quote number two and this comes from an interesting book the organized mind which finishes with

this idea that the key to change is having faith that when we get rid of the old

something or someone even more magnificent will take its place i think this can motivate us to to move

on and make changes and do things differently so that's the end of part three and

hopefully we have a couple of minutes for questions and i'm just going to put this feedback form

also up on the screen here so that you could give me some brief feedback when this finishes

so caroline and lisa are there first of all have we run out of time and do we have time for maybe one or two

more questions hi joe yes we've got um eight minutes uh remaining on this session

so i think we have got a couple of questions in the q a maybe caroline would like to

choose one for you okay sorry i was muting muted um yet we have a question which is how

do it from leslie saying how do we know if we're overwhelming students with too much variety

we've talked about in including variety but can there be too many platforms too much

variety leslie's asking that's an interesting question um i think

one one good way is is to ask the learners and to get feedback and that can be as simple

as asking the question what do you think we've been using this platform that this platform this other

one um would you like to use other platforms too or is that enough

um have you you know how are you finding the course so far are we going are we going too fast or

are there other activities that you haven't liked so getting feedback regularly in many different ways is is

really important just by talking to the students or by giving them something a little bit more structured like

some kind of um google form or something like that um i mean it's it's i think variety

is really really important that the brain has a novelty bias so we we're looking for the new and it gives us a

buzz and we do want it but at the same time um and uh that's one of the talks earlier today

was about the power of habits um we also know that you know younger children and and

perhaps up to many ages this idea of routine as reassurance is also very powerful so it's kind of

like we do need routines and we do like routines but within that routine we also need this variety factor or we

switch off and we become disengaged and as soon as we're disengaged and switched off

we're actually not taking stuff in and we're not learning um so it's it's a balance i think

definitely it's a balance um i think probably going back to the learners and asking them

is a good way to to work out if what we're doing is is what they want

thank you see me if there's a so one question which is um general very general

um asking saying somebody asking about effective ways tips for preventing states of anxiety

or boredom amongst students it's it's a big question joe but i mean you've obviously touched on a

lot of that but if there any any other thoughts you had on that yeah it is a very big question it's a big

question anyway i think right now this um this point in this pandemic and and with the um the you know the

socially distance classroom it's it's it's even more important um i mean i think anxiety in general

can be you know massively destructive in terms of learning because it's this whole thing about the

effective filter and it means that we don't we don't take stuff in when we're in an anxious state

so it is really important that you know that we're creating this pleasant environment where people are happy

and i think in a way what i was demonstrated badly at the beginning i went too quickly um and that kind of

makes people go oh you know you need to slow down so i think we need to have the right pace

when we're teaching and um again you know students with additional educational needs um

this is a particular factor that's important so this whole idea of structuring the learning breaking it

down making it into smaller steps and not moving on to the next step until really we're happy that

people have mastered the step that they were at and it's a good delicate balance because

if we if we go too slowly there are also learners who will just not be engaged so we need to strike the balance but i

think reducing anxiety is incredibly important and i think right now probably it's going to be a

lot about um about encouraging dialogue no um and addressing the whole

sort of corona virus fears to some extent and and listening to to learners and and

sort of you know making sure that we do discuss the issues that they might be

particularly worried about so that um you know we're aware of our learners and what

what anxiety issues they're having um and just encouraging that that pleasant

classroom environment and and i think something graeme was saying earlier you know making sure that there's fun

and there's time to socialize at the beginning it's time to chat um and that there's plenty of moments

for enjoyment and and things that aren't perhaps really high stakes so you know

a quiz a game that kind of thing a song okay indeed no more questions but a nice comment here

from flurry which probably helps us to to tie up here um she said no question but

inspiring she's got she says definitely to be watched again the talk and to grasp take more from it

um which is some nice feedback there at the end um maybe i don't know lisa

yeah um actually i had uh just an uh sort of comment on the previous um question

and maybe a comment for joe as well as you mentioned about um preventing anxiety by

balancing finding a balance with the pace and i thought about also a balance between

as you said variety and yet routine because we often find that um the idea of having a routine

uh reduces anxiety especially in younger learners so perhaps it's a it's a case of us also

as teachers finding a balance between maybe perhaps introducing our lessons with a set routine

which might be very valuable for these learners in this time where everything's quite uncertain

and changing um but also adding that variety as you said later on in the lesson

possibly yeah i i totally agree i think uh routine is reassuring habits are reassuring

um and one example there where you can sort of have a routine but have variety is this idea of a sort of student

presentations so you have this routine every week one of the students is going to give a presentation and they know

that that's maybe the last 10 minutes of class and but every time it's a new student um

so i found that that works really well with with sort of higher level learners but you can work

down with you know with learners with a sort of a2 level and above um and just to yeah

um sort of set a set a a calendar for when those students are going to be presenting so

they've got plenty of time to think about it so yeah i think variety within routine

is is important yeah that's great joe thank you

um okay so we're just coming to the end of uh the talk now the end of our time

um thank you again for a very informative talk and as you can see on the screen now

we've got just a couple of instructions for you the virtual hall um we'll paste the

link into the question and answers now perhaps caroline can help me with that um some of you are asking about where

you can find um the slides and the handout that joanna mentioned well you can find it

on the virtual hall padlet we should have all of these speakers information and handouts available by

monday so please remember to keep checking in there when you'll be able to find

the handout and the slides from this presentation if some of you would like to watch the

presentation again remember you just need to click on the teams link the same link that you

clicked on to attend this session and you'll be able to find a recording of the session

where you can watch again or you can send it to anybody who wasn't able to attend today

and just to remind you again that we are celebrating our 80th anniversary here in spain

so keep sending us your texts about inspirational teacher colleagues to teaching conference spain at

britishcouncil.eso.org and we'll have some prizes for that okay and so thank you very much

everybody for attending today and um remember now we have a lunch break and the next

uh talks will begin at 4 pm this afternoon so we hope to see you back again this afternoon

thank you very much and goodbye thank you very much goodbye