Regular guest Matt Courtois returns to discuss teaching groups of young learners online. We focus on some of the advantages of online teaching – what is it possible to do online, that isn’t possible to do offline? How to get students to genuinely and meaningfully communicate with each other online? And why tech problems and glitches might actually be the best part of online language lessons.
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest, returning once again, is Matt Courtois.
Matt Courtois: Hey, it's good be back.
Ross: It's good to have you back. Matt, you and I used to work together in the same company. A large part of what you were doing was training teachers to teach online lessons of groups of students.
Obviously, lots of teachers now all over the world are teaching groups of students online, so pretty cool to get your ideas and experience of doing that.
Matt: Also, where I'm working now, we're doing the same thing that I think a lot of people are going through, and then we're transitioning our face‑to‑face classes to online.
Ross: In your experience of doing this, both now and in the past, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges for teachers?
Matt: One thing that every teacher...Actually, it was my first instinct as well, whenever I move to an online company, was thinking about, what do we do in a "real" classroom? Basically, figure out, right now, let's do that online, which is all good.
It limits you because there are things that you can do online that you can't do in your regular classroom. First of all, teaching online is a real classroom. Secondly, there's a lot of advantages that teaching online has that you wouldn't even know how to do in a real classroom.
Ross: I'm imagining here like a Venn diagram. It's like, what teachers tend to do online is just the stuff that overlaps often with teaching offline.
Matt: One of the challenges that I still struggle with in training teachers online is trying to consider how can you get students to interact more. You've run Skype meetings, I've run Skype meetings, or zoom meetings, or whatever platform you're using.
It ends up being a lecture. You don't get the participation you would in a normal training. It's just the nature of the way those platforms work. You can't get 10 people talking at the same time when working on a project.
Ross: You can't do that thing of turnaround to speak to your partner now and discuss this if it's 10 people all sharing the same online space. What do you think are some ways that teachers can get students to interact with each other online in those group classes?
Matt: I think the nicest way that a lot of platforms use, the most logical way to get all your students interacting at the same time is if you have six students, break them up into three different breakout rooms. They can talk for five minutes. Then you gather back together at the end, and you can debrief what they came up with in those five minutes in their breakout rooms.
Ross: I can imagine there being a lot of trepidation from teachers in using them. It really is like a complete blind spot. If you're setting up group work in a class, you can kind of hear what everyone's doing at the same time, but as soon as they're in different, literally different rooms, it's absolutely impossible to hear what's going on.
I guess maybe some tips for teachers in setting those up would be to be really clear about what you expect students to be able to come back at the end of the five minutes and be able to do or present and be super specific in the instructions.
Matt: That goes with something I recommend telling teachers during class. Tell your students, go and get something from your house. You're talking about food, like tell students go to your refrigerator and find some food that you can present or show off.
Again, you do have to consider, if you don't set a time limit, you might have some students that are gone for 15, 20 minutes. Because going on the refrigerator can be a point of distraction with some people.
[laughter]
Ross: Yeah, that's such a good point. I feel that's the other side of that Venn diagram. It's something that's possible to do online but not offline, is get real stuff from your house and from the students' houses, and bring them together and show them and compare them.
Matt: Some obvious sets of stuff that everyone has in their house. You've got your furniture, different rooms. I had a teacher who's doing a demo with me. I was the fake student. She was doing the different rooms in the house. She basically would say, instead of take your computer to the bathroom or the bedroom ‑‑ it's too difficult; it's an invasion, almost.
Instead, what she said, "Go to your bathroom and find a toothbrush. Bring your toothbrush back here and then go to your bedroom and find your pillow." It's vocabulary within the room. You can practice some of that.
Different rooms, food, family members, presumably you're in your house with your family. For little children, especially, you can say, bring your parents here and introduced them to the class.
Ross: You could do some cool translation activities with that as well. Like, get grandma, and you ask the question in English, the other student has to translate it into grandma's first language, then you do that back the way.
Matt: Another huge way ‑‑ this is probably the best way you can get all your students talking in the same time with that breakout rooms ‑‑ is have them do the role play with their parents.
It's great for parents too, because I think a lot of parents want to see that their children are learning and there's evidence of them being able to produce language in English, and they are interested. They are wanting to participate in their student's learning.
Ross: They'll participate regardless. If the teacher just lets them be passive, you're really rolling the dice there in terms of what participation you're going to get. We've seen just about everything, from just shouting out the answers to telling the students that they're stupid for getting it wrong, to giving the wrong answers.
If you're able to set roles for what you actually want the parents to do, then you can involve them in a way that you know is going to be productive.
Another big difference for teaching kids online compared to offline, I think that's a potential advantage, is the classroom management language is really different for online to offline.
If you think about just any decent coursebook, the first chapter is usually going to be things like what's your name, because you need to know your students' names, and things like stand up, sit down, pencil, eraser, pen, boom, blah, blah, blah, because students need to know and need to be able to use that language in order to actually participate in the class.
I feel that most coursebooks will not have the language that you need to participate in an online class, which is all these other things. It's [inaudible 7:00] not stand up and sit down. It's like click, circle.
Matt: It's an interesting thing, with teaching Lexus. I remember, a few years ago I went to a talk, and somebody was saying what are the first words that you teach to students? You teach the highest frequency words first because those are the ones that students use most.
Ross: Again, it's so context specific, isn't it? I guess if you were teaching a group of students from different countries and different backgrounds, you would want your coursebook at the beginning to have things like, where did you come from?
If you're teaching a group of students that are all in their home country from the same time, that language is not meaningful at all. It's even not meaningful, like if the students already know each other's names because they're in the same primary school class and have been for three years. That's not useful language.
One of the things for teaching online is you really have to start assessing like, why do we teach some of the things that we teach?
Matt: Along with that, here's the flip side of it that's positive is that a lot of my teachers, in the beginning of a lot of classes, they want to do something that students notice.
They always ask students, "How's the weather today?" Something I point out is you and I sitting here in the same room would never ever ask that question because you're fully aware and I'm fully aware of how the weather is today, and we know that each other knows.
It's not a real interaction. There's no exchange of ideas happening. It's purely a fake interaction that we create for the classroom.
Whereas, all of a sudden, online, you do have some people being in different places. When I'm on the phone with you, if you're in Shanghai and I'm in Shenzhen, let's say, we would say, "How's the weather today?" I think online, now that becomes a genuine interaction. We can actually do it and have some different language appear as well.
Ross: Even very simple things, like very, very low level students, like, "What colors can you see?" It's a sort of thing you'd maybe do in the classroom with real beginners. When everyone's in their own living rooms, all of a sudden, that's a genuine question. What colors can you see? Because I can't see your living room.
I can just see wall behind you. You can see all these different things. All this communication that before used to be fake, or these questions, at least, that used to be display questions are now referential questions. Real communication is happening.
Matt: I remember a story from our old company where one lesson, the teacher was asking students questions like that. They were looking at this PowerPoint together, and he said, "What's on this page?" The kid would say, "This is on the page, this, this, this." He just named all the items. "All right, next slide, what's on this page?" "This is on it. This is on."
It's all this fake interaction because the teacher knows what's on those pages. Then all of a sudden, there was a technical difficulty. They started looking at two different pages.
All of a sudden, the teacher said, "Can you tell me which page you're on? What are you seeing?" The student starts describing the page, and he's like, "Oh, so you got three pages ahead of me." You realize, it was by mistake, by a glitch in the system.
Finally, we had a real interaction when they were looking at different things and trying to communicate and solve the problem together, so they could end up on the same page together. For the first time in their lesson, they're having a meaningful exchange.
Ross: The teacher has a reason to actually listen to the student's answer as well. The communication is happening both ways.
Matt: How many times am I going to ask you like, "What do you see?" He'd tell me, and I'd say, "Good job." That's not a real interaction. It's only for the classroom.
Ross: That's a fascinating example, doesn't it? It was like, sometimes online, when things go wrong, it can be a positive thing. I've definitely seen this as well in terms of the audio quality, and then the teacher and students are not being able to hear each other.
It doesn't mean you get more sort of negotiation and meaning of like, "What was that? What do you mean? Can you explain? Is there another word for that? How do you spell it?"
Again, I'm not asking how do you spell it because I'm checking your spelling. It's because I'm genuinely trying to understand.
Matt: Trying to understand. I remember something you used to complain about. In another previous, previous job, there's a lot of times to get that gap between students, to get that meaningful exchange in a real classroom.
To get one student looking at something the other student doesn't, you end up blindfolding the student. You end up blindfolding student B, so student A can describe what to do. How many times have you been blindfolded in real life? No, don't answer that. I don't want to know.
[laughter]
Matt: You can understand why teachers are doing that, why they're putting the blindfold on their students ‑‑ so they can create that gap and that need for real communication, but it's just so inauthentic. Whereas online, you do have some people with camera problems and some people that don't. You can really use those to make your lessons better.
Ross: Absolutely. I feel so much of this, it's really just taking the same principles as you're teaching off...I think there's so much of what is bad teaching offline. Teachers holding up flashcards and getting students to name them. That's also bad teaching online.
Matt: It's a bit more obvious online as bad teaching. A teacher, when they have those flashcard activities, they can have 10 activities where they get the students up and running around.
In essence, all they're doing is getting students to memorize these words on the flashcard. It is a very interactive thing where students are moving around. It can feel pretty fun.
Online, if you're doing just that list of words or looking at the picture and treating it like that focus on the six vocabulary items again, and again, and again, you can't really fall back on that fun flashcard activity.
Ross: Something you hit on there is the importance of doing something to get the students to move.
I think half an hour, if you're six years old, to sit in the one place, that's a big ask. Trying to do those activities of whatever it is, like miming something or finding something in the room and bringing it back. Just doing something to get the students to just move away from this sitting, staring at the screen is a bit of a must.
Matt: One rule I make for teachers is get your students up and moving in every class.
Ross: That's obviously really easy to do offline, but I think that's something that requires a lot more thought online. Or, maybe it's not necessarily easier offline. It's just everyone has been doing it for longer.
People have developed all these strategies for getting students to switch seats or look at something outside the class or do a rolling dictation. If it's online, you need to think of a new way, a new reason for the students to stand up and do something.
Matt: I said in the beginning that this is something that all teachers around the world are doing, this transition from offline to online. I'm excited about it. In my profession and education, it is a pretty conservative thing.
It hasn't evolved that much since I've taught. We're at a time now, right now, that we are doing something very different, and everybody's doing it. I'm excited to see what comes out of this.
Ross: Good. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Matt, thanks for joining us.
Matt: A pleasure, as always.
Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.
Matt: See you.