to teach one-to-one-in-a-group, i.e. teach in a way that allows the
teacher to challenge each learner at their own level.
Can you give a practical example of this?
AU and JS: Well, for example, in a whole class situation where a
learner is trying to make a sentence of their own but is struggling
with some point of grammar, lexis, pronunciation or expression that
they appear keen to improve, working one-to-one within the whole
class can be productive. The teacher may listen to what the student
says, give a little feedback, let the student try again, listen, give a
little more feedback and so on. Over a few iterations, the student
will tangibly upgrade their sentence. And we are arguing that this is
valid and valuable, despite running contrary to what we see as a
fairly widespread contemporary paradigm: that generally one should
praise every piece of half-formed language that a student says and
that we shouldn’t interrupt or help students to upgrade language
when they are primarily communicating meaning (for fear of
damaging “fluency”). We are arguing that the classroom is a great
place for continuous, playful, exploratory help in language upgrade
– and that very often this is exactly what students want. We are not
suggesting just “correction”; rather a kind of feedback that helps
every student to move forward by little steps at their current level,
and as far as possible on what seems to be their own agenda.
We propose a small course correction to our direction of travel.
This involves sensitising more teachers to learning. Thus we view this
as learnING centred rather than learnER centered...
As with teaching, we propose a small change of focus in teacher
training (which might of course have much bigger ramifications). That
is, a move towards helping teachers to think more about learning
rather than worrying about the mechanics and entertainment value of
lessons
demandhighelt.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/demand-high-article-from-the-teacher-trainer-journal-vol-27-no-2.pdf
Some Ways of Demanding High - pdf
A very stimulating teaching blog full of ideas from Adrian Underhill and Jim Scrivener:
Welcome
Introduction
We launched this blog in March 2012. Since then, we’ve given a large number of conference presentations and seminars in different countries aiming to explain our concept of “Demand High” teaching. We’ve met lots of people with lots of opinions and this has really helped us become clearer and more focussed. Thank you for all the interest you’ve shown. This page sums up where we think we have got to by June 2012!
What is Demand-High?
Demand High asks:
- Are our learners capable of more, much more?
- Have the tasks and techniques we use in class become rituals and ends in themselves?
- How can we stop “covering material” and start focusing on the potential for deep learning?
- What small tweaks and adjustments can we make to shift the whole focus of our teaching towards getting that engine of learning going?
What Demand-High is not
Demand High is not a method and it is not anti any method. We are not anti-Communicative Approach. We are not anti-dogme. We are not anti-Task Based Learning.
We are simply suggesting adjustments to whatever it is you are already doing in class – ways of getting much greater depth of tangible engagement and learning.
Does Demand-High mean making everything more difficult?
Demand-High is not the traditional idea of making things more difficult in ways that did not help the majority of students (e.g. setting exercises that were too hard). When teachers did that they were probably trying to help, but were out of touch with our learning needs and therefore caused us to struggle, and with limited result. This is un-doable demand.
We are proposing a demand that comes precisely at the point where the learner is capable of making their next steps forward – and helping them to meet that demand, rather than avoiding it. This is doable demand.
What we want to investigate
We want to explore:
- How can I push my students to upgrade their language and improve their skills more than they believed possible?
- How can I gain real learning value from classroom activities that have become tired or familiar?
- What teacher interventions make a real difference?
- How can I shift my preoccupation from “successful task “to “optimallearning”?
- How can we transform “undoable” or “low” demand into “doable demand”?
- What is the minimum tweak necessary at any point in any lesson to shift the activity sideways into the “challenge zone”?
- What attitude and action changes would lead to “Demand-High” teaching in my classroom?
- What is the demand on a teacher to become a “Demand High” teacher?
What we hope this blog will offer
Over time, we would like to offer a wide range of practical tools for teachers and trainers.
- Observation tasks that teachers can take into peer observations
- Ready-made Seminars for trainers to address these issues
- Descriptions and videos of DH Classroom Management interventions
- Practical lists of Demand High “tweaks” (to add onto what you normally do)
- Articles to read and discuss. Experiments to try out in class.
Adrian Underhill & Jim Scrivener
Demand High ELT | A discussion about re-inventing our profession
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