#ililc5 Ryan Hoy @Taisez Investigative learning

It was lovely to hear a fellow Norn Irishman at ILILC and Ryan delivered a very impressive session on investigative learning. He did his examples using History rather than focus on one language. 

For the first activity, we had to move along the room according to prior knowledge, whereby the top of the room was strongly agree, the centre (where we all landed) was I'm not sure and the bottom of the room was Disagree. We then moved on to the second  task which was in groups. We had to put 8 battles in chronological order. With the clue on the board of "getting to know your neighbours is always a good idea" we quickly realised that only 4 of the cards had the information we needed on them and that we had to talk to another group in order to complete the activity.  Having done this activity, we could respond better to the first timeline now.

John Connor @bootleian  got a shoutout here with his belief (and mine) that we need to move from being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. ie we need to move away from giving the pupils everything. The temptation is to give them the answers but that doesn't move them on as effectively in their learning. Ryan also pointed that authentic collaboration is where pupils are working together on a task that genuinely needs more than one pupil to work it out, rather than a group of pupils doing a task that could easily be done by one pupil. 

So what do good investigations have? 

Intrigue 

Confusion 

Intense challenge 

Team work/collaboration 

A shared outcome 

Red herrings 

Clues 

TENETS 

• Confusion to a) heighten challenge b) induce engagement.                            Engagement not fun, two different things.                                                            Gave them all time activities at the start of the lesson and worked backwards 
• Extreme challenge (throwing students into the "Learning Pit") throw them in and let them climb out at the end - James Nottingham 
• Group-based investigation 
• Independence (silent beginning, cryptic instructions) eg our starter activity here 
• A roving, "prompting" teacher  - to help them along with 

Ryan ended the session by showing us a 14 minute video which had been recorded over an hour's lesson with him and a class of above average pupils. The key points were: 

• There were paper signs for start of lesson - Hola and Sentaos por favor, rather than him speaking. 
• First activity on board - unscrambling. The pupils started to talk to each other. Activity 1 was blue tacked under the desk - the groups had to organise words into sentences. The group discussions were very insightful. 
• Activity 2 A sentence on the board said "Comparatives always bracket a noun - ¿estás de acuerdo?" (Do you agree?) There were Spanish phrases stuck up round the room. There was an icon of Eyes on the screen as a clue along with a series of comparatives in English to translate.
• Activity 3 was a series of sentences which started with half Spanish and half English and worked towards full sentences in English to translate into Spanish. 
• Activity 4 was to rank the drugs from least addictive to most addictive. 
• Finally there was a Plenary on whiteboard 

This was an excellent lesson and an impressive session overall. The pupils were working at a high level with very little input from their teacher and even those who struggled were engaged with the tasks. I enjoyed this session and look forward incorporating ideas into my lessons. 

#LW2011 Greg Horton Active learning and Raising achievement

This was a more active session than I had anticipated, yet I should have guessed from the title, and from what I had heard about Greg in advance. We started with PE warm ups, with instructions in the target language. Greg suggested that pupils adapt their own model and lead future warm-up sessions. He also said that he uses this at any time to re-engage pupils in a lesson eg he walks round the room and will randomly shout an instruction to anyone not paying attention.

Kagan Timed Pair Share
Greg had a slide with pictures of different coloured eyes and the Spanish beside it: Tienes los ojos.. with colours. Put the music on, pupils circulate, having agreed in advance who talks first when the music stops eg the person with the biggest right hand, highest playing card, tallest person. Another option is to either do word lists when the music stops or person B gives feedback in TL to what person A says eg A gives personal details, B repeats it back to them in the 'you' form.

Greg's approach is making a physical response a routine part of the learning in his classroom. In this sense, it ties in closely with Rachel Hawkes' approach to teaching phonics, subject pronouns and verbs. Greg talked about levels of active learning:
o Word level (fun but..)
o Sentence level (manipulation and creativity)
o Conceptual (tense and grammar)

He teaches connectives with gestures in Form 1/Year 7, early on. Anytime anyone uses one, the whole class has to do the action. If you teach with gestures then read a text, they should do the actions.

Human word chains
These are particularly effective for a starter or a plenary. Give teams pieces of paper, so that each pupil has one word. Pupils can repeat their word but not show it, and the teams have to organise themselves into a sentence which makes sense. This activity reinforces basic sentence structure. If you wish to repeat the activity in the next lesson, make pupils guardians of their word, so that they need to remember their word and where they were in the line. At a higher level, the tecaher can add detail such as "I’d like the two adjectives to sit down” Then you can have runners run down the back of the line and shout the missing word(s) out in the appropriate gap in the sentence as the remaining 'sentence' pupils shout out their word in order. To take this to a higher lecel, construct, deconstruct, adapt and extend – invite the rest of the class to be extra words or punctuation. Kids can also choose the words they want to be.
Add gestures to this activity to make it more active; eg someone acting a connective or sequencing word does windmill action. The last person needs to be punctuation, eg the full stop sits on the floor, whilst the first person stands on a chair to illustrate that they are a capital letter.

PRONOUNS
Greg teaches his pupils Subject pronouns gestures, eg ointing to himself with one hand for I, pointing with two hands in front for You plural. To add to this, he suggests you use these with We Will Rock You music, where the teacher says the word on one beat and the pupils then do the gestures. Once pupils have got this, you can mime the pronoun and the verb, adding past or future once advanced, and pupils shout out the answer.

The clock times ballet
This is done to classical music, where Greg says the time, then pupils use their arms to represent the time on the second beat. This proved quite hilarious for our group, some of whom lacked the coordination to become a prima ballerina.

All in all, this was a really really useful session in terms of practical, immediate methodology which you could do at any time with little or no preparation, but which I think will prove to have a maasive impact on learning in the classroom.