What's in Your Pencil Case, Anna?
This article is part of a series of interviews with selected teachers in which I explore the relationship between last-minute relief teaching and the principle of teaching with minimal resources. I wanted to find out more about their approaches to teaching unexpectedly and with limited class preparation time.
#31, Anna Hasper, Dubai
Anna Hasper is a primary-trained ELT teacher and teacher development specialist currently based in Dubai. She started her teaching career in New Zealand and Australia before heading off to Jordan for the British Council and has since taught and trained around the world, but mainly in the MENA region for the BC, International House, IDP IELTS and publishers. She’s a self-confessed addict to learning and is passionate about enabling teachers to enhance effective learning in the classroom. Anna regularly presents, writes articles for MET and ETP and blogs, and delivers CELTA and Train theTrainer courses around the world. She also designs and delivers bespoke teacher training courses for her own company, TeacherTrain. Her special interests are teacher development, educational psychology and enhancing effective learning. If she’s not reading about learning, you can find her riding a motorbike around Oman or doing yoga in the desert!Question 1: You are going to start teaching a class in 10-20 minutes' time. What’s on your desk or in your bag or pencil case that you can grab to use in class?
There’s of course always items that you can use for a ‘show and tell’ activity. It might be a precious object like a necklace or bracelet that your students can ask questions about. But I’m passionate about photography and really enjoy taking photos when walking around new places, old towns, but also of daily life and common items. So with my online classes, if I just have to jump in in 20 minutes I’ll definitely go for images.
I’ve got cats, so I’ve got a lot of images of them on Onedrive and my phone and there are some images of them doing strange things (this one is of Sammy the office helper!). I’ve noticed, though, that I’m much more purposefully taking pictures now when I’m out-and-about in the streets. I often take pictures of something and I think, ‘oh, I could use this in a lesson on recycling, or repurposing things’, because I’m trying to make my students aware of the fact that caring about our environment is actually really important. So, I use personal images from my phone, as well from Pixabay, which is free, Pexels, Unsplash, and in Google you can actually go into Settings and search for images that don’t need a license.
Sammy the office helper.
Question 2: What will you do with the image once you've chosen one?
I show it to the students of course, so I usually put it on a PowerPoint slide and then it really depends if there has been a lesson plan made by someone else, or if there's no plan. Because many images are really rich, they can facilitate language practice like asking questions and they're good triggers for language production. Images can also encourage lower-order and higher-order thinking skills, so what I do really depends on the level of learners and how much time we have.
One of the things I like to do is show a picture of me with one of my friends. I’d say, ‘Okay, this is my friend, what would you like to ask them?’ And then once they’ve brainstormed some of those questions, I get them to think about some quirky questions, because we all know ‘What’s your name? Where’re you from?’ so I’m encouraging students to think about more unusual, complex questions. I might then model question structures, we might work on pronunciation which can be challenging with certain stress patterns. Then I might move them into pairs in the breakout rooms to ask each other those questions about their friends, so it’s more like a prompt to enable them to make that personalised conversation happen.
That could be my warmer, creating a bit of a personal connection, and then I might do something with different images. It could be two images on a topic that I think is interesting for students like compare and contrast, but one activity I really like and that needs only one image (but you need to get a rich image, like the one that I photographed in Dubai Mall one night on a walk through Fashion Avenue) is to get the students in pairs to describe what they see, then explain what they see, and then speculate about the message the photographer is trying to convey with the image or what might happen next. I think that is really inclusive because sometimes I don’t know the students when I jump into an online lesson, and with this activity everybody can succeed in something: describing, then explaining – ‘ … because’, ‘the reason is…’, and then speculating with ‘it might well be’, ‘it’s possible that’ etc. So one image and three different kinds of questions provides you with a really effective diagnostic tool. Describe, explain, and speculate. I love that activity.
Read Anna’s full interview here.
