The Beauty of One-pagers & RETRIEVAL PRACTICE

Thanks to Betsy Potash, the author of the marvellous space nowsparkcreativity.com, I have discovered and come to love one pagers- the response one pager, for example TedTalk one pagers like these:

or hexagonal thinking templates, such as this one:

Both types are a wonderful way to afford student autonomy and creativity at the same time providing a framework to harness and channel those time and content-wise. They are much loved, universal yet personal tools that can be used to process and produce language and content for numerous activities- listening and reading comprehension, class presentations and vocabulary work. (If you want to find out more, check out my presentation on one-pagers that I delivered during the recent IATEFL Poland conference- here)

Still, it is retrieval practice one-pagers that I find most useful these days. You may ask what these are- they are simple grids or tables where students put eg. vocabulary they manage to recall from last lesson, last week further back (see a sample vocab grid I created here). Such one-pagers are effective low- or no-stakes activities that promote true learning, and when done together with spacing, interleaving and feedback-driven metacognition that are the foundations of powerful teaching and learning, they are key to our students succeeding- retrieval practice will definitely be the topic of my next blog entry- stay tuned!

Meanwhile, have a look at this wakelet collection and view the recording on my webinar on one-pagers here:)

Just a side note, hope you don’t mind......

If you like my content, maybe you would like to support me and buy me coffee?

Also, you might want to check other materials I create for the English Bilingual Secondary Classes (C1) - I am sure some of them will be useful for the English B HL classes, for example BritSpeak or OpenBookCouples.

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SPEECH STATIONS

I have been looking for a way to spice up a bit the class I give in DP1 as introduction to speeches- both oral and written (paper 1). Then it dawned on me- why not get the students move and learn about the structure, language, rhetorical appeals rotating the stations in pairs? I tried and it worked very well- have a look at the stations and the sample answers:) . The class is designed for 5 stations, but there is also an optional one on extra linguistic features- I’ve put them in my google disc as pdfs, but you can also create QR codes for them so that you don’t need to print the activities. As for the class itself, you can ask students to compete against each other in their pairs, and check their worksheets yourself, or allow them accces to the sample key to encourage self-assessment or peer-assessment. What needs to be done at the end is a wrap-up session on the text type that speech is- one idea might be ask students to elaborate on the titles of each s...

HONY, honey:)

There is a book, fb page, lots of articles, videos, interviews, lesson ideas on HONY- Humans of New York, and now there is also my extensive lesson plan-... Never heard of it? Humans of New York (HONY) is a popular photography project and storytelling blog created in 2010 by Brandon Stanton. It started as a simple goal to photograph 10,000 people living in New York City, but evolved into a powerful collection of portraits and personal stories. Each photo is paired with a short interview or quote that reveals intimate, honest, and often surprising details about the subject's life. Over time, the project expanded beyond New York to include stories from many countries, covering diverse experiences and social issues. HONY offers a unique window into the lives of everyday people, encouraging empathy and understanding through storytelling. Interested? Check out this handout for reading, listening, writing and speaking ideas. Just a side note, ...

Bloom’s balls!

You might think in a secondary classroom there is no room for such ‚primary school crafts’, which require the actual, not digital (!) cutting and pasting. Wrong! Students of all ages and levels should be encouraged to get creative and use all their senses and body to construct knowledge:) It is useful and fun:) My students recently applied and practised lower and higher order thinking skills described by Bloom in his taxonomy (LOTs and HOTs). The ‘Bloom’s Balls they created was a project to wrap up our reading of ‘The Giver’ by Luis Lowry (highly recommended for teenage groups, btw!). The students were given a selection of tasks labelled with the six tiers of Bloom’s taxonomy, and a template with pentagons to cut and paste:) You can find the template below- it is a picture, you might want to manipulate with its size to fit the page:) Their job was to choose 2 tasks from each category, and complete them on their ‚ball’. The tasks were diverse, with different levels of...

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