I speak with Morag McIntosh about the reality of teaching online during the Covid-19 lockdown. We discuss how the current pandemic has affected student’s lives outside of the classroom and what the implications are for online teaching.
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn, and before we get into this week, I wanted to play you a quote from Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens." This is him on Sam Harris' "Making Sense" podcast talking about all things online teaching.
Yuval Noah Harari: This shift to online teaching. This can lead to all kinds of dangerous directions. A lot of the experience of going to college doesn't happen in class, it happens during the break time. With teaching classes online on Zoom, of course there are break times, but you're alone in your home. You don't meet the other students, for a chance in the cafeteria. I think that whatever happens to education, we should always remember the very central rule of the community and of social interaction...
Ross: I wanted to play you this for two reasons. First, to me, it's amazing that people like Yuval Noah Harari and Sam Harris are now talking about online teaching. Second, that what you just heard him say about the importance of what happens outside of the classroom.
I think it's so easy to forget with online teaching, and I think this is true of the podcast that we've done recently here on this topic, that we tend to focus on the changes that have happened inside the classroom.
For so many of our students and obviously for so many of you that are listening, the coronavirus has really changed for millions and millions of people what's going on for them outside of the classroom. Obviously in language teaching, so much of what we do inside the classroom is based on what's going on in our students' lives.
We always try to personalize lessons based on students interests, jobs, hobbies, vacations, whatever. If you're part of the world where students are also in self‑isolation, that's going to have a huge impact on what you can get students to talk about inside the classroom.
I want to bring this up at the beginning because that's one of the themes I think that came up in this week's interview with Morag MacIntosh. Morag works for Live Language in Glasgow, mainly teaching Academic English and helping students there prepare for IELTS, and Morag's also currently studying for her diploma in TESOL.
For the last few weeks, Morag's been teaching online, and really is an inspiration in this area in finding resources that I would have never thought to use in a classroom but using them to great effect. In this interview, Morag and I talk about the reality of teaching online, not just teaching online but teaching online during this period of self‑isolation due to the coronavirus. Enjoy the interview.
Ross: Morag, thanks so much for coming on. I really wanted to talk to you about this, because to be honest, a lot of what I read on online in terms of teaching tips at the moment seems to come from people who have never actually taught online and they certainly aren't doing it now.
Morag MacIntosh: No, and there's things like say to your students, "What was the best thing you did yesterday? What was the most exciting thing?" Right now, that is being published to say to your students. They haven't been out of their house, you're not allowed to go out. You can't say what's the best thing. There's no good thing about it at all. A lot of the stuff you read is not suitable.
Ross: [laughs] I think that just shows how out of touch some people really are at the moment with the reality of what's going on. This is the other thing with online teaching. Simply taking what happens offline and trying to put it in an online classroom, it just doesn't work.
Morag: I think it's just so intensive when you're online. Students get very tired. It's very concentrated. You can't just replicate the classroom in any way at all, that just wouldn't work out. There definitely needs to be a different approach.
Why would you use pictures in a course book when you can have your own pictures that you've taken? You can share a screen of something from your country, you can show the real thing in your house.
Ross: Absolutely. Let's talk, then, about some of the activities that maybe are more suitable for online teaching, especially at the moment. I presume a lot of the activities that you're doing in class now, you've just discovered through trial and error. Is that right?
Morag: Yeah, I think that because we didn't have any training, we had to rely on our own resources more. We didn't have a lot of course books. We've got a lot now, because they've been produced for us, and we've been given access to them, but at first we just had to think outside the box. Use the resources that we had to. Use the environment. Just work with what we had on the spot.
Ross: That environment, that you've mentioned there, Morag, is that just the students and the apartments that they're in? Where they literally physically are right now?
Morag: Yes. I'm talking about their physical environment because you're in their living room or some other room, and it's their personal space. It's ready‑made, authentic materials, isn't it? You don't have to think, "Is this authentic?" or "How can I make it communicative?" or "How can I make this realistic?" It's realistic already, we don't need to have that problem.
We use things, they bring things to show us. We'll go around and look at their rooms, we'll look at their furniture, ask questions about that. One day, we had somebody who had a flat type TV delivered, and we helped him. The instructions were in every language but of course, the one that we couldn't understand any of them.
We needed some help with that and what tools to use. We had a lesson in that kind of vocabulary about tools like spanner, hammer. All of these things that people wouldn't normally... [laughs] Then we could see the physical things as well.
Ross: I love that example. That's brilliant. I can remember teaching a unit on household tools before. It certainly wasn't very contextualized like that. Again, a great example on how actually teaching the students from home can be better for some topics. Is that something that you planned there? Or was that something that was just improvised?
Morag: It sort of evolved. He was saying that he kept getting deliveries every few minutes. There would be his bell ringing in the background. Eventually I said, "What is that noise? What is happening?" and he said, "Oh, it's another delivery."
I said, "What are you getting delivered?" That's what led to that. The next day, it was still lying there. We just looked at what he was doing with his package there and then there was the instructions. He was trying to read it out, and we would instruct him. It was like asking questions and directing him. What would you use?
We didn't do the whole thing. Obviously he made it up after the class, most of it, but it was preparation. It was like describing a process as well, so it was helpful for their IELTS and writing. That's one of the tasks ‑‑ describing a process. I'm always thinking, how can this tie into their four skills.
All the times so we had all the four skills were definitely covered. The next day, he actually took us to see the finished item. [laughs] That kind of rounded it up and it was quite good.
Ross: Such a good point. It's so important in this situation that you link whatever is happening in class back either to the course book or the test that the students are studying for so that students can see the point of what they're doing in class.
Obviously in the situation where course books haven't been designed for the current situation, I think it's very easy to deviate from that, and for students to feel that whatever they're learning really isn't going anywhere.
Morag: Definitely. You've got to make sure that everything you do is going to be tied into that. You can just have a good time looking around peoples' houses, and it's not so productive. You need to remember that they're actually paying for a service.
Ross: Do you want to tell us about how you do that in class? How do you relate the class content back to the learning goals?
Morag: A lot of it's in the structure. They know the structure that my lesson's going to be. First, I would have them doing something in the chat box when they're all waiting because people arrive just at random times. It's very difficult to motivate yourself to get out of bed when you don't actually have to go out physically.
I have that problem, so, when they arrive, they can do something like an activity in the chat box. Like write a sentence about something or post a comment for somebody else. Or a letter, and find an animal or a vegetable. All these kinds of things. Then after that, we usually use the flipped lesson approach.
I think that's the best. They've done a lot of the work at home, maybe the fun stuff. They've looked at the video, they've run a podcast, something like that or a blog. They've sent a file and they're speaking, Vocaroo. They'll go into the chat room, and then they'll do a task connected to that. Once we come back, we'll do a fun thing.
We'll maybe look out the window and see what we can see. Describe that. Or we'll show videos of what we've been doing on our walks outside. From there, I kind of evolve it from what happens, but I've got a structure in my head. I really take what they produce, and we work with that.
Ross: You mentioned videos there, from students' walks outside.
Morag: Yeah.
Ross: Do you want to tell us a little more about those? What are they, and how do you use them?
Morag: What I've done before is, because we're only allowed to go out here for an hour on our isolation walks. When they're outside, I've asked them if they could maybe take a video of where they go. That kind of motivates other people. It's quite boring to be in your house for 23 hours a day.
Somebody showed the cherry blossom, and he was holding it in his hand, describing that. When we came back and we're listening to that, we're looking at what he did, then making up questions and things from that as well. Then they can follow that through with writing summaries to practice their vocabulary, and obviously focus on a grammatical point as well that's come up.
Ross: Again, that's really great. Really making lessons highly personalized. With sharing those videos, again, you're doing something online that I think would be more challenging to do offline. Another thing I know that you've done before that I thought sounded fantastic was taking students on virtual tours of tourist attractions.
Morag: Yes, we either do these at home, or I quite like to do them in the class so that the students are interacting with each other as well. We'll maybe share the videos as well, because they can get a lot more communication out of that.
Some of the things that I've done are...When I was looking on the Internet, because we're on lockdown and it's a bit boring, a lot of things have been put online free for people to use just now. For example, Google Arts & Culture, they've made over 2,000 things free like cultural attractions and people can go and they can take a virtual tour.
I thought, "I wonder if I could use this," adapt these into the lessons in any way. We can do things with going into museums. There's the British Museum. All the famous museums, [inaudible 10:57] the Louvre. For all these and you can take a virtual tour and walk around it. You can click on different artifacts and find out information about these.
I can write a quiz for the students, as if they were actually going around the museum physically. Practices writing, practices speaking, and listening as well. Everything. We also had Edinburgh Zoo as well. You can look at live webcams of different animals there. They were able to choose one animal, for example, the panda.
They could look and see what they were doing, and then you can go to the page on the website all about the giant panda and all the information about that as well. They were finding out information about different animals, the habitats, and the history of the animals. All that kind of vocabulary as well.
Another good one that I've just done, I was doing it yesterday and today, we took a virtual tour of Buckingham Palace. I shared the screen with them, so we took the virtual tour together.
We could speak about it like we were going around there in a group, rather than just looking at it. I wanted them to be interacting with each other and describing what we saw, like the materials. There was gold and plaster and all the different fabrics and the colors and all the objects.
We could look in the throne room, and we could hear the queen speaking, so we can listen and making up a WebQuest for them to go around and find out different things. After that, going into the breakout rooms. They chose artifacts or a painting or the throne, something like that, and they could click on it, find out the information and they were going to write a summary. So, paired writing.
Ross: Again, I think that's something that's useful on two levels, isn't it? It's great language practice, but it's also plugging a gap that students can't do these things outside a classroom.
Morag: Yes, because we're missing out on all of that. They signed up to come for a cultural experience here, and they're not getting it. I'm trying to give them some of that as well that they're missing out on.
Ross: Now, those breakout rooms that you mentioned there, they must be a huge help in keeping students engaged and involved.
Morag: Especially if you have a large class, and especially if they're sitting with their videos turned off. People can get lost in the class. Sometimes, you don't know if they've fallen asleep, or if you've forgotten about them if you're going around asking people and someone's quiet, and you just see a blank screen, it's very easy to forget about somebody like that.
Breakout rooms, they can work in twos or threes. Small groups, and you can choose the rooms. You can do it randomly, or you can manipulate it to have stronger and weaker students together. Just like in a classroom.
It's good because then they have a chance to interact just with one or two other people. It really replicates the classroom situation, and the teacher can just pop out and in of each room. The only thing is you really need to set it up very, very carefully beforehand, because you can't be in two places at one time.
If somebody's gone off on the wrong track, they might be the last room that you arrive at, and they're sitting there and they haven't done a thing.
Ross: Yeah, I think some of those aspects of classroom management like group work are obviously so different to teaching offline. Especially when students turn off their webcams, that's the equivalent of students coming to class with a paper bag over their head.
Morag: We can't enforce it, though I say to them, "It's your choice." I understand, if they've maybe just got up or something. Really, you've just got to work with that because you're going into their home. They might not want you to see their personal possessions. There's lots of reasons why they wouldn't have that video on.
I feel like I understand that, but it does make it pretty difficult to gauge how they're working, if they're working quietly. That's why I don't have a lot of individual work.
Ross: That was Morag MacIntosh, everyone. Thanks, Morag, for joining us. Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.
Transcription by CastingWords