Matt Courtois and I talk about how to incorporate movement into language classes.
Ross Thorburn: Matt, welcome back to the podcast. To start off with, why is movement important? Because I must admit, it's something that I try to include in every lesson I do, whether it's teaching kids or adults or even doing training for teachers, so for you what why is it important?
Matt Courtois: It's important for a few reasons. First is, a lot of parents and students sign up for courses at learning centers, because they want something that's more interactive and fun. That's one reason, I don't necessarily think that's the most important.
I think, with young learners, they have a lot of energy as well, and sitting and listening to a teacher for an hour is not a realistic expectation, they do need to get up and move around to work off some energy.
Ross: If you watch what students do when they're unsupervised. For example, if you teach kids and there's a break in the middle of the class, watch kids playing when they're not being supervised by a teacher, they're probably usually running around, so if you force them to sit down, you're going against the natural flow of what they want to be doing.
I don't think that means you mean to get the kids running around all the time, but I think need to get them at least doing what they would naturally do some of the time.
Matt: You can see them in classes with young learners especially, you can see their legs start to shake, like at that point, they can't focus on learning, they're focusing on staying in their seats and not running around. That's what they're focused on. They can't focus on whatever it is that teachers talking about. I don't think that's necessarily the most important reason.
The most important reason to have movement in classes is because as you're physically doing something it does help people to learn and remember things more strongly. You're building up more connections in your brain, like whenever you're learning new words, and linking it to movements, and that stuff can actually help people to learn more.
Ross: The one other reason I would add is, apparently, if you are sitting for a long time, the blood flow to your brain is lower than it is if you're standing up and moving around, so the more, to an extent you can get students standing up and moving around, the more bloods going to be in their brain, and thus, the easier is going to be for them to concentrate and learn.
Matt: I have a question, you were saying earlier that you think it's important for young learners and adult students, why do you think it's important for adults? Is it as important for adults as it is for young learners?
Ross: I guess, it's not, I would say, for adults, I don't think all hell is going to break loose if you force them to sit down for an hour, but I found in general, if you can build some movement in say, halfway through the class, that helps to break up the lesson, it's a bit more variety, it helps to shift the focus.
I also think you can match the phases of the lesson to people's attention spans, so for adults, maybe they can pay attention for like 20 minutes, half an hour, but if you have them sat down for a whole hour, that's a long time.
Matt: What is it? I don't remember the specifics about it, but I know like TED talks are limited to 13 or 17 minutes, which is the average adult length for their attention span. You can only focus on something well for 13 or 17 minutes, somewhere in there.
Ross: Absolutely. Another aspect of this is you can change the focus of the classroom. For like a gallery walk or something, you're changing the focus of the classroom away from the front of the lesson where students are maybe looking at you to all of a sudden, I'm standing up and looking at things on the walls.
That makes a huge difference to people's ability to pay attention. It's not just that we moved, but it's also, I'm not looking at a different part of the classroom, I think that makes a difference.
For kids, a great way of doing that is breaking up your classroom into different areas. Maybe you have all the kids, this is for, say kindergarten students, you maybe have all the kids sitting on chairs, say when you're presenting new language, but when you come to sing a song, you get everyone to stand up and make a circle in the middle of the room. Then. if we're looking at a storybook, we're going to get everyone to sit down in a circle in a different place in the classroom.
Matt: Or even on the ground.
Ross: Absolutely, changes the focus of the lesson, that's another nice way of building in that movement, but it's also helping to change the focus, which helps people pay attention.
Matt: I remember when I was a new teacher, I didn't have much experience, and this guy who probably taught one or two years, was giving him advice and I looked at him at that point, I think, "Wow, he's taught for one or two years, he's a real expert,"
He did give me some good advice and saying, he looked at it, if you ever had a reading activity, right after that he would need to have an up activity where they're up and moving around and physically involved with it, then he could go back down.
It's like a chart going up and down, and up and down. He tried to rotate his activities to introduce language, then you have an up activity where they're moving around and doing a mingle, then reading time where they all sit down in a circle quietly.
Ross: That reminds me of how movies are, you would never get a movie where it's non stop action sequences, you'll get, especially towards the end of the movie you might have an action movie you'll have a big fight or something, and it will look like the movies over and it'll be calm again for another few minutes, and then you get another action sequence. Then, everything is OK now and then the energy level gets brought back down.
It's not always super exciting and high energy. It's not always low energy, you're moving between the two. That's another nice thing about movement it's a way of increasing the energy in class.
Matt: I'm not saying, going back to that reading activity, since that teacher was saying, going up and down moments, I don't think you'd necessarily look at the reading activity as a down thing that people have to get through, you can work in some engagement there, as well, and some movement into that, as well.
Generally, that advice is strong, because it's still a down type activity. You might have them acting out certain parts of a story or doing certain motions along with a story as you're reading it, especially in stories with lots of repetition in it, there might be some actions that you incorporate.
It's not quite as physically active as a mingle activity, or survey activity, which is coming up next. I do think though, it's important not just to have movement, like, "Now we're going to dance. Now we're focusing on English. Now we're going to run. Now we're going to focus on English, again." It's important that you incorporate that movement into the English activities, or you incorporate English into the movement activity somehow.
Ross: Such a good point. Some ways of doing that, even at low levels, things like everyone who's wearing black shoes change seats, or everyone with glasses swim around the circle and come back and sit down.
Matt: As a movement English activity versus a slower language focus activity.
Ross: We mentioned a couple of activities there, like gallery walk and survey, so do you want to start off by telling us what's a gallery walk?
Matt: A gallery walk can be done in a few different ways, but basically, you put different stations up on the wall. You might write instructions for one thing, and put it on the northeast wall, and then another station at the southeast wall with a different set of instructions.
Basically, you create this atmosphere where people have to rotate through the different stations. It could be different activities at different stations, or it could be different prompts for the same activity, but it's setting up the room on the walls and getting the students to go through the classroom, like it's an art gallery.
Ross: Some of the things I've seen related to that, you could have different writing prompts in different areas, or maybe you've got a topic for the class and you have to write down all the adjectives you know about this topic, all the nouns you know about this topic, are in different place.
You might have different readings in different places around the classroom. You have to go around read the different things, might be paragraphs are out of order. Read them all, and then come back and guess what the reading was about. You're basically just taking something that you probably could do sitting down, cutting it up somehow and then putting it around the classroom.
That's a great example of an activity where that movements integrated in there. Another one I like for that is doing surveys and mingle activities, so things like find someone who or people bingo, where students need to ask questions to other people in the class.
The easiest way to do that is to get everyone to stand up and talk to as many different people as possible. So, for find someone who, the adult versions for this are often things are like speaks more than two languages or has been to more than 10 countries. For kids, it could be things like find someone who likes math, or find someone who has a pet, or find someone who has the most brothers and sisters in your class.
That's a nice one as well, where the students can't do that sitting down. You have to talk to multiple people, so feel any kind of activity like that where students need to talk to multiple people in the same class is going to be good for integrating movement.
Ross: Do you have any other favorite activities Matt that involve a lot of movement?
Matt: The simplest one, and there's a lot of different uses for it, is miming. You can do it where student A gets a word, they have to mime it and student B needs to guess what it is. What are some other ways you can do miming?
Ross: I guess, like Simon Says is another similar thing to that where you're getting people to mime something, but in your example, the gap is you're trying to get someone to guess the words here. It's like the mime is the response instead of the prompt.
Matt: Or, in a story as you're reading a story, you can talk about the wind blowing or something, and you get the students to wave their arms around like the wind, or a bear comes in and you get them miming a bear.
Ross: Miming like a bear, right now.
Matt: That's great for a podcast.
Ross: That's a good one for the story. You could say, "Every time you hear this word, do this action," and then it becomes something like the students responding to what the teacher is reading out. That's one of the difficulties sometimes with reading stories is that the students can be quite passive and get bored, but then you're giving them like a listening task, while you're reading out the story.
If you do read the same stories to your students again and again, which I think you should do, almost like the first stage of participation, there's going to be students joining in on the actions and then much later on they'll be able to join in with the actual words.
Another nice thing about having gestures to go along, for example, with vocabulary words, is that they can be a nice prompt for teachers. When you're trying to get students to remember a word if you already have a little gesture that goes along, say with cats, maybe you've got like cat ears, which is like your hands up by the side of your head, and you're flapping them up and down.
Matt: Now he's flapping his ears up and down.
Ross: If a student's struggling to remember the word doing the gesture is a good prompt to help them recall that. Those can be useful for helping students remember, as in the memorization process, but it can also be good for retrieval for prompting students to say something, as well.
Earlier on, we talked about using different places in the classroom, but one thing I've done occasionally, and we mentioned at the start is using different places outside the classroom. Most classes are going to take place in a classroom that's in a school. There's often a lot of different things that you can use within a school to help students learn things as well.
Some examples or ideas, I've done before a roleplay at the front desk of the school, and my role play was getting some of the students to pretend to be staff at the school, and other students pretending to be parents, which they loved and asking for directions to the different classrooms.
Or, you could take for example, let's say we're learning colors, you could take the students on a walk around the school and try and point to some different colors that you see in different places around the school. Another one related to the rooms is, "Let's walk around the school, and what are all the different rooms that we can see in the school?"
Matt: This takes a bit of planning, but you mentioned surveys earlier, and you could incorporate different people, maybe the cleaner or the person working at the front desk, and you can include those people on the survey. You'd have to ask them permission first and tell them like, "You might have 20 students coming to ask you questions at this time," but it can make it a lot more memorable.
Ross: Absolutely, or sometimes you might have parents outside the classroom somewhere, they can be good people to survey as well.
Matt: I did one with adults one time, we were talking about clothes and I had everybody go out with their cameras around the center and find the most fashionable person. Then they came back and described in his flowery language as possible, why this person was so fashionable and how they got their look, and stuff like that.
Ross: No one tried to sue you for taking photos of them?
Matt: Not right now, I got away with it that time.