CPD in Critical Times

I have been very busy thinking hard about how to put together my first presentation for our Head of MFL conference here in rural SW England. It's sort of - flattered to be asked, scared to be doing it!! I've warmed to my theme and here is my presentation - I really have learned so much over the last two years about ways of keeping up with latest technology and using Web2 tools for teaching. I am also a very convinced Twitter user and love Google reader.

I have given useful links on last page of presentation and hope that any one from our conference who finds their way here, will find the ppt useful, practical and not too geeky. Many thanks to Twitter friends and FM friends for assistance and my 2 delightful sons, who are a constant source of patient advice for me and a fount of knowledge.

CPD in critical times

View more presentations from Valerie Mcintyre.

Here we go again!

Maybe I will manage better this year - as a Head of Department, I constantly go over what else we can do, should do, could manage to do, to improve learning and teaching - that's my job along with all the other admin bits and pieces which often hold me back from focusing properly on that teaching and learning. Heads of Dept will know exactly what I mean.
Followed a great thread on TES forum about time management and people's ideas about how to manage better. I even took the time to make a list. I am particularly liking the use of an old kitchen timer for 25 minute bursts, with a 5 min gap to do whatever you like in, before resetting the timer if you need to. I can cope with 25 mins but not the thought of 11/2 hours of marking at one go. The system fools me into sensible chunking. So far, so good.

I might manage better this year too as I have some very major things behind me - the OF**** word, - they hit in May - we did well. I did my Leading from the Middle course last year too. It was pretty good, I am quite reflective already, so it maybe wasn't as revealing to me as to some others, but time spent with other Middle Leaders was very enjoyable - glad to see this kind of support is now available (but it may disappear??) Read Alex Blagona's interesting post on his experience of Leadership attempts!

One of our lovely successes last year too was a big joint project with our Partner primary schools. We all did story-telling - can you guess our story?!- and drama and then our year 7s went to visit a Primary school with an MFL teacher - result is that we all performed what work we were each doing, all our team got a chance to go to a Primary school and our Year 7s loved going back to yr 6. What is more, all the teachers are still friends and we understand what we are all doing or trying to do. I call that a result! In the face of so much change at Secondary level, the project with our Primaries was great fun, even if someone reversed the school minibus into a police van on the day of a visit... ooops! No injuries - phew!

So I look forward to a productive but slightly less hectic year and trying to keep my sanity will be a priority!

Teaching English Grammar to English kids!

The title says it all - we need to teach grammar explicitly, it doesn't just happen; Englishpupils know less grammar than many other European pupils and at Secondary level, we pay a price for having a mother tongue which doesn't have Romance language verb endings. We do have complexities of our own - pronunciation and English phrasal verbs for example - but not verb endings and they still have no real grasp of what a verb is quite often. What can we do?
Well, Charlie Berney - teacher of MFL in Wales, member of ALL West of England committee and frequent, talented speaker in our area - led a good session on her recent attempts to be cross-curricular with a difference. Her main difference is that she goes to the SUBJECT and delivers the content in THEIR lesson and Charlie generously provided us with her CD of materials for an English grammar sequence of lessons, dance, cooking and  Geography.
Most interesting was the fact the her English colleague stayed in Charlie's "What is grammar?" lesson in the English department and was devastated to see the reality that we face often - kids do not appear to know what a verb, noun, adjective, pronoun etc actually are, despite the fact that they have been met in Primary school. Surely this trend is only going to get worse as the Literacy hour disappears again??. Interestingly, when Charlie asked the class to tell her what some grammar terms were going to be in English, they came up with spelling and punctuation rules - "i before e, except after c etc."
Charlie kindly allowed us to use all her grammar booklet and powerpoint from our March conference and I am finding it immensely useful now and plan to use it extensively at the beginning of the academic year. I want to see children who are not afraid of the term "verb", never mind - er verbs and "terminaisons" !

Year 9 comes up trumps!

After the lessons we did recently on Apollinaire's shape poems - "calligrammes "- I set my lovely Year 9 class the homework of coming up with their own poems - a re-working of Apollinaire's poem Automne (which some of them managed very well) or making a calligram of their choice.

Here are a few of the results on my classroom wall. We used two lessons, we read the Automne poem and analysed it, then discussed how they could adapt it easily to another theme and then we went on to look at more Apollinaire calligammes, particularly the Eiffel Tower shaped poem, which is a rallying cry against the

Nazi invasion of Paris. 

One pupil changed it into a celebration of Paris as the capital of l'amour!

Their homework was to come up with a new poem and/or a calligramme. 

Results were mixed the following week, so I set the classroom out in groups and they took their work and compared it with each others' offerings and decided on improvements - AfL boxed ticked!! 

Katie G did a wonderful figure of Michael Jackson and turned it into a tribute to the singer.

You can see the ideas she included here. Not all of her classmates agreed with her choice but her tribute is obviously heart-felt.

Many other pupils loved the sun shape as it lends itself to short phrases and circular repeating images. Flowers were popular also, with a few very imaginative landscapes. Quality of French improved from one week to the next and pupils happily put their work up in my room.  This class has only one lesson of French per week , as the other one is German - the only way we can get them enough exposure to a couple of languages in no extra time. So WELL DONE 9a1!!

MFL Show and Tell at Nottingham High School, Sat 10 July

Last year I went to my first event of this kind and had a really profitable time.  Come to Nottingham if you can - Jose is a great host, the company is fab and the learning you can do in one day is second to none. It is tempting to feel that you may be overwhelmed  and feel you will be unable to say anything - all I can do is encourage you, by saying I had a very warm welcome last year, there are people of every level of experience there and we all learn from each other. Many teachers are real techie experts, presentation experts, Primary experts - all with an open, sharing, friendly presence - here is the link to Jose's site MFL Show and Tell at Nottingham High School   Others are novices and need to go over ground which is familiar to many - don't worry, you are so rewarded for taking the plunge and coming along, regardless of expertise or lack of it. Extremely relevant, up to date, on the ball, challenging, well-tailored and grounded CPD - what more could you want?! See you there.

Controlled Assessment for GCSE

A recent Linksintolanguages meeting brought over 50 concerned teachers out to a meeting at Norton Hill school near Bath to discuss all aspects of the new GCSE controlled assessments. Gosh, we are a worried bunch and real attempts at assessments are not lessening our worries.

Peter Spain MFL Advisor for BANES  spoke in the Plenary and then we broke into Exam board groups.
Discussions covered the how, when, how long and wherefores of the process we deal with now.  We are all struggling with the design of Assessment topics, although I feel we are doing it well. The main angst is caused by the slightly bizarre rulings on management of preparation time - those of you in the middle of Year 10 assessments will know exactly what I mean. Teachers don't like to be rendered incompetent by so much change!

Peter and the team at Norton Hill very kindly put his and other presentations on the BANES wiki - here is the link http://baneslanguages.wikispaces.com/Current+news

The only road to comfort if you are picking up a new class in September is to make sure you understand the importance of teaching the class to build up a bank of useful material as they go along including good paragraphs which you have marked for them. They need to know that everything you cover is important for them but without you betraying what the eventual assessment task will be - "prepare yourself for something you don't know about yet "   - it feels very odd but it's the only way to do it.
Our stronger pupils will cope as they always do but I feel that the new GCSE will make life on the C/D borderline very much harder and lower ability pupils are not coping at all. Do you agree?

Inspiring work - calligrammes

Last month my friend Marie France Perkins sent a tweet out about the lovely work done by her pupils on the 1st World War - if you don't use Twitter then you may be missing some of the amazing sharing that takes place on a regular basis. Marie France runs her blog called Sans problèmes for promoting French and show-casing her pupils' work. In March she posted some fabulous calligrams - picture poems in the style of Apollinaire - and a terrific link for a french site showing Art from the WW1 trenches - very moving stuff and MF's pupils have produced some great work - thanks for sharing with us. It has reminded me of this lovely way of recycling vocabulary - word pictures for all sorts of lexical areas.
I like the site for English teachers too for writing shape poems - there is a lot that we can adapt very quickly for MFL. This week I have challenged my Year 9s to make their own calligrammes in the style of Apollinaire or to substitute their own ideas into his poem Automne - I'll post the results when I mark their work with any luck!