I learnt quite a lot today! Today’s school was a bit special and quite secret ( you’ll notice it’s not on the schedule) because for the last 2 years they’ve had one of the other Elementary School experts helping their school out. I was quite surprised to find that the head of that particular publisher actually taught the lessons herself!! Unfortunately it seems the school weren’t too keen on what they did as they didn’t include the schools own teachers in the lessons and the kids apparently didn’t enjoy the lessons very much. So one of the teachers, a really great guy, got permission to ask me to pop along for a seminar and also for a model class to show the teachers how they can teach on their own.

So I was well up for that. Individual lessons always help counter the “oh Genki English is just for big groups” type of criticism, plus they are always fun! The model class was a 4th grade class ( always the best) so I figured I’d do the warm up game ( the basics), a review of stuff they’ve done before using the “What’s your name?” and “Rock, paper, scissors“, then in the remaining time I’d do “What are you doing?” as the main lesson. If they’ve had English for two years this should be fine. I also planned to slow things right down, not speak English but instead use the computer for all the new words and rather than go off with all my usual tricks and genkiness I’d just pretend I was a normal non-English speaking non-experienced Japanese teacher and play things exactly by the book.

So the warm up went OK-ish. The kids responded well, but they were so quiet! They actually seemed scared to speak, not scared in the “shy” Japanese way, but scared I’d shout at them. So a bit of motivation talk sorted that out. Then “What’s your name?” and they could do this quite well when practising with me. So I went straight into the song, but it seemed like they’d never done any pair work before. So I had to do it again and this time they were really quite good. The teachers also seemed very happy to see how well the songs work. Never be afraid to repeat the songs, each time challenging the kids to get louder each time. It works wonders!

However this had taken longer than I thought ( I had mistakenly figured that after 2 years with a famous teacher they could nail “What’s your name?” and basic classroom English without much preparation!!), so I cut Rock, Paper, Scissors and went straight into “What are you doing?“. They did really well on the basic introducing of the vocab. But simply repeating after the teacher isn’t real learning so of course I used the “I like everything game” to give them some independent practice and for me to see how well they’d got the English. And they hadn’t! They were cool with simply repeating stuff, but had no idea at all about asking questions to each other. Hmmm. Normally I would have built them up to doing this, but I again wrongly assumed that during 2 years they would have at least done some practise with each other instead of just with the teacher!! So I kept going a bit longer and we tried the game a few more times and although they were very quiet they did get a lot better! But then I realised I was really running out of time and was actually thinking that this might go very pear shaped! If this was a normal class I would leave the game till next time and just concentrate more on confidence and independence building, but as it was supposed to be a complete example lesson I really had to get it down to the end!

But the kids could only get half the answers on their own. So I figured, right let’s bring the pace up and go straight into the song. And to be honest I should have done that right from the start. With two goes singing through the song they practically had it. It makes a huge difference. So my advice is to forget the “vocab” stage and just plough straight into the acapella and song, test with “I like everything“, do the song again, test again and you should be OK! So with the song there was at least enough to work on for the Harry Potter game. The teachers gave me a bit of extra time and the kids even suggested one team as Voldemorts and one team as Dementors!! The kids were still really quiet, but when playing the game with them they all spoke with really clear pronunciation ( with maybe a touch too much of a Yorkshire accent!), which was good. It’s always important to listen to the kids who don’t learn English outside school as these are the ones that reflect your lesson.

So even though communicative type activities seamed quite alien to them at first ( how can you teach without them? ) and they didn’t quite master the whole theme, they at least succeeded in my aim of getting them able to use the question and answers on their own to effectively communicate in the game. And more importantly the Japanese teachers could see how they could pull off a lesson on their own.

If I had to do this again as I model I would have just done a “from the beginning” lesson and just gone through the basic skills, probably just doing the warm up to get control and then “What’s your name?” as the main theme. ( Or if I was doing it as me and not pretending to be a Japanese teacher, I would have blasted through with a load of songs, got them on a “rock & roll” high and then let them loose on the game! But that wasn’t called for today. )

But the teachers did enjoy the lesson and did indeed have the confidence to try a lesson like that on their own. And of course it was completely different from the type of rote learning lessons they had seen in the past.

So then after a quick break it was the teachers seminar. That was a bit rough for the teachers as I only had an hour and rather than do an activity then explain it, they had already seen the activities and it was just questions and answers! Plus they needed all the background “English is easy”, how to choose topics, what to do about pronunciation. And although it was really hot they were still into things, laughing at the jokes and asking all the right questions. So hopefully that’s another school where even the “I hate English” teachers have a firm target to aim for and the inclination to try it for themselves!

So today really made me feel like wanting to be an ALT again!! It would be so great to just get a regular class and get them super good. But another model school that can’t be duplicated isn’t what’s needed, what we need is a normal bread and butter school with normal teachers to prove how easy it is to get the kids good. And hopefully over the last few weeks there are a few more schools that can achieve this!