English Presentation Day

We have an absolute plethora of small group work in this course, which is somewhat frustrating me. I guess I'm just not used to it. There are obvious pluses: getting to divide up work, being available to a variety of ideas etc. but sometimes it seems that the downsides are the frustrating amount of time it can take to make decisions and the joys of working with other people's thinking styles. And this is working with friends. We keep being warned about having to collaborate with other teachers within staffrooms. I think I'm going to keep practicing karate. lol.

Today we had an English Presentation Day. Each group had to invent a unit of work for middle years students, which is between years 5 and 9. And the nasty catch of the assignment was that it had to be within a discipline outside of English, but applying to the English dimensions (a vic.gov.au techo expression) of writing, reading, and speaking and listening. Read that three dimensions, not four, notice the careful placement of commas there. Coming from an ESL background its kind of weird having speaking and listening smashed together in one dimension, as its an exceptional person that's equally good (not average) at both, whether one is talking about second (or third, fourth, fifth) language or communicating in one's first tongue.

Our group chose to base our unit of work on the recent 2020 Summit, and designed it for year nine students. We started off wanting to tackle all or several of the key areas, but ended up honing it down to the section on sustainability. Me - hanging out with bloody greenies. Never!

There were 18 groups in all and we had to present in less than 10 minutes. We had been told the time was to be strictly adhered to, but after spending last night timing speeches and shaving and juggling time it was annoying in the least to have to sit and listen to some groups waffling on for up to twenty minutes. There were a couple of key areas we had to address: how we had incorporated the English dimensions into our unit and used the work of a couple of theorists called Luke and Freebody. Any doubts I had about the more minute points of the latter were clearly fixed up after listening to almost eighteen groups specifically call attention to such work ( a couple missed that line on the assessment criteria - they didn't do so well I suspect).

On top of all this we were being peer assessed, which meant we had to listen to each other, which is good for the people presenting. It also meant we all learnt a lot from each other, which is somewhat stating the obvious, but when I was in a high school watching students give talks in English, lots of students were staring out the window or writing notes to their friends whilst other people were giving their presentations. We were just before lunch and attention was well and truly flagging by that time; it must have been awful for the people going last. I was worried because a lot of people used attention grabbing devices to keep engagement, but we just had a somewhat dry power point presentation and the benefit of three loud voices - until my high school presentation nerves revisited and my voice started cracking. Luckily no one but me seemed to notice.

It was interesting that the people who used food and or gimmicks didn't necessarily command the most respect. Despite how much we have been trained in whole-group-whole teaching, only one group broke the class up into smaller groups. Some people did far too much work for a unit that had to be a minimum of six lessons long. We had sat down at the start and decided we wanted to do the minimum work necessary for the maximum marks. A lot of groups brought food, especially sugar, in, and I felt sorry for the groups who had to follow them, remembering how much I hated teaching kids after school whose parents loaded them up with sugar just before they came to class.

All in all in was a long but interesting day. I think the thing I brought away from it was that being prepared and confident and knowing your subject matter is much more engaging than having zingy distractions that haven't been thought out properly. But I guess I always knew that.