#Dogme ELT: The first 1,000 years, or How I Integrated Dogme ELT into my teaching. ‘So forth and brighter fares my stream, Who drink it shall not thirst again; No darkness taints its equal gleam, And ages drop in it like rain.’From ‘Two Rivers’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson All great rivers are borne of the slightest trickles of water. Many take great distances to form, from the joining together of hundreds of tributaries. And so as it is with the art of teaching: my philosophy has its origins a great distance in time from where I am today and from many different, disparate sources.
Here I describe where my teaching philosophy came from and where it may be heading. To the right is a map of the Kingdom of Prussia, a nation that hasn’t existed for almost a century, yet one that plays an important part in the story of my teaching philosophy and Dogme ELT. You see, this is the site of one of the tributaries from which the mighty river Dogme originally sprang.
The Prussian education system was a framework of compulsory education dating back to the early 19th century. 1. 1. 1. 2. The five most important trends in ELT. 10 video clips that will help you to enter the world of Dogme ELT. Time for a bit of end-of-year reflection… and video clips. Have you ever actually tried to organize a piss up in a brewery? I mean, there’s this huge assumption that this is the one single action against which all other efforts at organization are to be measured. I for one don’t buy it. I’ve been on a couple of tours of breweries and let me tell you they don’t just happen. Firstly, you have to organize the event way in advance, book the travel arrangements, get everyone to meet at a prearranged time, get them onto and off a bus and make sure they don’t get lost when you’re going round the brewery. Secondly, you then have to make sure that you get as much booze down you in the allotted twenty minutes of complimentary drinking time as is humanly possible.
There is a phenomenon in ELT which suffers from a similar level of misconception: the Dogme lesson. Adopting a materials light philosophy when you’re teaching a content based course is no easy thing. 1. 2. 1. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. How to get 10 grammar teaching activities from one video clip.
Today I’m going to show you how to use a video clip to uncover a variety of different language points in class. While the examples I give are somewhat specific to this clip, many if not all can be used with other clips without a great deal of adaptation required. Basically, today’s post is a template of ideas for using video clips that have no dialogue. Before we begin, though, let me give you a little bit of background on this clip, which is one of my favourite on the whole of YouTube.
What we see in this incredible video are scenes shot from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1905. This footage was captured just before the earthquake and fire of 1906 which completely destroyed the area. This is truly remarkable footage giving us insight into the lifestyles of a bygone California age. Ok, before we get down to business, I’d like you all to watch the video yourselves, just to get a feel of it… That really is something, isn’t it?
Talking about the past 1. 2. 3. 4. How to get 10 grammar teaching activities from one video clip. Dogme Cookbook | An Experiment with Dogme. Here is a collection of practical no-nonsense ways for setting up an Unplugged lesson and getting it going. Once you’re up and running and conversation is rife, you need some effective ways of working with emerging language .
This is what it’s all about – the fine line between aimless conversation and real teaching. These are not lesson plans, they are a list of activities for working with language. Print it off, adapt it, add it to your own. You will note that it’s nothing new, they are not all wonder-activities in their own right, but they all serve the purpose of promoting real communication and struggle with language. After each one is a link to a description of a lesson in which I used the technique, in case you want some ideas for using it in context. I hope to add to this page and create a one-stop resource for anyone wishing to increase their Unplugged repertoire. This page is divided into three parts: 1. Tasks for generating conversation Paper conversation Elicit a topic. 1. 2. IATEFL 2011 – talk | Teacher Training Unplugged. These are the notes I made for a talk I gave as part of the Dogme: Doing More With Less Symposium at IATEFL 2011 in Brighton, UK.
I was in the estimable company of Candy van Olst, Howard Vickers, Luke Meddings, Scott Thornbury and about 250 (anti)Dogmeticians. You can read my summary of the talk part of the symposium here. Candy gave a blazing talk which left me at a loss for how to follow her, especially as she had unwittingly stolen my idea for a warmer! However, her talk – about stories and life stories and journeys – made me think about how I had got to be sitting there at that moment. On with the talk: Some time ago I visited another school, and watched a trainee teacher teaching their final lesson. The “aim” of the lesson was to get the students to write a letter of application to appear as a contestant on a well-known TV reality show.
OK, what potential problems with this lesson can you imagine? OK, so what did you think? They pull them apart, then put them back together. So I said: We need to talk about Dogme. | Five against one: Teaching against the odds. It’s been awhile, I know. After a long break from writing my last post about the project a lot has happened. I took a break due to conferences and then we had the Easter break, which meant that the lessons I did have with the project group, in-between this period, were a bit all over the place in terms of topic, and also lacking in student attendance. This week has been the first week where I have had all the students back together, including two new students. With such a big break it was hard to go in with any real ideas of where the class was going to go. But, I did have a lesson about giving and receiving good and bad news prepared, just in case.
Telling some good news after or before the bad newsusing humour / tell a jokedon’t tell them the whole truthget someone else to do itdo it face to face The next step was to get the students to listen to seven short conversations I had recorded onto my dictaphone and work out if it was god or bad news and what the news was. The next class. Has dogme come home? | Candy'Stripe. Just got back from Glasgow – a city that shimmers with the energy of regeneration and that can be justly proud of its new self. I was there for the annual IATEFL conference and although engaged thoroughly, the courage required to take up the challenge of presenting was something I lacked this year. I took the time rather to reflect very actively on what I witnessed. Adrian Underhill started the ball rolling with his heart-rending lament on having the Reflection Blues.
This set me on my somewhat solitary course as I followed some of the new young lions and filled up on wisdom from the sages. Something which was voiced in a talk by Geoff Hardy-Gould, and which resonated strongly with me was the swelling call to teachers to be courageous and by extension to make our students courageous about the language they use and goals they set themselves. Duncan Foord proposed that today’s adult learners need coaching rather than teaching. And as to my own love affair with dogme. Like this: Making Student-Centred Dogme Student-Friendly. So it seems that some students have been complaining about their teachers not using the assigned coursebook and the discussion about whether the use of the coursebook should be encouraged/enforced has yet again risen.
With the Dogme approach to language teaching becoming more widely accepted in the TEFL world in the recent years, I had assumed that the debate was more or less over. That it was clear as day that a materials-light classroom where the use of students as the main resource was almost a given. I have taken for granted the fact that everyone knew that when done correctly, such lessons are rather taxing on the multi-tasking Dogme Practitioner, and that the benefits to their language learning process were for all to see. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been a Dogmetician teaching without a coursebook for over 3 years.
Could it be that they find the lack of structure daunting? 1. This is crucial in a classroom where a coursebook is not going to be followed. How long have you been here? The Teach-Off – The Dogme Observer’s POV. During this entire Teach-Off, we’ve decided to implement a open-door policy in which any teacher who wanted to watch the class could walk in at any time. As a result, we’ve had Shelly Terrell, Adam Beale, Emi Slater, several of colleagues at IH, and my DOS, Varinder, who will be teaching the coursebook lessons in the second half of this teach-off, come watch the class unfold. On Thursday, Emi Slater sat in with us for the whole three hours, from 9am to 12noon. So far, all of the blogposts on the Teach-Off have been from my point of view (POV).
We thought that it would perhaps add some objectivity to the experiment if we could hear the observer’s POV. It is in this spirit of objectivity that I invited Emi to guest blog about her POV… So, here is Emi Slater: Thursday 19th April 2012-04-20 In the spirit of trying to learn more about Dogme I was lucky enough to be allowed to observe a 3-hour lesson by Chia today. Intimacy and Warmth “What time do you need to leave home? Motivation Grammar Bingo! Dealing with emerging language | languagemoments. One of the many bits of Dogme terminology that perplexed me in the first year of teaching was exactly this, ‘dealing with emerging language’.
I mean, if you consider that dealing with a problem generally means finding a solution to it, the whole idea seems kind of counter-intuitive if you ask me. Emerging language isn’t a problem, is it? This issue perplexed a number of my colleagues on DELTA during the experimental practice. Keen on trying Dogme, there was some doubt about the language focus even if there was great success in facilitating learner-centred, conversation driven lessons. I got the impression that the easiest way to do this would be reformulation. During my first year and a half of teaching, this issue led me to ask myself whether dealing with emerging language meant only reformulating it to make it sound more natural. The questions that led on from those questions concerned how to expand my repertoire of ideas for dealing with emerging language. Gap-filling For form 2. 3. A rose by any other name…? | Unplugged Reflections. Dogme has been getting a lot of coverage recently.
Yesterday it featured highly at the IHDoS conference, which I and many others followed on Twitter thanks to those attendees such as @shaunwilden and @chiasuan who did a fabulous job of tweeting the event as it happened. (You can also read a great summary from @mcneilmahon of the day’s events here.) Unsurprisingly, not everyone sees this coverage as a good thing, and there are many people out there who harbour reservations towards Dogme / unplugged teaching. One Tweet I saw expressed the hope that Dogme wouldn’t dominate the panel discussion at the end of the day. This is, of course, absolutely justified. We don’t attend (or ‘tweetend’?!) That said, when there’s a new kid in town, especially one who is seen as fairly controversial or simply a fraud, I believe we should lend some time to its analysis, break it down and see what it’s made of, challenge it, confront it, test it, question it.
But what does it mean? Let’s see: Neil wrote: Teach teens unplugged? Why on earth….?! | macappella. Do you need electricity to light the darkened room? ** When I was a teenager, if you didn’t have an encyclopaedia and you wanted to look something up, you had to go to the library. There was a lack of easy-access information in most homes. And as for gadgets and technology, well, we probably all had a radio, and access to record and cassette players in the house, we’d had a colour TV for a few years, and maybe a Kodak Instamatic camera. At 13 or 14, I got my first calculator – it’d been slide-rules all the way until then. There were no computers, videos or digital anythings in the home, and Bladerunner hadn’t even come out!
On the whole, my generation did, however, get conversation at meal tables, on car journeys etc. Teenagers nowadays live in a radically different world. The other reason is this. So, it’s something like this: As any fule kno, teens are a needy bunch, they are proto-adults, grown-ups with L-plates. Unplugged, or dogme, teaching is about dialogue. Like this: My post-plan today. At the dogmeholics anonymous meeting… My name is Mike Harrison, and I didn’t have a plan today… No, I had no plan.
Aaaah, you were just winging it, weren’t you, Mike? Isn’t that what dogmeticians do – no plan, irresponsible and wayward? Morning workshop (9.30-10.30) and lesson (10.30-12.00) Bad traffic and an accident meant we were not at full operational capability in the workshop first thing this morning. I set the class a listening task from elllo.org (a fantastic resource – lots of online recordings for listening practice) – listen to something, make notes, talk about it in pairs. Then on to the lesson proper, and my question.
How do you keep fit and stay healthy? Having seen Luke Meddings do something similar last night, I asked the learners to write down their answer to the question on a post it note. Afternoon lesson (1.00-3.00) I set them off asking each other questions and just listened, later asking them to write down what questions they had asked each other. Spot the difference. My research journey into Dogme | EFL thoughts and reflections. I carried out and completed my MA research in 2010 on CBI. Why? Well, I’d been trying to teach speaking classes since my very first EFL job and always failed badly. I had tried all those famous ring bound or photocopiable books but to no success. I felt that just speaking wasn’t enough and that the topics/activities in the resources were never appealing.
I had thought TBL was the answer to all my previous doubts as it set realistic reasons for communication but had grown tired of trying and failing to do language focus and of having students do unmeaningful tasks from books. At the time, I was the head of a debate course and had realised that CBI was the best way to run the course so over the summer I redesigned all 20 2 and 1/2 hour classes, created powerpoint slides, handouts, tests and collected multimedia resources. By the end of the course I was very satisfied and my questionnaires collected positive FB from students and teachers. Is it just TBL? Is it IPE? Like this: Views on coursebooks « Authentic Teaching. Following Dick Allwright (1981), here are two views concerning classroom activities which are predetermined by coursebook syllabi, practice of which is among the most common ways of teaching, as far as I could notice.
The deficiency view: coursebooks are needed to compensate for teaching deficiencies, to make sure the content of the lessons are well thought out and covered properly. In essence, it seeks a teacher-proof curriculum, i.e. a curriculum that regardless of who delivers it has its aims achieved. And this is only achieved if there is a high degree of control over what is taught, how and when. This became a predominant system in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language mainly because of the rather informal nature of the job, which is largely performed by what in the profession is, unfortunately, known as backpacker teachers (low-qualified traveling native-speakers of English). For some this conception may seem to ‘reduce’ the teacher to the role of mere classroom manager.
IATEFL Issues: Dogme (or Wandering Naked Through the Dogme Forest...) - TheTeacherJames. Reflecting on Criticisms of Dogme ELT | ELT Experiences. The Five Stages of Dogme.