A Lot of Learning

A week on, I can articulate (I think!) some takeaways from the Tauranga StartUp Week End
Rewind back 7 days:  I pitched, my idea did not get traction, went round the room, liked a few ideas, hard to put forward my "soft skills" when people just want to get going, needing a developer or a designer, and then chose to hang around an idea that inherently involved learning and self directed learning, as well as speaking competence and ability, and enhancement of these through feedback and feedforward, through the development of an online community dedicated to do just that. All stuff that I relate to through language teaching, ePortfolio development, understanding of what good expert and peer feedback consists of,  credentialing of evidence with Open badges, online community building experience both as a user and a facilitator... The SpeakEazy idea talked to me on many levels.
Now to make a Minimum Viable Product from an idea like this and turn it into a convincing business plan...That's the challenge.

Lean Canvas

This is where the words Motivation, Team and Leadership come alive. Those very words that are the foundation for a positive productive and supportive learning environment.
The team had a difficult challenge, the one they set themselves to solve.
The team had the tools: each other's experience, expertise and contribution, the devices, the internet, an outline of the success criteria, and the Lean Canvas.
The team had the support: honest mentors with a range of expertise, a set framework, food, drink, attentive organisers
The team had time: well not really (54hrs sounds a lot but...) in fact yes there was time since we were in "locked down" doing anything but work on the project uninterrupted.
Challenge+Tools+Time+Support =  Motivation.
> Isn't this level of engagement that we want in school?

Co constructed under effective leadership

The team members have never met before.The team recognised the role individuals within the team could play, and the strengths and limitations each has. There is respect, there is collaboration and there is ownership.  The sum of their contributions will lead to solving the problem if the pathway to it is underpinned by a thought through strategy, facilitated by a leader. The team was well lead indeed, by someone who not only had given careful consideration to what it will take to succeed but who also could articulate the steps, as well as enable team members to contribute at their level of competence, while providing opportunities to stretch beyond.
> Isn't this the type of  leadership of learning we want in school?

Then came the evaluation, the 5 minute presentation of the project to the Judges, in front of your peers turned audience, culmination of the hard work but also the competition. And the celebration of success, not just for the winning team, but for all that have fully immersed in the experience, each individual taking away with them something to reflect on, grow, emulate, extend.
> Isn't this the type of individualised learning we want in school?

In learning mode...

Just felt I have actually lived Ewan McIntosh's Design Thinking for Learning, including the ah ah moment! That ah ah moment applies actually to ThinkAgency as I have been working on getting to the value proposition. It is about serendipity also!
Isn't this the type of success what we want all learners to experience?   ;-)

Tagging, portfolio pondering and John de Mado

Coucou Pascale,
I've just had a second read of your synthesis of our various frameworks with Ewan McIntosh's tagging for self-assessment and your reflection on incorporating e-portfolios as an integral part of the learning and assessment process. Lots to be digested here but it's certainly going in the right direction in terms of passing the responsibility onto the learner. One of my first tasks when I get to my new school will be to ascertain what they already have in place, if anything, and then take it from there. It's certainly the way I intend to go.
For years I've felt that there was something radically wrong with teachers going home night after night with a pile of books to make laborious comments that students rarely act upon. It's just too passive. It's a form of martyrdom which makes teachers seem very busy, but how often do they ask themselves "WHY am I doing this? Is this helpful for the learning process or is it just generating grades for my mark book and ultimately for the sacrosanct school report?". In other words, is it being done for purposes of compliance because someone else is going to check that work is dutifully done and marked?
I dislike imposing anything on students that smacks of duty or 'cod-liver oil' - you have to do this because it's good for you. I don't think that learning out of a sense of obligation, and at the teacher's instigation, is likely to elicit the intrinsic motivation required for real engagement with the subject.  I like the idea of students deciding when they're ready for their teacher to comment and/or grade their work as I totally agree that they all learn at different rates and don't have to be assessed on exactly the same thing at the same time. The only advantage it has is its convenience for the teacher who likes to tick things off as they go, under the illusion that if it's been taught, it should've been learned.
In fact I even have difficulty telling any group of learners what I think they should learn and when, as this robs them of ownership of their learning. I have also felt that instead of producing a quantity of work they would learn much more from reworking and polishing fewer items. An e-portfolio seems a perfect vehicle for doing just that. All this fits in very well with the model you propose. If I had to tag it à la Ewan McInstosh, what would I say? What is it? > Tagging, student-centred assessment, e-portfolios. What skill/competence is involved? developing learners' autonomy and self-reflective capacity  How do I feel about it? Enthusiastic, optimistic, curious, exploratory......

As you know, my blue sky vision for language teaching is partly shaped by the ideas of John de Mado who maintains that language is acquired rather than learned, that students self-select language in accordance with their interests. His presentations at the Queenstown NZALT conference made a deep impact on my thinking as they articulated precisely my own feelings about what's really important. He outlined the difference between Language Knowledge and Language Proficiency, saying that language teachers traditionally focus on, value and assess against Knowlege whereas it's Proficiency that fosters communication. Language Knowledge values accuracy and complexity and tends to give rise to inhibition and risk-averseness. Language Proficiency on the other hand is about survival strategies for communication. In other words, what you say (the message) is much more important than how you say it. The key element in communication is vocabulary, as it's impossible to understand or express ideas without a good repertoire of words at your command. You can communicate a great deal with nouns or verb infinitives with gestures or simple time words to indicate tenses. This is unsettling for many teachers who feel strongly that language should be used correctly. John de Mado drew a rather neat analogy to illustrate his point about what's essential to communication. What he said was frankly liberating as it fast-tracks students to a stage where they can say practically anything provided the listener has a tolerance of errors.
Here is his analogy. Supposing vocabulary was represented by consonants and structure by vowels.
Would it be possible to make something comprehensible purely out of vowels (=structure) ? ae i u ouie. NO (That was 'my name is Ruth Bourchier'). Would it be possible to make something comprehensible out of consonants (=vocab)? My nm s Rth Brchr ALMOST.
He illustrated his point further by asking us whether the letters BTTR were comprehensible. Well ALMOST. What would be required for those letters to have only one meaning? Most people answered 2 vowels but on closer inspection it was only the first vowel that was really necessary to distinguish BATTR, BETTR, BITTR, BUTTR, but that the second vowel, E, although adding to accuracy actually added nothing to the comprehensibility of the word.
Thus he underlined the importance for teachers and students of identifying and devoting time to essential structure and elements of language that allow language users to avoid miscommunication. So if we take a quick look at French it becomes clear that most structure turns out to be largely decorative - aesthetically pleasing but not essential for communication. This includes some biggies that normally hog lots of teaching and learning time.

• verbs conjugated with être in the passé composé 
• gender 
• the subjunctive 
• most agreements 

to name but a few. Essential things could include subtleties of pronunciation such as the distinction between u/ou which can lead to problems (merci beau cul,  cou/cul) or the tu/vous distinction which is so important interculturally, but which we tend to delay tackling because it's felt to be too difficult for beginners to grasp. French has traditionally been taught in a fairly standard progression based on a perception of what's easier or more difficult for students to assimilate, with the present tense preceding the passé composé, preceding the subjunctive etc. There has been little account taken of what students are actually interested in being able to say. My argument now is that if we were less precious about errors and allowed students to experiment and try getting their meaning across with survival French, not only would this more closely equate to the experience of anyone learning an additional language in an authentic context, but it would be a jolly sight more motivating and fun, as it would no longer be a case of pre-learning prescribed language for the purpose of practicing it. Can you see how well this fits in with  the notion of students being responsible for their own learning? Considering the majority of students don't continue learning languages beyond Y10 why are we clipping their wings with structural constraints when they could be having fun exploring and making their own meaning? This would be a better preparation for the real world. Let's tap into their creativity!!

Nothing is plain-sailing though. According to the Ellis' principles, effective language acquisition depends on having plenty of input, output and interaction as well as an extensive repertoire of formulaic language and some rule-based competence. My question to myself is 'If students are all self-selecting and building their own individualised repertoire, how can teachers guarantee that they will end up with enough common repertoire to be able to interact effectively? They might be able to interact with a teacher or native speaker but not necessarily with each other'. I'm still pondering my way through that problem. On the one hand I'm adamant that we should be looking beyond the time-honoured boring, neutral old topics to something of real interest, more likely to engage the learners emotions, but what can I put in their way instead, which will give rise to some common ground on which to interact? This is not a problem for writing so maybe that's where there should be much greater freedom. For interaction it's vital to develop a good repertoire of language that can be adapted to lots of different contexts and topics. I think perhaps one of the best ways of doing this is to get the students to monitor how frequently the same words and expressions pop up in English in class. These should become the transactional target language, generated by need rather than habit. This would be more effective than my presenting the students with my pre-prepared list, even though they're likely to come up with something very similar.

Getting back to subject matter, I was interested to see the FLIP lessons on Chris Harte's website, Learner Evolution. These clearly gave students more responsibility for their own learning but I couldn't help noticing that the subject matter was unchanged. The students were building Spanish sentences with cards, which they seemed to be enjoying but they were still saying 'I don't like maths because it's difficult and the teacher is too strict' which is the same sort of predictable utterance students have been trotting out forever. It's dictated by the obligation for everyone to learn the same words and expressions. There's no evidence of being encouraged to put one's own stamp on the content by asking 'How do you say........ in Spanish/French....?' Where's the students' creative input? Maybe they have little choice with regard to content. In New Zealand we're particularly fortunate to have 'carte blanche', as our language curriculum no longer has suggested topics or prescribed structure, although there is a list of prescribed NCEA vocab, designed less to constrain learners than exam-setters, and very broad proficiency descriptors for each curriculum level. I wonder, then, why most teachers still adhere to the same old stuff. WHY ARE WE WAITING?

So how do I see my role as a teacher of French, if it's not to push all students through the same mold? I can draw on my own experience of learning languages and share with them strategies that have helped me to become fluent in French and proficient in Spanish. I can put them in contact with native speakers both in person and virtually. Some would say that it's best to stick to authentic materials that adolescents are likely to engage with but how can we be sure this is not short-changing them? For me what has been memorable has been the unexpected, often moving, inspiring things that I might never have come across without guidance from the teacher (poetry, art, music, history, literature). I wouldn't have wanted my teachers to limit themselves to my popular culture or keep me fixed in my present. I'm looking for myriad ways to inspire my students and foster their intrinsic motivation.

Wow, this is a ramble. Congratulations for getting to the end of it!

ePortfolio: Tag, Reflect and Assess - Still from ICOT2013

The Tagging the Learning Journey- A new model for assessment by Ewan McIntosh appealed as soon as I saw it on the ICOT2013 programme.

What I am trying to do here is to connect the development of an ePortfolio, the use of Tags as introduced by Ewan, and the principles of Assessment for Learning. I go on to suggest what it could look like for the Language learner.
A tall order: hopefully by the end of this post I will have outlined a vision ofhow it is all meant to work together to "enable student to take more control over their assessment" (E. McIntosh)

ePortfolios can be a showcase of the best, the final products that are the result of following a task.  The teacher can access the product, and grade it. This is an initial step in the eportfolio world for Language students and teachers in NZ: NCEA Interact and Write internally assessed standards require a portfolio of evidence. That is 3 to 5 pieces packaged together to be graded, by the teacher.

Yet a move to portfolio assessment offers a great deal more by opening a wonderful box of opportunities to, amongst others:
- change the nature of the tasks (Is "one fits all" still current when personalising learning?)
- change how the tasks are assessed (feedback, feedforward)
- redistribute the assessesing cards (self, peer, teacher)
- make the learning process visible to both the student (learning to learn) and the teacher (measuring the progress not just the achievement)
- hence know the students better and know how they learn better (to ensure that each assessment is appropriate and fit for purpose)
- give the students a chance to think critically and reflect about their work (gain awareness of not only what they learn but also how they are learning)

Add "e" in front of portfolio and e-porfolio become a vehicle for teachers and students to develop together their digital skills and competences, as well as their creativity.
Then you start having an eportfolio as a process, showing the stages of learning ("filming the learning", from beginning to end, with initial draft, rework, feedback, to final draft) that are now visible, can be revisited to identify how skills have evolved (reflection), to showcase success (to parents and/or third party?) and to establish where to next.

Ewan McIntosh at Clair2013 presenting Reflection

What Ewan McIntosh explained in his workshop is how his team and the teachers in the London school worked together on shifting the onus of assessing from the teacher to the student. So that the students own their learning, by organising it, reflecting on it and sharing it. So that the teacher, by refering to these reflections, gets a way richer, fuller picture of each individual's learning journey, thus empowering him to plan the next learning step, in full knowledge of where the student is at and in conversation with them.

Ok I must add here that Ewan's workshop is set up in the concept of Design Thinking (here is an example), in a provocative inquiry learning project that the students themselves entitled "London is full, evacuate", that all teachers are on board revisiting their assessment strategies, that the notion of time seem to be strategically ignored and that a range of technology is provided.

I am not (yet!) trying to delve too much on how this could look like in a French class.
What I am trying to do here though is to extract the possibilities considering our framework (NZC, Achievement Objectives, Ellis Principles, iCLT, and effective pedagogy) to develop the use of an eportfolio to support language learning. 

- Know your students, spend time,  have them define for themselves why they are learning French, ask them to show you the type of work they produce in other areas, invite them to list what they see as their strengths and weaknesses, what they find easy or hard, what prior knowledge or interest they can bring to the class. Make this a first eportfolio activity, by recording this on a profile page or a blog post for instance.

- Allow to let go of the tyranny of time and programmes. Make time to explain and discuss what a learning process is, why they are engaging in thinking about their learning in the French class, make time to have them "picture" what an eportfolio looks like, what type of stuff there is in it, collaboratively. Suggest they share their strengths and weaknesses with others in the class to build a support network (KC: Relate to others). Make a place and time to really know students, and be able to say how we know them.

- Design authentic ("is there a genuine need to do this?"), passion tugging ("are we going to have a good solid argument about this") and engaging ("would I want to do this if I was 14?) task. If unsure of the response, put it to your students and invite them to tweak it for their purpose. (KC Participating and Contributing). Involvement in the assignment brief can only deepen engagement. Plan for collaborative and collective assessments. Build in opportunities for students' creativity to come through by letting them chose their direction and their medium for completion (slideshow, video, poster, online, on paper...) Model, and if needed, prompt them:

eg: If preparing for an upcoming trip to New Caledonia, brainstorm what preparing involves: some may choose to investigate places to visit and create a pamphlet, other make a useful phrase booklet to print, others prepare a mihi or a cultural show and record the process, others again might publish the itinerary for their hosts families etc. (KC: use of Language Symbol and Text)

- Define, clearly,  together,  what constitutes high quality work: discuss, display on walls, talk together about it... The students ought to internalise this to own it. Use official curriculum or ncea stuff if you want but cut the jargon out of it with your students. Making connections with how they learn in other learning areas can help them engage in the process of learning French and it will show on their eportfolio through their reflections (KC Thinking)

- Consider that any task can lead to potential evidence towards the criteria.

- Assure them that errors constitute learning, that is why there are drafts on which they get feedback and that they keep them as a record of their progress. 

- Hand over to student to capture evidence of learning when it occurs. Great use of devices, own or not, and wifi! Not a "let's record this now because today is recording day"! Not everyone can capture evidence of their own learning at the same prescribed time, and not everyone will update their eportfolio this way either. (KC: Self Management)

- Let the students tag the evidence meaningfully, this will help internalise the criteria for high quality work (KC: using Language, Symbol and Text)

Ewan McIntosh suggests three different categories of tags to start with
(I am adding in brackets some tags that could be used for Languages)

- what it is (Eg: read, write, type of text, interact, present...)
- the skill or competence (eg: language, culture, produce, spelling, pronunciation, past event, future event, accuracy, fluency ...)
- an "emotion tag" how the learner feels about it (Great, hard,  proud, love, must do better, hate, boring, success... those tags could be in the target language)

Tagging online evidence allows to organise it. 
eg: find all the evidence tagged "interact" and "proud" at the click of a mouse and thus help the student identify which they would like to submit for a showcase portfolio towards 1.3

- Prompt them to use these tags to reflect on their progress (KC Thinking)

Ewan McIntosh suggests to scaffold reflective capability with simple questions to start with:
- where have I been? (eg: "I found it hard to describe a situation in writing")
- where am I now? (eg: "here I have used some language with success and x understood my description")
- where am I going next? (eg: "I must do better with the accuracy of my pronunciation to avoid misunderstandings)

Over a period of time and depending on the level of language acquisition, students can start to use the target language to tag and then reflect .

- Comment on their reflections punctually, using a reminder prompt ("do you know what to do next?"), a scaffold prompt ("ss that enough help?') and an example prompt ("what will you do if you get stuck again?". Leave a mark to acknowledge you are reading and using their reflections to inform your teaching.

- Step back, observe and trust them to start commenting following a similar model on their peers' work.  Consider assessing yourself only sporadically at a designated time (eg: maybe only after rework of an initial draft that has been peer assessed twice or for some designated pieces)

- Consider that different students produce different ePortfolios. You may start with carefully designed templates which will help make the purpose transparent and communicable. Accept that they should just help with the process and that individual students will progress and capture evidence of learning at different stages and through different learning opportunity and possibly personalise their eportfolio.

SO here are some ingredients to "film the learning": Provide great assessment activities (and plenty of them), scaffold them to learn new stuff and revisit previously acquired ones, co-define with students what high quality work looks like and what it involves, provide descriptive feedback in a timely manner and always look towards improvement.  Assist in selecting, in conversation with the student, what constitutes the best pieces for submission to be evaluated formally.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I am merely trying to clarify what steps could help students and teachers understand what are really, in my opinion, the reasons to consider building an ePortfolio: it can be hard initially because  students may not have any piece of evidence to add to their portfolio (if they have been used to producing and saving digital evidence in say, their own drive, they are a step closer to get started!)

They will use self management, digital skills, critical thinking, opportunities to work with others, to learn to trust/critic judgement from a range of people, to gather their own evidence that they can meet the requirement of the task,  to learn not to complete an assignment to be seen just by one, the teacher. The type of stuff they will need to do all life long, when school's out for ever!

Next we can start thinking about some tools that can help with this!

What do you think? Can this work? Something wrong in here? Where is the French I hear you think?
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Thanks to all the following for your virtual great help:

NoTosh Projects
Playing Tag: Ewan McIntosh on Assessment at ICOT2013
Great tips and tools to create eportfolios
Core ten trends 2013: Personalisation
Assessment for Learning TKI
Using the ePortfolio to validate students' learning
Senior Secondary Achievement Objectives Learning Languages TKI
Effective Teaching in Languages TKI
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Un peu de ménage.....

Salut ma co-bloggeuse,

It occurs to me (again) that responding to posts with 'comments' runs the risk of things slipping under the radar. I've just been back through the comments and see I've missed yours because I don't seem to get any notification about comments, so I thought I'd bring them back from the dead and combine them with some of mine in a housekeeping post. Well, that's the plan but you know me...... Here goes. Your comments are in italics. Mine are as is. I'll put my responses to your comments in blue.

Loving the new found discipline, secretly wishing it was going to be a constant as it is really a huge bonus for our conversation here! It is all very coherent Ruth and highlights the need indeed for a "method to our madness". 
In my case the discipline is entirely generated by hedonism!! You know me well enough to realise that if there were any sense of obligation or duty associated with this undertaking then I would be off like a rocket. I'm doing it because I love it. INTRINSIC MOTIVATION PAR EXCELLENCE. You couldn't coerce me into blogging previously because I would've derived no pleasure from a one-sided conversation. I'm an interactive dude!! Actually, although I often claim to be ill-disciplined I think I may be motivated by a deep underlying discipline driven by perceived needs or wishes to go down a particular path when the time seems right. Synchronicity. I also prefer to have things ordered in my mind rather than on a piece of paper that I may not refer to. You can't escape your own mental order. I spend a lot of time just thinking about things. I've discovered about myself that I have to be very careful not to impose too much obvious order on what I do as it tends to elicit a rebellious response in me. If, for instance, in a fit of uncharacteristic efficiency I decide to plan my day in an orderly fashion, I can almost guarantee that I'll end up doing something else (unless the plans involve others). It'll always be something worthwhile as I'm not a time-waster, but it just won't be what I planned to do. That's just me and it's something I've come to understand about myself. I'm a great believer in the old Delphic oracle tenets 'Know thyself' and 'Nothing in excess', both of these help to keep my life in pretty good balance while still leaving scope for risk-taking and exploration. Having said that, I can be highly disciplined in certain spheres where there's no margin for error, such as planning for our school France trips. I could almost have been described as a control-freak. They went off very smoothly due to meticulous dotting of 'i's and crossing of 't's.

None of this above is very practical for "la rentrée" I am afraid. We need a list of classes (year group) and a list of key ideas to tackle the diversity with gusto! I have a couple more ICOT posts to add to the smorgasbord, I know you dont do recipes. Or can this too evolve?
I'm sure it was practical, whatever it was. However, I now have a list of classes but I'll have to wait until I've got to know the students a bit before making too many decisions on how to tackle the diversity. I have a number of things that I'm interested in trying, for example designating at least one lesson a week for completely student-directed study where they're identifying their needs (a la Ewan McIntosh) and devising their own strategies (with my support) for meeting them. There remains the question of harmonising with the departmental goals and I can't walk in with hob-nailed boots and presume to change the world, if indeed it needs changing, but I envisage making incremental changes, some of which will involve quite a mind-shift for the students who, I suspect, have been fairly spoon-fed and exam-prepped. I'll be teaching in optimal conditions, for teacher well-being, anyway, as my largest class has 20 students. The others are in the 17 - 20 range with the smallest being a Year 10 of 11 students. Given that they all have laptops and the classroom is well equipped and supported for IT, there should be scope for integrating IT creatively. Yesterday I was planning with Ostiane Amigues Mathon, who has a CM1/CM2 (as well as her teacher training) to see if we could get an exchange going with my youngest Year 4 group. Her class has both a Twitter account and a blog. That's what's generated my latest appearance on Twitter. Will it last?

Yep. (re ICOT) It's certainly great to be able to benefit from others' synthesis and analysis of such events. Even though I would love to have been there, I feel that I haven't missed out, thanks to the conversation we're now having and reading of the links.
As far as Twitter is concerned, I can see you've missed your calling as a super saleswoman. I have never doubted the value of Twitter for creating a sense of community and sharing of great stuff but for me it's just too fast. I'm a bit like Mainland Cheese and take a long time to mull over things. I find Twitter vaguely unsettling, as though I can never quite catch up with it. You're a speedier person in every respect. So I rely on other ways of accessing great ideas. As you know I'm somewhat of a Facebook junkie and following various pages and belonging to various groups, as well as exploring links suggested by friends from all over the world, in areas other than education, is about the right pace for me. As far as developing a following is concerned, it would be nice to think that whatever I write could be of potential value to someone else out there but it's mainly a reflective tool for me at this stage, as I undertake a major challenge. The other thing about Facebook I really like is taking part in educational conversations in the threads and having random real time chats with Art teachers in Lithuania, English teachers in Turkey, friends from closer to home that I don't see often enough. Since I joined Facebook I find I feel connected and think about my friends more than I did before. I've tried Twitter 3 times and failed to get hooked. It's just the way I am. I'm a long-winded and ruminative old carthorse rather than a thoroughbred racehorse. We both get there in the end.

Would love a job with Twitter :-)! Yep I find Twitter hugely unsettling too (and horses too by the way!)and it needs some taming to extract the goodness. And also if I am not careful it is very easy to follow and read from people that sort of think like me, and that does not make me progress in my thinking much. One can only take so much affirming! I get my head out of the "education" thread. I am enjoying following a range of tweeps, who keep me real: fashion, activists,journalists, businesspeople etc. People I am unlikely to meet in real life.
I would not go as far as envisaging to develop a following and making the buzz, but you and I have friends and colleagues whose awesome contributions would be very beneficial to help us in our thinking. Lesley is very keen on "Starting with the end in mind", Kheya teaches in an inquiry school, Simon has huge experience and expertise in language teaching, at that is just to namedrop a few! I would like to think that we could at times invite their feedback. 
Yep, it's great to get inspiration from outside the educational sphere. Things that you can mull over and perhaps incorporate into your teaching. Important, as you say, not to limit your reading/viewing to those already of your persuasion. Broadens the mind and opens you up to new possibilities. It would be very good to share ideas with Lesley and Kheya. 'Starting with the end in mind' is a logical modus operandi, as long as the end isn't too set in concrete. There has to be room for flexibility. As my colleague and friend Simon put it 'If you know exactly what it's going to look like before you arrive, what's the point of going there?' Likewise, it's helpful to know what the objective is (preferably an open-ended one) but maybe you don't need to map out the entire itinerary, which could be different for each traveller. It might be convenient and tidier for the driver or tour guide that everyone travel together by a predetermined route but possibly less interesting and rewarding for the travellers than if they had more autonomy and input into the process.

"The heart of our problem is indeed in the task design..." Yes indeed.
I'm thinking a lot about the affective element of learning and Ken Robinson's 'exile of feeling'. I couldn't agree more.
As far as a more scientific approach is concerned, it isn't really a method that I warm to. I know it might unsettle some of the students not to know at every step of the way where they're going but isn't this a more accurate microcosm of life? I may in the short term be obliged to stick with some of the tired old material but together we can devise ways of making it relevant, in some wider, more open-ended context.

 As far as the key attributes that I would like to help my learners develop, we need look no further than Guy Claxton's Magnificent 8 Qualities. I've internalised them in the same way as I've internalised the Key Competencies and Ellis' principles and am trying to internalise Newton's Intercultural Principles, so that they provide a constant filter through which I pass my pedagogy. What is this activity doing to help develop .....?

I've just had another look at Ewan McIntosh's Problem Finding Ted Talk and that has also reassured me that I don't need to map my methodology out in advance. I need to follow my instinct and intuition, honed over the years and trust that my experience both as a linguist and a teacher will be equal to whatever comes up. I have a few doubts about the German for precisely the reason that my lack of depth here won't allow me to be such a flexible resource as I can be in French or Spanish.

My prompts worked: you did "list" your principles! Yes step by step and back to the drawing board if needed I would be happy to devise materials with you as the need arise. All to be revealed when you meet your students, discover the learning environment and take stock! 

Indeed, indeed. It'll be great to incorporate you in the process. In particular your e-portfolio expertise will be invaluable. I haven't had an answer to my question regarding the school and Google. We'll see.

Wow I am very awake! We indeed learn and process information really differently: I enjoy getting the info "second or third" hand from a respected "intermédiaire" before going to the source. Not necessarily the most adventurous way but... I had secretly wanted you to tell me more about your take on Guy Claxton for a long time and here it is. I am also glad that you have an opportunity to consign to the page what you stand by, clearly and loudly. I have heard you before and this has been at the heart of many conversations.I know you will tell me how to go about acquiring the first chunks of language learning to enable this interaction, in TL, happen. I look forward to your post on the NZC now. Surely there is going to be something about formative assessment...
We have a point in common: I am well used to the concept of sharing good ideas which after polite enthusiasm are relegated to the too-hard basket too: the relative slow uptake of eportfolios by our language colleagues is leaving me perplexed. I am convinced that developing an eportfolio is an awesome way to develop and strengthen Key Competencies in language learners but I have obviously not done a good job at selling it to them... I did throw in NCEA many times even...
To your relief I am sure, I have nearly "emptied my bag" about ICOT apart from a couple of things I will add. I never envisaged when we started talking about this blog a couple of weeks ago that I would actually be able to write anything. I have put it all out there as it may be something I/we would want to revisit/refer to at a later stage, who knows? I don't pretend that any of it would be of any influence as you are about to go and meet your many students (name tags, does it still work :-)?) In a couple of weeks I envisage that our conversation here will have slowed right down, in frequency and quantity, as you will be otherwise engaged. I ll ensure to probe and poke, such is my curiosity as getting to know your learners alongside you. Eh, are you still awake?And yep conversation in a post is the way to go! Loving it!

I'm hoping our conversation won't slow right down when I get started in a couple of weeks. It'll be a privilege to have your continued support and input as I negotiate my way around this new challenge. It's bound to be a re-learning curve from the structural point of view. I can well remember the uncomfortable feeling of being on a mouse-wheel, at the mercy of bells and time constraints. About things which offer no choice, it's best to go with the flow.

Yay!! Problem solved with a modicum of tinkering and fine-tuning. (in response to posting photos and comments directly from a smartphone) This is a perfect example of working things out by trial and error. Text, although written above, appears below on the blog. :-)

That reminds me.... did I ever tell you about the great 'distance' plumbing lesson that François Muller gave me when I was staying at their place in Bagnolet? The bathroom shower tap was on it's last legs and had a habit of shooting off and flooding the bathroom, however, with careful adjustment it could be coaxed back onto the straight and narrow. Well, I was staying there by myself when the family were down in Tarbes, and the tap did the dirty on me. I knew where to turn the water off but didn't know the 'astuce' for fixing the tap. I texted François and he tried to contact his brother (you know, first response - get a man in) but when that failed I suggested we might try a virtual repair lesson. First he sent me off to locate a set of allen keys (or was it a phillips screwdriver?) (I can't remember the translation for allen keys, and who the hell was Allen anyway?). Then, armed with the requisite tools, I effected a magnificent repair following François phone-delivered instructions. Difficult to hold a phone and grapple with a defective tap but we got there.(You'll immediately notice that I didn't think of putting the phone on speaker!!) François observed with satisfaction that it was a perfect example of peer collaborative learning. It was even more satisfying, from my point of view, as it took place entirely in French. 

Voilà pour le ménage.

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