(gentle music)
- In this video, I wanna talk about
something called experiential learning.
Our textbook mentions this as a great way
to create and maintain a student-centered classroom.
Four of the examples given in the textbook
of experiential learning, include role-plays,
simulations, debates, and presentations.
I wanna talk about each one of these,
give you some ideas
about how I've used them in the classroom,
and get you thinking about ways to implement them
into your own student-centered classroom.
A role-play is a classic component of the language classroom
and it's the first thing I think of
when I think about experiential learning.
A role-play is where you give two or more students
specific roles and you set them loose
to spontaneously interact, given some context,
and perhaps some goal.
It's a little bit different than a dialogue.
A dialogue is written.
They're both great, but they practice different skills.
A dialogue is written, practices that skill of writing,
and it focuses more on correct, perfect written language.
Whereas a role-play we're looking
for spontaneous interaction, action interaction,
listening speaking are the main skills
being practiced there.
When you do a role-play,
it's important that you give clear roles,
that you set up the context through those roles,
and you should probably give an explicit time amount
how long do you expect them to be interacting?
It's okay to give them a goal
something you want them to achieve,
but you don't wanna give them too much direction
because you really want this,
you wanna see where they go with it
and you want it to be as spontaneous as possible
for them to practice those real life interactive skills.
Some examples of role-plays that I've done.
The classic is a tourist speaking with a local,
and that's a great way to practice questions,
giving directions, using prepositions of location.
Another one is a parent and a child,
can be a mom or dad, and a son or daughter,
and that creates a clear context,
power struggle, or power balance right away,
and that's a great way to practice modals,
you know, you should, must, have to, don't have to.
Another one is a police officer
or a couple of members of the police
with either accused criminals or witnesses of a crime,
and that's a great way to practice past tenses
to describe what happened.
It's also a great way to provide descriptions of settings
and descriptions of people, if it's a witness in particular.
Another one that's really easy and really simple
is a teacher and a student, but you flip those around.
You let the students, they love to play the teacher
and you, as the teacher can sit down and play a student
and letting yourself and the other slip into these roles
is a really great way to practice new language
and kind of drop the affective filter, we call it,
let them be someone else,
they're gonna be a little bit more open.
A simulation is similar to a role-play,
but it's usually a little bit more extensive
and it actually often uses regalia
to really try to simulate a real life situation.
Classic example of that is bringing in regalia
like you know, utensils and a glass,
maybe a napkin to set up a place setting
and then an authentic menu,
and you have students sit around a table
and order from a menu and you have a server
so they get to practice
the authentic language of a restaurant.
Another simulation that I've done with younger learners
is to bring in regalia like this kind of fake food,
and you set up a market,
we set up a market around the classroom.
I had a class of 10 year old learners in Spain
where we did, we set up, we had the fruits
and we had the vegetables, we had the meats.
And so they had to ask questions
about the food that was available,
about amounts, and about prices.
And so that allowed for a lot of interaction,
that simulation.
Other things that I've done was to set up a town meeting
where you give people their roles.
We had one where a small neighborhood meeting was happening
and McDonald's wanted to open a restaurant
in the neighborhood, and we gave each person a role.
So to say, you're a mother of small children,
you're a father of small children,
you are the pub owner, you are the health minister,
and you are the minister of finance,
and they get to have a meeting
and use polite disagreement to talk about their opinions
about whether McDonald's should be allowed.
I've also done a mock trial,
that was for more advanced students
and we're teaching the American justice system
where you give them roles of a defendant, and a prosecutor,
and then witnesses, and you have a judge
and you can set up the classroom for that.
And that's a great, very interesting stimulation.
Simulations sometimes take longer to set up,
they can take many lessons or even weeks
in the case of the mock trial,
took several weeks to set that up
and then it was an entire two days of simulation,
but it was really great.
Another excellent example of experiential learning
in a language classroom is a debate.
Debates are fairly clear, they're fairly easy to set up,
they're great for practicing a language
of formal argumentation
and a formal agreement and disagreement.
I kind of think of debates as having two general categories,
either small scale or large scale.
By that I mean, small scale would be something
you could set up and do within an individual lesson,
whereas large scale would be something
that would require outside research
and for the groups to have a lot of time to prepare for.
You always wanna give them time to prepare
whether it's outside of class or within the class.
You wanna give very clear parameters about the debate,
you don't wanna just say, "Go!"
You wanna let them know, for example,
if there's three people on both sides of the debate,
you wanna give them time to come up
with their three strongest arguments,
let them know that each student will have one minute
to present one of those arguments,
and there'll be two minutes for rebuttal
and questions afterwards,
and that way, everyone gets to speak
and you can set expectations for the other side
to present a rebuttal and ask questions about that.
Topic, topic is the most important thing with debates.
You have to kinda tailor your topics to your group.
You need to understand that what's controversial
in your country is not necessarily controversial in theirs.
And you need to judge the dynamic.
Are they gonna be comfortable
talking about controversial topics or about politics?
And if they are, that's great.
If not, there's a whole lot of lighter topics you can use,
you can find those online.
Some interesting light topics I've used
are things like money can buy happiness, agree or disagree.
It's better to be single or it's better to be married.
What's a better pet, cats or dogs?
And one interesting one I've done with students
is what's more important the individual, or the group?
And I've had a lot of great benefits
from doing debates in the classroom,
students interacting and using formal language
to agree and disagree with each other.
Another great example
of experiential learning is presentations.
And that's pretty self-explanatory.
You have a student or groups of students take the stage
and formally present information to you
and the other students.
Some advice I would give you
if you're gonna use presentations, is to model,
model, model, model, give example presentation
of what you're looking for,
a good one that contains the language you're looking for,
all the aspects of the presentation you're looking for.
A great thing to do is create a grading rubric,
give those to the learners, and they could get to grade you
while you're giving the model, they love to grade you,
and they also will get familiar
with how you're gonna grade them
when they give their presentation.
You should try to require active listening.
If the students are in front of the class
giving a presentation,
you don't want the students that are sitting
to be able to fall asleep,
you wanna have them take notes
or maybe present a graphic organizer for them to fill out,
you could also have them grade,
give them the rubric and have them grade the students,
but just something that requires
that they're actively listening to the presentations.
I definitely encourage you to use groups.
You know, if you have 20 students,
it takes a long time for 20 individual students
to get up in front of the class.
You might need to do that to assess them.
You can have them present in groups in front of the class
but you can also break them down into smaller groups
for the presentations, you know, four groups of five,
who are gonna take turns presenting to the smaller group.
That's harder for you as a teacher to assess,
but it gets a lot more speaking practice done
within those presentation groups.
Some topics, just ideas for topics,
they can present on anything really,
but for the lower levels,
you can have them present about their country
or perhaps a tradition from that country.
If they're all from the same country
you might wanna do, maybe their hometown
or their home neighborhood, or even their home.
They can maybe plan a trip,
that's a great way to use the future tense,
it's just choose a location you've never been to
and actually plan a trip there
and then tell us what you will do on that trip.
A little bit higher level,
you can do explaining the details of a process,
maybe one of their hobbies, something technical.
You could also have them present a problem
and propose different solutions to the problem.
They can also present controversial topics,
similar to a debate, but there's no debate happening,
but they're gonna present something that's controversial
and then present arguments for both sides
of the pros and cons.
Business students, obviously they can make a sales pitch,
they can create an advertisement for a product,
either real or imagined.
Those are just some ideas
for having students give presentations.
Presentations are a great example of experiential learning
and experiential learning is a very important part
of any student-centered language classroom.
(gentle music)