Translator: Stephanie Brabant Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good afternoon, everybody.
I want to talk to you today about how to make a classroom
alive and ready for tomorrow.
So please think about school education today.
Whose child in the audience
ever took place in a peer-learning experience?
Whose child in the audience
has had a teacher using an interactive white board?
Using technology in the classroom
or taking part in a peer-learning experience
are fantastic steps in the evolution of learning.
But where is all this going?
Actually, it goes very well together.
So why not combine them, taking the best of each one's characteristics?
Today, I'm going to give you examples in the language domain,
because it's my specialty,
but my examples can be applied to any other school subjects.
I have three points to point to.
First point --
as it is the case with all school subjects,
language is not an abstraction.
It is alive all around us, in the street, at the supermarket.
So we need real proactive teaching in a real communication situation.
This proactive teaching in a real communication situation
is not something new.
It's the concept of interaction,
and interaction is not something new.
I went to the European School,
where everything is based on interaction.
From the age of three or four,
we're talking in all of the European languages;
in the classroom, in the playground,
we were even singing together in all of these European languages.
So by the age of seven or eight,
I already knew the Italian song "Bella Ciao"
and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
So nothing new with the concept of interaction.
But there is something new:
you can now make your students talk in the classroom.
And why not with the help of the technology?
Unfortunately, this is what is happening today
with technology in the classroom.
Please have a look at this picture.
What do you see, really?
Do you see more interaction between the students?
Obviously not!
And this is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about shared technologies,
technologies that enable more connections between the students.
Let me show you an example of this:
the so-called project "Mystery Project."
In this project, one class is chatting with another class,
one of the 1,000 other classes around the world.
One class's language is the learning language of the other.
Those students have to talk and to ask questions
in order to guess some information like the school name,
the city name, the country.
They have to guess that before the other class guesses theirs.
Do you see how much this is interaction?
There is no silence in this classroom.
there is talking, there is laughing, and there is fast-track learning.
Interaction, this is what we want in our classrooms.
Second point:
research already proves that exams and reprimands close the brain.
They cause frustration, they cause shame,
and they cause negative stress.
Negative stress causes sleeping problems, concentration problems, eating problems.
So we really have to shift away
from using exams and reprimands to using encouragements,
because encouragements open the brain.
As Ken Robinson already said in a previous talk,
when you are not afraid of being wrong,
when you are not afraid of being punished,
then you have a try;
and when you try, you have a chance to succeed.
So we really have to shift away from using the red-pen method
to creating a pleasurable environment.
You want to know how we bring pleasure into the classroom.
Think about the moments when you enjoy talking.
Perhaps you do now to comment my presentation?
But otherwise, usually,
people love talking in natural settings, like with some friends.
Another great way of finding something pleasurable is using games.
I can hear you.
You're thinking school is not a place for games.
Sorry, but we really have to challenge this assumption,
because all of your childhood,
all of your adolescence was marked with games that were structuring for you.
Please remember the time
when you were playing hide and seek with your brothers and sisters,
and you were searching for what was a good place to hide,
like under a bed or into a closet,
and you were thinking about bad places to hide, just behind a door.
That was really structuring for you
and all of your childhood, all of your adolescence
was marked with these kinds of games.
So we can use these games in order to support learning.
We can even add technology to this.
Numeric games that enable learning are called serious games.
Serious games in the domain of language are very numerous and successful.
You can look into your smartphone application,
you will see a list of them.
Not now! Not now! After!
But they are still like individual games.
Once again, I want to insist on that: we need collective activities.
Let me show you a collective activity.
This time, I will use a university example.
At university, I give very theoretical lessons.
Sometimes I give a case study, sometimes I ask for a group presentation.
But most of the time, my students are stuck on their chair, very passive.
At one moment, I had to admit a fact of modern life:
during my lessons,
all of my students are connected on their laptops or their smartphones.
They are connected to chat with their friends,
they are connected to verify what I'm saying.
Yes, they do that!
One day, I decided to use this connection for the purpose of my lesson.
I asked them to install a poll application
in order to make them vote two or three times a lesson.
Let me give you an example of use of this poll application.
For example, I give a lesson on interpersonal communication.
At one point of my lesson, I ask this question,
"In SMS contexts,
which of these salutations do we use the most?"
I ask them to vote between 'good morning, hello, hi, yo, hey, yello, howdy.'
I ask them to talk together for two or three minutes, very important.
Afterwards, they have to vote. Their votes are anonymous.
Then I show the actual results of their votes.
You can see that for my students
'good morning' is mostly used in an SMS context.
Then, I compare that to actual research results.
Of course, research shows that it's 'hi';
because it's shorter that's why is mostly used.
My students love this kind of activity. Yeah, really.
Some of them love to be in line with research results.
Others love not to be in line with research results.
They tell me why, and we talk together.
Reaction, this is what I want in my classroom.
Third point:
have you ever noticed
that our mainstream school produces clones?
Clones, yes. Clones.
A society, on the contrary, values originality, individuality.
Yes, society encourages you to be a high potential,
and you over there to be The Voice,
and you over there to be a Top Chef.
So, on one side, society encourages you to be original people,
on the other, society educates our children as clones.
Howard Gardner from Harvard University
proved that there are eight different kinds of intelligence.
You have for example, musical intelligence or interpersonal intelligence.
Do you think all these different kinds of intelligence
will learn the same way?
No, we have to differentiate.
Differentiated learning has already been accepted by a series of countries
like Switzerland, Germany, or Finland.
These countries understood that there are different avenues to learning.
And why not adding cooperation and co-construction to this?
Because once again, we want the children to work together,
and to talk to each other, and to learn from each other.
The teachers would become like coaches in their lessons.
Some other school systems, some other countries
would like to use differentiated learning in their schools,
but don't know how to make it.
What is the point with differentiated learning?
How do we make that?
The main point is that you have to let the student
learn at his own style and his own rhythm.
For example, you can take a classroom
and split it in groups of three or four
- sorry! -
and you can use activities
that enable different kinds of talents and different levels.
And why not add technology to this?
Let me show you a last example: the French project called Twictée.
The aim of the project is to teach spelling.
A teacher dictates a series of sentences of maximum 140 characters,
you know, a tweet.
Each child has to write down
but doesn't have to give back to the teacher.
No, the classroom is split in groups of three or four,
and the students have to talk together,
and agree on what is the good spelling of the sentence.
When they agree, only when they agree,
they tweet it to one of the other classes around the world.
This other class has to correct their tweets
and tweet back the correction using specific hashtags.
Can you see how much this is a reflexive activity,
how much they had to listen to the teacher,
to practice, and then to talk together, to defend their points of view,
how much this is differentiated learning
because this activity values a lot of different talents
from very studious students who know very well the grammatical rules
to little techno geeks who know how to use hashtags
through very communicative people who will lead the team.
This is peer learning.
This is differentiated learning.
This is what we want in our classrooms.
If we want to make ready the world of tomorrow,
we have to use insights and the technology we have today.
First, we can leave the textbooks aside for a while
to make the classroom a little more interactive.
Second, we can use a little technology in the classroom
in order to make the classroom a little more fun.
Third, with the right use
of shared technologies and an open pedagogy,
we can honor every student's special talents.
Today, I have given you my examples, my solutions.
I would like to invite you to find your solutions for your classrooms
and to create a generation that is ready for tomorrow.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)