100 Teaching Tips: Author Review
Penny Ur, Israel
Penny Ur is an experienced English teacher at primary and secondary level in Israel, and has taught preparatory and in-service courses on ELT methodology. Her main interest is the design and use of practical classroom language-teaching procedures and materials, on which she has written a number of books. Email: pennyur@gmail.com
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What is this book?
Why did I write it?
Helping novice teachers avoid common beginners’ mistakes
‘Tweaking’ to enhance learning/teaching
‘Debunking’ fashionable but not very helpful assumptions
References
It’s a collection of tips – one tip a page – coming mainly out of my own long experience teaching English in schools, enriched also by observation and occasionally the research literature. The tips are typically things you aren’t usually taught on teacher-training courses, but which you may hear from colleagues, or discover yourself in the course of your work in the classroom. When I started sharing them (on the Cambridge University teacher’s website Cambridge English Teacher) they typically got responses like ‘Why did they never tell me this?’ or ‘Ah, yes, of course, why didn’t I think of that...?’ Sometimes less positively someone might say: ‘Surely everyone knows that?’: but of course, they don’t, necessarily, particularly novice teachers.
The trigger which induced me actually to write out these tips and publish them was the memory of a lecture I once heard from the educationist David Berliner. He said that hospital doctors pass on their experience-based wisdom to younger doctors during the course of ward rounds... ‘But’, he continued regretfully: ‘teachers’ secrets go with them to the grave’. It’s true. Rarely do we observe more expert colleagues’ lessons in order to learn from them, and even more rarely do good teachers have the time to sit down and write out their experiences for the benefit of the next generation. Having finally (well, I think finally!) retired from active teaching myself, I decided that my own secrets would not go with me to the grave: I would make them available for anyone who wanted to read them. Hence this book.
Some are simple ideas based on my own mistakes at the beginning of my career: often a quick tip from an experienced colleague could have saved me feelings of failure growing out of a clumsily managed activity, or discipline problems. Others are ideas for ‘tweaks’ or simple strategies that can make a routine activity more learning-rich, or more interesting and fun to do, or open it out so that it is available to different levels or personalities of students in the class. Yet others grew out of an awareness that teachers are often led to believe that they ought to be doing things that may not be very effective in practice: so some of my tips are aimed at ‘debunking’ a selection of fashionable, but in my experience not very practical, assumptions.
Tip # 5. Don’t give homework at the end
If you know you have a homework assignment to give, explain it sometime in the middle of the lesson, or even at the beginning, and make sure students have noted it down; don’t leave it until the last minute.
If you do (leave it to the last minute), you may well find that you may not have enough time to explain it properly, and/or students may not have time to write it down. Anyway, doing something right at the end of a lesson conveys the idea that it’s not so important, an afterthought. It’s much better to give it earlier, at your leisure, and then just provide a reminder at the end.
Tip # 14. Catch problems as they start
Don’t ignore minor discipline problems, thinking they’ll go away by themselves. They usually won’t.
More often they escalate, and before you know it you find yourself having to stop the lesson to get things back on line. This is something that often happened to me early in my career – and even later! If a student has just started going off task, or talking to a neighbour, you can unobtrusively bring them back into things by a quiet word, or just moving to stand by them. It’s worth doing, in the majority of cases.
Tip # 68. Don’t make students read aloud
If a student is reading aloud a new text, his or her attention is necessarily on pronunciation and phrasing, not on comprehension.
Also, learners don’t usually sight-read very well, so it’s not an ideal way to mediate a new text. Of course, having students reading a rehearsed and familiar text aloud can be fun and learning-rich (see the tip on ‘Reader’s theatre’), but doing so when they’ve never seen it before is likely to interfere with understanding and brings no significant learning benefit.
Tip # 9. Allow lots of right answers
Most coursebook grammar and vocabulary exercises are ‘closed ended’: there’s one right answer for each item. But it’s easy to change them so that lots of right answers are possible, making the exercise available to many more levels of student, as well as more interesting and fun to do.
For example, let’s say you have a gapfill exercise practising the past tense, like ‘She ______________ early. (leave)’. That’s OK as far as it goes. But if you tell the students to ignore the ending of the sentence and finish it any way they like after ‘She left’, you’ll get lots of different sentences (she left the school, she left her key at home, she left her husband...) - providing much more practice, much more fun, and many more opportunities for students to respond at different levels.
Task # 41. Limit tasks by time, not amount
Learning tasks are normally defined by quantity: ‘Do six questions, finish reading the text, write a paragraph’ and so on. But for a heterogeneous class it’s better to define by time: ‘Do as much as you can in ten minutes’.
This not only allows you to call a halt easily if they’ve been working individually or in small groups, but it also lowers tension: slower workers don’t need to feel inferior or rushed, faster ones doesn’t need to start looking for other things to do when they finish early. Each student works according to his or her own pace and ability.
Tip # 18. Correct (sometimes) during speech
You may have been advised never to interrupt students to correct when they’re in the middle of speaking in a communication activity. But there are times when you can – and should.
In some situations, interrupting to correct can distract the speaker and destroy the flow of what they were saying. In others, students really appreciate being told if they’re getting something wrong, even if they’re in the middle of talking, and will be helped by the correction. But it’s not a case of ‘always’ or ‘never’. You need to make a rapid calculation: if I interrupt to correct, will the correction do more harm than good or more good than harm? It’s one of these rapid on-your-feet decisions that we make tens of times every lesson. A useful strategy here is to ask individual students to tell you: would they rather, in general, that you interrupt them to correct if they make a mistake, or wait until later? Many of them, I find – particularly adults – prefer to be corrected ‘online’.
Tip # 67. Minimize guessing from context
Guessing from context is a strategy encouraged by many methodologists; but actually it’s surprisingly unreliable as a way of accessing word meaning.
So it depends what your goal is when you ask students to guess: but if the goal is to access the meaning of a word, then in most cases they’ll get it wrong. Research shows that more than 50% of content words are guessed wrong from context (see for example Nassaji, 2003). It’s not because learners lack ‘inferencing’ strategies, it’s simply because most natural contexts don’t normally give away the meaning of a missing word. So to tell students to guess is setting them up to fail, as well as likely to elicit misleading responses. If your aim is to teach them a new word, it’s better just to tell them what it means yourself. If, however, your aim is to teach reading strategies for their own independent reading, that’s another story: that’s a place where guessing from context can come in useful!
I guess that with this tip – as for virtually all the others in this book – a good motto is ‘never say never’! Don’t assume that any tip, even if it’s widely applicable, will always work in any context.
With that proviso: I hope you’ll enjoy reading this book and get some good ideas that will be of practical help in your teaching!
Nassaji, H. (2003). L2 vocabulary learning from context: Strategies, knowledge sources and their relationship with success in L2 lexical inferencing. TESOL Quarterly, 37(4), 645-670.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
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