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The visible and invisible classroom– on what contributes to the feeling

of success and failure in grades 4-6

Marta Rosińska

Marta Rosińska

Marta works as the Director of Studies at the English Language Centre based at the Univeristy of Łódź. She is the Academic Project Manager for DOS ELTea Teacher Training Solutions. She runs teacher training workshops for various other ELT institutions and is a conference

speaker in Poland and the UK. She has been working for Macmillan Education as a trainer and coursebook writer for the last 12 years. Her most recent publication is Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, Repetytorium z Testami, Macmillan Education, 2013.

As a teacher, teacher trainer, coursebook author and most importantly a mother of a 12-year-old girl perhaps I tend to think

about learning and teaching all too often. I refl ect on what makes education a success or a failure, what contributes to each student’s self-confi dence, which factors determine whether or not teaching causes learning or how teaching towards an exam aff ects each and every learner. Accordingly, I try to help teachers fi gure out eff ective methods of working with their students as individuals or as members of a larger group.

Attitude essential

The teachers keep asking for practical ideas and new activity types whereas what they really need to improve their performance in the classroom is a sweeping change in their attitude to the students if not a new philosophy of teaching and constructing lessons, creating good classroom dynamics, giving feedback and assessing the learner. Fun activities do go a long way but they are certainly not suffi cient to engage the learner and make him or her succeed in learning English. My belief stems from my own experience as a teacher and the work of modern educators who express their concern about current education. One of them is Linda Darling Hammond, Professor of Education at Stanford University. When asked about the problems we need to address in the structure of schools today she responded in the following way:

‘Well, I actually think there are two big problems in the way that we run schools today. One is that the schools we have now are constructed as though teaching doesn’t matter, and secondly they’re constructed as though relationships don’t matter. We have this idea that if we just give them the textbooks to follow and the test to give and the procedures to, pursue, the kids will just magically get taught adequately, without realizing that teaching, when it’s good teaching, is reciprocal. What the kids do determines what the teacher needs to do; the teacher needs to know a lot in order to be able to do that.

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She needs to know a lot about children, about learning, about subject matter, about curriculum and how to build it so that it’s in some kind of a logical order, and so on. […] The other problem is that we have schools structured as though relationships don’t matter. If you want to teach well to very high standards, you have to know the students well, you have to have that relationship that allows you to both challenge them, and adapt what you’re doing for them so that it works. So schools have to be redesigned to focus on teaching and to enable relationships1.’

What Hammond says between the lines is that every teacher has to realize that there are two types of classroom: the visible one and the invisible one, both equally important. They are interdependent and must be given equal amount of attention for learning to happen. The visible classroom consists of the teacher’s repertoire of teaching techniques, those practical, engaging activities and all kinds of teaching materials or resources. The invisible classroom, on the other hand, appears much more elusive as it is to do with how skilfully you use the above to create a conducive atmosphere, how you react to success and failure and fi nally what values your students leave the classroom with. Do your learners feel that mistakes are a natural part of learning or do they think they make them failures2? Do your students have the feeling they are only learning English for the tests or do they see more sense in acquiring new structures and lexical items? How do you communicate all of those to your learners?

Balancing the two classrooms

You may be wondering by now why I decided to treat you to such a lengthy introduction on the aspects of teaching you probably feel you are familiar with. The reason is that the concept of catering for both the visible and invisible classroom in equal measure will become even more relevant to every teacher of grades 4-6 due to the upcoming Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty. Primary school teachers have so far been spared the fate of gimnazjum and liceum teachers, who have already had to re-focus their teaching and who have felt aff ected by the pressures of exam preparation and the so-called washback eff ect the exam exerts on the teaching/learning process. Teaching towards any exam often results in the visible classroom becoming more prominent as teachers become

1 http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/today2.html2 Grzegorz Spiewak talks about this at length in his „Język

obcy udomowiony” article series, especially in episode 2: „Mój przyjaciel błąd”, Języki Obce w Szkole 3/2013, available online at: http://www.jows.pl/node/558

result-oriented if not obsessed in some cases. The invisible classroom becomes secondary in importance as teachers communicate the superiority of the exam through their choice of activities, amount of tests and messages they convey to their students such as ‘Study or you’ll fail the exam’ instead of ‘Study and you’ll communicate better’, for instance.

Avoiding testing overkill

Consequently, many teachers may have to think harder about how to ensure the balance between good teaching and good exam preparation. They will be wondering how to go about the test and how much time they should devote to exam practice as, after all, they would like their learners to do well. They realize, of course, that their results will refl ect on their teaching methods and, sadly, the school’s place in the public rankings. The situation will have to be approached with a lot of common sense because the last thing we want to do is deprive youngsters of learning English in an enjoyable, child-like way. Hence, the least desired scenario in grade 6 would be concentrating solely on exam tasks and exam practice as such. Too frequent testing, as is commonly known, creates grade-driven students and leads to ‘grade-grubbing’, thus destroying the motivation to learn for the sake of learning and in many cases killing the curiosity needed to learn anything for real, including a foreign language.Therefore, I sincerely hope most teachers will not make their teaching resemble one long mock exam. At the same time, however, I am aware that teachers will be asking more than before for tips on how to teach without overtesting. The trick of the trade again lies in the teacher’s eff ective and invisible incorporation of the exam requirements. In other words, it is about practising the exam skills without making this practice overly visible to the learner so that he or she acquires the necessary training without consciously realizing that they are doing the exam work. Eff ective teachers are powerful mediators of children’s thinking and learning so how your students will feel about the sprawdzian is entirely in the teacher’s hands. So, in the light of the above what can we, the teachers, do to navigate our learners through the challenges of the test? My proposed plan of action is to see what you can do at the visible and invisible levels. To begin with the latter, through our classroom behaviour we communicate to the learners that they are studying English not to merely pass the test but to learn to use the language in real life and we don’t use the upcoming sprawdzian as an excuse to test more

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often or, what would be even worse, to control and coerce the learners’ classroom behaviour. Secondly, we work with mistakes in a constructive way, remembering that students’ mistakes are also, to a large extent, teachers’ mistakes. So don’t teach just the curriculum, teach the children and go back to what they have problems with rather than move on with your lesson plan. Such an attitude will help you establish a positive atmosphere and a culture where real learning prevails.On the more visible front we make sure we still use an engaging coursebook which teaches general English. And we take advantage of a good repetytorium to revise the material eff ectively in grade 6. The idea of replacing the coursebook with a repetytorium no matter how good it may be sends the wrong message to the learner and makes learning dominated by in-your-face exam practice at the expense of more universal tasks that most sensible coursebooks off er. Next, we should analyze what sprawdzian entails at two diff erent levels: the linguistic one and the cognitive one. In other words, we must be certain about what challenges the students will have to cope with in terms of language diffi culty (lexis, grammar and functional English) as well as task types and thinking processes the learners will have to utilize. Finally, we must learn how to craftily smuggle exam skills in the form of non-exam tasks and learn to do it on a regular basis. Let us look at some examples.When you examine sprawdzian tasks carefully, you notice that a signifi cant number of tasks are based on visual material, which as such is a welcome development. Here is a good example of such a task:

In this task the students have to follow the conversation and based on their comprehension of the information match the names with the pictures. As you can imagine the students will be tested on their understanding of the vocabulary connected with appearance and objects as well as the prepositions of place as can be seen in the corresponding audioscript:

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.32, Macmillan Education 2013.

Girl: Adam, are these your friends in the photograph?

Boy: No, they’re my cousins.

Girl: Do you see them very often?

Boy: Well, I see Frank quite often. He’s the boy in the baseball cap. He’s really funny.

Girl: And the others?

Boy: The girl wearing the dress is Ann.

Girl: The tall one with dark hair?

Boy: Yes, that’s right. And the boy next to her, in shorts, is Peter.

Girl: They look so similar!

Boy: Oh yes, they’re brother and sister.

Girl: And the one in shorts with curly hair?

Boy: That’s Emily.

Girl: She looks a bit like you.

Boy: Well, we’re similar in character, too.

Girl: And who’s… (fade)

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Now, let us take a look at a more complex example, involving both visual and linguistic input:

In this Use of English task, the students have to interpret the visual and written information at the same time in order to determine the correct answers. Again the comprehension depends on the learners’ understanding of lexical and grammatical forms.

You may have noticed that the learners will be faced with picture-based tasks which test listening and reading skills as well as language resources. The difficulty for the average 6th grader will be connected with the multiprocessing of information. The student will have to listen to the speaker or read the text, identify the items which are referred to in the texts and match these with the picture prompts. This means that in order to do such a task successfully the learner must know the key word in its spoken/written form and quickly associate it with its visual representation. This necessitates a well-designed programme of teaching vocabulary and pronunciation which should include a lot of practice in reading/listening and visualizing vocabulary. Needless to say, the more visual our presentation of vocabulary the better, like in the tasks that follow:

a simple matching task:

a slightly more challenging elicitation task:

possibly the most challenging task based on the interpretation of the visual and written material:

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.47, Macmillan Education 2013.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.7, Macmillan Education 2013.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.11, Macmillan Education 2013.

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Learning to visualize

Another useful idea is to read a piece of text to your learners and get them to represent visually as many items as possible, which can be done with most texts, simple songs or adverts and which is easy to disguise as a non-exam task. You may also encourage the learners to study a picture for a few minutes and then write from memory what they saw. Alternatively, you may wish to display a few big posters along the classroom walls and get the student to walk about the room and find the items you want them to focus on. As the students walk along, they tick the items they have found. Or write a picture description where some information is incorrect and ask the students to spot the mistakes. All of the above activities can be run as class competitions or done in pairs depending on the students’ competency.

Make sure you use pictures which are interesting to the learners and vary the visual material as much as you can. Make use of paintings, murals, photos, posters, newspaper cut-outs, book illustrations, cartoons etc. so that the students do not realize that they are practising for the exam.

Of equal help would be very frequent vocabulary revision tasks revisiting the so-called word lists. And again instead of making the learners learn vocabulary by heart you may prefer it if your students activate the lexical items in a more involving and innovative way as in the tasks shown below: All the exercises in this

article have been taken from the upcoming Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty. Repetytorium z testami, Macmillan Education 2014. To find out more contact your regional Macmillan representative.

All contact details available on www.macmillan.plAlAlll co tntactt ddettailils av

The tasks presented above will help the learners focus on both everyday language which they need for everyday communication as well as certain skills required of them to tackle the exam tasks with greater confi dence. However, what is of vital importance here is the fact that their implementation makes you a student-friendly teacher who loves teaching English but never forgets about the fi nal test. This approach guarantees that the needs of both the visible and invisible classrooms are adhered to, which makes the whole process more natural, appealing and, what is more, valuable. I hope you will still enjoy your teaching despite the pressures of the exam and remember to make the visible less visible and the invisible more visible.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.14, Macmillan Education 2013.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.91, Macmillan Education 2013.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.84, Macmillan Education 2013.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.80, Macmillan Education 2013.

Source: Sprawdzian szóstoklasisty, p.81, Macmillan Education 2013.

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