When I was a student teacher countless moons ago, I would spend many an evening designing oh-so-necessary worksheets for my students. This was hard work. I not only had to come up with relevant content, no, I also had to insert little dinky pictures to increase student motivation (?!). Worksheets were important because worksheets help students to learn.
Are worksheets really that effective?
Have you ever practised the simple present tense (statement, negative, question) using at least six different worksheets only to find at the end of two weeks’ work that the students had awful marks in the final test? They should have understood everything! They completed the WORKSHEETS, didn’t they?!
Since reading bits of the Lazy Teacher’s Handbook yesterday, I decided not to photocopy two worksheets to practise the different forms of the simple present that we discussed yesterday. As Jim Smith so rightly says: Worksheets are often for teaching, not for learning.
Ask yourself…
Jim Smith – the “lazy” teacher – suggests answering a short catalogue of questions before you take your place in the queue for the photocopier wasting at least 5 minutes of your valuable coffee break.
Here are a selection of the questions:
1) Why do I want to print paper copies?
2) What types of activity will this lead up to?
3) Are these activities to do with learning or filling the time or crowd control or something else? (How true, how true!)
4) How is the sheet going to be marked?
5) How is the learning going to be assessed?
6) How could the work be done without any photocopying in the first place?
Today’s warming up – the worksheet-free version
OK, usually I would photocopy a few exercises for the students to complete at the beginning of the lesson, have them work on the answers, ask the students to compare the answers in plenum, give them the next job and walk around the classroom to see if they have missed any mistakes when we discussed the correct answers.
Not today.
This morning while brushing my teeth and bopping around to Prince in the bathroom, I had an idea. I told the students in the first class:
“I listen to Prince in the morning because his music makes me feel bouncy.”
The next student repeated what I said and added his own sentence (“Ms. X listens to Prince in the morning because his music makes her feel bouncy. I listen to Goth music because it makes me feel happy.”) Each of the six rows in the class spent a few minutes collecting each student’s favourite kind of music and we discussed the similarities and differences. Each student said something, the students started correcting any mistakes without me asking them to and it was fun to find out the different styles of music that students listen to (The Exploited, Sex Pistols and the Ramones are still popular among 17 year old Germans:). The students are in their third week of the first year of vocational training so they don’t really know each other that well. This exercise helped them to see that there are other people in the class with the same taste in music. Reggae seems to be really popular…
On the blackboard I wrote the internet addresses of a few sites that have online grammar exercises so that the students with problems relating to the simple present(he, she, it – das “s” muss mit) could practise at home at leisure.
Oh, and I gave a student the task of preparing a short presentation for next week explaining the present continuous/progressive:)
Less teaching, more learning 