Four encounters that changed my teachingUniversidad de Sevilla 13th December 2014

Demand High:

Are we challenging the full learning potential of our students?

Adrian Underhill

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the Demand-High

meme

Am I engaging the full human learning

capacity of the students in my class?

What is Demand-High?

Are my learners capable of more?

Am I under-challenging my students?

Would my students learn more if I demanded more of them? How could I do that?

Are we “covering material” rather than focusing on the potential for deep learning?

Do our sophisticated coursebooks steer us towards attending to the mechanics of task rather than to the learning?

Do I somehow rely on the task do the teaching?

What shifts or tweaks can I make to what I already do to meet each student at their learning edge?

Demand High is…

… using any activity to challenge every student individually at their own learning edge.

…not so much about setting differential tasks, but a way of requiring differential responses calibrated to be the best that that learner can do at that moment.

…essentially a teacher quality, rather than a resources quality

Root problem no. 1

…we do not see the learning - we see the activity in front of it: the task

And we let the task do the teaching. We watch the task, but not the learning.

We see what sts do, but not the learning moves they have to make,in order to do it…

If we don’t see the learning we don’t see how it gets lost … we don’t see the undemand, instead we get used to it.

Root problem no. 2

A place to start Demand High is…

….. in the oral phase during or after a class activity, when students are sharing their responses in the class.

This is typically a time when the teacher focuses on correction, which can mean focusing on those that have ‘made a mistake’, rather than on those who have not.

Learning can get lost when we slip into checking for the right answer…. The Correction Culture

The correction culture

… makes what’s ‘wrong’ (narrowly defined) into something tolerably correct (also narrowly defined), rather than upgrading whatever is offered (mistake or not) into the very best the individual can do at that moment.

Thus the mistake correction routine can lower the bar, becoming an instrument of Demand Less.

“I’m sorry but I have to do a correction ….”

Teachers worry about correction and may feel that

“Sts aren’t interested in each others’ mistakes…”

“Correction is not really the lesson...”

“Sorry about this folks, let me just correct this then we can return to the lesson….”

The DH alternative: Upgrade everything…

Ask St A to check the no of words,

B to say it faster,

C slower and more clearly,

D to bring out the word stress,

E to say it joining the words together,

F to add another word,

G to take a word out,

H to say it with interest,

I to whisper it,

J to make it a question,

K to change any one word for another,

The whole class to find five other ways to say the same thing…

The Upgrade Culture

If there is a ‘mistake’ the upgrade can include it

If there is no ‘mistake’ we still upgrade.

So everyone is taken from where they are to attempt some upgraded version that is doable for them, and perhaps different from everyone else.

In this way we add a permanent challenge that is wider than ‘getting it right’, but that includes any mistakes, and keeps everyone, from the fastest to the slowest, on their toes.

Doing this also enables one to operate outside the confines of the particular teaching point in any one moment.

Correction Upgrade

Correction becomes a subset of Upgrade.

Everybody gets a personal upgrade, from what they did … to the next better, quicker, clearer, more interesting, DO-ABLE version

You don’t need a mistake to upgrade

What if the dominant mind set was the optimal doable upgrade, rather than the correction….? Everybody pushing their learning edge?

The Demand High tweak:

once for the task,

twice for the learning,

third time ‘in English’!

13

Making learning visible…

If the learning and the demand fully inform each other then the demand will adjust to High.

If it is obscured by the task then the learning is less visible, and so the demand disconnects from the learning.

How can we make the learning visible?

How can we put on spectacles that see learning

The Task master’s question: What do the students have to do?

The Facilitator’s question: What do the students have to do …. to do this?

Here are some activities that start to make the learning visible….

Extract: The Farmer and the Sky Women

At last, in the dark hour just before dawn, long golden ropes dropped down from the sky, and sky women climbed down into the field, where they began to milk the cows.

Once their bowls were full they returned to the ropes and climbed elegantly back into the sky, without spilling a drop.

In spite of rubbing his eyes and pinching himself, incredulity prevented the farmer from running out from behind his rock to challenge the sky women and save his precious milk.

ropes their climbed into bowls

were they to returned the and a

elegantly once the sky without

full spilling back drop

Practice without repetition

The student cannot concentrate on all aspects of production at the same time. But the teacher can encourage the St to go back over what s/he is saying several times, integrating a new variable each time - word order, pronunciation, melody of the sentence, rhythm, intonation…until St has captured something of the spirit of the language.

‘Practice without repetition’ … by constantly making new doable demands

How We Learn and How We Should be Taught

Young and Messum, 2011, Duoflumina

DH: making everything more difficult?

Demand High is neither Demand Difficult nor Demand Low

If there is synergy between the demand and the learning.

The aim is for the demand to fully challenge the learning.

But the two easily come adrift if the teacher is watching the task and not the learning. When the demanduncouples from the Learning both degenerate into over-demand, under-demand, or irrelevant demand.

Five (provisional) qualities of a DH teacher 'mindset’

Feedback: enabling intelligence to flow

Holding open the learning space (Class leadership)

Teaching by learning

Spontaneity: responding to what is actually happening

Optimal do-able demand constant upgrade