TeachingTeenagers

Gordon Lewis

2007

Teens get bad press!

Who’s a Teen?

• 10-12: Tweens

Young Teens

• physical changes• social pack animals• longer concentration span than primary children• abstract thinking

– Think they’ve figured things out – Black and white thinking

• believe what they think and what everyone else thinks is essentially the same.

• they have one foot in the adult world and one in the world of their childhood.

Middle Teens

• physically they are adults– clear attraction to opposite sex

• more independent, less group behaviour.– individual relationships grow in importance

• accept that there is more than ONE answer to a question.– differentiated world view.

Classroom Management

• Treat Teenagers with respect– Do not condescend or “teach down”

BUT• Do not pretend to be a teen or act

“cool”.– You are an authority figure

• In other words:Be friendly, but don’t expect to be

your students’ friends

How do we motivate teens?Challenge them to think!

Language Awareness Activities• engage teenagers by creating language awareness activities which

foster an understanding of and interest in how languages function.

Critical and Creative Thinking Tasks• encourage logical thinking and reasoning• generate new ideas.

Teenager Topics• focus on topics and themes that are important to teens. • set up contexts and let students provide the content.

Language Awareness Activities

• The Archeologists– Unearthing students’ language skills. i.e. give

opportunities for them to see what they can do already / Elicit as much “raw material” as you can from students, which you then use for activities. / Get Students to explore their own capacities (mind-mapping, find everything you can to do with...)

• Repair English– Applying language skills: Students apply all the rules they

know already in an attempt to make English a more easily learnable language: e.g. produce easier grammar rules, spelling rules.

Critical and Creative Thinking

• Glass Half Full

• What if…?

• What Would Inanimate Objects Say?– Writing a first person narrative

Teenager Topics

• Teen (or teacher) Alphabet Book

• Anti-rules

Technology and Teens

• Great for Differentiation• Forget about why or should we. • Stop seeing technology as an add on.• Remember for teens, technology is as common as the

telephone.• As one Italian writer wrote:

We don’t have “BALL” and “PALL”

• GOAL: Invisible technology

We Need a Model for the Internet

• Too often, information and teaching practice is simply transferred to the Internet as is (online exercises, reference sites).

• We need to rethink how we access and use information.

• We need new teaching frameworks if we want to fully exploit technology, especially the Internet.

One Internet Framework

• Communication

•Web Search

•Web Creation

The “E” lympics (basic activity)

• Introduce the subject of the Olympic Games to your class. Ask them what kind of sports are played at the Olympics. Make a list of these sports.

• Hand out the “E” lympics worksheet. Explain to the children that you are going to hold an “E” lympics at school and the partner schools are going to do the same.

• Play the “E” lympics events. If possible take photos with a digital camera.

• Record the results of the events on the worksheet and send the sheet and the photos to your partner schools.

• As the partner schools send in their results, record them on a master worksheet.

Goal: To compare results of a competitionLanguage: Comparatives, superlatives, simple past, numbers…Level: elementary and up. Age: 10 and up

The “E” lympics (differentiation)

• Step 1– Research Olympic Games on the Internet. – Share games with partner schools.

• Step 2– Conduct a live chat with the partner school.– Create a video or audio “commentary”.

• Step 3– Create a Website or “Yahoo” group site.– Work with partner school (s) to design and select content.– Work in virtual teams to edit and post information.

Distances(web search activity)

3.11 Distances

How far is it…?

From ... To ... ?My guess True distance

http://www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

Internet is a Third Learning Space

Home

Internet

School

Yahoo Group

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/teenstalkuk

http://onlinelearning101.pbwiki.com/