Page 63 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

series. Reasons given for this were: “wanting to proceed with caution when beginning to use SpeakTeach”,” teaching a difficult subject with a lot of new vocabulary” and “it was the only speaking activity available”.
In six lesson series, self-evaluations were used with all or several types of speaking activity in class to increase insight into the learning process and, in two lesson series, students were allowed to choose for themselves which speaking activity to do the self-evaluation on to help the teachers to tailor their teaching to meet the students’ needs. These changes made the teaching method even more adaptive.
Table 3.2
Extent to which design principle 2 was applied in SpeakTeach lesson series (n=30) with factors taken into consideration in the choices made
SpeakTeach
design principle
2. Provide input and exercises for improvement and differentiation
Design aspects in SpeakTeach lessons
Number of lesson series (n=30)
Perspective of considerations underlying choices
L
A
P
Analysis of extent to which principle 2 was applied
Not / Minimal
Maximal
(score 0) No input or exercises for improvement.
0
0
0
0
(score 1) Teacher-led; type of improvement activities, order and types of work decided by the teacher and the same for all students.
3
1
1
1
(score 2) Shared management: partly chosen by students so improvement activities more tailored.
10
2
6
4
(score 3) Student-led: input, exercises, speaking activities for improvement fully tailored, all chosen by students.
17
3
19
2
Adaptations
-
0
0
0
0
Choices made with respect to principle 2 (offering improvement activities and differentiation)
The results on the application of design principle 2 are summarised in Table 3.2. This shows that design principle 2 was implemented in all of the lesson series: no lesson series were found in which there were no improvement activities after the self-evaluation.
Steering of improvement activities refers to who decides what input will be used and which exercises for improvement are to be done, the order of doing things and the types of work to be used. What stands out is that in the SpeakTeach lessons, the students mainly decided this and so the majority of the lessons were student-led (17/30), followed by shared steering (10/30), and that relatively few teacher-led lessons were reported (3/30). It is striking in this regard that it was mainly adaptive considerations that were mentioned with all forms
61
61
3