ANGLAIS LANGUE SECONDE 
FAIRE MOINS, ACCOMPLIR
PLUS
«Réduire
sa charge de travail, tout en enrichissant l'apprentissage. »
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Doing Less
While They Do More Y a-t-il des tâches dont les élèves pourraient se charger à votre place? Qu'y gagneraient-ils? Faire moins, intelligemment, peut permettre à l'enseignant de renouveler ses méthodes et de réduire sa charge de travail, tout en enrichissant l'apprentissage. |
The idea in a nutshell: for
anything you do as part of your teaching, ask yourself if the students could do it
instead. If they did, how would it benefit their learning? The "doing less" principle can help teachers discover ways to renew their teaching, reduce their workload, and enhance students' learning. (Reproduced from a TESOL presentation, with kind permission of the authors). |
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A few "doing less" ideas
Instead of answering the teacher's questions about a text (oral or written), students write their own questions in groups. They can be encouraged to ask a variety of questions: detail questions, main idea questions, questions about structure, questions that call for evaluation, questions they'd like to ask the author. Later they discuss their questions with students in other groups. Students take dictation from each other; one way to do this is to have all the students at the board Student X dictates to everyone and can immediately see the results. In reviewing for a quiz, students predict the quiz content and write quiz questions that later appear on the actual quiz. Students teach peer grammar lessons based on one of their own recurrent errors (after they've learned how to correct it). In one simple version of this activity, the student puts a flawed sentence on the board and leads a class discussion of it. At the end of the term, students prepare a comprehensive review by dividing up the course content, assigning groups to handle a topic, and conducting peer-taught reviews. |
Students find things they'd like to read in newspapers, magazines, or other sources. One week they read their self-assigned articles and write brief commentaries about them. The next week the commentaries are circulated and students make new individual selections based on their peer's recommendations. Or they choose one article to focus on as a class in the coming week. Students choose problems from their own writing to become the focus of lessons. A student might produce a handout showing a sentence or paragraph she's struggling with; the teacher and the class offer feedback. Instead of the teacher creating a handout of problem sentences, each student writes one problem sentence on a sheet; photocopied, it becomes a handout for the next day's class. Instead of using a handout, the teacher says, "Write this down," and the students create their own record of the lesson. If the teacher plans carefully, the students can dictate parts of the material. Students bring in sentences they've found for analysis in class. Before class they write the sentences on the board; in class they introduce it and tell why it interested them. |
Students keep a class log of what they have studied, in a three-ring binder that is passed from student to student, depending on whose day it is. If you have your own classroom, the log pages can be put on the walls. Students keep error logs as a record of their problems and how to solve them (error in context on the left side of the sheet, revision on the right). A student writes the day's plan on the blackboard and opens the class by greeting everyone, calling attention to the plan, and reading through it.
Students give closure to an activity or to the day's lesson by asking and answering, "What have we learned today?" Or students provide closure by writing a sentence or two about what they learned. |
In an all-class discussion, when a student finishes talking, she "passes the torch" to another student; the teacher doesn't intervene.
Before handing in an essay, the student writes a "cover sheet" to ease the teacher's reading task; in one version this includes the title, the topic, the main idea, a sketch of the overall structure, and requests to channel feedback ("Do I need more details in paragraph 2?"). The student may also write marginal comments to call the teacher's attention to problems. Students give peer feedback on essays in writing; if students are taught to do this effectively, the teacher can often respond "I agree with X" (in addition to offering feedback on things the peer readers overlooked). On assignments, students occasionally trade papers (or tapes) and offer each other feedback. |
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More on doing less : This is not the first time teachers have thought of turning over some of their customary roles to students. Each of the following resources discusses at least one way in which students can take on new roles.
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An E-TEACH member website by Jean-S. Sahaï
Agreg
Page - first posting December 1996 |
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