Shaun Crowley has worked as an EFL teacher and a marketing manager for an international ELT publisher. He is the founder of www.linguavote.com, an e-learning platform for learners of English that features social learning and gamification. Follow Shaun on Twitter: @shauncrowley. In Part 1 of this series, Shaun Crowley considered the importance of 21st Century Skills in ELT, concluding that the group of competencies that define this term are indeed important to English language learning. In the next four posts, Shaun continues by offering ideas to help you integrate some of these skills into your classes.
Critical thinking skills are some of the key “21st Century” competencies, so it’s no surprise that we’re starting to see publishers position their course books with this benefit up-front, from primary to tertiary level.
Here is an idea to help you maximize opportunities for critical thinking, so that your students are better prepared for the rigours of university education and the professional workplace.
Adopt a “question-centred” approach to your classes
Since the recent curriculum reforms in the US, a question-centred approach to teaching has been gaining popularity in schools. Teachers start a module with a big question. Students consider this question critically, and over the course of the module they synthesize information to form a conclusion in the form of a final homework assignment.
This approach first made its way into ELT with the publication of Q Skills for Success. But whatever course you are using, so long as you have enough time to step out of the materials, it should be possible to customize your lessons to feature an “essential question”.
For example, Headway Elementary Unit 4 is called “Take it easy” and follows the topic of leisure activities. Before you start this unit, you could write this question on the board:
“What makes the perfect leisure activity?”
Perhaps search for a YouTube video that offers a nice way-in to thinking about the question… here’s one I found following a quick search:
Pre-teach some of the main vocabulary items that fit into the question theme. Then spend a few minutes discussing the question and gauging students’ opinions before you open the book.
As you go through the unit, use the various listening and reading texts as opportunities to return to the big question, encouraging students to synthesize and evaluate the different input. For example, in the “Take it easy” unit, there’s a text called “My favourite season.” Here you could ask:
Is the perfect leisure activity one that you can do in any season?
Return to the big question any time you see a link to the course material you are using. Then at the end of the unit, have students write an answer to the question for homework. If students are not in the routine of doing homework, round off the question with a class discussion.
Have you adopted a similar approach to your classes? If you have, we’d love to hear how you apply the question-centred method.
Reblogged this on hungarywolf.
Although I had not called it “the question-centred method”, I have practised something similar. For two or more years, I would begin my course by an introductory survey in which I asked the students’ responses to such questions as what they would like to learn in the course, what they expect of it, etc. Then, I would summamrise their responses for my own reference and every time a question mentioned by them occurred, I would draw their attention to it saying, ‘You said you wanted to learn, for example, of “the structure of the English sentence”, here we have the basic, which was ‘verb complementation’, and so on. This kept them awake and interested. But I mean to add more of “the question-centred focus” to my course of modern English Grammar (Ronald Carter, Michael McCarthy, CUP, 2007) now that I have read of the practice you have suggested. Thank you.