Sustainable Methods

By Miles Newmyer

The word sustainability certainly prompts many different thoughts, from the effect we have on our environment, to the idea of teacher burnout. In this article we will consider some of the ways that teachers can prevent student burnout by making some of our teaching practices more sustainable.

PPP 2.0

PPP is a familiar acronym to any veteran of the CELTA program and is the structure around which most of our teaching is formulated. You start by presenting new language, you practice it and then you head into a production task that allows the students to use the new language in a meaningful way.

PPP provides a loose framework for the teaching process; from there I can take the coursebook material and lay it over that framework and create a cohesive lesson with a clear goal. It also helps that many modern textbooks are written with some variant of PPP in mind. In short: it makes our lessons easy to plan.

But in my four years of teaching YLs, I have noticed a consistent problem with this model.

The most engaging and memorable part of the lesson is that final production stage. By the time we get there, we’ve already been in class for around two-thirds of the lesson; that means we’re an hour into a ninety-minute lesson. That’s too long a time for most nine- or ten-year-olds to be working in English before really sinking their teeth into a production activity.

In the long run, students were getting burnt out by the end of lessons. They are tired after having been at school all day. Then they come to my class to practice new skills in a second (sometimes third) language, and I have the audacity, after all that, to ask them to take those new skills and do something even harder. I consistently ended up with mediocre production, distracted by low-level misbehavior. I was frustrated and so were my students.

The plans should be working, that’s how lessons go. You present, you practice and you produce. Was I not running the lesson correctly? Were these students unable to see the benefits of my well-thought-out, compelling and engaging production task?

I thought about it and considered a teaching method I learned back in Boy Scouts, almost the same as PPP, that we called EDGE (Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, Enable). In Scouts, skill acquisition is significantly less linear than we have in the modern EFL classroom. Most skills were not ‘enabled’ to perform a skill independently by the end of a session so we would return to guided practice right away during the next session. After reflecting on something I learned about fifteen years ago, I figured: why not rejig what I’m doing in the classroom?

And I’ve hit something that has largely fixed the consistent patterns of problematic behavior in my classroom.

I split the PPP structure across two lessons. I open my lessons with a review of the previous material, some kind of mini-Practice phase. Then we hop straight into Production. This puts the most demanding, the most challenging and the most communicative portion of the lesson at the point where my students are warmed up to using English but well before burnout has a chance to set in.

Then a brief transition – five odd minutes of English games that serve as a palate cleanser.

In the second half of the lesson, we move into a presentation of the next topic, generally flashcard games for vocabulary or student-oriented approaches for grammar.

The lesson ends with practice tasks that are less demanding than a Production phase but still create familiarity with the topic. So far, students have been able to return to class, hop into a shortened practice phase and then effectively complete a production task with more focus and intention that they had been within a more traditional PPP framework. What has become a PP-PP (Practice/Production-Present/Practice) framework shifts effectively into the next lesson’s topic or sub-topic, depending on the long-term goals of the course or coursebook.

The Cross Fit Lesson Plan

After experimenting with this alternate form of PPP during my YL classes, I started reconsidering the structure of all my lessons. I was certainly aware that my students develop novel skills on top of existing skills, but I still framed each lesson to specifically develop a single novel skill with perhaps some reference to the previous. I think that this is PPP’s weakest feature and it can passively train teachers to treat language skills as independent of each other.

One outcome of this change of mindset was the ‘Cross Fit Lesson.’ Most people are aware of CrossFit and to me it is a rebranding of the age-old P.E. class practice: stations. This is where you move from exercise to exercise every few minutes and you walk away from it all feeling as if you’ve survived a whirlwind of calisthenics, weightlifting and cardio. That’s the sense I want to capture in my lessons.

I used to struggle teaching good exam lessons. I’d want to look at, say, the Reading and Use of English paper, part two (the fantastically-monikered open cloze), but I’d always wonder to myself: how exactly can I make a compelling lesson out of just this task? This is a common problem for our exam classes, as we use the Cambridge trainer, which is jam-packed with exam practice but does not provide a consistent thematic context for that exam practice. This can make the material hard to package for the students, so the lessons often feel quite flat.

But I had solutions, I would run board races to add a competitive element or make students answer the questions for reading tasks with only the notes that their friends had taken on the reading to add a level of collaboration. But these are difficult to fit into a single lesson.

Then it hit me – why fight to fit the material, when I could just treat it like a nice round of P.E. stations.

This helps break up the potential monotony of exam preparation – new day, new task – with a more active movement-based lesson that tests their English in several ways and mixes up their usual, well-ingrained expectations for an English lesson.

Depending on student numbers and level of independence, I’ll set up stations around the room each with exam tasks for students to work through. Students will receive the correct answers to the task immediately after completing it. Feedback on my part is minimal because I provide explanations for the answers (often produced by AI) so that they both have the answer and an explanation and the activity can continue uninterrupted. Following the exercise, I can do full group feedback where I address the questions that posed the greatest problem to the students.

Sometimes, I do an Olympic-style lesson where students compete in several different events (each one being part of the exam). Students complete ever more difficult questions for different exam tasks – word formation or key word transformation (parts 3 and 4) work particularly well for this – and the student able to complete the most is the winner. I have also upped student interest by organizing betting for the students on their own performance.

Conclusion

These are a couple of methods I’ve been developing to avoid student and teacher burnout, both in the long term and in the short term. There are many different approaches to play with and I’m sure there are many effective alternatives ways to approach guided discovery and Test-Teach-Test that could help students make the most of their time in class.

I think it is also important for teachers, new teachers in particular, to recognize that the models you are given at the beginning of your teaching career are flexible and adaptable. Your ability to provide interesting and unique experiences in the classroom makes your lessons (and the content therein) more memorable to your students.

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