Anna Laghigna Module 1 script [609432]

Anna Laghigna – Module 1 script
Hello everybody!
My name is Anna Laghigna.
I'm a secondary teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Udine,
northern Italy.
My students are Italian speaking teenagers of 14 -19 years of age.

My desire as a teacher is to plan activities that are engaging and motivating
for my students. I want them to be active and creative. I think Learning by
Doing and Group work are the best ways to learn.
I have been experimenting new ways of creative teaching and learning
that focus on developing students’ language skills through creativity,
critical thinking and collaboration among peers .

What I can say from my experience is that group work has proved
particularly efficient especially in classes in which the level of language
compete nce was initially pretty low. Working together has given a chance
also to my weaker students to achieve better results and as a whole it has
improved my students' motivation for language learning.
In designing new activities I always start from analysing my students'
points of weakness so I can focus on activities which aim at strengthening
them.
I then ask myself how can the project I have in mind contribute to make
them better independent learners? Does it help them to learn how to work
together?
I try t o encourage students to discover and investigate contents
independently. As a guide and facilitator, I try not to give ready answers
but hints to their questions and encourage peer -learning in groups.

Inquiry -based and webquests were key in this project a bout Theatres at the
Time of Shakespeare.

The project was carried out with two different 12th year classes last
January. My students loved this project!
I thought it could be a nice idea to introduce modern teenagers first to the
fascinating atmosphere of the Elisabethan theatres before reading
Shakespeare's work. We thus embarked on virtual tour of the reconstructed
Globe Theatre in London. Students got hooked by the story of the actors,
the costumes, the props, the way the audience used to behave in thea tres
and ended up longing to see a play by Shakespeare.
The whole working process is shown here: some videos to introduce the
topic; guiding questions to answer while watching and to develop students'
independence and responsibility in their learning ; groupwork to
collaborate and negotiate answers to the questions shared on a common
Google Doc; up to the creation of a mutual Prezi and the final oral
presentations in class.
What did I do as a teacher?
First of all I made sure that team members were aware o f what was
expected of them.
We did not create norms because these were senior students. I tried instead
to give them voice and choice along the process. So they were given the
freedom to decide about roles in their own group and how to develop the
project
I monitored progress constantly and provided guiding feedback both in
class and online. I found out that giving feedback on Edmodo or through
comments on Google.docs is more discreet and better received by students.
They know when they are doing well and appreciate my efforts because
they can see that I care about their progress. I would be very interested in
learning more about other forms of discreet guidance without coercion.
And finally we produced a slideshow to celebrate their success. It was sort
of a psychological reward and a moment of deep sharing.
This project definitely helped my students to get to know each other better
and build up team spirit.

What challenges did I face in this project?
One of the challenges that a teacher may face when shi fting from teacher –
centred to learner -centred activities in class has to do with control.
Students can get pretty loud while collaborating or they may easily get off
track. I found it helped to use a tool called Scrumy to plan our activities.
Moreover I as ked my students to end any working session with a short
report in the form of a check -list or mindmap illustrating their work in
progress. This helped to keep them on track.

The biggest challenge in my experience of working with collaborative
learning has to do with assessment. In our Italian education system, school
authorities as well as parents demand individual summative assessment on
a set number of written and oral tests.
I have tried to integrate formative assessment in my planning and have
involve d my students in self -evaluation with the use of rubrics focussed on
collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, negotiating and other life
skills. I have also introduced more and more peer reviews for mutual
feedback. But all these activities usual ly come into play only at the end.
I would like to learn from our experts and peers in this course about how to
plan the assessment of collaboration and other interpersonal skills.
How can we design activities to monitor teamwork, personal responsibility
and leadership, aim -oriented discussion and task -based work, time
management and organisation?
If some of the key words related to collaboration are: Added Value ,
Respect for others and Negotiation , how can these items be evaluated
within a group and then lead to individual summative assessment?
Thank you for your attention. Goodbye .