Facilitating AfL & Structuring Consolidation

English Language Institute of Singapore (ELIS)

20 Oct 202211:00

Summary

TLDRThis video demonstrates how English teachers can apply six principles of language teaching, focusing on assessment for learning (AFL) and consolidation. Two teachers, Ms. Illustrious Oh and Ms. Sam Carman, explain how they guide students to ask questions, make inferences, and improve their learning through feedback. By identifying gaps in student understanding and encouraging metacognitive awareness, the teachers help students apply skills in various contexts, reinforcing knowledge through activities like reading and writing. The process fosters deeper, more meaningful learning by continuously refining and consolidating student knowledge.

Takeaways

📚 The video series is designed to help English language department heads and teachers apply the six principles of English language teaching and learning.
🤔 Teachers Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts and Miss Sam Carman share how they applied these principles thoughtfully and flexibly in their classrooms.
📝 The video emphasizes the importance of facilitating assessment for learning (AFL) and structuring consolidation in English language instruction.
❓ Miss Carman taught her students to formulate WH questions, while Miss Illustrious taught her students inference-making and conclusion-drawing strategies.
🔍 Facilitating AFL involves using questions to monitor students’ understanding and metacognitive awareness, helping them notice, monitor, and regulate their learning.
💡 Miss Illustrious used student responses to diagnose learning gaps and provided feedback to improve their performance and understanding.
🧠 Structuring consolidation helps reinforce learning by allowing students to apply knowledge in different contexts to make it personally meaningful.
✍️ Miss Illustrious reinforced learning through reflective activities where students recorded and categorized their learning points.
🌍 There is a relationship between reading and writing; students learned to read as writers and write as readers, deepening their skills in both areas.
🔄 Continuous practice, both individually and in groups, builds confidence and skill proficiency as students practice over time in varied contexts.

Q & A

What is the main focus of the video series?
-The video series focuses on how English language heads of departments and teachers can apply the six principles of English language teaching and learning, as well as the six teaching processes, in planning school curriculums, developing lessons, and making teaching decisions.
Who are the two teachers featured in the video?
-The two teachers featured are Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts and Miss Sam Carman, who share how they thoughtfully and flexibly apply teaching principles to support student learning.
What teaching processes are highlighted in this video?
-The video highlights two teaching processes: facilitating assessment for learning (AFL) and structuring consolidation.
How does Miss Sam Carman facilitate AFL in her classroom?
-Miss Sam Carman teaches her secondary 2 normal technical students to formulate WH questions, which allows them to check their understanding and look for evidence to support their conclusions.
What teaching strategy does Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts use for her students?
-Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts teaches her secondary 2 express students to formulate questions and use strategies such as making inferences and drawing conclusions from texts, particularly in relation to an expedition to Antarctica.
How does Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts assess her students' learning during AFL?
-She monitors students' understanding by asking guiding questions, diagnosing learning gaps, and providing feedback to help students close those gaps while reflecting on their thought processes.
What method does Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts use to reinforce student learning?
-She consolidates learning by summarizing specific points and designing activities that allow students to categorize and make connections between ideas, helping to strengthen their understanding and application of concepts.
What is the purpose of the advisory note students are asked to write?
-The advisory note is written to a future team embarking on an expedition to Antarctica. Students gather evidence from a source text about a previous expedition to sound credible in their advisory notes.
How does the relationship between reading and writing play a role in the students' tasks?
-Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts emphasizes that when students read, they should read like writers, and when they write, they should write like readers. This dual focus helps them to build skills through practice and reflection.
What is the overall goal of the AFL and consolidation processes discussed in the video?
-The goal of these processes is to enable students to become more metacognitively aware of their learning, fill in learning gaps, reinforce knowledge, and apply their skills in different contexts, making learning more meaningful and personally relevant.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Introduction to English Language Teaching Principles and Processes

The video series focuses on how English language heads of departments and teachers can apply six key principles of English language teaching and learning, along with six teaching processes, in planning their school's curriculum, developing lessons, and making instructional decisions. In this episode, two teachers—Ms. Illustrious and Ms. Carmen—discuss how they apply these principles thoughtfully and flexibly to support student learning in their respective classrooms. They address facilitating assessment for learning (AFL) and structuring consolidation, exploring how teachers can help students fill learning gaps and reinforce their skills for meaningful and relevant learning.

05:01

👩‍🏫 Applying Assessment for Learning in the Classroom

Ms. Carmen and Ms. Illustrious apply AFL in their classrooms to assess how well students have learned and applied language skills. Carmen teaches her students to formulate WH questions, while Illustrious helps her students make inferences and draw conclusions from a text about an Antarctic expedition. Using targeted questions, they encourage students to check their understanding and gather evidence to support their conclusions. This section highlights how questioning can drive student engagement, helping them establish routines and reflect on their learning, which fosters better understanding.

10:02

🧠 Monitoring Student Learning and Providing Feedback

Ms. Illustrious monitors her students' learning as they present evidence and draw conclusions. She uses questions to identify gaps in their understanding and provides feedback to help them improve. By encouraging students to connect their evidence with the task, Illustrious helps them develop metacognitive awareness and critical thinking skills. She guides them through the learning process, emphasizing the importance of closing the loop—using evidence to explain their conclusions fully. This reflective approach ensures that students can assess their own progress and revise their work based on feedback.

🔄 Structuring Consolidation for Long-Term Learning

In this section, the focus shifts to how Ms. Illustrious and Ms. Carmen help students consolidate their learning. After students have learned a new concept or skill, they reinforce it by applying it in new contexts. Ms. Illustrious encourages her students to write down and reflect on their learning points, which they can recall in future lessons. She structures activities to help students categorize their ideas and make meaningful connections. This method of consolidating knowledge strengthens students’ understanding and enables them to apply their skills across different scenarios.

📝 Bridging Reading and Writing Skills

Ms. Illustrious helps her students apply what they've learned by having them write an advisory note based on their reading about an Antarctic expedition. She emphasizes the connection between reading and writing—students read as writers and write as readers. To support their writing process, Illustrious initially models the task, gradually releasing responsibility to the students. This step-by-step approach builds students' confidence and allows them to practice the skills repeatedly in different settings, from group to individual work.

🎯 Conclusion: Facilitating AFL and Structuring Consolidation

The video concludes by summarizing the key teaching processes of facilitating AFL and structuring consolidation. These processes, when combined with the six principles of English language teaching, help teachers make informed decisions that enhance student learning. Teachers are encouraged to use these strategies to monitor student progress, provide actionable feedback, and design opportunities for students to consolidate their learning, ensuring long-term retention and skill development.

Mindmap

Keywords

💡Assessment for Learning (AFL)

AFL is a teaching process focused on assessing students' understanding throughout their learning journey. In the video, teachers use AFL by asking students WH questions to check their comprehension and provide feedback to address any learning gaps. The process helps students become more aware of their learning and improve their skills.

💡Metacognitive Awareness

Metacognitive awareness refers to students' understanding and control of their own learning processes. In the video, the teacher encourages students to reflect on how they learn and regulate their actions. This is illustrated when the teacher asks students to gather their thoughts and recognize how they arrived at conclusions about a reading task.

💡Formulating WH Questions

WH questions (who, what, when, where, why, how) are used to probe students' understanding of a topic. In the video, students are taught to formulate these types of questions, which helps them gather evidence from texts and develop critical thinking skills, particularly in understanding how characters in a story became lost in a blizzard.

💡Structuring Consolidation

Structuring consolidation involves reinforcing students' learning by helping them apply concepts in new contexts. The teachers in the video use this technique to help students recall previous learning points and connect them to new situations. This is shown when the teacher has students summarize what they learned about being an expert reader.

💡Making Inferences

Making inferences is a reading strategy that involves drawing conclusions based on evidence in a text. The students in the video apply this skill when analyzing how a protagonist in a story became lost in a blizzard. This activity helps them use clues from the text to understand underlying reasons and connect ideas.

💡Feedback

Feedback is the information provided by the teacher to help students improve their understanding or performance. In the video, the teacher gives feedback on how students can strengthen their explanations and close the loop in their reasoning, using evidence to justify their conclusions about the text.

💡Expert Reader

An expert reader is someone who actively makes connections, analyzes text, and draws conclusions with a deep understanding. The video highlights how students are encouraged to think like expert readers, making connections between evidence and their conclusions about the characters in the text they are studying.

💡Learning Gaps

Learning gaps refer to areas where students have not fully understood or mastered a concept. In the video, the teacher identifies these gaps by asking probing questions and provides targeted feedback to help students close these gaps, ensuring they can progress in their understanding of the material.

💡Categorizing

Categorizing involves organizing information into meaningful groups to aid understanding. In the video, students are asked to categorize challenges faced by a team on an expedition to Antarctica, breaking down larger concepts into smaller, more manageable parts, such as miscommunication and low visibility.

💡Reading like a Writer

This concept emphasizes reading with an awareness of writing techniques and structures. In the video, students are encouraged to 'read like a writer' by analyzing how the text is constructed, which helps them prepare to write an advisory note for an expedition, making their writing more informed and credible.

Highlights

Introduction to the six principles of English language teaching and learning, as well as the six teaching processes.

Teachers Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts and Miss Sam Carmen discuss applying principles thoughtfully and flexibly in planning English curriculum and teaching.

The focus of the video is on facilitating assessment for learning (AFL) and structuring consolidation in the classroom.

Teachers explore how to check students' understanding and help them identify gaps in their learning through AFL.

Miss Sam Carmen teaches her students to formulate WH questions as part of the AFL process.

Miss Illustrious Ooh Yachts focuses on teaching students to formulate questions and use learner strategies like making inferences and drawing conclusions.

Teachers facilitate AFL by asking students guiding questions, such as 'What makes you see that?', to promote metacognitive awareness.

Miss Ooh Yachts monitors students' learning and diagnoses gaps by posing questions, allowing for feedback and revision.

The importance of closing the learning loop by connecting evidence to a clear conclusion is emphasized in feedback.

Miss Ooh Yachts provided immediate opportunities for students to act on feedback to revise their responses.

Structuring consolidation through reinforcing learning by applying knowledge in different contexts for personal relevance.

Students reflect on their learning points to recall and apply concepts in new scenarios, reinforcing skillful reading strategies.

Sallas Tree consolidates learning by summarizing key points and engaging students in categorizing ideas to deepen understanding.

The relationship between reading and writing is emphasized: 'When you read, you read like a writer. When you write, you write like a reader.'

Teachers scaffold learning by gradually releasing responsibility from group work to individual practice to build student confidence.