Full marks to my awesome teen class last week. The work they produced was fantastic and I’m so proud of them.

We did a short project based on describing graphs. It started off with scanning tasks and a few activities on reporting data, based on an infographic in Gateway B1+ (Macmillan)…

(c) Macmillan

Students then made their own questions for a class survey. Once they’d gathered data I gave them my own fairly shoddy model of a graph and a description of the data. They completed an ordering task and discussed the purpose of each part of the description.

They prepared their own graphs from their data, describing them with some of the target language in the example…

hey Matt Noble, this was on my flip so it’s technically a #ELTwhiteboard 😉

Then they practised presenting the information on the poster, considering what people might ask them and how they might justify their opinions related to the data. And, well, that’s it. Apart from… the work they produced, both the posters and the presentations, was top notch. Fantastic. I couldn’t have asked for more.

A line in one of the posters…

‘Alternatively, it could suggest that bus[es] are relatively cheap’

That’s two words from recent modules… they’re learning! BOOM!

It was the presentations that really impressed me. They did a poster presentation activity where other teachers and staff came in and questioned the students about their work. It’s mad how much they bought into the task… I was convinced this topic was going to fall flat but, wow, they really went for it. I’d never have been that confident when I was a teen, no way.

To be fair though, there’s something about this class. Every now and then you just get a group of students that are enthusiastic, responsive, inquisitive, all that. Of course I love teaching in general, but with classes like this one it’s not really a job. I genuinely get excited about stepping into class and working with this bunch! And there they are at the end of class, thanking ME for the lesson and Thai ‘wai-ing’ ME. Roll on next Saturday!

Categories: General, reflections

Tags: #eltwhiteboard, British Council, British Council Bangkok, describing graphs, elt, great students, love teaching, reflections, tefl, Thai learners