Go With The Flow (Part 2 — The Dogme Experiments: The Beach Party)
By Scott Donald
In the previous article, I defined Dogme and presented the idea that the approach could be put on a scale. At one end, Dogme could be embraced simply by engaging more with students’ lives and opinions. And at the other, we would have Hardcore Dogme (sometimes referred to as Deep-end Dogme), which would involve giving over your entire lesson to reactive teaching. In this article, I share the first of two occasions where I’ve tried this more extreme approach.
First, some housekeeping
I talked a bit about how Dogme had become a dirty word in ELT in my last article, and gave examples where it had met with some considerable resistance. I’d like to add something that occurred to me after writing, which is the issue of branding. I joked about how Dogme sounds a bit risqué and that it has often led to some giggling at my talks, but perhaps this is part of why it hasn’t been taken seriously.
As you may know, the name Dogme is taken from the experimental Danish film movement started by controversial director Lars Von Trier. The problem with this is…. well read that last sentence again. Does that sound like something that your average school owner or manager is going to encourage as a teaching method?
I once offered a Director of Studies a list of Professional Development sessions that I was happy to run for the school’s Friday seminars. I suggested an introductory talk on Dogme, and I also suggested a talk about Adrian Underhill and Jim Scrivener’s Demand High (another teaching ‘approach’). In some ways, I can totally understand why my DOS immediately went for the latter. ‘Our teachers are developing professionally through the funny-sounding experimental Danish film approach’, or by ‘Demanding High of their students’. Which one sounds more legit? Which one would appeal to you more if you were looking at them on a programme at a teaching conference.
Sure, I can imagine the above description of Dogme might appeal to a certain group of teachers, but I can certainly see why others would avoid it. In fact, it had me wondering whether the title of Teaching Unplugged (the book based on the approach) was deliberately chosen to steer people from the name Dogme. And sure enough, a little rummage online revealed I wasn’t the only one who felt like this, and that Thornbury himself had agreed that the name Dogme was off-putting, referring to it as daft and like Frankenstein’s monster (his co-author, Meddings, has said similar too).
So there we have it, the importance of branding. Do it right, and you’ll become a household name.
Do it wrong, and you’ll be stuck trying to make a snappy logo for a blog you hastily titled A Little More Action Research.
I regret nothing.
The experiments
Experiment 1: the beach party
The first thing I learned from this experiment was: videoing yourself teaching is one of the most terrifying, but profoundly useful things you can do to improve your teaching. If you think you know what kind of teacher you are, what kind of person you are, believe me: you don’t know until you’ve watched a video of yourself teaching.
Is that what my hair actually looks like?
What am I doing with my face?
Why do I keep saying ‘like’? That’s like so annoying…
Aside from these more frivolous observations, I noticed tonnes of other practical things about my teaching. Making the video has also preserved this lesson so explicitly in my mind, that I could give a detailed description of it now, without even looking at the video. Seriously, take a trip to the hairdresser’s and video your next lesson.
The reason I was going to such extreme lengths of self-analysis was: the DELTA course. This was 2013, I was living in Hungary. and I was knee-deep in one of the hardest academic challenges of my life. If you are considering doing it, I’ll offer you some mild relief: during the course, while you are being berated by language analysis, and screaming at your essays to try and see if that will help reduce the word count, the tutors offer you a bit of fun. A lifeline of light relief in the form of the Experimental Practice. The idea is for you to choose a less common teaching approach, give it a go, and reflect on it.
Some teachers opt for the sturdy Task-based Learning approach, and the wackier ones go for something a little more unusual, like Suggestopedia (don’t ask), or Dogme. I was feeling wacky…
What follows is a description of the experiment, taken from my retrospective lesson plan.
So far, nothing special…
Szilvia was my strongest student, and wasn’t particularly shy in class. I was, therefore, quite surprised that it took around seven minutes of small talk before she mentioned her birthday the previous day. I’m not suggesting that every student’s birthday be a focal point for every lesson, but I do think it’s interesting that it took so long before she felt that this was something worth telling the class.
At this point, an idea started to form in my head. The strong reaction to the idea of childish birthday parties was clearly something I could exploit:
Then, I put their ideas up on the board and had them plan their ideal non-childish birthday parties using a pyramid discussion (details of this set-up can be found here).
As I monitored I noticed that most students were making suggestions to each other by giving one-word suggestions, e.g. beach party? drinks? barbecue?. Of course, in some ways, this is fine, but it’s perhaps a little on the lazy side for B2 students, and it certainly isn’t going to impress any examiners. I ran it through my how-would-I-say-it filter and decided on some nice functional exponents I could teach (rather than constraining myself to a particular grammar).
On reflection, I’d now change a few things here. The labelling of the of the stage ‘Round It Off’ isn’t quite right, but a botched attempt at me trying to apply the stages of the lesson ideas in Teaching Unplugged to my own lesson.
Secondly, the idea of rating them from strongest to weakest may have some merit, but it would have perhaps been cleaner just to check that they knew need was stronger than should. Finally, the student’s error why don’t we have invite topless girls was really my fault. Not the idea, (which, had me stuttering and stammering as I tried to decide the correct way to respond), but the fact he said have invite. To help prevent this error (and similar ones) occurring, I should have written up some form with the exponents, e.g. Why don’t + present simple.
Honestly, I think I was afraid of messing up the grammar in front of my colleagues, who were sitting at the back of the lesson and knew way more about grammar than I did. The lesson finished on a positive note, with all the students agreeing on one final beach party plan which included: no parents, a big barbecue and the rather unappealing idea of playing tag with sharks. The students then present their ideas to me and the other observers
Did the students enjoy the lesson or find it useful? Well, we can tell, because I had to collect data on the lesson for my assignment.
Ignoring that awful leading question at the start (come on, please, tell me how good it was!?), I think it’s safe to conclude that the students enjoyed the lesson. In fact, when we reviewed all our lessons to help me plan for the next year, the beach party lesson was one of the most popular. From the comments I recorded above, I think Helga’s is particularly apposite It was better because we didn’t learn, we just spoke in English. I think this demonstrates how subtle the learning can be in a Dogme lesson and why it might be particularly useful with young learners or those averse to more traditional teaching styles.
That’s not to say the students were ready for me to torch the coursebook and stop planning lessons. Many of the students were quite mature for their age and when asked about the coursebook, most wrote that they found it useful, and felt that Dogme-style lessons could perhaps play a supplementary role to the syllabus.
So where does that leave us with Hardcore Dogme? Well, I’m going to leave further conclusions for my follow-up article about my more recent experiment with the approach, but I’ll leave you with this — a final bit of data from The Beach Party class.
While I may not be proud of this dated looking pie chart, I like what it indicates, which is that I only spoke at my students for a fraction of the lesson. I spoke with them for about a third of it, and they spoke with each other for just under two thirds. If I could get that level of student participation in every speaking lesson, I would be a very happy man.
