Process, not Product, in Team Teaching Practice

It’s been an amazing week or so since Otis, Scott, Rumi and I started working together on a practice lesson. I’m pretty sure we’ve learned more in the process of putting together this simple lesson than our “students” could possibly learn from participating in it. So, I thought I’d share the process we’ve been through.

Most of our EVO tours have been to places that require a certain level of language competence. Explaining technical problems, understanding spoken instructions without nonverbal support, initiating conversation with a stranger, negotiating a group activity–these can all be pretty daunting to an elementary or even intermediate student. So, I was curious to see if we could create a lesson that was “controlled” enough to be manageable for less advanced language learners, that would require them to use English to complete a task, but that wouldn’t lose the uncontrolled, multi-variabled beauty that is SL. That was our starting point.

Our first draft was a lesson that looked a lot like a RL lesson reviewing food categories and location vocabulary–very common stuff. Without the resources of a Language Lab or university language sim, it didn’t make sense to try to introduce new language. Not the most effective use of class time (assuming we had real language students) or of SL’s possibilities.

We had students going to one location to collect free food, and then TPing to another (sandbox) location to rez the food on a table and move it around. We tried to do it, and discovered that if I collected the food and put it on the table, only I could move it around. A lovely, if unexpected, lesson on what “full permission” really means. We had to learn how to change permissions so anyone in a group could move the food since this was supposed to be a collaborative activity. We also discovered one of the best things about SL: if you’ve made a lot of friends, then there’s almost always someone in world who knows how to do what you’re trying to do (Thanks, Nick!).

Then, there was the entire challenge of getting any group of people from one location to the next via TP. Obviously, it can be done–we do it at every event, eventually, with varying degrees of success. But, we didn’t want to spend our entire lesson time trying to gather our students at the second site. Again, not the best use of class time.

The second draft had us in one location, with food arrayed on a table to choose from. We had to let go of the category idea at this point, because without putting in a lot of time (and some L$) we were stuck with what food we had that could be made fully permissable. Next, we had to figure out how to link the foods with the table, and to make them also copiable to save us from having to lay out multiples of each food on the day of the lesson, and having to rez the table and each item of food individually. (I use “we” loosely, because we’ve all worked on different skills and parts of the lesson–the beauty of having a team!) And of course, we had to practice using editing tools to move and rotate the items before we could ask students to do the same. Next up was how to give instructions that were clear enough that they would allow students to focus on the task rather than trying to figure out what we wanted them to do. Voice is one channel, but not always the most reliable one in SL. We considered passing one member of each group a notecard and asking them to share it, but that seemed to fall into the same category as asking group members to TP to a new location. Both tasks could be great in a lesson, but they would add a level of complexity and make the lesson longer, not necessarily better. We were trying to stay within 30 minutes.

Now we had new questions for ourselves: How do we put people in groups? How will they know where to work and who else is in their group? Should we set up the physical location so that groups don’t have to listen to chatter from other groups (although isolating information from noise is also a valuable skill)? How could we do that? How can we get information for several stages of an activity to students? How best to back up voice instructions. So, we were off on another treasure hunt trying to find the tools that would do what we wanted to do, trying to figure out how to make them do that, and then trying them out on each other to be sure they did what we thought they were going to do. For now (this is still a work in progress, and Friday is two days away), we have color coded tables, floating cubes above to make the tables easier to spot at a distance, and badges for group members. The badges are currently worn on the chest because on left pectoral they become doughnuts outlining a particular part of female avatar anatomy–a problem we decided to work around rather than trying to learn how to fix. We also have a notecard reader, a speakeasy hud, two (yes, two!) notecard givers, and a notecard taker.

I’m still in shock that I can to refer to all these bits of SL technology and know what I’m talking about. Otis, Rumi and I had never been in SL before this EVO, and even two weeks ago I wouldn’t have had a clue. Never underestimate the value of a real task to motivate learners (us!).

At this point, we realized that we no longer had a language lesson set in Second Life. We had a Second Life lesson practicing language.

For the third draft, we split the objectives into language objectives and SL skill objectives, to see what we were actually asking students to do. We used the multiple intelligences to check that we had enough variety in the lesson. (Obviously, we could have used Bloom’s or any other taxonomy to equal benefit, but we’d recently been to the MI sim, and liked it!)

That brings me to now. We’re still trying out our tools and making sure they’re going to work the way we think they will. We’re trying to walk through our own steps to see what we’ve missed. We found a back up location just in case someone else is having a class in the sandbox on Friday. And we know that something else that we haven’t anticipated will probably go wrong during class. That’s okay–it’s all part of the process

If you want to see the toys we’ve been playing with, I’ve left them set up at my campsite. If you touch the mailbox, you can get a copy of our (current) lesson plan, and if you touch the treasure chest, you can get the second set of instructions (first set is on the notecard reader) and if you touch the pink and yellow box, you can get a copy of our feedback survey. The objects (should be) fully copiable, so please do take a copy if you like.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Virtlantis/24`/93/20/?title=Lynn%27s%20Campsite

This has been very long-winded, I know! I’ll close with just a little reflection on what I believe are some advantages of Second Life for teachers:

1. Foreign language as a subject has no defined content (grammar doesn’t count unless you’re studying to be a teacher). Second Life provides content, whether you practice language as you do SL tasks or whether you visit a virtual city in the target language.

2. SL is a great place to learn how to communicate more effectively as a teacher, whether you teach in SL or not. When you can’t just walk around the table to show your student how to fix something, you’d best learn how to explain clearly so that you don’t both get frustrated. Skills that are equally important in RL classrooms, but easier to finesse when you have face-to-face communication.

3. Teachers like to talk about student autonomy. SL does it. No matter how excellent I become at explaining how to toggle the talk button, my student has to do the toggling. And if I haven’t explained satisfactorily, or if he doesn’t know what toggle means, or doesn’t see the button, he has to speak up. I can’t see the bewildered look and jump in to help. Students learn how to get information they need to succeed at a task.

4. Thanks to the social nature of SL, it’s like having a virtual teacher’s lounge on my laptop. Especially for those of us who are relatively isolated in terms of teacher development, this is a godsend. I can attend workshops and conferences without having to find the time and money to fly half way around the world. I do wish I lived 3 hours earlier or later than I do, so I could attend SLexperiments meetings, but I can at still read the wiki post-meeting.