Spanish class with Dr. Liam Printer

Reflecting on how Dr. Liam Printer runs his Spanish classroom at International School of Lausanne.

And the next stage of my Churchill Fellowship begins! I’ve arrived in Lausanne in Switzerland to spend two weeks observing lessons and learning from teachers at the International School of Lausanne. As I write this in the staff room, I’m looking out at the stunning views over lake Geneva with the mountains in the distance, which I can only imagine is is a great antidote to the stress and busyness the average teacher can experience!

The International School of Lausanne is an independent school and has just under 1000 students aged 3-18 years old. The working language is English but the school offers a bilingual French programme where students can take subjects in French as well as English. The school follows the International Baccalaureate programme (Middle Years Programme and Diploma Programme) with students taking final exams in year 13 before they leave the school.

International School Lausanne, Switzerland

The reason I’ve ended up in Lausanne is a Spanish teacher called Dr. Liam Printer. Liam and I attended the Agen Workshop together last summer, and I’ve also done online training sessions with him in the past. Liam’s podcast  The Motivated Classroom was a big inspiration for me. It helped me rethink my own practice, and led me to ask bigger questions about how I can teach a language in a way that is accessible, enjoyable and most of all, effective. The podcast is an amazing source of CPD for languages teachers and you can check it out here.

This morning I observed my first Spanish lessons with Liam, which was wonderful. Liam takes a Comprehensible Input (CI) approach and tailors his lessons so that his students get optimal input in Spanish. He uses the target language 90%+ of the time, so students are getting lots of lots of input that they understand from context. I would describe Liam’s teaching style as teacher-led yet extremely interactive. Liam is constantly modeling language, asking lots of questions, and getting to know his students well by genuinely communicating with them about their lives and their interests. The sense of connection in the classroom is beautiful to see.

Like Adriana Ramírez’s classroom in Vancouver, Liam’s classroom had the desks pushed to the side with students sitting in chairs and no desk in front of them (although he tells me this isn’t always the case as he likes to have variety). The concept of a deskless classroom was new to me, but having seen it in Vancouver as well as here Lausanne, I think it has some advantages. First, as there is nothing standing between students and the teacher, there is a greater sense of connection. Secondly, pupils have nowhere to hide, and communication seems more natural and spontaneous. For a lesson where there is lots of listening and speaking, I think the deskless classroom works well. If students need to write, they can always move to the side of the room, as Liam had them do today when they were writing some new words from the conversation in their books.

Liam’s classes run like a Swiss watch. His pacing is excellent, all tasks have an assigned time limit, and students are given a countdown when time is nearly up. There’s a lot of variety in the class: students get up and move around to swap places, work with a partner or do actions to remember key vocabulary (this is sometimes called TPR – Total Physical Response – and is a great way to learn new vocabulary).

Liam’s use of ritual gives a real sense of structure and flow to the class. Students are greeted at the door and pick up a mini-white board and pen as they enter the classroom. Class starts with 5 minutes (10 minutes in longer classes) of silent reading of a graded novel that students have chosen – this settles the atmosphere, allows students to get “in the zone” and most importantly, increases the amount of input they get in Spanish. It was also lovely to see many of them with their noses in an Adriana Ramírez novel, having just been in her class in Vancouver. While students are reading, Liam models reading at the front of the class by reading his own book. Beginning class in this way in a great way of building regular reading into a curriculum – and we know from research that this is so important when learning a language (check out my previous blog entries on extensive reading).

Liam doesn’t use a traditional textbook in his classes, prefering instead to give his students lots of input and interaction through class talk, stories, reading and lots and lots of questioning. In the Spanish lesson I observed, he used various grammar structures and tenses, as well as vocabulary for the current topic, without using a textbook. The freedom of not using a textbook meant that interesting input could come from interactions with the students. At one point, a joke about a pupil with an imaginary sore back provided the opportunity to talk about going to the hospital and body parts, something that fitted well into the current topic.

I’m hoping to come back to textbooks in a future blog post, as it’s quite a big issue for us language teachers and requires a bit more space…

Over the next week I’m looking forward to learning how Liam builds and plans a curriculum using a CI approach. I’ll also be looking in more detail at some of the key CI techniques teachers use in their lessons, such as MovieTalk and Special Person Interviews.