Creative ways to practise writing, reading and translation skills: Google Earth

This week has been one of those weeks were more traditional activities and the latest cutting edge technology have merged to inspire me!  This morning I saw on Twitter a great writing game, shared by Erin Gray, called "Capture the flag"  to revise for the fast approaching GCSE writing exam. It goes like this: 

Divide your class in 6/8 teams. For the game you will need a set of coloured flags, say 12, per team.  Print your cards and stick them on the board, as shown by Erin on her twitter post picture: 

Give each team a list of typical GCSE questions/bullet points. Students, in teams, write a paragraph for each given question. Once their paragraph is written, they must come to the teacher who checks the paragraph for any mistakes and if correct, students are allowed to pick any flag belonging to any team from the board. If the paragraph is not correct, they must go back to their seats and correct it. 

At the end of the session, points are given to each coloured flag, (see picture below from Erin Gray posted on twitter) so the team with most points wins the game. As Erin points out, it is a mixture between a running translation activity and a group game with the add-on of practising writing skills!

I love the game as it is! Thank you, Erin. However, after attending the third webinar on Joe Dale's series on AI for MFL teachers, and being a BIG fan of Google Earth and Wheel of Names tasks, I was inspired to combine these two tools with Erin's concept into one activity. This is the result

Writing Quest around Barcelona using Google Earth and Wheel of Names

I created a project in Google Earth based on a Writing Quest around Barcelona. Inspired by Joe Dale, I used Chat GPT to suggest 10 famous landmarks in Barcelona and to provide me with a description of such places in Spanish at GCSE level. I added the places suggested by Chat GTP and their description information to my Google Earth project. 

Then, I went to Wheel of Names and created a wheel with the GCSE questions in relation to Theme 1 for AQA GCSE Spanish (it could have been any theme and I could have used Chat GPT to give me a suggestion of questions, but I had my own). I went back to my Google Earth project and added the link to my wheel of names, at the end of each landmark description. 

This is the result :  Google Earth Writing Quest around Barcelona 

It works like this:

1. Divide the class in 6/8 teams like the original Erin's game

2. Have the sets of coloured flags like Erin suggests, stuck on the board. One set per team.

2. Share the Google Earth link with students via Onenote or Google Classroom

3. Students in teams, you could this in pairs or threes too, open the Google Earth presentation, go to the different places and do two things: 

         a. Translate into English the description of the landmark they are seeing (Reading)

         b. Click on the Wheel of Names link, spin the wheel and write a big paragraph on the  selected question for Theme 1. They must do this without looking at notes. (Writing)

4. One member of the team must go to the teacher to check their writing is correct

5. If correct, like in Erin's game, they pick up a flag from the board from any other team. If mistakes are found, they must go back to their team and revise their paragraph.

6. They continue with the next landmark in the presentation.

I have included 10 landmarks, meaning, 10 translations and writing 10 paragraphs. The translations include nice, new vocabulary, which I will ask students/teams finishing early, to identify and add to their personalised Random Quizlets. 

The whole activity took me 10 minutes to design thanks to Chat GPT. The Wheel of Names can be reused in other retrieval practice tasks for self testing, either for writing or oral purposes. In fact I have a wheel of names for each AQA Theme for this purpose:

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 1

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 2

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 3

The game, adding Google Earth Projects, adds a cultural important element: a virtual visit to Barcelona. If done periodically, you can show different cities where the target language is spoken! Students will need to speak in Spanish when talking among them: real purpose for the activity, which helps motivation!

I hope the idea is clear and thank you again, to Erin and Joe for their inspiration today!

Scaffolds and Lifts: adaptive teaching in the mixed ability MFL classroom

Today I want to talk about having high expectations, differentiation in a meaningful and stress free way, and adaptive teaching: the new differentiation in the classroom.

When I trained in 1999 differentiation was already a hot topic and I remember extremely well how I had to provide evidence of specific and different tasks for at least three levels of learning in the classroom. I basically planned the same task in three versions corresponding to levels: high, medium, low and would pre-determined who would fit each level, hence the adaptation of my worksheets. It was a nightmare to run and to photocopy!

We have moved away from this philosophy and over the years I have stuck to the concept of Anchoring in Challenge (from Making Every lesson Count) meaning, pitching high and expect ALL the students to reach the top of our expectations. To achieve this, we must provide scaffolds for those who need it and lifts for the more able students, making it clear that the expectation is that everyone reaches the top at their own pace. 

How to manage a mixed ability classroom in practice?

They key is to check for understanding constantly, and adapt our teaching accordingly within the lessons, using our repertoire of scaffolds and lifts. This means preparing one activity (not multiple versions of the same task) but leading students to the top, skilfully, through our scaffolds via the use of questions and whole class involvement. It’s about spinning the plates, reacting to what you see and changing our lesson plan if needed, on our feet.

Having Sentence Builders in a booklet format (for the whole academic year) has been instrumental in providing me with the tool to easily scaffold and lift any task. 

Let me show you how I adapt my teaching using scaffolds and lifts with different activities.

Dictation activities

I always carry out these activities with MWBs, an easy way to check for understanding at all times. I start dictating small sentences, repeated very slowly and gradually move to longer utterances at increased speed. When checking for understanding with MWBs, I can see at a glance, how many students could carry out the dictation easily and who struggled. Based on this information, I continue dictating sentences, but will direct some students to have their Sentence Builders booklet in front of them while I will ask others to take it away. I go back to shorter sentences after two longer ones and back to a challenged utterance. After increasing my speed of dictation, I go back to short utterances again and back to longer sentences at different speeds. I do this as a response of what I see in the MWBs. I adapt to what students produce, constantly. 

I may start with a gapped dictation (only some words are missing, basically a fill in the gaps type of activity) to move to a fill in the gaps without gaps (words are missing but without gaps and students have to listen carefully for the word missing in specific spots) and back to fill in the gaps again to be back to dictation without gaps, all in the same text. 

I can also dictate deliberate grammatical, lexical or pronunciation mistakes and can use cold calling to ask students if they spot something dodgy. 

When carrying out dictation activities and some of my students finish quickly while others are still writing, I may ask the faster learners to translate the sentence into English or to extend it using vocabulary from a past topic. I will do this on the spot, adapting to each child’s needs at that moment. 

Scaffolded output practice

When carrying out language activities involving scaffolded production of the learned topic, I normally start with simple translations from English into TL, again using MWBs, wheel of names works wonders for this and students will get points (they keep a tally on their MWB) for each correct sentence they translate. I give them thinking time and writing time, then I will check answers: I may have to ask some students to revise their sentences:  can you spot a mistake? If all correct I can ask students to extend their sentence with something they can think of on the spot. I may use initials in the activity and after a while just initials without the English support to go back to short translations. I may ask some students to stop writing and tell me the sentence orally while others write it. 

Another strategy is to give prompts and students to write/say a sentence based on this. Some students may write something short, others something long. I can push all students to include different tenses and one or more magical powers, we have 5! See this post for the Magical 5 Powers.

In oral, pair work activities I move around the classroom, I redirect students where needed, to our Sentence Booklets, while I remove the booklet from others. I can ask challenging/reinforcing questions to different students while moving around: why did you choose that ending? How would you say....? Can you extend your answers so you speak for an en extra 10 seconds?  While moving around, I take notes of mistakes, answers and we analyse them, reflecting on the students' work at the end of the activity. While walking around, I may decide that students need extra practice with verbs in the past or the future or in pronouncing specific sounds and will plan a subsequent lesson accordingly.

Fluent Practice (Mastery of concepts: spontaneity)

At this stage, I can push students to speak faster and faster and more spontaneously: talk 2 minutes about a topic with your partner/or recording yourself. Then, say the same information now in 1:30 minutes finally in 1 minute. Speed dating, Relay Races and any oral activities with time limit are great! Again, I would be walking around, directing students to their SB booklets if needed. 

If doing written creative practice, I would model the thinking process first and we would write a model answer together, then on their own or in pairs using our 5 Magical Powers sheet as a scaffold, where needed, but wouldn’t allow the use of their SB booklet: think, think what you can say instead or what you actually can remember! 

This is differentiation by outcome, a sin when I trained, as that wasn’t considered real differentiation. I disagree! Working at your own level, receiving scaffolds or lifts and allowing you to reach the top with skilful guidance is the way forward and that is, differentiation by outcome, not by task as ALL students are working towards the same target with the same task at their own pace with the expert guidance of their teacher.

It is about having high expectations for all!!! 

The new, new kid on the Block (and it's here to stay): ChatGPT

I have not been blogging a lot recently, mainly because I have been busy decorating our new house in Oxford but also because I get inspiration from my students and at the moment I am not teaching, although actively looking for the right job for me. 

However, I got very, very excited with the last TILT webinar on Tuesday 21st February on ChatGPT (thank you to Helen Myers and Joe Dale for the series). I have been playing with it in hypothetical situations but it was truly inspirational to listen to all the wonderful contributors that shared ideas on how to use the AI tool in a languages context. 

Julia Morris, who presented for an hour, was great, but also all the presenters in the TeachMeet session afterwards: Sandra Aktas, Sonja Fredizzi, Jerome Nogues, Sarah Shooter, François Stalder, Steve Morgan, Aubrey Swisher, Vincent Everett, Caroline Schlegel and Claudia Elliott. Apologies if I missed someone, you were all great!

To start with, I would recommend anyone interested in ChatGPT to watch the free webinar here

However, I thought I would write a post giving a summary of the activities that I particularly loved from everything shared by these wonderful educators, using it too, as a self-reflection tool! 

 ChatGPT is free, although there's a premium version. To use use it, you just need to open an account. Please, be mindful that you need to be 18+ to open an account. Children under 18 need parental permission, so I would not use ask my KS3/KS4 students to open an account and use it themselves, at the moment, in lessons. 

The way I can see this working for me is to use the chatbot as a resource generator, although ALevel students and GCSE students at home, with parental permission, can also use it to practise their linguistic skills directly with the chatbot.

My favourite activities with ChatGPT 

1. Asking ChatGPT to write any text format: dialogue, a story, a typical exam question and command it to create reading comprehension questions about the texts in TL or English + answers. The key thing is to be very specific with with your command: " write a dialogue of a 14 year old in a train station in German" (example from Julia Morris) or "write a typical GCSE 150 words text on holidays in Spanish using present, past and future and generate 6 context questions about the text with answers". 

2. Asking ChatGPT to write a text but, commanding it following Julia's advice, to write each paragraph in a box with a left side in the TL and the right side in English.  This would be ideal to create a spot the difference activity if you modify the TL or English texts slightly. I particularly liked François Stalder's idea to ask students to read the generated text using the "read aloud" Chrome extension feature or the Reading Coach in Microsoft Teams.

3. Once you have your text, students can translate the text into TL or from TL.

4. You can ask ChatGPT to write a text and use it as a typical model writing answer for a GCSE exam, which you can analyse with your students. It would be great to ask the chatbot, to use specific vocabulary, structures or tenses. I actually asked ChatGPT to write an essay on La Casa de Bernarda Alba, one of the A Level texts we used in our school, on Bernarda Alba: ¿víctima o verdugo?. Although not perfect, the text presented a good starting point to write an essay and have a discussion with students. I would also use it to complement it with further ideas from my students: perfect for a rewrite to improve type of activity. 

5. You can ask ChatGPT to generate a vocabulary list in a table in the TL with an English translation. I thought this would be great for A Level teaching to generate a list of vocabulary on more abstract topics. 

6. Another great idea shared by Julia was to use ChatGPT to summarise a text taken from the internet, for example, from a TL/English newspaper, to make it accessible to students. You can command it "to make it accessible to a 12/13 year old reader".

7. You can ask ChatGPT to create a gap fill activity, commanding it to take a specific number of nouns/verbs/adjectives/conjunctions out. For this activity you can copy and paste a text you already have or ask the chatbot to product the text in the first instance. 

8. You can ask ChatGPT to create Quiz/MCQ based on a text + answers.

9. You can ask ChatGPT to pretend to have a conversation with you on any topic. This is great for A Level students! Below you can find a little extract of a conversation on Tolerance in Spain, where I play the part of an average A Level student. Although not perfect, I can train ChatGPT to practise a more natural conversation: ask me questions, one by one. At the end the chatbot gives me lots of information on Franco etc.. which, is not natural and not analytical enough, but very useful to spark ideas in the students. 

10. Ask ChatGPT to give you typical questions + answers for ALevel on a particular topic, the more specific the better! (it can also be for GCSE) and then you can mix these up and ask students to match up the questions to the answers. This was a great idea from Sandra Aktas.

11.Ask ChatGPT to produce Narrow Readings: create a text about Paco who is 15 and he likes...  then you can ask it create a very similar text about Rosa, who is 13 and ask it to generate a find who type of activity based on the texts. Great ideas from Sonja Fredizzi and Sarah Shooter. 

12. François Stalder suggested to copy and paste a text generated by students and command ChatGPT to correct the mistakes in the text and provide an explanation for them. I thought this was great for marking!

13. I also loved Jerome Nogues' idea of getting the transcript from an audio/video, using Word, and then, generate questions on the transcript using ChatGPT, or generate grammatical questions based on the text too. Appsmashing at its best!!!

14. Following the Appsmashing tendency, the following Steve Morgan's idea was fab. He suggested to get text from a picture (maybe from a textbook?) using Onenote, to ask ChatGPT to tidy up the text (when extracting text from a picture the format is all over the place, and it can take ages to tidy it up!). Then we can command it to write questions based on the text. Finally, we can go to www.fromtexttospeech.com and turn the text into an audio file, with listening comprehension questions! I thought this was genius as finding audio material can be difficult, so this way, we generate the audio + the questions to go with it. 

15. I loved Aubrey Swisher and Caroline Schlegel's suggestion of using ChatGPT to generate cultural comparison questions for students. 

16. Finally, I loved Claudia Elliott’s idea to ask ChatGPT to create comprehensible input simple stories using emojis! What a great way of making the text more accessible and fun!

There were more ideas, indeed, so watch the video,  and a second part to this webinar will take place on Tuesday 28th February when Julia will share more little gems with us but what a wonderful collection of tasks! Finally, use this list of good prompts, curated by Joe Dale, to help you using commands for our new friend on the block, ChatGPT. 

As it was repeated over the webinar, please be mindful that ChatGPT is not fully 100% accurate, so you will need to check your texts for mistakes, its cultural understanding can be limited, as Vincent Everett pointed out, and you will need keep prompting, to eventually get the final product you want, like training a digital pet!

Dictation: the new (really?) kid on the block. 9 activities.

Happy new year everyone! As the new term has started and inspired by Suzi Bewell, I thought I would write a small post about my favourite Dictation activities. Dictation has become fashionable lately, as it was revealed that it would be part of the new GCSE exam tasks. However, I know that many teachers have been using Dictation tasks for years, as part of the modelling stage of teaching a topic; as a listening activity led by the teacher, and later, by the pupils themselves. 

Dictation is a fantastic activity to include in your repertoire of listening activities as it practises the bottom-up processing skills involved in listening: phonemic, syllabic, segmenting, lexical and syntactic processing skills, as outlined in the book Breaking the Sound Barrier, which I thorough recommend, by Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith. 

Dictations tend to be carried out by us, the teachers, which means that we can adapt the speed of the utterances, the intonation or can focus on segmenting activities, which students find particularly difficult, as liaison/sinalefa phenomena are part of the spoken discourse. It allows teachers to focus on a particular grammatical structure or specific sounds and how these correspond to given graphemes. 

I personally do not agree that dictation should be an assessment element of the GCSE exam, as pure grammar activities are not (these are assessed implicitly via writing/speaking skills). I see dictation as a first scaffolded, learning step into the learning journey, allowing modelling the language to students, and an activity which should be present in all MFL classrooms at all Levels!

These are my 9 favourite, high impact Dictation activities which students particularly enjoy in my lessons. To carry out these dictations, I use mainly Mini Whiteboards:

Classic dictation

This involves the dictation of small sentences/paragraphs after language has been introduced to students via chorus repetition. I start slowly, making clear pauses between words, to quickly increase speed and start joining words via liaison. Students just write in the TL what they hear and show me after I count 1,2,3. As I can check for understanding immediately, I can adapt my dictations to the students' responses.

Mistaken dictation

This is a classical dictation activity but with deliberate grammatical mistakes (it could also be pronunciation mistakes or any type of error!) which the students must spot. This is a great activity, again, to test whether students have assimilated a particular grammatical rule.

Delayed dictation

This type of dictation, originally from Gianfranco Conti, is great for students with poor working memory processing. The idea is to dictate an utterance, like in the classic dictation, but students are not allowed to write the heard material until after 7-10 seconds. During these seconds, students need to try to memorise the heard utterance by mentally repeating to themselves in their heads. Students keep their hands in their heads while they do this and when I say "now", they write the sentence. 

Random dictation

This involves dictating random sentences that if put in order will make up a paragraph. After dictating the sentences, students, in pairs, rearrange the sentences in order to form the original paragraph. I love this activity because it can lead to translating the paragraph, improving it or just using as a model to create a new one.

Running dictation

A classic that works every time! Students work in pairs. Several texts are displayed around the room, one for each pair. One student, the scriber, remains sitting while their partner runs to one of the texts, memorises a sentence, runs back to their partner and dictates the memorised sentence, which the scriber writes down. The fastest couple to rewrite the text on the wall, is the winner! After they dictate the text, students can then translate it into English, improve it, use it as a model etc..

Opinion dictation

Students draw three columns in their MWB: Yes/No/I don't mind. The teacher says sentences and students write them in the correspondent column depending if they like what the statement says or they agree with it, or if they don't or they don't mind. I love this activity as it adds an element of personal choice. Similarly, the activity leads nicely to an oral task, where students talk about what they like/dislike/agree or disagree according to their choices. This activity also leads to reported speech sentences: "my friend says that he/she likes...."

Dictogloss

Dictogloss is a dictation activity where learners are required to reconstruct a short text by listening and noting down key words, which are then used as a base for reconstruction. I love this activity because it is a multiple skills and systems activity. Learners practise listening, writing and speaking (by working in groups) and use vocabulary, grammar and discourse systems in order to complete the task.

I sometimes carry out the activity doing the dictation myself but my favourite mode is when students work in small groups or pairs as follows:

1. One student reads a text prepared by me based on the Sentence Builders we are working on and will take notes in English (not literal translation)

2. Working in pairs, student one, using their English notes, will reconstruct/dictate the text in Spanish to student two. Student two will  write in Spanish the text they hear. As a final task, both students will look at the original text and compare both versions.  

I do use this at all levels by adapting a given text. An example on the topic of Jobs is below for a Y11 class. I tend to prepare two texts so all students have the chance to be speakers! Students then exchange information, this way Dictogloss becomes an information gap activity.

Information Gap dictation

This dictation is to be done by the students in pairs. Students have two texts/ list of sentences with missing bits in them but by listening to their partner, they can fill in the gaps in their respective texts.

Sentence 1 for Student A:

Suelo _______ con mis _________ los _______ de ______ porque ____ ayuda a ______

Sentence 1 for Student B:

_____ salir ___ _____ amigos ____ fines ___ semana ____ me ____ ___ relajarme

Buzzed dictation

You will need a buzzer for this activity.  The teacher dictates sentences or a paragraph to the students, which they write in MWBs, every so often the teacher presses the buzzer and the students need to write a word that makes sense in the given context, to replace the buzz. At the end of the activity, we look at the different options that students have written. 

Spinning the plates: Responsive and Adaptive teaching in the mixed MFL classroom

I have not been posting recently, as I have been busy moving to Oxford. As I am having a Christmas break, I thought I would write something on how adaptive and responsive teaching looks like in the real classroom. The idea of differentiating by multiple tasks being used in the classroom at once, is long considered obsolete as it is time consuming and so difficult to implement successfully! Instead, we talk about adaptive/responsive teaching embedded in a culture of anchoring in challenge and providing scaffolds.

Anchoring in challenge, a term used by Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby in their book Making every lesson count, is well rooted in my teaching philosophy:  having high expectations for ALL students and pitching high, getting them ready for their best performance ever and making them believe that they can aspire to and achieve their personal best. As we pitch high, we provide the foundations for a I can attitude and we scaffold activities to support students to reach the same final goal.  To achieve this, sentence builders, underpinned by a lexicogrammar approach is key, as all students have got the ingredients to communicate and become fluent at the highest level, while providing a clear scaffolded structure to reach spontaneity. 

Adaptive teaching is about planning high ability core activities that are scaffolded by us, in response to our students’ answers, skilfully, through checking for understanding techniques, to cater for all abilities. It’s like a lift, that we elevate, when necessary, to stretch all students, or take down, to reinforce misconceptions from some students and to provide scaffolds for some, in order to immediately go up again, to stretch students straight away. 

How is this done in practice? 

Modelling stage

Through dictation activities where we move from dictating very short sentences to longer ones, using MWBs, to constantly check for understanding and react appropriately. In this type of activities, varying the speed of the utterances is also key to adapt input to the students’ demands: 

I start saying sentences very slowly, increasing the speed and the length of the utterance, as the activity progresses, to move back to a slower speed, again, if some students cannot cope well and go back to being faster again. We may need just a lesson for modelling but we may need two or even three if that is what our students need: Responsive teaching.

Modelling activities  are also great opportunities to check for understanding and identifying gaps in knowledge. I, personally, do this via grammar dictation, which is a normal dictation but with deliberate grammatical mistakes of stubborn, classical errors which students must spot themselves or via our skilful questioning: 

Is this sentence correct? Why? What would  be the correct way? Let’s revise adjective agreement! Can you give me examples of this rule applied correctly? 

For a wide range of modelling activities visit this blogpost. 

Scaffolded production 

At this stage, students must start producing the language themselves via structured and scaffolded practice. A this level, checking for understanding and carrying out responsive teaching, may be trickier as, we stop using MWBs and students start working in pairs or move around the room. It is imperative for the teacher to keep moving constantly to spot errors, making a mental note of these for a subsequent whole class feedback task, after an activity, or just to give advice and encourage students individually, as they carry out the activities in the lesson: 

That was a great answer, well done! How could you make it even better by adding the past tense? Or You are doing extremely well, can you include some content from the past topics we studied? Or, That was a great answer but a little bit short, can you have a look at your sentence builder to make sure you extend your answer?

When common mistakes and issues are spotted, we adapt our teaching to address these:

Students may need more practice of the learned structures as a whole class, either orally or with MWB, using a Wheel of Names or a Flippity task, where they need to translate sentences practising key structures, from English into the target language. When this is done, scaffolded and responsive teaching is also key. For example, for those who have finished translating a sentence, while others keep going: 

That’s great, could you add some more information on the spot using the future/past/imperfect tense? Or Can you write a list of alternative things you could have used instead of the shown translation? (Outformation/metacognition). For a wide range of activities to be carried out at this stage, visit this blogpost. 

Grammar

Some grammar will be learned, implicitly, within the modelling and structured/scaffolded stages. However, given the constraints of curriculum time, explicit grammar needs to be learned to make sure that students can manipulate the language and start moving away from the sentence builders. 

My experience is that an inductive approach to grammar works best, which also allows for checking for understanding and adapt teaching accordingly: 

Can students work out a specific grammatical rule after extensive use of sentence builders and narrow readings/listenings? Can they discuss this rule in pairs? Can we all explain the rule explicitly? Can we contrast our knowledge of past grammatical rules with this new rule? ( for example the formation of the present and the past tense?) 

After rules have been established, students need to apply the rules, using the same activities used in the structured production stage, but now, moving away from the sentence builder by changing the person who does the action and using different vocabulary from that on the sentence builder. The idea is to work with the grammatical structure in context (lexicogrammar) and in sentences, not just in isolation with new examples. Wheel of Names, Boardgames, Battleships or Flippity (randomiser), work extremely well to practise grammatical rules. 

As before, we do so as a whole class activity using MWBs, encouraging, supporting and stretching students as we carry out different activities: 

Great answer! Could you write this verb/sentence in the future too? Can you read your sentence and spot any mistakes? Where? Adapt your teaching according to the information you gather from the students: Do you need further lessons embedding grammar practice with scaffolded production tasks? If so, which activities are you going to use?

Reaching Fluency and Creativity 

At this stage, the idea is to work, entirely from memory and under time restrictions. Students tend to work independently, so moving around to spot errors is now more important than ever! This is what I call spinning the plates! We move around, we spot errors but also excellent use of the language: we showcase the latter; we engage students in deep thinking about what they know well and expect them to demonstrate this knowledge through meaningful independent output. Students set themselves targets based on this and where gaps are noticed, we reteach, remodel, practise again and again. Speed Dating, group talk or the 1,2,3 technique work brilliantly here. The important thing is to listen to the output produced by the students and to respond to it!

The beauty of the process is that not specific worksheets are needed, all is managed via our skilled questions and observation of the classroom and students' answers. It is teaching skill at its best.