 I'm going to talk today about the student-centred classroom. This probably seems very obvious. All classes are student-centred, obviously, but this is about my personal mission to reduce my teacher talking time because it was having a negative effect on my class and on my students. So basically what was happening was I teach full-time. I'm doing 30 hours a week and I'm a very energetic person. I drink a lot of coffee and it comes across in the class. I talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and I'm always moving and I was getting exhausted and I was using my voice and not only the effect on myself, but my classes felt chaotic and they felt scattered and disorganized and that's not what I wanted, obviously. And it was having negative effects as I'm going to go into in more detail, like direct negative effects on the students, which I thought, OK, this has to stop. I need to fix this. So in order to fix it, I first needed to think about why it was happening. So here, this is kind of the royal we. I'm not suggesting we all talk too much, but we isn't me. And I got to thinking that one thing that we do, I, one thing that I do, is I always want everyone to be engaged in the activity. I want to make sure everyone is OK and everyone is having a good time and are you enjoying the class? Are you talking to your partner? Ah, it's really irritating, actually. Even I think it's irritating. And as well as that, I don't have, well, I did before this, I didn't have much confidence in my own ability to give clear instructions. So I would find myself constantly, OK, so page four. Are you on page four? No, not page five, page four. Four. No, four. And then it would just all descend into utter chaos. But once again, that was not the fault of the students. It was my fault. I was over talking. It wasn't necessary. And thirdly, fear of silence. This isn't some psychological thing. I just, in the classroom, I, possibly from my own experience, I feel a silent classroom is a boring classroom. The students aren't having fun. And I have to keep it dynamic. You know, the favorite words of all the students, the classes are dynamic. I don't know where they got that from, but it kind of feeds in. You don't want them to be bored. You want them to have fun. So because of that, oh my God. Boy, boy, boy. But that's actually something relevant. I would narrate as well. Whatever I was doing, I would tell the students what I was doing. So I'm at the CD player. I'm looking for a CD. Where is the CD? I can't find the CD. And totally unnecessary as well. But this just all contributed to the manic vibe that was going on in my classes. You can probably feel it now, can't you? But the problem with this, and I'm calling this the teacher-centred class, because it was more about me than them, which I know, I'm pretty great, but I don't know. It should be about them. And it was manifesting in extremely low levels of concentration by the students. And this was actually, this relates into what Gavin was saying before. They didn't need to think, because I was telling them everything. They didn't have to, you know, take a minute to read the instructions, because I would tell them the instructions, and they knew that. So they would wait for me to check that they were okay. If they paused in their conversation, they knew that I would come. I'd swoop on them and ask them why. I'd instruct them again and again, and I would try to get them motivated. So they had very little to do themselves, because I was kind of trying to do it for them. And as a result of this, they didn't really trust themselves, and they didn't really trust each other, because they knew if they asked me, I'd give them the answer. Because, you know, like Gavin was saying, the teacher is the dictionary. The teacher knows everything. So they weren't checking their dictionary, and they weren't asking their partner. They were just asking me, which, you know, that's fine. But it's not great for creating their own autonomy, which is ultimately what we want to facilitate. So I'm only trusting my answers. And the communication was unnatural, and this is something that comes up a lot. When you get them into their pairs or their groups to do their conversation, and it's more like an interview, and they're just running through the topics. And quite often I think that's because we tell them in advance, you have three minutes to talk about this. Can you imagine being told you only have three minutes to talk about something? It automatically puts pressure on you. How can you? You can't have a natural conversation. So that was the result. They wanted to get the activity finished because of this constant sense of pressure. So my goal from my personal project was to reduce their dependence on me and to increase their kind of independence and create a supportive learning environment where the students felt like they could ask each other questions and they wouldn't be mocked or they wouldn't be made fun of or made feel bad because that's a horrible atmosphere if you feel like you can't ask somebody. And to build confidence in themselves because I find a lot of students, when they're checking their answers they say, I don't know, I don't know. We'll check with the teacher, I don't know. Because they don't want to say, well actually I do know because I studied this. There's a feeling of insecurity that I wanted to try to reduce if possible. So I set myself a method and the first part was the most difficult, especially for me because I'm chatty. I am talkative. So I had to cut my pre-class chat down to basically nothing because I felt like if I came into the class and was chatting like I normally do and then that's not really going to work. It had to have a lead in. So my plan was that I'd say hello to the students but I wouldn't engage them in chat about their weekend or anything like that. I'll talk about the problems that arose with this a bit later but it's not 100% smooth and no pairs. This is a little controversial. I personally find that if you have a pair, sometimes you can have one person in the pair who is just not feeling it that day. They just don't want to talk or they're talking too much or they're distracted or they're bored or they don't like their partner and this can be not only awkward for the conversation it means the other person isn't having their conversation, they're being limited too. So instead of pairs, I only put students in groups of three. Four if absolutely necessary but minimum is three because if there is a situation like that, that person can sit back, they can listen, they can be distracted if they need to and the other students can still have their activity and still do their conversation. So I find that this works much more successfully in my classes than pairs do. And this is my favorite one. I have multiple teachers in the class. This is not just me being totally lazy and outsourcing my work. In each group I nominate one teacher who is in charge of the conversation and they're in charge of the activity and they know that they have to make sure that the conversation is moving through the questions that everyone is staying on topic and it's actually turned into a fun little kind of class joke where I nominate the teacher and the others would say oh Adriana's been teacher three times, why can't I be teacher? Because they enjoy it and it gives them a little boost in their confidence which is really nice. And written instructions, obviously if I'm trying to reduce my talking I need to increase my writing. And I have awful handwriting. So this hasn't been great for the students. They're trying to decipher my hieroglyphics on the board. But it also has benefits in students obviously need to be able to read detailed instructions when they're doing exams or when they're doing any sort of individual activity because they won't always have someone to explain it to them. So I encourage the students, we're going to take one minute or maybe sometimes I do Cambridge style 45 seconds to read your instructions. And then after that I only do one ICQ. This is instruction check in question because my instruction checks were just ridiculous. So I only allow myself to ask one check per activity. And the idea is that the students have read the instructions. They've underlined the key phrases. They're comfortable with it, they have time to process. I check. Okay, so do we know what we're doing? We're going to go into the activity. Okay, that's my only check. Yeah, this one isn't as bad as it sounds. But you position yourself in the middle of the class if your class is a horseshoe shape, you can sit on your chair in the middle. And I found that if I was writing, you know, like instead of interrupting the group work, as Allison was saying, you don't swoop in on error correction immediately. You correct later if possible. So this actually refers back to something James talked about in Limerick as well. So if I'm hearing any errors, I'm writing them down. Maybe I'm making examples of, you know, good language, interesting language, good use of the target language. And I find that if I look busy, the students are less likely to ask me a question. And so they will redirect their question to their partner. And that is something that I think is incredibly helpful to know that, okay, well, I don't want to interrupt Jane. I'll just ask you. And if the other partners don't know, then it comes to me. And if I can, let's say you know your class very well, I can say, okay, I know for a fact I explained that to this other student yesterday. I'll direct it to them. Or it will take it to the group. So it doesn't have to be the teacher all the time. There are other sources of information, which is something I wanted to really foster with the students that they do have resources out there. And what in this personal experiment that I had, the results were for the most part very positive. When I left the students in their small groups with their teacher, you know, doing the activity themselves, the extended length of the activity was notable in one situation speaking, which was, it's from New English File Intermediate and it's about wishes and dreams. And I had planned that it would take about 15 minutes, you know, a good 15 minutes. That was me being optimistic. But when I used this method, they were talking for 45 minutes with absolutely no intervention from me, no first language. It was all in English and it was meaningful. It was a real natural conversation, which I thought was absolutely lovely, which is the next thing as well. Because they're not under pressure in this atmosphere, it is more realistic. So they're talking as if they would, you know, in an authentic situation. And that was probably the most gratifying part for me. And as well, I'm, as I said before, I'm quite irritating and like, come on, let's all be happy all the time. Yeah. And so when I reduced that, oddly enough, ironically, when I let the students build their own motivation through the acknowledgement that, yes, I do know this information and I can explain to my partner, and I do understand, and we can have these good conversations, their optimism increased and there was less of the, oh, I don't know, I'm not sure, and more of the, okay, well, I think it's like this. So there was a definite shift in the balance of that, that the students themselves seemed more confident and they seemed happier. But there are always negatives, unfortunately. And the problems I encountered were, yeah. The first day I did this, my class actually said, teacher, are you angry with us? And I didn't really want to go into my methodology. And I said, oh no, I don't normally talk like that. So that actually took a few days for that to kind of dissipate in them to realize, she's still mental like she always is, but it's just a bit more toned down. So that was something I had to prepare myself for. If you're usually very mad, they will get a shock because they're used to that. And as well, a slightly more serious one is, it is not the traditional teacher-student dynamic, and a lot of students have no faith whatsoever in their ability of their peers to tell them what they need to know. So certain students, especially students who are older or ones who have come from a kind of grammar translation approach, they found this very difficult at the beginning because they were always saying, but I need to check. It's like, no, you don't need to check. We can check at the very, if you're really not sure, then we can check together, that's fine. But it is about just bringing it to a stage where the students know outside the class they have the resources, they can keep practicing and they can keep improving themselves. So on the whole, it was a pretty successful experiment and I haven't been able to maintain it every day. I can't tone down the madness all the time, but I do try to incorporate it a couple of times a week and it gives the students a nice break. But the little groups, the three people and the teacher in every group, I have continued that every day by bringing themselves into the groups and they're nominating the teachers, which is really nice. So that's that and thank you.