{"id":1735,"date":"2017-10-07T10:06:49","date_gmt":"2017-10-07T10:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freelanceteacherselfdevelopment.wordpress.com\/?p=1735"},"modified":"2017-10-07T10:06:49","modified_gmt":"2017-10-07T10:06:49","slug":"managing-monkeys-and-dragons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/2017\/10\/07\/managing-monkeys-and-dragons\/","title":{"rendered":"Managing Monkeys (and Dragons)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/monkey_tricks.jpg\" width=\"775\" height=\"569\" class=\"size-full\"><br \/>\nDo learners rely too much on teachers to do the &#8216;heavy lifting&#8217; in the classroom? I&#8217;ve had a couple of things happen this week that have had me on this train of thought.<br \/>\nOne of my colleagues put me on to Alan Waters&#8217; (1998) article, <a href=\"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/eltj\/article-abstract\/52\/1\/11\/2924386\/Managing-monkeys-in-the-ELT-classroom\">Managing Monkeys in the ELT Classroom<\/a>. The monkeys are not learners but the task at hand. Who is dealing with the task, and who should be?<br \/>\nToday, I had a review class with one of my <a href=\"https:\/\/freelanceteacherselfdevelopment.wordpress.com\/?s=Dungeons\">RPG-based classes<\/a>. It was the worst I have seen them. For a minority of students, when they should have been planning, they were talking about nonsense in Japanese (yes, I eavesdropped). I reset the task, asked to give support, but in the end I can only do so much. Perhaps they thought the task retry was too simple in spite of initially claiming otherwise. Next week, I have students managing proverbial bonobos rather than the capuchins they have had so far: they will control the role playing and the points for the game themselves. They have been given a basic scenario and have to imagine possible events. I shall see what happens next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do learners rely too much on teachers to do the &#8216;heavy lifting&#8217; in the classroom? I&#8217;ve had a couple of things happen this week that have had me on this train of thought. One of my colleagues put me on to Alan Waters&#8217; (1998) article, Managing Monkeys in the ELT Classroom. The monkeys are not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8],"tags":[152,154],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa34By-rZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}