Since the photograph we shared in this month’s Cambridge English Empower competition – which you can see above – offered such an inspirational image, it was hardly surprising that many teachers chose to use it as a means of encouraging their students. Antonia Maria Marchitelli of Italy suggested printing it up as a poster, with the slogans “Different worlds, different times, same goal: learning” and “Where there’s a will, there’s a way!”
Others suggested that Kimani Maruge, the subject of the photograph, could serve as a wonderful exemplar of the value of lifelong learning. Patricia Alarco-Vizcarra of Peru thought that the picture would work particularly effectively with a class of teenagers who might be going through a phase of thinking they ‘know it all’.
This month’s competition winner, Ekaterina Kvasova of Russia – congratulations, Ekaterina! – has actually already used her suggestion in class on World Teachers’ Day on October 5th, as a means of getting her students thinking consciously about their learning. Learners spent some time running their own short lessons in pairs, re-teaching each other the grammar rules they’d learned previously; they then revised and discussed their roles in those short lessons before presenting to the class, giving explanations and examples of the grammar points they’d learned and taught. At the end of the session, the class discussed the importance of education at all ages. All in all, this allowed learners to develop their presentation skills, practise speaking, think about their learning, and also revise the grammar they’d already learned. For such an excellent suggestion, Katerina wins this month’s prize of a handpicked selection of Cambridge Professional Development titles and a year’s subscription to Cambridge English Teacher.
Another approach was to develop students’ empathy while practising their language skills. Farid Bashiri of Iran asked his students to put themselves in Kimani’s shoes, or his classmates’; they could then suggest ideas for how to improve his learning experience. Olivera Stankovic of Serbia suggested asking learners first to imagine the story behind the picture and then, once they’d been told the true story, to consider how somebody they knew themselves had influenced their own motivation to learn. Ayca Deniz of Turkey proposed taking this outside the classroom and taking learners to a village near her school so that they could interview older people to discuss their education.