Daniel Vincent has taught English for over fifteen years in the UK, Japan and Spain. He has experience in materials and course development and is currently working as a teacher and coordinator for the British Council in Madrid. He is also currently working on authoring a new teens course for Cambridge University Press. In his 5th and final blog of the series, Teens Together, Dan looks at another example of a collaborative project that works well with teens: music festival proposals.
This project calls upon one or more of the skills we looked at in my first post of the series, such as decision-making, negotiation, planning, time-keeping and feedback, and it’s worth reviewing that post for some suggestions of the kind of language students need to develop those skills. You’ll find general advice on how to set up and run collaborative projects in the second post of the series, while post number three is full of ideas for dealing with any problems that might arise. With that in mind, let’s go!
The best music festival on Earth
Who will headline? How many stages will there be? What cause does it champion? What is it called? These are just some of the questions you can set your students as they work in groups to come up with a proposal for the best music festival the planet has ever seen.
To set this project up, first establish the following scenario. A fabulously rich individual (you can pretend this is you or a colleague!) wishes to fund the development of a music festival that will bring people together and raise money for a good cause. The money on offer will go into renting the venue, hiring the equipment, paying the performers and running an advertising campaign. It will be recuperated through ticket sales.
Divide your students into groups of three or four and explain that each group works for an organisation or an NGO that champions a particular cause (you can leave it up to the students to choose which cause they are interested in, but can make suggestions if none are forthcoming, such as anti-bullying, animal welfare, LGBT rights or cross-cultural exchange and so on).
In their groups, students then have to decide the following:
- the name of the festival they want to organise.
- the date, location and duration of the festival.
- the layout of the festival (for this they can design a ground plan of where the entrance, the stages, the food stalls and so on will go).
- how the festival will help to champion their cause (for example, it might feature artists known for particular causes, there might be awareness-raising videos screened between performances, or the profits from the tickets might go towards relevant campaigns).
- the type and content of the advertising campaign (online adverts before YouTube videos, posters in the streets, TV commercials and so on).
This first stage requires students to brainstorm, decide and plan together, and is an ideal place for them to practise some of the language I suggested in the first post in this series. In the second stage, students prepare a presentation in which they will make their proposal to the funder and try to convince them that theirs is the festival that should receive the money. Students should plan the presentation in a group, but it is important that each student is responsible for writing and delivering one section of the presentation, as this ensures that everyone has something to do. They should also anticipate the kind of questions they might be asked and prepare their answers. This is also a good opportunity for the teacher to help students develop essential presentation skills, such as signposting the stages of the presentation, facing the audience, speaking clearly, making eye contact and presenting from notes rather than memorising what they are going to say.
After practising their presentations, the groups take turns to present their proposals to the funder. This could be you, but ideally would be another teacher. From experience, I’ve found that having to present to someone other than me makes my students take the presentation more seriously and heightens the sense of competition. A teacher other than their own is also more likely to be objective when choosing a winner. At the same time, encourage the other students to listen by making them ask a number of follow-up questions.
Well, that’s it from me for now. We’ve reached the end of this series of blog posts, looking at why it’s a good idea to get our students to do collaborative project work, as well as how to set such projects up and deal with any potential problems, and we’ve looked at a number of projects that can be done in class, from writing and recording pilot episodes for new series to making museum displays, from creating infographics to building towers. I hope you try some of them out in class and that your students find them both engaging and useful, as you help to develop their ability to collaborate well with one another, a key competency for their future in our ever more demanding modern world.
Go to our Cambridge Secondary page for lots of other secondary activities and ideas.