'Give Me More' Technique: Using it for Multi-level Adult Students (Part II)

 First, my parent's class is back on the upswing.

Yay, I don't suck! My Parent's English Class has averaged over half the original attendance... approximately six students a session.

Definitely, not bad. The class is free and dropouts after the first day is to be expected.

Occasionally, I realize I'm like some of the professors/teachers that I never liked.. my whiteboard gets a bit crazy with all the additional stuff I try to squeeze into my lesson and rather than erase everything
(for fear I may need to refer to the examples or that my students haven't finished writing), I just add it
where there's space. This is something I'd advise against. I've been getting a little better at being neat with my habit, but sometimes, I literally can't help it.

How can you teach a multi-level classroom when you can't physically split yourself?

I wondered this last week when two of my parents got a little frustrated over the content. Frustrated?

Problem: Not being told you're teaching from the same textbook as the last NET.
It seems the NET last year taught them from the same book. Same. How can that be when I was told the NET before me never used one? Well, not only did she use a textbook for the parents, but used the same one for my teacher's English class! Yeah- I've been making my own lessons for my Teacher's English Class from scratch!

Solution:  Give Me More technique

While the Give Me More technique works well with teaching multi-level students in my elementary classroom, I wasn't sure how I could use it if I tried to facilitate a two leveled class in one.  Ordinarily, utilizing this technique would have been fine, but I panicked. When my two students felt a bit cheated of having to repeat an entire semester with the same textbook, I decided to throw them an extra lesson. It was a lesson I used for my Teacher English class:  Conversational Talking about Movies. I had my advanced students sort this out between themselves as I held a chapter review and tried to bump my class up to the chapter last year's teacher ended on (I was only a chapter behind!).

Midway through teaching my basic students (Subject: personal preferences aka Like/Dislike) I found a way to weave my advanced students back, through composing additional vocabulary words with them to describe preferences/tastes. I also had my basic students Give Me More by extending their sentences beyond the point of my advanced students. My advanced students were now intrigued, challenged and back to basic!

The example my basic students had was musical preferences, while my advanced students were on movies. so relating topics was easy. Here is a rough sample of how I implemented the Give Me More technique (the photo below is an extension of the one above).

The Original textbook:
"I like/don't like ____________music"

The Give Me More part:
"  because it sounds __________ and it makes me feel _________. "

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