Mini Lesson
Activities in an autonomous classroom written by Hanne Thomsen who is an experienced teacher who worked for years with mixed-ability
learners in autonomous language classrooms in Denmark.
In association with her
students she set forth criteria for a good activity. A good activity for an autonomous
classroom should be relevant, you should learn from it, and it should not be too easy
or too difficult. To this Thomsen adds that it needs to cater to individual learners’
interests and needs and be appropriate for cooperation. It should be open ended and
entail differentiated processes as well as products. Her learners had many favorite
activities such as writing reflections in the logbook, making authentic material for
future use in the classroom, to do extensive reading and other individual work, pair
and group speaking exercises and project work (Thomsen, 2000).
Activities in the learner autonomous classroom can be varied and usually there is
something that caters to the interest of every learner. The fairy tale project that
follows below is an example on how one cartoon can lead to different projects, be
they individual, pair and group work.
Fairy tale project
This is an example of autonomous learning through project work. The fairy tale
project was organized by Seeman and Tavares and worked on with 5th grade learners
in 1998. The learners were in their second year of learning English.
1. Learners wrote down their individual goals for the project. Some wanted to
expand their vocabulary; others wanted to improve their pronunciation, etc.
This way each learner had a genuine reason for wanting to participate.
2. The teacher provided an input on the project by showing a video of cartoon
stories in English based on Hans Christian Andersen’s well known fairy tales.
The learners were already familiar with the fairy tales and could understand
the stories without too much difficulty. They could therefore concentrate on
the linguistic input.
3. The class discussed the video and then split up into small groups of two to four
learners to determine how they wanted to work on the fairy tale they had
chosen. One group made word cards; another wrote in their logbooks about the
fairy tales, the third group wrote their own fairy tale, etc.
4. When a group had finished their work, they shared what they had done and
learnt with the rest of the class. They presented their work, assessed it and then
asked the class for their assessment. By sharing their learning products this
way, learners can find out what other groups in the class are doing and learn
from one another. Very often different groups will emerge that want to try out
what another group was working on.
