not that you'd be interested...

Here's a link to the PowerPoint presentation that so captured our CEO's imagination. I've made the PPT available to the public, but some explanation may be required.

I tried to stay true to some of the principles put forth in my book—keep things student-centered, always check student knowledge, etc. The object of the game is to teach students five new vocabulary words that come from an article (about ChatGPT) they'd been assigned to read. The lesson begins with a priming exercise that's meant to be relaxed in that there are no wrong answers—no pressure to perform in a specific way. Just look at the questions and fill in the blanks with whatever you think might be right. The purpose is just to get the students thinking about context and vague semantic fields, nothing more.

We then move into a pure-lecture component based on things the CEO likes: teaching about roots, delving into meanings, giving sample sentences, showing synonyms and antonyms, etc. This is a way of building out the "world" of each vocabulary word being learned. The CEO asked me to include some visuals for the students' sake, so I cheated and used DALL-E to generate images for me to put into the PPT.

We then return to the initial priming exercise, but now, the students know five specific, fleshed-out words that need to go in those blanks. At this point, especially since this presentation is being done before an audience, the audience ought to feel confident about which words go into which blanks. Confidence-building and success experiences (all talked about in my book) are essential for motivation. If students fail from the beginning, they won't want to continue learning: they'll become depressed and give up. This exercise ought to show the learners that the overall lesson is easy.

We then move into more exercises designed to evoke the vocabulary—not by multiple choice (which I hate—again, see my book for a rant on multiple-choice testing), and not by giving hints (e.g., giving the student a blank with the first letter of the vocab word showing), but by asking for students to produce the full word. This keeps the student from relying on "passive vocabulary" and relying instead on "active vocabulary," i.e., the mental library associated with language production, not reception. A multiple-choice situation would allow the students to rely on passive vocabulary, which is nice for them: they don't have to stretch their brains.

As the PPT lesson continues, we get into things like recognizing synonyms, using dialogue as context, and exploring other forms of the vocab words (e.g., the vocab word is embellishment, so the verbal form would be embellish).

A slide explicitly devoted to word roots and to words with the same roots comes up as a pure-lecture component. The teacher, here, stresses the roots themselves, not so much the words with similar roots. The purpose is to equip the student with the ability to guess the meaning of words they've never seen by analyzing the roots.

The CEO wanted me to include a story component, so I again used ChatGPT to generate a story using all five vocab words, as you'll see. (It's obvious that ChatGPT can be a labor-saving device when it comes to materials generation, but as I said earlier, it's also going to make us all lazier.) While I'm not a fan of these sorts of information dumps, a creative paragraph at least gives students a chance to see all the words being used appropriately and in context. And for what it's worth, I did include, among my quiz questions, a chance for students to write their own one-paragraph stories.

We jump to a crossword. Gamification has its advantages and disadvantages, but in this case, the idea is—once again—to evoke the words from the students, who are given the word meanings as a clue. By this point, the exercise ought to be a piece of cake.

Coming back to the question of guessing the meaning of previously unencountered words, the final exercise in the lesson (before the review and quiz) involves looking at new words in context and trying to guess their meaning.

This leads to the review, then to the two little quizzes I made.

While I tried to keep the lesson as close as possible to my own cherished pedagogical principles, the final PPT is something of a Frankenstein's monster made up of my ideas, my boss's ideas, and the CEO's ideas. My boss should be credited with emphasizing word roots and recognizing those roots in other, never-before-seen words. He's also the one who stressed the teaching of other word forms (fret, fretting, fretful, ambiguous, unambiguous, etc.). The CEO suggested the humor, visual, and story components, and it was up to me to tie it all together and make it as smooth and logical as possible.

As I told the CEO, lecture leads to mental passivity for most people. Some people will listen actively and avidly, so I'm not saying that it's impossible to absorb anything from a lecture, but for most of us, especially if we're not taking notes, information received via lecture tends to fray and disappear in a short time. Ask someone what the three main points of a given lecture were, say, two hours after the lecture, and most people might come up with, at most, a single point. But interactive learning that is student-centered (and also task-oriented and somatic) will keep the students awake, alert, and producing. Student proactivity should be a huge goal in education. The word "education" comes from e(x) + ducere, the drawing-out of something. Think of education in terms of drawing out and not putting in (e.g., via lecture-style info dumps), and you'll see real improvement among students.

Anyway, that's my rundown of the PPT I made. Enjoy.