HOTS Workshop at SK Seri Saujana in Kota Tinggi area

At the end of April I was honored to be invited to organize a workshop on how to bring HOTS type activities into the Malaysian English Classrooms.  The Kota Tinggi PPD requested I make a presentation to assist in this.

I had prepared a presentation on 21st Century style lesson planning, but I felt this didn't cover what was being requested of me, so I redid the presentation to focus more on how to create activities for HOTS style lessons.

I started off with some theory on teaching styles to incorporate HOTS in the classroom.  I used Brighton Educations PAL project to demonstrate how lessons need to be student centered in order to facilitate HOTS in the classroom.

an example of PAL in the classroom

After this I moved on to define HOTS and how it benefits the students and why the schools are trying to implement it in schools.  The benefits to students is large and will allow more independence and hopefully a more balanced and higher grade score for the students.

The teachers that attended the workshop were all very willing to participate and have fun, much like the students will.

After the theory I introduced two games that the teachers could use for vocabulary (Hot seat game) and a more general vocabulary game (treasure hunt).  Both these games require the students to use vocabulary not related to the direct lesson forcing them to think about English as opposed to just repeating things they have heard in the past.

Once they had a couple of examples of HOTS games it was time for them to create thier own game.  We did this first as one big group.  After this was done we broke up into smaller groups to create even more games that could be taken to their schools.  When the games were completed they had to present to the group.

Guess the sentence from the picture

All the games were great and with only a little assistance they could understand the difference between a HOTS game and a regular game that's been used in the past.

This was a very rewarding experience for me and I hope everyone went home with the ability to create their own games in the future.