An Introduction to Dogme

Last week, I led an insett at the British Council, Bilbao on Dogme.  We discussed dogme principles (see Scott Thornbury’s article ‘A Dogma for EFL' for more information) by contrasting them with a coursebook orientated approach and deciding which we agreed with more (thanks to Lee MacKenzie for this strategy).

We looked at some ideas from ‘Teaching Unplugged’ by Meddings & Thornbury (Delta Publishing, 2009) and a few I picked up from different sites on the net, of which I particularly recommend:

 - the Dogme Cookbook    

 - Dale Coulter’s Language Moments

 - Mike Harrison’s site

 Luke Meddings delivering a live lesson is also very useful to get a better idea of what a dogme lesson consists of.

At the end of the session we carried out a little survey. While only one of the teachers present felt they would like to adopt a completely dogme approach, everyone felt they would like to incorporate some of the approach into their teaching. But, as a colleague pointed out, they probably wouldn’t have come to the session if they hadn’t.

Are you ready to Dogme?

Dogme certainly seems to be one of the current buzz words in English language teaching – we've even had a dogme session here at our centre (thanks Peter!) So what is it? As I understand, it's all about making as much out of students' input into your class as you can. But don't take my word for it. There are a lot of experts out there ready to give their definitions and specific takes about its implications for what we do in our classes.

Check out:
Scott Thornbury's blog An A-Z of ELT  – and particularly the comments on his posts – for an unwinding debate about what dogme is all about. Scott wrote the classic on the subject - Teaching Unplugged (do we have a copy at our centre? We should!)

He co-wrote the book with Luke Meddings, who is currently the guest writer on the TeachingEnglish website. Lukes's already written there an article, 2 activities: Family snapshot and My wikipedia plus a blog post. And if these inspire you, why not take the opportunity to ask Luke a question while he's around on the  site? All you need to do is to add one to his blog post.

Another dogme blogger to look out for is David Coulter. David's blog – which is endearingly called Language Moments – is based around him providing lesson skeletons – not lesson plans – because if you've got a plan you've probably not got the right dogme mind set to go with the flow of how students are responding to your class. (So forget most of what you learnt on your CELTA/DELTA course!) I personally like his skeletons a lot – they're full of practical ideas for activities to do in class and are obviously the product of a teacher who reflects a lot about what works (and doesn't) in his class.

There are many more dogme ELT bloggers than the 3 I've mentioned here. Perhaps you can add them yourselves in a comment or write another blog post? Or if you've found this useful, let me know and I'll add a follow up.

Is T for Technology?

• Scott Thornbury's ideas David Deubel: Myths and madness and on using Technology the “Right” way
• Gavin Dudeney's take on the debate
• David Deubel: Myths and madness and on using Technology the “Right” way
• Teaching With Technology - A Basic Checklist from Sue Lyon-Jones
• Choosing the technology that works for you by Darren Elliott
• Nicky Hockly on The principled approach
• Graham Stanely suggests the 5 'W's

Is TEFL really a profession?

Ideas on the topic from Professor Baker, Scott Thornbury and The TEFL Times