Virtual tour of The Louvre, to view the Mona Lisa

Photo by Free Birds on Unsplash

If you have students who are interested in art and culture, this is the perfect virtual tour for them! It is suitable for all, as the resources I made are all easily adaptable for all levels.

As always, these virtual tours have a strong focus on learner autonomy and group participation and communication. In particular, this session will help the students to develop listening skills in a variety of ways. They will use Total Physical Response (TPR), Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), and collaborative and cooperative learning throughout.

To lead in and create interest in the topic, I created a simple Zoom poll to get the group talking about art galleries in their countries. After this, they are asked for their ideas about the location of the virtual tour. I elicited that it was France and that it was The Louvre and one of the students was able to guess the Mona Lisa. 

The students then take part in a sensory activity, designed to stimulate their curiosity and allow them to make an informed guess as to the destination of the virtual tour. It is a drawing dictation. If you have never used drawing and picture dictations with adults before, it can be very effective with adults too – and not just beginners. This technique rehearses some of the vocabulary that will be useful later on in the lesson and it makes use of  TPR, a technique which involves both sides of the brain through the combination of speech and action, and is connected to Trace Theory (The more intensively a memory connection is traced, the stronger it is).

The students are told that a picture is going to be described to them, and they have to listen and draw what they hear. The teacher can select any art work etc. which relates to the lesson. It is crucial to stress to the students that it is not about their artistic talent, and that they will not be forced to show everyone what they drew. I know from experience that activities like this can produce some very negative reactions about not being able to draw. To lower the affective filter, the teacher can prepare a very basic drawing of another art work before the class, to show them. This highlights that drawing ability is not part of the activity. 

After I finished the description, I shared the original work of art on the screen and the students looked at their own versions and evaluated how accurate they were in the detail. They are told that they can hold them up for everyone to see if they want, but that they don’t have to (They nearly all did).

The main part of the session is participating in a virtual tour which is led by a teacher from the USA for her class.  In this tour the teacher introduces us to the Louvre and then takes us to an exclusive private viewing of the Mona Lisa. You can see the video I used here

The activity during this part is a listening followed by a student-generated quiz, in pairs, or as a whole group. The students can be put into pairs of mixed level (if the level of the class is mixed), or, if it is a smallish group such as I had this week, they can do it all together. They are told that they will be watching the video with the purpose of taking notes. After the video, they will then have to use the notes they made to produce questions for their partner, or the entire group, to answer. The listening was quite challenging, as there is a lot of information, but this is a good place to make use of differentiation, as well as to reinforce that it is not necessary to understand every word and important not to panic in a situation like that. You can still get the main idea and important point and clues such as facial expressions, body language, the context, images and background knowledge to help you. 

 For differentiation, lower-level students could work in pairs to make up their questions, and higher level students can be told that the number of questions is at least four, thus making the activity open-ended. They can also be challenged to provide a variety of question types.

The students are put into breakout rooms to check the accuracy of each other’s questions and then to try and ask and answer them. The teacher should monitor the breakout rooms to sort out any issues, as there may be a few problems in making up accurate questions. Alternatively, for a small group they can take turns to ask a question in open pairs (where they nominate another student to respond). Student generated quizzes and questions are a powerful way of requiring the students to use Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) It is much more motivating and promotes deeper thinking than superficially just listening out for dates, numbers etc. You can read more here about how to make use of student-generated questions if this is something new for you. 

For the second part of the main activity, the students visit the official website of The Louvre to watch animated videos of the stories behind some of the most famous exhibits. This is a scaffolded activity. For the first step, we all watch one of the short videos.  Then the whole group work together in a chain story to reconstructing the events orally. This is an activity that focuses on collaboration and cooperation and is much more difficult to organize than it sounds. I found this quite challenging online and decided that the best option would be for me to call out students in a random manner to provide the next part of the story. The students do tend to jump in and ‘help’ each other out too quickly, so that has to be taken into account and the instructions made super clear. We watched the video twice. This type of activity is excellent for focusing on sequencing words. 

If time allows, the next step is for the scaffolding to be removed and the students put with a partner. They are free to select any of the other short animated videos on that page and to work together with their partner to retell the story, then, after practicing it, retell it to the class. The process of task repetition in a slightly different manner is- according to much research- highly beneficial for both fluency and accuracy. For example,  see: Bygate, M. (1996). Effects of task repetition: Appraising the developing language of learners. In J. Willis, & D. Willis (Eds), Challenge and change in language teaching (pp. 136-46). London, UK: Heinemann

To bring the virtual tour to a close and personalize it, the students are asked to think of how they could use one of the techniques they practiced today when they are outside the class. This allows them to use self-reflection and make connections with the real world and to help them develop their independence and take charge of their own learning.

As I stated earlier, all my virtual tours are prepared with learner autonomy in mind. The learners who attend these sessions are not an actual class. They do not have the luxury of a teacher to ‘teach’ them on a regular basis. What I am trying to provide for them, is to give them the tools, motivation and confidence to continue learning outside the classroom, and to help them to explore a range of different ways in which they can make use of the authentic materials that are freely available online. This is a very useful skill for all learners to be trained in.