Teaching with Diplomacy — Week 2

At the start of the class today we spent some time thinking about useful language for playing this game, focusing on

• Giving opinions
• Negotiating
• Relaying information

For Negotiating, the students provided a bunch of useful expressions like “What do you want (me to do)?” and “Let’s make a deal” as well as some simple First Conditional if-statements (if you _____, I will _____).

I also simplified the zine to be three sections (instead of five) for each turn:

• What shall we do?
• What did we hear?
• What happened?

I collected the zines, which I will use for assessment — looking at the sentences that they wrote.

During the game, I circulated again and took notes on the phrases that students were saying, as well as some of their mistakes which I will then use during next week’s warm-up phase.

Another great thing I saw happening today was turn-taking. As there are 14 members of the class, one country is played by two people. And, instead of dominating the conversation, I saw students taking it in turns.

During the planning phases (i.e., outside of the “diplomacy” phase) students would often revert to Japanese to talk among themselves. I allowed it for the first two minutes, with the understanding (and my announcement) that the second two minutes were to be English only.

I did not get a chance to do a formal debrief of the game, which I would like to do next week… The turns actually take more time than I expected…

Using ChatGPT to generate questions

I want students to get more comfortable and confident with conditionals in English, so I’ve created a worksheet for them to practice. I’ve also been using ChatGPT to generate quiz questions based on the current state of the map. But, the statements that it generated are not that great. It makes up weird orders and hypothetical situations that do not exist on the map. With a bit of finessing though, all is good. I’ll be using the worksheet at the start of the next class.

Turns this year:

A lot is going on in the above picture. What was striking was how double-faced England was. They got Germany’s help to enter Bel, but at the same time double-crossed them by helping Russia into Den… I can see France and Germany working together in the near future against England.

It’s quite hard to parse what is going on around the Black Sea (BLA), but what is clear is that Turkey seems to have made pacts with both Austria and Russia, but only took up Russia’s offer. Austria lost ground here.

Also, look how unfaithful England is again. Just moving on up into Russia’s territory like it doesn’t mean anything… Brutal. I’m sure they are in for a shock when the tides turn against them.