What makes a lesson GREAT? Part 1 (and a postscript)

This was the question posed by Mike Harrison on the IATEFL facebook page  recently. Considering the space constraints of commenting on a platform like that, and given my Faible for whimsical responses to serious questions, I replied thus:

If you are familiar with acrostics, a form of poetry where the first letters in each line (or some other regular pattern) form a message, you will see what I have done here – my response to Mike’s question is hiding in plain sight.

But afterwards, amused and satisfied as I was at my minor achievement in melding pedagogy and poetry, I felt the need to expand on this collection of ideas, as I had contributed them with more than simply the intention of showing off my (questionably) witty way with words.

So lI thought I’d look at each of my criteria for what makes a lesson great in a bit more depth over the next few days. I’ll be taking them in order so let’s begin at the beginning with G for Group Dynamic…

Group

Starting from first principles, my dictionary gives the following definitions as primary for defining what a group is:

group |gruːp|
noun [treated as sing. or pl. ]
a number of people or things that are located close together or are considered or classed together : these bodies fall into four distinct groups.
• a number of people who work together or share certain beliefs : I now belong to my local drama group.

What is interesting for me about the first definition is that it applies regardless of whether the individuals in a group actually consider themselves to be constituting one or not. In other words, a group may be a construct defined outside itself.

It’s also interesting that only physical proximity or the practicalities of bundling large numbers of individuals together – possibly to simplify management – are considered defining characteristics of a group.

The second definition is clearly different: it foregrounds cohesion – the bond between the members of the group which defines it as such.

Now, what interests me is that the second definition of a group here is certainly the one I would prefer to apply to groups of students; however, thinking about my schooldays, the first definition – the administratively pragmatic but externally imposed bundling form of grouping – seems to be more descriptively accurate.

Of course, the former type of group can transform into the latter kind given the right conditions – and vice versa! I suspect that getting grouped individuals to sense and invest in a common purpose is a beneficial thing, however, so the question then arises: how can this be achieved?

Dynamic

A word that collocates very strongly in education with the noun group is dynamic. This term gets used a lot by teachers and it commonly seems to mean something like rapport. The classic book Classroom Dynamics is full of activities claiming to establich a positive group dynamic – on inspection, they are mostly predicated on the idea that dynamic is dependent on mutual information and trust – in other words, rapport.

Looking at the dictionary entry for dynamic, we see the following:

dynamic |daɪˈnamɪk|
noun
1 a force that stimulates change or progress within a system or process : evaluation is part of the basic dynamic of the project.

ORIGIN early 19th cent. (as a term in physics): from French dynamique, from Greek dunamikos, from dunamis ‘power.’

What strikes you? What I notice is that dynamic is a catalyst for change. It is a change agent, in other words. Its function is to drive systems, to avoid static or stable states.

How is this any different from the idea of rapport? And why is this important? The root meaning of rapport (so my dictionary tells me) goes back to the 17th century French meaning “giving back”; the root for dynamic goes back to Greeek, via French, to the word for “power”.

So rapport is at heart about giving feedback – it is therefore an action more than a state or characteristic of a group, while dynamic is a quality inherent in systems, rather than being an action taken by elements of the system.

Groups are systems, so dynamic is a characteristic of groups, and is a product of rapport. In this sense, then, rapport building is perhaps a poor collocation – we should perhaps be rapport sending, or rapporting – what we are builiding is not rapport, but dynamic, a head of steam. Dynamic is the end, and rapport is the means.

So far, so good… So what?

I thnk this view of rapport and dynamic raises a few questions to which I have no real answers, but think perhaps you might:

• if dynamic is an essential part of a developing system (as development requires change, and dynamic is the change agent), how can it best be generated? Can it actually be generated by teachers at all?
• Can we as teachers really do much to get students rapporting, and thereby building a head of dynamic steam in class?
• In what ways might our current practices be acting as a baffle or impediment to student attempts to rapport to each other?
• Can (and should) teachers seek to steer or leverage group dynamic in deliberate ways? What unforeseen (and potentially detrimental) impacts might this have on the system? How well prepared are teachers in various educational settings to work sensitively with dynamic? Indeed, can this be taught and trained at all?

POSTSCRIPT

After writing this on the train this morning, I had a conversation with a colleague that seems germane to this post.  She recently took over an in company group of learners with a wide range of ability in the class. Previous teachers had suggested that there was an unproductive or awkward class dynamic.  They mostly thought this had something to do with the wide ability spread (a group in the first sense we looked at, perhaps?)  My colleague took on the group a few weeks back and has been describing the lessons to me.

The last two lessons are striking.  Last week she entered the classroom to be met by her students eagerly setting up a data projector to show her a video that they had found on their company intranet about some topic of interest to them.  They watched it and she helped them with language issues, then for homework they wrote summaries.  None of this was planned by my colleague – the group sprang the lesson on her.  All the students did their homework, and there appeared to be some healthy competition developing between some of the members.  The most recent lesson was also an ambush by the students, who had an email from work that they wanted to understand; after this was achieved with the teachers’ help, they each chose 5 lexical items that they personally wanted to learn for next week.  This was reminiscent of Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s work with non-literate children in New Zealand, I thought.

On establishing that my colleague would test them the following lesson, a student insisted that they needed to settle on some bonus words in case of a tie-break situation!

My question is: what had changed here?  The class members were the same, yet their behaviour seems to be a model of self-directed learning, not the awkwardness and lack of productivity that was reported.  It begs the question: Can a teacher really make such an impact on a group of otherwise motivated adults that they either totally switch off or go into overdrive?  If one teacher really can make this difference, how much can whatever it is that my colleague is doing right be taught on initial training courses, and how much time is actually spent on it?  As the discussion over on Scott Thornbury’s blog on rapport recently seems to place high importance on this aspect of classroom work, perhaps class management sessions on teacher training courses need to go a bit more beyond the notion of “pairwork/groupwork” and “Instruction Checking Questions” and provide a bit more time for rapporting?

Click on this to go to the IATEFL group on facebook and comment on Mike Harrison's question

On Why The (Unplugged) Revolution Will Not Be Televised

(Gil Scott-Heron reciting The Revolution Will Not Be Televised)

There is nothing like a conference to re-ignite debate. Last week saw the IHDOS Conference in London, a wide-ranging forum for middle and senior academic management at International House schools.

One of the sessions at the conference was a public debate between Jeremy Harmer and Luke Meddings on the validity of teaching unplugged (aka Dogme). The debate was heatedly followed and participated in via twitter in real-time, and these disputes have started to find a more accommodating overflow in several well-argued and eminently readable blog posts.

Hawks, doves and dogme

Jemma Gardner wote a post seeking to synthesise and summarise the Dogme debate which has proven to be extremely popular and, ironically considering her intention not to be seen as hawkish, rather provocative. If you have not read it yet, you should.

The post was written in response to one by Neil McMahon, a DoS at an IH school. His initial position was critical, not of the ideas and principles associated with Dogme, but rather of the “hype” and “evangelicism” as he saw it, generated by its adherents.

As this blog post goes on, Neil may well feel this position of his is being vindicated

In a later post replying to Jemma’s post (itself a response to Neil – are you keeping up with this?), Neil considered whether his resistance to Dogme was basically down to the fact that he didn’t need it – that he had evolved as a teacher within an environment where this kind of student-centred, resource efficient teaching was the norm. He suggested that he may simply be “one of the lucky ones” who didn’t “need” dogme.

Looking after the 99%

If I were one for making radical associations with current affairs, this might make me consider what is going on today with the Occupy movement. Perhaps Neil really is one of the teaching world’s equivalent of the 1%, one of the “haves”, one of those who truly “get” teaching.

Good for him. However, unless and until the other 99% also share in this privilege, then I think there is still work to do.

Occupy the classroom? Been there, done that.

I’d like to take this analogy a bit further, but before I do, I want to stress that I have simply been occupied (ahem…) by some of the references Neil McMahon makes in recent posts, and I would like to play out their ideas, in the spirit of playful dialogue: a bit of devilish advocacy rather than raving fundamentalism is what I’m aiming at

So let’s suppose some teachers constitute the ELT equivalent of the 1%: a set of teachers who for one reason or another don’t need to take on board what dogme is offering as they already feel they have it. If such a group exists, it would be unsurprising to find them nonplussed at all this call for change – revolutions, after all, are rarely considered necessary by those who don’t require them.

Perhaps such teachers (as Neil self-identifies himself) are fortunate in terms of history: dogme as a label and movement emerged in the late 90s/early 2000s, when course materials were undergoing an undeniable expansion (coursebook, teacher book with supplementary activities, workbook, CD rom, then DVD rom, then websites etc…)

All this material brought with it, wittingly or not, the pressure to become familiar with it all, and, if it had been sold to students, then to make full use of it. This seems to have led many teachers and students to feel coursebook-bound to a greater or lesser degree.

If you as a teacher “came of age” prior to this period, you may well have escaped unscathed; for those qualifying after this period, they may have been less lucky.

ASIDE: By the way, there may also be a parallel to be drawn between the Dogme and Occupy movements in terms of their perceived lack of coherence in their positions and demands: Occupy is criticized for not having a clear agenda and leadership; Dogme is criticized for being similarly fuzzy and ill-defined. But that is perhaps a parallel best saved for another time

So it may be fair to say that there were, for a certain period whose impacts are still being felt, systemic forces at work that maintained a materials- and/or prefabricated-syllabus hegemony destined (of not designed) to distract teachers to some degree from considering their learners (rather than syllabus or coursebook content) as the first point of reference when considering lesson content and design.

And I think there is a very clear materials and prefabricated syllabus hegemony still in place in education today, at every level. While such a hegemony may have many advantages for many people, undeniably including some for learners, it is also true to say that it brings with it disadvantages, and these disadvantages are almost exclusively learning and learner related.

I’m thinking here of low-worldly issues like costly courseware that students are obliged to purchase in order to participate in a course, through to the de facto narrowing of lesson and course focus to a greater or lesser extent to that pre-selected content as defined by the coursebook.

Revolution calling?

I don’t know Neil McMahon, but one thing I really like about him (apart from his love of running, which I share) is that he also posts about the thought processes behind his blog posts; he invites us to observe the process as well as the product. This time, he did this in another post, where he made a reference to the poem/song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised By Gil Scott-Heron. In referencing it, he provides me with the second revolutionary image that I would like to pick up from him and explore.

Gil Scott-Heron, while reciting “the revolution will not be televised” in the recording at the start of this post, said that the true revolution is one of thinking, of the mind, rather than one of street action. A revolution does not start with stones being thrown or peaceful protests being organised, it starts with the thought of doing such things, of realising that such actions are within one’s power.

As such, revolutions – true revolutions, as opposed to revolts, the physical evidence of revolutions – are unobservable. They are therefore matters, not of action, but of attitude.

So how does this revolutionary detour relate to dogme? I have argued for some time now (though my position is not original) that dogme is certainly not a method, still less a loose set of techniques. Approach (Richards et al 1992) is close but approaches are too often related to a given method; and methods (Thornbury 2010) are more defined on the level of action rather than reflection, leading to the term approach itself being also associated with specific types of action.

So both approach and method are too much predicated on the notion of action itself; Dogme (or teaching unplugged) as I see it is not so much a way of doing – no particular techniques are elevated or proscribed – but a way of being and seeing, a way of conceiving action in the classroom rather than a way of executing that conception.

Dogme…a new way of being a teacher.

Meddings, L. & Thornbury, S. in Teaching Unplugged)

Attitude is a word better suited to what I think dogme is really about as it is about something more “gut-level” than “intellectual level” – it is at the gut level that attitudes reside. I would go so far as to suggest – and I think even Gil Scott-Heron might agree: it is also where revolutions – true revolutions, are first felt.

For me, therefore, an unplugged revolution (if there is one) is actually about classroom practice only insofar as it is a proxy indicator for teacher attitude. This does not make dogme unique, or even original – but it does, despite these shortcomings in pedigree, make it profound.

It’s not about the bike (or the book, or the photocopy…)

It isn’t ultimately about what is used or not used in a lesson: the fixation on whether or not a dogme classroom allows for use of any materials is misconceived in my view – the recent post I is for Input by Scott Thornbury addresses this.

If learners really do need and are interested in exposure to and work with certain texts, then that should occur – but not simply because those materials are to hand, no matter how cleverly a teacher can imagine “making them relevant”: they either are or they aren’t, and there the matter rests.

Equally, any classroom which demonstrably takes seriously and prioritises work on the language that learners are self-motivated to attempt as opposed to being corralled into using through more or less subtle means is one in which dogme as such is irrelevant – because it is already there.

Dogme for me is less about the presence or absence of material per se and more about the beliefs and principles that informed their selection and implementation; it’s less about the language that gets taught and more the reason for teaching it; it’s less about what the teacher was doing far more than about what they were thinking.

I like to think that when Scott Thornbury and Neil Forrest were working on DTEFLA/DELTA courses in the period leading up to Scott’s first unplugged outburst, the question going through their minds when watching lessons was not “What are you doing?!” but rather “Why are you doing that?!”

There is more than a facile difference between those two questions.

This blog is about teacher training: whether we train teachers to use coursebook material or to operate without it is not the real issue, although it is obviously an important practical decision when designing a course. The real issue is whether or not our training enables our charges to become, as quickly and effortlessly as possible, conscious of their beliefs and thinking as teachers, so that these can more adequately inform their actions.

When we as teacher trainers succeed in this, when we succeed in helping our trainees reach that state of grace that Neil feels himself fortunate to inhabit, then in this way, whether we need to call it dogme or not, we will be in the presence of a revolution taking place in teachers’ minds and – writ large over time – within educational systems, and in Scott-Heron’s words, it most certainly will not be televised

Cooking Unplugged (or: the roaring in the oven)

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about food recently. Granted, this soon after the festive excesses of the Christmas/New Year period, the last thing you may want to read about is food, but please bear with me for a while.

Recent debate over in Chia Suan Chong’s Devil’s Advocate blog series drew my attention back once more to an analogy which links teaching and food: the idea of lesson recipes.

“First, pre-heat the oven to 220°c”

The metaphor of a recipe pervades discussion of lesson structure both at pre-service level and beyond.  There was even a highly popular book based on this analogy.

Beneath this metaphor is of course the notion of required ingredients and workflow. A dish is successful to the extent that the recipe is followed, and this is generally taken to mean doing what the recipe instructions tell you in the manner and order in which they tell you. Success is only guaranteed if the recipe is followed, Substitutions are possible, but if unlicenced are at one’s own risk, and this is a strong incentive to stick to the recipe.

This leads to many otherwise competent people feeling they can only cook from recipes – they become recipe bound. In industrial settings, the extreme logical consequence of this recipe reliance is short-order cookery or – more intentional and disturbing – MacDonaldisation of meal production.

But ask any Michelin star chef what makes a great dish and they will say that it is essentially a question of the ingredients – without fresh, high quality ingredients, no quality cooking is possible, leaving only the misdirection of presentation to obscure the inadequacy of the dish in nutritional terms.

“I followed the instructions to the letter – why does it taste so bad?”

In teaching, and in teacher training, there is also a lot of talk about recipes. There are commonly accepted recipes for a receptive skills lesson or for a grammar focus lesson; PPP, ARC or ESA are recipes of a type. While there is nothing wrong with this in principle, perhaps there are some issues, as there are in cookery of the cookery book-bound type, which we should consider.

For a start, is it wise as teacher trainers to focus our trainee’s attention more on the shape of a lesson – the recipe – than on the content of the lesson – the raw ingredients? You may say that you do this already, but still, it’s worth asking the question.

I know that in my work I fear I spend more time before observed teaching practice talking to trainees about the steps they are going to take with whatever resources they have to hand – in other words, focusing them on the recipe worksteps – than on asking them to consider more fully the quality of the texts and tasks – the raw material – themselves.

The interesting point is that, when lessons turn out problematically, it is often the case that the issue lay not in what the trainee tried to do, but the quality of the material. Perhaps taking a Michelin star attitude to selecting raw materials for lessons would help?

“Delia Smith says do it that way, and who am I to argue?”

Going further, how can we avoid inculcating the belief that these recipes which we present are somehow better than all other possible ways of doing the same kind of thing?

Which one can you trust to deliver the goods?

How can we avoid establishing the belief that for a receptive skills lesson to be acceptable as such, the Holy trinity of Contextualise – Gist task – Detail Task must be present? (Please see Scott Thornbury’s blogpost Z is for Zero Uncertainty for a critique of such recipes)

And even if we do succeed in doing this within the scope of our own courses, might we just be setting our trainees up for hardship when they enter the ELT mainstream, where observers of their teaching may see variation as deviation, and interpret this as “inadequate grasp of the underlying principles of learning and teaching”?

“Quality is the elimination of variation” – W. Edwards Deming

And while we’re at it, how comfortable are we with the fact that a consequence of training by recipe rather than raw material is an inevitable slow shift towards the homogenisation of education? The dream of a fast food executive is that, wherever you go in the word, their burger looks the same, is prepared in the same way, and could be built (a better verb for the process than prepared or cooked) by even the least skilled worker.

Do we, as teachers, teacher trainers, language organisation managers, politicians, want the same thing for our classrooms? Do we want lessons worldwide to display the minimum of variation – not in the surface features, but really down to the basics of their composition?  We may not intend this to happen, and we may not have considered our approach to teacher education as contributing to this process, but nonetheless, we need to address the question.

What do you think: am I right in being concerned about the issues and consequences which accumulate around the metaphor A LESSON IS A RECIPE?  Or am I just grumpy because my classes never turn out looking like they do in the book?

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Acknowledgement: The title of this post is inspired by comment on Twitter by Scott Thornbury.