Unplugging Day Two

So what does day two look like? Just to recap: on day one, the teachers have observed, listened and reflected; they have observed their tutors giving them feedback on the language they used when getting to know their colleagues, they have experienced being an absolute beginner (perhaps had their first Old English lesson) and they have observed their tutor teach their TP group and listened to their students and what they have to say.

When designing our new course, Anthony and I quickly realised that we need to dedicate more time in ‘input’ to practising. So this is what happens on day two…

The trainees get out their notes on student language from the previous day, compare and pool these in their TP group. Once they have corrected them they then categorise the students’ errors according to whether these are issues relating to meaning, form or pronunciation. To help them do this the tutor works with them on some examples.

Trainees typically end up with something like this:

Meaning	Form	Pronunciation
My name is difficult for Germans to … how do you say aussprechen? My name is difficult for Germans to pronounce.	The name from my grandmother is Hilde. My grandmother’s name is Hilde.	It’s a normal name in my country. It’s a normal name …

This is not necessarily a straightforward task and interesting discussions can arise about the distinction between problems of meaning and form – it is often not that clear cut.

The next step is to help trainees prepare to give students feedback on these bits of language. This is where we introduce the whiteboard plan. What we normally do is demonstrate giving feedback at the board using one of the bits of language that we heard in class. We have previously prepared a series of whiteboard plans showing in very small steps how we would get from the error to the correction. On my boardplan I have also noted down things I would say to help get there.

Trainees are given blank A4 paper and coloured pens (if they like) and then choose one bit of language that they would feel confident giving feedback on. We felt it is important that they choose something they feel happy about approaching; this should be as comfortable a first try as possible. Trainees then spend some time preparing how they would go about it.

It is important to remember that on day one trainees have already started to notice the techniques that are open to them such as:

• using gapped sentences
• different colours
• substitution tables
• underlining / boxing off words or phrases
• symbols / simple drawings
• marking stress
• arrows
• teacher talk such as ‘look at this’ ‘this is something interesting I heard’ ‘what other word can come here?’ ‘listen … where’s the stress?’ ‘does this mean X or Y?’ ‘can you think of other examples?’ ‘what is the ending on the verb here?’

Preparing a board plan gives students the chance to think about techniques which would be suitable for dealing with the particular issue they have and of course techniques that they would feel comfortable using. They may have noticed Anthony and me using technical tools like phonemic script and, while some may be familiar with it, of course many don’t know it and are scared of it. It is important to reassure trainees that at this stage we just want to give them the opportunity to experiment and experience standing at the board to focus on a bit of language – they should only choose a bit of language which they feel confident dealing with.  These are examples of what they come up with:

This is what a trainee prepared to help them stand up at the board and practise giving language feedback

... and here's another one!

This reflects what will happen in class. In TP 1 all the lessons are speaking lessons and trainees have no control over what language students use (although they may have an idea of what language might be helpful for students). We emphasise that we would like trainees to listen, make notes and then choose perhaps 3 bits of language to give feedback on. They have control over which bits of language to select and so they can feel more confident in helping the students to use them better.

Once the trainees have practised their feedback at the board we invite them to share how they felt, what they thought worked well and which challenges there were. Lots of interesting things come up here:

• importance of maintaining eye contact
• legibility/size of board writing
• how much the teacher needs to talk
• usefulness of simple questions which have a clear answer
• smiling and giving praise
• listening to and responding to students’ contributions
• …and of course lots more.

We often finish this session by asking the trainees whether they can imagine doing this kind of thing at the end of their lesson tonight / tomorrow. Of course, we know and they know that they won’t realistically have time to do such an elaborate board plan for their delayed feedback but the process of planning it and testing it is a great way to allow trainees to see what is possible and it is a chance to experience in a secure environment what it is like to stand at the board and teach.

No Sleep ’til Harrogate…

As some of you might know already, we will be running a workshop entitled Teacher Training Unplugged: simplifying initial teacher education at the IATEFL Conference in Harrogate, UK, on Thursday 8th April, 16:05-17:05 hrs (Conference Room).  The talk is part of the Teacher Training & Education Special Interest Group Special Programme on that day and we are very honoured to have been selected as part of it.

We will be using the hour to sketch out our reasons for changing our approach to running our CELTA course and exploring the process of change, as well as offering the audience chances to reflect on how our work may provide them with the impetus and tools to make similar changes in their work.

We are very excited and also very nervous about this: excited because we will have the chance to see who else out there has been working on similar ideas; nervous because it will be our first time speaking to such a (hopefully!) large and international audience, and it will certainly be the first time we have spoken about our work in that kind of public forum.

To add to the thrill, our session may also be recorded and accessible from the IATEFL/British Council website iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010, if you cannot come to join us in person, perhaps you can see us later!

Our position on Dogme and elitism

Recently, Dogme as an approach to teaching has been criticised for giving status to teachers who have high language awareness and confidence in working with emergent language.  There are many teachers out there, the critics point out, who do not fall into this group, and many of them are non-natice speakers who, because they are NNSs, lack the requisite language competence and confidence to work “unplugged”.  Critics have suggested that this is tantamount to native-speakerism and is therefore discriminatory and exclusive.

We do not understand this criticism because it seems to suggest that (a) most non-native speakers are unable to develop a level of language awareness and confidence sufficient to work in this way, and (b) that most native speakers already (presumably by dint of their being native speakers) possess this competence and confidence.  In our experience, neither of these premises is true.

We accept a high percentage of non-native speakers onto our courses (around 50%) and in terms of grades achieved see little difference between the achievements of native and non-native speaker beginning teachers.  Since adopting more Dogme-like principles into our initial training course design, we have noticed an increase in higher grade (Pass B or Pass A) awards, without an increase in fail/withdrawals – the shift has been in moving more candidates from the Pass bracket into the higher brackets.  This suggests that encouraging beginning teachers to work in a more Dogme-like fashion may enable stronger candidates to excel without placing average or weaker candidates under measurably increased strain.  This encourages us that our changes are not disenfranchising anyone.

However, we do agree that to work in a classroom substantially free from published materials and focusing on emergent language is to ask a great deal of the teacher (not to mention the learners).  So, whether native or non-native speaker, we do believe that a teacher does need to possess strong language awareness.  Insofar as short training courses place more strain on the participant than longer training courses, we suspect that candidates on short initial training courses actually need to be qualitatively better than their counterparts on longer initial training courses in terms of their initial language awareness.

For us, this justifies our decision to encourage our beginning teachers to work on emergent language from day one.  As there seems to be agreement that this is a challenging way of working, and as we believe it is the most effective way of working, it seems essential to start working on developing this skill as early as possible.

Our position on technology

The short version: we love it.  Hence this blog!

Not what I expected to find in a "Rural Lifestyles Museum" in Brittany...

The slightly longer version: We believe that there is plenty to gain from principled, competent and creative use of technological opportunities for language learning purposes.  Whether these be IWBs, mobile phones, Web 2.0 stuff like Twitter, SL, etc, we can imagine useful things to do with it in a “materials-light” classroom.  Technologies like these present opportunities and are too rich a resource to be scorned.  Dogme ELT’s eschewing of anything that did not naturally occur “on location” in the classroom did not foresee the extent to which such technologies would become ubiquitous and, for many people, irremovable parts of our social lives and environments.  Our students bring many technologies with them into our shared spaces (i.e. classrooms) all the time in the form of mobile phones, laptops, and the associated software affordances: it would be foolish to reject such opportunities out of hand.

We also believe that, useful as it is,  it is important that technology not become the tail wagging the Dog(me).  Technology is a tool, and a tool should be subordinate to its user, not vice versa.  Technologies should not (and, under healthy circumstances, cannot) dictate content or work processes, they should enable them.  The degree to which this occurs is a function of the competence of the learners and the teachers using them, but not of the technology in itself.  In this respect we agree with many commentators, like Gavin Dudeney and Vance Stevens, who have made this point before us.

However, we also believe that as the prerequisite for intelligent use of technology for language learning purposes is a sound grasp of pedagogic principles and practice in general, it seems fair to say that a good teacher will be able to make good use of technology in their lessons given the opportunity, but a bad teacher won’t.  Furthermore, as many still current teaching contexts exist where ready access to such technological affordances such as workstations, laptops, mobile phones and network coverage, reliable broadband connections, IWBs (all, specifically, within the classroom space) does not exist, we feel it is important to enable our trainees to learn, first and foremost, to be comfortable operating in a minimal environment.  This represents the “worst-case scenario” from a resources perspective.  If trainees on our courses are comfortable in this environment by the end of a course with us, we feel we have done our job and them a service.  This is because with the skills and perspective that materials-light teaching offers them, we believe it is more likely that they will comfortably add ways of using available technologies to their skill-set, whereas learning to live without is hard.

As helping people become good teachers in a short space of time is our business, we prefer to focus, therefore, on approaches to technology-light classrooms and lessons in our training courses.

This is not to say that we discourage our beginning teachers from using technology in their lessons, simply that we do not force them.  Becoming comfortable with becoming a teacher is ample challenge for many beginning teachers.

There are other, less philosophical, reasons why we do not place heavy emphasis on use if technology in our courses.  Firstly, we are not heavily resourced in this respect. Second, some initially attractive technological aids are unfeasible due to set up/break down time (in shared classrooms with small get in/get out time windows.  Thirdly, we are enthusiasts but not experts in this area.  None of these reasons validate avoidance of emphasising technology use by beginning teachers, but it does explain it.

We feel sad about the unnecessarily polarised conflict which occasionally flares up between those purporting to support Dogme principles and those purporting to support uses of technology in ELT.  For us, there is no conflict.

Next, we will outline our take on recent discussions of Dogme and “native-speakerism”/eliteism.

Our position on language focus

Whiteboard feedback

We believe the language that learners produce during their conversations with each other is the richest source of potential learning available.  This is because whatever learners say reveals where they are in the linguistic development and also indicates where they would like to move next – assuming, of course, that they have freedom to choose the forms and words to use.  We believe that teachers who become skilled in noticing and working with this language have two advantages over their colleagues who can’t:

Firstly, those teachers can use this language for awareness-raising purposes immediately after it has been used.  Striking while the linguistic iron is hot here means making as immediate a connection as possible between a learner’s attempt, a proposed improvement, and a meaningful context for its use: the “correction” has the best chances of being understood in both formal and pragmatic terms.  We believe this makes it more likely that learners take this up.

Secondly, those teachers can use these language notes as the raw material from which to hew dedicated lessons exploring language areas which their learners are evidently ripe for, as evidenced by their attempts to use them.

That’s all for now – we’ll be back soon!