What makes a lesson GREAT? Part #4

Here is the much-delayed part four in a five-part series of posts inspired by Mike Harrison, who asked on the IATEFL Facebook page “what makes a lesson GREAT?” My answer was:

Group Dynamic

Relevance to learners’ lives

Emergent language

Attentiveness

Thoughtfulness

You can find my posts on the first three characteristics by clicking on them above. Or you can start in medias res by reading on…

A for Attentiveness

The now-traditional glance in my dictionary tells me this about attentiveness:

attentive |əˈtɛntɪv|

adjective

paying close attention to something : never before had she had such an attentive audience | Congress should be more attentive to the interests of taxpayers.

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French attentif, -ive, from atendre ‘give one’s attention to’ (see attend ).

Attentiveness is then, the paying of attention to something. Seems obvious, but there are one or two implications worth paying attention to! For instance, paying attention is a conscious, deliberate act, and the collocation pay is more than coincidental.

The capacity to pay attention – or focus – on something is cognitively limited and it comes with an opportunity cost: humans are not omniscient – we have to make attentional sacrifices.

These sacrifices for learners may come in the form of error, memory failure, tiredness. As teachers, it is worth being attentive to the shifts in dynamic which may arise from the impacts of our learners paying attention to something new in class.

Here is a simple piece of homework for you:

TASK

In coming lessons, practise slowing down any instructions you give or transitions you make by counting to to three after each part of the instruction or transitional talk. In this three seconds, work on using eye contact to gather your learners’ attention. Try to use silence and stillness to marshall their attention instead of volume and movement. Here is an example of what I mean…

Ok everyone, you came up with some great ideas in that last task (3 second pause; look at learners)

Now, let’s use those ideas to make something (3 second pause; look at learners)

Look here (indicate section of coursebook containing next task; pause three seconds; check learners are looking at what teacher is pointing at)

etc…

This is aimed at training an attentive, deliberate approach to gathering your learners’ attention in preparation for new tasks. In the cut and thrust of a class, it is not uncommon for us to feel under time pressure and try to work more quickly than our learners may be able to follow; slowing down transitions like this may actually lead to gaining learner attention more effectively and thereby enabling them to get to work more quickly.

Paying attention to attention

Attention as a concept is also worth attending to briefly. Here are some excerpts from its dictionary definition:

attention |əˈtɛnʃ(ə)n|

noun

1 notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important : he drew attention to three spelling mistakes | you’ve never paid that much attention to her opinions.

What catches my attention here is that attention is linked to interest or a sense of importance. We pay attention to what seems interesting or useful for us. This relates to my earlier post in this series about relevance to learner lives. Paying attention is selectively ignoring other, competing stimuli in the environment in order to focus on something that we have deemed worth our attention.

The pedagogic implications of this for lesson content selection should be obvious – if we expect learners to pay attention to what goes on in our lessons, we had better make sure that what’s going on is interesting or important for the people in the room. To do this successfully, we need to be making the content of our lessons more worthy of their attention than anything else in the competing environment.

But how can we best manage this given that what is interesting or important may change on a daily basis for the people in the room, while the content of any given syllabus is prescribed months if not years in advance?

Scott Thornbury has just been discussing the limitations of such “bulldozing” of content; to take his evocative flock of starlings metaphor (read his excellent post to see what I am talking about), if we as teachers use buckshot instead of birdseed to get our learners’ attention, we are onto a loser.

All we will succeed in doing is scattering their attention even further, instead of focusing their attention on something that will generate a feeding – or learning – frenzy.

Easily said, but how can we as teachers pick the right kind of birdseed? To stretch the metaphor to breaking point, I would suggest we should pay close attention ourselves to the topics and language that our learners start pecking at, in class and outside of it. To help promote and develop this habit, here is a little homework:

TASK

Over the next week, keep a notepad handy and note down at least 2 examples of the following for each of the learners in a chosen class:

1) pieces of language that they ask for clarification about while engaged in talk with classmates not involving a teacher-specified task

2) topics of conversation that they use to initiate or extend conversation with classmates or you, the teacher.

The language that the learner uses is not important for our purposes here – if you do not share their L1, and you suspect that something interesting or important is going on in their conversation, ask them to paraphrase in English in the break.

I hope that after this small piece of data-gathering, you will have an increased sense of what kinds of things catch your students’ attention, and then you should be in a better position to leverage it in future. If you do this experiment, please let me know what you learn, and how you manage to exploit it!

In Memoriam: Chris Foley (? – 2011)

A poor sketch of a great teacher... and a great man

These are private words addressed to you in public

- T.S. Eliot

I do not expect many will read this. It does not matter. As I write, I imagine you are being carried by friends and family from the church to your final resting place. I doubt you will like that very much: you never were a restful kind of guy.

You were the best teacher I have ever had. We only worked together for two years but in that time I can honestly say that you forged me. You didn’t mould me, you didn’t shape me: you heated me, tempered me, prepared me to take an edge.

I met you when I was 16, just starting A-levels. I knew of you before then, of course; teachers are always talked about by school-kids, usually disrespectfully. You never were. I understand why not now but it fascinated me then: how could this teacher fly under the radar? Why didn’t he ever cop any flak?

You didn’t look like a teacher – at least, you didn’t look like a promising one. You were unkempt, with long hair combed back tight down to your shirt collar (always standing slightly askew over the jacket). Your mutton-chop sideburns connected to your mustache making you look like a cross between a WWI Field Marshal and an early member of the Wolfe Tones. Your jacket (never a suit) hung off you carelessly. You may have worn a tie, but that didn’t stop you from having an open collar.

I don’t recall you ever walking into class with photocopies or any other kind of material; I barely recall you ever working at the board or lecturing us. What I do remember are the conversations.

You sat at your desk (occasionally on it) and talked with us. This was the first time that I genuinely felt in a conversation with a teacher. As a group we chewed the fat about John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, John Milton and the rest – you wanted to know what we thought, and you wouldn’t allow us to hide ourselves behind adolescent silence.

When something we said interested or challenged you, your face lit up with mischievous delight, as if you were gleefully engineering a more sophisticated riposte to put us on our toes again.

When what we had to say seemed trite or ill thought-through, you never looked frustrated or disapproving; instead, a melancholy sadness passed over your face. In time I came to realise what that look meant: your awareness of how much we are all truly capable of, and your sadness that we in this moment either were not aware of it or did not trust ourselves to live up to it.

You lived for the cut-and-thrust, the conversation de fer, but not for the victory. I never saw you satisfied if you won a dispute with us.

I learnt passion from you. Not in the “I’m so in love with what I do, it makes me leap out of bed each morning with delight!” way that the word gets bandied about these days; no, from you I learnt that passion, at root, is suffering, effort; that being so, to live passionately, you had to be prepared for hard work, and occasionally failure. You never tried to teach me this; I doubt you ever tried to teach us anything. You weren’t interested in teaching; you were intent on us learning.

I learnt from you how to work on a problem, to put in effort, to roll up my sleeves, get my hands dirty, go toe-to-toe with whatever it was I didn’t understand and beat it into submission. I learnt from you to expect a few punches on the way and to take them on the chin.

But you were no brutal ascetic – far from it. You loved life and its sensuality and we learnt from you how to revel in it through literature. A glorious antidote to the otherwise prim attitudes of a Catholic boy’s school, you would have us all cracking up with a combination of sharp literary critical skill and smutty, school-boy humour.

I recall you reading a passage from Marvell, To His Coy Mistress; you read as you walked between the rows of chairs, our eyes were fixed on our books, our ears fixed on you. Suddenly your voice tailed off into silence mid-line. We looked round to see you staring at the window, staring down to the street.

“F***ing beautiful”, you said.

We came to the window and looked out – you had been distracted by a woman walking past outside.

And you were right about the legs. You always were.

Years later, I returned to my old school, a qualified teacher myself, to work there. Sadly, you were probably already ill and I never got to work with you as a colleague – at least, not officially. In my heart, though, I think we were colleagues from the day I entered your classroom as a pupil all those years ago. That was your genius, Chris, and I admire you and thank you for it.

Rest In Peace.

One from the Vaults – “40 Things…”

Was clearing out my closet and found this article I wrote with my colleague Dominic Braham a few years back.  I’ve added it to the blog as a page in the “Other Writing” section.

We enjoyed writing it and I hope you may find it interesting – here’s the link: http://teachertrainingunplugged.wordpress.com/other-writing/40-things-to-do-with-a-text/

Feel free to comment with your own ideas – let’s see if we can get to 100!