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

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

(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

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?

—–

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

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I got an email a few days ago from a teacher in Australia called Rufus. She works with teachers in parts of the world where resources that many of us take for granted can be scarce, and where others that we may occasionally get our hands on are pure pipe dream.

She asked me to contribute to some upcoming training she would be leading in Cambodia, with teachers whose local resources were limited and whose confidence in their own English proficiency may also be limited, and who may not have been fortunate enough to have received much in the way of formal teacher education in the recent past.

In particular, she asked me what I considered my essential teachers’ toolkit: what, as a teacher, I considered a bare minimum of resources with which I could imagine working effectively with groups of students more or less anywhere.

Bare-naked teaching?

I recall that Jeremy Harmer tweeted out basically the same question earlier this year (it was something like: “what is the minimum you need to teach in terms of resources?“); at the time, I flippantly replied: “students“. While I still stand behind the sentiment, when push comes to shove,  I can’t imagine working with no materials or resources to facilitate, if not mediate, learning work for any protracted period of time.

And it seems I am in good company: even Scott Thornbury, not one who needs to rely on materials to do his teaching for him – even when on his home turf – doesn’t bowl up empty-handed to class…

This hoopy frood always knows where his post-its are...

I’d bet we all go into class with much more available to us than we realise, and, like Scott, most of us also always go in with something – even if it’s just a board-pen – or a post-it.

Now the attraction of teaching unplugged is, at least in part, for me the important job it does of refocusing us as teachers on the richness of that potential in the resources around us even before we reach for a coursebook or switch on an IWB or insert a multiROM…

But, as Madonna said, “we are living in a Material world” – and while I am not a Material Girl, I can’t ignore the reality that some raw materials are not only useful, but actually essential.  After all, even Adrian Underhill’s impressive countermovement against published materials is predicated on having some blank canvas on which learners can paint their own masterpieces.

Be Prepared

So Rufus’ request offers me a chance to make good on my earlier sleight of hand while replying to Jeremy Harmer. it also offers me the chance to relive a childhood passion: creating emergency survival kits that fitted in a matchbox was something I used to love doing, and this is a natural professional extension of that. Naturally, I won’t get my toolkit into a matchbox, but it will still fit in there in spirit.

Yer not on the list, yer not gettin’ in…

Before I describe my toolkit, though, I should lay out some criteria for inclusion. I’m aiming for extreme minimalism here – and to be clear, I have never taught under circumstances where I would have neededto have such a kit with me.  So for me at the moment, this is a thought experiment, but hopefully it may be of som epractical value to some teachers doing admirable work under more challenging conditions than I normally face.

The toolkit should be small so I’m setting myself a maximum of 5 items (you could have more or less if you wish). In addition, anything in my toolkit needs to be:

portable
By this I mean small, easy to transport and light. It also means that you won’t get stopped at airports or by security because of it.

(relatively) cheap
Teachers aren’t exactly rich, and if you are worried about a toolkit like this, you probably can’t rely on a school or third party replacing stuff for you when it runs out or gets lost. This also suggests that most of the contents of the toolkit should be locally sourceable. All of my tools will be, with one possible exception.

hard-wearing or long-lasting
Teaching needs to be sustainable. and in part this means getting a lot of use out of limited resources. For teaching unplugged, this means squeezing every conversation, every text, every moment in class dry; for an unplugged teaching toolkit, this means recyclability and durability. Nothing disposable makes it in – or at least, jsut because it’s designed to be disposable doesn’t mean it will be treated as such!

multifunctional
How many uses can you think of for a paperclip, for example? It’s designed to be a single function device, but with imagination it can serve a range of purposes. So should everything else in the toolkit.

OK sir, empty your pockets…

OK. Those are the benchmarks. Here is my suggested toolkit, in no particular order:

• pencils (2B or softer) & chalk
• a dictionary
• safety pins
• a BIG ball of string
• a small photo album

pencils (2B or softer) & chalk
OK, cheating a bit here by counting these as one item, but a couple of pencils or pieces of chalk are small, light, handy, and extremely versatile. If I don’t have a board to write on, I might have paper, and failing paper, I could use either soft-lead pencil or chalk on most walls or flat surfaces. If push came to shove, I could use the pencils to write and draw in the earth!

But writing is only one function, you may say, so what other functions can chalk and pencils serve? If you know Cuisinaire rods, you know how flexible variously coloured sticks can be. A few colouring pencils or chalk can serve at a pinch for the same kind of purposes.

a dictionary
Dictionaries are worth their weight in gold. A good learners’ dictionary (such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, my current favorite) provides me with a vast range of support: a core lexicon, corpus-sourced examples of the langauge in use, definitions, grammatical information including collocation and colligation, picture support, style guides – in fact, good learner dictionaries almost make a reference grammar redundant. I would love to have space in my toolkit for a basic reference grammar, but something had to give and the dictionary won.

But apart from research language, what can you do with a dictionary? It can serve as a screen, a stand, or (in large classrooms) as a useful way for me to gain a few inches height to be seen in the back row!

safety pins
I’d pack about 50 of these, in 5 sets of 10, sorted by colour. You can do a lot with these.

For example, they would help manage grouping in large classes, so people could quickly identify their team-mates or the people they should seek out in mingle activities: just look for the person wearing the same colour safety pin.

Or you could use them as place markers in board games. I know, I have not packed any board games, but you can make those yourself.

You can also use them to pin up examples of students’ work – but for that, you might also need…

a BIG ball of string
Organise a washing line with some twine or string and you can use the safety pins to hang up student work in art gallery fashion. The students could unhang the work easily and go to talk about it with other people who have work with the same colour pin attached, or form pin-colour buzz goups with representatives from each colour group, as you wish.

You can also use string to create designated areas in whatever space you have available, by laying ot out on the floor or by cordoning off. This could be useful for creating little “performance spaces” or for recreating other locations (for example, laying out a students’ bedroom or office, which then could be filled with other props in place of their furniture – other students act as delivery people while the learner describes where the things should be put (over an imaginary phone to make it trickier ).

Speaking of phones, do you remember having “phone calls” when you were a kid by stringing two plant pots or plastic cups together with a length of string?  While at the moment I exploit skype, flatrates and ubiquitous mobile devices to make telephone skills lessons more authentic, I could replicate the same sense of distance with these – and the connection might even be better!

a small photo album

Photos may more generally live inside people’s phones and laptops these days, but that’s no help when the juice runs out.  A few photos from home (apart from staving off homesickness) can be used for all kinds of class activity, such as:

• visual stimulus for teacher input (live listening, generative situations, introducing or eliciting words…)
• raw material for production tasks (students describe what they see, form questions, hypotheses, opinions etc about what they see; they can talk about this, write it down, or both)
• additional “classmates” during 121 lessons, giving the learner other “people” in the room to address than the teacher
• and so on…

So that’s it – my suggested minimalist teaching toolkit.  I’m sure I haven’t even begun to find out what could be done with even these poor tools, so now it’s over to you to help Rufus further.

The appeal is to make the following donations by way of comment or link:

Go On, Be Generous – It’s Christmas!

Thanks to Kim Traynor for this image

There was a trainee teacher on my last CELTA course who had come to us without any academic background to speak of but with a wealth of life experience; in the end, he turned out to be one of the most interesting trainees I’ve worked with.

I would like to share a particular story involving him which raises some questions about our profession and professional training.

Scene: the training centre kitchen

Time: a break between sessions
Characters: Me (silent, listening), The trainee (D) and another trainee (T)

T: So you were a sailor, then?
D: Yeah, I’ve done all sorts, me, sailor, scaffolder…
T: Scaffolder, you mean you put up scaffolding?
D: Yeah
T: I saw them doing that down the road here, it went up so fast!
D: Ah monkeys could put up the stuff they use here – it’s all pre-fitted, you just snap it together. Back home we use what you call tube and fit, just plain piping and nuts, much more flexible.
T: Uh huh
D: Yeah, here, you just use these kits, y’know?
T: But what’s wrong with that?
D: You can’t do anything special with it. OK, it’s easy, but you can’t, for example, if you’ve got something round, like a chimney, you can’t build a circular scaffold with that stuff, it’s rubbish.
T: So what do they do?
D: Best they can – you end up with big gaps between the sections, blokes throwing stuff over, jumping across. It’s not safe.
T: No..
D: And it’s just… it’s not elegant, there’s no art to it…
T: Art?
D: Yeah, I mean, a scaffold – a real scaffold, tube and fit, it’s,… I mean, it’s beautiful to look at, it’s art. Inside a huge tower, for example, with a proper fitting scaffold going all the way round inside. Perfect, no gaps, smooth. That’s beautiful, that is.
T: I suppose…
D: Yeah, this stuff you get over here, well, like I said, monkeys could put it up. There’s no skill to it, no art. Anyway, gotta go…

That conversation got me thinking.

(Raw) Material(s) and scaffolding

D is here making a case against using materials for scaffolding that are too specific. He argues that, to be flexible and to be able to fit the local circumstances – literally, to adapt to the contours of its environment – scaffolding needs instead to be as raw as possible. Tube and fit – two elements with which an almost infinite variety of needs can be met, given ingenuity and skill.

The other, superficially more refined kit system, while being faster and easier to work with under certain conditions, quickly reaches its limits when needs become more than basic.

Might this also be the case in our field? Mass-produced courseware, no matter how well-intentioned and no matter how well-designed, cannot possibly claim to be tailored to any given learner or even class. Therefore, any class using mass-produced courseware is necessarily engaged in a compromise – in terms of linguistic content, topical relevance and theory of learning.

Recent blog posts criticising teaching unplugged have suggested – amongst other things – that asking teachers to custom-build material for their learners or respond flexibly to emerging circumstances is unreasonable: that may be.

However, that is only because of a flawed concept of education and how it is acceptable to go about it.

If we take an industrial model to education, it will lead to perceiving such individualising effort as either inefficiency or unjustifiable strain. This reveals only the inadequacy – the lack of fitness for purpose – of the industrial model of education, because education must always be a tailor-made solution, or as close as we can get to one. Education theorists like Ken Robinson have been pointing out the inadequacy of the industrial model of education for some time now, and they haven’t been the first.

Decrying efforts to move in this direction (as teaching unplugged tries to move) as inefficient or unreasonable in the light of current “realities” does not actually stop those efforts from being nevertheless right.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.
M. Gandhi

Further, the criticism that expecting teachers to be(come) adept and practised in using raw materials rather more than in maneuvering pre-fabricated materials is expecting too much of them – could be said to stem from or lead to an impoverished view of what a teacher actually is.

Teacher artistry and scaffolding

Ingenuity and skill are what using raw material well requires – in scaffolding buildings and in scaffolding learning. Skilled professionals take time to develop and are expensive to maintain. It is therefore economically easier to economise work processes by making them “idiot-proof”. This can be observed in the fast-food industry, where the process of creating a meal, once the preserve of skilled chefs, has been reduced to an industrial, production line process so simple and mechanistic that the worker is completely replaceable.

This leads (indeed, is designed to lead) to downward pressure on pay and this leads, in turn, to a downward pressure on the felt and perceived level of professionalism of the job: a fast-food worker does not enjoy the same professional respect or benefits of a well-skilled chef.

Might the same be true of our profession? Might the widespread use of pre-fabricated course materials, whatever their short-term pragmatic benefits and the potential for using them in a principled manner notwithstanding, still inevitably lead to just this kind of de-skilling and de-professionalisation in our field?

You pay peanuts, you get monkeys
- saying -

Scaffolding and scaffolding

The metaphor of scaffolding has found a place in Western education theory since the discovery of Vygotsky; this much is old hat. The question is: how much focus is there really on initial teacher training courses on how to scaffold – really scaffold – learner talk and learner learning?

D’s criticism of “scaffolding kits” which appear to offer quick and convenient support for workers often leave alarming gaps which have to be dangerously bridged. At best, there is an awkward fit between the structure in progress and the scaffold ostensibly there to serve it; at worst, the scaffold presents a danger to those using it.

Are there parallels to be drawn here to a teacher’s attempts to scaffold their learner’s discourse when the teacher has a only superficial grasp of what scaffolding actually is and what it requires in order to be supportive and effective?

Do popular training courses spend sufficient time not only on discussing the notion of scaffolding, but also on working intensely on developing competence in doing it?

A little Learning is a dangerous thing
- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism -

In short: do ELT professionals have some lessons to learn from a different kind of scaffolder?

Lesson Idea: “What’s up?  There’s been a powercut”

Acknowledgement: Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshab/ for this CC licenced image

True story – I arrived at work one morning many years ago to find the school in darkness and dismay – there was a powercut and nothing was working.  Our morning courses didn’t have coursebooks assigned but there was a course plan.  I had nothing prepared yet.

I was scheduled to review “present perfect 3″ (if you know what that means, you’ve been in ELT too long!). I walked into the darkened classroom with 6 confused students and did the following:

1. ASK students “Hi. Why is the light off? What’s up?” ELICIT “the lights aren’t working“. Ask for reason. ELICIT “There’s been a powercut – nothing is working“
2. BOARD EXAMPLE/CHECK UNDERSTANDING (So when did this happen? Do we know exactly? Is there still an effect now?)
3. UNPACK FORM (POS: S + have/has + 3rd form verb etc…) and MODEL/DRILL contractions/sentence stress
4. WRITE 4-5 SIMILAR SITUATIONS ON WB in de-grammared form (e.g. A) “What/happen? B) THERE/ACCIDENT. TAKE/TO HOSPITAL”). Students re-grammar examples.
5. CONVERT TO “DISAPPEARING DIALOGUE”, removing key grammatical elements, students recall and perform each dialogue with partner with decreasing scaffolding until performance is entirely from memory.
6. ASK STUDENTS TO CONCEIVE AND SCRIPT OWN DIALOGUES. Repeat steps 4-5.
7. STUDENTS MAKE LESSON NOTES

Materials light?
YES. Only used the whiteboard present and the students’ notebooks (paper ones!)

Conversation driven?
YES. The situation in the school was leveraged but not contrived (I didn’t cut through the power lines just for the opportunity to do this!)

Focus on Emergent Language? Innovative? UNPLUGGED?
NOT REALLY/NOT REMOTELY!/ABSOLUTELY!!! I had a clear agenda so this wasn’t very Dogme in this regard. However, the students provided the working language and later contributed their own ideas/language to the mix.  The approach is pure Old School PPP but considering it was entirely on the fly, involved no materials and was a response to “the situation in the room” that fortunately coincided with curriculum requirements, I am still happy to consider this as my first Unplugged lesson.

What do you think? Did I meet Richard’s challenge?  Go to http://eltbites.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/5/ and see what others have posted in response to the challenge or take up the challenge yourself!

We have come a long way since the beginning, two weeks ago.  Through your journals I have had the privilege of following your developmental and emotional journey.

Of all the ideas, thoughts, questions and wishes that keep recurring, one of the most frequent is that of fear.

This has been expressed by each of you, each in your own way, at some point up to now in the course. Here are two comments that caught my attention:

I’m scared to take risks because I’m being assessed.

I didn’t feel confident enough to do something new.

I can understand where you are coming from, but I would like to tell you now that the time for fear is over.

I’m scared to take risks because I’m being assessed

I know that I can seem like a very dark cloud on your horizon when I am sitting in your classroom, watching you at work, scrutinising every action you take. Many people feel frightened by the simple fact of observation.  It is easy to be paralysed by this fear.  However, if you are to grow and develop, you need to see this fear for what it is: just your reaction to a circumstance – no more, no less.

What is it that you are afraid of? If you are anything like me, it is the fear of failure, however that is defined.

I have spent years wrestling with this fear: every time I work with you, every time you watch me at work wth other students, every time I post something on this blog, every time I give a conference talk.  I am scared of the judgement of others, scared that I will be found wanting.

Such fear may always be with you, and I suspect it will always be with me, but these days I have found ways to put this fear in its place, move it aside and enable myself to take those new steps forward into unknown territory.  One thing that has helped me is a question.  Perhaps you have even heard this question before.

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

Spencer Johnson

As Ken Robinson has said, you will never create anything of value if you are not prepared to be wrong; and teaching – above all else – is the business of creating something of value.  So as teachers (and you and I aspire to be such), we cannot afford to be limited in the choices we make for our learners or for ourselves by fear of someone else’s opinion.

I didn’t feel confident enough to do something new.

On the other hand, you may not feel intimidated by forces from the outside; instead, you may be stopped from development by your own sense of inadequacy.  You may have felt doubt in your own capacity, your own competence – and for this reason, when faced with an opportunity to take a new path in your professional practice, you baulked and shied away.

This leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, one that I also know well.  I have shied away from certain things in the classroom (not to mention in life) because I doubted my ability to measure up to them.  The terrible thing is not that I was “cowardly” or any such thing; the terrible thing is that, in not trying to take the hurdle, I will never know if I would have made it or not.

The worst failures are the ones that we deny ourselves the chance to make.

I told some of you, and I will repeat it now, that I have an unshakable confidence in your capacity for greatness, in your potential for professional mastery.  I may well have more confidence in this than you do yourselves.  I would ask you to meet me half-way.  The next time you are planning a lesson or are in the middle of one, and you are faced with an opportunity to take a risk, move beyond your limits, and enter the arena of potential failure, recall this following statement, and afterwards, make your move:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”

Marianne Williamson

————

References

Johnson, S (1998) Who Moved My Cheese?, London, Vermilion

Robinson, K. (2006) Are Schools Killing Creativity?”, TED Talk retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html on Sunday 13 November 2011 at 16:18hrs GMT

Williamson, M. (1992) A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”, Harper Collins

Well, you've got to start somewhere...

On our CELTA courses up to now, we have maintained an approach to finding out what our trainees thought about their teaching that is fairly typical of such courses: we ask them to write a self-evaluation after they have taught, which they submit to us before we sit down with them to discuss the lesson.

This has several purposes and virtues: the trainee has an opportunity to reflect on the experience and work it through on their own terms; this in turn allows us the chance to see what the trainee is thinking (and, possibly, what they aren’t yet thinking about); it provides documentary evidence of the trainee’s capacity for self-reflection which is then amenable to evaluation.

“Remember, this is for posterity, so please, be honest: how do you feel?”

Earlier, we provided a fairly typical pro-forma document which contained questions for the trainees to respond to.  There were questions like how far do you think you met your aims?  Did anything in the lesson surprise you?  If you were to teach this lesson again, is there anything you would change?  What would you like your tutor’s opinion about regarding this lesson?

Over time, we started to feel this was not giving us the kind of information we wanted.  Quite apart from the odd case where we got single-word responses of the yes…no…nothing…not really variety, I started to feel that form-filling was not by its very nature conducive to reflection.

“Love letters straight/from your heart…”

So someone had the idea of just asking trainees to write their tutor a letter after the lesson.  We started to get (I think) much more interesting and considered responses.  Trainees were more candid, but also more discursive.  They asked questions.  They cracked jokes.  Sometimes they cried for help.  Of course, this had got through using the pro-forma, but we felt letters allowed for more of it.

A recent visiting assessor confirmed this feeling, adding that he felt the letter approach allowed for a much clearer view of the trainee’s reflective capacity and it revealed more of their personality into the bargain.  It’s always a relief to hear that something you are doing (or, in this case, asking someone else to do) is actually working.

So you might be surprised now to hear that on our next course, we are ditching the letter writing idea.

Goin’ Old School…

Then again, if you have been following discussions on this blog, you’ll already be aware that journal-keeping had caught my interest.  So finally we have gotten round to breaking the old routine once more.

I’ve bought a stockpile of really old-school exercise books (just like you probably had at school) and we are going to ask the trainees to keep a journal.  Instead of just writing something expressly for reflection on days they taught about their own lessons, we want them to write for at least 15 minutes each evening about anything related to their experience on the course up to that point.  It’s likely that on days they taught, this will predominate their reflections, but we will also hopefully get insights into their approach to planning, what they are noticing through observation and what they are picking up and toying with from our group sessions.

The idea of using journals is nothing new – it is fairly common on in-service courses like DELTA and I believe it is also common on Trinity College London  CertTESOL courses.  But it is new to us, so we hope to learn something from it.

Quid Pro Quo

We tutors are also planning to keep journals ourselves and make them available to our trainees, just as we will have access to theirs.  Fair’s fair, after all.

So what I would like to know from anyone reading this is: what are your experiences with journal-keeping, especially in a pre-service context?  Do you have any useful reading references on the subject?

Teaching Tao ‘n’ Zen…

…We have a firm opinion about our strengths and weaknesses, we believe we know enough to know our character, and recognise our limits.  In this we know, strictly speaking, absolutely nothing.

What we “know” about ourselves, we have learnt through comparison.  All the characteristics that we have attributed to ourselves, we have taken using another person as our standard.  We only know how we are in comparison with other people.  We compare ourselves with what we have learnt, with what others have taught us, with how we are to be like, with how success is to be achieved, with how one should become educated or how others imagine we are to be or to behave.  Therefore even our behaviours are relative.  They orient themselves on those standards that are essentially relativistic….

Believe me, the average person has not the faintest idea, not a clue, what they really are.

- Theo Fischer -

I was going to comment on this quote, but I think I would rather let it stand, and allow you the space (if you wish) to attend to it and allow it to work on you, and your practice as teachers and teacher trainers.

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.