Christmas ELT Appeal: Worst Case Scenario Survival Toolkit

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:

1. What other teaching uses for the items I’ve packed can you think of?
2. What would you pack in your own survival toolkit, and why?
3. Do you know of any other “teacher Toolkit” discussions like this online?  If so, where are they?

When you reply (as I hope you will!), please contribute practical ideas as well as having fun with the appeal (a teaching toolkit is for life, not just for Christmas ), and also please allow Rufus to share your ideas with her colleagues in Cambodia when she gets there in February (perhaps by including your suggestions in any handouts she gives them – with you properly acknowledged, of course

Go On, Be Generous – It’s Christmas!

A Different Kind Of Scaffolding in ELT

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?

ELT BITES Materials-Light Lesson Challenge!

Richard Gresswell over at ELT BITES posted a low-materials challenge for teachers recently – you can find the challenge and instructions here.  I thought I would try, so…

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!