Question: should I write a book or not?

Someone recently messaged me to encourage me to publish a book of low-resource ideas for initial language teacher training.

I think I would like to write such a book (when I get the time, that is!), but I would hate to do it if the world doesn’t seem to want something like that with the Teacher Training Unplugged twist.

So here is a bit of fun with a serious purpose: if you have a moment, please answer this simple question and I promise I’ll act (sooner or later) on the results!

 

 

If you can’t see the poll question, it is because your browser is blocking the embedded content from PollDaddy – this could happen if you use Ghostery or NoScript to protect yourself online.  Please allow PollDaddy if you want to see and answer the question.

Thanks for participating; I’m really looking forward to what you think.

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.

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!

Why ELT needs to cut like a knife

A few weeks back I was working with a group of CEF B2 learners. I had recently returned from a holiday in France and had brought a souvenir back with me: a pocket knife made by hand in the traditional heart of French blade-making, Thiers.

The knife itself (as you can see in the picture) is not particularly attractive or interesting – there were many other shinier, more beautifully made display pieces in the dozens of specialist shops in the town.

Every boy should have a penknife...

But this was the one that had found its way from a mediaeval town in France into a language class in a Hanseatic town in Germany.

I recalled I had the knife with me and pulled it out. After passing it around, I told the group about how the blades used to be sharpened back in the old days: backbreaking work, lying face down on a plank of wood hanging over a spinning grindstone (hence the phrase nose to the grindstone), judging if the blade was ready by touch (!) because they couldn’t see it, suspended over a roaring river deep in a valley where, to stave off the cold and damp, they trained dogs to lie on their legs for the 12 hours a day that the blade-grinders spent prone at work.

...and you think your working conditions are bad?

If that seems like an awfully long sentence, just think how long that kind of working day must feel like.

The group was fascinated and appalled by the story, and we had a lively discussion about life expectancy and industrial accidents. The students picked up on language I’d used to tell the story and went on to tell their own (not about industrial accidents, I hasten to add!)

If I had to choose a word to describe the atmosphere in the room, I’d say keen.

Keen in both senses: eager and sharp-edged. The people in the group were absorbed by the story and compelled to engage with it out of raw curiosity. They were notably determined to grasp the precise technique used for sharpening the blades – they were definitely not going to be satisfied by a superficial skimming of the text, which Scott Thornbury has written about recently.

What did it take to achieve this focus, this keenness? Well it wasn’t about the knife – my own shiny precious was barely interesting in itself. What cut through the afternoon lassitude was the story: the story behind the blade – the human story – cut like a knife.

What thoughts have I taken from this experience, as a teacher and teacher trainer? Well:

Stories are powerful
Candy van Olst pleaded passionately for more space for stories – particularly learner stories – in the classroom at the IATEFL Dogme Symposium. stories are part of what connects people, and language is the essential medium through which stories work their magic. More stories = more language.

Tools – by themselves – do not sharpen the mind
It is often asserted that use of EdTech can help establish motivation and focus in otherwise unmotivated classes. This may be true but it seems to me that it’s not the tool we should be concerned with, but the motivation and how to awaken that.

Trainee teachers need to dig deep in their pockets
… and I don’t mean for the course fees! Perhaps trainee teachers need to trust their own stories and their own resources more – and perhaps those of us who train them need to encourage them to trust these things, too. Perhaps we should refrain a bit longer before reaching for a tried and trusted piece of our own material to shortcut a planning deficit in teaching practice.

Find the sublime in the mundane, not vice versa
Our job as teachers is to take the everyday – whether it be situations, texts, language or resources – and leverage them for high performance. We shouldn’t be pouring our time and energy into things which appear “Awesome” on the surface but leave our learners speechless for all the wrong reasons.

What do you think? Or have you experienced a similar low-material/high performance moment recently?