Teacher in Development

More and more I see a tendency towards personal learning. Students are tired of course books. Teachers are tired of them too. I know I am. I also know my students are.

Sure, sometimes the text can be interesting and relevant, but the more I think about Alger’s post around curriculum and how it creates a certain aloofness, the more I’m seeing esl textbooks in the same light.

Curriculum forces you into a scheduled environment. It’s 7:30 a.m. - English time. Your English time lasts until 9:00 a.m. where you’ll leave the “English environment” and enter your real world. English, more often than not, slides away until it’s time for the next block of English time.

A fantastic quote from David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth:

“It isn’t about the technology. It isn’t about the machine! It’s about the information. So, with this in mind, what if we instead said…

…kids should only be allowed to learn from textbooks they have written themselves.

The sentiment is the same. Kids are learning by teaching themselves, within their own information environment. They are accessing information, doing something with it, and expressing it in a way that will be valuable to themselves and/or to others in the future.” (Warlick)

and

“The point is that students are learning, not merely by consuming content, but by interacting within an evolving information environment and producing valuable content. In addition, they are learning by building a personal network of content, and ultimately, a network of trusted people as sources of knowledge. It’s the best way I can think of for students to learn contemporary literacy as a learning skill.”

Learning is not only consuming information, but it is also reflecting on it, producing value added content - where value added is the information of origin with the student’s own informed addition to it - and connecting with others who are also speaking into the same body of information.

I especially like Warlick’s comment that the content should be drawn from within the student’s own information environment. How true, and how far off we are sometimes.

Most course books attempt to be relevant, but they just cannot. Atleast not for long. Market Leader used to be a course book on the cutting edge of business English. But that was several years ago, back when faxes and memos were the rage. E-mail was just arriving on the Mexican business scene. Market Leader targets business people, it attempts relevancy - and for a time it was successful. But in the end, it was just a course book that took a snap shot of it’s environment, was adopted into curriculum by many language schools - I know I brought it into ours - but now has and is phasing out of relevance.

I like Warlick ask, why can’t we have the student bring in content? Why do we have to latch onto course books, when we should be basing our content on the student’s world. Their “information environment.”

I’ve started doing this in my classes, tired of the frustration of a course book that is no longer meaning much to my students.

In my legal class, my students have started bringing in actual legal briefs - in English - that they are working through, and struggling over. Their information world is starting to become our content.

The results have been….amazing. We’re still in touch with grammar and vocabulary - but now it’s grammar and vocabulary and sentence structures that are useful. Relevant. Why? The student said so.

Learning is no longer passive, but is very much a prosumer activity. I see the classroom content of the future as being something that is live - highlighted by the student as being important to them (hello rss , blog content, day to day papwerwork etc.)

Curriculum will likely always play a role, but it will have to be personalized - and the teacher will need to be an expert on the horizon (the big direction that students have to be moving in) but also incredibly flexible around the steps involved in the journey that will get them there. I think the effective trajectory coach is unafraid of developing fluency in what their students are involved in.

I’m no tax lawyer, but my students are. Relevant content for them is tax law. Is tax treaties. Slowly but surely I’m starting to tap into this pipeline. My bloglines account is now a buzz with spirited activity of several tax blogs (holy cow, lawyers blog too!).

While I don’t plan or pretend to know everything about tax law, I have made it my mission to become a student of it, so I can be relevant to my students.

I’m still moving towards curriculum set goals and proficiencies, but I’m doing it from within my student’s information environment.

the conversation is open…what do you think?