Teacher in Development

 I was going through a few of my old draft posts and found this gem from Clarence Fisher: Blogging Depth.  Ouch! I totally see how this relates to everything "learning" don’t you? Are we out there "surfing" our curriculums, or are we slowing down to dive deep?

"Schoolwork up 50%. I’d be very interested in knowing where this stat came from. Courses filled and well padded in around the edges with goals of all types. So many pressure groups, so many governments and departments each with their own agenda, each needing to justify their existence, their philosophy, their view.

Surfers abound in this type of environment, but depth of perception falters."(Fisher, 2005)

I think ESL classrooms are no exception, and could greatly profit from teachers who refuse to surf. Language learning is a long-term engagement that would would only get better and more meaningful if we just slowed down. Course books hate that. At least the ones I’m stuck with do. They seem to delight in dropping hit and run grammar bombs. Students are rudely introduced to the grammar theme, are invited to lightly play with the rule in the few activities that come after the rough explanation, and then bam! You’re off like a shot into the next activity. It’s a polaroid moment. 

 

Point I’m pondering now: What would happen if you speant a few weeks diving deep into the Present Perfect or Wh- questions? What if you actually had extended, authentic encounters around the grammar or language point? That’s easy! It would rock. But do we have the time?  

This post started a few days ago, actually sometime last week. Via Educause.edu:  

 An exploration of the Career ePortfolio at NYC College of Technology (CityTech)

As I explored around the site, I found myself wondering why portfolios seem to be so fond of the finished product. Why should you create a portfolio for just one purpose: the showing off of what you have accomplished?  Shouldn’t a portfolio be a fluid place that showcases success, and highlights skills for employers while at the same time invites continued growth and development? (Learning.)

 I’m totally for showing off skills and competencies. That’s important. Met goals and challanges should be displayed in your portfolio, but I wonder about showing your "work in progress" as well.

The ePortfolio featured here just feels boxy to me. You can post info under Academic Samples, Work Experience, Internship, From the Field,  Professional Goals, and your Resume. (See the ePortfolio template.)

But wouldn’t it be cool if the student could create his/her own categories and decide what goes in them and why? Maybe schools should place some fixed categories there, but a genuinely personal learning environment should offer the student deeper control of its content.

The NYC ePortfolio examples that I explored just seemed to have too many periods. Too many finished statements and experiences. I could be totally wrong here, but isn’t that an incomplete picture of learning? Isn’t it encouraging a breakaway from lifelong learning? Isn’t it tempting the student to think: I met the competency, I read the book, I reflected on course content and that means I’m finished learning? I kinda think so.

Today I came across a really interesting podcast from the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session on ePortfolios entitled Digital/E-Portfolios and Learning: From Mosaic to Kaleidoscope, From Static to Dynamic.  It was delivered by Linda Ehley and is quite interesting if you’re thinking about ePortfolios for your classroom.

One of the biggest questions it left me with was Ehley’s position around the portfolio’s purpose. She argued that there are a large variety of ePortfolio purposes out there, but effective portfolios only focus on one of them. It could be built to showcase accomplishments, to showcase development over time, for employment seeking, for assessment purposes etc. but should only be on one of those, not a combination of many.

She gave an interesting analogy of why: Think about a Swiss Army Knife. It has a variety of tools that can be used for a variety of purposes depending on the tool you select or require at the time. But think about how effective those tools really are. Ehley used the can opener tool as her example: Have you ever cleanly opened a can with a Swiss Army Knife can opener? You often wreck the can and cover yourself with the contents in the process.

According to Ehley, an ePortfolio that tries to be too many things at once loses effectiveness and therefore needs to be highly focused on one thing or purpose.  

Her analogy was compelling, and made me consider my own position on the ePortfolio being used for a variety of purposes at once. But one question remains for me: If an ePortfolio is a focused environment, don’t we set ourselves up for a great splintering of our educational/learning experience?

You want a place to record your learning journey, you build a portfolio specifically for that purpose. You want to show your growing skills to a prospective employer, you have to build a specific portfolio for that purpose. Before you know it you’ll be faced with multiple environments happening at the same time.

Wouldn’t it be more practical and powerful to build a layered environment instead? A portfolio node or hub, that offers a variety of lenses to be looked through, but all from the same place?  Not to push blogfolios, but I see the possibility for this type of thing in this environment. The ability to build a separate page to your blog could be like adding a separate lense or purpose to your portfolio.  

I really like the blog as a portfolio mainly because of the blog’s "unfinished" nature. It’s an addictive animal that needs constant feeding and attention - just like authentic learning. It’s also an interactive environment. Ehley, at one point, describes the thrill students have of posting their artefacts so that others can SEE them. I say you should post your artefacts so that others can interact with them, and give feedback for further growth and development.  The concept that learning and growth never stop is really hit home well using the blog as a portfolio solution.

What do you think? 

I love reading Wesley Fryer. A post of his from yesterday has just landed in my bloglines account. The title alone is enough to fizz my mind: Messy Learning and Public Education.

The post itself…rocks.

Authentic vs. Fake Learning.

What is authentic learning? What does it look like? Have you seen it before? Have you experienced it before?  Is it represented by a number or a grade? Has it happened if you finish a course book or pass a test?

Is there space for messiness in our classrooms and schools?

According to Wes, learning should be messy, and that means:

"Messy learning involves students taking initiative and working in an environment where unexpected, constructive learning events can happen– in fact, they are encouraged. Authentic, messy learning recognizes that real learning is the product of dynamical, even chaotic interactions, rather than false perceptions and constructions of linearity and predictability." (Messy Learning and Public Education, 2006) 

I wonder if messy learning means, if you’re a teacher, to plan and prepare, and be immersed in your subject area - to literally simmer in it, so that when the mess happens you can go with the flow and speak into those situations? 

Are those "messy moments" what many refer to as teachable moments? 

I don’t think it means letting go of the "must knows." I don’t think it means floating aimlessly down the curriculum stream.  Wes calls it "constructive." Planned, and allowed for chaos that results in deep impact. Learning that sticks.

Fake learning is the kind we see most. The kind that says: I got 90% on this. I learned it. I got 50% on this - I totally didn’t learn this. I suck. It says: "I finished my course book, I’m now an intermediate III language learner." 

Today I have a beef. What if you’re asked to purposefully engage in fake? A human resource department  has told us that a few of our groups have been at the whole English game long enough. Time to close down the group and let someone else play in the kiddie pool. Problem: We’re half the way through the course.

My direction: Plough through. Don’t pause. Don’t deviate. Skip what may be skipped so you can cover the other half of the course by the end of May.

This ticks me off to no end. It’s fakeness.  It’s dishonest. It shuts off any chance for messiness because you’re too busy with the "learning" to really LEARN.

Language learning is totally MESSY. Borrowing from Wes a little: If it’s the AUTHENTIC KIND, it’s not package wrapped inside a nice course book. It’s not predictable. It’s not sequential, and it’s totally hard to organize.

We promise to churn out proficient English speakers, and I believe we genuinely attempt to do so.

But caving into the numbers driven demands of HR is a bitter waste; a complete and total disservice to our students and our passionate teachers.

 

For the last few months my "bookless" student and I have been exploring issues related customer service. It all began with a simple photocopied article that my student brought into class one day.

 

"Hey, I’ve been reading this and I really like it. It’s useful. It’s what I’m doing at work, so why don’t we work on it in class?"

 Cool! This is the perfect situation: Your student willingly telling you what he/she needs or wants. I took out a copy of his article, and began reading it through on my own to prepare discussion questions and highlight more difficult words for vocabulary building.

Our classes rocked for a few months or so. My student came into class filled with energy, and completely ready to engage in stimulating conversation and debate about the article’s ideas. On many occasions we would be so engaged in the content that all conciousness of time would just evaporate, and his personal assistant would have to come knocking at his office door to announce that the class had ended.

I thought, "This is great! I think I’m onto something here. I should look for more articles by the same author addressing similar ideas and themes. We could build a whole course around this stuff." I presented my idea to my student, and he loved it. Rock on! I started researching on the net, and found piles of pdf files, reports, and websites. I even found a few podcasts from other sources that delved into the same issues we had been exploring in class.

It was, in my mind, the perfect set up. I had endless content to work with. Content that my student had identified as being interesting and important to him. I was being "student centered."

But something strange started to happen. When January rolled around, my student’s travel itenerary picked up considerably. Our classes began to get cancelled. Business trips abounded. When we did see each other, I valiently tried to continue where we had left off, but was met with little to no spark. The interest, the engagement with the content, had moved on.

Interesting. Now I was faced with a choice. Would I ignore the failing vital signs of the classroom - attention was falling away, eyes were fluttering, breathing was labored, and blood flow…well…it simply wasn’t moving very much. Would I plunge forward with our beautiful, "student centered" course that I had so quickly attatched myself to? Or would I toss it, lean in close to the "body" and listen again for the vital signs? 

The class wasn’t dead. There was still lots of life, but a shift had happened. What was interesting and useful before had moved on, and interesting and important had become something very different for my student.

So I’ve been listening to his vitals. Friday’s class was an interesting one. The heartbeat started to get stronger again as he shared about a major off-site he had just come back from in Miami. Now on his front burners was branding. Public opinion. Change. It was a passionate discussion. The class flowed again.

So I stayed up really late last night researching corporate brands. I wrote down a page of really cool quotes and ideas that were directly related to what we had been discussing in the previous session. I went to bed exhausted, but armed and ready for thismorning’s class.

Or so I thought.

I was pumped and ready to dive in, but as the session began I noticed that my student was on a different beat. The conversation flowed freely and easily, but in a completely different direction this time. Again I found myself faced with a choice: I could cut the flow and broadcast my stuff, or I could keep my finger on the pulse, and flow along with what my student was genuinely into today. I kept my prepared class out on the table for a few minutes, just in case, but in the end it wasn’t needed. Not today.

The class flowed easily, and at the end he gave me some really cool feedback. "I really like free talking like this. We explored themes that we hardly ever talk about, and I got to play with phrases and structures that were completely strange to me. I liked it!"

He liked it, and I learned a cool lesson: It’s important to plan and prepare, but it’s way more important to teach like a DJ - to be sensitive to the student’s "beat" and flow with it.  If I wanted to, I could have just ignored the pulse, and broadcasted my own stuff - but the party would have flopped.

 

 

I came across a really interesting blog today via EFL Geek.

If you’re an ESL teacher, you will likely find some very interesting thoughts to ponder from Scott Sommers. His post, The Power of Reading by Steven Krashen, left me with much to think about.

I’m big on equipping students to help themselves as they work on their English, or at least I’m trying to be.  I often ask, "What can you do outside of the classroom to continue working on your English?"

One of the primary suggestions is free reading.

Scott highlights some really interesting gaps that surface as free readers attempt to produce language. Gaps occur in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Even with massive free voluntary reading of appropriate texts, complete acquisition of the conventions of writing may not take place; even very well-read people may have gaps in their competence. Typically, these gaps are small, and many readers will recognize them as problems they experience. Here are some examples:

Spelling demons: Words like “commitment” (or is it “commitment”?) and “independence” (or is it “independance”?).

Punctuation: Does the comma go inside or outside the quotation mark?

Grammar:Subject-verb agreement is sentences such as: A large group of boys is (are?) expected to arrive tomorrow.

These errors usually do not make much of a difference in terms of communication. “Independance,” for example, communicates the idea just as well as “independence.” Obeying the rules, however, is important for cosmetic reasons; readers often find written language containing errors irritating, and this reaction can detract from a writer’s message." (Sommers, 2006)

I really liked his exploration into why this happens, and I think I agree. Why are free readers reading in the first place? Likely for enjoyment, with little attention paid to form and mechanics. 

 

 If I follow Sommer’s ideas correctly, solid teaching practice should be to encourage free reading, but also help students pay attention to the mechanics - the grammar, the punctuation etc.

I can attest to this myself. If you’ve been reading my blog at all, you’ll notice that I’m not very good with punctuation. My college English prof once said that I was a "promiscuous comma user." Punctuation was never something I’ve excelled at.

However, in an interesting and wild twist of fate, I’ve been asked to build and deliver a course on effective email writing for one of our clients. As I’ve researched and prepared for this thing, I’ve found myself returning to the basics of simple, compound, and complex sentences. I’ve even started to learn about proper punctuation again.

I haven’t become an expert, but I have started reading on purpose for examples of the rules I’ve been learning about in my research.

I think I’m starting to notice how simple punctuation works. As I read The Lord Of The Rings, I find myself pausing every once and a while to think about a sentence: hey that’s a complex sentence, or that’s a compound sentence.

I’m also starting to think about why they are compound or complex, and I try to recall and employ the rules I’ve been learning about to explain my reasoning. 

The result…well that’s inconclusive. I’m still in progress there, but I have been working on employing what I’ve been learning about here in my blog. Perhaps there is a decrease in promiscuous comma usage? I hope so anyway.

But the lesson is important: Reading alone is not enough. You also need to pay attention to what you read, and why it’s written the way it’s written.

And maybe, just maybe, you should invite your students to learn the rules used to produce language in order to teach them to someone else.  

In development…What do you think? 

 

 I had an amazing experience thismorning. I arrived to class, and began setting out our "un-course" material for the session. (In this class we’ve been going bookless for the last few months. Instead we’ve been working with material that my student has identified as being important and interesting to him.)

 A few moments later my student arrived. We engaged in some easy small talk: the family, how his week has been, any plans for the weekend etc., and then he said:

"Today I’m not feeling very talkative."

Hmm. Ok. I took that as a cue to just dive into the course material. We could read and maybe get into pronunciation work, or so I thought.

"Ahh, no. Not today. I’d rather listen to you for a bit, if you don’t mind" he said.

This weekend I’m going to a wedding, so we got talking about that. The conversation took off from there.

I can’t remember the exact pathway our conversation took, but it went EVERYWHERE. We delved into issues of destiny, purpose, why we’re  here anyway, God, faith, athiesim, the intelligent design behind the universe and our bodies, God again, faith again, personal purpose, and finally we ended on family, love, and on adoption. (I know, it makes me dizzy to just writing it all down.)  Turns out my student adopted one of his kids.

 

Wow!

The story was amazing. It was heartfelt, and revealed a new tender side to my student that I had never seen before. (He’s a company director.) 

What really floored me was an instant transformation. One moment he was talking about how proud he was of his family, specifically, of his adopted daughter, and the next moment he was in tears.

I blinked. Double take. Yep. This guy was crying!  The conversation went full circle, and touched again on destiny and purpose. He couldn’t imagine not having this girl, who is now 26 years old. He couldn’t imagine anyone not being able to love and care for her. Most of all, he was so impressed with how well she turned out: from an unwanted baby to business administrator and responsible family member.

This was no ordinary class. There was deep connection. There was emotional engagement. It was really student centered. 

It wasn’t grammar centered. It wasn’t course book centered. It wasn’t a "production." It was real. My student was real. The language he worked with was real.

 He ran into trouble a few times, encountering new grammar structures. We quickly teased it out, and moved on.

Made me think of a great post by AJ over at
Effortless Language Acquisition: Covert Operations

Student-centered, in my mind, refers to a process in which the students are encouraged to experiment, probe, choose, and make discoveries… in which the language has context and deep meaning for them.

  Amen to that!

If you’re hunting around for a podcast to listen to this weekend, I highly suggest you give this one a spin. Enjoy! 

Moving at the Speed of Creativity » Blog Archive » Podcast 40: Defining and Telling the New Story

An interesting read around the role of the TOEIC in today’s marketplace. Via:
The Korea Times : Recruiters Discount TOEIC Scores

Employers seem to be placing higher value on how well you interview vs. how high your TOEIC score is.

"In many companies, TOEIC scores are merely used as a cut-off threshold, rather than a critical evaluation standard of one’s capabilities."

Then there’s a really interesting bit about hacking the test: 

“TOEIC has been around for such a long time people have started to get a `feel’ for the tests, which could result in higher scores than their actual English ability,'’ said Lee Hak-sung, an employee at Doosan Infracore, a machinery unit under the Doosan Group.

“You get a better idea [of English skills] from asking job applicants to speak English in their interviews and hear them respond to different questions, rather than relying just on TOEIC scores,'’ he said.

Note to English teachers: Prep for life, not soley for the test. 

I have to admit something: After about a year of fighting the insane traffic of my beloved Mexico City, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about teleclasses.  

What would a 30 second commute be like? Where all you had to do was walk down your hall, and turn on your computer to hook up with your student via internet?

You could say goodbye to traffic. Goodbye to wasted time if your student didn’t show. No more saying no classes because you would arrive home too late at night.

 The benefits are plenty, and they’re not just for the teacher. Students could take classes wherever, and whenever they wanted to. Classes would be cheaper in theory. Few to no books to buy. An endless source of customizeable content on the web.

I’ve read of AJ’s experiment with this, but and correct me if I’m wrong, it just didn’t seem to fly.

Why? Why would something, with so many advantages to offer, be so hard to actually do?

Today I came across two articles via edtechtalk.com , (sorry but I lost the exact link where these articles were mentioned) that got me thinking about the whole idea of teleclasses again. It seems to be working for them…

A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard - New York Times

and

For students, outsourcing makes help only a half world away. 

I wish I remember where I read this, but a recent survey on university students who did online courses said that they liked online for convenience’s sake, but missed the human contact.

 

Have you ever wanted to show someone what blogging was all about, and you needed to do it without the help of a computer or internet? (Hey, no-tech happens right?)

Head on over to the Bud the Teacher blog. Bud Hunt has a really cool idea to help people see and touch the read/write web.  

His intro post is here. Small Sticky Notes, Loosely Yarned

 I strongly suggest you read through the comments. There’s some really neat ideas there.

He then comes back with a mini update report here:  Yarn Blogging

What I really like about what Bud and his coworker have done here, is that they have found a way to explain an intangible thing in a tangible way. This may be useful for people who like to get their hands and eyes into the learning process. (Visual and hands-on learners.)

 That and it’s just a really imaginative alternative way to explain blogging and the connections that become possible on the 2.0 web.