Teacher in Development

Before I even begin, to all you experienced Carnival readers out there, I would like to apologize. This is my first time ever writing for a carnival, and I’m not quite sure I’m going to do it right.

 So with that little disclaimer out of the way, I’ll get started.

Perhaps I’m cheating a little bit here, but I would like to move our clocks back to June again. There have been some really interesting posts from last month that I would like to draw your attention to, comment on, and open the floor up to you.

Back in the last week or so of June, and into the first two weeks of July, there was a little "mini-buzz" in my bloglines account around Skype, and it’s possible uses in the ESL classroom.  I took special notice of these posts because of my own growing interest in employing such tools as Skype in my own practice as a freelance ESL teacher.

The first post comes from Teacher Dude’s Grill and BBQ: My first international lesson - First impressions. Teacher Dude does a really nice job of sharing his experience of employing Skype with one of his students. 

Though an avid tech in the classroom advocate and user, Teacher Dude discovers some pretty important obstacles to an effective deployment of Skype in his long distance class: The sound quality is still rather beta. This is ok if you’re talking with another native speaker, but what about students who usually need to hear the big picture in order to communicate effectively?  He also delves very nicely into the whole lag issue, that seems to crop up often when you’re involved in a long distance Skype conference with varied connection speeds and network conditions.

But the observation which Teacher Dude makes at the end of his post is what I really thought to be interesting: Are students in general ready to embrace Skype and other such tools, as a regular part of their English development?

A few days later, thanks to a comment left on my blog, I discovered Barbara over at Language Lab Unleashed.  Her post: Skype calls as assessment tools captured my attention.

There seems to be a great interest in authentic assessment these days, you know, the kind of assessment that requires your students to show understanding of what they learned, not just regurgitate memorized vocabulary lists or grammar rules. Barbara does an amazing job of deploying Skype and student blogs for this purpose.

What I learned from her, and what I hope to put into my own practice, is her focus on reflection. In most assessment, the test is given, it’s graded, and the results are returned to the student. But what happens then? Is it ever revisited? Barbara suggests that by posting their recorded Skype calls, "snapshots" (I really like that concept) on their blogs, "the brave ones" can return later to guage progress.  They can HEAR how they have grown over time. What do you think, isn’t this more valuable than a simple number on a feedback report?

I also really enjoyed her thinking around mistakes and perfection.

A few days later, Graham Stanley joined in the Skype in the Classroom conversation, and adds some valuable extras.  

Next Stop: AJ, of Effortless Language Acquisition, sounds off on Pain and Enjoyment in the ESL classroom. I whole heartedly agree with AJ: distance running has a lot of similarites with language learning. At least it should. I know plenty of students and teachers who are out there running full blast. They’re going for speed. They devour the course books. They cram the vocabulary lists. They immerse themselves in the grammar, attempting rapid language acquisition. Around Mexico City, some language schools boldly proclaim that you can be bilingual in a year - "Bam!" You can almost hear the starting gun firing somewhere in the distance, and thousands of eager language learners, victims of a marketing ploy, take off from their starting positions. But, as AJ asks, will they make it to the end?

Learning another language is not about speed. It’s not about quantity. It’s about QUALITY. How are you transforming your classrooms today by embracing this truth?  

To end today, I’d like to mention a post that I came across back near the end of June. Charles Nelson, and as far as I know we’re not related, writes about what to do when your students just don’t seem to "get it."  If it’d had been a snake, it would’ve bit me.  I enjoy reading Nelson’s blog, and this post offers something interesting to poder as we seek to transform our classrooms and teaching practices.

So often we are seeing things that our students or coworkers are not. Or sometimes the converse is true.  But Nelson asks an important question: How well are we "seeing what they see?" How well do we come along side in order to build bridges with the people we work with, or do we just stand on our side of perception and what is understood, simply shouting across the divide, trying to convice the other that they need to jump across.

You’ve likely experienced this. It’s frustrating for both you and your students, and it’s not very effective either.

So in this brave new 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 world of ours, I think it’s really important to be aware of the tools. I think it’s important to learn how to use them in our classrooms. But most of all, I think we need to learn, and practice the skill of getting on the same page as our students or coworkers. It’s pretty easy to find our spot on the "cutting edge" of what’s happening out there, but what good does it do anyone if we don’t learn how to share the view in a meaningful way?

So one of the big life changes I’ve been trying to deal with lately has been that I’m no longer working full time in an office. I’m now partly a freelance teacher who is trying his best to start up an English consulting business.  

I’ve been thinking about many things as I prepare myself for this venture. I’m working a business plan. I’m thinking about who I’m after, what sort of classes I’d offer, what that would look like, and where they should happen. I’m thinking about brochures and websites to help promote my services, and I’m talking with graphic designers who will help get a "look" for these services - business cards, website, brochures etc.

All this thinking has been leading me to reflect on exactly what I’m trying to offer a prospective client. What is my service, and how will I offer it? What is my USP? (Unique Selling Point.)

Ever since I started blogging, about a year ago now, my whole philosophy about teaching English has undergone, and is still undergoing, a very slow, but steady transformation.

If you talked to me in my pre-blogging days, I would have told you that my objective as a teacher of English was to form a strong relationship with my clients, and keep it that way. Success would be to keep your students for as long as you possibly can, ensuring your regular income and economic stability. Yes, student success mattered to me, but more than anything, my monthly paycheck was king. I think most English teaching companies subscribe to similar thinking: I get you to be my client for as long as I possibly can.

But all that has started to change for me, and I can link that change to this post by Will Richardson way back in September of 2005. This post got me thinking about what successful English teaching really is, and what it isn’t. Are you a successful teacher if you form a student/teacher relationship with the same person for years? Are you a successful English teaching company if you have the same clients, and the same students filling your classrooms for years?

 Economically, this is good. It’s safe. It’s predictable. You know that student "x" or company "y" will be with you for the long haul. That means regular money, and saftey.

But is this sort of practice really successful? Does the present, and very classic structure of ESL classrooms actually help its students succeed? Can fluency be achieved taking 1.5 hour blocks of English class month in and month out,  or are we wasting teacher and student time? (Not to mention money.)

Going back to Richardson’s post, and the discussion about what makes a successful English teacher, If  it’s not about building long-term relationships with students and clients, what is success as a teacher about?

The new thought that is slowly working its way into my life as a teacher: Teaching should be about equipping students so well that after a while you’re not needed that much anymore. One aspect of teaching success should be putting myself out of a job.  

I’m a regular reader and fan of AJ’s Effortless Acquisition blog. A few days ago he posted something that just resonated with me, and all that I’ve been pondering as I prepare to launch out more on my own: Small Is Oh So Beautiful

I really like his ideas:

"Students too fall into a kind of hypnosis when they enter a class. Its like they walk through the door and automatically surrender their autonomy and responsibility to the authority figure." (Small Is Oh So Beautiful. AJ.)

Autonomy and responsibility. That’s pretty important isn’t it? Teachers, in general, are well versed in their responsibilities as teachers. We know that we need to plan our lessons. We know we need to be responsible to come prepared for our classes. We know we can’t depend on anyone else to do our teaching for us. But how much do students take on this type of thinking? How often do they, through years of "school training," come into class thinking as empty vessels that need to be filled by the teacher? How often do they expect their teacher to teach them English?

Sure there is a major role for the teacher to play here, that is obvious. But I think we may have swung too far in this direction. I think I need to change the way I teach. Instead of the usual focus on vocabulary, grammar, conversation etc, I should be spending more time teaching my students HOW THEY can and should be working on their English outside the class, and on their own.

"Small is beautiful. And the smallest possible learning unit is ONE. That’s you- the learner. No one else. No teacher. No school. No authority figures to surrender to. No one else responsible for learning but YOU." (Small Is Oh So Beautiful, AJ)

 I think we need interaction to help process and refine what we learn. Teachers shouldn’t strive to create isolated language learners, but what does need to happen, and happen on a very deep level, is the spirit behind this quote from AJ; a spirit that burns with the idea that my success as a language student largely depends on me taking responsibility for what I learn.

And as I consider how my freelance practice will be, I find myself in 100% agreement with AJ’s closing  reflection about his own teaching in light of his self-study discoveries as he learns Spanish. "At this point, I can’t imagine returning to a traditional classroom– stuck in a desk listening to somebody give obtuse explanations about textbook grammar points. Ugh! Such a brain-antagonistic way to learn! So damn borin {…}In learning, small is indeed beautiful.

(This experience, by the way, is profoundly changing my thoughts about my role as a "teacher". I now think the best service I can perform for "my students" is to wean them off me until they are autonomous leaners. In other words, my job is to teach my student-customers how to fire me "(Small Is Oh So Beautiful, AJ)

That’s what I want to be about. Not creating life-long student-customers. Not creating dependent relationships. I want my freelance work to be risky in that I help the people I work with to not need me anymore.

And that ideal is now in my business plan: Success Condition: Student Fires me. Fired not because of bad service or poor teaching. Fired me because I did my job correctly, and effectivly equipped my student-customer with the skills they need to develop their English apart from me.

Perhaps we’ll still work together, but I see the relationship as something very different. It’s not about me feeding them everything they need. It’s not about me coming up with content and vocabulary words to dump in their laps. Now I think it’s about me coming along side as a true trajectory coach. Their journey is already in progress. They may just need some encouragement. They may just need some direction to keep moving in the right direction. They may just need to test out ideas about what they’re learning. The point is this: The interaction I’m seeing here, and I’d love to hear what you have to say about this, is no longer a long-term thing. It’s momentary and it’s empowering.

Shouldn’t this be how we describe our success as ESL teachers?  

I’ve been away forever it seems. Still here in the city, still teaching, and still sitting in front of my computer often enough to post something, but too swamped with work and life in general to actually have the mind to post something. If you are a regular reader, thanks for waiting around for me. I will do my best to get back into the blogging habit.

Blogging In the ESL classroom: Learning to Navigate Freedom. 

So I’ve been delving ever deeper into the world of classroom blogging, and it has been quite an interesting trip. At the moment, I’ve got two groups heading towards deeper blog engagement with our classroom work. One group is at an advanced level of English, so we are quite flexible with the content and writing work we’ve been getting into.

The real strange thing that I’ve been seeing with this group is that it was actually quite easy getting their blogs up and running. The really big challenge has been, and continues to be, teaching how to use the blogs. We’re entering overgrown territory here: free range learning where the traditional ESL course book is out the window, and the student becomes the content. There seems to be great uncertainty as to what to do with the freedom.

"What should I write about?"

"Where should I go to look for info?"

My classroom has become something odd for me too. Instead of "teaching" we’ve been taking a nice hard look at student interests and hobbies. If you popped into our group, you wouldn’t hear a discussion about grammar. You wouldn’t hear a vocabulary word drill. (You wouldn’t hear that anyway, at least not very often in my groups.) Instead, you’d hear busy legal professionals figuring out what they really like about their jobs, and what they like to do OUTSIDE of work. The great content hunt has begun, and in my humble opinion, the student is that content.

As I mentioned above, the hard part has not been the technology side of things. We had our blogs up and running during one class. The really hard part has been using that blog. I’ve been trying to show what to do with it vs tell. I started low-tech with them by bringing in a few blog posts around topics which I new would be interesting to them. We read those articles together, and I had them write their own ideas or comments to each article. Then we exchanged their comments so that the other students could read and then attach their own comments to what their fellow classmates had already said. The coversation was brilliant, both on and off paper. (And by the way, vocabulary and grammar flew around too, but in a more natural sort of way. It wasn’t force fed. It was, hey, I like this article and I want to better understand it. What’s this word?)

I took several minutes, over several classes, to talk about what blogs were, and what they would help my students be able to do. We talked about the power of "networked learning" vs. the traditional esl classroom. WE talked about the 80/20 rule of learning a language: that 80% of your learning should be taken on by you, and 20% with support from your classroom.

Above all, I’ve been really trying to focus attention on equipping. I know I won’t be their teacher forever. What happens if their class gets cut in a month’s time? Would their English learning have to stop? (I don’t think so.) That, I explain multiple times, is where blogging and the net can really help you. There’s so much rich content out there that if they learned how to dip in and use it, they could continue on learning with or without an english class to back them up.

So that is where I am today. My students know, in their head, how useful the net could be. Now it’s time to put that knowledge into practice. A completely different ballgame.

The first task: content hunting. I strongly believe that if the content does not engage your student, you’ve likely lost them. I ask, what better way to find engaging content than by asking the student - hey, what are you doing at work? What are you passionate about? What are your hobbies? What do you know you need to pay attention to in order to succeed at what you do?

Our class’s first blog post was about this: Personal and Professional interests. The second blog post was about learning how to use their blog to link to outside content.

It has been slow, but very interesting. Fascinating actually. One of the students, a lawyer, is really interested in triathalons and endurance sports. She linked to a tour de france article, and wrote a little about testing athletes for drugs.  Perhaps small baby steps, but steps none the less.

As a side note, thanks to my athletically inclined student’s blog entry about interests, I was able to find http://www.enduranceradio.com/ which has regularly updated audio content directly focused on this area. For our last class, I downloaded the lattest episode and played part of it for everyone. The activity went over very well, and everyone thought it was pretty interesting.

But isn’t bookless wishy-washy?

It sure could be if you weren’t careful. While I don’t follow a book, I still focus attention on developing reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. We still deal with vocabulary words, and we still have regular evaluations. It’s just done differently. Content is relevant. Vocabulary words are actually wanted by the student. I don’t use exams where you suck in and vomit out anymore. Instead, we’re using portfolios to show what they know. Class structure - the where we’re going bit, is coming from a few outside sources. The Canadian government has a really useful ESL proficiency guide. It’s organized around describing what you should be able to do depending on what level of English you are at. Check it out if you want, it’s at www.language.ca

This material is not providing content. It’s just helping us move towards specifc targets, and leaves the getting there up to you and your students.  

So is bookless wishy-washy? Nope. I would dare say that it’s actually way harder than following a book. Harder, and just plain better.

The other day I found this post by Vicki Davis: Perusing the Top 7 of Jeff Utecht

In her post, she comments on and links to a great post by Jeff Utecht. Their posts delve into Professional Development and the use of bloglines and the net. Most importantly, professional development that is 100% managed by the teacher. I learn what is relevant and interesting to me.  

Jeff says:  "After reflecting on the amount of PD teachers should be receiving, I’ve decided that I have to control my own PD. I have been for most of this year. But it hit me today as I had a light class load that I am in charge of my own PD and so I did what you do at any good PD opportunity. I poured myself a big cup of coffee (Starbuck’s Coffee and used my French press, the only way to have coffee I’ve decided) and started on my PD for the day. Where did I start you ask? Simple, in my bloglines account." (My 25% PD, Jeff Utecht)

I completely agree. Teachers need to be in charge of their learning. They need to find the content that is both interesting and necessary for their unique teaching/learning needs. But I would like to ask, if this is true for teachers, shouldn’t it also be true for students?