Teacher in Development

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?