Teacher in Development

Via think:lab Can Adult Brains Retain Childlike Capability?

Teachers need to pay attention to the brains of their students.
How friendly are our classrooms, and our teaching styles to the human brain? In many cases, I think we often invite students to subject themselves to "learning environments" and teaching styles and methods that are actually contrary to how the brain likes to process and learn new information.

Consider this:

• In many ESL classrooms, course books/text books are the core diet.The book is erroneously considered to be the gateway to the next level - Intermediate level learners will be considered Upper Intermediate level language speakers upon successful completion of their intermediate level course book - usually between 60 and 100 hours of study. In many situations, teachers and students are faced with a deadline - you’ve got six months to move up a level. While it is good to have objectives and goals, these kinds of constraints promote ball and chain coursebook work. It’s the book and nothing else.

• Little to no physical engagement, where bodies actually stand and move about the classroom. Most classes remain seated 100% of the time.

• (ESL specific) Most in company classes are in corporate meeting rooms or empty offices. Most companies have environments that have a high focus on "seriousness" or "professionalisim" = a depressing lack of visual richness.= The classroom is often a boring place to be in.

Embracing the Brain in My Teaching Practice
The brain governs movement. Exercise, physical movement, internal organs in constant motion and activity - the brain seems to love activity. Having your students remain still for the duration of your class, which is how most classrooms function today, seems to actually work against your teaching efforts.

"Teachers who continually require students to sit still and stop talking apparently prefer to teach a grove of trees rather than a classroom full of students."("Skulls and School Boxes: Student Brains That Want Out" by Robert Sylwester)

Welcome Modeling and Mimicking Activities
Harness the power of "Mirror Neurons". Brains seem to like modeling and mimicking.

"Scientists are also exploring the relationship between mirror neuron activity and our ability to imagine our own planned actions, be empathetic, and develop articulate speech by merely hearing it. A preliterate child’s mirror neuron system seemingly activates the same speech mechanisms that the speaker activates. Speech involves very complex movements, and so infants can only babble initially within a verbal environment, but they eventually develop articulate speech." ("Skulls and School Boxes: Student Brains That Want Out" by Robert Sylwester)

The quote is pointing to a strategy around  how prelit children take on language, but does it matter to adult learners? I think so. Specifically with basic level adult learners, I’ve noticed that they often like to focus around a specific chunck of language. They listen carefully to how you, the teacher, says it, and then they attempt their own reproduction. The process often repeats multiple times until the student is able to correctly reproduce the target chunk of language successfully.

If you’re working inside tight deadlines, chances are you won’t have enough time to create and effectively deploy activities where students have extended opportunities to listen and repeat. (Miss Profe over at It’s A Hardknock Teacher’s Life blog, writes about an interesting exercise. Brain friendly? I think so…how about you?)

Mission Impossible? Rescue your Student’s Neurons
Fascinating: the hippocampus (vaguely remember that word from university bio class) is a spot in our brain that is heavily involved in learning and memory. According to an article on the SharpBrains blog,  which points to some pretty fascinating research:

"Thousands of new cells are produced there (hippocampus) each day, although many die with weeks of their birth. {…}"It is clear that learning can enhance the presence of new neurons in the adult brain," says Shors, implying a "use it or lose it" phenomenon. "I want to stress that the cells that are rescued from death by learning were born before the learning experience. It is not the case, at least as far as we can tell, that learning produces more cells," she says. Rather, their data indicate that the cells that were already there at the time of the training experience are affected by learning and thereby rescued from death."(Neurogenesis and How Learning Saves Your Neurons)

Our students have the necessary cells for learning a new language, but are we actively attempting to craft learning experiences which "rescue" and activate them? Neurons could be our greatest classroom allies…but how well do we use and engage them?

At the end of the SmartBrain article, there are some interesting tips to help save neurons: I wonder at one’s application in the ESL classroom…

"The simplest and most complete methods are the computer-based programs that challenge you mentally with a variety of new stimuli."(Neurogenesis and How Learning Saves Your Neurons –emphasis mine.)

How to Step on Neurons

Following the conversation around employing a more student centered approach in big classrooms, I’d like to spotlight some from James’ comments. He raises some very…well, usual issues that I think many teachers face…

"I think your ideas for delivery in the big group setting are very valid…they do, however, come with some baggage — management…
in the ideal scenario, students would be interested in issues like the war in Iraq (as you suggested) and would be interested in digging into them more. My experience is that many students seem self centered in their area of interests…their focus seems very narrow and not global in context…I know I sound cynical here, and I am speaking only from my experience.
Some students are into this, while others…let’s call them the ‘disinterested’ - will bog down on things even when given their own choice of topic…
so, management becomes an issue with working in small groups. It means the teacher must try to be moving from group to group in fairly quick order in order to ensure students are ‘on task’" (James comments from Can Big become Small?—emphasis mine)

I think James makes some very interesting points here:

1.What is student centered learning anyway?
Should we really open the door wide, and have students explore whatever they wish to explore? Or should teachers set some guidelines?

My opinion is that it depends on what learning objectives you’re working towards. How flexible and friendly are they to students picking any topic they want? Likely, teachers would have to narrow the focus a bit. I remember my university English teacher doing this with a term research paper. She gave us a list, a sizeable one too, of topics we could dive into. It was student centered because we could decide on topics that seemed interesting to each of us (there were at least 30 people in our classroom) and if we didn’t like any of her options, there was the option of presenting a new one of our choice - of course with the purpose of convincing her that it was a valid research topic.

2. Distraction - How do you keep students "on task?" You know, this is an issue no matter how old your students are. Teens or adults, distractions are still major threats to student centered learning projects. Adults?? Sure…their day job. They are usually better at drilling down in the classroom, but what happens when your classwork spills out into life beyond your classroom walls?

Ever try to get adult students to do homework? Sure, a few do it…but most are just to busy to even consider cracking their coursebooks out at home. It’s funny, and this is a  bunny trail, but I’ve been noticing more and more often lately as I ride the subway to work, that there is a large number of adults who do their English class homework as they bounce and jiggle about in their crowded subway seat…likely on their way to English class. Is this defeating the purpose?

Anyway, I digress. Distractions are a fact of classroom life, no matter how old your students are. Perhaps, as James hints at, this could be a lack of management skill. If this is an issue in our classrooms, maybe we need to do some action research around classroom management. (I strongly suggest reading up on a guy named Harry Wong. He often writes about this issue at teachers.net — Here’s their monthly column and past article bank)

For further thought, I came across some related articles to this discussion on the thinking stick blog…hope  you enjoy:

Student controlled learning
- a lot of student autonomy, students picked their projects
- frequent school interruptions hampered progress (momentum hard to create)
- teacher became a guide when asked for help, largely hands off approach
- students produced something that mattered - 28 thousand + people viewed their work as it was a product review. (part of assessment perhaps?)

Chaos vs Coherent
(Preview)

"Most standardized tests control what we teach, and how we teach it based on what content is needed in order to do well. Standardized tests doesn’t allow a teacher to walk on the side of chaos in fear that what they might teach, what may be a different way of learning, will not be acceptable when filling in circles.

A little chaos is a good thing; it is where we learn to take risks, where perhaps our best learning occurs. These past couple of weeks I’ve been on that side, and my brain actually hurts from such a steep learning curve. I don’t want to be on this side of the line for much longer. I need a little coherence in my life, a little more structure.

I think this is where our classrooms need to be. We need to walk that line between chaos and coherent. I sometimes hear teachers refer to this as ‘controlled chaos’ which sounds pretty good to me. When I taught in the classroom I tried to keep my class in that controlled chaos state. This is where we learn, where we are able to push ourselves and the people around us and still understand there is a structure to what we do."(Chaos vs Coherent , Jeff Utecht )

Student centered work that is "controlled chaos." Perhaps a more useable approach in large classrooms? What do you think? Please continue the conversation…

Photo Credits

Science Class by pmorgan

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A week or so ago I blogged about what happens when our group/class sizes start getting too big. If you want to refresh, the post is here: Keepin it Real. 

I know that many of you are in big classrooms. I also know that personalization happens best when you’re small. It’s just easier to work with a group of 5….not 50.

One reader left a comment, an observation, that has left me thinking:
 

"What would be useful here would be practical and tried suggestions for how to keep the personal touch and attention in large classes while maintaining clear standards and expectations."(Marco Polo)

Later on, James over at crisp reflective disarray, followed up with a similar question:

 

  "My question: how do you deliver boutique coffee when the place is lined up out the door? Or, how do you deliver customized learning (what some would call differentiated instruction) when you have 29 + students in one class — and I’m talking private (boutique??) school here, not public. This has been my frustration for some time." (James, Pointing to Boutique learning…)

So…how do the majority of you handle large classrooms? They’re a fact of life, like it or not. I don’t have any contact with such environments, and so the ideas that I have here may or may not be useful…but here I go:

To paraphrase Seth Godin again: "Small is the new Big, not so much in size, but small in how you think and act." (You can listen to this interview - focus is on social software and marketing, so be warned - here.)

How does this relate to the classroom? Well, I think that this approach will mean more work for the teacher - and that’s not always practical I know, but I wonder if it’s worth the extra work? (You tell me.)  But what if you took more time in the planning phase to develop lessons that can be broken down into small group activities? Lessons which, while targeting and working towards your learning objectives and grading standards etc, would allow for some personalization at the small group level? I’m trying to think of an example…maybe you’re curriculum goal is something like this:

"It is expected that students will draw reasoned conclusions from information found in various written, spoken, or visual communications and defend their conclusions rationally.

It is expected that students will:

• analyse the merits of print and electronic communications in relation to given criteria" ( The Prescribed Learning Outcomes for English Language Arts 11 and 12)

  The teacher will define the criteria, but what if you broke the class up in groups of student interest. Instead of getting everyone to work on the same source, perhaps you could plug in to student interest.

Maybe one group is interested in say, the war in Iraq because they have family members or friends serving there, or they just strongly agree or disagree with the whole thing.

Maybe another group would be interested in climate changes due to global warming.

I dunno, I’m guessing here, but I would expect that if you worked with your class a bit, you could get a few groups to organize around topics that are of personal interest to each group member.  

Your activities could be to have students use the internet, magazines, newspaper clippings, etc, to help build and defend their position as the learning objective hints at. During the opening phases of the activity, you could invite each group to reflect on their thinking about their particular topic. Why do they think the way they think? How strongly do they feel about their position and why? Record these ideas, and proceed with the research or info collection around their points of interest.

As students find information about their point of view, they would present it to the rest of their small group, and explain why they decided to use that article or bit of media. To finish the project, the groups could present their findings and opinions to each other, (inside their small group) and have a time to reflect on what was uncovered or added upon by what each group member found as they worked the media. Did their ideas change? Why? Did their point of view become stronger? How? 

Next: have the small groups present their projects to the rest of the class, explaining what they learned, how their ideas were changed, strengthened etc, by what they found in their explorations around their topic of interest.  

By doing small group work you would still be working toward your curriculum goals, but in a way that makes sense to your students.

Likely not all learning objectives would lend itself to small, but with out of the box thinking, many of them could.

 Am I totally off the track? What do you big group teachers think? I think this is a valuable discussion, and would love to see it roll into something bigger than just my own thoughts.

The Speed Link:
Business English teacher? I just came across a website that you may find of use in your classes.

bnet (The go-to place for management)
Key areas: Management, Strategy, Insight, Business Library, Work Life.
www.bnet.com

Tapping You
I’m working with the Operations Director of a multi-national insurance co. The company is from Europe, but its local team members (in Mexico)are from all over Latin and South America, which is creating a very…shall we say  “interesting” work environment.  Do any of you have any resource links that you’d like to share that speak to managing culturally diverse work teams?

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Power Point is one of the most common business communication tools in use today. 90% of my clients use it at least once a week, and I bet many of your Business English students do too.

If you’re interested in doing some classwork around Power Point, I would like to share some links with you that you may find helpful. (These articles would work best for intermediate to advanced level classes.)

 Cliff Atkinson has a wonderful article bank around developing strong powerpoint presentations. Take special note of the Science of PowerPoint Overload article, it has some very interesting data.

sociable media // articles by Cliff Atkinson

 The 10/20/30 Rule of Poweroint - by Guy Kawasaki

This one has become standard reading material when I do this kind of work - it’s simple, short, and very easy to explain.

Really Bad Power Point - by Seth Godin 

My growing collection of links on delicious:

http://del.icio.us/aaronN/powerpoint  (Feel free to post links to me!)

What you could do with this:

 1. Read the stuff before. Lots! Become familliar with the ideas and concepts. Realize that there could be some flexibility with the "rules"

2. Ask your students to present their stuff to you as they normally would - take mental and paper notes: How do they compare with what you’re seeing from the above links?

3. Print off a few articles, I usually start with Kawasaki because it’s pretty simple, easy to understand…and short. Make enough copies for everyone in your class (make sure you include the link and credit)  and read through it a few times together.

4. If you have access to Youtube, hunt around for some presenters who follow these rules like Steve Jobs or Seth Godin. (Kawasaki has some stuff on his blog  ) Can you show your class some examples of the new style? (My clients have LOVED this.)

5. Do a make over on your student’s presentations - in English of course.

6. Flickr’s creative commons photos can make great visuals - and you should check out this great tool:  flickrstorm   (tip: use the advanced search option to look for creative commons copyrighted stuff)

Hope this helps you do some powerful Power Point work in class. How have you approached this topic?

Photo Credit:

Blogging 101 by Justin Russell

Via Explorations in Learning: Powerpoint and Sage vs. Guide explores some thought provoking research around the use of powerpoint as an education tool…primarily what not to do with Powerpoint.

So if you want to overload your students,  you simply should throw up some slides with lots of text, zero images, and read the slide text - word for word - to your class. I think you’ll be impressed with the effecient speed at which you can throw your student’s brains into flatline.

“…people don’t process the same information as effectively when it’s presented both verbally and in written form. With respect to Powerpoint, then, you don’t want to just read words off a slide.” (Nelson,Powerpoint and Sage vs. Guide )

Nelson points to a fascinating article in the Sydney Morning Herald (I accessed it on May 13, 2007) entitled Research points the finger at PowerPoint.

If you use Powerpoint in your classroom, or in any other environment, you should take a peek at what this article has to say.

Some key points that I took away:

• Don’t read your powerpoint slides. Speak about them.
• Don’t speak and have audience read at the same time. (Maybe this goes against typical ESL classroom practice of having students read text out loud - what do you think? Are we overloading when we do this? very often Students say that they either focus on correct pronunciation to the expense of understanding what they are reading, perhaps this is explained by the overloading idea?? To fix this, we could just ask students to read silently and then talk about what they read?
• Give students the answers - reduces “memory load” and promotes learning. Grammar rules: I wonder if this would mean showing sentences with the grammar rule in action, and invite students to notice it??

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"All I can say is that my particular field; EFL/ESL the "hobbyists" are light years ahead of the professionals in terms of quality and innovation. English language teaching books have barely come to to terms with the 80’s, let alone the twenty first century." (– emphasis mine. — Teacherdude, Are you a digital narcassist?)

Hobbyists vs. Professionals. Interesting. Why is this happening? Could it be that big publishers have just lost touch with what their market wants? Could it be that big publishers — professionals– have tried to deploy solutions that they think we need? (In many cases people buy stuff they want…not what they need.)

There are a lot of reasons why course books  fall behind so quickly, and actually become irrelevant to their target market, but one big reason is very similar to why I hate buying computers: the moment you take it home, your fancy high-tech toy begins to age, and a week or month later there’s a new and better one on the market.

Course books are very similar. They age quickly, and when publishers or English schools don’t notice, or are just two lazy to upgrade…the results are downright foolish end-user experiences. Think Memo writing exercises. (Many companies just use email today.) Fax preparation - yes, faxes are still used today, but again: email is rapidly rising to take that over too (scanning documents etc.) Handling telephone calls…yes….yes…that is still done today, and lots…but VOIP communication solutions between businesses are growing pretty darn quick, and I can promise you that it’ll be many more years down the road (if ever) before you see a unit about how to prepare for a Skype conference in your ESL coursebook.

The point is that normal publishing options are just too slow for the rapid changes going on around us. I wonder if prosumerisim has an option here. (Prosumer is the blurring of the traditional roles of producer and consumer, where the two become deeply involved in the production/consumption process.)  Look at Lego, as an example.  Lego still sells great packages of predesigned things for you to build, but they have also begun opening the door for their users to tell them what they want to build…and are allowing customers to just buy the blocks needed to create the dream product they created. 1 customer tells the big producer what to do, and it does it. Quick and simple.

Designed By You  — great read over at Fast Company today, discussing the exact same thing: the market telling the producer what to produce, and gets actively involved in the process.

I wonder what this could look like in Education…open source coursebooks? Teachers and students having instant influence and involvement in content design and topics? Or maybe big publishers would just vanish from the picture all together with the advent of self-publishing tools like Lulu.com, blogs, wiki’s, and podcasts etc., for example.

Interesting stuff to think about, and some major problem areas as well, like quality of content or accuracy. The little guy will be passionate and likely current, but there will be greater opportunities for mistakes to creep in….

Could the two ever coexist? Big publishers who are closely connected to the little guy to the point where there is influence over production and products…but stronger quality as far as editing and publishing goes? Lego is big and global…and they’ve done it with their Lego Factory….I wonder what is stopping textbook publishers.

I just watched this, and wonder if it’s somehow related to the discussion. Even if you don’t think it is, it’ll make you laugh: guaranteed.

Seth Godin: This is Broken 

 Photo Credit:

 Biloxi Bridge Close-Up by laffy4k

Interesting thought: In sales and business and in family life, there are questions we always ask, or get asked, that derail conversation…instantly. It’s totally not your intention…in fact you’re seeking engagement…but the opposite happens.

"If you want to end a conversation with a teenager, just ask, "How was school today?"

If you want to end a conversation with a customer, just ask if you can help." (Godin, May I help you?")

 So if it happens in business, happens in family relationships, I gotta wonder if this happens in  teacher/student/client interactions too.

Engagement busters?? 

"Make sense?"

"Do you understand?"

"Need any help? — I’m guilty there. 

"If you need help, raise your hand."

Replacements?

"What do you hate the most about learning grammar? Vocabulary? Algebra? The war of 1812?" ( you fill in the blank with what you teach.)

"What do you think you’re kicking ass at in this unit? Class? Theme?"

"What’s fascinating you in this class, and would you like to dwell anywhere a bit longer?" 

And you? Are there more questions out there that we could ask our students or clients that would invite engagement?  

 

 Photo Credit:

 Talk talk by PinkMoose

 

Seth’s Blog: "May I help you?"

 

Will the Real Juan Valdez Please Stand Up? - Branding - Authenticity

"Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX)

Tactic: Create sumptuous cafés that sell a "coffee experience" along with $4 lattes.

Truth: Stores now use automatic espresso machines–something you’re not likely to find in Milan.

Risk: Starbucks is so mainstream, even its chairman worries it isn’t special anymore."

 What does this have to do with the classroom? Lots actually. Like what happens to your teaching as more clients/students come on board? What happens to quality as your group numbers go up? What happens to quality as you get more busy?

Perhaps we pull a Starbucks: We go for automatic machine style teaching vs. personalized brews in our classes. We get so caught up in our own momentum that we fail to continue to do the things that created the momentum in the first place: provide personal, passionate service.

Getting bigger is great. But to paraphrase Seth Godin: no matter how big we get, we have to think and act like we’re small.  

 What do you do to keep it real in your classroom? Clients?

 

Photo Credit:

 latta mosquito    miss pupik

 Fast Company strikes again: What if Customers WERE the Service
I really enjoyed this post, and was wondering what this would look like in the classroom. (Go ahead, read the FC post…if you are interested in positive customer experiences (and students are our customers) then you’ll likely enjoy the ideas presented here.)

What if we, the teachers, provided more space for students to interact with each other on their own terms? No scripts. No starter questions. Just people interacting on things important or valuable to them.

Today I had an interesting experience around this theme: I was working with a pair of account executives of a major credit card company. They are not at the same level as far as their English goes, and they are both involved in very different areas of the company.

We were listening to a podcast around developing lifelong relationships between clients and companies (fascinating stuff by the way) and we ran into some difficulties in understanding a few words and phrases.

What fascinated me about this moment was that I didn’t have to do anything. The more experienced student immediatly jumped in and provided excellent "service" to the other, effectively reframing the new words and phrases in a way that was easier to understand…and sometimes better than how I would have done it.

This wasn’t planned…but I think I will look for ways to do so in the future. Students serving students just seems to work. Yes, I have a role to play…I am the teacher and am in no way advocating that we should step down from that place. But we DO learn by doing, and most people learn even better when they have to explain something new to someone else…the same should be true in the ESL classroom don’t you think?