Teacher in Development

I’m really starting to love the idea that "Simple is Beautiful." A few weeks ago, without even looking for it, I came across a really great quote over at WorkHappy.net. This is what I found:

"Be mindful of the link between present action and desired future outcome. Ask yourself: if I repeat today’s actions 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?" Roz Savage.

I liked this quote a lot. There’s so much truth behind it, and I think that very few of us are really conscious of it - mindful - as much and as often as we need to be.

In a pre-intermediate group I’m working with, we’ve been looking at the simple future tenses, as well as the present progressive. That night I came across the quote, I thought to myself: Wow! What a great way to talk about something that matters to most of us (living a life that’s on purpose, and going the way we REALLY want it to) while working on some target language along the way - "will", "going to", "want to."

After teaching new words (mindful, link, desired, outcome) we read the quote together a few times. Then we worked on a really quick explanation of "will, going to, and want to" 

We read the article multiple times, and each time the students understood the text a little more. And then we started talking about it. I encouraged them to take a moment to pause, and consider what they were wanting to be by the end of 2008. After they had thought about it, I asked them to share. (Of course, having to use the simple future tense we had just been learning about.)

It was incredible. Mistakes happened, but not many. Because they had time to think a little about what they wanted to say, the ideas flowed very well…and best of all, they were very real. Then the really fun part came…the present continuous. So you want to do "x"? What are you doing today to make that happen?

Again, I encouraged them to take a few seconds and think about it before speaking…but the moment was electric. As I looked around the small meeting room table, I saw that a few were starting to think about things in ways they had never done before. What AM I doing to make my dreams happen???? You could almost hear their thoughts as they worked away in silence.

The end results: We spent the whole class talking about THEIR future, and THEIR present action. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t fake. There was no tooth pulling….the conversation flowed quite freely. The best of all, at least for me, was that it didn’t feel like a typical grammar lesson. No pain or suffering…at least in trying to figure out how to use the new structures. It just flowed because there was, I think, a strong connection to the content.

 

If you ever want to see a brain friendly text book, why don’t you take a quick look at O’Reily’s Headfirst series. I’ve got the CSS and XHTML programming book and totally love it.

So what does this have to do with Grammar?  

Lots. Crack open your course book. I’m going to write about the one I use: Market Leader Pre- Intermediate. The average grammar explanation is usually a text box with a quick explanation of the grammar point featured in the unit. During the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at the Present Perfect. Here’s the book explanation:

 

 "The present perfect connects the past and the present. We use the present perfect:

• to talk about past actions that affect us now.
• to talk about life experiences
• to announce news " (pg. 46 Market Leader Pre-Intermediate Business English  Cotton, Falvey, and Kent, 2002)

After each useage explanation, there is a quick sentence showing the tense in action. So there’s an explanation, and then students are to tackle some exercises where they try and use the new grammar rule. (Maybe spotting it in example sentences, in short writing activities etc.) But have we fully included and engaged the brain here?

I don’t think so. Perhaps the explanation was enough to survive the incoming exercises which follow, but did your students own the new grammar rule and how it should be used? Are they able to employ the grammar in free conversation later in the class? The next day? The next week? On the exam? In my experience, the answer has been "nope."

A recent post by Katie Methodology Debates From OneStopEnglish.com which points to another article, well worth your time: Debate one: is it possible to teach grammar? by Jim Scrivener, has me thinking: Maybe grammar is often hard to swallow and employ because we, the teachers, have flown right by the brains of our students.

The High Speed Version of what you’ll get if you click through to these posts are best summed up by Katie:

"The gist of this article is: teachers, including experienced ones such as Scrivener himself, deliver decent, engaging, well-prepared, quality lessons – but it takes much more than that to “teach” grammar. He ultimately suggests that doing more reading and listening at lower levels, and waiting for students own interest/noticing/need to arise might well be more effective than focusing explicitly on grammar.

I think what he says makes sense, and fits much of my experience. One difficulty in implementing this though is simply that many students want to be taught grammar and will just not put up with a class or school where they don’t feel they are learning it (or are being taught it) as quickly as they would like. And I believe that while many people do genuinely want to know English and genuinely need to know English, they won’t ever take an interest in “why is … like it this, how do I know.” People who like languages might – but I’d say these people are more likely already to have learned languages however they were taught, and less likely to be clients of a language school later." (Methodology Debates From OneStopEnglish.com)

The Scrivener article really got me thinking about how we should teach Grammar. I’ve had the same experiences Scrivener describes happen in my classes: I put in hard work and prepartion to try and explain a grammar point. We do activities, games, role plays, and even free conversation that encourages the use of the newly presented grammar. For the class, a 1.5 block of time, the grammar seems to "take", but then the next class rolls around, and it’s like the previous lesson never happened.

So how should grammar be taught? Can we be more effective when we present grammar or vocabulary?

 

I wonder: How often do we simply "blue line" our students by simply walking through the grammar explanation offered by the text? If we were to only follow the book, and most folk do because supposedly the book knows best, we would make the big mistake of thinking that after the text box grammar explanation and following exercises, that the student will have successfully learned.

But doing the "blue line" leaves the brain out of the equation. It encourages constant clock checking (is it time to go yet?) and simply doesn’t work very well at helping students retain content. I think, if we want to become more effective at teaching grammar, for example, we need to learn how to "green line" our lessons. (see the graph above.)

The brain longs for more than just text. Cliff Atkinson points to cognitive research findings and how the brain processes information:

 

"…cognitive scientists have discovered three important features of the human information processing system that are particularly relevant for PowerPoint users: dual-channels, that is, people have separate information processing channels for visual material and verbal material; limited capacity, that is, people can pay attention to only a few pieces of information in each channel at a time;" (Atkinson, 2004)

 

Dual-channels: Text box grammar explanations fail to take advantage of the brain’s visual processing abilities = if we only rely on the text explanation, we loose half of our student’s potential to own what we teach.

Limited Capacity: pretty easy to figure out, right? Too much text breaks processing.

So maybe the effective teaching of grammar should include some new features:

• Unexpected images that help illustrate the grammar point you’re working on.
• Humor and Fun - how well do you help students slip into "flow", or a feeling of "play and enjoyment" while they’re working on the rules? (Hint: great pictures can help you do that.)
• 3R’s - Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Don’t try and cover too much at a time. Repeat or Reuse the grammar you’re working on repeatedly during the class, during the week, during the month etc. Go back often to "recycle" previous grammar lessons - it’s not fire and forget!
• Fight for more time in your course work: effectiveness is not about how fast you cover the content, but how deeply. (Think years, not months!)  

 

True Story

So yesterday I threw together a few power point slides using creative commons photos from flickr storm. (Here’s one) My objective was to review, reinforce, and encourage ownership of the Present Perfect. Interestingly, at the start of the class, I had a few students tell me that they had to leave early because they had a meeting, so we quickly dove into the material.

Know what happened?  The "green line" affect. The pictures did an amazing job of creating interest in what is normally a very uninteresting topic. (Grammar is exciting to linguists perhaps, but to mere mortals such as myself…)

The class was actually fun!  Lots of laughter and a sense of play permiated the entire lesson. Our 1.5 hour class flew by, and so did my student’s "important meeting" - they left class 15 minutes later than they should have.  But we spent the entire time, having fun…but on target as far as the work was concerned. We had lots of free practice, and opportunities to personalize the target tense. (The slides have little to no information, so students have to do most of the work)

24 hours later, the next class came around. Instead of rolling forward, I put a few slides from the previous class up, just to see if they could use the tense again. It took a few minutes to "warm up" but then they were throwing the present perfect around with ease. Tomorrow I see them again, and once more we’ll reuse the tense as much as we can throughout the class to help encourage ownership.

If you’ve survived all the way to this point in this post, I thank you! I’ve likely been a hard one to follow this time, but this is such a huge and important topic for us to be thinking about as teachers. And this is my own developing thinking on the subject, so I would love to have your input… 

 

 References:

Atkinson, Cliff (March 16, 2004). MarketingProfs.com. Retrieved June 14, 2007, from The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint: Q&A With Richard E. Mayer Web site: http://www.marketingprofs.com/4/atkinson10.asp?part=2

Via Marco over at Autono Blogger: A mismatch between curriculum and student desires

And the one I enjoyed the most, even though I totally felt his pain: My textbook doesn’t work 

I found this post in particular to be the of the most interest to me, and underscores, in my opinion, the desperate need teachers and schools have of being relevant to their students.

Books are useful. But if we force students to march through them, with zero personalization or lesson crafting…we’ll simply miss connection with the majority of the folks filling the chairs in front of us.

Yes, there are outside constraints - curriculum. It tells us what to do, what to talk about, what not to talk about, what to spend time on, and what not to spend time on. It tells us what matters. It’s a part of most teacher’s lives…but the question…the need still remains: engage. Be relevant. Create connections with your students. If we don’t, it’ll be more than the text book that’s broken don’t you think?

We could follow the rules like Marco did..doing everything by the book, which would keep the curriculum happy…but what about the folks the curriculum is there to serve???? Clearly something is missing. 

 

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

"As language educators, our focus is on communication but how much of that communication is metalanguage and how much is actual face-to-face communication with our students?

In my viewpoint, language teaching is more than teaching language functions and discreet points about a given language. Language teaching is modeling, expressing culture, and exchanging meaningful experiences through varied stages of communication." Talk to Me. ESLPundit

I think so too, and suggest that meaningful and authentic learning experiences are the pathway to building and sustaining both yours and your student’s motivation in the ESL classroom.  While the language functions and grammar have their importance, they need never be the only thing we base our lessons around. Nor should we fixate on our coursebooks, an all too common practice in our industry.

Coursebooks are useful. While I have often used this space to rail against them, I do appreciate the sense of direction they help create in the classroom. One page follows the other. One exercise after another, each (hopefully) building on the one before it. There’s comfort there. But we must be cautious: if fixated upon, coursebooks can kill off passion in both yourself and your students. You’ll never deviate from its path, and never explore past the exercises planned out and created by "linguistic experts" who know way more than us mere mortals. (Why deviate…really smart people have already gone ahead to show the way, right?)

I’ve been there before, following the "experts" and marching my students down the coursebook’s pathway to language proficiency. But it was an empty trip that rarely stepped into the adjectives of "authentic" or "meaningful."

Was that wrong, or poor teaching practice? Did my students make progress? Based on what I have learned about motivation and its connection to language transfer, yes…I think passionless, meaningless classrooms are examples of poor teaching practice. The more meaningful and authentic the classroom exchange in the target language, the greater teacher and student(s) are motivated. The greater the motivation because "this matters to me," the more your students will pick up and use the language we’re helping them to learn. They’ll connect to it on deeper levels, and will find it harder to forget or neglect.

Progress does happen in the fixated classroom, but I suggest that it’s slower than the progress achieved in learning situations that are deeply meaningful.

So what is deeply meaningful? What do passionate classrooms look like?  

I’m excited about the work I’m doing with my students. During the last month, my upper intermediate students and I have been working around a "personal leadership" theme. (No coursebook.) We’ve been exploring what and who leaders are. We agreed that leaders are anyone who exercises influence over another - which means that anyone and everyone can be a leader. Then, thanks to the Harvard Business School IdeaCast, (here’s the link to their podcast archieve if you want to explore) we tapped into one of the most meaningful months of conversation I have ever had within an English class. If you hop over to the IdeaCast podcast archieve, episode 14 is all about the fascinating topic of leaders and their legacy. I downloaded the podcast and we’ve spent the better part of the month listening to it over and over again, with a different focus or purpose each time.

One time through, I made a list of "gist" questions, and paused the recording ever few moments to get student’s feedback. Then, the next time through, I set up more difficult questions that were designed to workout my student’s "listening for specific information" and comprehension skills.

The podcast itself is very interesting, and deals with issues that matter - or should matter - to our lives. It asks "What will you leave behind" when you stop working? Can you shape that? How do you want to be remembered? And then we went personal. A few years ago, I read "The 7 Habbits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. (Great book, by the way.) There’s a chapter in there that is very similar to legacy, and deals more personally with the issue of "How do you want to be remembered, and by whom." 

There’s an exercise that invites you to imagine yourself at your own funeral. (Scary, but very powerful.) Who do you want to be there to remember you? What would you like them to say about you as they share their memories and shared experiences they had with you? And the biggie: what are you doing today to make that happen, and what are you doing today that is destroying what you want to see happen?

Last week, I brought that exercise into the classroom discussion with amazing results. One student was near tears as she started thinking about matters that really….mattered to her in her life. Another shared a disconnect between her thoughts of how she wanted to be, and living purposefully to make those ideals a reality. 

Our 1.5 hour time slots have literally flown by. We reach the end of the class (so says the clock) but find ourselves deeply involved in discussion that actually matters, and that touches us on emotional levels - leaving some on the verge of tears. 

Today was going to be our last day talking about legacy, but only one student could make it to class as the other two were away on business. As we sat down to begin, my student excitedly told me that she had not stopped thinking about our previous conversations…and that she had actually began dropping them on her friends. She shared that over the weekend she had gone on a mini vacation with ten of her pals, but spent a lot of the time engaging them around the topic of legacy and purposeful living.

I was floored. I had never seen this level of connection to classroom activity before. When I mentioned that today would be our last day of work around the theme, she asked me to wait as her travelling classmate had also been heavily impacted by the topic, and would be very dissappointed if we closed without her.

Wow! I’ve never had that happen before either. Most of the time students (and myself) are happy to finish off a unit. We love the "progress" of starting the next thing, but I’m seeing something very clear now: Sometimes deep progress happens if you dwell on meaningful things. 

Grammar was worked on - we were steeped in the future tense. We lived in "would" and "if" statements, and endlessly discussed progressive and present tenses as we described how we are living now, and how our everyday routines are building or destroying the legacy we so deeply desire to leave behind.  

We practiced writing those ideas out, as part of the podcast talks about creating "legacy statements." (We worked on our own.)

So the typical stuff was worked on, but it was fueled by passion. Student and teacher did not cringe as a dry lesson on the "future tense" was dumped out on the table. We just found ourselves in the middle of it, making sense of how to use it as we tried to express something that mattered.

Today, I’d like to challange you to go meaningful with your classroom work. Sensitive exploration of things that matter kicks language transfer into overdrive. Go ahead and try it, your students (and maybe even yourself) will come back to thank you.

 

Photo credit

Boys having fun! by Ray (rayphua)

 Have you ever wondered if your classroom work is actually impacting the lives of your students? ARe you really making a difference? In my case, I often find myself wondering if my students are actually making progress in learning English as a result of my classes. Is their fluency being improved? Are they a little more fearless when speaking English now than when they first met me?

Sometimes you can easily notice improvement. Confidence is one area that I frequently see improve with many of my students. For many, speaking English is first of all, a great inner battle against the fear. There’s the fear of looking and sounding stupid: "What if I forget what to say, or how to say something?" "What if I speak with a heavy accent?" "What if I use the wrong word?" "What if I speak like Tarzan when I meet my native speaker boss?" Fear, at least in my classes, is often the first place where both myself and my student notice progress. Very often they just come out and tell me that they feel much more confident with their English speaking skills.

But what about the slower skills of say grammar and writing? Once you reach intermediate level language proficiency, progress is much harder to notice, and usually takes a great deal more time to accomplish. Is it possible to craft learning experiences that help students transfer what is taught to their slowly growing skill sets?

Keep it Relevant: Link your content to THEIR reality.

Charles Nelson over at Explorations in Learning, recently posted on this theme here: The Transfer of Expertise. Cool quote to think and ponder on:

Transfer is a problem. Although first-year composition is designed to prepare students for academic writing in other courses and eventually to their careers, the skills they acquire often, even usually, do not transfer in part because the concepts in FYC are not seen as relevant to other contexts. (Nelson, The Transfer of Expertise)

 Nelson goes on to say that if teachers want to encourage concept transfer, they must focus heavily on helping students realize subject relevancy for their lives today. He suggests that one way for this to happen is via journaling "…the presence of classroom concepts and practices outside the classroom." (Nelson, The Transfer of Expertise.)

I like that idea, but I also would suggest that the teacher must first of all DELIVER content in meaningful ways. Why ask students to journal something they don’t care about to begin with? Don’t get me wrong: I think journaling or even blogging class work is a great way to encourage connection with the content. But that connection should begin solidly in the classroom with the teacher.

A Possible Application 

Prepositions: They suck. They’re boring to try and teach, and even more boring to try and learn. (Prepositions are words like in, at, on, under, around, through, with, etc.) Native speakers throw these monsters around without even thinking about them, but try helping a non-native English speaker figure out how and when to use them. Prepositions are rebels. They rarely follow rules, and there are so many different word/preposition combinations out there that memorizing them is just…well..a depressing idea to contemplate.  

A few weeks ago, a student gave me a three page list of word and preposition combinations and asked me to help her learn them. I took it home, and asked her for a few weeks to think about how best I could help. I knew that if I went with the typical drill and memorize routine, we would likely go nowhere, except to frustrationville. Instead, I got a new idea: Flickr+Powerpoint = an interesting and highly visual way to work on prepositions.

So I dove into flickr, and stayed up way to late prepping a series of slides that would help my student visualize word/preposition combinations in meaningful ways. Example: "Angry with" — I got this angry looking Hulk pic here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/throughmyeyes/191432700/  by without you. 

Then I plugged it into Power Point as a slide, and wrote "Angry" in nice big bold text. Then I wrote "with" and "at" as hidden text on the slide, and animated them to appear after mouse clicks. I made about ten slides like this, of course with different word/preposition combinations.

This activity was completely engaging for me in that it forced me to think differently about something I use everyday. It made me think: "How can I express this preposition visually in a way that would almost instantly make sense to my student?"

The hard work paid off. Big time. My students LOVED it. Not only were they engaged by the pictures, but they actually had fun trying to figure out what preposition went with the main word on the power point slide. Instead of slogging our way through another drill, we were laughing and actually having fun WHILE working on something that is normally not a fun thing to do.

To make the activity even more relevant, after the student got the right preposition, I got them to create their own sentences using the word/preposition combination.

Did transfer occur? Well, in some cases it’s still too early to tell. But I did notice my students successfully recycling newly met word/preposition combos in conversations held later on after the powerpoint activity was finished. (And without my instigation.) And even more interesting to me: after each preposition presentation, my students have all asked for a copy of it for their own computers so they can practice at home.

What I learned: Connect your content with your student’s reality if you want to see transfer happen. 

How are you being relevant to your students? Would you share how you make meaningful links between your content and your student’s lives?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credits

The Transfer of Goods by SyN+H

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=93715447&size=s

Linked by  HP - LaFilipinaNegra

http://www.flickr.com/photos/halfpinay/167702137/ 

Teaching 2.0 Emancipation. Just finished reading this post over at think:lab, and totally enjoyed it. What I enjoyed even more were the video links at the bottom of the post. Ok, it’s really very late, so I couldn’t watch them all, but what I saw was a great example of a normal teacher trying to make a meaningful connection with his students.

Sure, the approach won’t work for everyone. That’s not the point. The point is MEANINGFUL interaction. While I don’t know if I ever see myself doing something similar to what Drew has done here, watching his video around resume prep just got me thinking about how important framing or presenting our content really is.

If we just go with the ole fire hose approach, and soak our students with our content without actually trying to make it meaningful, we’re really just wasting our time don’t you think?

I wonder what would happen in the ESL classroom if a teacher, maybe you…maybe me, decided to employ a similar approach to explaining say…the past tense…or the past perfect tense. Most people that I know HATE grammar. Why? It’s sorta boring. Your brain (well, mine anyway…) seems to switch off the moment those rules come rolling down the aisle. So…what if we thought of different ways to package them? Would they make more sense to students? Would teachers have more fun teaching them? And would having fun while learning something USUALLY very boring, make a difference in what folks actually take on board?
 
I’m just thinking about TV shows like Beakman’s World. I’m 31, and I still find his style to be very engaging. I’m having fun, but I’m learning something…like what halitosis is. (Go ahead and watch…you might enjoy it, and you might just learn something new.)

I guess I’m just thinking that teachers have a really big responsibility. That responsibility, among many others, is to help their students REALLY understand what is taught. If the book explanation doesn’t cut it, or if the lecture totally flopped, what are we willing to do to make that vital connection with our students and the content? What have you done?

powered by performancing firefox

I am just reading a post over at the Hello, my name is BLOG blog, and I really enjoyed it, agreed with it, and wanted to pass it along to you for your consideration. It’s called “The World is a Mirror, Part 13. M is for Mundane.”

Scott’s opening is great, in my humble opinion, and it’s something teachers…perhaps especially ESL teachers, should be thinking about constantly: How can we make mundane things memorable?

How can our classrooms be fantastic places?

If you’re a freelancer, I think “breaking mundane” is vital if you want to expand your practice. I don’t mean to pick on any company or way of doing things, but I’ve just gotta mention something I see almost every day.  I always drive by a major language training center on my way to work. They’re a big time company, and can afford nice offices and classrooms. The classrooms that I always see, are on the second floor, and are completely glass. As a marketing ploy I suppose, you can see everything that is going on inside the classroom. Wanna know what I see? Pretty much the same thing every moring: Business people sitting around square tables. Their heads are usually down, working through some exercise in a workbook.

To be honest, I don’t know what the environment is like on the inside of the glass. Maybe they have lively discussions, and a wonderful teacher who excels at crafting engaging learning experiences. But somehow I doubt it. I’ve known a lot of people who have worked for/with this company. They often have similar opinions of the methodology: It’s boring, and there’s little freedom to go off the beaten curriculum path.

But even if you’re not a big shot company, I think you have to strive to ward off the mundane. Think about it for a while. Would your students describe your class as being: monotonous, tedious, irksome, tiresome, or humdrum? (Those words are all synonyms for boring at thefreedictionary.com. ) An even better question: How would you describe your classes?

According to Scott, killing mundane is vital for growth. Here’s how he sees the results of killing mundane:

Breaking the silence = breaking the pattern.
Breaking the pattern = mundane into memorable.
Memorable moments = increased comfort.
Increased comfort = increased approachability.
More approachability = strangers into friends.
Friends = people who become loyal, aka, fans.
Fans = people who love your stuff.
More fans = more positive word of mouth.
More people talking about how much they love your stuff =

HELLO, my name is BLOG: The World is a Mirror, Part 13

A week ago, I decided to do something different in one of my one-on-one classes. I arrived a few minutes before, and dropped into a nearby bakery. I picked up two AWESOME looking apple strudels, and took them into class. Food and drink totally transform most gatherings where people are involved, and classrooms are no different. While this particular class is almost always relaxed and easy going, the strudel brought the conversation even deeper. We had a great time, and our conversation ranged all over the place. Most of all though, there was greater comfort and confidence: key ingredients to successfully building language fluency don’t you think?

What do you do to break the mundane?

powered by performancing firefox

Over the last three months I’ve been working with lots of interesting people. We’ve been studying powerpoint and presentation styles with the help of Guy Kawasaki and Dick Hardt, we’ve been learning how to write email that is faster, and more efficient, we’ve been delving into podcasting in education, and most recently, how to use RSS and Bloglines to enhance market research.

Sound like your typical ESL classroom? Well, in one way, it shouldn’t. I think every ESL classroom should be buzzing about something uniquely important to its participants. There should be no cookie cutter classrooms, where you drop in on the intermediate level folks of one classroom, and then drop into another room of intermediates in another classroom and hear/see the same content being taught.

I think, if we want to be successful at what we do, then there must be strong personalization of classroom work.

So lately I’ve been doing a lot of listening to what my clients tell me. One group, that has turned out to be the one of the most interesting for me, are regional sales reps at a major credit card company. They do tonns of presentations, and are constantly having to troll the news for what their clients are up to in order to offer better services. 

They’ve loved Kawasaki’s stuff, and were floored by Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation. (So was I the first time I saw it.) Then we tried applying it to their own work. One student profusely thanked me. She was terrified of making her first English presentation in front of the "big bosses" of her company. She showed me her presentation one class before her debut, and it was the perfect candidate for a Kawasaki makeover. We spent the rest of the class talking about how we could transform her presentation, and she went to work all that night, giving it a total makeover.

The next afternoon she called me and excitedly told me how well it went. Before the makeover, she was deadly nervous because she was trying to cram as much info as possible onto her ppoint slides, scared that she might leave something important out. 

We worked on cutting all the "stuffing" down to key words and phrases, which would force her to really know what she had to say. The result: some nervousness, but far greater confidence in the actual presentation. She said that it went brilliantly, and had Kawasaki to thank.

And lately we’ve been working on using RSS to enhance market research. A few of my students rely  on outside news sources to help them do their job, so the other day I started talking with them out RSS coolness and how Bloglines could help reduce their workload.

I totally loved this article by Anita Campbell around removing the "geek factor" from RSS. While explaining RSS, I focus my attention on helping my students understand what it would allow them to do, instead of the more geeky side of feeds, and code, etc.

The result: One student who has already used bloglines to spot some new services she could offer to a client she manages in Peru.

This is my vision for ESL classrooms that matter. There shouldn’t be a disconnect from what you do in class, and what you do when you leave class. There should by synergy. What do you think?

powered by performancing firefox