Teacher in Development

 It’s been ages…and I’m not even sure regular posting will resume again. For those who have stuck around the Teacher in Development RSS feed, I’d like to thank you…and now ask you for your thoughts.

I think the biggest thing that has been keeping me REALLY busy lately has been the growth of the little company I am working to get off the ground. After a year or so of really hard work, we’ve finally landed our first "big" client. 18 people - at all levels- in an insurance company.

If you’ve been a regular of this blog - back when there was something to be "regular about" then you know that I strongly support and employ bookless classrooms. In brief, here are my reasons:

1. ESL coursebooks are "one size fits all." My opinion is that if you really want to see motivation happen, then you need to focus work around what is important or interesting to your students.  Ask yourself, if you’re a coursebook regular: how often do you think your students experience disconnect when they step out of your classroom and into their offices?

2. Many schools equate book to level. When you finish Market Leader Intermediate, for example, you’re now ready to move up to upper intermediate. In my experience, when you finish a book, you’ve just…well…finished a book. In most cases, students still need more time to be considered "ready" for the next level.

Pros: Books make teacher’s workload much lighter. That much I know is true. It’s so much easier to just open up a book and presto: your lesson is basically set out for you. Sure, you need to prep a little, but in most cases, workload is reduced considerably.

Books are great a providing direction for the class. There’s great comfort in just finishing a page, turning it, and starting the next. One page leads to the next, five pages turns into a week or two of work, a unit turns into a month…and well, before you know it you have course work for a year set before you.

My style, while working one on one, has thus far been bookless with great success. From my end, going bookless has meant more work for me. More reading, skimming my google reader, podcast hunting etc. But the result has been class work that has not only mirrored my student’s work environment, and their language needs there, but work that has actually helped them do their job better.

Personalized, unique, student centered content creates powerful language learning environments. It’s not theory. It’s not wishful thinking…I’ve read about it, seen it happen and have experienced it.

But my experience up until now, has been betweem me and MY students. Nice and easy to manage.

Now that my little company is expanding, I’ve started to hire teachers, and have larger classes. So far, I’ve been trying to deploy the "student centered" and bookless style with my growing staff and pool of students.

It hasn’t been easy. In fact, many times feels like I’m walking against a really strong current. Textbooks are expected. Everyone uses them, and most frown on outfits that don’t give their teachers books to work with.

Take this recent post from a blogger I am coming to respect a lot: Alex Case over at TEFLtastic posts about making sure teachers can really teach: (brilliant post Alex, I’ll be referring to this a lot over the next few weeks as I work with my teachers.)  

"Give them the resources they need in order to teach good lessons- good textbooks, classes with students in the right level, lots of supplementary materials that are easy to find" ("How to make sure teachers can really teach." Case, 2007)

So, teachers who teach well are also teachers who have great coursebooks to work with. A close teacher friend of mine, MA in teaching and school admin, who is also in the middle of starting up a company of his own, seems to share this idea as well. Great teachers need to use great material.

That makes sense to me. I feel a big pull…like a magnet, drawing me towards those coursebooks. But, I still resist and wonder: What if a great teacher was provided with plenty of proD, and ongoing support in creating a bookless classroom with his/her students? Could it be done on a large scale? 

Here’s how I’m organizing currently:

1. Students are grouped according to level, and groups are kept to 5 members max.

2. Students do a needs assessment which is designed to let us know what sort of things they do with English on a day to day basis. We also ask about hobbies, interests, goals, etc. The results of this assessment provide us with possible content ideas for the course….instead of a coursebook. I currently find myself at this stage with all of my teachers….conducting the needs assessment, and searching for related content.

3. Instead of working with a set coursebook for direction, we are following a "Can Do" benchmark system set up by the Canadian government (check it out here: www.language.ca)  I like to think of these objective statements like a skeleton. They give you a place to go, but how you get there..and how you look on the way, is up to you and your class. Big room for personalization. Every teacher who works with me gets a modified copy of these benchmarks and ongoing coaching on how to use them.

So, I wonder to myself and now to you, what do you think about this? I freely admit that this direction is not easy. It’s very hard to work with teachers and help them create unique class content. It’s not practical. But do you think it’s possible, or should I stop going against the flow and give into coursebooks?

Which, do you think, would provide the best learning solution for a student?

Where would you rather work, if you’re a teacher? Textbook classroom, or a more flexible environment? 

What do you think?  

I have heard rumors about English shifting in importance as the world’s official language of business. Where? I don’t remember…but I’ve heard it "around". The idea sort of makes sense if you think about population numbers…

But one quote I found to be fascinating:

"Cheung of Executive Mandarin estimates a non-native would have to study Mandarin full time for five years to pass the securities exam."

I don’t know about you and your language school: but that kind of honesty is absolutely beautiful. I know a lot of schools that could learn a thing or two about being real with regards to answering the FAQ "How long’s this goanna take?" - How about you?

So…just curious: do you think English will fade in importance? Should we begin Mandarin classes? 

Learning Mandarin now mandatory for Western executives - International Herald Tribune "An executive can probably get by without speaking Mandarin, but the one who does will have a much better chance of succeeding," says Helen Cheung, a director at Executive Mandarin, the language school where Image studies. "It makes you seem more intelligent, more involved than the foreigner who just sits there and smiles."

 

 "Friend or Foe?"

From a recent post by Jeff Utecht over at The Thinking Stick blog Goodbye to your job. 

Interesting video, but curious response from some of Utecht’s students: "Goodbye to your job!"

Maybe I’m not seeing what his students are seeing, but in my view technology can only enhance the classroom and the teacher; never replace him/her.

 I saw this video and I thought to myself: wow! What a cool way to interact with language. Imagine being able to take pictures and so quickly be able to interact with them. Now imagine how that could be woven into a lesson around verbs, or nouns or….whatever you need to teach? 

Or what about providing instant feedback to students? If you could put a digital camera or a cell phone on that computer table, and have them instantly interface, how hard would it be to have microphones that pick up conversations so that students could see and manipulate their words…looking for errors, maybe better ways of saying things, pronunciation, grammar mistakes…all hands on. (Language learning that appeals to hands on learners! Wow!)

I see great possibility for classroom and teaching enhancement with this innovation…and the only threat to those who fail to reinvent their style to keep up.

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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What’s the motivation behind what I do everyday? Perhaps classroom practice is motivated by a multitude of forces…school policies, state/provincial standards, HR expectations, language assessment exams and final grades, our own agendas…think about it. What moves the work in your classroom?

Fast Company has a really interesting interview entitled “Do leaders teach? Do teachers lead? Bill George and Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp take to the blackboard.” I found several fascinating spots scattered throughout this article, but for now I just want to draw attention to one…and invite discussion on it.

“At Teach For America we know that teaching successfully is an act of leadership, and I often hear our corps members and alumni describe the moment they broke through as a teacher as the moment they realized that this work is not about them, but rather about their students.“(emphasis mine) Full Text: Open Debate

There are many roads which will lead us to breakthrough in our classrooms, but one we should be familliar with is the road of focus. Speaking from a TESOL perspective, to me this idea means that my classroom is not about my coursebook. It’s not about my school’s method. It’s not about the TOEFL or TOEIC. It’s not about grammar lessons or vocabulary lists…no, the student should be the focus if we want to experience breakthrough in class.

How well do we shape and craft our work around our students? This approach defies typical classroom design which usually embraces factory style course deployment: one coursebook or activity is firehosed across the people sitting in front of you….and everyone is expected to follow along and actually learn something by the end of the course.

Does the approach work? I’m sure it does, but I wonder if it’s the best way to do things in class. I wonder if it’s the most efficient use of  very limited time. Sure..factory style is easy to deploy. You just buy the material that is designed for your student’s level…and march on. Factory style deployment and even execution is easy, and perhaps that’s one of the things that lures us toward it so much, but what happens to this efficiency as the teacher/student…language school/client relationship progresses into years?  My experience tells me that it drops like a rock. What about you?

What if we reversed the equation a little. What if initial course development and deployment were slower due to personalization? What if schools/teachers were far more careful about who they lumped together in their classes…at present we smear placement tests around and dump folks together based on their results, with little to no consideration to what these people actually need to do with the language. Some are secretaries. Some are marketing coordinators. Some are accountants…all have extreamly different language needs and demands, yet we expect them to focus on, and be interested in the same thing for an entire course simply because they scored as an Intermediate I on our placement tool.

I wonder what would happen if we really bought into the idea that it’s all about our students, and that one of our jobs as teachers is to develop learning experiences that are both relevant and engaging for students. (Please see a fascinating post about relevant engagement by Cleve over at English360.)

He effectively argues “that engagement is not enough, that indeed some kinds of engagment are counter-productive, that relevance is critical, and that material selection/design and activities should follow the “relevant engagement” rule.” (Learning content: relevance and the limits of “engagement” )

“Relevant Engagement” is all about your students. It’s all about my students. It may take longer to develop and deploy than standard material, but I wonder if it would lead to more effective learning experiences for the people we get paid to serve everyday: our students.

Photo Credit:
Are you ready??? by ssh

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I am not an environmentalist, but I live on this Earth and hope to never see it self-destruct. I read this article from Fast Company today: Resources: The Revolution Begins and just started thinking, I wonder what kind of impact the ESL industry has on the environment?

I started thinking about:

1. All the trees we destroy for the paper we use in our lovely course-books and their ever so important companion workbooks and teacher’s editions.

2. All the trees we destroy for TOEIC and TOEFL exams (the first two I could think of.) - and let’s not forget all the books we publish to hack - umm, prepare for these tests.

3. All the regular, paper based reports we dish out: student attendance, progress reports, tests etc.

4. All our publicity: brochures, posters, business cards etc.

5. I use, I admit, a fair amount of paper too. Most of my classes have gone bookless, but I still print lots of articles etc, from the net. While not as destructive as a course-book, I think I am still needlessly consuming.

So yeah, I’d say our industry has a pretty big contribution to environmental problems around the globe.

I read the Fast Company article and I thought…now this is interesting. It’s a bit scary. But I really enjoyed the FC spin. To begin solving the problem, we shouldn’t go “doomsday.” We should look for innovative ways to go green, and develop sustainable businesses in doing so.

“…a group of big thinkers has emerged in the past decade to put a newtwist on the green dream–people like William McDonough, MichaelBraungart, Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and Paul Hawken. Rather thantaking ecological principles primarily as moral prohibitions, they suggest, why not see them as design challenges?” (Resources: The Revolution Begins. Giller, Roberts.)

The ESL design challenge. How about we adopt more technology friendly learning environments? Instead of course-books, use the net. Students could use bloglines and their own personal blog as their info catcher and notetaking tool. (No notebooks required.)

Reading, writing, and listening activities could also all be 100% digitally based by using blogs, online articles, and podcasts.

Instead of cds, why not help your students get ipods or inexpensive mp3 players as a part of your service. (I’m already planning how to do this when I get my company rolling.)

Companies could go for paperless reporting solutions with their clients, which would cut down paper waste, increase reporting speed and efficiency, and just make the whole process smoother. Sure there would be hurdles to jump, and adoption would likely be difficult at first, but going 100% green is very doable. I know the folks at www.english360.com are working on some pretty exciting stuff that could maybe open the road to this sort of thing at some point.

Doable aside, now that I’m in the middle of trying to get my own company off the ground, I am seeing this as a very possible USP. (Unique Selling Point.) I have never seen a Green English course. I have never seen an environmentally friendly language school either. But around here, in some places, there is a rising interest in going green. What if you could build a high quality, 100% green language development solution? What if, and more importantly, why not? There’s nothing stopping us but our own laziness and addiction to doing things the way they’ve always been done.

The Green language learning solution. Crazy ideas, or a possible niche? What do you think?

It’s weird and cool that many people are thinking about similar things as you RIGHT THIS MOMENT. 

Bedouin Related Memes: 

Becoming a Better EFL Teacher: Could Computers and the Internet REALLY Replace TESOL English Teachers?

There has been some really interesting posts coming from this blog lately, and today’s post was another example of that. I just have two things to say: 1. I don’t use blogger anymore, and therefore I can’t add my comments. I really don’t like that about blogger! 2. I think Lynch gives a really good opening: No matter how techie we become, the teacher will never be replaced. We will always need the human touch.

But what I really liked from his post was his call for reinvention. The Concept of School must change.

That four walls thing we have going now… it’s gotta become a thing of the past.

"Schools, at virtually any level, will need to be virtually and interactively linked to an extensive array of external resources. This means that the “traditional” board, markers and OHP will need to give way to additional, integrated resources that expand the classroom environment to an almost unlimited degree."(Could Computers and the Internet REALLY Replace TESOL English Teachers?, Lynch)

Then there’s Doug Noon over at Borderland. He recently posted about Working on a Change Gang.

 

Noon further explores the importance of examining our assumptions, and wonders what happens when you decide that what you believe about education is no longer valid. How do you replace the old with the new? How do you translate success stories of others into your own practice? (Can you?)

These, I think, are vital questions. I’m finding myself very dissatisfied with the classroom environment I’ve been living in. I’m tired of how things have been "working." I’m ready to explore, envision, and rethink what I do. But I want to break away from just thinking about change and classroom/teacher/student reinvention. I want to be the change. I want to live it.

Doug’s post comes via Clarence Fisher’s idea: Thinking about Change.

"It frustrates me to see all of the transformative tools we have, the networks we can form, the powerful theories of learning and change that we can implement, and yet we plod along, tinkering with assignments and where we seat kids in the classroom thinking this will change the kind of learning that develops, making it more appropriate for the century we live in."(Thinking about Change, Fisher.)

Now that’s something to think about isn’t it? I really liked the matrix he works with in his class. Test your assumptions. Think about why you do what you do. Are there other solutions out there that make more sense? Should we just keep going with the way things are? (Could we keep going and expect better results…I think we all know the answer to that one.)

Then, just before turning in to sleep tonight, I found this post from Stephen Downes. I couldn’t resist posting it here: Everybody’s a Network.

He asks a question that should sting: "What if education isn’t a business anymore - people share what they know as part of their day-to-day routine or part of the job, everybody does a little, and nobody makes any money?"(Everybody’s a Network, Downes)

That’s a brilliant question. Afterall, there’s a lot of money to be made in education. Nothing wrong with that, but I wonder about the implications of "Going liquid" as Downes suggests. Profit creation will change as well - and that could be one of the reasons why our educational environments seem to be so resistant to change; there would be too much of a loss. Downes points to BuzzMachine’s post: Everybody’s a network. Looks like a great read.

Nuff said I think. To remix BuzzMachine’s opening line: "In the future of education, which is now, everybody is a network. In the past, networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and content is controlled where it’s created."

The future is going Bedouin don’t you think? 

 

If you work with students who have anything to do with law, I’d like to pass along this really great resource blog: the (new) legal writer

 You’ll find lots of interesting and VERY useful links to articles, style resources, and it even has a grammar and useage category.

I’m no lawyer, but I’ve sure learned a lot from following law blogs for my classes. I see first hand that in today’s world, it’s no longer what you know that counts. It’s your ability to know more.

Tax Law News

The Oyez Supreme Court Podcast 

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

The post itself…rocks.

Authentic vs. Fake Learning.

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

Is there space for messiness in our classrooms and schools?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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