Teacher in Development

We’re prepping to step out into uncharted waters, and so I thought I’d post this out and see who’s reading still - and tap into your networked intel.

My small company has started working with an adult student with ADD, and I’d like to toss out some ideas that I got from research I’ve been doing on the matter. Please tell me what you think, and if you have other ideas on the matter - do chime in on the comments. Thank you!

Source:http://www.livingwithadd.com/

Traits that could work in our favor:

1. ADD does not mean "unable to learn."  It means teachers must find a way in and reach the student.

2. Teachers should look for ways to take advantage of and unleash creativity. I’ve interviewed this student and spoken to him several times. His office has many small statues of famous musicians, cool jazz instruments, and - changing topic - sports items. (He’s an intense soccer fan.) Having read the bit on livingwithadd.com, the creativity part seems to make some sense here.

3. Gut feelings and Intuition - how could teachers tap into this? From what I’ve heard about the ADD client we want to work with, he has a reputation of operating from the gut. I wonder how/if this could be tapped in the ESL classroom. Perhaps trying to anticipate how grammar will work?

4. Holding interest is a big battle we must win. Learning a language is a long term quest - and a successful teacher working with an ADD student will need to learn how to market their stuff REALLY, REALLY well. And on a regular basis. I’ve heard this student say - on several occasions - that he’s just not good at learning languages. Perhaps what he’s really saying is that he’s just not been engaged in the right way?

5. Class material must be deemed important by the student to be paid attention to. The guy’s office is —well, it looks like a small bomb went off. Piles of stuff everywhere. EVERYWHERE. What does that look like in the ESL classroom? Is there something here against strict classroom rules or learning pathways? Should there be more freedom instead? More - wandering?

6. Time not mattering much. That’s bad news. This guy notoriously arrives late for class - or sometimes doesn’t show at all. Could this be that his concept of time has been altered for the moment? What does this mean for typical classrooms? How long could he hang in there and focus? Would short, high concentrated bursts throughout the day work better?  

 

7. Very important: help create a strong sense of accomplishment - and on a regular basis. Create short work projects with clear objectives, and then help student realize that they have actually accomplished that task with they finish. Create clearn starting and ending markers.

Those are some of my thoughts…what do you think?  

 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?  

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…

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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.

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Are you ready??? by ssh

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Brilliant post over at Dekita.org by Aaron Campbell. Start with Student Passion

I would say this is a must read for ESL teachers who want to tap into flow and inate student passion.

The most exciting classes I have taught (if you could say it that way) have not been beautifully delivered by yours truely. Nor have they been because of the best or most expensive course books or audio.

The best classes - the ones where both myself and my students forget they were in English class because of the fun we were having - have always been the ones that grew around my student’s passions, interests, hobbies, and work requirements.

A good curriculum should bend around the student, not the student around the curriculum. The more we embrace that, the more passionate and EFFECTIVE our classes will become.

“He might even forget he is learning English altogether. (Campbell)”

A painless, FUN English classroom. What a novel idea!

This is a pre-reading and studying post. Perhaps my blueprint for action research in an area that I find to be fascinating, exciting, and elusive all at the same time. Personalized learning.

To me, personalized learning experiences are exciting because of how quickly and completely they engage the student. Content is devoured. Time flies. Fun and Joy blaze into the classroom. Flow!

But then I’m faced with that “C” word. Curriculum. The “must knows.” The final exam that pretty much every human resource department head asks us for. (If you’re inside a school system, then replace that last bit with school board or district or principal etc.)

We live in a programed world don’t we? We grew up in and under the big C and we’ve been trained to reproduce it and expect it in all other “learning” experiences/environments we encounter.

My questions around curriculum largely remain the same: Is Curriculum bad? It’s push technology. It’s a broadcast that all of our students must tune into, or face failure. It’s a broadcast that teachers have to transmit, or they too shall fail. Is that kind of setup incorrect? Have our times changed so much that “the way it’s always been” no longer applies?

I’m thinking that the answer to that question is yes, but I have no idea what it really means. I admit to being in a state of ignorance around an updated educational model, where the power of personal is released.

So I embark on an exploration. Over the next few posts I would like to learn more about Personalized Learning. I have some towering questions that I would like to echo and ask. This post from Stephen Downes really helps frame my questions:Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Personalisation and Digital Technologies

“The logic of education systems should be reversed so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system. This is the essence of personalisation. It demands a system capable of offering bespoke support for each individual in order to foster engaged and independent learners able to reach their full potential.” Good stuff, and I support most of it, though I note (and this is a small criticism) that the authors can’t quite let go of the reins, as evidenced by their suggestion that students take merely “joint responsibility” for learning choices and able only to “co-design” their own curriculum. When two people - one with power, and one without - are sharing “joint responsibility” and “co-design,” the person without power is inevitably overruled by the person with power. Status quo.

1. How do you let go of those reigns?
2. Should their be reigns of any kind?
3. Shouldn’t there be some kind of…framework set out around what is to be covered in class? A curriculum that is, but isn’t at the same time? It’s hard for me to get my words around this one. I think J.M. over at Palimpsest redux really hits this one well: Curriculum as guide not a gavel.
4. How do you get co-design that is really equal? Should it be all student? If it is all student centered course design, what happens to society when these students graduate? Will we be failing to reach key and important learning targets that are required to live and work outside school? Will unleashing self-directed learners…those who learn in a “just-in-time” fashion be able to fit in to our world successfully?

Lots of questions, and exciting directions to explore. As always, the floor is happily yours!

More and more I see a tendency towards personal learning. Students are tired of course books. Teachers are tired of them too. I know I am. I also know my students are.

Sure, sometimes the text can be interesting and relevant, but the more I think about Alger’s post around curriculum and how it creates a certain aloofness, the more I’m seeing esl textbooks in the same light.

Curriculum forces you into a scheduled environment. It’s 7:30 a.m. - English time. Your English time lasts until 9:00 a.m. where you’ll leave the “English environment” and enter your real world. English, more often than not, slides away until it’s time for the next block of English time.

A fantastic quote from David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth:

“It isn’t about the technology. It isn’t about the machine! It’s about the information. So, with this in mind, what if we instead said…

…kids should only be allowed to learn from textbooks they have written themselves.

The sentiment is the same. Kids are learning by teaching themselves, within their own information environment. They are accessing information, doing something with it, and expressing it in a way that will be valuable to themselves and/or to others in the future.” (Warlick)

and

“The point is that students are learning, not merely by consuming content, but by interacting within an evolving information environment and producing valuable content. In addition, they are learning by building a personal network of content, and ultimately, a network of trusted people as sources of knowledge. It’s the best way I can think of for students to learn contemporary literacy as a learning skill.”

Learning is not only consuming information, but it is also reflecting on it, producing value added content - where value added is the information of origin with the student’s own informed addition to it - and connecting with others who are also speaking into the same body of information.

I especially like Warlick’s comment that the content should be drawn from within the student’s own information environment. How true, and how far off we are sometimes.

Most course books attempt to be relevant, but they just cannot. Atleast not for long. Market Leader used to be a course book on the cutting edge of business English. But that was several years ago, back when faxes and memos were the rage. E-mail was just arriving on the Mexican business scene. Market Leader targets business people, it attempts relevancy - and for a time it was successful. But in the end, it was just a course book that took a snap shot of it’s environment, was adopted into curriculum by many language schools - I know I brought it into ours - but now has and is phasing out of relevance.

I like Warlick ask, why can’t we have the student bring in content? Why do we have to latch onto course books, when we should be basing our content on the student’s world. Their “information environment.”

I’ve started doing this in my classes, tired of the frustration of a course book that is no longer meaning much to my students.

In my legal class, my students have started bringing in actual legal briefs - in English - that they are working through, and struggling over. Their information world is starting to become our content.

The results have been….amazing. We’re still in touch with grammar and vocabulary - but now it’s grammar and vocabulary and sentence structures that are useful. Relevant. Why? The student said so.

Learning is no longer passive, but is very much a prosumer activity. I see the classroom content of the future as being something that is live - highlighted by the student as being important to them (hello rss , blog content, day to day papwerwork etc.)

Curriculum will likely always play a role, but it will have to be personalized - and the teacher will need to be an expert on the horizon (the big direction that students have to be moving in) but also incredibly flexible around the steps involved in the journey that will get them there. I think the effective trajectory coach is unafraid of developing fluency in what their students are involved in.

I’m no tax lawyer, but my students are. Relevant content for them is tax law. Is tax treaties. Slowly but surely I’m starting to tap into this pipeline. My bloglines account is now a buzz with spirited activity of several tax blogs (holy cow, lawyers blog too!).

While I don’t plan or pretend to know everything about tax law, I have made it my mission to become a student of it, so I can be relevant to my students.

I’m still moving towards curriculum set goals and proficiencies, but I’m doing it from within my student’s information environment.

the conversation is open…what do you think?

More thought happening around the role of the teacher in the classroom…It’s all about the STUDENT!

Student Centered Learning– Defined:
1.

Student-centred learning describes ways of thinking about learning and teaching that emphasise student responsibility for such activities as planning learning, interacting with teachers and other students, researching, and assessing learning.

[Cannon, R. (2000) Guide to support the implementation of the Learning and Teaching Plan Year 2000, ACUE, The University of Adelaide. ]

Plain and simple: The teacher steps down from the soap-box, and students take an active role in the LEARNING process. They are no longer PASSIVE receptacles, but generators of their own content, working towards clear learning outcomes.

Skeletons from the Out-dated Classroom:
Teacher is in control. Knowledge is trickle down.
Classroom is TEACHER centered. To borrow J.M.’s phrase: Teacher is the “Sage on the stage.”
Teachers transfer their knowledge, and students soak it up. (In theory.)
Focus on covering curriculum content. [Read: One size fits all and you’ve gotta fit in x amount of time.]
Teacher is the gateway to knowledge.
Students memorize to pass exams, and little real UNDERSTANDING takes place. [ESL APP: How many vocabulary words did Juan memorize today, and how many did he get right on his exam? vs. How many words did Juan LEARN this week, and how many of those few words see actual useage in his day-to-day conversations?]
Never deviate from course books.
You finish a course book, you move on to the next level.
English stays in English class.

The Updated Classroom is STUDENT CENTERED
Students are ACTIVE Learners and
are responsible for their learning.

Teacher’s Role in the Student Centered Classroom
Teacher is a Trajectory coach: they realize that students are IN MOTION, [Read: Already moving, learning beings with experience, acquired knowledge, and direction. They aren’t passive, stationary objects just waiting for teacher’s knowledge. ]

Trajectory Coaches are experts at inspiration.
They strive to Spark, Fan into flame, Protect and add to learner momentum.
They are passionate about their subject themselves: Passion often creates passion in others.
They promote learner autonomy. The TKT preparation course I’m doing has an interesting section on student motivation where they describe Learner Autonomy as a

“Feeling of being responsible for and in control of our own learning.”

(Unit 9, pg. 38 The TKT Teaching Knowledge Test Course - Cambridge University Press 2005.) I would like to add to this: Learner Autonomy is not just a feeling, but a STATE OF BEING. You are or you aren’t! Good teachers must actively encourage the rise of autonomous learners, and work themselves out of a job! (real success.)
Trajectory Coaches make their class RELEVANT to their students. If it doesn’t matter to your student it’s forgotten.
Trajectory Coaches love to explore, develop, and exploit student goals to deploy ADDICTIVE and ENGAGING classes. (Sorta fights the norm of being the Teacher’s goals or the school’s goals, or the curriculum’s goals that are most important.)
Class is customized to student interest and passion. Therefore: Trajectory Coach: KNOW THY STUDENT.
Be as fluent as possible in what your students do, are interested in, and are passionate about.

Always remember: Motivation can be created and continued by you!