Teacher in Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is expected that students will:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality in the ESL classroom is shocking, scary, and beautiful. By reality I mean what happens when you step out of that enclosed, safe, course book enslaved meeting room where your class happens each day.

Students who spend years bottled up in the classroom, who rip through course books, and easily listen to the scripted audio that comes with their course book, pale and freeze when reality strikes.

An English only client walks into the office reception and the secretary (your fearless classroom student) blocks up, forgetting everything English other than “One moment please.” or “Hello.” Or the phone rings, again an English only moment, and your “fearless” classroom student quickly passes the buck onto someone who really speaks English.

Or what about the students you’ve had for a year or so who keep making the same mistakes, no matter how many times you correct them.

What’s going on?

We’re missing out on reality. Experience really does make the best teacher. AJ, over at Effortless Acquisition really slams the point home: Real Work, Real Language

“A growing body of research indicates that for students to apply knowledge in real situations, they need to learn in those situations. Abstract knowledge gained inside schools is poorly applied by students in real situations outside of school.” (Dennis Littky via AJ)

Classrooms must stop being a safe bubble.

I had an interesting experience this week with a few of my students. We’ve been working on passive voice - where all you care about is that the action is done, not who is doing/did it.

I’m a passionate opponent to having students memorize grammar. It’s boring. It’s joyless. It rarely works. My mantra: Use it! Use it! Use it! The more you use it, the faster you own it. I’d rather own something over memorize something any day!

So that’s what we did. We lightly examined the passive tense, with a focus on what it’s good for (what it will help them do.) One of those “usefull” things is when you need to leave a list of “To do’s”

Since all of my students love to travel, we decided to pretend that they were about to leave on a trip, but had a few unfinished projects that had to be left for someone else to take care of.

In class, the bubble, we worked out their lists on paper: The bosses’ credit card needs to be paid, annual reports need to be delivered, etc.

We worked these through a few times and then we moved it up a notch. E-mail. What if you had to e-mail this to a co-worker? Could you do it?

Again, we did it on paper. Then a little bit of reality, a sanitized version I admit, but definately a step closer to the real thing: I told them that I would take their paper-mails to my office and send out real e-mail replies to their work accounts, which they would have to reply to.

Five shocked, fearful faces starred back at me as the classroom bubble went “POP!”

Reality is also beautiful. We finished the entire exercise in less than a day. (I e-mailed a response, and they replied in real time.) The e-mails were very well done, and after minimal tweaking, became really cool examples of passive tense in reality.

In the classroom, after we reviewed it in the book, there were still a few questions and “Hmmm…I don’t really get this yet’s”

After our e-mail exercise, all wrote back saying that it had become crystal clear - and their mails were evidence to prove it.

Reality makes a difference. The more we open classroom doors wide and welcome it in, the easier our jobs as “teachers” will become.

Aaron Campbell got me thinking on the topic of testing and assessment again today: specifically the role of testing and assessment the ESL classroom. In fact, his post along with Cleve and Aaron’s comments, opened up a thought chain that I would like to explore a little here.

Assessment on trial:

In a student centered classroom where should assessment fit in, and how should it look?

Obviously we [read: schools, teachers, students, the community] need some way of evaluating the quality of learning that is taking place both in and out of the classroom. That much is clear to me. Responsible assessment should, and needs to have a place in the ESL classroom.

But what should it look like? I’m thinking that in a student centered classroom, perhaps even in the classroom of today, we need to begin to distance ourselves from the way it has always been done. I wonder if it really is working, if assessment and standardized testing really gives us fair, reliable, and accurate information about those who take it and about how well schools and teachers are doing at teaching.

How often do students cram facts and information into their brains to just pass the test? How many forget what they crammed a few days or weeks after the exam has been written? How many actually use what they memorized for those tests outside the classroom where it really matters?

Thinking about my own classroom practice, I see this happening all the time. My students prepare for the end of unit exam, pass it with little to no problem, but fail to deploy unit material in day-to-day life.

They continue to make the same mistakes, continue to use old vocabulary - forgetting what we “learned” in class, and all this with a high 90’s average!

According to the test, learning happened. According to reality…

Assessment is necessary. The right question is “How are we doing this?” I think student centered teachers should think about portfolio work as a way to follow, assess, and evaluate learning.

Instead of memorizing and dumping information out on exams, portfolios encourage thought, application, and reflection of classroom material. They also follow a more “I can do this” method of evaluation. You can see or listen to the progress.

The Robust ESL Portfolio
The ESL portfolio can and should take on samples of a student’s developing skills, and follow them through their learning career. Portfolios should be readily accessible to student, teacher, and interested parties. They should be open conversations that develop over the long-term. They should even be paperless. Enter the porfolio blog.

What you could include:
1. Written samples: Likely the easiest sample to begin collecting. Blogs naturally lend themselves to this. Have your students blog on a regular basis about their thoughts on the class, what they understand and don’t understand, world events that matter to them and why, writing assignments that maybe would have normally be done on paper etc. I think that’s one of the keys: Get your class to blog what they would normally be asked to write about on paper. Encourage opinons. Encourage connections to other sources. Encourage commenting and linking. Encourage exploration.

2. Podcasting: Great for listening practice, but you can also use this tool to record your student’s spoken skill. Record conversations, presentations etc. and include these audio files in their portfolio. Over the time they work on their English, they should begin to see - or rather hear - a developing skill and proficiency with the language.

3. Podcasts for listening development: You could keep a bank of listenings your students have worked on in class, and their written and spoken interactions with them, that would show their ability and skill to understand what they are hearing. These listenings would grow in complexity and level of difficulty as time goes on.

4. A very similar approach could be followed for reading development. Articles, both electronic and paper based, could be kept in the student’s portfolio, along with their thoughts and interactions with them. Blogging would also lend itself greatly to this, as students could read a net based article, link to it, and comment on it in such a way as to show they understood the content, and not only understand the information presented, but add to it.

Portfolios lend themselves to being student centered. In the teacher training work I’m involved in we’re using portfolios as our main means of evalutaion. While I have specific questions I’m asking our teachers about the course work we’re dealing with, I’m opening the bulk of the process to them.

I’m encouraging them to write about what was interesting to them about what we’re working on in our PD sessions. I’m encouraging them to comment on what they are trying to implement from pd sessions in class, and how it is working. I’m asking them to reflect on their present teaching practice, and write about what is working and what isn’t, and what needs to be taken away and added.

The process has been slow and bumpy. (I’ll post on that later). However, I’m looking towards the long-term with this. I’m not looking for “instant” grade based gratification, but the development and growth of a teacher of English as a second language.

Maybe that’s a viewpoint all educators and schools need to adopt: It’s not about short term, grade based scores.[They likely aren’t all that accurate anyway.] Instead it’s about the meaningful development of a life-long learner.

A grade is short term. A portfolio describes a lifetime.

I’ve been coming back to one idea over and over as I dip into the world of student centered learning. That idea is this: Awareness. Awareness of self, and awareness of your students.

Aware of Self:
How do I teach today? What’s my style? Am I using outmoded methods? How do I see my role? Does it fit with SCL? Am I prepared, as J.M. so thoughtfully put it in his comments, to

“… humble ourselves and point students to the vast resources out there…i think it is einstein who said that ‘if i see any better it is because i have stood on the shoulders of giants’ or something like that. There are so many ‘experts’ available at our virtual finger tips that to not access them by introducing technology into the classroom and teaching appropriate use would be a dis-service to our students.”

Am I prepared to recognize the outmoded tools I use, and trade them in for upgrades?

“I’m a trajectory coach - I come alongside my students.” “I’m a prolific connector - I show my classroom the world, and help them connect to it, learn from it, contribute to it, participate in it, and create it.” “I no longer bend students around curriculum, but instead shape it to fit the NEEDS, PASSIONS and INTERESTS of my students.” “I feel comfortable beside my students - I don’t have to be in front of them.”

Aware of Students
A very thought provoking post from A.J. over at Effortless Language Acquisition around Great Students. A.J. raises some very important and key points to deploying a student centered classroom. Student centered teaching requires teachers to change, but it also requires a huge paradigm shift for students involved in the class as well.

“Teachers must change. That’s the theme of many of my posts… and its absolutely true. But there is a flip side to that: Students must change too. Forget being a passive student.”

We need to increase our awareness of how we see our students, and become very aware of how our students see themselves.

Teachers, preparing to deploy a SCL environment will need to make great headshifts, but so will our students. As a brave trajectory coach, we’ll have a part to play in that change, and helping students become aware of their “outmoded” learning styles.

Two major shifts. Two key players who need to build their awareness in order to successfully enter the updated classroom.

So the question begs to be asked, researched and answered. “If it’s all about the student, if student centered learning is the “updated classroom”, then where does that leave me- the teacher? What does this look like, and how do I start doing it?

Welcome to the conversation.

I’ve yet to see a clear, practical exploration around this topic and that has annoyed me to no end. I’ve been preached to. I’ve seen the stats proving student centered learning (SCL) is better than the traditional, “outmoded classroom.” I’ve converted, and I’m sold out on the idea, But I have never seen a clear “How to implement SCL” explanation anywhere.

Enough discussing the Student Centered classroom and how awesome it is. How do you do it? What does it really look like? How should we begin to get out of the driver’s seat, as J.M. mentions in his great comments around implementation. Is there a role for curriculum and learning outcomes?

The bottom line: We want passionate classrooms. We want active learners. We know that SCL sounds right, but the question remains: How do you really do it? How do you let go as a teacher, and yet hold students to a trajectory that will help them cover required learning outcomes? Let’s face it, no matter how learner centered we go, we will always have to cover the basics…the “must know’s” of our school districts. That’s where I hope this conversation travels: a candid, reality based, exploration of deploying a student centered classroom.