"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.

Via the Fast Company blog: Education: The Cream Is Rising

So does having high grades as a student teacher mean you’re going to create star performers out of your future students? The FC post seems to avoid unwrapping that point - but don’t you think it’s a rather important question to explore?

Perhaps the main thrust of the post was that the education field was attracting smarter talent…but does that mean anything on the front lines of the classroom?

In my opinion, not really. Most teachers are smart…but I’ve had more than my fair share of them who lacked the heart of a teacher.

For me, math was always my weak spot. (That’s why I’m a social worker who teaches English. I got as far away from math as I could.) There were concepts and operations that just never clicked with me, and though I’m sure I had really smart math teachers, not one of them had what it took to see my state of stall, and come along side to help me out. Or if they did, they quickly lost patience and moved on.

There’s more to being a great teacher than just having great marks on your training courses. (A really cool FC post that touches on this here:Talent is Everywhere (if you know how to look) Especially with teaching, I think there’s a lot to be said for talent, vocation, and heart - but I wonder how well DELTA or CELTA courses (or any other teacher training course for that matter) help you develop there?

Knowing the theories and facts about teaching is very important, but if you are lacking in the other areas like how to make what you know meaningful and understandable for your students, then prepare yourself: instead of inspiring your students to dig deeper and march forward, you’ll be great for a few (the smart, fast moving ones like you) but you’ll shut down the slow movers, and help perpetuate the idea in them that english class sucks, and I might as well give up on trying to learn the language in the first place.

Being a great teacher is more than just head knowledge. 

Photo Credit:

Teaching Math or Something: by     foundphotoslj

I’ve got a 5 year old and a 1 year old (almost.) Aside from playing with lots of toys, my wife and I are often subjected to TV shows for kids. (The TV shows are a love/hate relationship. as I’m sure any parents out there can identify with.)

One of my favorite shows is called Pinky Dinky Doo.  I like the program for a variety of reasons, but one in particular that I’d like to share with you.

Go ahead and visit the site - if you’re an ESL teacher I think you’ll see some pretty interesting things you can do and model in your classroom from this program. The website (link above) has lots of cool resources, and even some full episodes of the show. Go ahead and watch one.

What to look for: How the program teaches new vocabulary words.

Key things to notice:

1. The show works on one new vocabulary word.

2. That vocabulary word is repeated many times.

3. (and my favorite) The new vocabulary word is linked to the sound of a trumpet just before the characters say it. This helps you pay attention and notice it.

4. There’s regular review.

What ESL Teachers could Learn:

1. Adults could likely handle more than one vocabulary word per class, but we should really be careful to limit the number of new words we introduce. Maybe you’ll feel good…and *gasp* some students will feel good if you dump a truckload of vocabulary on them each class, but you should ask yourself a few things: truckloads are great for stats, but have your students really taken them on board? Are they successfully using those truckloads of words in their everyday conversations in English? (My bet is no.)

If they are not using those new words…I think you’re just wasting your time. (And theirs.)

Instead, ESL teachers should limit the number of words introduced each class/week/month. The smaller the list, the greater opportunity you will have to help students "own" them. (Owning a word is when that word becomes a part of the speaker’s vocabulary. They know what it means, and can and do use that word in everyday conversation.)  

 2. Vocabulary ownership is linked to repetition. When you know what a new word means, repeating it over and over again will help the "ownership" process take place. I often think of how my oldest son learned new words. He’d repeatedly ask me what something was….I mean like ten, fifteen times. (I remember actually getting worried a few times…like am I doing this wrong, he keeps asking me the same thing over and over again.)

I think we need to make sure we have room in our lessons for vocabulary repetition. Reuse and Recycle those words to death! The only way this will work well is if you respect the first point: big long word lists don’t get repeated - except on tests and then they are quickly forgotten after.

3. The trumpet point is what got me thinking about this post in the first place. I have a 40 something adult male in one of my classes. He’s just starting out with English, and well..things move rather umm…slowly with this guy. He tries his best, and is genuinely interested in developing his English skills, but he’s just one of those people who don’t have the gift of languages. (I linked to Steve Martin in the Pink Panther when he was trying to say "I want to buy a hamburger")And well…Steve Martin’s performance makes me almost cry from laughter…and totally reminds me of my student at times.

My student’s worst nightmare is saying (and hearing) the difference between "e" and "i". (Aside:This is one of the most frequent difficulties for Spanish speakers learning English -at least in Mexico.) We’ve been doing the Martin routine around these two letters for the past month or so, with little progress. We review it over and over again, but it just doesn’t seem to stick. Then I pulled a Pinky.

As I was trying to think of a way to help this guy learn what we’ve been working on, I started thinking about how Pinky worked with new words, and I thought…well…I’ve got to try it!

Everytime we’d spell a word that had "e" or "i", I’d do the trumpet sound (of course I explained where it was coming from and everything.) Surprise, surprise! It actually worked! Now the guy even makes the sound himself before he comes to his problem letters.

Yes, he still makes a few mistakes, but they are much fewer. It caught on so well, that the more advanced student in this class (don’t you think mixed level courses are difficult??) started to do it with a word she was finding hard to remember. (All on her own, without help from me.)

What do you think? Have you ever tried to pair a vocab word with a strange event or sound in your classes? It’s great for a laugh, and actually seems to work with adults, as well as kids.  

Was prepping for a meeting tomorrow with a company director. My mission: get approval for more class time. Presently, the company only has two hours a week alloted for each person to take English class. I know that you know that this amount of time is simply not enough, but he doesn’t seem to be very aware.

I met this guy once before, and noticed that his office was covered in cool statues related to jazz and music in general. The guy loves it. Then, thanks to reading this article ( using metaphores to help you connect with the people you’re trying to convince of something) I thought, maybe I could use his love of music as a way to convince him that more English study time was needed.

As I did a little research about how much pro musicians practice, I realized something…

The Realization

English teachers can learn a lot from professional musicians…

From Principles Of Practice - Music Teacher Magazine here are three ideas that can and should make there way into our teaching style:

"PRACTISE ONLY AS FAST AS YOU CAN RETAIN CONTROL Practice which is too fast leads to inaccuracies and works against the development of technical control. Every single mistake delays the leaning process more than one might expect. It takes much less time to make a mistake than to erase it from the memory. In fact, it is estimated that up to 20 correct repeats can be necessary to prevent the return of a single mistake. Mistakes which have been practiced are especially persistent, particularly rhythmical ones. It can be quite an effort to eliminate them completely, and it is sometimes almost impossible."(Principles of Practice, Isolde Schaupp - emphasis mine)

Point One: "Practice only as fast as you can retain control" 

Application: do students demonstrate control over those new grammar points you just introduced? Can they "control" that list of vocabulary - or are they just spitting out the right answer on your fill in the blank test?

Class time should make lots of room for "language control" to develop. (If we’re marching through our lessons in order to finish our course on time, do you think we’re promoting lang control? "Practice which is too fast leads to innaccuracies."

Point two: "… it is estimated that up to 20 correct repeats can be necessary to prevent the return of a single mistake."

Application: 20 correct repeats. 20 correct repeats. 20 correct repeats. 20 correct repeats. 20 correct repeats. 20 corr– ok, so I think you get the point. Repeating is, in my humble opinion, an underused - or abused - language learning power tool.

Underused in that teachers (or perhaps schools or HR folk,) simply don’t make time for it. Maybe repeats happen two or three times, but if you’re at a basic language level, repeating what you hear is the only way forward.

I am teaching a wonderful guy who is almost at square one in English. It’s slow. It’s VERY repetitive, it’s very repetitive, it’s very repeti- oops, there I go again. Really, we sometimes have to repeat a phrase or word so many times that I feel a little….silly. (Sorta feels like this sometimes: Steve Martin’s English class  (**If this little video doesn’t make you laugh out loud, I’ll give you your money back. 100% Guaranteed.)

Abused: Repeating can easily make your student feel like a moron. Watch yourself: don’t become impatient. Don’t laugh AT the student(heard horror stories of that from students) and if they seem to reach a frustration point, take a break and do something else. Return later.

Point Three: Focus Small - Focus on Quality.

"Only if one makes it a rule to practice in short passages can enough attention be paid to each detail." (Schaupp)

Application: Biting off more than you can chew is a common English student killer. Classes should be about "how well we can do this" vs. "how fast and far can we go?" Nuff said.

If you liked the connections, try exploring these articles…you might get some useful ideas:

BBC: Practice Makes Perfect 

How to Get to Carnegie Hall 

A Guide to Great Home Music Practice 

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?  

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."

I just gotta say that I really loved the little I did read (Katie’s post) and would like to quickly add my two cents:

“if you train the students mainly to cope in real life tasks but then grade them on a grammar test they are going to feel they are being cheated and that you don’t really believe in the method you are using.”  (Case)

Isn’t it odd how our classrooms tend to disconnect away from real life tasks?

Textbooks help provide a sense of direction and structure to class, but they are often a far cry from the student’s real life.

I think real life and classroom content should be mirrors. One should not look different than the other if we want to help our students succeed. What do you think?  

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)

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!)  

 

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

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.