Teacher most likely to succeed

By Bob Gilmour - Programme Manager for In-Sessional English Language Programme, INTO Newcastle University, England

I read this, Teacher Most Likely To Succeed, with interest. Having not seen the New Yorker article before, it is interesting to see that they identified the same points as us.

Two years ago I took over the In-sessional English support classes here at Newcastle University (roughly about 70 weekly classes and 800 to 1400 class places in each Semester).

In the non-credit classes which are not part of students degree programmes, there has always been a problem of dropping attendance towards the ends of the Semesters. We started collecting online feedback from all students who had registered including those who stopped attending. We noted that there were particular teachers who commanded much higher attendances in their classes and analysed the feedback for those classes and talked to those teachers to see what made them different. We also compared that with feedback from other classes where attendance dropped.

What seemed to be the main issues? Engaging and challenging students; humour; taking the class seriously; passion; individual feedback. What was really interesting is that a less experienced, younger teacher is just as likely to be successful in terms of attendance and student feedback as the more experienced and higher qualified teachers. However, there are also limits and, in my experience, the limits seem to be that students expect to be taught by teachers with qualifications equivalent or higher to their own.

We then fed this back into teacher training and awareness raising sessions and attendance across the Semester improved significantly this year (although there's still some way to go!).

Bob Gilmour website

Teacher self-evaluation and the iconoclast

By Lesley Woodward, MA, M.Ed. - Cleveland State University IELP, Cleveland, OH USA

I have found that occasionally taping my own classroom teaching sessions was invaluable in determining my own amount of teacher talk. It's hard to overcome both our own and students' preconceived notions of what is good and bad teaching, and subjective evaluation is a skewed perception. By unobtrusive taping of segments of my classes, I had an objective account of how much teacher talk I actually generated.

In my own teacher training at Teachers College, I was lucky to be exposed to the FOCUS observation system which uses a descriptive observation system rather than the usual prescriptive checklist. I highly recommend the book, "Breaking Rules: Generating and Exploring Alternatives in Language Teaching" by John Fanselow. When I first used this system, I was amazed at how consistently I did not practice what I preached. I found that I used the same strategies over and over again, that I talked most of the time, and that I tended to call on the same students. Taping segments of my own classroom teaching coupled with using FOCUS allowed me to expand and explore alternatives in teaching. By using a descriptive system, I could see my teaching in a broader conceptual framework.

I have also found that attending to "wait time" is crucial in reducing teacher talk and this is something that I have had to consciously work on throughout my long teaching career. It's so tempting to finish student sentences, and assume that we understand what a student is trying to communicate before that student has really had time to complete his or her thought, much less express it. Over the years, I have learned to intuit when a student is thinking of how to say something and when that student is just stumped for an answer. It's a fine line between waiting and embarrassing a student who just doesn't know. Over time, I learned how to perceive the difference.

John Fanselow was a wonderful though quite eccentric teacher. His book "Breaking Rules" defies a cover-to-cover reading. You have to sample it and then reflect. Most important, he moved away from the prescriptive observations which were and are so prevalent and introduced a descriptive protocol which urges teachers to move outside their usual mode of teaching ... to "break rules."

Two examples: We came into a large methods class once and sat down and began chatting as usual. The time for class to begin passed. Slowly, we became aware that John was sitting in the rear of the class, watching. He finally spoke, and taught the entire class sitting in the back of the room. Then we talked about how interactions were different if the teacher sits and different if the teacher is not front and center of the room. He also like to put "T's" on the board. He would put various aspects of pedagogy up on the board in one column, then we would be asked to brainstorm ways in which certain received wisdom was not good depending of variables. Or conversely, how practices which we thought bad could be good in certain situations. He was the ultimate iconoclast.

The last I heard, he was teaching on the Tokyo campus of Teachers College, and then that he retired. I'll never forget his classes.

For more on John Fanselow, see: ESL MiniConference Online interview with John Fanselow

Group work organization

By Jennifer Wallace - Anhui Gongye Daxue, Ma’anshan, Anhui, China

In my first year in China I was really disappointed in how my students (mostly college freshmen) were doing group activities - or not doing them! I was stumped as to how to manage the classroom to achieve anything better. Various people gave lots of suggestions, and I want to say thank you again for all the help.

This semester all my classes are college freshmen - many barely able to say anything. This semester I got the college to get us the Cambridge Skills for Fluency Speaking (2) book, which I’m now using with them. It’s a task/activity book, unlike anything they’ve ever used or done before, and there are lots of group activities in it. I have 7 classes, all of 30 to 35 students. Each class is now divided into 5 groups, on the basis of their exam marks from last semester’s oral classes. Each group has a manager, a secretary, a monitor (responsible for collecting and returning any written work, etc), a timekeeper and a coach. For a couple of weeks this all felt a real uphill struggle, but suddenly they’re getting their heads round this way of working and the classes are working much better. I’m asking groups to do many activities ending up with a presentation to the whole class, which I tape and mark, and which they’re getting better and better at both doing and listening to.

During the activities I can spend a few minutes with each group, and a bit more time with one particular group. But what’s really nice is that I’m able to relate much more to the students as individuals this way - even though there are exactly the same number of students in the classroom. In their small groups, I can relate to them much more personally, and even though it’s only ever for a short time, it seems to have much more effect than when they were either in the whole class group, in pairs, or in changing groups (i.e. different people in a group from week to week). I feel that they’re developing a different sort of working relationship with me now, as well as my getting to know each of them better. This has been an unexpected bonus and helped me greatly to start to get my head around how to teach using group-work as well as using task-based activities as the dominant method.

This experience has also made me think about some of the recent discussion about our various training courses and qualifications (or lack of them). I did a CELTA course and have about 7 years teaching experience, most of which has been TEFL. I’m in my second year here in China. On reflection, I think my CELTA course assumed group activities would work, it certainly didn’t go into any depth about how to literally train students to work in this way. I think I’d have only got that sort of depth of training on a one-year full-time sort of teacher training course. In Europe I’d used group work and used it successfully. I’d never before had classes entirely of students with no experience of this as a way of working, and didn’t really appreciate how alien it would be to them. My students are not high-scorers in the college entrance test, so will possibly have taken longer to get their heads around this than maybe students will in some of the places other people are teaching. But nevertheless, I’m having to learn as much as they are as regards methodology - and I do wish I’d got more training, not less.

Get ready for China

By Leslie Sirag/R.L."Seth" Watkins - Olympia, WA, USA

The first and most important thing we learned about China in our first year of teaching there is that everything we thought we knew was wrong. I don't think anything can really prepare you--the best you can do is let go of assumptions and expectations and just go with the flow, even when it feels as though you should swim against the current!

On the value of formal teacher training

Dick Tibbets - University of Macau, Macau

In my part of the 'training' and 'qualifications' postings on this list I've been concerned to say that it is the knowledge that is important and that organised courses are probably the easiest way to get some of this knowledge. The letters, well, they're just for the CV.

If you take a course then you are accepting someone else's syllabus and, to some extent, someone else's ideas of how you should use that knowledge. You just have to hope that they know what they are doing. After all, this is what your students have to do. You are their 'someone else'.

If you design your own course of self study then you need to know which topics will be useful to you. It can work but you are a little more in the dark.

As for my background, yes it's helped me all along. When I left computer programming all those years ago, the post grad cert ed I took really did help prepare me for the classroom and once I got there a series of courses by Rinvolucri helped even more.

The experience I gained over the next 10 years teaching various types and levels of
English to learners from some 70 or so countries then fed into my MA and both the experience and the 'extra' knowledge from the MA helped when I came to Hong Kong and Macau.

I'd say that the experience is the most valuable part but it was those bursts of learning (I won't call it training as a fair bit was independent) on courses that put the experience into contexts and made it all much more useful. Teaching in this part of the world IS harder than teaching in, say, Spain or Germany. Knowledge based experience was worthwhile for me.

Learning from your teaching

By Lesley Woodward, MA, M.Ed. - Cleveland State University IELP, USA

I have found that occasionally taping my own classroom teaching sessions was invaluable in determining my own amount of teacher talk. It's hard to overcome both our own and students' preconceived notions of what is good and bad teaching, and subjective evaluation is a skewed perception. By unobtrusive taping of segments of my classes, I had an objective account of how much teacher talk I actually generated.

In my own teacher training at Teachers College, I was lucky to be exposed to the FOCUS observation system which uses a descriptive observation system rather than the usual prescriptive checklist. I highly recommend the book, "Breaking Rules: Generating and Exploring Alternatives in Language Teaching" by John Fanselow. When I first used this system, I was amazed at how consistently I did not practice what I preached. I found that I used the same strategies over and over again, that I talked most of the time, and that I tended to call on the same students. Taping segments of my own classroom teaching coupled with using FOCUS allowed me to expand and explore alternatives in teaching. By using a descriptive system, I could see my teaching in a broader conceptual framework.

I have also found that attending to "wait time" is crucial in reducing teacher talk and this is something that I have had to consciously work on throughout my long teaching career. It's so tempting to finish student sentences, and assume that we understand what a student is trying to communicate before that student has really had time to complete his or her thought, much less express it. Over the years, I have learned to intuit when a student is thinking of how to say something and when that student is just stumped for an answer. It's a fine line between waiting and embarrassing a student who just doesn't know. Over time, I learned how to perceive the difference.

Can good students make bad teachers

"If anyone is likely to have accurate insights/judgment into the impact of particular techniques on a language learner, let us hope it is language teachers about their own past learning of other languages."

Shouldn't teachers have some special insights into the learning process derived from their own experience studying a language?

No.

In fact, this experience can be very harmful.

Some students are academically inclined. They read something, they remember it. The teacher says something, they remember it. They study the books in the library and they do everything correctly in class. Sometimes they even sit in the front of the class.

These people often become teachers.

They are remarkable people. We cannot criticise them, only admire them. As students they can smilingly sit through the most boring lectures and actually pull some jewels of important knowledge out of the verbage. They can study the most complicated texts, decipher them as well as any CIA analyst and file away the data into different parts of their computer-like brain and retrieve it later when the teacher demands and to his pleasure. (Indeed, such students make teachers feel like gods.)

The problem is the other 80% of the class, what to do with them?

Some of them have blank looks on their faces. Some of them just don't get it. Some of them are bored to death. In extreme cases, some of them have slipped into a teacher induced coma on top of their desks.

When good students become teachers and then draw on their learning experience when dealing with their students they can make a big mistake. They can be tempted to believe that their students are like them and can learn like they did.

Value of training

By Jennifer Wallace - Anhui Gongye Daxue, Ma’anshan, Anhui

I did a CELTA course and have about 7 years teaching experience, most of which has been TEFL. I’m in my second year here in China. In reflection, I think my CELTA course assumed group activities would work, it certainly didn’t go into any depth about how to literally train students to work in this way.

I think I’d have only got that sort of depth of training on a one-year full-time sort of teacher training course. In Europe I’d used group work and used it successfully. I’d never before had classes entirely of students with no experience of this as a way of working, and didn’t really appreciate how alien it would be to them. My students are not high-scorers in the college entrance test, so will possibly have taken longer to get their heads around this than maybe students will in some of the places other people are teaching. But nevertheless, I’m having to learn as much as they are as regards methodology - and I do wish I’d got more training, not less.

The role of the teacher

By Janet Kaback - Newark Public Schools, USA

In the past, the role of the teacher was the keeper of knowledge who was considered all-knowing, who would deign to deposit some of this knowledge into the minds of his/her students. This role fit in well with society after the Industrial Revolution. The vast majority of students did not pursue higher education and were trained to work in factories where they were responsible for a certain job. The industries needed laborers, not thinkers.

However, in today's world, the ability to acquire and utilize knowledge and to apply it in various situations is the goal of the modern societies. The global economy, international travel, and the internet, shrink the world's differences as we move to develop a fast-paced, technological society. No longer do the advanced countries seek to produce quantities of laborers, rather, we need the technological knowledge and the ability to think and problem-solve that schools must now produce.

Therefore, the role of the teacher needs to change in order to produce students who are able to think, plan, and act on their knowledge. As one teacher said, "Students have to learn to discriminate between useful knowledge and less useful knowledge and decide on their own language learning priorities."

Advanced societies must change the way the schools teach to produce the citizens who will understand how to act, and how to activate in the 21st century. This includes teaching students how to seek out their own knowledge and how to discriminate between useful and extraneous information in the pursuit of a goal. It does not only come into play with language learning, but must be considered within all disciplines. Just holding a diploma with the knowledge that one was supposed to acquire doesn't cut it in today's world...using that knowledge in the correct manner and form to surge ahead in the changing world is what is needed.

You should be creative but you don't have to entertain

By Jennifer Wallace - Anhui University of Technology, Ma’anshan, Anhui Province

I used to worry a lot about creating lessons my students would like, and that would hold their interest, but my focus has now changed. And it’s changed, I think as a result of training. I taught for several years (starting back in the 1970’s) with no teacher training qualifications - not unusual back then.

To get my present post in China I had to get a teaching qualification, so did a one-month intensive CELTA course. One of the best pieces of advice I had on that course was to work less hard - to do less for my students. One of my supervisors advised me to always keep thinking about how little I could do and how much I could get my students to do.

As un un-trained teacher, replicating many of the teaching habits of my own teachers, I would always tend to try to take full responsibility for all and everything in the lesson. And now I don’t. I try to focus on my aims and objectives for each lesson - the learning and practice opportunities being offered to the students. I try to think through exactly what processes I’m asking them to go through to get to whatever the goal of the moment is. And I expect them to work hard. And usually the lessons are judged successful. Or successful enough.

But if someone’s having a bad day and doesn’t want to participate (and I teach university, not school students), as long as they don’t inhibit others participating, I let them do that. I don’t think it’s my job to be an entertainer, though I know that teaching something in an entertaining way can help. My most entertaining contributions in a lesson always seem to be the unplanned, spontaneous ones.

My blackboard drawings often produce smiles and chuckles. My examples and illustrations tend not to be over-serious. But I don’t think my college students expect entertainment - I think they value far more actually learning and practicing and sensing their own progress. If that can be achieved by pleasurable means, all the better, but they always seem well content to get on with the tasks as long as they understand what’s wanted - and why. And I do explain more and more why we do particular types of activities, what the point of them is, to encourage the development of more self-aware learning.

So, for me the better lessons do often come from trying new things, but not in terms of trying to entertain or hold the interest of the students.

"Modern English Teacher"

By Dick Tibbetts, University of Macau, China

A teacher wants to know: "Is Modern English Teacher available online or at any of the foreign language bookstores in Beijing?"

MET is a quarterly journal and should be one of the standard journals in the libraries of tertiary institutes where ESL is taught. I wonder wHat the reaction of your library would be if you asked them to subscribe to this and the other major ESL journals. MET is particularly useful because it is teaching based unlike some of the others which contain a proportion of articles detailing worthy research but written mainly to fill the author's publishing quota set by the author's university.

Reflections after going to China to do new-teacher training in a small city

By Amanda Bryson

I went with a non-profit group called the Via Serica Foundation. Our team consisted of nine Americans, including a native Mandarin speaker. I was the lead presenter and the only current professional teacher. Half of the other team members were experienced volunteer ESOL teachers. The others had no teaching experience, but came along as small group facilitators and language models.

Every day began with a one hour theory lecture followed by three hours of model language and cultural lessons focused on a particular topic. These model lessons focused on listening and speaking skills as these were the teachers' greatest linguistic needs. The lessons included skits, explanations, songs, lectures, demonstrations, poems, role-plays, games, movies, authentic language tasks, realia from America and a variety of other materials, activities and techniques. See the daily list of topics below.

After a lunch/siesta, we came back for a more advanced language lesson and then split into small groups by age taught (primary, junior middle and senior middle/university). The small group time included facilitated discussions about the morning lecture, the day's lessons and other related topics. During this time the teachers also worked on their small group presentations for the last day. Each subgroup of teachers was required to present a communicative English lesson targeted to their age group. Total time for each day was ten hours minus a two hour break in the afternoon. By the fourth day, though, we insisted on taking three hours off in the afternoon because the days were over 100 degrees F with no A/C. It really improved everyone's mood (and attention) to have extra time for a siesta.

We had an average of 55 teachers attending each day. For most of them, the seminar was a requirement. We had a broad range of proficiency so we often translated the morning lecture into Chinese. Some of the students were struggling to understand the basic English lessons while others were asking us to stop the morning translation because it was unnecessary for them. We compromised as best we could. By the end, most teachers reported a dramatic improvement in their oral and aural English proficiency.

When we arrived, we discovered that some teachers had taken the train for hundreds of kilometers from other towns and villages. We agreed to teach ten days straight with no weekend break so these teachers could travel home sooner.

Daily Topics (with a few activity examples in parenthesis)

Day 1, Monday
Lecture: Introduction, Overview, "What is Teaching?"
Instructional/Cultural Topic: Greetings/Getting to Know You (team members present skits using a variety of greetings) Grammar Focus: Forming Questions

Day 2, Tuesday
Lecture: SLA Theory and Research
Instructional/Cultural Topic: Where People Live (students use real brochures to plan a trip to Washington, DC) Grammar Focus: Adjectives

Day 3, Wednesday
Lecture: The Communicative Approach
Instructional/Cultural Topic: Travel and Transportation (with the movie "Sabrina") Grammar Focus: Prepositions

Day 4, Thursday
Lecture: Creating Immersion in the EFL Classroom Instructional/Cultural Topic: What People Do (Occupations) (with the "Who am I?" guessing game--an occupation taped to their back, they must ask yes/no questions to discover their occupation) Grammar Focus: Contractions

Day 5, Friday
Lecture: Student Motivation
Instructional/Cultural Topic: Marriage and Family (with a mock wedding) Grammar Focus: Articles

Day 6, Saturday
Lecture: Learning Strategies
Instructional/Cultural Topic: Leisure (with a real game of baseball in the schoolyard) Grammar Focus: Verbs

Day 7, Sunday
Cultural Topic: Religion in America
Panel Discussion Q&A (teachers asked anonymous questions on note cards about our lives in America) Afternoon Picnic with Teachers

Day 8, Monday
Lecture: Learning Styles
Instructional/Cultural Topic: Food and Dining (with a race to see who could correctly arrange a Western place setting) Grammar Focus: Imperatives

Day 9, Tuesday
Lecture: Teaching English (Five Language Skills) Instructional/Cultural Topic: Celebrations and Holidays (with a creative Thanksgiving dinner family role play--each teacher assigned to be a family member with a certain issue or personality quirk--very fun for everyone!) Grammar Focus: Future Tenses

Day 10, Wednesday
Teacher Presentations
Teacher Feedback
Graduation Ceremony

Days 11 & 12, Thursday and Friday
Retreat in the mountains with host school staff

If and when I do this type of program again, I will probably not agree to ten days. It is too long for the presenters and the teachers. Or perhaps I will insist on at least one day completely off. We tried to turn Sunday into a half-day-plus-picnic, but it still wasn't restful. I think six days of instruction with a seventh for graduation/celebration/party would be ideal. That would be long enough to experience the benefits of English immersion without running into exhaustion. Part of the problem was that we were expected to attend evening social functions with local officials and senior staff as well.

Also, I was a little skeptical about the contribution of the team members who had never taught English, but was pleasantly surprised by how much these folks were able to help in explaining cultural concepts, idioms and linguistic quirks. The teachers simply adored their small group facilitators and the non-teaching native speakers had enough energy to engage in real conversations (while I was a limp rag in the corner). I was very glad.

I now have plenty of time on my hands as I am still recovering from multiple digestive tract infections I brought back as souvenirs.