A good day today -- unless I'm wrong.
This was day one of a teacher-training programme in a new school. When I say a new school, I mean it's going to be a fresh start for them with SpeakYourMind.
The school has been up and successfully running for 20 years and has a good stable stream of clients and a strong local reputation. Why rock the boat? The owner thought that after 20 years he could simply be looking towards another 20 years of the same and then retirement. Was that doing justice to himself and his own potential? Was it doing justice to the business that he might want to pass on? And was it doing justice to his staff who have been very loyal and hard-working over the last few years? He evidently had asked himself these questions and decided that no -- he wasn't ready to settle into a comfortable rut.
A lucky coincidence brought his attention to SpeakYourMind: a new student at his school told him that he had done a really good course in another town where he had spent the last few years – the method had really worked for him and he had made a lot of progress: didn't this school have anything similar to offer? The course was SpeakYourMind and the owner contacted us. After a few exchanges he came over to visit our central office in Verona with a friend from his town who would be able to get a student’s-eye view of things. They both liked it and were impressed and the decision was to go ahead with SpeakYourMind being at the centre of his revitalised school’s new era.
So today saw the school staff’s first real encounter with SpeakYourMind: the owner had prepared them for this in advance so it wasn't totally out of the blue and because they had a good relationship with him they were naturally inclined to trust his intuition on this important decision - or at the least, to approach this change with open minds. So -- how did it go?
Sitting here in my hotel room reflecting on the day, I'd say that things got off to a good start: the teachers had a busy schedule after our training, so feedback has to wait until tomorrow. I think things were far more different than they had anticipated but I think they are impressed by the way things are thought out and the reasoning that has gone into what we propose as an English course -- they like the whole approach that really looks at things from a student’s point of view.
And talking of students – well, they always seem to be our best allies. The students we had today as volunteers did the SpeakYourMind placement test in the morning, which in itself seemed to gain positive response from them -- and then they came back for their first lesson in the afternoon with all the staff observing. Students tend to instinctively get the point of the whole lesson format and quickly see how easy it is to get a lot out of the lesson, and for the teachers to see that positive response goes a long way towards persuading them that there really is something of value inside the course - things that might not be evident on first or even second sight. Thank goodness for the students!
Showing posts with label teacher-training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teacher-training. Show all posts
Feb 25, 2013
Jul 2, 2012
INNOCENT VICTIMS OF LEARNING STYLES?
Innocent victims of learning styles?
Diversity is so much more appealing than uniformity, and uniqueness is so more intuitively attractive than sameness. The monolithic methods that taught on the assumption that ‘languages were languages’ and that ‘brains were brains’, so that success in learning was primarily a question of how much effort you put into it, have largely been long left behind us. The mood of the times changed a generation ago and the individual became the centre of attention. In teaching, the recognition that brains were far more complex and idiosyncratic than the blank slates that we used to have in the old days has brought lots of benefits, many of which we have been able to take advantage of ourselves as students in enlightened school classrooms or universities.
Multiple intelligences, learning styles -- with all this variety, we're bound to find a category we can be slotted into, rather than simply being lumped together with everyone else. But how beneficial is it to be categorised and divided up? To what extent has the focus on these diversities been a distraction from a more essential and panoramic way of viewing learning and learners?
Intelligence lost in meaning
In terms of multiple intelligences, we can keep on adding to the list to suit whatever purpose suits us. A recent article in IATEFL’s Voice’s publication describes how to develop ‘eco-intelligence’, an individual’s awareness of the environment and the threats it faces. Does this mean that a person who is unconvinced by scientific arguments supporting the role of emissions and global warming is ‘eco-unintelligent’ rather than just ‘sceptical’ or ‘stubborn’? The idea of multiple intelligences is valid enough in the way that it can break down artificially narrow barriers and prejudices but I'm not sure if it tells us something that most people didn't already instinctively know. The thing is, of course, that when the word ‘intelligent’ becomes applicable to so many different areas of human activity, it stops meaning anything at all -- the comment that “she is a very intelligent girl” in theory becomes meaningless, except for the fact that most of us will actually know what was meant – ‘intelligent’ in the sense of the pre-multiple intelligence days.
Learning style - the goods or the labels?
Learning styles is an idea that has been so enthusiastically embraced by many teachers that it's become hard to disembrace, to stand back and look at it from a fair distance. When some of the people reading this went to school, we didn't actually have learning styles but we still had ‘good teachers’ and ‘bad teachers’, and I think those good teachers would still be ‘good’ today and, on the whole, the bad teachers would still be ‘bad’. One of the reasons the good teachers were good is probably because they were aware of learning styles: they simply had different ways of describing the attributes, personalities and receptiveness of the students that they taught. What they didn't do was to separate their classes into distinct groups -- they were able to respond deftly enough to different individuals and to accommodate them while being guided by the needs of the group as a whole - and the needs of the curriculum they had to follow.
The fact is that the classroom is one aspect of the real world which involves constant contacts, negotiations, concessions and compromises. As individuals we have to be responsive to our circumstances, aware of our priorities, aware of our strengths and weaknesses in any given situation and to be adaptable. This is true in ‘real life’ as it is in the real classroom - people who are unresponsive, unaware of their circumstances and unadaptable tend to have what we could call unsuccessful lives, and in the classroom they tend to be unsuccessful learners or teachers.
The good teachers throughout history didn't know about learning styles but they did know about people, and could base all their decisions on a more dynamic moment-to-moment and person-to-person flow of information and impressions, rather than on a set of descriptors which would label their students as being in one or another category.
One-sided or well-rounded?
Adaptability is the key, I think. Most human beings, by the time they are young teenagers, have learnt to be adaptable enough and resourceful enough to cope in a range of learning situations, including those which are not presented in their most preferred style. To design a course in order to match the specific preferences of a learner or a category of learners underestimates the mental potential of those learners and can, in reality, be unhelpful. Learning works best when different forms of perception combine and work together rather than in isolation. There is evidence to suggest that people learn better when they are required to make a little more effort and not allowed to operate in their sphere of comfort.
Most language examinations test learners’ abilities, naturally enough, in the different so-called skills. What is the normal or most appropriate thing to do when the student is weaker in one of these skills, say, listening? Do we simply say that because the student is not an aural learner it is unfair that he or she should have to face such an unfair test, or do we work hardest on improving that skill in order to bring it up to level?
Don’t talk to me like that to me– I’m a visual learner
For the vast majority of people learning a language, language will be encountered both in its spoken and written forms and it makes sense that the modality of teaching should ultimately be decided by what needs to be taught, rather than by who it has to be taught to. In other words, if understanding spoken language is important, it is important full stop.
The reason that so many people on foreign language courses regard themselves as being visual learners is that most of their personal experience with that language has been in the written form: it’s simply the most familiar form of language and, naturally enough, the form they feel most comfortable with. There are many people like this on English courses, people who have become ‘visual learners’ for convenience's (and tradition’s) sake. In reality there is more to being a visual learner than needing to see a word written on a blackboard or on a page, but this fits into a conventional understanding of it.
To get back to the point of the primary modality of teaching, SpeakYourMind is a method that favours spoken presentation and practice of language simply because that, for most people, is likely to be their declared priority: “I need to speak but I'm not very good at it”. It makes sense for everyone to address this in a responsible manner and one of the prime objectives of our course is to enable people to learn to trust their own abilities to operate in a modality which they find, or had always found, to be their weakest. If people can’t learn to trust their own abilities to understand and to speak when they are in the classroom, the chances of them succeeding to do so outside the classroom will inevitably be reduced, and the course in which they invested time, effort and money will end up a disappointment.
I am not opposed to learning styles -- I am opposed to creating unnecessarily divided classrooms, to the constant narrowing down of how we teach, and I prefer to look at how we can broaden course design and teaching procedures and teacher awareness in order to accommodate as many individuals as possible, in the attempt to meet their priorities as closely, and as pleasantly, as possible.
Diversity is so much more appealing than uniformity, and uniqueness is so more intuitively attractive than sameness. The monolithic methods that taught on the assumption that ‘languages were languages’ and that ‘brains were brains’, so that success in learning was primarily a question of how much effort you put into it, have largely been long left behind us. The mood of the times changed a generation ago and the individual became the centre of attention. In teaching, the recognition that brains were far more complex and idiosyncratic than the blank slates that we used to have in the old days has brought lots of benefits, many of which we have been able to take advantage of ourselves as students in enlightened school classrooms or universities.
Multiple intelligences, learning styles -- with all this variety, we're bound to find a category we can be slotted into, rather than simply being lumped together with everyone else. But how beneficial is it to be categorised and divided up? To what extent has the focus on these diversities been a distraction from a more essential and panoramic way of viewing learning and learners?
Intelligence lost in meaning
In terms of multiple intelligences, we can keep on adding to the list to suit whatever purpose suits us. A recent article in IATEFL’s Voice’s publication describes how to develop ‘eco-intelligence’, an individual’s awareness of the environment and the threats it faces. Does this mean that a person who is unconvinced by scientific arguments supporting the role of emissions and global warming is ‘eco-unintelligent’ rather than just ‘sceptical’ or ‘stubborn’? The idea of multiple intelligences is valid enough in the way that it can break down artificially narrow barriers and prejudices but I'm not sure if it tells us something that most people didn't already instinctively know. The thing is, of course, that when the word ‘intelligent’ becomes applicable to so many different areas of human activity, it stops meaning anything at all -- the comment that “she is a very intelligent girl” in theory becomes meaningless, except for the fact that most of us will actually know what was meant – ‘intelligent’ in the sense of the pre-multiple intelligence days.
Learning style - the goods or the labels?
Learning styles is an idea that has been so enthusiastically embraced by many teachers that it's become hard to disembrace, to stand back and look at it from a fair distance. When some of the people reading this went to school, we didn't actually have learning styles but we still had ‘good teachers’ and ‘bad teachers’, and I think those good teachers would still be ‘good’ today and, on the whole, the bad teachers would still be ‘bad’. One of the reasons the good teachers were good is probably because they were aware of learning styles: they simply had different ways of describing the attributes, personalities and receptiveness of the students that they taught. What they didn't do was to separate their classes into distinct groups -- they were able to respond deftly enough to different individuals and to accommodate them while being guided by the needs of the group as a whole - and the needs of the curriculum they had to follow.
The fact is that the classroom is one aspect of the real world which involves constant contacts, negotiations, concessions and compromises. As individuals we have to be responsive to our circumstances, aware of our priorities, aware of our strengths and weaknesses in any given situation and to be adaptable. This is true in ‘real life’ as it is in the real classroom - people who are unresponsive, unaware of their circumstances and unadaptable tend to have what we could call unsuccessful lives, and in the classroom they tend to be unsuccessful learners or teachers.
The good teachers throughout history didn't know about learning styles but they did know about people, and could base all their decisions on a more dynamic moment-to-moment and person-to-person flow of information and impressions, rather than on a set of descriptors which would label their students as being in one or another category.
One-sided or well-rounded?
Adaptability is the key, I think. Most human beings, by the time they are young teenagers, have learnt to be adaptable enough and resourceful enough to cope in a range of learning situations, including those which are not presented in their most preferred style. To design a course in order to match the specific preferences of a learner or a category of learners underestimates the mental potential of those learners and can, in reality, be unhelpful. Learning works best when different forms of perception combine and work together rather than in isolation. There is evidence to suggest that people learn better when they are required to make a little more effort and not allowed to operate in their sphere of comfort.
Most language examinations test learners’ abilities, naturally enough, in the different so-called skills. What is the normal or most appropriate thing to do when the student is weaker in one of these skills, say, listening? Do we simply say that because the student is not an aural learner it is unfair that he or she should have to face such an unfair test, or do we work hardest on improving that skill in order to bring it up to level?
Don’t talk to me like that to me– I’m a visual learner
For the vast majority of people learning a language, language will be encountered both in its spoken and written forms and it makes sense that the modality of teaching should ultimately be decided by what needs to be taught, rather than by who it has to be taught to. In other words, if understanding spoken language is important, it is important full stop.
The reason that so many people on foreign language courses regard themselves as being visual learners is that most of their personal experience with that language has been in the written form: it’s simply the most familiar form of language and, naturally enough, the form they feel most comfortable with. There are many people like this on English courses, people who have become ‘visual learners’ for convenience's (and tradition’s) sake. In reality there is more to being a visual learner than needing to see a word written on a blackboard or on a page, but this fits into a conventional understanding of it.
To get back to the point of the primary modality of teaching, SpeakYourMind is a method that favours spoken presentation and practice of language simply because that, for most people, is likely to be their declared priority: “I need to speak but I'm not very good at it”. It makes sense for everyone to address this in a responsible manner and one of the prime objectives of our course is to enable people to learn to trust their own abilities to operate in a modality which they find, or had always found, to be their weakest. If people can’t learn to trust their own abilities to understand and to speak when they are in the classroom, the chances of them succeeding to do so outside the classroom will inevitably be reduced, and the course in which they invested time, effort and money will end up a disappointment.
I am not opposed to learning styles -- I am opposed to creating unnecessarily divided classrooms, to the constant narrowing down of how we teach, and I prefer to look at how we can broaden course design and teaching procedures and teacher awareness in order to accommodate as many individuals as possible, in the attempt to meet their priorities as closely, and as pleasantly, as possible.
Jun 19, 2012
Successful teaching - the art and craft of synthesis and simplicity
Thinking back over the last school year - we've held five teacher-training courses, in different schools in three different countries and in different sets of circumstances.
Taking SpeakYourMind out there into the wide world is a relatively new and challenging experience but the hard work that has gone into it is paying off and we are learning good lessons along the way.
I have got a lot of pleasure out of getting to know and working with dedicated long-term TEFL professionals who have been open-minded and keen to look at something new. It's been interesteing too to meet and have long discussions with long-experienced teachers who could only see teaching in terms of their own vision of what that involves and could not take on board the basic premises of SyM. At the other end of the scale there have also been bright, interested trainees with no formal teaching experience. Yes, and there were lots of people in the middle - the silent army of TEFL: CELTA and a year or three's experience, keen and conscientous but with half an eye on a different career elsewhere in future.
Two main things have emerged from these experiences. A lot of teachers with long classroom experience have really liked SyM's 'directness'; the fact that the whole lesson is active, focussed and immediate. Getting across the importance of freeing the lesson of 'books and board' takes time, but when new teachers see the point and see how their skills are really challenged as a result, they enjoyed the direct, person-to-person nature of lessons.
They also really appreciated the fact that they could rely on the course material and that lesson-planning and gathering from resources would no longer be part of their busy working days.
The other thing that emerged is that SpeakYourMind makes teaching and learning look so simple. When trainee teachers observed lessons either in-person or on video they tended to think (so they told me afterwards) 'Well, that looks pretty straightforward.' The lessons flow easily and everything seems natural and friendly.
In reality, trainees often got a unexpectedly rude awakening when training got under way. The training programme is a pretty intensive 5 days including (normally) 2 hours teaching practice daily from day 2 (and homework!). What seemed so 'simple' as observers, is, they soon began to find out, the product of a combination of practical teaching skills, classroom techniques, understanding of the design and intricacies of the material, quick-thinking, intuition, and 'experience'. Walking is simple - almost everyone does it pretty often. But not on a tightrope, juggling and whistling a jaunty tune. Teachers began to see that the greater the 'familarity' with classroom procedure and material, the freer they were to teach and to enjoy their students. That 'familiarity' comes with preparation, concentration, practice and feedback.
As trainers, we don't expect people to run before they can walk, but 5 days is not long and the programme is no leisurely stroll. Each day sees ups and downs, learning is no steady straight line on a graph, but on all courses Day 5 saw breakthroughs and satisfaction.
This aspect - the apparent simplicity of lessons and learning - is something that has begun to really sink in. I think now, that this is probably the most important point of all in SpeakYourMind, that it addresses the complexities of learning and of language and arranges or models them into a form and a means of presentation that is straightforward, accessible and (very often) enjoyable.
Simplicity is a good thing - we want it in the things we use and the things we do - and if SpeakYourMind seems 'simple' that is to its credit. Just remember not to judge things on appearance.
Jun 14, 2012
'So, it's good for new teachers'
Yesterday I took part in an online tutorial as part of the conversations series on WizIQ. They host people from various fields of teaching and it is hosted very capably and courteously by Dr Nellie Deutsch.
There were a few technical hitches at my end, despite all the effort I had been making beforehand to make sure everything would work smoothly. I had to change microphone after 5 or 10 min of faffing around with plugs and dials and buttons and things, and my video connection never worked at all as I discovered later. I felt like I was in an isolation chamber.
Never mind, the people taking part could see Nellie and the live chat board seemed to be pretty active with people joining the class and asking me and each other questions and making comments. It's a very good format for this kind of discussion–next time I'll make sure I can keep track of the comments as they happen, but Nellie was very good at summing up the most relevant questions and posing them to me.
At one point Nelly invited Jesse davis - a teacher who had worked with SpeakYourMind in Japan - to recount his experiences and one of the things he pointed out was how that after having taught in Japanese English schools where he'd been pre-much dropped in a room left to get on with it and pretty much just amuse the students, he had learned with SpeakYourMind a great deal about basic classroom skills and classroom rapport and was given for the first time a set of criteria by which he could assess how learning was proceeding.
In the chat-box a comment soon appeared, “so it's good for beginner teachers". I couldn't tell from the context whether or not the implication was “it is only good for beginner teachers ", but that is a comment that I have heard in the past.
First of all, if it is a good method for new teachers, that's great! It's designed to be teachable - to be intuitive and straightforward enough for people who have the right teaching qualities, but not the experience, to be able to do a decent job right from the start.
Being good for new teachers is a far better thing than not being good for new teachers. I don't know exactly what percentage of teachers currently working in schools around the world are in their first year, but I imagine it's a significant amount. It's also very common for a teacher's first year to be almost their last year: in fact, the figures claim that on average TEFL teachers have an average career span of 18 months. So in this kind of context, being able to provide a method that helps new teachers work well becomes a very important asset.
Good teachers are, however, a school’s greatest asset of all.
In our own experience we have been lucky enough to have very high retention rates of staff over the years–fairly seldom over the last 10 or so years have we had teachers who have only done one academic year with us. The same applies to most other schools using SpeakYourMind in other countries. It may be the case that teachers stay simply because it's an easy option–they enjoy their place of work, so what reason do they have to leave? But I'm pretty sure that teachers stay largely because they very much enjoy the teaching and I'm sure that if you ask them they would certainly say they have grown as teachers because they have been able to see potentials within the teaching method and the material which simply were not accessible to them as new or relatively new teachers.
Teachers don't have the challenges that they would have working in more conventional environments, such as being able to improvise activities or having to prepare materials and presentations, even though this can be a burden more than a challenge. But teachers do face a challenge every time they open the door and walk into a classroom. The material is there for them -- the same material they've used hundreds of times – but because it's a very direct, personal, individual-to-individual lesson format, the lesson itself will be unique. The challenge comes in the dynamic nature of the lesson, the moment-to-moment assessments and decisions, the responsiveness to needs and moods, and the ability to emotionally and intellectually engage students.
I'm certainly not naive enough to believe that every teacher will be happy working with what is, after all, 'a method' There are teachers who need to have free rein and there are teaching situations where that is appropriate -- but the idea of SpeakYourMind is to be able to give students as complete a lesson as possible when the time for learning is limited. And apart from the classroom teaching itself, I think one of the things that keeps experienced teachers interested and fresh is the sense of reward they get from seeing real results from students over time. So, if the people you teach are satisfied, that will be important to any teacher – new or not.
There were a few technical hitches at my end, despite all the effort I had been making beforehand to make sure everything would work smoothly. I had to change microphone after 5 or 10 min of faffing around with plugs and dials and buttons and things, and my video connection never worked at all as I discovered later. I felt like I was in an isolation chamber.
Never mind, the people taking part could see Nellie and the live chat board seemed to be pretty active with people joining the class and asking me and each other questions and making comments. It's a very good format for this kind of discussion–next time I'll make sure I can keep track of the comments as they happen, but Nellie was very good at summing up the most relevant questions and posing them to me.
At one point Nelly invited Jesse davis - a teacher who had worked with SpeakYourMind in Japan - to recount his experiences and one of the things he pointed out was how that after having taught in Japanese English schools where he'd been pre-much dropped in a room left to get on with it and pretty much just amuse the students, he had learned with SpeakYourMind a great deal about basic classroom skills and classroom rapport and was given for the first time a set of criteria by which he could assess how learning was proceeding.
In the chat-box a comment soon appeared, “so it's good for beginner teachers". I couldn't tell from the context whether or not the implication was “it is only good for beginner teachers ", but that is a comment that I have heard in the past.
First of all, if it is a good method for new teachers, that's great! It's designed to be teachable - to be intuitive and straightforward enough for people who have the right teaching qualities, but not the experience, to be able to do a decent job right from the start.
Being good for new teachers is a far better thing than not being good for new teachers. I don't know exactly what percentage of teachers currently working in schools around the world are in their first year, but I imagine it's a significant amount. It's also very common for a teacher's first year to be almost their last year: in fact, the figures claim that on average TEFL teachers have an average career span of 18 months. So in this kind of context, being able to provide a method that helps new teachers work well becomes a very important asset.
Good teachers are, however, a school’s greatest asset of all.
In our own experience we have been lucky enough to have very high retention rates of staff over the years–fairly seldom over the last 10 or so years have we had teachers who have only done one academic year with us. The same applies to most other schools using SpeakYourMind in other countries. It may be the case that teachers stay simply because it's an easy option–they enjoy their place of work, so what reason do they have to leave? But I'm pretty sure that teachers stay largely because they very much enjoy the teaching and I'm sure that if you ask them they would certainly say they have grown as teachers because they have been able to see potentials within the teaching method and the material which simply were not accessible to them as new or relatively new teachers.
Teachers don't have the challenges that they would have working in more conventional environments, such as being able to improvise activities or having to prepare materials and presentations, even though this can be a burden more than a challenge. But teachers do face a challenge every time they open the door and walk into a classroom. The material is there for them -- the same material they've used hundreds of times – but because it's a very direct, personal, individual-to-individual lesson format, the lesson itself will be unique. The challenge comes in the dynamic nature of the lesson, the moment-to-moment assessments and decisions, the responsiveness to needs and moods, and the ability to emotionally and intellectually engage students.
I'm certainly not naive enough to believe that every teacher will be happy working with what is, after all, 'a method' There are teachers who need to have free rein and there are teaching situations where that is appropriate -- but the idea of SpeakYourMind is to be able to give students as complete a lesson as possible when the time for learning is limited. And apart from the classroom teaching itself, I think one of the things that keeps experienced teachers interested and fresh is the sense of reward they get from seeing real results from students over time. So, if the people you teach are satisfied, that will be important to any teacher – new or not.
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