Putting It Together and Starting Again -Another Model

After being a teacher for almost 20 years, it has been in the last two, as I re-entered the academic field that I have had the greatest opportunity to reflect upon what I do, and how I do it in contrast with the knowledge of experts. It has been tremendously helpful to be able to look at what my practice, my worries, the sudden insights, and find out that there is a place for them in theories and other people’s experiences.

I think it is in the nature of being a teacher that you can’t help but ponder at the results of your efforts, and try to find new and better ways to accomplish the educational goal you have set for yourself and for the students you guide into the adventure of learning.

Some people say that we teach as we have been taught, I think it is true up to a point, because you also teach as differently as possible from the way you were taught (from the things you used to hate), and you also teach in the way you like to learn, whether you are kinesthetic, or more orally oriented, or visual.

I have seen people who (in their personal lives) always do the same things and their teaching strategies haven’t changed either. I also know people who are curious and eclectic, and so is their teaching style, they are highly creative, but often disorganized.

We all have ideas, and experiences that would be wonderful to tap, so we can grow as professionals and people, but we often don’t feel confident enough to put our thoughts in writing, even though we often dare to experiment with our students….

In Costa Rica, the rich experience gained by teachers about what works and doesn’t, is mostly lost, because we do not reflect and share our findings as part of the normal course of our profession. We buy the books other foreign teachers help develop, and do our best to adapt the methodologies they propose to our contexts, but the knowledge gained through our work is not reintroduced into the creative loop. On the contrary, we try to change our contexts to make the student population conform to the results expected (and indicated) by the books.

We have to find the time, and the money, to gather our teachers’ collective knowledge, and use it to create more sophisticated resources that they can use in a variety of contexts for teaching.

About Reflective Teaching

Leo Barlett’s article: “Teacher development Through Reflective Teaching”, from Second Language Teacher Education (1990), book published by Cambridge University Press, moved me deeply. First, it confirmed the feelings I had that it is not possible to be a good teacher if you are not a person that reflects upon his or her actions, thoughts, and beliefs in order to follow a life-long learning process.

Second, that teachers (who play a very important role in facilitating or obstructing the process of development of human beings), should know not only what they are doing, but why they do what they do. I am not referring only to the academic aspects, but to the relationships and interactive dynamics they establish with the learners, with their co-workers, and the educational authorities.

I was talking to a teacher last Wednesday, and at one point XX said: “the problem is that I hate it here”.  X was an accountant who was at the moment studying to become a certified public accountant, yet X was also teaching fourth grade students Spanish, and Social Studies.  What’s worse, X had been doing it for the last 5 years, and I suspect that the students being taught  were as unhappy as X was. What a great contrast with another teacher who was also teaching the same students, but who absolutely loved her chosen profession.

What I told the accountant-teacher, was that now that at least, X had admitted it, it was possible to  start working towards alleviating some of the anguish by changing  the ways X did things. It is much worse when we encounter teachers who think they like their job, but pass their deeply buried dissatisfaction to the students, and then complain about their behavior and lack of interest.

I fully agree with the author when he exhorts teachers to take time to think about what they are doing, how and why. What I think would help, is to have time to do this, as part of the regular work schedule.  Too many times, teachers’ hours are filled with lessons, and correcting student works or reflecting about how to improve their performance, is left for the hours that are stolen from family and very needed relaxation.

Something I might try this coming year is to record my observations, and then download the files into my computer, so I don’t have to take time transcribing what I said.

About Building Community in the Classroom

I thoroughly agree with Ellen Booth’s article that highlights the importance of creating a warm and welcoming environment for students from the start. I believe teachers always try to set up some kind of frame of reference or ground rules, when classes begin, and I also think that students do the same. Perhaps the learners’ process is not as conscious as that of the teachers, but I have the idea that the first weeks of class are a kind of dance in which one partner is represented by the teacher, and the other by the students. Each partner makes a move, trying to get in the lead.

As teachers we try to create a class atmosphere and dynamics that we interpret as conducive to learning. A powerful reason to make a great effort to establish the dynamics you as a teacher favor from beginning on, is because students learn as much from what you do as from what you don’t do. So, in the face of a void, they will quickly fill it with their own patterns. These usually have to do with their home environment, mixed previous school experiences since students tend to recreate in the ways they interact that which they are most familiar with. When both systems (what you want and what they want) coincide, it is heaven; but when they differ or even oppose each other, the result is a power struggle that the school and the teacher not always win.

We tend to think that the “dance” I mentioned above happens only at the beginning of the school year, but in reality, the dance lasts all year long, with moments of more or less intensity. So, we have to be awake the entire year, or risk finding ourselves reacting to what the students unconsciously do, putting out fires and exhausting our energies.

Small classes, experienced, caring teachers, and clear rules go a long way to prevent disasters. Making students feel as proprietors of their learning process also helps (it reduces possible feelings of rebelliousness). Every year, there are several new students, but most students go on from previous years; reaching out to those who can be positive role models, or moderators of other more extreme student behavior, may help build bridges to the environment you want to recreate.

About classroom management

This is a very difficult topic because class management makes or breaks the learning process.  There was very good advice in the Classroom Management Manual excerpt that we had to read, but as they say…”one thing is to see rain coming, another very different one is to get wet”.

There are so many different factors that affect classroom management… Some of them have been mentioned in the manual, but the depth of their dimensions is hard to fathom.

There are many aspects that are beyond the control of the teacher. Some have to do with the students and their home environment, others with the institution where the learning takes place and a whole lot of them with the teachers themselves.

Even when the conditions are good, or too difficult to be able to make much progress, a good teacher can make a big difference, but besides the knowledge a teacher should have about his or her subject, what else should a teacher have?

According to my personal observations, and what several specialists describe, a good teacher should:

·         Be empathic. That is, capable of connecting with student’s emotions, and to communicate with them at their level of understanding.

·         Have a positive mental attitude when confronted with challenges. A healthy sense of humor, with a willingness to laugh at yourself without becoming the clown of the class, helps lighten things up. Everyone tires of grouches, and no one respects clowns.

·         Be open to change. It is a reality, and an opportunity to grow. It can come from any source.

·         Be a consistent role model. There is nothing worse than to be caught at saying one thing and doing another! And.. there is no turning off the constant scrutiny under which  students subject everything teachers do. They learn from actions, omissions and inconsistencies as well.

·         Be creative. In our changing world, you won’t always find a readymade answer for what is at hand, creativity is one of teachers’ most useful intellectual  muscles.

·         Have good presentation skills. Now days, most students are highly visual and kinesthetic learners, teachers that are highly energetic without being overbearing, go a long way in keeping their students interested.  However, one must not forget that discussion and not lecturing stimulates greater feedback, and that you can’t substitute students’ learning processes..

·         Be calm. It helps to remember that the behavior directed towards you, is not personally against you, but to what your represent in the student’s imaginary (mother, father, authority…). Usually, a word acknowledging the student’s feelings or expressing how the current behavior can be interpreted is enough to give the student some room to reconsider why he or she is conducting him or herself in an undesirable manner.

·         Be respectful. Besides being the ethical thing to do, contributing to lower a student’s self-esteem will only result in a worse conflict.

Overall, one must always remember that a teacher has the capacity to touch people’s lives. If not…,  just look back at your own life , and see who you remember with fondness and who with anger or contempt.  A teacher who inspires people to reach their highest potential will always be remembered with respect. When teaching is not just a profession, but a way of being, a vocation for service that gives meaning to life, then, we open the door for all those qualities and skills mentioned above to flourish.  Then, we can say with satisfaction that we have left a small footprint on the sands of time that is worth following.

About Assessment

Through a combination of practical experience in my teaching posts, and formal education at ULACIT, I have learned that tests have to be thought of as learning tools because of the feedback they provide, and that they require careful preparation. For example, although I`ve been teaching the same subjects for some years, none of my exams are exactly the same, because the students are never exactly the same. People grow, evolve, things happen, and all of these produce variations that a teacher has to be attuned to in order to offer the best possible learning environment. It often takes me a couple of hours to design a test to my satisfaction.

Many times students are afraid of exams because they have been used as power tools to intimidate them into submission, or because the tests are not well prepared and feel like walking through a misty swamp.

Assessment has to reflect what has been covered in the learning sessions: each subject, the weight of the percentage the points contribute to the overall grade, and the type of exercises’ difficulty –identify when just introducing the subject, complete once students have had a chance to practice but still need help to jug the memory, and finally production when students have appropriated the way to use the structure you are assessing.

In order to insure that you are designing documents that are clear and easy to use by the students, it helps to imagine yourself in their shoes and do the exercises just as you expect them to do them. It’s amazing how many little mistakes one can catch that way.

One of the mistakes we tend to make is misjudge the time allotted to complete the assessment. The Ministry of Education provides guidelines, for each type of exercise, but time management is also a skill that has to be practiced before it is mastered. The amount of time it takes a student to complete a test provides valuable input when seen in conjunction with the accuracy of the answers.

When studying English, tests should be faithful reflections of authentic language use (not disjointed, out of context utterances). The more that context is provided, the closer we will place students to the actual challenges of real use for which they are being prepared. Overall, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that students should not be surprised by what they find in an assessment exercise.

Something else to take into consideration is the difference between public and private schools. For example, public schools are forced by the Ministry of Education (MEP), which rules them, to apply summative tests, while private schools have more freedom to apply alternative formative testing (although only to a percentage of the total grade), summative testing is also expected by the MEP from such educational centers. Even the test that is conducted for graduation requirements at the end of high school, is a summative test, that does not respect different styles of learning.

Ideally, we should be using formative assessments because, as mentioned in the text given to us to read, in formative settings, the activities as well as the tests reflect the kinds of challenges, and allow for the kinds of solutions, that learners would encounter in communication outside the classroom.

In formative learning sessions and testing, the student is co-owner of the process, setting goals, defining pace, and assessing progress. However, in order to be able to do so successfully, the overall system has to be set up this way, not just a subject, or for a year.

I’m not saying that if students are not used to this learning style it should not be attempted, but it is going to require an adaptation period and a far greater effort for all involved.

Even teachers have to get used to a different way of doing things. For example, checklists and scoring rubrics have to be constructed with a lot of attention because we tend to clump information, or take things for granted, which then results in tools that are incomplete, ambiguous, and open to subjective considerations.

Since students have to be provided with a useful assessment tool that they can comfortably use, one option is to discuss and construct it jointly at the beginning of the learning period, and to practice using it so students can be relaxed with the tool. Then, opportunities for fine tuning arise. Of course, adjustments have to be made to account for student maturity and previous familiarity with this type of learning strategy.  

Something I like about self and peer assessment, though, is that students become more familiar with the fact that communication is a social act, and therefore, it is in the interaction between producers and receivers of the message that effectiveness should be determined, and opportunities for improvement identified.

Such an approach benefits not only the students of a particular subject, but society as a whole because the more people use it, the more we contribute to the development of responsible citizens, and that in turn has the potential to transform our societies into more sustainable, fair, and tolerant ones.

About Motivating Learners

“When students think of the language as a school subject like any other, they may learn a great deal about its vocabulary, grammar, and sentence and discourse structure, but the language will not become a true medium of communication for them and won't engage them very deeply…”

The article from the National Capital Language Resource Center that we were supposed to comment this week is one of the readings I enjoyed most so far in this course. I thought it provided very good advice, and I could identify with many of the suggestions and observations it made. Although it is obvious that motivating a university student requires different strategies than motivating an elementary, middle or high school student (and the same goes for adult students that enroll in language learning institutes), if you are creative enough to think from their different perspective, that is, if you are able to put yourself in their shoes, you can come up with adaptations that work.

Something that was not discussed in the article, and I missed advise on, was what to do when you don’t get students who are starting their learning process, but the ones that have been in it for some years, and are the product of a system that does not help them differentiate between learning any other school subject, and learning English.

How do you undo the fossilization that has taken place over time, not just of mistakes in language use, but in attitudes and learning strategies as well?

When planning activities and approaches for promoting the engagement of the students in language learning, I have intuitively used some of the suggestions mentioned in the article, which I have also improved, as I had the opportunity to reflect upon in other classes I’ve taken over the course of studies at ULACIT.  However, reading through them again, I got new ideas I’m going to try next school year. The article suggests:

 To promote engagement in language learning:

·       Encourage students to use the language spontaneously to communicate ideas, feelings, and opinions

·       Identify informal out-of-class language learning experiences

·       Ask students to evaluate their progress in terms of increases in their functional proficiency

Students' motivation for learning a language increases when they see connections between what they do in the classroom and what they hope to do with the language in the future. Their attention increases when classroom activities are relevant to their other interests.

To make these connections, begin by having students list the ways they may use the language in future. Have them include both the ways they plan to use it and other ways that might arise. Ask them to be as specific as possible. For each way of using language, ask them to list specific communication tasks that they will need to be able to do. Use these purposes and tasks as the basis for task-oriented classroom communication activities.

Some of the things I do (like role play) fall in the connection making category. I usually use topics that I have observed interest the students. The challenge is to relax enough to keep it fun, while keeping students focused on the learning goal as well. That’s particularly difficult with students that have attention deficit, or immature ones.

Something I haven’t tried yet, and it just occurred to me, is to have learners make a personal poster which can be used as a reminder of why they want to learn English (or if they are not the ones who want to do so, at least remind them of why it is useful).

Another of the things I do, is to increase the amount of control pupils  have through choices that I allow them to make with regards to the types of activities we engage in, or to negotiate “boring” tasks in exchange for games they like to play (for example clue, or treasure hunt).

Last year, I also pondered about the importance of learning strategies in learning English. It was inspiring to also read about this in the article:   

“Good learners are able to identify the best strategy for a specific task; poor learners have difficulty choosing the best strategy for a specific task…”

For example, recently, a seventh grade student I had for the first time couldn’t complete an exercise in which he had to use the correct verb tenses within a short text, not because he didn’t know the tenses, but because he had not learned to recognize in which tense the action of the story was taking place. This was a lack of reading comprehension skills that was not linked to learning a foreign language, but to processing information (which he had difficulties with also in his mother tong).

Finally, I have also found very useful the suggestions about how to use Metacognition to “tap into students' knowledge about how languages work and how learning happens” in order to “… help them direct and monitor their language learning processes”.

 I recognized some activities I have been applying in my teaching style which have provided positive results. However, as I become more and more aware of the importance of such strategies in early stages of learning, I also wonder how to reverse the damage done when they were not applied in the learning process for 6 years prior to my coming into contact with the students.

One thing I can attempt is to continue to bring suggestions for making students aware of successful learning strategies to the school’s director, and the pre-school and elementary teachers, in order to continue to provide input for changes in the methodologies that have been so far used in the school.

On Syllabi

The syllabus is a small place to start bringing students and faculty members back together... If students could be persuaded that we are really interested in their understanding the materials we offer, that we support their efforts to master it, and that we take their intellectual struggles seriously, they might respond by becoming involved in our courses, by trying to live up to our expectations, and by appreciating our concern.

 - Rubin, “Professors, Students, and the Syllabus,” Chronicle of Higher Education

http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/syllabus/ 

I like this resource from the University of Minnesota that I found on line. It says that a syllabus tacitly records and transmits your teaching philosophy. I like the inclusion of the word “tacitly”, because when I look at a syllabus (and I have seen many in the course of my studies) I not only look at what it says, but also at how it is saying it, and even at what it is not saying.

I have noticed for example that many times the syllabi are very stiff, as if mass produced, repeating the same things in the same ways, as if they were more a routine requirement than an opportunity to start getting closer to the students.  

I prefer  the syllabus that reflects the personality of the teacher in the way information is being presented, and in the choice of material that is included. I look forward to courses that seem attractive because of the challenges they present, the interesting methodology, or opportunity to learn something new.

On the other hand, it is discouraging when you read a syllabus about, for example methodology, and the way the syllabus is written clashes with the subject contents. Or, the syllabus says that we are going to learn about student centered methodologies, and the teacher divides students into groups so they can lecture their classmates on the topics contained in the text book with miserably written power point presentations.

I found the questions the tutorial poses to help guide the process of creating the syllabus quite useful. I also liked the encouragement if offers to bring the teacher closer to the students, to help show him or her as a person with interests and cares, not an impersonal entity like most syllabi show. Perhaps because they are not written with that purpose in mind, but with the theory that authority is created through respect that cannot exist except through distance.

In the school level, respect is gained because students know you care about them, and you are knowledgeable, and consistent. I think at university level it is the same. It is not the suit, or the aloofness, or the fear that you can make life complicated, which gains you the respect and desire to collaborate of the students.

I check my syllabi every year, and I adjust them according to the characteristics of each of the groups that are coming up to the next grade level. I incorporate things I learned in the previous year, and different resources that might be better suited for the groups. Sometimes I even cut things out from a previous program. 

In a way, for me, syllabi are like plants that you prune and shape in a way that they reflect who you are and what you want to do, as clearly as a picture.