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.

Planning a Lesson: Books a Heaven Sent, or a Trap?

When you start working as a teacher in a new school, you usually come to a system that is already in place. They give you the books you will use, possibly some previously elaborated annual plan, and depending when you come on board, you may have to create your lesson plan, or you will inherit one done by your predecessor.

If you are a beginner, or someone who strictly follows specialists’ advice, your lesson plan will be highly detailed in order to show that you know what you are doing, make sure that you have everything that you need, and don’t forget any important steps due to nervousness.

This kind of planning is very good. Many times it is not even that difficult because nowadays, books and their accompanying resources have everything you need for planning. It is just a matter of using the format preferred by the school you are working in.  It just takes time to “fill in the blanks”.

So… books and the resources that accompany them seem to be a heaven sent for teachers, but are they really? What happens when things do not work out as you anticipated they would? You have to think fast on your feet, and improvise, have a plan B, or even C, for just in case. If you have gotten used to depend on what the book says you should do, you might run into trouble because, creativity breeds creativity, but dependency does the same.

Another drawback of letting books dictate your plans is that books are not always well matched to the learners’ needs and to their  socio-cultural context. Books can be like a pleasant house: it helps organize things, has everything that it should, and protects you from the unknown but, can it can also limit you (and your students). As teachers, we can never forget that books are tools to attain a goal. They are not the only path.

Since there is an economic aspect attached to the issue of books, for both the editorial house (through the schools), and the learners and their families (who are asked to buy and trust in them), the decision of which books to use can be a really tricky one. Teachers, often times, have little control over the final decision, but are asked to create their lessons based on them.

I’m always very saddened when I hear teachers say that they didn’t have time to do anything else than to “complete” the exercises listed, to “finish” the book. In this circumstances, the book becomes a tyrant that has snipped off the creativity of the learning process.

To have a model, guidance, resources, is important. But, we cannot forget that books were part of the methodologies created to service the needs of societies based on paper technology. As we provide more and better professional development for our educators, and take work ethics to a higher level, we will have to insure teachers become more self-sufficient, critic, and less dependent on readymade tools. Instead, they will have to become more dexterous in their capacity to use many different kinds of tools, or even create their own, to better adapt to their learner’s needs, interests,  capacities, and learning styles in our fast changing world.

When planning our lessons, besides the more immediate objectives, we also have to think about what it means to be part of the information (or knowledge) society; its paradigms, the skills and competences needed to be successful in such world; then we can set our teaching goals, and then we may choose the best pathway and tools to reach them.

So what are we to do in the mean time? Use the books provided, design your lesson plans creatively,  and don’t let them rule over the learning process that takes place in the classroom. 

Be the rider, not the horse!

About goals and methods

I liked the distinction the author of week 7's reading makes between the ability to communicate competently (I’d say effectively), and communicating like a native speaker. 

 First of all, not all native speakers can communicate effectively in their mother tong. In second place, and with regards specifically to the English language, we can say that its use is so broad all over the world that, both for reasons of phonetic interference of native languages, and due to necessary respect for local culture, it would be impossible to have everyone talking like a British or an American (even if that were desirable).

It has been by now sufficiently established that to learn a language is a lot more than to learn vocabulary and structure; many authors also call attention to the importance of the learner’s capacity to connect with the context in which the language is used.

This means, that learners will be able to make more sense and use the language with greater effectiveness if they are familiar with, and have a certain appreciation for, the culture.  For example, it would be a lot easier for learners to connect with the contents of a book like Interchange from Cambridge University Press, if they were not only young adults, but from a mid to high socioeconomic status, living in San José, because they could connect better to the urban, yuppyish atmosphere of the pictures, situations and dialogs used.  In an economically depressed, rural environment, the effect wouldn’t be quite the same.

When teaching students English, my goal is for them to be effective communicators. In order to achieve this goal, I take into consideration cultural aspect such as the ones I mentioned above, as well as other personal and institutional ones, but most important of all, I take a really close look at the students that are supposed to achieve greater communication competence.

In the private high school levels where I have taught, and that my children have gone to, I often see the same kind of trouble. When students have reached a certain level of proficiency in the understanding and use of the language, many of them do not want to make the effort to go any further. For them it is enough just “to be understood.”

When attempting to analyze the different elements that might help overcome this setback, or those that tend to make it harder, in order to redirect my teaching strategies, I looked at the following:

·         What motivation do the students have to improve their English?

According to their responses:

o   They have to get a good grade because their parents want them to do well in school.

o   They can understand the lyrics of the songs they like, or sing them, better.

o   They can chat and communicate with English speakers in Facebook better.

o   If they travel to the US they can be more independent of their parents, or even act as translators for them.

·         And…What hinders their advance?

o   They have better things to do than to study English (including other subjects such as math, or to chat through Messenger or Facebook, or just play “Farmville”, or another game) until late hours of the night.

o   They don’t want to be considered “nerds”

o   Their role models are “tough guys” from MTV and other music TV stations that do not talk “pretty”.

o   They aren’t able to distinguish between slang and proper English, or they just think proper English is not relevant in their context, since all the young people they know talk in the same way.

o   Boys don’t care if girls can use the language with increased efficacy, but how easily they can get under their skirts. They devote a great deal of time and energy to this subject.

o   Most girls prefer “bad boys” over the “nerds”. They are more fashionable, and fun.

o   Many kids are very impatient, and get easily discouraged when they make a mistake.

o   A lot of them incur in similar mistakes when using their mother tong (clipped sentences, vague expressions, syntax errors).

o   They have reached a period of rebelliousness and project their resistance to adult “guidance” onto the relationship with the English teacher and the learning of the language. Or more specifically, they are mad with one or both of their parents and project those feelings onto the class environment and teachers.

o   They consider that they have a lot of time, and “later on” they will apply themselves to improving their communication capacities. For example, once they are at the university.

I probably haven’t covered all the issues, and I have also left by side the few students that one may consider self motivated; but overall, what I have just mentioned is not a product of my imagination, but of conversations I’ve had over the course of several years with different students in various schools contexts, most of them attending private schools in middle to upper class urban areas.

Once you enter the schools in rural areas and/or marginalized neighborhoods, the things that disrupt advancement get much more complicated. However, the motivation to do better also increases since, for many of them, the advantages that effective English communication offers when getting a job are a lot more clear.

Now, having said all that about the students, I have to also look at the conditions and resources that I have to work with. The conditions include personal ones, as well as others linked to the institution, such as infrastructure, equipment, books, policies and regulations.  All of them have an input on the methodologies I can use to help students reach effective communication. They also have a bearing on my emotional state and my motivation, which in turn have a very important impact on the students and their learning processes.

With the understanding that I have general and specific objectives that are set for each level every year, and at the risk of sounding a bit chaotic, I must confess that the methodologies I use are in a permanent state of flux. The heart of the reason why they constantly vary is due to their being “student centered”. I am constantly studying my students, individually and collectively, and adapt the methods I use accordingly,

I may have a lesson plan established, but if I sense that their mood is in turmoil, I may vary the method or the activity all together. If something goes well, I may decide to try it on another group, or to repeat it with the same group, but with another topic. I use a combination of inductive and deductive methods, also depending on the subject matter, and the feel of the class.

Sometimes the students provide the explanations and games for their classmates, others, we watch a video and I ask analytical questions; every so often they work individually in their workbooks; they take turns reading, or listen to native speaker’s recordings; we have oral presentations on a variety of topics, but we also do dramatizations, and play clue; we may play grammar related internet games, but I have also asked them to design their own web quests, and to choose  what they want to work on.

As to the results, they are not everything that I would like, but they are very close to what I think can be achieve given the variables I have to work with. Student’s grades reflect the work they have done, and the improvements they have experienced because they are the combination of various types of assessments of their class work, homework, special projects, short tests, partial and trimester exams. Assessments, for me, are not just administrative requirements that have to be fulfilled. I always tell students that they are like pictures of their state of achievement in relation to the goals set.

A positive aspect I’d like to highlight from my methodologies is that I am always looking for new and better ways of doing things, and that I have gained the trust and respect not just of my colleagues, but of most of my students, who may even disagree with me at times, but know I’m always looking for their best interest.