Flexibility

“Be formless… shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You pour water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or creep or drip or crash! Be water, my friend…”

Bruce Lee’s famous words, which I came across after some post-Way-of-the-Dragon research on the martial-arts master. These words have something profound to say to professionals intent on providing the best service possible. Good – better – best practice, however, conjures up a notion of the one perfect form for a teacher of a second language. On the contrary, Lee’s quote made me think that you are the form, the liquid form – not the Trevi Fountain of teaching – and you adapt to the cup, bottle, teapot, dirty old bucket full of mould (we’ve all had that class, right?). There seems to be, therefore, a mismatch somewhere between the notion of best practice and how it is achieved.

Last week I was asked the most important attribute of an ELT teacher, to which I immediately responded “flexibility”. There was no hesitation at all. Methods, approaches, language awareness, classroom management techniques – learnable. Flexibility – acquired on the way thanks to a combination of success and failure.

Failure: flunk, bomb, mess up, flunk – there’s so much negative stigma attached to this word. Just taking a look at the red pen the letter ‘F’ on the test on the right and let the memories come flowing back of that embarrassing arithmetic test in which you scored zero when you were thirteen. Calling out your mark, much lower than every other in the class, every week, was an absolute nightmare. Enough of my year-9 mathematics nightmares now.

There is negative stigma that doesn’t do justice the learning power of failure

Kathryn Schulz, in her talk ‘On Being Wrong’, differentiates between being wrong and realising that you are so, providing a really striking analogy of what it feels like: The Coyote chasing Road Runner off the mountain and the sudden realisation dawns on him mid stride that he’s about to drop hundreds of feet to the bottom of the abyss. Before, he runs off the edge in complete ignorance of what he’s just done, takes a few more strides and suddenly sees the ‘F’ staring him in the face, then falls. It’s about 1:08 in this video if 6 minutes of Looney Toons is too much for you.

Obviously, it’s not fun in any respect to realise that you’ve done something wrong. The double-edge sword is that firstly you cannot do anything about the mistake and secondly you often find out from someone else – losing face an having the risk of dwelling on it. Not necessarily a sword though, all of this. I’ll come to that a bit later.

I digress a little from the original point of flexibility. At this point I feel I should link the two strands; flexibility and failure. When you hit the bottom and brush yourself off after the Coyote-esque fall, to avoid yourself from doing the same thing over and over again, there comes a point when quiet reflection on your practice is necessary to avoid any future reoccurrence. In this way, failure feeds into flexibility as the protagonist; it is the reason why you end up resembling either the Trevi Fountain or the water it spurts out.

Let’s not get too hasty here though and assume making mistakes over and over again will result in flexibility. The Coyote, credit to him, experiments with a number of different methods to try and catch the pesky Road Runner. He doesn’t keep on making the same mistake over and over again (although that famous falling scene does have a habit of poking its nasty head up more than once, touché). To my mind, he is trying to be like water and should deserve a lot of credit for it; he’s only doomed to failure thanks to the script he has to follow. This might have some significance to teachers who have a script forced upon them by a third-party, too.

“Now water can flow, or creep or drip or crash! Be water, my friend…”

How to be more like water: You put the teacher in a class and the teacher adapts to the class. Seems simple, 1+1 = 2, right? Trust me, this is NOT as simple as it sounds and it’s very likely that you’ll fall off that cliff once or twice. There are, thankfully, ways that can help you realise when you do in the hope that in future you see the cliff coming and take a detour.

• Listen to your students and respond to their feedback, even if it involves doing things that don’t fit well with your teaching beliefs
• Collect feedback on a regular basis; don’t be afraid the negative stuff – you’re water, you adapt
• Is your classroom a cup, a bucket, a glass? Find out this stuff before and when your course starts
• Use a variety of methods and approaches – even the ones that your not so used to or consider to be not as conducive to learning; if you’re students learn benefit, then why not?

Warning: bending over backwards too much can lead to back pain.

Just a note to finish on: The Coyote, who finds himself messing up all the time, at least tries a variety of different methods to achieve his goal. He’s wrong, he realises this; that doesn’t stop him from trying something new. Be like the Coyote, you’ll find the right method one day. The process will make you more like water, better adapted to take the form of the vessel.

Some afterthoughts

I would like to make a call to any teacher that has ever received a nasty comment from a student, some negative feedback on an observation, below-average marks from formal training: do you consider yourself more flexible as a consequence?

Secondly, how do you go about ensuring you don’t fall off the cliff when you are handed a new class? Does this always work?

 

 

 

 

I am used to going to bed late

That is certainly how it felt after a 6-day holiday over Easter. Whether I was out or at home, with no commitments the next day, I fell into the trap of stay up well into the wee hours of the morning. Not a problem, until Thursday arrived and I was up and wide awake at 6.30am to teach at 9am at school.

Having read Chia’s inspirational accounts of the first few days of her Dogme challenge, I thought I’d try out one of her ideas in my classroom. The lesson was a group of 9 pre-intermediate learners, observed by CELTA trainees to make up part of their compulsory observations.

I sat down and introduced myself to the class, who, in turn, introduced themselves to me. I then asked them to make line up in order of what time they went to bed the night before. I listened carefully to the language they used to do this, they asked questions like:

What time did you go to bed last night?

Did you go to bed late last night?

Did you go to bed early?

Did you sleep lots last night?

They completed the task with very little trouble and we started talking about our sleeping habits, what time we go to work, what time we get up and have breakfast – this lasted about 5 minutes. After this, one student said

for me it’s not difficult to get up in the morning, I am…. (come si dice ‘abitudine’ in inglese?)…. urm… use it?

I CCQ’d the structure the learner was looking for. I asked “is it something you always do?” “is it difficult or easy?” and then wrote on the board:

I am ________ _____ get____ up early

We filled in the gaps to form:

I am used to getting up early

By now interest was at a high and everyone had clearly understood the meaning of the sentence. I highlighted the form (mainly the getting after ‘to’ and used as an adjective following the verb ‘to be’) and drilled the pronunciation. I also used the opportunity of creating some examples to correct some of the errors with prepostional phrases I’d heard in the previous activity such as “in the weekend, one time in a week, go in the park).

I then asked for some more sample sentences from the class and we made four on the board. After that, I asked students to go to their seats and make some more examples with their partners. During this time, I heard one group say “Americans are not used to the way we do things in Italy” and decided to pick on this topical aspect to extend the task.

I put learners into groups and asked them to discuss why it would be difficult for a foreigner to come to Italy (in the hope of eliciting ‘get used to’ as well).

Learners chatted and discussed their ideas, I inputted bits of vocabulary where needed and noted down some errors and also directly corrected a few. In my prioritisation of error I considered the following:

is it a chunk they are missing or is it language they already know which they are making mistakes with?

e.g.

They used to drinking large coffees (elicited the ‘are’) and asked what’s the difference between American coffee and Italian to put the learner back into fluency.

They have difficult when they read the menu in Italian (they find it difficult to read the menu) – I left this one for feedback.

By the end of the activity I had a list of pronunciation (mainly stress in words) and lexical points I wanted to look at. I decided to make correction more covert and wrote an email with the class on the board to recycle the language we used in the activity, extending students language by highlighting the use of the pronoun with be used to, e.g. I’m not used to it; an error I hear a lot from Italian leaners being ‘I’m used to’ and fill in some more lexical gaps, e.g. I find it difficult to…

25 minutes to the end of the lesson. We’d finished the email and I asked learners to write a quick email to a friend telling them about an experience they’ve had abroad to use the language we had looked at in class that day. I checked the emails and helped with some problems while students were writing.

The end of the class took the form of a review of the language we looked in class. I asked learners to draw a table with four parts: one for new grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and topics, which I’d seen in Teaching Unplugged. They filled in the parts of the table and class finished in plenary discussion of what we had learned that day.

On reflection perhaps introducing ‘get used to’ in the form of ‘I’m getting used to/I can’t get used to’ may have pushed learners further. The lesson was 1 hour 30 minutes however and I didn’t want to flood learners with too much information. It was my first time with the class and it seemed prudent to provide practice of one structure and the incidental lexis which accompanied it than provide an input tsunami.

It’d be interesting to see what trainees thought about the lesson. They all commented that students seemed very motivated, spoke a lot and clearly learned and processed a lot of language. I wonder if I should have told them what I was doing and why? Why bother?

From the chalkface (part 2)

As some of you may remember, I posted a few days ago on my YLs class. I’d like to start by thanking everyone for their responses and encouragement:

Reaching out to students like A and B can be tough, Sadly, this is often because you are the only one prepared to do so. As you say, many parents prefer to wait for them to ‘grow out of it’ and this is often the attitude of other teachers as well

- Dave Dodgson

Apart from the fact that my brain wants to study these kids (dyspraxia, gifted, shy, … not that I like labels necessarily but by your descriptions it sounds like they need a bit of extra attention at their own particular level: not easy in a classroom full of peers!)

- Louise Alix

As for the ‘cloud-boy’. If he’s got strong logical-mathematical intelligence, some jig-saw puzzles might do the job. I make jig-saw puzzles myself and there are lots of options of using them. I guess anything that can make him focus would work. Snap! – may be for practicing voacbulary?

- Alexandra Guzik

secondly yes, absolutely, the best way to control the uncontrollable is to give them the control. If he is good with numbers, assign him as the “Maths Correspondent” of the class. Get him to do a poster outlining his duties in his post in addition to contact details, i.e; the best time to speak etc. Communication problems in language are mostly related to self confidence issues which explains the stuttering and withdrawal from classroom activities

- Tamara

Parents

Unfortunately, it would seem that many parents here are either unwilling to admit or unaware of the fact that their children have special needs. Of course, not when the issue is staring you right in the face, to be blunt about it i.e. serious problems with motor skills or physical disabilities. The question calls for sensitivity with their parents; they don’t want to be seen as having ‘the special kid’. Thankfully, my class contains fewer of these children than others, but Student B is a classic example of this kind of issue. His parents wish to remain unaware of his difficulties.

Behaviour is another difficult topic to broach with parents. Many parents tell our teachers, “you need to shout at them more, then they will behave themselves”. It seems that here, shouting is seen as the way of confronting negative behaviour. Of course, any YLs teacher out there will likely know that shouting lies among the least effective ways of dealing with naughty children. Here’s a conversation I had with a parent concerning her daughter:

“but why does she have a low mark for behaviour, is she a bad child, you say she winds up the boys”

“It’s not that she is badly behaved, but she antagonises the boys when she’s with them, especially Student X”

“Ah yes, Student X, she is always talking about him. You should just shout at her more when she does it”

“Yes, he is often the protagonist too. Listen, I think she may respond more to positive and negative feedback on her behaviour. This is why I have given a low mark for behaviour, hoping that she will take it as an incentive to improve in class, I feel she will respond. It gives her more time to think about what she is doing. I’ve also separated her from Student X to give her a chance to show me this”

I think it’s important to note as well that I don’t blame parents for shouting at their children. After all, I have them for an hour once a week, they have them for a lifetime. The situations are completely different. The mother of the student walked away smiling and happy. Her daughter was a little angel in class yesterday. I told her her after class to go and tell her mother that Dale said she was perfect that day. She did with a beaming smile on her face.

Extra attention

The criteria with which I planned my lessons yesterday arose from my previous reflections, advice from the assistant director where I work, and the comments left by visitors to this blog:

• Include touchy/feeling activities
• Give Student B a more ‘mathsy’ task to see how he responds to it
• Give Student A and student B some one-to-one attention
• Make the best use of the space in the classroom to keep students active for the whole lesson.
• Provide positive or negative feedback on classroom behaviour and language use in class.

Here’s a post plan of the lesson:

1. Started by sitting in a circle on the floor and reveiwed animal vocabulary and the chunks we looked at last lesson’snakes are long, sharks are mean’, using mimes and acting to elicit vocabulary. Praised students and asked them to mime an animal to guess as a reward.

Seated still in a circle on the floor, we counted to 40, each student taking a turn. After reaching 20, I wrote 21 on a student’s back for them to guess the number, to model the next activity. We carried on until reaching 40. After, students drew numbers on backs to guess. I got involved as well.

*At this point I made sure I watched Student B carefully. He was by far the most engaged in the activity.

** Student A was allowed to work with her friend as a reward for being so good. Students sat back in their places and completed the following activity with letters and numbers:

I then gave students the following activity to do to practise saying and recognising the spoken forms of letters and numbers, which they still have difficulty with. During the activity I noticed that Student B’s performance differed quite considerably between the two stages. In the first part of activity he needed to listen to letters and find the corresponding numbers. In the second, he said the letters and and listened to the corresponding numbers to write. He found producing the individual sounds very difficult. I helped him out and congratulated him on doing well. It was fairly evident though that he was frustrated.

After we finished the activity. I took some tap measures and put up a piece of card on the wall and we stood around it. One of the students said “quanto sei alto, Dale?” which is “how tall are you, Dale”, which I’d written, without my name, on the top of the card. Two students stepped forward and measured me. I then asked them to measure each other in groups and say how tall they are.

We lined up to take turns to mark our names and heights on the card on the wall.

In a circle at the end of the lesson, we filled out the behaviour chart. Every student received a yellow smiley face for outstanding behaviour. When I gave feedback, I gave it in L1, then English. I made sure also to have a quiet word on the side with Student B to tell him how impressed I was with him that day.

From success to success

This was one positive lesson. I need to think how I can build on this to make one positive experience for learners into another, make short term successes and small victories in long term development.

How can I go forward?

• Think about implementing a marbles in a jar style behaviour feedback system so that students can get feedback without my reliance on L1, even if it’s very little and rarely.
• Do not go over the top with ‘mathsy’ stuff. It worked once but that’s not to say it will work so well next lesson. Include snippets of it in activities.
• I need to continue with varying the activities in class, lots of moving, standing, sitting, pair-work, individual work, groupwork. Include more games too, with puzzels.
• Give students individual responsibilities and think about creating a rota for this. I could make student B responsible for doing a head count.
• Continue with positive feedback to build confidence in the class. I like how the classroom is becoming ‘our space’ and students are taking ownership of it, we have been really bonding as a group in the past few weeks.
• Find a time-efficient way of letting parents know about their children’s progress. We have very little time together, which can make it difficult.
• Do not focus too much on the special needs of the class. Remember the high-flyers and make sure there’s constant challenge for them too.

Reflection at the chalkface

“Oh my gosh that was an absolute disaster, I lost complete control, they (the children) were running circles around me” - 

An extract from my journal in December 2011, written after the YLs I teach on Thursday afternoon had a particularly rowdy hour. They were chatting (in Italian), distracted, not engaged in the lesson had absolutely no respect for their teacher.

“Little brats, why won’t they just behave themsevles”

“They are absolute terrors”

It was quite unfortunate that these were the thoughts occupying my mind on the walk back to school. Why, you may ask, were they so negative? It is perhaps a defence mechanism employed to mask whose responsibility it was to resolve this situation. In these cases, it is tempting to deflect blame onto the easiest targets. Fortunately, the brisk walk back to work was enough to cleanse my mind of these thoughts. By the time I arrived back to school, my thoughts had refocused on how I could take proactive steps to change this situation.

What is the cause of this problem?

How can I change my classroom to encourage more positive behaviour in my classroom?

In contrast, these are much more constructive thoughts, wouldn’t you say? With this question in mind, I set about preparing a rough action plan.  First I identified a few salient points to improve: classroom management, use of materials and grading of language. I figured that the reason for the lack of students engagement in class was because the language was too difficult, the lesson pacing was too quick, the structure of the lesson was not ‘stir-and-settle’ and tasks lasted too long.

In addition, without any system of giving feedback in place – I was relying on verbal feedback, which was useless, given that the learners are more or less absolute beginners – students had no way of knowing how they behaved.

• More engaging materials
• Classroom layout
• Lesson pacing
• Feedback

More engaging materials

The language school where I work is a veritable library of materials to use with YLs; they have everything from jazz chants to CLIL activities. What is more, the teachers I work with are seasoned pros when it comes to teaching young children.

• Read up on teaching techniques using flashcards.
• Team teach a lesson with my assistant director using cuisenaire  rods to make a song with new chunks of language.
• Take activities from resource books and plan how to adapt them to the class.

Classroom Management

• Abandon the classic ‘communicative horseshoe’ in favour of tables grouped together in squares; I can monitor and give on-to-one attention to those need it.
• Observe a more experienced colleague. Make note of any similarities with your classroom. Note any differences and consider the reasons.

Lesson Pacing

• Brainstorm stirring and settling activities.

Feedback

• Introduce a behaviour chart to be filled in weekly.
• Design a ‘classroom responsibilities’ chart e.g. English monitor, writing the date on the board, wiping the board, handing out sheets of paper.
• Draw up classroom rules, with Italian translations (to avoid any ambiguity).

After the Christmas break the class completely changed. By the end of January I had finished my first action plan and the class is going much better. Songs and visuals, new techniques and games keep students engaged. Feedback makesstudents happy that they are pleasing their teacher and doing well in class. New classroom management keeps students focused and makes the classroom more interactive. As a result, we have a fantastic rapport developing. Thursday afternoons are now a joy.

Recent developments

I flagged up four students as problematic in the past three weeks.

“what’s causing this behaviour?”

For two of them, it was a simple case of separating them and seating them in different positions in the classroom. The other two were slightly more perplexing however, and required a little more thinking.

Student A

Very disruptive behaviour, still not very engaged in class, plays, challenges the teacher’s authority in class whenever she can. It might seem a classic case of a badly-behaved child. I spoke to her teacher, who revealed to me that she has trouble producing words in Italian; her linguistic ability in L1 is far lower than her classmates’. It is therefore entirely possible that her rebellious behaviour in class may be a way of masking her low ability so as not to stand out and look like ‘the dumb kid’.

• Involve her more in class: give her tasks that give her responsibility like handing out materials or collecting in pens and glue.
• When the class is seated around the teacher, ask her to sit next to you to give her more direct attention and help her with her linguistic difficulties.
• Make tasks a little more open with easier language. This gives the stronger students in the class a chance to run with the language and frees the teacher up to give her some one-to-one teaching and engage her.
• Give very positive feedback on language and behaviour. Make her feel like she is achieving.

Student B

Unfortunately, this student is a bit more perplexing. He shares student A’s problems when it comes to producing words in English. He slurs and stutters, producing an incomprehensible blur of language. He is clumsy and spends most of the lesson with his head in the clouds.

• Sit him next to the boy with disabilities’ assistant. The adult figure is likely to regulate his behaviour so that I am not forced to give him constant attention.
• Give him the same one-to-one attention as student A.

The student is still alienated in class around his classmates. He rarely knows what he is supposed to do and seems very uninterested in taking part in class.

Not surprisingly, after chatting to his parents, it emerged that he is in fact lagging behind his companions in Italian. But interestingly, it also came to our attention that he is succeeding in maths. After talking to my assistant director, we decidedthat tasks with a lower linguistic load that appeal to more logical/analytical learners, using numbers, counting and mathsy things might appeal to him, give him a sense of achievement and engage him more.

At this point, I’d like to call on anyone who reads this blog to contribute their ideas on student B. Have you had a student like this? If so, what measures did you take to involve the student more in class? What activities do you know of the sort I outlined above?

 

Practical Ideas for Retrospective Planning in a Reflective Journal

I want to offer my thanks again to the audience in my talk on Reflective Teacher Practice at TESOL France, who came up with a number of very practical ideas to create a retrospective plan to use in a reflective journal. Their wealth of experience they had to offer helped me come up with a number of ideas. I owe you all a big thankyou, and maybe a drink next time we see each other, you can hold me to that! I have synthesised the ideas into a few frameworks that could be of use to someone thinking of starting a reflective journal:

 

Circular snapshots

 

Hard-data stored in your brain is more easily accessed through emotions and visuals, in my humble opinion. This model encourages the teacher to first go back into the lesson and take a visual snapshot of it, then, give it an adjective. Having entered the lesson in this way, you’re ready to look at the focus, needs, opinions and feedback.

 

Questions about the teacher/questions about the learner

Reflecting and writing a journal has a number of benefits which I would espouse. However, at times, alone with your thoughts, it’s possible that reflection becomes inflection. By this I mean the teacher is the centre of everything. We are professionals and we take our practice seriously. Basically, we flagellate ourselves. This framework rebalances the situation by addressing the learners first and then the teacher. The questions in the first box focus the reflection on the learner, then expanded and refocused on the teacher; it’s beneficial not only to learners but also to the teacher to bear them in mind when retrospectively planning/evaluating.

 

Reflection into research

An area I touched upon in my talk was action research. This is the area in which I feel I short-changed my audience slightly. There was a missing link between how to synthesize the journal content into a well-focused and fruitful action research project. The idea below goes some way to bridging the gap; it takes you step-by-step through the lesson running order. The first part elicits your thoughts on the lesson. Unpacked, the most salient points are then questioned and re-packaged in the form of a focus or action research (by this point the number of point should reduce). By the time you arrive at the action research box, you’ll have a few ideas in mind. At this point it’s a good idea to get the opinion of other teachers. This could be done by asking them to read your journal or through an informal staff-room chat. Finally, you’re ready to start picking out literature to help research.

 

The two classroom pillars

I used this framework to analyse a Dogme lesson I did last week. I found it useful to start with the learner pillar. They focus on interactions: firstly communicative interaction, then the interaction between learners and the content of the class, difficult and easy.

Answering the three questions on the teacher-pillar accesses the teacher’s decisions through the lesson in relation to learner interactions. What I find helpful about this framework is that you can draw conclusions on your decisions in the classroom and link them directly to the learner.

It could be beneficial to revisit the lesson or start an action research project in the case of an imbalance between these questions e.g. Learners found it difficult to produce X language/I found it difficult to help them with X language, learners found it difficult to understand what was required of them in the lesson/I found it hard to give instructions.

 

Surprises and moments

It doesn’t always go according to plan, does it? Emerging interactions can come as some surprise. It’s how we deal with them that makes them learning opportunities. In reflecting on them, consider the cause: internal or external. E.g. students had a bad day, it’s 5.30 p.m. on a Friday and my teenager group wasn’t exactly thrilled to check into grammar 101, the material was pitched too high, etc etc. If these were surprises the next step is to reconsider your plan or classroom behaviour.

At the end of the process, give yourself a mark out of ten. It’s better at the end than at the start – again, reflection is better than inflection.

 

Moving from one lesson to the next

This idea focuses on how to move from lesson to lesson. As I mentioned in my talk, I often find the focus for the next lesson in the leftovers of the previous. Reactivating could be to address any one of the questions presented. This doesn’t necessarily have to something identified as a negative; one might want to reactivate to revise, add continuity or to introduce a new focus in the context created in the previous lesson.

 

Challenge

Here’s my challenge. To anyone out there: teachers: newly qualified or expert, trainers: teaching or training. Directors/ADOSs: running development sessions or teaching, try it out with a class. Maybe two if you have the time.

1. Which of these structures best fits your teaching style/beliefs about teaching/context? 

2. Do you find it helpful to reflect in this way?

3. Have you noticed and areas for improvement in your teaching? Would you like to improve these?

4. Have you identified any strengths? If so, how could you ensure your planning/preparation/teaching exploits your strengths?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TESOL France: Reflective Teacher Practice for Newly Qualified Teachers (and everyone else)

Firstly, I’d like to send out a big thanks to all those who came to and participated in my presentation at TESOL France. I’m planning another post and a few challenges to include the excellent contributions given by some of the participants.

Reflection

I want to share with you something that happened to me a couple of months ago. I had just moved city and I was going through the interview process. Now, I consider myself a rookie when it comes to interviews, but this one in particular will stand out in my memory for years to come. We were about half way through when I was asked:

“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

Now I’ll be the first to admit how much I dislike this question. I even felt quite inclined to not answer it. Let’s face it, who in their right mind would reveal potentially harmful information in front of their prospective employer? It seems like interview suicide!

You see, it’s not what the question is asking that troubles me; it’s the way the question is asked. I have never sat on the other side of the table, but If I did, I imagine the perfect candidate would respond like this:

“Well, at the moment I’m in the process of improving…”

I think you’ll all agree that this is quite different from the original question, but is that not what it’s asking? There’s something curious about this: taking a different perspective on a question I’d been asked many times before provided a very positive outcome, one which no doubt will make me more confident for the next time.

In this presentation, I’m not going to treat a weakness as a problem. Instead I’m going to propose, like in the response, that it makes up part of a proactive process towards improving. Confront the issue with a different mindset so that, in essence, the question remains the same, but the results you obtain are different. That’s how problem solving works, right?

I have not been in the EFL world for very long, two and a half years to be precise. In that short time I’ve come across many teacher trainers who are passionate about their work, who are an inspiration to their trainees which, in turn, speak very highly of them.  These courses provide lots of support – regular feedback with an experienced tutor, post lesson evaluation, setting action points to improve on, help with lesson planning, a focus on language awareness and language teaching methodology – trainees are never on their own.

I remember my first job in EFL very well. After a few months working where I trained, I moved to a school in Italy. Let me tell you now, you’re left to your own devices. You complete your pre-service training, you move away and you’re more or less ‘autonomous’ – which is a nice way of putting ‘on your own’.

Now I’m sure all of you remember being a newly qualified teacher or you work enough with them to recognise some of the following thoughts:

Journal writing

Very soon after starting my first job I began to write a journal. I had a class of badly behaved teenagers on Friday evenings and needed a place in which to track my efforts to pacify the warzone, where I could record my actions in lessons and how students responded to these. I have a confession to make though: I didn’t manage to resolve all their behavioural problems by the end of the course. What I did manage to do however was to learn a lot about the teenage classroom. This learning experience taught me two things: firstly, classroom interaction between a teacher and teenagers differs from interaction with adults. Secondly, that writing about my thoughts after a lesson, making a connection with what I planned before crystallises the experience in your memory.

I spent the next year keeping a record of my lessons, writing what I felt happy about and what didn’t work so well and asking myself why. In my experience, it works. My classroom practices became a lot clearer to me. I pulled them out of the dark and put them on paper. If there’s a something to work on, and it’s clear, improving it is much easier. If there’s a record of what’s good, continuing it is no problem.

The best thing is that I had a record of my ritualised practices, be they positive or negative. You slowly pick up your own style; the things you do, when you do them, which can be used to get in touch with your teacher-self – the teacher you are in the classroom.

There’s an element of self-evaluation involved. It’s got a lot in common with pre-service training courses; in fact, it’s more of a continuation of what one learns during training. The structure I’m partial too is likely to be very familiar to any teacher trainer out there, it includes: What I learned from the lesson, what I think the learners got out of the lesson and how I would do the lesson differently if given the chance to.

What about our newly qualified teacher’s thoughts? First of all, bad lessons aren’t thrown in the bin. They aren’t forgotten but instead used as learning moments for the teacher. Not only this, but also, keeping such a record lets you know what your strengths are as a teacher. We all have them, but it’s easy to focus your evaluation on negatives and fixate on improving these. In actual fact, identifying your strengths is just as important.

Retrospective planning

Now the question I’m going to put to you is this: does it always go according to plan? One of those questions we all know the answer to. What interests me is the moments in which we put the lesson plan down and respond to what is happening in the classroom.  One of the fears about this for newly qualified teachers is they are stepping into unknown territory; if you go down that road you might not know the way back.

But we are curious beings; we want to know what’s out there. Let’s just have a quick show of hands: how many of you have recently dropped your plan and ran with something that came up in class? I have spoken with newly qualified teachers about this and, as it turns out, we (I include myself still in this bracket) do in fact go with the flow at times. Now, this leads me to think: how do I deal with these moments, when my teaching skills are put to the test?

Let me give you an example. I have just moved to Rome, you know, Julius Cesar, The Coliseum, a big church where some important religious people live… well… naturally, the first thing I bought before leaving was a map. The first few days I clung to my map with my life, never leaving the house without it. Two months down the line and my map is gathering dust in my desk drawer. I’m walking around the city, taking in the sites, the alleys, street names and landmarks. What I’m getting on at is, every new discovery remains in my memory that much more with my head in the air, not to mention the world passing me by that would otherwise go unnoticed with my head buried in a map.

There’s something important to be learned from these experiences, and doing a sort of retrospective plan of the lesson accesses and unpacks these. I like retrospectively planning, it gives me feedback on the decisions I made during the lesson and the learning opportunities that presented themselves. I feel more confident after reflecting on them and that, the next time they arise, I will be better prepared to exploit them to the students’ benefit.

A retrospective lesson plan might resemble a normal pre-lesson plan. You write down, say, each individual stage as it unfolded, with timings, aims and interaction patterns. Place yourself back into the lesson and reassess what difficulties learners were having at each point during the lesson.

Another question: But but but, I hear you say, doesn’t this lead to more planning time? It depends on the mindset towards planning. Well, actually I hope it’s quite the opposite. Since I started using a journal and including retrospective planning the amount of time I spend planning has reduced. It’s question of efficiency. Take the idea of a new city and a map. I’m a cyclist too, and it’s not always possible to look down at the map, there are a million and one things to concentrate on, especially when trying to negotiate a safe passage through the frantic Roman traffic. I check the map after my ride, trace my route through the city and compare it to what I had planned out, and then I’m ready for the next time I use that route. The same can be said for retrospective planning.

Why spend so much time investing time into a lesson if there’s no review of the investment? Tracing your route through the lesson, the corners and one-way systems encountered along the way bridges the gap between one lesson and the next. By reflecting on the last lesson in this way you’re immediately in the mindset to tackle to the next lesson; I can’t tell how many times I’ve found the stimulus or language focus for my next lesson in the leftovers of the previous.

Action research

So here’s another question: what to do with all the information in the journal? Personally I found at first that there was more than I knew what to do with, so many thoughts about my classes. It was a case of prioritising what seemed most immediate at the time and synthesising it into an action research project.

If then we see that what’s most needed comes up in the journal, it can be followed up on with action research. I saw that the most common areas for improvement had to do with language awareness and ideas for engaging students in lessons. I kept my focus narrow and my goals reachable. This is important too. There’s so much out there to know that a well-thought out goal for action research is necessary.

I want to give another example of how I did this. I remember a lesson in which I ‘did a reading’ and faced the blank confused stares of ten students. I had gone through the necessary stages and checked comprehension, all regular, all how I was trained to do. Something didn’t seem right though and in my ‘how would you do things differently’ section I found myself brainstorming ideas to tackle reading texts without comprehension questions, to engage students in reading.

There’s an interesting pattern here. This kind of teacher-centred research, involving what’s immediate is what I’d outline as important for newly qualified teachers in facing low language awareness and a lack of ideas in the classroom. Base it on what you do. We teach our students on a what-they-need-to-know basis, so why not centre our teacher development on the same sort of things?

Indeed, this sort of way of approaching lesson-planning, from reverse, puts the teacher at the centre of development. Imagine an environment lacking in external support for a newly qualified teacher; you might feel pretty lost, right? For many of us, this is the reality. Nonetheless, remedying the situation doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Assuming that teachers want to develop, they can place themselves at the centre, in charge of their own pathway.

So why not try it for a month. Keep a journal of your lessons and at the end of the month review it. Make a list of the most common areas of your journal and write an action plan. Include points of reference for reading up on the topic, brainstorm ideas to include in lesson planning and try them out in the same classes. Include retrospective planning to get the bigger picture of how things happened. After two weeks, do an intermediate review to see how things are going. Then at the end of the month, have a look at what has changed.

Obtaining subjective feedback

It’s fair to say that in the last two years, a lot of changes have happened as a result of my keeping a journal and the action research projects it gave birth to. Yet comparatively, an equal amount has been also as a result of student feedback. Now I might hear you say: there’s nothing new about that, is there?

Allow me to now give another example, this time of when I was learning Italian in language school. One of my teachers came to class most days and told us a story, which used to be the highlight of the lesson. You see, Italians are great story-tellers, it’s got something to do with the fact that they rarely get to the point, which makes their stories full of imagery and rich in detail. Anyway, at the end of the of course we were given feedback forms to complete, by then it had been two months since I had last had this teacher and it didn’t cross my mind to write about how much I liked them.

Now, the question I want to ask all of you now is: how do we make feedback more useful for the newly qualified teacher? I know for sure in my case that I didn’t give truthful feedback at the right time. It’s a shame, it really is, and I could have changed my class for the better. But there’s a reason for this; feedback wasn’t subjective and it didn’t come at the right time.

So the question poses itself: how can we make it so? One idea I have had success with is keeping a teacher-student journal, in which students write to you and you respond to the content. I started this idea as a way of giving students practice writing informally about what interested them. Over time the conversation turned to class. What I found striking was that students felt freer to write what they think about class in this space, what’s more there’s more trust involved; it’s a dialogue between you and your teacher.

To repeat: feedback is most helpful when it’s subjective and at the right time. A teacher called Adam Beale is currently using student diaries to gather subjective feedback on an unplugged course in Spain. If you haven’t had a look at his blog, I really urge you to. Students write about their lessons in a diary, using either L1 or L2, which ever they feel most comfortable with. Now I think that’s a fantastic idea, how much feedback, especially at low levels, gets lost in translation?

Another idea is to dedicate 5-10 minutes of classroom time to gathering feedback based on the following aspects: What have you liked about class? What would you change about class, how much do you think you have learned? The important thing here is to collect it regularly; weekly for an intensive course or monthly in a course lasting the academic year. If you’re short on class time, setting feedback as homework via email can remedy this problem.

In addition to this, I have also tried a class suggestion box. Place a pile of cards next to the box and learners are free to post a suggestion at the start, in the break, or at the end of class.  Take them in at the end of the week/month and include them in a review of your journal.

Now I’ve had the same thoughts as I outlined at the start many times: “I feel like I’ve run out of ideas”, “I think my lessons are boring”, “I’m really not sure how my teaching went”. But you know, how much of it can be resolved by obtaining the opinions of your learners? In fact, taking action on constructive feedback from your students – a collaborative effort – indicates to learners that their teacher listens. What’s more is the feedback can be included in your diary and matched against your own evaluation of your teaching.

It’s fair to say that one size doesn’t fit all; everyone out there has their own way of doing things, one of the important parts of reflective practice is that you find what works best for you. So, in light of this, can you now work in groups of two or three to come up with a scheme with which to evaluate a lesson in a journal

Mentoring

Can I just have a quick show of hands from those of you have been mentors or have been mentored? It’s great, isn’t it? I remember my mentor, Chia Suan a person who helped define the teacher I am today, whose ideas and enthusiasm still remain a constant inspiration to me. I also remember being a mentor for the first time, last summer, to two newly qualified teachers. In both cases what I found most benefiting was the exchange of ideas – someone to offer a second opinion.

So I started thinking and my question is this: how can mentors play a role in the reflective practice of a newly qualified teacher? Imagine writing a journal in your first year of teaching – it’s fair to say that many of your questions will remain unanswered. Which is not much of a consolation. Now imagine that your mentor has the opportunity to read your journal – a mentor that can nudge you in the right direction when you come to a dead end – a mentor that can offer some direction and support. What I am proposing is that alongside the content of the journal there’s also a dialogue between teacher and mentor.

Peer observation

Here’s a thought: it’s nice to get a second opinion on your strengths and weaknesses and official observations can be a bit daunting. What I am going to suggest is that colleagues review their journals and observe their teaching. Take a review section including the strengths and areas to work on and have a colleague watch you teach to see if they agree. Like I said, it can be a bit disheartening when there are no answers to your questions, likewise if you focus too much on areas to improve. To this end, I had a fellow teacher read my diary and observe me when I was trying to make my classroom environment with those rowdy teens more conducive to learning. From there we discussed what was in my diary in relation to my lesson and set some action points.

So where are we now? We have a significant number of newly qualified teachers working autonomously on action research, using the situations that arise in their classrooms. Now there’s definitely a huge benefit to the institution regarding the sharing of this information. It’s grassroots teacher development. I don’t know how many institutions out there involve their newly qualified teachers in running development sessions, but here’s a thought, why not?

I want to take you back to the start, when I asked, “What would you say is your biggest weakness?” I said it was not what the question is asking which bothers me; it’s how the question is asked. In the same way it’s not the problems for a newly qualified teacher that should bother them; it’s how they deal with the question. In contrast with our teacher we saw at the beginning, I’m going to show you another:

It can work on three levels: the teacher, the teacher and students and the teacher and institution. Depending on the situation you find yourself in, any of the three levels is possible to achieve.

Thoughts

Could these ideas be incorporated more into teacher training? Certainly they are transferable skills that would be useful to a teacher embarking on their career. Are they worth squeezing into an already packed schedule of input sessions in a pres-service training course? There are already some incredible trainers out there taking steps to include more reflection in their timetable.

Secondly, as in institution, could there be the possibility of including some of these ideas in teacher development? Handling the demands of a busy timetable is time consuming to say the least. Could there be benefits of adopting this sort of mindset?

If you’ve recently started teaching, or even if you are a seasoned professional, would you consider making space for reflective practice? If so, I’d be very interested to hear about the results.

Whether you’re part of a teacher-training team, in charge of hiring new teachers, in some way involved with teacher development or training, or you are a newly qualified teacher, I am going to leave you with this thought: the end is not the really the end, it’s just the beginning.

Lesson Reflections: On the Phone

Today I decided to use the lesson skeleton I had drawn up a few hours before. In the post, I hope to give a bit of an insight into how the lesson went, looking at what my decisions were during the lesson, why I took them, how the learners benefited from the lesson. I would normally do a ‘retrospective’ plan like this in my journal but instead this time I want to share it online.

In my presentation at TESOL France, I outlined some of the benefits of writing a journal to reflect on lessons. At the end of the talk, groups in the audience came up with some frameworks with which to reflect on a lesson. I plan to use one of these to go through today’s lesson.

Here’s a quick run-down of what happened:

1. I followed the lessons skeleton until the extension activities. I picked out some problems students had with grammar and lexis and discussed them with the class, using question to help guide them to the meaning and also encouraging them to help explain.

2. I asked students to draw a graph showing on the vertical axis good time or bad time and on the horizontal axis the time of day for today. I asked them to fill in the good and bad times, explaining why. I did this to give them extra language practice. I repeated the stage and asked them to ask questions to stimulate more conversation the second time around.

So, here’s the reflection:

Level: Intermediate

Class size: 6

Time: 1900-2030

The teacher		The student
How long did I speak	Why?	How long did they speak
What I found easy to do	Why?	What they found easy to do
What I found difficult to do	Why?	What they found difficult to do

How much did they speak?

I wrote on the board the following question: Have you spoken on the phone today?

I also wrote some pointers to follow, to help scaffold their answers:

• What were you feeling?
• What were you doing?
• Was it an important person
• Did they have something good or bad to tell you?

Everyone started speaking, and continued for about 10-15 minutes before the chat died down.

After looking at some emerging language (past continuous, past simple and ‘be about to’), I set a task for students to do, which led to about another 20 minutes of speaking.

What did they find easy?

• They found it easy to explain what they were feeling at the time.
• They found it easy to use ‘before and after’
• They found it easy to speak with their groups about the question. By easy I mean comfortable to share information and ask each other questions.

What did they find difficult?

The million dollar question:

• Speaking: They are all new to the language classroom, especially one in which so much conversation drives the class.
• Past continuous/past simple with while.
• A few words they didn’t know, which they asked me in Italian and then I encouraged them to explain in English.
• Pronunciation of stress in adjectives and longer vowel sounds.
• Prepositions with ‘morning/evening/lunch/lunchtime

My board looked like this:

How much did I speak?

I sat down and shared a little about my day with the people sitting in the room. I normally do this at the start of the lesson and I find it can bring out some interesting discussion. Today in particular was a tough day because I’d got soaking wet while cycling from one of my lessons to another. When I arrived at the next school, the mother of one of the students brought me some clean clothes. The only thing is, they were quite strange, so my students were wondering why I was dressed so strangle.

When I boarded some emerging language, I spoke for about 10 minutes, which mainly consisted of asking students questions about the language, what they wanted to say and why they said this. When it came to checking the meaning of the emerging grammar, I used a mixture of gesture and jumping from the present to the past, and using bodily movements to help explain the meaning. I did this because my students, although intermediate, have a fairly low level of English. You could say it’s to lighten the cognitive load.

What did I find easy to do?

1. Identify emerging difficulties. While students were talking about the phone calls they had received that day, two of them asked me

“Can you help, I want to if this is right: While I had lunch or while I was having lunch?”. I went on to hear the rest of the class trying to use this structure. It makes sense really; you want to explain something that happened in the moment during another action which started before and finished after. The thing was, one student managed successfully and four tried to replicate it, modeling it to the others. I noted this down as an area for focus.

Another asked me, “how do you say ‘stavo per pranzare’” Which translates to ‘I was about to have lunch”.

I also heard lots of inaccuracies with past tenses, so the focus made itself fairly clear. I had also noted down from the last lesson that students had difficulty focusing on accuracy when talking about past actions.

2. Elicit meaning for emerging language. This is somewhat obvious as the students created the context, creating the concept at which they arrived amongst themselves, so extracting the meaning I find is never so difficult.

What did I find difficult to do?

1. I always find the first lessons difficult, especially when establishing a rapport with students. I feel nervous. Do they know what I’m doing? Do they understand what I want them to do? Do they understand my boardwork?

To this end, I made sure that at the end of the lesson I explained what my signs on the board mean, went through the lesson: what we looked at, why we did what we did. I think students felt more confident after this. I certainly did.

Concluding thoughts:

I think I made the right choice of language to focus on. Other possibilities were weather forecasting and giving advice. I feel I picked the most common area of difficulty for the whole class.

I can give the class practice on this language point using the distance learning materials the school provides.

I will definitely use this lesson skeleton again.

The reflection framework:

• I like it because it gives me the chance to look at things from both the students perspective and mine. Students’ difficulties can then be compared to the teacher’s, which encourages a less teacher-centred reflection.
• Looking at how much students speak places you back into the lesson at each phase.

Lesson plans: skeletons and retrospective planning

Lesson Planning is familiar to all teachers as an essential part of our jobs. It helps us organise our classes and shows our directors that we are prepared and know what we are doing. Detailed plans help break down our lessons visually into sections and include step-by-step activities, timings and even interactions. They can also include sections on anticipating problems and developing possible solutions. But are there any disadvantages to this high degree of planning? Anthony Gaughan recently suggested one:

“it’s curious though, that no standard lesson plan pro-forma contains sections asking learners to look out for opportunities and leverage points. The closest we get is asking, “what if this is too easy? (ie PROBLEM)”

With an extremely rigid plan that takes account of every minute and activity we can be faced with a difficult dilemma when a spontaneous learning opportunity arises: should we ignore it or seize it? The latter option will obviously mean diverging from the plan or even worse, abandoning it all together. For those of us who have been raised on a diet of daily lesson planning this thought could be petrifying.

When it comes to pro-forma planning, could there be a more effective system of lesson planning available to help with flexibility when faced with changing variable factors in the classroom? While I intend no disrespect to a well-planned lesson, I wonder if prospective planning makes us even more rigid in our profession and less willing to respond to these emerging phenomena in lessons?

Here are some examples of a few changing variables that I have come across in my class:

• Learners request some work on X grammar point in a lesson or want to know more about X topic for lexis
• A topic of conversation emerges from an activity that interests the class
• Homework designed to be integrated into the lesson is not done
• Half the class are absent
• Lesson aims turn out to be too easy/difficult for learners
• Not enough materials/activities planned for the lesson

Sound familiar? Of course, the seasoned teacher can easily react to these classroom interactions using years of knowledge built up from previous experience. With less experience though this is tends to be a bit trickier or even impossible.

Lesson skeletons

 

If the path ahead is not clear, then why is planning so linear?

One thing I found particularly helpful in increasing the flexibility of my approach to teaching was creating a loose framework of a lesson to act as a guide. Adding potential avenues which the lesson could down to the plan made me feel more confident and better preapred to respond to classroom interaction. A month or so ago, I started a section of my blog called ‘lesson skeletons’, which is designed to be a space for lesson ideas that allow for deviation and include room for lesson interactions. What would a lesson skeleton include?

Here is an example of a lesson skeleton I use with classes:

 

An activity that encourages discussion on a topic/language area	Sit in a circle count, stopping every 2/3 and say something about the public transport in the city you are in. Remove the stabilisers (counting) and allow discussions to run and questions to flow.
Consolidation of ideas to focus onto language	Ask learners to make a ‘good points’ and ‘room for improvement’ to consolidate and extend
An extension of language activity	Ask learners to write their ideas on one half of the board under ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Elicit some corrections and add related language on the other side of the board.Discuss as a class, pushing students to express their own standpoint.
Change of skills focus	Write a newspaper article supporting or criticising/letter to the mayor to suggest improvements
Change of language focus	Role-play a question and answer session in conference/political debate on the future of transport in the city.

 

The left hand column represents a very simmered-down version of a lesson skeleton, stripped down to stage aims. The right hand column includes the introduction of a topic but not a language aim.

This skeleton would be useful either in preparation for a lesson with an initial language aim or with a focus on emerging language. It could be used to take a topic off the page of a course book and make it more engaging for a lesson. Alternatively, during a lesson it could be drawn upon to focus on a topic that has interested students.

As and when learning opportunities arise in the lesson, a skeleton allows deviation from the original aim or plan and for focus on what is immediately difficult or important for students. The space is there for making the most of learning opportunities and the teacher has the freedom to deviate, with ideas in mind to do so and exploit these moments.

Once having a skeleton in hand, I start to anticipate the sorts of language and difficulties that may emerge from it. If I have a lesson aim, I consider how quickly students will achieve it and the types of extra language related problems associated with it. Pre-lesson brainstorming in this way helps me predict, using what I know of teaching the level/using the skeleton/needs-analysis and makes the inevitable emergence of other classroom interactions easier to deal with when they come up. To aid me I have found it useful to put my ideas on paper in the form of a flow diagram containing extra stages in the lesson to deal various changeable variables.

Retrospective lesson planning – filling in the flesh

 

In a recent post, I looked at some of the advantages to teachers of keeping a reflective journal. I am a firm believer in the benefits of keeping a teaching journal and much of what I write in mine concerns the ‘flesh’ of the lesson – what was the language, how did I fill in the skeleton what would I do differently if given the opportunity to repeat the lesson. This raises four questions:

1. Was the language suitable for my lesson aims/student difficulties/level?
2. In each stage did I teach according to X-norm or Y-methodology or Z-belief about language learning?
3. What have I learned about X-lesson skeleton/idea that I would include for the next time I use it?
4. Did my lesson unfold as I had planned it to, if not then what type of classroom interaction made me deviate and how did I deal with this?

Reflecting in this way not only makes me more prepared for the next time I teach, but it also helps me identify my own teaching behaviours in the classroom, putting them under the microscope and forcing me to think about them in terms of learners and language.

 

Why lesson skeletons then?

 

1. Let’s take it as cyclical process, in this way it stocks up your teaching ideas with a store of instantly retrievable lesson plans not only helpful for planning, but also during the lesson, as and when interaction opportunities arise. Since there is space for deviation within a lesson skeleton, it provides a blank canvas that can be applied during a lesson in response to classroom interaction.
2. Much less necessity to administer a lesson plan has given me more chances to listen to students, take into consideration what they produce and anaylse it for how it can be extended and what there is to work on.
3. Less time in front of the photocopier or resource book selecting and copying activities to pad out lesson time and supplement the course book because extra classroom time can be dedicated to extending language and reacting to interaction.

The syllabus and work records, how do the fit in?

 

Work records, aims, pages of the course book, language points to tick off on a syllabus – these are parts of daily life for many teachers. In fact, far from hindering, retrospective lesson planning and lesson skeletons may even provide a more accurate record of learning outcomes, skills covered and language covered during a course; it takes into account the fruits of harnessing the power of classroom interaction.

So instead of abandoning our lesson plan, a few minor tweaks to the structure and the mindset of planning a lesson mean that we make room space for deviation, making it less of a plunge into the deep end when responding to learning opportunities. With retrospective planning, there is always the chance to look back over things and learn from each experience, modifying the original plan and reflecting on how learning moments were harnessed to their full potential.

After all, if it goes wrong, you’ve just come across a learning opportunity…

Reflection

Today I went to class and learned something new

 

Since I have been ranting about post-lesson reflection lately, I thought it fitting to close my little red book of reflection and put my thoughts online. One of my learners came to me in the break and said “I speak lots today, it is good, you have much patience with us”, it got me thinking…

Class: Pre-intermediate

Age: Adults

Class size: 6

I started class with a headline about what had happened to me earlier that day. I wrote:

“Teacher stuck in a bus for an hour, he misses lunch”

I then asked myself: what sort of language might this elicit?

Modals of deduction?

Past tenses?

Chat about the transport system in Rome?

Interrogative adverbs?

Expressions for opinions?

I asked my learners to think about why and tell me. They stared blankly at me and looked confused. I let a minute or two pass and then mimed ‘stuck’ and reformulated ‘misses lunch’ as ‘did not eat lunch’

Still silence…

No panic… someone will say something

Silence…

Don’t panic Dale, someone will say something…

Still nothing…

Change of tactic

I gave each learner a post-it note and asked them to write a question to find out why I missed lunch. They were:

What’s your name? (added after)

What did you do today?

What did you do at lunchtime?

Did you take the lift?

What do you do when you don’t have a job?

Where do you live?

What do you usually eat for lunch?

I answered the questions and shared some information about myself. Explaining the story of how I had been in a waiting room for 2 hours in a queue for a tax code, then taking a bus at 1.30 in Italy is lunchtime rush hour. A few sprouts of conversation raises their heads from the silence.

Success!

I boarded the questions and asked students to interview each other. One learner asked to change did you take the lift to ‘di che cosa hai paura’ what are you afraid of. She could not manage the phrase in English so she said the Italian and we mimed and gave examples until we had it.

Given the silence at the beginning, I decided it would be best to write the questions already corrected on the board to save any losing of face (they seemed nervous enough already). I made a note of this for some language work later.

Learners interviewed each other, swapping partners when they had finished.

Difficulties I noted in their conversations were:

• Stressing prepositions more than verbs when pronouncing phrasal verbs “get UP”
• Start/Stop + verb (ing)
• Lack of prepositional phrases to express where they eat (at the canteen, at home, out, at work, on the bus)
• Adjacency pairs for agreeing/disagreeing (me too, me neither)
• Consonant cluster in ‘makes me’
• Pronunciation of /v/ sound
• Vowel sounds in ‘afraid’ and ‘scared’

Difficulties I didn’t focus on:

• Past simple formulation

There’s only so much you can do…

Strengths I noticed:

• Collocations for daily routines “I get out of bed”, “I take the bus”, “I go to work”, “I eat lunch”
• Use of adverbs of frequency “often, usually, always, hardly ever”

I then asked learners to write a half-page summary of their conversations while I wrote up some feedback on the board focusing on the above areas. Once finished, I checked the summaries for content and vocabulary but said I would check errors after (this was then set for homework). I then elicited pronunciation, drilled for stress and rhythm and discussed some of the language on the board.

Break

After the break I asked learners to look at an exercise in their books on question formation. Feedback included use of auxiliaries in question forms, intonation in questions, stressed and unstressed words in questions and pronunciation of ‘do you’.

What did they learn?

• Stressing prepositions more than verbs when pronouncing phrasal verbs “get UP”
• Start/Stop + verb (ing)
• Lack of prepositional phrases to express where they eat (at the canteen, at home, out, at work, on the bus)
• Adjacency pairs for agreeing/disagreeing (me too, me neither)
• Consonant cluster in ‘makes me’
• Pronunciation of /v/ sound
• Vowel sounds in ‘afraid of’ and ‘scared of’
• Reviewed question formation

What did I learn?

That silence is not to be feared in the classroom and I do not fear it. Perhaps something has changed in me since stepping back into the learners’ shoes that has given me more empathy. Before I might have panicked and started talking to fill the silence or tried to explain the activity again. This time I was calm, I had more trust, much more patience. I can prepare for these gaps when thinking about my lessons in future.

What would I change?

From now I will consider what kind of questions stimuli might elicit as well as what sort of language/topics. I want to continue on this line of patience. My learners here are different, they are not surrounded by English every day, some have not been in contact with English for months – which means they need more time to think, to open up and share. These things are not instantaneous.

To move ahead: activity for vocabulary recycling, focus on past simple formation… hmm food for thought.

Reflective Journals

What exactly is a reflective journal?

 

This is the same question I asked myself after leaving a stationary shop with a stylish leather-clad diary in hand. I opened it at the first page, wrote the date, some information on the class and the rest, as they say, is history. Having used various forms of a journal in the past 18 months, I have come to realise that the primary aim of it is to provide a space to articulate and download your thoughts. What’s more, using Dogme, I wanted to be sure that I had both a record of what I was teaching and how I was teaching it.

 

 

How was my journal conceived?

 

As I mentioned, about a year and a half ago I started keeping a teaching journal. The thinking behind it involved a desperate attempt to control a class of rowdy teenagers, all uninterested in English at 7pm on a Friday evening. The idea was developed from a black book of successful lesson ideas, tried and tested in the classroom, unpacked and recorded in this book for future use. The new-look journal documented changes in behaviour of the class during the course, including post-lesson reflections on the efficacy of my attempts to pacify the war zone. Three months of reflective experimentation with the class saw improvements in their behaviour, their motivation and my attitude towards the students. Success motivated me to reflect more, including my thoughts from other classes in the diary, including a Dogme class I included in my presentation at IATEFL 2010, but also classes with which I used course books, YLs classes and exam classes.

 

Dear diary, today…

 

Well, not quite, but some of my entries bear some resemblance to the classic dear-diary structure. Mostly, entries focused on capturing as best as I could remember what had happened in the classroom. With this information on paper, I re-read it and asked myself  for instance why I did things in X way or what would be the benefit of doing X before Y. The guiding question that emerged was:

 

Is this right because I do it, or do I do it because it’s right?

 

The bold to me represents ritualised practices and routines, which have a large part to play in a lesson, whether positive or negative. Once on recorded in the journal, I started to question these, asking for example why I used to elicit answers in full-class plenary or why I used pairwork instead of open-class discussion. The implication of this is that established classroom practices become those that are based on successful models, tried and tested in class.

Is a teacher’s intuition and existing belief set enough to act as a guide though? Of course, this relies upon a person being very observant and having a heightened sense of self-awareness regarding their practice.

 

But doesn’t this mean I will spend more time planning?

 

I will be the first to admit that it adds to your planning time, around 30-45 minutes per lesson. Consider it a start-up cost, an investment. Much like lesson planning immediately after qualifying, it reduces very quickly. After a few months the way in which I planned had turned completely on its head; reflecting on the lesson after it happened prepared me to teach the next, like retrospective lesson planning.

 

How do you know the right questions to ask?

 

Good point. I certainly did not have a highly developed reflective capacity at the start and there were times where I felt like I was reaching a dead end. From looking back on early diary entries, the focus was more on capturing the information and detecting patterns in my classroom routine. The addition of student feedback guided me towards what to ask and was included in journal reviews, where I put my practice under the microscope and extracted what to keep and what to throw.

 

You’ve mentioned ‘awareness’, what do you mean by this?

 

I guess it lies in the ability to look at your classroom as an outsider and pick up on what is happening, This is by no means easy, as the pen is in the teacher’s hand, which is influenced inextricably by existing beliefs on teaching and even the surrounding social and cultural context. Therefore, is subjectivity possible in a journal? Or should the aim be to reflect on, formulate and reinforce your practice?

 

That’s all very well, but what do you actually write?

 

From my experiences with a journal, I would recommend putting on paper what is on your mind at the moment of writing. This is already a step towards bringing things to the surface. A lot of the time an entry included my concerns over why learners had difficulties or why some did not seem engaged in the lesson. In fact, these thoughts still come up and often form the basis of a foray into the past, reviewing the lesson structure, materials, interaction, language/skills focus etc in order to make a few pedagogical tweaks to it ready for next time.

 

Might it not be beneficial to get a second opinion from a more experienced teacher?

 

I would be the first to say so. In fact, it might be beneficial for both parties, especially if there were some sort of mentor system set up to support this. I found exchanging ideas with a mentor very helpful for my growth as a teacher. In other cases, I found the dialogue-with-myself aspect of the journal very comforting, especially if I did not feel confident talking to colleagues about something, or if nobody was available.

 

So what are some of the benefits?

 

1.   Bad lessons are not thrown in the rubbish bin

 

Everyone has lesson they would rather forget. Instead of being forgotten about, they can serve as useful learning moments for a teacher. Placing yourself in the shoes of the students in an attempt to pinpoint what went wrong has its benefits. Not only does it make you consider your role, but also that you might not be to blame. Sometimes, however hard you try, things just do not go well.

 

2.     Strengths are identified

 

We all have them, but sometimes it is easy to forget what we actually do well. Especially in the face of some bad feedback or a lesson that went badly. Not only this, but also, there is an extra benefit of being aware of your strengths: they form the basis of your day-to-day teaching to make sure learners benefit from the best their teacher has to offer.

 

3.     Areas to work on become more apparent

 

When something appears consistently in the journal as less positive, it is time to make an action plan to improve it. In addition to this, looking out for what is missing (just like we do with our students) can uncover a springboard for a research project and structure a sort of self-directed development, based on what you need at that time.

 

I will wrap up with a few final thoughts, one from an article written by Scott Thornbury (1990)

“Might not the detection and analysis of teaching rituals… provide insights into a teacher’s image set?”

Now for a few questions…

 

• Directors and managers, how can you create the right conditions in your staff rooms to encourage teachers to detect and analyse their teaching rituals?
• Trainers, how much of your course is dedicated to guiding teachers towards becoming reflective individuals, able to ask questions about their practice in their formative years of teaching after qualifying?
• New teachers/experienced teachers/senior or expert teachers/EFL gurus, have you tried keeping a journal? If so, what form did it take and would you recommend it?

Dale

Thornbury, S. (1990). Metaphors we work by: EFL and its metaphors. ELT Journal, 45/3