A Letter To An Unnamed Student

Dear Unnamed Student,

I am writing you this letter because I feel the need to apologise. Recently, I was thinking back to our lessons, and I realised I needed to say sorry. I should have given you more when you were a student in my class.

There was clearly a problem from the beginning. As you were all too aware, the other students in your class were at a higher level than you. You struggled to produce even the most basic sentences when asked and it was clear from the beginning that you weren’t going to fit in. I imagine that made you feel vulnerable, embarrassed, maybe even ashamed and lonely. I hate to think of anyone feeling that way in one of my classes.

When I look back on it now, I wish I had been more thoughtful and considerate. Unfortunately amongst us teachers there was an unspoken agreement that you were somehow unteachable. I think we thought that to give you the lessons you needed would have been detrimental to the other students in your class. Now I don’t think that’s true, I think we told ourselves that to make us feel better. We wanted to be reassured into thinking that by neglecting you, we were doing the right thing.

And that’s what I want to apologise for. We were wrong. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, or was incapable of finding a way to help you, but I was lazy of thought and I took the easy way out. You were there in my classroom and you deserved as much of an opportunity to learn as anyone else. So I’m sorry, and I want you to know I’ll never do that to another student for as long as I teach.

Yours,

James

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A Tale Of Two Teachers

Meet Steve...

True story...

Here’s a tale of two teachers, Steve and Bob. They both teach the same class, one after the other. After almost every lesson, Steve returns to the teachers room, sits down at his desk, lets out an audible sigh and then proceeds to moan about the students. They don’t engage, he complains, they don’t get what he’s trying to do. The atmosphere around him is negative and other teachers look at each other with a look that says “here he goes again...”. Steve then opens up his big folder of lesson plans, photocopies the materials he needs for tomorrow’s lesson and goes home early.


Bob teaches the same students. After his lesson, he comes back to the staff room full of energy, enthusiasm but with occasional and irrational pangs of self doubt. Sometimes the lesson is great, sometimes it could have been better but he rarely criticises the students, and when he does he feels bad about it later. He reflects on the lesson he has just given and thinks about how it could have been better. He then looks at his lesson plan for tomorrow, and prepares his materials, changing and adapting them from last time, trying to make them better. He leaves at the end of the working day.

Steve is a naturally gifted teacher but he has given up. He isn’t interested in becoming better and is completely incapable of self-reflection. If anything goes wrong, it’s always the students fault and he has started to resent them. The students have picked up on this and they now no longer enjoy their lessons with him. Some of them have even complained about his lessons to the administration of the school.

...and Bob.

Bob is far more experienced than Steve, and yet when you talk to him he, he knows he still has has a lot to learn and can improve. He is grateful to the students for their patience with him, and he genuinely enjoys their company. The students pick up on this and they look forward to lessons with him. He feels that after lesson he has learned something and through interacting with these people, he is becoming not just a better teacher but a better person.

I’m going to guess that nearly everybody reading this will identify with Bob. After all, the Steves of this world don’t read blogs in their spare time like you do. So I’m not trying to convert Steves with this blog post, instead I want to remind you that you are a Bob and you should be proud of yourself. Just make sure you don’t ever let go of your inner Bobness and become a Steve.

Apologies if your name is Steve, I’m sure you’re a great Bob!


Photos taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinb/, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence,http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en_GB.

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Just Say Yes

About a year ago, I made a decision. It was the kind of decision that people have made careers out of, especially the writer Danny Wallace who coincidentally was at my university at the same time as me. Since he studied Journalism and became a writer and I studied Media, specifically television, and became a teacher of English as a foreign language, I’m going to assume that his days at the University of Westminster were rather more productive than mine.

He went to write a book called Yes Man, which was Hollywoodified (that's my word but you can use it...) into a movie staring Jim Carrey, who I definitely did not go to university with. Anyway, back to me. My decision, which was in no way at all influenced by either the book or the film (I regret mentioning them now, to be honest) was to say yes. To everything. Within reason.

Taken from http://bit.ly/JvESrw

I'm talking professionally here. You see, I don't believe in luck. I'm a rationalist, I believe that science is our ticket to a golden future and that our destiny lies in our own hands. Sure, sometimes circumstance and coincidence can wreck our plans, but it's not luck, because it doesn't exist.

If you've read this blog in the past or know me personally, you know that I became an EFL teacher because I moved to Brazil and didn't really have any other alternative job options. So I guess you would think that I was lucky because I only had one option and I loved it? I politely disagree. It's a coincidence that the one job I could do is also one I love. And how did this coincidence come about? Because I moved from London to Brasilia. I made the coincidence possible because I took a risk and went for it.

Once I realised how this sequence of events had occurred, it changed how I see the world and I made my decision to say yes to everything that I reasonably could (you have to know your limitations). And what has happened since then? Let me give you an example...

At the IATEFL conference in March, ELTchat hosted a symposium. I, me, James Taylor, theteacherjames, was featured in the first three talks. I don't tell you this to show off, really, but because it illustrates my point. Marisa Constantinides mentioned me because I am the producer and presenter of the ELTchat podcast, something I volunteered for after seeing a request on Twitter, despite having never made a podcast before. With my media background, I was confident I could learn what was required of me in order to put a podcast together, so I said yes and it's been great fun so far.

In the second talk, Shaun Wilden showed a video that I made for him on his subject hashtagging. I don't consider myself to be particularly knowledgeable on the topic, but I racked my brains and come up with something I hoped would be useful. Why? Because he needed a hand and why not? It took 5 minutes of my time and was helpful to him.

Finally, Sharon Hartle used my summary of an ELTchat from last year as an example in her talk. Coincidentally (not luckily!), this was Sharon's first ever ELTchat and included her first ever tweet. My summary was used because I volunteered to do it after what had been a feisty and fascinating chat. This was my first ever ELTchat summary, and I volunteered because it was a subject I'm passionate about and I wanted to contribute to the community that was giving me a lot. Somebody asked, and I said yes.

I could go into more details, but what it comes down to is that as well as the above, I have been to conferences in Switzerland and France, my writing has been featured in an ELT journal for the first time, I have reviewed books, I have spoken to Petra Pointner and her class via Skype, I've met two great Belgian teachers, I've given my first presentation, I’ve been featured on blogs, and more. All through saying yes.

Am I richer as a result? Well that depends on how you define richer. In monetary terms, no, categorically no (those conferences are expensive!). However, I prefer to look at it in non-monetary terms. I've met great people, been involved with fun projects, improved my skills and I hope become a better person. In that sense, I'm the richest man in ELT.

So can you do the same? Of course you can! To kick you off, I'm going to ask you some questions and you can begin by saying yes to a few...

1) Will you start blogging about teaching? 

2) Will you get involved in ELTchat whenever you can? 

3) When someone asks for help on Twitter or Facebook, will you help them? 

4) Will you help your colleagues, even though they might not help you back? 

5) Will you start using Twitter and Facebook for your professional development? 

6) If someone asks you specifically to help them, will you say yes even if it means stepping out of your comfort zone? 

7) Will you start to read more ELT blogs? 

8) Will you tackle that pile of methodology books you've been meaning to read? 

9) Will you ask for help from your PLN and not feel discouraged if you don’t get the result you were hoping for?

 

10) Will you start to say yes more often?

That should get you going! Be sure to let me know how it goes.

Update:

Some people have posted relevant links in the comments which I thought I’d share with you here above the line:

Cecilia Lemos shared the fascinating story of Profeta Gentileza (Prophet Kindness), who has painted the phrase “Kindness generates kindness” around Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Adam Simpson shared the following TED talk on the power of yes:

Phil Pethybridge was “peeved” by this post and responded here, including my reply.


And here's a quote I saw on the Facebook page of the School of Life that seemed relevant:

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ELTchat Blog Challenge: My First Lesson Plan

The current ELTchat Blog Challenge is to share with us your first lesson plan. If you can't find it or threw it away in a tidy up many moons ago, then why not tell us about your first ever lesson as an EFL teacher? What do you remember? What do you wish you'd known then that you know now? And when you look back on that lesson, how do you trace your own development since that day? I'd love to hear about your memories and reflections.

If you'd like to learn more, listen to Bethany Cagnol's reflections on the ELTchat podcast.

I've actually already blogged about my first ever lesson, in fact it was my first post proper on this blog back in October 2010. For this post I have decided to literally write about my first lesson plan, the first time I ever sat down and wrote out my aims and the procedure of the class in a formal way. Not surprisingly, this was on my CELTA.

So four years on, how do I feel about this lesson plan? Here are some observations...

Time

Twenty minutes! Oh how I remember it now, it seemed like an eternity. Now it disappears in a heartbeat. But it's hard to achieve a lot in that amount of time, so it does make a difference in how I assess the plan.

Stage and Aims

Clearly this was a writing class with the idea of recycling vocabulary already learned in the lesson (the lesson was divided up into sections, twenty minutes per teacher). I have no problem with that!

Procedure

- Eight points in twenty minutes! For me, that's overplanning but at the time I needed to break a lesson down, understand its constituant parts and how they work in order for them to become the second nature that they are now.
- I used a supermodel as an example, which I certainly wouldn't do now. It's too bland and clichéd for me nowadays. Politician could certainly create some interesting feelings in most countries at the moment, and then we'd use students own examples rather than mine.
- As activities go, it's not a bad one. I wouldn't make handouts now, just give them pieces of paper which they could divide up into four.
- I collected examples of errors but didn't mention also collecting positive, correct uses of the target language which I would always do now.
- It didn't coalesce into a more meaningful activity, but I didn't have time, so I'll let myself off that one.

Interaction

I should have played a less active role in point four. Now I would let the students get on with it without my input unless they specific asked for something. Otherwise, I would monitor, take notes, and not get involved.

Observer Comments

The feedback was very positive, but this examiner was known as the good cop of our two trainers! I'm sure he overlooked numerous faults in order to look to the positive, especially as it was the first teaching practice of the course.

Peer Feedback

I particularly remember the feedback I received after this session as it was one of those occasions where somebody says something that really sticks in your mind. In general, I'm a fairly lighthearted person so I was surprised when one of my fellow trainees described me as coming across as very serious in the lesson. She basically told me to smile more, and that simple point was very helpful in opening me up to the students and has helped me a great deal over the years. Thanks Lindsay!

Join the ELTchat Blog Challenge! Write about your first lesson plan or your earliest teaching memory on your blog and share it with me in the comments below, or tweet it with the hashtag #eltchat. For more details, read here.

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Blogoversary & Blog Challenge: What's Your Story?

Last weekend it was my first blogoversary. A big thank you to everyone who has stopped by, retweeted the links, added me to their blog roll and RSS feed, and commented. The following post is part of Vicky Loras’ blog challenge and it seemed to fit with my first proper post from just over a year ago. In the challenge she asked us to reflect on one of the options below:

• Have you made a big move?
• A career change?
• Have you been teaching and living in a country for a long time, but have seen changes in yourself as a person, educator or both?
• Are you thinking of a change in the future?

I’ve written about a moment when everything changed for me. I hope you find it interesting (and not too self-indulgent!).

Time to decide...

I studied Media Studies, specifically television production, at university. I studied it because I was, and still am, an avid consumer of the media and the arts. I also am very interested in the interaction between the media and society, and how their complicated relationship affects our daily lives. The fact is however, that academically I wasn’t a great student and in the end, due to a number of factors some of which were my fault and some which were not, my final grade reflected this. This experience has undoubtedly influenced my current belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we approach our education system, but that’s too complicated to explain here.

I worked on films for the year after I graduated, and while I enjoyed the work a great deal, I didn’t feel particular comfortable in that world and with those people. I was a shy man in a world of self-aggrandisers and show offs and it wasn’t for me. (I did meet some very nice people too, but they weren’t generally the ones who could get me work.) I also wasn’t prepared to spend years without any money, waiting on the slightest glimmer of a break. I just didn’t feel cut out for it. The problem was that I didn’t know what it was I supposed to be doing instead.

To pay the rent, I took a temporary job. It wasn’t interesting at all, but the money was pretty good and I could keep myself supplied in records. Somehow, and I still don’t know how, I ended up doing that supposed temporary job for three and half years. As I sit here and type this I still find it completely inexplicable that I worked there for that long. I know we’re not supposed to have regrets, but I can’t help but wish I’d made more of that period of my life.

And the question remained: “What am I going to do with my life?” After a mercifully brief stint in a bank, I got a job in a massive central London music, film and video game store. I enjoyed it there, largely, working my way up to the position of buyer, but it didn’t fulfil me. It was a job, I didn’t hate it and it paid enough, but I hadn’t found what Sir Ken Robinson calls the Element.

The fact is that I was searching, like so many of my generation, for a job that satisfied us creatively, morally and professionally. We wanted to do something interesting, worthwhile and valuable, but those jobs are not easy to come by or even to define. The idea that I would become a teacher and live abroad was so remote in my thinking, I hadn’t even considered it as an option. It just didn’t figure at all, for reasons I’m still not sure about.

But move abroad and teach I did. For personal reasons, I had the opportunity to move to Brazil and I lept at the chance without a seconds thought. That really isn’t an exaggeration either, I literally said yes to moving there without any pause for reflection or time to think. I didn’t need a couple of days to mull it over, or to ponder over my decision with a cup of tea. I didn’t speak to my Mum or my friends, I just said yes and it all hinged on that moment.

I think my lack of hesitation came down to the fact that I was searching for something and an opportunity presented itself. I was craving a change, an adventure, something needed to take my life by the lapels and shake it around. I didn’t know what I was going find, but I knew it was definitely going to be different from what I’d left behind.

Moving to Brasília, I had no choice but to become an English teacher and luckily for me, I adored it. Everything fell into place and I could look back on the previous ten years and see how everything should have gone, how I should have read the signs and studied English Literature at university, how I should have gone to a far flung corner of the world when I graduated to teach English to a room full of exotic kids, how should have got the bug and taken my CELTA and started along the unpredictable career path that is TEFL.

Unfortunately that never happened, but if it had, I wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t be half as grateful for discovering my Element, the thing that I love doing more than any other, which is teaching English.

If you’d like to read about my first ever class, read this post from October last year:

http://theteacherjames.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-i-accidentally-started-my-teaching.html

Read more entries in this challenge by heading over to Vicky’s blog:

http://vickyloras.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/blog-challenge-whats-your-story/

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Back to school.

Picture Source: atbaker and Animal Photos!

Reading Ania Kozicka's excellent guest post on Ken Wilson's blog this morning, the thing that struck a chord with me was not the main topic of her piece, but something she mentioned at the end in her biographical information.

"When you see me you may catch me…- writing a script
- listening to music
- dancing
- enjoying the sun – the best source of energy
- reading a book
- watching the Smurfs – they always make me smile!
- sitting with a Spanish grammar book - I believe a teacher cannot understand their students unless they are students themselves."

It's that final point that got me to thinking about my own experiences as a learner as opposed to a teacher. I absolutely agree with Ania's point, but my relationship with language learning has always been complicated.

Like almost everyone, my first experiences were at school, studying French. My memories of the lessons are very hazy, as you would expect after 20 years, and aside from my almost unrelenting cheekiness (Mr Sheppard, if you're reading this, I apologise for being an irritant of monumental proportions), I'm not sure at all of what we actually did in the classroom. 

Nothing unusual about that, I don't remember the make up of any of my other classes either, but as a language teacher I am especially curious, particularly as I know I studied French for at least three years, got a B for my GCSE and yet at no point in my life could I honestly say I could speak French, or even be close to it. If I was to join a French class today, and I've just moved to Belgium so this isn't entirely unlikely, I would have to be in the beginners class. So now I'm burning with curiosity, trying to fathom what we could have been doing for those years that, even if you take into account my own reticence to study the language, led to a situation where I can just about read a menu and say "Le singe et dans l'arbre". If you can answer that question for me, I'd be grateful.

My next experience was after moving to Brazil, some 15 years later. I took Portuguese classes for a couple of months before I became a teacher, which I quite enjoyed, although I was by no means the class swot. That experience was invaluable to me, because I can still remember the feelings of inadequacy and frustration I had as the class happily sung along with a pop song while I understood absolutely nothing, and had to sit there in stoney faced silence. I remember the repetitive annoyance of being asked a question by the teacher and overhearing the answer muttered under her breath by another student who was quicker than me and impatient of my slowness. And I also remember the pleasure I got from getting the answer right, of pair work with an anarchic New Zealander, and the general amusement at the man who refused to stop speaking Arabic.

In other words, I think it's essential for a language teacher to have these experiences so they can know what it feel likes to be an adult language student with all the occasional frustrations that can involve. I'm not someone who loves to learn languages, for me it's a struggle and I'll never be one of those people you hear about who 'pick up' a language in no time at all. That's my reality, and I'm not complaining about it, it's just something I have to accept. But what it has done is enable me to understand that all students aren't wide eyed enthusiasts who just can't wait to learn. 

When you teach adults, there will always be a percentage of your students who are there because they have to be, or think they have to be. As a result, I can understand their frustrations and feelings, and there are two benefits of this.

Firstly, it makes it easier to empathise with their situation. I have worked with teachers who talked about adults learners who "need a kick up the backside". To me, this simplistic approach fundamentally misunderstands the complex nature of language learning. If you've been there, and had that bad day, or forgotten to do your homework, or said soap when you meant to say ice cream, you are more likely to understand that this can lead to sensitivity, shyness and embarrassment. 

Secondly, an awareness of the students situation leads to a greater understanding of how the teacher can act as a motivator in trying to engage them in the class and their studies. Rather than dismissing them as lazy or too quiet, the teacher can think about their own role in stimulating the students by perhaps encouraging a more positive learning style and subsequent outcome. (The subject of learner motivation interests me, and I'll come back to this at a later date.)

These experiences, I think, have been essential in helping me to become a better teacher. As a teacher of adults, disciplinarian is a role that I never feel the need to occupy. Friend, adviser, and counsel, however, are positions that from time to time are required. Without understanding their feelings this is impossible, and the experience of being a student makes this much easier for the teacher.

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How I accidentally started my teaching career unplugged.

If you are not familiar with the term 'teaching unplugged', you should read this, Scott Thornbury's excellent article from 2001.

I arrived in Brazil in May 2006, and after some time waiting for my work visa, I started looking for teaching work. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Sara Walker (have a look at her CV and you see what I mean by lucky), who kindly made a couple of phone calls to help push me in the right direction. One of those phone calls led to my first contracted teaching job, which I'll write about at some point in the future, and the second, to the boss of a language school, led more immediately to my first lesson.

After going for a meeting with a school administrator, one of her teachers called me and asked me if I would be interested in working for another school she was setting up. Obviously I was interested, and after meeting with me they decided they were prepared to completely overlook my total lack of experience and give me some private students. They would support me with coursebooks and materials that I could use, and they assured me that the students would also have their own books. As a complete novice relying only on my status as a native speaker, this was clearly important to me.

A couple of weeks later, I was still waiting for my first student when the phone rang. "We have a student for you," I was told, "but it's just a one off class and it starts in two hours". When I realised that the bus journey would take around an hour and a half, as you can imagine, I was pretty frantic. The student was a business woman who was having a phone interview in English the following day and needed to practice her interview technique. So I googled 'interview questions' and printed out a couple of pages of typical subjects for a job interview, and off I went to my first lesson, scared of getting the wrong bus, of getting lost, of being late, and of messing up the lesson.

Now I don't remember much of what happened in those two hours we spent sitting at her dinner table, apart from the amazing fruit smoothie her Mum made for us, but I do remember that we talked non-stop and that she had the opportunity to speak about many aspects of her life and work. Truth be told, there was almost certainly too much teacher talking time, but that aside, I think I did pretty well for a newbie who'd been dropped in it at the last minute with no preparation time or materials.

At the time, the experience boosted my confidence in my ability to 'be a teacher' or at least successfully pretend to be one until I could learn more about it. In the long term, I can look back on it now and see how I had inadvertently started my teaching the way I want to continue, by being able to walk into a classroom and use the material that the students generate to create dynamic, useful and enjoyable classes. The interview questions we used were just a springboard, and a natural conversation (class) followed, but it was never forced and there was definitely no strict lesson plan with a required grammar activity or a listening exercise. In other words, it was mainly student led (although this was probably because she was a very easy going, chatty person, and not because I had somehow opened up a telepathic link with Thornbury and Meddings, writers of whom I was not yet aware).

I have followed a fairly traditional path, if such a thing exists, in becoming a qualified ELT teacher by working in an institute, following their prescribed coursebooks and then taking the CELTA and learning classroom management and CCQ's etc. As with many teachers now, who seem to be moving away from the controlling influence of the coursebook to a more cooperative and occasional relationship with the published material, I too prefer to dip in and out of coursebooks and rely more on student generated content. This leads me to wonder if I need to unlearn some of these lessons I have learned in the last few years and go back to the naive happenstance of my first class, with just a handful of interview subjects and a willingness to learn, both for the student and the teacher.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that I regret the things I've learned between then and now. On the contrary, those experiences are precisely what have enabled me to reflect in this way. I am also acutely aware that coincedence was a big factor, with not just the personality of the student affecting how it went, but also the fact that she was an adult, that we shared common ground for discussion and there was only one of her, as opposed to the more intimidating environment of a classroom of staring and expectant faces. I was fortunate in a number of ways, most of all in that the class wasn't a disaster and didn't put me off teaching for life! Furthermore, although it took me some time to realise it, it provided me with an example of the possible effectiveness of a simple, materials light approach to teaching. And yes, she did get the job.

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