There are stranger things in this world than in all your philosophies, Horatio

If we had a “post of the month” award, Autono Blogger would win hands down for questioning his approaches when faced with inconvenient facts. The whole post is a must-read, but here are the lines that grabbed me:

It’s whether I’m too attached to my teaching philosophy that I might be overlooking evidence that it isn’t working….would I be so enamoured of my belief that learners construct their own knowledge that I would doggedly pursue my chosen course regardless?

It’s wonderful how Autono Blogger questions the learner autonomy/authentic material/teacher-as-facilitator paradigm that we all revel in (and if you browse through the English360 site you’ll see that I’m deep in the autonomy camp as well). But what happens when the actual results get in the way? In my experience, most of us ignore reality and cling to the group buzz associated with exciting concepts and shared enlightenment. Who suffers from that? Our students, of course.

I was taking a really interesting online course earlier this year and a funny thing happened. Here’s the story: The course format was great - community-focused, forums, a wiki, both synchronous and asynchronous activities - and I learned a lot from some really bright people. Of course a dominant theme was the poverty of the “sage-on-a-stage” teacher-as-authority model in favor of the more enlightened constructivist teacher-as-facilitator model.

About the third week in we had a synchronous e-learning activity held on a webconferencing application, where about 20 of us from around the world signed in and saw a great presentation by an expert on education and RSS/blogging. He spoke for about 30 minutes as we watched his powerpoint slides roll by, then had several minutes for questions. The next morning the course forum was abuzz with praise for how much we all learned from this activity, until one guy (bless him) said “Hey - how could we have possibly learned anything? That was an archtypical teacher-centered sage-on-the-stage event…we didn’t learn anything! We just had a control-based hierarchical power structure re-inforced, that’s all”.

Forum silence. Then some forum muttering about “clinging to old ideas”. Then slowly the party got back to speed as the community antibodies ejected the intruder.

At the excellent EuroCALL conference in August we attended about a dozen 30-minute presentations every day; some had a few minutes for questions, many didn’t. I learned a lot there as well, and I didn’t construct a thing - just sat there passively and had knowledge poured down my throat. And of course the topic of many of the presentations, either implicitly or explicitly, was that that very teaching mode doesn’t work (as they used it to teach the session).

And if you want a truly frightening example of educator groupthink, check out Project Follow Through.

Anyway, back to the ESL classroom and how to do the best we can by our students. Here are a few quick thoughts on Autono Blogger’s points:

+ We need to maintain the eclectic approach. What “learner-centered” truly means is that as teachers (or trajectory managers) we recognize the individuality of each student’s learning style and needs, identify what will work with each learner, and within our limited resources provide that, whether or not it fits in with current philosophies (easy for me, as my groups max out at about 6 students!).

+ We need to differentiate between our approach and classroom management. We can be in control of the classroom and at the same time focus on learner autonomy. We should demand autonomy and be rigorous with helping learners achieve it. Sometimes teachers think that “giving up control” means abdicating from getting things done in the classroom. Telling learners that they’re in charge doesn’t mean they get to slack off - quite the contrary.

+ Action research rules! Discliplined action research prevents teacher groupthink. All teachers should be action researchers.

7 Comments

Strickland Series II: teaching artistry

Inspired by an article in Fast Company on Bill Strickland, last week’s post discussed free agent language teachers as potential social entrepreneurs. Here’s yet another role for teachers, inspired by Strickland’s comparison of artists and entrepreneurs (and note how learning is characterized):

The use of art to change students’ attitudes is at the heart of Strickland’s vision of education. The goal is not to produce artists. It’s to find an individually tailored approach to learning that will redirect troubled young people, and get them into college and on to productive lives. But Strickland does see a connection between the creativity instilled by a love of the arts, and the skills needed for business success in the new economy.

“Artists are by nature entrepreneurs, they’re just not called that,” Strickland says. “They have the ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs do that. That’s what makes them different from businesspeople. Businesspeople are essentially administrators. Entrepreneurs are by definition visionaries. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable in many ways. The hip companies know that.”

Three things come to mind with this great observation:

+ The entrepreneur/artist comparison reflects the increasing recognition of the importance of design in business (see Tom Peters, Steve Jobs, et al)

+ I’m not sure I agree with the entrepreneur vs.” business people” distinction. Who says you can’t be a visionary administrator? Can’t you take an entrepreneurial attitude when faced with fixing a bloated bureaucracy? I agree that, largely, this distinction may be true as a descriptive statement, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

+ Entrepreneurs as artists…I think the point here is that any profession can bring artistry into its practice (even administration!). So, how can teachers be artists in the classroom (or outside of it)? Leave your ideas as comments or a post of your own, and we’ll revisit this later this week.

No Comments