January 10th, 2008

Corporate language “programs”

This has me intrigued.

I’d imagine that most BE professionals working with large corporate programs are like me - spending half their time thinking “There must be a better way”. We work with creative, high energy managers who are passionately engaged with the high-speed challenges of their job. Then we have them stop what they are doing, go sit in a classroom, turn to Unit 4, and read about what Richard Branson has accomplished (”he has started many different businesses, and he has sailed around the world in a balloon”). Then we wonder why attendance is 60%.

Anyway, we’re always looking for a way to connect language training with business goals, and the excerpt below points to a perspective that might contribute to that:

Systems, Not Programs

The HR profession is very adept at program development. Success is most often defined as creating and/or adopting best-practice programs, and HR is organized and managed accordingly. HR consulting firms align their practices with the way their clients are organized: They deliver products and programs for HR subprofessions (such as training, staffing, and compensation). But the data is indisputable: Decades of new and better programs have not delivered great results. The reason is that “world-class programs” cannot deliver performance results. Only systems deliver results.

An automobile engine is a system that requires great parts. All parts must be fully integrated and aligned to the purpose of the engine, whether that be high performance or a fuel economy. A well-built engine uses just the right parts and no more. Likewise, succession planning, training, and appraisal can be viewed as parts. Just as throwing pistons and spark plugs into an engine compartment will not deliver a satisfactory engine, neither will “world-class” HR programs deliver acceptable customer results. More and better HR programs will deliver no better performance in the future than they have in the past. Performance results require a system.

From The New Human Capital Strategy by Bradley Hall. Hat tip to KnowHR.

What would a corporate language system look like? How would it differ from a “program”? Or would there be no specific language system or program, but rather a language training componant that is subsumed within the overall human capital system? Can we emancipate corporate language training from its legacy institutional (school) origins?

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September 2nd, 2005

Learning ecologies

No need to add anything here; this rousing post by George Siemens in his Connectivism blog is truly a gem. Here’s a quote:

Educators are a conflicted group. The intended outcome of our activities is a nebulous concept we define as “learning” (some type of change of state or potential in the learner). We assume that through pushing buttons and pulling levers in an intricate process we call “instruction”, we will be able to “create” learning. The best we have been able to do to date is create a series of guidelines and conditions in which learning might occur. Vygotsky, Bruner, Chickering, Bloom, Gagne, and others have sought to pry open the door of “making learning happen” through checklists and best practices. In the end, most educators will admit that we are really rather clueless about the whole learning thing. And we should be. We have taken the wrong approach. We are trying to achieve a task (learning) with a tool (teaching) in an artificial knowledge construct (courses). It’s all about us.

Read it all - please.

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July 29th, 2005

HR takedown: a rebuttal

Here’s a response to Why We Hate HR discussed in this post. It’s a strong rebuttal (but as a teacher, I’m an HR guy, so I’m not 100% objective).

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July 28th, 2005

Obligatory reading for all Business English teachers

BE professionals all have to read Why We Hate HR. Not just read the ideas in the article, but ponder, re-hash, debate, and reject or accept (obviously I vote for the latter).

Why? Three reasons:

First off, most of our clients are training managers or HR departments. The article explains why HR sits at the kid’s table, while marketing, finance, and production call the shots. That our clients are marginalized within their organization should be of concern to everyone involved with BE.

Second, we need to take into account the internal dynamics of our client companies. HR has less clout than other areas. What does that means for us? It means that we must bring the line managers to the table. Since most of the time we design the language program structure, we must include line managers (not just HR) at every step. Needs assessment, course planning, attendance reporting…all must flow through line managers as well. Our students feel accountable to their direct manager, not HR. At English360, when we started pushing for active line manager partication in the programs we designed and delivered, program success improved considerably.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to constantly ask ourselves “how can we best impact our students’ business?”. It’s the lack of perceived direct impact of HR on business results that this article laments. For BE to contribute to business results, we need to design courses and activities around actual performance events such as presentations, meetings, and email, instead of page 42 of Market Leader (nothing against Market Leader by the way).

Of course many BE teachers do this already. But several years ago I observed about 40 different classes and dozens of teachers for a client, in 9 countries, and I was dismayed at how few of the teachers strayed from the book. Some weren’t sure what their students’ jobs were…even in individual classes. In the follow-up interviews, it was clear that these teachers (and their schools) understood that, for most of our students, English isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. They just weren’t teaching that way.

The purpose of Business English teaching is to improve business performance (through more effective communication). Focusing on that end requires, whenever possible, a dogme approach, an emergent syllabus, and classes primarily based on preparing for learners’ actual on-the-job language performance. I’ll be discussing these ideas on this page, as they summarize the English360 approach.

(Full disclosure: my BE experience is from Latin America, and I’ve spent some time in Eastern Europe. Why We Hate HR is is right on the money in LatAm and the US, but I’m not sure how applicable it is to the rest of Europe and Asia. If you have experience there, please chime in.

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July 19th, 2005

Goal setting and metacognition

Here’s a quick read on goal setting using the well-known SMART system.

We use this approach when helping learners set up their program, objectives, and timetables (see “Roadmap” in our glossary). I even have a lesson plan somewhere with a step-by-step guide - I’ll track it down if anybody asks.

In our experience SMART goal-setting can be a invaluable metacognitive tool for adult language learners.

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January 25th, 2005

Motivating…

I have to say that the last paragraph of Aaron’s post this morning is one of the most motivating things I’ve read in a long while.

The post also helps me see more clearly the how and why of the resistance to management and the value of subversion in this type of institutional context. Coming from the corporate training environment, I just couldn’t get it (note to self: accelerate learning curve!).

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