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?

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.

Strong post from AJ over at Effortless Language Acquisition. Bottom line:

The honest truth is that (especially above the intermediate level) teachers and classes aren’t necessary. Therefore, the only honorable purpose I can claim is this:

My job is to help students break their dependence on teachers and school. My job is to help them learn how to learn English… on their own. My job is to help them become autonomous learners.

The whole post is worth a read. BE teaching with its smaller groups and individual classes should exempt most teachers from this level of frustration, but the overall conclusion is about the same. Two other thoughts:

First, it’s great to see fearless “action research” like this. Here’s a teacher reflecting on what’s happening in the classroom, and concluding that…it’s a waste of time. I love the lack of complacency.

Second, in BE we can integrate performance support into our teaching, and add value that way. So maybe we can say that as BE teachers our primary roles are fostering learner autonomy and performance coaching?

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).

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.

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.

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!).

One way to think of semantics is as the study of the larger system of meaning created by words, which as why I think the dialogue on the term learning “management” among James Farmer (and here), Aaron Campbell, and others is important as well as interesting. Words have power…what larger system of meaning do we refer to when we use the word “management”?

On the one hand management connotes rigidly stifling, top-down, centralized control from an authority (think: Mordor). On the other hand, it connotes goal-setting, resource gathering and allocation, task planning, and interim results monitoring….approaches that are empowering for both learners and teachers. But how can we speak of the latter good stuff without the Saurons of the former overpowering us with their orc-driven connotations? (Which would make WebCT and Blackboard…Saruman? the benign wizard that due to an inherent character flaw is seduced by power and becomes an evil minion?…)

In a wonderful comment to my previous post, Omar Johnstone offers an alternative for when we refer to the Good Stuff:

Expropriating a word is often a labor of Sisyphus, but the only alternative that comes to mind is ‘husband’ as a verb, and rather than conjure up the whole Herstory thing, I’d prefer to address your ultimate point…

…So what can a teacher do? My role, as I see it, is to facilitate a natural process. To help learning along by offering prudent advice, by revealing resources, and by constant encouragement. I cannot teach anyone anything, but I can help people in lots of other ways.

This, I think, is husbanding. It is what the Arabs call “tarbiyyah”, the act of helping something to grow.

(I’ve distorted the comment by quoting selectively, so please go read it.)

With a nudge from Omar, I’ve been thinking about this and have decided that -provisionally- I’m going to hijack the term “open management” when referring to the Good Stuff. I think it conveys much of what we’re going to do with our English360 application, while the qualifier “open” slays the orcs. So for learning platforms (which could be OLEs or purely analog learning infrastructures) open management refers to structures and processes that promote:

• self-management skills that foster learner independence and accountability
• self-directed inquiry - independent and/or collaborative
• multiple assessment approaches with a focus on introspection/self-assessment
• transparency: system and data are open to all stakeholders
• learner-driven (”bottom-up”) orientation
• recognition and validation of all stakeholders (although traditional roles may change)

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adding, subtracting and fleshing out how I feel the open management term applies to language learning OLEs, and the larger system of meaning it entails for learner outcomes. Remember, I’m coming from the corporate language training space, and as always please help me out with your comments.

In an excellent post James Farmer has started a dialogue on blogs and the future of online learning environments, making a most valid contrast between educational software designed to provide closed, centralized control (chorus of booing) vs. software that allows open, decentralized learner independence (delirious applause). In this context he also makes a critical point regarding the issue of learner blog “ownership”, which I won’t summarize here, but which really, really needs to be defined by both educators and their institutions.

Boy, do we ever need to move towards software that allows open, decentralized learner independence - all for it - and the post provides some cogent analysis and examples of how to do it. But I’m worried by how this contrast (closed, centralized vs. open, decentralized) has been framed, because closed, centralized control (bad) is equated with “managed” and “management”.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that the concept of management is one of the all-time great things we humans have come up with. I know that in the post the word “management” is referred to in the context of current learning management systems and their limitations, but unfortunately the edublogosphere has picked up the meme “management = bad“ from this post and I think it’s a mistake for educators to think that way.

Now I’d certainly agree that “bad management = bad”, or that “Dilbert’s clueless yet authoritarian pointy-haired boss = bad” or that “œtop-down, closed, centralized control = bad” (well, usually). And I hope that’s what everyone means. But reading this, I’m not sure:

We’re obsessed with management, I reckon. Managing our finances, managing our workplaces, managing our kids schooling, managing our expectations, managing our knowledge, managing things to such a degree that we have squashed personality, differences, argument and life.

If we understand management as visualizing a desired future, establishing that as a goal (say, the best schooling possible for our kids) then coordinating and scheduling resources and tasks to achieve that vision, then, well, management doesn’t squash “œpersonality, differences, argument and life”, management empowers these things.

So for teachers, management is a pretty important ability to help students be able to achieve, because it helps students to be active, independent, and to have a voice. For school administrators, management allows teachers the freedom to focus on facilitating their students’ learning (bad management, of course, impedes this, as do clueless yet authoritarian pointy-haired bosses).

As a business English teacher/consultant in Latin America, I work with adult learners in multinational companies. The overall success rate of our learning programs is, basically, unacceptable. As a result, thousands of people feel stuck, frustrated, and voiceless within their own organizations, and one of the two main reasons for this is a lack of learning management (I’ll discuss both reasons in upcoming posts). Words have power, so let’s not use the word “management” as a synonym for what’s wrong with learning software or education in general.