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

October 19th, 2005
by Cleve

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.

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Strickland Series II: teaching artistry

October 6th, 2005
by Cleve

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.

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Strickland Series I: Free agent teachers as social entrepreneurs

September 24th, 2005
by Cleve

Via Matt at Signal vs Noise, an amazing article about an amazing person, social entrepreneur Bill Strickland. His story struck home with me on so many levels that by the time I finished reading it I had outlines for 8 different posts scribbled on a piece of paper. So here’s the first post in the “Strickland Series”.

Any way you cut it, social entrepreneurship is about the coolest thing going (here’s the wikipedia article). It’s a mix of pragmatism and idealism that pulls together two conflicting camps: the “That’s reality: deal with it” camp vs the “But this is how reality should be” camp. There’s a grain of truth in the over-generalized caricature of the mercilessly effective cut-throat capitalist and the pompously pontificating academic liberal who can only manage words, not deeds. (There. I’ve pissed off everybody.) Sometimes people try to simplify the complexities of life by filtering events through a one-sided advocacy of one camp without acknowledging any virtues of the other. Social entrepreneurship takes the best of both camps by not only getting things done, but getting the right things done.

What does this have to do with language teaching? We’ve been kicking around the ‘teachers as free agents” meme over the last few days (AJ’s original post that started the idea, me, Aaron, Scott). The idea I want to propose is that free agent language teachers working abroad have (literally) a world of opportunity to engage in social entreprenuership.

How? There are many types of social entreprenuership, so there are many different ways. One approach that comes to mind is for teachers to partner with corporate sponsors to teach less-advantaged kids. One of many possible scenarios would involve, say, an ex-pat Business English teacher doing in-company classes somewhere in Latin America.

Probably some of our hypothetical teacher’s BE students are in marketing, and therefore have access to the marketing budget, and may be open to sponsoring an after-school English program taught by our teacher in a public school. Our teacher would then work out the English program with the English teachers of the public school so that it complements the curriculum, and set up a Dekita exchange with kids in a school in our teacher’s home town (if they need a PC with internet access, then get the sponsor to help.)

Our teacher is paid for the classes by the corporate sponsor, perhaps less than an institute would charge, but perhaps more than our teacher would make working for the institute (if our teacher is in a position to donate his or her time for free, that’s great, but then we’re moving towards philanthropy and away from social entrepreneurship). The corporate sponsor gets publicity for being a good corporate citizen. In my experience most companies do want to do good things and if the market rewards them by buying more of their product, well, that’s OK. My thinking is that anytime you can move marketing money away from TV ads and into education, that’s a good thing for everyone.

Two years ago while I was teaching in Caracas I came up with a project, similar to this but at a much larger scale, and to my surprise got a corporate partner almost immediately. We started the project but later put it on standby – I profoundly underestimated the complexity of the technology I had proposed to build, but we’re slowly but surely pulling our resources together and hopefully we’ll have some news in a few months. I’ve got another project just barely in the planning stages here in Miami, and it’s too soon to tell if it’ll go anywhere, but I think it’ll be really fun if we can pull it off. We’ll keep you posted on of both these projects as they progress.

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Teachers as free agents

September 21st, 2005
by Cleve

I had made a vow not to link to AJ for a month or so, but his latest post makes this impossible. Why? Because his take on teachers as free agents is exactly why we’re building our software.

The education field is beginning to resemble the sports world. Teachers can be free agents too. Forget the days of tenure. Forget the days of working 20 years for the same sorry bureaucracy. While some bemoan the loss of “job security”… I see this as a very positive development. Sure, the mediocre clock-punchers are losing “security”. But great opportunities are also opening.

These opportunities boost the demand for and the power of passionate, engaged, interesting teachers…As I survey the TESOL field, for example…I find it almost laughable. The standards are incredibly low. The established field of public and private programs is ripe for destruction. How much longer will boring, grammar-translation based, unpleasant, and ineffective programs be able to survive?

The passionate and engaged teachers that AJ points to are exactly who we’re building the English360 web application for. The learning, teaching, and admin support in our application will allow independent Business English teachers to nurture learner autonomy, connect with P2P communities of practice, and support improved on-the-job language performance by their students. One of our goals is that the English360 application will emancipate these teachers from mediocre schools that take half the fees the client company pays, yet add no value to what happens in the classroom (or, more commonly, actually hinder teacher performance). Another of our goals is that it is free for teachers.

I was discussing this vision with a group of independent BE school directors in São Paolo last year, and they were concerned about the role they would play in this new world of bureaucracy-busting technology. One director asked “but if your application will do all this, what will teachers need us for?”. I said “Take a minute and think of what you do that directly helps your teachers help your students, and that’s your answer. And there’s a need for clients to have a single point of contact. But if your primary role is sales, administration and infrastructure, you’re history”.

So what’s the timetable for our software? We’re hoping for a beta launch of the complete, 5-section application for early 2006. Right now we’re knee-deep in interface design for the second of the five sections, and finishing up the back-end coding for the first. That means we’ll have a working version of the first section in about two weeks. It’s a needs analysis, the first step when designing an effective business English program.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to recruit a few teachers to try out the English360 needs analysis. If you’d like to be the first to test drive some cutting-edge learning technology, then drop us an email, and we’ll send you a user name and a password. In October you’ll spend an hour or so playing with a very cool web app, finding bugs, and telling us what you’d improve.

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More on ESL teacher roles

September 13th, 2005
by Cleve

In a previous post we discussed teacher roles, and in a great comment to that post Bee has shared a nice resource for my ongoing quest for a “unified theory of BE teaching” which as of today mostly consists of questions I pose to myself (hopefully I can work out some answers via this blog). Bee is part of the triumvirate that launched the wonderful Dekita P2P for ESL community.

Anyway, Bee suggested checking out the Indiana State University site on instuctional design and teaching styles. The resource summarizes clusters of approaches/roles:
+ formal/authority
+ facilitator
+ demonstrator
+ delegator
It’s well worth a look. Something that struck me was the emphasis on learner training as a defining characteristic of facilitation. That’s logical, seeing as how facilitation focuses on the process rather than product, but I hadn’t made the connection strongly enough until now. So thanks Bee for that.

In this context: can anyone suggest a favorite resource that explicitly compares teaching language skills vs. teaching a “subject” (such as science or literature)? Specifically, I wonder how the constructivist approach could be modified to address the difference of domain. SLA isn’t the same as acquiring knowledge of, say, science: how does the constructivist paradigm address this? I could start by re-reading through Rod Ellis, but aside from that, any ideas?

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How (and how not) to teach grammar

August 22nd, 2005
by Cleve

Autono Blogger has a nice post on implicit language learning, linking to the Eide Neurolearning Blog. I posted (well, linked really) on the same topic a few weeks ago, but Marco Polo does a proper job of it, contextualizing things a bit and pulling in some killer links, including this .ppt from Grant Goodall, which is fascinating.

Goodall’s bottom line: we should avoid grammar activities that are all form and no meaning – maybe not earth-shattering news to post-Raymond Murphy teachers, but the explanation and examples are excellent.

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Teachers as Trajectory Managers

August 10th, 2005
by Cleve

Regarding learner autonomy and the role of Business English teachers: fascinating post by Stephen Powell about a workshop he attended on Communities of Practice led by Etienne Wenger. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with gaps in the “teacher as facilitator” concept so I’m intrigued by Wenger’s amplified role of “Trajectory Manager”.

I asked Etienne about the tension between an individual’s motivation to do something and their being told to do something as one might experience in a school setting in terms of empowerment of individuals to make choices. The answer that came back was framed around the notion of a ‘trajectory manager’ who is someone tasked to help individuals make decisions by helping them to understand the consequences of their choices. This is more than a facilitator of learning in that there is a notion of the need for outside intervention to enable us to grasp the information we require to make informed decisions. Empowerment is more than the ability to chose course x rather than y, but requires us to understand the implications of choices through social interaction with our ‘trajectory manager’.

I’d always thought of the BE Community of Practice (CoP) as consisting primarily of teachers. Instead, we can look at the BE CoP as consisting of everyone involved: teachers, learners, schools, HR managers, and line managers, each with specific but overlapping roles in the community. Teachers then would occupy the position of “expert” in Wenger’s schema, which has the benefit of being a difference of degree, not of kind, with learners.

So if teachers are experts, what are they expert in? Not language skill, not language teaching, but language learning. Teachers help guide learners towards greater autonomy by understanding the consequences of their learning decisions (Wenger’s “trajectory manager”). Of course teachers have many other roles (model, resource, feedback, etc.). But the primary role is supporting active, autonomous, accountable learners (the A3 principle).

Now I think my epiphany this morning is largely an epiphany of the obvious. It’s all over the literature, both in education in general (e.g. anything by James Farmer) and in language teaching blogs, Aaron Campbell and AJ Hoge have posted on this recently. But Wenger’s concept of “trajectory manager” fills in a couple of gaps for me.

First, here at English360 we’ve always pushed learner accountability in the corporate BE programs we design and run. Wenger’s notion of trajectory manager differs from that of a pure facilitator by emphasizing this focus on consequences (call it learning karma). By helping learners understand and internalize the future effects of learning decisions (e.g. “Hmmm, should I go to class today?”), we can help them make better decisions that contribute to reaching their goals (and in corporate BE, sometimes the correct decision is not to go to class).

Second, this transition – that teachers are different in degree not kind – helps break down the wall that seperates teacher and learner in the traditional classroom. In the traditional schema, teachers hold an authoritarian position that places them in front of the classroom as the unique source and arbiter of language, with students as passive, dependent receptacles. If instead we look at teachers as experts in the same community, we can then close this breach between teacher and student: we’re all learners. As “teachers” we’re just further along.

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Teachers or facilitators (or just teachers)?

February 5th, 2005
by Cleve

Nice discussion over at Stephen Powell’s blog on the alignment of software, teaching approach and student expectations. The ecology/farming metaphor:

The rainforest being the rich learning ecosystem where social constructivist philosophies of the software, teachers, and expectations of the learners are aligned. This is opposed the didactic software and teaching philosophy that acts to “dessertify” any student expectation that is anything other than to be the passive receiver of information. Clearly, it is more likely that a mixed set of philosophies and expectations will be found and this manifests itself as either a free range farm with diversity of crops intermixed with weeds and bugs, to the monoculture of a apparently healthy crop but devoid of variety and kept “orderly” by a tightly controlled regime of pesticides and herbicides.

The vertical axis reminds me of the teaching vs. faciliating discussion and Susan Mirandi’s question as to whether, really, “teaching” is bad, and her observation that in her experience as a student many of her best teachers would today be considered pedagogic dinosaurs: authoritarian and on stage.

There are two points, and a question, that come to mind:

First there is a semantic issue: personally I’d like to reclaim the title “teacher”, but with the clear understanding that “didactic” (as in preachy or instructing excessively) is left out. Stephen Powell’s label in his schema is the correct one. What I’d like to be able to do as a teacher is take the appropriate role at the appropriate time for my learners (as a group, or individually). That may mean that at times I stand in the front of the room and lecture a bit. Along with Susan, many of the best teachers I’ve had were in-charge lecturers…they were engaging, electrifying, and were able to personalize the topic so that, well, I got it. These “lecturers” were perhaps better seen as practicing the art form of storytelling. Of course these were special teachers, and not everyone has this talent (but quality facilitating isn’t easy either!). The point is that ideally we can do both.

The second point has to do with the synchronous e-learning technology we’ve been using in our EVO2005 Weblogging course. It’s pretty amazing: voice and chat dialogue, private messages among participants, whiteboarding, application sharing so that the group can move throught the web with the instructor, community building tools…very cool stuff. And the instructors have been extraordinary as well. I think I speak for most everyone when I say that these sessions have been rewarding.

And you know what? The sessions are classic examples of “antiquated” pedagogy: teacher-centered, authority on the stage, learners as passive vessels listening attentively to the expert. And you know what else? That’s OK. I learned a lot. Lectures can be good. Social constructivist facilitating is good too: let’s figure out how to do it in an online environment, maybe with mini-groups breaking off mid-presentation for an IM-powered mini-project, then coming back to present to the group and instructor for discussion, or similar. Note: Nathan Lowell gets my post-of-the-week award for the original insight, although I think our conclusions may ultimately differ.

Last point (the question) and I don’t even know exactly how to ask it, so help me out: in the context of teacher/facilitator roles and constructivism social or otherwise, how does the knowledge domain affect the implementation of these methods/philosophies? In other words, are the prescriptive results of our analyses and experience equally valid for Domain A (say, history) and Domain B (say, ESL)? Maybe it’s simpler to ask: what (if anything) is special about language learning? Anyone with any insights or resources to share?

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