edgeblog 07
I begin this edgeblog in hopes that Richard’s lesson on how to attach a document will have stayed with me, though it is certainly as hazy in my memory as it seemed complicated at the time. In order to keep our shared ideas in play. I’d like to post the text of the talk I gave at the ABLA Convention in Cali, Columbia, at the end of July. It was an excellent event altogether. Other plenary speakers were Kathi Bailey, Jeremy Harmer, Kumaravadivelu and Bob Oprandy. The theme was ‘Teachers as Learners’, which was very much in my area of interest, and participants from all across Latin America provided a very high standard of presentations and of involvement in the sessions that I saw. As well as the plenary, I had the opportunity to do a Cooperative Development workshop with Bob Oprandy that included us working as Speaker and Understander. It’s a bit risky to do that in front of an audience, but working with Bob is always a rich and rewarding experience, and so it proved again. The quality of engagement by participants and the level of questioning and comment was very satisfying. Cooperative Development lives.
Back on the topic of that text I’m posting, by the way, let me clarify what it represents. It’s not something that I read aloud at the audience — I hate that practice and I think it is, actually, dying out. When I am doing a straight talk to a large group, however, I do these days write a text in order to help me be sure that I have a coherent message and to help me judge the timing. I read the piece several times before the talk itself, including reading it aloud. So, when I get up to speak, I have the shape of the thing pretty clear in my head. What this also means is that I feel confident about improvising where appropriate and still finding back to a coherent line. On this occasion, for example, I was closing the conference and I could refer back to points that had been made by previous speakers and try to tie those separate statements together into themes.
Let me highlight just one such. When people ask me how to start developing their teaching, a regular suggestion of mine is that they make a recording of one of their classes and listen to/watch it. You may find yourself witnessing a perfect event, but most of us see something in there that would be worth working on. This suggestion was written into my text. In her talk, Kathi Bailey reported on research into the kinds of developmental activities that teachers liked more or less. Right down there at the bottom of the list, least favoured of all, was, yes, you guessed it, making a recording of your class.
Hmmmm. Highly effective and least favoured. Now, why is that? My intuition is that it is because it is the most directly challenging option. We can talk about what we do and we can keep our diaries and we can read the journals and always there is some wiggle-room in which to find a little comfort, but that recorded data of what happened in our class just stares back at us and cannot be denied. This then also links up with that threat of ‘being observed’ that makes most people feel uncomfortable. I think that’s interesting.
Well, that’s enough for now. Next week, I’m off to the BAAL Annual Meeting in Aberdeen. I’m taking part in a colloquium organized by Robert Phillipson on the topic: British ELT in a state of existential crisis. I’ll report back next time.
Best,
Julian
I do something very similar for my talks / papers these days.
What I then find fascinating is to compare the original text with what I ctually said ‘live’. And to wonder why the performance went where it did ….
Hi Julian,
Thanks for sharing the Colombia text. I’m sure that fantastic opening in Spanish was delivered brilliantly
I find your words very meaningful and relevant to my work as a teacher development facilitator (?) [I still don't like the term 'Teacher Educator']. Anyway, terminology aside, I think your text has helped me to answer one of the main questions I have about my research, or at least it has provided an alternative explanation. You know the story, but I will retell it for the rest of the edgebloggers.
I always wonder why it is that most of the teachers I work with are not very keen on reflecting, working in collaboration and doing action research. Rather, they want me to provide what they call ‘practical ideas’ for the classroom and although not all of them have said this in so many words, they think reflection is not as useful as those apparently life-saving ideas I bring with me for our meetings. To make a long story short, I have been trying to understand what is going on since early 2008. I have come up with many different theorisations of the problem, but I had not thought of this one: ‘None of this is necessary’. As I read this bit …
‘I defend the right of the person who knows his or her subject, who turns up to work reliably, who cares about his or her learners, and who teaches the material stipulated in a methodical way that allows students to learn according to their abilities and score appropriate marks on their tests, to say, I am a teacher. All that other stuff is extra.’…
I was able to see some of the teachers I work with in that description. I am not saying all the other explanations I have come up with are not relevant anymore, but there is definitely a new angle here which I had not seen before.
Thank you Julian.
Hi Magdalena,
Two thoughts just came to mind when I read your post:
- It might also be possible to assume that teachers were once students who were educated by the ‘banking’ method, and thus socialised to believe that learning follows from being told. This would then be the unmarked form for development, and feel more natural.
- A teacher who had just completed a period of using CD for a research project I initiated commented that doing CD was like going to the gym – you couldn’t always motivate yourself to do it, even though you knew you would feel better afterwards. She felt that it was therefore a good idea for a program of CD sessions to be organised for teachers, rather than leaving it up to them to initiate.
db
Indeed! It seems to be replaced by the practice of copy-pasting the text onto the PowerPoint slides and reading directly from there! Seriously, though, much as I hate that practice myself, I can sympathise with the fact that some non-native speakers may find ex tempora delivery to be too hard.
Hi Magdalena, Hi Donna,
Thanks for yours. I think we are looking into some very human dilemmas here through the lens of our professional interests.
If I get frustrated with teachers who don’t want what I believe to be good for them, that feeling can’t be taken away by an acknowledgement of their right to want what they want, not if that means that I have to spend my time doing things that don’t really motivate me or assist me in my own development. I am happy to defend their right to call themselves teachers, but less happy if I have to spend my time working with their version of being a teacher.
Similarly (?), if people say that they want to do something but constantly rely on me to arrange it for them, I lose motivation after a while. If they want it, they have to work a little more for it. Or not.
Is this uncaring? I think a person could see it that way. On my good days, I see it as teaching to my strengths and encouraging autonomy and letting people and ideas develop as they will.
A while back, after doing some cooperative development with me, a course participant asked for my advice on which modules to take next. I said I didn’t think I could know that, so he asked a colleague of mine, who gave him advice that he was happy to follow. I had hoped to evoke, albeit implicitly, some CD principles, but I fear I may just have seemed uncaring.
Best,
Julian
Thanks Donna! Yes, I think their previous learning and teacher training experiences are playing an important rolen here
And I liked the gym metaphor, which I found works for CD and so many other aspects of our lives!
‘role’
Hi Julian,
Perhaps you did seem uncaring to that student, but might not have if your evocation of the usefulness of a spot of CD at that point had been explicit instead….
I think it’s ok to spell things out a bit, especially when it’s a (possibly) marked form of development you want to communicate, and also ok to create the affordances for CD to take place. Or not.
If I think of the aspects of English grammar I might try to teach in a group language lesson, well, I’m not going to stop providing the lesson because some of the students don’t seem to be taking at least some responsibility for learning. I guess I’m still going to teach, but I’m going to let go of worrying about whether they learn.
…but maybe that’s what you were saying, anyway!
Nah, actually, it’s a bit different, because I would still feel ok about providing the opportunity to CD, in the same way that we schedule other PD opportunities. I would just let go of worrying about whether anybody signed up for it! And I would communicate my expectations and understandings about why I thought it was a good idea, in the same way I tell English learners why I am teaching something and what I think would be good learning practice on their part.
db
Hi Magdalena,
Your work with teachers sounds really interesting, and after reading your post again, along with Julian’s, I remembered a colleague who was scared about teaching a new level – preliterate beginners – but did not want to join a CD project because she felt she needed someone to tell her how to teach, rather than rely on finding her own answers through CD.
Anyway, she went through a teaching term of many trials and tears, at the end of which she felt she had developed some expertise. Ironically, this was by rediscovering through practice all the experiential knowledge she had from a previous career teaching early childhood emergent literacy.
At the time, I thought CD would have been perfect for her, because she really did know how to do this job, it’s just that she had forgotten how to access what she already knew. So, of course I thought she had really missed out by not wanting to do CD.
However, now that I think about it again, it’s also fair to say that she figured out how to do it well without CD, and the main difference was not in the teaching outcome, but in how she felt along the way. Her teaching term had been painful and ended in feelings of self-pity and exhausted tears, while the teachers using CD had felt empowered, supported, emboldened by their ability to sort things out, and had also discovered a new sense of sharing and caring in the staffroom.
So, back to the gym, then!
db