a class with no teacher
I recently read and enjoyed Jason Renshaw’s post about teacher silence in class, and thought I’d try it out myself. I have a class of students who are all very smart and engaging young people, but perhaps a little too relaxed. Most of them know enough English to do what they want to do…. which isn’t always what I ask them to do. They enjoy each others company and sometimes fall too easily into passing time in Japanese. We are using a challenging textbook which (I think) is interesting – Face the Issues, a book based around NPR interviews and news stories, authentic and quirky English. This class focused on the second half of unit three. The class meets twice a week for 90 minutes, and also attend Reading and Writing classes with other teachers. It (should be) a lot of English.
The remainder of this blog post follows Jason’s example, and has been posted on the student’s blog as a report of what happened. I hope that some of the students who participated in this class will come along and comment themselves.
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I started today’s class at 9:20 by projecting this message on the screen at the front of the class.
Today, you are going to take responsibility for your own learning. I am not in charge of today’s class. We will work on pages 38 -44 of the textbook. The CD and the CD player are at the back of the room if you want to use them. Please make your own groups, and decide which parts of the book you want to study. And how you want to study them.
Of course, you will use English to do this.
Thank You.
At first, everyone looked a little surprised, but it didn’t take long before the students formed groups of four… and within ten minutes, everybody was talking in English comfortably. At 9:32 the first group moved to the back of the class and used the CD player to check their answers in the pronunciation section. It seemed that each group was working through the book exercises in order, and also following the instructions in the book directly. Why was that? By 9:40 there was a really nice buzz.
By 9:55, most students were on to the discussion section, and some started listening to the NPR recording to take notes and prepare for the case study on pages 42 – 44. This was one of the biggest challenges for me – one group had difficulty finding the right track on the CD, but rather than doing it for them, I let them do it themselves. It’s hard to let go as a teacher!
By 10:30, students were talking actively about the topic, although I tried not to walk around as much as usual, to remove myself as a presence from the class. At 10:35, I projected this message on to the screen.
How did you feel at the start of the class?
Did you speak more or less English than usual today? Why?
Did your group have a particular style?
How did you choose what and how to do, and when to move to the next part?
Would you like to study this way more often?
What were the best and worst things about today’s class? Why?
Do you need a teacher?
To finish the class, I showed this message. I didn’t say anything at all – not a single word – all class.
Please leave your homework and your attendance card on my desk.
Please do page 46, exercise II (vocabulary) before Friday’s class. Visit the blog, too. I will write more about today’s lesson and I would like to read your comments.
In Friday’s class, I will probably talk to you again ; P
So, what did you think? Comments welcome!
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Nice, Darren. Another good example of how ‘minimalism’ in teaching can be highly productive. The Silent Way, of course, is predicated on just such a withholding of teacher intervention in the interests of increasing learner autonomy.
Of course, it wasn’t a class with “NO teacher” as such – more a class with a “silent teacher”: it might not have worked as well if you’d been physcially absent. Nor if you hadn’t already etsablished a bedrock of trust with the learners, upon which you can start to take this kind of risk.
Or was your use of “no” the Japanese one, as in “No Drama” (I think with a little line on top of the ‘o’)? Maybe there’s an article, paper or even book there: The Art of No-Teaching.
I think what you have done is very good Darren and in the biography of the group it will be one of the most memorable moments of your course. The discussion on Friday is likely to be one of the most productive you have had about responsiblity, what it means to learn languages and the role of the teacher in general. Students need to have an experiential feel for these things and this is one of the best ways of doing it. I have done similar things in my career as a teacher but not with the structured questions that you put up at the end of the class which I think is excellent. Withdrawing from the classroom process at certain moments in principled and conscious ways and reflecting on it afterwards can be very useful. I personally like moments of silence in classes, subscribe a lot to a less is more, minimalist approach which Scott mentions above and would encourage more teachers to experiment with various versions of this. You say that resisiting the urge to intervene was difficult when the students were looking for the right track on the CD, but I’m sure it was worth it. One of my tutors, Mike Breen, said to me nearly 20 years ago: “Never do anything you can get students to do” I’ve never forgotten that!
Love it! Love it! Not much more to say really, but the more the teacher lets go, the more the students take over. From experience, you can’t do this in every single class but the more one incorporates less talking/less top-down instruction giving then whenever you do need to talk/instruct or whenever they’re stuck and need help – they actually deep-listen and pay attention.
It’s always quality over quantity
Karenne
Really good post, Darren. I’m interested to know how you felt while this was happening. Were you surprised how well they did? (and the fact that they didn’t use L1?). Was the temptation to jump in and help overwhelming? Did you spend the whole lesson listening to their language, or holding your breath, waiting for something to go wrong?
It’s true there can be periods in my lessons (towards the end of term sometimes when fatigue- theirs and mine- sets in?) when it seems that the more effort I make to make my classes interesting and engaging, in fact the opposite occurs and the more the learners withdraw into themselves and engage less. This type of activity puts the ball firmly back into their court.
It’ll be interesting to hear the comments from the learners, too.
Sounds like a great lesson Darren. I might just have to have a go at that myself. I have a class that’s UI level and can be a little lazy when it comes to speaking English, last week I gave them autonomy over a series of discussion exercises while being observed by one of our teachers, I wanted to demonstrate how she could take a back-seat in the class and just take some notes. The students spoke in English almost entirely for around 40 mins. This would take it that one step further!
Hi Darren,
I tried a “silent” two hours recently as part of an intensive two-day course with personal assistants. I teach these relatively often. This time the level of English was very mixed, and the more proficient ones were slightly hostile to those with less English.
One afternoon is always dedicated to writing. I put them in two teams of 4, engaging in a simulation where they were writing emails in connection with a meeting they were organizing. They had reference materials to work with.
I wasn’t really “silent”, though: When they sent out emails I’d respond as a participant with special needs, and they would then write back handling the problems. There was also some writing going on between the groups.
Anyway: They spoke German to each other the whole time in those two hours (although I’d asked them to use English). I don’t have this trouble when I can throw in some English comments. But I gave them only my written input, and they dealt with it in German.
How do you and your readers deal with this problem?
Good work, mate – sterling stuff!
Now you and I know this can work and we’ve documented it. All we need is a few other teachers to try it and report similar results, and I think we could be onto something here… The Renshaw-Elliott maneuver. I would ascribe the idea to Thornbury and Meddings, but to be 100% honest, I put this into action years before I’d even heard the word “dogme” (and anyway, the approach we’ve both experienced here still involved coursebooks!).
Something a lot of people have talked about or alluded to, of course, but which few have actually put into practice and documented. Let’s see more of it!
Cheers,
- Jason
A great lesson. Makes me want to try it again with my FCE students, however I still have no idea how to make them use English instead of Polish, but perhaps I should trust them more and perhaps using a book and not teacher-made materials or games during such a lesson is more sensible. Do you think it’s a good idea to do such a lesson on regular basis (once a month)? Thanks for a great post.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Scott Thornbury, Scott Thornbury, Sue Lyon-Jones, annehodg, Arjana Blazic and others. Arjana Blazic said: RT @livesofteachers: New blog post: a class with no teacher http://bit.ly/9EANL2 #efl #esl [...]
Not wishing to toot my own horn, but in the spirit of furthering the concept of minimal intervention (initially at least)there’s this description of an experiment I tried a while back:
http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Scott%27s%20beginners.htm
Also, of course, we shouldn’t forget Sugata Mitra and the concept of “minimally invasive education”: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
Great stuff indeed – would be interesting to see how it works without a coursebook. I’ve never tried the full on withdrawal, but I used to teach an Advanced class that would often work on the same article/text from the press/web in groups, deciding on a reader response code, what discussion questions to ask each other, and what interesting points of language they’d noticed with no intervention or guidance from me. At the end of the group work each group would report back on what they’d found out, about the topic, about each other, about the way the language works and was used in the text. I’d love to try that out as a whole lesson.
Thanks for the documentation–and thank you too Jason. I will definitely try this when I feel it is appropriate. Great to read that it can actually work!
Interesting. A great book I like to look at is called The Minimax Teacher, from the Pilgrims group. Essentially, the idea is minimal teacher input, and maximum student output. That is definitely a Minimax approach. I’ll save that one for a migraine day.
Hello, Darren.
I very much enjoyed reading this post.
The more I think about your experience, the more I realize how much I have to drop my concepts and constitute myself with that which is new, fresh and effective.
However, I ought to confess that the very first thing that came to my mind when I finished reading it was “WHAT A RISK”.
Could you please tell me what you would have done if things hadn’t gone the way you thought they would?
Thanks for sharing!
Orlando.
Been thinking over the L1 problem in a monolingual class, which Marta also sees. It’s a little off-topic here, but clearly we need to create a number of very healthy classroom conditions (building trust and establishing English for any communication) before we can go silent and hand things over. But it’s clearly doable.
Yes, I’ve been thinking about this too Anne! Like some of the other readers, I’ve only tried doing this at certain stages of a lesson (e.g. silent way dialogue-building is lots of fun) but I have never tried it for a whole lesson. With my current classes, the issue wouldn’t so much be L1 use (as I’m teaching multilingual classes right now) but the issue of level- has anyone tried this type of activity with really elementary/ beginner level learners?
Thanks everybody…. plenty to address!
As several of you mention, silence is a very useful tool – indeed, a vital one. Leaving a couple of beats after a student’s answer is very likely to lead to them adding more. But this was the first time I tried something this radical, and I say ‘no’ teacher (or ‘Noh’ if you like, Scott) rather than ‘silent’ teacher as for much of the class I withdrew to a corner at the back and took notes. Indeed, I did leave the room for a couple of minutes and no one seemed to notice when I came back.
To answer Angela and Orlando – I wasn’t surprised that they did what they did. Partly because I had read Jason’s report and he always makes a lot of sense, and I had seen a video at a conference over the weekend of a teacher who tried something similar which also worked. Mainly because I know these students are capable…they do have plenty to say, I just wanted them to say it without me pushing them! I suppose if things had really fallen flat I would have stepped in and taught the class as usual, but it really took no time at all for them to start organising themselves and talking to one another. I knew they would do it… perhaps I was slightly surprised at how well.
One other thing though… as a teacher with dogme-tic tendencies, it does give me pause for thought about how useful a textbook can be. Face the Issues is a very well put together book, and a lot denser than texts I use in other classes (we work with it two weeks on and two weeks off, to get some breathing space). I think it works especially well with this class. I’m not sure what would have happened without a textbook. Maybe next time
And one more – Karenne, I won’t be doing this every week! More silence is good, but I might file this in the ‘breaking the cycle’ box. This kind of thing never has as much impact the second time around, but it can have a lasting effect. I videotaped last years’ class (same class, different students) then played it back to reflect on the lesson together. Kind of unnerving for them at first, but they were more aware of themselves for the rest of the semester (in a good way).
Finally, on the use of L1. There was next to none, despite this being an (almost) monolingual class. Marta, Anne, I posted this same report on the students blog after class, to let them know what was going on, and it seems some of them had been talking about it all day. I hope they drop in here and comment themselves, but based on the first couple of comments ‘fear’ may have been a strong motivating factor….. well, we’ll see how class goes on Friday!
Loved reading Scott’s account of the class in Egypt!
Shall now quite humbly retract my call for a “Renshaw-Elliott Maneuver”, in case it wasn’t taken in jest…
I would, however, say in response to Scott’s experience that it may in fact be harder these days to get away with what I fondly call “giving the students the silent treatment.” ELT has become a lot more cluttered, teachers are under more overt pressure to “perform” and there is often less room to innovate and experiment (with the associated stakes of mastering English becoming more and more extreme in many contexts). Then again, the exact opposite could be true as well – I’m not a particularly qualified commentator!
Cheers,
- Jason
[...] an expert on ESL/EFL pedagogy and author of several ESL textbooks, and read the linked article by Darren Elliot. The discussion that ensues with ESL/EFL teachers worldwide is very stimulating and [...]
Ah, I should have followed Scott’s link before posting- someone has tried it with beginners!
[...] 27, 2010 by Shane Mason While scrolling through twitter a few nights ago I found this article written by Darren Elliott. In it he discusses how he designed a lesson where he never said a thing. The students had to take [...]
Very interesting Darren, I would like to try this kind of lesson myself, however what were you doing? I think I would feel guilty if I didn’t do anything!
That’s a fascinating comment Alice! I didn’t on this particular occasion because it was a bit special, and that is why it was good to do. Perhaps we need to stop ourselves from getting involved, cutting activities short, interjecting and otherwise disturbing the flow out of guilt, loneliness, boredom or other non-pedagogically sound reasons
I actually got some very interesting, and slightly unexpected, feedback on this from my students, which I will share in a forthcoming post…..
I loved reading through your experiences. I think anything else I might have to say has already been covered. Well done, Darren.
I tried a watered-down version today. I put something like my lesson plan on the board (not all at once), but in a way that looks like a step-by-step instructions, and put a time-guide next to it. The students were then free to spend that time in whatever way they chose to get things done. It was a writing class, and they were to choose their topics today, and so from my side, it looks like it worked well, but the students were a bit quiet. I wonder how things would go if I repeated this a few more times (perhaps not consecutively for the time being).
Many years ago when I was working for IH/ILC in Japan, they used to encourage newbie teachers to go and watch more experienced colleagues’ lessons. As luck would have it, the very first class I observed was one that operated on a similar procedure to this throughout the course. No materials were prescribed but the inspired teacher (think his name might have been Roger) dumped a selection of different books and cassettes on a table and as students came in, they’d grab some and settle down to work in groups that they arranged informally themselves. It was an adult class. Roger(?) spoke pretty good Japanese and apparently during the first lesson, he’d had a long discussion with them in their native language about the best way to learn and what they hoped to acheive. They’d decided on this method together. As I recall, he said there were problems whenever new young students joined because they didn’t know what was going on so they quickly transferred to a more traditional class. But the students who had attended the first lesson loved it and they did better than other students who had tested at the same level at the end of the course. Even more interesting was their level – they were beginners.
Forgot to say, I don’t think Roger remained silent all the time. He floated around the groups here and there asking how folks were doing and chit chatting.
I think the question about what the teacher does is a vitally important one. I think note-taking is highly appropriate in these types of activities. When students take initiative, it is important to give them credit for showing independence and persevering without teacher nudging. This is a strong way for teachers to force themselves to gradually release responsibility. When teachers become acquainted with the concept of wanting to jump in but knowing it is better to wait and watch, they are positioned to learn from students.
When I’ve tried variations of this with book group discussions for middle schoolers or socratic circles, I try collect anecdotal notes of the strategies I see students using and the strengths of their work. When I resume talking, my initial feedback is specific and descriptive. They are rewarded for their independence by hearing about themselves as data.
It is also an important point of reflection for the teacher. What supports did I provide in writing? What structures have I taught and what do those structures look like when I’m not actively steering the ship?
Just want to say that I agree with Joe’s point above 100%. Observing and taking notes is a fantastic way to show the students you are interested, that this approach has a point to it, but also to basically educate yourself better as a teacher as to what’s really going on with your learners. And yes, it allows for very specific and descriptive feedback once the teacher takes the classroom reins again later on.
On a completely irrelevant aside, Darren, I found your title for this post reminding me of something and it took me ages to work it out…
Eventually it came to me. There is a scene from that classic movie “Excalibur” where Lancelot wakes up in the woods, buck naked after doing some very naughty business with Arthur’s wife, and finds Excalibur thrust into the ground between him and the queen. He looks at it in shock, then gasps “A king without a sword… A country without a king!” He then dashes off into the woods in a blind naked panic.
Not sure, but the sensation of scandal and panic might have more than a little in common with the reaction some teachers might have to “a class without a teacher”. What do you think?