the lives of teachers

When Karenne Sylvester wrote recently about the frequency of blogging, on Janet Bianchini’s blog it made me think. Initially, I disagreed… I would rather have an occasional, top quality read than a regular second rate one. But then I realised that some bloggers are delivering frequent, good quality content. Shorter, maybe, but good quality nonetheless. Quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. I also notice that there has been quite a slowing down in my google reader of late.  Although the hardy veterans (Alex Case, Karenne herself, Jason Renshaw and a few others) are plugging away giving us the good stuff, many of the second and third waves of bloggers certainly seem to be posting less.  Is this seasonal? My June and early July are pretty hectic, in this is reflected in my posting frequency. Now I’m in the lull between last classes and exam marking, so I’ve had time to write a little more (although no one read my magnificent archetypes piece… a real labour of love, that one!).

Does it indicate the fading of the flame, a natural burn off after the initial spark of enthusiasm?

I have a slew of interviews lined up (and these are very much the centre of this blog – anything I write myself is to fill the gaps in between) but I also want to stock up for the busy months ahead. I have a long, lazy summer planned… plenty of time to work like a blogging ant! How about you? Do you have anything in the tank? Are you getting tired of blogging? Or do you just want to kick back and recharge your batteries for a couple of months?

In the first, a tousled woman peers out of a darkened room into the bright sunlight, martini glass in hand, sunglasses shielding her eyes from the glare, stocking hitched, a bored socialite drenched in ennui. Her children will populate the early Bret Easton Ellis novels of the 1980′s, deadened by money, neglect and sex.

In the next picture, we see a beautiful woman on a city street. She looks concerned. Maybe she has $30,000 in her briefcase, ‘borrowed’ from the office safe. She might be worried about her lover (James Stewart, perhaps?) who has been acting strangely recently. It’s possible that she is being followed by a portly gentleman with a distinctive profile. Whatever, she’s a smart woman in trouble.

These are 8 x 10 stills from B-movies you have seen before. At least, you’ve seen films like them. You won’t have seen these particular films because they were never made. They are a part of a sixty-nine frame series created by the artist Cindy Sherman in the late 1970′s, each of which she starred in herself as heroine, starlet, woman in danger, sex kitten, sophisticate, ingenue…

Sherman has continued to use herself as a subject, transforming herself into ridiculously-breasted virgin mothers, sinister clowns and fairy tale goblins. This not-quite-first series, however, is her simplest and most direct – both visually and thematically. The artist is an actress, and she plays ‘types’…. vaguely familiar, known but unknown.

Korean artist Nikki S. Lee has gone a step further in her immersion, as a guerrilla method actor, like Sherman not a photographer but an artist who uses photography to capture her conceptual or performance art. She places herself entirely into her context and collects snapshots as an archetype archaeologist.

That’s archetype rather than stereotype. Whilst the stereotype is cliched, oversimplified, tired, the archetype is the quintessential embodiment of an ideal. The archetype represents a universal, instantly recognisable to anyone. One might say it’s just a question of positioning. Nevertheless, archetypes are common features in literature, in psychology, in cinema, as shorthand to help us understand and connect to narratives. The Child, The Shadow, The Devil, The Sage, The Mentor.

Lately, I’ve noticed archetypes emerge in my classroom. I have been teaching some of the same classes for three years now, and although the students change every year…. in many ways they don’t. Classes from the same department have a familiar charater and chemistry year on year. I am wary of allowing this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as far as curriculum development goes (the narrative of teaching) I can work my story around certain archetypal characters before they actually arrive in my care.

Is this dangerous? Are there archetypes in your classroom? What are they, and do you use them to your advantage?

About a week ago I wrote about an experiment in silence with a class, and promised to come back with a report on the students’ reactions. It really was quite enlightening. This is what we all learnt.

1. A particular result may not mean what you think it means
Looking back through the many comments on my previous post (which was one of the most commented upon I have posted) it is interesting to see that we, as teachers, slightly misread the whole situation. As professionals, committed to our students, caring about them deeply, we all assumed that the end result (constant discussion in L1) springs from the joy of freedom, the taking up of responsibility and other positive emotions. Actually, according to the students, they were terrified.

“We actually thought that you were angry at us and abandoned us because we use too much Japanese in class.”

“I took it for granted that you were angry and you didn’t want to give our class.”

I don’t know where this leaves Krashen. Despite the cause being the negative emotion of fear, the result was very positive.

“To do task without your help was difficult for me. However, I were able to hear much English. And I could speak more in English than usual!”

“…if we have no teachers, we must think how we should study. However,this situation is very important to us too I think. Actually we try to look for the answer more harder than usual. I spoke in English more ,moreover I heared more opinions of them than usual. Though we had much difficulties, it was very interesting to me.”

Of course, anyone who has met me in real life will find this fear highly amusing. Teaching teenagers we do sometimes need to wield a big stick. However, I don’t want this to be the dominant motivating force in my classroom, which leads us onto our next point.

2. Although mystery can be effective, we must ultimately provide transparency

When the students realised what I was trying to do, they were very happy. This was a vital step in the experiment – revealing the mystery.

“But I read your comment , you tried to see our class from all kinds of directions.”

“After reading this article, I noticed you care about us more than I expected. So I’m happy that you are our teacher!”

“We were so puzzled! Me, K., M.,and M. were discussing about ﾞwhat’s happening!?ﾞ through out the whole class.
K. and I were even talking about it the rest of the day!”

So had I left the class cold, with no feedback or no discussion of what had happened, the positives of confusion may have caused longer-term damage to the rapport we have been building. I kept the next class very light, and the students kept up their good habits from the previous class.

3. Perceived teacher beliefs do not always reflect actual classroom practice

If you had asked me before this class if I believed in learner autonomy and a hands-off teaching approach, I would have given you an emphatic yes. But what I was actually doing in the class belied this. It was only by removing myself completely from the lesson that I could see how students had been relying on me to prompt them, feed them and cajole them into using the language. In the last week, I have given many of my classes similar opportunities and they have all surprised me by speaking fluently in English for as longer than I expected.  Had I been unwittingly restricting learner autonomy by doing too much, by jumping in too soon, by shutting down an activity simply because I was ready to go on to the next one?

This is why I think reflective practice has never been done properly in mainstream ELT literature. The questions we are prompted to ask ourselves are always the same, and we end up giving the answers we think we should. What was good and bad about that lesson? Why did that activity succeed or fail? We will never really know unless we break the mirror and try to rearrange the pieces.

An invitation to experiment, then. This weekends homework – choose a class and do something you never usually do. Then report back and tell us how it went and what it revealed.

The Japan Association of Language Teaching is over thirty years old now, and currently numbers around three-thousand members. One of it’s larger special interest groups is the CALL sig with an internationally peer-reviewed journal, and last weekend I attended it’s annual conference.  Paul Lewis, one of the co-chairs and someone with a longstanding involvement with the sig, details the history of the conference here.

What is the JALTCALL Conference? from darren elliott on Vimeo.

As well as making two presentations of my own, I did a few interviews, went to plenty of great presentations and plenaries, and met a lot of very nice people. Like most conferences, this one had a theme, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on it as I walked around the campus. The question is “What’s your motivation?”, and like most conference themes it is open to interpretation.

jaltcall 2010 – what’s your motivation? from darren elliott on Vimeo.

So, what is your motivation?

Two workshop prezis from JALTCALL 2010 at Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan, May 29th – 30th 2010.

Parallel Learning: How online teacher development informs classroom practice

Video blogging and Podcasting: Interviews with English Language Teaching Professionals

As you can imagine, there is a fair bit of overlap between the two sessions, so I chose to use the ‘flavour of the month’ presentation tool to make one big slide with two different pathways. It was really fun mapping it out… I am not sure if it helps me think differently, in a less linear fashion, or if it just panders to the mind’s natural inclination towards multiplicity. But this is my first paper run through….

Anyway, I am not sure whether it is such a bad thing to have ones thoughts marshalled into straight lines by PowerPoint or Keynote. Something about Prezi does scream ‘Big Fat Gimmick!’, but let’s enjoy the whizz bang fireworks while they last.

Because I hate decontextualised slides so much (one of the greatest dangers to academic discourse today, I’ll venture, is the proliferation of mute online slideshows, stripped of the only thing which gives them a life) I have recorded a run through with commentary so you know what all the pictures mean. It’s forty minutes condensed into twenty, so it’s both too long to watch online and not long enough to make any sense. Apologies for the mumble, everyone else is asleep and I really ought to be myself.

Parallel Learning: How online teacher development informs classroom practice from darren elliott on Vimeo.

I made this using iShowU HD, which works very nicely. Screentoaster also seems good, but a bit more obtrusive.

If you were at either of the sessions in Kyoto, thanks! Questions or comments are very welcome.

It really isn’t that hard to learn how to teach. Or should I say, a teacher can be trained to stand in a classroom without making an absolute idiot of themselves within about a week, from a standing start. For something which is only actually relevant for a very small proportion of a teacher’s career, training seems to generate a disproportionate amount of discussion.  The pre-service teacher or the teacher spending the first few months in the classroom needs to be drilled in ‘the fundamentals’*, but beyond that the teacher is largely in need of development rather than training **. Guidance or mentoring from senior staff, advice and hints from colleagues in the staff room, encouragement from peers in formal or informal communities – development rarely takes place alone, but it is often initiated and directed alone. After the first year or two this often becomes a practical necessity, but I suspect is also what most of us prefer.

As so many of us plan our own professional pathways, we need to know what we are aiming at. Something of which we are infrequently reminded is that we will stumble off the path on a fairly regular basis. Teachers fail. For example.

A new class is misjudged early in the course and the teacher gets stuck in a cycle of student demotivation.

A teacher changes context (new institution, new country, new…) and finds his or her hard-won expertise meaningless.

After attempting to implement too many innovations, a teacher burns out with exhaustion.

Many longitudinal studies by mainstream education specialists and sociologists have followed teachers to identify developmental patterns and life cycles. ELT has its own too, notably Rose Senior’s “The Experience of Language Teaching“. This blog has been up for nine months now, and I have been promising a review of the book after which it is named – Michael Huberman’s “The Lives of Teachers“, a study of 160 secondary school teachers in Switzerland. If you were at IATEFL 2010 you will know that Tessa Woodward has done the job for me. If you weren’t, or you missed the plenary, or something, you really ought to watch it here.

What I particularly like about Huberman’s study is its recognition of failed outcomes, dead ends and dangerous trajectories. Self-doubt, personal crisis, lassitude, disenchantment, apathy… all possible or even likely stages in the life of a teacher. Stability can be rewarded with stagnation, rather than harmony and satisfaction. Expertise is not a permanent state, and teachers can easily slip back to previous stages of development. Everyone ends in disengagement. If you are lucky, it is serene. If not, bitter.

These are not the little failures of the novice who forgets to set up a listening, or speaks to quickly, or doesn’t know how to field an unexpected question. After a time (and given a full teaching schedule) such mechanical issues are resolved and many of the processes of teaching become automatised. If they don’t, this may spark a crisis, not uncommon after the first two years of teaching. In ELT the teacher/tourist may quit before reaching either proficiency or crisis – without, even, the concepts crossing his or her mind….

For those who continue in the profession, and reach a certain level of expertise, the next danger area is in the eight to ten year bracket. Stagnation, exhaustion or a full-blown existential crisis are all possibilities. The potential stimuli for difficult periods change as one goes through life as a teacher, but are always there.

If you are new to the profession, or in a sticky patch at the moment, I apologise. But this post is not supposed to be a negative one (or a patronising one). My point (via Huberman) is that by accepting the inevitability of difficulties, by being aware of the danger zones in the career cycle and how particular vulnerabilities manifest themselves, we have a far greater chance of reducing their impact, getting through them more quickly, and perhaps (just perhaps) avoiding them altogether.

“The teacher who had not experienced one or more difficult periods in his career was very rare…. In effect, the ‘fickle’ nature (of triggers) meant that teaching moments of exhilaration are just as fragile and ephemeral as moments of distress…. ” (p. 257)

Or shall we say, the distress is just as ephemeral as the exhilaration?

(Footnotes)

* Although even this can be approached in a more self-directed fashion. A nice link here with Tessa Woodward, too – the unplugged CELTA concept has a flavour of loop input to me.

** This refers largely to EFL or ESL teachers, who I believe are largely responsible for their own development from the very beginning – financially and practically. If we consider postgraduate degrees or diplomas to be formalised development rather than training, then I can only count five weeks of training in ten years of my own career. However, I would be interested to hear from UK ESOL, which I understand to have a much more standardised system as part of mainstream education. I would also love to know about training programmes in larger institutions such as International House and the British Council.

I got tagged by Jason at the wonderful English Raven as a part of the “It’s worth taking a look at this blog”  thing which is doing the rounds. It’s quite a timely initiative, with the ELT blogosphere a little bit tired and emotional recently. Nice to share the love again. Had I decided to do this straight, Jason’s blog would certainly have been in my top ten… but I am pretty sure that anyone who is reading my blog is reading his. I really do recommend all the blogs in my blogroll – none are there for show, they are the ELT blogs I regularly read, and often comment on. So my list is made up of the twenty one blogs in my blog roll. Can I call that my ‘trad’ list, and then give you something a little more wonky?

Here is a list of ten blogs you probably don’t read…

I’ll kick off with the two who are blogging most specifically about ELT. What I like about them both is that they are writing fairly specifically about the minutiae of classroom activity. A lot of ELT bloggers like to address the ‘big’ issues, but I love to read about the daily concerns of practising teachers. Eisensei is working in Japanese universities, like me. This post is an account of his experiments with dogme, part of a journey which I am really enjoying watching and (to a small degree) participating in. Rich is in Spain, and his writing is quite affecting. I love this pithy piece about online community.

Now three bloggers who teach English, but don’t really blog about it. ELT does seem to attract the creative, or perhaps it makes one creative? Maybe once people realise that the life of a TEFLer is a precarious one, they invest more in their lives outside work. There are plenty of us who do it because it’s all we can do, because it enables us to live where we want, because it offers us little and expects little in return, leaving us free to pursue our passions. For every one of us who defines themselves as a teacher, there is another who ‘teaches’… but is actually a writer, a photographer, an entrepreneur…

I am sure that all three of these bloggers are committed and talented teachers. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to read about the other things they love. Pig Sty Avenue is currently learning the piano, but also writes a lot about football and photography. This is a rare piece about teaching, and an initiative which needs to get off the ground. Scribe of Light is an incredible photographer working mainly in China, who I first came across via Flickr. This piece, about itchy feet, will resonate with many of you world travelling teachers out there. And finally, I have actually had the pleasure of meeting the author of Troutfactory Notebook, another brilliant photographer and writer, based in Osaka. This piece on the soapbox derby is a dazzling example of his thought-provoking writing about art and ideas.

There are a few news blogs I read regularly. The first is Mashable, which you may be familiar with, collecting techie, social media type stuff. This one on David Letterman’s Twitter Machine is a lot of fun. For an alternative take on the mainstream news, for the stuff that falls through the cracks, Global Voices Online is a great resource. I enjoyed this recent post about the new company recruits here in Japan. And speaking of Japan, Education in Japan does a great job in gathering stories together without editorialising (and without the awful, awful comments you often get on Japan News blogs). Everything you need to know about the collapse of the GEOS language school chain is here.

I have long been an admirer of George Siemens, and he is a very prolific blogger about education and (of course) connectivism. His blog is like a fat twitter. Libraries is a nice spot to start. And if you like that, there are about eight years of archives, updated several times daily….

I have now idea how to categorise the last one, but I love it. Pull Up the Roots bills itself as “a visual essay exploring teaching, learning, and society”, and it utilises the tumblr platform perfectly. My first blogging experiments came via tumblr, when I noticed a lot of my flickr photos were being linked there. If you can imagine a twitter for visual artists, designers, and the painfully young and hip, that’s tumblr. Even though I am none of those things, I love tumblr!

So, thanks Jason. And it’s a nice idea, but can we shake it up a bit? I am pretty sure that the ELT blogosphere has been sufficiently mapped. I’d like everyone to do this again, but actually surprise me

Cherry blossoms herald the new academic year in Japan.

Like the tree itself, I get another year older. But the blossoms, like the students, are always new.

You may not be in such a slump as poor George Costanza, but why wait? The life of a teacher is characterized by peaks and troughs, by breakthroughs, epiphanies, bad days, difficult classes, critical incidents and culture bumps. But these things are GOOD things, because the worst thing that can possibly happen to a teacher is stagnation. Early on in our teaching life, we are too busy figuring out the basics to worry about anything else. But after that? As Frances Fuller (1969, 1974) describes, our concerns change… from self, to task, to impact. We start by asking “Am I adequate?”, move on to “Is this activity working?” and (hopefully) end up with “How are the learners?”. Achievement of a state of stability is a  both a blessing and a curse, however.

Trainers spend so much time with pre-service or novice teachers that those of us later in our careers (and I speak as someone who has actually only been teaching for ten years) are left to our own devices. Which is fine. I am happy to direct my own development… why would I be sitting here writing this, otherwise?

Part of the way we can continue working happily as a teacher is by shaking things up before we get bored. In my research into teacher development during changes in context, I was very interested to see how often ELT professionals moved on – from one institution to another, from one country to another – to fend off the impending stagnation. Any anxiety and difficulty created by the change was compensated for by the invigorating power of ‘the opposite’.

I recognise the fact that TEFLers don’t always get a choice in these matters. But I would tenetively suggest that some of us are grateful for the chance to wipe the slate clean and start anew. Do those of us attracted to the industry have shorter attention spans than teachers in mainstream education?

But if you don’t fancy moving to a new continent, or you have ties and responsibilities that make that difficult, how do you avoid getting into a rut? Well, George’s advice still holds good. Try the opposite. If you usually stand up, sit down for your lesson. If you are a great whiteboard artist, leave it blank next week. Don’t give any homework, or set loads. Teach a class without a textbook, or fire-up a laptop.

But, whatever you do, don’t let yourself get bored!

Personal Learning Networks – the what, why and how from darren elliott on Vimeo.

A presentation at the 4th International Wireless Ready Symposium, Nagoya, February 19th 2010.

A good starting point for twitter. I’ve made a list of ELT professionals and educational technologists worth following… there are many more out there too, but these might get you started. Don’t forget to include a decent bio in your profile so that potential followers know you are a real person, not just a robot, a pornographer or a marketeer.

The reading and research for this presentation can be found on my diigo social bookmarking page – the PLN list and tags should yield most. I particularly recommend the works of Warlick, Downes and Seimens (all of whom are on the twitter list, too)

There are some great listservs in yahoo groups. I’ll start you off with the webheads group, and follow with ELT dogme. Both very different, but very lively. A tip – set to receive a daily digest.

If you are looking for blogs, onestopblogs has a good selection. Choose the ones you like, put them in your google reader… tweeters on twitter may have blogs of their own, check the profiles.

If you want something more involved, join a ning! Bloggers in ELT is a favourite of mine, Classroom 2.0 is very active.

But your Personal Learning Network should be just that  -  PERSONAL. Take your time building relationships with real people, don’t be afraid to turn off or cut out when things become distracting rather than helpful, and have fun!