the lives of teachers

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!

(Testing the poll function here before I try it with a class)

Are our Personal Learning Network’s becoming lopsided? Are we limiting ourselves by assuming all professional development needs to be technologically mediated? Are on-line networks better, worse, or just different to those we develop off-line?

In the pre-internet world, which I know many of you remember, how did you learn to become a teacher?

(polls)

Please vote, and if you feel the need to enlarge on your answer, berate me for my unimaginative options, or point out that I am an idiot for any other reason, please comment in the box below!

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!

“Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?”

“It’s like having an operation,”  said Treece. “You don’t know you’ve had it until long after it’s over”

(Eating People is Wrong – Malcom Bradbury)

Isn’t that true? Aren’t the best learning experiences the ones which you have time to absorb, reflect upon, digest? Perhaps the ones which click into place a year later, ten years later? What worries me is that we no longer have time to reflect. If an afternoon with a good book is a long look in a full-length mirror, is the internet a glimpse caught in a shop window on a pell-mell dash through a shopping mall? Maybe I strangled that metaphor…..

But it seems to be something of a ‘meme’ in the twitterverse / blogosphere at the moment. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, but noticed others pop up with the same message over the last week or two. Maybe a lot of people are reaching the same point at the same time. There’s a very nice little graphic (and post) from Jeff Utecht which shows the stages of Personal Learning Network adoption.

Cresting that wave now, I think.

Alex Case asked me a couple of questions in his recent interview which I think are pertinent. The first was (a tongue in cheek) query as to whether I wanted to become the next Scott Thornbury. Well, the reason someone like Scott Thornbury becomes an ELT superstar (stop sniggering at the back) is through quality work over many years. His online presence is another outlet for that. Alex then asked “Do you think it is still worth getting published on paper?” The phrasing itself gives away his feeling, perhaps. But I absolutely think it is… and I worry that the amount of time I spend online is detracting from “real” research, “real” reading and “real” writing.

Bear in mind that I am blogging this, and I will tweet my new blog post, and I understand the irony in that. I have commented on several other blogs today, and got a great deal out of reading them. But I’ll just finish with this second quote from a book I am reading and enjoying at the moment…

“Well, that’s the lot of people like us. We abstract ourselves from the sphere of national effectiveness. We’re too busy taking notes to do anything… and the fault lies precisely in the things we value most”

So, are we all wasting our time? Deposit kickings in the comments box below and regular, classroom based discussion will resume soon.

Despite the pleasures of the blogosphere and the twitterverse, I generally prefer to take my literature in paper form. A cup of tea, a digestive biscuit and a good book. The quiet hush of the library and the musty aroma of slightly damp academics. The per-lunk of a freshly-minted journal as it drops through the letter box.

I took to writing book reviews a couple of years back, partly for the free books, partly to get a few things published and on the CV, but mainly to motivate myself to read more and read more critically. It is a different experience to read a book from front to back with a highlighter pen, a biro and a scrap of paper to make notes, and generally I find it very rewarding.

However, published reviews are generally limited to the current… books which are not more than a year or two old. So, I’ve decided to start an ongoing series of reviews on this blog – old books, books which didn’t quite hit the mainstream, books which can start fights, books which deserve a wider audience, books from outside the field of ELT which are nevertheless pertinent, or books which you really should just read!

I have a little stack of books in my office which I intend to attack over the coming weeks and months, but I would also love to hear from YOU. This seems a ripe series for guest postings – pick a book off your shelf that we all need to know about, write your reasons why in as few or as many words as you feel appropriate, and send it to me…..

Cheers!

I have a confession to make. My Japanese is pretty crappy. There, I’ve said it.

I mean, I can read a menu. I can figure out what’s going on when I watch a movie or join a conversation about everyday topics. I can go shopping and get around. And in my defence, Japanese has three writing systems, one of which contains thousands of ideograms. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking how great it would be to be able to read a whole newspaper….

I can think of several reasons why a language teacher should also be a language student.

1. It makes one more empathetic towards the students.
2. It helps understanding of WHY students make certain mistakes with English
3. It enables the teacher to use L1 in the classroom
4. It sets a good example for the students

A serious question of priorities. Ideally, I would study Japanese, teach, do classroom research, publish and present, spend time with my friends and family, watch the football, keep up my photography, and go to the gym. Some of you self-disciplined scoundrels manage it all, I know. But if you are native speaker of the language you teach, do you think it is more important to study another language, or to engage in professional development activities? Which, ultimately, makes you a better language teacher?

(I can read most of these signs…)

I didn’t set out to rip off Lindsay Clandfield’s excellent blog gimmick, but it turned out that the number of free online journals I like is six!

First up is elearn magazine, collecting papers on learning with technology (mainly) for educators in tertiary education. The journal has been going for a few years now, and still has a fairly strong focus on multi-media online programmes (what might be called Virtual Learning Environments) rather than individual applications or websites. It also looks at the deeper impact of changing technology on the ways that we learn and teach. Stephen Downes’ article, Elearning 2.0, from 2005, is quite a good place to start.

The National University of Singapore has been publishing the Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching for the last five years, covering language instruction across Asia in a number of different languages. I particularly recommend Nikitina and Furuoka’s article “A Language Teacher is Like…”: Examining Malaysian Students’ Perceptions of Language Teachers through Metaphor Analysis, being a big fan of metaphor in the exploration of beliefs and attitudes.

The Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick produces an annual, peer-reviewed journal entitled “English Language Teacher Education and Development” which does what you would expect, very well. This article, written by the editors in the latest edition, gives an excellent overview of the project, its beginnings and where it stands now. I also enjoyed Elham Sadat Mousavi’s article about teacher stress in native and non-native teachers of English. The NNEST / NEST thing is one of those ongoing issues that never loses steam…..

 If you are at all interested in reading, then “Reading in a Foreign Language” should have something for you. It’s co-edited by Richard Day at the University of Hawai’i, a man who knows a thing or two about extensive reading. I like İsmail Hakkı Erten and Salim Razı’s fascinating study into “The effects of cultural familiarity on reading comprehension“, which looks at the impact on fluency of using “nativised” texts – the question is whether we are using texts purely for building skills, or for teaching culture and content. Either way, the study has definite implications for the selection and creation of extensive reading materials.

TESL-EJ covers a broad range of language teaching issues in a quarterly journal, usually with one or two feature articles and a lot of great book reviews. Reinders and Lazaro’s article “Current Approaches to Assessment in Self-Access Language Learning” struck a chord with me; the space at my university has been very successful, but one is always walking the tightrope in trying to encourage students to exercise their autonomy. The minute it becomes a requirement, it dies, right?

Finally, a relative newcomer to serve the growing needs of International Foundation Programme Teachers produced by the University of Reading, InForm. It is not specifically aimed at language teachers, but most international foundations are studying content in a second language (CLIL?). You should go straight to issue four and read the article about learner / teacher development through reflection by a young man with a bright future called Darren Elliott…..

Please comment on any recommended links you have, and I’d also like to know what you think of the articles I have recommended.

Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto Interview from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Barbara is an EFL materials writer, teacher and teacher trainer working mainly with children in Japan. This interview was conducted for the lives of teachers website at http://www.livesofteachers.com/

If you have ever taught children, you may well have come across the ‘Let’s Go!‘ series, now on the third edition and a multimedia behemoth! I met with Barbara, one of the authors, today at the ETJ Chubu Expo, and she was kind enough to give this interview. As you can see, she is delightful company and I wish I’d left the camera running because we talked for as long again after I turned it off. She has a lot to say about teaching children and professional development in particular, but we also touched on a few other topics. If you haven’t already, you should check out Barbara’s blog and have a look for her on twitter. Thanks Barbara, I hope to see you again soon!

It seems somewhat solipsistic to write my first post about other blogs I’ve kept, but I suppose to some extent all blogs are exercises in solopsism, so here goes nothing….

My first blog was an attempt to set up an online teacher development group. I tried far too hard with all the wrong things (using particular applications, stipulating rules for participation) and not hard enough with the really important things (writing quality content, and often). I’m probably a little hard on myself there, it was a noble endeavour… and anyone interested can read more about it here. We did gather a truly diverse group of people, from all over the world, who then proceeded not to talk to each other.

What I did learn from that experience is that there are existing networks for that kind of thing. That groups form organically out of the discussion, rather than discussion forming out of artificially created groups.

My second blog is ongoing, and has been much more successful. At least, I judge it to be more successful by rather arbitrary means. This one is the blog I manage for my students, and through this blog I have learnt to relinquish control. The blog was set up originally to deliver media and content to university students, English majors, and to give them a collaboration space. Of course, it evolved pretty quickly once it became apparent that the students weren’t watching the videos, reading all the articles or listening to all the music I’d tracked down for them (at least, not as much or as many as I’d hoped). Although I’d never seen myself as a controlling teacher, I realised that it wouldn’t work unless it was the students’ own space. The long summer vacation was the ideal opportunity to test this out, and I set them the task of posting one item a week and commenting on two others over the break. The links flooded in, and the interaction in the comments was great to see.

There are a couple of niggling doubts, though.

Firstly, if the students are required to do something, how autonomous is it? I allowed total freedom of posting (which meant a lot of cute cat videos, cute boy band videos, and people falling over). But I still asked them to do it. I suppose we can differentiate between the autonomy of philosophy, and the autonomy of educational institutions. Theoretically, the learner can make an autonomous decision to refuse the teacher’s ideas or methods, but this may mean failure (to pass the course and/or to improve their English). For this reason, I didn’t make the blog a requirement, but if one doesn’t require students to attend self access centres or use VLE’s, how do you justify the expense and effort of creating and maintaining them? How to balance the the dream of autonomy with the reality of institutional education?

The other problem I don’t actually see as a problem, but some people might. That is, how much language do they learn? Probably very little, but I’d argue that not everything has to directly input, practice or test new language.

Again, you can read more of my thoughts on the student blogging here.

First post, I hope future posts will be a bit more focused!