Interview

Chuck Sandy

How supportive (or otherwise) of your teaching methods or style have the various schools you've worked for been?
I've been extremely lucky in my career, both in Japan and elsewhere, to work in very supportive environments and within institutions that have allowed me the freedom to try new things and to even bumble things up on occasion. I've also been extremely fortunate to have had the chance to work with incredible groups of teachers in every place I've ever taught - people with whom I could comfortably grow and who helped me see the things that could be learned from even my most disastrous bumbles.

In the early 1990s I was lucky enough to be at Kanda Gaigo Gakuin in Tokyo at the same time as a core group of people (such as Dale Fuller, Chris and Liz Mares, David Olsher, Herman Bartelen, and Sean Reedy) who went on to become ELT authors and grew up to become master teachers. It's been much the same in every work situation I've had, and I do realize how very lucky I am to be able to say this.

And what about the students? For many Japanese students coming out of high school, the kind of autonomy you give them must come as something of a shock.
We work up slowly to autonomy in the one freshman class I teach, so no one is particularly shocked all at once by what I ask them to do. Then, by the time I see some of them again in one of my seminars for upper class students, there's no shock what-so-ever. Of course, for these seminars, students choose to work with me, which means in some sense that their learning style jibes with my teaching style. Still, it's worth noting how readily almost all students I have at whatever level take to autonomy - which means in essence, being asked to take responsibility for their learning habits and class-work within an environment of limited choices.

It's probably important to point out here that learner autonomy in no way equals classroom anarchy nor resembles a true democracy. Students are still on a tether. It's simply a much looser tether than they might have been used to in high school, and I don't think anyone is taken by surprise. The biggest problem I have with first year university students in my classes involves having to temporarily reel a few in who get too excited and then redirect their energies in more productive ways. That, of course, isn't much of a problem.

Given the limited contact time that most teachers have with their students, do you think it's practical to try to focus on the needs of individual students? Or is it enough to focus on individual groups or classes?
When I add together the participants in my current handful of classes and seminars, I have a total of only 50 or so students all together. This means, of course, that I have the luxury of simple things like being easily able to call everyone by name, not to mention the wonderful fortune to be able to get to know most of my students quite well. I fully realize that I am one of a small number in our field who can say such things and that many teachers have intensely diverse workloads, huge numbers of students, and more classes in a week than I teach in a month.

This is to say that the question is a non-starter. If a teacher is in a context like mine, then there's no reason not to focus on individuals rather than groups, but if a teacher is put into the situation of working with so many students that he or she cannot be expected to even remember names without a roster sheet, then that teacher has no choice except to focus on individual groups or classes rather than on individuals. You do the best you can, given the situation you're in.

Do you think it's possible for your students' need to learn English -- in the university setting rather than the "real world" -- to be compelling enough to motivate a significant number of them to make real progress?
As far as I know, no one has ever been able to definitively say why one student will seem to make significant progress while the person sitting in the next chair will seem to make almost no progress at all. Need and motivation is only a part of it, and to focus too much on who 'needs' what for what reasons is to give that factor more weight than it deserves. Moreover, how does one measure "real progress?" Certainly, for many, this is measured in test scores, but again, that's only one measure.

I don't think any teacher can truly say who's making progress and who isn't as each student in any class, no matter what the field, is learning different things at different times. If you don't believe me, try this sometime: at the end of any class, ask each student to write down what he or she thinks is the most important thing learned during the class period. It's quite eye-opening (and humbling) to see the incredible variety of responses to this question. Everyone is making progress. Simply said, some are just making progress at things we haven't focused on.

As far as the real world goes, I tend to think this world is as real as any other. Granted, no one is able to leave a class in Japan - or Korea or China or Brazil - and go out to order lunch in English, yet the days of limited access to English language materials are long gone. It's been a very long time since language students had to carry around a copy of a textbook and accompanying tape or tune into some distant radio station in order to have access to the L2.

Globalization certainly and rightfully is the cause of some major discontent, but one side effect of this process has been to make the real world, as that term is used here, even more real and more accessible to a greater number of people than ever before. Inexpensive travel, a bevy of people from other Asian countries to talk with, Amazon.com, the internet, and MTV all work together to make the old real world/ non-real world distinction almost another false dichotomy.

How much disparity of levels do you encounter among your students? How do you overcome that?
Like anywhere, a class full of students is like a city full of buildings in various states of construction. Some need almost no support except for polish. Others are in danger of complete collapse without solid scaffolding. The rest are spread out between one extreme and the other. It's useful to note that this is a fact of life in all classes, whether they be language or math or music or chemistry classes.

A teacher deals with this by working to provide more than one way into any activity, by providing extra work for those who need it and for those who finish before others, and by using materials which are flexible enough to be of use to students at either extreme - either by watering down or supplementing.

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