ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Chuck Sandy

George Jacobs

Panelists: Marc | Chuck | George
Date: February 2003
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Topic: "What role can collaboration and project work play in language classes?"

Chuck Sandy

A former colleague of mine once remarked quite seriously that he thought it was a mistake to give students interesting things to do in class when they were just going to graduate and go on to spend their life involved in drudgery.

"They're going to spend their adult lives doing things they don't like, working with people they don't like, creating things that have no meaning, so they'd better get used to it now, " he said. Had this been all, it would have already been too much, but he went on to say that, "what these people need to learn is discipline and self-control, and they won't learn that by fooling around."

“Even among the most enlightened, a teacher is most often viewed as someone with clever teaching ideas and good classroom management skills.”

One way in which education improves of course, is when such people retire or, God forbid, die. Another way is when a generation of teachers, once taught by such people, reacts to this extraordinarily morbid view of life and education by revolting against it. Such a thing has been happening in classrooms around the world in all fields during the last twenty years or so. In language education, it began with the communicative approach with its shifts from meaningless to meaningfulness, from form to form and content, and almost most significantly, with its emphasis on pair and group work and the shared creation of language.

Pair work and group work, of course, are the simplest forms of classroom collaboration and are something almost all teachers in any field are now familiar with and comfortable doing. One reason for its almost universal acceptance, of course, is that as revolutionary as it once was, it's actually a form of collaboration that requires very little risk on anyone's part.

Teachers relinquish control for only a limited amount of time, ready to jump in at the slightest sign of confusion or misdirection. Knowing this, students often respond by failing to leap far in their language use, and those that do often monitor the room, looking for confirmation from the teacher or each other before leaping further. Then, after five or ten minutes, the teacher says something like, "Ok class, quiet down," and then proceeds to check answers around the room. Sound familiar? Even my former colleague might have approved. We'll never know, though, because he's both retired and dead.

While it's impossible to know for sure what he would think of anything now, I knew exactly what foolishness he was talking about that not very long ago day. He was talking about classes like mine - messy classes with lots of noise where people sit on the floor or practice presentations in the hallway. Classes where the visible aim is to produce something concrete ­ a poster, a newsletter, a presentation. Classes - built on project work - which don't look much different from a Montessori preschool or a content-based "whole language" international school classroom -- because they're not much different.

In each case what's taking place is diverse human learning of all kinds, which takes place mostly when people are engaged in creating something interesting and meaningful to them. Not everyone approaches this the same way, and thus the messiness, the foolishness, the fun.

This is the revolution, and despite my current zeal, it took me years to catch on. What took me so long was the same basic fear that keeps most teachers building their classrooms around activities and tasks, pair work and group work. This is the fear of relinquishing control, of not being a teacher in the sense my former colleague and many others think of one. Even among the most enlightened, a teacher is most often viewed as someone with clever teaching ideas and good classroom management skills.

In his book, Why Children Fail, John Holt writes that, "It took me a long time to learn, as a classroom teacher, that on the days when I came to class just bursting with some great teaching idea, good things rarely happened." He goes on to say that most teachers never learn this and in fact believe that if one good teaching idea can produce any learning at all, then one hundred good ideas will produce that much more learning.

This, of course, is not true, but if you doubt the popularity of this idea, browse the language teaching section of any bookstore and look at all the teacher help books called, variously, One Hundred Great Teaching Ideas. The interesting paradox is that, as Holt points out, too many great ideas and too much control can have the effect of stopping learning all together.

Why would this be true? Holt believes it's partially because even the best teachers can't stop teaching. They are like someone "who tries to help a friend start a car by giving it a push." Even when the car starts rolling and the engine starts up and the driver says "It's going now, you can stop" the pusher won't let go, thinking that the car will stop unless he keeps pushing. In the classroom, the pushing is the control, the over-reliance on a textbook, the overuse of games and activities, the over-explaining, the inability to leave the front of the classroom, stand back and let learning happen - but this, I've come slowly to see, is essential.

No one should think for a moment that I am advocating that teachers should do nothing in the classroom -- far from it. Getting to the point where the class, built on projects and collaboration, functions smoothly without overt control, takes very careful planning and constant monitoring. It also requires the ability for teachers to think on their feet, to answer questions they're not prepared to answer, and to take on roles they may not have been trained to take on. When teachers give up control, they're no longer at the front of the classroom - they're in the midst of it all, a participant guide. This is extremely hard work, but to take on that role is to be at the forefront of the revolution.

In language teaching we've moved through the communicative approach to the learner-centered approach to the content-based approach to what some in the field have been calling the post-methodology era. This is the era characterized by a new and growing understanding of learning styles and strategies, and by a refocus on humanism and individuality. What we've learned, as the revolution has continued through all these necessary stages is that there is no holy grail, no best method or approach that's going to work all the time for all the people. What we know is that we don't know.

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Panelists: Marc | Chuck | George

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