ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Chuck Sandy

Curtis Kelly

Chris Hunt

Mark O'Neil

Panelists: Chuck | Curtis | Chris | Mark
Date: December 2004

Topic: "What are 5 things you wish you'd known when you started teaching?"

(This is a continuation of the theme discussed by panel regulars Marc Helgesen and Peter Viney, as well as guests Stephen Krashen and Michael McCarthy, last month at the JALT 2004 national conference. See last month's feature.)

Chris Hunt

"At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide."
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)

"(He) may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you, he really is an idiot."
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

Oh my goodness, I feel like George W. Bush. When asked at a press conference if he had made any mistakes, he couldn't name any. Asked to name five things I wish I'd known before taking up teaching, my mind runs an equal blank. I think I'm going to stumble through this, grinning aimlessly.

"Silence can be tyrannical, but silence with a smile is another matter."

Oh! Found one! Aimless grinning. I think that was what carried me through my first year in Japan at a private language school that could have bubbled up from hell. There were three teachers, including me, when I started. The others quit without notice after a month. The school probably ran through one new teacher every six to eight weeks. I found myself cast as the main teacher, even though I had minimal experience. I grinned a lot. Without realising it at the time, I think my affable-gullible demeanour did three things. It kept my sanity (one teacher was driven to a near nervous breakdown), it allowed me to acquiesce to trivial indignities and successfully ignore and reject excessive manager demands, and most importantly, it gave the students head and heart space.

Silence can be tyrannical, but silence with a smile is another matter. I guess if I'm being picky, I can demand that the kind of smile be defined. A sinister smile is hardly likely to relax and inspire, though nowadays some children will tell me to be "scary".

Picky ­ now that's scary! The school where I started out had its own method, and teachers were required to pounce on every mistake. It got to the point where I could notice mistakes in my own speech as I was talking.

After I left the school, I used to ask adult students how picky they wanted me to be. I gave them the choice (I can't count this as one of the five as it has been pretty much a constant for me). Nowadays, I wonder about the usefulness of focusing on mistakes. I learnt to praise self correction by students and to correct mistakes by remodelling the correct form back in their faces (direct correction was seen as confidence-eroding). But what do students really learn from this kind of correction? Rather than noticing errors, I guess they more likely just learn a repetitive style of discourse. I've seen various students get stuck with the habit of repeating direct questions and comments. They are also able to introduce errors at the same time, which really suggests that this kind of focus on errors is of limited value. But this is something for me to now unlearn rather than something unknown before I started teaching.

Teaching, never wanted to do it, kept finding myself doing so. Probably because I associate it with schools, tests and oppression, I find the word uncomfortable. I have found, especially with children, that the less I teach, the more they learn. Direct teaching seems to compress head and heart space, it seems to inhibit curiosity and squelch discovery. As John Hull said, as quoted by John Holt in How Children Fail, "If we taught children to speak, they'd never learn." So, being a non-teacher is what I aim for. I'm tempted to write 'facilitator', but sometimes non-teaching involves obstruction. Sometimes the way to lead a horse to water is to gently pull its tail or block its path. It might be more likely to drink as well.

I'm getting there. Before I started (non) teaching, I definitely thought the water of a lesson was language. I brought four books with me when I came to Japan. Two were on games, one on drama and one on music and song ­ all were applied to language learning. Now I know that I'm not teaching language, anything but. Communication, expression, inventiveness, intuition, learning, self, awareness, consciousness, choice, strategy, spontaneity. A ragbag of skills, a patchwork of qualities all revolving around the process of change.

When we invite students to learn, we are inviting them to change.

Where am I? Grin gently, there are no mistakes, avoid teaching, embrace change. One more ­ avoid competition. This has been my own personal odyssey. Before I began teaching in Japan, I couldn't really have imagined non-competitive and co-operative games, perhaps with the exception of role-playing games. Having been inventing games since around the age I could ride a bicycle, I found it second nature to create games for language learning. I found it much harder to eliminate competition. It required a different mindset. Now co-operation is the norm. Caring and sharing, exchanging roles and realities, teacher now student, students now teacher, we learn and change together.

On a good day.

And on a bad day... it still makes a difference. I'd be misleading you if I suggested that by cutting out competition everything is filled with warmth and light. Conflict can occur, especially when children arrive tired or grumpy or when individual rights are trampled on (usually by over-helpful mums). But there is a qualitative difference one can only find when competition has gone and co-operation is the norm.

To illustrate what I mean, I'll mention a recent kindergarten class. We were doing weather and I had 6 copies of a B4 sized poster showing 8 different kinds of weather. The children divided into groups and I gave each group a poster. There were well over 50 children, so each group had between 8 and 10 children. The game was to find the kind of weather I called out.

If we were playing competitively active children would have been racing to slam the right answer with their hands. Instead, I showed the children how they should start by pointing up in the air and then touch the answer with just one finger. If nothing else, this method has the advantage that the picture is not hidden from view by a tomb of tiny hands. But it had another that I only discovered on that day. There were so many children that sitting around the poster was difficult. In several groups one or two children were sidelined. I went around the groups and encouraged them to join in. In some groups the focus changed from finding the right answer to making sure everyone could touch the right answer and where this happened the change was electric. It was simply more challenging and more fun all doing and succeeding together.

Next time I do the activity I'll incorporate this change of focus. I can learn, too.

At 18 our convictions are caves from which we peer. At 45 they are spires from which we soar.

He may look like a teacher and talk like a teacher, but don't let that fool you, he really is a teacher.

Panelists: Chuck | Curtis | Chris | Mark

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Chris Hunt, Wise Hat.

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