ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Curtis Kelly

Marc Helgesen

Chuck Sandy

Chris Hunt

Panelists: Curtis | Marc | Chuck | Chris
Date: January 2006

Topic: "What was the best idea you had in the last year?"

Chuck Sandy

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When I hear Curtis Kelly say that the purpose of education is to improve people’s lives, I want to stand up and cheer. It’s been a long time since someone in our field has been brave enough to put such a warmly humanistic declaration into words. After years of focus on standards and benchmarks, corpus studies, best practices, and standardized testing, our professional pendulum is finally beginning to swing back towards the human.

“Over the course of year, while working on several projects together in this manner, I became not just a teacher but also a collaborator, a coworker, and a comrade.”

I’ve been learning a lot from Curtis this past year as we’ve begun working closely together on a materials development project, and in this context I’ve found that my very best ideas have sprung from something he’s said or written to me. Not long ago, Curtis sent me an email with this thought:

“There was once a time when word processors did the following: If you wanted to put something into italics, you first had to choose “italic mode” and then type the words. You could never type something and italicize it later. Unfortunately, this is not the way human beings work. We are object-oriented and not the other way around. You don’t pick up a knife to cut something and then look for an apple. You pick up an apple and then decide what you’re going to do with it. Human beings tend to focus on the object first and then think about what to do with it. We work better when we start with particulars and work outwards. It is then that we have a need, a need we can feel, and that’s when we go looking for tools to fulfill that need.”

This got me thinking, and led to my most effective idea of the year: not only providing full models for my students working in project-based classrooms, but also becoming with them a full participant in whatever work they were involved in. If I assigned my students a story-telling project, I first did it myself and demonstrated it for them. If I assigned a research paper in one of my seminars, I did one myself first and then made copies of it for everyone to see. Not only did I pass out the work or demonstrate it, I also talked openly about what was difficult for me and asked students to evaluate my efforts ­ pointing out things they thought I could have done differently or better, making suggestions for ways to improve upon what I had done.

It was at this point in each of my classes that I then explained that the students would be doing the same work on their own and that is was their job to do it not as I had done it, but better than I had done it ­ in their own way. As you can imagine, this was routinely met with a loud chorus of “that’s impossible” or “how are we supposed to do that?” And that’s when I began to break it down for them, showing them step-by-step what would be involved and how it would all work. Modeling the work myself was the apple Curtis wrote about, the particular we could all work outwards from. Breaking it down into steps clearly showed them what tools would be required for the job -- creating a need for when we began working at building up their language toolboxes so they would have everything necessary for the job at hand.

Then, as students began doing their projects, I sat down in their midst and did another one myself, taking into account their suggestions and trying to incorporate the ideas they had shared with me. While I was working, students would come over to see what I was doing. While they were with me, they’d not only ask questions about how to acquire some language tool they needed for their own work, but would make suggestions for how I could move forward with my own. Over the course of year, while working on several projects together in this manner, I became not just a teacher but also a collaborator, a coworker, and a comrade. They began to see me as a person rather than as some director, and I began to see them in new ways as well. Taking myself away from the center of the classroom allowed us to be together in new ways, talk about things that really mattered, and become fully with each other as we worked from the particular outwards on our various individual projects. Knowing exactly where we were all headed gave them the need they could feel that motivated them to acquire the variously required tools. Having the direction to produce a piece of work that was better than the original model I had first showed them, gave students a creative challenge they all set out to achieve.

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Panelists: Curtis | Marc | Chuck | Chris

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