(This is, I guess, a companion piece to Ken Wilson’s blog about ELT novelists – though it’s about to go off in a different direction…)

Whilst at the launch party I got talking to a successful literary agent and we started to talk about the number of manuscripts she gets from authors who want to be published; how many she rejects/accepts etc. So how can authors who want to be published, I asked, try and make sure that she (and people like her) will actually LOOK at their material?

It all depended, she said, on the synopsis and the sample chapter, but mostly the former. Getting noticed (and then accepted), she said, depends on your PITCH. It boils down to how you can interest someone in your novel using only a sentence or two sentences,

I thought of people whose talks are not accepted at conferences (there has been a flurry of comments recently about the 2012 IATEFL conference on this topic ). For many conferences, such as IATEFL,  submissions are read anonymously, so the pitch obviously matters.

“Pitch me your novel,”" said the agent (it wasn’t me who had told her that I have written one called The Whistle at Siete Vientos – he said defensively), so I did. “Not interested,” was her immediate and dismissive response so I countered with the following: “choose your favourite novel by Charles Dickens (I’m on a bit of a Dickens ‘thing’ at the moment!) and pitch that to me”. She Chose Great Expectations and made a complete mess of it. Which pleased me!!

So here’s a bit of a challenge. How would you pitch your favourite novel, your own novel, you teaching  material, your  website, your talk, your approach etc in one or two sentences – so that everyone sits up and takes notice?

It’s not easy!

Talks in preparation are about multi-tasking and focus – a development from the enquiring blog I wrote about it. I wanted/want to know how we can ensure our students’ attention – and what they should pay attention to,. The best way to tease out thoughts (perhaps) is to try and put a coherent session together about it, and that’s why I am working on this one. Making new sessions is a great developmental tool. Planning teacher training sessions is, maybe, the best way to learn about/reflect on teaching.

I have to re-work and amplify a session on how people can best collaborate and share both within schools and institutions, but also in the wider world. I love the wide world we all swim around in via our PLNs, blogs, conferences, meeting etc, but in the end (I want to argue), the most important communication and collaboration exists within institutions.

Talk preparation is nerve-wracking and exhilarating all at the same time; a bit like doing the CELTA teacher training course is for many teachers in training.

Perhaps the most exciting (and genuinely scaring event coming up) is an evening presentation called ‘Bent and Broken into a better shape’ – a celebration of the life of Charles Dickens, perhaps England’s greatest-ever writer of novels. With musician Steve Bingham I was asked by the British Council to do a show to celebrate his 200th anniversary and so we have been wracking our brains to find a way of conveying his genius in a 60-minute presentation. A lot of wracking going on! How do you convey the sheer ebullience of those 19 novels, countless short stories, fiery polemics – not to mention a whole busy chaotic, involved, complex life.

In the end we have gone for 9 short extracts interspersed with comments about the great writer and the contexts in which his novels were written – all (well some) of this will be enlightened by Steve’s extraordinary music. We are doing some tryouts before the event is filmed (and live-streamed) in the great hall of The British Medical Association on Tavistock Square, London on February 9. This is appropriate since Dickens lived on the site for ten years. As you can see from the poster, you can come along and watch/listen, or watch the live stream. We’d love to have you along.The big fear is whether reading from a writer’s works is the right way to celebrate his or her achievements, especially a writer as prodigious as Charles Dickens. And yet what other way is there, in a short time, to convey his amazing character descriptions, his scary and wonderful stories, his ability for comedy, his romanticism and passionate reforming zeal? Answers on a postcard, please.

In the meantime, it’s off to conferences in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, Dubai etc. Perhaps 2012 should be the year where we/I reconsider the benefit – for participants – of such parachute visits. I wonder.

Oh, and there’s a new book. But that’s another matter.

What about you? Big challenges for 2012?

What would you like to prepare a new talk about in order to have think about it seriously?

What new talks are you working on?

If you had to present a show about a great writer who would it be and how would you do it?

(Yes, men can do it too – though see below)

The thing is, I wasn’t doing any of it very well or very efficiently. I could have finished the handwriting in half the time; I could have engaged with Shaun’s fabulous presentation more avidly, and even my tweets seemed a bit ragged – and I’ve forgotten what the news was about.

(So perhaps men CAN’T do it!)

And it got me to wondering about stuff. For example, the tech educators say that because kids multi-task all the time (they have endless computer windows and apps running at the same time – well actually so do us older digital residents, but that’s another matter), we, the teachers should join them and harness this because otherwise we’re ‘past it’, and not dealing with their (the kids’) reality.

But wait a minute. Multi-tasking has been getting a bad press recently. Maybe it’s not the kind of magic we thought it was. Hey, don’t take my word for it. Listen to Sherry Turkle (see above), author of Alone Together. You can hear/see her by watching a Yotube clip here (I am not allowed to post it into this blog). Basically the argument goes like this:

a   We don’t really multi-task anyway. We skip from one task to the next and back again.

b  The more tasks we are skipping backwards and forwards from, the less ‘good’ we are at each individual task. We may think we are being creative but actually we aren’t.

c  We should re-train outselves as  unitaskers – because our on-task work will not be degraded by the brain-time we are giving to other tasks.

This reminds me of a quote from Rodney Batstone which I included in my last methodology book. It goes like this: do tasks which require simultaneous processing of form and meaning ‘overload the learners’s system, leading to less intake rather than more’? (That was in the ‘Key concepts’ section of ELT Journal 50/3, 1996).

It’s a profound question, and one which I am wrestling with right now. Perhaps if – following Turkle’s line of argument -  language learning is focused, uni-directional and uncluttered, then it will be more successful. Perhaps by restricting the input we would give them a better start, a better chance – and perhaps many of the more exciting and excitable activities that we all love so much may actually get in the way.

Please don’t misunderstand me! My professional world is all about methods, approaches, techniques, activities, routines. I love nothing better than observing new and exciting procedures in lessons. I am entranced by the never-ending creativity which new generations of teachers bring to the job of teaching. But maybe

MAYBE

if Sherry Turkle is right about multi-tasking, then maybe we should simplify things down? Back to substitution dialogues? Restrict rather than amplify? Get kids on-task, one task at a time. Only one.

Yes, I know my questions are naive. But sometimes those questions work.

I would really love to hear what you think about all this. I need some thinking-direction!

We’ll get to being a reflective teacher in a bit, I promise….

In Britain, as in many other countries around the world, we remember the men and women who died fighting for their country. We call it Remembrance Sunday and it takes place on the Sunday as close to November 11 as is possible. Why November 11? Well, because the armistice/peace treaty which ended the First World War (1914 – 1918) was signed at 11 am on November 11 in 1918. And so every year the bands play, the Queen and the country’s political leaders go to the Cenotaph in London (see the photograph below) and lay wreaths of poppies (poppies grew in the fields of Flanders where millions of young men were slaughtered in that useless conflict all those years ago).

Why do we have ceremonies like this? Yes, of course we should honour people who die for their country, though the history of British military action is not a story, necessarily, of universal nobility. But is remembering enough? It feels beautiful and solemn to some (irrelevant to many others), but do we learn anything from it? Does it help to stop wars, does it lead us to a better understanding of who we are and what we do?

And what about the moments of love and grief – or even the more quotidian awkwardnesses of ordinary life – that we all experience? Do we learn from them? Do we (do you) transform experience into future action, future wisdom? Or do we/you just live them, experience their sadness, elation or ordinariness, learning nothing?

Which is where teaching and learning comes in. I mean, all this wondering makes me think about being a reflective teacher, something I have written about before, of course.

To be a reflective teacher means to try and think about the experiences we have had so that they can be changed, modified, and made better when we repeat them in the future. It is different from just flopping into a chair in the staffroom saying ‘that was a terrible lesson!’ and doing nothing about it (something we have all done!) But if people can’t be reflective in their ordinary lives (and many can’t), how can they be expected to do it in their professional ones?

So I guess the questions I have for this blog post go something like this:

Do you think I have described being a reflective teacher appropriately?

Are you yourself a reflective teacher? Trainer? And if so why, how do you do it, and what effect does it have?

Or are you, perhaps, too damn busy to have much time for reflection and consequent action?

Are you a reflective ‘liver’ (person I mean, not thing!!)? Or do you find yourself repeating the same old behaviour patterns again and again??

And is Karl Marx right that “History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce?”

Who? I hear the younger readers of this blog ask (I’ll come back to age, if I may, a bit later). Well Donn Byrne was an ELT writer and in two particular books Teaching Oral English and Teaching Writing Skills, he set a standard for writing about teaching methodology which it is hard to beat. You might not, now, agree with his way of doing things, his view of teaching, but his descriptions of pedagogic practices are clear, helpful and steeped in the reality of the classroom.

Does his death (or the other deaths we’ve heard about recently) change things or make way for the new as Steve Jobs suggested? Well that depends on whether the person who died was standing in the way of others, blocking their path. Perhaps, we might agree, older people should move aside, alive or dead, to make way for younger change agents. Because we do need agents like that – people who (like Bert Jansch for me) make us try a little bit harder, think a little bit more radically, try something new. And by the way, older people are pretty wary of youth in that sense, for as Gina Gershon says in the film Showgirls (no I haven’t seen it; I read this in a newspaper), “there’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs behind you!”.

So I wonder: does change have to come from young people? Or rather does it usually come from younger people? In a recent event at London’s Festival Hall 87-year-old ex US president Jimmy Carter was, by all accounts, on sparkling, energetic and intelligent form. Would he still be – is he – a change agent?

And who are the change agents for us anyway? The people we admire (why do we admire people?), the people we love? The prophets shining with zeal? People who tell us things which amaze and enthrall us? Or maybe the ones who get us all mad and disagreeing, challenge us, make us uncomfortable about things we thought we knew.

I think (despite, myself, being a slave, in his lifetime, to Steve Jobs and everything he made – and he saw that is was good!), that he may not be right. Death is not necessarily a great change agent except in the sense that it creates space for the people still alive – and can make us very very sad. Change agents are the living, maybe young, possibly old, maybe inspirational, maybe convincing by example, maybe just plain ‘God how can she/he say things like that, I mean it’s just WRONG….isn’t it?!!!!

In my case, thinking back over the years, I’ve been entranced, provoked and enriched by change agents in folk clubs, concert halls, books, classrooms and even conferences, but I’m not sure that I can describe what a typical change agent is.

Can you?

It’s a continuing issue – especially when we think about how to tell if someone really is a good teacher or not. How do we KNOW? Or perhaps, more importantly, how can we be sure that our dissenting voice (if we have one!) is ‘right’, rather than just idiosyncratic?  And, finally, what happens if we change our mind? Which opinion was the right one?

All of this pondering has been brought on by seeing, last night,  Lars Von Triers’ latest movie Melancholia

I thought, last night, that it was the most boring, vacuous and vapid movie I had seen for a long time (others would/will disagree with me completely). Stylistically arresting maybe, (and at times, yes, weirdly beautiful) – and helped by blasting out full blast Wagner at his most ravishing (a cover for paucity of imagination?), the film’s substance completely failed to convince (I thought). There was nothing there. The dialogue was awful, the characters were universally unlikeable cardboard cut-outs, the action was unbelievable on so many different levels   ….sorry, that’s quite enough.  However, while some critics had the same kind of reaction as me, others emphatically did not!

Today I find my judgement less harsh. I remember the style more powerfully than I expected

Is it like that with conference talks, for example, or for/with methodological preachers?

1 Do opinions get polarised in the same way at conference talks?

2 Do our opinions change, and if so, which one should we trust?

4 Are we sometimes blinded by the mood music, by the ‘images’, the feel  – so that we ignore the (absence of?) substance underneath all that?

And yet we seem to need leaders – and few people become presidents and CEOs without at least a little bit of stylistic charisma…..

5 So if you are a conference goer, film visitor, drama addict, what do you want? Style or substance?

and

6 If you are a conference presenter which do you plan for for first?

I’d be interested to know.

1

2

Questions?

a what is similar about these two pictures? What is different?

b what is, or should be the function of things like this?

c where do you think they are and who did therm?

d what do you think of them?

(And here are some other people who’ve had a go at the same idea (er, thanks – maybe – Brad for causing me to get totally distracted from work…..). I’m sure I haven’t found everyone who’s done it, so if I misssed you out sorry…..

Mike Harrison

Ceri Jones

Chiew Pang

Baiba Svenca

Cecilia Lemos

Jason Renshaw

Tara Banwell

Larry Ferlazzo

Anna Varna

(In parenthesis: Radio 4 is a national radio station which broadcasts news, drama, comedy, factual programming, magazine programmes etc)

Anyway, the announcer told us that the programme would be about ELF (English as a Lingua Franca - I think you may be able to listen from outside the UK) and suddenly I found myself listening, on national radio, to people I know such as Jennifer Jenkins, Andy Kirkpatrick, Val Hennessy from IH (International House) Bristol,  Michael Swan etc. Of course anyone in the UK is used to David Crystal popping up on the radio , but this was more surprising! Two worlds colliding…

As with all ‘public’ programmes (i.e. not made specifically for linguists or language teachers etc) it was fairly general. Jennifer Jenkins, for example, talked about how certain features (such as the omission of present simple 3rd person ‘s’ or the simplifying of allaphonic variation) crop up in a lot of ELF discussion – that is when 2 non-native speakers of English use English to communicate). Interestingly, however, she said that ELF was not, of itself a language ‘variety’ in its own right (as , she admitted, she and others had originally thought).

Mike Swan thought it would take a long time before ELF had its own identity – and suggested that the way people use language depends on both their linguistic context (e.g. what first language background they come from) and on the context the language is occurring in. It would take a long time, he seemed to be suggesting, before a radical language shift turned up as a general change.

Val Hennessy talked about how correctness in a language class depended on what we want students to do – successful communication, she reminded her interviewer, does not depend on accuracy alone.

But then they talked to Cambridge ESOL and this (and Jennifer Jenkins’ comments on language teaching) is where it gets interesting – for me, at least. At Cambridge ESOL they will continue demanding accuracy for British English until and unless ELF emerges as a quantifiable, quality-driven variety in its own right. Tests have to test against a standard after all, and British English, for example has one (of course not all language exams focus on accuracy). Jennifer Jenkins, on the other hand, suggested that English langauge teachers don’t like ELF because it suggests they aren’t teaching the right thing, and that they (we) need to adjust their/our views on what is correct/acceptable, and maybe stop trying to force students to do things they are not going to (be able to) do.

Hmm. My own view is that ELF is out there – there are observable phenomena when L2 speakers get together – but that we have to teach something and students DO expect to be told what is or isn’t right. I have argued before that it doesn’t matter WHAT variety of English you teach, provided that it is widely intelligible. British English is a perfectly good variety to teach – but that does not mean it will be used as it is or as it was learned when that learner speaks to someone from a different country who uses a different variety. In other words I think ELF research (and Andy Kirkpatrick was extremely interesting in the programme talking about Asian  forms of ELF) is fascinating, but as yet does not have much to say about English teaching.

Of course, if you teach exclusively very British (or American, Singaporean , Irish, Jamaican, Australian etc) English which is not going to ‘travel’ then you’re not doing your students much of a service. But that’s not how it happens, I reckon. But if you teache British English and leaven it with other varieties and accents? Is there anything wrong with that?

What’s your view, I wonder…ELF or non-ELF?

I’d better explain.

Recently I have started playing the guitar and singing in public again – after a break of…..well let’s say quite a few years. True I’d done a bit of this before (2 songs at an IATEFL ‘come and sing’ evening I ran with Adrian Underhill a few years back, and a song in the Touchable Dreams show I do with Steve Bingham). But they weren’t happy experiences. My right hand shook and it was clear I’d lost ‘it’ in some way or other. But then, for reasons which are not interesting for this account, I started to get ‘it’ back – I started to want it once more – and so I practised and practised, bought a new guitar and began to think I could perform again.

And then, In June 2011 I agreed to do three guitar-based shows (in three different countries) during a trip I would be doing a month later (this was on top of the usual language-teaching talks I do). I felt very brave making the decision to sign up for these shows, and incredibly scared. But also invigorated in a way, because that’s what ‘moving out of the comfort zone’ does for you -  taking risks, going that one bit further. I used to do a teacher development talk about this, and based the whole session on going gliding for the first time. It seemed a good metaphor; flying right outside the comfort zone to produce a feeling of total euphoria and learn more about yourself. Surely teaching should be like that too, I argued.

About to leave the comfort zone - that's Christoph the instructor!

In a sense all teachers leave the comfort zone every time they meet a new class or teach a brand new lesson, but deciding to do those shows in South America (I hope you are following!) seemed a little more than that. A real risk. An exciting and terrifying risk.

But – and you don’t really want to know this, but it’s necessary  – I have a problem with my finger nails. They keep breaking. And that’s not good if you are a finger-picking guitarist. So I asked guitar virtuoso Jason Carter for advice, and he recommended false nails and glue as well as having my nails painted with acrylic paint to strengthen them. I found a nail beauty clinic in Cambridge (where I live) and made an appointment (for the acrylic painting). The next day, therefore, I turned up and stood outside the glass-fronted salon. It was full of women. Only women. I couldn’t see a counter or a reception area. I wouldn’t know which of the women to talk to. I walked towards the open door. Some of the women saw me, a strange-looking man loitering outside a beauty clinic. I thought: I should go in now and say ‘I have an eleven o’clock appointment. Can anyone help me?’ But I couldn’t do it. I walked away from the window and thought about it. Turned back. Tried to walk into that clinic again. And then I lost my nerve and like some loser, returned to the car and drove home, chastened and ridiculous.

It’s been false nails and glue since then (thank you Jason). They seem to work more or less.

But the experience got me thinking. Why didn’t I have the nerve to enter that nail clinic, that women-only world? Surely the situation was a classic ‘out of the comfort zone’ experience I should, based on my own talk, have relished. But it wasn’t, and the only thing I can think of was that it was TOO uncomfortable, an uncomfort zone too far, so far out of the zone that I could not cross that threshold (yes I know it was ridiculous; I’ve said that already!)

And so, perhaps, it might be time for a new kind of zone, a ZCPD, a zone of comfortable proximal development. The formula might go something like this: the best way to develop – as a teacher or anything else – is to move out of the comfort zone BUT NOT TOO FAR – or at least only when you are ready for it. Maybe THAT would be an easier concept to sell than the one-time bungee-jumping, glider-flight, nail clinic kind of terror that could be a step too far.

What do you think? Does the concept of a ZCPD do it for you??!!

The music first and then a crossover to teaching and teaching conferences:

This year I heard a fantastic collection of singers and music – and if you are interested you can click on the links and hear the people I heard (the clips aren’t from their festival performances, but still). For example there was the English folksinger Chris Wood with his incredible song about the murder of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes by the British Security services. In contrast (the rest of this paragraph is very ‘folky’ – blues, country etc later) the Irish band Danú charmed us with their folk airs and supreme musicianship – and in the same vein Manran and a whole host of others fiddled and piped their way through the four days. And that’s not to mention the sheer zaniness of The Spooky Men’s Chorale (check out their wonderfully ridiculous version of Dancing Queen – the audience loved it) or the humour and straightout good traditional singing of the Cornish Port Issac’s Fishermen’s Friends.

There was Country and Western music too from Caitlin Rose and the incomparable Mary Chapin Carpenter (who sang a wonderful song about Ernest Hemingway’s wife and their time in Paris). Rumer Bacharach-ed us into submission. But Richard Thompson was there too – one of the greats of British folk music, and legend Robert Cray with his blues. Femi Kuti kicked up an African storm (and the energy of his dancers!!), Newton Faulkner amazed (especially the younger festival goers) with his guitar hammering, and the miraculous Laura Marling, unbelievably only 21 years old, completely bowled me (and everyone else) over with her fantastic songs, mature voice and terrific support band.

But the greatest fun was the extraordinary folk ‘big band’ Bellowhead. They take old folk tunes and stomp them up in a unique and enjoyable way. In the main stage tent people we bopping away like crazy when they were on. Oh yes we were!

Right, now here’s the teaching/conference bit:

The Folk festival took place at the same time as the incredibly successful third Reform Symposium e-Conference – something I really wanted to attend, but the music won! Still I kept seeing tweets and that kind of kept me thinking about the day job (and the conference going). Some questions arose:

1

Most of the acts I really really enjoyed displayed fantastic musicianship. The singers and players were experts at what they were doing. For example Bellowhead’s inspired clowning and energy only works because they are damn good at what they do. Is that the same for teachers? They have to be damn good at what they do? I can recognise a good musician from miles away, but recognising good teachers? Is that as easy? What are the clues? What do you think?

2

The festival now has two big screens and (sometimes) good sound, so it’s easy to sit out in the sun and enjoy the music instead of heading into the scrum of the crowd. But that kind of anaesthetizes the experience; it’s much more sweaty, immediate and human inside the crowded tents. Is that the same for teaching and training? Does easy technical access somehow compromise the human experience of learning?

3

Newton Faulkner, now there’s a gifted player. But he did keep telling us how he was going to use this pedal or that device and he may not have meant to (I’m sure he didn’t), but it sounded like showing off – ‘look what I can do’. Are the best teachers and speakers people who wear their expertise lightly? Do some presenters/teachers show off too much?

4

The wonderful Bellowhead sing songs with historical, but sometimes frankly dubious content. About men getting, er, a bit drunk and visiting professional ladies, some of whom they rob etc. And we all bop and dance and shout our pleasure. Because the music’s so good. But it made me wonder: is our critical thinking (in conferences and classrooms) frequently dulled by the surface brilliance of what we are experiencing? It happened to me, I am sure, at a conference recently.

That’s quite enough for now. I hope you enjoyed (some of?) the music.