I first met Ju Zheng when she attended a pre-conference event which I ‘ran’ with Penny Ur (a huge privilege for me to work with her – you can watch an interview with Penny here). The day was organised by the Teacher training and Education Speciaql Interest Group). In that session she (Jun Zheng) briefly mentioned the idea of lesson ‘polishing’. In brief, the idea is that a teacher is observed teaching a lesson and is then given feedback. Result? The teacher then teaches the same lesson again, and the lesson is again commented on. Then the teacher teaches the SAME (but modified in the light of feedback) lesson again. And again. And so on.

People in our workshop group expressed surprise at this. It sounded to most non-Chinese ears a bit ‘weird’. Later, however, in conversation with coursebook-writer, teacher and fellow-presenter Hugh Dellar , it turned out that he was Jung Zheng’s mentor (as a first-time IATEFL speaker) and that he was very interested in what she was going to say in her talk. He (Dellar) wondered if teachers, especially at the beginning of their careers, do exactly the same thing  when they teach a lesson from a coursebook, say. Each time they do the same lesson again they will, if effect, ‘polish’ it in a way that is very similar, perhaps, to what Jun Zheng was describing.

Maybe. But, in contrast, most of our training (pre or in-service) doesn’t go in for polishing. On the contrary we ask teachers to do a range of different lesson-types, and observers would probably be bored by going back to the same lesson.

In her talk Jun Zheng went beyond the original polishing concept to something she calls MSBTT (Models for school Based in Service Teacher Training). In her iteration of the repeated lesson concept, a teacher’s colleagues all watch the lesson and are drawn into a discussion about it, and it is on the basis of that discussion (rather than just the feedback from a trainer) that the lesson is repeated and repeated.

And here’s the scary bit! Well-polished lessons mean that the teacher may well enter a teachers’ competition – an X-Factor, Pop idol kind of event, quite common in China. In front of a large audience a few teachers teach real lessons. A panel of judges chooses the winner. Jun Zheng says that the winners feel great – and go on to better things – and the non-winners feel good to have taken part. The nearest ‘western’ equivalent I can think about are the Spanish Oposiciones (literally a competition for civil service – include teacher – jobs)

I wonder (in passing) whether the one area where people like me really do ‘polish’ our lessons is when we prepare and then give new presentations. Most of my presenting colleagues say that it’s about the 3^rd time that a talk ‘settles down’.

So – and many thanks to Jun Zheng for this (and for conversations with Hugh Deller) – I am left with two or three questions:

1 Are teaching competitions a good thing? And if so, for whom?

2 Could lesson polishing be a good approach to pre- or in-service training in your environment?

3 How we feel (= presenters) feel about polishing? A good idea? Or something we do anyway?

(Above is one of the slides I’ll be using)

Saba as a platform? Well sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. Last time we did one of these the slides worked fine in the morning session, but in the afternoon they didn’t at all – kept getting stuck. Was that because they had animation in them?

This time, to try and minimse the risk of glitches, I have done a Powerpoint presentation with no animation (by the way I don’t use Powerpoint if I can help it; Keynote – for Macs – is infinitely preferable, in my opinion….but I digress). The slide above is one of a sequence where the diagram is built up, one slide per ‘bit’. This is unusual for me. I like my animations, slide transitions, flames and pinwheels and all that stuff. It makes, I always think, the screen come alive, makes things more interesting.

But some people don’t agree. When I’ve used the ‘flame’ animation that comes with Keynote to help a negative image or point appear, many people laugh. But others find if childish and distracting. The same with my flopping, twisting, open door slide transitions.

I quite like the rather stark Powerpoint I’ve done for the webinar (starting in 28 minutes….). Would you?

Here are my questions:

1 Do you like visual presentation with lots of tricks, flashes and animations? (or Prezi with its swoops and turns)?

2 What presentation software do you like to use and why?

3 What will future presentations look like (e.g. what’s just round the corner)?

And of course it means presenting again – in various guises I’ll be doing that at least 3 times in Liverpool. And though I’ve done it hundreds of times before, the nerves never go away – of course. And neither do the nightmares.

Nightmares? Well yes. I have a series of ‘presentation’ nightmares! Three nights ago, for example, I found that my ‘audience’ for some reason had split into three rooms – that’s after I had noticed that they weren’t really paying attention to me. And when I went into one room they (the teachers) seemed to be involved in a  karaoke session and wouldn’t stop! They wouldn’t even listen to me! Me!!!

Once I had a nightmare about how I was talking away, losing confidence, so I turned my back on the teachers – it seemed to be in a room I had once presented in in Serbia – but/and when I turned round again almost all of the audience had vanished.

And then there’s the one (which recurs quite a lot) where we are some big conference and someone introduces me and explains what I am going to talk about and I stand up….and then have absolutely no idea what to say about the topic, and all the people are looking me expectantly…

I guess we all have nightmares which have something to do with the things that we do, and the fear of looking like a fool comes to some of us in some dreamlike form or other. I once knew someone who used to have hideous dreams about being in a reception line for the Queen wearing only her boots and a hat!

Then there’s the nightmare about publishers going crazily all-out digital and making people redundant all over the place and focusing only on a corporate-driven view of client satisfaction (the two are not compatible by the way).

Oh wait. That’s not a dream, that’s reality. So it doesn’t belong in this blog post. I’d better continue….

Not all my dreams are nightmares, of course. I had one which had an incredible farewell song in it so I had to write it down and record it.

But the presentation nightmares are part of my life, it seems, and even if/when I stop presenting (if I ever do) they’ll probably stick around.  Personally I wish they’d go away, but maybe they are part of the presentation ‘furniture’

Do you have presentation/teaching nightmares that you feel like sharing?

Go on! You know you want to!

Others are going faster than me. Pearson (my publisher) for example is going hell-for-leather into digital publishing (I suppose that should be hell-for-digital) with consequences that I do not believe they can quantify or be sure of (though in principle I support their intentions);  visionaries like Sugata Mitra have gone a lot further – and he and that ‘further’ is the subject of this post.

Sugata Mitra, you will remember, gained fame with his hole-in-the-wall experiment in which computers were installed literally in a hole in the wall, first of a Delhi slum, and then in a wall in a village in India and kids were left to get on with it. The results were, apparently, astonishing. With no ‘teaching’ as such, the kids soon worked out how to use the computer, download anti-virus software and all manner of other computer abilities. By themselves! If you want to watch Mitra himself talking about it (after winning a HUGE cash prize for his work) you can see his TED talk here.

Mitra’s idea is that that the concept of schools has had its day. He says:  I’m not saying they’re (= schools) broken. It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system’s broken. It’s not broken. It’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated, and he goes on to suggest that we need to create ‘self-organised’ learning, in SOLEs (self-organised learning environments) where people gather round computers (or use handheld devices), sometimes with the help of a remote ‘granny’ asking them ‘yes but how are you doing this?’ etc. So no more school, then, just kids solving problems  (like how DNA works – and they did this in a foreign language in one experiment he describes, though with little real detail) together, because they can do this, and don’t need it done to them. A utopia, in other words, where children are simply set together to work things out for themselves. Because we don’t NEED to have good handwriting or be able to do multiplication (all those things that outdated schools taught); we don’t need to KNOW anything any more, only to be able to work things out collaboratively, by ourselves and with ourselves.

Sounds a bit Lord of the Flies?  Perhaps. Because despite the immense popular appeal and reputation that Sugata Mitra has evoked, many are not convinced. Donald Clark, for example, questions the way the hole-in-the-wall experiment was funded (by a computer company); suggests that in using mentors (and having computers in schools) all these SOLES are just schools in disguise and worries that giving an anecdote-driven ‘inspirational’ TED talk (where the audience pays up to $10,00) is not the same as producing qualitative research. He (Donald Clark) thinks that only low-level learning takes place (something Mitra implicitly denies in his TED talk), and most damningly accuses Mitra of the very colonialism that he (Mitra) credits with having invented the school system in the first place [my own take? Schools are and were a lot older and more diverse than the British empire. Education has been around a lot longer than that, and in different contexts].

In a startling piece by a soon-to-be TED lecturer herself, Audrey Waters has serious doubts about the whole hole-in-the-wall and SOLE philosophy too. She writes:  ”I have questions about community support. I have questions about what happens when we dismantle public institutions like schools — questions about social justice, questions about community, questions about care. I have questions about the promise of a liberation via a “child-driven education,” questions about this particular brand of neo-liberalism, techno-humanitarianism, and techno-individualism“. Tellingly she suggests that much of the ‘let-children-do-it-themselves-with-the-help-of-wonderful-devices ‘ philosophy comes from a libertarian silcone valley kind of way of looking at things (our shiny technology is the answer to everything!) – a proposition that, because of his emphasis on what poor kids can achieve, Sugata Mitra would most assuredly disavow. But still.

Finally, ‘Torn Halves’ remarks that:  One of the concepts conspicuously absent from Mitra’s critique of empire is that of community. He is all in favour of children working in groups to learn from each other, but he seems hostile to the idea of a community organising itself and organising the education of its children, and he goes on to question why Sugata Mitra didn’t go to the communities he touched first to ask them what THEY wanted and needed, rather than ‘imposing’ his experiments. Was Mitra, in other words, guilty of the very colonialism that he starts his TED talk with?

Gosh, all this hurts my brain! I’m captivated by the promise that Sugata Mitra seems to offer, but seriously alarmed (as always) by people who say we don’t need schools (because they have served humanity well when they have worked, it seems to me – though there is, of course, much that can be done better). I find the notion that all children will learn well with and from each other somewhat idealistic. And yet the idea that learning can come from a sense of wondrous enquiry is deeply attractive to me.

On the other hand, it is telling that the one example that Sugata Mitra shows of a ‘granny’ helping in a SOLE has her (in the UK) drilling kids in India via Skype. Self-organised learning? I don’t think so. Old-fashioned stuff with a bit of technology thrown in.

But don’t take my word for any of this. Go and watch his talk yourselves and, perhaps, answer these questions:

1 Is technology starting to drive learning (cf what Pearson are doing – that was at the top of this blogpost), or is learning directing technological development?

2 Is ‘school’ outdated? or perhaps, what is the role of school in our modern world?

3 How much self-organised learning can (and indeed should) children be asked to do, and how confident are you of its success?

4 How on earth can we evaluate the glowing evangelism of a TED talk?

To explain….I was listening the other day (by chance) to a programme called Open Book, and one of the interviewees was a woman called Natalie Phillips (see picture below), a cognitive psychologist who has recently done some research in which subjects were sent through MRI brain scanners whilst reading extracts from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. My curiosity was aroused because in this 200^th anniversary year for Austen’s Pride and Prejudice I have re-read that novel and have enjoyed thinking (for the first time in ages) about the world Jane Austen portrays.

But it was what Phillips says happened in that MRI scanner that really got me going. If I understand it correctly, it goes like this: when her subjects were reading Mansfield Park for pleasure the scanner showed a rush of blood to a certain part of the brain. But when, later, they were shown an extract from the novel which they were asked to analyse (= study/concentrate on), the blood flow increased dramatically – and went to a different part of the same brains. In other words, reading for pleasure and concentrated reading seem (in her research) to be different processes. That’s what I heard her say on the radio – and that is what is also reported here and here.

And this line of thinking coincided, for me, on the same day, with reading David R Hill’s survey review of graded readers in the ELT Journal (Hill, D 2013).  Before you read it I need to say that personally I am a huge fan of extensive reading using ‘graded readers’, and have always advocated their use because the more students of a foreign language read in that language, the better they get. (I should disclose that I am hosting the Extensive Reading Foundation awards at IATEL 2013 in Liverpool, so you can see that I mean what I say!).

Anyway.

And like many other methodologists and reading enthusiasts I have always advocated reading for pleasure (aka extensive reading) and trumpeted its superiority over reading for study (aka intensive reading). But in a startling passage of  his review, Hill writes:

…….there is tacit support for reading for pleasure and most enthusiasts use this argument to promote ER (extensive reading). I have come to believe this is unfortunate for five reasons. One, most students find reading in a foreign language difficult and not at all pleasurable, certainly at first. Two, students can obtain pleasure more easily in many other ways (mostly related to a screen). Three, aspiring students (and parents) expect to work and not to have fun while they are at school. Four, when entertainment is the foremost reason for reading, publishers, teachers, and students have no focus for selecting titles. Finally, and most important, promoting ER as reading for pleasure almost guarantees its status as an optional extra on a par with a keep-fit class.

I think that ER has to be justified on the grounds that it aids learning and I am attracted to the proposition that it helps to establish patterns in the brain and promote automaticity. Until there is research evidence to prove the case, I suggest that the strongest argument in support of ER is that it is the readiest means by which students can obtain the information about culture and history that they need for a deep level of communication. (88)

So, two brains? No of course not. But two different processes (as Phillips’ research seems to suggest). Acquisition vs learning anyone? That would certainly make us all think again. And IF there really ARE two different processes going on, then is that ‘learning mode’ actually better for us when we read and/or study? Better than, say absorbing language for and through pleasure? That perhaps is the question Scott Thornbury was asking some years ago in a talk called ‘No pain, no gain’, a threnody that has been picked up in a somewhat ramshackle way (it seems to me) by Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill. In passing I think they may be mixing cause and effect, and I wish there was more reading/research behind their claims, but still…..

Mention of Scott Thornbury reminds me that in the same edition of the ELT Journal he reviewed my book Essential Teacher Knowledge. I am (genuinely) flattered that the book was even worthy of his attention and he has a lot to say with which I readily agree (and wince about!). But in the course of his review (Thornbury 2013) he writes:

He (= me!) devotes the bulk of his overview to reviewing a theory (specifically Krashen’s Input Hypothesis) that, however influential it was in its time now feels somewhat superannuated. (131)

Well yes. And no. Because the discussion about the different processes of the brain, and the way that different activities stimulate different parts of it – something that Stephen Krashen talked about and which, though he may have got it wrong in many people’s eyes, still seems to me to be an ongoing and engaging issue – is brought into sharp focus yet again (in at least one part of my brain) by what I saw and heard last week.

Superannuated? Probably. I am, anyway, even if the arguments aren’t!!

What do you think?

References

Hill, D R (2013)  Survey review: Graded readers. ELT Journal 67/1

Thornbury, S (2013) Review of Essential Teacher Knowledge. ELT Journal 67/1

To be a good musician you have to practise because ‘practice makes perfect’. Or does it? Or rather, what kind of music practice is good practice? The video is what violinist, violist and music teacher Christina Everson said when I asked her that question a couple of months ago.

Her answer was typical of the many people I have videoed in preparing the session. Inter alia, they talk of practising often and intensively for only a short time rather than playing for hours. They emphasise that practising = problem solving (e.g. concentrating on the bits that cause you trouble) rather than playing straight through and solidifying bad habits and that (as Christina says) you have to really listen to yourself (= monitor yourself) as you work.

Is learning a language like this? Well yes and no I guess! You are unlikely to become a proficient language user without practice, and you are unlikely to be able to conquer the fear of using a foreign language if you have not tried to use words and phrases before (even if only in your head). If fluency, for example, has a lot to do with deploying lexical chunks ‘automatically’ then just like the musician who practises so that that in performance they can concentrate on how to ‘feel’ the music rather than panicking about the notes, then you have to learn the chunks, practise them, concentrate (in Chrissie’s words) on them. Don’t you?

Which brings me, of course, to Stephen Krashen (see picture above) and his acquisition vs learning duality. In his A-Z of ELT blog Scott Thornbury doubted whether this discussion was (or even should be ) still current – e.g. the discussion about whether ‘concentrated-on’ language could ever become part of the acquired store, and whether or not monitoring one’s output was a good thing, or whether it just interferes with communication.

Yet this IS the big question, it seems to me. The good music practiser solves problems but then goes on to play through a piece, to perform it. Does that whole-piece practice work in the same way as short bursts of problem-solving?

For those who are interested in following up this debate I highly recommend (for the second time on this blog) a book by the linguist and cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus called Guitar Zero about his experience of learning to play guitar.

But for the moment (and that’s what my talk will be about), I am left with the following questions:

1 How should students practise language in class? In short problem-solving bursts or in long communicative flows?

2 Is homework done better in short frequent bursts or in less frequent longer chunks?

3 What kind of ‘concentration’ is appropriate for language learners?

4 What does appropriate correction look like? Is ‘reformulation’ even remotely useful? Or are what Wong and Waring (2009) call ‘pursuit’ questions and ‘problematizing’ student  responses the way forward?

5 What does good repetition look like?

Reference:

Wong, J & Waring, Z (2009) ‘Very good’ as a teacher response. ELT Journal 63/3

Recently I have read a book called Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist. In it he talks about his efforts, in his late thirties, to learn the guitar from scratch. I found this passage especially interesting (remember he’s talking about music teachers). Here goes:

“Why do we need teachers at all? The most obvious answer is that teachers know things that the students don’t, be it the most efficient fingering for a sequence of notes in Beethoven’s ninth or the difference between a diminished chord and an augmented chord. Another reason, of course is that teachers can serve as motivators, either through carrots (gold stars and stickers) or through sticks (mortification, shame, or bad grades). For an adult learner teachers also likely provide incentive: most of us probably practice less than we should, and then race to catch up when our next lesson is coming up. Good teachers can also impose structure, helping us know what to practice and when. It is not enough to say, ‘Go home and practice’; a good teacher says what to practice and how: the most skilled teachers aim to help their students practice efficiently. But beyond all this, the most important role of the teacher may be to help the students pinpoint the errors and target their weaknesses; beginning students especially, are often too busy trying to make music. They don’t really hear what they are playing. As one sage academic and music teaching put it ‘(Often too much of a student’s) attention is devoted to the production of the music, not (enough) to monitoring the results of the sound.’ Teachers can be brilliant in this regard .” (Marcus, G (2012) Guitar Zero. Oneworld Publishing page 66)

Do you think he’s right? Are those the reasons we need teachers? Or are there others?

I’ve been thinking about drilling as a language teaching/learning technique, recently. That’s partly because in a new book of mine about teaching methodology I devote a whole double-page spread to drilling and repetition, and I wonder if I’m out of step with ‘the others’. And it’s partly because we all (teachers and methodologists) seem to be going through a look-back reflective stage at the moment. It’s partly because learning a musical instrument has made me think about repetitive practice. And anyway, I am preparing a new talk on drilling – and preparing a new talk concentrates the mind!

Drilling was the habit-forming technique which underpinned Audio-lingual methodology, and which erupted into prominence in the audio-active-compare sequence which language laboratories were originally designed to accommodate.

Drilling survives today in procedures such as PPP (Presentation, practice and Production) – it’s in the second phase! But no one likes it very much (or likes talking about it).

Or do they? I went looking to see what they say. Doug Brown doesn’t mention it in Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, and neither does Tricia Hedge in Teaching and Learning in the Language classroom. Penny Ur gives one example of a habit forming drill in the new edition of A Course in English Language Teaching, but Graham Hall suggests that there eave been numerous strong criticisms of the idea that habit-formation by itself offers a full explanation of how languages are learned (page 65) in his book Exploring English language Teaching. Scott Thornbury says it still goes on, even in ‘communicative’ classrooms in his A-Z of ELT, and in most of my writings I talk about stopping doing it as soon as possible!

But, in case you are getting all worried because you (yes, YOU) are a driller, let Jim Scrivener, in his latest edition of Learning Teaching,  reassure you: So don’t worry too much about your colleagues or methodology books who (sic) tell you not to bother with drills! Certainly there is some danger that students repeating are just making noises with little idea what they are saying, but of all activities I the classroom, the oral drill is the one which can be most productively demanding on accuracy (page 170).

In his excellent blog post on repetition Scott Thornbury quoted Clare Kramsch’s suggestion that Utterances repeated are also resignified. And that’s where Long Day’s Journey into Night comes in. I saw it on the London stage last night with the actors (amongst others) that you have seen in the video clip. A brilliant production with some exceptional acting, and a forest of words that the actors have to say night after night after night – a torrent of, yes, resignified words. Wow! If only students could do that!!

So here are three questions I would be most interested to know the answers to:

1 Do you like drilling as a teacher/as a student? Why?

2 What part, if any, does learning lines to act (drama) have in language learning?

3 Are there other ways of getting the same benefits that drilling gave/gives us?

I was reminded of all this today when they played the Gil Shaham recording of the violin concerto by Korngold on the radio. And (as always when I hear it) I was taken back to an experience I had of genuine spiritual ecstasy (or so it seemed at the time). I was walking from the terminal building at Bonaire aiport, back over the hot tarmac to where the clapped out (but refuelled) KLM DC10 was waiting to take us on to Lima. Playing on my mini-disc player (remember them?) and invading the headphones, was the Gil Shahan recording I heard again this morning. It was a completely incongruous moment, but there was that feeling of sublime divinity (you know what I mean, though it may not be music that does it for you) which – even though it was some years ago – I have never forgotten.

(The music? Well Erich Korngold was a Viennese wunderkind who ended up writing amazing film scores for great films of the thirties and forties like The Sea Hawk – you can see the original trailer of the film – with Korngold’s music – here). His violin concerto uses extracts from these Hollywood scores to fashion a dreamy (soupy?) score and here is Hilary Hahn performing the 1st movement (the music that got to me on that day).

All of this leads me to wonder about he following questions:

1 Do you love, like, feel indifferent to or hate this music?

2 Do you love, like, feel indifferent to or hate music in general? Do you/can you work to it or do you need silence?

3 When/if you teach do you play music in the classroom? Why? Why not?

4 What do you think of this scenario: a teacher in an English lesson organises students into groups and then puts on some background music while they work. When he or she judges the activity is over, the music is switched off, whatever is playing?

5 What is your best music-based activity ever?

Small questions. Big answers?

The first time I did the presentation I then showed the following video clip about the Plan Ceibal (the one-laptop-per-child project in Uruguay). It takes a full 5 minutes, but it’s well worth watching.

And various questions are posed by these two ‘extremes’ – and suddenly became immediately relevant in the context of ITC access in Bulgaria. And that’s what this blog is all about. Here goes:

1 If you can ‘teach with a stick in the desert’ why do you need fancy technology?

2 If you were able to get the money to equip a whole country with free broadband and one-laptop-per-child, would you do it? And if so what would you do with it? How suspicious are you when (as in a country – not Uruguay – recently) governments hand out tablets or IWBs as a mark of progress?

3 How relevant is discussion of the digital age when, as in Bulgaria, very very few schools have access to the kind of technology. Would I have been better off talking about desert & stick techniques?

4 And just because kids are completely familiar with (and use) digital technology, does that mean we need to (or that they want us to)?

5 And (a question I posed at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow) does being a good teacher automatically include (in 2012) being IT-competent?

(for the record, in the talk last week I referenced Vicky Saumell’s digital storytelling blog, talked about Bruno Andrade’s use of Skype (and talked about how @TEFLpet uses it too), pinched a lovely idea from @feedtheteacher and then referred teachers to Eduardo Santos’ lovely use of QR codes, took them through one of Jamie Keddie’s Youtube ideas, showed mini video interviews with various teachers (incl @little_miss-glo), told them about the work of Languagelab in Second Life, showed theme videos from Essential Teacher Knowledge  etc etc etc)