Where do ideas come from?

One of 11 pages from the 2015 edition of the Practice of ELT; there are ideas everywhere!!

I didn’t want to write this blog post. I still don’t want to but events, and the ever-grinding wheels of the ELT rumour mill, make it almost unavoidable. Coupled with that is the fact that, with no intention or action on my part, things are being said and discussed which are to some, it seems, frustratingly opaque.

In case you have no idea what I am talking about it is the accusation, made in a closed Facebook group where (quite rightly) I have no access or ability to defend myself – and since repeated elsewhere – that I stole someone’s talk (and others’) and passed it off as my own. If that accusation was indeed true I would be guilty of severe professional misconduct.

Every talk I prepare – and I assume this goes for other conference speakers and workshop leaders – takes a long long time to put together. Weeks sometimes, sometimes much much longer. In that process we read, listen watch, attend other talks, have conversations, and suck in information from all sides. Speaking personally it is sometimes an incredibly lonely process interrupted by sudden flashes of excitement and the wonderful moment when things start falling into place – so that a talk finally emerges. Ideas, during this process, fly around everywhere.

In the case in point I became interested in a particular topic because of a plenary I attended (and have acknowledged everywhere) nearly two years ago. I used that talk as the basis for planning my own session on a similar topic. During the subsequent months (in this case literally months) it took to put my talk together I scoured the internet, read, referred back to my earlier talks, blogs, books etc and kept my eyes and ears wide open to what was going on in the world and which might add ‘grist to the mill’. And had a number of conversations. One of these – stimulating, wide-ranging and enjoyable – lead to the current accusation, even though it was only one of many many sources for my thinking and talk development.

It gets difficult, this blizzard of ideas etc and can sometimes lead to accusations, for example, of using someone else’s ‘meme’ or idea – even where such ideas are in common currency all around us and no one can really claim ownership of them.

This kind of problem is not new: classical music composers have always incorporated parts of other people’s work (even where they are not conscious of it). They use folk tunes, and draw from a tapestry of all the other melodies floating in the air around and above them as they seek for inspiration. I think of the times, sitting in orchestra, rehearsing a symphony by X and suddenly thinking ‘wait a minute – that’s a direct copy of something written by Y’ – though it wasn’t really a copy at all, at least not a deliberate copy, just part of the creative sharing, borrowing, and unconscious intertexuality of music creation. As a songwriter myself I understand the difficulty (aka impossibility) of ever producing a song which is genuinely melodically original. To say nothing of the lyrics.

And what of ELT and the talks and workshops that many of us (wish to) offer. I have an endless supply of memories of sitting in a conference hearing someone else tell a joke or anecdote that I thought was ‘mine’!! (which it almost certainly never was; I will probably have got it from somewhere else myself). I think of the many many times when someone has used my formulation of something (from, say, one of my methodology books) without saying where it came from – because it had become, in some way, common currency. Or worse, that sinking feeling, as you attend someone else’s talk, that yours has ‘had it’, because theirs is so similar (and usually better). And yes, inadvertently I may have done the same with other speakers’ content (that is if it WAS their original content in the first place), though I try to be as scrupulous as I can be about these things (as do my peers, the ones I respect anyway). The fact is that we learn endlessly and continually from the amazing wealth of talent around us all in the field of ELT. In that context, if someone brings a lack of attribution to our attention (that we didn’t give proper credit where credit was due) we are honour bound to do something about it.

In the case that provoked this post, amongst the many other speakers, books, sources I referenced during the talk (and there were a lot) it IS true that I was discourteous enough not to mention my conversee as one of the many people I had read, watched, listened to or talked with (but only one, and not the one I based my talk on); made aware of that I instantly did so – as I am and was honour-bound to do – in the places where such acknowledgement might be useful or helpful for them. (I have resolved never to give the talk again, as it happens; I have no desire to cause anyone upset, even if I disagree, categorically, with their view of the situation. To be clear you have not stolen someone’s talk and passed it off as your own if your talk was actually based on someone else’s talk – acknowledged – not the one alleged! And anyway, there are a lot of other things to talk about in ELT).

This whole area of ideas and who they belong to is, as I have said, complex and difficult to negotiate. An accusation of stealing is serious; a carelessness in giving credit is regrettable. So if there is anyone else out there who thinks I (or other speakers) have stolen their talk or ideas, please let us know and if they are right I (and I am sure colleagues in a similar situation) will instantly do something about it (if anything can be done). In my case I should point out that I have a detailed record, going back to 1993, of exactly when I first (and subsequently) gave the many talks I have worked on. That should at least make it easy to establish any causal chronological relation there is (if there is one) between someone else’s work and mine, for example. In the muddy in-between? More difficult (as this blog suggests), but we’ll try. At least I will.

So that’s my blog. Please feel free to comment – respectfully, as I have tried to do here. The real question is this; who owns ideas and how should we deal with that?

Does size matter? Or is it shape? Or room?

As October faded into November I found myself giving talks at the fabulous TELLSI conference in Mashad, Iran, immediately followed by a stint at the IGA conference (Instituto Guatamalteco-Americano) in Guatemala City, and then MEXTESOL in Queretero, Mexico. That was special because it was the organisation’s 40th anniversary, and I have to admit (proudly, come on, proudly!) that I spoke at MEXTESOL’s first ever conference in Tampico all those years ago.

Perhaps the most interesting of the three conferences was the one in Iran. Why? Well because it’s not so easy to get to Iran right now (though it may, InshAllah, get easier soon if our governments talk more to each other). But the conference was beautifully organised, the welcome was effusive and the standard of presentations was terrifically high. I found myself wishing that there had been more international visitors listening to the riches that Iranian ELT has to offer.

In Mashad, at the Tabran Institute of Higher Education I spoke in a large theatre, more or less rectangular-shaped, with me on one of the shorter sides (in other words it was a kind of vertical arrangement, full frontal – see the photo)

The teachers at the 2013 TELLSI conference in Iran

In Mexico I spoke in a massive modern theatre with galleries and circles things. But other large-audience speakers found themselves speaking in  rectangular rooms, only they were on one of the long sides of the rectangle. In other words they had a kind of horizontal room to deal with. That’s often happened to me, as in a Pearson conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina some years ago (see picture)

The thing is, I find it much much more difficult to animate one of those ‘sideways-on’ rooms than a long vertical one, and I wondered whether there is something wrong with me! But all the walking from side to side is sooo tiring (maybe I should stay still)! With a full-length room you can still feel like you are talking to the back of the room, but in a sideways-on room I always feel as if some people (especially in the front rows) are far far away. Rooms like that never get so engaged (I think) as vertical rooms.

Or is it just me? Or are there other things going on? For example, I reckon the acoustics make or break a presentation. I was in a large room with echo-ey acoustics in Montevideo a few weeks ago and I couldn’t understand a word the speaker said (but that might have been my Spanish!). Is the distance of the stage from the audience a factor (if you can’t get down to the audience level)? Or is the deciding factor (for success./engagement etc) the amount of available space? Do you prefer (both as speaker and participant) a crowded or nearly empty space?

If YOU were designing a new conference space how would you design it? When you go to a presentation where do YOU like the speaker to be? If you are a frequent presenter, what’s your favourite and least favourite space?

I’d be fascinated to hear your views.

Teaching competitions and lesson polishing: would you do them?

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at the recent IATEFL conference was by a Chinese trainer called Jun Zheng. Unfortunately her session was not filmed and so is not online (but there are many other fabulous presentations and interviews available here) She talked about ‘Moke’ – or ‘polishing’ lessons. She showed us pictures of the public teaching competitions that are a feature of educational life in China (but which many westerners find ‘peculiar’).

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?

To animate or not to animate…..

In less than an hour I will be doing a webinar (repeated later today to accommodate different time zones around the world. We (that’s me and Pearson) will be using the Saba platform which means the people attending get to see and hear me and they get to see my Powerpoint slides. In return I get to see who’s come along and I can read their text chat which runs as the webinar is going on.

(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)?

The stuff of nightmares – but what’s yours?

Next week it’s the IATEFL conference, the annual getting-together of our ‘tribe’, one that pre-dates (but includes) the twitter folk (aka PLN). It is always god to see so many friends and colleagues in one place.

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!

How digital are you? And why?!

I found myself in Bulgaria last week  (and very beautiful it was too). I was giving a new talk (as requested) about the impact of the digital world in language teaching.  I started by showing the following photo (taken in 2007 and used in a recent book of mine) and asking the audience to reflect on what technology  they could see. Hell,  you can imagine all those teacher training sessions 2000 years ago on ‘the impact of chalk in language teaching’.

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)

Not another post-IATEFL blog! Well yes, as it happens……

There has been some energetic blogging going on since the 46th IATEFL conference drew to an end last Friday. For sheer stamina no one can match Chia Suan Chong‘s long diary entries (she’s only got to day 2 and she’s already posted 6 times!), but she’s not the only one. There are lots more….addd them in the comments if you want or let me know and I’ll include more here.

Those are Scott Thornbury’s cherries, by the way, courtesy of ELT pics. I used them in my Pecha Kucha introduction because they look luscious.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about the wonderful things I heard, or the events I went to or anything like that. I just thought I would pass on 4 things I think I learnt/worried about in Glasgow:

1 Over-officious health and safety people stopped many of us attending talks in the ways we normally do (standing at the back, sitting on the floor etc). It was irritating and inconsistent (some of the conference centre officials let us through). It ruined one whole day for me. On the other hand health and safety rules are there for people’s safety. Were they right to be so doctrinaire?

2 I will never be critical of Twitter again. People like @jemjemgardner, @chiasuan, @sandymillin, @jimscriv immeasurably improved my conference experience by tweeting intelligently and coherently from talks I couldn’t  or didn’t go to. I got to be plugged into a whole conference thread (questioning assumptions) that I would otherwise have missed. It was (is) a great way to be a fully involved conference attender. You can be in one talk and simultaneously follow what’s happening in others. Great. Isn’t it?

3 Presenting with no technology at all (except a clip-on mike) is incredibly liberating. It feels comfortable, and strangely ‘honest’. I’m not quite sure what I mean by that (and I love my Keynote and power points etc etc), but it is ‘teacherly’. Would you do it?

4 What we say isn’t necessarily what people hear. For example, at the end of my talk I was attacked big time by two men who assured me that I had been stereotyping Germans and accusing them of being humourless etc. They were very cross. Indeed. Hmm. I did say something about a mismatch in learning culture between touchy-feely ice-breaking Brits and Swiss German students who wanted to get on with lessons rather than have warmers thrown at them at every lesson beginning. But that was more about British teacher insensitiveness than anything else – and not a single German was involved in my comment. In fact the only German I mentioned….hell, what’s the point? I absolutely know I said nothing stereotypical about any nationality; only questioned some assumptions. So I guess those guys heard something from their own heads triggered, I suppose, by something I said. I wonder…..is that the same with students? How do we know they hear what we say and not something else entirely? Is it anything we can control?

Any thoughts?

Being naked – is presentation technology really necessary?

The collapse of not one, but TWO computers 3 days ago was a bit of a shock, as you can imagine, but it got me thinking. Nothing concentrates the professional (well, and social) life quite like it. As i write, sitting on a Turkish Airlines flight, the big question in my mind is will the guy I left my main computer with over the weekend have been able to restore my corrupted hard disk – or at least get all the data from it? Actually, that’s not the big question really. The big question is whether I would be able to continue doing presentations without my computer – or at least without an iPad – the device that allowed me to present at Izmir Özel Türk Koleji yesterday. Perhaps it would be better not to use any technology at all

[Picture & links to follow, but see, I am posting on the iPad and I’m not so good at it with this device!]

Wow, that thought scares me! I have got used to accompanying words with pretty pictures, slide transitions, video clips, music – all that kind of stuff. ‘Nice transition’ somebody said to me recently (which was kind of exciting!) because I had used Keynote. But others have said the opposite – namely that too much visual ‘noise’ detracts from what you are trying to say, and can be very irritating. I have quite pronounced views about using Powerpoint and Keynote, which I have blogged about before. They can be used awesomely well, or appallingly badly!

The point is this: how would you feel if you suddenly had to present ‘naked’ (I mean, of course, with no technical backup)? Could you do a ‘Crystal’? – that is David Crystal standing there and wowing his audience with nothing more technological than a microphone? Or (from the other side) do you LIKE watching presentations which eschew technology, that are, in the jargon of the times, ‘unplugged’? I only ask because it has suddenly become clear to me (partly because of my computer problems, and partly because the hectic travel schedule I am locked into provides almost no time for the complex business of putting together an AV show) that I am going to have to present unplugged (how ironic!) at the most important conference of the year. And it scares the **** out of me!

Would you be scared (like me)? Or would you, if you happened to find yourself in my (or anyone else’s) presentation with no technical backup, be relieved and happy to see someone speak – just speak?

How long does preparation take YOU?

Forgive me for repeating myself (a frequent and unattractive trait), but there’s this Dickens thing coming up. Tomorrow.

(By the time you read this it will probably have happened already).

Oh sorry! If you don’t know what I am talking about, it’s a show I am doing/have done with friend and colleague Steve Bingham about the magical storytelling of Charles Dickens. The British Council asked us to do it and we have had great fun putting the words and music together for the show. Oh, and since it’s his 200th (and 1 day) birthday today here’s a last photo of of him!

But the point is – and the point of this post – is that it took a long long long long time to choose and prepare and rehearse and tryout our 65-minute show. Hours of time.

And it’s the same with conference presentations. I was talking to my colleagues at a conference in Barcelona last weekend, and there seems to be some variability about this. Some presenters (like me) spend hours and days and weeks building huge documents of notes, suggestions, pictures etc until they gradually coalesce into something that has a narrative – and the possibility of engaging a group of listening teachers. Others seem to be happy to throw a new idea – or a quick description of what they are doing – at an audience in record time.

And what happens when/if the talk is ready? Well for me it takes about two or three ‘goes’ before I feel really comfortable with what I am talking about – before I know how to pace things well.

At the weekend I saw a brand new talk from Scott Thornbury on the use of gesture, physical movement etc in language learning and teaching. I would happily listen to it/watch it again tomorrow because like all his talks it was engaging, thought-provoking and enjoyable. I’d love to see it again after 3 or 4 more outings too – to see how it has evolved!

Is that the same with planning lessons, I wonder?

Right now I SHOULD be preparing 3 new talks for a trip to Vietnam in two weeks. But I am blocked by the knowledge that there is no time.Help me someone!!!

It’s all Mr Dickens’ fault.

What about you, I wonder? How much preparation do you need to do when you present to teachers (or work with students)?

I’d love to know.

Style vs substance – what’s your view?

I have blogged before about the difficulty of ‘knowing’ when something is either good or bad – about how to have a standard to evaluate things with/by, and if you want, you can read that post here.

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.