How I see it now

In my previous post, I mentioned that I had completed a four-semester course in prevention of drug abuse at schools. One of the things that has stuck with me is that it’s very hard to notice the absence of something. For instance, if a student suddenly starts misbehaving, your attention is immediately drawn to it. You may find out that the student’s misbehaviour has deeper roots and you start acting in one way or another. You may try to talk to the student, give them advice, point them to a specialist, etc. However, in a group of boisterous teenagers, you may fail to notice that one of them is quieter than usual. In other words, the absence of misbehaviour of one particular student is harder to clock. If you think about it, this absence may, in the end, indicate something much more serious than if the majority of the class are mere troublemakers.

I realize I myself tend to overlook something in class just because I’m forced to focus on the salient aspects of what’s happening there. Somebody’s missing homework immediately captures my attention. Then, in an attempt to fix a thing which is deemed unacceptable, I may easily miss something equally undesirable going on right under my nose (for example that the rest of the class have their homework just because they copied it from one another during the break).

Even in a communicative language classroom, it’s likely that at some point, you’ll create an environment in which you’ll miss important things. For example, during a mingling activity, you may be under the impression that everything’s perfect. The kids chat and laugh and thus you believe they are learning. Running dictations are certainly fun but do all students benefit from them? What about slower or introverted kids? However, this doesn’t only apply to language teaching. My ten-year-old son once told me that it distracts him a lot when his classmates shout ‘finished’ one by one when they solve a math problem. He needs more time and the fact that the others start shouting prevents him from concentrating. Does his teacher notice this? My other son told me that in PE lessons, he used to be the one to be picked last by the team captains. He gradually got used to it. Did the teacher?

Another thing I learned during the course was that even the nicest kids can be the worst bullies. What’s more, even the worst forms of bullying can easily go undetected because the whole group has already accepted and complies to the norms of the bullies so to an outsider, everything may appear in order at first sight. It’only when you go deeper and start looking for things which are out of your sight, i.e. which are absent, that you realize something’s not quite right.

Ironically, we, teachers, are sometimes as cruel as the kids – without even realizing it. When dividing the class into two teams, it’s us who ask two students to pick their team members and we do it again and again even though we know the same kids will be ‘picked’ last. We prevent kids from concentrating in the name of communicativeness. We fail to notice things because, for some reason, they are not salient to our mind. Or is it because it’s sometimes convenient and more comfortable for us to leave things as they are?

My regular readers might have noticed that I’ve been blogging a bit less recently. Also, I’ve been reading ELT blogs less than I would like to and that’s what I feel a bit guilty about. However, it’s not because I’ve lost interest in ELT but because my attention has temporarily been diverted from it. Two things have taken most of my time this year – 1) completing my four-semester course in the field of prevention of drug abuse at schools and 2) fitness and healthy lifestyle.

Don’t stop reading, my fellow English teachers. Both of the above-mentioned have more to do with my original profession than it may appear at first sight. The course has substantially widened my horizons in the field of psychology and therapy. It has changed me as a person and my view on social work in general.

While throughout the course I focused on my and other people’s psyche (the soul, mind, spirit, or invisible animating entity which occupies the physical body, if you will), my private life has revolved around fitness and healthy dieting (yes, it requires a lot of your attention and mental energy). Since June 2018, I have lost about 17 kilos (almost 38 pounds). This means that I virtually have a new body. I weigh less than I did when I graduated from high school. Inevitably, this has affected my personal as well as professional life a lot. Since I lost most of the weight over the summer holidays, my colleagues and many students could not but notice the change when I turned up at school in September.

Believe it or not, having a new body may, under certain circumstances, mean that you become a totally new person – to yourself and other people as well. From a practical point of view, life certainly becomes easier and more satisfying in many ways. This is related to the fact that your confidence increases tremendously. However, there is a dark side to it too. Since most people are obsessed with being slim these days, paradoxically, losing weight suddenly appears to be the biggest achievement of your life ever.

Some people see me as a role model now, which is good. I’ve got used to being constantly asked what on earth I have done and how the hell I have achieved such a substantial weight loss. The only problem is that I don’t have a secret recipe. I normally say that I’ve got into sports (mainly jogging and yoga). But it’s obviously not the whole story. What I think is that I simply made the right decision at the right time and then stuck to it. That’s it.

This, I think, applies to any change that happens in our life. If we are to lead a happy life, we need to make the right decisions at the right time and then stick to them for long enough for the desired change to evolve to its full potential. This is my motto for the upcoming year too. Wish me luck. 🙂

Happy new year!

In one of the recent lessons, I decided to combine my favourite literature genre (inspirational quotes) with a not so popular method of learning/teaching a foreign language (translation).

First things first. Last year, I got this wonderful hand-made present from a friend of mine – a jar full of inspirational quotes. In the jar, there were precisely 364 colourful slips of paper – one quote for each day of 2018. Since most of them were in English, I thought it would be cool to bring them to school toward the end of this year and share them with my students.

As far as quotes are concerned, I described one way of using them in English lessons here. In this particular case, the teacher works with one quote only and gradually builds the whole lesson around it.

This time, however, I focused on quantity (we used as many quotes as there were students in the class). Also, in this particular lesson, I primarily wanted to check my students’ ability to deal with the translation of a literary genre. I guess that other than that there were no other linguistic aims.

So, each student picked a quote from the jar. I gave them some time to read it silently and let it sink in. Then a random student read their quote out loud. I waited a few moments. Then I picked a different student and asked them to translate the quote into Czech. I encouraged them to divert from the literal translation if necessary. I reminded them of Google Translate and what it sometimes does. The student who had translated their peer’s quote then read theirs, etc. This was a good strategy because it made the students pay attention more than if they had just had to focus on their slip of paper. Sometimes, the quote had to be read several times, often in small chunks, to make it possible for the other student to translate it. This inconvenience was partially caused by the fact that the interpreter couldn’t see the text.

All in all, despite being an English teacher, I was totally impressed by my students’ ability to produce beautiful Czech utterances. Honestly, I was a bit surprised too because we don’t practice L2 > L1 translation a lot in class. Also, since students constantly immerse themselves in English (movies, music, computer games), I sort of supposed they had partially lost their ability to produce decent Czech. 🙂 I was wrong. They only struggled with a couple of individual English words, which was quite natural given that some of the language was way above the B1 level, but overall, they did very well.

This gives me some hope. The German Department at our school takes part in various translation competitions which we, the English Department, usually avoid. We justify this arguing that we teach communicatively, so our students don’t get enough exposure to translation techniques. But again, we may be wrong. Perhaps it’s not just about extensive translation practice but merely about the students’ knowledge of L2 and L1 combined with life experience.

You might have noticed that I’ve recently been sharing pictures of my classroom boards on Facebook (and Twitter, occasionally). It’s a little crazy and self-indulgent if you think about it. Well, it’s definitely over the top for someone who’s not a member of the ELT community and/or hasn’t heard of the eltwhiteboard hashtag.

Anyway, like I said, over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking pictures of my board work and added them in an album on FB. There’s no system or order in it. If I think a picture is worth it, I share it.

Now, if you’ve seen the photos, you’ll know that my board work is not exactly impeccable. Still, I think it’s very useful for me to look at the photos in hindsight. First of all, it’s a great tool for my classes because I can use the pictures in any of the subsequent lessons. It’s much more efficient than writing the whole thing up again if you want to revise the material. I’ve noticed that it usually jogs my students’ memory quickly, especially if they helped me create the board in the previous lesson by adding items to a mindmap, filling in gaps, etc.

Not only is it good for my students, but it’s also good for me. It’s a great way of observing part of my work in retrospect. I’ve come to a couple of observations:

The board always looks nicer in reality than in a photo (I should clean the board more thoroughly). I sometimes think wow! but then I conclude hm, ok.

My handwriting is not bad but there’s still some space for improvement. In combination with a filthy surface, the result can get a bit illegible.

Coloured chalks look cool. Use them more often regardless of the fact that you are a secondary school teacher. 🙂

If you have time to prepare (and clean) your board before the lesson and write on a wet surface, the result is much better when it gets dry.

There’s one way to find out that your board work is cool – your students will take pictures of it. 😀

Also, believe it or not, some of your non-ELT friends may even learn from your boards. 🙂

To sum up, it’s great to have a visual record of what you’ve been doing in your lessons. By looking at the photos, you can always make a mental connection to a specific class and topic, which can inspire your future lessons. Also, you can use the pictures in different classes and different groups, which saves your precious time.

I wonder what it’s like to organize an ELT conference for 300+ attendees. Is it possible to satisfy everybody?

I don’t think we teachers need much to be happy though. Or do we?

1) Of course, we need some interesting content (especially practical ideas for our busy lives).

2) Also, we like it when we get some free stuff. This reassures us that our money (namely the conference fee) was worth it. Free samples of coursebooks in a nice blue bag will be fine. A raffle will prevent people from leaving earlier and it will keep everybody in suspense until the end of the day.

3) We also need lots of caffeine and some good food.

4) If we get free access to the internet, wow, that’s super cool.

Although I don’t think it’s an easy task to make all the above work smoothly, the 23rd P.A.R.K. Conference lived up to my expectations, as usual. It actually exceeded them (see point 4 above).

In this post, I’m going to focus on the content though. If you want to see more, check out my Twitter and Facebook pages.

Here goes.

In his opening plenary called How do we bring authenticity to a world full of screenagers?, Phil Warwick challenged the 20th century approaches to English language teaching. Phil argued that it is no longer enough to teach information. Students can look it up themselves if they want to. We need to be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage. Phil gave us some tips on practically incorporating authenticity into our lessons. He says that improving our students’ L2 is not enough. Through L2, we need to teach other skills too. Also, an English class is not about the teacher explaining grammar. It’s about the students communicating in English. So, what we really need to stabilize is the communicative skills – through lots of pair or group work. And we should use textbooks that reflect this need. But at the end of the day, we should be checking the operational level of English, not just the language which is in the book.

The first workshop I attended was called Language Espresso and it was delivered by Bronislav Sobotka. It was very practical and experiential. I’d like to say that I had chosen to see this particular session out of sheer curiosity. My students once told me about a guy who shares educational videos on YouTube. They said they liked the videos a lot and they even persuaded me to play a few of them in class. That’s how I learned about Broňa. When I saw his name on the list of the conference presenters, I immediately knew I had to see him. I had my doubts though; to tell the truth, his online presence had appeared a bit too enthusiastic to me and I wasn’t sure if his enthusiasm was genuine. Conclusion: no, it’s not fake. It’s absolutely authentic! Although I’m not into crazy workshops where adult people are made to stand up and run down the stairs, I was excited. I think Broňa can simply pass some of his energy on to the audience. I’m definitely going to try some of his activities and I’ll share the insights here on my blog.

I chose the next session primarily by the name, but the content was also interesting. Nikki Fořtová (my former methodology teacher at uni) spoke about classroom observation. At first, she wondered why observation has such a negative connotation. One of the reasons may be that teachers simply panic because they feel they need to give a ‘special lesson’ during formal observation. But then she goes on to say that observation is one of the tools to keep your teaching fresh. Also, peer observation is a cool tool for your school; teachers can share ideas, see students differently, work on weaknesses, develop skills, etc. Pop-in observation (teachers observe each other for about 10-15 minutes), on the other hand, is a great way of working on specific (problematic) bits of your teaching, e.g. giving instructions, TTT, etc. If repeated frequently, it can help to create an overall picture of someone’s approach. It also avoids the one-off ‘special lesson’ syndrome. Nikki gives the attendees a useful tip: using #eltwhiteboard on Twitter to become a fly on other’s classroom wall. 🙂 Finally, Nikki asks if it is helpful to be told everything that could have been done better during the observed lesson. Almost unanimously, the audience said ‘NO’.

Sabina Pazderová (also my former methodology teacher) had a keynote speech in the auditorium, called Inspiring Your Learners. Although it happened in the so-called graveyard slot (right after lunch), it was refreshing and energizing, as Sabina always is. Here are some of the bits and pieces that have stuck with me: 1) Sabina thinks that the older one gets, the more difficult it is for them to teach teenagers. 2) Superficial flicking through the textbook happens because teachers sometimes feel ‘behind’. But behind what? asks Sabina. 3) She says that the Comprehensible Input Theory doesn’t work for her because she needs to learn consciously but she adds that it may work for our students. The problem is, however, that elementary authentic materials are seldom interesting. On the other hand, interesting material is often too challenging for students. 4) She also touches upon seating arrangement. How can we teach communication in L2 when the only thing our students see is each other’s backs, i.e. in a traditional seating arrangement? She offers a few alternatives to this, for example, the jigsaw method, chat stations or Round Robin. The overall message of the talk was that we need to cultivate students’ curiosity, give them sense of purpose and satisfaction, inspiration instead of information, including a bit of mystery, suspense or surprise.

The closing plenary was delivered by Dr Anne Margaret Smith. Dr Smith is a teacher and a dyslexia specialist tutor and assessor. She was recently instrumental in
setting up the new IATEFL SIG: Inclusive Practices and SEN. Her talk was called Reaching out, unlocking creativity. Among other things, Dr Smith says that, unfortunately, syllabi tend to be linear and thus are only easy for those with no learning problems. I was a bit surprised to hear her mention the right vs. left brain hemisphere dichotomy though. I was convinced that this was considered a myth in the ELT field, along with multiple intelligences and learning styles. By the way, on several occasions at the conference, I heard people mention learning styles. Apparently, they are not completely dead. It’s not easy to kill a myth, is it? It has a damn long life and can even turn into a zombie. Anyway, Dr Smith advises us, teachers, to provide our students with multisensory input and practice. Thus we can work on our students’ strengths and allow them to apply their creativity. Drama, art, storytelling and music are highly beneficial in inclusive language teaching. Neurodiverse and the parable of the piano were two concepts I learned during the talk.

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Thanks for reading. To get a better picture of what P.A.R.K. conferences are like, check out my previous post here.

It’s a beautiful day. You are sitting comfortably in a warm classroom, listening to your students reading the answers to an exercise you assigned as homework. It’s one of those somewhat boring phases you need to survive before you can introduce a more exciting activity. Anyway, it’s a pre-intermediate class and the exercise is very short and very easy – it’s about the difference between will and going to. Your students know the rules (prediction, offer, promise, plan, etc.), you know the rules, so everybody is happy.

In the middle of the exercise, you suddenly realize it; once again, the wicked coursebook writers have included a question where no rule can be applied. You start panicking because you didn’t check the answer key. You never do with pre-intermediate classes, not for trivial grammar exercises like this one. The trouble is that both answers seem perfectly ok to you.

We’re going to the Caribbean this year.
a) It will be my first visit.
b) It’s going to be my first visit.

You know what’s going to happen now. It’s not the first time you’ve experienced this so you fully realize the disaster a few seconds before it actually happens: you won’t be able to predict what the answer key says. In other words, you won’t be able to guess which answer the coursebook writers expected the learners to pick.

You wait and hope that something or someone will save you. You could text a colleague and ask her to knock at the door. You could pretend to have passed out. Anyway, when the dreaded moment comes, the student reading the sentence chooses option B. You nod in agreement but hesitate for a second. The girl at the door must have noticed your reaction. They always sense your insecurity, your students. Her hand shoots up instantly as if she could read your mind. You know exactly what she’s going to do. You can predict it with absolute certainty.

“Isn’t A a better option here?”

“Damn it. Calm down. You are the teacher. You know the answer. Come on, there are only two options so there’s a 50% chance you get it right anyway. It’s like a game of roulette. Red or black? A or B? I can’t open the Teacher’s book now. What would they think? They’d think I don’t prepare for the lessons. They’d think I don’t know such a simple answer. No, I can’t check the answer in the key. Not this time. Not now.”

I put on a thoughtful expression and I tell the students that both options look acceptable to me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem the option they expected to hear. How come there are are two possible answers here? It’s all very suspicious. Oh dear, my reputation has been ruined. They will never trust me again. Or … they are never going to trust me again?

But then it dawns on me. There’s still a way out of this mess.

“Ok. Let’s ask fellow teachers on Facebook. Let’s see what they think”.

The students’ faces lighten up. Hm, this sounds interesting. Plus they can have a break. Yeah, let’s go and ask on Facebook.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

From now on quite seriously. 🙂

Luckily, almost instantly, people started responding to my FB post. The good news is that the comments I got were quite varied. Most teachers found both options perfectly acceptable and some even came up with new, better ways of expressing the same thing. I made the post public so that my students could read the responses later. And they did!

In the next lesson, we had a nice discussion about the post. I think it was quite interesting for them to see that I can ask about a linguistic problem on social media and that people from all around the world will respond. The guilt was gone. I realized that if I had checked the answer key prior to the lesson, we would have never had such a nice exchange about a grammar point. Well, sometimes it’s better to be underprepared. 🙂

Monitoring the class while the students work in pairs or groups is one of the classroom management techniques every teacher is expected to do. In a language classroom, we usually monitor activities to listen for the learners’ accuracy and fluency and also to check if everything is going according to plan.

However, I’ve recently realized that when I am in the role of a student/trainee/attendant of a workshop, a close physical presence of the teacher (or the presenter) is not pleasant to me. From this perspective, I often find monitoring distractive and intrusive, especially if the presenter is somebody I don’t know well. I simply can’t help the feeling that sometimes it’s as if the presenter is only pretending to be interested. The questions addressed to us sound like a small talk you have with strangers in the street – nice but totally pointless. It’s as if they knew that they are expected to be monitoring and that’s the only reason why they are doing it. I understand that sometimes they just need to blow off steam and thus they pace the room, distracting the attendees.

I prefer it when during pair work, the teacher/presenter stays in their default position, getting ready for the next stage of the lesson/workshop, for example, rather than monitoring us by closely listening to what we are discussing, occasionally asking a redundant question or giving unsolicited advice. I know I’m being harsh here but that’s how I see it now. 🙂

I mean, monitoring can and should be done only if it’s natural and absolutely necessary. I know that even adult learners like to have somebody nearby who they can ask a question if they come across a problem. However, I prefer it when we discuss the problem in the pair (that’s what we were asked to do after all) and we ask for clarification later – when we share the insights as a whole group and everybody can a have a say. This is what autonomy means to me. And if we believe in sharing and the benefits of peer work, i.e. we don’t do it just because it’s cool, we should simply leave the students alone. Thus, they can better concentrate on their tasks. I believe that the time during pair/group work should be the students’ private space, safe from the prying eyes (and ears) of the teacher.

I know there needs to be a certain amount of trust between the teacher and the students. If you believe your students will go on Facebook instead of doing the assigned work, you’ll probably need to monitor them every minute of every practice activity. And let’s be honest, we teachers are suspicious creatures. However, if you believe they can do well without the teacher being around all the time, you can relax and eavesdrop monitor from a distance.