Narrative: GEP 4/27/12

Much to cull from class two days ago. So probably the best place to start is a narrative.

Background: GEP is 'required' overtime, recently converted to contractual hours, for which I am compensated for classtime only.  The general English Program is the hopelessly broken undergraduate program for SMU students. I think the SMU-TESOL faculty fairly universally resent having to waste their time and efforts with English teaching that is nearly impossible to pull off under the conditions provided - we'd much rather be doing overtime in our own certification program, or developing this program, or simply not being forced to do this extra time.  That said, I am among those who, once committed, feels an obligation not to let the kids down too much, so somewhere in here I need to find the compromises I can make to create a win-win.

Hopelessly broken means many things: the graduation requirement for SMU students is that they pass a semi-communicative University-designed English test in two areas, speaking and writing, and complete two one-semester courses -- one called Discussion and Presentation, the other Writing.  Each course has a textbook written by uncompensated native speaking faculty but sold to every incoming student. Yes, there's a typo in the first sentence of the first page of the writing textbook, and at least one error in every paragraph of the opening couple of discussion texts in the speaking textbook, last time I checked. Yes, that's right, it's a one course fits all and a one book fits all concept.  To make matters worse, students in each class are nearly always grouped by major, not by proficiency level.  This results in utter beginner-'rocks' sitting alongside semi-communicative intermediate-'walkers' in the same class. For reasons I dare not think too deeply about, students from different majors are allowed to pass the above-mentioned exams at different levels.  Thus, last semester, my music majors passed if they scored 'int-mid', while liberal arts or law students might be required to achieve an 'int-high' rating or something like that.  What this really means is that the textbooks, which consist of pretty advanced model texts and paragraphs on various topics, are more or less completely unusable by the majority of students in any class, and so are completely ignored by nearly every GEP instructor I've met. The exam which is also negligibly related to the textbook, further forces an instructor's hand as it must become the focus of the class by the midterm break if the students are to have a hope of passing it.

This semester SMU blessed me with 14 modern dance majors in their first semester, and 2 traditional dance majors in their final semester, whom I would meet for three hours per week.  The latter two students have obviously failed the g-mate exam and this class before, and are retaking both.  I had posted a syllabus as per the requirements a few weeks before class started. I knew then I had no plan to follow it after the first week of ice breaking and relaxed assessment tasks. By the end of the first week of class I knew I had 15 students who lacked the grammar and vocabulary to write even one single accurate and comprehensible simple sentence in the simple present about common personal topics, and lacked an awareness of paragraphing, too, and one who could.  Yet these students were supposed to be able to write a reasonable 1 paragraph persuasive essay and a communicative email roughly 12 weeks later. Thus I began with a general syllabus idea of a few weeks on developing sentence structure, then persuasive paragraphing, then eventually substituting in a model email based on an exam topic.

And yet there is precious little time or desire to prep the course, due to scheduling and compensation issues. The class meets in hours 5 and 6 of six consecutive teaching hours on Friday, and hour 6 after a 1 hour break following 4 teaching hours Wednesday morning. Alternative scheduling is even less desirable.  So I tend to rely on my experience, keeping my general course syllabus in mind. I am also aware that the ss are friendly and somewhat responsive, though they always hit my class after hours of practice (and I think they play hard at night, too) and complain of being exhausted.  By this I mean, "Teacher, very tired!" and "Teacher, English very difficult." And quiet students in the back row sleeping, and others putting their heads on their desks as soon as an opportunity arises (pairwork, extended teacher talk, etc). Then there is social practice: even the most involved students unable to resist sneaking a text message on a phone; the use of Korean for translations of my instructions by the stronger students for the weaker students (though I suspect the translations aren't necessary if they just trust their instincts and pay attention to my utterance and MIC techniques), and for chatter while they 'work'.  The one positive about the class is that the students are very very nice, friendly, fun-loving, and there are several who quite enjoy doing well and interacting with me.  Hence, given my lack of faith in the system and the horrifying makeup of the student profile, my focus from the beginning has been on maintaining a very low effective filter and mustering whatever interaction and meaning construction opportunities the students will let me, while at the same time starting class a few minutes late and ending a few minutes early by not taking a break, to make the whole experience as painless as possible for everyone.

Reaction to Harmer vs Rinvolucri on lesson Planning

Begin with Midterm story. Arriving class 20 min late. In suit. Serious. "Your midterms were terrible, so some thingas have to change." 4 rules (phones, Korean, sleeping, head on desk). Copy paragraph I model on paragraphs. Read aloud, one sentence at a time. Ask questions. Elicit answer.  Keep enforcing rules. Taking phones. Quiet and focused. Model paragraph. Give instuctions. pass out paper. Warn about no paper next week.  Pairs. Ss start working. Force English. Force GaYoung to ask correct question. Model Q for ha Yeon. Model Q for Sunny. Help build classroom language proficiency. Discover they only want to honor me (by analyzing their reasons for the rules), not improve their English. Lead them to see honoring me by learning English. Understanding they don't know how to learn, only know how to do school.

The fault is on me for not exerting the effort to manage the class effectively at the beginning, for not LOVING these students. Use of CI techniques for 2 hours is exhausting -- not willing to do that every week. Am I not willing to love these students?  I think I will be.  Needed to ocus on developing an appropriate culture for learning from the git go. Is it too late now?

CI & MIC with my GEP students

To be frank, I should plan my General English Program classes more carefully than I do. But since we are explicitly told to enable as many of our students as possible to pass the final standard exam, and its requirements are so clear and few, very little planning is necessary to achieve that goal. Yesterday I met my new group for its first formal 50-minute session, having instructed them to buy the coursebook beforehand.  This group of freshwomen modern and traditional dance majors is of depressingly low proficiency in all areas, and evidence of terribly poor instruction is visible in their habits: dependence on translation, dictionaries, etc. rather than trusting their instincts and my cues.  Furthermore, the course textbook (a horribly edited and conceived profit source for my University -- the same advanced-low book for all students in the UNI, nearly all of whom are sub-Intermediate.) is beyond all of them, save for one or two bits at the beginning.

Anyway, this lot were generally charming, alert, good-humored, and eager for decent instruction, so I resolved to give them a bit of commitment until they started slacking off as a whole.  We focused on a Find Someone Who activity at the front of the book, for which we needed to compose appropriate and accurate questions from the prompts in the book so that they weren't walking around refossilizing awful question structures.  Left to their own devices, the ss would have failed miserably at this (there might not have even been a way to get them to understand what they needed to do. So I t-fronted that part of the activity, demoing a form as an example so that they could inductively do it themselves the 2nd time that form appeared in a question.

For example, we'd read one "who" sentence aloud ("who has traveled to more than 5 countries"), I'd write it on the board as several ss could hardly even follow along in their books (not used to the English letters?), point to the verb structure, write "______ you________" on the WB, point to "has", then "you", then look at them with a quizzical eyebrow and any of three or four of them would volunteer a hesitant "have". I was quite pleased with this, and by the time we'd got about 15 questions on the board, ss were helping each other, following my MIC gestures, and having a good time. Not dry or boring at all. 

I'd also managed to work in quite a bit of choral repetition with fingers rising and falling according to the intonation and syllable stress of several of the questions, and very happily introduced my two-handed teeth and tongue gesture to get ss thinking about and practicing correct "l" and "r" formation. They saw the need for it on "who can cross" their eyes ('sounds very much like 'close' if they get it wrong).

Finally they got up to try out their questions.  They did fine with the questions, but weren't even clear that the object was to find a 'yes' answer for eaqch question among their classmates.  They also would ask the Q, answer with a yes or no then lapse into Korean to jabber about it for a bit. I stopped them frequently and urged them to use L2 and just keep it simple, but I guess they were too excited and too weak and too enculturated with inefficient learning strategies. Ultimately, I decided the goal today was to have fun at their own pace and just use the basic language we'd practiced while coming up with the questions.

We wrapped up with a 1 by 1 info sharing activity where each S told us about someone they had found. This got each s to work with me to build one sentence correctly, and loudly enough for all to hear. This was quite challenging for several of the ss: with the teacher, speaking alone, substituting a name for "who" in the textbook... but ultimately quite fulfilling for most ss, and it gave each of them a chance to connect 1 on 1 with me.  It went quickly enough that no one got bored, they all seemed interested in their colleagues' efforts, and wondered if if their name would  be called next...

In sum, though I didn't pre-plan any of it, I was thrilled to see so many of the principles and techniques (CI and MIC) I've been teaching developing teachers over the past five years paying off in an actual mixed-abilities classroom.

Love and change

On one of our semesterly new student intake interview days, I decided to get many of our potentials to discuss the qualities shared by their best teachers.  Most of these potentials said something like, "They love their students!"  This got me to thinking that if this were true, then the methodology courses I'd been coordinating were really courses for each potential to discover what it means to love her/his students.

Since the course is really about understanding how change occurs in people (learning IS change, after all) in order to gain some influence/control over how our students change, then to some degree influencing change MEANS "loving our students".  Now tie this idea to M. Scott Peck's famous definition of "to love" from "The Road Less Traveled" -- "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's growth", and we can see the validity of this circular argument.


I wrote the above two paragraphs nearly a month ago. With a little space to breathe, it seems that the fundamental question any graduate level course on pedagogy ought to give a student a solid chance to answer is whether the will to extend oneself for others to the degree required of the best teachers is there. I'm thinking about this now because in two weeks one of our courses will end with presentations by participants of their own analysis of how far they've come towards "the best way for [them] to teach".  I suppose now that they'll be addressing this question indirectly, anyway, and the answer will be apparent in their presentations.

Building a model sentence into a survey.

Must have been a constellation of factors. Actually, it is ALWAYS a constellation of factors, because that's what a 'context' is -- everything in the social world is produced by and produces everything else.

Today in my second class on Controlled Writing Activities, I created a terrific survey activity where there hadn't been one before.  Its genesis was years ago when I became a fan of encouraging my teachers-to-be to design survey activities for one of their assignments as surveys remain one of the most efficient means of getting students to meaningfully practice and use new L2 in all 4 skill areas. That topic began coming round again this semester 3 classes ago, and for the last week we've been recycling Penny Ur's guidelines for effective grammar practice, and reading Harmer's Teaching Grammar chapter which also (I discovered two weeks ago) promotes survey activities. In my first class today I hit on the idea while discussing the slide with students, and even commented to an observing co-teacher, "Wow, that's a great idea!"  In the 2nd class I demoed it with students in the following way.

Today it started from a ppt slide I made from one of Doff's teach English writing activities. A couple of weeks ago one of the students had asked for clarification and examples of the sequence of activities from isolation to practice to production.  The slide demonstrates the advantage of writing personalized sentences from a textbook model.  The TLC focus is 3rd person simple present expressing likes and dislikes using present participles.

1. It begins with: "Samir enjoys playing football and reading books."  
2. The Doff activity then asks students to write a true sentence about themselves.  I model my own example, "I enjoy teaching teachers and playing darts," and highlight the difference between 1st and 3rd verb forms.
3. I model the question structure with choral repetition, emphasizing intonation: "What do you enjoy doing?"
4. Ss make pairs and raise their hands on my command.
5. ss ask and answer the question. (controlled, success-oriented practice of the isolated structures), and write the answer. 
6. Class notes same 1st/2nd person verb form.
7. Ss ask a new partner what their 1st partner enjoys doing, and note the answer. Now we're back to 3rd person, and the isolated rule should be clear.
8. Ss take out a piece of paper and daw a trwo column table, headed by "Name" and "Activity". T models filling in the form with the three names and activities they know (their own and two partners).
9. Ss stand. T gives time limit AND tells students to race around asking everyone about everyone else's enjoyed activities. The goal is to be the first to get everyone's activities down. (This is the survey part). Success-oriented, heterogeneous, repetitive, and TLC-focussed. 
10. Feedback & Closure: Ss write two general statements about the class's data, and TSST to the WB.  They can try to write up a report for homework and post their findings to the class blog, if nowhere better can be thought of.

Is there always time to look in the mirror?

A collection of the reflections that stuck in my memory ocver the past two weeks:

• I've been pushing my students to spend only 10 or 15 minutes twice a week on their reflections. I've also been encouraging them to write detailed lesson plans, teach the lesson, reflect, on the blog, teach it again and reflect again.  I suppose they COULD copy and paste the lesson plan notes and then reflect for 10 or 15 minutes by inserting appropriately, but I get the feeling a few of them are spending much more time than that, and a few others are discouraged by the prospect of doing that, resulting in... very little.
•  
• I haven't been much of an example lately, although I had striven to participate equally.  Other than the roll-out of our massive "TESOL 2.0 Challenge", a couple of other events conspired against me. 1 was the absence of classes due to midterms, the other was an ongoing experiment mentioned earlier which reached its culmination this Tuesday and Wednesday.
•  
• The choice to use the video of me demoing setting up a pairwork spot the difference activity in place of me actually demoing the activity live seems to have paid off.  I observed 64 students setting up speaking activities in the past 48 hours and would guess that a much higher percentage of them resisted the urge to "explain" the activity and instead used all manner of useful non-linguistic support mechanisms to get across to their students exactly what they were supposed to do.
•  
• Speaking of these microteaching demonstrations, I do feel I am making great strides in delivering consistently positive feedback to students, even (and especially) the ultra-sensitive face-threatening task of delivering criticism couched as suggestion.  Of course, I have no direct evidence to prove this, just a sense that I got it right this time. I allowed the students to do most (at least half) of the oral feedback, and I wrapped up each session with a minute or two of main ideas gleaned from that session that would be appropriate for everyone.

I just had an idea while writing that paragraph -- a solution to the "of course I have no direct evidence...".  What about an anonymous questionnaire for each microteaching session.  Include the questions:

"Did you microteach today? If yes, did you feel embarrassed/discouraged by the manner or tone of the instructor's comments?  Did you feel that anyone else was embarrassed/discouraged by the manner or tone of the instructor's comments?  Could the instructor have rephrased the comments to be less culturally inappropriate?  If yes, how?" And "If no, Did you feel that anyone else was embarrassed/discouraged by the manner or tone of the instructor's comments?  Could the instructor have rephrased the comments to be less culturally inappropriate?  If yes, how?

The above is something I might be able to write up. Might be able to get other teachers to participate as well.

• In my ongoing quest to bring home to my students the effect of using English as the primary language of instruction for their students (and what you have to do differently as a result of that code switch), I'm thinking about switching many of my demos into Polish next semester.  This was brought on by a student's presentation on the audiolingual method which included a video of a Russian professor teaching Russian in Russian, rabbitting on to a bunch of dazed kids (though that wasn't the intended message of the film, one supposes), which prompted another of my students to voice my thoughts, "That must be what I sound like to my kids!"

October 12 Practicum: Giving Directions

Typically for this class I've demo'd a 'Spot the Difference' activity presented in the students books and in Tanner & Green, hoping the students will twig to the need for interaction and lots and lots of visuals when setting up activities with students who are only now learning the language the teacher is speaking. I'm particularly impressed the amount of detail I've injected into the demo, but I'm often disappointed with the payoff -- at the next microteaching assessment day, many students typically don't seem to have taken the key points to heart.  I wondered if this was perhaps in part due to the fact that the ss are roleplaying novice-mid speakers and listeners, and too caught up in the role play and activity to observe the T with a '3rd eye'. Given how much effort the demo demands of me (and that I have to do it 2 or 3 times a day), a possible solution revealed itself prior top class this AM, and I rolled with it.

Last semester, one class was in the habit of recording my demos (and other bits of class) with their smartphones, and this was one that I managed to get a copy of for my records. When I played it as an observation task for my International students class, I was surprised at how engaged the students were in analyzing the techniques, and in how several of them journalled about the success of these techniques with their classes.  So this morning I got my Korean students to read the activity instructions and materials in their student books, and in pairs identify what Ss have to do, infer the TLC, infer the proficiency levels of Ss, and plan the CL/CIs, and MIC techniques that might dominate the most successful setup of this activity. Then I had them watch the demo, noting the CIs and MICs.  Then they discussed their observations and we established that Ss understanding of what they are supposed to do is the crucial aspect of giving instructions, and that heavy reliance on visuals to dual-code the language is paramount.

The students in both classes seemed really involved in the task all the way through the video, and the resulting group microteachings as they tried setting up a speaking activity suggests that they got the point.  We'll have to see in a couple of weeks how far they come...

Ideas for integrating reflection/video into the main curriculum

Had a stimulating chat with a colleague today, who was getting ready to film his classes' microteachings today, following an earlier lead from an ICC colleague.  Ss filming their teaching demos has long been on my list, but to date, most of my thinking has been around Ss using their own smartphones. I'm really psyched to see this development, as it means that at least three of us (almost half the program) are making our ss video-reflection aware.

We still need an institutional policy/program for this.I don't think we can ask all faculty to film all their students, transfer, rename, and upload the videos, etc.
A. it's too much extra work,
B. we don't have enough video cams for four simultaneous classes. 
C. it doesn't send the right 'independent learner' or 'reflection' model to Ss. It sends a t-centered 'here's your video, now reflect' message instead.

In our conversation, my colleague and I blended a few practices together. I'm now processing the idea of our staff helping all our students create their own Reflection Blog on blogger in the opening weeks of the course, complete with a tutorial on how to limit viewers to class members. I can train our staff to train the students.  We can do this in week 2, before the first journals are due. Ss would at a minimum write their Meth Journals and reflections here, rather than our current format. Other courses could have ss answer here, too.

Meanwhile, each Meth T sets up a blog for each Group, invites the Group's other instructors to join. (Or the Captain could). Crucially, the students would then need to send the blog creator a link to their Reflection Blog, which the creator can add to the 'links' panel as we have done here at STI.  Then, all Ss can click and go to each others blogs (in that class) easily.

The point here is that ss would keep their Meth journal and reflection portfolio online.  This means they can record their MTs with their smartphones, upload them and reflect on them, write ongoing developmental personal objectives based on them, and theoretically at least we can evolve our assessment/feedback possibilities.