Final Methodology Reflection: Changing Yourself through Changing Others

(This incorporates themes and ideas from Chapter 6 of 'Values in English Language Teaching' by Bill Johnston and addresses Questions 4 and 5 from said chapter)

In the course of my teaching career, I’ve had a few occasions in which I’ve had to make difficult choices. Whether the outcomes of these choices were positive or negative, they’ve led me to grow as a person and as a teacher.  No doubt my most important decision was leaving my old job. After teaching at my previous University for four years, I was bored and not sure of what I wanted to do. While I was generally happy with my work-life, I had started to feel a lack of serious forward momentum and I yearned for a break from the same old routine. I had turned thirty and didn’t know if I even wanted to stay in Korea or if staying here would hurt my long-term career.  In short, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I concluded that four years was enough and I needed a change.

            However, when I came home to the US, I realized I missed teaching. I would look at the notes my students had left for me during my last days and feel empty inside, like I left a part of myself behind. I came back to Korea and figured I could pick up where I left off, but I hadn’t anticipated the dramatically tightened job-market. Settling on a public school job, I felt angry at my hubris and shortsightedness. Instead of taking a step forward, I thought I had taken two steps back. My confidence had taken a serious hit too, and it was at this point I realized to what extent your job could be personalized as a part of your identity and self-worth.  Enrolling in STG was my way of grabbing on to something positive and believing in myself again. I went for my TESOL certificate as a direct result of a negative choice I made earlier. Through TESOL I am learning how to be a better teacher. If I had decided to stay at my old University, would I have enrolled in TESOL? Probably not. It’s often said adversity is the impetus for innovation and growth, and that’s held true for me as well. Now, as my time here draws to a close, I feel like I’m approaching some deeper truth about what being a teacher means to me. It can’t be just a job, but an extension of you as a person.

            In the past when people have asked me why I want to be a teacher, I wouldn’t have a good answer. What values drive us to dedicate our lives to this often un-rewarding profession? Is it something as simple as wanting to help others? But if so, then why not become a doctor or a police officer? Does the truth run deeper? In the course of our development into the people we are today, most of us had good teachers and bad teachers. You don’t remember the ones in the middle, but those on either side of the spectrum influenced you and if you want to be an educator, they can either serve as inspirations or warnings. The teachers who listened to their students, helped them overcome their problems and ultimately pushed them to their full potential, consequently left a lasting impact on their learners years later. Unfortunately, so did the teachers who yelled too much and sarcastically dismissed their students. 

Johnston, quoting Allwright, reiterates, “Teaching is about changing other people.” (125). And if change is supposed to be for the betterment of students, then the elements of that change must be morally justifiable from the teacher’s point of view. And if the social aspects of our instruction is informed by our individualistic views and moral core, then this brings up as close to an existential question as one can have in education; what lasting moral and social influence do you have on your students’ development? Through your teaching, is a small part of your moral core passed on to your students? Does a small piece of your self become a small piece of who your students will grow into? And if so, do we have a responsibility not only to instruct language, but to teach in a way that is true to who we are as individuals? If we introduce an aspect of our moral core into our teaching, does it go from simply helping, to changing and shaping other people? Is that a truth some of us actively avoid confronting, because it could be perceived as narcissistic and even selfish, an unseemly irony for a profession almost always associated with selflessness and dedication to others? However, this simplified conclusion is missing the point that becoming a teacher in order to change others means you are trying to share the best parts of your selves and others (who, in turn, changed you for the better when you were developing) in order to prompt your learners and nourish their own awareness and growth.

             Being a language instructor means the weight of what we bring to the classroom is that much greater, since we are ambassadors not only of our home-countries but of globalized culture in general. If we focus on purely linguistic instruction and ignore connecting to our learners on a human level, but approach them as a job requirement, we will not be remembered as anything but a nameless face in a gallery of forgotten and interchangeable ELTs. If we yell at students for lacking the proficiency to understand our instruction and take delight in disciplining them or otherwise raise their affective filter, we will be remembered, but as monsters who turned them away for English during their most formative years. If, however, we have awareness of who we are as teachers and use that to elicit social interaction among the students in a meaningful manner that leads them to their own intercultural and inter-language awareness, we can spark an interest in our learners that will not only motivate their acquisition of English, but provide them a window into our worldview, a perspective we alone bring to the classroom. Our worldview puts them on a journey to understand their own.

It should be clarified, that your worldview isn’t expressed by explicitly sharing your views, but passively through the activities your students utilize for output in your class. More so, our morals drive us towards the material we teach. What feels like a great activity for me, may feel wrong for you and that’s why it’s not a good idea to pull activities from the Internet and go into a classroom with them cold. If you do use other ideas, you must adapt them to your own teaching-style and personalize it to the needs of your class and what your students want as learners and respond to as people. If I teach an exercise that I either don’t believe has any intrinsic value for the students or is something that is not representative of what kind of teacher I strive to be, I approach it half-heartedly and lack confidence in carrying it out. Of course this has a domino effect on the students’ own motivation and by a self-fulfilling prophecy the class becomes a loss. I suspect many educators feel the same way about leading a class in a way that is not in synch with who they are as a teacher. This could also be why TESOL instruction might be hard to accept if we’re set in our ways. It is not a product from our own moral core, but a series of new and external ideas that could be seen as a threat to an aspect of a carefully cultivated and developed identity; a challenge to who we are. However, it could also be used as a tool for research that helps us grow as a teacher and it doesn’t need to be in conflict with what we learned before, but used to further refine or add to already established methods. 

            This morality-based Western approach to teaching may clash with the straightforward approach of traditional English teachers, especially those in the public school system.  In saying that, my intention is not to malign all Korean teachers, as there are many fantastic ones, and even the ones who focus on pure linguistic diction may do so out of conformity with what their peers and employers expect, but rather I would like to be honest in what I see as a system that lacks a human touch. Within the public school I work, the emphasis is on units taught per class and not the learners’ output or whether they learned anything. If a unit is taking too long or I, as a teacher, try to lead it in my own direction I come into direct conflict with their expectations that a certain amount of material is covered within the allotted time. The Korean school system seems more focused on pleasing the parents of the learners, than nurturing their growth linguistically, socially or otherwise. Johnston emphasizes that comprehensible output must be allowed, and it’s frustrating when that output must either be denied or cut short due to inflexible orthodoxy enforced by people who have never stepped into these particular classrooms or exchanged one sentence with any of these particular students.

            I do feel a sense of marginalization compared to my previous job and that’s probably what frustrates me the most. As the sole Westerner in my school, I lack colleagues from my own culture, to share ideas with and give feedback to. For my Korean colleagues within my school, they avoid discussing classes with me either because our approaches and ideas differ so much, or they accept that as the truth even if it may not be. Another factor is I’m outside their hierarchal social order, neither higher nor lower than anyone else. Within my school I sometimes feel like a non-person, one who has no voice in any of the decisions made by my school, but also someone who can get away with breaks in orthodoxy easier than the other workers there due to my perceived outsider status.

In one class, a Korean co-teacher had started screaming at one student, drowning out my instruction to all the students. Literally, she missed the forest for the trees, compromising the mood of the whole class in order to settle the misdemeanor offense of a lone student. I confronted her about this after class, but she didn’t seem to understand the negative effect this has on the class’s ability to absorb my instruction and my own ability to instruct. In her own way, she is asserting what she thinks is the best way to teach, but it runs in direct opposition to what I’ve grown to believe a teacher should be. Is this due to an absence of her own moral core in teaching, or is this method actually a result of her moral core? And if it is what she believes with her heart to be the right approach in the classroom, are the values and beliefs of NETs due for an even greater collision with those of the traditional teaching methods, as the latter battles for survival and relevance in a quickly globalizing world? And what if part of our purpose here is serving as a counterweight to traditional teaching and perhaps an eventual victor over it? In learning the right way to teach, is our next step telling our students what we consider to be the right way to learn? All questions I’ll ponder as I transition to the next stage in my development as a teacher.  

ICC Final Micro-teaching Reflection

ICC Final Reflection on Microteaching

Video of my final ICC Microteaching

(NOTE: Thank you to Michael for recording my lesson. Had some trouble embedding YT video directly, so the link is above and I'll try to embed again later.)

Overall, I’m quite happy with the activity and how I conducted it, but it’s far from perfect. The first problem is when it starts and I greet students, I give simple one word evaluative and closed answers like “excellent” (:46) when I ask the students how they’re doing. I have to remember to try and build them towards more substantive answers. In the context of this lesson, I had ten minutes and a lot of material I wanted to cover for my presentation stage, so that’s one reason I rushed through the greetings. However, in this case, since the focus is on interpersonal interaction, follow-up questions and understanding how others feel, I could have incorporated a little more extensive IRF language into my greeting instead of rushing through it. I think my problems with too much teacher-talk, while still present, have improved greatly since my first micro-teachings and I have learned to trust the students more instead of feeling the need to explain everything.

           After eliciting some words to associate with USA, I listen as the students interact with one another and then when the students volunteer their answers I elicit some responses for why they came up with those particular associations.

           The review of new vocabulary is gone through too quickly, partly because I’m worried about time running out, but I think I also didn’t know how to properly integrate the vocab tasks with the next section about Janine’s schedule (4:10). While my activities are good and I’m happy with them, they are not integrated that well with one another. In rapidly going from identifying cross-cultural similarities, to review of new vocabulary words to expressing the highlights of one’s native culture, there are too many jarring transitions that lack a natural flow. Besides an awkward teacher-talk segue, this also has the side-effect of possibly diminishing the students’ ability to store the new information relayed from these activities into their long-term memory. In the future, what I could do is incorporate the newly learned vocabulary into the next activity so it’s passively retained by the learner instead of forgotten.

           The students compare their generalized associations of USA with their more specific associations with Janine, a student from the USA. I thought this was a good activity with a focused goal of increasing intercultural awareness in mind, but I wonder if writing the associations in silence was the most useful way to pursue it (5:00). Although we learned in methodology that writing gives students more time to consider their answers, it also seems to temporarily rob the class of its energy and deny them the chance to interact with their peers more.

           Like I said I’m satisfied with my activity, but unpredictable answers could be a problem. At about 5:25 I ask Evan for his 1a) generalized word associations with America and he had terms (such as “LA Dodgers” and “Obama”) that would be hard to contrast with the words about Janine in order to promote cultural awareness. I inform him they’re “not quite the words I was looking for”, which might inhibit the learner and make him think he did something wrong, thus raising his affective filter. In reality, the fault lies with me relying too much on success-orientation and not anticipating the variety of unexpected responses I may receive. Also, again, near the end of asking the students for their terms I moved on too fast, instead of eliciting further information about why the learners picked the words they did. And once again, a better transition should be considered for going from word-associations to discussing Janine’s Seoul schedule.

           Some useful interaction occurs between the students when they discuss places they would take Janine to buy clothes. They personalize the information and engage in student-led IRF. After I end that part and ask Evan (9:00) how we can think of new questions for Janine, he doesn’t immediately give me an answer. This is useful because it replicates a real teaching environment where desired answers aren’t always given. Instead of staying with Evan, I give up on him after a few seconds of silence and go to Swati to ask the question again. If Evan were a student, he would feel discouraged at this point and might not participate in the rest of the activity with any real effort or enthusiasm. At 10:00 I finally model some dialogue on the WB (with the “could you…?” question structure), but this should have been done much earlier and, although difficult, I should try and avoid putting my back to the students. At the very least, I repeat Swati’s words as I write them down, maintaining interaction with the learner. Afterwards, I think I do a pretty good job of prompting students for more clarification and specific detail about the question and why those particular questions would fit what we’ve learned about Janine from the reading.

           Overall, I believe the lesson was a success. While I wrote about areas I could improve in my writing, I don’t believe there are any major problems and I think it would be successful in achieving my goals of broadening target-culture awareness, helping the learner to relate aspects of his or her own native culture to foreigners and passively building vocabulary, I think there are ways it could have been executed in a more efficient manner. I could have used a listening component in conjunction with the reading to provide further context. However, I don’t know what fashion this listening would take since the writing was of my own production. Furthermore the expected vocabulary should have been modeled on the WB in advance, and I should have used that to elicit surrounding sentences from the students to increase their chance of absorbing the new terms. The whole vocabulary focus should be reworked, expanded and better integrated, because as it is it seems like a bit of an afterthought. Next, I need to anticipate how to respond to students’ answers that veer from my expectations in a way that prompts more discussion from them, instead of shutting them down and moving to the next student. Finally, the extensive and superfluous teacher-talk, while diminished, is still too much and too self-indulgent.

           The aspects of the lesson that worked included leading students to contrast their assumptions and stereotypes of a culture with the reality of the individual, without explicitly feeding them the answers. Within the reading were advanced vocabulary terms, and while the reinforcing of these terms was flawed as I said, there is still an attempt to push the student towards an understanding of new vocabulary using a top-down approach. The activity also did a good a job of slowly building in difficulty and encouraging the student to search the reading for key information. It used the information in a way that enabled the students to personalize it and compare it to the similarities in their own culture, while still encouraging them to respect the differences. Finally, they had chances to interact with their peers and compare their answers, which as mentioned prompts dialogic discourse, but also reaffirms for them there’s no universal truth, but diverse perspectives even within their own class and native culture.   

Reflection: Up, Up and Away

Reflection: Up, Up and Away

*updated: 1:24am 11/21

Thank you, Jeremy Harmer! Four words I probably don’t say enough. I was struggling for an activity for my debate class this week, when I came across a gem of an activity on page 350, the likes of which I had never seen on Dave’s ESL or anywhere else in my six years of scrounging online for fun, innovative ESL activities. You can find it under the bold header “Formal debates.” Basically you assign students (or let them choose) the identities of famous and prolific historical figures. These public figures, whether they are Julius Caesar, Marie Antoinette, Albert Einstein, King Sejong (for that local flavor) or PSY (for the less cultured learner) are all flying in the same hot-air balloon, when suddenly a catastrophic fire means one of these timeless icons has to jump out of the basket and sacrifice him or herself in order to save the group from certain death. Of course, being somewhat self-absorbed celebrities, none of them are too eager to do so. So the premise is they have to conduct a spirited defense for why they deserve to live. This is performed in the style of a debate. For brevity’s sake, I’m pasting below the exercise-sheet I prepared today for the class, based on the original exercise from the book. Oh, and these are the same debate students I’ve written about before, and reiterating from previous reflections, they are mostly higher intermediate and lower advanced speakers.     

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Balloon Debate:

Each person should pick a different famous person:

You can pick your own. But if you have trouble, here are some examples to choose from; King Sejong, Shakespeare, Ban Ki Moon, Cleopatra, PSY, Ghandi, Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Disney, Barack Obama, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Prince William

You and your famous friends are in a hot air balloon!

You are having a great time flying across the world…. but SUDDENLY DISASTER!!! There is a small fire!! The balloon will crash and everyone will die, unless one person jumps out and sacrifices him or herself to save the group. But nobody wants to be the one to die.

Come up with 3 reasons for why you (as the famous person) should live. The other group will judge who has the best answers.

I, _________________, am too important to die, because….

1)   ____________________________________________________

2)   ____________________________________________________

3)   ____________________________________________________

For BONUS points, come up with a reason for why one of the other famous figures SHOULD die:

____________________________________________________

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Then after they completed the sheet and had time to consider what they’d say and how they’d express it, they delivered their defenses in the punchy 90-second format of a debate (alternating with each numbered point), with rebuttals (where proficiency allowed it) and counterpoints made. Since there were six students, three students debated each other, while the other three students played the role of judge (and I guess jury and executioner), deciding which two students had the strongest points and which one went cloud diving.

The class was a lot of fun and the students who lost accepted it with good humor. When we previously had judged debates, the losing side had appeared discouraged or sullen, but not this time. There was a consistent rapid-fire discourse in the class that didn’t have as many pauses or trailing off as is usually present.

The past couple of weeks I felt I had been treading water in my debate class a bit. The formula of choosing an issue they felt passionate about, such as school uniforms or using smart-phones in class, and then discussing its merits or downsides had become stale and predictable. In inserting a bit of fantasy and having them personalize their roles as these revered figures, I could feel the atmosphere becoming a bit lighter and more easygoing than in previous weeks, when it had started to feel a bit too workmanlike.

I think some of the learner’ enthusiasm was due to the fact they were fulfilling a role that was detached from them personally. This was a fantastic role of someone very idolized (in most cases), so it gave them an extra boost of confidence in portraying him or her. They were able to step out of their L2 learner shoes and embody a public persona known for success. This is just my personal theory, but in my own experience when you act (and perhaps Tom, you would understand this too with your theater background) and personify a character other than your own, you leave behind a lot of your insecurities and inhibitions. In TESOLese, I believe this exercise lowered the students' affective filter and provided them a more passive and comfortable learning environment. In the course of the exercise brainstorming and actualization, there were lots of student-to-student interactions, student-initiated IRF, personalization, critical thinking and logical reasoning skills utilized. While NOT cooperative learning, it contained elements of it, such as the students being held individually accountable for their success, encouraging a healthy competition between them, a greater trust being placed in their abilities and peers giving each other feedback. Of course, they didn't work together in this instance. I suppose if I want to do a cooperative learning exercise in the future, a debating class would be a natural environment to do it.

In summation, the Harmer activity challenged me to re-evaluate how I teach my debate class and to think outside the box a bit, instead of relying on the same old formula of pick-an-issue, brainstorm it, organize points and debate. There’s a hidden angle there that I hadn’t fully considered and one which the Harmer exercise in question has opened my eyes to. I hope next time I can come up with my own original debating activity that is as effective as this one.

  

ICC Lessons Reflection Part One of Three: Introduction and Set-Up

ICC Lessons Reflection Part One of Three: Introduction and Set-Up

In the last week I have filmed two pre-planned ICC lessons in two different environments with two different learner-types. One lesson was a private lesson in a coffee shop setting with two former University students of mine, their proficiency level advanced-low to advanced-mid in my determination.  The ICC lesson I put into practice with them was based on my lesson I had crafted for class a few weeks previously (which I have titled ‘Intercultural Comparisons of Family & Friends’), focusing on the differences in how holidays are celebrated and social interaction between family and friends. The other lesson filmed here (‘Native Culture Expectations Meet Target Culture Reality’) was during an afterschool class at my current public middle-school job with students who were mostly intermediate-high to advanced-mid, with one novice student being the exception (her friend, an advanced L2 speaker had invited her to sit in, and I think since this wasn’t intended to be a heterogeneous class, she had trouble keeping up). The primary focus on this lesson, partly demonstrated by the extreme and ridiculous examples on the hand-out, was how tourists can unrealistically place their native-culture expectations on target-culture environments and treat such a place by their cultural rules, even when they are the visitor. This second lesson was requested and consequently generously provided to me by Sean Makarenko and is based on his original plan for ICC class. I imagine I taught it a bit differently than he would have, not to say there’s a correct way to teach it, but rather different approaches, different interpretations or responding to the needs of different learners.

In all honesty, I prefer my first lesson with my old University students to the second lesson with the middle-school students for a number of reasons. First, being in a more intimate setting (despite the din of noise from being in a crowded Starbucks… don’t worry the sound still comes in crystal-clear) I think they felt more at ease and retained a very low affective filter. This leads into the second reason, which is that I’m well-acquainted with them (one of them I first taught almost four years ago). Finally and perhaps most importantly, there is a degree of extra confidence, passion and familiarity that comes with enacting your own lesson plan. And again, that’s not taking anything away from Sean’s lesson at all. Led Zepplin are really good at playing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ What if you asked them to play ‘Hey Jude’ by The Beatles? Because it’s a great song and they are great musicians, it would probably be pretty good. However, their rendition most likely wouldn’t be as good as The Beatles playing ‘Hey Jude’, because they are not The Beatles. And vice-versa, The Beatles probably wouldn’t be able to play ‘Stairway…’ as well as Zepplin. Anyway, you get my point. Sorry, for the strained analogy that almost turned into a musical theory tangent. Basically, because of this preference, I’m going to delve into and analyze my ‘Intercultural Comparisons of Family & Friends’ with my private-lesson students first, before transitioning to the ‘Native Culture Expectations Meet Target Culture Reality’ middle-school class.

Enough rambling. Without further ado…

Lesson One: Intercultural Comparisons of Family & Friends

Lesson Two: Native Culture Expectations Meet Target Culture Reality

ICC Lessons Reflections Part Two of Three: ‘Intercultural Comparisons of Family & Friends’ Lesson One

ICC Lessons Reflections Part Two of Three: ‘Intercultural Comparisons of Family & Friends’ Lesson One

As explained in the set-up, this is a private-lesson with two University students, advanced-low to advanced-mid speaking and listening proficiency. Both have studied abroad in the USA for about a year. The lesson was conducted in a coffee-shop, so please excuse the background noise. Their voices and my voice come in clearly nonetheless. Additionally, one of them requested not to be filmed, so the camera is mostly placed either downward or focused on the materials. In reviewing the film, I realized the shifting focus is a little vertigo inducing, but still watchable.

This lesson is initiated with a PPT describing the differences between the traditional Korean Chuseok feast and the American Thanksgiving culture (with some stereotypes peppered in). It then segues into a clip of the TV show ‘Friends’ in which a fight breaks out between two siblings, Ross and Monica, and they make accusations against each other in front of their parents. The language contains many topics that would be taboo in Korean culture and their demeanor towards their parents could be perceived as disrespectful. Transcripts that they can follow along with accompany this clip. At the end of the clip, they are instructed to highlight any parts of the transcript that struck them as inappropriate from the vantage-point of their native culture. On the second page of the transcript is a series of discussion questions, which run the gamut from identifying the taboo-breaking topics, to considering what the consequences of these actions would be in their native Korean culture and how would the tensions depicted here be resolved differently in Korea.

I start off by trying to elicit information from them about Chuseok, their Chuseok experiences and then asking them what they know about Thanksgiving in America, the “American version of Chuseok.” From there, a contrast is slowly built beginning with innocuous subjects such as difference in the food that’s eaten. As the students feel more at ease and their interest becomes aroused, the conversation progresses towards more abstract differences, specifically how different social interactions and attitudes are in the target-culture, culminating in a discussion about family fights breaking out at the dinner table. 

From there we watched the ‘Friends’ clip mentioned previously, and I asked the students to spend a few minutes looking over the transcript and highlighting anything that seemed offensive or at least exceptional from their ethno-cultural perspective. In the interest of time and not boring anyone to death, I elected not to film myself playing the 3-minute ‘Friends’ clip or the students highlighting their transcripts in silence for 4 minutes after that. However, if you wish to see it, it can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3hn40NlrVk

The students discussed the many topics mentioned that would be taboo in Korean culture, such as divorce, marijuana use, co-habitation before marriage and the general tone of disrespect the characters use to address each other and their parents. Their conclusion about the target-culture was that personal topics are discussed more directly, while Korean people avoid open confrontation over serious issues. What was striking is both students indicated they prefer the more open and casual environment of the target-culture to their own.

Later on, they discussed how Korean society expects one to be deferential towards their elders. An interesting aside was one student saying she thinks if she got in trouble or acted out, her father would be angrier with her mother than with her. In talking with them, while they agreed a general respect should be paid towards the elderly, they seemed to rebel against the notion that they’re entitled to unconditional reverence, regardless of their actions and behavior. Here I sense a generational shift; with the influence of globalized youth culture, people here are slowly drifting away from their traditional Confucian moorings.

I ended the lesson by asking them if they encountered anything that shocked them from their cultural perspective when studying in the US and they both mentioned manifestations of more open and casual social interaction, such as strangers greeting people, making eye-contact and even smiling.

I thought the lesson was successful, with a nice set-up complete with schema activation and visual scaffolding. From there, they had a good peer-to-peer dialogic discussion examining different cultures and personalizing it by relating it to their own experiences. These students are already fairly worldly, but I think they developed their “little c” intercultural understanding a bit with the frank and mature discussion that they held. Due to the taboo topics and mature insight required, I wouldn’t recommend teaching this for children or teens. In being proud of the fact that I conducted an accomplished class, I still had issues and that is again too much teacher-talk and too much feeding of answers. I’ve improved in this regard, but problems remain. All in all, it was an enjoyable lesson to teach and even I, as a teacher, received some valuable target-culture (Korea being my T-C) insight.