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.