Teaching Village

Female Pirates Weren’t Sexy (by Lesley Ito)

Barbara — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:33:58 +0000

Wacky facts I’ve Learned from teaching cross-curricular lessons.

(The information contained in this article was originally presented as a Pecha Kucha at the JALT National Conference in Tokyo, Japan in November 2011.)

It’s been six years since I opened BIG BOW English Lab, a private English school in Nagoya, Japan with a unique cross-curricular focus. Since most of my lessons are original ones, I’ve had to do a lot of research and reading on my own about subjects that interest children.

One thing I have learned is that “common knowledge” is always changing and some of the facts I learned as a child in school turned out to be no longer true. (Do you remember learning about the Brontosaurus in school? I do. Now they say paleontologists mistakenly put the skull of a Camarasaurus on the body of an Apatosaurus. The Brontosaurus never existed!) I am also reminded of the influence movies have on “common knowledge”. One of my friends used to be a high school history teacher in the USA. One day she asked her students what they knew about Watergate. One student raised his hand and said, “Well, Forrest Gump was staying in this hotel. . .” My friend interrupted her student with a loud sigh and said, “No, that’s what happened in a MOVIE!”

Movies are the reason we believe female pirates were sexy. Take a look at Penelope Cruz on the poster of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie: She’s absolutely stunning with her long, flowing hair and sexy, off-the-shoulder dress. Real female pirates were not sexy. Real female pirates, like Anne Bonny and Mary Reed, had to disguise themselves as men because women weren’t supposed to be pirates. In fact, Anne Bonny’s nickname was “Toothless Annie”!

Movies are also the reason why we believe that ninjas wore black clothing from head to toe. If you really wanted to sneak around after dark, you shouldn’t wear black clothing. Black actually makes you stand out in the dark of night. The dark indigo dye, traditionally used by the common people of Japan to dye cotton cloth, would be a much better and more likely choice.

Elizabeth Taylor’s infamous flop, Cleopatra, is the reason everyone thinks that the most famous queen of Egypt wore bangs and garish blue eye shadow. Perhaps the hairdressers and make-up artists on the movie set used the ancient drawings of women and the goddess, Isis, found on the inside of the pyramids as a guide. However, the pyramids were built around 1000 B.C. Cleopatra lived from 69 B.C. to 30 B.C. (I’m pretty sure that fashion would probably change in the course of 900 years.) Marc Anthony had a coin made with Cleopatra’s image on it, so a more accurate depiction of “the most beautiful woman in the world” does exist and she does not have bangs.

Speaking of ancient Egypt, I learned long ago that when bodies were prepared for mummification, the brains were removed from the skull through the nose with a long hook. This always seemed quite difficult to do, but that’s what the history books said. Not to mention that my students loved to hear this fact and say, “EEEEEWWW!” very loudly. Last year I gave a presentation on teaching cross-curricular lessons in Gifu, Japan and afterward someone in the audience came up and told me that she had just taken a college class on ancient Egypt and scientists had recently concluded that instead of pulling the brain out through the nose in chunks, they probably used a whisk type instrument to liquefy the brain and have it pour out the nostrils. I was completely disgusted to hear this, but my students were more than pleased to learn this new tidbit of information.

Another thing I learned a long time ago was that the first airplane, flown by the Wright brothers, was called the “Kitty Hawk”. Actually, the first airplane was given the very boring and utilitarian name of “Wright Flyer 1” and was flown in the town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I theorize the reason for the mix-up was because the Wright brothers did not want any newspaper reporters present, after a previous test flight of one of their gliders turned into a media circus.

I have advanced elementary classes read a chapter or two a week of a young adult novel and write a short book report. One of my students was reading a somewhat strange novel where one of the side gags was a neighbor who was raising lemmings for their pelts. At the end of the novel, the protagonist accidently leaves the neighbor’s gate open and the lemmings throw themselves in the sea to drown. My student had never heard of lemmings and asked me about them. I told him what I had learned in elementary school: that groups of lemmings sometimes commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs. He said that sounded really stupid to him and I shared that I always thought something was really fishy about this “fact”. After a mere 30 minutes on the Internet, I found out that while lemmings may occasionally fall off cliffs during mass migrations, they do not commit mass suicide. This myth was started by the 1958 Academy award winning documentary, White Wilderness. Documentaries are supposed to be factual, but they filmed scenes of a turntable flinging lemmings off a fake cliff for dramatic effect.

Finally, I learned how something simple can change the course of history. Without the humble lemon, explorers could not have had successful expeditions to new lands. Magellan’s expedition might have made it around the world, but it started out with 270 crew members and ended with only 18! Many of those crew members died of scurvy, caused by a lack of vitamin C. James Cook was the first explorer to realize this and made sure that his crew always had fresh fruit. As a result, he was able to make many long and successful voyages.

In the Internet Age, our students are given access to so much information. Sometimes this information is not exactly true; sometimes the images we see have been manipulated or retouched. As teachers, we have a responsibility to teach our students to think for themselves and understand that what we know about the world is always changing.

Why I Love Teachers

Barbara — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:00:46 +0000

There are teachers, and there are Teachers. I respect anyone who steps into a classroom, but I adore educators for whom teaching is as much a vocation as a job.

Why?

Because when Teachers go on vacation, they look at ways to exploit their adventures for students. Whether collecting foreign magazines for language class, or foreign coins for math class, or postcards for geography class, Teachers always look for inexpensive ways to make learning more interesting and relevant.

Because Teachers know that The Voice is a super power to be used wisely.

Because Teachers believe that strong coffee (or tea, or energy drinks) can substitute for sleep when they’ve stayed up until 3 am on a school night to attend an online workshop in another time zone, or to play with a new tool that just might have potential for students.

Because Teachers have Facebook friends who are half their age, and it’s not creepy. They answer homework questions from these friends until the wee hours (and again pretend that coffee, tea, or Red Bull is as good as sleep).

Because Teachers support other teachers. It’s not that Teachers are always one, big, happy, egalitarian family. There’s a hierarchy that ranges from (roughly) Ph.D. weilding professors in “real” subjects at the top, to bilingual Teachers working with children at the bottom. However, Teachers take pride in their profession, and in colleagues working to strengthen that profession, particularly when it seems that they’re the only ones who actually consider teaching to BE a profession.

Because Teachers manage to smile rather than scream when facing non-Teachers who think the “people who can’t, teach” joke is funny. Ditto for dealing with people who assume that teaching was their fall-back job.

Because Teachers turn every freakin’ thing they touch into an educational opportunity. Teachers looked at World of Warcraft and thought, this just might motivate reluctant learners. They visited Second Life and said, “Cool place to teach! Look at the potential here!” They looked at Skype and saw a way to connect their students with the world. They looked at Twitter and said, “Great way to share resources!”

Because Teachers fight passionately for education ideals–to include technology, to exclude technology, to abolish standardized tests, to improve standardized tests, to open classrooms to the world, to protect children from the world. But, at the end of the day, Teachers work to help students succeed within whatever reality they face.

Because Teachers are reading this and wondering why I’m making a fuss about the things they do every day. Because they assume that other teachers would do the same, if they were able to. Because they can’t imagine doing anything but Teach.

Happy World Teachers Day! Thank you for inspiring the world’s children.

What is a PLN, anyway?

Barbara — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:00:22 +0000

A good friend (and a great teacher) e-mailed me after my last post. “Great links,” she said. “But what’s a PLN?”

A good reminder about why I try to avoid acronyms and jargon in my writing.

PLN is an acronym for Personal Learning Network. The acronym is relatively new, but the idea is not. Teachers have always had learning networks—people we learn from and share with. Teachers are information junkies. We’re also social. Put the two together and you have a personal learning network.

The structure of my PLN has changed since I first started teaching.

The pre-Internet 80s

Yes, there was an internet of sorts in the 80s, but I wasn’t on it. Teachers at my school made up the core of my PLN. Network central was wherever we gathered between and after classes. Most of the information we shared came from articles or books we’d read, conferences or workshops we attended. Books came from the bookstore, information from conferences came home in suitcases. The good stuff was photocopied and filed for future reference.

My PLN was very small—the teachers in my school, a few colleagues from graduate school, workshop presenters. Most information was shared face to face.

The e-mail 90s

I sent my first e-mail message in 1995. I could find information about books online, but had to buy them in a store (or, ask someone in the US to buy them in a store and ship them to me). I saved bookmarks for websites I liked, but still printed out pages for my files, and still shared information face to face.

My PLN got a little bigger in the 90s. I could use the Internet to look for infomation, and I could use e-mail to communicate with people after I met them at conferences. However, the people in my PLN were still mostly teachers I had met face to face.

The social 2000s

For information junkies, this decade has been amazing. Not only can I order books online and have them shipped to me in Japan, I can order books and download them to my computer. I access most journals and newspapers the same way. Information is waiting for me each morning in my inbox from discussion groups. The sheer volume of information available can be overwhelming at times.

The biggest change has been in the way I meet and communicate with people in my PLN.

First, there is Twitter, which is like a big noisy teacher’s lounge. Everyone is talking (texting) at once. I might share a conversation with one or two teachers in the lounge, and catch fragments of other conversations around me. As I read the newspapers and group digests in my inbox, I share the good bits by sending short messages to other teachers on Twitter. Since they do the same, there are a lot of good bits being shared.

Most of the resources are in the form of links—to websites, to e-books, to blogs, or to activities. Rather than printing out copies for my files, I save the links on a social bookmarking site, like Delicious. Because I use tags instead of file folders, I can easily search for specific items. And because teachers can look through each other’s bookmarks, it’s easy to share.

Discussion groups (like JALT’s Teaching Children SIG or IATEFL’s Young Learners and Teenagers SIG) are like conference breakout sessions, where teachers have extended, and topic-oriented conversations.

Nings are like subject area resource rooms in a large school. They’re social networks connecting teachers with common interests. In addition to discussion forums, members keep blogs, share resources, and plan group activities. EFL teachers might belong to EFL Classroom 2.0 or English Companion, or both.

I attended more conferences than ever before, but travel much less. I still prefer to physically attend a conference, but online sessions and summaries allow me to be there in spirit even when it’s impossible to be there in body. For example, the IATEFL conference this year broadcast plenary and workshop sessions (and then archived the videos available on the website), Twitter allowed workshop participants to share updates and allowed teachers not at the conference (like me) to ask questions during panel discussions. Issues raised during the presentations were discussed in online forums.

The kinds of discussions I have, and information I share with my PLN hasn’t changed all that much over the years–what works in class, how students learn, how to become a better teacher. How I meet other teachers, where we discuss ideas, and how we share information has changed. Significantly. My PLN now includes teachers who live quite far from me—in Asia, Australia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. I meet them online. I learn from them online. I share with them online.

The teachers in my Personal Learning Network are some of the best friends I’ll never meet.

Language, Camera, Action! Motivating Young Learners with Video (by David Dodgson)

DaveDodgson — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:36:48 +0000

Back in the sepia-tinged days of 2010 when I was still very much finding my way around blogs and Twitter, I was virtually introduced to Barbara and she kindly offered me the chance to do a guest post here on Teaching Village about how I used PowerPoint in class. 18 months on, we again get the chance to collaborate as part of the EVO 2012 Digital Storytelling for Young Learners team along with some other fantastic educators, namely Shelly Terrell, Özge Karaoğlu, Esra Girgin, Jennifer Verschoor, Michelle Worgan, and Sabrina De Vita (full details are included at the end of this post).

As part of our EVO event, I will co-moderate a session about Video Stories with Young Learners with Özge. As a prelude to that, am delighted to have the chance to return to Teaching Village to share some of the ideas I’ve used in class, often with little more than a video-recording device and some editing software – and creative young students of course!

And what better way to share some ideas about using video than by recording a video! Please watch on:

Video in the Language Classroom 1 – How, why and what for?

And here are a couple of examples (used with permission of course!) of videos we have made in class (note: these were made as follow-up projects reviewing a story we had just finished reading entitled Alien Alert in Seattle just in case you are wondering what’s going on!)

The Strange Show!

OK, so I did a bit of editing on this one BUT all of the inout came from the students! They said what they wanted the video to look like and asked if I could slow some parts down and add in some extra visual effects.

Life on Mitrax

This is a wonderfully creative poster about the alien planet (mentioned but not seen, meaning the students invented all the details themselves!) from the story. Rather than just being part of a (largely unseen) wall display the corridor, this presentation now has pride of place on the class wiki page.

You can see more of my students’ Alien Alert video projects by clicking here.

Another great way to use video on a school or class website is by making Talking Head videos:

Video in the Classroom 2 – Talking Heads

And we should not forget that many of the recording devices we have allow us to go beyond the classroom walls both virtually and literally:

Video in the Language Classroom 3 – Going Mobile

Thank you for indulging me and my video mayhem – I hope you got some useful ideas and I would love to hear how you have used video in class via the comments section.

Normal Teaching Village service will be resumed shortly…

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I have been working as an EFL teacher since the year 2000 and, aside from my initial training in Barcelona, Spain, I have spent all of my teaching career in Ankara, Turkey. I started out teaching adults before switching to young learners nearly 10 years ago and have never (well, almost never!) looked back.

I teach in a private primary school in Turkey, where I am widely known as ‘the computer guy’ and asked to do everything from running the English website to helping colleagues retrive accidentally deleted files! I am also currently studying for an MA in EdTech and TESOL, which I am due to complete in 2012.

You can follow me on Twitter (@DaveDodgson) or visit my blog (www.davedodgson.com).

EVO 2012 – Digital Storytelling for Young Learners

As I mentioned at the start of this post, I will soon have the honour of co-moderating an EVO session along with a fantastic group of teachers and educators. Our 5-week session on Digital Storytelling for Young Learners runs from January 9th to February 12th 2012. As well as looking at Video Stories, we will also cover Comic Strip Generators, Collaborative Online Stories and Mobile Storytelling and a whole host of other ways you can really engage your learners and exploit their creativity through stories.

Registration is open from January 1st and will be done through our Yahoo Group. You can also find out more information about our syllabus on our pbworks page. Hope to see you there!

Come join the Electronic Village Online (by Carla Arena)

Barbara — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 01:23:31 +0000

I’m here to tell you about how a simple acronym – EVO – changed my life and was a true turning point in my professional development. When I joined the Electronic Village Online for the first time to take the online session Becoming a Webhead (BaW), I had the feeling it was special in the sense of learning something new, understanding more about this online world, and connecting to like-minded educators for a period of time. Never could I imagine that the Electronic Village Online would be way more than my initial expectation. The Electronic Village Online was a new beginning of renovated passion for my profession as an educator, of lifelong learning and the joy of being always connected. It was not about a definite time, it was about constant feeding and improvement in who I was as an educator and person.

Every year, we gather for five weeks to network, to connect, to have fun, to meet like-minded international educators, and to dare. It is that time when we gain new insights on how to make a difference in our educational contexts, when we give ourselves some time to test new possibilities in the classroom in an environment where every educator is invited to experiment with the many choices they are given in the many online sessions they can opt to join. Throughout the years, as a moderator and part of the EVO Coordinating Team, I’ve come to see many educators flourish and gain new insights, finding new meaning to their professional lives and spicing up their teaching practice with a myriad of classroom ideas, activities, resources they learned in the EVO Sessions. I’ve seen them bloom to become great local leaders and multipliers of the ideas they’ve gotten from the different Electronic Village Online sessions. Some have even become digital stars, well-known in the online circles of educators via Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Webconferencing, among others.

In 2012, the prospect of educational training for educators looks more exciting than ever with our traditional sessions and some brand new ones. EVO will run from January 9^th to February 12^th. Here’s the list of what you’ll be able to choose from:

Becoming a Webhead
Developing our Mentoring Skills
Digital Storytelling for Young Learners
Digital Tools with Purpose in the Classroom
TESOL-Drama Workshop: Teaching and Assessing English Through Drama
Teaching and Language Learning Through Gamification
MachinEVO – Video Productions of Language Learning Conversations
MOODLE for Teachers
Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments
PLEs and PLNs for Lifelong Learning
Podcasting for the EFL/ESL Classroom
Social Networking: Making it Work for You and Your Students
Teaching English to Young Learners and Teens
Tutoring with Web 2.0 Tools – Designing for Social Presence

To check the session abstracts and to register for them, access http://evosessions.pbworks.com/Call_for_Participation2012

EVO is an eye-opener for everyone interested in improving the way we teach, share, connect and interact. I do hope you have the chance to experience this professional development program that is free, welcoming of novice teachers and more experienced ones, and totally addictive! I started as a participant and have never stopped joining the sessions and moderating some as part of my own professional evolution and the need to belong to this group of educators who are pure inspiration and passion.

Join us to see what I mean!

Carla is a teacher, teacher trainer, and Ed Tech Supervisor at Casa Thomas Jefferson in Brasilia. She has been using social media to explore the potential of educational technology in the classroom and beyond. Carla is part of the TESOL’s Electronic Village Online Coordinating Team and has been co-moderating the EVO online sessions to help educators develop their digital literacy and fluency. You can find Carla in Twitter @carlaarena or in her blog http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com

Learning Lessons in Thailand (by Rob Newberry)

RobinThailand — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:00:56 +0000

I teach in an International School in Bangkok. The “internationality” of the school is an interesting term, as there really are two languages spoken here — English and Thai — and not necessarily in that order.

There used to be signs posted around the school saying, “Proud to be an English-speaking only school,” but when I went to find one today, hoping to include a photo of it in this blog post — I couldn’t find any around anymore. Curious.

At any rate, our school is probably about 80% Thai — with a significant Indian population as second highest population, and then a small mix of Korean, Chinese and European/North American students round out the remaining percentages. The majority of students here speak Thai as their first language, and on a typical day I am fortunate enough to hear enough Thai to pick up the daily playground talk.

As an IT Specialist/Teacher, I teach Grades 3-5 technology and Grade 6 Digital Photography. I have approximately 250 students between the ages of 7 and 12 in my classes — with quite a lot of differentiation in terms of literacy comfort and language acquisition. In my first teaching year here, my Principal evaluated my teaching style and watched carefully how I interacted with my new EFL students. I particularly remember one observation and the feedback that I received. I was teaching a lesson to Grade 4′s and was asking the students why they thought it might be importatnt to save their work. My questioning was similar to the questions written below.

Me: “Why is it important to save our work? Any ideas? Why do you think we should save our work often? What do you think? Do you think saving your work is important?”

Students:

After the lesson, my Principal and I talked about that particular line of questioning. After a few laughs about the response together, he pointed out very clearly that what I was doing was asking three different sounding questions, and my students were all still processing the first one. It was a good lesson learned…and a good starting point for more lessons down the road.

The transition into an ESL environment has been a particularly important experience. As a teacher in Canada, I had collected hundreds of short educational videos from resources all over the internet and was excited to use htem in the classroom. It became evident pretty early that much of the humour, language and context would be difficult for my new students. As a result, I’ve been forced to look for new multimedia resources for my classroom and more importantly — evaluate those resources with a new set of criteria — with the ESL student foremost in my mind.

In my classroom, I try and find great Web 2.0 resources for my students that challenge their literacy skills while engaging their strong technology skills. Online applications like ZimmerTwins, BitStrips, Prezi, XtraNormal, and GoAnimate are some of the favourite websites in my classes because they blend strong visual elements with literacy and language. No-dialogue games like Samorost or Chasm are big hits any day of the week — probably because the students are able to sit and think about the game in any language they want . . . and there’s nothing wrong with a little break now and then.

Having to rethink ESL teaching strategies and resources is probably something more teachers should be doing — as it challenges us to consider different learners in our classrooms and ultimately widen our catch basin. The nicest part about reinvention is that social networks (like Twitter) and connecting with teachers in forums like Teaching Village can provide very real and meaningful opportunities for sharing and collaboration.

So far the frontline has been as stinulating as one might imagine.

Engage,

Rob Newberry

Rob Newberry is a technology specialist at Ruamrudee International School in Bangkok, Thailand. He began his teaching career specializing in Interactive White Boards and multimedia integration, and now focuses on Web 2.0 applications in the classroom.

Rob is the license holder for TEDxBKK — the first independently organized TED.com event in Thailand.

In 2009 he began a long term relationship with Prezi — an online zooming presentation tool and was nortorious for seeing Posterous on the side.

Follow him on Twitter: RobinThailand

Raising a Digital Native in Argentina (by Jennifer Verschoor)

Barbara — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:00:15 +0000

Deciding where to send your child to school is arguably one of the hardest decisions a parent has to make. My 4 year old daughter attends a regular school in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The school is not bilingual and offers English as a compulsory subject.

I have been speaking in English to my daughter since she was born. She understands the language and feels very confident. Children at school even thought she came from “Disneyland” because she was fluent in English.

As a Web 2.0 fan I felt that something was missing in my daughter’s education. Language learning through videos and games is not a new concept in education, so I thought that being able to play in English was an excellent alternative. Therefore I created her first blog called Vicky’s Learning English when she was only 4 years old. It was just unbelievable to see how she naturally incorporated the mouse and learned very quickly how to go to favourites and open the link to her blog.

Amazingly she taught me that she was able to navigate when she was only 4 years old because she knew all the YouTube videos linked to the one I uploaded on her blog.

How did I add the content to the blog? This was really very easy because I followed her teacher’s syllabus and uploaded the same content with images, sound and videos for her to play at home. Her blog became a finalist earlier this year in III Espiral Edublogs 09. You can read about it here.

You must be asking yourself how was she able to use her blog if she couldn’t read or write. She knew there was a clickable orange link that took her to a web page. I compiled an extensive list of some helpful web pages for her to continue learning English after school. Reading is a highly individualized skill and each child´s performance will vary. She didn´t have to learn how to read because she was able to play with several Chinese websites. She was definitely using a different skill I never learned at school.

She was learning and having fun at the same time. This experience allowed me to start one of the most rewarding professional experiences I have ever had. Nowadays in a very small school in the Northern Area of Buenos Aires I am in charge of uploading content offering extra activities for students using a private wiki as an online platform.

Digital natives take technology for granted. Do you know of any other story on how teachers are engaging this new tech-savvy generation?

Jennifer Verschoor holds degrees as English University Professor, Bachelor in Educational Management, English Public Translator and ICT in the Classroom validated by Trinity College London. At the moment she is studying for her Master´s degree in Virtual Environments. She is a member of The Round and is going to publish her first ebook in January 2012.

Her emphasis in training teachers to integrate technology into the classroom started several years ago. Since then has given numerous workshops on the integration of New Technologies in Education in Argentina, Japan, Paraguay and Costa Rica. She delivered online presentations for Tesol France, Besig in Germany, Tesol Uruguay, ETAS in Switzerland and IATEFL LT SIG.

Currently she is working as the Coordinator of New Technologies for the Teaching of English at a Bilingual School. She is a teacher trainer for SBS Argentina, ITESL and St.Matthew´s college and a course coordinator at ESSARP, specialised in Technology Integration in the classroom.

She is a proud WEBHEAD and President of ARCALL Argentine Computer Assisted Language Learning. She participated in several online international projects as Global Partners Junior provided by IEARN. She has been an online moderator in various TESOL Electronic Village Online sessions since 2006. She was hired by The Consultants-E to create a Science Webquest.

A 1.5 Million Yen Secret (by Steven Herder)

StevenHerder — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 09:00:19 +0000

If you read Stories from the Front Lines of EFL, and thought, “I’d really like to be part of this project, but I’m not sure anyone would be interested in my story” then this post is for you.

Answering just a few important questions can give you the confidence to share your thoughts and ideas about teaching. It may take a bit of time, some reading and some effort, but anyone can do it. You can benefit yourself and all of us by taking this step in your own development as a teacher. Everyone has some great successes from the classroom to share, and all of us really do want to learn from you.

Here’s one way to get started:

I was a shy teacher for 16 years. I had learned so much over the years but was too timid to share any of it with my colleagues. I had so many worries: they would know that I wasn’t originally “trained” as a teacher, they wouldn’t believe what I had to say, they would ask me questions that I could not answer, and so on and so on. Even though I had years of experience in the classroom, and loads of common sense, I was lacking the theoretical background, in both the science of learning and the art of teaching, that always left me feeling like an impostor or a fake. For me, doing my MA TEFL was the way to become a complete teacher: but now, having recently finished, I realize that it is not the only way. I’m going to share a secret with you that can save you 1.5 million yen and make you feel equal to your educational peers if you’re willing to put in some effort.

There are only two small steps that you must take. In return, you’ll enable yourself to make a giant step in your own professional development and feel like a very well rounded teacher: define your theory of learning and your theory of practice.

A theory of learning (TOL) is simply an opinion about how people learn a language. There are probably 436,782,285 other opinions out there, so don’t feel like there is any one “correct” answer that you must follow. What I’ve learned from three years of reading about and discussing this topic in detail is: teachers who stop and think about how people learn have more success than those who simply teach from the teacher’s manual, or teach as they were taught. Simply writing down what you think leads to learning, and then giving reasons why you think like that, will put you way ahead of many other teachers who have yet to realize this simple truth.

The second step is to define your theory of practice (TOP). This is like making a list of all the things that you will do in your lessons to help your students learn. Of course, these TOP methods or activities should be directly connected to your TOL opinions. If you can decide to do more of what YOU believe leads to learning, and stop doing things that you don’t believe leads to learning, again, you will be way ahead of many teachers who unfortunately don’t know the power of this secret.

I ‘m happy to share examples from my own personal TOL and TOP. I’m always looking for new colleagues to share ideas back and forth with. Who knows, maybe we’ll work together on a classroom research project; maybe we’ll publish something together, or even better than that, maybe we’ll become friends.

Finally, the reason I wrote this is that I want to help those who would like to share their thoughts on this blog but don’t have enough confidence to get started. I think that is a shame, because I realize that some of my best ideas that I now share are the same ideas that I first used 15 years ago. Nobody at that time helped me to realize that I could share them with others. So now you know that you can!

Good luck and cheers for now! I hope to read your story soon.

Steven has an MA TEFL from Birmingham University. He believes that being a teacher means a never-ending commitment to learning. “First, we must connect with our students, then expect them to grow in some way; the rest we just work out day by day.” He is an avid collaborator and is always looking for new ways to grow.

You can learn more about his TOL and TOP on his website and his blog.

Teaching English at a Japanese Academic High School (by Tomo Wakui)

Barbara — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:00:45 +0000

My teaching History

Hello. My name is Tomoe Wakui. Please call me Tomo. I am a high school English teacher in Niigata, Japan. I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself here in Teaching Village.

Let me explain my teaching history briefly. I became an English teacher in 1989. I worked at a Girls High School. Except for only having female students, it was just a normal high school.

After three years, I moved to a kind of vocational high school. The curriculum included textile, domestic science, commercial and general education courses. There were many mischievous students at this school. They caused a lot of problems, but they were always energetic and bright. I loved them very much. The problem with teaching English in both of these high schools was that most of the students didn’t have a concrete purpose to learn English. Even term examinations weren’t enough to provide a purpose to learn. In order to motivate students and have them experience a sense of achievement and enjoyment, I tried to focus on 5 points in teaching. First, I always set goals for the whole year, the whole lesson, each class and each activity. Second, I spent enough time at the pre-reading stage. In this section, students were encouraged or motivated to read a text by looking at the pictures, title or diagrams, and guessing the content of the text. Thirdly, I chose materials carefully. I tried to find texts that were inherently interesting to the students. Fourth, I tried to adopt a communicative approach with my lessons as much as possible. I used classroom English. I made my own conversation textbook and used it in every class. This book consisted of questions and answers because they are the most basic elements of communication. To teach how to ask and answer promotes student communication. Lastly, I did many kinds of pair and group activities in my class and created an atmosphere in which students could talk freely and comfortably.

In 1998, I moved to a credit-system high school. Many students there had various kinds of problems. Some of them needed mental support. Both very fragile and sensitive students and rebellious students were mixed together in one school. It was really tough for teachers to take care of each student. Since many different students were absent from class one after another, it was very difficult to accumulate knowledge. I worked for this school for nine years. While teaching there, I learned a lot about counseling, mental health, class organization and so on. I used a cooperative learning style in my classes. I divided students into groups in which all members had roles. I also used this group system both inside and outside of the class to encourage students to take care of each other. Students did really well. I was very proud of them. They stuck together like a family and enjoyed learning English together. My students made me realize how wonderful it is to learn together! They managed to do well because they did not learn alone; they motivated and stimulated each other because they worked as a team.

Now, I am working for an academic high school. I was just transferred last year. Working in an academic school is hard because teachers are always busy and face a huge amount of pressure to cram students full of as much knowledge as we can, and then worry about the result of their exams. In my former schools students caused a lot of trouble and did not have specific reasons to learn English. But I could teach anything I wanted to suit the students’ levels and preferences. I didn’t have to reach a certain fixed standard. I just set each attainable goals and got there moderately. When I first started teaching at an academic high school, I didn’t feel like I had enough experience or skill because teachers were required to follow a rigid syllabus in order to help students attain a level high enough to pass very difficult college entrance exams, irrespective of their abilities, motivation or interests. So, in order improve my teaching ability, I observed most of the other teachers’ classes and I also visited classes at other academic high schools. Even so, I felt like my efforts were not enough. I needed to know more about many kinds of effective teaching skills. Finally, I made up my mind to learn at International University in Japan. That is where I am now studying.

Present conditions at a Japanese academic high school

Since I became a teacher, I have explored specific methods in which students learn and help each other in pair and group activities. However, in a typical class at an academic high school, there is no time to do any “extra” communicative activities. I found that some teachers still teach English in almost the same way we were taught when we were high school students. Nowadays, there are a lot of new English teaching methods. Especially, the communicative way of teaching has become popular. However, the truth is that the majority of teachers at academic high schools still follow a passive, teacher-centered, lecture style of teaching.

The main reason is college entrance examinations. Students believe that studying at an academic high school will help them pass the exam to get into a good university. Teachers face a lot of pressure to finish the lessons which will prepare students for the exams. I really want to do something fun in class, such as communicative team-teaching lessons, but this puts me in conflict with the reality that we have to cram as much knowledge for the entrance exams as we can, and finish each lesson as fast as we can.

If we teach students more communicatively, they will enjoy interacting with each other. The problem is simply time limitations and teaching skills.

However, I still believe that student-centered communicative teaching methods don’t necessarily have to disturb students in their studies for entrance exams. Instead, this style of teaching has beneficial effects on language acquisition. So, I would really like to develop more interactive, student-centered ways to teach, using existing textbooks. I would like to prove that even at an academic school, we can teach communicatively, involving students with the text and with each other as well as giving them enough knowledge for entrance exams. I believe that if students learn more interactively, it will not only make them feel motivated, but also have a great combined effect on their examination results.

Tomo’s Tips for pair and group activities

Here are nine tips for my pair and group activities. This might be a little bit different from typical pair and group activites. I believe that student-centered pair/group activities encourage students to work independently. Iwill be glad if these might be of some help for other teachers.

1. Each group consists of four members. All students must have their own roles.

(a) They should choose a leader to represent them as the “Chairman” of the group

(b) Then they choose a “Secretary” who will correct the assignments and take notes during discussion.

(c) The other two members will be “Spokespeople” who present the activity to the whole class. In case these two members fail to do their task, it is the Chairman’s responsibility to carry it out.

2. All the group members should cooperate and work together to practice using English language–in reading, writing and speaking, both inside and outside the classroom.

3. The secretary must ensure that every member of the group submits assignments or activities. He/She only submits assignments to the teacher once all of the members have completed the tasks.

4. Usually, the teacher can’t finish most activities during class. Thus, students have the liberty to choose any method to accomplish the reading and listening activities (e.g., Shadowing, Fill-in-the-Blanks, Read-and-Look-Up, Reproduction activity) according to their English level and preferences and should be encouraged to continue doing their preferred activities even outside the classroom.

5. Every day, the first 10 minutes of the class is utilized for a group reading test. Each member of the group must do well on the test; otherwise, the group takes the test again until every member passes. The group is encouraged to help each other to improve their English reading skills so they can pass the test with flying colors.

6. If a student is absent, their partner or group members update the absentee before the next class. It is very important for them to help the returning absentee to catch up.

7. Each member of the group must respect their co-members, especially during discussion activities. They must give each other a chance to express their opinions on the topic and should show their interest by listening carefully and interacting with each other. All members of the group must learn how to become good listeners in order to foster good communication within the group, thus improving their communication skills. Showing positive peer attitude and being an audience of good listeners encourages the speaker to gain more confidence and be motivated to present strong arguments.

8. Students are responsible to look out for each other. If one member of the group is tasked to do a presentation in front of the class, the rest of the group is obliged to support that member.

9. Members share ideas, exchange information, set goals and encourage each other to improve their English skills. If one of the members has higher English skills than the rest of the group, that member should share knowledge, be a role model and foster peer support to his/her co-members.

Teaching in a Small Village in Poland (by Anita Kwiatkowska)

Barbara — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:00:11 +0000

In September 2003 I got a phone call from my former primary school teacher offering me a part time job in the old primary school I started my education in. I felt extremely excited!

It was my first real job offer and I was supposed to work with teachers who had taught me the alphabet as colleagues! At that time, I was still a student at a university but as I had already completed my pedagogy and methodology courses, I was more than welcome in Szkola Podstawowa in Tuchom, Poland.

Tuchom is a small village in the north of Poland and the school there provides education for kindergarten and early years students from grades 1 to 3. There are around 10 students in each grade so the total number of children attending is around 40. There were many attempts to close the place down due to economic reasons and to send the kids to bigger schools but so far, luckily, these attempts were unsuccessful.

Teaching in a very small school like the one in Tuchom and bearing in mind the fact that it was the school I attended was an amazing experience. Teachers knew every child by name, they were familiar with their situations at home and had plenty of time to focus their attention on the kids’ individual development. The atmosphere in the school reminded me of home and students felt at home being there.

My students showed extreme willingness to learn English. A vast majority, if not all, of them had never been abroad or heard anyone speak the language before. They came from frequently large, poor or broken families. Their knowledge of the world outside the village was scarily scarce. I remember bringing toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals into the classroom and having the kids ask, ‘What is McDonald’s, teacher?’

The beginning of every school year was a torture test. I had to collect money for the course books from the students, order the books from the bookshops and then carry them on my own from the nearest city. As we were ordering an insufficient number of books, the bookshops did not want to provide free transport. The same story happened when I requested Teacher’s Books and audio CDs from the publishing houses. ‘Sorry, you need to order at least 20 books from each level to get them,’ I was always told. Fortunately, after calling the representatives repeatedly, explaining my situation and begging, I finally succeeded.

Still, half of the students could not afford the books, there was no computer and no VCD/DVD players to use in the classroom and no copying machine either. The only thing we had was an old cassette player that kept breaking down.

Yet looking back I cannot help smiling. All the effort and money I put into helping these kids was not for nothing. They loved learning English. With the help of ‘Songs for Very Young Learners’ and the forever breaking cassette player, my students had the chance to learn songs and sing in English. We spent a lot of time doing crafts work and sold what we created during the Christmas fair to raise money for the school. During a Spring Fair my students sang ‘Head and Shoulders’, ‘The Wheels of the Bus’ and ‘Wind the bobbin up’ for the whole village community and the ovation they got was worth a million! They managed to get everyone involved in singing the songs and doing the actions and I felt really proud of being their teacher!

At the moment I teach English to Young Learners at Istek Belde, a primary school in Istanbul, Turkey. It’s a private school that provides education for the more affluent members of society. Needless to say, I no longer face difficulties like the ones I faced in Tuchom. The classrooms are well equipped. Most children learned English in kindergarten. They all have their books and are eager to learn.

There is only one thing I am not sure of. Will they still say ‘Hello’ to me in English every time they see me even after years have passed like the students from Tuchom in Poland?

Anita Kwiatkowski holds a M.A. in English Philology from the University of Gdansk, Poland. She has been teaching kids and adults in Poland since 2001 and in 2007 she moved to Turkey. During the week she does her best teaching young learners. At the weekends she performs her duties as a Cambridge ESOL oral examiner, runs workshops for teachers or travels. She is a huge fan of Pedro Almodovar, loves face painting and sometimes indulges in Indian cuisine.

You can follow Anita’s adventures on her blog and on Twitter.