way leads on to way

Now I Become Myself

2009-01-31T17:19:00.000+09:00

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before—"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton

I love this class!

2007-05-02T12:55:00.000+09:00

Words that any teacher would love to hear, right? One of my first-year students has told me this and written it in her feedback a couple of times already (and it's just the beginning of the school year...) Last Friday she explained.

In high school her classmates weren't into speaking in English. She's been overseas on exchange programs, but when she returned to Japan, the other students just didn't want to talk in English with her. It seems like it wasn't "cool" to speak English.

In our class all the students enjoy using their English to communicate & do quite well at staying in English when they're doing any kind of "free conversation" type activity. She can relax and enjoy speaking in English knowing that her new classmates don't think she's a geek for being into English. If she's a geek then they are too. She didn't use that word, but I think she knows the feeling quite well. Not wanting to show enthusiasm for something that others see as uncool.

There's a tendency these days to call anyone who is really into something a "geek". Or use it as a self-deprecating way to describe oneself. Maybe we've so assimilated the "lowest common denominator" approach to life that we're afraid of showing our true colours and enthusiasm for the things that we love. It's not just the "square peg" teenagers in a "round hole" society that feel like this. Our supposedly individualistic western societies perhaps don't celebrate the individual as much as we think they do. Otherwise, why would there be such a long Wikipedia entry for geek?

So, I'm gonna say it loud, I'm a teaching geek & a "quotation marks" geek and a journalling geek, and I love teaching the English-speaking geeks!

Sometimes the most memorable lessons are the ones learned the hard way…

2007-04-30T08:10:00.000+09:00

At a recent Hokkaido JALT meeting I told the story of my first presentation. In the spring of 1999 I was finishing up the Interim Year Teaching Practicum of my MA in TESOL at the School for International Training. I’d kind of forgotten that I’d sent this in as part of one of my reports. The lessons I learned from that experience have become part of my presentation “prep” routine. Here’s an excerpt of the report that I wrote about that experience 8 years ago.

…One reason why I’m so tired is because of the action research project that I’m doing in my pronunciation class and the JALT presentation that I did about it on Sunday. If those who attended my presentation learned half of what I learned that day, then I’ll be satisfied. My first thought about it is that it could've been worse—I could've really fainted, instead of almost fainting. It was probably the longest 45 minutes of my life. I started out all right, if a little nervous. But there were about 35-40+ people in the room and after about 10 minutes I felt like I didn't know what I was saying and I wasn't making very much sense. That's about when the room suddenly got very hot (the classrooms at the international school where the conference was held are on the west side, the sun was shining brightly and the windows were closed due to the sports day at the school next door). [2007 Addendum: the rooms were actually on the east side, but it was a warm and sunny day!]

I wasn’t focusing very well (both verbally and ocularly) and started to see wavy lines in my field of vision. So, I stopped and said something like, "I'm feeling very hot and I'm going to open the door." Which I did, but the door to the hallway didn't let any breeze in so a couple of people helped me to open the blinds and windows. I also had to sit down for a while and continued talking from my chair. When I felt a little better I stood up and when I started feeling whoozy again I sat down. People were very sweet and asked questions and made comments, which helped a lot.

After attending two other presentations, I went to a friend’s house and broke down – literally crying on her shoulder for several minutes. We went for a long walk and she talked me through what had happened. This was just a few hours later, but there were gaps in what I remembered, even then. Who asked what question when? When did I talk about this point? Most of it was, and still is, a blur. But as we were walking I was already thinking about things to do differently in my next presentation. That’s the blessing of being in the experiential learning cycle. Every experience can be a learning experience (but if you don’t go out and put into practice what you’ve learned, does that mean that you haven’t learned it?)

Some of the things I learned are:

• Have someone there for support.
I did everything on my own, including spending 30 minutes that morning making copies of my handout at the local convenience store (the copy machine got clogged up because I tried to copy on both sides of the paper), getting nervous, and giving out handouts to latecomers. It was too much to handle by myself.

• Have everything that I'm going to say on one piece of paper.
Next time I’ll enlarge the handout and write in the margins. I had to keep going back and forth between my note cards and the handout to make sure that what I was saying corresponded to what was on the handout.

• Do a run-through and think through the whole presentation.
I ran out of time to do this. I was going to talk through it with a friend on Saturday night but was so exhausted that I didn't have the energy. I hadn’t taken any time to think about what it would be like to be in front of a group of people in this situation, talking and being “the expert.” It’s much different than being in front of a class of 50 students or even giving a chapel talk to 100+ students and teachers.

• Have everything finished and ready two days before the presentation.
To be fair to myself, I didn’t have much time to prepare a lot beforehand. I was working until the last minute because that’s when I had the time to work on it. I was quite tired and probably hadn’t eaten enough that morning, due to nerves. But, next time I’ll make a plan of what needs to get done and when to do it and try to leave plenty of free time before the presentation itself.

• Find ways to work out my anxiety before the presentation!
I kept downplaying it when anyone would ask me if I was nervous. Next time I'm going to say, "yes, I’m nervous because..." and then do something about it.

• Make sure the title of the presentation accurately describes the content.
In the conference program my presentation was called "Large-class Pronunciation and Listening", the second part "an Action Research Project in Progress" was left off. All the questions and comments pertained to pronunciation and none to the AR cycle. I’m afraid that people attended expecting activities for teaching pronunciation in large classes and not an introduction to the AR cycle. I think that the abstract I wrote up accurately described the presentation, but titles tend to stick in people’s minds.

• Check out the room as soon as possible and make sure that everything is in place.
The room was really warm, even after having been empty for a long lunch break. Airing it out after the previous presentation would’ve helped a lot.

After the conference was over a friend of a friend (who hadn't attended my presentation) asked if I would be willing to do a workshop in October on using songs and music to teach pronunciation at GEOS’s in-house conference. (GEOS is the language school where she works.) I tentatively said yes. I’ve got to get right back on that horse again and put into practice what I did learn, right? [2007 Addendum: this was quite ironic for me because I had interviewed for a job with GEOS in Canada before I moved to Japan and didn’t get it. 8 years later I did a presentation at their conference. Life is fun like that.]

The feedback I got after the presentation, and from some co-workers on Monday, was generally pretty good (or perhaps just kind), but rather vague, along the lines of “It was interesting.” I’m not sure if I could’ve handled more than that anyway. It was a huge learning experience…. It also keeps me humble, realistic in my goals, and appreciative of those people who often give presentations and make it look so easy. Not everything is going to be easy the first time I do it and new challenges are necessary to keep life interesting and to keep growing and learning. My next presentation is going to be a lot better because I have identified very concrete ways to make it better.

A post-script to this section: On Wednesday evening one of my fellow night program teachers called me a “syllable genius” (or something equally flattering). He had attended my presentation and so received the “Haiku Syllable Count” activity and tried it out in one of his classes. He said that it had worked really well. [2007 Addendum: This same teacher still tells me when he’s going to use the activity he got from that workshop. Another lesson – taking the time to tell someone that they appreciate and use what they’ve shared with you is always a good idea. So, I try to do that too. Thanks, B!]

Making sense of classroom experience through reflective practice

2006-10-08T07:39:00.000+09:00

Here's an edited version of the handout for the workshop I gave at the Professional Development in Language Teaching conference in Okayama, Japan this weekend. It was a great conference with lots of workshops by teachers working on their teaching. I'll post thoughts and inspiration from the conference in the next few days.

Making sense of classroom experience through reflective practice

Systematic, rigorous reflective practice is a potentially transformative method of professional development since it focuses on the classroom experience – where our beliefs about teaching meet our practice.

The steps of reflective practice…

Experience – a critical moment that you would like to understand better

Description – the video clip of the moment
• What was happening? What were the students doing/saying? What were you doing/saying?
• How did you feel? How were you reacting to the students?
• What other details will help you to understand this moment – group dynamics, institutional context, level & ability of the students?

Analysis – produce several hypotheses that could explain the situation
• Why do you think this happened?
• What beliefs do you have about learning that might help interpret this moment?
• What does your past experience (generally and/or specifically with these students) tell you about this moment?
• What do research and/or theories of language acquisition tell you?
• Can you think of other possible explanations?

Plan of action – articulate a variety of future actions to address the situation
• What would you do differently next time based on your analysis?
• What information or skills would help you address this issue?
• What information or skills would help your students address this issue?
• What else can help you address this issue?
• What questions would you like to explore?

Disclaimer
This presentation is based on materials and terminology developed by trainers in the SIT TESOL Certificate course.

2006-09-30T14:24:00.000+09:00

Article Recommendation

This past week I stumbled across an article by Kathleen Bailey called "Promoting our own Professional Development Through Reflective Teaching Journals." It's available at the World Federation of Modern Language Associations website in the May 2005 newsletter (pages 12-22). (The following link will take you to the newsletter as a pdf file. The article begins on page 12.)

FIPLV May 2005 Newsletter

Here's the opening paragraph...

"Working in the tradition of reflective teaching, over the past two decades many language teachers around the world have kept journals as a way of documenting and investigating their teaching. In this paper I will offer excerpts from several teaching journals. The dual focus here will be first on reflective teaching as a way of promoting our own professional development, and second on the insights that some language teachers have gained by keeping teaching journals."

This article is a clear and accessible overview of what is involved in keeping a reflective teaching journal. I find that reading the insights that other teachers have gained through their own reflective practice is good motivation for continuing to reflect in my teaching journal.

Read it and get motivated yourself!

2006-09-28T22:33:00.000+09:00

First Reflection

Description
(What I plan to write usually changes in the act of writing. As I write I remember more details and see that the moment didn’t happen quite as I remembered in the emotional first recollection.)

This is a higher-level first-year Oral English class for English majors. There were 8 students in the class in the first semester. One other student joined from September.

Moment: a listening exercise from the textbook. Students listened to 3 people describing the contents of their fridges and checked the items they heard on a picture in the textbook. 8 students were present, so the students were arranged in 4 pairs to check their answers together.

Two students (one of them was the student who just joined the class) repeatedly were not checking their answers. After the first listening, three of the four pairs were on task and checking their answers together. The fourth pair was talking (in English) about McDonalds and how fat Americans are. After the second listening they were once again not on task. This duo had been paired up previously in the lesson and similarly had not been on task. They chatted in Japanese, spoke loudly and disturbed the other students.

After the third listening I had students pair up with the person on their other side. The two noisy students were separated and settled down and focused on the lesson.

Analysis
(I find that ideas generate ideas when I’m writing out my reflections. I might have one interpretation in mind when I start, but others pop up as I continue.)

According to what I know about these two students (since I've taught the new student in another class) Both are the kind of student who seems unaware of the effect of their behaviour on those around them. They both have quite high levels of English even though neither of them have spent as much time studying overseas as their classmates have. They seem less able to focus on a lesson after a warm-up of free chatting time.

According to what I know about control and initiative, some students can stay on task with more initiative while others drown in the freedom. They might not be used to doing what the other students are doing and tend to simply do their own thing during pair work. Higher level students to whom English always came easy in junior and/or senior high school haven’t always developed the work habits necessary to be successful in college. If they’re not used to paying attention in high school, they won’t necessarily know how to do so in university.

According to what I know about people and their differing personalities, coming into a new class (as R did) or having the class members change (S) in the middle of the school year can cause insecurity that results in “acting out.” S has always had days when she’s been rather hyper and unaware of the effect of her actions on others.

According to what I know about setting up tasks, people process information in different ways. Just giving instructions verbally will probably not reach all the students – especially if they’re used to “tuning out” the teacher because of their previous classroom experiences. But I did give the instructions verbally and visually as the students were looking at their textbooks as I explained the task and the other pairs knew what to do.

Plan of Action
(based on the analysis of the moment)
Keep R and S apart during pair work. They get along fine, but don't work together very well.

Make sure that the tasks are clear in two ways: what the students have to do & why they're doing it. I know that I'm more motivated to do something if I know why I'm doing it. "This activity will help you to see if you understand the difference between countable and uncountable nouns." It wouldn't take much to state the purpose of the activity. It would also help me make sure that I'm not making the students do "busy work" that doesn't help their learning.

Help the students connect the content of the lesson to the goals they made at the beginning of the semester. Have them look over the page/unit and note what they know about the vocabulary, grammar, structure or other content of the lesson. Find out what they want to learn/remember/review.

Learn more about the students' learning styles by giving them a VAK (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) self-assessment test that will help them determine their preferred learning style. Knowing their own learning style will help them make plans to reach their semester goals and it will help me plan lessons that will engage each student.

2006-09-25T22:52:00.000+09:00

Sometimes little things make all the difference...

Last year after the first Canadian Studies lesson of the second semester, I was very dissatisfied with the lesson. It was disorganized, boring and irrelevant to the students. (At least that's how I remember feeling about it!) Today's lesson went much better and generated lots of comments and questions in the students' written feedback. At one point I looked out and saw all 57 students on task and working. Wow – what a beautiful sight!

When I think about the changes I made to the lesson they really were quite basic...
• I redesigned the handout so that the instructions for the different tasks (graphing population statistics about immigration to Canada) clearly matched the graphs they pertained to.
• I set up the unit on immigration in a way that connected to what the students know (Japan's birthrate is falling and its population is decreasing. Canada's birthrate is falling and its population is increasing. Why? A student says "immigration".) Most Japanese would never dream of immigrating to another country so students are generally quite curious about what would motivate others to leave their countries of birth.
• I connected to the students’ prior knowledge by using a K-W-L worksheet for students to write down what they already know about immigration, what they want to learn about it, and (at the end of the lesson) what they learned so far. (Google K-W-L for lots of resources that explain the K-W-L technique.)
• I didn’t ask the students to do what they’re generally not comfortable doing. They didn’t have to share their answers with the whole class. If they wanted to work with a partner they could. If they wanted to work by themselves, that was all right too. Basically, in a large class, students are going to do what they want to do – it’s too difficult to monitor them all the time. So why not give them permission to work in their preferred style sometimes?

What small changes can you make in your lessons? Sometimes they can lead to big results!

2006-09-24T21:21:00.000+09:00

The “it” that I continually mention in the poem below refers to keeping an online teaching journal. The goal and challenge is this: to reflect regularly on my classes at least once or, if possible, twice a week and post those reflections online.

In the past I’ve tried to keep a teaching journal, but haven’t been very successful at doing so for any length of time. I’ve also tried to find actual examples of reflection on language teaching on the internet and haven’t had much success. There seems to be a lot of resources about various theories of reflective practice (I’ll add links to those I think are most useful to the language teaching context), but not many examples. So I’m hoping that this blog might be a useful resource for teachers who would benefit from reading actual reflections on teaching. And imagining that there is an audience out there who will read my reflections creates the incentive to add new content.

Maybe I’ll find out that I’m the only one who is interested in reading examples of reflection – and that’ll be all right. “Way leads on to way” and this is the way I’m being led right now.

Happy teaching!

2006-09-20T10:21:00.000+09:00

What if I ran towards it
with the same energy and intensity
that I run away from it?

What if I threw myself
into this project
with the same willingness
I use to distract myself from it?

What if I worked on it
with the same enthusiasm
that I talk about it?

What if I found ways
to make it work
with the same creativity
that I dream up reasons
why it won't work?

What if I just started it
and followed where it takes me
and actually let
way lead on to way?

What if I just did it?