Michelle Hunter is a Business English teacher with 20 years’ experience, based in Germany. She has seen first-hand how both students and teachers struggle to maintain quality learning / teaching when working in a foreign language. Currently an Applied Linguistics PhD student at University of York, her research aims to find out what learning / teaching strategies could help deal with emotional and self-confidence issues in university classrooms. Email: keeptraining.michelle@gmail.com

Maximising students’ oral fluency practise can be helped by reducing teacher talking time, and creating an easeful environment. Calm and confident participants engage better in classroom activities. The study presented here takes a coach-approach to teaching which adds to discussions within the area of language learning psychology. Starting from Mary Budd Rowe’s wait time research and incorporating Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment 10 Components ®, the practitioner research project was designed to test out a Time to Think coaching-approach teaching model in a small German university business English class. An analysis of student feedback highlighted the importance of small groups and a calm teacher when it came to engaging learners in speaking tasks. By constantly striving to adhere to coaching principles, the teacher modelled desirable behaviours which appear to have been incorporated by the students.

Review of situation prior to the study

In many EFL classes, teacher talk tends to dominate. Combine lengthy TTT with minimal Wait Time (WT), and students have limited opportunity to practise their oral fluency, or even think clearly. Evidence shows the positive impact on the brain of giving more time and space to think (Brown & Brown 2012). In this paper, I shall summarise what I learned from my Master’s studies about how adopting a coaching mindset influenced by Nancy Kline’s Time to Think Coach approach, can focus a teacher’s attention on her learners and reduces the desire to interrupt and ‘help’ too much.

The research project I conducted looked into how students responded to a Time to Think Coach coaching-based teaching model. One key outcome was that operating with a coaching mindset in the EFL classroom benefits the teacher as much as the students. Having a heightened awareness of one’s own conceptions and behaviours, and understanding how to tune into students’ needs, enables the teacher to better create a generative learning environment, an awareness reiterated in a study by Mercer and Gkonou, (2017).

Wait Time

Mary Budd Rowe (Rowe 1986) measured how long teachers typically give students to respond to a question. She also measured the average wait time before the same teacher reacted to their students’ answer. Subsequent studies support Rowe’s findings (see Ingram & Elliot 2015):

Table 1: Average Wait Times in four different cases       Source: Rowe (1986)

Teacher Talking Time

Closely linked to Wait Time, or the lack thereof, is the amount of talking done by teachers. The fact that teachers tend to speak more than their students in ELT classrooms is widely recognised (Flanders 1961; Long & Porter 1985). For example, Flanders (1961) identified a “rule of two thirds” breakdown of talking time in an average classroom setting:  

Table 2: Break down of who is talking in class and how often                 Source: Flanders (1961)

In second language learning classrooms, Long and Porter (1985) estimated the following average speaking practice times:

Table 3: Average length of speaking practice in two different situations  Source: Long & Porter (1985)

Affording students maximum speaking opportunities does not mean teachers should withdraw completely from the communicative process.  Quality teacher talk is of great value, and learners benefit from listening to good English from their teachers (Nunan 1987).  The point is that what the teacher says must be both considered and considerate. Operating with a coaching mindset could be a way of achieving such a thoughtful balance.

Time to Think

Evidence from the field of neuroscience (Brown & Brown op.cit.) supports coach Nancy Kline’s assertion that giving a person time to think enables them to come up with higher quality responses (Kline 1999). Allowing a person to identify their problem, have their own insights, find illumination and supporting them in taking action to realise their ideas, can only occur successfully when the coach remains attentive and does not interrupt the reflective thinking process.  If we break the alpha-waves (1) created just as an insight is being reached, how can that insight ever be fully shaped?  (Rock 2006)

Equally, if the coach jumps in right at the moment when the thinker’s brain is making new sets of connections, the links creating a super-map in many parts of the brain and enabling illumination, might never form properly and the moment of illumination becomes dulled.

Rock (2006) acknowledges how difficult it is to control our thoughts. However, based on a study by Libet and Associates (in Rock ibid.), he insists that we are able to decide which thoughts we ultimately act upon. 

“... the brain sends us a desire or urge to act, about five tenths of a second before acting, a long time in neuroscience terms. ... the control we had over ‘voluntary’ behaviour was only in the last two tenths of a second before we moved.” (Rock ibid:7)

Rock further argues that the power we have to ‘veto’ actioning a thought, to exercise our self-control, can be developed through systematically concentrating our attention and building a mindful awareness of this momentary choice.  We can learn to curb our impulse to jump in with ‘helpful’ advice and suggestions before we interrupt someone’s thinking time, empowering them ‘to respond rationally to emotionally stressful stimuli.’ (Rock ibid: 6)

With this in mind, it will be argued here that teachers who want to reduce their talking time and build confidence to offer longer Wait Time can achieve their goals by learning to work with the ten components of a Thinking Environment. This will help nurture the necessary mindful awareness of their own thinking, behaviours and intentions, as well as of students’ needs as whole people, not only as learners in the classroom. As Nancy Kline writes: ‘The quality of your attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking.’ (Kline ibid:36)

The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment®

The ten components of a Thinking Environment® are: Attention, Ease, Appreciation, Equality, Diversity, Encouragement, Information, Place, Feelings and Incisive Questions

The initial impetus for the study was Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment (Kline op.cit.) on which Time to Think coaching is founded. The more I learned about this particular coaching philosophy, the more I recognised its applicability to EFL classrooms. Indeed, Kline began her research into what contributes to effective learning while running a Quaker school:

‘...my colleagues and I wanted to help teenagers to think for themselves. ... for several years we observed what was going on when our students thought clearly for themselves, and what was going on when they did not.’ (Kline ibid:16)

The components are built upon the belief in ‘The Positive Philosophical Choice’. This fundamental, underlying belief shapes how a Time to Think Coach operates and can equally be used by any teacher:

“The work of the Thinking Environment is based on the chosen philosophical view that human beings by nature have choice, are intelligent, loving, powerful, multi-talented, emotional, assertive, imaginative, logical and are able to think through anything.” (Kline 2016)

While many EFL teachers are naturally caring and have their students’ best interests at heart (Mercer & Gkonou op.cit.), their actions do not always match their intentions (Nunan op.cit.). Anecdotal evidence from colleagues adds weight to the impression that teachers know they need to speak less; they want to offer their students maximum speaking practice time, and yet many consistently fail to do so.

The Study

Aim    

The aim of this study was to conduct classroom research and collect data on how my students responded to a Time to Think coaching-based teaching model. How far would the evidence point to a successful reduction of TTT and increased WT, which subsequently lead to more student speaking practice?

Setting and students

The data were collected from a convenience sampling of 18 undergraduate international business degree students, over a period of three weeks. Total teaching time was 27 hours. The setting was a German state co-operative university of Applied Science. All participants had received their secondary education in the German school system, although two students originated from China and one from Romania. Their ages ranged from 19 to 24; of the 18, three were male. All had a strong level of English, at least B2. Two focus groups were held as well as two individual semi-structured interviews. Observations were noted during and after class in the teacher’s journal. The data were analysed via NVivo 11 and evaluated in light of the literature reviewed.

In order to offset any potential risk of confirmation bias arising from the pre-existing relationship between students and teacher-researcher, the researcher aimed for mindful awareness. Similarly, to safeguard against possible power differential disturbance, a coach mindset was adopted. Being consistent with Thinking Environment principles helped reinforce these aims. Notably, the component ‘Equality’ served as a reminder of the research premise that all parties in the study are on an equal footing.

Time to Think Coaching-approach teaching model

Fig.1: Part 1. How Bain’s questions fit within the Thinking Environment, underpinned by Kline’s ‘Positive Philosophical Choice’

The graphic shows that underpinning the whole teaching process is the Positive Philosophical Choice. Belief in, and adherence to this, sets the teacher up for everything else that she does with her students. Before a lesson begins, the teacher will have considered two of the four questions taken from Ken Bain’s research into what the best college teachers do (Bain, 2012). Thinking about how to prepare to teach and what is expected of the students creates a clear picture in the teacher’s mind of the ensuing lesson. Once in class, the teacher works on maintaining an environment conducive to thinking and generative learning. To help her do this, she reflects on what she is doing and how she is with her students during the lesson – similar to Schon’s ‘reflection-in-action’.

Fig.2: Part 2. How the 10 components of a thinking environment form the foundation for what occurs before, during and after class, and where Bain’s questions apply

At a more detailed level, this graphic shows the ten components of the Thinking Environment, which inform a teacher’s mindset before, during and after class. Adhering to the ten principles as much as possible, and being acutely self-aware (reflecting-in-action) enables the teacher to behave more in accordance with the coaching mindset. Referring to Bain’s questions at the different phases of the teaching process helps with the meta-level awareness checking and reflection, before and after class being as valuable as during (reflection-on-action).

Limitations

As with small-scale studies of this nature, the low number of participants limits the veracity of any findings. Similarly, the homogeneity of the group restricts the variety of perspectives. The limited time created a degree of pressure to rush; students would not have been available after the course for the focus groups so they had to be conducted in lesson time. Verifying the results would be difficult as the context of this study is very specific. It may not be feasible to conduct similar research as teachers would need to be trained in the Thinking Environment components or at least basic coaching principles. This is costly and time-consuming.

Results and discussion

How did the students react to being taught in a thinking environment?

Two main themes stand out from the data: small group size and a calm atmosphere. Four transcripts were analysed in Nvivo 11. The following word frequency queries were run with the resultant outcomes showing how often participants referred to these two themes:

Table 4: Word search query 1