Since Steve Mullen began teaching in the Czech Republic in January 1991, he has had an extensive career in education and training. He has been employed as a teacher in private and public schools, founded two language schools, written numerous training courses in areas connected with hospitality and customer service, developed content for TEFL activity libraries, designed a web-based lesson planner and ecosystem for language teachers and learners, and worked as a freelance language teacher. Email: steve@mullen.cz

 

Note

“Lessons Learned Teaching Abroad Part 1” can be read here.

“Lessons Learned Teaching Abroad Part 2” can be read here.

 

Lesson Learned #5

Teaching isn’t a science – it’s an art form.

For years I used to think of the classroom as my laboratory – a place where I could test activities on students and, depending on the outcome, label and catalogue them, refine them and retest them, or discard them as failed experiments. As a young teacher, I was concerned with finding my style and adding to my bag of tricks. However, I have come to I realise that thinking of the classroom as a laboratory for experimentation has flaws. While it is true that we need to find an approach that works for us, the classroom should not be thought of as a personal teaching lab for two reasons. Firstly, it implies that learners are lab rats – and this line of thinking is clearly flawed and, secondly, the classroom is far from a controlled scientific environment. To test something scientifically, we need constants and a control group.  And the groups we work with as teachers are anything but controlled and have many more variables than constants. They ought not to be controlled either – they should be communicative, democratic, and dynamic.

As we use activities to help us attain our learning objectives, we need to be mindful that some of them usually work, some of them sometimes work, and some of them rarely work. Even if the activity is appropriate for the group in terms of level, theme, and target language, a lot depends on the way we set it up and on the group itself. A group can be greater or less than the sum of its parts. Occasionally we come across groups that, despite being full of dynamic individuals, seem to lack the collective energy or cohesion they need to be engaged in the communicative activities we bring to the lesson. Conversely, other groups might surprise us with the enthusiasm they put into their learning. Each group has its own personality and that personality often seems to be directed by one or two individuals within the group. One of my own past teachers once pointed out that, whether group members are conscious of it or not, there are leaders within each group whose enthusiasm or apprehension have an impact on the other group members and the results of our hard work and planning.

I now tend to think of teaching more as an art than a science. Everyone has their own idea of what art should be in a similar way to learners having their own ideas of what a lesson should be. The creative aspect of the teaching is in how learning is set up and framed. The art supply shop is the school’s resource centre or the Internet; the studio is the classroom; and the work of art is what each group member takes away with them to share with someone else in the future.  But we mustn’t be confused – although teachers need to be artistically inclined to know which supplies and materials will be needed, it’s not always the teacher who is holding the palette inside the studio. And let’s be clear – learners are not an audience in a gallery – they are part of the process. 

 

Lesson Learned #6

We must be careful not to start shingling the roof before we dig a foundation.

When it comes to course design and delivery, I like to compare it to building a house. I think this is a fairly neat way of taking something as abstract and mind-boggling as language acquisition, and putting it more concrete terms that are easier to visualise.

The architect of a course is the person or organisation who draws up the blueprint.  In course design, we refer to the blueprint as the curriculum. There needs to be some kind of a curriculum or there’s a very good chance that the walls won’t meet or that we’ll forget to hook up the plumbing to the toilets, which could result in courses that stink.  In many language schools, there is a very good chance that neither the builders, nor the foreman, nor the project management team will ever lay eyes on the architect because generic blueprints have been purchased. In other words, many schools use sets of textbooks prepared according to standardised curricula. So the architects of the course may be professional course writers retained by publishing companies.

In other, typically well-established, schools, they may have developed their own curricula. The reason that such schools are probably going to be well established is that developing curricula and materials to support them is very time-consuming and expensive. A school would probably only do so if they were trying to create brand identity, trying to enhance the prestige factor, developing a shorter course where it is feasible, or hoping to sell their programs to other schools.

It is not entirely unimaginable that a native-speaking teacher could be thrust into a classroom and told to teach without a textbook or a curriculum. This happened to me in 1991 on my first sojourn as a teaching traveller. Something like this is a true test of a teacher’s resourcefulness. When inexperienced teachers come into this type of situation, we very quickly get to grips with just how complex our mother tongue is. It’s hard to imagine just how to proceed after we have done, ‘Hello, my name is Steve. What’s your name?’ There is a real danger that we will attempt to put the shingles on the roof before we have dug a foundation.

To my knowledge, this situation isn’t so common nowadays in Central Europe, but it may still happen in other countries. It is worth asking potential employers what course materials they use. If they can’t put our minds at ease, we would be advised to try to find out what levels of learners we will be teaching and bring our own materials.

The project management company in this analogy is the school and the foreman, who works for the management company, is the teacher. It is their job to interpret the blueprints, purchase supplies, manage costs, create work schedules and write up daily work plans. From the curriculum, or blueprint, the teacher and school management need to decide how much needs to be accomplished by when and how it is to be undertaken. This is the work schedule, which we call the syllabus. The syllabus is a plan derived from the curriculum that outlines how the course is supposed to unfold.

Following the syllabus is very important to the school management, especially in public courses that are repeated for new groups coming along in the next school term. If a group falls behind the prescribed pace, i.e. they don’t manage to cover the material they are supposed to, learners will have difficulty enrolling in a course next year. In language learning one level ends where another begins because that’s just how the materials are written. If learners don’t complete level one before the time allotted for the course runs out, they won’t be ready to advance to level two without remedial work. And if the learner is allowed to move into level two without remedial work, the group, teacher included, may suffer, since it can be very difficult managing groups where there are varying levels of communicative competence present.

So, if we are not party to the writing of the syllabus, we need to make sure that we understand it, that its objectives are clear to us and that the learners in our group will be ready to take the next step when they finish our course. 

 

Lesson Learned #7 

Good planning yields good results.

To me, lesson planning is one of the most creative processes in teaching. And it is very, very important. Without a lesson plan, teaching tends to be unfocussed, lacking in continuity and far less engaging than it could be. The lesson plan is what the builders work from.  Imagine giving everyone hammers and saws and putting them to work without letting them know what they are supposed to accomplish and what it is supposed to look like. Unfortunately, many teachers don’t plan well enough and end up with rickety sheds rather than functional, quality buildings. 

In my experience, there are four kinds of teachers that have a tendency to not plan well. There are the inexperienced teachers who don’t know what a well planned lesson can do for them; there are the seasoned, and possibly burned out, teachers who have taught the same material for so long that they know it like the backs of their hands and have lost their zeal for being creative and finding new ways to teach; there are the prima donnas who think planning is beneath them; and there are those who just don’t care. Not planning lessons is usually a sign of ignorance, burnout, laziness, or incompetence in a teacher. And remember, by planning, if we ever do become burned out, lazy or simply are too rushed to get the job done right in the future, we have a body of our own work to fall back on. Planning lessons and saving lesson plans saves us time, work and stress down the road.

As a teacher, the lesson plan is the document I work with most closely. As a student of Education I remember touching on the lesson plan, but I think that methodology was sometimes overshadowed by theory. Having been out of academia for some time and working with other students and teachers, I realise that the theory I learned during my studies has been very important, but I still would like to have learned more about the planning aspect of teaching.

The art of lesson planning doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves – perhaps everyone thinks it is a matter of common sense and it doesn’t need to be pointed out, and I have to say that to me it should be common sense. But, I can attest to the fact that it is not a sense that is common to all teachers. So I am going to briefly explain what I think a good lesson plan should look like, what it should help to accomplish, and how to go about writing one.

Going back to the building analogy, the lesson plan is made up of one or more learning activities. These can be thought of as the materials and supplies needed to construct our house or, in pedagogical terms, as steps we take toward reaching the objectives (or desired outcomes) of the lesson.

The objectives of the lesson go toward achieving the goal of the course. In addition to our objectives, there may be other issues that pop up along the way. Perhaps the learner or group has expressed an interest in a theme or grammatical point that is not contained in the syllabus per se, but that they need or want to learn more about it.  So, it is the teacher’s job to contemplate what the group wants or needs to achieve during the lesson. If using a textbook, the unit objectives should be clear, but we may feel the need to add a few of our own.

Having determined what the lesson’s objectives are, the teacher must then decide how to attain them. Many factors need to be taken into account. Some questions the teacher needs to ask might be: ‘How much time do we have to work with and what kinds of activities can be effectively used within this time frame?’; ‘Is there anything from last lesson that needs revising or clearing up?’; ‘How many learners are likely going to be present?’; ‘What kinds of activities will the group respond to?’; ‘Do I want to use all of the activities suggested in the textbook?’; ‘Can I find or create something that will work better with my group?’; ‘Where can I find suitable resources?’; ‘How do I set up the activities so that they flow seamlessly into each other from beginning to end?’; What are the learners not likely going to understand?’; ‘What questions are they likely to ask?’; ‘Do I know how to respond to them if I am called on?’; ‘What do I do if I have prepared too much material?’; ‘How will I know if they have learned something?’; ‘What happens if they go through the material more quickly than I expect?’; ‘Do I have anything to fall back on if the lesson falls flat and my plan ends up in the waste paper basket?’

Experienced teachers may go through this checklist automatically – that is to say, we may not consciously think about these questions, but instinctively craft our lesson plans intuitively knowing what stumbling blocks are apt to pop up, and we usually are able to recover with a plan ‘B’ if it becomes apparent the lesson is not going to work.  We have developed a feel for the work that acts as our ‘trouble radar’.  Less experienced teachers are advised to heed Murphy’s Law and know that if anything can go wrong, it will. With this knowledge we should consciously try to anticipate trouble.

Knowing how much time we have to work with, knowing the group we are working with and knowing what our objectives for the lesson are, we can get to work planning the lesson. There are two threads in a language lesson that, ideally, should be present from the time we say, ‘Hello, how are you today?’ till we say, ‘Take care, see you next time…’

They are the theme and the language focus. 

The theme could be anything the group is interested in talking about, or whatever topic is featured in the current unit of the textbook. When dwelling on a particular theme, vocabulary and phrases (new language) common to that theme typically come out. This new language needs to be highlighted by the teacher and at least written on the board, if not given to learners in a handout. Teachers should then record this new language in their notes for future revision.

When I started out as a young language teacher, my role model, and my inspiration for becoming a teacher, was one of my French teachers. He once told us that a new word isn’t ours until we had used it at least three times in conversation. And I think that’s about right.  The implication for the language teachers is clear – when teaching new language, we haven’t taught anything unless we have stored it so we can retrieve it for the learners to focus on several more times in future lessons.

In my lessons, the language focus is typically a grammar point. So, assuming the language focus is a grammar point, ideally, the grammar thread should be intertwined with the theme. And again, it should be present from the time we greet the learners as they come in until we say good-bye. This means that the best warm up activities have a dual function – they help to get everyone’s attention and establish an energy level, and they serve to introduce the grammar and theme at the same time.

In a perfect world, the warm-up helps to set up another activity to come that delves more deeply into the theme, its vocabulary, and the language focus. This may lead into another activity to reinforce or expand upon the one before, and so on.

Finally, the lesson needs summary and revision. The activity we choose to achieve this should tie in with all those that have gone before it and provide us with closure.

If you are new to teaching, you may be reading this and nodding your head in agreement, and that would be because you are new to teaching. If you are an experienced teacher, you might be thinking, ‘Yeah, right… Your ‘perfect world’ is not Earth. What planet are you living on!?’

There are several realities that make the ‘ideal’ lesson plan difficult to pull off. Firstly, the lesson’s seamless flow often has to be disrupted by essential non-theme or non-language focus tasks that the group needs to address. There could be homework to check, quizzes to write, announcements to make, vocabulary to revise, or new grammar to teach. Secondly, the flow is often interrupted by ‘off-topic’ questions from learners that need to be addressed. And, thirdly, it can be really time-consuming and tough finding, adapting or creating several activities that flow together and focus on the same theme and language focus for a particular level. Who’s got the time?

Nevertheless, with the knowledge that planned and unplanned disruptions are unavoidable, we should always do our best to focus on the continuity of our lessons.  The bright side is that we accumulate lessons and activities as we teach and, as a result, future lessons aren’t so tough to plan well, i.e. we build up a ‘repertoire’ of activities we can draw on. Also we can take heart in the fact that, as we research and use creative activities in our teaching and come to understand their dynamics, they become easier for us to adapt or create when we need something new down the road.

 

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