How much change do you really want?
or How much do you really want change?
On a recent BBC Radio podcast there was a very interesting anecdote of asking a room of hardcore Ecos whether they would reveal to the world an invention which would stop global warming tomorrow but take away the need for people to change their lifestyles to make them greener. Out of an unspecified roomful, two put their hands up to say yes- stopping climate change it would be. The rest would let us boil in our own juices in the hope that we would learn the live the “right” way.
Here are a few similar thought experiments for my fellow TEFLers and TEFLettes:
1. If it is was found that enjoyment in young learner classes actually led to less learning, would you scrap fun and games?
2. If you found a way of making your laziest students progress as quickly as your most hard working, would you use it?
3. If the most effective method was to set up an activity at the beginning of the class and leave your students to it for 55 of 60 minutes twice a week, would you happily “teach” that way and spend most of the time standing round twiddling your thumbs?
4. If following the instructions in the teachers’ book and students reading grammar explanations and instructions for activities was proved to be more effective than your attempts at lesson planning and explaining, would you do it that way? How about if that couldn’t be proven class by class but could be shown over the whole education system you work in and so you could be sure that voting for and using that straightforward system would improve the lot of students all over the country/ chain of schools, even if not in your own classes? (Voting for it and then secretly teaching your own way is not possible in this alternative universe).
5. If the Wall Street system of five hours with a computer for every one hour with a human was proven to work, would you advocate it?
6. If you discovered a form of self study that would make us all unemployed, would you publicise it?
7. If the business manager at the school where you were DoS proved that students would progress quicker by being given 50% more classes for the same price by employing cheaper and therefore less experienced etc teachers, would you support the decision?
8. If there was a drug that took away the dissatisfaction that drives you to constant CPD like reading TEFL blogs in your free time, would you take it?
As comment-hungry as I am, I guess you can discuss whether such things could be proven if you like, although I think the original question of whether you would do those things is more interesting. Alternatively, any other interesting thought experiments for us?
Tags: questionnaires
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Hi Alex!
Interesting questions you’ve got here! The beginning of your article reminded me of that joke about the number of psychiatrists needed to change a light bulb. How many…? Only one! But the light bulb must really want to change!
Besides the questions, I think you’re also raising a problem of how tricky and treacherous human nature is, never satisfied with whatever solution we might be offered…
Here are my answers to your questions:
1. Yes – teaching YL is not about having fun but about making them learn.
2. Yes – if it makes them work and learn, it’d be worth adopting
3. Yes – again, if it’s effective…. although I don’t know why they’d pay me… to just be there and make sure they behave?
4. No – much as I might like it to work for the whole system, I’d want to see my students progress!
5. Yes – although I don’t know much about this system, I would be in favour of spending more time in face-to-face conversations with people than on the internet. The only advantage I see in synchronous and/or asynchronous communication is the fact that all the ideas are written, not lost into thin air…
6. No – it would leave us all unemployed… Yes – if we could still bring learners together to communicate and share ideas and opinions, otherwise society/science would probably progress slower.
7. No – it’s not about the quantity/amount of time given to students, it’s about the quality of the teaching.
8. No – I’d take measures to find the source of my dissatisfaction and change things and even change job, but wouldn’t use any drugs. Reading blogs has not proven addictive, not for me anyway…
Best wishes,
Melania
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:38 am
1 – No. Kid’s still need to have fun. And – anyway I think this is very unlikely to be true – but even if it was I’d say they still need to have fun or they will stop coming to class. So do teachers BTW.
2 – yes. Actually, a lot fo TEFL is about making it easeir for the students. And the harder working ones would benefit too – they could learn faster still or expend their extra work in a different direction.
3 – I actually think this might be true. But what activity? Who will choose it, set it up and monitor it? Who will train the students to do this? Experienced, motivated, skilled teachers.
4 – I’m unlikely to do what the book says – whatever the evidence says. One reason is many students have done it already or read ahead and have their answers ready – often written in weeks ahead or by the student they bought the book off second hand. If I could be convinced that using a book worked I would still give it some kind of a twist – if only to keep me interested. Interested teachers are actually more important than interested students!
5 – No. I’m a luddite. I love the internet and computers and use them all them time. But I think language learning is about interacting with other humans – and so class time – in groups – is best. Students might learn to pass tests faster by spending 5 hours with a computer and one with a teacher but ability to communicate is unlikely to benefit – many learners – especially teenagers, younger adults, and older males from Asian cultures need to work on social skills if they are ever going to be able to interact with other cultures using English.
6 – Yes. It wouldn’t make us unemployed though. What is making us unemployed is the high costs of EFL classes and disappearance of certain legal issues effecting student enrollment and teacher recruitment. When students from Europe swelled the ranks of the language schools in the UK things were different. Basically – there are forms of self study that could replace EFL classes – but they don’t because students feel they need to come to class – witness TOEIC and TOEFL classes where the students just get told the answers to the test questions. They could do this themsleves but they know they won’t.
7 – No. Students’ time is valuable. There is a limit to the time students can spend learning effectively in class (though there is a higher limit on self study time that could be usefully spent) so X hours with a good teacher is better than 1.5X hours with a not so good teacher.
8 – a joke in a list of jokes?? No. Drugs don’t work, though this comes from someone with experience of only alcohol. The general malaise that we variously call burn out is partly endemic – every just feels like that sometimes. Also we remember a time or times we really loved going to work and are still searching for that feeling when it is never going to be very common. Our lives often lack balance since living abroad means we have limited social networks, few hobbies or outlets that are not connected to alcohol.
Rather quick and all just unfiltered opinion as usual. Fun topic though and not without it’s serious edge. Thanks Alex.
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:36 am
1 – nope. Kids need downtime too.
2 – yup
3 – already made that transition. It’s hard psychologically, feels strange but it’s better and the students are so much more involved in driving their own learning.
4 – not going to happen. :-)
5 – not going to happen. :-)
6 – yes. There are other things to life than teaching, we’ll find other jobs. But ya know, not going to happen.
7 – no. We would have to find an alternative method like moving students on to an online platform and making them more autonomous.
8 – eh? What dissatisfaction?
Karenne
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Thanks guys
Number 8 was only half a joke (and the others weren’t at all), and I meant that if we are constantly trying to improve our classes we must be driven, which is a kind of dissatisfaction.
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Oh, and number 9, which is one close to my heart.
9. If you found that your lifetime’s production of worksheets directly clashed with your new beliefs about learning and teaching, would you stop using them all and/ or would you take them down from your blog/ website?
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:21 pm
9 – I would gradually stop using them but never give up entirely. Who’s to say what I now believe is right for everyone? And most of what i’ve produced and what Alex has produced in his monumental corpus of work has at least some value to someone somewhere – even if it’s not what we (he)’d produce now.
I was joking about them being jokes. The one about the greenies was a joke – I’m guessing.
The green movement has suffered a lot from being a beardy left wing fringe of wierd hippy types and anti-capitalists. But they got smeared with that when in fact it was always a much broader movement.
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:41 pm
I wouldn’t take ‘em down, like Andy says, what is right for everyone? I’d do sumfink different from now on…
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:21 pm
How about, “If you discovered that paying teachers a decent wage and offering them job security would raise the achievement levels of their students, would you change the employment habits of your business?”
Unlike the thought experiments that you posit, there are reasonable grounds for supposing that this might be true. However, I haven’t come across an EFL employer who didn’t put business concerns over and above any other concern.
I have to be respectfully dismissive of your thought experiments as they are all so far removed from reality (or at least my understanding of reality) so as to be pointless. In many of them, I imagine that the subtext is, “Do you agree that the teacher’s job is exclusively to promote learning at whatever cost?” My answer would be, “No. I think the teacher’s job is to enable students to fulfill their potential as whatever cost to themselves that they are willing to pay.”
Whilst I am sure that I am reading Melania’s comments uncharitably harshly, I find something very chilling in the assertion that “teaching YL is not about having fun, it’s about making them learn.”
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:27 pm
…as for the worksheets, yes. I think I would probably take them down. What we publish ourselves is a reflection of who we think we are. If I have produced a lifetime of worksheets that are based on sth like the PPP paradigm and I later feel that emergentism is what language learning is all about, I would remove anything that I had put my name to and which directly clashed with what I thought to be true. Alternatively, I would put them in a distinct are and make clear how I felt about them.
I think I would probably use any of them that I felt I NEEDED to use and which were worth their salt. If I had to provide emergency cover and felt that I couldn’t walk in to a class without something up my sleeve and they were the only thing available, I might be tempted to use them. If the question is really, “Would you ever use materials that you did not believe in or which you thought were pedagocially flawed?” my answer would be, “Yes – if I thought that these materials would get me out of a tight spot and allow me to maintain my authority as a teacher.”
February 4th, 2010 at 1:30 am
I won’t take the worksheets comments personally!
“they are all so far removed from reality…”
hence the use of the second conditional. The theme of the whole post (if there is one!) is- if something that you thought highly unlikely to be true turned out to be proved and that clashed with something that you had invested a lot in, e.g. games for young learners or worksheets, would you really change your behaviour? The evidence suggests that most humans would not, and I very much doubt what my own answers would be in most of these for that reason. Will post my answers to the questions soon.
I think a focus on learning the language is severely lacking in many classes where “holistic learning” and such like is used as an excuse to use whatever craftwork activity you like the look of when it leads to not one word of English being learnt. I say choose the best way of teaching the language, and then see if you can add things to add to students’ social skills and what have you.
On pay, see here:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/teaching/tefl/better-pay-better-teaching/
and here
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/teaching/tefl/working-conditions/how-can-we-increase-tefl-pay/
February 4th, 2010 at 6:09 am
1-7: Yes
8: No
February 4th, 2010 at 6:18 am
As for no. 9, I be careful about taking them down, just like I’d avoid deleting errors in blog posts after they have been published. With modern technology, it’s possible to delete and rewrite history – OK, I know there’s probably a cached version on Google somewhere, but if you don’t know the web page has been edited..? So good blogging practice is to use the “strikeout” formatting option, which is prominent in many blogging interfaces for this reason.
So, as suggested previously, I’d leave them as historical documents – but provide commentary, explaining your current opinion. The alternative is just too “1984″ for me.
February 5th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Just in case we are on the verge of misunderstandings, let me clarify: my comments on the worksheets WERE hyptohetical! And aimed at what I would not, not what anyone else should do. Similarly, well I know that you have been championing decent pay for teachers for years. I mention pay just because there really IS a link between happy teachers and happy students, but it is one that employers often fail to see. So [the implication went] if my employer came up to me urging me to pay any heed of Nos. 1-8, I’d be very sceptical indeed.
As for the theme of the post, truth is always subjective (even scientific truths, as the god squad would illustrate). So, if I had failed to subscribe to any of the shock revelations, no – I wouldn’t change my ways. If I had been convinced by them, I think I would change my ways.
Incidentally, back to the “hardocre Ecos”…do we know for a fact that their intention would have been to leave us to “stew” or was that a supposition? I ask because it occurred to me that they might just be inherently sceptical of new inventions that are trumpeted as eco-friendly. If you subscribe to the idea that we activate schemata to help us dream up answers to unimagined scenarios, then it is quite possible that among the schemata that they rifled through was the schema that has the technological solution to the energy crisis – “clean” nuclear power…
February 5th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Again, the point is whether you would change your ways if you became fully convinced of something that went against everything you had ever done and believed before. The number of priests who no longer believe in God suggests that for many people the answer is no. For example, I think I would find some justification for leaving my worksheets up however worthless I later decided they were, just because I have put so much work into them and 90 odd percent of the hits for the blog are for them rather than for my navel gazing.
No further info on the hardcore Ecos (my deliberately colourful words rather than the speaker on the radio) I’m afraid, and the podcasts only stay on the site for a week.
February 5th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Just noticed that Andy thought the greenies story was actually a joke. Don’t be fooled by the language (making the most of not talking to students and not writing serious articles to be as colourful as I can), that was really what happened (if through the filters of my recollection of that person’t recollection of what happened)
“TEFLtastic- Even he doesn’t know when he’s joking” as a motto it is then!
February 6th, 2010 at 12:04 am
Ok. Glad you cleared that up. I suppose truth can be stranger than fiction. In defence of said greenies – maybe the oulandish hypothetical nature of the proposition put them off raising their hands. I’d be curious to know the exact context if the podcast is still available.
Some of your 1-9 what ifs elicit the knee jerk – never ‘appen – response too. Though I did find them thought provoking and tried to respond to them honestly.
Thought experiments like this really do give us an insight.
February 6th, 2010 at 2:30 am
Interesting as these questions are, Alex – I immediately got stuck when I read the “ifs” followed by words like “was found to be” and “effective”, “progress” etc. etc.
Who found? How did they find it? What do ‘effective’ and ‘progress’ mean, and in whose book?
I say this only because I’ve seen countless changes or calls for change based on such findings, and the findings are either dubious to start with, or deliberately manipulated in advance to rationalise the called-for change…
Cheers,
~ Jason
February 6th, 2010 at 5:03 am
Good point Jason, but if you have a knee jerk reaction to such phrases that means that no research can ever prove anything to you and that progress is impossible. Although we might be at the stage with ELT that such claims should normally be treated with scepticism, if not a downright dismissal of theory with the limited time we have to come up with practical ways of changing, many other fields where those phrases were long misused have reached a tipping point where they can now often be taken seriously. I would say from my interested amateur who often reads about them viewpoint that economics is perhaps at the tipping point, and psychology is probably well past it (if quite recently)
April 27th, 2010 at 6:21 am
Oh great post!
I’m with Jason in that I’d want to look at the contexts for that research, but if the data was credible, I’d sign up for them all.
There are teaching procedures that credible research indicates are not effective, but that nevertheless are widely followed. Teaching vocabulary in lexical sets is an example that spings to mind, which you’ve posted about elsewhere ( http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/tesol/teaching-quote-of-the-day-17-december-2007/ ) but there are more.