Josette LeBlanc – Korea

Josette LeBlanc is an English language teacher and teacher trainer who currently lives and teaches in Daegu, South Korea. She’s passionate about reflective practice, compassionate communication, and the development of online and offline teaching communities. She believes learning should be at the center of the classroom, and therefore aims at creating atmospheres that allow students and teachers to realize this. Josette is also a reflective blogger (www.tokenteach.wordpress.com ), a keen life observer (dabbles in photography and video making), and a collector of cute notebooks from around the world.

What are you passionate about, Josette?

I’m passionate about helping people discover new things about themselves and their teaching. I think this is why I love reflective practice so much. I believe that reflection is about deepening your awareness of teaching and learning. I’ve been using my blog to help me get a better understanding of my teaching and the results have been rich and rewarding. I want to help teachers feel this way too.

This brings me to another passion: building learning/teaching communities. In May, we started a reflective practice special interest group (RPsig) in Daegu, which you may call a branch of the RPsig that was created over a year ago by Michael Griffin, Manpal Sahota and Kevin Giddens (learn more here Our Reflective Community).

Although we’ve only had two meetings so far, the results of the exploration and support have been inspiring.  Because reflection is about self-exploration, members are able to examine their own classroom situation, gather ideas on what to change, and come back and talk about it during the next meeting. I believe that this cycle is a great tool for self and professional development.

Another exciting community I’ve been involved in is the online Twitter group KELTchat (check out our blog #KELTChat). We came together by chance, but also by our common connection: English teachers in Korea. Twice a month, we meet on Twitter for an hour to discuss topics relevant to our context. The connections I’ve made via this forum — and Twitter in general – have been mind blowing. I’ve learned about a lot about teaching, but more importantly, I’ve learned how many incredible teachers there are in my own backyard! Without Twitter and KELTchat, I’m not sure I could have known this.

How and why did you become a teacher?

I became a teacher by accident. Really, I guess you could say life pushed me to become a teacher. After graduating I tried to find work that corresponded to my majors, criminology and sociology, but had a hard time. The jobs I did find (part-time night supervisor in a halfway house and legal assistant) weren’t satisfying. I realized what I really craved was work that was creative and made me feel like I was making a difference. Making sure people met curfew and typing out legal documents just wasn’t cutting it. But strangely the idea of becoming a teacher never crossed my mind.

Then one day my cousin who was a teacher was complaining about the work, and all I could think about was how exciting it sounded. The light bulb went off and I started taking steps to become a teacher. They may have been unconventional steps, but they got me where I am today: I started substitute teaching in my hometown; came to Korea in 2005 and completely fell in love with teaching; got my MA TESOL at The School For International Training (SIT) in 2010; and now the journey continues. Teaching is what I was meant to do. It’s incredibly creative, and I feel like I’m making a difference.

Teaching is rewarding work.  What keeps me going through the hard times is when I catch that look in a student’s eye that says, “I got it now!” It’s the look that indicates a shift from not knowing to knowing. I teach because I love learning.  Learning is what makes the impossible possible. I love the idea of helping people realize this about themselves. And one of the best things about teaching is that my own learning never stops.

What are you most interested in right now?

I’m really interested in the topic of teacher support. I want to help teachers learn how to support each other, and also learn how to personally support themselves. As an in-service teacher trainer in Korea, I meet many Korean teachers of English who feel alone and unsupported in their work.  I’ve come to believe that this feeling inhibits them from being able to really be there for their students. On countless occasions teachers have shared with me how exhausted, overwhelmed and depressed they feel about their work conditions. They talk about how they want to consider their students’ learning needs, but they just don’t have the energy to do so.

With my own personal work in learning communities, I’ve learned that teachers can gather some of that much needed energy when they feel empathy. I especially learned this from my Nonviolent Communication (NVC) practice group. I have been a facilitator in this group for about three years. NVC is communication technique that helps us listen to and express feelings and needs with greater empathy.  I think that this technique can not only help teachers understand their students’ needs, but that it can also help them get a better understanding of their own needs.  One crucial element of NVC is the concept of self-empathy. Without recognizing our own needs, we can’t take care of the needs of others. I would like to help teachers learn how to recognize the value of their own needs.

Another interest of mine is helping teachers learn how to use this tool in class when they communicate with their students. I see NVC as a way of helping teachers become aware of how their language and behavior affects their students’ learning.

What things do you do to help you get better at being a teacher, Josette?

As you’ve read above, my teaching communities are very important to my professional development. I have already mentioned the RPsig, KELTchat, and NVC, but I would also like to mention KOTESOL. KOTESOL was the first teacher’s association I was involved in. It is through this group that I first learned about teacher development, and it is also where I first turned to for inspiration as a new teacher. I’ve been an organizing member of the Daegu KOTESOL chapter for about four years, and a member since I came to Korea.

What advice would you give to a teacher just starting out on a journey of professional development?

When you first start your journey in professional development, you’ll probably want a lot of tips and advice on how to teach. Find a group who doesn’t mind giving this to you, but also make sure this group puts more importance on helping you find your own answers. The best tips come from experience, and even if your experience is limited, it is invaluable. True mentors will help you see this and guide you along the way by asking the questions you need to hear.

Is there any blog or online link you’d like to recommend? 

This is such a hard question because there are so many great blogs that I can’t give you just one. I’ll tell you about some of my favorites if you don’t mind.

Alien Teachers by Alex Walsh: Alex writes honest and profound reflections about his experience as a high school teacher in Korea. He also offers creative lesson plans and teaching ideas.

Elt-resourceful by Rachael Roberts: Rachael’s teaching tips are incredibly insightful and ready-to-use. What I also like about her blog is the personal touch she adds to her tips. When I read her blog I feel like we’re talking about teaching over a cup of coffee.

The Other Things Matter by Kevin Stein: Kevin’s talent at writing fictional stories for English language learners has moved me on countless occasions. His blog showcases his creativity and also his ability to look at his teaching in a fresh and courageous manner.

ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections by Michael Griffin: Mike’s ability to question what most people accept about teaching at face value never ceases to amaze me. His reflections and rants display an honest curiosity that leaves readers wondering and unsure: a place I think every teacher needs to stand on.

The Daily Ptefldactyl by Laura Phelps: Laura writes about her experience as an ESL/EFL teacher, trainer and now coursebook writer. Her blog is speckled with intriguing questions about teaching and learning, and inspiring examinations of what life as an ELTer is like.

What’s your favorite quotation about being a teacher?

A constant in my life:

Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand. – Chinese proverb

Without experience, and our reflection on this experience, I believe learning is stunted. It is through experience that we grow and expand.

 

Kevin Stein  – Japan

Kevin Stein is the coordinator of the International Course at Clark Memorial International High School Osaka Campus. He believes that a classroom is a place for teachers and students to learn and grow together.  He lives in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan, and often spends Saturdays feeding deer with his daughter. When he is not feeding deer, he can often be seen making up silly songs and dances with the other members of his family.

What are you passionate about, Kevin?

When I was younger, I was passionate about understanding things and getting them right. For about six years, I was a social worker in Chicago and I just loved to read psychiatry and psychology and social work journal articles.  They seemed to me to have the answers I was looking for at that time, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a whole lot out of them. From how to handle basic mental assessments to things like how to use mirroring to help set a client at ease, the articles were filled with good information.  And when I started teaching English in Japan 13 years ago, with a master’s degree in creative writing and very little ELT training, I also felt like theory would be a great way for me to make sure I was doing the “right thing” in class. But recently, they way I look at my role as a teacher has changed. Or perhaps it has been changing and recently I’ve really noticed this change playing out in how and what I teach. Now I am passionate about finding out from my students what they need. I realize that they are more than willing to let me know, if I am willing to take the time to notice. And while I still love to read journal articles, I have to admit that the longer I teach English, the less sure I become of even the most basic terminology such as EFL or communicative learning.  A lot of the energy and love I had of theory has become a passion for how students and I can work together to find a path which helps students attain their goals.  In the same way, I think this outlook on teaching has informed how I relate to my coworkers and even my friends and family.  I guess I don’t feel like I have any answers, but I’m happy to spend time and energy thinking about any number of questions and seeing what I and the people around me can come up with together.

How and why did you become a teacher? 

I actually taught my first language class when I was 12 years old. I was preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, a Jewish coming of age ceremony, and I was practicing reading and chanting Hebrew as I had to recite a portion of the Old Testament in Hebrew. As part of my training, I was also expected to teach some basic Hebrew lessons to the kindergarten students at my temple.  I watched one of the older, more experienced students lead a class first and then it was my turn. It was very communicative based. We would just say phrases to the students and kind of expect them to answer back. If they couldn’t, we would model what was expected. Our lessons were 20 minutes long and followed the same class procedures as any other lesson — only they were in Hebrew. I really loved teaching those classes.

Basically, I think one of the big reasons we become what we become is because we are given the chance to excel at something and the feeling of success helps keep us interested. I wasn’t a particularly great 12-year-old Hebrew teacher, but I was in a very warm and supportive environment. I was free to make mistakes and improve. So when I got to be about 16 years old and had a chance to work at summer camp as a counselor and work at a nature center, I jumped at it. I spent the summer teaching elementary students about the life cycle of painted turtles and how to recognize about 20 kinds of edible plants, and the list of at least tangentially teacher related jobs just goes on and on. Basically, becoming an English teacher was the end result of having a chance to teach and finding out that there was something in teaching for me. It’s what happened because the people around me were encouraging and helped me succeed and take pleasure in what I was doing.  That’s something I hope informs the way I teach and what I hope my students get to experience in my classroom.

What are you most interested in right now?

As a teacher, I’m most interested in making sure I have the skills I need to meet my students where they are at any given moment during the day.  I know this seems kind of fuzzy, so perhaps I should give a few concrete examples. Up until a few years ago, I was not very good at teaching vocabulary, nor did I think teaching vocabulary was necessarily a good use of a teacher’s time in class. I just expected my students to spend the time necessary to build their vocabulary out of class. This was my prejudice and I carried it around as if it was a truth. But what I failed to realize was that for some students, vocabulary is their main area of interest. Or even if they are not particularly interested in vocabulary, on any given day they might suddenly be very interested in a certain lexical chain or a particular word family. And when that happens, it’s my job as a teacher to make the most out of that moment, which means I need to be able to help explore almost any language issue which my students find interesting at any given moment.  That means I need to be up on my International Phonetic Alphabet. I need to know about early literacy issues. I need to be ready when my student asks me to go exploring a new space with them.

On a little more down to earth level, the big things I’ve been working on in the classroom the past few years include:

– Humanizing the standard testing procedure.  I can teach to a test and perhaps even help improve students’ scores, but I decided roughly three years ago, while helping students prepare for the speaking portion of a standardized test that I had had enough of that particular mind set.  Now most of the trainings I hold for the standard tests are student led, offer chances to engage in realistic conversations, and encourage as opposed to limiting personal expression. Interestingly enough, the student pass rate has gone up as well. I have an article coming out in the next issue of KOTESOL’s The English Connection and would be happy to answer questions anyone might have about how preparing for standardized tests can be turned into a richer and more positive communicative experience.

– Using literature in the classroom. There’s a lot of great material out there specifically made for the language classroom, but I think we really miss out on something important when we ignore fiction and poetry in our classroom.  Language, in many respects, evolved not to just give information, but to help us tell our stories, and students really react well to stories. They get passionate about the characters. They express their dismay when things don’t go well for a particular hero. There is just a much stronger emotional connection with the material.  Of course, I am really indebted to Mark Furr’s (http://www.eflliteraturecircles.com/howandwhylit.pdf) work on reading circles and Stephen Krashens stuff on extended reading, but aside from reading oriented classes, I try and use fiction in my communicative and even my study-abroad prep classes.  I have tried writing a few short-short stories (under 500 words) for English language learners and have them posted on my blog. I’ve gotten some feedback that students enjoy the stories and it is very gratifying.

Pictogloss: probably the biggest thing I’ve been working on is an activity I call pictogloss. For the past two months, 16 second year high school students and I worked to develop a new image-based take on the dictogloss activity.  The students’ feedback was spot-on and over the course of 9 weeks we really came up with an activity we all want to share with the broader ELT community.  So wrote up the entire process of how the activity came to be and tried to highlight the role of the students in the activity’s development.  It’s the first paper I wrote with extensive student input.  Right now I’m in the process of rewriting the final draft and thinking of where I might be able to find an audience for the paper, but just the experience of actively soliciting students ideas and feedback for an academic article has been really humbling and positive.

What things do you do to help you get better at being a teacher?

I’m very lucky to work at Clark Memorial International High School. It is a network of private high schools in Japan and currently John Fanselow is our advisor on the International Course Program. A lot of my growth as a teacher just comes from the fact that John is always willing to take a moment and ask a question which I hadn’t thought about before. So no matter what type of activity I run in my class, if I film it or write it up and send it to John, I am going to be able to look at it in a totally different way after he gives me his feedback.  And once again, it’s this chance to notice which really seems to help me change and grow as a teacher. But there’s only one John Fanselow and there are 14 of us teachers at the school, so I try not to use up too much of John’s time. But one thing John has pushed which I think has really forced me to improve as a teacher is simply video taping my classes. I video tape at least one class a week, pick two minutes of the lesson and transcribe it and what I find is I don’t necessarily say or do the things I think I say or do in a class.  Being able to revisit my class through the impartial lens of the video camera has really helped me form a more honest and more critical view of what I do in my classes.

I also mentioned some of the teachers who support me earlier and think I need to mention again just how much the teachers who I exchange ideas with on Twitter (especially #ELTchat) are constantly providing me not only with support, but with a steady stream of questions about what I am doing in my classroom.  The curiosity of the teachers I’m in contact with helps me refine how I think about what I’m doing in my class. The other day, a teacher in Korea wrote me to ask if I could provide some more insight on how some image-based dictation activities I use in class might lead to language acquisition. Which resulted in me looking back on my class notes and talking it over with my students. Which led to some small but important changes in my class procedures.

But probably the most important thing I’ve learned to do to improve as a teacher is just admit that something isn’t working out and ask for help. The fear of not being perfect and the shame of not knowing what to do can be really damaging, especially for a teacher, a person who is supposed to hold the answers.  But as teachers, we need to be learners first, and that means owning up to the fact that we don’t have most of the answers, that we are in fact finding and creating them with our students and our peers from day to day and class to class.  So I will often send out a tweet or write a blog post and look for help from the wider ELT community. And in a similar way, when I take part in webinars (and I really recommend webinars. Penny Ur’s take on classroom management and methodologies in the last iTDi webinar really changed how I use class time) or go to small (and free) conferences, I ask a lot of questions. I’m not over my fear of looking like I don’t know something, but I’m getting better at dealing with it.

What’s the biggest challenge you face as a teacher?

I’m facing two major issues as a teacher right now. The first is the fact that I am a really result-oriented and goal-oriented kind of person, but I am working in situation where that kind of mind-set can really get in the way of my relationship with my students. You see, I work in a school where a majority of the students have suffered from school refusal syndrome while they were in junior high school. That means that many of my students have a huge amount of anxiety when it comes to just going to school. They are also very finely tuned-in and dislike being in evaluative situations. Of course this is all at a rather impersonal level, but I see it expressed regularly in my classes.  Students will miss tests regardless of how well prepared they are. They will get in a fight with one of their classmates and then be unable to bring themselves to go to school again for a week. And my, “You will get better at English, no matter what” kind of stance and attitude has sometimes made the classroom less welcoming and less safe for my students. Now the good news is that actively using reflective practices like journaling and blogging has helped me recognize this as a place where I need to spend some of my time and energy to develop.  And then there are amazing blogs like Josette LeBlanc’s Throwing Back Tokens (http://tokenteach.wordpress.com/josette-leblanc/), which are focused on classroom empathy and have a different focus than the one which I bring to my classroom. nd the more I work on it, the more I realize that what I thought were issues particular to my school and my classroom are really universal issues. It’s just a question of how they play out in a particular fashion in my school. But the fact that students need to be supported, that my goals are not always a students’ particular goals, that I need to make sure I am taking notice of where my students are at emotionally today and everyday are things I would need to do to be a better teacher, regardless of where I was teaching.  So I guess my biggest challenge right now Is how to be a more empathic teacher. And mostly I am working on this by journaling and blogging about my classes, twittering and sending emails back and forth with fellow teachers, trying to place what I do within the larger ELT context.

What advice would you give to a teacher just starting out on a journey of professional development?

I have two pieces of advice.  Both of which I wish I had taken to heart earlier in my career. The first is that you are the best person to judge your particular situation and the needs of your students. That means trust what you see in your class, believe what your students tell you, and use that information to improve the learning environment for both you and your students whenever possible.  But in order to notice what is going on, I recommend both journaling and video-taping your classes. Watch and think about what happens in your class after you have a little distance from the actual event.  The other piece of advice is to do everything you can to invite the world into your class and bring your experiences out of the classroom into the world.  What you are experiencing is not new.  There are people who can listen and with a timely question or suggested article or story, can help you discover ways to move through any rough spots you might be experiencing. Get on twitter. Attend webinars through iTDi, TESOL Int., and any other organization which offers them. Join your voice to the voice of the ELT community. As educators you are part of a rare breed of professionals, a group of people who are striving to help each other succeed in a way other professionals can hardly imagine.

Any blog or online link you’d like to recommend?

Well, there is my own blog, The Other Things Matter: http://theotherthingsmatter.blogspot.jp/ in which I do a bit of reflective blogging on my own classes as well as how I think ELT theory can and does influence my own teaching style.

I also think that Barbara Sakamoto’s teaching Village (http://www.teachingvillage.org/) is a must stop for any teacher.  There’s an amazing range of teachers’ voices and they write eloquently on the what and how of their classrooms.

There are a number of blogs I read regularly, but I would like to just highlight two more if I could.  Josette LeBlanc’s blog and how it treats issues of empathy and the role of reflective practices in teaching is really a must read for anyone, not only as an example of how RP works, but as a reminder that all of us need to be kind to ourselves and accept our own experiences for the treasures they are.  And then there is Scott Thornbury’s An A-Z of ELT (http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/) I can’t say how many times I’ve been flummoxed by a certain term or idea floating around in the ELT world, only to have it take a nice crystallized shape after reading one of Scott’s blog posts.

What’s your favorite quotation about being a teacher or about education in general?

It is our job to help students realize how much they already know about language.  — John Fanselow

I think this quote really captures what it means to help meet a student where they are and together explore what the next step in learning will be about.  All of our students are already, in some sense, linguistic geniuses.  They can use language to express how they feel, get what they need, console a friend, and celebrate life.  As a fellow member of a learning community, my job starts by recognizing and respecting what the student knows and finding a way to take the next step together.

 

A summer holiday special this week with guest bloggers representing the ‘Voices of the iTDi Community’.

Chuck Sandy	Annie Tsai	Bruno Andrade
Debora Tevovich	Josette Leblanc	Kevin Stein