Category: Topics

Learning to See – Kevin

Seeing Through The Cracks

How we can see our class more clearly in real time   —  Kevin Stein 

In general, people are pretty miserable at seeing what is going on around them. Just check out this video of Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world, playing in a DC metro stop.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw&w=560&h=315]

If you’re interested in why this happens, I highly recommend Daniel Simons The Invisible Gorilla web site and his work on inattentional blindness.  But do teachers in their classroom suffer from the same kind of blind spot?  In general, I would have to say no.  Part of the reason is teachers develop lesson plans. That means we are usually comparing what is happening in class to those simulated lessons in our brains, and things that don’t happen as we expect stand out rather clearly.

Ironically, this habit of focusing on what seems to be going wrong—or even what seems to be going right—can also keep us from seeing what is really happening in our classes. Just the other week, I had told students that they were not to use their electronic dictionaries in class.  When I noticed a student with a dictionary on his desk, the only thing I could think to say to the student was a snappish, “Put that away.”  I felt like a jerk when the student explained he was using the dictionary’s voice recorder function.  Aside from my assumption that a physical dictionary on a table equals looking up words, I was also running up against the constraining effects of the activity’s original conceptualization.  The dictionary on the table becomes a problem because it does not fit in with the original idea of how the activity should work.  In this situation we miss what might be creative solutions (students can record a class to look up words later) or opportunities to further expand and enrich the classroom experience for our students.

Fortunately, there are some simple things we can do to allow us to get a fuller picture of what is happening in our classes.

Change perspective: If you are standing next to a group of students who are working and something seems off, walk across the room and view what is going on within the larger context of the class.  What seems strange or off-task from close up might suddenly feel a little more acceptable within a bigger picture.

Take a personal time out: as teachers, we want to fix perceived problems as soon as possible.  But perceived problems might not be actual problems. People in stressful situations—such as an activity, which seems to be falling apart—tend to make decisions with only partial information and rarely think about alternatives in systematic ways.  Giving yourself an extra minute or two to just watch what is happening can lead to better outcomes if you do decide to intervene.

Keep a real-time journal detailing what you see, not how you feel: by focusing on what your students are actually doing, you increase the chances of noticing potentially useful tweaks to an activity you would have never come up with on your own.

Ask non-confrontational questions: If you want to know what students are doing, just ask.  Students, who seem to chatting in L1 when they should be practicing a dialogue, might actually be divvying up roles.

Use dictation as a class observation tool: just because students start an activity by doing what you expect, does not mean they understood what you said.  Take a moment to have students put down on paper what they think you said or what they think they should do.  While it is disheartening to find out students hear “Choose a book,” as “Juice a book,” it also gives you an opportunity to get things back on track before they completely fall apart.

While there are things we can do to be better observers of what’s happening in our classrooms, we can’t completely overcome our limitations as humans.  This is why inviting a co-worker in for supportive peer observations and video or audio taping and transcribing your classes can also be very useful.  We have to try various ways to see what is happening in a lesson in real time because it is in the often hectic and bumpy minute-to-minute of classroom life that our students are waiting, right there in front of us, hoping to be seen.

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Learning to See – Josette

Questions on The Reflective Journey  — Josette LeBlanc

 

The beauty of questioning is that it helps you look deeper into yourself. Questions ask you to investigate, to doubt, to grow, and to change. Questions help you learn to see.

But some people don’t want to see. For some people, there is no beauty in this concept at all. Questioning is unpleasant and scary, and something to be avoided. Questions may ask us to admit we’re wrong or bring light to the fact that we made a mistake. It is much safer to hold on to beliefs and usual ways of doing than it is to change.

Part of the desire to avoid questions comes from the fear of being judged by others and by the self.  This is something I have struggled with as a teacher and as a trainer.  When I was a new teacher I’d sometimes tell myself I wasn’t good enough, and that shouldn’t be an English teacher. As a teacher trainer, I often hear in-service teachers talk about themselves in the same way. They also talk about the fear of being judged by their colleagues. In Korea, English teachers must compete against each other to gain professional points. School administrators observe lessons in a way that is more focused on finding out who has the most dynamic class than on helping teachers improve. If a teacher comes from such a space, then any question asked will understandably feel like a judgment.

But these questions are so important! If I don’t question, I risk getting stuck in the world of judgments. In that world, I can’t make room for new possibilities. I become blind to my students’ creative potential or even my own. Without these questions I may not see that making a small change could have a huge impact (see John Fanselow). I limit myself to a narrow view of the world.

So how can we wake up to being curious about our teaching and ourselves without giving in to the fear of judgment?

Description.

Take a step back and ask yourself what happened. What did you see? What did you hear? What did you feel? Don’t interpret. Just imagine you are watching a scene on TV. Just describe the moment. Write it in a journal or share it with someone. Stay with the description and don’t interpret…just yet.

When we deal with observed facts, it is harder to get defensive. It’s just something that happened instead of an attack.

“The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.” – J. Krishnamurti

This is the first point I learned in my conflict resolution studies (see Nonviolent Communication). Creating the separation between observation and interpretation increases the chances that the person I am talking to, who can also include myself, will be open to listening to what I have to say next.

From this place of non-defensiveness I’m ready for questions. I’m ready to get curious and explore in the ways John Fanselow wrote about in his last iTDi blog post, Breaking Rules.  I start to look into the “why” and generate as many explanations as possible. I expand the possibilities of this “why” to my students, the context, the content, the environment, and the relationships in between. I imagine and interpret what may have happened during the moment I’m looking into. From here I can chose a new point of departure for my next experience.

From description to interpretation to your next plan of action: this is a process you can go through on your own via your blog or a reflective journal, or it’s a process you can go through with your reflective community (see my blog post, Our Reflective Community). Whatever medium I choose, through this process of reflection, I learn to see myself.

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Learning to See – Chuck

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please   — Chuck Sandy

 

When I first came to Japan, I lived in Tokyo and worked not too far from where I’m sitting now in the Ginza area of Tokyo. For several years, I’d finish classes and head to Ginza to wander the streets. I can honestly say that I’ve never been lost in Ginza– until this morning.

Yesterday, I traveled to Tokyo from rural Japan for a conference.  As usual when I’m in Tokyo, I booked a hotel in Ginza but this time reserved a room at a new hotel – a few blocks from where I usually stay. This morning, I woke up there with a lot on my mind and went for a walk.  I had no destination in mind. All I wanted to do was walk. I confirmed the check out time. 11 AM.  I had two hours to wander and off I went.

As I walked, I thought about a loved one going through a difficult time, about a conversation I’d had in which I was unable to express my ideas clearly or kindly enough. Soon, I was remembering advice my father had once given me that would have been useful yesterday.  Meanwhile, I was reminding myself to email this person or call that one, thinking about this blog post and where I’d write it, and deciding what order I should do what.  That’s when I looked up and saw that it was 10:45 and I was lost.

I looked around for landmarks, spotted one, and headed in what I was sure was the right direction. It was the right direction, but while I was out construction workers had put scaffolding outside my hotel, making it look like nothing I’d seen before. I passed right by it in a panic.

I started mentally rehearsing the language I would use to explain why I was late checking out. What form of the verb should I use, and why hadn’t I just checked out before I went for a walk?  Why had I even booked this hotel? Gosh, Chuck, you’re such an idiot., I told myself.   While having this internal conversation, I walked by the hotel three times before asking a construction worker for directions.  “It’s right in front of you,” he said, “You’re looking at it.”

My internal chatter, my increasing panic, and my stored mental image of the hotel entrance had blinded me. I’d gotten lost inside myself.  It happens. It happens to all of us, and it happens frequently in the classroom.

I’m reading a book called The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. In this book, Singer writes about the voice inside all of us, about how that voice can get us to believe it is who we are and is reality itself. It’s not. “What voice?” I can hear you asking.   Say the word “hello” silently in your mind. Make your inner voice say “hello” several times.  Hear that? That voice.  Make it shout “hello” inside yourself. Make it say, “I’m not good at ______.”  No, stop. Don’t complete that sentence. Make the voice say, “I’m really good at ______.  Complete the sentence in different ways. Listen to yourself. Now, think about this.

Inside all of us, writes Singer,  “there is a voice talking, and there is you who notices the voice talking and you listening.” Are you the voice, the observer, or the listener?  Think about this and you’ll realize you are the one who listens, not the one who’s talking. You’ll also understand that your inner voice isn’t reality. It’s your mental model of reality and when you pay too much attention to it or let it get out of control, it can get you lost and panicky.

In the classroom, this is the voice that can say things like this isn’t working and that student is causing problems and I should have planned better and I’m not very good at …. .”  Stop it.  You’re getting lost. Take a deep breath. Look for landmarks, spot one and head in that direction. Better yet, before you get to class, take some moments to quiet that voice.  At the very least, get it to tell you something good.

As always, I’m writing about something I’m trying to get better at myself. Obviously, I fail sometimes and wind up lost and panicky. What’s clear to me is that if I want to see clearly what really is, I’m going to have to keep working on this while telling myself this noisy chatter inside me is not me.  I am good enough. This IS going to be FUN. Now, will you please be quiet please? 

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Learning to See

Before you can break the rules, you have to be able to see what’s really happening. Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of John F. Fanselow’s Breaking Rules and iTDi’s More Breaking Rules online course, our blog this week is devoted to learning to see, with a post by John himself on why the obvious can be difficult to see. Click on any of the portraits below to view the post.


John F. Fanselow		 Chuck Sandy
Chuck Sandy
Ratnavathy Ragunathan

Josette LeBlanc
Chiew Pang
Kevin Stein

Connect with John, Chuck, Ratnavathy, Chiew, Josette, Kevin and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDi Account to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers and Teacher Development courses.

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Breaking Rules – John

John F. Fanselow’s work has a continuing influence on generations of teachers, teacher trainers, and material writers. This year marks the 25th anniversary of his ground-breaking book, Breaking Rules. What better time to join John on a journey of discovery in an intimate five-week online course designed by John to help teachers make real changes in their teaching as they learn to see the obvious, break unconscious rules, and try the opposite? Click for further course details and registration here.

What Would Happen If …. ?      John F. Fanselow

Sit down before what you see and hear like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. — T.H. Huxley

 

The most frequent questions I am asked after workshops and classes are usually about how I come up with activities and why I insist on making even my plenary sessions interactive. My short answer usually is, “I have no idea.”  I do offer possible explanations but always with the caveat that explaining why we do and do not do things is very, very, very speculative.

I do not advocate breaking rules to be different or distinctive but rather to explore.

The first candidate is the curiosity we are born with.  I tap this and so I consider what I do as natural and perhaps quite normal.  For me, breaking rules and doing the opposite are simply attempts to answer the question we ask as children,

“What would happen if . . .?”

Like a child, I wonder.

As a child, I was curious about how switches turned lights on and off, partly because my father was an electrician. My father gave me switches to play with, which nourished my curiosity.

I was curious about more than switches. My parents bought me a chemistry set and an erector set, which had motors and metal parts, I could screw together to make things like windmills and bridges. I learned knot tying, canoeing, plant identification in the Boy Scouts. I built a clubhouse in our yard from lumber my friends and I scavenged along the railroad tracks near our house.

In addition to these activities that were at that time reserved mainly for boys, I also became interested in baking. I loved desserts and wanted to learn how to make them. I learned by watching a TV show. I was the only boy in our neighborhood that was making éclairs, angel food cake and fruitcakes, to name a few desserts that particularly fascinated me. My classmates were playing baseball and other sports as I was baking. My parents were very indulgent and let me follow my curiosity wherever it went rather than stifle it.

As I said, reasons why I continue to want to always ask, “What would happen if . . .?” is speculative.  But I want to state some ways that people misunderstand Breaking Rules that are not speculative but true.

First, I do not advocate breaking rules to be different or distinctive but rather to explore. The subtitle of my book Breaking Rules is Generating and Exploring Alternatives. I urge teachers to try alternatives to see what difference they make. If we do the same thing over and over not only are we likely to be bored, but our students will be also. Vitality comes from change. Routine leads to stagnation.

Second, I urge teachers to analyze what they do rather than to judge what they do. Judgments, based on preconceived notions and beliefs, prevent genuine exploration. “I can’t do this because my students will be confused,” we might be tempted to say, but we can only see to what extent our students will or will not be confused if we try the this. We have to also ask how being confused could possibly be positive rather than negative.

Third, I urge teachers to describe in very, very precise detail what the words It works and It doesn’t work refer to. Hardly any teachers record and transcribe parts of classes to identify the It much less the works and doesn’t work. When teachers analyze transcripts of their teaching, they can see that the claims we usually make for what works and does not work are so general as to be meaningless. There are loads of other terms that are equally dangerous such as scaffolding, positive feedback, lived experience. These are not only imprecise but inconsistently used so if we look at five teachers saying they are doing scaffolding, we will see that they are doing five totally different activities.

Fourth, I advocate that teachers see that any communication has multiple characteristics. In Breaking Rules I identified 5—the source and target, the purpose, the medium used, the way the medium was used and the content. Each person can add others or create their own, but we cannot describe any communication with only one label.

We need to look at what we do, make small changes, and compare the results.

A fifth theme of Breaking Rules is that very small changes—asking students to underline words they know rather than ones they do not know—can have very large consequences. Such small details are rarely noticed much less discussed in post observation conversations or articles about methods. Again, the point is precision, not breaking rules to be rebellious or different.

Finally, I advocate that teachers make multiple interpretations of transcriptions of what they and their students say and do. Did the students learn anything? Did they enjoy it? Was their curiosity nourished or dampened? Did they become more able to learn on their own?  The words I just used are fuzzy and slippery which is all the more reason to discuss multiple interpretations with many examples and always asking how what we think is good is not and how what we think is bad not.

I just said “Finally” but I lied! The central point of Breaking Rules is that I believe that we should not listen to so called experts, researchers or leaders in our field alone. Rather, we need to look at what we do, make small changes, and compare the results. Of course we can learn a lot from reading and attending conferences. But we can learn much more and can be more powerful teachers if we explore what we are doing in precise detail.

He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
– William Blake, quoted in Breaking Rules.

Register for John’s four-week More Breaking Rules Course with live sessions on June 9th, 16th, 23rd, and 30th. The course is only $49.95. The experience: priceless. All sessions will be recorded and the archives made available exclusively for registered participants. 

Connect with John and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDi Account to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers and Teacher Development Courses.

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