Category: Topics

Road Posts Along The Way 

Before I started working at my current high school, the man who interviewed me tried to impress upon me that the students were, “a bit of a challenge.”  They were futoko, which, he explained meant that they had missed over 30 days of a school year, not because they were truant, but because… and then he ticked off a laundry list of reasons. They had been bullied. They had anxiety disorders. They were diagnosed with light cases of Aspergers. They exhibited behaviors like mild self-mutilation. They had been victims of domestic violence. He looked at my resume, mentioned that he was happy I had social work experience in Chicago, shook my hand and offered me the job.  Funny thing, my social work experience hasn’t actually been all that helpful.  Not when I started and not now, five years into the job.

Now I know that futoko can be translated as school refusal syndrome. I’ve also taken in-services and learned that many futoko are labled in some way or another (ADHD, DD, LD), a garden of capital letters blooming throughout their school records. But being able to decipher a school record hasn’t taught me much about how to meet the needs of my students. Fortunately, my students are willing to tell me what they need themselves. All I have to do is pay attention to how they stand up for each other, and how they care for each other.

Here are six things that my students have taught me about how to create the kind of safe space that can foster learning in a classroom.  There is no particular order to this list.  On some days some things are more important than others.  Some of the ideas on the list might even seem contradictory.  That is because they are. Learners are people. There’s no manual for how to connect with people and there’s no map for how to go about learning. Still, a few road posts are better than wandering around lost.

1. Make every success a group success. My students all progress at different rates.  Some get stuck for weeks without any sign of improvement.  Some suddenly switch on and take in months’ worth of language in a few days. But when one of them passes a standardized test, wins a speech contest, or gets into university, they all celebrate. Because they are a language community, I do everything I can to foster this feeling. Learning to celebrate these successes—big and small—helps all the students feel as if they are moving forward. It is the tailwind that keeps them learning.

2. Honor and welcome who my student is today. Yesterday and maybe for the whole month before that, one of my students might have taken notes, been active in class, and flashed smiles here and there. But today a cloud hangs over his head. He can’t put together a full sentence. Maybe he doesn’t answer back when I say hello. Still, he is in school. He managed to pull himself through whatever darkness greeted him when he woke up in the morning and got himself to class. Thinking about what he could do yesterday is not going to help him do any better today. One of my students’ most common greeting to a friend in a funk is a simple, “I’m glad you’re here today.” It is a great greeting. I would even put it slightly ahead of “nice to see you,” on my list of useful phrases.

3. Focus on the language, not the person. My students have been bullied, pushed out and ignored. When they share something about themselves, it is a gift. When they correct each other in class (and they sometimes do), they have a way of saying a word and waiting for a few heartbeats for their classmate to respond. That one word and pause seems to change the gears of the conversation. It shifts it out of the personal. Now I try and do something similar to separate the content from the language and make the class feel safer. Jotting down student language on Post It Notes, correcting it, and laying it down on their desk is one way I’ve found to help depersonalize the language of a communicative act.

4. Focus on the person, not the language Often as I watch students have a conversation in my class, one of them makes a shocking grammatical error, and the other student does not comment on it at all. I think this probably has something to do with students’ ability to differentiate between an error, a mistake, and a slip. If you put the jargon aside, it is really about how sometimes people just can’t put together a decent sentence—in a second language, or even in a first. Depending on what else is going on with the person, sometimes those errors/mistakes/slips do not really matter very much. So on those kinds of days, let a student talk, and instead of checking for cracks in the surface of their words, dive a bit deeper down towards their intentions.

5. Have more patience for students than they have for themselves:  Missing 30 days, 100 days, 1 year, or 3 years of school can make anyone feel a little stressed about lost time. Compound that with a diagnosis that implies the future is less than well paved and it is no wonder my students get a little impatient with themselves. Fortunately, most of the students in class are in or have been through a similar situation. Perhaps that is why they never, ever, get impatient with each other. As the teacher, I’ve learned to take it a bit more slowly, extend my class wait time, and give hints as necessary until a student can answer any question I ask. Someday I hope to be as patient with students as they are with each other.

 6. Ignore general lists of things that should or shouldn’t be done for students. When talking with one another, my students have no such lists in mind. As far as I can tell, they also have no intention of making one, which seems to me to be a very good thing indeed. Watching them support, share, and relate with each other from moment to moment is the best way I’ve found to keep learning what it means to be the kind of teacher I need to be—for them and for myself.

No One Has Special Needs: We All Do

I was a ‘special needs’ kid at school according to modern definitions.  Nobody, including me, knew it at the time though. I wasn’t diagnosed until the age of 38. When I was finally diagnosed, a lot of my school experience starting making a lot more sense.

At the age of 14, I had another two years of compulsory French classes to attend, and the idea didn’t enthral me. But, in the first French class at the start of the new school year, my French teacher addressed me personally: “You can sit at the back of the class and talk to your friend Dave about any topic you like in English. However, do it quietly because the rest of the class will be learning French”. And, that’s what I did for two years. Needless to say I failed the French exam.

The irony is that I was probably one of the most motivated people in the class to learn French. If my teacher had asked me at 14 if I actually wanted to communicate in French, I would have responded with an enthusiastic ‘Oui’.  If he had then asked me why I wanted to learn French, I would have explained that my primary motivation was to talk to teenage French girls on my family trips to France. Thus, I required conversational ability to cover the topics of music, fashion, etc. But, we never had that talk.

So why did I fail at French? Two main reasons: 1) The course. The classes were heavily grammatical and had no conversational component. Thus, the learning was perceived as not matching my goals. 2) Me. With hindsight, my ‘special need’ made me incredibly intolerant and outwardly frustrated in any situation that is not furthering my personal goals.

When I became a teacher of English I was determined to have conversations with individual learners about their personal goals, and spent effort on developing methods of analyzing needs. I became aware of teacher assessments that asked students to rate the class without probing for any personal circumstance. Thus, I would read a negative comment from a student about another teacher’s class, but, in a follow-up question directly to that student, the student would readily admit that the class wasn’t a success for that individual due to a personal health issue. According to the biased assessments, the school owners were ready to blame a teacher for a student’s personal problem. I changed the way class evaluations were structured.

A book that had a profound influence on my teaching was Psychology for Language Teachers (Williams and Burden 1997), particularly the chapter on teacher beliefs about learning and learners. The authors quote sociologist Roland Meighan (Meighan and Meighan 1990) saying that teachers beliefs about learners can be construed metaphorically as:

• resisters;
• receptacles;
• raw material;
• clients;
• partners;
• individual explorers;
• democratic explorers.

From my own French-learning experience, I knew I would never construe learners as the first three metaphors. As my teaching and teacher-training developed, I wanted to move from a construct of learner as partner (with the teacher) or as individual explorer to a belief that each learner in the class is a democratic explorer, but I was struggling for inspiration to make this happen.

The turning point was having my ‘special need’ diagnosed by doctors. This led to experimenting in professional groups I joined with explaining my behavior did not necessarily reflect how I felt about working in the group. I encouraged colleagues to challenge me if they felt I was being negative but didn’t mean to be. This approach worked well and helped me realize that we all have responsibilities as part of the group.

In the excellent book Group Dynamics in the Language Classroom (Dörnyei and Murphey 2003), the authors urge teachers to invest more time in the IMPORTANT/NOT URGENT (Space 2) activities. They say: “Learning about group dynamics and organizing well-functioning groups will go a long way toward facilitating smooth classroom management and enhancing student performance.”

 (From Dörnyei and Murphey 2003:p11)

I agree with them. Every member of the group has a responsibility to see its holistic nature and have positive intention for the group’s success. I have gone full circle. It was not my French teacher’s sole responsibility to extract my learning preferences. I had spurned an opportunity to explain what I wanted and negotiate with the class.

We are all special and all have special needs. In a group, we have to make the other members aware of what these needs are and be able to position them in relation to everyone else’s.

“un pour tous, tous pour un”

References:

Dörnyei,Z.. and T. Murphey.  2003. Group Dynamics in the Language Classroom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Meighan, R. and J. Meighan. 1990. Alternative roles for learners with particular reference to learners as democratic explorers in teacher education courses. The School Field, 1(1), 61-77.

Willams, M. and R. L. Burden. 1997. Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

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