{"id":6497,"date":"2018-06-27T01:55:50","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T01:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=6497"},"modified":"2018-06-27T01:55:50","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T01:55:50","slug":"a-reminder-that-learning-is-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2018\/06\/27\/a-reminder-that-learning-is-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"A Reminder that Learning is Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"KevinA Reminder that Learning is Learning<\/h3>\n

by Kevin Stein.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have been a teacher for twenty years. Over that time, I\u00a0have often been given\u00a0a list of program goals at the beginning of the school year. The goals are often things\u00a0like\u00a0an expected average increase in students\u2019\u00a0standardized test scores, minimum acceptable results for student and parent satisfaction surveys, and class attendance rates. When I first started, I would sometimes see what was happening in my class through the lens of these goals. If a class did not go particularly well, if students wandered off task during a speaking activity, or if there were a bunch of frowning students shuffling out of the classroom at the end of a lesson, I would feel a little flutter of panic. Would my bosses\u00a0think I was failing at my job?\u00a0What was going to happen at the\u00a0end of the year when my students all checked off boxes that stated I was a barely satisfactory teacher?<\/p>\n

As I got used to teaching, I\u00a0became much more focused on\u00a0what the students were\u00a0actually learning in my classes\u00a0and spent less and less time thinking about those program goals. I was lucky enough to work with a team of teachers who wanted to share their own teaching experiences and did not hesitate\u00a0to honestly tell\u00a0me how those experiences did or did not help learning take place in their classrooms. We were, as a team, also lucky enough to work with my mentor and friend, John Fanselow. John constantly pushed us to pay close attention to what our students were doing in class and to compare and contrast the impact on learning of small changes we could\u00a0make in our classroom. We all tried out simple changes,\u00a0such as where we stood during an activity, or how long we waited for a student to respond after asking a question.\u00a0And\u00a0as we all became more adept at noticing how and when learning was taking place, students began to reach those goals which, for the most part, we no longer thought about on a daily basis.<\/p>\n

As we worked together and worked with John, we came up with a list of ideas that we still have hanging on\u00a0the\u00a0wall of our staff room. These are our beliefs about what we are trying to do as teachers, the principles born out of our shared experience:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Students know how to learn. They have been learning and succeeding at new things their whole lives. Our job is to remind them of this simple and amazing fact.<\/li>\n
  2. When students are learning something new, it is not our job to replace that process of discovery by telling them what and how to learn, but to make the process as smooth as possible.<\/li>\n
  3. Students learn best when they have a chance to see and hear HOW they\u00a0are learning. When students are engaged in an activity, they\u00a0are often wholly focused\u00a0on completing the activity. Providing students with time to watch and listen to videos or recordings of themselves in the process of learning helps them to see how some\u00a0of the things they do are effective and some are not.<\/li>\n
  4. When provided with multiple examples of language in context coupled with enough time,\u00a0students\u00a0can and will (with occasional hints)\u00a0notice features of that language which they want to use.<\/li>\n
  5. Students who come to school are all motivated! If they really did not want to learn, they would find a way to avoid your class. So treat the students\u00a0with the respect they deserve for wanting to learn.<\/li>\n
  6. True goals\u00a0are internally generated. Regardless of\u00a0suggestions\u00a0we\u00a0make as teachers about what kind of score we think a student should get, or what kind of language a student should be able to use, it is the\u00a0students themselves who decide\u00a0what they want to accomplish. We need to help students articulate and reach those\u00a0internal goals.<\/li>\n
  7. Students have a rich and important life outside of our classrooms. When they make a decision to prioritize one aspect of their life over our classes, we should treat that decision with, at the very least, respect, and if possible help a student tie those other experiences to their learning goals.<\/li>\n
  8. Acquiring a language is a wholly personal endeavor. We might have\u00a010 or\u00a020\u00a0or 30 students in our classroom, but each of those students\u00a0experiences class as an individual. Our job as teachers is to create\u00a0an environment where there is enough emotional and cognitive room for each student\u00a0to truly participate\u00a0in their OWN class.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    When I became a manager three years ago, program goals, some of which I\u00a0was asked\u00a0to create myself, suddenly began to once again seem like the most important part of my job. I began to keep myself up at night worrying about how far behind we were in the race to reach those numbers\u00a0that stretched out like a ribbon\u00a0across the finish line of a100-meter dash. I would observe a teacher\u2019s lesson and count frowning faces and empty chairs. I would nervously open emails from TOEIC or download the test results from the EIKEN site. I was miserable.\u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0pretty sure I was making the teachers miserable as well. And all because I had somehow\u00a0convinced myself that I was indeed in a race, a sprint to reach a set of numbers I had long ago realized were the\u00a0result of an effective program\u00a0and not truly the goal of teaching.<\/p>\n

    At the beginning of this\u00a0academic\u00a0year,\u00a0I took another hard and long look at that\u00a0list of beliefs and principles of what it means to be a teacher.\u00a0And\u00a0I realized that whether I am a teacher or a manager, my job is to help learning take place. The beliefs and principles\u00a0upon which I had done my job for the past seventeen years had not changed, even if my title had. While some of the words needed changing, the spirit of what\u00a0was being expressed\u00a0did not need to change at all:<\/p>\n