Motivation for a varied life in teaching
(1385 Words)
What motivates a teacher to start in the profession? For sure many reasons make someone begin a career in teaching. Is it pay or job security or is it a fall back option? This being said, initial motivation does not mean that years later the same can be said. The fact of the matter is the evolution of the new teacher into a mature tutor. This is then the professional person who has recognized the true meaning of teaching. This person recognizes their role in helping to shape young minds and impart moral values through education. Teaching has to be a vocation. In part an autobiographical story highlighting aspects of Asian teaching and also analysis, there are many aspects that any teacher has to realize to fulfill true potential.
Certainly, ongoing professional development highlights certain challenges in teaching that a teacher has to face up to. A focal point has to be the realization that students do not really know how to learn. How can any teacher, great as they may think they are, not realize that the students are naive about how to get the most benefit from a lesson? Any teacher has to look at the students’ own learning traits in light of today’s imperative that they both foster lifelong learners in their classrooms as well as become lifelong learners themselves. It’s the teacher’s inspiration that plays a huge part in a student’s education although every student and the class as a whole have to progress to help the teacher get the most out of them.
Different countries have varying approaches to learning and teaching. How does a foreign teacher survive in another country’s learning environment? Any foreign teacher working abroad has to adapt and work within the culture. It can be hard to change teaching methods to what has been ingrained from school through to university. Motivation to rise above some of another country’s inequalities as you see them is paramount. In some of these cultures, students tend to be passive and may be reluctant to participate in communicative exercises. A change in the style of teaching to suit these learners’ needs is essential because completely following an Asian model would be alien to any foreign teacher; a balance has to be met. A new foreign teacher would think it is strange to see no encouragement given to the students to think independently while just following the examples of the teacher, who is held in high esteem. Progression as a teacher means drawing attention to many facets of teaching. Inspiration has to come from somewhere. Breaking the barriers that slow students’ learning and build foundations that provoke students’ development has got to be a motivator.
Of course, any teacher would not automatically change their style of teaching. The question is: should they focus more on themselves as a teacher or the students? Which one deserves more thought? It must be believed that deeper thinking about the children’s role in learning is paramount. It’s just when you see children who have so much energy, who are not lazy per se, using their energy into ignoring the learning process. This does not mean every one of them is mentally challenged; it is the direction they are taking. For example, a fifteen-year-old student kept saying the word ‘brio’. What it meant in his language or English language was not clear, but he would say things like ‘do you brio?’ and ‘I am brio’. This was actually when ‘present tense’ was being taught. The co-teacher thought this student was being disruptive and after class, she had a word with the teacher about it. She went on to mention that he was a hyperactive kid who had problems at home and she was sorry. Basically, that was the end of the story. Many factors come into one’s learning and potential, but there was a child who had energy. He was contributing in his own way. It was the way the teacher dealt with this child’s attitude that had the major factor in his learning. The teacher was glad to have this student taking part. He felt it was a bit negative just to put him down as having problems and forget about it. It was felt the teacher just had to channel that liveliness and educate him to use it properly. To put in bluntly teachers need to see what role the students actually play in the classroom. Similarly, Beth Buchler, educational consultant and director of New-Learning Educational Services wrote that you need a ‘student who is responsible, who takes charge, and who self-regulates in the context of today’s changing learning environment’. A teacher does not change these children overnight and many will take time. Every student has potential. The issue for the teacher is how to overcome their learned behaviors they have in class that is being detrimental to them.
So, why are they not performing? One other factor could be a boring teacher. How can any teacher help a student change their learning style if the students (or even the teacher) do not have any interest or enthusiasm? Referring to Alexandra Frean’s piece written in the Times newspaper about ‘boring teachers blamed for rowdy classes’. It seems obvious that students will show their bad side when they are bored, but according to Ofsted, at that time, this was a problem in English schools. The report drew an angry response from the National Union of Teachers which was understandable but it happens. An example of a disruptive class comes from watching an Asian teacher conduct a lesson. The students were naughty, but why were they naughty? Was it because they were disobedient or because the lessons were not so interesting? The teacher was shouting at the noisy students at the start of the lesson. They were quiet once the teacher started shouting, but after that, they were back talking again. The teacher asked them to look at the questions in their book and find the answers in the reading. It seemed a very easy lesson plan. Were the children interested? Maybe, they were not interested. All they needed to do is fill in the blanks which were being done by a couple of people, namely by the best students. The others were just waiting for the answers happily relaxed talking to each other. This teacher was not making the class interesting, no wonder the students were back talking. After exiting the classroom for five minutes then entering an ‘okay let’s check the answers’ loud voice, the teacher went through the answers. The teacher started speaking in their native language then asking for one English word answer at a time. The English teacher’s speech was mixed with their native language. The answers were now being given anyway so the ones who did not bother can just fill in their book. What was the teacher’s purpose in this class? Where was the motivation to learn? If you had filled in the answers you would have finished. It must be said that “Yes, you have finished but isn’t the purpose of learning a foreign language for using it in a context that is valuable for the future. The weaker students are just copying the answers while laughing about something not involved in the subject at hand. This new information they should have learned will stay in their minds for a short time”. Basically, it is hard for a native English teacher to see this whole episode and not feel sorry for everyone involved because everyone walks and carries on regardless.
The irony of all this is that the more the students become independent learners; a process “in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others” (M. Knowles), the teacher’s job will hopefully become more manageable. Motivation and interest will take over idle chat and disruption. Teachers can then confidently feel that they are succeeding and be motivated to take their teaching to another level. This will be not only with themselves but also with the other students. Hopefully, the pride the teacher feel from making these students ready for the world outside school and their future will show them the true meaning of teaching and encourage them for many years. Hopefully, this piece of writing has tried to open teachers to this fact.
References
Bernard-Powers, J., Darling-Hammond, L., Der Ramos, A., Kass, M., LaBoskey, V., & Markowitz, M., et al. (2000). Principles of high quality teacher development. San Jose, CA: The Teacher Quality Collaborative. Retrieved January 23, 2002, from http://www.jointventure.org/initiatives/21st/tqc/principles.html
Boring teachers blamed for rowdy classes
By Alexandra Frean, Education Editor
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article624308.ece
Critical Issue: Terms of Engagement—Rethinking Teachers’ Independent Learning Traits – Beth Buchler, M.A., educational consultant and director of New-Learning Educational Services
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/profdevl/pd400.htm
Malcolm knowles, informal adult education, self-direction and andragogy
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-knowl.htm
Supporting and Facilitating Self-Directed Learning
http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/89dig.htm
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Dictogloss
So, you may be one of those instructors who are very teacher centred and has a deductive approach to learning and teaching. However, it may well be a good idea to think about collaborative procedures that allow the students to make discoveries. Thus, there is the inductive approach where students (in a dictation lesson, for example) induce meaning through their own use of the English language. Here is where ‘Dictogloss’ comes in. Learners retain the gist of a story (from dictation) and then use their own grammatical knowledge to rewrite the story.
So, here is how it goes. Students are introduced to the topic and the related vocabulary. Techniques such as an open class discussion, group brainstorming, question and answer elicitation, predicting text content from pictures or vocabulary, are used to contextualise the lesson. Learners then listen to the text. The first time, they do not write anything. But, the second time they take notes, noting keywords. Then, the students work in groups of three or four to reconstruct the text with one student acting as a writer of their own group version. Once finished, students can then write their copy on the board where a comparison can be made with other groups’ ideas and of course the teacher’s original text. Above all, at this point, feedback through peer correction is encouraged for all students.
text → student reconstruction → comparison
input output feedback
Thornbury (1999:85) evaluates the dictogloss and reports that it ‘provides a useful means for guiding learners towards noticing the gap between their present competence and their target competence’.
Reference: http://www.academia.edu/323021/A_Classroom_Experiment_Using_dictogloss
GIVE IT A GO!!!!!
Teaching Reflection: A Critical Incident
(554 Words)
A “prudent understanding of variable situations with a view to what is to be done” (McCarthy, 1984, p.2) encapsulates that moment when a teacher is met with new experiences that need resolving. Teachers are met with acts that define their personalities. While working in Asia, I was faced with one such dilemma as two students had complained to my manager that I was rude to them. I had mentioned, after class on the first day of a new term, that they had entered late, ignored me as they walked in across the class and sat down to subsequently talk with friends. Contemplating Asian culture which may ignore this kind of attitude, I still felt the need to deal with it. What is called a ‘technical rationality’ (Schon, 1983), my reaction, I hoped, was a means to an end by telling them, in not so many words, that I would like them to respect the learning students and the teacher teaching. In this given situation and given they were both adults, who was right as we both had views? For this piece of writing, I would like to like to draw on Gibbs (1988) model of reflection with the hope of using the six steps to examine this classroom experience.
This ‘critical incident’ (Flanagon, 1954) emphasizes a direct observation of human behavior to examine the point of myself, the teacher, keeping two students behind after class to talk about their behavior towards the learning process. This is also the ‘concrete example’ (Peters, 1984) where we have to step back and test ourselves. One test is my ‘feelings’ (Gibbs, 1988) towards the students’ attitude of nonchalantly arriving late and traipsing past me. I felt somewhat annoyed as the class had been disturbed, I was disrespected as a teacher and unfortunately unsupported by my manager who told me to apologize to them.
Moreover, to ‘evaluate’ (Gibbs, 1988), the third stage of Gibbs’ model, which highlights the good and bad, is first to say that I chose a quiet moment to explain myself to the students after the class. The bad would be the students’ reaction to a situation they felt was nothing to be worried about which in Asian culture may have made them lose face. So, to make sense of the situation and ‘analyze’ (Gibbs, 1988) it, I was left feeling that I was in the wrong. My manager was now telling me to apologize and forget about it although I felt he was driven by the Asian culture and business ethics of the customer is always right and do not say anything bad.
The “conclusion” (Gibbs, 1988) is to highlight and reflect on what more could I have done, seeing as I had to apologize (or jeopardise my job). Culture was an issue, but also I think attitudes to lateness of another teacher to which they had had the previous term. My ‘action plan’ (Gibbs, 1988) is now to see if the situation arose again what I would do. Of course, there are reasons for being late, and also for reactions to negative things said about someone. Culturally, maybe I was too abrupt and too serious. Finally, laughter and a smile work in Asian culture and also getting the students’ personal feelings as to the right behavior instead of pushing my personally held beliefs. Hopefully, this essay creates more reflection.
References
Peter Scales, 2008. Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector. 1 Edition. Open University Press.
Geoff Petty, 2009. Teaching Today: A Practical Guide. 4 Edition. Nelson Thornes.
Yvonne Hillier, 2005. Reflective Teaching in Further and Adult Education. 2 Edition. Continuum.
Andrew Armitage, 2011. Developing Professional Practice, 14-19. Edition. Longman/Pearson.
A linguistics class reflection
(1102 Words)
Six days of attending linguistic lectures spread over three weeks can not be a major amount of time to achieve a solid and complete knowledge of linguistics, but all the same, this essay will try to establish how I accomplished a relative level of understanding through my studies. I tried hard to combine items raised in these lectures, my classmates’ comments, further reading away from the class, and clarity added by my focus group. I will try to highlight some of the points that stuck in my mind regarding linguistics while giving a little insight into the further ideas into the subject.
To begin with, would be to give my general view of linguistics. So, as I researched I found that linguistics is the study of human languages, where within this the science examines not only the structure of language but also its use and the structure in the mind. A layman may think that a linguist, the person who is skilled in linguistics, only looks at rules and grammar, but it is so much more than this. The subject takes in such fields as humanity, science, society, philosophy and literary criticism. Language is not as routine as some may think, and it is astonishing to think that language came from one source which spread across the world to create 6000 more. A learner of linguistics then would be amazed how many branches of linguistics have been created. So, without language where would we be?
My first recognisable factor about the classes was the highlighting of daily use of language which has to be the main dynamic in anyone’s scaffolding of knowledge. The more any speaker uses it, the more they will be able to use their fresh available knowledge of language. The lecturer actually mentioned that reading and writing inspire to make you more creative with your writing and speaking. This, I found to be a sensible choice to further one’s linguistic knowledge. The path that I followed on this course was not the one that I thought and as such I would like to draw attention to some of the further points.
I feel my reading has taken in many factors and has shown me that linguistics is a broad church. I was asked yesterday where the word ‘Santa Claus’ came from, and then I remembered I read about it in a book called the Power of Babel by John McWhorter who is famous for studying creoles. In it, he spoke about how it was a Dutch word, Sinterklaas, where immigrants coming to America and following their tradition they spoke about it and Americans misheard the word to be Santa Claus. This field of study in linguistics is actually called ‘Etymology’ where it recognises the origins of words and sees how they have changed over time. I actually picked up the Power of Babel book because I had read one of my group’s summaries from the book ‘Introduction to Linguistics’.
Moreover, the chapter in the Introduction to Linguistics book spoke about how words have changed through time. They called it variation; this means that languages take on their own route. English people especially in the northern region took the word ‘butter’ and pronounced it with the ‘er’. Other regions say ‘butta’ but other words are not so easy to understand such as ‘Owt and Nowt’. For me, this course has highlighted that linguistics is not just about grammar. Language takes on its own form and even one language like English below the surface lies a myriad of factors that are distinguished by linguists. For example, I read that language which was described by Ronald Langacker who is a founder of the field of cognitive linguistics, makes three fundamental assumptions: ‘that language is symbolic in nature that a linguistic community creates linguistic conventions, and that grammar is a speaker’s knowledge of linguistic conventions’. So, this gave me a better insight into the linguistic community creating the language and grammar. The speaker uses sentences that are built by selecting appropriate words from their vast lexicon that are learnt from his local language community.
Furthermore, if we are to talk about language communities, I can think back to watching the movie Sense and Sensibility in one class. The students were faced with sociolinguistics and the use of language around 1800 in England. A pioneering sociolinguist was William Labov who recognised the value of society, cultural norms and expectations on language. As for the film, it has a language of propriety of upper-class England. What people say and what they mean can be of different meanings. People had to behave properly and women were kept in place. There is a great scene where the daughter of the deceased father has to move to another residence where the owner speaks his mind to the disgust of the quiet and proper sisters. The movie certainly purports this as the characters are higher social standing and speak rather eloquently.
In addition, for this class to I had to look up the meaning of some of the branches of linguistics and as such, I read up about sociolinguistics. I recognised that language is seen as being used in a social context and isn’t this thing that is external to human beings but something that makes who we are. We could also add the branch of linguistics called Historical Linguistics which actually started around the same time as Jane Austin wrote her book. This field of study grew philology which is the study of ancient texts and documents. Not all fields of linguistics started that long ago. While studying this class, the name Noam Chomsky was mentioned a few times. He is an American linguist among other positions. In the 1950s, his branch of linguistics was generative grammar which is a particular approach to syntax. He came up with ‘universal grammar’ which highlights innate properties in the brain. This means that any person born to parents from one background (i.e. China) can easily be brought up to speak another language if they were immersed in another country (i.e. America) from an early age which means that the brain is programmed to accept speech at any level. This idea went against the behavioural idea that BF Skinner proposed.
To conclude, I have deepened my knowledge of linguistics and found that language works in many ways. It is interesting to see the use of English that has spread over the world and the variety of new words added. I think the main factor when studying linguistics is to take it on how it is used, not how it should be used, because maybe there is no clear right or wrong way. What matters is meaning.
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