teaching

Teaching is a performance art. The whole show in the classroom stops if the teacher stops. So we have our lesson plans planned out like scripts; they skillfully modulate the time , enabling teachers to present the lesson, elicit participation and then, turn things over to the students for ‘pair work’ or ‘group work’. Like all performances, some are better than others.

In the two months I’ve been teaching for 6 hours each day in a classroom, I’ve had my good days and less good days when I plod page-by-page through the coursebook. On the good days, I have the course material in my mind and I know what the book says but, more importantly, I’m aware of some larger concept behind the immediate lesson and I manage to bring that out. The good students recognize the energy and excitement immediately and get on board and we all go for a wonderful two-hour ride that I think can be called ‘understanding’. What a feeling!

But…

I’m suspicious that the performance – even on a good day, perhaps especially on a good day – is mostly for my benefit. When things go well in the classroom, I feel great. But is the classroom there so I can feel satisfied with my performance or is it there so the students can learn? The more I understand the actual nature of the classroom and the more I talk to other teachers caught up in the business and pleasure of teaching, the more I believe the classroom is an arena designed to prepare teachers to improve their performance, without actually improving the learning.

The learning is an unknown territory. It is happening in some way in the student’s mind. The performance of the teacher is, of course, designed to demonstrate some ideas, to illustrate some examples, to motivate the student to think about the ideas and examples and to relate those ideas and examples to materials from their own lives. We no longer believe in lengthy sessions of memorizing rules of, say, grammar. We have instead, a little bite-size morsel of the ‘rule’ and lots of gap-fills and role-play and other learning activities. It’s all monitored by the teacher whose passage among the groups and pairs is marked by sudden silences and nervous looks. What sticks in the mind of the students is largely unknown.

At my school – a respected English-language school in Busan – students are ‘level tested’ in a five minute interview; it seems too short a time to be accurate but if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you’ll know that we make our decision about someone’s capability in the first 10 seconds and then spend the rest of the interview time justifying our choice. Unfortunately, the accuracy of our decision is not directly proportional to the speed with which it is made. So we test more as a useful organizational tool for student distribution to the various classrooms; the student may be in the right room or not.

How do we find the learning in all the teaching?

All I have learned by being in the laboratory of the classroom for the passed two months is to let the students decide what they want to do. In the Level 3 and 4 classes I teach, I ask the students if they want to begin each class with short talks given by students on any subject or with warm-ups from the book. There’s usually a long pause… then the overwhelming choice to give short talks. The results are interesting: engaged, unscripted speeches and discussions of subjects such as ‘women’s rights in Korea’ or ‘the increase in unnecessary cosmetic surgery’. Half the class is busy talking and arguing in English. Perfect.

And a few anonymous complaints at the front desk: too much ‘talk’ and not enough ’teacher’. Some students love the role of audience member, watching how well the teacher is developing his or her performance. It’s fine to have students as critics but we would prefer them to be creators, wouldn’t we?

Still, in language teaching there’s the tug between fluency and accuracy. The short talks given by students and the questions they engender, are great for fluency. And I know teachers who toss the coursebooks aside and simply chat like this for an hour or two. That maybe good but it is still teacher-dominated in disguise. We need a way that lets the lesson be driven by student interest and, at the same time, somehow brings forward the shape and pace of organized learning.

A teacher can be a performer or a baby-sitter but neither is right. There’s another role for teachers but I’m not sure what it’s called - something closer to spotter: we’re lucky to catch the learning going on and acknowledge it, maybe amplify it, so that it can happen again and more easily.

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Older people in Busan, Korea, talk about hiding in the mountains at night when the Communists shelled the city and coming back during the day to do their jobs and live their lives. Busan is in the very south of the Korean peninsula and the armies from the North had almost taken the entire country. That was 55 years ago.

Now Busan is the bustling, building, second-largest city in the country and one of the busiest ports in the world. There’s a film festival and a dozen universities and lots of babies everywhere and the people are very keen to learn English – or at least pass some exam that says they are learning English.

Today is my first day teaching English in Korea. Apparently there are 15,000 registered teachers here and about the same number doing it illegally. My classes start at 1 in the afternoon and go until 10 in the evening everyday – with regular breaks and time to eat (thank god!) Koreans see English as an essential part of being in the world – although, many of them have never left the peninsula and seem nervous about doing so.

The strange thing about being in Korea is you realize it is still a ‘developing’ country. So many things are still so rough; often, for instance, areas have the smell of sewage from the overtaxed systems. And foreigners are still stared at with surprise (and sometimes apparent mistrust or even disgust) and that’s true even in Seoul. With China growing on one side and Japan still there on the other, not to mention the presence of almost 40,000 US troops that many Koreans see as occupiers, the outside world can be seen as a malevolent force that has no understanding of or genuine interest in things Korean.

But, as we all know from the flood of increasingly sophisticated technology, Korea is a new type of developing country – let’s call it ‘advanced developing’. It may have problems with sewage and social support systems but everyone uses a cellphone and I mean everyone! I was on the subway and a very old man started talking with me and Gemma. His English was quite good and he said he had learned it in school! (Amazing in itself.) I asked his age (which is kosher in Korea) and he said he was over 80. When I wondered aloud if he had a cellphone, he looked at me like I was crazy - of course he had one! With a cellphone you can shop and take the subway and watch TV and take pictures and even make phone calls.

Small countries like Korea and Finland and others are making their way in the world by being smart. Short on resources and people, they have been working harder and planning better than other smaller countries like Canada and Poland. (I don’t think this makes the world ‘flat’, by the way; Tom Friedman’s ‘analysis’ is just charming cheerleading.) Vivek Chibber is a left-wing economist with no particular affection for the Korean government, but he singled them out as the best economic planners within recent memory. They focused economic policy on developing a few giant industrial enterprises capable of competing in the world – Samsung, LG, Hyundai – and gave them free rein. So did governments in India and Brazil and Turkey, according to Chibber. Despite the mess that the International Monetary Fund foisted on all four countries, the Koreans succeeded. Chibber says the causes are not perfectly clear but it looks like one significant factor is that the Korean developers actually kept the money in the country while the other countries saw a lot of cash head to bank accounts in Europe and the US.

Why? No one knows for sure but one difference between Korea and the others is the Korean experience with Japan and with the war at the beginning of the 1950s. It seems to me being annexed by Japan for almost 50 years has left Koreans with a very determined streak; they don’t want that to happen again! So they are fighters and nationalists (Chibber refers to the “exceptionally united capitalist class.”) Perhaps that was especially obvious during the war – although I have to say that I know very little about the Korean War other than the strange fact that my half brother, Peter Bingham, commanded the Canadian troops of the Royal Canadian Regiment. Peter was 40 years older than me, so I didn’t learn much from him; to me he was a cartoon figure of a British officer with a handlebar-moustache and a couple of Weimaraner dogs and a walking stick.

Now I find myself in Korea, commanding no one (thank god again). But I am a believer in the power of English and I want to do my best to help a few Koreans learn. When I draw the globe on the whiteboard for my class and then mark out Korea’s tiny physical space, the students look terrified – but only for a moment. They seem to be as determined as their parents and grandparents to fight for their place and also their place in the world.

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One of the goals of this blog is to figure out what teachers should do. Because I believe technology will be central to the future of education, I want to figure out what teachers should do with technology. Even though I was trained as a teacher, I’m not sure what we should do with technology – as I have mentioned in the past, the university where I trained to teach English dealt with tech by pretending it didn’t exist. They had some romantic notions of language students coming to Canada from some strange place in the world where no technology existed. One instructor got all choked up with the idea that some of our Literacy students might not know how to hold a pencil. (Literacy, for those of you unaquainted with the term as it is used in language teaching, is the ’square one’ of language learning; it’s getting to know the alphabet!) When I taught a Literacy class, all my students were about as low on the financial and bureaucratic ladder as you could go; they were refugee applicants! But they all had cell phones and they all had figured out how to use video chat on their computers to speak to the folks back home.

So much for how to hold a pencil.

The numbers on students using computers at home suggest that it’s very heavy use, of course. A recent report from the U.S. National School Board Association said that 95% of kids have been online but that number is less revealing than the 70% who are online every week, logging almost as much time each week (9 hours) as they spend watching TV (10 hours). The shocker is what these students are doing online. Half the online group, or one third of all students, are doing homework!

They’re doing their schoolwork online. What are we doing?

Facing this kind of time investment by students, teachers need to get to know their tech – and we’re often reluctant because we simply don’t know where to start! Smart guys like Stephen Downes sometimes say there should be no classrooms, which seems a bit future tense. But he also says teachers should “model and demonstrate”, and that sounds right. But how do we “model and demonstrate”?

Two interesting teachers using technology in their teaching are based in Toronto: Konrad Glogowski, who teaches Grade Seven students (his blog here), and Quentin D’Souza, who is a tech advisor for the Toronto Catholic School Board (his blog here; links to both in the blogroll).

Glogowski is a busy guy, doing his PhD and teaching, so he doesn’t post a lot: two or three times a month; but each post is worth reading and he’s been at it since early 2005. The great thing about Glogowski is his focus on making the teaching work with the tech and not hyping the tech for its own sake. Here’s his intro to a recent post:

I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about the tools I will use next term with my classes (21classes? Edublogs? Ning? Wikispaces? PBWiki? MindMeister?) only to discover that what I’m really interested in is preparing the ground for learning. I don’t want to structure and pre-define. I do not want to create a community or a social network for my students. Instead, I want to create the conditions necessary for the right kind of environment to emerge. Building an environment for the students is likely to result in failure: environments and communities need to be build with the students, with their full participation, through their work and their interactions with and about texts. It’s not just about choosing a blogging platform and letting the kinds in. We need to move beyond the traditional approach of “pick the tools, add students and stir.”

I’m not sure I quite agree with that because, in my opinion, it simply shows that the right tools are not yet available but I’ll write more about Konrad Glogowski at a later date because he has so much good stuff to say.

Summer and a new baby have led to fewer recent posts by Quentin D’Souza but you could spend a long time reading through previous posts on Quentin’s site and learning valuable information about the practical interface of technology and teaching. It’s a rare bit of useful tech that goes unnoticed by him. While Glogowski is correct to say that we don’t want to pre-build a tech-world for students, we still have to know and understand the wide range of possible tools - in fact, that takes even more time and effort! Experts working in the real world such as D’Souza make that possible.

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If you’re an antiquarian agriculturalist, you’ll find this question easier to answer than the rest of us:

What English noun in its plural form has none of the same letters used in its singular version?

Not an antiquarian agriculturalist? Not even a fan of trivia from The Lord of the Rings movies, where the word was used? If you want to know the answer, you’ll probably do what I did when I first heard the question: click Wikipedia, where it took me ten minutes to find the answer:

cow is the singular and kine is the plural, antiquarian form

WARNING! Some dastardly wiki-grammarian could be fooling us and providing the wrong answer! I doubt it. As George Siemens says in a recent post:

We use Wikipedia not because it is authoritative, though that argument can be made. We use it instead because we can access it for “quick and dirty” knowledge. …we require different types of information for different purposes. And, for most of my daily quick and dirty information needs, Wikipedia suffices.

Meanwhile, schools and universities rail against the false authority of Wikipedia while their libraries are jammed with dusty print encyclopaedia that are decades out-of-date. Fortunately, no one reads them.

This week and next, I want to explore some of the best thinking about Wikipedia and how we might use it for teaching. This post focuses on the struggle of ideas behind the techniques of wiki-collaboration; next week, some practical ideas.

Wikipedia ain’t perfect – but it is busy. 50 million unique visitors used the online encyclopedia in May 2007, up 70% from the previous year. This makes it the most popular online news and information destination according to Nielsen/NetRatings, with half of Wiki’s traffic coming from Google searches even though Wikipedia display no Google Adwords (data link here). From the beginning in 2000, Wikipedia has been a magnet for keen participants and angry critics but, recently, the sheer size and accelerating growth – it now has almost 2 million articles in English and is 15 times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – seem to have made an impression on the mainstream media. Last month, The New York Times, a bastion of Wiki-bashing, ran a positive story, saying:

Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.

The volunteers behind Wikipedia’s growth have not been lulled into any premature good behavior; recently they provided the world with a list of over 60 errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have, as they say, “been corrected in Wikipedia”. Thanks, I’m sure.

Some educators are trying to understand the notion of Wikipedia-driven homework assignments but, for many web-shocked teachers, the wiki-method of collaboration is still seen as ‘cheating’. To help educators, the MacArthur Foundation in the US has funded a Wikipedia study with Henry Jenkins as principle investigator. Jenkins is presenting some of his early insights at the big annual get-together of educators in St. Louis and, on his blog, he has a draft of his speech, with the encouragingly open title, “What Wikipedia Can Teach us About the New Media Literacies”.

It starts out in a very cautious way; Jenkins has obviously had a number of encounters with angry and defensive teachers who wish the whole wiki-thing would just go away. (And they’re not alone: even Elton John has called for the internet to be shut down!) But Jenkins thinks collaborative, online education is too important to skip and he quotes an op-ed piece written by Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation:

In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing.

I’m sure many teachers will find that hard to swollow but Jenkins pleads the case that Wiki-type participation “…functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum” which represents “a paradigm shift in how we teach English, social science, science, math, and the other schoolroom subjects.” There’s a tone of desperation when he says:

Our ultimate goal is not to convince you to use Wikipedia in your classes, but rather to argue that in a world where many young people are turning to this as a key source for information, educators need to understand what is going on well enough to offer them meaningful advice and guidance.

If we’re telling teachers they need to understand something before they criticize it, we clearly have an uphill climb. But Jenkins has canvassed widely among those who actually work with Wiki rather than those who simply complain about it and the material he presents from these folks is valuable - although it is certauinly not conciliatory toward Wiki-doubters. Wikipedians, Jenkins tells us, don’t see their website as a big collection of articles but as a on-going, people-driven process and he quotes one researcher:

…when you talk to people who are very involved in Wikipedia, it becomes a collection of people who are carrying out a project….Wikipedia was a place where people were coming together to write about the world and figure out what’s true about the world and what kinds of facts are important to know about the world. These are the kinds of things I think students should be doing.

Jenkins sums it up this way:

Wikipedians argue that the question isn’t what knowledge matters but rather what knowledge matters to whom under what circumstances for what purposes.

Exactly. And that, in my opinion, makes the whole thing political, in the sense that, ‘I’m doing this because I think it’s important to me. ’ If teachers are going to use the wiki-world, they are first going to have to prove why something is important and worth doing. Teachers usually assume what’s important has already been established by today’s lesson plan.

For anyone hoping that all the teachers listening to Jenkins in St. Louis will be leaving the hall smiling and planning to wikify their curricula, the speech gets tougher when he expands his world view from Wikipedia to the entire system of networked information the web; Jenkins quotes David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous:

It’s not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest….It’s not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else’s experience. It’s how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links… A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.

That passage is positively humming! “A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.”

So much for cautiously pleading the case!

Next week: some practical approaches to the wiki-wonderland.

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