Job Discussion Forums

[JVM]

I'm a licensed teacher trainer who has worked in the US and Latin America (and ESL in Asia prior to this). Lately I've been reading quite a bit about how much ESL is taking off in China, as well as the emphasis some organizations are placing on concepts such as student-centered classrooms and experiential learning [see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01China.t.html?ex=1183089600&en=9e67b9f693c71794&ei=5070 in the NY Times Magazine for example]. It seems there must be a huge demand for quality teacher development there in these areas, but over the web it can be a bit overwhelming! Does anyone have any suggestions about certain sites or organizations that might be interesting to explore? Thanks!

[jeffinflorida]

I can help. Please send me your information and $500 usd cash to the address I sent you in the PM and I will set you up with the dream job in china that you have always wanted.

[james s]

....

[Anda]

I am employed teacher trainer here in China for the government for the top pay rate of 4,500 RMB a month plus conditions.

My classes are small, only 55 students a class. They provide me with a blackboard and textbooks with stories from around 1950.


If you want to come and join the fun then contact.


http://www.chinatefl.com/jiangsu/teach/jecie-4.htm

Oh, I have recontracted for a second year where I'm working and I'm happy enough. However don't let little things worry you like the pay office being two months late with your airfares after the end of the contract etc.

Now all I have to do to get a student-centered classroom going is to loose control and let them sleep or talk to each other in Chinese. Good luck as you will need it if you think it's going to be easy to teach here.

[tw]

[China.Pete]

"It seems there must be a huge demand for quality teacher development there..." - JVM

Well, it might be helpful to consider a few of the forces, especially the external ones, that have helped to shape education in China already.

1. Higher education in China developed from the need to prepare the offspring of the wealthy for the imperial civil service exam, which required the memorization of ancient Confucian texts. In modern times, the imperial exams have been replaced by the college entrance exam. For language testing and instruction, out-of-copyright English texts often replace Confucius.

2. Education in China was "modernized" in the 19th Century by Christian missionaries. This may help to explain the popularity of the grammar-translation method of language teaching in China - especially useful for studying dead languages such as classical Latin and Greek. Today, the Internet and technical manuals in English have replaced Homer, Plutarch et al. as the sources to be read.

3. In the 1950s foreign experts came from Soviet Russia to focus on improving the standards of math and science education in China, before many of their students were sent out into the countryside for more rudimentary training in the following decade. Even today, most students regard the hard sciences as the most worthwhile subjects to study; the social sciences are considered to be the preserve of the less talented.

4. In recent years, China has welcomed experts from Western countries. But the schools are still very attached to the Confucian (teacher-centric) education model. Grammar-translation language learning, out of fashion in Western countries since perhaps the 1940s, is still widely practiced. Therefore, most of the latest foreign educators in China are really only considered suitable for teaching Oral English and officiating "English corners."

So you can see that bringing modern Western teaching approaches to a culture as ancient as China's presents quite a challenge. For more about this, you might want to read some of the other threads here.

[JVM]

Thanks for all your voices! I don't mean to sound as ignorant as some of the comments made seemed to imply. I spent four years in Japan and have also been involved in Indian educational methods. Most of my Master's program in TESOL I spent comparing traditional Eastern methods of education (which I came to greatly respect) with innovative student centered models and finding shared ground. I don't mean to suggest that the whole of China is turning student centered... I spent too much time in Japan to think thus!

What I found so exciting reading this aforemention NY Times article was that there were certain corners seeing the value of moving towards this kind of whole student learning. As the article points out, many Chinese were pointing to Confucius as an early model. As my work is now based in training teachers to "let learning guide teaching", I had no idea where in China these corners might be, and how I can bring my own work to people or organizations looking for high quality models. I had found similar such corners in Japan, and that is actually what brought me to this style of education... in Japan I ended up working for a private high school that had set up a classroom culture of investigation and exploration... I had never seen anything like it in Japan and I couldn't believe the students were succeeding to learn without a heavy teacher presence!

If anyone has any further suggestions or comments, I'm very interested to hear them, and thanks again!

[jeffinflorida]

[Anda]

I try as much as I can to be a facilitator but here in China where I work the students in Class have no material to study except what I can provide. I can provide 4 pages of A4 downsized onto a B# sheet or whatever they call the size and that's all. I can tell students to read and watch DVDs but over 90% don't. Unless you are making your students do stuff in front of you then you shouldn't hold your breath!

I taught for a company in PNG once where I could photocopy as much as I wanted but most places you are very limited. I have even paid out of my own pocket in Indonesia so that I had material to teach with.

If you can feed task based material to your students then results are fast but you can be speaking of 20 pages in just one lesson, once they get a bit of speed up. You can forget anything like that here in China.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/methodology/task_based.shtml

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The English Teacher as Facilitator and Authority

http://tesl-ej.org/ej36/a2.html

However, there are good reasons for thinking that a student-centred approach should not completely displace a teacher-centred, authoritative approach to English teaching. Calls for the abandonment of the latter approach proceed from flawed epistemological assumptions about how knowledge is generated in linguistic practice. That students learn the knowledge embodied in language actively, even autonomously, is not denied here. But I will argue that what can be defined as the technical and practical knowledge of a language is also transmitted from teachers to students in classroom settings (although teachers are only one of a number of possible agents of transmission). Progressive education theorists such as Malcolm Knowles have stressed the importance of students' experience as a "rich resource" for each other's learning in the classroom (Knowles, 1970, p. 44; 1984, p.

[caius celestius]

You haven't told us how effective "modern western student-centered" approaches proved in your job in Japan. I for one am highly sceptical! It's nothing but a buzzword. Before students accept to be masters of their own educational destiny they must accept responsibility for themselves. You won't find students that show any sense of responsibility for their own success in China! My suggestion to you: Come off your high horse of "modern education" and begin at the end of the learning curve where the Chinese still are!
To begin with, you should question why they cram 50 bodies into a room fit for 20; you should question why they have to be supervised as they do homework (hint: student autonomy is a foreign concept not even heard of here). You should question what they are learning or acquiring, and what purpose it fulfills; you will most certainly find that teaching and learning English is not meant to empower them linguistically. Rather, it is just another dry academic subject of zero practical applicability. Students have to pass more tests in one year than you did in all your high school years.

Yes, China needs teacher trainers, but the powers-that-be here block any changes to current curricula and so teacher instruction and training follows Party-imposed diktats.
Don't forget the prime objective of education in any country: it is to reinforce national values and patriotism (I am sure you will agree that in your short presentation you gave a few clues of your own very nationalistic beliefs). The CHinese are unwilling to accept advice and idea from outside their own pale. You will have to do "as the Romans do in Rome". Any degree of academic freedom is merely perceived by you; you will be taken for a fool.

[JVM]

It's been illuminating once again to read the comments. Thank you.

First of all, I was quoted as using "modern Western" methods several times in my last post. I did not use these terms and would not. I wouldn't know what was meant by them myself. I was also told about some underlying "nationalistic" notions. I'd be very interested what this might have sounded like to another reader. After spending my first two decades in American discourse styles and learning methods, and feeling extremely comfortable and enthusiastic about these, I was quite influenced spending time in Asia by traditional Japanese and Indian educational structures. I think there are some serious disadvantages that public schools in America have today over Asian ones. Vice Versa is also true. I've been fortunate enough to have spent time in both places, and I've tried to take the best of both, of which there are plenty. And, to try to understand where these ideas are coming from and rooted in, and where they've wandered away from...

I don't want to get too deep in theory here because often I find people can end up talking over each other and each gets more and more attached to his or her argument. This happened on a recent course when a math professor was completely shut off to this style of teaching with the refrain, "well I'd like to see you try that with my students." My co-trainer said, "so would I!" So he did his math homework, got permission from the principal, and impressed these skeptics so much in teaching these students that the teachers came to him the next day and week with a newly opened mind saying, "how can I do what you did?" This is what happens when practice gets prioritized and theory only goes to supporting it... (thank you also for bringing up this important distiction about "student centered" being an empty buzzword versus actually accomplishing something)

The big dichotomy I've found, which in all honesty I am still struggling with myself, is the teacher who says "geez, these are my students and it's all up to me to find a way to have to teach them", and the one who says "these individuals have a lot of knowledge in them already, even if they're not used to be asked to bring it out (in a classroom context, anyway). How can I consider the objectives of this course, and pose questions so that I help them to explore this material?" Sure, it will not be easy, given all the past conditioning you're up against, but is it really impossible? And it might not be a majority, but what small segments are exploring this? Where is there inroads? What I found in my research between "East and West" is that successful models in both tend to do the latter. Tired or unmotivated teachers tend to fall back on their cultural (or nationalistic?) structure and use it to do the former.

The magical thing for me in teacher training has been this: once one really decides they want to work towards being a facilitator than teacher, they find ways where none appear. Actually, Anda, often I teach with zero materials prepared just to enjoy the challenge. There is a wonderful paper I read by an English teacher in Japan who spent a whole semester using only student generated materials as a way to engage them in the material.

To answer the question about what I saw in my school in Japan, one example, is I'd present a grammar point just by showing the changes a sentence might go through. "What's going on here?" I'd ask, and I saw something I never believed I could ever see in Japan: partners in pairs turned and discussed what was going on. They explained as much as they could about Form and Meaning issues, and what they couldn't explain, I'd ask honed in questions to lead them towards an answer.

And as for the Teacher as Authority... oh boy! This was the question that swamped me for months on an internship. All I did was think about this. I'd be happy to send an essay to anyone interested I ended up writing. What I came to eventually was defining the difference between being "authoratative" and "authoratarian." I'd led myself to think there are times when it's beneficial for the teacher to elicit from students, other times when s/he should "tell" the answer. Well, until the present moment, when I happen to find myself with a co-trainer who does more to get out of the way and allow students to learn (and to set this up successfully) than anyone I've ever seen... but this is another story

Oh and thanks for the PPP link... my main question would be... is it really the teacher who must present everything...?

[Anda]

Well I am supposed to be teaching students to become elementary English teachers. I have recently found that they have no idea of how to present material for that age group.

I am now using stories off the internet written by English kids of elementary age, you could say student generated kind of. Most of my 19, 20 years old students cannot write as good as these elementary students plus they have no imagination.

The way the system works here and South Korea is that students study very hard in high school so they can get into a good subject along with a good university but once they are at Uni they party and take it easy as they will be passed easily. Motivating students to study especially when you have large classes becomes quite difficult.

If you can find or produce material that is of interest to your students that can be photocopied and given to them, usually this results in about 20% of your students doing home study with what you have been provided. You have to be out in front of the teacher who provides nothing. However you can do your thing in class and still give a handout for home study.

I introduce a subject for the first part of a class with a handout and then having prepped them somewhat proceed to go into free discussion for the rest of the class on the introduced topic. Half the handout I give is for self study.

If you start off day one with what you expect your students to learn by the end of the year, then change the context every lesson, then by the end of the year you will succeed. But if you spend each lesson presenting a part of what you expect them to acquire by the end of the year but with no built in repetition then you will fail.

Nearly all text books presume that the student is living in an English speaking country and at least spending half the day with English speakers. The truth of the matter is that they (the Korean / Chinese person etc,) quite often work for a Korean / Chinese boss and work with other Asians and live with other Asians and watch DVDs from their home country and live with other Asians despite living in a Western country. So we are back to the �learn forget cycle�

There is quite a bit to be considered if you are into results based teaching.

[InTime]

RE: Teacher Training

Check us out @ www.redhorselake.com.cn

We certainly welcome folks interested in promoting humanistic/whole-brain approaches.
Newly-opened, we plan to have 50 FTs by the Fall, and have been approached by major organizations in other provinces to establish similar centers in other provinces.
"Build it,
and they will come..."

Are you familiar w/DeBono's Six Hats approaches to promoting lateral thinking? Many of the replies you received can be classified as Black Hat Thinking.

[james s]

...

[shuize]

Re: Teacher training.

I've met some very dodgy people who try to cover their lack of teaching ability by claiming to specialize in "teacher training".

Which has prompted me to add a line to the old standby:

Those who can't, teach.

Those who can't teach, teach EFL.

And now -- Those who can't teach EFL, teach those (who can't) who teach EFL.