Teacher Discussion Forums

It's not going well at my JHS/HS, and I have to support the following article's data. My school uses the Progress series textbook all the way through JHS and HS. Lots of choral repetitions. Team teaching with Progress was just introduced this year, and it's not working well at all, if you look at the results of our first major exam. How do you do team teaching at your school (whether you are successful or not)?

(article from www.eltnews.com)
Team Teaching May Not Be the Way to Go
A study has shown that having smaller class sizes is more effective than doubling up on teachers, as in English team teaching. The study, by the National Institute for Educational Policy Research, tested students on their understanding of "comparisons" after the topic was taught the same way to several classes in different configurations. The best scores were recorded by students put into classes divided by academic ability. These classes also out-scored team teaching classes in terms of student interest, involvement and desire to learn. The study was carried out between September of last year and March, and involved almost 4,000 eighth graders at 104 schools nationwide. There were seven different class configurations such as: one teacher with a class of 40, 30 or 20 students; team teaching with 30-40 students in a class; classes of 15-20 students grouped by ability and taught by one teacher. The education ministry is encouraging smaller class sizes for English lessons, a policy being implemented at 28.7% of junior high schools, as compared to 54.8% in the case of math lessons.

Were the team teaching classes also divided by ability? If not, it seems the comparison would be problematic because of too many variables.

Seems to me this study would not be considered too reliable. Your exam results might be a bit more reliable. Still you can't tell if the teacher the year before you wasn't as good and so the kids are behind and so on.
If you have a test, you have to teach for the test. It seems to be important in their lives and that is what motivates the students on the surface at least. Of course, behind the scenes you can do everything you can to get this changed so they are actually learning English. But I have seen people who know very little English and who don't speak a word do very well on the TOEFL because they knew how the test worked. So once you have figured out what they need to do to pass your particular test, you divide that into lessons following your textbook format. None of this has to be drill and kill or chanting lessons - you can be creative about how they learn the material. All these textbooks have themes and most are themes that people are interested in in some way or other so they can be developed from the themes, using small mixed ability groups.
Then we have two teachers in the same room trying to use these themes. Of course, we plan together but in the classroom we split the responsibilities - sometimes we just split the room and take half of the groups and are facilitators to make sure the small groups of four or so are going in the right direction. Sometimes we are materials gatherers to make sure they are able to find the right materials to demonstrate their learning - poster board, books, magazines, an article from the Internet. Sometimes the L1 teacher has to translate and sometimes the native speaking English teacher has to smooth out the language so it is understandable or be a living dictionary or thesaurus. Sometimes when we are introducing a theme and a lecture type format seems appropriate, the other teacher is the roamer, watching for kids who don't understand or taking kids who are having problems off to a smaller room to give them a boost by giving them an intensive lesson on the topic in more personal terms. More often than not the two teacher format gives the L1 teacher time to straighten out problems with a student who has great diffiuclites, in their own language. Once these major problems are solved a the beginning of the year, the class goes much more smoothly. There will be a natural leader between the two of you of course, and you have to have someone you enjoy being with to make it super successful. The native speaking English teacher should remember that their Japanese colleague has a lot more responsibilities for the other English classes when you are not present. They are the ones with the parents able to breathe down their neck when their little Toshio doesn't do well on the exams. They have to live in the community the rest of their lives. So never complain about them, especially to their bosses or your host family. It is just too small a community. Try to boost their image and encourage their strengths. They are the ones that stay after school to tutor and help the kids in the summer. They also have a ton of paper work and responsibilities to their colleagues and responsiblity to keep you happy too. Yeh, for smaller class sizes! We have two teachers in a classroom of 20 students for the first four years of school. You might want to check out CREDE on google - they have lots of exciting ideas about team teaching.

In my area of Japan, a classroom often has three teachers- two Japanese and one native speaker. I have this setup for my first-grade junior high school classes and I have found it to be a complete flop. One teacher is always standing around doing nothing, and often two. The rational for 'TTT' teaching is that one teacher is always free to help a struggling student or manage discipline problems, but I have to agree with Glenski- the dicipline problems would be reduced in a smaller class and if the classes were divided by ability, the struggling student wouldn't be as far behind. I haven't been here long enough to see the exam results yet, but I get the feeleing they are going to show that this method isn't helping much.

Unfortunately, the schools seem to be very resistant to division by ability- though my school has five first grade classes there are extreme examples of advanced and struggling students in every class. This means that in all of my classes the teacher needs to babysit one or two students the whole time. It seems like a waste of resources, if you ask me- I would love to split the teams and make small classes, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

The native speaking English teacher should remember that their Japanese colleague has a lot more responsibilities for the other English classes when you are not present.

Not where I teach, and not according to many people I know. Of course, I am referring to team teaching where both the JTE and NET are full-time people, not where the NET is a JET ALT. (Whew! Too many acronyms there!)

crow,
FWIW, in my HS, we divide the kids into 3 groups.
1. alpha students are those that graduated from the school's sister JHS.
2. beta students graduated from a variety of different JHSs.
3. Discovery students (a very small number) include returnees from abroad, students from our own JHS with the highest grades, and a tiny percentage of students from other JHSs with very high grades

Now, obviously, kids fall into a bell curve no matter where they are from. Even in our alpha kids, some actually deserve to be in the lower level beta group, but our administration refuses to transfer them "down". Only a rare beta gets moved "up" into alpha, too. Stupid, but you can't fight city hall. As a result, teachers are forced to deal with presenting practically the same lessons to alpha and beta groups, but with DIFFERENT lesson plans! They even take different tests, for the most part. The one exception is the listening tests, and all THREE groups take the SAME test. How unfair is that!?

Phew! That is definately a downside to splitting by ability that I hadn't thought of! It'd about triple my lesson planning time...

Here, the JTE does have some more responsibilities, mostly for assesment and such as well as teaching the class more often (they're supposed to see the classes 3 times a week while I see them once- both of these ideals rarely happen.)

I team teach. It is the worst part of my job, though not always.

In my school I teach 6 first grade oral communication classes, 7 second grade writing classes and 1 third grade writing class.

The oral communication classes go remarkably well. They are my primary responsibility and the JTE is there for support. I do all planning, marking and teaching for the courses. The JTE is there to assist with Japanese if necessary, to help model, and help with classroom management. Before the lessons I go over what will happen in the class, areas where I foresee difficulty, and talk about the things I need them to do. The teachers are all very active in the classes and are truly helpful. Class sizes average 43 students. Smaller classes would be much better. The classes are tracked into two groups. They take a homeroom assigned the name A and a homeroom B and put the better students from the two hmerooms into 1 English class and the lower students into another. In addition there are three tracked groups of superstudents each with classes of about 25. After midterms and finals the classes are reshuffled based on the exam scores. Everybody learns the same content and takes the same exams.

The second year students are my problem area. Although I'm supposed to be the supporting teacher the teachers carelessly chose a textbook they didn't know how to use. The textbook approaches writing through listening and speaking, thus making it more like an oral class. This causes the teachers to rely on me much more than they should. Although I have no part in test design the JTE have come to rely on me to completely plan the lessons and usually just stay out of the way when I teach them. They often get visions of what I should be doing while I'm in the middle of something in the lesson. Typically their visions involve choral repetition or having student memorize a dialog and perform in front of the class. In these classes team teaching usually does more harm than good. The classes average less than 30 students and are tracked into three levels. The school felt that it wants to provide the best possible learning situation for the second years as they gear up for exams.

In the third year class we actually genuinely team teach. The class is grammar intensive. I plan the class after learning what content the JTE wants to cover. I also run the the class. The JTE takes care of grammar explanation (of which there is a lot of). The teacher I work with is extremely competent in the classroom and also has outstanding spoken English. The students are also high level, so class always go very well. The class has about 25 students.

To conclude, I feel that team teaching only works well when teachers completely understand their roles in the classroom. This requires communication, consistency and planning. A beakdown or deficiency in one of these three aspects typically doesn't present a problem, but two or three and the teaching will not be effective or enjoyable.

Guest,


I also teach OC1 and was wondering if you created your own curriculum or you use a text.

I am in the process of planning a grammar based (communicative) curriculum for the next term.

I found an outline called the 20 grammar points for absolute beginners and want to cover these points with my students.

It's a whole new concept for me and one that I'm looking forward to.

I began by giving the students a quiz with multiple choice fill in the blank questions, each question representing a different grammar point. I asked them to complete the questions, compare and discuss answers with their friends and then we corrected as a class. After, I illicited from the srudents the question most of them missed and I explained the grammar point, as best I could.

One of the problems I have found is my ability(lack of). to explain grammar.

I would appreciate any pointers you could give me.

Hi undeterred,

In my current school I work with another foreign teacher and we designed a funtional communicative curriculum based of the textbook "Expressways." My students are all beginners in oral English, but they are of average intelligence.

In my previous school, I was the only foreign teacher and I designed a grammar based communicative syllabus. The students were extreme beginners and far below average intelligence. I supported the curriculum I designed with the "Side by Side" textbook. I did a lot of creative editing and photocopying to make the activities communicative.

Explaining grammar is something I don't attempt to do at lower levels. Instead I use models, pictures and mime. If I were you I wouldn't worry too much about how poorly you may have presented the grammar in your previous experiment. I'm assuming your efforts were mostly diagnostic, in which case you were probably a success. If you team teach, in the future if you find that the grammar needs explanation, then you would probably be better off letting the JTE take care of that.

At present I can use a funtional curriculum because my current students have a basic understanding of basic grammar even though they are mistake prone in writing and cannot effectively communicate orally. In my previous school, even though the students had "studied" English for three year a sizable portion could not write their names in English. Vocabulary like "book" and "computer" sent their heads spinning. For that reason I kept ot a very simple grammar focus with limited vocabulary. A grammar focused class is more boring and can turn your students off. If your student have a basic understanding of grammar and can recognize a few hundred written vocabulary words then I'd recommend trying to create a funtional syllabus. A functional communicative method is basically what Mombusho expects from us, but certainly there are exceptions.

If your students are anything like I taught last year then you won't be undeterred for long. You don't happen to teach in rural Chiba do you?

Hi Guest,

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply to my post. I want so much to get things on track at school and would like to have hammered something out before going on break at the end of the month.

In making your curriculum functional, are you designing your own pair or group work speaking tasks? Can you give me some examples of the functional part of the lessons and which types of activities you find work best?

Thank you very much for your advice. My kids are in the latter group and will work well with the function syllabus, providing I am able to produce one. I shall begin in earnest today.

All the best Guest and have a great day!


P.S. Saitama, you?

Hi undeterred,

A functional syllabus approaches functions of communication as opposed to grammar points. It enables the students to use short speaking turns with relatively set expressions.

Example topics in a funtional syllabus:
Introductions
Making requests - can I, could I, May I
Suggestions - You should, you'd better, Why don't you, How about verb-ing.
Talking about the weather
Time
Dates
Talking about past event
Talking about future plans
Daily schedules
Visiting the doctor
At a restaurant
Talking about school subjects
Talking about sports and clubs

There are certainly elements of grammar in a functional syllabus, but they take a secondary role. Criticism against a functional syllabus argues that it merely replaces a list of grammatical items with a list of expressions. It is typically less structured than a grammar based syllabus, and students don't usually retain the skills developed well because there is often little relation between the topics.

On a positive not the students can learn a lot of vocabulary which is relevant to their daily lives, and they can get genuine practice speaking in situations which they may encounter. Due to the diversity of topics, if a student is weak in a particular area it won't necessarily cause a snowball effect through the course.

In terms of activities you should try to enable the students to speak as much as possible with some structure. You can introduce the lessons using model dialogs. The students can practice the dialogs, but it isn't necessary for them to be memorized. Move the lesson from limited responsibility on the students to speak to greater. The format I typically follow is: listen to the dialog, repeat the dialog, pair practice of the dialog, comprehension questions on the dialog, then I do a listening exercise, I follow this with a highly structured speaking practice (often this is teacher centered) and finally the student spend the last 15 to 2o minutes of class doing freer speaking practice. For the freer speaking practice I typically use surveys and information exchanges. I close the lesson with a quick review by asking questions in which the students have to use the lesson content.

It would be silly for you to try to design all the materials from scratch. More than likely your school has a vast collection or oral textbooks given by publishers hoping to sell their wares. If not then you might want to pick up the ESL textbook "Fifty-Fifty." It's a low level functionally communicative text which has lots of speaking activities.

I'm in Chiba. Have a nice day.

Hi Guest,

You are the man. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain the functional syllabus, pros and cons and detailing your own lesson plan. It will go a long way toward helping me to lay out my own syllabus.

I like the structure your lesson represents and hope to do the same.

Yes, I discovered 50/50 a few years ago and love it!

Pheew, I can't tell you how much this means to me. I sort of know what I should be doing but it helps to have someone walk me through it.

BTW, you ever get down to Kyushu?


Enjoy yourself Guest!

Guest wrote: listen to the dialog, repeat the dialog, pair practice of the dialog, comprehension questions on the dialog, then I do a listening exercise, I follow this with a highly structured speaking practice (often this is teacher centered) and finally the student spend the last 15 to 2o minutes of class doing freer speaking practice.

Gday Guest,

Can I pick your brain here?

1) When the students listen to the dialogue, do they have a copy?

2) Repeat the dialogue- What do you do about students who won't repeat? For that matter, what do you do when students don't pay attention when you are reading the dialogue?

3) During pair practice, is it necessary to go after the students who think it's free time. I know we have to pick our battles but how to deal with the slackers?

4) Comprehension questions- Is this written or oral? If oral, do you call students randomly?

5) Could you give me an example of a highly structured (teacher centered) speaking task?

5) I really liked your lesson plan. Unfortunately, I believe my students haven't a clue when it comes to grammar. If they clearly don't know the grammar is it possible to proceed with the functional approach? Should I introduce the material with a grammar review?
Should I be using a grammar based communicative plan?

Last year, I was working a functional communicative curriculum and at the end of the year I was very disappointed to find that most students seemed to show no signs of having been taught anything at all. I accept full responsibility for this and was determined to turn things around this year.

This year I thought I would do something that I have never done before and that was to follow the Mombusho text. It started out allright except that the text centered on the students acquiring key expressions, say 3 per lesson, which contained many grammar points each. They were able to reproduce these expressions but I didn't feel it was going very far in improving their communicative abilities.

I have been becoming increasingly more and more frustrated with my situation. I believe that my weakness lies in poor classroom management. I imagine a class where the students sit straight, lean forward, act interested, nod occasionally and track me. I know, in a perfect world, right?

The truth is, I have loads of classroom experience as an ALT and no experience at developing curriculum or classroom management. I love my job but feel stuck between the money machine and my notion that every student in my classroom can, and is going to, follow my lesson and make me proud by being able to express themselves in English.

On a final note, Guest. I am new to these forums and want to say that I find your posts to be most excellent. You are always informative, concise and helpful, all qualities which I find to be extremely rare.

As always, I am anxiously looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
undeterred (still)

Just my 2 cents...

1) When the students listen to the dialogue, do they have a copy?

In my HS, no. They have to practice their listening ability somehow, so for the first 3 rounds or so, they do this totally by listening and repeating. Then they get a script for the dialog and repeat a few more times.

2) Repeat the dialogue- What do you do about students who won't repeat? For that matter, what do you do when students don't pay attention when you are reading the dialogue?

Stop the whole class if you see someone just sitting there and not even trying. Ask what the problem is. Don't expect an answer because he will probably be shocked you even noticed. Tell him that this is a rare moment to speak without being embarrassed. Urge him to do the work.

If students aren't paying attention when teachers are reading/reciting the dialogue, that's the time for discipline. You are in control of the class, not the other way around. Deal with it.

3) During pair practice, is it necessary to go after the students who think it's free time. I know we have to pick our battles but how to deal with the slackers

During pair practice, yes, go around the room. Monitor, correct mistakes, help the shy ones, answer questions about your instructions, get people started if they are unsure or slow, find partners for those without any. And, don't let slackers just sit by idly. Let them know you are the boss and that this is a valuable moment for them to practice REAL English.

4) Comprehension questions- Is this written or oral? If oral, do you call students randomly?

In my case, it is oral. Yes, call on them randomly if they won't answer voluntarily. Few will anyway.

5) I really liked your lesson plan. Unfortunately, I believe my students haven't a clue when it comes to grammar. If they clearly don't know the grammar is it possible to proceed with the functional approach? Should I introduce the material with a grammar review?
Should I be using a grammar based communicative plan?

If they are that low level, then it is obvious that you must introduce some grammar. You can present it before or after the dialogue. Focus on only one point even if the dialog has many. And, yes, be as communicative as possible. There's nothing more boring than a lesson with no point, even if students are just studying for the college entrance exams.

Glenski,

Thank you very much. While reading your reply I felt as though I were in the classroom because those are exactly the things I do and I feel reassured that my efforts are heading in the right direction.

This sounds awful but I am already looking forward to getting back in the classroom after the summer break.

Before going on break I want to write a syllabus to use in the next semester. I plan to give the students a copy and I want to give them worksheets to reinforce the structures as homework for each lesson.

I have each class twice a week. Do you think it would be a good idea to spend 2 lessons on each topic?


Merci beaucoup,
undeterred