What makes a good teacher?

[doriangray]

Do you think that recent ideas (Task-based learning, emergent grammar, lexical approach, use of corpuses, Dogme, 'Jungle path' lesson design etc.) have changed our idea of what a good teacher should do in the classroom, because they suggest that the most effective teaching is unpredictable?

Does this mean that there should be less emphasis on pre-conceived aims/rigid planning and more emphasis on the quality of response to students?

PS. I'm doing a seminar on this and would be grateful for any ideas

[Anuradha Chepur]

Does this mean that there should be less emphasis on pre-conceived aims/rigid planning and more emphasis on the quality of response to students?

Yes, that's what a good teacher should do, but that's not what a good (rigid) management would want a teacher to do.

[metal56]

Yes, that's what a good teacher should do, but that's not what a good (rigid) management would want a teacher to do.

Sadly true. Thank God I'm freelance.

[fluffyhamster]

Corpora give a much better idea, if anything, of what ought to be covered, and programmes that shy away from those empiricial nitty-gritties (and/or leave the vast majority of it up to the students themselves to dredge from corpora and reference works) surely miss a lot of opportunities to impart valuable knowledge to paying customers; that being said, maybe it's true that "even the most well-designed course can't usually cover everything that might conceivably be useful", so at least some of the decisions about a course might well need to be left to students (in my experience, however, oriental students especially generally do not respond well to suggestions that they be the ones who take much responsibility, especially not for planning/content etc).

You might like to do a search for the threads that I started or contributed to where I mentioned 'Sinclair' and 'Renouf' (in connection with lexical syllabuses, which they view as "non-degenerate"), or 'Dogme'. If I think of more, or more links, I'll post again.

[openmind]

I agree with Fluffyhamster, responsibility is an important key word when it comes to describing the role of a teacher. The question is can you really teach English or any subject for that matter? Based on my experience you can only learn so what exactly does "teaching" mean? A language is nothing but a set of habits. If you develop the habit of surrounding yourself with English you are bound to pick up the language and make progress. If you have the habit of waiting for a person to tell you exactly what to do, you are bound to get frustrated and eventually you will blame your teacher for not being able to teach you English.
So, a good "teacher" is a person who gets the other person to change their thinking process and their habits.

[lolwhites]

If you develop the habit of surrounding yourself with English you are bound to pick up the language and make progress.

That might be true for spoken language, but even native speakers need to be formall taught how to read and write properly in their own language. My spoken French has definitely come on in leaps and bounds since I've moved here, but I still need my partner to correct my writing and make sure my emails are in an appropriate style.

To me, a good teacher is one who is sensitive to the learners needs, stregnths and weaknesses and then responds to them appropriately.

[openmind]

How do you "teach" somebody to write properly? If you exchange emails with a native speaker you can copy their phrases and ask them how to say certain things in English. So why shouldn't it be possible to pick up written language by communicating with a native speaker?

[lolwhites]

I've learned quite a lot about emailing in French by lifting phrases out of the ones I've received, but that's only one form of writing! What about essays, letters, articles...?

I had to be taught how to do that in English, never mind in L2/3... I suppose I could have learned how to write and spell simply bycopying what I saw, but it would have taken a long time.

[openmind]

So how exactly did your teacher teach you to write essays? Do you think you can write good essays? Why can't you "lift sentences" out of essays and letters as well as you did with your emails? Why can't you read a lot of good essays and letters and memorize some of the phrases you like? What do you need a teacher for? To tell you what you do wrong? If you are not comfortable writing an essay than you have to read more good essays.

[lolwhites]

How did my teachers teach me to write good essays? By getting me to write stuff, then correcting and showing me where I'd gone wrong. Like I said before, this was in my L1 so there was no language/culture barrier. The conventions for good essays actually vary from culture to culture, and if you want the students to pass their FCE/CAE/CPE/IELTS... exams, you need to make damn sure the students know what their examiners will be looking for. I've marked enough stuff that was badly laid out and wrongly organised, and the students concerned needed guidance on what they'd done wrong and how to get it right next time. I suppose they could have learned by themselves just by reading lots of essays, but, like I said, it would have taken much longer. There's rather more to it than lifting out phrases - you actually need the skills to work out which phrases are worth lifting out and when it's appropriate to plonk them back down again, so to speak.

Actually, I think much the same goes for speaking. Sure, it can be "picked up" providing the learner has enough immersion, which is not likely unless they spend significant amounts of time in an L2 speaking country but even then some help and guidance helps things along. Unless you can cite some serious research that it makes no difference, of course.

Reading and listening? Again, everyone advises their students to read and listen to lots of English, but these are skills that, while one can pick them up, can be developed more quickly through instruction.

So, while I would agree that the learner has to do most of the work, a good teacher makes sure they're working in a way that helps them develop their English instead of banging their heads against a linguistic wall.

[doriangray]

A big thanks to everyone for your informed responses. I didn't expect to get so much so quick! A question for you, hamster (or others!). What you said makes good sense to me . However when talking about response to the students it is not so much an idea of handing over the planning (although it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea) but more on a ‘micro-level’. An example might illustrate what I mean

Being a CELTA veteran, in my early training one of the lesson models was the much maligned (and recently reappraised) PPP. Let’s say, for example, my aim was to teach ‘Prepositions of place’ to a Pre-intermediate class. The lesson would be structured as follows:

Presentation
I illustrate the meaning of the (10?) prepositions (perhaps with real objects in the classroom) and work on the meaning, form and pronunciation.

Practice
I then allow students to practice the 10 items using a gap-fill or tightly controlled speaking activity (in pairs or groups).

Production
Students then do an information gap ‘spot the difference’ activity in which they have to describe pictures with minimal differences (to find 10 differences). The intention is that they might use the prepositions they have been taught

This could be followed by a freer activity where they describe their bedrooms/homes to each other


Some modern approaches (Task based, Jungle path, test-teach-test etc) might suggest that a more effective way to do this is to use the ‘Production’ task initially. ie Have the students try to use some language first. The teacher’s ‘input’ would follow this and may or may not involve prepositions depending on how the students have performed and what they can most profit from. The teacher’s role is to decide what this language is and then to teach it to the best of their ability – a more diagnostic approach.

It seems to me that this necessarily implies

- less control for the teacher
- less work outside classroom
- more work inside the classroom.
- living with unpredictability
- the teacher listening more
- an ability to think on your feet
- a comprehensive repertoire of easily prepared practice activities

Does this mean that we need to change our idea of what it is to be a good English language teacher?

[fluffyhamster]

Well, dg, the sort of activities you've described are pretty basic, meat and potatoes stuff (and there's nothing wrong with that): I don't imagine there would be that large or clear a divide between those students who could "show you what they could do straight off their own bat (TTT)" and those students who "could do pretty much immediately, and then unfailingly forevermore, whatever you'd taught them (for the very first time?) or reviewed with them (PPP)", so it might not ultimately matter too much "which way around" the teacher approached things (i.e. one could soon teach students who couldn't perform, or conversely lay off lecturing students who seemed more clued up on things); generally, there doesn't seem to be much "response-ability" (to allude to e.g. LTP's Wilberg) - and I understand that term ultimately in a linguistic/language-to-be-produced-and-sent-back-in-response sense rather than just giving an encouraging nod or remark sense - called for here from the teacher.

If however the teacher were expecting e.g. (and this is off the top of my head) students to enquire after the whereabouts of truly missing objects (which might involve the use of present perfect, verbs such as 'left' before the prepositional phrases, perhaps phrases such as 'Where did you last see/use it? Where do you remember last ...ing it?', people even making veiled accusations etc), not just the same object in differing positions in info gap pictures (probably by asking just 'Where's...?'), then things would indeed be getting a lot more demanding not only for students but for the teacher (the latter of whom would need to be much clearer about whether he or she is going to need to supply, or can reasonably expect the students to already be up to themselves supplying, at least the focal, "expected" language).

You might not agree with the necessity of this sort of "expansion", and I am not sure myself if I would actually end up deciding to branch out in exactly the way I've imagined (even if there is or were a course recommending something similar)...perhaps the additional functions and exponents I've thought up would end up elsewhere, used in a different context (or, indeed, contexts - branches might lead to sub-branches; there is certainly a tension in even my mind about needing to decide on and have something reasonably definite and concrete, and, on the other hand, pondering how things might still be done differently, even if only slightly differently).

[fluffyhamster]

Taking a different tack, imagine a teacher who's a true expert, who has taught everything and is really clued up about what to do in any situation, given any stimulus or question. The problem is that, if such a teacher operates on a purely reactive basis, what the students learn will be closely tied to what they are only capable of asking or suggesting, for perhaps a looong time (unless they can pick up every last nuance and organize their thoughts and hypotheses accordingly)...only the fittest students survive, and the teacher ends up "teaching" when they are not really doing anything of the sort (and one has to wonder why the students would continue to part with their money to "learn" here mainly from the sweat of their own brow). It would be better if this superteacher tried to commit at least something to paper, committed to some sort of idealization regards processes of learning and linguistico-social or whatever growth, wouldn't it? If only to help students (not to mention other, doubtless knowledge-hungry, lesser teachers!) down at the lower levels.

[doriangray]

Yes Hamster. I see what you mean about the dangers of being totally reactive and I think that part of the teacher’s role is not to allow the thing to become stagnant but to keep on pushing forward into the ‘next zone’. The prepositions lesson I described above is a bit simplistic but to take it one step further wouldn’t it be possible to introduce all sorts of language after students have done the ‘Spot the difference’ or ‘Describe my house’ activity – including simple lexical sets, It looks as if, Comparisons, It needs doing , This activity isn’t very challenging, This is boring/interesting, I’ve just had an idea etc etc? The teacher’s job would be to make sure that the best opportunities are chosen for the most appropriate language. I take your point about learning ‘from the sweat of their own brow’ although you could argue (as I think Gattegno does) that is in the ‘sweat’ that the most effective learning takes place

I’m wondering if other teachers have gone through the same stages of development as I have as a teacher. Initially, with very little grasp of the grammar and insufficient confidence to allow the lesson to take on its own form, I was very much what I’ll call an ‘input-output teacher’. My classes were run to an external agenda (possibly a coursebook) and to a large extent the content was dictated by the material I had to use. The PPP paradigm (or classic ‘skills lesson’ paradigm) was king! I would rarely stray from the prescribed language points and my development was all about learning the grammar myself and refining my techniques.

Quite a lot further down the track my teaching became more output/input (as in TTT, Task-based, Jungle path). I was more prepared to deal with language issues off the top of my head and increasingly used the natural contexts of the classroom, students’ experience etc to introduce new language points (the idea being that the best time to present/introduce language is when the students really need to say it). This means that there is no necessity to build an artificial context to illustrate the meaning of language.

I’m not suggesting that one approach is used to the exclusion of the other but rather that a more experienced teacher is able to switch from ‘input/output’ to ‘output/input’ mode when it is appropriate and capitalise on the moment-to-moment interests of the group. Sometimes of course the whole thing ‘dries up’ and this may be the moment to open the coursebook and switch into ‘input/output’. Does this ring bells for other teachers?

PS Fluffy, I haven’t yet worked out the ‘response-ability’ - new to me - but will google it before my next posting

[fluffyhamster]

I think a lot of what you've said there certainly will ring quite a few bells for quite a few teachers, DG : most probably aren't ever totally convinced that the grammar/structural syllabus, as it progresses through whatever textbook, is always the best way to go (even though a halfway-decent book can, as you've suggested, provide some needed juice during dry spells); it's certainly more exciting if students can take over a bit and go head-to-head with a native speaker, give a clear enough indication of what they meant that a truly natural conversation emerges (or the teacher can understand enough to at least fill in the gaps and subsequently provide the optimal desired forms).

I see what you mean about the dangers of being totally reactive and I think that part of the teacher’s role is not to allow the thing to become stagnant but to keep on pushing forward into the ‘next zone’.

I like what you wrote there, it's similar to what I was trying to say on my "Dogme" (titled, 'Out, damned Lewis! Enter the Lacksitall Approach instead!') thread.

I can't remember if 'response-ability' is just an aphorism of Wilberg's ('The teacher's primary responsibility is response-ability') that Lewis includes at the start of one of his books, or if it is actually part of a larger discussion in Wilberg's own One to One.