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Managing in the Gaps

We’ve been hearing more and more about companies requiring employees to return to work at the office now that the COVID-19 era work-from-home mandates are no longer so compelling. There is pushback from many employees, who argue that they are more productive at home and appreciate freedom from the daily commute that wears on them and causes traffic congestion and pollution. For their part, companies argue that in-office work results in greater productivity and collaboration among employees. Possibly the relative effectiveness of in-person and remote work depends on the type of business. While a purely digital company like Dropbox has a ‘virtual first’ policy, allowing employees to work 100% remotely, some high-profile corporations such as Amazon and Google are requiring in-person attendance. Amazon’s justification is that in-person work “will strengthen company culture, collaboration, and mentorship” (1). On its hybrid three-days-a-week-in-person policy, a Google spokesperson stated, “(i)n-person collaboration is an important part of how we innovate and solve complex problems.” (2). 

In performance-based workplaces that are common in the U.S. and many other industrialized countries, there is a strong emphasis on individual productivity, performance, and achievement. Ambitious employees strive for recognition in order to get ahead, and performance evaluation systems recognize merit based on the achievement of  individual goals. Managers rightly try to motivate employees to do their best work, and identify, recognize, and reward the strongest contributors. 

This isn’t where the manager’s role ends, though. Most organizations – and schools are a good example – don’t thrive through the isolated efforts of individuals, but through the joint work of people in collaboration, which is more than the sum of the parts. If an organization is in any sense like a machine (but let’s not stretch this analogy too far), then we know that the individual parts of a machine are useless on their own. It’s only when the parts are working together as part of a system that the machine functions. A big piece of the manager’s job is to ensure that the system – not only the individuals in it – is functioning correctly. This involves what I call ‘managing in the gaps,’ because it is about what happens in the spaces between and among the individual employees. When relationships are positive and there is collaboration, the team, department, branch, or organization is effective. Many problems organizations experience arise when relationships between and among individuals and teams are poor or not well developed.

Managers cannot simply trust that good relationships will arise in the workplace, and they should assume that at least some relationships between individuals and teams will be problematic. Even with great individuals on board, workplace setups can create friction that get personal. For example, at one intensive English program, it was one staff member’s job to provide administrative support to faculty coordinators of short and specialized programs. But because roles hadn’t been clearly demarcated, disputes frequently arose between the staff member and the coordinators over whose responsibility certain tasks were. The individuals involved were strong and positive employees who wanted to do a good job, but the situation inadvertently put them into conflict with each other, and yes, it got personal. It was the manager’s job to recognize the source of the tension and develop a solution, which in this case was to define and explain each person’s role more clearly, and follow up to make sure everyone involved understood. That done, relationships improved and programs could be delivered more effectively. This is an example of managing in the gaps. 

Managing in the gaps isn’t only about troubleshooting problems, though; it’s primarily about preventing them from arising in the first place. Although it’s easy to criticize workplace meetings with slogans like ‘death by meeting’ and complaints such as, ‘I just want to get out of meetings and on with my job,’ there is a lot to be said for regular team check-in meetings and cross-department check-ins to hear what others are doing, share stories about what’s working or not, anticipate potential obstacles and plan around them, and just engage with each other face to face as people. Meetings like this don’t need a strict agenda, but should allow participants to share with others what’s going on in their job or area of the organization. Think of meetings like this as like bringing in your car for a regular oil change and tune-up. Again, the individuals in the organization may be doing a great job, but managers need to address the effectiveness of the whole. 

While some online, work-from-home organizations have developed sophisticated means for the kind of relationship development and collaboration described here, people-centered organizations such as most schools don’t tend to lend themselves to the kind of collaboration needed to make the whole thing work remotely. From what we know about interactions on social media, at their most extreme people can become pretty nasty to each other when they don’t know each other or interact face to face. We are human, and most of our great achievements have come not from individuals working in solitude, but from doing things together, in relationship to each other. Some employees may argue, “I’m more productive working on my own at home,” and that may be true individually, but it’s what the team achieves – not the individual – that ultimately determines the fate of an organization.  

Are you managing in the gaps? Here are six quick questions to check: 

  1. When tensions arise between people or teams do you try to look beyond the individuals involved and consider the system that has put them into conflict with each other?
  2. Do you openly appreciate or celebrate collaboration among individuals and teams?
  3. Do you hire people based not only on their ability to do the tasks associated with their position but also on their ability to work with others? 
  4. Do you evaluate, and reward people on the same basis?
  5. Do you regularly gather individuals on a team to check in on how things are going, even without a specific agenda?
  6. Do you call regular meetings of two or more teams to share what everyone is working on? 

Make it a habit to pull back from the individuals – and from the individual team – and look for solutions in the gaps. 

(1) https://www.npr.org/2025/01/02/nx-s1-5237654/this-is-the-day-amazons-return-to-office-policy-takes-effect

(2) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/google-tells-employees-to-return-to-office-3-days-a-week-or-risk-losing-their-jobs/articleshow/120622395.cms?from=mdr  

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Getting Serious About Quality

“A high quality English learning experience.” “High quality English instruction.” “High quality courses.” “Quality English lessons.” “The highest quality English programs in the area.”  

Defining Quality
Whether explicitly stated in our materials or not, we all want to offer quality, but it’s an elusive concept. The dictionary gives two definitions:

Definition 1: degree of excellence; how good or bad something is

Most likely when programs make a claim for their ‘high quality,’ they have something like this in mind. Unfortunately, ‘excellence,’ ‘good,’ and ‘bad’ don’t bring us any closer to a definition of quality, since they in turn need to be defined.

Definition 2: the extent to which something is fit for purpose

In other words, it is good quality if it does what it is supposed to do. This is unsatisfying if your program wants to market itself as standing out from the crowd. Some combination of the two, such as ‘we are ideally set up to do what we do, and we do it excellently’ gets us closer, but is still just as easy a claim to make as ‘we are high quality.’

If your program wants to avoid using the word ‘quality’ as more than marketing copy, you ought to substantiate the claim. (In fact you should do this even if you don’t explicitly use the word quality.) You not only need to satisfy potential students and other stakeholders of your quality; you also need to define it for yourself.  You need to determine what constitutes quality at your program as a benchmark against which to measure your program’s performance.

Elements of Program Quality
There are four bases on which you might define and claim quality for your program.

  • Quality of inputs. Inputs include teachers, program staff, the curriculum, the textbooks, and educational technology. For example, you might emphasize the credentials, experience, or personalities of your teachers; your highly researched and trialed curriculum; or your state-of-the art classrooms and digital learning opportunities.
  • Quality of the experience. You might emphasize your modern, comfortable facility, your carefully vetted and monitored homestay families, or your exciting social and cultural activities.
  • Quality of outcomes. While the inputs and the experience may make the process of learning at your program positive and comfortable, students are there to make progress in their English. Quality of outcomes may include increased test scores, successful achievement of measurable outcomes based on reliable and valid assessments, and job placements or college acceptances that depend on English attainment.
  • External recognition of quality. If student completion of your program is accepted by universities as an indication of English proficiency for admission programs, you have an external acknowledgment of your program’s quality. Some programs mention their accredited status as a mark of quality, or collect and publish testimonials.

Evidence for any of these claims can support the ‘we do it excellently’ and the ‘fit for purpose’ definitions of quality, but a convincing picture of program quality will need to be based on a combination of all four. A program may have knowledgeable and stimulating teachers (input), but students will not be satisfied if they are sitting in a poorly lit, unventilated classroom (experience). Accreditation involves meeting a large number of program-wide standards (fit for purpose), but has limited ability to communicate excellence above and beyond other programs, hundreds of which are also accredited.

Measuring Quality
A program that is serious about quality and about substantiating its quality claims should have quality assurance measures in place. Quality assurance means not only systematically collecting information; it also means reviewing it, sharing it, and using it to make improvements. Many programs are effective at collecting information, but few seem have consistent procedures in place to make use of it to improve quality.

Most measures of quality address inputs. Only relatively recently have measures of outcomes become more prominent, as a result of calls for greater accountability in education. The last two items in the table below are outcome measures.

MeasureQuality TypeQuestion to Ask
Class observationsInputs/ExperienceAre there plentiful affordances for learning in the classroom, and are students making use of them?
Course syllabi  InputsAre syllabi consistent with the curricular goals and objectives?
Course or teacher evaluation forms   InputsAre students delighted with their classroom experience and learning?
Student surveys  Inputs/Experience/ OutcomesWhat common themes indicate what your program is doing well or poorly?
Student needs analysis   InputsHow closely aligned with students’ expressed needs are your courses, skills, and language knowledge?
ComplaintsInputs/Experience/ OutcomesWhat do students express dissatisfaction about?
Suggestion box Inputs/ExperienceWhat are students asking for that you are not currently providing?
Teacher and staff retention  InputsIs your workplace attractive enough to maintain continuity in a faculty and staff that have a stake in your program’s quality?
Teacher feedback  Inputs/ExperienceWhat can you learn from your teachers about the student experience?
Accreditation feedbackExternal recognitionHow many of the accreditation requirements are you meeting and not meeting, and in which areas?
Student achievement  Outcomes (direct measure)Are valid and reliable measures of student attainment of your program’s learning outcomes being used to determine the level of student success?
Job placement/College acceptances (if applicable)Outcomes (Indirect measure)What percentage of your students are meeting English language standards for their academic or career goals?

Using a mix of these measures, you can develop a quality dashboard to benchmark your current quality performance and set goals for improvement. Provided the measures yield positive information, you can use the information to substantiate your quality claims and strengthen your sales messaging.

Not a bad strategy in an always-competitive field.

For Schools

How to be a Professional

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Professionalism, like common sense, may be most frequently referred to in its absence. “That was so unprofessional.” “I’m bothered by your lack of professionalism.” “You should dress more professionally.” And so on. 

In common parlance, as in the examples above, professionalism refers to a particular type of behavior in white-collar work settings. Professionalism in this sense refers to behaviors such as arriving at appointments and meetings on time, dressing appropriately, meeting deadlines, and speaking respectfully to colleagues. Being professional is a minimum requirement for most workplaces. But being a professional can also refer to one’s membership in a profession, such as the medical profession, the legal profession, or the accountancy profession. Teaching – and since this is a blog devoted to it, specifically English language teaching – may also be a profession, and English language teachers may be able to consider themselves professionals. But why the tentativeness here? 

English language teaching – that is, teaching English to speakers of other languages – has traditionally had a low bar to entry. I started in the field, as many people did, with no formal education or training in it. My first formal qualification – which I earned five years after I began teaching English – was a one-month certificate, the RSA/Cambridge CTEFLA (I was in the last cohort before it became the CELTA). These days there are plenty of copycat certificates, many of them online requiring no actual teaching practice, that permit the holder to claim certification to teach English and are accepted by some English language schools in the U.S. and many other countries.

Certificates like these offer routines to present language and have students practice the four skills (such as PPP – presentation, practice, production), and have a smattering of ‘language awareness’ to give prospective teachers at least a bare-bones knowledge of what they will be teaching. They offer training, which I’ve characterized in another post as ‘the learning of standard routines for predictable situations.’ With only a certificate in hand, one could hardly call oneself a full-fledged professional in the sense of belonging to a professional field. 

Professionals undergo an in-depth education that gives successful students an understanding of the contexts, theories, and practices in the field. It permits them to connect these three so that rather than simply following procedures, they can make informed decisions based on – in English language teaching – an understanding of the teaching and learning context, teaching and learning theories, and knowledge of effective practices. While some masters degrees in TESOL or Applied Linguistics include a focus on classroom teaching, many also introduce students to second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language, culture and society, to provide such a broad and deep knowledge background. This background allows individuals in the field to talk to each other using a common vocabulary – in our case terminology and its underlying concepts, such as communicative competence, discourse community,  pragmatics, and, if we choose, linguistic imperialism. 

The distinction between training and education gives a basis for distinguishing non-professionals from professionals in the field of English language teaching. This is not everything, though. Earning a master’s in TESOL clearly does not automatically make one a professional – it is an initiation into the field. In addition to accumulated experience over several years, being a member of the profession requires an ongoing commitment throughout one’s career. If you consider yourself a professional in this field, what, beyond education, is the basis for your professionalism? Some of the following should be on your list. 

Ongoing Professional Development
Through reading, attending conferences, webinars, and in-house workshops, you keep up-to-date with current theories and practices in the field. For example, over the years you will have become familiar with the notions of global English and English as a lingua franca; recognized the limitations of English-only methodology; and gained an increasingly sophisticated approach to error correction. You use your evolving knowledge to try out new ideas in teaching, and importantly, to reflect on and adapt them, and take on new kinds of teaching assignments. You conduct research based in your practice – formally or informally. And you give conference presentations or publish articles in the field’s publications. 

Service
Your institution and the field need the benefit of your input and efforts beyond your classroom teaching if they are to remain dynamic and vibrant. You can serve on committees and working groups in your institution, and organize professional development sessions for your colleagues. You can volunteer and take leadership roles with organizations like TESOL and (in the U.S.) EnglishUSA. You can contribute to your organization’s accreditation effort and become a site reviewer for the accreditor.  

Collaboration and Networking
You make connections with others in the field – and outside it – to identify and find solutions to teaching-related challenges. You are collegial with those inside and outside your organization and become known as a go-to person for advice and consultation. 

Mentorship and Coaching
You pass on your experience and wisdom to those newer in the field and serve as a role model for career development. You help the less-experienced develop conference proposals and articles for publication. 

Advocacy
English learners need the right learning conditions and teachers in order to make progress. English language programs are frequently looked down on in academia. English language schools may struggle with unreasonable regulations. English language teachers teach under challenging conditions, receive poor pay, or cannot find full-time work. As a professional, you become an advocate for English language learners, programs, institutions, your colleagues, and the field. 

Ultimately, being a professional means not simply treating work as a job but rather as something you are invested in, something to which you are making a lifetime commitment. This isn’t easy – work conditions and part-time employment can leave many in our field feeling as though they are always on the receiving end of other people’s decisions, and family commitments can leave little time for professional activities beyond what’s required. But no matter your situation, taking charge of your career through an ongoing commitment to being a member of the profession is a way to empower yourself and your chosen field. You’ll also make lifelong connections and enjoy an enriching professional life. 

For Schools

What is ChatGPT Like?

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“Everything must be like something, so what is this like?”

― E.M. Forster

Artificial intelligences are likely to transform our lives and societies in unimagined ways, but right now many educators face the immediate problem of how to respond appropriately to students’ use of ChatGPT, which can produce passable text and images in multiple genres and formats. What are we to make of this new resource and its place in education?  Is ChatGPT a threat to academic integrity or a tool that teachers and their students can leverage to achieve better performance? 

Responding to something we don’t know or understand is daunting, but we can employ one of the principles of adult learning to help us: we can get a grasp of something new by relating it to something we already know. What kinds of innovations and challenges have we or our predecessors faced before that can help us make sense of the new AI? How you respond to the challenge of ChatGPT may be related to the internal metaphor you are using to think about it. 

Think for a minute. How is ChatGPT like: 

  • A performance-enhancing drug?
  • A calculator?
  • An elevator?
  • A multivitamin?
  • A personal assistant?
  • A robotic exoskeleton?

ChatGPT in terms of a performance-enhancing drug
It boosts performance, making you stronger and more competitive. Everyone else is using it too, but it is considered cheating. We can detect its use with sophisticated tools. To keep things fair, we should allow it for everyone or ban it for everyone. If we want to know how someone can ‘really’ perform, we should forbid it. 

ChatGPT in terms of a calculator
Students at the early stages should learn how to do the fundamentals themselves. But as they master these fundamentals and attempt higher-order functions, they can delegate the basic stuff to this tool so that they can get on with more advanced-level thinking. It would be wrong to introduce it too early in students’ learning, but can be encouraged as they advance. 

ChatGPT in terms of an elevator
There are two ways to get to the destination – one is fast and easy, the other is slow and takes effort. The slow method may help keep you exercised, and the fast method may contribute to your gradual decline. On the other hand, the slow method may tire you out while the fast method may allow you to reach heights you’d never dreamed of. 

Chat GPT in terms of a multivitamin
It allows you to get what you need quickly and without much thought. The results may be positive in many ways, but you may stop thinking critically about what’s good for you. 

ChatGPT in terms of a personal assistant
By using it you can focus on what is important to you, but you may forget how to do some fairly basic things. You may become dependent on it and not able to function without it. 

ChatGPT in terms of a robotic exoskeleton
You work in tandem with this machine to increase your power. Machines are our current and future reality; they are not going away. We should learn to work with them to augment our human potential. 

One question for educators raised by these kinds of metaphors is: what do we actually need our students to do? Education isn’t only about achieving a result, but also about undergoing a process, and students need to be taken through processes such as writing a convincing essay, building an argument, or defining and researching a topic in order to fully understand them.  

When we think about what our policy on ChatGPT should be, we should consider the stage of learning students are at. When children start out learning math, we don’t give them calculators – we have them understand number, place, arithmetical calculations, and so on. Later, when they have mastered basic skills, they can use a calculator for those functions, as we are expecting higher-order problem-solving from them. Similarly, with language education, students should learn the language for themselves and not rely on AI tools. Later, when they have gained facility with grammar, words, idioms, register, and genre, we might have them delegate some of the work to ChatGPT, with the calculator analogy being most useful. 

What is ChatGPT most like for you? How does that affect how you will incorporate it into or exclude it from your teaching? 

For Schools

Is it okay for language learners to make mistakes?

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Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay

“It’s okay to make mistakes.”

That’s what many English language teachers tell their students at the start of a course. It’s a reassurance designed to address the anxiety of students who are reticent about speaking or writing because they are used to teachers emphasizing accuracy in language use: accuracy in grammar and vocabulary in particular. And it’s a recognition that taking risks is a means to improvement.  

In spite of the merits of the ‘it’s okay to make mistakes’ advice though, grading practices of many teachers, programs, or institutions contradict it. In fact, grading systems often implicitly communicate to students that it is emphatically not okay to make mistakes. 

Here’s how the contradiction happens. Most schools still give grades, and most students want to get a good grade. Final grades are most often arrived at by combining the results of work done during the term or session – assignments, quizzes, and the like, known as formative assessment – and an evaluation of the extent to which a student has met the goal(s) of the course, or summative assessment. Teachers’ gradebooks and the gradebooks of online learning management systems combine these grades in some way to arrive at the final grade. 

The problem is that formative assessment is done while the students are still learning, when they haven’t yet mastered the course outcomes, when they are bound to make mistakes – those mistakes that their teachers tell them it is “okay to make.” But if a student does poorly on some of those formative assessments, and the grade from those assessments factors into the student’s final grade, then even if the student eventually succeeds in meeting the course goals, her final grade is brought down by the low grades she received while she was learning and making mistakes. If she cared about her final grade, then it was certainly not okay for her to make mistakes, contrary to what her teacher told her at the start. 

If we truly want students not to worry about making mistakes as they progress in their learning, then formative assessment shouldn’t figure into the final course grade. Instead, we would determine whether and to what extent the student had met the course learning goals. Students could follow their own route to achievement without fear of mistakes along the way bringing their final grade down. 

Shifting the burden of the final grade onto final summative assessments brings its own problems, however. In particular, it is stressful for students if their entire grade for a course hinges on how well they do in a final, summative assessment. How to deal with that is another discussion…

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Teacher to Administrator – the perks and pitfalls of moving into the office

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Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

At some point in their career, many teachers ask themselves if they should move into school administration. For me that question came soon after I moved to the U.S. and realized that in an ESL field dominated by part-time teaching appointments it was going to be challenging to make a career as a teacher. I also perceived that others had a passion for classroom teaching, pure and simple, that I couldn’t match. Having worked in another industry previously, I also felt restricted by the strict scheduling of my time when teaching. It just didn’t suit me that well, and when the opportunity came, I began making the move ‘into the office.’

If you are considering making that move, perhaps these questions and answers will help inform your decision…

What kind of schedule do you want?

As a teacher your daily schedule is fixed. You know when your classes are, and you know where you need to be and at what time. It’s a highly structured work life.

Administrators generally have much more control over their time (other than the slew of meetings they have to attend). Depending on your institution, vacation time is structured differently too. University-based teachers tend to have more vacation, but are restricted as to when they can take it. Administrators may have less time off, but more flexibility.

In both cases though, the ability to really unplug varies. Teachers may spend much of their vacation time thinking about and planning for the next term’s classes; administrators tend to have to be reachable even on vacation, and may have to attend meetings remotely even while they are supposed to be taking a break.

Either way, the way your time is structured will change if you move from the classroom to the office.

What’s going to happen to your teaching skills?

Being a great teacher is a constant process of practicing, trying new techniques and materials, refining routines, reflecting on what went well and what didn’t, and making efforts to become more effective. Teaching is like learning a foreign language in that it requires regular practice. If you get out of practice, you get rusty.

If you make a move into administration, you’ll have to ask if you are going to continue to keep one foot in the classroom or not. Some think that academic administrators should continue to teach, so that they can fully appreciate the experience of teachers and the consequences of the decisions they make. That’s a nice ideal, but teaching and administering are two completely different jobs, and there is a danger that you will not be able to give your full self to either.

In my first job as a school administrator I was a teacher five mornings a week, and a housing director five afternoons. In the classroom students would ask me – or more often complain to me – about their housing. In the afternoon when I was working on housing, my students would visit me with questions about their classwork. This led to long hours for me and the potential for early burnout, as well as the sense that I wasn’t doing either job really well.

It can be hard to leave the classroom behind, but it’s a tough balancing act to keep teaching and office work going at a high level.

Do you care about a career path?

Teachers and administrators may have different mindsets when it comes to their careers. Many teachers just want to teach. Some end up doing similar work year after year; others push themselves to become more effective teachers through professional development and teaching different kinds of classes.

Either way, there isn’t traditionally what you would call a career path for teachers, especially in ESL. Some institutions might have ‘junior lecturers’ and ‘senior lecturers,’ and of course there are part-time and full-time teachers. But in the end, teachers tend to remain teachers, and many teachers are fine with that.

The administrator mindset tends to want to see career progress – increasing levels of responsibility, higher level job titles, broader influence in the organization. If you are planning to move from teaching to administration, it’s a good idea to reflect on what kind of career you want, and what you want to be doing ten or twenty years from now.

How will other teachers view you?

In some institutions, teachers and administration enjoy a constructive and positive relationship. In others though, there may be a level  of mutual suspicion and mistrust resulting from differing perceptions about how decisions should be made, less-than-perfect communication, and a failure to understand and appreciate the demands of each other’s work. If you move from teaching to  administration, some teachers might view you as having switched teams; or feel you’ve gone over to the dark side.

You may not be able to avoid this because while many in the organization call for transparency in decision-making, you may be required to maintain discretion (for example to protect individuals’ personal information), not publicly disagree about higher-level decisions with which you personally don’t agree, and be accountable to individuals or entities that teachers rarely encounter, such as accreditors, boards of directors, the Department of Homeland Security, and upper-level management. Sometimes what teachers may feel is best for the students seems contrary to what is demanded by one of these entities. Too bad – as an administrator you have to comply with demands wherever they come from.

On the positive side, as a former teacher you might be seen by teachers as someone who ‘understands us.’ Either way, you should be aware that perceptions of you may change with your move to the back office (or the corner office).

Finally – do you have the skill set and the inclination?

While some of the soft skills of teaching transfer well to administration – planning, organization, and effective communication, among others – teaching and administering are fundamentally different jobs, each requiring a refined set of skills. Do you enjoy working with spreadsheets, budgets, student records? Are you ready to handle complaints from students, teachers, and staff? You will need to ask yourself if you have those skills or are able and willing to develop them. And of course, working in an office is very different from working in a classroom. Will you be happy with significantly less contact with students?

So, is administration for you?

Educating our students requires many different roles and functions, from classroom teacher to academic administrator and student services provider. We are all educators, no matter our job. Education can be a rewarding field to work in regardless of your role. I hope you will find the right niche for your talents, skills, and inclinations.

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Talking textbooks

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If you’ve been teaching English as a second or foreign language for a few years, you’ve probably taught using a wide variety of textbooks. Over the years, textbooks have evolved from layouts you could easily create (now anyway) in Microsoft Word, to sophisticated, full-color extravaganzas that seem designed to cater to limited modern attention spans. Textbooks also mirror evolving approaches to language teaching, from the decontextualized sentences of grammar-translation, through the drill-and-kill repetitions and substitutions of audiolingualism, information gaps and situational dialogues of communicative language teaching, to…whatever it is we have now, which is not entirely clear. 

Teachers use textbooks in various ways, sometimes as a springboard for whatever will happen in class, sometimes as a ‘pick and mix’ assortment of activities and exercises, and sometimes – perhaps too often – as the lesson plan itself. The latter seems to be increasingly true of those sophisticated, theme-based texts which can lead to what I think I’ll call ‘textbook lock-in’ – the tendency of the textbook to bind you to its content. The way this works is that each unit is based on a topic, and all vocabulary, grammar, speaking, listening, and reading exercises are based on that topic. It’s hard to do what’s on page 23 unless you’ve already done page 22. And 21. 

While this kind of textbook offers rich content, the language practice and the methodology tend to get a little lost in the mix. If learning involves analysis of the subject at hand, then it’s a good idea to isolate a piece of it (let’s say the present perfect tense), examine it closely, practice it in a structured and then a freer way, and then integrate that new piece of the subject into one’s total knowledge. This process of analysis and synthesis can get a bit lost when you are confronted with the whole language, everything all at once, and you (the teacher) are expected to also teach about volcanoes (been there, done that). 

This content-based, ‘locked-in’ approach in textbooks is very likely useful for students preparing for academic study, but it makes you wonder what the teacher is supposed to be expert in. Many ESL teachers are not expert in the specialized content of the textbook, so the textbook becomes the content authority in the classroom. And with all the exercises tied to the content, there may not be much for the teacher to do but manage the delivery of the textbook content to the students – or not stick to the textbook. 

Which creates its own problems. If teachers stay close to the textbook, they may be giving up some of their teacherly authority to determine content and method. The lesson is derived not from the teacher but from the publisher. The teacher is reduced to a delivery system, just as in the days of the old Berlitz schools (when teachers didn’t have to be qualified to teach in a language school). But if teachers don’t use the textbook, students may complain about having paid for it but not having used it, or may feel overwhelmed with all the content in the book plus what the teacher is supplementing with. What a bind this is. 

Do you like your textbooks? How do they position you in relation to your students? What is your role with regard to the book you are using? Does it support you in freeing up your creativity, or lock you in to pre-defined content? There’s a lot more to say about textbooks, but I think these questions are worth discussing. 

The image for this post is from Lessons in Vocabulary by Robert Lado and Charles Fries, The University of Michigan Press, 1956

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Proficiency by proxy: language proficiency and test preparation

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

I wonder if your school offers test prep classes for any of the English language tests that are intended to indicate a person’s readiness for academic study in English or to succeed in a professional or daily life in English? Test prep classes – and the test prep industry – have always struck me as being a little strange. What are these tests for? In my naive moments I think they are meant to give a snapshot of a person’s language proficiency at a particular point in time. Looking at a test result, we are supposed to be able to say that on such and such a date, the test-taker’s English was at a certain level of proficiency.

A complication arises because of test preparation. By intensively focusing on the test itself prior to taking it, a learner ‘hacks’ the test so that it may not give a true indication of the learner’s level. The result then is not an indication of the person’s English level on a given date, but of the person’s ability to get a certain score on the test on that date. And the score is everything – because scores have a gatekeeping function for higher education and other purposes, the aim of the learner becomes the score rather than English proficiency as such. The number is a proxy for English proficiency and is treated by gatekeepers as a substitute for actual knowledge about English proficiency.

Now, it isn’t true to say that English proficiency tests have no relationship to English proficiency, but in my experience, a test score that was gained through test prep classes, coaching, and individual study may make learners appear more proficient than they really are. Anectodally, I think we all know of the students who arrived at an institution with a qualifying English test score but who were not able to handle the demands of the English language academic environment. This may have a lot to do with whether the test is truly valid, that is, whether its scores indicate what they are purported to indicate.

Test preparation can be beneficial for language learning, of course. In my own experience, preparing for Japanese proficiency tests gave me motivation and no doubt improved my vocabulary, grammar, and (under controlled conditions) listening ability. Yet even when I passed at a high level – sufficient to be accepted to a Japanese university – I knew that I wasn’t equipped linguistically to handle that level of language. I had prepared intensively to perform well on a limited and somewhat predictable range of tasks.

In spite of these concerns, test prep will continue to thrive because, well, everybody’s doing it and learners put themselves at a disadvantage if they don’t. I hope that as a field we will try to keep language test preparation in its appropriate place, connected to a genuine effort to build practical language knowledge and skills, and never an end in itself, chasing proficiency by proxy.

For Schools

Goals, outcomes, objectives – clearing up the confusion (I hope)

If you’ve had anything to do with curriculum over the past few years, then you’ve likely wrestled with the terms ‘goal,’ ‘outcome,’ and ‘objective.’ It’s not surprising they cause confusion. After all,

“What is your goal?”
“What outcome are you seeking?”
“What is your objective?”

all sound like different ways of asking the same question. But in educational circles, the terms have come to take on specific meanings, and it can be hard to tease them apart. So here’s a handy-dandy guide to – what I think is – the correct way of thinking about how these terms are used by curriculum wonks.

Although there are various ways to design curricula, the in-vogue approach this century is backward-design. It starts by asking what we want students to achieve as a result of – that is, by the end of – the course. Hence the fixation on the end-result vocabulary. Let’s take a look at each term in its turn.

Goal
The goal is the most general statement about the end result. It’s the answer to the question, “What’s this course for?” Another way to think about it is by asking, “What change do we want to see in the learners as a result of the course?”

Possible answers are, “We want them to become more proficient academic writers.” That’s not a bad goal. “We want them to be able to speak English more fluently.” Pretty good goal. “We want them to be able to understand lectures.” And so on.

The goal offers a general rationale for the course. But It isn’t very specific. So this is where outcomes come in (so to speak).

Outcome
Often referred to as student learning outcomes, or SLOs, outcome statements are there to hold teachers, students, programs, and schools accountable for results. They are usually expressed as ‘can-do’ statements and describe observable behaviors that successful students should be able to demonstrate. Usually an SLO can be preceded by the words (or it actually includes them), “By the end of the course, successful students will be able to…”

So in the academic writing example above, an SLO might be, “…write a five-page essay in English examining a current topic in the social sciences, with a clear thesis, supporting argumentation, and citations.” Something like that. The statement is in some way measurable, usually using a rubric against which the students’ performance can be gauged. It is useful to people outside the school, such as potential employers or admissions personnel, who may want to know what the student can actually do, and it is useful to the school itself for analyzing its own effectiveness (by asking how many students meet the outcome and at what level of proficiency).

So we have our goal, the general change we wish to see in our learners; and we have our SLO (one or more per goal), a specific, measurable statement of what a student should be able to do. But how are we going to get there?

Objective
Objectives break down the goal and SLO into more specific teaching and learning activities. I like to think of objectives as the components of the SLO. Just as the parts of a car, assembled correctly, result in, well, a car, the objectives, or components of an SLO, when put together, lead to the attainment of the SLO or goal. For example, speaking more fluently (depending on the level of the students) might involve ‘practicing conversational routines,’ ‘engaging in free conversation practice,’ and ‘expressing one’s thoughts in speech,’ among others. Objectives can help guide teachers in planning which skills and sub-skills to work on in the classroom to support the students in reaching the outcome.

So that’s the short version of goals, outcomes, and objectives, and I think it more or less represents the consensus, although you will find many points of disagreement or elaboration in the curriculum literature. I wonder if my understanding of goals, outcomes, and objectives is the same as yours? What would you add or change?

For Schools, Other news

Why you should be teaching to the test

Back in the day, if you were ‘teaching to the test,’ you weren’t really doing your job as a teacher. You isolated the pieces of knowledge and the skills that you knew would come up on the test and taught them to the exclusion of broader educational activities that might have enriched the students’ experience. You might have done this to ensure a high pass rate, which reflected well on you as a teacher if the higher-ups were judging you on your students’ test scores. But teaching to the test was frowned upon as a kind of shortcut for both teacher and students.

Since the advent of the accountability movement, teaching to the test is exactly what you should be doing. In the currently popular paradigm, schools and teachers are accountable for students’ achievement of defined learning outcomes, expressed in behavioral terms: “The student will be able to…” Examples in language programs are:

  • give a five-minute presentation on a topic of personal interest
  • write a five-paragraph narrative essay
  • summarize, in writing, a radio news story
  • re-tell orally the plot of a short story

If the learning outcomes are well-conceived, they should be a guide to what the test – let’s call it an assessment – should be. How do you assess students’ ability to give a five-minute presentation? Have them give a five-minute presentation at the end of the course. How do you assess their ability to write a five-paragraph essay? Have them write a five-paragraph essay. And so on. (The specifics of the assessment will need to be made clear, and rubrics provide a means of determining the students’ level of performance.)

And so what is the best way to prepare students to give a presentation? Teach to the test and have them practice giving presentations. To write an essay? Teach to the test and have them write essays. This is what I mean when I say ‘you should be teaching to the test.’

Some summative tests – including many of those provided in published textbooks – are not good tests to teach to. A grammar gap-fill isn’t much use in giving information about a student’s final level of achievement, unless your learning outcome is ‘be able to provide the appropriate grammatical forms in a gap-fill test.’ That’s not a very useful outcome to anyone, though this activity might help promote student learning along the way. A well-defined learning outcome is a behavior that you can describe to a future employer or school indicating the student’s ability to do useful things with language.

So let’s embrace teaching to the test – as long as you have good learning outcomes and a corresponding test that assesses them appropriately. (If you don’t, maybe it’s time for an overhaul.) And while we’re doing that, let’s not forget that games, songs, poetry, sharing experiences, and laughter create a positive, human environment that leads to unanticipated learning and ideal conditions for students to learn.

 

 

For Schools

“They don’t know how to order.” The challenge for ESL students outside the classroom

How many times are ESL students told to ‘go out and speak English?’ The possibility of using the target language outside the classroom and the school is surely one of the strongest rationales for learners to come to an English-speaking country to learn the language. Theorists of second language acquisition have proposed that ‘negotiation of meaning’ with native speakers will provide learners with the comprehensible input they need to make progress, making access to native speakers important to that progress. As Bonny Norton points out in the 2nd edition of her book Language and Identity, getting that access is not so simple.

Like the five immigrant women in Norton’s 1990s research study, for international ESL students “the opportunity to practice speaking English outside the classroom is dependent largely on their access to anglophone social networks” (p. 172). But getting  into those networks is challenging because the ability to speak English is necessary to enter them. Back in 2012 we learned that many international students on college campuses fail to make any close U.S. friends for this very reason. And according to Norton, even in interactions between native and non-native speakers, native speakers are often unwilling to engage in negotiating meaning, placing the burden of comprehensibility on non-native speakers. I saw this first-hand at a campus Dunkin Donuts: two students from China had difficulty communicating their order to the server, who offered little in the way of ‘negotiation.’ When the students left, the server, shaking her head, turned to her colleague and sighed, “They don’t know how to order.” It is unlikely the students’ learning of English was enhanced by this encounter. As Norton writes of her research participants, “native speakers of English were often impatient with their attempts at communication and more likely to avoid them than negotiate meaning with them” (p. 150).

ESL programs for international students can mitigate some of these challenges through careful programming that brings students into meaningful contact with native or more proficient English speakers. Some examples (the first two are from my workplace but I take no credit for them):

  1. The Showa Friendship Circle at Showa Boston matches pairs of students with people in the community who have a genuine interest in getting to know international students. Students and ‘friends’ are chosen and matched carefully to maximize the chance of a positive relationship and the opportunity for language learning. Students and their friends arrange meals together, visit local places of interest, or take trips.
  2. The College Connection Program, also at Showa Boston, similarly matches international students with students from local colleges. Groups of students are carefully selected, matched, and oriented. They plan several activities together, and the international students spend a day or two visiting the campus and sitting in on classes.
  3. Meetup.com makes it possible for international students to find people in the community who share an interest. While international students in such groups may need to gain confidence and find their voice, meetups do offer a legitimate ‘way in’ to meaningful interactions that can lead to friendships and enhanced language learning. ESL programs can help students by orienting them to the app or website, supporting them in finding appropriate meetups, and giving them advice on language and behavior to optimize their experience.
  4. Finally, let’s not forget homestays, which, if successful, can offer an enriching language experience in which the student’s voice is welcomed. ESL programs must select and monitor homestays carefully and ensure they are not simply seen by the host as ‘renting out a room.’ Hosts must be willing to spend time talking with their students and engage in the negotiation of meaning that will help the students make progress.

I have barely touched on the riches that Norton’s book offers. Her stories of each research participant are compelling and memorable, and will offer anyone in the field of language teaching new insights into the learner’s experience, and ways to empower students to find their voice in the target language.

Language and Identity (2nd Edition, 2013) by Bonny Norton is published by Multilingual Matters.

For Schools

Interaction: the imperative of the classroom

I’ve observed hundreds of ESL and other small-format classes over the years, and one thing that always interests me is the pattern of interaction between the teacher and the students. For years there has been an injunction against ‘teacher talking time,’ and class observers commonly pointed out (and still do) when the teacher is talking too much, lecture-style. You can represent this type of classroom interaction in the following way (forgive my back-of-the napkin doodles):

In this interaction pattern, information is being communicated one-way, from the teacher to the students. At least you hoped communication was happening: that would depend on whether the students were listening, or tuned out. (Lecturing can be a useful teaching method, used in moderation. You just have to be an excellent lecturer, able to hold students’ attention for a prolonged period of time. Not many of us really have this talent.)

More commonly in classroom observations, I would see – because the teacher was likely making a special effort to ‘get the students to talk’ – a more socratic-type interaction that looked more like this:

Nonetheless, the interactions were still limited to what looked like a series of one-to-one conversations between the teacher and each student. I would often notice that other students’ attention drifted during these types of interaction.

What these interaction patterns failed to do was to do what I call ‘exploiting the interactive potential of the classroom.’ Meaning that when you have a group of people gathered together in a room, you have a unique opportunity for learning to take place by having those people interact with each other. This could result in various configurations such as this:

Or this:

The interaction patterns I’ve described represent a shift from a ‘banking’ model of education, in which knowledge is supposedly communicated by a fount of all knowledge to students lacking knowledge and with nothing to contribute to the educational enterprise; to a constructionist model, in which knowledge is not transmitted but grows or is built in the mind and behaviors of each learner.

(Scheduling observations with a teacher was interesting when the teacher would tell me, “Don’t come on Tuesday, the students are just giving presentations.” Or, “I’m just having the students work in groups for most of the class, so you won’t be able to see much.” The assumption being that if the teacher was not up there ‘performing,’ there would be nothing interesting to see.)

With advances in technology and recent notions about the ‘flipped classroom,’ there is less and less excuse for classroom interactions to be teacher-dominated. To give an example from the 1990s: I used textbooks that contained listening and speaking exercises based on NPR stories that could be between five and ten minutes long. Typically the instructions in the textbook called for the students to ‘listen to the story’ for general information. Then ‘listen to the story again’ for details. And finally ‘listen once again’ for some more specialized task. I could never help but feel that a lot of class time was being wasted by students just sitting there listening (hopefully) to the story. It did help to fill the time in my lesson plan though, even if it did suck the energy from the room in those drowsy early afternoon hours. (By the way, the shall-not-be-named textbook that contained not-very-interesting-and-wholly-unrealistic 15-20 minute ‘college lectures’ was the greatest offender.)

The problem was that the story was recorded on the book’s copyrighted cassette (later CD) which was made available only to the teacher (emphasizing the banking model’s notion of the teacher as holder and distributor of knowledge). The only legal way to distribute the story to the students was in the classroom by pressing ‘play.’

These days, textbooks – and enterprising teachers who pull material from the internet – make it possible for students to access the listening material themselves, in their own time, and play and re-play it (in some cases at the speed of their choice) as many times as they wish. And the increasingly popular learning management systems and published online materials allow students to do much of the individual work on their own. This means that the teacher is able to truly exploit the interactive potential of the classroom by having students get their language input outside of class. One principle I learned early on in my career was, “Don’t let students do in class what they could do outside of class.” The thing they have difficulty doing outside of class is working with each other, discovering and building knowledge together. And if I went to observe a class today, that is what I would want to observe. How does the teacher create the right conditions for learning, recognizing that the classroom is potentially an interactive environment?

But for all our talk of ‘student-centered learning,’ I’m afraid that if you walk past many ESL classrooms on a typical day, the most likely thing you will hear is the teacher’s voice. You might still hear the listening text from the textbook (often a TED Talk these days). In some cases, more egregiously, a movie is being shown – which makes that classroom the most expensive movie house in town.

Now I may have gone a bit too far here. Running an interactive classroom has its challenges. If you, the teacher, expect the students all to have done their out-of-class listening, reading, or exercises and to be ready to discuss them in class, you may be disappointed. Even if you train your students to do all their out-of-class preparation, you know that some won’t have done it. In those cases, you have to decide what to do with the slackers – try to incorporate them anyway, or set them aside to do the work they should have done and assign a lower grade?

Despite the challenges, if teachers are not exploiting the interactive potential of their classrooms, they are failing to keep up with established good practice, and denying their students a once-only opportunity. Classroom interaction should be high on the ‘classroom observation checklist’ for anyone observing or being observed teaching.

For Schools

The Inadequacy of “ESL” for International Student Preparation

Wrapped up in the term ESL (English as a Second Language) is an assumption that language, above all, is what students need to succeed in an English-speaking environment. The same kind of assumption can be found in the name of the most popular standardized U.S. admissions test for international students, the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) lists levels of language proficiency by skill, and many ESL programs continue to organize their curricula on the basis of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing skills. The field of SLA (Second Language Acquisition) is a major feeder discipline in ESL teacher preparation programs.

A focus on the acquisition of language skills gets us only so far if we are preparing an international student for academic work in an English-speaking setting.  One thing among very many that this student needs to do is to read a text critically and offer an original, well-thought-out, supported, and argued response. The student may need to argue that response in class, and defend it against other points of view, in an assertive yet diplomatic manner. To be taken seriously, the student will need to behave in what is recognized as a normal and appropriate manner in that environment – and know when and how to revert to a more informal style when class ends. All of this goes far beyond language skills.

What this student needs to learn is what James Paul Gee in Social Linguistics and Literacies refers to as Discourse (with a capital D). Discourse “is composed of distinctive ways of listening/speaking and often, too, writing/reading coupled with distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing with other people and with various objects, tools, and technologies, so as to enact specific socially recognizable identities engaged in specific socially recognizable activities” (p. 152). These are less language skills than “social practices into which people are apprenticed as part of a social group” (p. 76). As we move in different Discourse communities, we need to know how to play our part and be recognized as a legitimate member of each community. Discourses are mastered by “enculturation…into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse” (p. 168).

This helps us understand why any program of learning that reduces preparation to language skills is inadequate. Students need to learn the ways of interacting, believing, valuing, and effectively being in the academic Discourse community. University IEPs (intensive English programs) teach English for academic purposes, but they still largely identify as English language programs with language-based missions, their faculty members have degrees in teaching English, and classes are often language skill-specific. They are often isolated from the rest of the campus, and therefore don’t allow for the kind of apprenticeship into the social practices of the campus that would make international students full members of the Discourse community.

In order to address this wider understanding of international student preparation:

  • Intensive English programs should ensure their missions, their curricula and teaching, and their names, encapsulate the full meaning of international student preparation – not simply ESL.
  • University administrations should make international student preparation a task for the whole university, supported by, but not the sole responsibility of, an intensive English program. The IEP’s efforts should be integrated into a campus-wide strategy for international student preparation.
  • Universities should not expect that simply raising the required TOEFL scores will improve international student outcomes – students need induction into the Discourse community, not just a higher TOEFL score.
  • ESL teacher preparation programs need to include coursework on social literacy and in preparing students to enter and successfully navigate their target Discourse communities.

Some of this has already been achieved. Many IEPs recognize their wider mission of orienting students into academic culture, and more recently,  pathway programs have been structured to provide ESL support alongside credit-bearing classes that, in theory at least, offers an apprenticeship into the academic community. But there is a long way to go before the notion of Discourse communities drives international student preparation beyond the inadequacy of “ESL.”

Reference
Gee, J.P., Social Linguistics and Literacies, 5th Ed., Routledge 2015

For Schools

Keeping your Intensive English Program Relevant on Campus


Created by Ijeab – Freepik.com

These are trying times for many on-campus intensive English programs. Enrollment and revenue are down, and there is increased pressure from senior administration for many IEPs to demonstrate their continuing relevance and usefulness to the wider institution.

At the same time, many universities have enrolled international students who can benefit from language, cultural, and social support. IEPs have faculty and staff who are highly qualified to provide programming in these areas (and who may currently have less work to do), yet because IEPs are typically viewed as profit centers rather than service units, they are not called on to offer such support. This is short-sighted, as increased support for degree-seeking international students will improve their retention and completion rates – which is good for the students,  the university’s bottom line, and the institution’s reputation.

IEP directors can sell this idea to university administrators. Here are some activities the IEP can offer to improve the international student experience on campus:

Workshops for faculty: Offer strategies to encourage international students to participate in class discussions, or give advice on assessing written work of students using English as a second language.

Resource webpage for English language support:  Like this one at Hunter College. Include online dictionaries, grammar resources, and writing advice for international students across campus.

Tutoring: Many universities have a writing center, but few have a place specifically to help with second language issues. The IEP can provide this.

English language workshops: Students who have gained a high score on the TOEFL or IELTS may still be lacking essential English skills. Offer workshops in pronunciation, pragmatics, or giving presentations.

Career preparation workshops: Many international students may seek on-campus employment, co-op or internship positions, or CPT/OPT opportunities. Help them write an effective application and interview effectively.

Pre-arrival language preparation: Develop a short online course to give incoming international students confidence with English. Prepare them for the various situations they will encounter and provide strategies to continue working on their English once they arrive.

These ideas will likely require building relationships with other offices on campus, and IEP directors may run into territory issues. Getting buy-in from a senior administrator who can support these efforts may be essential. This person may also be needed in making the case that the costs incurred in these activities will be more than recouped in international student performance, retention, and completion.

On-campus IEPs are home to enormous expertise on international student success. It’s time to put that expertise to work across the campus.