Deconstructing to reconstruct the teacher-learner paradigm

"TEACHER:    Welcome to school, Pippi. I hope you will enjoy yourself here and learn a great deal.

PIPPI:      Yes, and I hope I'll get some Christmas vacation. That is the reason I¹ve come. It's only
            fair, you know.

TEACHER:    If you would first tell me your whole name, I'll register you in school.

PIPPI:      My name is Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim's Daughter
            Longstocking, daughter of Captain Efraim Longstocking, formerly the Terror of the Sea,
            now a cannibal king. Pippi is really only a nickname, because Papa thought Pippilotta
            was too long to say.

TEACHER:    Well, then, we shall call you Pippi, too. But now suppose we test you a little and see
            what you know. Pippi, can you tell me what seven and five are?

PIPPI:      (shocked) Well, if you don't know that yourself, I'm certainly not going to tell you!"
(Adapted from Pippi Goes to School by Astrid Lindgren
http://www.timelessteacherstuff.com/readerstheater/PippiGoesToSchool.html)
***
Let us join Pippi in daring to question the teacher's role, shall we?

Let's begin with knowledge.
In the information age, what can we really teach that the students can't find on the internet?  That's not a rhetorical question, there are answers.  But it's essential that we realise that the information we purport to provide can just as easily be found elsewhere, and most likely of better quality too. 
So what do we offer that the internet doesn't?  To a certain extent, we offer a scope and sequence to follow.  For example, it's easy to find grammar rules and translations of words online, but we offer a structured way of learning a language.  There are online programs which do this, but I would say not as well. 
We certainly offer the discipline to complete the work and progress, which is harder to find when you're studying on your own.
We offer our passion for whatever it is we're teaching, for whatever that's worth to our students.
We could offer personalisation, but all too often we don't.  The stand-and-deliver type of lecture, especially when it slavishly follows a textbook, offers nothing that couldn't be better done online. 

However, when we differentiate our students, design projects and games for them, develop assignments in line with their interests and abilities, and generally treat them as individuals...Ahhh, THEN we begin to offer value for time.

What about mastery?  Don't we know more and better than our students?  Simply put, yes.  I speak better English than my learners do.  But does this automatically confer upon me the right to determine what my students should do in my class, how they should do it, and how long it should take?  Do I then get to be judge, jury and executioner by setting the agenda, designing the assessment and determining whether or not students have achieved what I think they should?  In reality, no; all that is taken care of by distant authorities, governments and textbook publishers; but in the classroom I represent this vast body who makes these decisions.  The students are rarely empowered to take such decisions for themselves. 

These ideas are not new: the point has been made before by the likes of John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Paolo Freire and many others. 

My action research is based on a simple question: if we wanted to deconstruct the current teacher-learner paradigm in order to better reconstruct it, how would we go about it?

My answer is to redesign our teaching method using what we know from the related fields of game design and motivation, then see how it impacts the teacher-learner relationship.

• Would there be less confrontation between what the teacher wants and what the students want?
• Would the teacher be in a better position to respond to the learners as whole individuals rather than a homogenous group?
• Would the teacher be able to scaffold the students not only in the academic learning process but also in the skills necessary for a 21st century adult to have?
• Would it be possible for feedback to usurp numerical grades as the endpoint of assessment?
• Would the teacher find herself exploring more of her own humanity with the students, sharing her own passions and interests rather than simply being a purveyor of facts and on-duty class management cop?

Why are missions better than quests?

Interesting development: it seems like everyone seems to want to start with the missions.  

Is it because the quests are boring?  Maybe we could find ways to make them more interesting. 

Is it because there isn't actually as much relevance between the quests and the final mission as there should be?  Is it because you don't actually need to complete the quests before you're able to do the mission?

Is it because the missions are more intrinsically interesting?  If so, then what are we doing right?

Is it because if you try the missons first you have a better understanding of the relevance of the quests?

On the other hand, I may be wrong about my original assumption.  Which leads to other questions such as :
Are the missions intrinsically interesting and worthwhile?
Are the quests useful in helping you to accomplish the missions?
Do you feel the quests and missions help you to learn English?
Do you feel the quests and missions help you to learn about global issues?

And possibly the scariest question of all (for me!):

Are you learning anything in this course?







 

Action research: why implement a game-model for EFL?

We have approximately 200 students distributed unevenly among 7 levels with most (approximately 60%) being in the bottom three levels.  This is surprising given that the vast majority of our students have been studying English since primary school or even pre-school.  Why, then, is their level of English so low?

There are many possible reasons.  We posited that the students were simply unmotivated.  We therefore set out to find out what motivation was and how to create, or at least stimulate it in the EFL classroom.

There are two main groups of researchers who seem to be most interested in motivation and who actually have a great deal to do with each other: motivational psychologists and game designers.

Games seemed interesting at first simply because of the statistics.  In 2013, $21.53 billion dollars were spent on videogames.  59% of American play video games, divided between 52% male and 48% female players, a combined 61% of whom are under the age of 35.  Games are an interesting study because there is no (or rarely any) real-world benefit to playing games, yet people are collectively spending millions of hours playing them.  Therefore, one can assume that there is something inherently motivating about games.   Is it possible to harness this in the classroom?  Many are certainly trying, but what methods are succeeding?

Motivational psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan studied motivation from an interesting angle: they started by asking what the factors are without which motivation cannot happen.  Self-determination theory, as they call it, posits that the three most important aspects of motivation are autonomy, competence, and relatedness.  The first concept, autonomy, suggests that the antithesis of motivation is micromanagement; in class this would translate to teachers imposing assignments and deadlines without regard for the learning styles and preferences of their students.  Games, on the other hand, would seem to offer players a certain freedom of choice, beginning with whether to play at all.  Once the player is in the game world, gameplay progresses through a series of choices: whether to go left or right, whether to jump, crawl, run or hide, whether to slay the enemy with a gun, grenade, sword etc., or not to slay the enemy at all.    

This point actually turned out to be more important than all that follow.  Most games lie on a spectrum from linear narratives, such as early versions of Super Mario Bros in which the player literally moves forward in a single direction overcoming obstacles along the way until he eventually reaches the castle of princess Peach; to games with a single goal but many ways to achieve it, such as beating the other team in football, to non-linear games such as Grand Theft Auto in which, though players have missions, they have considerable freedom to complete quests in the order of their choice and to pursue side missions if they so desire.  While the elements mentioned below were fairly easy to implement, this seemed to be the sticking point, as I will show.

Competence refers to the feeling of being able to succeed at something, which may be difficult in a system where students are graded on a curve and points are deducted from 100.  Games, on the other hand, offer such things as experience points and levelling up.  If you die (fail) you can “respawn”, or simply keep on trying until you achieve your goal. 

The term relatedness is used to describe the feeling that one’s work matters to others; again, this is difficult when the only person who reads students’ assignments is the teacher, and then not out of interest but in order to correct it.  Many games, in contrast, are highly social, whether they involve raiding teams or a friendly Scrabble game against your mom. 

My action research began with the following question: How can we design an EFL curriculum for university students at Universidad de los Hemisferios in Quito, Ecuador based on game-like learning (Salen, 2004) in which students have greater autonomy, competence and relatedness (Deci and Ryan, 1985) than in “traditional” EFL classes (ie: the lecture-course book-test model) they are accustomed to?

My first answer was inspired by a non-linear game model, my second by a linear game model.

critical pedagogy

Critical pedagogy begins with questions...all kinds of questions. 

• If I have a class of 30 kids, how do I treat them all as individuals?
• I'm supposed to keep discipline and order in the classroom, but real learning is messy.
• How can I apply standards when I have students who learn at different speeds?
• How can I teach creatively when I have to follow a book and a curriculum?
• What's my role as teacher?  How can I have authority while still being their friend?
• Is what I'm teaching useful?
• How do I know my students have learned?  How much learning is enough?

The problem with all of these questions is that once you start, it's really hard to stop.  The challenge is to ask a lot of questions, then narrow your focus to good questions, ones that will actually make your classes better.  Then narrow your focus further to the questions you can actually answer.

My story:

I had decided (prior to reading Freire, interestingly enough) to question my role as authority figure in my university classes.  What right do I have to assign tasks and determine deadlines?  What would a classroom look like where students could determine their own workload and deadlines, while still following a pre-set curriculum and course book?

I tried the experiment.  I told the students they were required to complete the coursebook and I added what I thought were extra fun tasks for when they finished.   I set only the deadlines imposed by the university (3 per term).  I told them they could send their work to be corrected as often as they needed as long as it was perfect by deadline.  If so they would get 100%, if not, they would get 50%.

It failed.

Students were paralysed and confused for most of the term, and lined up outside my office to be corrected the day before deadline.  They didn't seem to enjoy the extra tasks at all because they saw them as extra work.

They didn't say any of this of course.  According to the surveys, they seemed to enjoy the freedom.  They said they enjoyed the extra tasks as a way to make the course book topic come alive and be more relevant.  But the reality appeared different.

Then I realised my question was wrong.  It was based on the wrong theories and the wrong assumptions.  The problem with students isn't necessarily that they want more freedom.   A different educational paradigm wasn't the answer.

It's true that they sometimes find the coursebook a little dull and it's true that the coursebook fails to teach certain crucial skills that can be taught through extra tasks.  But the solution isn't to flip the teacher-student paradigm.  I now think the solution is to use the book as a springboard for more meaningful, structured assignments.

Why I made the mistake I made:

I was inspired by the fact that so many people seem to enjoy playing videogames, so I decided to learn more about them.
Video games tend to fall along a spectrum: "sandbox" games allow for greater player freedom to do things in the order of their choice (the Grand Theft Auto series, for example, gives you missions, but there is a certain amount of freedom in how you choose to go about them).  Mario, on the other hand, is linear: you move in the direction the designer wants you to go.

I tried to teach "sandbox".  Now it's time to go back to linear. 
Now, how can I do that, and still make it great? 

Paolo Freire

I've just been reading Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's a brilliant read that intuitively feels right, but apart from having trouble seeing teachers apply that theory, I don't even honestly think university-age students who've been told what to do all their lives can deal with breaking out.
Maybe the aim isn't to "free" them so much as to teach them English in a way that resonates with them, at least to the extent that they look on English class with enough fondness that they might consider contnuing to learn on their own.

How can we make learning more like a game?

I've discovered that this is a harder question than it looks.  Games do a lot of things:

• In a good game, you learn as you go.  You may look at the manual or watch the tutorial before or during play, but many people prefer the learning to be seamlessly integrated within the game itself.  In English class, should there be a time when the teacher stands up and delivers a lecture on grammar or essay writing?
• In a game there is a clear progression from one level to the next, often culminating in a "boss mission".  In English, it's hard to design a boss mission in which you actually need everything you've learned in terms of grammar, vocabulary, essay writing etc, unless the teacher specifically makes that part of the grade.  So does having a "boss mission" still have value?
• In a game, even though there may be a logical progression between levels, there are still many choices the player makes.  The more linear the plot, though, the fewer meaningful choices you have; the looser the direction of the story, the more choices you have.  In the interest of designing a course where students feel free do choose the assignments they feel like doing ("I feel like writing today"), do you lose the linear path to the boss mission?  There are arguments that say that learning should be progressive and the students may even feel adrift without it.  A game is usually voluntary and many game designers and academics go so far as to include that in their definition.  English class is not voluntary, so is there a point to pretending that it is?  How much choice should the students have in theory... and how much are they even prepared to handle?

Communicative language teaching traps

Communicative language teaching is all about having the students use the language to communicate something meaningful. 
This isn't as easy as it sounds.  There has to be a genuine reason to listen or read what the other is communicating.  there has to be a goal that both communicators are working towards.  And, it has to be meaningful to the learners.

The first trap: SELLING
Trying to convince someone to buy something or to do something is an excellent idea.  However, there must be the possibility of rejection.  No prospective buyer can buy everything.  Even Bill Gates, arguably one of the richest people alive, doesn't just hand out his money to charities willy nilly.  He has them prepare a good pitch, which he evaluates and considers.  In the end, he donates his money where he thinks it will do the most good. 
If you're preparing some kind of a buy-and-sell activity, the buyers have to be limited in some way.  Money is the obvious choice; each student is given a set amount to spend which is less than the total of what is being sold. 
However, you can also simply say "you are only allowed to say yes to a maximum of three". 
A final way is to make the task real world.  For example, my students have to convince their classmates to sign a pledge to boycott a particular company for the duration of the term.  They can sign as many as they think they can reasonably handle.  Most students will honestly journal their attempts and failures in such a boycott.

The second trap: AWARENESS RAISING
A lot of teachers might have their students research a topic such as climate change or healthy eating and then make posters as an "awareness raising" project.  That's cute, but like all advertising, the target group needs to be carefully identified.   You'll do better making little storybooks for kindergarteners or facebook campaigns for teens tahn just putting up useless posters in the hallways.  Kids know when something is real and when it isn't, so make their work as real as possible.

Game-like learning workshop takeaway ideas

Point 1. 
Game-like learning doesn't mean playing lots of games: it means seeing what's appealing about games and seeing how those concepts translate to the classroom.

What's a game? People suggested words like: FUN, RULES, REWARDS, COMPETITION, CHALLENGES.
I suggested: GOALS, WORK, PARTICIPATION.

We looked at Jane McGonigal's types of work:

• High stakes: spelling bees, competitions that aren't for grades
• Busy work: doing workbooks outside, with friends or with music in a relaxing atmosphere  
• Mental work: puzzles and brain teasers
• Physical work: scavenger hunts and running dictations
• Discovery work: research, but not just looking for the first answer on Google.
• Team work: work where the sum of the group can do more than any individual in it
• Creative work: projects, art, music etc.

Obviously how challenging the work is depends on the age and level of the group.

Then we focused on making course books more game-like with the following running dication:

Games have three stages. 
First you learn how to play the game: you learn the rules and the limits of what you can and cannot do.
Secondly, you start to experiment with the rules.  You try to find loopholes and strategies to maximize your chances of winning.
Third, you can now begin to work toward the goal of winning.

Course books should be taught with the same three stages.
First the students do the exercises to practice the target language.
Then they create their own similar exercises for each other.  Creating multiple choice and gap-fill tasks is difficult and helps them see the limits of the language.
Finally they should have a communicative task with a clear goal that will be shared with others.  Can you think of any examples?

In other words, course books need added participation and added goals.  No coursebook writer will build that in for you; this is how you develop your own style as a teacher.

Play the game: teach.

 

Yom Kippur game

Kol Nidrei is one of the most contentious, yet central prayers in Judaism.  Literally, kol nidrei means "all our vows" and roughly translated, it asks God to ignore all of our vows in the past year and in the year to come. 

You can see the problem: on its surface it is pure fuel for anti-semitism, as in "Jews break their promises".  But that isn't what it means.  On the contrary, it means that we take vows so seriously, that when we make impossible ones, we feel terrible if we can't deliver the goods.  This prayer is what allows Jewish people to be at peace with themselves and with God, and to make every effort to honor vows all the more.

I asked my students to complete the following:
1. I will make this class better by...
              obstacle 1:
              obstacle 2:
              obstacle 3:
2. I will make the world better by ...
              obstacle 1:
              obstacle 2:
              obstacle 3:

Then they played a simple board game where they had to make their way across the spaces of the board.  Every space that had a dot on it, they had to say what their obstacle was and how they planned to overcome it.  I noticed that, although on the surface it was a competitive game (who can reach the end first?), students nonetheless seemed to help each other when they got stuck for solutions.  I found that interesting.

Then they journaled what their partner learned from the game.  Jewish people are well-known for helping each other, and I wanted to get some of this spirit into our class.

From now on, they will continue to write journals from their partner's point of view by asking them what they accomplished that day and how they felt about it.  They will also be responsible for checking first drafts of each other's work before having me check it.

To me, it seems like a good idea to have students "buddy-up" in this way for several reasons.  One is simply more speaking practice in English.  Secondly, being accountable to a peer in addition to a teacher means that an extra resource is available.

Unfortunately, some students didn't seem to like the idea much.  I think I would like to try the experiment for at least a couple of weeks.  Then if there are problems, maybe we can either find a way to solve them, or try a different approach.

reggeton and the F word

"The stuff kids listen to these days...it's not music, it's just noise!"
Hasn't every generation said that about the next one?  My husband brought that up in the context of the reggeton his niece listens to. 

Emma Watson has recently been all over the news with her now-famous speech to the UN on her #heforshe campaign.  Although it was nice to see a fresh new face join the fight, nothing she said was really new.  At least once a generation since the 50s and before, someone has said something similar. 

What's the connection between bad music and a good speech?  The themes are recurring.  Most regetton videos show scantily clad women dancing around a fully dressed man.  Girls dream of being those girls: thin, beautiful and wanted.    Boys dream of being that man: surrounded by beautiful, half-naked, dancing women and wanted. 

#Heforshe cannot happen when teenage dreams are still so unbalanced.