I woke up having anxiety thoughts about lessons going back to work this week, after a couple of weeks off sick, thinking about what the lessons were going to be. And, perhaps as some sort of procrastination, this got me thinking about what people don’t understand about approaches like participatory ESOL and dogme ELT.
The big thing I used to get about this is that it doesn’t involve planning. “You just walk in, Sam, and make it up as you go along.” Even I’ve joked, quite recently, that I was “winging it with principles.” This is, of course, utterly utterly wrong. The implication behind this kind of comment is that the teacher involved can’t be bothered to plan, which is both rude and inaccurate.
If you read anything, for example, on critical and participatory ESOL, you will find that there is in fact an awful lot of thinking and planning going on behind the lesson, not just philosophically but also pragmatically. One thing I found in my research, for example, is that the element of teacher control, or at least of leadership, remains a constant. Learning doesn’t just happen by everyone sitting round in a circle and talking. (Well, it does, sometimes, but this isn’t something you can rely on). Dogme ELT has not only spawned a movement of people sharing, er, lesson ideas, but entire books on “unplugged” and emergent language. Planning happens, and needs to happen. It might be looser in places where a traditional “input” lesson might be quite restrictive, but in fact often in order to create the learning opportunities which arise in a lesson of this sort requires a fair degree of restriction in other ways – prompts, activities, focus of discussion and so on.
What people have misunderstood, and probably will always misunderstand, is that these are examples of a process curriculum. Your usual lesson/course starts with learning outcomes / objectives / intentions / aims / whatever faddy phrase you like for “stuff I want students to learn” and follows from there. This is how I was taught to do it, it’s how I’ve taught people to do it, it’s how books tell you to do it, it’s how it is done. You start with the thing you want the other people to learn. Obvious, really.
Sure. OK. But what if you flip that around? My research project was essentially founded on the observation that students take away from lessons things which you did not set out to cover. The language which popped back up in subsequent lessons was not the tense structure that you covered in the last lesson, but rather the phrases and words you hadn’t expected. So what happens if you work back from the assumption that students at best only partially progress towards your learning aim for that lesson, but make weird jumps and connections in other ways that perhaps you weren’t expecting, but which came up as an aside or a conversation. What happens if you get rid of the learning outcome, and simply create affordances – communicative conditions in which learning opportunities arise?
This kind of approach takes, you’d be surprised to hear, a lot of thinking and planning. The planning is not trying to second guess which language might come up, although sometimes it might be obvious, but rather trying to create those conditions. This takes thought and planning. In fact, the only box you don’t fill in on the lesson plan, if you like, is the one at the top which says “by the end of the lesson, students will…” Everything else is thought about, thought through, and considered. Even assessment strategies, checking that students are engaging and reflecting on the emergent language, for example. And if you work somewhere which is punitively obsessed with learning outcomes, i.e. any FE college in the country, you simply keep them open enough (students will read… will discuss… will listen to… – the old AECC competencies are surprisingly useful on this point) that anyone looking at it will be happy. (And let’s face it there are few enough ESOL experts in quality teams or indeed at ofsted that the chances of anyone taking a careful specialist look at it are minimal.)
In short, there is planning and thinking. Arguably more so than the “decide outcome > find resource > deliver resource” model, for but only because my experience means I could wander into a classroom with a handout and an “aim” and then “cover” the language with little or no pre-planning. It wouldn’t be a great lesson, unless, of course, I let things wander off the “aims” a bit, but it would cover the language. (Whether the students would be able to subsequently be able to use the language is an entirely different question.) But before you get all “why reinvent the wheel” about resources, the amount of planning and thinking time is very similar whether I am doing an emergent language lesson using a handful of picture prompts, or whether I am doing a directed “input” lesson using presentations, printouts and all the bells and whistles.
A process model is nothing new, by the way. Stenhouse named it in 1975, which makes it as old as I am. Most ELT course planning books deign to give it a chapter (Nunan, for example, or Nation & Macalister more recently) and then rush on saying “yeah yeah yeah, anyway…” But it is messy. You don’t know exactly what is coming out the other side, necessarily, but that’s part of the fun. Capturing it is important, to show that something useful has happened, for the sake of the students. Sometimes revisiting language is necessary, explicitly and directed, but those lessons are based on what came up in a previous lesson, not some scheme of work you drew up in August.
Planning is important, whatever approach you use, but to accuse users of a process model of laziness, or at least to gently imply it with comments about “winging it” is just plain insulting. As with most insults, it’s usually as a result of ignorance or narrowmindedness, or, more usually, both. Whether this has gone any further to undoing that ignorance, I don’t know. Filling in lesson plan forms, of course, is a nonsense, but that, dear reader, is a whole other discussion, but right at the moment, I have lessons to plan.
Sam Shepherd 