Teacher down, dear teacher!

This post starts in the classroom (Surprise, Surprise!) and they are generated by me but only in connection with what I do in the classroom and how my audience reacts to it. This is everything, aside from the thoughts of the experienced teachers, aside from what we find in the coursebooks, aside from what we learn about in different workshops and lectures. How the kids react to what happens in the lesson…

And since most of my professional life is spent in the presence of the very young one, the reaction and the feedback is immediate, without the intermediary help of the admin, parents or educational supervisors or trainers. If the lesson is good, you know it. If the lesson is bad, you will know straight away. If you can read the signs and reading there must be a special part of the brain devoted to looking out and reading these signs, while teaching, learning, monitoring, supervising and growing goes on happening.

Hence this post.

Teaching the whole child

This is definitely one of the key words in the EFL / ESL methodology, which teachers, trainers, bloggers, authors are more than eager to recite, together with the ZPD, scaffolding, short attention span and many more. ‘Teaching the whole child‘ will also be on that list.

In order to understand what might be hiding under this term, it is necessary to have a look at the list of the key development areas outlined by Sandie Mourao and Gail Ellis: personal, social, emotional development, communication, language and literacy, problem soling, reasoning, numeracy, knowledge and understanding of the world, physical development and creative development. These are naturally the areas, typical for the early years child development, first and foremost age-related and not specific for any particular context, L1 education or the EFL/ESL education. But, especially, because of that, they need to be included in both and in teaching of any subjects to the early years children, be it their L1, a foreign language, Maths, Art or judo.

Carol Read can also be a point of reference. She has quoted her C-Wheel in quite a few sources and apart from the overlap with the areas mentioned above, she also included a few others that would help to better understand the idea behind the whole child. These are: care, community as well as context and connections (i.e. family and school), coherence and challenge as well as the cultural context. The most important factor, the child, is in the centre of the wheel.

But the quote that really made an impression on me comes from a post I found on Teaching Channel where, on top of some practical solutions for implementing the approach, I have also found this way of explaining what it means to be teaching the whole child: ‘by being responsive to children’s understandings, interests, and abilities, allowing them to deepen their natural curiosity and their eagerness to want to discover and learn more’.

It deeply resonates with me because of the conviction that I have held for a long time (and which I have tried to brainwash my trainees with over the years) that the most important thing that a primary or pre-primary school teacher can do is to sit on the carpet with the kids, literally and figuratively speaking, too, in order to change the perspective and to try to see the world from their point of view. This change of the point of view is absolutely crucial when it comes to classroom and behaviour management, staging, lesson planning, craft, literacy skills development and many many more.

‘That is very well but what is your point here?‘ you might be wondering.

It seems that, sometimes, regardless of our good will, professionalism and even experience (yes, I know what I am talking about), we, the teachers tend to allow our methodological principles take precedence over the child in the classroom and choosing between ‘what I need to do today‘ and ‘what the room needs‘, being the professionals that we are, we choose the standards and the rules, not the audience, not the child. It is all well-intentioned and well-meant, of course, but it might not mean that it is also the best decision as regards the said audience.

In this post today I would like to call the teachers to teacher down a little bit! Remember about the standards, methodological, institutional, cultural and what not, but to put them on the back burner and to focus more on the six-year-old beloved crowd insead.

Below, the three areas and some classroom stories from yours truly.

Storytelling

A story first. It was a lesson with my adorable monsters, in our fifth or sixth year together and it was a story lesson. I got everything ready, the audio, the text, the words to be pre-taught, the comprehension task, a game and, most importantly, a while-reading task. I wanted to be very clever and, since the story had a repetitive element and it was perfect for prediction. I wanted to have us read and listen to it but with pauses, with the kids discussing every stage (‘What happened?’ and ‘What will happen next?’). I thought it was a brilliant idea and, perhaps, it really was. However, once we started to go through the story, after two ‘episodes’, one of my students, one of the more confident ones, looked at me and said: ‘Anka, can we just listen to the story?‘

And I don’t know what it was, the tone of voice or how effectively she used intonation to convey meaning, carefully stressing ‘listen’ in the whole phrase, or maybe it was the faces of the rest of the class showing a mix of dedication but this simple human fatigue that made me realise that I overdid it.

I took a story, a great story, that we would be interested in listening to or reading, something humanly exciting and fun and I turned it into an exercise, a learning activity, a task, at the same time, and totally unwillingly, making it dull and tiring, simply because of the context – our classroom. That made me gasp in shock.

Naturally, we read to learn, to extend our vocabulary and to practise grammar and to develop the reading comprehension skills and all the other skills, too. However, a story is still a story and it deserves to be enjoyed, in a human way, even if we are in an A1 classroom full of kids, at least to some extent, at least in a balance with all the very teacherful activities with a clear learning focus.

In the classroom that can be done through: including a variety of stories, coursebook stories, YL exam stories and storybooks, traditional stories and videos, including elements of reading for pleasure, a school or class library, just listening to a story for fun before any reading comprehension tasks are introduced, giving the students an opportunity to express their views about the story and accepting different opinions, also those negative ones, basically anything that we might do with a story in our real L1-life.

‘My students don’t like to sing!’

It is one of the most common comments that my trainees make and one of the most common questions they ask right afterwards and that is: ‘Should we make them if they don’t? How?’

Well, the short version according to Murao and Ellis is 8 reasons to bring songs into the classroom. Carol Read mentions a few more in her book. In an earlier post here, written based on the materials I found in different sources, there are 60 reasons, for the kids and for the adults. There are so many of them that we have enough justification to change the famous song’s title into ‘The classrooms are alive with the sound of music!’ Or, at least, they should be!

But, with all that in mind, or, almost against all that, what we do with a song in our L1 life, as adults or kids, is to simply listen to it and to enjoy the fact that it is on. Sometimes we dance to it, sometimes we might sing some lines, sometimes not. As people, we are not expected to know all the lyrics, to like all the songs and to sing along every single time. We definitely do not listen to complete some comprehension tasks or to focus on a particular structure or an idiom. There is a danger, then, that by imposing all of these on our students we will be destroying the organic character of this resource.

Again, it would be a good idea to remember the need to teacher down songs in the classroom a little bit. Accepting that not all the students will love all the songs equally and that not all the students will want to sing all the songs every single time seems to be the first step here, although that does not mean that songs will disappear from the coursebooks, curriculums and lesson plans. In the everyday teaching, it might mean simply starting with ‘Let’s just listen to the song!’ before we get down to the vocabulary, grammar, lyrics and all the follow-up activities and asking the kids whether they like the songs or not. Getting the students involved in the song selection is another important way of teachering down here and either focusing on those that they actually really do like and including their suggestions in the lessons, too.

‘We have so many things to do today!’ or about the lesson plan

This time the story took place in my Playway 1 lesson, at the end of the year, somewhere in the food unit. Those who have used the book might remember the listening activity in which students have to listen to a boy, one of the charcacters from the coursebook, who talks about his likes and dislikes and mark these accordingly in the picture. One of my students, Sasha, a 6 y.o. boy, didn’t deal with the task very well. ‘I like pears’, would the character say and my Sasha would say: ‘I don’t like pears’ and then, to my horror, he would cross the heart in the book, instead of colouring it in. Every single time Sasha did not agree with the character in the recording, he would loudly comment and then mark the answers according to his preferences.

I was watching him thinking the following thoughts: Oh, Lord, he is not following instructions, he does not understand what to do, he will not pass any of the exams and, in general, I failed as a teacher. None of which is true. I am happy that, despite the way I felt in the lesson, I reacted as a true educator, I went for the child’s well-being and I did not insist on the ‘correct’ answers. Thinking of the lesson afterwards, I was laughing out loud at my professional silliness. My little student told me, in English, what he thought of certain food items, he clearly understood what he listened to and he reacted to the content. The problem was not me or the child but the activity itself that assumed that the little people are able to disentach themselves from the activity and to de=personalised the content in order to complete a task. This made me look in a completely different way at the YL coursebooks content and it has been a turning point for me.

This same approach can be applied to any lesson plan. We go to school not to teach the lesson plans or the coursebooks but to teach the kids, the particular kids in our classrooms. Not everything that the great authors at the famous publishing houses thought of for the particular lesson, unit, activity will be appropriate for Masha, Katya, Sasha, Tomek, Agnieszka, Juan and Pierre that are entering our classrooms. Not everything that we have prepared for the lesson might not be the best idea on a Monday morning after a long break etc.

In the everyday life teachering down might mean:

• evaluating the coursebook material carefully as regards its relevance for the particular group of kids and appropriate adaptation and adjustments as regards the content, the cultural context, the emotional context, the personalisation or the lack of, etc
• adapting the lesson plan on the go, depending on how the students are feeling on the day. Pushing the day agenda at all cost will not be effective and might result in frustration.
• putting yourself in the kids’ shoes while preparing the activities for the lesson and trying to answer this simple question: Why would they want to do it?, apart from the obvious, the fact that a person in the position of authority, older and taller than them, someone that knows their parents and is also able to assess them is bringing this to class and tells them to do it. Is there anything in the exercise, activity, story, listening, song that they would want to do anyway? And if it is not there, can we add it?
• while things are not going to plan, looking at the situation through the kids’ eyes to better understand what is going on in order to deal with it more effectively.
• involving the kids in the decision making process about the lesson, as regards the songs to sing, the games to play, the stories to read or even the order of the activities (when possible), to share the responsibility for the learning but also to find out more about the audience and their preferences.

Coda or what this post is NOT about

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I am calling for a complete abandonment of all the methodological principles, present-practice-production, good teaching standards. Far from it. ‘Organic’ is a nice word to use to describe a lesson and a teaching approach as long as it is not synonymous with ‘I didn’t bother with planning the lesson, we’ll just go for it!’

It is an invitation to keeping your eyes open and to not forgetting that our students are very young and that the age will be very often the most important factor behind their behaviour and attitude. On the one hand. On the other hand, they are people, too and that we can act as people, too, instead of being teachers 24 / 7.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments!

And make sure you come back for more because the second part of this mini-series is coming up! ‘Teacher down!’ is ready now. The post about the need to teacher up is already being written!

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

Sandie Murao and Gail Ellis (2020) Teaching English to Pre-primary Children, Delta, page 10 – 11.

Carol Read (2007), 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom, Macmillan, p. 7.

More than a grade! Teaching the whole child from the Teaching Channel.

How to use songs in the English language classroom from the British Council.