Author: Kevin Stein

Kevin Stein is a teacher and a program manager. He works at Clark Memorial International High School. His areas of professional interest include how to use standardized tests to help students develop autonomous learning skills and the effective use of literature in language teaching. Kevin's Blog:The Other Things Matter Twitter: @kevchanwow

Why I Dig Stephen Krashen

Kevin SteinKevin Stein

In political science, the Overton Window is the relatively narrow range of political policy recommendations that are acceptable to the public at any given time.  No matter how economically, morally, or scientifically correct a certain policy recommendation might actually be, if it doesn’t fall within the Overton window, the person recommending it will be considered either on the fringe of debate, or even worse, just speaking a bunch of craziness.  The Overton Window is a useful concept because it helps us understand how any large community of people evaluates ideas and how new ideas eventually become part of a community’s discourse.  We often say that a new idea broadens the debate.  But a large heterogeneous group has a limited range of ideas that they are willing to entertain at any particular moment.  Debates do not get broadened.  Instead, the relatively narrow parameters of the debate simply shift in one direction or the other.

In ELT, policy recommendations are called ‘best practices.’ While the name implies a set of teaching methods which should be implemented in every classroom, ‘best practices’ are closer to the menu of teaching recommendations which a majority of teachers are willing to entertain as both practical and useful.  One way to measure the influence of any particular language learning theorist is to keep track of things like how many times they are cited and plot it against the number of critical responses to their ideas over time.  But there is another way to measure influence, and that is by trying to see how what they wrote and said has shifted the Overton window in one direction or another .

When people talk (or write) about Stephen Krashen, they most often write about the finer points of how he formulates his hypothesis. This is very normal. They are engaged in an academic debate.  So it makes perfect sense that when Stephen writes about how people acquire langue and says:

“How do we move from stage i, where i represents current competence, to i + 1, the next level? The input hypothesis makes the following claim: a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to move from stage i to stage i + 1 is that the acquirer understand input that contains i + 1, where ‘understand’ means that the acquirer is focussed on the meaning and not the form of the message.” (Krashen, 1982, p. 31)

SLA theorists want to know what exactly is “i” and how can we go about measuring ’+1’.  But what, perhaps, has gotten lost in dust ups over whether these theories are properly formulated, supported by evidence, or even testable or not, is that Stephen connected and continues to connect these ideas directly to the language classroom. So Stephen doesn’t just walk away after saying learners need understandable input, but expands on the idea by saying that  “the best input is so interesting and relevant that the acquirer may even ‘forget’ that the message is encoded in a foreign language. (ibid, p.66)” and “the profession has seriously underestimated the amount of comprehensible input necessary to achieve even moderate, or ‘intermediate’ levels of proficiency in second language acquisition. (ibid, p.71)”

When many people think about Stephen Krashen, they often think of him adamantly arguing that language acquisition happens only through adequate exposure to the comprehensible input, and that this alone is enough for language acquisition. And for many people this becomes the sticking point, the place where they plant their feet and engage with Krashen in debate.

But even as people have busily and sometimes heatedly been arguing over these points, Stephen Krashen has not given up an inch. And even as his detractors have grown increasingly obsessed with knocking down his theories, something pretty remarkable has been happening around them. Teachers and publishers have increasingly worked to find and produce more interesting and engaging texts in which, if content is not the primary concern, it at the very least doesn’t play second fiddle to issues of teachable grammar points. In reading classrooms, teachers spend more time letting students actually read and less time ’teaching’ reading.  And in listening classes, very short micro-skills building exercises are designed specifically to optimize learning time and help make as much aural input as possible comprehensible.

I’m not saying that Stephen somehow directly orchestrated all of these changes. It would be pretty hard to untangle all the threads that have been woven together to make the current tapestry of ELT. But what I am saying is that by taking a fairly controversial position and defending and arguing for it at every single opportunity, Stephen has managed to move the Overton window, the ideas that can be entertained as a best practice, more than any other language theorist.

Stephen’s ideas have directly led to the Extensive Reading movement as well as, at least indirectly, influencing text comprehensibility and vocabulary acquisition research. The fact that we can walk into a classroom with some assurance that a text in which 98% of the words are known will allow students a fair chance to understand the remaining 2% from context (Hu & Nation, 2000) is the research driven answer to the question of what actually constitutes ‘i +1’. And it is not just in regards to what makes for good comprehensible input that Stephen’s lingering influence can be felt. Ideas as diverse as avoiding error correction during fluency activities, the importance of learner-autonomy and a need to introduce students to ways to seek out comprehensible input outside of the classroom, and even negotiated syllabus design that eschews a traditional sequenced grammar, are all to some extent influenced by Stephen’s theories.

If you want to know how indebted we are to Stephen Krashen, take the time to reread

Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf)

and Second Language Acquisition: Theory, Application, and Some Conjectures (http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/krashen_sla.pdf).

And then, before entering your next class, take a moment to just look through the classroom window and appreciate how much richer the learning opportunities for our students are, how much better the view, because of the work Stephen has and continues to do.

References:

Hu, M., & Nation, I.S.P. (2000). Vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403–430.

Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition (pp. 65-78). Pergamon: Oxford. Retrieved from: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf.

 

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More Creative Writing – Kevin

Kevin Stein

Hand Holding Most Definitely Allowed
– Kevin Stein

 

A few weeks ago I introduced Storybird to a few of my students who were hanging out after school.  The site is filled with sets of professional level illustrations and an easy to use interface which allows people to create original picture books. After I had finished showing off what you could do on the site, most of the students kind of shrugged and drifted off to practice listening with Lyrics Training or to do vocabulary work with Quizlet. But one student, Y-Chan, got right to work on making her picture book. It was the story of a rabbit who could only hop backwards. Y-chan worked on the story all week. When she was finished, she let me read it and then absolutely refused to let me show the other students or link to it in my blog (or anywhere else for that matter). She was perfectly satisfied with putting the story together and showing it to her teacher.

In case you’re wondering, this blog post is not at all for students like Y-Chan, because for every Y-chan there are 10 students who don’t really think that writing a poem or story is all that fun. And out of those ten, there might be one or two for whom the idea creative writing activities is terrifying. We have that cliché, “my mind went blank.” But the fact that it’s a cliché masks just how unnatural the whole concept really is. Minds don’t go blank. They are constantly throwing up ideas, images, the detritus of ourselves. So it’s not surprising that some students, when faced with a snowy white sheet of paper and a similar expanse of nothing in their minds, feel a hint of panic. If I’m going to assign students creative writing assignments, I think it’s my responsibility to tamper down that feeling to the best of my ability. Here are two ways I’ve found to make creative writing activities a little less scary:

Pick the right form

A number of poetry and even prose forms provide a structure which makes the act of creating something new a little less daunting. I’ve found that Haiku, with it’s three lines in a short/long/short combination is limiting enough (and short enough) that students don’t quite get as panicked as they might with a longer assignment.  There are a number of Internet sites and blogs of people writing haiku in English as a second language. One of my favorites, English Haiku English Haiku is worth using as examples for a writing assignment, or even for a reading class.  Similarly, Six Word Memiors, a story in only six words, work well with almost any level English student. But even limiting the space which students have to fill up isn’t enough sometimes. Just in case, before I start this type of short form writing assignment, I prepare six themes which I then write up on the white board. Things like, “What I did last summer,” “My worst Day,” and “My favorite thing,” work well.  Then, if I find a student who is still struggling to start writing, usually because they can’t decide what they want to write about, I just hand that student a die and tell them to roll it two times.  The numbers they roll are the themes they should use to start their writing.  And if all of this is still not enough to get a student’s pencil moving, I will simply supply the first few words of the assignment for them.  Jotting down the word ‘yesterday I’ or ‘tired,” at the top of the page makes choosing the next word much easier.  And when they are done, students can go back and erase those first words—usually without any damage to the piece as a whole—making the work entirely their own.

Provide good prompts

For longer activities in which the form is less constraining, I find that some students need a series of prompts to set them at ease. The prompts are a way of assuring the students that they will be able to get from the beginning to the end of the piece. Adam Simpson over at Teach Them English Teach Them English has a great set of question prompts which serve to help students write a one paragraph story. The Story Box is another example of writing prompts. It’s a box of flash cards divided into Characters, Setting, and Action. In each section, there are cards with basic information, so a Character card might read, “Patty: 42 years old. Works in a library. Loves children. Is afraid of mice.” Students pick 1 setting card, 2 character cards, and one action card to start. The information on the card provides them with the information they sometimes feel they need to start writing. And if a students gets stuck in the middle of a story, the remainder of the page a cliff over which they are dangling, having them pick another “action” card usually provides the story (and their imagination) with enough of a push to get their pencil moving again.

You might wonder, if all these nudges and hand-holds are necessary to keep students moving through the process of writing, is it really worthwhile?  Isn’t there something easier students could do which might be a more effective use of time?  Maybe. I wonder that myself sometimes. Only, I love the open-ended nature of creative writing tasks. And some of the things students produce reveal them in ways that I could never get at through a more typical activity. But it’s more than just the selfish desire to get to know my students a bit better. When our students get out of the classroom, almost every communicative act is going to be novel, is going to require an act of imagination.  Providing an opportunity for students to play with language; to make something personal and new; to listen to other learners’ stories and poems; these are all a kind of training, I think, for the wildness of real communication. Sure, it’s not easy, but it doesn’t have to be.  That’s why we practice it.

There’s one other reason why I love to give students creative writing activities.  Remember Y-chan? Students like her thrive on these kinds of assignments and should also have a chance to shine. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about them being constrained by all those steps you set out for the other students.  Most of the time Y-Chans will raise their hands and simply ask, “Can I do something different?”  Then, like a rabbit who can only hop backwards, they’ll simply ignore all those signs you’ve staked along the way as they happily managed to get themselves from their very own beginning to their very own end, enjoying all the spaces in between.

 

13 for 2014 – Kevin Stein

12 ways my PLN (often unexpectedly) made my classroom a better place for learning (and teaching) + 1 look ahead
– Kevin Stein

Kevin Stein
This year has been a little busier than I would like.  In many respects I feel like I took much more from the teaching community than I was able to give back.  And is often the case when busy, I haven’t taken as much time as I should to say thank you.  So I’m grateful to have a chance to share a collection of 12 ways my PLN made my school a better place to learn and teach in 2013.

 

1)    I love Post-It notes.  This might seem like a very small change, but it has been huge for my students.  The fact that I don’t need to run to the board, that the post-in notes remain right there in front of the students, that they can be picked up, elaborated on, slapped into a student notebook and taken home, all of these things make all the difference.  So thanks Carol Goodey (http://cgoodey.wordpress.com) for the original nudge towards post-it notes, and Larissa Albano (http://larissaslanguages.blogspot.it/2013/10/the-power-of-post-it-notes.html) for another example of why Post-It Notes are a crucial classroom tool.

 

2)    Be a gentle observer.  A few months ago I was wondering why, whenever I observe a class and a student seems unsure of a vocabulary word, the teacher invariably stops the flow of the lesson and insists that the student (or class in general) try and guess the meaning of the word from context.  Why doesn’t the teacher just give the meaning and move on?  I was kind of ranting about the situation over drinks with a more experienced teacher.  He laughed and said, “Maybe they’re just teaching by the book because you’re in the room.”  It hit me that being observed often comes with the feeling of wanting to do things the “right way.”  Being an empathic and supportive observer means keeping this in mind, always.

 

3)    Comprehensions question, not so bad.  I wrote a series of posts over the course of the year in which I derided comprehension questions.  I was, for the most part, very, very unforgiving and harsh.  Members of the community were for  the most part, much more forgiving of my unforgivingness.  On Twitter, in e-mails, and face to face, teachers would ask (and so gently), “Don’t you think there might be a role for comprehension questions?”  And because they kept asking, I kept thinking.  Eventually, as I was teaching a class in September and thinking how useless the coursebook’s comprehension questions were, I remembered something John Fanselow (http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/teaching/) said: “If you don’t like the questions in the book, have the students make up their own.”  So that’s what I did.  And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.  Comprehension questions do serve a purpose, especially when students write them and ask them to each other to check their own comprehension.

 

4)    Video as student tool.  For the past year, I’ve been taking short videos of my classes to use as observation tools with my fellow teachers.  Nina Septina and Tim Murphey, both iTDi-ers, suggested that I could take those same videos, give them to the students, and let the students use them as models to practice English outside of the classroom.  Their suggestion was, I think, based on a paper they wrote together here (http://peerspectives.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/language-performance-videoing-for-home-viewing.pdf).  And it allowed me to take a observation tool for teachers and turn it into a resource for student learning.

 

5)    Moving isn’t just for children.  As a high school teacher, it’s all too easy for me to fall in the trap that sitting at a desk and puzzling over difficult language is what learning is all about.  So thanks to Sir Marco Brazil for your collection of videos (http://www.youtube.com/user/5254marco/videos), Malu Sciamarelli, and Barbara Sakamoto (amongst others) for reminding me that getting up, playing with actual objects, and physically feeling the wonder of learning isn’t something that diminishes as our learners get older.

 

6)    Walk the mistake walk.  I often give lip service to the idea that making mistakes is good, and that students should make mistakes.  But what does that mean?  And how can I do more than just give lip service?  One of my favourite PLNers, Sophia Khan (http://languagelearningteaching.wordpress.com), started a blog this year and she had me thinking about mistakes.  I realised that probably the best thing I can do is just own up to my own mistakes in class and show the students how I’m going to use that knowledge to make future classes, hopefully, a bit better.  So this year I’ve said sorry a bit more often.  And I like to think that’s helped my students see their own errors as a chance to improve.

 

7)    Useful tech.  This year I set aside some time for the students in the computer room.  Not much, about an hour a week.  Some of my favourite bloggers have kept up a steady stream of comments and reflections on tech they love to use in the classroom.  So thanks to Sandy Millin (http://sandymillin.wordpress.com)and Chiew Pang (http://aclil2climb.blogspot.jp/p/useful-resources.html) and many others, for links and lesson plans about Quizlet (quizlet.com), Lyrics Training (http://www.lyricstraining.com), and Storybird (http://storybird.com) to name just a few of the tools that my students have loved enough in the classroom to take outside of the classroom and make language learning a larger part of their lives.

 

8)    Pronunciation work has always been one aspect of language teaching that I felt could be saved for when there was more time.  But in a classroom, there is never really “more time.”  A series of blog posts on pronunciation by Alex Grevett (http://breathyvowel.wordpress.com) convinced me that students might be much more interested in pronunciation that I thought.  So thank you Alex for convincing me to take the time I need, and the students want, to focus on pronunciation issues.

 

9)    Tell ‘em what’s wrong.  Cecilia Lemos, iTDi associate, blogger and teacher, gave a talk at IATEFL (http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2013/sessions/2013-04-09/oral-correction-reflections-recovering-recaster) this year in which she challenged the notion that clearly correcting students’ mistakes will somehow inhibit classroom learning.  It was a great chance for me to rethink what error correction is all about.  And when I asked my students, it turned out that they wanted, whenever possible, quick, clear and concrete error correction as well.

 

10) Go to Activities.  At the end of the year, Anna Loseva (http://annloseva.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/the-flashmobelt-movement/) and Michael Griffin (http://eltrantsreviewsreflections.wordpress.com) came up with #FlashMobELT, a lino wall filled with classroom activities that take little to no preparation.  (http://linoit.com/users/annaloseva/canvases/flashmobELT).  Having 1 or 2 of these activities in reserve has given me a nice cushion to fall back on when things don’t exactly go as planned.

 

11)  Other Ways to Collect Feedback.  For much of the year, I found myself stuck in a student feedback rut.  But thanks to posts on fostering student reflection by Alex Walsh (http://www.alienteachers.com/1/post/2013/05/promoting-student-reflections-failures-successes-and-lessons.html) and a host of other suggestions such as feedback boards, many of which can be found here on Anne Hendler’s blog (http://lizzieserene.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/collecting-and-using-learner-feedback-a-workshop/), I was able to make the giving and collecting of student feedback a much more enjoyable part of class.

 

12) Teaching is trust.  When a class starts, and the students are sitting at a table, all of the theory and knowledge in the world isn’t going to do very much if your students don’t feel that you care about them.  Every single time I read a blog post, every single time I perused the iTDi forums and interacted with teachers on FaceBook, I was reminded again and again, that here are a group of teachers who are, more than anything else, dedicated to their students.  Dedicated to fostering their students’ potential, to making a safe place for learning.  And knowing that I am part of this community, makes me a much better teacher than I used to be.

 

So this has been a year of much taking.  These are just 12 of the ways the teachers I know and respect have made me a better educator.  Which leaves me with 1 more something to bring this post to a nice round 13 for 13.  And I would like to end by looking to next year.  #13 is a promise to give something back.  This year, more than anything else, I’ve learned that I am a member of a community which recognises the value of experience.  We are a community which believe that all teachers have something important to say.  So my goal for next year is to more actively help to create that kind of space and invite as many teachers as I can into it.  Because 14 for 14, 15 for 15, and even 45 for 45 is well within our reach.  Especially if we have a chance to hear the rich and nuanced voices of all the teachers dedicated to making learning possible.

The Observation Issue – Kevin Stein

Watch Me, Watch me  –  Kevin Stein

Kevin Stein
I’m not sure how most people feel about observation.  But I’m curious to find out, so if you have a minute, please take this short survey on how you would rank “lesson observations” in relation to things like “sleeping in on Sunday morning” and “going to the dentist.”

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HHFYBYS

Even before the survey results come in, I’m guessing that lesson observations, even peer lesson observations, are not going to be super popular.  Which, when I think about my daughter, seems pretty odd.

You see, my daughter is 6 years old.  Her three favourite things in the world are running as fast as she can, practicing gymnastics, and playing piano.  If I or my wife are around, my daughter invariably calls out, “Watch this,” before she cartwheels across the living room, taps out a song on the piano, or sprints up the street.  When I compare my daughter’s boundless desire to be observed with my own feelings about classroom observation, I can’t help but feel that, as a teacher, I have misplaced something important, something joyful.

What is it about the way I watch my daughter as compared to how classroom observations are conducted, which has created this psychic gap?

When my daughter is running up and down the street, she will often ask me to use a stopwatch to time her.  I use the lap function to keep track of how long it takes her to run the first third, the middle third, and the last third of the distance.  Sometimes I ask her “when were you running fastest, at the beginning, the middle or the end?”  Sometimes she asks me.  But I rarely, if ever say things like, “That was a very interesting sprint,” or “I don’t think the pacing of your run was very even.”

In “Beyond Rashomon,” John Fanselow (1977, p.27-28) points out that the words teachers use when observing and commenting on each others lessons—words like ‘meaningful’ and ‘interesting’—often “have good and bad connotations…are in themselves judgmental as well as descriptive.  Judgment means someone’s ego is involved, and this can interfere with perception.”  Like keeping track of a runners time, collecting hard data during an observation and sharing that data during post-observation follow up can help keep the focus away from the kind of purely personal evaluations which so often land on our ears with the slap of disapproval.  In some of my favourite observations, my fellow teachers have: used a stop-watch to keep track of how long each activity lasted; categorised the types of teacher talk I used; counted the number of words each student said during a class; and even made a map of where I was standing in the room during each activity and what materials I used at each location.  In each an every case, I was given another piece of data to more fully see what was happening in my class without the sense that I was being inherently judged.

After my daughter’s piano lessons, the teacher will usually tell us one aspect of her playing that she would like us to focus on during the week.  Sometimes it is paying more attention to rhythm.  Sometimes is varying the intensity and duration of the notes played.  We all know just what and why we are going to pay attention to during piano practice over the course of the week.  In a similar vein, Jack Richards (1995) suggests that during peer observations, the observee give the observer a task which entails focusing on a particular aspect of the lesson and only collecting relevant data.  Tasks can include measuring time on task, notating types of student responses to questions, or identifying classroom management techniques used during a lesson.

In any classroom, so much is going on at any one time that, if we try to observe the class as a whole, there’s a very good chance we won’t notice very much of anything.  In addition, at least for me, knowing the focus of the observation ahead of time means I can let go of one specific worry while I teach, allowing me a little bit more psychological breathing room so that I can attend to things I might normally miss as I teach.

I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but my daughter can stand on her hands, fall into a back bend, and then scramble around the room like a crab.  Still, until last week, she couldn’t do a somersault.  Every time she tried, she would land with a thud on her back.  I took a few videos just before she started to tumble over.  It turned out that the moment before she fell forward, she kicked off and that extra burst of momentum propelled her over just fast enough that she had no time to curl her back.  Hence the thud.  After watching the video and talking with me about the other things she could already do, she bent down, slowly walked herself into a ball, curled herself over and rolled across the carpet.

Peter Maingay (1988, p. 119-129) says, “Much of what a teacher does in a language-teaching classroom is ritual behaviour rather than principled behaviour.  The most important role of an observer in most, if not all, observations is that of making teachers think about what they do: of drawing their attentions to the principles behind the rituals, of leading them away from ritual behaviour towards principled behaviour.” So observation is not just about presenting data, it’s about creating a space where a teacher can revisit what they already know about teaching and compare that knowledge with what is happening in the classroom.

A few weeks ago, after observing my lesson one of my co-workers pointed out that a vast majority of the language students were using in class was memorised content from a worksheet.  That gave me a chance to think about the role of creative language in my classroom and the types of speaking activities I was using.  I realised that how I was teaching was disconnected from some of my deeply held beliefs about how languages are actually learned.  And in that moment, I could see the right way to naturally lean forward and tumble back into the kind of teaching I wanted to be doing.

John Fanselow (1988, p. 115) suggests that perhaps the goal of observation is not to, “help or evaluate,” but instead to provide teachers with a chance for self-exploration.  Which seems perfectly right to me.  I found out early on in this dad-thing, that when my daughter said, “Watch me,” it was sometimes (but not always) a request to help her find a way to figure things out for herself.  She was almost never happy to be told exactly what to do.  In the same way, I have rarely finished a post-observation feedback session where I was given an armful of prescriptive suggestions and felt like I was walking away with anything other than a whole lot of unnecessary baggage.

So whether it be peer or supervisory, I think keeping in mind some of the things that make a six year old happy when they are being watched, could go a long way to decreasing the anxiety and defusing the defensiveness that often colours our ideas of observation.

  • First and foremost, an observers job is to watch, not to judge.
  • Observer and observee need to talk things over and decide what to focus on during an observation before the observation takes place.
  • Observers should not limit themselves to a taking a few notes as they are observing.  They should collect as much data as possible, which is probably always a bit more than they have already managed to catch.
  • Observers need to provide real chances for a teacher to see how what they are doing in class, what they believe they are doing, and what they believe they should be doing might be different.
  • There should be enough room and time for the teacher to sort through the post-observation feedback and figure out for themselves what they are going to do next.

If observations, both peer and supervisory, followed these guidelines, I wonder if it would change how teachers feel about being observed in general.  In spite of the negative experiences we have all probably had with observations, there is still something inherently positive about being watched.  There is a kind of joy in knowing that what we do is important, that it’s worth observing.  But to create a community in which all teachers can continue to grow and flourish, we need to find the right light with which to observe, the kind of light in which teachers can truly shine.  Because in all of us, there’s still a child, waiting to cry out with a special kind of delight, “Watch me!  Watch me!”

 

References:

Fanselow, J. F. (1977). Beyond Rashomon: conceptualizing and describing the teaching act. TESOL Quarterly 11(1), 17-39.

Fanselow, J. F. (1988). “Let’s See”: Contrasting Conversations About Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 22(1), 113-130.

Maingay, P. (1988). Observation for training, development or assessment. In Explorations in teacher training: problems and issues, ed. by T. Duff, London: Longman Group UK LTD.

Richards, J. C. (1995). Towards reflective teaching. ENGLISH TEACHERS JOURNAL-ISRAEL-, 59-63.

 

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Learning to See – Kevin

Seeing Through The Cracks

How we can see our class more clearly in real time   —  Kevin Stein 

In general, people are pretty miserable at seeing what is going on around them. Just check out this video of Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world, playing in a DC metro stop.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw&w=560&h=315]

If you’re interested in why this happens, I highly recommend Daniel Simons The Invisible Gorilla web site and his work on inattentional blindness.  But do teachers in their classroom suffer from the same kind of blind spot?  In general, I would have to say no.  Part of the reason is teachers develop lesson plans. That means we are usually comparing what is happening in class to those simulated lessons in our brains, and things that don’t happen as we expect stand out rather clearly.

Ironically, this habit of focusing on what seems to be going wrong—or even what seems to be going right—can also keep us from seeing what is really happening in our classes. Just the other week, I had told students that they were not to use their electronic dictionaries in class.  When I noticed a student with a dictionary on his desk, the only thing I could think to say to the student was a snappish, “Put that away.”  I felt like a jerk when the student explained he was using the dictionary’s voice recorder function.  Aside from my assumption that a physical dictionary on a table equals looking up words, I was also running up against the constraining effects of the activity’s original conceptualization.  The dictionary on the table becomes a problem because it does not fit in with the original idea of how the activity should work.  In this situation we miss what might be creative solutions (students can record a class to look up words later) or opportunities to further expand and enrich the classroom experience for our students.

Fortunately, there are some simple things we can do to allow us to get a fuller picture of what is happening in our classes.

Change perspective: If you are standing next to a group of students who are working and something seems off, walk across the room and view what is going on within the larger context of the class.  What seems strange or off-task from close up might suddenly feel a little more acceptable within a bigger picture.

Take a personal time out: as teachers, we want to fix perceived problems as soon as possible.  But perceived problems might not be actual problems. People in stressful situations—such as an activity, which seems to be falling apart—tend to make decisions with only partial information and rarely think about alternatives in systematic ways.  Giving yourself an extra minute or two to just watch what is happening can lead to better outcomes if you do decide to intervene.

Keep a real-time journal detailing what you see, not how you feel: by focusing on what your students are actually doing, you increase the chances of noticing potentially useful tweaks to an activity you would have never come up with on your own.

Ask non-confrontational questions: If you want to know what students are doing, just ask.  Students, who seem to chatting in L1 when they should be practicing a dialogue, might actually be divvying up roles.

Use dictation as a class observation tool: just because students start an activity by doing what you expect, does not mean they understood what you said.  Take a moment to have students put down on paper what they think you said or what they think they should do.  While it is disheartening to find out students hear “Choose a book,” as “Juice a book,” it also gives you an opportunity to get things back on track before they completely fall apart.

While there are things we can do to be better observers of what’s happening in our classrooms, we can’t completely overcome our limitations as humans.  This is why inviting a co-worker in for supportive peer observations and video or audio taping and transcribing your classes can also be very useful.  We have to try various ways to see what is happening in a lesson in real time because it is in the often hectic and bumpy minute-to-minute of classroom life that our students are waiting, right there in front of us, hoping to be seen.

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