Shankly and Me – byBarry Jameson

“The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. It’s how I see football, it’s how I see life.”

The above quote is by the late, great manager of Liverpool Football Club, Bill Shankly.  Shankly was one of those special characters that transcended sport.  You can find websites dedicated, not only to his football achievements, but to his quotes.  Strangely, when I think about teaching, he is often the person I think of.  It is hard to have heroes in modern football.  It is full of overpaid prima donnas, cheating, diving, and commercialism.  Shankly reminds me of the purity of sport, the purity of human beings working together to achieve mutual goals.

His beliefs mirror my own about life.  Socialism without politics.  It is a way of life, working together.  Shankly used his beliefs to inform his approach to football.  His influence shapes my teaching.  I would simply change the last line to, ‘It’s how I see teaching, it’s how I see life.’  Few (if any) of us become teachers to become wealthy.  From my experience of connecting with teachers around the world, there are common traits.  A willingness to share, to help others reach their goals, whilst also trying to achieve our own.  It truly is a case of sharing the rewards.

Football and teaching are similar in many respects.  Teamwork, dedication, and commitment are needed to reach the heights.  When players step over the white line there is little the manager can do.  It is enough to support, to guide from the side-line, and hope that they do the job.  Teaching, for me, is similar.  Ultimately, the students are the ones who have to learn and develop by themselves.  All I can do is try to guide, support, facilitate and prepare to the best of my ability.  You try to give them the tools to succeed.  You train, coach, inspire as much as you can and hope that, in the end, it is enough.

When it works, the rewards truly are shared.  I am sure we have all felt the immense pride when we see a student reach their goal.  All the struggles, the blood, sweat, and tears to get to that point are briefly forgotten as you bask in their achievement.  The satisfaction for me comes from knowing that I gave everything to help them.  I can take no glory, as they are the ones who put in the real hard work, but I can feel satisfied that I may have played my own small part in their success.  Sometimes we make a deep connection with students.  Sometimes we don’t.  The important thing is that we act in an honest way and do our best for each and every one of them.

Another quote of Shankly that I often think of is:

“I’d like to think that I have put more into the game than I have taken out. And that I haven‘t cheated anybody, that I‘ve been working for people honestly all along the line…”

Reading the thoughts of Shankly changes how I approach teaching.  If I succeed, if I fail, at least I try.  I never cheat a student.  I try to go home each day knowing that I’ve given my best, even though my best is sometimes not good enough.  Work together, succeed together, fail together, and improve together.  These are the principles that I attempt to follow.It seems fitting to end on another quote from the great man:

“I’ve been a slave to football. It follows you home; it follows you everywhere and eats into your family life. But every working man misses out on some things because of his job.” 

This is how I see teaching, and I would have it no other way.  – Barry Jameson

Read more work from Barry Jameson on his always interesting blog All Things ELT, and as Barry is an iTDi Mentor you can connect with him and other iTDi mentors from around the world by joining the iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDI Account to create your profile, connect with our community, and get immediate access to our social forums and a free trial lesson from both our English For Teachers and Teacher Development Courses. 

 

 

Thinking Is Critical  —  Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

Long, long ago, when I was working toward my first teaching license, I was introduced to Benjamin Bloom and began a love-hate relationship with his taxonomy of learning objectives.

I loved having a rubric that helped me include higher level thinking skills in my lessons. I hated that my lessons so rarely touched on the skills at the top of the pyramid. It’s easy enough to write lesson objectives that incorporate higher order skills:

Students will analyze the appeals used in popular television advertisements, evaluate which appeals were most effective, and create an original advertisement incorporating one appeal from each of the categories studied.

 

The challenge is to make sure that students remember the names of the persuasive appeals, understand how they are used in advertising, and can apply that knowledge in new contexts so that they can make the most of the more challenging tasks. It’s the time spent on building the lower level thinking skills that make the class project a meaningful activity.

If we’re doing this activity in a language class, we also need to make sure that students are comfortable with the language needed to discuss, negotiate, and produce a group project. The tasks at the top of the thinking pyramid reinforce the language and concepts that we’re trying to teach. But, without the foundation of remembering, understanding, and applying language, students will be unable to accomplish the tasks in English. On the other hand, teaching language without also teaching students to think when using it can produce students who answer questions with grammatically correct utterances that make no sense in context. Naomi Epstein addresses this problem, and introduces a simple approach that helps students become better at producing answers that are relevant to the type of questions being asked in her The “Reading Pictures” Strategy.

All levels of thinking are critical. And all have an important place in our classrooms.

I like the visual image of a pyramid because it helps me remember that my goal in teaching English is to make language a tool that has value in my students’ lives outside of class. For that to happen, I need to help them make connections between the language they’re learning and the creative ways in which the language can be used. One cannot happen without the other. In Moving beyond “Do you like? Randy Poehlman shares a clear step-by-step example of how he builds the language students need to discuss, share, and support opinions.

The taxonomy can be a useful tool for incorporating higher order thinking skills with even the youngest learners. For example, rather than telling your students why we say It’s a ball but It’s an apple, give them several examples and let them figure out the rule behind the pattern. Even if your students don’t have the language to explain to you that whether to use a and an depends on the initial sound of the word following the determiner, they can show you that they’ve analyzed the language by providing the appropriate determiner in front of new words.

Games like I Spy or Twenty Questions encourage problem solving as students learn to ask smarter questions without feeling like hard work. You can also challenge your students to solve a problem that you face in every class, coming up with activities that practice target language in an enjoyable way. Rather than choosing a project or creating a game that reinforces language objectives, let your students come up with their own solution. The process of creating a game, of coming up with and testing different rules for play, and then evaluating how well the game meets the language objective is an easy way to strengthen your students’ thinking skills while using language for a real purpose.

We do something similar in our English for Teachers course by asking teachers to focus on both language and teaching objectives in our lessons. For example, in EFT Lesson 2, teachers strengthen their language skills by focusing on collocations and logical connectors in listening, vocabulary, grammar, and reading sections. Not too different from any language course, except that the context for lesson is teaching – in the case of EFT 2, about how we can incorporate a variety of thinking skills in our lessons. (We made sure that the language focus was authentic and relevant by having discussions on the same topic with our iTDi Associates first, and pulling language for the lesson from those conversations.)Teachers connect the language they’re learning to their own experience by participating in discussions about teaching thinking skills with iTDi Mentors and other teachers working on the same lesson.

Thinking skills and language skills are not separate learning objectives. Including both in a lesson creates a more effective learning experience. The key, I think, is to find what motivates your students – games, projects, discussions, or something else – and use that to engage them in lessons that build both their language and thinking skills.

~ Barb

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