John F. Fanselow’s work has a continuing influence on generations of teachers, teacher trainers, and material writers. This year marks the 25th anniversary of his ground-breaking book, Breaking Rules. What better time to join John on a journey of discovery in an intimate five-week online course designed by John to help teachers make real changes in their teaching as they learn to see the obvious, break unconscious rules, and try the opposite? Click for further course details and registration here.

What Would Happen If …. ?      John F. Fanselow

Sit down before what you see and hear like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. — T.H. Huxley

 

I do not advocate breaking rules to be different or distinctive but rather to explore.

The first candidate is the curiosity we are born with.  I tap this and so I consider what I do as natural and perhaps quite normal.  For me, breaking rules and doing the opposite are simply attempts to answer the question we ask as children,

“What would happen if . . .?”

Like a child, I wonder.

As a child, I was curious about how switches turned lights on and off, partly because my father was an electrician. My father gave me switches to play with, which nourished my curiosity.

I was curious about more than switches. My parents bought me a chemistry set and an erector set, which had motors and metal parts, I could screw together to make things like windmills and bridges. I learned knot tying, canoeing, plant identification in the Boy Scouts. I built a clubhouse in our yard from lumber my friends and I scavenged along the railroad tracks near our house.

In addition to these activities that were at that time reserved mainly for boys, I also became interested in baking. I loved desserts and wanted to learn how to make them. I learned by watching a TV show. I was the only boy in our neighborhood that was making éclairs, angel food cake and fruitcakes, to name a few desserts that particularly fascinated me. My classmates were playing baseball and other sports as I was baking. My parents were very indulgent and let me follow my curiosity wherever it went rather than stifle it.

As I said, reasons why I continue to want to always ask, “What would happen if . . .?” is speculative.  But I want to state some ways that people misunderstand Breaking Rules that are not speculative but true.

First, I do not advocate breaking rules to be different or distinctive but rather to explore. The subtitle of my book Breaking Rules is Generating and Exploring Alternatives. I urge teachers to try alternatives to see what difference they make. If we do the same thing over and over not only are we likely to be bored, but our students will be also. Vitality comes from change. Routine leads to stagnation.

Second, I urge teachers to analyze what they do rather than to judge what they do. Judgments, based on preconceived notions and beliefs, prevent genuine exploration. “I can’t do this because my students will be confused,” we might be tempted to say, but we can only see to what extent our students will or will not be confused if we try the this. We have to also ask how being confused could possibly be positive rather than negative.

Third, I urge teachers to describe in very, very precise detail what the words It works and It doesn’t work refer to. Hardly any teachers record and transcribe parts of classes to identify the It much less the works and doesn’t work. When teachers analyze transcripts of their teaching, they can see that the claims we usually make for what works and does not work are so general as to be meaningless. There are loads of other terms that are equally dangerous such as scaffolding, positive feedback, lived experience. These are not only imprecise but inconsistently used so if we look at five teachers saying they are doing scaffolding, we will see that they are doing five totally different activities.

Fourth, I advocate that teachers see that any communication has multiple characteristics. In Breaking Rules I identified 5—the source and target, the purpose, the medium used, the way the medium was used and the content. Each person can add others or create their own, but we cannot describe any communication with only one label.

We need to look at what we do, make small changes, and compare the results.

A fifth theme of Breaking Rules is that very small changes—asking students to underline words they know rather than ones they do not know—can have very large consequences. Such small details are rarely noticed much less discussed in post observation conversations or articles about methods. Again, the point is precision, not breaking rules to be rebellious or different.

Finally, I advocate that teachers make multiple interpretations of transcriptions of what they and their students say and do. Did the students learn anything? Did they enjoy it? Was their curiosity nourished or dampened? Did they become more able to learn on their own?  The words I just used are fuzzy and slippery which is all the more reason to discuss multiple interpretations with many examples and always asking how what we think is good is not and how what we think is bad not.

I just said “Finally” but I lied! The central point of Breaking Rules is that I believe that we should not listen to so called experts, researchers or leaders in our field alone. Rather, we need to look at what we do, make small changes, and compare the results. Of course we can learn a lot from reading and attending conferences. But we can learn much more and can be more powerful teachers if we explore what we are doing in precise detail.

He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
– William Blake, quoted in Breaking Rules.

Rules Are Made To Be Broken  —  Scott Thornbury

The first rule that I broke as a new teacher was using translation in class. I can’t remember being told not to, but everything on my initial training was geared to a direct method, no mother-tongue, kind of methodology. Moreover, translation was considered an unreliable means of conveying meaning, given the differences between languages and cultures. One person’s clock is another person’s watch, so it’s better to use a picture of a watch than to say ‘watch’, lest the students think it is a clock, or vice versa. For these reasons, translation was considered to be a highly sophisticated skill, only to be tackled with the most advanced students.

“The use of the students’ mother tongue need not be a taboo, and that in fact it can be exploited as a very natural prompt for real communication”

But I did it with beginners. I was teaching in Egypt, and had to teach a lesson on basic description using there is…/there are…, adjectives, it’s got… it hasn’t got…, and so on, the theme  being towns and villages. The towns and villages in the coursebook did not look like the towns and villages the students were used to, so I had a problem. I wanted to base the lesson around the kinds of village that my students would visit when they went home for the weekend, villages with mosques, sugar factories, covered markets, and maybe the odd Pharaonic monument. I would have used a picture of one had I had one, but I didn’t. So I had this idea of asking the school receptionist, who I knew came from Upper Egypt, to describe her village onto a tape, and to do it in Arabic. I hardly spoke any Arabic and I used this to my advantage. I took the tape into the class and asked my beginners to help me make sense of it. More than information gap, there was a language gap, and they were eager to fill it. I played it line by line and they shouted a rough translation at me, using mainly words rather than structures: “Mosque!  Ferry!” and so on.   I would stop and reformulate what they were telling me onto the board. It went something like this: “My village is very nice, it’s very quiet, it’s on the Nile, there is a large mosque in the centre, there is a sugar factory, there’s a primary school but there isn’t a secondary school. There is no university either. There is a ferry across the Nile.” And so on. By the time we had translated it reformulated it and put it on the board we had all the structures we needed for describing a town or village. And for practice, of course, they described their own villages – not so very different from the school receptionist’s.

“I learned that rules are made to be broken, and even if the resulting experience is not as productive as my Egyptian village lesson, you can always learn something from experimenting”

What did I learn from that lesson? That the use of the students’ mother tongue need not be a taboo, and that in fact it can be exploited as a very natural prompt for real communication. Nor is translation necessarily a very sophisticated skill – as we now know, thanks to online translation tools. I also learned that rules are made to be broken, and even if the resulting experience is not as productive as my Egyptian village lesson, you can always learn something from experimenting.

Focus on Creating, Understanding, Sharing
– Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

If you want to learn how to effectively break rules in young learner classes, look to the experts. If one of the aims of early childhood education is to teach what rules are and why we need follow them, then young learners are experts in the art of breaking them.

We can learn a lot about shaking up the rules we apply to own teaching by watching the way our students approach life and learning. Here are a few of the things they’ve taught me about teaching.

Nurture curiosity and creativity

Children are naturally curious, so encourage them to use English to ask questions and explore. “What’s this?” and “Why?” are very easy but powerful questions, and “I don’t know. Let’s find out!” is a great model for learning. Accept that there’s more than one way to look at things. For example, we often check comprehension by asking children to separate vocabulary into categories. If we put pictures of ice cream, spaghetti, a polar bear, a snake, a pencil, and a piece of paper on the table, we might expect groupings for food, animals, and classroom items. After students have done the expected task, ask them to create a new category of items and explain it. You might see milk, ice cream, polar bear and paper together (things that are white) or spaghetti, a snake, and a pencil together (things that are long and thin), or something else entirely. The point is to reinforce flexible thinking while building language skills.

 

If one of the aims of early childhood education is to teach what rules are and why we need follow them, then young learners are experts in the art of breaking them.

Focus on accomplishments

Young children are thrilled when they master a new skill or acquire a new word, and don’t tend to focus on what haven’t yet mastered or learned. Teachers have a tendency to see errors rather than accomplishments, which limits our ability to understand either one. In the example below, the student still has a long way to go in her writing development, but she’s already accomplished a lot. She has a good handle on her consonant sounds, is beginning to make some good guesses with vowels, has spaces between her words, and is writing from left to right. She can read what she wrote (“Kuro likes outside”), and is communicating something that’s meaningful to her (Kuro is her cat). Understanding her errors in the context of her accomplishments helps me to plan more effective lessons.

 

Sharing is another kind of showing, one that adds purpose to using language.

Show and share

Children nearly always show rather than tell. I’m almost always better off showing my students what I want them to do rather than telling them. I’m always better off showing them how language works than explaining it.

Observations can show me what’s actually happening in class (versus what I think is happening). One easy way to find an impartial observer is to set up a video camera in one corner of the room and leave it running for the entire class. I did this when I was having a problem with younger siblings disrupting class. What I observed was two young girls trying to join the older children and becoming frustrated when they couldn’t (usually because they didn’t know the English being practiced). Since the parents and students were all fine with the non-paying siblings joining, I turned it over to the students to set the rules. In the process, I got to see how students had interpreted my class rules. Beyond that, they came up with adaptations that enabled the younger children to join activities even without knowing enough English. I was impressed with the creativity and empathy my students used in solving what could have become a major classroom management issue.

Sharing is another kind of showing, one that adds purpose to using language. Technology makes it easy to share student projects with parents and other students. For example, my older students always need practice with writing and speaking clearly, in addition to opportunities to use English in meaningful ways. So, when my younger students were ready to take on English prepositions, the older students created listening tests for them. These student-made tests are motivating for everyone involved, and they encourage a level of care with enunciation that I can never achieve without an audience.

link: http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/barbsaka-1551393-satoshi-listening-test/

To see an example of student projects, visit my YouTube channel or authorstream.

Children begin formal education unaware of rules that limit answers to a single correct response, that make errors more important than accomplishment, that put an emphasis on telling rather than showing, and keeping rather than sharing. By learning to break these rules in our teaching, we can also encourage students maintain healthy attitudes about exploration and sharing, and develop creative and critical thinking skills, in addition to helping them become skilled language users.

On Creating Change

(With A Little Help From My Friends) 

– Chuck Sandy

We all want to change the world, but when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out. – Lennon / McCartney

When I was six, my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Spenser, passed out a farmyard worksheet and told us to color the barn, red, the donkey, grey, and the chickens, white. I had no problem with the grey donkey, but why a red barn and white chickens I asked?  Mrs. Spenser explained those were the rules and everybody, including me, had to follow them.

I thought about this, and then colored my barn black and my chickens brown — not realizing as I did that I was committing a revolutionary act that would result in my mother being called. When Mrs. Spenser explained to my mom that she could not tolerate rule-breakers, my mother said, “Well, we live across from a black barn and we have a brown chicken. What would happen if you tried to understand that?” Then she hung up the phone. My mother became my hero.

A rule breaking, activist, change-maker is not a rabble-rouser

Activism came next. Having to sit in assigned cafeteria seats seemed like a rule worth fighting, so I got lots of kids to sign a petition and then got everyone loudly chanting “No more assigned seats!” This resulted in Mr. Anderson, the school principal, changing the rule. I won! From that day on, we could sit anywhere in the cafeteria we wanted. I basked in my hero status for a few moments, until Mr. Anderson told me I was now cafeteria monitor, responsible for making sure everyone kept the cafeteria clean and our voices down. He tried to make it sound like an attractive job, but I knew I’d won the battle but not the war.

Out in the world a war was happening far away  in Vietnam, but TV news brought it home every day. I was 11. Woodstock happened, and Country Joe led 300,000 people in the Fish Cheer and a rousing antiwar song. When I brought that experience to my school’s playground by climbing the jungle gym and leading my classmates in the Fish Cheer, teachers panicked and pulled me down. Later, the principal called me a rabble-rouser and sent me home. At home, my mom handed me a dictionary and asked me to look up the word:

rabble-rouser NOUN (plural rabble-rousers)  A person who tries to stir up masses of people for political action by appealing to their emotions rather than their reason. A demagogue.

This was not what I wanted to be. In fact, as a kid I had no idea who I wanted to be, what I was doing, or why. Now, however, as a man in his 50s, I clearly see how these early experiences shaped me and how they eventually lead me to read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom, Mark A. Clarke’s A Place to Stand, and John F. Fanselow’s Breaking Rules as I made my way through the years to become who I am: a teacher working for positive change by exploring possibilities within communities.

While there are certainly rules that need to be broken and problems in our schools and society that need to be changed, we cannot go around rabble-rousing and expect to create change by, in Friere’s words, “causing the alienation or demoralization of anyone.” Change becomes possible when we consciously break a rule in Fanselow’s exploratory spirit of wondering what would happen if we do, and then comparing results, or in Clarke’s sense of wanting to “create disturbances that wobble the system” enough to get everyone talking.

Consciously breaking a classroom or school rule to explore what happens and actively wobbling the educational system enough to encourage discussion are positive acts that can lead in hopeful directions. On the other hand, noisily refusing to follow rules, going off on one’s own, or leading a rabble-rousing revolt often just scares people and sometimes leads to the alienation and demoralization of everyone involved.

While we cannot force change, Clarke points out that as teachers we can “manipulate variables in the learning environment and observe the consequences of these manipulations.” Fanselow says essentially the same thing when he encourages us to make very small changes in our classrooms, compare results, and act accordingly based on the reality of what’s going on rather than on some preconceived notion of what learning is and how a teacher should be or behave: not to be different or distinctive, Fanselow wisely points out, but to explore.

When you break a rule or wobble a system, make sure you’re smiling … and that everyone’s eyes are shining.

I believe we can and should be doing exactly the same thing in our classrooms,  school systems and educational organizations, and it’s here that I’d like to add something else I learned from John F. Fanselow: When you break a rule or wobble a system, make sure you’re smiling and that in Benjamin Zander’s words, everyone’s eyes are shining.

At this point in my life, I’ve learned to stand in front of a class or a group of teachers and say with a laugh, “well that didn’t work out like I thought it would. Let’s try this instead” or “does anyone have any ideas about how this could work.” Then, just as importantly, I’ve also learned to step back far enough to let others shine as they show everyone a way forward. I’ve also learned that by doing this, my own eyes shine brighter, too.

The key to lasting change is the release of joy and possibility.

The key to lasting change in education is not just rule breaking and system wobbling. The key to lasting change in education is the release of joy and possibility that comes when we work collaboratively in community to change ourselves and cause positive ripples in the world around us.  So break some rules, wobble some systems, but do it with a smile. Just keep at it and by all means, don’t worry that you might sing out of tune. That’s fine as long as everyone’s eyes are shining and you have more than a little help from your friends.

Rules I’ve Broken and How I Lived to Teach Another Day – Steven Herder

I’m reading two great books right now – The Courage to Teach (Palmer, 2007) and Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (Fink, 2003).

They are both major rule breakers in the sense that through their own research and personal experience, they have evolved beyond the regular assumptions of what it means to be a teacher. They have both created a new paradigm of sorts and based it on their own perception of teaching and learning. Palmer has an endless number of great quotes, for example,

“Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher” (Parker Palmer, 2007, p. 10).

“Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives” (Parker Palmer, 2007, p. 5).

Brilliant stuff. And there is so much more to be had in both these books!

So the good writers and the great teachers always inspire me to continue to believe in my instincts in the classroom – to trust my “spider sense” of what is good, what is working and when to tweak things in another direction. This tweaking is not random at all, but based on years of honing my skills at observing what’s actually happening in my classroom.

So, I wonder where these preconceived teaching rules come from? Could it be from all of my previous teachers from kindergarten onwards? Could I be carrying their baggage of assumptions and norms for teaching that they themselves picked up along the way? I’m sure that has had a major impact on many teachers including me. It’s funny, though, the teachers who were memorable were the ones who broke free from the mold, who, as Palmer says, evolved beyond technique, to create or empower their own identity as teachers.

Here are a few of the rules that I regularly break with glee and abandon:

1. Don’t let the students take control of the class.

2. Don’t postpone the start of the syllabus until the team is ready to study

3. Don’t tell students about your personal life.

4. Don’t go off on tangents during a lesson.

5. Don’t negotiate with students.

I’ll elaborate on any of these in the comments section if anyone asks. I would also love to hear which rules you break in your classes. This picture represents a whole new foray into breaking rules if anyone wants to know more…