Category: Topics

How NOT to do Action Research – 5 lessons learnt

Jessica Brook profileby Jessica Brook

“Doing a project that is truly complex and difficult tests your real ability… the thing we most fear with regard to failure is our own self-acknowledgement, that we really don’t exactly know what we’re doing.”  Milton Glaser

This time last year, I was halfway through my first proper Action Research enquiry, and I definitely didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. Three years after finishing the DELTA I had been itching for a new challenge. Although I was very keen to start a master’s, I wasn’t so keen on 2+ years of distance learning. Looking at various MAs online I came across a new course with the University of Leicester, a Post-Graduate Certificate in Action Research, a much more doable seven months. I was a stranger to formal research, although throughout my teaching career I’ve tried hard to develop through reflective practice. Indeed, this is what has always kept it interesting, so I was really motivated to step it up a level. 

Nine months later, frustrated and dissatisfied, I was secretly pleased to see the back of it. I felt that nothing I’d set out to discover had been clarified as I’d hoped, and if anything I just had more questions. However, with time and reflection, I began to realize just how valuable a learning experience it had been. I’m now infinitely better-equipped to run small-scale research, to guide and encourage other teachers in their own development.

Bearing in mind the many hiccups I experienced along the way, this is the advice I would give.

  1. Choose a (good) research question.

An excellent bit of advice my tutor gave was “it’s better to write a lot about something small than the other way round”. I completely disregarded this advice, my research question involving new paradigms in listening instruction, and how best to incorporate them in general English syllabi, as well as teacher training. In hindsight, picking just one technique would obviously have been much more manageable. Posing your research goal as a question helps to focus, but the size of the project inevitably grows with its ambition. So think carefully about what you want to explore, how much time you want to commit, and whether your area of focus overlaps with your students’ needs, your colleagues’ interests, and/or the goals and objectives of your institution. Does it solve a problem? Or respond to a student survey? You’re also more likely to gain support this way. Mine admittedly did all three, but would have been just as useful on a smaller scale.

  1. Don´t get rid of anything.

What’s the difference between bog-standard Reflective Practice and Action Research? This debate continues to rage in academic circles and some would argue there isn’t a distinction. However, if you’d like to take your findings to a wider audience, be rigorous, and keep an open mind. It’s very easy to start off unconsciously expecting a particular outcome, but things may well not turn out that way. And it’s within the ”mess” of Action Research that interesting things happen. You won’t know if you don’t have the data to explore, so with that in mind, record everything, chuck nothing. One of my most unexpected and interesting insights came from my field journal. Meant as a personal record, it became a rich source on the different, often conflicting, roles we take on when facilitating planning, observation and feedback sessions.

  1. Individual, collaborative or participatory?

Thinking about who you want to involve is really important. Collaborating with colleagues is extremely rewarding, but bear in mind the practicalities. Put together a schedule detailing the main commitments with time estimates and communicate it in advance. Getting students to participate in the process empowers them – after all they’re at the heart of what we do – but make sure they know exactly what’s involved, seek permission, document it. Again if you have any plans to take your findings to a wider audience (i.e. outside your own school), this ensures your research is ethical. I decided on a collaborative approach known as lesson study. Working alongside two other teachers was intense and challenging, but the detailed, positive comments in their exit questionnaires made it all worthwhile.

  1. Be flexible, expect hitches.

Picture the scene. You and your colleagues spend hours planning a dynamite observation lesson, which you plan to video on the only day that teachers, timetables, and classes align like a once-in-a-century solar eclipse. The lovely case-study students have agreed to give up an hour of their time after class for you to interview them. You arrive that morning to discover all classes have had to be relocated to a nearby hotel due to noisy building work. The said hotel has terrible audio equipment and all the plug sockets are deliberately positioned to prevent effective video recording, or so it feels. Unfortunately, these things just happen in teaching. Don’t throw in the towel, do your best, record, and note-take whatever you can. Learn, move forward, and look for solutions.

  1. Share your findings. 

Perhaps my biggest disappointment was that I left the country before my write-up was complete, so I wasn’t able to share it with my colleagues face-to-face. Reporting your findings gives a sense of resolution and regardless of how worthwhile you feel it was, people will appreciate your efforts. It’s also a great way to raise your profile and connect you to a wider community and there are many outlets for doing so, iTDi being just one example. Give a talk, submit an article, start a blog, make a poster for your office!

I’d be lying if I said my project was a complete failure, far from it. In fact, my main failure was not realizing at the time how much more I would learn from the process itself, rather than the final product. Actually, I do have a more fully formed and practical approach to listening instruction in my own classroom, which is what I’d set out to investigate after all.

“There’s only one solution… Embrace the failure!” Milton Glaser

 

What is failure anyway?

Theodora Papapanagiotouby Theodora Papapanagiotou

A definition from Cambridge dictionary says:

Failure (noun) – the ​fact of someone or something not ​succeeding.

The ​meeting was a ​complete/​total failure.

I’m a ​bit of a failure at making (= I cannot make) ​cakes.

I ​feel such a failure (= so ​unsuccessful).

The dictionary does not help me much, though. Trying to find the definition that would be right for me was a complete failure. In my understanding, not meeting a goal does not mean being unsuccessful, it is not the end of the world. It just means that we were not ready at that particular moment, or that it was not the right time for us, at least not yet! When we feel a failure, all we want to do is give up. I believe that, on the contrary, that’s exactly when we need to try one more time, and then maybe once again… and again, if necessary.

As a teacher, I tend not to use this word and I will tell you why. Foreign language teaching in my country is absolutely exam-oriented. Students learn one or two foreign languages at school, but they also attend courses at private language schools to actually “learn a language”. “Learn a language” in this case always means “pass an exam in order to get a certificate”. Certificates are everything, they last forever if you want to work as a public servant. As a result, students start learning English at a very young age (usually 5 years old) and keep going until they get the desired certificate. EFL exam industry thrives in Greece and children take C2 CEFR level exams at 14.

And yet they “fail”. They fail because the language level  is way too demanding, because they have loads of homework assigned either by school or by private tutoring centres, or maybe because they have taken up more extracurricular activities than ever. They fail because they are too young to understand texts in C2 level – they do not even read newspapers or watch the news in their own language. They fail because they are taught to prepare by studying three test books and learning huge lists of vocabulary by heart. In the end, most of these students do not pass the exam…

But does this really mean failure? And if so, failure for whom? Failure for the student who has not passed the exam? Failure for the teacher? Why have we failed?

theodora pic

In my opinion, we have missed our goal. Our goal is to make students use the language, develop their basic interpersonal communication skills as well as their cognitive academic language proficiency. In the real world, having a certificate means nothing if you cannot use what you have learned. Of course, certificates are a mere necessity in order to study, get a job, have an officially documented proof to indicate your knowledge. But what happens, for example, if you passed your language exam at 14 and have not used the language ever since? I have seen so many people not being able to communicate in English after years of learning the language. It is certainly sad, but it is not failure. You are never a failure if you are willing to improve yourself.

So, what can we do in order to meet our goals? As teachers, we should:

  • Promote communication among our students and with peers from other countries. Let them realise that we have more similarities than differences. Let them learn how to tolerate people and how to handle situations with different mentalities and cultures. Show them the power of language.
  • Make them use the language everywhere they can. Watch movies and videos, listen to songs, read books, magazines, newspapers, and websites. Make them interested!
  • Create real life situations. Let them see why they need the language. Try role plays – take them out and have them pretend they are tourists and cannot speak their native language. Let them play!
  • Have them use the vocabulary they have learned by playing vocabulary games to revise it. Make it fun!
  • If they have to take an exam, make them familiar with the exam format, devote some time to making them work with certain strategies. Talk about the topics you find in the books. Organize debates, use group work, and let them take decisions and find solutions to problems.
  • Use technology. There is definitely some kind of an app to help you with your goal!

Whatever you do, remember this: not passing an exam does not make you less intelligent, as well as having students who did not make it in an exam does not mean that you are a bad teacher. “Failure” is just a word which is overrated. Keep moving!

 

Over the Wall of Experience

Kevin SteinBy Kevin Stein

I’ve been a high school English teacher for 10 out of the past 15 years. Before that I spent five years as a coordinator of an outreach program for runaway youth in Chicago.  I wish that those years of experience added up to a deep understanding of teenagers that I could share with you, a key to unlocking the secret fears and longings that sometimes hide behind a sullen look or a blank face of boredom.  But honestly, I probably understand my teenage students less than when I first started working with ‘the youth’.  Probably because the older I get, the less I remember about what made the daily grind of my junior high school and high school days difficult.  So instead of insights into what teenagers are or are not like, I thought I would share 4 things I try to keep in mind that my 45-year-old perspective doesn’t get in the way of communicating with my students.

1. Students have to go to school every day, but there are days they would rather be somewhere else. Sometimes my students work late at a part-time job to help their family make ends meet. Probably the last thing they want to be doing is sitting at a desk in school the next day and trying to keep their eyes open. So instead of just acting like my students are the problem because they aren’t in the perfect place to study on any given day, I ask them the following 3 questions: 1) What time did you get to bed last night? 2) Did you eat breakfast today? 3) If you weren’t in school right now, what would you be doing? And I find that if I ask these questions, instead of nudging my students awake, or worse, scolding them for not participating, they usually will answer the questions and give a little bit more effort in class. Because, “I’m interested in what’s going on with you” is a much more motivating sentiment than, “I’m upset with you.”

2. Just because a student isn’t noticeably joining in an activity, doesn’t mean they aren’t participating. Sometimes I see one of my students just kind of hanging back in a group activity and I get the itch to jump in and try and get them more involved in what’s going on. But if I step back and watch, I often notice that while those students might not be speaking or writing, they are often listening, nodding, and making space for others to lead. Instead of feeling that group work requires a certain set of ideal behaviors, I try and remind myself that there’s no way for me to know what role a student is playing in a group of teenagers unless I spend time carefully observing what’s going on.

3. Tests totally suck. And I mean that in a very technical way. For the most part, tests suck the joy out of learning, the curiosity out of a topic, and the energy out of my students. I often try to use alternative testing to assess my students. In any case, regardless of what kind of testing I do, my students have at least 12 years of school experience to trigger feelings that at the end of each semester they will be standing on the lip of a black hole of giant-test-suckiness which is going to pull all the color right out of their lives. That means that in my classrooms I have to keep the focus on learning. I have to highlight the small gains made in each and every class. I have to find a way to make class about learning and NOT about the test. Even then, my students are going to have to suffer through mid-term and final exams, and the least I can do is empathize with how difficult that can be.

4. Time is relative. When I am sitting down and doing career guidance or holding a student-parent-teacher conference, and feel a wave of anxiety about how hard a student will have to work to prepare for a university entry test three years down the road, I need to take a deep breath and give myself a time out. Three years to a sixteen-year-old is the distant future, it is the glowing umbrellas in Blade Runner, it is unknowable. Three years for me sometimes feels like it might arrive the day after tomorrow. But how I feel isn’t really the point of counseling a student about their future. Before I can talk about a student’s future, I need to make sure that I am listening to and understanding the story of their here and now.

I have a friend, Devon, who manages the PR and recruitment division of a large language school here in Osaka. Up until five years ago, he had been a classroom teacher.  Sometimes when we have coffee together, he reminisces about his time in the classroom.  When I asked him why he had stopped teaching, he said, “One day, I was teaching a unit on hobbies and likes and dislikes, and I suddenly felt like there was this huge gap between me and my students.” He said that he just couldn’t find a way to personally connect with his students the way he had in the past. He didn’t think it was anything he had done which had led to the gap. It was just the result of growing and changing and ending up in a place very different from the one he had been in when he started teaching.

The older I get, the more I understand what Devon meant, how he felt on that day. For me, though, there is no job I would rather do and nowhere I would rather spend my workdays than in a classroom. If that means I need to spend a few extra minutes trying to peer over the wall of my 15 years-experience to see my students a bit more clearly, then that is what I will happily do. Because there are no special keys to help us understand our teenage students, just as there are no magic keys to unlock the feelings and dreams of any of the people we talk with throughout our day. The best we can do is to keep in mind that the people in front of us are living their own stories, in their own way. Making real connections with the people around begins not with our own expectations of how things should be, but with watching, listening, and noticing the small moments of how things are now.

The Difference an Audience Makes

Barbara Hoskins SakamotoBy Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

My teen learners are amazing. After a long day spent in an environment that values English test scores over communicative skills, they still come to my English class. While they appreciate that pronunciation and word choice matter, and that the best way to improve in English is to use it as a means of communication with their classmates, they have a hard time moving away from focusing on getting right answers. They have enough years of experience as students that they’re generally pretty quick at figuring out patterns so that they can create grammatically accurate sentences, yet still have a lot of trouble in using learned language to communicate meaningfully beyond getting the ‘right’ answer.

I’ve found that giving my teens an audience makes a huge difference. Who they are communicating with helps define language parameters.  Trying to communicate something to someone presents students with real-life problems to solve, and encourages them to think deeply about the language they use. Strategic selection of audience and task can help create problem-solving activities that are within my students’ ability to discuss in English. Having an audience tends to help balance the public school focus on English as a subject where success is measured by a test, by focusing on English where success is when communication happens.

Here are three examples where having an audience made a difference.

Listening Tests

When students answer questions, or talk to each other in class, there’s not much motivation to speak clearly. Even when I ask them to record themselves, they don’t work very hard at careful pronunciation. So, I asked my teens to make listening tests for younger students. The preparation was great review for the older students, but even more importantly, the process of recording the test for the younger students encouraged my teens to make a lot of effort in speaking loudly and clearly. They felt responsible for being understandable. You can hear the effort Satoshi makes in his listening test. Click the link to go to Satoshi’s listening test online, in order to hear his recording.

listening test image

Book Reviews

My teens do a lot of writing – it really helps them build fluency with the grammar and vocabulary they’ve learned over the years. Even when they write stories where peers are the audience, it doesn’t really push them to consider word choice in the way an outside audience would. So, I had them write book reviews of books they’d chosen to read from our small library. The first time, I asked them to tell me about the book and if they liked it. I got something like this:

It’s a book about dogs. It’s a good book. I like it.

The second time, I told them we’d put the reviews on our class blog so that students in other countries could read them. I told them that their review would help other students decide whether or not they might want to read the same book. Suddenly, they were thinking about what might information might be important to include in their review in order to help other students make good decisions based on their reading interests. They were also being much more careful about revising and correcting, so they wouldn’t look ‘bad’ in public. You can see how Satoshi includes a summary and recommendation in his review.

The third time, we posted the reviews on Amazon. This time we talked about who would be reading the review – teachers, mostly – and why they would be reading it – to decide whether or not to buy the book for their own students. This time I noticed students really considering what information to include in the review based on who might be reading it.

Satoshi's book review on Amazon

Games

My teens enjoy creating games, and the process can be a great creative and critical thinking activity. However, unless I’m very careful in setting up the activity students tend to switch into their first language when they get caught up in the excitement of deciding content and rules. It’s still a great discussion activity, but not great language practice.

If, however, I ask them to create games for much younger students, the content tends to be language that teens find very easy, and the rules are simple enough that they can manage to keep the discussion in English (mostly, with some reminders).

I asked the students to create a matching card game that would reinforce the language the kindergarten class was learning – shapes, colors, and numbers. They based the first version on a card game they’d seen online (Blink), and then had to decide how many items and how many variations of the items were needed for a game, and then how to adapt the rules so that the kindergarteners could play it in English.

student made game

If you’d like to read more about the game students created, I wrote about it on the Teaching Children English blog.

I don’t always specify an audience for tasks, but when I do I find that it helps my students see English as a tool for communication, using it to communicate something meaningful to a specific audience. Success happens when they communicate clearly enough for someone to understand their speaking on a listening test, or provide enough information to enable someone to make a decision, or create an easy-to-play game that reinforces language practice for a specific group of learners. Success in communicating with people outside of their small class also builds confidence in their ability to interact with others, in English.