After stepping out of the classroom for what has been a few weeks now, the following article – http://oncourseworkshop.com/table-contents/67-worst-teaching-mistakes/ – has been the best wake up call I’ve had for a while and since doing so I’ve gone on one heck of a CPD mission!
Say hello to the following books!
- Talk Less Teaching
I bought this book on the back of not only seeing it in a bookstore here in Oxford and it catching my eye (I’ve felt I’ve been too teacher fronted for a while..) but point 7 in the article: “Talking too much and doing too much” really jumped at me when I read it. In this point it succinctly states, “the more responsibility the students take to present, manipulate, debate, sum up and draw conclusions about information, the more they truly learn the material”. Too much and too many times have I stood at the front and just talked at the pupils! This is at times, largely down to the great degree of content I had to get through, where teacher talk gives you more control and confidence that you are getting through the content that pupils need to know and from questioning can then also know to some degree that most students have understood it….
In recognition of this, I did attempt at times to “flip” the learning by having pupils apply techniques such as the ones mentioned here: Teaching Pupils “How to Learn” Chinese and Why it is so Important (Part 1) and Teaching Pupils “How to Learn” Chinese and Why it is so Important (Part 2). This was certainly effective, and the students clearly enjoy it, however the issue I found was that students would take far too long on just a couple of characters – there’s only so much time in the lesson that you can spend explaining and instructing to cover all bases and ensure all pupils know what they need to do, before an activity completely falls on its head!
This had then led me to buy the following books also, mainly because they all came in a bundle on Amazon, please do not blame me for being too trigger happy…!
- Engaging Learners & Backwards Teaching
The key message of this book is that if you want to be an outstanding teacher, pupil engagement should be its bedrock. The author also says that for pupils to be engaged, they must be in “flow”, that is, they have completely lost themselves in the the activity that they are engaged in. We have all been there…I was this afternoon while playing away on my guitar! But again, of the six essential ingredients for flow was, yes that’s the one…minimal teacher talk!
This book basically tells you that you need to make sure there is a specific end goal for your students starting from the very end and then working backwards from there. Once you have got this end goal in set in stone, you then tell and guide your students how they can eventually reach it, starting from right now.
The inspiration therefore to buy this book, came from a colleague who told me that in the lesson she came to observe me teaching, she could not see “where the students were going”. This refers to point 56 in the article, “failing to assess learning objectives”, whereby if you teach a lesson without some sort of end goal and just “oh today the Scheme of Work says I must teach this” or “we must get through this content because it is one of the many topics on the exam”, then that is when eventually, as the article puts it, “students may disengage, avoid participating, give you blank stares, avoid letting you know they are falling behind, or perform poorly in periodic tests or projects”. Students clearly need to have their learning oriented, and be able to orientate their learning themselves. This cannot be done without any kind of end goal in sight…and before one can say, “to get an A* at GCSE”, this end goal may not only be one, but one of several end goals, which are most meaningful to that particular learner.
- Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points
As I continued to read the article back and forth, Dr. Deming, someone who I had heard of before when reading a famous self-improvement book titled “Awaken the Giant Within” by the legendary life coach Tony Robbins, suddenly jumped straight out of the page at me. I remember Dr. Deming and how he helped made Toyota become so successful, with the need for the company to improve at least 1% continuously in every aspect in order to become the market leader, in which it did – with “Kaizen” or “continual improvement” (精益求精）as its principal drive.
In this article, the author, Del Nelson draws us to point 59: “destroying the students’ inborn, natural desire to learn through competition and grades”.
Unfortunately for us, it is an inescapable truth that grades, when it comes down to it, mean pretty much everything to not only the pupil but also to the parent, the teacher, school and event to future employers! However, what we need to hold onto is the fact that this is only one of the long term goals that we help our students strive to achieve, and I would like to trust that Deming, through his 14 points, was to make the point that high achievement is a byproduct in the long term as a result of perfecting one’s craft.
As the author states, “Deming says…schools should teach students about the “evils” of short-term thinking and the “evils” of the merit system and ranking people” as “grades (especially forced ranking and grading curves) robs students of their intrinsic motivation to learn (and probably robs teachers of their joy in teaching)”.
The book which puts forward this argument, titled “The New Economics” (see below), was published back in 1993, and still rings true to this day.
I could not agree with Dr. Deming more – and I fervently believe that this is particularly critical in light of the new GCSE spec for pupils learning Mandarin Chinese. We are all too aware, and should not bury our heads in the sands, in light of the fact that traditional vocab testing for one set of characters, which eventually becomes disjointed as we go from topic to topic throughout the academic year, is in effect almost completely meaningless.
Make It Stick – The Science of Successful Learning
I was very much inspired by a NQT training day run by ISTip a couple of years ago at Goldolphin & Latymer School in Hammersmith, where they held a very pertinent and meaningful session on the topic of “low stakes quizzing” (aka vocab tests!). During this session, the following book was brought to my attention:
This book puts forward convincing cases that there is no such thing as a “learning style”, but in fact that learning styles are more of a preference, as the person who learns in a certain way has not explored or committed themselves to other ways of learning to know what works best for them. It also mentions how learners must embrace difficulties and avoid illusions of knowing, all things which are vitally critical for pupils who hope to master the characters they need to know to achieve a good grade in the writing paper of the new GCSE Chinese examination. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts before, and is outlined in this book, we must teach students how to learn for them to become effective learners, and to be sure that what they learn, will, in time, stick.
So these are my current CPD endeavours! After I’ve read these books from cover to cover and put them intro practice. I will be sure to be back again to tell how you I got on, particularly in regards to the teaching of Chinese to secondary school students.
Thanks for reading. Please do share your comments below.
Chinese Teaching Blog 