Teach English in Nanboshan Zhen - Zibo Shi

Pedagogy in the United States has traditionally been thought of as an “expert” dispensing knowledge onto students who are to obtain that knowledge – a philosophy deeply indebted to Enlightenment thinking. Put differently, the relationship between teachers and students is usually understood as transactional. However, there is a crucial subtext to this ITTT course that argues that teaching and learning should not be solely or even necessarily understood as transactional, but rather relational. Effective teachers, according to this course, need to have a sensitive finger on the pulse of the classroom atmosphere and the students’ needs. In other words, teachers need to care about the relationships between themselves and the students and between the students themselves too in order to create an effective and enjoyable learning environment in which students can best thrive and learn the English language. Beginning in Unit 1, the course covers the different roles that teachers should play in the classroom, ranging from facilitator, prompter, and organizer to manager, assessor, and monitor. These roles are all about the different types of relationships that teachers should shave with their students depending on context, circumstance, and need. Teachers cannot only be assessors, correcting each and every mistake made by students, or managers, taking full control over the classroom and taking up all of the talk time. Giving up those controlling roles in favor of facilitation and observation allows students to step up and speak without fearing (as much) the scrutiny of assessment. This is not to say that teachers should relinquish their authority to assess entirely, but rather that students might grow more confident and comfortable to practice speaking freely and fluently if teachers demonstrate their willingness to step back from the role of manager and assessor. Stepping back and allowing students to speak will often reveal where students’ strengths and areas of improvements lie, giving the teacher an idea of what to focus on in future lessons. Furthermore, students may begin to feel more comfortable raising concerns and questions with the teacher, whereas if a teacher takes up all of the talking time, the teacher might lose track of the issues that students might be experiencing in their learning. Is the material inappropriate for their level or age group? Is the teacher moving too fast from topic to topic? Is it a big class and is the teacher only focusing on the “stronger” students? Is there something specific in the native language structure that is making learning a particular structure in English more difficult? Teachers need to be in conversation with students about these issues. Therefore, pedagogy, according to this course, cannot be merely transactional. Teachers must care about the relational aspects too. Much of this work, which this course describes as building rapport with students, takes place in the Engage and Activate stages of a traditional Engage-Study-Activate (ESA) lesson structure. In the Engage phase, teachers should try to get students to think and speak in English as much as possible through a light and fun activity, such as watching and discussing a short video or playing a word game. This not only helps students switch into a different linguistic mindset but also helps get them engaged in the lesson from the beginning. This is an important part of nurturing student-teacher relationships. If teachers just take on the attitude that the duty of students is to learn the material that is taught no matter how boring the material is, students will not learn the material as well. A well-executed Engage phase gets students interested and excited about learning before delving deep into the nitty-gritty material, allows teachers to get to know their students better, and helps build community in the classroom – another way of talking about rapport. All of this is necessary for getting students to engage in the Study phase, which focuses more on new material, correcting mistakes, and caring about accuracy and details. However, it is really important that students also get to practice the new material without the scrutiny of assessment and correction in the Activate phase. During this phase, students should be able to focus on fluency rather than accuracy. Role plays or small pair or group projects are appropriate activities. Students should be using up the majority of the talk time (though teacher input is not unwelcomed entirely). For students, however, to feel comfortable making mistakes and focusing on fluency, teachers need to have already built trust with students – trust that making mistakes will not be penalized in all stages of their learning and that teachers understand that making mistakes is constitutive to learning. This is again why the Engage phase is so critical to building this rapport with students. This is why caring about the relationships in the room is crucial to the pedagogy taught in this course.