Teaching adults… This is a post I’ve been stalling on for weeks, but, difficult to write as it is, I can’t put it on hold anymore.
I’d like to begin by sharing three seemingly unrelated anecdotes which, by the end of the post, will hopefully have made some sort of sense.
Anecdote 1: therapy
I’m no stranger to therapy, but I’m not big on the more orthodox, Freudian approaches. I’m a Flower Remedy kind of guy. Last year, for example, I tried something wonderful called EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which draws heavily on NLP and basically tries to help you get rid of some of your emotional baggage by means of the repetition of key sentences coupled with a firm but gentle finger tapping applied at certain points of the meridian system. One of the tenets of EFT, my (great) therapist used to insist, is that you don’t need to understand or relive the pain to get rid of it. It so happens, however, that I am a pretty intense and hyperbolic kind of person, verging on melodramatic at times. So, needless to say, I wanted to relive my memories and understand them in hindsight, rather than simply see them fading away into some sort of ignorance-is-bliss oblivion. My therapist would then, session after session, remind me that I was using the wrong “learning style.” Her principled and well-meaning advice would often take me back to the days when I used, for example, to try to talk students out of mentally translating the new input: “No, no, no. Don’t think in Portuguese.” Or when I used to persuade them not to take notes in class and simply “go with the flow.”
In hindsight, she was right, of course, in trying to help me open up to a new way of “learning”, but I can’t help but wonder what role my intrinsic “learning style” played in the whole process. Would I have achieved better results if I’d really allowed myself to surrender to the idiosyncracies of the process and let go? Or would the whole experience, wonderful as it was, have been even more fruitful if she’d somehow tried to meet me halfway? And what does have to do with teaching adults? Please bear with me for another paragraph or two.
Anecdote 2: the mouse that just isn’t there
To say that I’ve been busy lately is quite an understatement, so unfortunately there’s been hardly any time left for more mundane pursuits (which I miss badly!) such as watching TV. To keep my sanity, though, I do try to squeeze in at least three or four hours a week, but the viewing experience is definitely not what it once was. It’s getting harder and harder to simply sit through an entire show (however entertaining) without -are you ready for this- trying to reach for a mouse or a hyperlink, which, duh, just aren’t there – It’s a TV, not a computer, for heaven’s sake. And that’s really the whole point. I have grown so used to being able to determine what it is that I watch (read “learn”), for how long and in what sequence, that being simply a passive spectator (read “student in class”) can be excruciating sometimes. I don’t want to generalize beyond my experience, of course, (especially when I spend an average of 15 hours a day in front of a computer), but there must be people out there who feel the same way. Anyway, thank God my movie-going habits have remained relatively unscathed.
Anecdote 3: “Whatever happened to this place?”
Last week I spent a few hours at a shopping mall I hadn’t been to in four or five months. Honestly, I was taken aback. Not really by the building itself, but by the closing down of old (old = 1 year old) stores and restaurants and the mushrooming of new ones, which, in their majority, I’d never even heard of. It seems these days things are happening way, way too fast. I know I’m stating the obvious here, but it’s getting harder and harder to see things happening. They just happen, in the blink of an eye, and suddenly you’re jolted out of your pseudo-comfort zone, which, well, didn’t last long enough to even qualify as “comfort” in the first place.
And this is exactly how I felt in class last month, teaching adults after a year-long absence.
I’m not teaching these days – just (just?) writing, doing course design and the occasional teacher training. One day, though, I had to sub for a colleague who was ill and, in many important ways, I felt like a novice teacher in class. It was as if one year away from the classroom had been multiplied tenfold – just like the mall experience.
Twenty minutes into the lesson, I found myself wondering ‘how could students’ profile have changed so much and so fast?’ They were all adults in their best behavior, of course, but there was a palpable sense of chaos in class, which I wouldn’t have been able to put my finger on ten or even five years ago, I think. I felt as if the teaching I was doing -technically competent as it might have been- was simply being allowed to run parallel to eight or ten personal, self-driven syllabuses, each belonging to a different student and manifesting itself in the most haphazard manner throughout the 80 minutes in which I was there. An orchestra playing out of synch, if you will. How could teaching adults have become so difficult?
Me: “Ok, so I want you to read the text quickly and choose the alternative that…”
St 1: “I have a question. When do we use fewer and less?”
Me: “Repeat after me… older than… don’t stress the “than”… older than I am. Ok, now this side only.”
St 2: “Mas quando que eu uso older e the oldest? Eu ainda tô um pouco confuso.” (But when do I use “older” and “the oldest”? I’m still confused.)
Me: Now in pairs, you’re going to look at the pictures and compare…
St 3: “Why the best place in Brazil and not of Brazil?”
Me: You know… prepositions have no rules sometimes. You just have to … (bla bla bla bla).
St 4: Tem algum livro bom de preposição que o sr. recomenda? (Can you recommend a good book on prepositions?)
Me: Sure, I’ll tell you soon, ok? So, take a look at the pictures and compare the two…
St 5: How I say “perceber?”
The students, nice and receptive as they were, struck me as extremely analytical. ‘So what?’ you must be wondering. After all, there have always been analytical and over analytical students in our classes, ever since English 900 was the latest craze.
What I mean is that this sort of profile might have been less of an issue, say, five or ten years ago, when the need to “reach for the mouse that isn’t there” wasn’t nearly as acute. Today, in many important ways, when teaching adults, we’re dealing with individuals who want to choose what to learn more than ever before and yearn, first and foremost, to have their immediate needs met and their questions answered – whether or not these are even marginally connected to the lesson at hand. It’s as if we’re being forced to redefine words like “aim” and “focus.”
The funny thing about what I just wrote is the choice of the word issue. Take a look at the beginning of the last paragraph. What do I mean by “might have been less of an issue?” Do I mean that those students’ tendency to over (and I say over) analyze is inherently negative? Or do I mean that the students’ own agendas ended up seeping into my tight and well thought-out lesson a little more than they should have – hence the orchestra out of synch analogy? I’m not sure I can answer either of those questions at this point.
But that may not matter in the end. Maybe what does matter is the repertoire that the 21st century teacher needs to develop in order to learn how to cater to all the individual, parallel syllabuses competing with each other and, above all, with the lesson and the textbook. In other words, when teaching adults, what do we do when, in the middle of a pre-listening, João wants to know the difference between less and fewer? How do we handle Paula, who, two minutes into a drill, switches into grammar analysis mode and wants to be reminded of the differences between comparatives and superlatives? Do we gently bring them back into focus (which my therapist used to do with different degrees of gentleness and success, for that matter) or do we allow ourselves to be sidetracked when teaching adults? And what is the optimal level of productive chaos in that case?
When teaching adults, what is, I wonder, the ideal balance to be struck between the course syllabus / processes and the learners’ own syllabuses / learning styles?
A few years ago, this might have been just one of those mildly stimulating DELTA niceties, over which teachers could split hairs for an entire afternoon. They would naturally come to no conclusion and, after the session, would simply allow themselves to get on with their day-to-day teaching, happily impervious to all that “theoretical nonsense.”
Not anymore. And having stepped back into a 21st century adult classroom for eighty minutes last month, I learned it the hard way.
Teaching adults in the twenty-first century is definitely not for the faint-hearted.
Thanks for reading.
Click here for another interesting post on teaching adults.
You just put into words how I felt a couple of weeks ago when replacing a teacher myself – after a whole semester away from a classroom. I used to talk about those old teachers and how difficult it was for them to deal with a younger ‘audience’, people who’d do more than nod and take notes (aka us youngsters), but I felt the same way on that day, wondering how to deal with a bunch of teenagers who have a thousand explorer tabs open at the same time in their heads and are used to working on all of them at the same time! sigh
Ariane,
I love the “thousand explorer tabs open at the same time” analogy and if I ever rewrite this article for publication elsewhere, I will ask your permission to use this analogy.
Um beijo
L.
This soul searching article – could I say that? – struck a chord because I had been
living this dilemma for quite sometime a while ago.
I really didn´t know what to do when students infiltrated their own agenda in the lesson
and that somehow irritated me. I had a lesson to finish and although I was not working
in a school with a coordinator breathing behing my back, I had a duty to myself to end
the lesson with the time frame I had set. It never worked and I had to learn the hard
way students come first and their needs. Having said that, I realised the best way to
solve the problem was to meet them half-way.
If on one hand I had to stablish a certain order, on the other hand I had to avoid being
a dictator. I found the latter had a much more demaging result and made the learners
frustrated.
Halfway is the best way in anything you do in life.
I´m still struggling to let it go the old teaching style: “It´s not relevant to the lesson” sort
of behaviour. It may not be to the lesson, but it could mean the world to the learner
whose inquietude has to be put at ease at that particular time.
Again, balance is the best alternative, otherwise it´ll become and anarchy.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
It means a lot to us.
and it has been very hard.
Elivan,
Thank you for your kind words and for the choice of adjective (soul-searching). It’s great and flattering to know that you feel my words make some sort of difference.
Anyway, I have a choice here.
Agree with the sensible, level-headed stuff you say (which is easy enough to do) or problematize it further. Guess which one I’m choosing? 🙂
You said that the best strategy for you was to meet them halfway in order to address that particular “problem” (your words). This can be read in a number of ways, of course, and one of them is: “You’re better off with a pre-defined syllabus and pre-defined teaching processes, but your agenda and anxiety might get in the way. So, in order to get around that, I will try to reach a compromise.”
This is a sensible and entirely valid assumption and, trust me, it’s the one that I myself have used for many years and will continue to use as long as I’m in the business of writing textbooks and designing courses. For the sake of survival (and to keep a minimum degree of coherence with my current job and set of beliefs), I cannot subscribe to “anarchy” (to use your words) as a modus operandi. I just can’t.
But the neck-breaking speed with which students’ profiles, needs and attention spans are changing are forcing all of us to redefine time-honored words like “aim” and “focus.”
This is why maybe, and I say maybe, “meet them halfway” is the easy way out in this case: it helps us (and I really mean US – as a teacher I face the very very same issues and dilemmas you do and probably react in the same way) address the most immediate problems we face, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage us to look beneath the surface and ask ourselves:
“What is REALLY going on here, beyond what I can see?”
Thank you, Elivan! 🙂
We should have a delete buttom.
This last sentence “and it has been very hard” was a mistake.
Fret not.
Luiz,
Congratulations on the blog. I found the most recent post so interesting, especially the way you draw on three experiences that map out the questions.
I am working towards training for Early Years education here in the UK at the moment and we have this issue of…”teaching the individual child” in groups of twenty!
Also, I’ve felt those same tensions in therapy. In therapy its just one to one and it’s already hard to find the balance, in groups that challenge is multiplied.
I found myself resisting the therapist (CBT) and yet trying to put my reservations aside and “go with it” or trust it and put my questions on hold.
My first intuition reading your text on classes was to think about this. Asking the students to trust the overall practice of the class…(there is method in my apparent madness/ willing suspension of disbelief) and at the same time to give value to all the questions that pop up in their heads during the lesson. Perhaps, it would work to have an agreement to note them down and have an agreed time set aside to deal with them either together or to direct them to self learning resources… “First, check this in Swann, “How English Works”…etc.). Although I agree that this doesn’t get to the deeper malaise of fast shifting needs and the “a thousand tabs open at once” syndrome.
However, if someone has 10 tabs open all the time, unless they’ve got a way of keeping on task or recalling focus, they can get lost! (I speak from experience). In this day and age of all info at our finger tips we do need to learn strategies for knowing when to go off at a tangent and when to come back and to keep checking whether we are on track or not…maybe educators will need to work on that in teaching learning skills.
I was also interested in your description of reaching for the mouse when watching TV and what that all relates to.
The new fast access to all sorts of resources of varying quality has one interesting outcome. As you said we are less and less in a passive situation and for some I guess that means our levels of tolerance of a mismatch between what we perceive we need and what we are getting are getting lower and lower. What are the implications of that for our classes?
It’s an interesting set of questions you’ve raised.
I’ll keep following the blog.
Thanks for the stimulating article!
Um abraço,
Dear Louise,
Thank you for your kind words and it’s such a pleasure to be able to speak (!!!) to you again after – how long has it been – nearly 20 years?
And also thank you for your thoughtful and well-articulated post – it’s clear that you’ve been giving all these questions a lot of thought. It’s good to know that you’re one of those professionals to whom asking the right questions is more important than arriving at the right answers. ELT should thank its lucky stars for people like you, Elivan and Ariane, who took the time to respond to an article that provided no answers whatsoever – especially in a time and age when people are constantly looking for, guess what, answers.
Your “suspension of disbelief” method is, of course, a good one (I’ve lost count of the number of times I myself have used it) and it seems you’re basically making the same point as Elivan: compromise seems to be the best midground solution. But as you youself said, it fails to get to the HEART of the “a thousand tabs open at the same time syndrome.”
And you see, your use of the word “syndrome” (in common with Elivan’s use of “problem”) suggests that we tend to see this sort of ever increasing ability to multi-task, multi-focus, multi-function in what appears to be a predominantly negative light. I know I do. Well, fair enough. We’re all 40-year-olds (well, I’m still 39…), who went to school when the world was nowhere near as interconnected and real-time (for better and for worse) as it is today and who were taught and trained by people with even fewer tabs open, so to speak.
I think the only answer I have at this point is that we are all in the middle of a mamooth paradigm shift and that, to a certain extent, we’re all lost, trying to learn how to be the best teachers we can be. And that’s the whole point: we need to be willing to reassess our practice and our beliefs. I know this sounds very very cliched (takes me back to the old and glorious Cultura Inglesa Reflective Teaching days), but this ability to look beneath the surface and think beyond the doing (hence the name of this blog) is no longer a luxury. It might have been back in the day, but not now – it’s a matter of survival, I think.
Two more points: each kind of “open tab” should be considered in its own right… So, the person who asked me about a good preposition book could / should have waited, of course (and maybe the most sensible course of action would have been to put the answer on hold until the end of the lesson), but the rule anxiety that surfaced in the middle of the drill is different, right? How productive would the rest of the drill have been without clarification?)
In the same way, maybe younger learners and adults ought to be treated differently here. It seems to me that one of the key skills that children need to develop is the ability to focus (and that’s always been true, hasn’t it?) and this need is even more acute now. So, conversely, maybe it’s the school’s job to actually CLOSE some of those tabs for a while and help them explore each one in more depth. So I see where you’re coming from. I do.
Anyway, thanks for reading, Louise.
dearest luiz,
i think now you know what i meant in my last comment… don’t you? hehe
and there’s something else :”They were all adults in their best behavior, of course, but there was a palpable sense of chaos in class” I am really laughing at this “they were all adults”!!!!!! Something I’ve already learned is that “in the classroom, there are no adults or teenagers, they are or we are all and only students”!!!!!
xxxxx
Hi Luciana,
Welcome back!
Many thanks for your post.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree, though, that in class there’s no such thing as younger learners / adults, but students in the broader sense of the word. But that’s for another post, which, incidentally, I’m thinking of inviting someone to write. Stay tuned!
Great post! As usual. In fact today, in the morning, one of my students came in with “his own agenda” and I decided to go over his proposed set of topics, which had to do with modal verbs and auxiliaries. I think it happens all the time.
In my case, as I teach one-to-one mostly at the moment, I try to be careful so that my sts don’t think I don’t have any planned lesson, which I think they might sometimes. Especially if we are not using textbooks. But, I agree with Elivan – the best thing to do is to try to keep some sort of balance.
Hi, Marcos. Thank you for your kind words.
When it comes to the planned / unplanned balance, one-to-one teaching can, paradoxically, be even trickier, I think, precisely because what you’ve said: students’ perception that the teacher is unprepared and things are too laissez-faire.
Over the years, I have found that some of the most successful one-to-one teaching I’ve done depended a lot on how I followed up on students’ questions / language gaps. For example, if I’m using a grammar book with the student, half of it will probably be covered as part of my teaching plan for that student (e.g.: at some point he needs to be able to take part in a job interview, so “for” and “since” should be the next topics), but maybe the other half should be set aside for things that come up naturally in class.
So, for example, if on Monday the student is getting adjectives vs. adverbs wrong, I like the idea of doing a mini presentation (unplanned!) in that lesson and then perhaps following it up with something more structured (i.e., lesson on adjectives vs. adverbs) on the following day.
That’s a possible way to create a certain degree of linearity in the middle of chaos. Plus, when you choose to work on a certain grammatical / lexical area that arose out of the students’ needs and language gaps, chances are that it’ll stick more easily (roughly same developmental level).
Well, we live in a world where information is quick and people don’t need to think anymore to have answers. We only need to have questions and the answer you just Google it! Anyway, I’ve enjoyed reading this post very much! Such a pleasant writing!
Dear Cláudia,
Thanks for stopping by. Interesting take on the fast food industry of thought – form a student’s perspective.
Hi Luiz,
Thought-provoking post. So in the end do you think students have worked out their learning strategies better than students in the past? And do you consider them to be now more autonomous learners?
Just asked the question: how can we help our students to become autonomous learners? on the TeachingEnglish facebook page . Would be very interested to hear your ideas.
Best,
Ann
Hi Ann,
Thank you for stopping by (and congratulations on the wonderful, wonderful job you’re doing on the British Council Page).
Have those students become more autonomous?
Hard to tell. I only taught them once but if I had to guess, I’d say “no”, largely because of their educational background. It’d be hard to fight years and years of dependence-breeding schooling in just a few classes.
First of all, I think I might start by saying that I haven’t taught English in a good while – since early ’08, to be more precise. Since then, I have taught a handful of lessons, but not about the English language. I’m probably out of touch with the classroom world, despite having close friends who still teach, but something here caught my attention.
I reached this article through a link in your post about common pronunciation mistakes and I was quite stunned by it. Students’ own agendas seeping into your well thought-out lesson? All the anecdotes you told are about students who were into the lesson, thinking about the topic at hand, and had a doubt. The lady who interrupted a drill to ask a question could have waited, perhaps, but sometimes students have never been made aware of why the teacher is drilling them at that particular point in the lesson or what’s coming next, so it feels natural for them to ask questions whenever they arise. When you haven’t studied methodology and you don’t know the structure of the lesson planned by the teacher, you have no way of knowing when is the best time to ask a question so it won’t get lost in the sequence of tasks. The student who asked how to say “perceber” probably was thinking about the pictures and trying to put together what he wanted to say. Again, he could have waited until after the instructions, but I put it down to the informality in our classrooms. We Brazilians tend to think it’s okay to interrupt someone who’s giving instructions, unless we’re very clearly told it isn’t, because usually we don’t feel a lot of distance between the students and the teacher.
I guess my point here is: those students were not imposing a different agenda on you, they were following your lead and doing the tasks you assigned them. It just made the gaps in their knowledge to stand out. It’s not like they were trying to take the lesson to a different direction (like teaching a different theme or using a different method), but they were just not reacting the way you hoped. And it’s always going to happen to some extent: no-one can really plan how other people are going to behave.
The way I dealt with it back in the days when I taught English was to tell students what I had in mind (something along the lines of “Now we’re going to repeat a few sentences to practice the pronunciation of verbs in the past, and later we’re going to do an exercise where you fill in the blanks with the correct verb to check if you got the difference between past simple and present simple, okay?”). I was also explicit about what I thought was inconvenient behavior, such as asking questions about topics unrelated to the lesson (if they have doubts on other topics, they were supposed to talk to me in private during the break or after the lesson).
Hi, Mariana!
Thanks for coming along.
What perhaps didn’t come across clearly enough in my post is how important I think these student-directed “learnable” moments are, how student-driven the whole process ultimately is, how apparent this has become over the last few years and how ill-equipped we are to handle all of this. You seem to be under the impression that I was upset that my tightly-planned lesson was disrupted, when, actually, I was trying to underscore my own limitations as a “21st century” teacher in that respect and reminding myself that if we are to promote student learning, there’s a whole new set of skills to be developed and deployed.
Luiz, you´re right, I probably interpreted your text in a way that was different from what you intended. To me, you seemed somewhat surprised at how students behaved.
In my opinion, a student-centered classroom is much like a conversation with a friend: you may start out with a goal in mind and ideas on how to get there, but you can´t really plan the outcome in terms of “One hour into the conversation, I´ll have convinced my friend to go to a pub with me Friday at 7pm”. You may hope for it, you may prepare yourself to achieve that result, but the actual result has some degree of unpredictability to it because an interaction always depends on your interlocutor´s wants, needs and reactions.
Exactly! The most meaningful, memorable and maybe “retrievable” learning will probably take place during those “open spaces”. My point was that students are increasingly controlling their own learning and pushing (and I don’t mean “pushing” in a negative way whatsoever) their own agendas and we’re still coming to terms with this sort of paradigm shift. The lesson I described was meant to show how ill-equipped I was to juggle the existing syllabus and students’ own organic syllabuses. You see, Mariana, I actually suspect that relatively few teachers are aware that there’s a paradigm shift going on, so my aim was to urge the reader to look upon his or her lessons with slightly more critical eyes. Anyway, it looks as if we’re basically on the same page. Thanks for stopping by and don’t be a stranger, ok? 🙂
Ooops, a little typo in my unbelievably long comment: the last line was supposed to read “if they had doubts on other topics”.
Hello, everything is going sound here and ofcourse every one is sharing facts, that’s truly fine, keep up writing.