The sine qua non of all TESOL training these days is what is called “action research.” This involves observing your own or another's classroom using a “classroom observation instrument”--a form you prepare, then fill out with tick marks—while you keep trying new methods. The form is generally not supposed to be in any way judgemental, only to note what happens. Nevertheless, doing this is supposed in some mysterious way to improve teaching practice.
As I recently pointed out to a friend who is an advocate of the technique, this looks a lot like pseudo-science. Even if people and subjects were all the same—as of course they are not—no data collected in one classroom is ever going to reach the threshold of statistical significance. At the same time, unless we are ready and able to make judgements on what works, no observation is going to improve the technique of any given teacher.
And, supposing we want to make such judgements, how do we do so? Imagine we try a given technique, and the results come in for the next student test, and they show, inevitably, that some students did well, some less well, and some poorly. How do we know from this whether the tested technique worked? We cannot, without some kind of control, using a different technique, involving the same or nearly identical subject and students. And action research has no room for a control.
My friend responds that it is nevertheless of value, because it makes you reflect about your teaching.
I counter:
Jim, let's be frank here.
Unless we can answer the question, “how do we know, in the course of action research, that some new technique is working, and working better than the alternatives?” action research is not valid even on the level of the individual classroom.
You suggest that it is simply good to reflect on how you teach. If so, this still does not necessarily mean action research is the best way to do it. Reflection can involve prayer, study, survey, interview, analysis; experiment is not automatically required. One can reflect rather deeply on sin or death without actually having to try it.
Consider using “action research” in another profession—one that really does involve a body of scientific knowledge. Imagine if an engineer you hired spent his time on your project experimenting with how he joined trusses, rather than following the building code. Would you, as a client, consider that a good thing? Suppose your accountant did the same with your business's books? Good practice? Your doctor? Your brain surgeon?
I don't think so.
You don't want them experimenting or varying their methods—you want them applying the known best practices as they learned them. Anything else would be, in a word (and legally speaking) malpractice.
So isn't it also malpractice for teachers?
The advocacy of of action research in teaching seems to amount in itself to a backwards admission by the reigning authorities in the field that they either 1. have no idea what best teaching practices are, or 2. if they do, cannot teach them. Because, if there are any known best practices, the demand to constantly experiment would systematically undermine them.
I believe there really are some best teaching methods. If I am right—if there is such a thing as good and bad teaching-- and we have strong empirical evidence that this is so--action research becomes actively destructive. If, on the other hand, I am wrong, and we have no idea, it simply becomes useless. But still immoral: immoral first because it is dishonest, pretending to improve teaching when it does not; and immoral second because it necessarily involves experimenting on clients without their informed consent—a plain violation of research ethics.
Why do we do it?
An obvious part of the reason is that anyone who has themselves been to school—let alone to university or even to grad school—has seen good and bad teaching modelled for them daily for many years. This is a far longer and better apprenticeship than you could hope to get for any other job. From this experience, we all know the basics of good teaching, to the extent that we are capable of learning at all; probably too well to need to even put it down in writing.
Unfortunately, that leaves little room for special degrees in education—and little room for a “profession,” with all the prestige and extra pay that this can command. To claim professional status, you need to claim special knowledge and expertise not known to educated people generally.
It is not just that teaching well involves no such hidden knowledge. To try to make teaching into a “profession” is actually selling it short. Vocations are more important to mankind, and to God; and they are harder to do well. Until very recent times, teaching was understood to be a vocation. Christians will be familiar with the gifts of the spirit, from Ephesians 4:11: “It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers.”
In principle, anyone, with enough hard work, can master a profession. But not anyone, no matter how hard they try, can be a competent priest, artist, prophet, or teacher.
That, and professions, though easier to do, pay much better.
We are able to see clearly enough, purely from empirical evidence, that teaching is a vocation, not a profession. First, we know from the statistics that those who go through programs in education get no better results with students on standardized tests than those who have not. Second, we know from the statistics that half of those who graduate from ed school drop out of the field within five years. Having been to ed school and gotten that training seems to have no bearing at all on whether you can actually teach.
Ed schools are useless; but the problem is, they are also a good living for a lot of peoplewho have grown accustomed to that.
Unfortunately, in trying to make teaching a profession, the “special knowledge” the schools drum up that is not obvious to anyone watching what teachers in the past have always done must necessarily be something that teachers in the past have not visibly done. That means the field has a vested interest in dismissing everything teachers have done in the past, and indeed dismissing anew everything newly established every ten years or so. Assuming we have learned anything at all about teaching and learning over the last 200,000 years, this is a sure way to destroy all that knowledge and expertise, and replace it with essentially random behaviours. It is also a way to ensure that we never get better at teaching.
This “action research,” an activity that itself is not visible to and so learnable by students in their seats, and that never comes up with any valid, verifiable results, fits the bill perfectly. It also has the cardinal advantage of being itself easily teachable. Anyone can learn to do it. And, moreover, it can be made to look to the unsophisticated like a scientific activity.
It is a calamity for the students, though, and a horror, surely, to anyone who is truly called to be a teacher, because it forces them to teach badly. No doubt driving most of them out of the field.
Oddly enough, there really are some things that ed schools could usefully be teaching. There really are some things tyro teachers could learn besides what is evident from sitting in a classroom as a student. Yet the ed schools seem uninterested in teaching any of these things. Certainly they do not add up to enough to warrant thinking of teaching as a profession; more like a trade. That may be the problem, or the problem may be, instead, that they are a bit of a slog to learn.
For example, every teacher should obviously know certain math: the math, for example, to turn any mark into a percentage, or adjust a mark out of 12 into a mark out of 30. Right? When working with the el-hi types, I regularly find that virtually none of them know how to do this high school math—we always had to laboriously make every test be out of the number of marks it represented on the final assessment, because they could not do the calculation; or possibly would not take the trouble. Every teacher should know how to bell-curve results, for those frequent times when a test turns out to be too hard or too easy for a class. Yet so far in my rather lengthy life and career, I have only encountered two other teachers who seemed to even know about this—one my own science teacher, the other with a Master's in math from a prestigious university. When I've asked superiors if I could do this for myself and others, they did not know what I was talking about.
I am no great shakes in math myself, but surely we can handle learning a simple equation or two—indeed, it's really just a matter of knowing where to go on the internet to get it when needed.
That may be why it is not taught in ed schools: the math is really high school level. Something more at the level of a trade, not worthy of a profession. But I also smell a certain mental laziness here: for most, math is probably not a lot of fun. Those who are naturally good at it do not tend to end up in ed school—they can do better as accountants or engineers. For anyone who does end up in ed school, doing the math is probably less fun than pretending to be a scientist.
Similarly, it ought to be a no-brainer to give every teacher some training in rhetoric, because that is the essence of what they do every day—public speaking, communicating, holding student interest. This indeed used to be the essential training for a teacher. Do they study it now? Ever? Just the reverse: all the current educational theories seem to share one odd premise—that one should avoid lecturing.
This is especially odd because we have good empirical evidence that “direct instruction”--presenting the information clearly and plainly--is the fastest way to learn. Teachers complain that this is beneath their professional dignity, because it is something mechanical that anyone can do. If so, QED; but I'm also not so sure it is that easy to say something plainly, clearly, interestingly, and memorably. Good speakers, to the contrary, can command pretty fat fees, even more than good writers.
I think perhaps more to the point is the fact that most people do not find public speaking fun. Most people fear it worse than dying. Studying it, and doing it, fails the fun test—for the teacher, not the student.
Mnemonics and mnemonic technology is also a rich field where a good number of things are definitely known. After clear presentation, after understanding, what is the second most vital element in learning? Remembering it. Cognitive studies get into this a little, but there is a vast literature out there spreading over thousands of years and all the cultures of the world. We should be tapping into this, teaching this in ed schools, and do not seem to be.
Instead, as part of their overall wrecking ball approach, just as they are against lecturing, the ed schools are down on memorization altogether.
Why? Again, because memorization is too “mechanical.” So it's beneath the dignity of a professional (but don't try selling that one to a medical student memorizing bone structure, or a law student memorizing cases). But is it fun and easy? Again, apparently not for most people. Why do anything that feels like work, if you can avoid it? Better to stick to the “action research.”
Similarly, every teacher should obviously have a good command of the tools of their trade: computers, projectors, smart boards, the Internet, media, online learning, ICT in general. In general, few teachers seem to know how to use these things, and most even seem resistant to trying. Businesses generally embrace these things for their training well before schools will.
It takes some effort, after all, to learn these things, and to keep learning as new tools come out. It's brain work.
Kind of like a doctor or college professor needing to keep up with his field.
Similarly again, nothing could be more important than actually knowing what it is you are teaching—you can't teach what you do not know. By insisting on degrees in education instead of degrees in the subject taught, we are actually preventing this.
ESL/EFL is perhaps a bit of a special case—by simply being a native speaker, we do have a sense of the language at least greater than that of any likely student. But do not be misled—language is the most complex thing mankind has yet invented, and there are definite levels of expertise. Shakespeare knew English far better than I do. Most of us make mistakes in spelling and grammar fairly often, few can write a good poem, and none of us knows all the words in the language.
This matters at the ESL level—I have not really observed ESL classrooms all that often, but it keeps me awake nights how often I have seen ESL students given a complete bum steer on some matter. Certainly most ESL teachers I have encountered don't have the first idea how to write a good essay, though they all seem to teach it. How can they show a student how to write one? How can they meaningfully judge his work?
So in TESL, it would make good sense to require at least one degree in English or another essay-based discipline requiring definite facility with the language: philosophy, history, theology, rhetoric, journalism. Broadly, the humanities.
Instead, education is all social-science based. The land of the multiple-choice exam.
In ESL, we ought also, as a matter of course, to study and become familiar with the basic elements of the L1 of our learners. This can obviously inform our teaching practice: by knowing the ways in which the L1 differs from English, we can target the areas in which our students will need help, and why. I do not mean the more laborious work of learning their language—not vocabulary. Just an overview of the phonemes and the rules of grammar. Most ESL teachers never seem to do this. In ESL training, it would be a fairly simple thing to include a review of at least the most common L1s in the current ESL world: Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic. The selection of languages could be adjusted regularly depending on current statistics from the field, and reasonable predictions for the future.
Indeed, it would make a huge amount of sense to expect ESL instructors as a matter of course to be reasonably adept in at least one language other than English, acquired not through osmosis in childhood, but through classroom study. You surely need to know how to learn a second language in order to know how best to teach a second language.
Why don't we do it? Again, I suspect simply because it would be slogging. Learning languages, even at this level, takes a certain amount of real application.
Also for ESL, we ought to have a background in comparative culture, because that is the elephant in every classroom—and the elephant goes home with us each night. Does anyone study that formally as part of a TESL program?
Instead, we're all in this silly sandbox called “active research,” making our imaginary castles to be pulled down again by the next tide.
Why? Because, on the one hand, it is not too obvious.
And, on the other, it is not too hard.
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