The Language Teacher
July 2003
Enhancing Our Hundred Secret Senses
Elka Todeva
School for International Training
Teachers all want to be part of educational systems which offer their students exciting learning opportunities. Equally important is the desire to work in institutions which invigorate and sustain passion and devotion to teaching. On the other hand, teachers have long acknowledged some of the grim realities of education and have felt at times burnt out or not completely satisfied with their teaching. The drive to do better has brought about the exploration of various models for professional development that preserve and enhance a teacher's excitement, commitment and sense of mission.
Educators and philosophers going back to Socrates and Plato, and, in more recent times, Dewey (1933), Richards and Lockhart (1994), and Rodgers (2002), to mention but a few, have strongly argued that reflection is one such model with great potential. It is not just another method to "save" education. Reflection is a deliberate process which allows us to make better sense of what we are already doing. Particularly when done in a community, reflection leads to deeper insights, opens up new possibilities, and reveals deeper connections that are conceptually coherent and personally meaningful.
There already exists a substantial body of literature showing the impact of reflection on our teaching practices (see reports on the Teacher Knowledge Project at www.sit.edu/tkp; Graves, 2002; and Rodgers, 2002a). It has been pointed out that what we choose to reflect on and the way we interpret concrete experiences can be limited by our assumptions, personal teaching philosophies, our culture, or the metaphors we operate under. Any of the above may leave us with blind spots and we may not even contemplate the possibility that particular elements in our teaching may have a significant effect on our students' learning. Also noteworthy is that practitioners often make the object of reflection those areas that they have perceived as problematic. In such a problem-oriented approach, we miss out on opportunities to maximize student learning through more comprehensive reflective practices.
It will be the objective of my workshop to provide participants with an opportunity to explore different frameworks which enhance our ability to see and to look at key elements in teaching from multiple perspectives. Frameworks reduce our blind spots and, as writer Amy Tan would put it, they help us to better tap into "our hundred secret senses."
Initial scaffolding of the reflective process through various frameworks can be beneficial for novice teachers. It can be no less beneficial for seasoned practitioners who have not had much opportunity to follow developments in the field or who have lacked a chance to share much with colleagues. In fact, conceptual frameworks invite all of us to explore our daily practice from a variety of fresh perspectives. Not only do they allow us to focus on particular issues, but if well designed, they offer opportunities to keep track of intricate networks of relationships that shape both the process and outcomes of our teaching.
My inquiry into the question of how we can maximize our reflective practices has been primarily informed by three sources which share much common ground: brain-based learning theory (see Caine & Caine, 1991), the five disciplines of learning organizations as first outlined in Senge (1990), and Fanselow's systematic approach of contrasting conversations (Fanselow, 1992). A serendipitous visit to a Matisse/Picasso exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which was targeted at children, gave me an idea how to translate many of the insights of the above three theories into easy to grasp procedures that can intrigue and inspire us to look at our practice in a more structured way.
All three theories contend that we learn optimally when we endeavor to make better sense of what we are already doing, i.e. when our learning is embedded in our own practice. Meaningful learning engages our intellect, creativity, and emotions. Inquiries into our teaching and student learning may be triggered by curiosity, by a drive to personal mastery and better service to our students, or by perceived problems in our classes. As pointed out, if driven by problems alone, we can easily slip into a search for solutions. What Senge, Fanselow, and Caine and Caine advocate instead is systematic exploration of alternatives in everything we do, carefully keeping track of how every small change we make impacts the entire learning experience of our students. This approach has been described in different ways as conscious rule breaking or contrasting conversations in Fanselow (1987 and 1992), and as metanoia or shift of mind in Senge (1990). Philosophers have long argued that the only way to fully understand what something is, is to try and see what it is not. The root of the verb "to educate" /ex-ducare/ means to take one from a particular place in one's thinking to a new place that allows exploration from a fresh perspective. To take a simple example, we can only appreciate the importance of "wait time" if we experiment with quick elicitation of student responses, which may result in less student participation, poorer performance or fewer opportunities to generate and compare different possible answers.
Keeping the parts and the whole in organic unity is critical for the process of inquiry. The organizers of the Matisse and Picasso exhibition made young learners aware of the importance of both the big picture—where we want to be or the general outcome—and of the parts by asking students to put a candle or a flash light behind an object, which resulted in a shadow outline of the object, deprived of any details that may overwhelm a young artist. The use of small mirrors that allow us to see only part of the object breaks the act of painting into more manageable tasks, something which encourages more people to try their hand at painting. By inviting children to use black duct tape, shadowing and different colors, the organizers further made it possible for children to see the intricate interplay of all the components in a picture as well as how the smallest change in each of these components immediately changes the entire picture.
Construction and deconstruction are not new to teaching. We also start with broad strokes and an outline, when designing our syllabus. Then a number of small mirrors that we acquire while observing other teachers, reading different theoretical sources, or participating in various learning experiences give us the set of concrete principles and material that fill our picture with texture and vibrant colors.
Concepts and frameworks provide us with mirrors that offer focal attention to various components in the fabric of teaching. Once in focal attention, components can be examined in "learningful," contrasting conversations "that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others" (Senge, 1990).
The scope of this article precludes any detailed description of the concepts that will be used in the workshop as scaffolding for those with limited or no experience in using the reflective cycle as a disciplined inquiry, and not just as a problem solver. I would just mention here that in my work as a teacher trainer, I find that teachers and MAT students look at their teaching in a much deeper way when offered as lenses "megaconcepts" such as empowerment, authenticity, autonomy, and learning maximization. If we are aware, for instance, of the importance of authenticity and that students learn much better when engaged in meaningful, authentic experiences, we are more likely to embed the learning of grammar in communicative exchanges, triggering naturally particular grammatical constructions.
The following concepts have also been identified by my MAT students to be among the fundamental ones for any inquiry into teaching, the way lines, shadow and color were selected in the Matisse and Picasso exhibition as fundamental for painting: focal/peripheral learning; preventive/remedial teaching; teacher/student talk; balancing of the four skills and the various learning modalities; Hawkins' I-Thou-It triangle (capturing the dynamics of teacher student interaction and the contribution of each in any particular learning episode); engagement of both cognitive and emotional memory; teaching language patterns vs. individual language items; public/private speaking; individual/small/large group work; ways of making meaning explicit; the role of corrective feedback; the role of minimal oppositions; form/meaning/use; and productive vs. receptive skills.
Some of the above concepts immediately suggest reflection from a contrastive perspective, e.g., comparing teacher vs. student generated language and how opting for one or the other typically results in quite different learning outcomes. It is equally important to have the same contrasting approach with the rest of these frameworks and concepts. The form/meaning/use framework, for instance, gives us a better idea of the exact nature of the challenges students experience with regard to a particular language category (e.g., with the Present Continuous tense in English), but only a contrastive approach can answer our wonderings whether it would be more beneficial for students to be introduced to the Present Simple and Present Continuous tenses simultaneously, rather than working with each separately.
The above list of conceptual frameworks is by no means something reflective practitioners should necessarily follow. Anything in our teaching practice can be the object of a contrasting conversation aimed at a deeper understanding. These frameworks are important solely as possible lenses through which we can look at our teaching. We quickly get rid of our fancy contact lenses when we realize that we can see with our own eyes the awesome intricacies and beauty of teaching.
References
Caine, R., & Caine, G. (1991). Making connections. Teaching and the human brain. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.
Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books
Fanselow, J. (1987). Breaking rules: Generating and exploring alternatives in language teaching. White Plains, NY: Longman.
Fanselow, J. (1992). Contrasting conversations. White Plains, NY: Longman.
Graves, K. (2002). Developing a reflective practice through disciplined collaboration. The Language Teacher, 26(7), 19-21.
Richards, J., & Lockhart, C. (1994). Reflective teaching in second language classrooms. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Rodgers, C. (2002). Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking. Teacher College Record, 104(4).
Rodgers, C. (2002a). Voices inside schools: Seeing student learning—Teacher change and the role of reflection. Harvard Educational Review, 72(2).
Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York, NY: Doubleday Currency.
Elka Todeva is a teacher educator at the School for International Training. She teaches Language Analysis, Lesson Planning, English Applied Linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition. She also supervises pre-and in-service teachers in the USA and overseas. Her publications explore issues related to authenticity, fossilization, late acquisition categories, and the role of grammar in language teaching.
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