There used to be signs posted around the school saying, “Proud to be an English-speaking only school,” but when I went to find one today, hoping to include a photo of it in this blog post — I couldn’t find any around anymore. Curious.

At any rate, our school is probably about 80% Thai — with a significant Indian population as second highest population, and then a small mix of Korean, Chinese and European/North American students round out the remaining percentages. The majority of students here speak Thai as their first language, and on a typical day I am fortunate enough to hear enough Thai to pick up the daily playground talk.

As an IT Specialist/Teacher, I teach Grades 3-5 technology and Grade 6 Digital Photography. I have approximately 250 students between the ages of 7 and 12 in my classes — with quite a lot of differentiation in terms of literacy comfort and language acquisition. In my first teaching year here, my Principal evaluated my teaching style and watched carefully how I interacted with my new EFL students. I particularly remember one observation and the feedback that I received. I was teaching a lesson to Grade 4′s and was asking the students why they thought it might be importatnt to save their work. My questioning was similar to the questions written below.

Me: “Why is it important to save our work? Any ideas? Why do you think we should save our work often? What do you think? Do you think saving your work is important?”

Students: <Insert sound of crickets here.>

After the lesson, my Principal and I talked about that particular line of questioning. After a few laughs about the response together, he pointed out very clearly that what I was doing was asking three different sounding questions, and my students were all still processing the first one. It was a good lesson learned…and a good starting point for more lessons down the road.

The transition into an ESL environment has been a particularly important experience. As a teacher in Canada, I had collected hundreds of short educational videos from resources all over the internet and was excited to use htem in the classroom. It became evident pretty early that much of the humour, language and context would be difficult for my new students. As a result, I’ve been forced to look for new multimedia resources for my classroom and more importantly — evaluate those resources with a new set of criteria — with the ESL student foremost in my mind.

In my classroom, I try and find great Web 2.0 resources for my students that challenge their literacy skills while engaging their strong technology skills. Online applications like ZimmerTwins, BitStrips, Prezi, XtraNormal, and GoAnimate are some of the favourite websites in my classes because they blend strong visual elements with literacy and language. No-dialogue games like Samorost or Chasm are big hits any day of the week — probably because the students are able to sit and think about the game in any language they want . . . and there’s nothing wrong with a little break now and then.

Having to rethink ESL teaching strategies and resources is probably something more teachers should be doing — as it challenges us to consider different learners in our classrooms and ultimately widen our catch basin. The nicest part about reinvention is that social networks (like Twitter) and connecting with teachers in forums like Teaching Village can provide very real and meaningful opportunities for sharing and collaboration.

So far the frontline has been as stinulating as one might imagine.

Engage,

Rob Newberry

Rob Newberry is a technology specialist at Ruamrudee International School in Bangkok, Thailand. He began his teaching career specializing in Interactive White Boards and multimedia integration, and now focuses on Web 2.0 applications in the classroom.

Rob is the license holder for TEDxBKK — the first independently organized TED.com event in Thailand.

In 2009 he began a long term relationship with Prezi — an online zooming presentation tool and was nortorious for seeing Posterous on the side.

Follow him on Twitter: RobinThailand

Hello. My name is Tomoe Wakui. Please call me Tomo. I am a high school English teacher in Niigata, Japan. I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself here in Teaching Village.

Let me explain my teaching history briefly. I became an English teacher in 1989. I worked at a Girls High School. Except for only having female students, it was just a normal high school.

After three years, I moved to a kind of vocational high school. The curriculum included textile, domestic science, commercial and general education courses.  There were many mischievous students at this school. They caused a lot of problems, but they were always energetic and bright. I loved them very much. The problem with teaching English in both of these high schools was that most of the students didn’t have a concrete purpose to learn English. Even term examinations weren’t enough to provide a purpose to learn. In order to motivate students and have them experience a sense of achievement and enjoyment, I tried to focus on 5 points in teaching. First, I always set goals for the whole year, the whole lesson, each class and each activity. Second, I spent enough time at the pre-reading stage. In this section, students were encouraged or motivated to read a text by looking at the pictures, title or diagrams, and guessing the content of the text. Thirdly, I chose materials carefully. I tried to find texts that were inherently interesting to the students. Fourth, I tried to adopt a communicative approach with my lessons as much as possible. I used classroom English. I made my own conversation textbook and used it in every class. This book consisted of questions and answers because they are the most basic elements of communication. To teach how to ask and answer promotes student communication. Lastly, I did many kinds of pair and group activities in my class and created an atmosphere in which students could talk freely and comfortably.

In 1998, I moved to a credit-system high school. Many students there had various kinds of problems. Some of them needed mental support. Both very fragile and sensitive students and rebellious students were mixed together in one school. It was really tough for teachers to take care of each student. Since many different students were absent from class one after another, it was very difficult to accumulate knowledge. I worked for this school for nine years. While teaching there, I learned a lot about counseling, mental health, class organization and so on. I used a cooperative learning style in my classes. I divided students into groups in which all members had roles. I also used this group system both inside and outside of the class to encourage students to take care of each other. Students did really well. I was very proud of them.  They stuck together like a family and enjoyed learning English together. My students made me realize how wonderful it is to learn together! They managed to do well because they did not learn alone; they motivated and stimulated each other because they worked as a team.

Now, I am working for an academic high school. I was just transferred last year. Working in an academic school is hard because teachers are always busy and face a huge amount of pressure to cram students full of as much knowledge as we can, and then worry about the result of their exams. In my former schools students caused a lot of trouble and did not have specific reasons to learn English. But I could teach anything I wanted to suit the students’ levels and preferences. I didn’t have to reach a certain fixed standard. I just set each attainable goals and got there moderately. When I first started teaching at an academic high school, I didn’t feel like I had enough experience or skill because teachers were required to follow a rigid syllabus in order to help students attain a level high enough to pass very difficult college entrance exams, irrespective of their abilities, motivation or interests. So, in order improve my teaching ability, I observed most of the other teachers’ classes and I also visited classes at other academic high schools. Even so, I felt like my efforts were not enough. I needed to know more about many kinds of effective teaching skills. Finally, I made up my mind to learn at International University in Japan. That is where I am now studying.

Present conditions at a Japanese academic high school

Since I became a teacher, I have explored specific methods in which students learn and help each other in pair and group activities. However, in a typical class at an academic high school, there is no time to do any “extra” communicative activities. I found that some teachers still teach English in almost the same way we were taught when we were high school students. Nowadays, there are a lot of new English teaching methods. Especially, the communicative way of teaching has become popular. However, the truth is that the majority of teachers at academic high schools still follow a passive, teacher-centered, lecture style of teaching.

The main reason is college entrance examinations. Students believe that studying at an academic high school will help them pass the exam to get into a good university. Teachers face a lot of pressure to finish the lessons which will prepare students for the exams. I really want to do something fun in class, such as communicative team-teaching lessons, but this puts me in conflict with the reality that we have to cram as much knowledge for the entrance exams as we can, and finish each lesson as fast as we can.

 If we teach students more communicatively, they will enjoy interacting with each other. The problem is simply time limitations and teaching skills.

However, I still believe that student-centered communicative teaching methods don’t necessarily have to disturb students in their studies for entrance exams. Instead, this style of teaching has beneficial effects on language acquisition. So, I would really like to develop more interactive, student-centered ways to teach, using existing textbooks. I would like to prove that even at an academic school, we can teach communicatively, involving students with the text and with each other as well as giving them enough knowledge for entrance exams. I believe that if students learn more interactively, it will not only make them feel motivated, but also have a great combined effect on their examination results.

Tomo’s Tips for pair and group activities

Here are nine tips for my pair and group activities. This might be a little bit different from typical pair and group activites. I believe that student-centered pair/group activities encourage students to work independently. Iwill be glad if these might be of some help for other teachers.

1. Each group consists of four members. All students must have their own roles. 

(a) They should choose a leader to represent them as the “Chairman” of the group

(b) Then they choose a “Secretary” who will correct the assignments and take notes during discussion.

(c) The other two members will be “Spokespeople” who present the activity to the whole class. In case these two members fail to do their task, it is the Chairman’s responsibility to carry it out.

2. All the group members should cooperate and work together to practice using English language–in reading, writing and speaking, both inside and outside the classroom.

3. The secretary must ensure that every member of the group submits assignments or activities. He/She only submits assignments to the teacher once all of the members have completed the tasks.

4. Usually, the teacher can’t finish most activities during class. Thus, students have the liberty to choose any method to accomplish the reading and listening activities (e.g., Shadowing, Fill-in-the-Blanks, Read-and-Look-Up, Reproduction activity) according to their English level and preferences and should be encouraged to continue doing their preferred activities even outside the classroom.

5. Every day, the first 10 minutes of the class is utilized for a group reading test. Each member of the group must do well on the test; otherwise, the group takes the test again until every member passes.  The group is encouraged to help each other to improve their English reading skills so they can pass the test with flying colors.

6. If a student is absent, their partner or group members update the absentee before the next class. It is very important for them to help the returning absentee to catch up.

7. Each member of the group must respect their co-members, especially during discussion activities.  They must give each other a chance to express their opinions on the topic and should show their interest by listening carefully and interacting with each other. All members of the group must learn how to become good listeners in order to foster good communication within the group, thus improving their communication skills. Showing positive peer attitude and being an audience of good listeners encourages the speaker to gain more confidence and be motivated to present strong arguments.

8. Students are responsible to look out for each other. If one member of the group is tasked to do a presentation in front of the class, the rest of the group is obliged to support that member.

9. Members share ideas, exchange information, set goals and encourage each other to improve their English skills. If one of the members has higher English skills than the rest of the group, that member should share knowledge, be a role model and foster peer support to his/her co-members.

In September 2003 I got a phone call from my former primary school teacher offering me a part time job in the old primary school I started my education in. I felt extremely excited!

It was my first real job offer and I was supposed to work with teachers who had taught me the alphabet as colleagues! At that time, I was still a student at a university but as I had already completed my pedagogy and methodology courses, I was more than welcome in Szkola Podstawowa in Tuchom, Poland.

Tuchom is a small village in the north of Poland and the school there provides education for kindergarten and early years students from grades 1 to 3. There are around 10 students in each grade so the total number of children attending is around 40. There were many attempts to close the place down due to economic reasons and to send the kids to bigger schools but so far, luckily, these attempts were unsuccessful.

Teaching in a very small school like the one in Tuchom and bearing in mind the fact that it was the school I attended was an amazing experience. Teachers knew every child by name, they were familiar with their situations at home and had plenty of time to focus their attention on the kids’ individual development. The atmosphere in the school reminded me of home and students felt at home being there.

My students showed extreme willingness to learn English. A vast majority, if not all, of them had never been abroad or heard anyone speak the language before. They came from frequently large, poor or broken families. Their knowledge of the world outside the village was scarily scarce. I remember bringing toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals into the classroom and having the kids ask, ‘What is McDonald’s, teacher?’

The beginning of every school year was a torture test. I had to collect money for the course books from the students, order the books from the bookshops and then carry them on my own from the nearest city. As we were ordering an insufficient number of books, the bookshops did not want to provide free transport. The same story happened when I requested Teacher’s Books and audio CDs from the publishing houses. ‘Sorry, you need to order at least 20 books from each level to get them,’ I was always told.  Fortunately, after calling the representatives repeatedly, explaining my situation and begging, I finally succeeded.

Still, half of the students could not afford the books, there was no computer and no VCD/DVD players to use in the classroom and no copying machine either. The only thing we had was an old cassette player that kept breaking down.

Yet looking back I cannot help smiling. All the effort and money I put into helping these kids was not for nothing. They loved learning English. With the help of ‘Songs for Very Young Learners’ and the forever breaking cassette player, my students had the chance to learn songs and sing in English. We spent a lot of time doing crafts work and sold what we created during the Christmas fair to raise money for the school. During a Spring Fair my students sang ‘Head and Shoulders’, ‘The Wheels of the Bus’ and ‘Wind the bobbin up’ for the whole village community and the ovation they got was worth a million! They managed to get everyone involved in singing the songs and doing the actions and I felt really proud of being their teacher!

At the moment I teach English to Young Learners at Istek Belde, a primary school in Istanbul, Turkey. It’s a private school that provides education for the more affluent members of society. Needless to say, I no longer face difficulties like the ones I faced in Tuchom. The classrooms are well equipped. Most children learned English in kindergarten. They all have their books and are eager to learn.

There is only one thing I am not sure of. Will they still say ‘Hello’ to me in English every time they see me even after years have passed like the students from Tuchom in Poland?

Anita Kwiatkowski holds a M.A. in English Philology from the University of Gdansk, Poland. She has been teaching kids and adults in Poland since 2001 and in 2007 she moved to Turkey. During the week she does her best teaching young learners. At the weekends she performs her duties as a Cambridge ESOL oral examiner, runs workshops for teachers or travels. She is a huge fan of Pedro Almodovar, loves face painting and sometimes indulges in Indian cuisine.

You can follow Anita’s adventures on her blog and on Twitter.

In my case, I don’t know when I became a teacher. Maybe it was when my parents hung a blackboard behind my bedroom door. Maybe when I first arranged all my teddy bears and my little cousins as my first students. It might have started many years later when I wanted to drop out from my dreary Economics degree and I bought books about teaching, but I didn’t have the courage to actually follow through on my instinct (fate, desire, willingness) at that time. Maybe it happened when I left my bank job, went to Yemen and by chance ended up in front of 20 Yemeni men teaching them English. It might also have been when I came back to Spain from living in Laos and I studied Education. Or maybe it started a month and a half ago when I got my position to work in a primary school in a village in my home region of Extremadura, Spain.

Whatever the case is, whether or not my first students were my teddy bears, the Yemeni men or my current 7 year old students, I feel that my teaching career has evolved and been shaped by the countries and different kinds of students that I have had the pleasure to teach.

I started teaching adults in Yemen speaking rusty English and I found myself turning the pages of a coursebook and following word by word the instructions of the teaching guide. I took tips from other more experienced teachers and filled a bag full of activities that were ready-to-use at any time when I was in front of a class.

Years later I found myself in Laos teaching English to children. Again with a coursebook in my hands and my bag full of activities and now with even some years of experience, but all the same, I found myself helpless. Many will say that if you are a teacher you can teach both adults and young learners, but I disagree.

My first month or two in Laos I simply couldn’t understand why children couldn’t remember a word we had just learned. They could repeat it very accurately, better than adults, but forget asking them about that word five minutes later because they were not going to remember it. I learned that children need to experience learning, they need to see things a million times in a million different ways and they need to use all their senses. I was suddenly a master at singing, dancing, craftmaking and so on, not out of talent, but of necessity. At that point I decided that I wanted to come back to Spain and take an Education degree to actually know what I was doing instead of experimenting with (or better said on) children. My trial, test and mostly error was wasting their time and their parent’s money.

Most of my teachers in university during my Education degree taught me, probably without knowing, not what I should do, but what I shouldn’t do in a class. To be fair, I did have some teachers who opened my eyes to different learning styles, intelligences, the cognitive developmental stages of children and also how to deal with children with special needs. Teaching a foreign language to children is a completely different story than teaching adults. They learn in completely different ways. It is true that you can use some of the same techniques with children as you do with adults, but that doesn’t mean that you are doing a good job.

On the 23^rd of September I started as a Year 2 teacher in a public school in a small town in Extremadura. I teach English (two hours a week) as well as other subjects to the Year 2 students and also 2 English classes of half an hour a week to students of 4 years old. My new challenge was set.

If approaches should be different between adults and young learners, there is also something to say about the learning differences between young learners and very young learners. In my case, I have a coursebook for my Year 2 class but I don’t have one for the preschool students. With my Year 2 students, the fancy coursebook with stickers included almost does the job on its own. Every unit is designed around one topic, and they make a picture dictionary with stickers of pictures of the main vocabulary. On top of that there are card games, spinners, puppets and board games. The book also includes a CD with all the listenings and a CD Rom for the students to use at home or in the computer room at the school (every class has an assigned time to use it and in it we also have access to an Interactive White Board). A third of my students received these books for free from the school through scholarships (the rest pay for all their books). This ensures that everybody is equipped with brand new stickers and unused activity books.

These all-in-one books are designed for everyone. From experienced teachers to novices, native teachers or for teachers whose mother tongue is not English and among the later with those fluent in English and with those with little English, the one size fits all model seems to work. This is the beauty of these coursebooks but the beast is that the same topics are SEEN every year but not in depth to be meaningful and connect to students’ experiences and interests.

Without a coursebook to follow for the 4 year old students, there is space for experimenting. The school could have suggested that we use a book for them too, but in general parents find the expensive preschool English books full of colourful pictures and empty otherwise. Many Spanish parents hold the view that learning is only accomplished through writing and loads of homework. I asked for advice from the teachers of the 3 year old students and also of the 5 year olds, and I saw that they were also hitting their heads on the wall, because (as had happened with me in Laos) they were trying to teach the little ones with activities more suitable for older children or even adults. If young learners are dealing with learning how to write and read in their own language, very young learners are dealing with motor skills.

I took the long way to finally become a teacher and now I am in front of 22 little ones who look at me and hopefully trust me with their learning. With no coursebook available for the 4 year olds, I have started to explore another ancient tradition, the storyteller. In Jamaa El Fna Square in Marrakech you find hundreds of people wandering around and listening to stories, something so ancient and vital to humanity that it receives special consideration by UNESCO. You find the entertainment industry selling millions of copies of DVD stories and tales for children. I wanted to explore the magic of stories with the little ones so I bought a big book version of Bill Martin’s “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” I read it the first day and didn’t get such an enthusiastic response, but I couldn’t understand why. Not having many other options available the next day I told the story again and again and again. Later, things became clear. Look at a child choosing a book to be read to them or a movie to watch and you will realize that they always choose the one that they have heard or seen a million times, much to the desperation of their parents.

Then yet more was about to be discovered. Day after day I walked into my Year 2 class with my huge version of “Brown bear” and the students’ curiosity grew until one day when they asked me to read it to them, too. Now, by popular demand, every single English class has to start with our friend the brown bear and even the fancy stickers don’t seem to be as appealing as our dear bear friend.

It’s all a learning process, not only for the students but for the teachers too! (maybe more so) It’s been a long journey just to get to this point, and surely I will learn a lot more, but for right now I’m happy just wandering around the school and hearing “Brown bear, brown bear” sung by the students in classes and on the playground.

Life put more than one obstacle in Conchi’s way before granting her her dream to become a teacher. Law and Economic degrees to satisfy her parents weren’t enough to dissuade her from getting her hands dirty at the blackboard. It took a twist of fate on the South-Western corner of the Arabian peninsula that ended up putting her in front of real, live students (as opposed to the stuffed animals and reluctant cousins she used to teach as a child). From there she taught in Azerbaijan and the smiling classrooms of Laos before ending up against her current and biggest challenge…the analog-age  Spanish Education system. A fearsome and unrelenting foe for some, but for this teacher, a piece of chalk.

Visit Conchi on her growing blog Ken and Karen

Or follow her tweets on Twitter Azulaza

A photo I took on the island of Santorini.

Determined to arrive to her destination, she climbs up the steep slope, ignoring the surrounding thorns and other invisible dangers. What is her eventual reward? She has reached the peak right on time to feel the calming effect of a most memorable sunset.

This is how I personally perceive teaching to be: its initial joys give way to responsibilities, potential trouble in class and special needs to cater for. But every single time the teacher has the chance to witness the progress her class has made, all efforts are justified and there is a soothing effect on the soul.

I now dare say that teaching English in Greece can be as enjoyable, challenging, pleasantly surprising and full of adventure as travelling in it. I also intend to prove this statement, since this is the topic of the present article.

MY PROFESSIONAL REALITY

Since my graduation from university, I have worked in the private school of foreign languages which my mother has successfully run for 34 years in the town of Heraklion in Crete. The principle by which the school invariably operates is the incorporation of all new practices and technologies we consider useful to the students in the teaching procedure.

We have made sure that there is all the supportive equipment needed for such lessons available, having in our disposal not only pleasantly colourful classrooms, but also a spacious projection room, a library with books of all levels and a state-of-the-art computer room. Importantly, all our classes consist of a limited number of learners, which facilitates the teacher to focus on each one of them individually when needed. The school also organizes educational trips to England almost every summer, parents’ meetings and end-of-year celebrations to supplement classroom work.

This is why I feel, without any exaggeration, that all my requirements for doing the best job I can have been met and I am thankful for that.

From First days in the new computer room!

Making cards and playing educational on-line games.

THE STUDENTS’ BACKGROUND

Almost all of the students live permanently in Heraklion and are mainly Greek, while some of them are Albanian or Georgian. It is common for them to embark on the full course of learning English (i.e. including oral and written speech) at the age of 8, after being taught the oral and written form of the Greek language for 2 years at school. However, a few parents insist that the starting point should be at the age of 7. I have noticed that in the cases that the children themselves truly want to start earlier, they never have difficulty in keeping up with their slightly older classmates.

One last point I would like to make about my students is that they live in a community where there is considerable exposure to the English language. Not only are there English films and shows on TV all the time, but the students are also passionate about American pop and rap music and like to find information relevant to their interests on webpages written in English. What is also worth mentioning is that quite a lot of native speakers of English live in Heraklion and in Greece, in general, while almost half of the native population appears to speak English as a second language (see this list of countries by English-speaking population on Wikipedia).

THE PRE-JUNIORS’ LEARNING JOURNEY

What is the best course of action for a parent, in my opinion, is having their children do a pre-junior class, starting at the age of 4-5. This cannot even be perceived as a class in its strict meaning, but  rather as a pleasant big game, full of games, songs, drawings, collages, stories and fairy tales, all the above involving the extensive use of oral, but not written, English. In fact, this class becomes more and more popular in Greece, as the children who join it are extremely enthusiastic about it (thus, more motivated), learn English in a process similar to learning their mother tongue and become fond of the foreign language from a very young age.

One of my youngest and most talented junior students, George, started at the age of 5 by going through the learning procedure I described above. He is now 7,  able to interact as well as write in English with a surprising ease. Since discovering students’ interests and incorporating relevant material in the lesson always pays off, I did the same with little George who is an accomplished expert on all kinds of animals. One resulting project he did when he was 6 consists of stickers, real sea creatures and drawing. You can find the relevant post and photographs here.

From Various Projects 2009

Marina’s story is quite similar to George’s. This is her project on word groups. You can read more about it here.

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS

Undeniably, 7 to 9-year-old children (not to mention the 4-year-old ones on the pre-junior level) need a lot of guidance to turn into motivated learners. Therefore, I would say that the lesson is mostly teacher-centered, but soon after the presentation stage that each activity entails follows the production stage, which allows the teacher to step back and monitor the students’ progress.

As related research has proven, children’s attention span lasts for a few minutes at this age; therefore, this kind of lesson calls for a variety of techniques which will attract the little ones’ interest at all times  as well as relieve their need to move around the room.  During the initial stages, the main focus is on vocabulary and self expression, while grammar is taught implicitly, namely the rules are understood through the stories and the examples provided, without being obviously stated. After a couple of years, grammatical phenomena start to manifest themselves in ‘cruelly’ explicit tables whose intimidating effect is immediately alleviated by various games, like the tense train.

From Verb tenses train! (A’ Class)

A common lesson of mine with young learners includes revising the material of the previous lesson and checking homework, then alternately presenting and practising new vocabulary and increasingly complex sentence formation. The above are interspersed with rhythmic songs (which allow movement and fun), special projects and collages, flashcard games, board games, puppet games (surprisingly, these stubborn puppets insist on speaking only English!),  relevant videos and occasional Internet activities appropriate for the learners’ age.

Personally, I love letting them know about foreign customs and special days in other countries and I more often than not prepare additional activities, which enable them to enrich their knowledge in an amusing way. A case in point would be the Halloween which is not celebrated in Greece, but always excites the children’s imagination. Grabbing the opportunity for more creativity that this day offers, intermediate students created a class glog last year, while the younger ones played tic-tac-toe with Halloween pictures or did some online colouring.

What forms an indispensable part of my teaching ‘toolkit’ is miming new words and urging students to follow together with pronouncing the new items. Miming can serve as an excellent outlet for suppressed body energy and, thus, enable the teacher to discipline the class more easily later on.

My ultimate aim in most activities is to stir the children’s vivid imagination, as I happen to believe in the power of it. Therefore, I try to help them dive in the world of fantasy their books depict, feel the characters as their companions in learning and, subsequently, make their own stories or dialogues with their new ‘friends’.  And why not urge them to smell the odours described in the story, share the  heroes’ excitement or, perhaps, chatter their teeth when the scary monster is approaching?

Flashcard game involving imitation and asking questions. See also a video of some junior songs and activities on the YouTube page of the school.

WHAT ABOUT ADULT BEGINNERS?

Things are not totally different with people who start learning English at an older age. They do not share the need for movement and pantomime, of course, but they welcome all the board games, crossword puzzles and funny stories the teacher has to offer. They also seem to be a lot more self conscious than  the children, as they have the maturity to realize that they are the ones holding the responsibility for their own learning; so, I think error correction and feedback, in general, require painstaking care when it comes to this age group. A video of an adult beginners’ sample lesson can be found here.

A very efficient consolidation technique all adults seem to appreciate is blogging. Even if they do not feel very comfortable using the computer, sooner or later they find themselves experiencing the ‘blogging frenzy’! The perfect example is my student, Aliki, who also happens to be  the mother of two children. Not simply aiming at getting a certificate, which is, from my point of view, the key to successful language learning, she was  more than willing to create and maintain a blog which she has by now turned into an electronic language portfolio. She  has now started  publishing her vocabulary calendars every month (find out more about this type of task on the wall below), recording her memorable experiences and collecting her favourite links: only a few of the infinite possibilities blogging offers to students.

MORE SAMPLES OF STUDENT WORK

Here is a collection of links to all kinds of special work done in the school. I hope this list proves useful or gives rise to constructive comments and questions.

• Students’ individual or team blogs and their contribution to the Blogging Challenge 2009 (using blogger or wordpress)

• Students’ glogs (on-line posters) on special days and glogs on the importance of a healthy lifestyle

• Some pre-junior work

• Samples of A’ junior projects

• Samples of B’ Junior projects

• Vocabulary calendars for adult learners

• Teach poetry and record students while reading it (using vocaroo)

• Electronic noticeboards with images, videos and links on the topics of  tolerance and world hunger created by advanced students (using wallwisher)

• Reading books and assigning relevant tasks

• Projects with text and images to protest about the forest fires in Greece

SOME TEACHER RESOURCES TO BE USED WITH ADVANCED LEARNERS

• My presentation on teacher and student blogging: how to set up a blog and ideas about how to use it

• An FCE lesson on ‘Wuthering Heights’

• A lesson on tolerance and its importance

My name is Christina Markoulaki and I am a 25-year-old teacher of English as a foreign language in Heraklion, where I was also born. I have also graduated from the department of English Language Literature and Linguistics of the National and Kapodistrian University in Athens, getting my degree with honours. I am fortunate enough to have been trusted with students of all ages and levels within my 4 working years, their ages ranging from 4 to 44 years old!

I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara for giving me this wonderful opportunity to present my teaching ‘journey’ in the Greek reality, which, combined with the teachers’ narrations from other countries, will help us get a better grasp of all the parts of the ‘elephant’ (referring to the Indial tale Barbara uses to illustrate how multifaceted teaching can be)  and will hopefully provoke further discussion of important educational issues.

Note: The publication of students’ photographs and videos is under the parents’ written permission.

At any moment between 4:30 and 8pm here in Spain, thousands of unqualified people are standing in front of children pretending to be teachers. This, however, is not a game of make believe played by kids with bits of chalk in their hands, but an extremely lucrative industry spread throughout every town and village on the Iberian peninsula.

…and it’s a game I play every weekday.

There are two widely held myths in language teaching throughout the world. Myths so deeply engrained and widespread that they might supersede Thor’s hammer, Mohammed’s muse, Buddha’s finger and Jesus’ loaf of bread. What on earth could be more powerful and believable than those?

The following TEFL axioms:

#1 Any native speaker can teach English.

And

#2 Any teacher of English can teach children.

The above myths, of course, are completely dependent on your definition of a teacher. If you define a teacher as someone who can simply stand, or even just sit in front of groups of people and speak English…well your faith in the above myths is secure. However, if your idea of what a teacher is consists of something more, matters of faith begin to fissure and shake. One of the main problems in the language teaching world today seems to be that the former has many more adherents than the latter.

Reasons for the spread of this fundamentalist thought abound (money anyone?) but one of the more easily overlooked explanations is simply the how and why people end up teaching English. We all know that TEFL teaching is more transitory than birdlife in the marshes of Mauritania; with the most common scenario being where ‘teachers’ find themselves in a country where they don’t speak the local language and need some money. A quick stop to a few of the local language schools and before they know it are knighted teachers and are thrown before the little lions.

I am no different from those above.

My TEFL career started in an Irish pub off of Tribunal square in Madrid. My travel companion, a qualified teacher, had been looking for a job for several days and had come up with nothing but rejection. Yet that afternoon she walked in and said that I, not her, started work the next day. The difference between her and I? While she had the qualifications and experience, I had the right passport.

It’s here where I could have flocked with the TEFLese Mauritanian geese, muddling through a year or two, relying on charm and plain old luck to keep the classes that would have me and moving just fast enough to find some more when the discerning wouldn’t, then moving on to get a ‘real’ job back in the comforting embrace of an English speaking country.

In fact, to a point I did, but after a time I was tired of blank looks and extremely sweaty afternoons trying to bluff my way through the present perfect. I then decided to get some training and did what most concerned ‘native’ speakers do in a similar situation, I took a CELTA course. My eyes were suddenly opened to the possibilities that existed in a language classroom and began to see what a language class could be. I had put my foot, or better said toe, in the door of a career that would take me through places like Yemen, Azerbaijan, Laos and Libya.

Training courses, TESOL conferences, workshops, mistakes, didactic epiphanies and hundreds of classroom hours later, I considered myself a proficient teacher. That’s not to say great, but I think I had been through enough different teaching experiences to call myself a veteran. I had finally earned that Certificate in English Language Teaching to ADULTS.

But wait a minute…If my entire career has been focused on the teaching of adults, from kalashnikov totting tribesmen in Yemen to oil workers in Baku, why was there suddenly a 4 year old boy biting my leg in my classroom in Caceres, Spain? Well, you’re a teacher aren’t you?

But is teaching adults the same as teaching kids?

I had taken a job in my wife’s hometown, decided to settle down, put down some roots and now had to extract a boy’s incisors from my calf. I unfortunately had once been a proponent of myth #1, but before I knew it, I had become an unwitting missionary for #2.

Out here beyond the sprawl of the capital, a new myth springs forth from #2 and goes as follows: In order to learn English, children must start as young as possible and must be exposed to ‘native speakers’, with some academies boasting classes with children as young as 18 months. All this regardless of whether or not these ‘natives’ have any YL training whatsoever…not to mention criminal backgrounds.

Interviews can go like the following:

Pulse: Check

EU passport guaranteeing easy paperwork: Check

Nordic appearance and barring that, U.K passport: Check

Qualified locals need not apply, that is of course if there’s fresh native speaking meat to be found. The abuse the children suffer aside, this is perhaps the most galling of all. Qualified, trained YL professionals are overlooked simply because of their passport. A C.D player can provide R.P phonemes, but a hungover backpacker can’t be bothered to brush up on his language acquisition for children under 8.

The fact that this is allowed to happen in so many different places around the world astounds me. Are myths so powerful? True, some governments have tried to legislate against this, but requiring University degrees does not mean you’ll get teachers, especially ones who understand Young Learners. A degree in nuclear physics doesn’t necessarily include knowledge of the cognitive capabilities of 5 year-olds.

So here I find myself faced with the following option, one that may be eerily familiar to some. Either take on some kids classes in order to fill up the timetable and make ends meet or take up a bit of performance art and hope for the best on the streets.

Lacking juggling skills, I chose the clown act in the classroom.

Where does this leave my classes? Basically it’s a question of damage control and learning that 5 year olds can’t do very intricate things with scissors. Some might argue that time and experience makes you a YL teacher, I would argue against it. Some might also say “find a new job” while those accused might respond, “I would if I could.” Whatever the case, the best idea is to make it as painless as possible for both parties involved, both the learner and the ‘Teacher’ of the moment.

Thankfully, YL coursebooks are coming out of the monochrome gap-fill dark ages, as are the photocopiable activity books that accompany them. Luckily my YL classes are only 60 minutes (waaaay too long in my opinion yet a world away from the 90 that some suffer). With a combination of class routines, coursebook work and the less than odd photocopy thrown in (or should I say AT them), objectives are theoretically reached and with a bit of the aforementioned faith, something learned.

Entertaining…well, not all clowns are funny, but with the help of materials made by actual professionals, at least the classes might be engaging, which in the end is all that can be asked of an unwilling or unprepared teacher.

The debate may rage whether a native speaker is the best option for adults, but in my mind there can be no debate regarding children. Those with the vocation and the training are best equipped to face the little lions, and as for the rest of us…well maybe it’s best that myths die away quietly.

Troy Nahumko is an unashamed traveller who TEFLs to make ends meet. His TEFL-Travelling has taken him across 5 continents and shown him that there is little more frightening in this world than being faced with a group of rowdy 4 year olds. He currently twitters out of his Almohad refuge in a Spanish city few bother to reach and has a strong penchant for local wines. For more quieries into the mysteries of teaching Young Learners in Spain, travelling the world and how to survive on tapas alone, among other things, visit No Not Far.

I teach in a rural area of South Korea at a couple of middle schools: one is located about 10 minutes about outside the city and has about 190 students whom I see three days a week; the other school is in the countryside (it’s adjacent to a rice field) and has about 32 students whom I see the other two days a week. The students are 13 to 16 years old and have varied backgrounds and competencies. While some are from white- or blue-collar families, others are from families that farm. What’s it like teaching these students?

A little like drinking a strong cup of coffee after orange juice. I come from a background in the communicative approach, where I trained to teach TESOL to adults and for several years taught adults who were at the same approximate level. By contrast, at the schools where I teach, classes at each grade level are not streamed so students, regardless of how good they are at English, study together. In the same class I can hold a good

conversation with a one student while needing to teach another how to answer, “How are you?”

To motivate these students is sometimes a bit tough. I think English is still very much a foreign language in South Korea so, especially at middle-school level, some students have little or no intrinsic motivation to learn it. Many of the students I teach have little exposure to English outside the classroom – apart from popular media, food labels, fancy shop signs, or the occasional foreigner who may stop to ask for directions or to kindly take a photo. From what I can tell, at their stage of life there is little need nor reason to learn English, except that it is a mandatory subject: From elementary to high-school level, all students must study English. Other than that,  English is of little relevance other than being important for tests (and more and more a gatekeeper for good jobs).

Because the education system tends to focus on the teaching to the test, and tests are extremely important in this country, in the eyes of the students the most important things to focus on are that which will be tested. Reading and writing English skills are formally tested within the education system however speaking is not (though this is set to change within a few years) so it can be a challenge teaching conversational English to students who consider English as another subject to be tested. Thankfully, I work with Korean teachers who manage student behavior.

We team-teach conversational English and a typical class is forty-five minutes long. We focus on speaking and listening skills to supplement the textbook that the students use. A usual lesson is systematic: after doing a short warm-up, we review the previous lesson’s material then then move to the new the lesson where we elicit the lesson’s vocabulary and present the grammar structure. After a short listening exercise, which exposes students to the language in context, students practice a dialog which then leads to semi-controlled and more open activities. For better or for worse, teaching tends to be teacher-fronted for a couple of reasons: It’s the educational norm; and most of the students that I teach are of such low-level that they require a lot of direction. Usually, the students sit in rows of desks which face the front of the class, though we do a lot of pair-work activities. From time-to-time students also do whole-class activities, for example a find-someone-who or a survey, which lets them move around the room; however, because these activities can be a bit noisy, we limit them to respect neighboring teachers.

Despite being a challenge – teaching to a different age group, adapting to and accommodating a different pedagogical approach – teaching young learners within this context continues to be an enjoyable experience. I’ve had to rethink, relearn, reflect, and reapproach. A lot.

It’s a great cup of coffee.

Dayle was a TESOL teacher in New Zealand for several years. In 2007 he moved to South Korea and was on the EPIK programme for three years. He now teaches English at a South Korean university and is pursuing an MA TESOL. You can follow him at @daylemajor on Twitter.

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be an English teacher! It was because my mum was my kindergarten teacher. She was so creative, engaging and inspiring that I wanted to be a teacher just like her. I had my own chalkboard at home and I was always the teacher when we played “school” with my friends. I think I’ve always had this huge passion for teaching and, today I have been an English teacher for eight years in Istanbul, Turkey.

I graduated from English Language Teaching Department and Psychological Counseling Department as a double major in Istanbul University. We had a four year extensive program at university but I can’t say that it was enough to prepare me to become a teacher fully. Most of the things I studied at university were the approaches, methods, planning and theories. When I started teaching, I didn’t exactly know what to do but I was lucky that I had great colleagues at school ready to help me to improve myself as a teacher. Peer observations, internet, books about teaching, training courses and my students has played an important role on my journey of becoming a better teacher.

I have mostly worked with young learners and for the last four years I am the leader of the kindergarten department and an English kindergarten teacher at Terakki Foundation Schools in Istanbul. It’s a private and a 140 year old school. There are some difference between private and public schools in Turkey when you consider English teaching. There are more English lessons, the curriculum is more extensive and comprehensive, there are fewer students in the classrooms, you have more technological equipments in your classes and you start learning English when you are in kindergarten if you are at a private school. At public schools, children start learning English when they are at 4^th grade which I believe it’s very late because you lose the most efficient and fruitful years when they actually acquire the language.

“Teaching should be full of ideas instead of stuffed with facts.”

I teach 4, 5 and 6 year old students. The younger the students are, the more rewarding and demanding the teaching experience will be and I believe, to make this experience beneficial for both learners and teachers, you should identify your goals, what you have in your hands and what you can offer your students as well as the needs and the demands of your learners and you have to be understanding, patient, caring and passionate about every single one of your students.

I am the first English teacher of my students and when they come to my classes, most of them don’t know a word of English. I have 8 hours of English with 6 year olds and 6 hours with 4 and 5 year old ones (One hour = 40 minutes). This may vary from school to school depending on their program and curriculum. Some schools have a half day of English or less or more hours and international schools have a whole day of English with a Turkish teacher at the same time in their classes.

You can watch the first week of my students this year on a short Animoto video:

“Teachers: The new generation will be your devotion.” Atatürk

I have 16 to 18 students in my classes and I have at least one hour English lesson with my each class every day. As we don’t have native teachers in kindergarten, we are responsible for teaching and improving each skill. Home room teachers have their own topics and we plan our curriculum according to their topics. This year our first topic is “About Me” in age 6 classes. With this topic, we aim at teaching greetings, colors, numbers, food and drinks and town. We have stories and songs to teach as well.

The typical day starts with the daily routines like greeting the kids with a song, weather chant, talking about weather, counting the kids (the best way to teach children to count) and counting girls and boys, talking about absentees and why they aren’t at school, chanting the days, months and seasons and talking about how they feel. These routines make them feel better and secure in English classes. We only speak English with our students so this sometimes makes children feel insecure as they don’t understand and as it is their very first days at school without their parents, but as I repeat the daily routines every day with the same order, they learn faster and they feel secure in learning a foreign language because even they can’t speak or participate in the activities, they know that they can participate in the daily routines. Transitions are important in English classes. I have rhymes and songs that make the children understand what we will do next. Also, they have small pictures of their lessons for each day so they all know which lesson or activity they are going to have next.

“A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.”

Children like singing songs and chanting rhymes and if the songs are TPR songs, they enjoy more. I like “Round and Round the Garden”, Wind the Bobbin Up”, “Incy Wincy Spider”, ”Teddy Bear”, “Bumble Bee”, “Open them, Shut them” songs and chants for the first days. I prepare pictures for the songs so they can understand the meaning of it and enjoy looking at the pictures. Children also love playing games, it’s their instincts and I can use games to teach any topic I want. Their favorite games are “Fly Swatter”, “Ostrich Game” and “Dice” game.

We also use course book but it is not in the centre of our curriculum, we use it just to provide something interesting, to teach them how to use books for the next year. Our course book is a story based book and is written for EFL students. The stories are repetitive ones so students can memorize, retell and acquire the language very well. We do role plays, dramatizations as well. We also read many other books in our classes.

We do also some craft activities and worksheets with the kids every week. We do class projects and present them in the class or in the corridors.

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Einstein

We have three important days in our school. The first one is “Open Doors” day. We invite the parents to our classes to observe one lesson at the end of the first term. This is an exciting time for the parents and the kids and stressful time for us, the teachers. It’s weird to be observed by parents. Luckily, I haven’t had a bad experience with that. The second one is the “Portfolio Day”. Children keep their worksheets or their crafts in their portfolios and at the end of the year; they present their portfolio and talk about what they have done in a year to their parents in English. We lead the children in what they are going to say. I really enjoy this because parents always get excited and very happy to see that their kids can produce language and understand what the teacher says. Daily routines that we do every day really helps.

I’m a lucky teacher because I have everything we need in our classes. We have projectors, computer, internet, CD player, DVD player ready in each our classes so we can use technology with our kids. You can have a look at our class wiki, our glogster, voicethread project that we did with Shell Terrell ’s and Marama Steward’s classes and a voki example.

“A teacher’s purpose is not to create students in her own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.”

For the last two years, we have created three animated stories. 6 year old students drew the pictures, colored them and recorded their voices in English. Two of them are my stories. First one is “Daisy and Drago”. This film also came in 2^nd place in Children’s Film Festival and was shown in many cinemas in Turkey and in abroad during the film festival. The second one is “Daisy, Drago and the Magic Wand”. We are using these films in our classes to teach English to the kids. The last one is “Doctor Monkey” story. The story is one of the stories in their books and I and kids really enjoyed doing this film. It was easy and took us only a day to create this. We also collaborate with IT department and we create our own digital games to teach children English in our classes. I hope to involve in more projects with my children that will help them to improve themselves.

You can watch this video, a collection of my school year last year:

I love to be around my kids and being a part of their growing. They are always so full of energy and laughter and ready to giggle so being a teacher keeps me young at heart. A teacher is always a student, you can never done learning and no other career can provide what being a teacher means. It’s my passion and a gift of a lifetime.

Özge is an EFL teacher and a teacher trainer in Istanbul,Turkey. She is also the educational coordinator, script and screenplay writer of “Yes,I Speak English” DVD series in America.

Visit her blog: http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/

Committed to learning

After 20 years in the EFL classroom, I still learn new things all the time. Certainly, here in Japan, the students are completely different than they were back in 1989; in those days, they all sat up straight, had their hair braided back and always made an effort (or pretended to, anyways) whether they liked English or not. These days, things are a little more… normal,  for want of a better word. The students make me work harder to get their attention, and they don’t try, if they are not interested in my lesson. I’ve had to grow as a teacher and adapt my lessons over the years. Here is a glimpse of my context, my approach and my challenges with my junior high school students at this particular point in my career:

My context

I teach in an all girls, Catholic, junior and senior high school in Osaka, Japan. I’m in my 16th year in this school. I currently teach all grades 7 – 12 (called Chu 1, 2, 3 and Ko I, II, III). There are only two Native English-speaking teachers in the school and we have earned complete autonomy to decide and implement our own syllabus and curriculum. I teach both Oral Communication and Writing II & III. Our students are generally “nice” girls from “decent” middle-class families. That is not to say that we don’t have our share of puberty, friendship angst and other typical teenage syndromes. Additionally, we are constantly battling against a very busy school calendar where English competes with something pretty exciting almost every month.

What I’ve learned after 20 years (finally…)

Here are 10 things that I’m quite sure of – in my classes with my students:

1. They want to get to know me and are willing to share things about themselves IF I can become a meaningful person in their lives.
2. They love to work in pairs or small groups because it is safer, less stressful and more social.
3. I need to ask myself 3 questions when I plan what to bring into class:
   Is it interesting enough to cause an emotional connection in their brains?
   Does it lead to giving opinions, sharing ideas, or exchanging information between us?
   Can they succeed at it and add another layer to their small, but growing, confidence?
4. They need to trust me before they will learn from me, and therefore I must spend as long as it takes to make a connection with them.
5. Knowing their names is not only helpful, but is invaluable. For both praise and for discipline, nothing works better than a name at the beginning or end of a statement to a student.
6. Praising effort is the only way to go. Acknowledging results and outcomes is great, but highlighting a student’s effort leads to further efforts by that student and by other people.
7. Motivation is king: there is quite simply nothing more important in my EFL classroom.
8. Classroom interaction is where I have the biggest chance to make gains: learning to improve how I interact with students, during lessons, is the key to becoming the best teacher I can be. Planning lessons and evaluating lessons are both important, but pale in comparison to the return on investment that comes from improving my questioning, feedback, correction, listening, discussing and eliciting skills.
9. A balanced 4-skills approach is vital to succeeding in an EFL context. Without a balance of input (reading and listening) and output (writing and speaking), students invariably lose interest in studying English, or worse case scenario, come to hate English.
10. Junior high school students need a lot more input practice than output practice. Piling on the reading and listening really adds confidence to their young minds. Of course, there are outgoing types in every class who need and thrive on output, but that can be easily accommodated.

What I do specifically in my classes

I focus on specific things for each grade, starting with a motto:

“Everybody – Think BIG – Maybe you will be an English teacher, a translator or a flight attendant. Maybe you will live in Canada or get married to a foreigner. Many of your seniors still use English today (gesturing ferociously and using Japanese when my gesturing only scares them)”.

They all learn that I want them to focus on 3 things in their first year: 1) to learn to write English quickly, 2) to learn to read English, and, 3) to learn to talk a little about themselves. Everything I do in the first year is somehow connected to one of these goals. For example, last week they had to introduce a classmate in front of another class. They asked questions to their partner, wrote about their partner, memorized it by practicing it, then performed it in front of another class.

“Some girls give up on English this year. Chu 1 is very easy. Now we start to learn the past tense this year, and some students don’t make an effort. IF you try, you CAN do it. At the end of Chu 2 we have two kinds of English students: the girls who give up and the “Yes, we can” girls (gesturing ferociously and using Japanese when my gesturing only confuses them).

In the second year, I really focus on learning to manipulate language between tenses, especially the past tense. There are countless opportunities to talk about their weekends, school events, family outings, etc. I also tell many stories about daily happenings with my two young children (son, 8 and daughter 6), then elicit to check their comprehension. Last week, they read some writing by their seniors – the grade 12 girls (Ko III) – who wrote “100 things about me”. It is ALWAYS exciting and meaningful to show students their seniors work. Then, in pairs, they had to write 50 things each about themselves. When they finish, they’ll have to present their list in front of small groups of friends.

Consolidation is a guiding principle in Chu 3. I expect them to be able to put more together in their final year of junior high school. I don’t introduce very much new material, but I do expect them to be successful with longer, denser material. Last week, they were reading graded readers in pairs (Cengage – Foundations Reading Library Level 1 & 2) and then retelling the stories to friends in Japanese (focusing on meaning rather than straight translation). In another class, they were translating “Frog and Toad” stories (A. Lobel) so their juniors (Chu 1) could enjoy them. For a recent final test, they had to design a poster, “Things that make me happy” with at least 150 words of text. The poster stays on the wall of my classroom for a year!

I hope it is easy to see that I want my students to use English to enjoy interacting with me and with each other. I want them to clearly understand that I care about them and expect them to improve and ultimately succeed at English. I’m willing to share my world with them and hope to learn more about their lives as well. As for challenges, I still want to learn how to get the most out of students who are pulled in so many different directions. I also hope to see the day that all teachers in Japan take a more balanced approach to teaching English – for the sake of the students, and in order to get more reasonable results that we can all be prouder of as teachers and as learners.

Steven has an MA TEFL from Birmingham University. He believes that being a teacher means a never-ending commitment to learning. “First, we must connect with our students, then expect them to grow in some way; the rest we just work out day by day.” He is an avid collaborator and is always looking for new ways to grow.

You can learn more about his TOL and TOP on his website and his blog.

1. The Letter

I have a treasure; I cherish it more than I should. It is getting old and grubby, it is wearing thin like ancient parchment. It is a letter. I read it when I feel overworked and tired. A student wrote it to me a few years ago. I get lots of thank you letters from students, but this one hit me right out of the blue, it made me cry, smile, sigh, and mostly made me remember what I was doing in my classrooms and why it was important.

She was an incredible English speaker, she had a 900 TOEIC score (which is very, very high!). She was also incredibly modest, polite, fairly quiet and never really got that involved with classroom activities (it was a communication class). I assumed she was bored, even a little agitated. I was wrong. She was being herself.

She was happy to take a back seat, in her letter she described how she had been picked on by teacher after teacher to model sentences/pronunciation/conversations. She had been put on a language pedestal so many times, it had created a barrier to real communication between her and her classmates. Her description of how I taught emphasized one simple rule I follow in every teaching interaction, that of fairness.  Instead of being constantly on edge as she was asked over and over to speak out, she could be herself, and that self was quietly motivated by observing others. She had watched her classmates make progress, rather than being asked to showcase her English skills, which often led to her friends simply finding fault with themselves. She enjoyed their pleasure in success, she helped them in quiet ways as a conversation partner. She found a place she was comfortable in.

When it was time for the students to apply for entry to four year universities, we laughed and cried together through their hardships and eventual successes. Her letter described our class as a breakthrough for many students, and it was not their English skills she noted that led to success. She described how through care, fairness, and small successes the students had gained the major component missing from so many of their fragile egos. They had gained confidence. She claimed this confidence led to success in interviews. She got a modest job in a modest city. I know she is happy there.

Now, you can imagine this was a great ego boost to me as a teacher, and later when I studied classroom management techniques during my MA in TEFL I realized that decision making in the classroom has huge impacts, not only on skill development, but on emotional development. We are dealing in the delicate commodity of souls, decisions we make may have huge consequences for our students (or may not – but that is the complex nature of classrooms – and I don’t have space to talk theories of complexity here). Use your emotional intelligence wisely and expect to be surprised by students, who don’t always think the way you think they think.

2. The Outside

I have a secret; I keep it more than I should. I love overtime. It tires me out, it leaves me feeling empty some days. I get home and collapse into a state of quiet intenseness; it used to scare my husband, but now he understands it is me recharging to get up the next day ready to be energetic, to be the motivational teacher I want to be.

I am lucky, the overtime I do is not marking terms papers, or writing endless report cards (I have time to do this in my working day). The overtime I refer here to is ‘time’ outside the classroom. Time spent with my students over a coffee, during rehearsals for a play, at a volunteer centre, at sports events, decorating the hall for Christmas, planning the school festival etc. etc. It is time spent outside of the classroom atmosphere, away from rows of chairs and tables, textbooks, tests, it is time spent talking (mostly in English, but also Japanese) about the things that are meaningful to us.

I know this is not possible in many teaching contexts, but for me it provides the insights, shared humor, points of view, which may one day make my classroom more meaningful and ‘authentic’ for the students. We learn to agree to disagree about musical tastes, we advise each other on relationship issues, we see how our culturally located world views affect all we see, we shock each other with interesting stories, we talk about stuff. Stuff, things, bits and pieces, events, snippets of information, the threads our lives are constructed and connected by, often these threads are the missing ingredient from so many textbook conversations. We learn what we can add to textbooks to make them become meaningful for us in our unique context. I learn what kind of ‘talk’ might provide energy, debate, interest and motivation in class.

This kind of overtime for me is valuable classroom/curricular research. In this time I build an image of what my students might need, what they want from me, from class, from college life in general. I can take some of the ideas I discover to management and try to improve our provision of services and gear our educational methods and classroom techniques towards meeting our students’ educational and emotional goals.

BTW. I have become much better at saving something of myself for when I get home!

3. The Others

I have a big teacher ego (my mum calls it vanity, it lives in the same realm as the me who can’t leave the house without make-up). I call it ‘GT-Jo’ (a pun on a Japanese TV drama a few years ago: GTO – ‘Great teacher Onizuka’). Sometimes it takes me over and believes it can be everything to everyone. This is one of my biggest failings as a teacher (and perhaps as a person), I get upset when I can’t be everything to everyone. I get upset when a student does not leave my class with something new, something interesting, something meaningful. I have to keep reminding myself: you are not alone, there are others.

In schools, we are surrounded by talented, creative, individual ‘others’; the human resource of ‘teacher’ is a precious, glowing, multi-faceted gemstone cave. Yes, there are the diamonds, the beloved, shiny, popular teachers, but there are also bedrock bases, providing stability and groundedness. Are you an anchor rock? An ethereal, flaming light filled stone? A bright, cheery ruby? A caustic, abrasive rock, sharp as flint? A warm, safe, mellow sand stone? Every teacher in the school contributes to the educational atmosphere of that particular institution, every teacher is a rock, some more crumbly, some just always there. Students can get what they need both educationally and emotionally from a variety of interactions with these variations on ‘teacher’ rock. No single teacher can be everything to every student.

There will be attempts to sculpt these variations into ‘perfect’ teacher statues, but try to keep your colours, your shininess, your individuality, the teacher you want to be. The creativity you have is a fascinating resource for your students, your unique way of thinking will add to the students’ own uniqueness as they pass through the system. We all have creativity, don’t give that up on the pretense of becoming a ‘teacher’. Teachers are creativity.

What kind of rock are you?

4. The Development

I have a favourite ELT theory book; it has scratchy, smudgy penciled notes on every page. I have many books, and I keep adding to them. Keeping up to date on the world of theory keeps me excited, interested, and motivated as a teacher in our profession. Connecting with new teachers/writers/school owners through conferences and social networks expands my ideas of what teachers/educators do and the choices they face in hundreds of language education contexts around the world. These new connections help me develop and re-develop my own theory of practice. Observing the vast differences between my context and others helps me begin to describe my own, it helps me visualize my located practice.

I think teachers should be learners first and foremost; learning is the most important part of our job. Getting ourselves educated (and continuing to do so even after we have the certificates) is incredibly important for our community. There are many kinds of teacher education resources available in both our local contexts and online. Use them.

5. The Choice

I have a question, a question you should keep asking yourself: “Do I love my job?” Teaching can lead to other things, it is not an end, it is part of your journey. Don’t be afraid to leave if it isn’t working for you anymore. You have a choice, there are many other jobs out there. If you don’t like books used in your classroom, write your own books. If you don’t like the way your school is run, build your own school, or go back to school and study educational administration or management. If you don’t feel like fighting a system anymore, go volunteer in a country that is in dire need of educational systems. Don’t get stuck. Don’t complain. Make changes, even small changes may make a difference for your students.

Teaching is a lifestyle, it is a choice. Make sure you are happy with your choices.

Forgive me for the haphazard somewhat hastily written nature of these ideas, pregnancy combined with multiple earthquakes is doing strange things to my thought processes.

Note from Barb: If you’d like to read more about Joanne’s adventures during and after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I invite you to read her interview on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog.