New Methods

Last year, I was faced with an age-old problem: I had to figure out how to get colleagues with lots of experience and fixed ways of doing things to try new techniques. In this particular case, I was leading 2 weeks of informal workshops intended to introduce active learning techniques to coworkers in Saudi Arabia.

For me, the workshops were a catalyst for thinking about old problems of teacher training: How do we get coworkers to try new techniques? How do we move institutions with ingrained practices forward? And how hard should we push for change?

The Seminar: Introducing Active Learning

For the purpose of this article, the instructors and the institution have been kept anonymous. I have only included the details that are necessary for discussing the topic.

In this particular setting, foreign teachers had become used to using a set of lesson plans that were divided into lecture notes and practical exercises. Previously, these instructors had been encouraged to use the lesson plans as they were written without any modification.

Several administrators at my school were now introducing concepts such as student-centered learning, the flipped classroom, the project-based classroom, and the gamification of learning. For simplicity’s sake, I will categorize all of these concepts under the heading of “active learning,” because the focus was on getting instructors away from lecture-type lessons and large amounts of teacher-talk toward active, participatory classrooms.

Over a 2-week period, my goal was to expand the teachers’ familiarity with these alternatives as well as give the instructors some grounding in improvising during class and creating their own lesson plans to fit the students’ needs.

The initial part of the training was conducted over the first week in 2-hour sessions. The first 30–40 minutes of the class concerned a core concept of active and student-centered learning. During this part of the training, ideas were elicited from the participants and discussed. We used elicitation, discussions, and activities in order to model ways to introduce new concepts while limiting teacher-talk. We followed this with structured exercises in which instructors had to demonstrate what they had learned.

Typically, the instructor or group of instructors had 20 minutes of preparation time. Over the final hour, the instructors demonstrated or modeled a specific teaching concept. One exercise was for an instructor to modify an activity from the curriculum based on an expected classroom situation. The instructor might have to make the activity harder for students who were bored or easier for students who were overwhelmed, or to design their own interactive game to create a more lively classroom atmosphere. Another exercise was for instructors to introduce a concept using elicitation and activities rather than direct explanation.

The second week of the seminar, I allowed each instructor 2 hours of observed teaching in a classroom with four students from our program. The instructors were given a unit to review with the students. I encouraged, but did not require, them to use the techniques taught during the first week of the seminar. Afterward, I or another colleague gave them feedback on their lesson.

Reflections: What Went Wrong?

As one might expect, I faced resistance. Prior studies (e.g., see Borg, 2011; McLaughlin, 2013) had shown that instructor beliefs are not easily changed by short-term seminars and that even more long-term training seminars have had at most mixed impacts on instructor beliefs and practices.

However, what was interesting about my particular series of workshops was the kind of resistance I faced. Many of the instructors professed to agree with the general concepts introduced in the first week of the seminar. They were able to create new activities, modify lesson plans, and create interactive games as long as they were in the safe space of a workshop without students. They were also able to justify their choice of activities during this first week of the seminar in terms of the new concepts.

However, in the second week, when they were presented with students in our program, most instructors reverted to old habits. Many instructors didn’t plan their lessons at all because they knew the old lesson plans by rote.

So, what went wrong with the seminar? Several of my colleagues told me that they planned to use the techniques in the future—when they were ready. One colleague who had just started out explained that he wanted to become familiar with the textbook before using the new techniques. Another confessed that he simply had not had enough time to plan his lesson that week, as he had had other responsibilities.

From my discussions, it was clear that the instructors saw the first week and second week of the workshop in different ways. In the first week, they were free to try out the new methods and experiment with them because they were in a risk-free zone where they were expected to do so. However, when faced with actual students, they reverted to the safety of their original techniques.

Not a Conclusion: Open Questions

The Wrong Lessons?

Some of the administrators who had suggested the workshops proposed that instructors should be forced to put active learning into their lessons. A mandatory percentage was suggested at one point. This, I believe, is the wrong approach to introducing new teaching methods. It might be especially inappropriate for techniques that stress learner autonomy. Instructors are learners, too. And just as we shouldn’t force-feed lessons to students, instructors shouldn’t be force-fed new methods.

Incremental Changes?

The seminar came as the result of the work of several advocates of learner autonomy, the flipped classroom, and the gamification of lessons. These advocates wanted to make active learning concepts the foundation not only of the English language training portion of our school but of all the training programs at our institution. However, as I suggested after the seminar, instructors might appropriate the approaches more if they are introduced gradually.

Offer More Incentives and Fewer Guidelines?

It’s clear that institutional inertia and muscle memory were working against those who had organized the workshop, including myself. For several teachers in our program, the old ways had become easy and familiar. Perhaps a better approach would have been to include other instructors early on and provide incentives for generating ideas of their own. This approach isn’t obviously the correct one. Our active student learning enthusiasts had already generated a great deal of material in their own time (often outside working hours) and made this material shareable, thus ensuring that anyone willing to take up these approaches could easily do so. And yet their work had also ensured that other teachers felt very little at stake in the success of the project. The irony was that the theoretical foundations of much active learning research point to the need for early involvement of participants and learner choice.

Empathy: Stepping Into Someone Else’s Methods?

The old saying goes, “Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked in their shoes.” As Spandler-Davison (2013) has written about his own experience teaching nonnative instructors in a rural environment, “Two of the key lessons to take away from this brief study are the importance of ‘walking in the shoes’ of the teachers you seek to train and developing a program that builds confidence.”

Unfortunately, I have been in an institutional setting where an administrator has tried to force me to teach in a specific way. The administrator made few efforts to empathize with me or get to know the reason for my classroom choices. It was uncomfortable. I didn’t feel like myself.

The same feeling might have been shared by other instructors trying out the techniques for the first time. Perhaps they really did understand the rationale for the new approaches and believed in their value, but something about actually putting them into action made them feel a little uncomfortable. Perhaps they just need time before they can feel confident using these techniques.

I went out of my way to provide examples but not force others to use any particular way of teaching. I encouraged instructors to come up with their own interpretations and ways of moving toward “active learning.” But perhaps I was still asking them to go a step too far.

Resisting a Conclusion

As you can see, the results of the seminar have left me a little perplexed, but have also opened up productive paths for inquiry. It’s still too soon to say whether the seminar will bear fruits. Sadly, I’ve moved on to another job, so I can only monitor the results from afar. But at the very least, I’ve come away from the experience with a renewed enthusiasm for experimentation in small steps, for democratizing participation of professional development, and for continuing to ask and answer questions as I progress as an instructor.

References

Borg, S. (2011). The impact of in-service teacher education on language teachers’ beliefs. System, 39, 370–380. Retrieved from http://simon-borg.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Borg-2011-System.pdf

McLaughlin, L. (2013, April). Relevance of young learner teacher cognition for English language teacher trainers and educators. TEIS News. Retrieved from http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolteis/issues/2013-04-08/5.html

Spandler-Davison, D. (2013, April). Training nonnative rural teachers of English: Three approaches. TEIS News. Retrieved from http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolteis/issues/2013-04-08/4.html

Daniel Clausen has taught English as a second language, English composition, and other courses in the United States, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. He has also conducted research in the field of international relations. His work has appeared in The Diplomat, e-IR, East Asia Forum, and TheKorean Journal of International Studies, among other places. He is currently an English language instructor for Coco Juku English School in Japan.