Teacher-Centered is bad!

These days, all the current ELT research, no matter what perspective it's coming from, advocates student-centered classrooms.  And for good reason!  Teacher-centered classrooms, beyond the very, very basic level of learning a language, or for extremely young learners has largely proved to be very ineffective at creating students who can actually communicate in a meaningful way. 

Just the other day, I was teaching across the hall from one of my colleagues and could overhear his/her (identity secret!) class.  It was teacher-centered to the extreme.  Like this person basically was "on-stage" shouting out vocab words quite loudly for 20 minutes out of the 50 minute class.  There were only 1 second breaks in between the words.  It was bizarre and I couldn't quite believe that this was actually happening in a university classroom.  What did the students actually walk away with at the end of that class?  My guess is probably absolutely nothing except maybe a headache. 

Here are a few tips to help make your classroom more student-centered:

1. Groups.  It's all about partners, or groups of 3, 4, or 5.  Beyond that is often too big to be effective.  Mix them up, randomly.

2. Set-up an activity (give them a task) and let students do it.  Supervise and give gentle correction or feedback, but don't interfere if they're doing a good job. 

3. Lecture, if you must, but only in 3-5 minute intervals.  Students will not pay attention for anything beyond that.  Then, use some activities to get students to practice what you just lectured about.

4. Think of your job as more of a "coach" than a traditional "teacher."  You're guiding students to correct language use, not uploading it into their brain. 

5. Challenge students.  Give them tasks that are big and not so easy.  Encourage them that they can do it.   Support them and give help when necessary.  Praise them when they genuinely meet the challenge and do a good job. 

Teaching Writing, minus Peer Editing/Teacher Editing- the 1/2-way review

Midterms exams are done and graded and I want to give an update on how  things are going in my 3 advanced writing classes for English majors (3rd/4th year students).

My approach has been to veer away from the traditional approach to teaching writing that consists of endless cycles of teacher and peer editing.  Part of it is that I simply don't have time to do this because I have about 100 students in my writing classes, plus 3 other classes I need to prepare for and teach.  And the other part is that I simply don't think it's that effective or helpful.  Students need to become autonomous instead of just relying on the teacher to correct them.

Peer editing fills class time quite effectively, but I got beyond doing that in my first and second year of "teaching" and now actually "teach."  But, I also don't think it's so effective because it often degrades to just sharing misinformation, especially among the very weak students.  Pairing up the extremely weak with the extremely strong is just an annoying total waste of time for that strong student too.  How can students who are essentially beginners at writing judge whether or not a thesis statement or topic sentence is a good one or not?  Sure, some of my students can but probably less than 1/3 would be able to do this. 

Instead, I've focused most of my class-time on genre analysis-that is looking at quality essays and analyzing them, as well as on crafting good topic sentences, thesis statements, hooks, etc.  We've also spent time reviewing some basic punctuation (a major weakness), as well as significant amounts of time on self-editing.  Also, we do "free-writing" each class in order to get practice writing fluently. 

Results: 90% of the students in my classes have an extremely firm grasp upon the basic structure of the essay and did it almost flawlessly, including parallel organization.  The ones that don't have missed a lot of classes and/or are late almost everyday so obviously they're not so engaged in the class and getting the content.  I feel happy about this because it's a solid skill they can take with them into their lives. 

Punctuation is solid.  Basic grammar is also solid for most of the students.  But, I take no credit for that.  The students that were solid before the class have remained that way.  And the ones who couldn't put together a grammatically correct sentence before the class still can't do it.  But, I'm not worried about that.  If a student, after 1000's of hours of English language instruction can't put together a sentence, how much could I actually help them in 3 hours/week for 14 weeks? 

Vocab/sentence variety-a bit shaky for some students.  But again, I wonder how much I could actually help students in the short amount of time I have?  It's just not my priority.

Of course, for a more "professional view" of things, check out Jeremy Harmer's book on how to teach writing:

Essay Writing and Student Autonomy

One definition of autonomy (from the source of all things good: Wikipedia) is: the ability to take charge of one's own learning.

I believe that the current model of teaching paragraph/essay writing in most unis in Korea (and perhaps around the world where English is taught as a second or foreign language....I don't really know) does nothing to foster student autonomy.  This model is basically that the student writes something and gives it to the teacher, probably with very little in the way of editing.  The teacher spends ridiculous amounts of time editing something that in some cases is barely understandable, gives it back to the student and they make the changes.  Repeat the cycle endlessly.  This cycle can also be done with peer-editing, of which I am not a big fan of either.  In this model, the learner essentially takes very little responsibility for turning out a quality product on their own because they know that the teacher or friend will just make the changes they need. 

However, this is 100% unlike real-life.  When students are taking an English proficiency test that involves writing, there is no teacher or friend sitting next to them, helping them along.  Nor would they have this at any job.  They would just be expected to turn out a decent email or whatever they would need to write. 

So my system?  I'm attempting to teach students to self-edit by giving them check-lists with things like, "Check all the verbs: correct tense?"  and "What is your thesis statement?  Is it stated or implied?"  And, I'm not totally unkind.  I'll read essays and give general feedback like, "Your hook is quite weak....what about changing it to something like....."  Yes, it's challenging.  No, I'm just not lazy.  I truly think it will be better for the students in the end, even if they are not so happy about it.  Students generally hate what is not easy for them, but spoon-feeding has really never been my style.