(BLOG #3.5 – Bonus Blog 2 by Jeremy Eckert – UIC-Barcelona student)

This will be a meandering post in which I raise many questions about teaching, and answer almost none. Enjoy!

Education is non-linear

I’m constantly struck by the fact that teaching practice is fundamentally non-linear. A teacher can put a great deal of thought into a lesson and have it go horribly, with little engagement from students, yet on another day go into a lesson much less prepared and yet oversee a stimulating, fruitful discussion among enthusiastic and inquisitive learners.

The theory of teaching can feel equally tantalizing, because it is simultaneously straightforward and enigmatic. When written simply, explanations of learning can sound circular, and even obvious:

How do children learn problem-solving skills? By solving problems.

How do children learn to interact with others? By interacting with others.

How do children learn to understand natural speech? By listening to natural speech.

We know what the learners have to do in order to learn, but now we must make them all do it. So much of the work of teaching happens in students’ own minds and feels largely outside of the direct reach of the teacher.

Abilities are latent, success isn’t always flashy

For my MA program, I have to analyze videos of teachers teaching lessons. When I watch videos of real classroom interactions and study them through the lens of conversation analysis, looking at how teachers use their interactional resources to support understanding, I’m struck by how ordinary it looks to practice good teaching.

Much of what teachers do is simply what normal people do when communicating with others: pointing at a board, rephrasing, using facial expressions, pausing, or emphasizing key words. These are not skills explicitly taught in teacher training courses, just commonplace interactional norms people acquire through a lifetime of communication.

There is nothing magical here, no single secret trick that makes learners learn. The lessons themselves often look very normal, with mixed success in student responses, yet the guiding analyses written by the university highlight teachers’ successful use of interactional resources to clarify meaning and keep interaction moving forward—even when the immediately visible responses from students are anything but flashy. In some ways, this is disappointing, because part of me was hoping my MA program would introduce me to the one easy trick I needed to guarantee learning. In other ways it’s reassuring. The examples of teachers successfully using classroom interaction to support learning resemble what I do, and what my colleagues do.

Thinking of the classroom as a box

I used to do private tutoring in my colleague’s apartment bedroom that had been converted into a classroom. (That classroom was later moved and expanded into the school which my colleague and I opened, and are currently operating.) I had a realization: the classroom is a box. For safety and consistency, we put children in these boxes so they don’t wander into traffic during a lesson. This sounds a bit silly written out like that, but it’s true: the classroom solves the logistical issues and the safety concerns of the adults involved in the process. But the children? They would rather not be in that box, mostly. Many would rather be at home, or playing in the park.

The classroom is a box. Children are placed in that box for an hour or so, and the teacher is expected to make that box both educational and engaging, turning it into a place of structured play and even simulated reality.

But to engage in simulated foreign language interaction, a learner must have some kind of need. In traditional classrooms, the need itself is also contrived by the teacher, implied but never spoken out loud. “You need to learn this because I say so.” Or if the learner’s mother signed the child up for class without the learner’s consent: “You need to learn this because your mother says so.”

Basing class work on learners’ needs outside of class

Considering the question of ‘needs’ is one reason I’ve found myself drawn to action-based methodology. I’ve long felt that motivating students requires some level of creating a fictional ‘need’ for them to interact with English, which can be difficult to force. (I may need to be careful here. It’s easy to conflate the idea of an immediate need [an incentive to participate in an activity], with a long-term need outside of the class, like needing to learn English in order to participate in a globalized job market.)

Action-based approaches seem, at least in theory, to drop the need for simulated needs by legitimizing classroom work through external actions and real outside needs. What happens in the classroom matters to the students because it leads somewhere beyond the classroom itself.

Instead of the traditional classroom way of saying,

“You need to participate in an imaginary dialogue activity about birthday parties because the teacher said so,”

an action-based approach might say,

“Your classmate who isn’t here today will have a birthday soon. Do you want to have a party for her? Great. What do we need to prepare to make this happen? Let’s work in pairs together to plan her birthday party!” (And then around the time of that classmate’s birthday – importantly – we all have that party just as the students planned it, so that the birthday dialogue exercise had a real impact on the future actions of the learners).

This is my understanding of what the action-based methodology means. I suppose in the above example, the birthday party plan isn’t exactly a “need” which existed before the teacher offered it as an option to the kids, so it’s still somewhat contrived by the teacher, but at least the dialogue activity leads to real future action.

I can think of one long-term need which my young learners have: they need to get into a good school later, so that means they eventually need to pass IELTS/TOEFL exams. In this sense, would a test-prep center be following action-based methodology? After all, it’s based around fulfilling a future need outside of the test-prep classroom.

Flattening multi-dimensional ability into a 1-D spectrum

I’ve found it difficult to conceptualize a one-dimensional, linear chronological track for something as multidimensional as language competence. In both lesson planning and syllabus design, there is sometimes leftover space that needs to be filled on the timeline of planned learning. I may have clear lesson or semester aims, a plan for how most of the time will be spent achieving those aims, and a sense of how and when review should happen—yet there is still time which is unaccounted for.

I struggle to articulate guiding principles for filling that space, and it can sometimes feel arbitrary what extra content ends up there. How to know what to teach these kids, and at what point?

Social justice as relief

Some pedagogies use social justice as their guiding North Star. This makes sense in multiracial democracies with protected freedom of expression, but in a extremely homogeneous Han city composed of almost purely middle-class families, and in which speech against authorities leads to guaranteed loss of freedom, that philosophy can feel poorly suited to teachers who don’t want to get disappeared into some political prison (or deported).

Still, I’ve begun to wonder whether social justice might take a different form here—not as political voice or direct critique of authority, but as relief for chronically over-stressed young learners facing burnout in a merciless race to college. Perhaps there could be a way to work stress relief into the curriculum for these kids, as an indirect form of social justice. 

Flexible curriculum or flexible teachers?

I’ve also noticed that many student groups work extremely well when they come into class well rested on their Sunday morning class timeslot. But those exact class groups also have a Wednesday evening class at 6:40 p.m., after a whole day of classes, and they are understandable extremely antsy then.

The question which this raises for me is, should our curriculum take this into account (bake into the syllabus that there is one type of lesson for weekday evening lessons, and one type for weekend morning lessons), or should we just leave it up to every individual teacher to modify for their particular situation? Can we trust all teachers to do such modifications on their own? They can be trained to do this but my question still stands:

When should certain issues be addressed via curriculum design and when should certain issues be addressed on a case-by-case basis by individuals? 

Some Noteworthy Nuggets About Education

Several ideas and quotations changed my way of thinking about education.

In The Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead famously described education as moving through three stages:

“The first stage is Romance. The second stage is Precision. The third stage is Generalization.”

This rings true for me based on my own experience. My favorite classes—and my favorite teachers—first ignited a genuine love for the subject before moving on to practical aspects.

Another influential idea comes from Life in Schools, where Peter McLaren writes that

“The classroom is a cultural arena where… ideological, discursive, and social forms collide in an unrelenting struggle for dominance.”

This helped me see classrooms not as neutral spaces, but as sites where bigger social expectations and power relations from outside of the classroom continue to play out. Which country’s English gets taught? Why must these kids learn to speak like me, while I was never pressured to learn to speak like them when I was growing up? Whose wish was it for this child to be here in class with me – was it her own wish, or her parents’ wish? What kinds of voices are rewarded in this classroom, and what kinds are tolerated or quietly corrected?

Finally, I once encountered the claim somewhere (forgot the source) that,

Education is not an engineering problem, but an ecological one.

Thinking of the classroom as an ecosystem does justice to the sheer number of interacting variables and moving parts: learners’ histories, motivations, moods, relationships, institutional pressures, and the limits of teacher control. In this view, teaching is less about producing results and more about shaping conditions—conditions in which learning may happen unevenly and unpredictably, over time.

That’s all for now.

SOURCES:

Council of Europe. (2020). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education and other essays. Macmillan.

McLaren, P. (1989). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education. Longman.