This is so true, as any experienced trainer will tell you. Having to deal with a wide variety of personalities, potentials and idiosyncrasies is what makes the teaching field so challenging … and fascinating! Still, quite early on in a teaching career, a teacher decides what their professional persona is; how they perceive themselves and how they wish to be perceived in class. What I have listed below is a list of very wide categories most teachers fall under, but it is by no means exclusive or scientifically proven!!! It is simply based on my empirical observations. I call them teaching styles, and are to be taken with a grain of salt.
TEACHING STYLES
Chirpy and cheerful
Serious professional
Creative maverick
Quiet and supportive
Traditional and effective
But what makes a teacher opt for one specific style, other than personal preferences of course? Could there be some common denominators between all these different options, shaping those choices to a certain degree?
Well, you must have heard the term rapport being tossed around in relation to teacher training, to refer to the way you approach and engage learners during the lesson. It is often paired with another term, (learner) motivation – hardly surprising, since these two feed off each other! What is more interesting is how these terms are being interpreted according to the wider educational and teacher training contexts. I believe that the way you interpret these terms largely defines your teaching style, and I have composed a quiz to prove it!
So, what is your teaching style? Take the quiz here and find out!
QUIZ
Choose THE ONE answer that BEST summarises your approach to teaching and learning in each area:
A. Learning philosophy
Every learner is different, and a teacher needs to take that into account and be flexible.
Syllabuses are there for a reason and they must be followed for a successful outcome.
Learners should be allowed to express themselves at all times.
There should be little or no homework: most of the learning should be done in class.
If learners are not motivated, there is very little you can teach them.
B. Control over learners
The teacher should follow the lesson plan no matter what.
Learners can learn a lot when given freedom of choice.
The teacher should be in control at all times.
The teacher should act as a facilitator most of the time.
Learners’ attention will fail if left to their own devices.
C. Teacher talk
The teacher should speak loudly to draw the learners’ attention.
Learners don’t need to be told what to do in detail the whole time.
Learners should talk more than the teacher.
Repetition is always helpful.
Proper terminology should be used at all times.
D. Overall demeanour
The teacher should be cheerful at all times.
The teacher should be serious and avoid smiling.
Teachers should keep a distance from learners so as to preserve their authority.
The teacher’s pastoral role is critical.
Teachers should treat learners like equals.
E. Attitude to correction and feedback
Learners should be allowed to make mistakes as it facilitates learning.
Teachers should correct all the mistakes learners make, at some point.
Teachers can choose which mistakes they should correct and when.
Learners should not be asked to correct themselves or each other: it is the teacher’s job.
Teachers should never make mistakes in their language: it makes them look unprofessional.
F. Preparation and planning
Each lesson should be planned in detail.
It is usually enough to have a quick look at the coursebook pages you are teaching and have an answer key at hand.
We should never use designated coursebooks: we can ask learners what they want to do in each lesson and go from there.
You can find materials online and prepare a quick task or two, if needed.
It is important that you have a clear idea of where your lesson is going, but you also need to be prepared to make changes on the fly.
This post kicks off our Back-to-Basics series, focusing mainly on – you guessed it – basic classroom techniques! The idea for this series came to me as I frequently had to train pre-service teachers, who had a practical need for core techniques that would help them function in a classroom environment with some efficiency.
Most beginner training courses do not spend much time on these techniques, either for reasons of expediency or because they are taken for granted. Still, many trainees have never been in a classroom setting before, and the fact that many training courses involve online teaching (and a set of additional basic skills) does not make things any easier.
Establishing a teacher presence
Each individual trainee has their own teaching style, and this is based a lot on what kind of teacher presence they may project. Some teachers may be quiet and low-key, others may be louder and enthusiastic, or laid-back and subtle – the list can go on. It usually takes some time to decide what your teaching style is and what image you want to project to your learners, usually based on your personal traits and preferences. Many teachers harbour under the misconception that they should be a specific type of teacher in order to be effective, which can be quite an obstacle to development.
Nevertheless, there is one thing most teachers have in common: they have a selection of common basic tools at their disposal, and this is their starting point. The way each teacher decides to use these tools is what defines their teaching style. Let’s have a look at these tools one by one.
Facialexpressions
This includes eye-contact, smiling and using facial expressions to convey feelings and meaning. Some teachers are not very comfortable with facial expressions or are by nature shy and not very expressive: that’s OK. Teachers do not have to be performers! However, there are a couple of things that everyone can do and are usually quite helpful in creating a positive classroom atmosphere.
AI generated Image by rawpixel.
Look at your learners – not at the floor, the ceiling, the wall, or the board the whole time. Try and establish eye-contact with them, especially the ones that are trying to say something or answer a question. This shows you’re actively paying attention to them, you acknowledge their presence and respect their efforts and contributions. This may also prove a bit more challenging for shy, introverted teachers, but it is definitely worth a try!!!
Remember to smile a few times during the lesson, especially when you are making eye-contact. This immediately makes eye-contact more friendly, and less threatening or awkward – in most cultures at least. In general, smiling at learners can make you look more approachable, creating a less impersonal teaching atmosphere. It can work wonders for encouraging and engaging learners.
Using facial expressions instead of words, when possible: this can be more helpful in clarifying meaning at times, which brings us to our next point.
Show, don’t tell!
Most people automatically resort to words when trying to communicate, give an example or explain. This is fine in everyday life, but you’ll need more than that, for example, in a multilingual classroom where English is the only language common to all. So, here’s what your options are:
Using facial expressions, e.g., to show you don’t understand, to praise, to encourage a learner to continue, even to demonstrate meaning, like in adjectives describing feelings.
Using gestures to do most of the above, plus to clarify instructions or to check understanding.
Demonstrating how something is done rather than trying to explain it verbally.
Miming an action or series of actions, to clarify meaning or give instructions.
Using your voice wisely and effectively
Obviously, your voice is one of your main tools and what you say in class (and what you don’t say!) is very important. Here, however, we are going to talk about how you can use your voice so that:
You do not find you’re losing your voice at the end of a long teaching day.
You do not feel like you’ve been talking a lot but what you say falls on deaf ears, which is extremely frustrating!
You can maximize learner attention and involvement.
The following tips are based on common sense and classroom experience.
Find your teaching voice: avoid using a loud, high-pitched voice, in the hope of drawing attention. Instead, experiment until you find the right register for you: carrying, but comfortable to use over long periods of time without tiring your vocal cords. A good rule of thumb is that your voice should easily carry to learners sitting at the back of the room, under normal circumstances.
Regulate your speed of delivery: speaking too fast can create miscommunication, while speaking too slowly can have a hypnotic quality! Aim at speaking at a normal, average speed.
Vary your intonation. A monotonous voice, even if one is shouting, rarely holds attention. Using a friendly, conversational tone of voice, with all the natural ups and downs, can make a difference even during a long explanation slot. A low, monotonous, “lecture” voice on the other hand can ensure lapses of attention every time!
Finally, for those fortunate enough to teach YL classes, try whispering instead of shouting: when you whisper, the automatic reaction is to quiet down in order to hear you! This can often work with rambunctious learners 😊
Image by rawpixel
Please, leave your own tips in the comments below, as well as questions, suggestions, or a simple hello!
Once you have enough enough training courses under your belt, you are bound to have heard this complaint, probably more than once. It is one of the most common ones, coming from trainees who have difficulty accepting feedback. There can be many reasons why this is so, but in this post I’d like to focus on a very specific one: the tutor changeover, usually half-way through the course.
Many thanks to Julie Lhnr and Diana Vaselenko for inspiring this post with their questionnaire on Swapping Tutors.
It is a common requirement on most training courses that trainees should work with at least two different tutors for many different reasons, the obvious one being to reduce the chances of complaints as the one above. One can think of many other benefits of this arrangement, which I am not going to list here; let us just mention a major one: experiencing different teaching and training styles.
But just swapping tutors mid-course is not enough. There are several other procedures that have to be in place in order to ensure the changeover has a positive impact on the overall quality of the course, and of course this involves not only course tutors but also the school administration as well. The following points are addressed to both.
The selection process
No school can really afford to turn away trainees these days, but you can at least be prepared for what it’s going to take to keep difficult trainees from ruining a whole course. During the interview part of the process:
Prepare a careful list of questions, aimed at receiving feedback and working with others, so that you can spot potential problems early on, as much as possible.
Let tutors know from the start which trainees may need careful handling: DO NOT let them walk into the course blindly!
Make it very clear during the interview, and preferably in writing as well, that there will be a tutor change and that it is a course requirement. Also, explain in no uncertain words, that it is an assessment criterion whether trainees take feedback into account.
Be transparent
It’s not enough to clarify from the start what the procedures are, why tutors have to swap and what this means. This level of transparency has to be kept up throughout the course:
Share pre-course tasks and all assignment and TP feedback reports in a common folder, accessible to all course tutors.
Encourage tutors to go back to each other’s notes when facing claims like “the other tutor had asked me to do the opposite!”
Do not hesitate to quote specific feedback given by other course tutors, mentioning the specific TP/assignment it was given: make it objective – not personal!
Encourage inter-tutor communication
Tutors should keep tabs on each other as much as possible. Of course, it is up to each separate school’s procedures and each tutor’s willingness to go the extra mile, but it can be extremely helpful with diffusing potentially difficult situations.
At this point, I’d like to make something very clear: tutors are NOT obliged to spend extra time liaising with each other, usually without any remuneration, trying to troubleshoot various situations. It is also the school’s responsibility to make the tutor’s work easier, since it is for their mutual benefit. I am well-aware that this is not always the case and I am not trying to guilt already overworked and probably underpaid tutors into investing even more of their time and effort into their work. The points suggested below should be relatively painless and easy to implement, always at the tutors’ discretion.
Spend 10 minutes looking at the latest TP feedback before you go into an input delivery or assisted lesson planning session; you can then be prepared for potentially disappointed, over-confident or even aggressive trainee attitudes: you’ll know what probably prompted this and therefore you may be able to do something about it.
Hold a brief 15-minute meeting with the other course tutors once a week, just to check what is going on and who might need extra help. Chances are you can identify weaker trainees who will need extra support, compare trainee attitudes towards different tutors, and generally present a united front, making sure you maintain consistency in feedback and support.
Do not hesitate to ask the other tutors for advice on how to handle difficult situations, checking how they would normally handle it or what the school procedures are in such situations. If there is an official complaint made, you may be the last to find this out, so make sure you have let everybody know a specific trainee is having a difficult time, how exactly this happened and what you’re planning to do / you have done about it. Take special care to let the school admin know about potential problems as soon as you’re sure what is happening: they should appreciate your professionalism. It does come back to transparency.
Involve all tutors throughout the course
This is a no-brainer, but may not be feasible in all circumstances. Of course, you will have a higher incidence of trainee complaints such as the above, if the trainees have never met the second course tutor before the transition. This would mean they’d spent all their time on the first half of the course with one tutor, for better or for worse, getting used to a specific way of doing things and will resist change anyway, especially when feeling stressed and insecure.
What can you do then? Depending on how much leeway you have, you may try one or more of the following suggestions:
Make sure you can share as many input sessions as possible between tutors; include a couple of shared sessions if possible.
Share assignment marking among tutors, double-marking as many papers as possible.
Make no secret of the fact that tutors compare notes on the trainees’ work and follow everybody’s progress closely.
Capitalise on the fact that each tutor may have a different way to approach certain aspects of teaching, and therefore has different tricks to show the trainees. (Keep fingers crossed you don’t hit a wall of trainees saying “I want to learn the onecorrect way”).
It all boils down to consistency
What will ultimately seal the deal though is taking the trouble to be on the same page as the other tutor, regarding the following:
Starting sessions on time
Delivering feedback on the same day, e.g. within 24-hours of the TP
Being as detailed in your feedback as you feel you need
Delivering teaching materials and TP points at the pre-agreed time, at least 48 hours before the corresponding SLP session.
Returning assignments on the pre-agreed date
Strike the right balance between being flexible and observing course rules
If you are consistent with the above throughout the course, it will take a very negative trainee to claim they were treated differently in the second part of the course. Hopefully!
Final thoughts
Let me close this post by a rather obvious observation. Yes, there will always be trainees who will come up with this sort of complaint, no matter what you do to avoid it. The steps suggested above are not fool-proof: they’re just ways to preempt and diffuse such situations. None of them can hold a candle to a really negative, defensive, determined-to-complain-about everything, none-of-this-is-my fault attitude which – fortunately only a few – trainees may bring to a course.
For those cases, I feel for you… If you’d like a post about how we may deal with these trainees, let me know in the comments below.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a trained SEN educator, psychologist or medical professional. What I am is a very experienced teacher and trainer, and a neuro-diverse person myself. What you will read below describes my personal experience with trainees. Any beliefs, opinions or advice you find below are entirely my own and do not constitute professional guidelines or best practices.
Continuing from the previous post, we are looking at increasingly complex teaching situations and the ensuing problems.
There are several times when one or more trainees ask you to stop and rephrase what you said or start from the beginning, claiming they cannot follow you at all, even if what you are saying seems simple and straightforward.
What happens:
Again, we are not talking about trainees who lack basic knowledge or the linguistic competence to follow a simple argument. And we are not talking about trainees who are simply indifferent or unmotivated and cannot bother to follow what you are saying. We are talking about trainees who are honestly trying very hard to follow you as you explain something, but they cannot remember what you said a minute ago. As a result, they get lost almost immediately, and therefore ask for help. There is nothing wrong with their comprehension skills, again, but their retention and concentration abilities are lacking.
How you see it:
You can see that the requests for repetition and help clearly require attention, but you cannot keep doing that throughout the whole session. A shift of perspective might help here: instead of worrying about how responding to such requests may upset your lesson plan, think of how much more effective your teaching can be if you can involve everyone, even those that need more support.
Ways to handle it:
Clearly, both patience and flexibility are highly required here, but I would like to make a couple of practical suggestions, connected to planning a session and managing a class.
Once you have spotted such trainees in your group, there should be a shift in your materials design: since you cannot do the best for everyone, settle for doing the best you can for most of them. This means you may have to forego ambitious class activities or highly technical sessions, full of terminology (assuming you wanted to do these things in the first place!). You may find yourself unable to go into concepts in much detail, having to confine yourself to the basics, presented in a succinct, accurate manner. You therefore need to plan for shorter, simpler input.
Apart from input quantity and degree of analysis, there should also be a shift in pace and use of alternative modes of instruction. You will need to examine cognitive loads carefully and avoid having dense, demanding activities one after the other. Instead, plan for deliberate pauses during your session, allowing trainees time to note down points or take a screenshot. Insert a recap slide every few slides, when a particular section has been completed. Plan for specific elicitation slots, with lots of clear visuals, following short simple steps and the tri-modal input model: say/ask + do + write. Finish each elicitation slot with a short checking task, e.g., T/F.
You can easily see that the techniques suggested above are time consuming and require a specific approach: instead of cramming as much as possible into your session, assuming more is better, you rather make a conscious choice to move at the pace of your “slower” learners and give everybody a chance to digest information and perhaps come up with some interesting questions.
Again, the suggestions above may not stop some trainees from getting lost at some points during the session, but there are certain benefits:
They will reduce the amount of confusion and the need for repetition in neuro-diverse trainees.
The whole process forces you, the trainer, to re-examine the scope and effectiveness of your materials, and rethink what works and for whom.
All trainees benefit from such an approach, being involved in most stages of the session and avoiding frequent or long explanation slots by the tutor.
The benefits mentioned in the previous point are all present here as well.
During input sessions, you notice specific trainees are always the first to speak when you ask a question, but their contributions are rarely relevant to the question asked. It seems like they just waited for you to stop talking, in order to make an irrelevant point or ask a totally unrelated question themselves.
What happens:
Such trainees always seem very eager to contribute but their contributions are often disruptive and almost never helpful. They are always faster than everyone else and there comes a point when no other trainee gets a chance to say anything, and you start dreading asking questions. They may honestly be trying their best to contribute to the session, and they cannot stop themselves from blurting out a statement, without always realising that it is irrelevant to the point being discussed. What’s more, their statements often lack cohesion or even coherence, and it may be really difficult to understand what they are trying to communicate, let alone answer their queries or decide how they are related to the session in question. In such cases, you may also notice problems with the trainees’ written work, in terms of coherence and cohesion, as well as excessive and often incoherent teacher talk during teaching practice sessions. It seems like the link translating thoughts into coherent speech is not working.
Ways to handle it:
This is very tricky indeed, since one of the most basic means of communication, speech, does not seem to work. Such trainees do not only have a problem comprehending input but are also extremely frustrated when they try to make themselves understood: what makes perfect sense to their ears is met with puzzlement, and gradually annoyance, by everybody else. As a result, they are often defensive, unreceptive to feedback (which they cannot comprehend most of the time), and deeply hurt when they realise that they are perceived as annoying and disruptive by their peers.
There is no simple way to handle this, really. A mix of techniques may prove useful, but only to a certain extent. Here are some that I have tried over the years:
Having one-to-one tutorials with the trainees in question, trying to understand their queries, and explain to them that they should let other trainees speak as well.
Prepare a careful list of T/F statements that reflects your concerns about the trainee’s development and ask them to complete it; then arrange an individual tutorial with them. Careful: your statements should be short and simple, e.g.,
I believe that I work well in a team. T/F
When my trainer asks a question, I always feel I know the answer. T/F
I feel my contributions are clear and helpful. T/F
If I have something to say on a point, I should say it immediately, not wait for someone else’s contributions. T/F
If in an online teaching environment, ask all trainees to mute themselves and nominate specific learners to contribute. A bit authoritarian but works at a pinch.
Be mindful who you’re pairing with the trainees in question during learner-oriented activities: avoid pairing them with weak, easily confused or short-tempered trainees and avoid pairing them with the same trainees all the time. Vary their partners and monitor closely.
Final notes
There are a couple of final points I’d like to make, more in the nature of what NOT to do in such delicate situations.
Well, for one, I would do my very best not to express annoyance at specific trainees, or single them out in any way. This might be extremely difficult to do under certain circumstances, e.g., intensive synchronous on-line courses, but it is crucial if any of the above coping techniques are to succeed.
For another, please do not forget that these trainees find it extremely difficult to cope with the course demands, especially if they do not have the option of going for a part-time course or doing a face-to-face course, which can simplify interaction a lot. On top of that, there may be an extra layer of challenge, if they are not familiar with an online teaching environment: the combination of neurodiversity and technophobia can be truly paralysing for some trainees! You are there to support them, not judge them.
Finally, I would like to highlight the fact that most of these trainees are either unaware of their diagnosis, or ashamed of it. In either case, they will almost invariably fail to mention it in their application forms, which leaves both schools and trainers between a rock and a hard place, since even the meagre affordances given to such trainees in most training schemes cannot be taken advantage of. It is a sad fact that such discriminations exist to the extent that people feel the need to hide anything that may be perceived as a disability, even to the detriment of their own development. But it is a fact. All we can do is cope the best we can and support them to the best of our ability.
I have to admit this is a bit of a misleading title, since no-one else has access to the listener’s head but themselves! Still, it is our job as teachers to try and guess what is going on in there, using research findings based on empirical data to help us.
I want to give a bit of historical background, not because I want to show off my wealth of knowledge – and, incidentally, bore you to death – but because I have seen that certain old-fashioned beliefs still hold sway in both learners’ and teachers’ attitudes towards classroom listening practice.
Most of you have heard of “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing, concepts that attempt to picture what is happening inside the listener’s head and draw useful conclusions for classroom practice. Many of the teachers I’ve come across over the years still struggle with understanding these concepts. This can be because, despite the many diagrams used, it is not very clear what that vertical direction refers to: up/down towards what exactly? From a general idea to specific information? From the phoneme to the whole text? From using lower to using higher thinking skills?
I believe that a linear representation does not necessarily serve better understanding of the listening process. I’ll now proceed, rather cheekily, with two different diagrams: one representing the more old-fashioned serial view of the listening process and another showing a more complex picture of what is happening inside the listener’s head. I’ll call them the line and the circle.
THE LINE
This view believes that the listener processes what they hear starting from the smallest chunk of sound, then adding them together to form words, which are then added to form sentences and eventually leads to the understanding of the whole text. We do not need all the empirical data of studies conducted with both L1 and L2 listeners, young and adult, beginner and advanced ones, to realise that if this were true, it would take the listener forever to decipher the speaker’s message, let alone formulate an appropriate response. Nevertheless, teachers still use recorded texts, paused and replayed ad nauseum, trying to get learners to understand every little thing they hear, all the time believing they are actually helping their learners develop their listening skills.
Unfortunately, this encourages the learners’ natural tendency to begin with processing the smallest amount of information and thus avoid information overload. Of course, this leads to some rather frustrating listening habits, like relying on the repetition of the information many times (never happening in real life listening) and the learners’ need to understand EVERYTHING before they can feel they’ve understood what the text is about (simply not true!).
Most importantly, it demotivates learners since it is an unrealistic and extremely demanding task. All this focus on detail encourages the segmentation of information, not regarding the text as a whole but as unrelated little chunks and relying solely on the acoustic input to decipher the message. No wonder learner confidence is shattered and motivation plummets!
We’ll contrast this with the circle in our next post.
I think you can guess my question for you now:
Have you found yourself following the line model, consciously or not, in your listening lessons?
I’m the first to admit that I have and that I have also found it extremely difficult to retrain learners to focus on other sources of information and regard the text as a whole.
There is a general impression that listening is a “neglected” skill, that it has received less attention than its more famous siblings, reading and speaking. Although research (e.g., Rost, 2002) has been focusing more and more on the key role of listening in language learning, I still feel that we as teachers may not fully appreciate the pivotal role it plays in both developing other language skills and in actually learning a new language. More to the point, I believe it is difficult to realise exactly how difficult and how complex the listening process is for our students. This is why I’m starting this listening series.
Rather predictably, I’m starting with a look at the nature of the listening process.
To wrap up, I have a simple task for the reader: just go down the checklist above and tick the points that reflect your own beliefs about listening. And if you feel like sharing, please put down your top 3 in the Comments section below.
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