‘Changes’

Wednesday 19^th, October, 2011

Last week’s successes and this week’s relative failure amount to a case of ‘two steps forwards, one step back’. The mid term results have affected the make-up of all my classes. Depending on their results some students have been shuffled around – some have moved up a level whilst others have dropped down. The co-teachers I teach with have been shuffled around too and even the actual class rooms have changed for some of the classes. It has been a confusing week. To add to the confusion my school is hosting a theatrical competition this week. Seven other schools are coming here with some of their students to compete and making the necessary arrangements has led to a hectic working environment. I have been helping our students rehearse (they are doing ‘Red Hiding Hood’ in a Korean style) and it has really thrown my schedule out of step. On a personal note I have been to the dentist 3 times in the past week and not to complain but it has really had a negative effect on my week.

Putting all of that aside what I mainly want to write about today is the follow up to the lesson I gave last week to my low level students. I wrote that the previous lesson was an experiment to see if I could change the way I taught the lower level students. I wanted to see if I could alter my pedagogic purpose in delivering those classes and raise the students own and my expectations of what they were capable. I dispensed with the lesson model I had been using for them and tried to use a more structured lesson plan. Throughout the lesson I tried to include ideas and techniques we have been learning in methodology class – activating schema, lowering the affective filter, bodily kinesthetic responses, different MIC techniques and so on. I concluded that, whilst difficult and teacher dominated, it was a good lesson to build on. The next lesson, the one I want to write about today, would aim to “move them a little ways along the obstructive / controlled continuum closer to the constructive / free end”.

So did today’s lesson build on the last lesson constructively and incorporate a greater degree of freedom in classroom interaction? I think the jury is still out. There were some issues to deal with:

Co-Teachers and Korean in the Classroom

Unfortunately Kyuyun is no longer teaching the low level classes. She has been swapped out with Sonsujong who is the most senior teacher and the head of the English department. Last week I had agreed with Kyuyun that we would not use any Korean in class. Sonsujong uses a lot of Korean, sometimes wresting control of the lesson away from me completely to explain something, at length, in Korean. She is an excellent teacher and a lovely person but I wish she would not do this. However, whereas I was happy to approach Kyuyun about speaking Korean in the classroom there is no way I am going to broach the subject with Sonsujong. Furthermore, the things she is explaining in Korean are things Kyuyun and I managed to convey without using Korean last week – mainly things to do with past tense construction.

There was a significant change in the atmosphere of these classes today. I’m not sure what to attribute this to. Teaching the classes with Kyuyun was difficult last week, I spent a lot of energy and really had to encourage the students to do the work, but it was essentially okay. The students were all awake and just about paying attention for the most part. However, in 2 or 3 classes today there were 1 or 2 students who were simply asleep on their desks. When cajoled by Sonsujong they point blank refused to do anything. Sonsujong actually got really angry and sent a couple of students from the room. A couple of others she just moved to the back of the room where they continued to sleep on their desks. This never happened with Kyuyun. Sonsujong, like the other two more senior co-teachers, is comfortable expressing anger in the classroom whereas the younger co-teachers, Kyuyun and Pakanna, never seem to do so. I have no solid explanation for this. Maybe when Kyuyun has been teaching as long as Sonsujong she will be screaming at the students too. Regardless it obviously changes the tenor of the classroom. I suspect it also has negative implications for the affective filter. Purely anecdotal evidence suggests that the students are happier, more engaged in Kyuyun’s class than in Sonsujongs. (When my grade 2 classes this week found out they were getting Kyuyun they were over the moon. She walked into the class and the students started cheering! There was no cheering from the students who found out Sonsujong was their teacher. Make of this what you will).

There may be another contributing factor. Last week the low level classes were in the English village – the nicest classroom in the school. It is light and airy and full of clean surfaces. The computer works, the technology is great and it is open and spacious. This week and for the rest of the semester the low level classes are in a standard classroom. (They rotate the classes taught in the English village so that every class gets a chance to use it at some point). The standard classrooms are a little rough around the edges, definitely not as inviting for the students or teachers as the English village. Class room environment clearly has a part to play in learner development. As I teach in maybe 19 different classrooms I have no opportunity to influence the way the classroom looks or is set up. This places a greater emphasis on the need for the teacher to bring the atmosphere into the class with them.

The third issue facing today’s lessons was the shuffling of students. Whilst most of the students remained the same, in each class there were one or two who had done well enough in their mid term to be moved up to the mid level class. At the same time there was a couple who were moved down to the low level class. This meant that not every student in these classes had been a part of the previous lesson although they had been a part of a similar lesson given to the mid level classes.

Together these issues conspired to derail my optimistic intentions for the new lesson.

The Regular Past Tense, Revising and Moving Forward

At the end of my last blog post about these classes I concluded (somewhat optimistically) that “the next lesson will afford these students greater opportunities for constructing knowledge and meaning, which Walsh says is one of the main pedagogic aims of a teacher, as they will bring this newly acquired schema with them.” I was crushed to discover that after all my hard work, all the energy, planning and effort of last week’s lesson the students remembered next to nothing! Truly, I was so disheartened. It’s not even that I was expecting them to remember everything or to be able to fluently explain the entire concept of ‘Regular Past Tense’ but I had hoped they would retain more than they did. I had a revision section planned for the beginning of this lesson to ‘refresh’ the students’ memories and connect to the previous lesson. My aim was to build on this foundation by first going over the material from last week and then introducing some little speaking / writing activities. The revision section however took a lot longer than I though it would because their grasp on the material was so tenuous. We spent around 20 minutes reviewing the material from last week. To be fair they picked it up a lot quicker second time around and maybe I was reaching too far too quickly in planning so much for the lesson. So on reflection I think I have to be satisfied. The 20 minutes were essentially spent doing exactly what was done last week – going through each example, checking understanding, choral repetition, modeling, asking questions, getting the students to ask each other the example questions etc. Afterwards I mentioned my disappointment to Sonsujong about the students not remembering the previous lesson. She simply laughed like it was to be expected and said you just have to keep repeating everything and eventually some little amount will be taken in. It really is like pushing a boulder up a hill.

The above actually makes it sound worse than it ultimately was. My expectations here are the problem. I should probably be happier with this result. During the review section I could see they were remembering things, they were putting it together and many students were answering enthusiastically. The bodily kinesthetic activity I planned as a little revision exercise worked really well too. The students were excited and engaged by it – it was a ‘pass the paper’ game. They really enjoyed playing it but still, even after the review section, a couple of students had no idea when it was their turn to answer something.

After the ‘pass the paper’ game it was time to introduce a new exercise. The exercise involved using the grammar we had already worked on plus a couple of small, additional items. So whereas they have already learned “did you cook dinner at the weekend? Yes, I cooked dinner at the weekend’ this time I also wanted them to learn ‘Barry cooked dinner at the weekend’ and ‘Barry didn’t cook dinner at the weekend.’ It was when I was explaining the concept of how to turn an answer someone gives, ‘I cooked dinner at the weekend’, into ‘[name] cooked dinner at the weekend’ or ‘[name] didn’t cook dinner at the weekend’ that Sonsujong intervened and explained in Korean exactly what was happening. I was really disappointed by this. Kyuyun and I did so well last week not using Korean that it felt like such a regressive move to use Korean to explain. I feel that I could have conveyed it quite simply. At the point where I was beginning to explain she just stepped right in and used Korean. I am worried that they are less likely to retain the English knowledge as it was explained in Korean. Still, Sonsujong is too senior a figure for me to ask not to use Korean in the classroom. I am far too concerned that I might offend her. She is my boss so I don’t really want to cause any problems with her.

The activity progressed after this with difficulty anyway. The students who only minutes earlier were excitedly playing a game together were overcome with shyness and reticence. I had to encourage and cajole almost every student. Would it have been smoother had Sonsujong not made a lengthy interjection in Korean? I don’t think it would have made much difference. I tried this activity with one of the Kyuyun classes last week and it was really difficult then too. How then do I explain it? In the lesson at this point they have already demonstrated they understand the grammar (even if it was explained to them in Korean) and they been being energetic and speaking to one another just prior to the activity. There is no real reason why they CAN’T do the activity so what happens in the transition from game to activity? Is it the way it is explained? I think it might have something to do with the distinction between ‘game’ and ‘activity’. The lines are too clearly marked. One is presented as inconsequential, ‘it’s just a game, not really learning’, whereas the other is presented as ‘work time, learning time, so pay attention, don’t get it wrong’. I need to think of a better way to transition from one to the other. I said elsewhere I was happy with a particular lesson introduction because it segued seamlessly from section to section. I was happy because the students shouldn’t notice the joins, the parts where your lesson is stitched together. In this lesson the students could see the stitching. I think this is why the lesson planning exercise was so helpful. I want to plan lessons that flow without jarring changes of direction or abrupt transitions justified only by what I want to achieve. The lesson should have its own internal logic.

Again, I was exhausted after finishing the fourth lesson of the day. The lesson, although not quite as teacher dominated as last week, still required a lot of energy on my part. I’m not sure where to go from here. The next lesson should move on to the irregular past tense whilst incorporating further revision of the regular past tense. I will have to remember to devote a decent amount of time to revising the previous lesson at the beginning of each new lesson. It will be difficult to build on this lesson immediately. The next two lessons I have with the low level classes will be consumed by their speaking test. The next lesson will be given to preparing for the speaking test and the subsequent lesson will be the speaking test itself. So I will have to pick up where I left off after the speaking tests are completed.

In future I need to have more realistic expectations.

Finally, I’m not going to speak to Sonsujong about Korean in the class room so I will simply have to work around that particular issue.