Reflections on a teaching philosophy

When applying for teaching jobs, you are often called on to write a mini-essay stating your teaching philosophy.  Sometimes you are forced to be overly concise (state your philosophy of teaching in 150 words or less) but I just started one for which there are no guidelines. 

Obviously, it needs to be something someone can pick up off a pile and read in a few minutes, so it can't be too long. 

I was writing one like that just now and I realized that my philosophy of teaching suggests that:

1. I should myself write in the way I would expect of those whom I teach; in other words, I should ‘transfer’ or carry over from my personal habits (my blogging for example) into my workplace and professional spaces.
2. I should not treat my writing as something I do for an audience of one.  I should direct it at a wider audience.
3. Writing like this is obviously directed at a purpose (to get a job for example, or to get a high mark) but its true purpose should be directed at the search for wider knowledge.
4. When teachers write about their profession (or when anyone writes about their true passion) that act of reflection should be pumped into the ongoing peer conversations around that topic.
5. My articulation of the teaching philosophy I am trying to convey can be improved on the basis of feedback I might receive by doing the above.
6. When writing is personal in addition to purposeful, writing becomes a joy, a liberation, and it becomes better writing, writing that writers want to improve through a process based in peer appreciation and feedback.

With that in mind, here is my short philosophy of teaching …

I love teaching.  In fact I thrive on it.  I realized this was so when I had completed my first 20 years of teaching and went into CALL software development and then worked on the management team of a language center.  Working in an office, I felt a kind of withdrawl. I missed teaching so much that I started doing it on a volunteer basis online, just to be working with students and to explore and learn myself how learning takes place online. 

I teamed with colleagues I met online to work with our shared students at first, but eventually other teaching peers began getting interested in what we were finding out about online learning, and gradually started to join us. So in 2002 I set up a course to model for them how to make their students feel a part of a community online by applying those very techniques in the new course I was facilitating.  This small community of teaching peers, which we have since called Webheads, has sustained itself to this day and now has well over 1000 participants in its associated communities, and touches thousands more through its larger extended networks.  Many who have encountered our community have said that this association has produced an epiphanal moment in their teaching and learning careers.

Several aspects of my teaching philosophy can be gleaned from this story.  First, it’s a story, and I believe that story-telling is an appropriate technique in helping learners to consolidate and internalize their learning.  In this story I started out talking about teaching, because I was asked to write about my philosophy of teaching. But as soon as I could I turned that word over onto its flipside, learning. At one point I used the word facilitating  in place of the word teaching.  Then I mentioned ‘teaching peers’ to soften the concept of teaching, and level out its hierarchical overtones. 

A major role of teachers should be, in my view, to facilitate learning environments which enable students to tell their stories. In a language or writing class, they might do so overtly.  But in other classes this might mean that the teacher strives to enable students to relate the material to how they envision themselves in the context of their own stories.

I like David Warlick’s idea of a teacher as ‘master learner.’  I often cite that phrase in conjunction with Stephen Downes’s distinction between teachers and learners. Downes says that teachers model and demonstrate, whereas students practice and reflect.  If you consider teachers to be master learners then you could argue at one extreme that there is no such thing really as a teacher, only learners.  At the other extreme, you could say that teachers are really learners in disguise -- master learners -- who constantly percolate the processes of modeling, demonstrating, reflecting, and practicing.

Language is not something in my view that can be taught, like a scientific principle or theorem.  Most of us know for example that e=mc2, or how to calculate the length of a hypotenuse of a triangle.  Many of us have been taken through the proof of that theorem, but I would think only a tiny fraction of all students who have regurgitated that proof on a geometry test have actually learned it, or can explain clearly what would happen to time if light were ever to exceed the speed of c (or even what happens as it approaches that speed in the vicinity of a huge mass the size of a black hole, which in turn would be tending toward the size of a pea, a flea, and so on). Similarly many have been taught some expressions in a foreign language (for example, “frère Jaques, dormez vous?”) possibly without knowing hardly any other French.

I said in a plenary address once that there was no such thing as a language teacher, only language learners.  Here we must distinguish teaching from training.  It is possible to train someone to speak a grammatical subset of a language. In how many languages can you (1) greet people? (2) thank them or express dislike? (3) negotiate food and a place to stay? (4) speak to them about topics of concern to them or to you? (5) talk politics? or (6) understand a wide range of media in their language? As all language learners know (or find out, if it’s their first time), these tasks chart a progression (from 1 to 6) of increasingly difficult and complex skills. It is possible to train people to do the first three with some degree of competency (as you can train them to sing Frere Jaques). But the last two require that the learner has taken the training further through curiosity and motivation to learn the language. 

This is what I mean when I say that language at this level cannot be taught.  I mean that someone who succeeds as a putative teacher to such learners is creating contexts in which they can more efficiently and successfully learn.  This then is the true work of a teacher, to motivate students to want to learn, to challenge them, to construct environments whereby learning will best take place, to model the behaviors of good learners according to what the teacher has found works best as a master learner, to demonstrate, to practice what is learned, to reflect on what he or she is learning, to do, and to model for the students how to do, all of the above.

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And my brief philosophy of teaching ends there.  That is about the right amount of prose for a job application. It reads like a story, it’s neatly ended.  But there is of course more. When I was writing this out, freewriting as it were, I continued in this vein …

Like others, I love to learn but I hate to be taught.  To be taught implies a teacher with a long ruler standing over fidgeting students bent over desks except when called on or to sneak furtive glances at the clock on the wall.  In my perception, a learning space should take on much more pleasant, more flexible dimensions.  Ideally it should be a space that learners want to go to (there have been studies of such spaces, such as children’s museums, space centers, etc. where people go voluntarily to learn).  Using Web 2.0 tools it is possible to construct such spaces online where students feel motivated to treat each other as collaborators in and audiences for projects.  The Internet allows us to scale such efforts out to highly significant dimensions, so if technology is available, it can be used for this purpose. But even if IT tools are not available, the focus of learning (as facilitated by teachers) should be on collaboration and appreciation of individual strengths, with deficiencies rectified in ways that students can see lead to success and progress.

When I have free reign to facilitate as I like (when I construct and facilitate my own online courses for example), I am able to tailor curricula around individual needs. I do this in part by letting students define their learning goals and document their progress in what I am now calling me-portfolios in open spaces of their own construction (not using a kind of e-portfolio software designed to place the entire e-portfolio into a single proprietary server space). In this way, when I have freedom to construct my own courses, I balance learner needs vs. a variety of choices in my curriculum to keep course materials flexible, adaptable, driven by students, and by their response to teacher trial and error. 

Sean Banville articulated this give and take in teaching quite well in an interview with  Larry Ferlazzo, reported in Larry’s blog here: (link). Sean referred especially to face-to-face language teaching, where teachers must listen carefully to students and then move in one of any number of possible directions either thought out and prepared in advance, or (and this is where it becomes an art) invented spontaneously.

Another important aspect of teaching is that it is necessary to have two general philosophies, or approaches, one for mature learners with developed literacy skills who can understand and articulate the metalanguage of learning and dissemination of knowledge, and another for learners without sufficient experience to enable them to express as well what they wish to accomplish in their learning environment.  I most often encounter the first group in online environments, where people tend to self-select to be there. Many of whom I am referring to as online students are in fact teaching peers carrying through on their master-learner roles, and for these learners I try to model how to use technologies to help them discover and learn what THEY want to know, and extend their learning through productive networking.  I often find that one of the rewards of working with such learners is that I am able to learn from them (again, in my role as master-learner).  Here, there are usually many opportunities to show-through-doing that to teach is to model and demonstrate, and to learn is to practice and reflect.  

For the less mature learners, the young men and women I teach in my day-to-day teaching at tertiary level in Arab countries, my over-riding goal as a teacher (as opposed to trainer) is to model and demonstrate for them the literacies I feel they will need to reach the next level. This involves giving more discrete guidance, much of it directed at affecting change in the culture of the learning environment itself.

One more important aspect of teaching is the role of doubt and confusion.  If my courses include many instances of realia and options, students can be confused at first.  I tell them, reassure them, that confusion is the state where learning begins.  If there is no stress or tension, then it is possible that training is taking place, but not necessarily learning in its optimal self-questioning sense.  So confusion serves a purpose and can be anticipated in stages where learning is most strongly internalized, and can be dissipated where interactions between participants are rich enough to help them resolve that confusion.

And now, as Auden said about great poems, never completed, only abandoned, I must leave off my exploration of teaching philosophies, or I would never actually complete any job applications ;-).  However, if the topic interest you, won’t you continue this conversation in the comments section below?

Coda:

I didn't get the job but my teaching philosophy got two retweets!
http://screencast.com/t/iSFXJX65y71

Original links:
http://twitter.com/ozge/status/67529362387374080
http://twitter.com/WackJacq/status/67538421492613120

Yes, I accept pay in karma :-)

Hold Presses:
This just in, here's a teaching philosophy in action from a teacher in my PLN, linking her students to the world from a class somewhere on the planet. This just popped up on my computer while I happened to be editing this blog post ...

This is what she was doing:
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=56473

A cookbook for 21st century project management

I just returned to Abu Dhabi from the CALICO conference in Amherst where I talked about my chapter in the book for which I was a section editor and that was featured on CALICO’s portal web page prior to the conference https://calico.org/page.php?id=452;. The book is on CALL in limited technological contexts and my chapter  “Shifting sands, shifting paradigms:  Challenges to developing 21st century learning skills in the United Arab Emirates” discusses not limited technology per se, but limited experience with the latest uses of technology causing educators to not exploit its full potential and benefits.  I point out in my chapter what some of the hurdles are preventing teachers from embracing the new technologies and I set forth a strategy for overcoming them.  In a nutshell the strategy explains how we can be change agents by getting our colleagues to interact with us using 21st century Web 2.0 technology tools and writing use of these tools into the curriculum where they are taught by teachers whom we help to familiarize with some of the uses and affordances of these tools.

I posted the slide show outlining the chapter at Slideshare.net, direct link  http://tinyurl.com/vance2010amherst. I put the full text of my final draft of the book chapter itself at Google Docs and create a tiny url for it at http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico.  The text is hyperlinked from the slide show, and I linked to the slides from the Google Doc. I hope to make a slidecast for the slide show and podcast that at http://vancestevens.podomatic.com/ if I can find a spare moment.  This would further model my ideas for teacher training, and for helping students acquire the multimedia skills essential to communication in the 21st century.

The paper articulates what is needed for several projects I’ve got going at the moment.  The slides would probably get me through several talks I’m giving in Brazil and Argentina in July and August this summer.  For example, in my presentations at BrazTESOL I’ll be talking about some of the affordances of teaching and learning through a PLN (personal learning network) and the social networking, tagging, RSS, and paradigm shifting associated with that concept.

I know I need to couch all these topics, unfamiliar to many, in terms that teachers can easily understand, to help them see the benefits and importance to them. It won’t be the first time I have addressed such audiences; for example, explaining tagging to Ministry of Education English teachers at their most recent Nile TESOL Conference, where they were in Cairo and I presented online from Abu Dhabi  http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0.

I wrote the book chapter in 2009 after having proposed a set of technological innovations to a previous director of the department where I work, but I have since got my teeth into some other projects, which I hope will help teachers learn more about the technologies they might be using with students as they prepare to teach from materials I am writing in conjunction with one of these projects.

Curriculum for students

In curriculum development, I am helping to develop a computing support course to students in an intensive English program at the Petroleum Institute.  My part of this project is to create curriculum introducing tools such as Google Docs and Delicious to support an English dept. focus on collaboration, team building, and Internet search.  The problem for teachers is that in order for them to effectively teach these skills to students they have to themselves be experienced users of the tools.  As this is not yet the case, I will need to find ways for the English teachers to use the tools in the run-up to these components being taught.

My plan is to create documents for them in Google Docs, create a project tag, and show the teachers how we can track latest versions of shared documents pertaining to our own collaboration and find them online via Delicious and other tools that will track tags.

Community building and professional development for teachers

I’ve been speaking and writing at length for much of the time I’ve been at the Petroleum Institute on these tools and on my many experiments with how they can be used with students as well as teachers in their professional development, but it is only recently that there has been wide enough interest among colleagues with whom I work face-to-face to allow me to take my ideas mainstream.

One manifestation of this interest is where colleagues and I in TESOL Arabia are rejuvenating the TESOL Arabia EdTech-SIG with emphasis on online potentials for promoting the “three C’s” of collaboration, communication, and creativity.  Jim Buckingham and I kicked off this latest phase in a joint presentation recently at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi where we connected with Phil Cozens presenting on-site that same morning in far-away Ras Al Khaima http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel.  We used the Adobe Connect platform that PI recently purchased and where I have been granted permission to set up and conduct online meetings.

Since that success, those interested in taking the lead on promoting use of such tools in the UAE have met online to discuss leveraging them to help bring teachers up to speed with technology throughout the UAE.  To this end we might have regular online training sessions this coming year, and the English teachers at the PI might want to get involved, in part as a preparation for teaching the intensive English course in the Fall.  So these developments could play into one another.

A further opportunity for teacher training will arise when I teach my PPOT (Principles and Practices of Online Teaching course on Multiliteracies online again for TESOL from September 3 to October 6, 2010 http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=664&DID=2642. I am planning to run the course in conjunction with a face-to-face continuing education course for colleagues at the PI where the live audience can benefit from interaction with the distributed one and visa versa. If English teachers at the PI take advantage of that then this will serve to ground them in some of the tools and competencies they’ll need to most effectively teach the materials I’m creating for our students.  One of the English teachers completed my previous rendition of that course http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo, so we’ve made a start here already.

Tagging

To organize and promote such courses and show how the many parts of the overall endeavor are loosely joined, I am starting to conceive of a cookbook for 21st century project management.  Here is its first item, a recipe for getting a project off the ground using open education resources.

1.       The first thing you should do is agree on a tag for your project.  For example, the one we agreed on for the TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG was taedtechsig.  Some of us had already been using uaedu which seemed like a nice choice until we tested it in Twitter and with Spezify and found it was already in use and that some of the hits were not especially educational: http://twitter.com/#search?q=eduae and http://spezify.com/#/eduae.  Similarly, we found that edtechsig produced hits from NileTESOL in Cairo http://spezify.com/#/edtechsig. Now this brings up another point.  If we wish to aggregate content only for us then we need to create our own unique tag (taedtechsig produces no competing hits, thereby fitting this bill).  However, if we wish to call attention to colleagues in Egypt to what we are doing then we could use their tag, and our content will appear when they attempt to aggregate their own.

So two affordances of tags can be immediately seen.  First, they can help you aggregate content on your topic.  That is, if we want to see content placed on the Web related to this topic, we can use certain tools to locate and pull into one place content where its creators have used that tag, and second, if we want to create content and bring it to the attention of colleagues in a common endeavor,  we can tag it, and hope they will be able to find it.

For TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG I will use the two tags that will cause content I view or create to aggregate with other content tagged taedtechsig, and also I’ll tag the same content edtechsig in an effort to get the attention of our colleagues in Egypt.

2.       The second way to loosely join the disparate parts of a 21st century project is to tag them.  Tagging can be done initially by creators of content. However, consumers of content can also tag content they find online using Delicious or Diigo, or other such tools.

Delicious for example can be used to illustrate to both teachers and students how quickly a web site tagged by one user can become known to another.  Delicious is a great way for anyone collaborating on a project involving Internet research to see what has been found by team members, or a way of aggregating content on a tag; see for example, http://delicious.com/tag/writingmatrix.

As another example, both creators and consumers of content on Flickr can tag there. In other words, if I post a photo on Flickr I can give that photo (or set of photos) a tag. However, I can also tag photos I find interesting on Flickr (assuming I’m logged on to Flickr, and that the photo has been granted a creative commons license allowing others to tag it).  Many are familiar with this same concept from Facebook, where we can tag photos of friends there, and the site provides a means for seeing on one page all the photos tagged for a particular user.

So to summarize this as a recipe in the cookbook, once your group has settled on a tag, then all members should tag as many sites used by the group as possible. This can be done by both creators and consumers of that content. Group members who create content (post photos or create blog posts, for example) should apply the agreed on tag to that content.  Those who view that content online should tag it using their preferred social bookmark system.  Then search tools such as Spezify and Delicious and Diigo can be used to find content as it aggregates around that tag.

Another important use of tags is as ‘hash tags’ or #tags in Twitter.  Using #tags has affordances beyond a simple search.  You can search in Twitter and find #tags (and other content matching your search) but if you use #tags then you can click on them to bring up all content using that #tag.

The 3 C’s

Use of these techniques puts the “3 C’s” of 21st Century Learning into your online projects and those of your students.  The three C’s are communication, collaboration, and creativity.  Here are a few ways that these are addressed through the cookbook for 21st century project management.  These lists are simply starters; they could be added to endlessly.

COMMUNICATION
(how you can communicate with others in your group using these techniques)

• Create a tag for your project
• Create a portal and link all of your stuff here
• Create a #tag
• Tag all sites and associated sites in Delicious and Diigo
• Tag other artifacts as needed
• Set up Tag Games to see what others are tagging

COLLABORATION
(how you can work with others online)

• Wiki for content (like this one!)
• Etherpad clone
• Ning Alternatives (see http://tinyurl.com/ningthing)
• Cloudworks
• Spruz
• Mixxt
• Grou.ps
• Etc. etc.

CREATIVITY
(some ways you can be creative and innovative using Web 2.0 tools)

• Wordle
• Wallwisher
• Tag Gallaxy (works only with Flickr)

In an attempt to crowdsource additions to this list, I've created a wiki here:

http://21centuryskills4pdo.pbworks.com/FrontPage

If you'd like to add more tools, visit that link and add them, and I'll synch the lists from time to time
(must be a better way :-( Vance :-))

Thanks to these tweeters in my PLN :-))