Why we language teachers need to be shocked out of our comfort zones

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Dear Gerhard,

Are you aware that the title of your upcoming book (“Make Language Teaching Productive Again – the Psychology and Quality Management of Language Teaching”) might be highly offensive to many of us readers? You must know that the “Make X great again” is Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, don’t you? That racist, sexist, transphobic, fascist US president that is bringing us all down! How dare you?!

An offended reader

Well, the book itself may indeed prove highly offensive to many language instructors reading it. Not that it would contain foul language, “locker room talk”, threats that “you’re a fired”, suggestions of building walls between your “good” and “bad” students.

On the contrary. The book promotes an agenda of inclusive language education, in creating “safe spaces” for the learner (!) where he or she can experiment without harmful criticism, in giving the “good” and the “bad” as many opportunities to intermingle as possible.

But, this regards our students. Our customers. Not us the teachers. As teachers, being in a “safe space” is the most dangerous thing to our personal development. And, it is unethical towards our students, who deserve the best version of ourselves.

Unfortunately, in a typical language school setting, many of us are in a comfort zone. Yes, there are strict requirements by the school’s administration. But, in many language schools, the administration tends to let teachers alone and not interfere too much in the classroom. As long as the formal criteria of using the prescribed textbook and applying standard tests are respected. Beyond that, most language school administrators do not dare to go too far with their commentaries, because of a perceived lack of competency. They themselves may not be language teachers, but accountants, economists, lawyers or just sales persons. They are so preoccupied with keeping the school going, with responding to customers and registering participants, that they typically do not have the time to regularly assist classes, develop a quality management system with standard procedures and train themselves to be competent in discussing with you.

Students in most countries, apart from situations in which something really bad has happened or if the student is a VIP, tend to be non-confrontational. If they do not like something, why tell it openly? They can just switch the school or take online courses.

What is there to ensure our professional growth?

The school may hand out questionnaires to students after each course. If you are lucky, you might get feedback beyond a simple rating of customer satisfaction, something more than the fact that X% of students liked your teaching, or consider you a nice and “open” person. You might get something more specific, that students want more or less grammar, want to talk more or less, want you to correct them more or less. However, all this feedback is still limited in use. It depends on the way questions are phrased, and is limited by the questions that are not asked. And, many students may not know what would be really good for their success. Remember the Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Likewise, most students do not have the personal experience of reaching levels of excellence in a foreign language. They remember what they did not like in school, and they most certainly have opinions about how you should teach them.

They want lessons to be “interactive”, “interesting”, they want to speak more, less “grammar” (or more “grammar”).  They want you to teach them proverbs, idioms, to learn dialogues for specific situations by heart. They want you to give them easy books, to show them websites with easy videos with subtitles where people speak slowly. But, how to reach fluency, how to reach a state in which they can build their own sentences with ease, they most often do not know. Otherwise, they would not have come to you, and figured it out by themselves instead!

Your school might invite regularly fellow language teachers, of course with the necessary certificate of being a “teacher trainer” and often even “a foreigner”, to give you the occasional one-off seminar. Most often, topics are chosen according to what administration (often, not professional educators) or teachers (open to learn, but keen on preserving their comfort zone as to how they teach) consider “interesting” and distractive. As the teacher trainer wants to be invited again, we end up with lots of highly interactive, visually attractive seminars with lots of tips and tricks on everything neuro (neurolanguage teaching, NLP in the classroom), how to teach to “multiple intelligences”, how to integrate technology into the classroom, interactive games for students, etc. Not that those topics were not useful. On the contrary. Of course, there are those more “boring” ones like how to get more out of textbook XYZ, or how to prepare students for the XYZ standardized language proficiency test.

However, what is mostly avoided is anything that would challenge the status quo in the school and in the classroom, fundamental debates about whether our underlying principles and assumptions are really correct, or not.

My upcoming book (in fall 2018) intends to do just that. You are free to throw it into a corner. Well, if it is on your Kindle, you might think twice. Become as angry as you like. But, language learning is becoming radically different. Whether you want to keep your safe space or not, your customers are not obliged to stay there with you. They have increasingly cheaper and more attractive opportunities. Do not rely on the fact that your school takes care of filling up your classroom! There is many a cook taken by surprise that, despite of having a marketing department, the restaurant has closed down. Better, be prepared! Better, have something to offer that no competitor, off- or online can replace!

If you want be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

Self-handicapping in language learning

It happens to me all the time. I have adults coming to my German group courses telling me before the first lesson. “I have never been good at foreign languages. I just want to try one more time.” Then they are surprised of how great they are doing during the first 10 or so lessons. Then, they miss 2 or 3 lessons due to work, holidays, or whatsoever. And then they send me a message telling me that, suddenly, they do not have the time anymore to come to the last lessons and pass the exam. Do you know what, I do not believe most of them! Sounds arrogant, inconsiderate, fill in the blanks. What I believe is that we have here a classic example of self-handicapping.

Self-handicapping is a well-researched concept in empirical (experiment-based/data-driven) psychology that describes situations when an individual chooses an action that is potentially detrimental to his or her future performance. In classic experiments, individuals, after initial success in some “cognitive” task in which they themselves did not quite understand how they succeeded, were asked to choose between potentially performance-enhancing and performance-impeding drugs. Around 70% of male (!) participants in a 1978 study by Berglas chose the first option. While many may ask why an individual would act so stupidly, in studies, women are quite accurate in understanding the situation. The participants just want to have an excuse for future failure.

There are many ways of self-handicapping: alcohol and drugs, and other bad habits, adopting bad strategies, and, not putting in the necessary effort. You know it all: the student who parties before an exam, the drinker friend that – if he were not drinking – would be the next Jimi Hendrix or Ernest Hemmingway.

Why do people self-handicap? Studies on self-handicapping offer several explanations:

·        To protect one’s self-image. If I fail, it is not because I am not smart, but because I just did not try enough.

·        To protect one’s social status.

Thus, research has shown that men do self-handicap more often than women, so do more dominant ethnic groups and professionals with higher social status. The phenomenon is more prevalent if the performance of a task and the feedback on results is visible to others.

Coming back to the initial examples. A participant shows unexpectedly positive results during the first lessons. But, she is afraid she may not replicate that in the final exam, due to a history of previous exam failures in other language courses. So, dropping out at a high point serves as leaving her (only?) success in a language course unchallenged.

What are the implications for your teaching?

Taking into consideration the above, you can suppose that students with the following characteristics will be more prone to self-handicapping.

·        Adult males,

·        Out of the dominant ethnic/religious group,

·        With high social status (school teachers, policemen, HR managers, university professors, judges, doctors, etc.), that is people in front of which we feel uncomfortable due to their authority of deciding our fate.

What can you do to stop self-handicapping?

I do not know the perfect remedy, because the underlying cause is a perceived existential threat to the individual. Just by “explaining” it, you won’t stop alcohol and drug addicts. However, you can introduce some standard procedures into your teaching that decrease the probability of its occurrence.

·        Periodically addressing the issue (using small videos, articles, jokes/parody) and discussing it with students (ideally in the target language as a discussion topic);

·        Forming peer-support groups so that students have an accountability partner outside of the classroom that can offer support in case of frustrations and difficulties;

·        Making the lesson as non-threatening as possible. I do this by having students work in always-reshuffled pairs during most of the lesson time, with background music to make them comfortable;

·        By stressing that the real exam is not at the end of the course but in real life when using the language practically;

·        By being transparent about the exam requirements, and also about the test’s limitation. No test will ever validly and reliably reflect an individual students abilities in their entirety.

Tell me what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions. If you want me to hold a live seminar for your school on the, just send me an e-mail.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

Developing a growth mindset among your language students

Professional or aspiring marathon runners, soccer players, golfers, musicians or salesmen, all understand the decisive importance of psychology. Most of them become interested when presented with scientific evidence or psychological techniques to enhance their performance. Many of them even do consult with a psychologist before key events. Rightly so, they understand that their success depends not only on their professional skills and work ethics, but also on their mindset.

This is in no way different for language learning. It being a long way to mastery, psychology comes into play whether or not a student chooses challenging tasks, makes enough effort and develops resilience to overcome obstacles. Unfortunately, most students view the process as something “fixable” just by the right technique or app, and by putting in time. As a result, even if there are millions, if not billions, of foreign language learners worldwide, drop-out rates are equally high. After buying a lot of books, playing with online material, nonetheless, at a certain point, they feel that they are not making enough progress. And than they discover that learning that language what really not that urgent.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has been researching for decades on learners that give up and those who do not. Her key insight is that the way we think about our intelligence can set us up for success or failure. People with a growth mindset think that their own intelligence is malleable, that it can be improved upon by practice and effort. Those with a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are more less unchangeable. Every one of us has a growth or fixed mindset in different areas of life. 

Think about the following activities:

·        Speaking in public

·        Cooking a dinner for a family reunion

·        Playing tennis

·        Singing karaoke

·        Playing a musical instrument

·        Writing poetry

·        Repairing home appliances

·        Dancing

·        Writing a scientific paper.

You will have noticed that in some activities, an inner voice has alarmed you by saying, this is not for me, I am not gifted enough for it.

People with a fixed mindset are obsessed with looking smart. Believing that their abilities are fixed, they fear that every impression they make on others is irreversible. Thus, they avoid looking dumb at all costs. This leads to avoiding any kind of challenging task that could contain the risk of failure. In consequence, they tend to choose only activities they feel confident in. On the other hand, people with a growth mindset love challenges because they see them as learning opportunities. Knowing that they can change themselves, failures are non-threatening to them. In the light of negative feedback, those with a growth mindset become defensive and look for external causes for their failure. They tend to give up easier.

Now, how does look like with language students? The statements below are not based upon any scientific study, but upon 10 years of teaching groups in Eastern Europe.

·        There is a high proportion of fixed mindset students in foreign languages (maybe because society tells people that you need to be talented to be really good at it, like in music?)

·        Fixed vs. growth mindsets vary according to the classroom activity

·        Fixed mindset students love to hide behind some kind of authority: the Textbook, the Teacher, the Course Structure.

·        Fixed mindset students love external structures imposed on them which they can predict, that is, knowing that they will pass the textbook page by page, thus being able to overprepare and minimize uncertainty.

·        Fixed mindset students prefer to learn and work visually (easier to control time- and content-wise) than with audio

·        If forced to communicate in the classroom, they will request to tell them the topic well in advance, that you give them word lists, and they will come with written-out phrases or dialogues.

The problem is, we as language teachers need to think about how our students perform after the course. In reality, most communication is audio and improvised. Just adapting to fixed mindsets of our student is unethical, and not profitable in the long run. Nonetheless, students will find out that even if they felt in the comfort zone with you, they cannot survive reality.

How to instill a growth mindset in your students?

·        Lead by example. Develop a growth mindset yourself as a teacher.

·        Show students areas where you yourself are still learning (pronunciation, grammar, but also other things than languages).

·        Tell students about your own obstacles in language learning and how you overcame them.

·        Talk with students about fixed and growth mindsets. Share a video with them or recommend them books.

·        Give feedback to students based on their effort, and not on their intelligence or talent.

·        From lesson 1: provide for exercises that force students out of their comfort zone (improvised communication; constructing their own sentences), and make them realize that, in reality, nobody was harmed by making some mistakes.

Tell me what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions. If you want me to hold a live seminar for your school on the, just send me an e-mail.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

5 easy ways to systematize your language teaching

Success in most areas of life depends on having suitable systems in place that support our development process. While we may have excelled at school or in corporations following “the system”, we may not be equally well prepared to set up our own systems. In a typical language school situation, all three stakeholders involved – administration, teachers and students – expect from each other to be given “structure”. At the end, we end up with relying solely on the “structure” offered by the respective textbook. This is far from enough, since successful learning depends on so much more, and mainly, the student having a training routine at home and learning how to self-correct.

Here are some premises to reflect on. What is your stance on them? On what grounds do you accept or dismiss them? What evidence do you have from your or fellow teachers’ experience? How do holding them affects your own teaching?

The most important predictor for success is not what happens in the classroom but what practical (!) training takes place at home. Just imagine someone taking guitar lessons and only playing the guitar when sitting with the teacher…
Apart from material for homework, standard textbooks rarely offer consistent coaching advice: how to train at home: how to set up learning routines, how to overcome obstacles (time-management, self-handicapping, frustrations), how to set goals, how to monitor your success.
Students typically do not have significant others around them, able to help them out with all the above. 
Therefore, the teacher is the only person a student can expect help. 
However, teaching time is very limited, and explaining the above to students takes away from the precious lesson time.
Thus, teachers need to find ways to automatize as much as possible their coaching role, so that they have maximum impact with the least time investment.

Here are five ways to do that:

1.      A welcome document outlining most of your coaching part. Address what to expect of your course, classroom rules how to train at home, what obstacles students may encounter and how to deal with them, recommended resources, etc. In the past, I spent most of the first lesson in a group “explaining” the course. Now I just give them a pdf and check at the beginning of the second lesson, whether everybody has read it and has questions.

2.      A classroom notes template. Instead of hoping students take notes whenever you are explaining, already have a customized template for them, where they write down new words (used by the teacher and classmates), rules and most importantly, document mistakes.

3.      A home routine template. If your students do not only complete homework out of the book, but have certain routine activities (x new words per day, reading, writing, etc.), have them fill out a special form for that.

4.      Accountability partners. Let students form pairs that hold themselves accountable in between lessons. They can also (pre)check each other’s homework, train together or help each other out when one is frustrated.

5.      Error management. Have a special template for error management. After each test, or, ideally, each lesson, students complete a table with all their errors, and probable cause, correction as well as preventive measures. Typically, students want their teacher to correct them. They don’t want to do too much thinking in analyzing what they have written. On the other, they will become proficient speakers only if they succeed in learning how to self-correct.

Tell me what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions. If you want me to hold a live seminar for your school on the, just send me an e-mail.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.