“Teaching should be subordinate to learning.” — Caleb Gattegno

Comprehensible Input

I bring out the magic in my students by co-creating improvised stories with my students based on their own ideas. My method seamlessly combines listening, speaking, reading, and writing in a way that creates exceptional student engagement and retention. I refined my method from Dr. Stephen Krashen’s research on Comprehensible Input. This method mimics the way that all people learn their first language; it is said to be the only way that language is acquired.

Dogme

Dogme informs much of what I do in the classroom. Named for a Danish film style, dogme refers to only using materials that you already have. This means that instead of using text books which tend to be expensive and can be culturally irrelevant, we create our own pedagogical material from locally-found realia, such as newspapers, menus, student’s memorabilia, and, most importantly, student’s own stories of their lives. Using material that is personally meaningful to students creates lessons that are personally meaningful.

Way of Council

Way of Council is my favorite way to begin when I meet a class for the first time, and my favorite way to activate schema every time we move on to a different subject of study. It is an egalitarian method of communication with simple rules, or intentions:

• Listen from the heart — be a witness for what other people share, accepting them as they are without judgement.
• Speak from the heart — tell your personal story, using “I” statements
• Be succinct — knowing that you have been heard, there’s no need to repeat your point
• Be spontaneous — don’t plan ahead what you will say.

In a Way of Council, we sit in a circle (sometimes moving desks out of the way first!), facing each other, and share who we are with one another, one person at a time. Only the person holding the talking piece has the power to speak, while everyone else has the power to listen. This has proven an effective way to discover where everyone is at that day — how they are feeling, how awake they are, what their knowledge of a subject is and how they feel about it, etc. By taking ten minutes at the beginning of class to do Way of Council, I get a ton of valuable information about how to best finesse the lesson so that my students will be most open to it.

Community Language Learning

Community Language Learning is a way to student-generate a lot of language without overtly teaching vocabulary or grammar. A small subset of students sits together in a circle, while the rest of the class sits in a circle around them, close enough to hear well what is happening. The small group has a conversation in the target language with a recording device. As a member of the group thinks of what they’d like to say, they raise their hand and try their best to say what they mean. I give them the correct sentence, and, without practicing it first, they speak the sentence into the recording device and pause it. This continues until they have finished their conversation, perhaps about five minutes. Then, we’ll listen to the complete conversation, once just to listen to it, and twice for me to transcribe onto the board.

The subset of students next joins the larger circle of students as I number the sentences. Next, I explain that I am a computer, and that I will repeat any sentence they want to practice. Any student can practice any sentence they choose. First, they raise their hand and give the number of the sentence they want to attempt so that everyone knows where to direct their attention. After they try the sentence, I read it with correct pronunciation. As long as they keep repeating the sentence, so will I; once they are satisfied with their pronunciation, they fall silent, and someone else may try.

Next we play a game of Memory. The students get into small groups and I hand each group blank cards. They write one English phrase or sentence on one side, and their own version of a translation on the other. After they have played the game, we return to our circle. I now take on the role of “the creative computer” to help them create their own sentences based on the sentences on the board. Similar to before, a student will raise their hand, but this time they will give the numbers of all the different sentences that they are combining. They attempt the new sentence, and as before I use correct grammar and pronunciation to say what they are trying to say. They can continue to practice the sentence as before.

Silent Way

Best for small groups of one to six students, the Silent Way allows students to retain their primacy as they self-teach using Cuisenaire Rods, which make the abstract concrete. It is based on the idea that learning starts with the awareness of not knowing something, with the acceptance that knowing and not-knowing are both good places to be. I give my students a series of small challenges, starting with the most difficult one (if they can solve the difficult one, I don’t want to insult their intelligence with the easier ones; I can then give them even more difficult challenges). As they are learning the content, I am learning the students by keeping 100% present with them, directing the difficulty of each challenge according to their abilities; teaching is guided by learning rather than the other way around. As the students run up against a difficult challenge, they become aware of their not-knowing, and I encourage them to keep trying to function within the challenge. If their feelings begin to interfere, I try to find ways for the students to overcome them. I do not praise or criticize student behavior, as this would interfere with students developing their own inner critic. The Silent Way gives students time to figure things out and makes it safe to make mistakes. Learning the target language is a by-product of the process of struggling with the challenges.

Participatory Approach

The Participatory Approach is also known as Freirian Pedagogy, after Paulo Freire, whose most famous work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Literacy, Freire believed, was a tool of empowerment. He saw that in the process of learning to “read words” learners could be enabled to re-see the world around them and “name” it with a critical consciousness. This critical consciousness (conscientizacao) enables people to problematize reality in order to determine how it is constructed by those in power to oppress those without it. Oppression rests, he believed, in the power to present the unequal status quo as an unchangeable reality in which we are fated to live. The poor, through lack of education and cumulative history of powerlessness, accept this reality and the futility of change. Freire is credited with having been the force behind many educational programs that work with marginalized populations. His thinking had a huge impact on refugee and immigrant ESL education in the US and the development of Participatory Approaches to language learning. The Participatory Approach has become the approach in which inequalities and injustices are examined and acted on, from language endangerment and linguicism, to language ownership and power.

The Participatory Approach is based on the idea that a student’s move from naïveté to a critical attitude is a by-product of learning to read. Critical understanding leads to critical action; magic understanding to magic response: the more accurately students grasp true causality, the more critical their understanding of reality will be.

The teacher is not the one with the answers, but the one who facilitates students’ discovery of their own answers, contributing expertise while learning from each other about their reality. Teachers are problem-posers, not problem-solvers. The mistake with some traditional pedagogies is that they cast the student as the Object of the teacher’s teaching. Freire would have students be the Subject of their own learning.

We do this in three ways:

• by changing the program content of education
• with an active, dialogical, critical, and criticism-stimulating dialogue
• in the use of techniques such as thematic “breakdown” and “codification”

We begin by talking and gesturing. The starting point is the experience of the participants; their needs and concerns should be central to the curriculum content, which at all times should be relevant and use the concrete experiences of the students. When using the Participation Approach, one must be careful not to reduce “participatory” to “participation.”

I use active listening and structured exercises with the students to uncover the vocabulary of the group. I select the words that are most heavily weighted with meaning; these are the typical sayings of the group, and words and expressions linked to the group’s lived experience, including even their experiences with the dynamics in the classroom. The words must be student-generated; they must not come from my personal inspiration.

Next, I select generative words from the list, focusing on phoenemic richness, phoenetic difficulty (sequenced from easy to difficult), and pragmatic tone.

Then I find or create “codes.” A code functions as a challenge, as coded situation problems containing elements to be decided in collaboration with the group. A code can be almost anything, but it needs to be something familiar, open-ended, and provocative (though I prefer to stay away from the controversial because it may make students defensive), something, about which, everyone is sure to have an opinion. Examples are student-drawn maps of their campus or town, a drawing of a difficult situation that the students have described, students’ own family trees, students’ own photos or significant objects, or stories of students’ own immigration experiences.

I facilitate a discussion about the code, which reveals areas rich with potential for our work together. I ask my students what they see, and as they talk, I listen to the kind of language they use. I pay attention to how they feel. I ask them what the problems are [as illuminated or revealed the code] to generate different viewpoints. I ask if they can relate to the code, and, if the code is too loaded, I will create some emotional distance by using third-person language, asking students if they know anyone who can relate. Next I ask them what the source of the problem is, which will generate a lot of discussion. Finally, I’ll ask my students what they can do about the problem.

During our discussion, I make note of the generative language that arises from the code and how we might work with it to extend students’ capabilities with English. Of course, none of our work should be reduced to mechanical follow-through exercises, as this sends the message that our work with the important “codes” of their lives was only a pretext for language practice. This is avoided by not creating a “prescription” ahead of time for what to do and how to do it. Rather, as the facilitator, I use investigative skills and a framework for making decisions, which is best developed in the actual context of our dialogue. In other words, the curriculum is not a predetermined product, but the result of an ongoing context-specific problem-posing process.

Show What You Know

I developed Show What You Know as my major project in my Curriculum Design and Assessment class, and have presented it as a workshop at the Sandanona Conference (2015) and at TESOL Arabia (2016). This performance-based assessment method was designed for the ESL classroom, but it’s flexibility means that it can be used with any content and any skill level. Read my paper on Show What Know and access Show What You Know resources.