Survey link for Synergising Professional Development

Hello,

If you caught our presentation at the JACET/JALT Joint Conference and would like to take the survey, please click HERE

Thank you for your time.

Cheers,

Steve Herder

What’s your thread?

It was my first national JALT conference even though I’ve been teaching in Japan for 18 years. I attended because I finally wanted to “join the [EFL] conversation”. The people I met were inspiring, friendly, and still committed to learning more. I left the weekend stimulated, challenged and wanting more. (50 words)

This is where I’ve been…

My poor neglected blog…

I’ve been busier than ever online, just hanging out with a different process. It is called the MASH community and it is an online collaborative community that my new best buddy and a small circle of colleagues on the University of Birmingham MA TEFL course have created.

In 5 short months we’ve been able to create quite a buzz for professional development through collaboration. The talent was there all along. We simply needed to give it a vehicle and off it went… vroom, vroom

Anyways, check it out if you like,

THE COMMUNITY

Eddie Reader - words don’t work sometimes…

What an incredible voice! When she lets go, angels seem to fill her body and come out of her mouth. I’m a sucker for people who get to the level of letting the music take over. Here are a couple of examples, one from TED Talks and one from You Tube that I may try with some of my high school classes:

And another real voice is Lyfe Jennings, who I stumbled upon thanks to an old magical friend, Maria, back in the summer of 1979 (can you tell I have another essay due at the end of this month? I’ve run out of things to clean and am now looking for new distractions) :

High Expectations???

I’ve been reading a few books on teaching and a common thread running through all of them is that a good teacher has high expectations for the students. It got me thinking - pretty hard, in fact - about my own expectations. Every year I start each class with a little theme for each grade followed by a short speech about the potential that they all have. I tell them some things that former students have achieved with English and they seem to react positively. Finally, I tell them that I have only 3 rules in my class:

1. Be on time - I also promise to finish on time because I know they have important things to do during their 10 minutes breaks between classes.
2. Be Kind to one another - I warn them that seeing any kind of bullying will make me go ballistic. It happens once every 5 years or so, and it ain’t pretty.
3. Try - I ask them to try in my class. I promise to try my best to make useful, interesting lessons and I expect them to try to improve their English.

OK, so here’s the problem: I guess my expectations take many forms because I expect something different from each student, based on where they are and what they seem capable of doing. How do we ever know if we are expecting enough, too much or just the right amount? I’d love to hear other teachers comments on this topic.

I’m sure it has a lot to do with making my expectations clear: in general, as well as specific terms. I expect your speech next week to be at least 2 minutes long, I would like you to make at least 5 different points in your argument, etc.

But I wonder if other teachers would get more or less effort and results from my students than I’m getting? Point me in any direction you see fit to get a better handle on this topic.

Cheers,

Steve

Where to begin?

I’m not doing much to prepare my students for the future, but this video gave me the idea to show it to my Grade 11 & 12 writing class and get them to write their reaction to it.

Back to Reality

I spent most of last week in Hiroshima attending the summer seminar for the MA TEFL course through the University of Birmingham.

It was stimulating, fun, and inspiring. The group this year was particularly cool. They seemed to have bonded from the first day, so when I got there on the 3rd day they were cruising right along as if they’d been together for months.

I made a presentation about collaborative learning using Skype. It went very well, especially due to the advice and support of Mark, Paul, Terry, Anthony and Matt. I hope others will be keen to follow my lead and offer to do other presentations at future events.

Anyways, here’s the video. There’s a 6-minute introduction, an 18-minute presentation and 7 minutes of comments and questions at the end.

Enjoy!

“The one book every teacher must read” (Shahar)

Just finished Lecture 2 by Tal Ben Shahar. He’s good - no doubt about it!

Marva Collins is one of his role models. She sounds good as well.

Here are the notes I took:

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Research into negatives …………………………………..Research into positive

Anger 5,584 ……………………………………………………. Joy 415

Anxiety 41,416 ……………………………………………….. Happiness 1,710

Depression 54,040 ………………………………………….. Life satisfaction 2,582

21:1 ratio of negative studies maybe reflects reality as evidenced at Harvard:

• 80% of Harvard students were depressed to the point of not being able to do anything in 2004.
• Depression 10 times higher than 1960
• Mean age for depression is 14.5 compared to 19.5 in 1960.
• 45% of college students nationwide depressed, 94% overwhelmed (Kadison, 2005)

3 reasons for more “Positive” Research

1. Psychology as active not only reactive
2. Happiness is not the negation of unhappiness
3. Prevention through cultivating positives

Disease model - to get rid of disease Health model – to get people to flourish

Focus on weaknesses Focus on strengths

Overcoming deficiencies Building competencies

Avoiding pain Seeking pleasure

Running from unhappiness Pursuing happiness

Neutral state (0) as ceiling No ceiling

 

Illness as the absence of health (vs. health as the absence of illness)

Neurosis is the failure of personal growth (Maslow)

 

The disease model has not helped to correct problems

Positive psychology strengthens our immune system

2 kinds of people who don’t experience depression, anxiety, etc:

1. Psychopaths
2. Dead people

What factors allowed “at risk” kids to overcome difficulties? Resilience was one of the keys and it was built up through:

1. Social support
2. Cultivating optimism and self-esteem
3. Faith and a sense of meaning
4. pro-social behavior
5. Focusing on strengths
6. They set goals
7. They had a role model

Marva Collins Case Study – She is one of his role models.

She began her class saying,

 

“We are going to do a lot of believing in ourselves. It’s up to you to succeed”

Tal says if you’re a teacher and you buy one book, it should be this one:

Marva Collins’ Way

NOT SURE WHAT THE POINT WAS (possibly ways to react to difficult life events) WAS BUSY ON AMAZON.COM

Passive Victim Vs. Active Agent

Self pity vs. Confidence

Blame vs. Responsibility

Frustration vs. Hope and Optimism

Anger vs. Forgive/forget

Happier, Harvard, H…

Had trouble coming up with a title for the first time. In reality, I probably had too many titles in mind.

Anyways, Thanks to Jon Stewart for interviewing this guy, Tal Ben Shahar , and thanks to Harvard University for allowing his entire course to be videotaped. Thanks to Amazon.com for the 32% discount and the prompt shipping.

Well, I ordered the book and I watched the first lecture. I was left with that old “X-Files feeling.” My wife and I used to rent a weekend’s worth of episodes (4-6) on a Friday night and then at the end of the first episode we would start the “just one more” chant until we had ploughed through them all very late that same night.

It was a great one-hour, opening lecture: after 15 minutes I even went back and started taking notes (it was THAT good).

So, if you’re still reading, here are the highlights imho:

The three phases in the history of modern psychology are:

1. Behaviorism
2. Psycho-Analysis
3. Humanism

It is through the third phase that “The Science of Happiness” has become very popular.

Grandparents of this field: Abraham Maslow (1906-1970) and Karen Horney (1885-1952)

Parents of this field: Martin Seligman, Ellen Langer, Philip Stone

Tal explains that his course is more about TRANSFORMATION than INFORMATION, offering a few quotes:

“The soul grows by subtraction, not addition” (Thoreau)

“In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired; in pursuit of wisdom everyday something is dropped.” (Lao Tzu)

Tal reiterates that Knowledge comes from Information;

Wisdom comes from Transformation.

He relates his approach to the course in relation to his beliefs about education, quoting Maslow, “… [the] goal of education is… helping the person become the best that he is able to become” (Maslow)

“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.” (Neil Postman)

Tal tells a story based on research about some intelligent graduating class surveyed 20 years later. The graduates were all successful. What separated success from super successful were two things:

1. They believed in themselves and their ability to succeed
2. They always asked questions, wanting to know more

The problem with self-help pop psychology books is that they are full of a lot of charisma but little rigor. On the other hand, he states that academia is full of vigourous testing, proving, analyzing but often totally inaccessible (academic articles are read by an average of 7 people - his quote)

His course purports to be full of rigorous fun

There were many other good things happening in the first lecture, but this is what I got from it. I heartily recommend taking a peek if you’re into the pedagogical potential in positive thinking.

Steve

 

Barking up the wrong tree

I’ve learned yet another life lesson having just turned 44 a couple of weeks ago. This lesson is not related to age but falls more so into the “barking up the wrong tree” category. Let me elaborate…

“I’ve been pushing too hard on a couple of fronts and wish to repent”

Starting my MA TEFL last April (2006) was a long overdue idea that floated in and out of my mind for years. When I finally got going on it I was overwhelmed with energy, ideas and opinions. Since a few years back, I had thought that I had pretty much figured out this teaching gig through a combination of time, common sense, and an abundance of sheer trial and error. Moreover, this feeling was consistently reinforced through positive feedback from students and fellow teachers. However, after only a few months into the MA program I began to realize how little I actually knew, especially in comparison to how much more there was to be known. This triggered the little evangelist inside of me, and at about the same time my innate ability to see the huge potential in people and situations also kicked in.

I guess I’ve selfishly been searching for a “nakama” (inner-circle). I have found one in my MA study group and I wanted to re-create the power and support of that group in a professional type inner circle. I pictured like-minded JSHS teachers all eager to see what else there was in terms of stretching themselves and their students to new limits in learning English. I have new ideas almost everyday and for me the fun would be in trying new things in collaboration with others. Doing it on my own doesn’t give me near the rush that doing it with others does (loaded sentence, in a freudian way, huh!).
A general list of ideas that won’t go away, includes:

1. Classroom research - “yaruki” points, effort journal, dictogloss, motivational ideas, 10-minute writing, Use of L1 in the L2 classroom, Nations 4 strands,
2. Curriculum development - How much TBL can Japan handle? developing EFL HS writing class curriculum, textbook-free curriculums
3. Collaborative projects - Extensive Reading experiments, developing learner autonomy,
4. Publishing - JSHS EFL in Japan related, Redefining the value of experienced, well-trained NTs vs. the ‘backpacking’ garden variety of AETs
5. Action Research - problem solving, error correction
6. Collaborative blogging - documenting the work of the “inner circle”
7. Professional friendships - sharing the foreign NT experience

The categories are pretty complete but the ideas within are just some of what comes to mind at the moment.

I have tried to express my enthusiasm and have probably over-expressed myself (again?) therefore I’ve decided to stop pushing, especially the JSHS group and the Bham MASH idea. I’ll focus on the immediate things that are already in progress and just hope that these seeds may take root at some time in the future.

I’m still completely open to a variety of collaborative efforts, however, I’m going to instigate less.

I apologize if I’ve been overbearing to anyone and no hard feelings on my part.

Cheers,

Steve