Becoming a Good Teacher

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

What are the qualities of great teachers? According to Jeremy Harmer, good teachers are attentive, understanding, good listeners, passionate. They give interesting classes. They bring their personalities and life experience into the classroom, and develop common ground with their students. They are flexible, student-centred, professional and knowledgeable, empathetic and motivating. They know their students’ names.

There is more. Good teachers adjust their language to a level students can understand without sounding unnatural or patronizing (this is called “modified input”.) They also use gestures, expressions and mime to communicate (this is called “comprehensible input”.)

The qualities students want in a teacher vary from culture to culture. For example, a TEFL student recently undertook a survey of Thai students in a TEFL class. What do Thai students want in a teacher? First, they want a teacher who is kind. They also want a teacher who understands the subject and is prepared for class. They want a teacher who is “human”, by which they explained that he should not be egotistical. And they want a teacher who arrives in class on time. These ideas are largely consistent with Harmers, but you can see cultural differences brought on by the insistence on kindness, humanity and being on time. (Thais are more frequently late than in the West.)

Here are some other ideas about the teacher’s roles and responsibilities. According to one writer, “great teaching comes from preparing thoroughly, challenging the students, listening carefully and respectfully, constantly learning as you teach, and including in every class a clear, insightful, new concept.” According to another, “the teacher’s main responsibilities are to choose class materials and to set class standards.” And according to a third, teaching and learning are part of the human condition. “We are all here to teach and learn.”

So those are the qualities of the good teacher. And there are as many ways to be a good teacher as there are teachers who are determined to do a good job. However, one choice that does seem to go a long way toward helping the teacher become a better teacher is the decision to use inductive methods. Here is a brief explanation of how that works, with examples.

Inductive and Deductive Teaching: Let’s start with the basics. English language teaching consists of applying four linguistic skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) to three groups of language items (structural, lexical and phonological). The latter correspond roughly to grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation; they amount to linguistic content.

There is endless discussion among teachers about the relative merits of “inductive teaching” compared to “deductive teaching.” In inductive teaching, the students practice language forms, but discover rules or generalizations on their own. They induce the rules from the examples they have practiced. In inductive presentation, the teacher makes the rules explicit by asking students to provide the answer. In deductive teaching, the teacher first gives the students the rules for a language form. Then they practice using them.

Here are examples of each.

Inductive Teaching
1.Write the following sentence on the board (or give it to them as a handout): “She gave me a beautiful big old brown Chinese hat.”
2.Then give them additional sentences, and ask them to put the adjectives in the right order. Example: “I want to buy a ____ ____ ____ ____ ____motorcycle.” (Japanese, red, pretty, new, small).
3.Make the scrambled adjectives increasingly more challenging in the worksheet sentences. Thus, they have to think a bit harder with each new sentence. In this way they will figure out for themselves (induce) how to place adjectives.
4.Elicit ideas from the students about the correct order of adjectives. Using that input, write the rule on the board.

Deductive Teaching:
1. Give the students the following information in a handout:

In English, adjectives come before a noun in a particular order. The order of adjectives is the following:

A. First comes opinion: (Lovely)
B. Then we provide physical description, in a certain order:

1. Size (big)
2. Age (old)
3. Condition (faded)
4. Colour (red)
5. Shape (elongated)
6. Sex (N/A)

C. Then origin: (Canadian)
D. Then material: (birch bark)
E. Then purpose: (racing)
F. And the noun brings up the rear: canoe

2. Give them some adjectives and ask them to write sentences using three or more adjectives in the right order. Their job is to "deduce" the right answers from the rule you set out at the beginning.
3. Check the sentences to see whether they got them right.

These two forms of teaching practice are quite different. In general, use inductive teaching. This may require putting more work into your lesson plans, but it is worth it.

Classroom Management and Student Discipline

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

I recently encountered two of my former students in a Chiang Mai restaurant, and asked them how they were doing in the job market. They had completed their training in December, and both quickly began to teach. But their working situations are as different as chalk and cheese. One teaches six classes of young Thai teenagers in a public school, and each of her classes has perhaps 50 students enrolled. The other works as a one-to-one English tutor, and teaches only 18 hours per week. His students are mostly Thai adults, but they also include two Korean teenagers.

As far as classroom management is concerned, this study in contrasts illustrates the extremes that English language teachers are likely to experience.

Think about it: The teacher with hundreds of students is dealing with individuals she will never know by name. The situation militates against her being able to give personal attention to anyone. Her students are there because the law requires them to study English. Their previous English teaching has been from teachers with mixed (generally poor) language instruction skills. The distractions of the classroom are legion for both teacher and student. Many of her students have raging hormones and little motivation to learn English.

In the tutor-teacher’s case, the situation is upside down – or, some would say, right side up. The students only get personal care. The teacher gets to know them quite well. They are studying English because they want to learn the language, and are therefore highly motivated. Their previous language instruction is irrelevant, because their tutor rough tunes to their level, and heals the areas important to them. And besides having motivation, his students are more mature. They do not let their hormones disrupt the operation of the classroom.

Without a doubt these classes illustrate two extremes in classroom management. But has one of these teachers been dealt a bad hand in the gin rummy of teaching, while the other got a royal flush? I suggest not. When I asked the two teachers how their first month had gone, both said “I love it!” Different strokes for different folks.

Classroom Management: And this brings us around to the issue of good classroom management. Teachers have to manage their classrooms well so their teaching can be effective. Good management creates an environment that helps students learn. Good classroom management reveals and influences your attitude, talents, perceived role, voice and body language. It strongly affects teacher-student interactions, including the challenges associated with teaching to large groups.

Okay, enough of the abstractions. What exactly is classroom management? It is what you do to make your teaching area a good place to learn in. For example, the physical environment of the classroom can contribute to student learning; while all classroom seating arrangements have strengths and weaknesses, you have to decide which one works best for you. There are ways to arrange classroom seating to encourage student interaction. Should you set your students’ chairs in a horseshoe? A circle? How about the old standby, rows of student desks? Each works best in different situations. As a classroom manager, your job is to think through seating plans and other physical arrangements (like making sure the classroom isn’t too hot) that will work best for your students.

What else can you do to optimize the learning process? Perhaps nothing is more important in a classroom than letting your students feel safe – the process Stephen Krashen calls lowering the affective filter. A huge part of your role as a teacher is to build a positive climate, letting your students know there are rewards for taking risks in your classroom. Classroom management involves looking after such details as having a place to post student essays, for example.

One way to make students feel safe is to clarify classroom procedures and rules. Part of helping students feel secure is to establish clear rules and class routines. And it involves discipline. Let’s talk about that.

The Learner’s Age: One place to start is to consider that each class you teach is likely to include students of about the same age. Thus, your students will probably be children, adolescents or adults, not all three. So let’s look at those three groups in age rank.

1. When you teach children, it is important to differentiate between two life stages – young children who are 5-8 years old, and mature children who are 8-11. In terms of how their minds work, the mature children are cognitively close to adolescents and adults. Young children, by contrast, are cognitively closer to Martians. According to one popular text on teaching English to children,

The adult world and the child's world are not the same. Children do not always understand what adults are talking about. Adults do not always understand what children are talking about. The difference is that adults usually find out by asking questions, but children don't always ask. They either pretend to understand, or they understand in their own terms and do what they think you want them to do.

In both cases, young learners have special requirements. They have short attention spans, and require lots of physical play and teacher patience. They sometimes have trouble differentiating between fact and fiction. They have little life experience, but buckets of honesty. And while they may have respect for authority, they have a great deal of imagination. A teacher may feel that on some levels communication is impossible.

2. When you teach adolescents, you are dealing with a different crowd. They often have attitude. They respond to peer-pressure. They are often insecure, their hormones may be running wild, and they are developing life experience. As they go through the rapid transition between childhood and adulthood, they are often seeking knowledge and self-identity. Many challenge authority, and in the language classroom that means you.

3. Adults are another story. They have life experience and, because they are unlikely to be taking English because they have to, they are likely to be well motivated. They are also likely to be more tolerant and self-aware, but they may be status conscious. This latter issue can be an issue in a number of ways. For one, in terms of age they are peers of the teacher. If they are wealthy, older or high-status professionals, they may consider themselves to outrank you. Therein lay minefields. Don’t ever believe that adult students won’t ever give you discipline problems. Most won’t, but some do.

An article by US educator Budd Churchward suggests a way to apply the thought of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to the problem of classroom discipline for children and adolescents. His ideas put the lie to the urban myth that a class full of young adolescents is a class out of control. Purveyors of this notion, which is common in the United States, for example, support it with such unexamined statistics as the one that the dropout rate for America’s urban teachers is 40-50 percent. Does this mean the students were out of control, the teachers got offers for better jobs, or the teachers were ready for a change?

Kohlberg developed theories about the stages of moral and ethical reasoning among people. Through his work, which included in-depth studies of youngsters from many parts of the world, he developed a scheme of moral development consisting of three levels (each made up of two separate stages). He suggested that almost everyone, regardless of culture, race, or sex, experiences at least the first four stages.

The Encyclopedia of Psychology explains the four stages thus:

Each stage involves increasingly complex thought patterns, and as children arrive at a given stage they tend to consider the bases for previous judgments as invalid. Children from the ages of seven through ten act on the pre-conventional level, at which they defer to adults and obey rules based on the immediate consequences of their actions. The behaviour of children at this level is essentially pre-moral. At Stage 1, they obey rules in order to avoid punishment, while at Stage 2 their behaviour is mostly motivated by the desire to obtain rewards. Starting at around age ten, children enter the conventional level, where their behaviour is guided by the opinions of other people and the desire to conform. At Stage 3, the emphasis is on being a "good boy" or "good girl" in order to win approval and avoid disapproval, while at Stage 4 the concept of doing one's duty and upholding the social order becomes predominant. At this stage, respecting and obeying authority (of parents, teachers, God) is an end in itself, without reference to higher principles. By the age of 13, most moral questions are resolved on the conventional level.

For purposes of classroom discipline, Churchward says that only these four of Kohlberg’s stages are important.

The Learner’s Stage: At the risk of over-simplifying his ideas, here is a brief review of the approach to discipline that Churchward develops. It strongly reflects Kohlberg’s stages.

1. Stage 1 discipline problems, he argues, involve recalcitrant behaviour. This is the power stage, in which might makes right. The students refuse to follow directions. They are defiant and require a great deal of attention. “Fortunately, says Churchward, “few of the students we see in our classrooms function at this stage. Those who do, follow rules as long as the imbalance of power tilts against them. Assertive teachers with a constant eye on these students can keep them in line. Turn your back on them, and they are out of control.”

2. Self-serving behaviour is the ruling characteristic of Stage 2; Churchward calls it the reward and punishment stage, in which the student’s key question is, “What’s in it for me?” In class, these students behave either because they will receive candy, free time or some other reward, or because they do not like what will happen to them if they do not behave. “Most children are moving beyond this stage by the time they are eight or nine years old”, Churchward explains. “Older students who still function at this stage do best in classrooms with assertive teachers.” Assertive teachers – the ones who insist on class control – are the ones who fare best with stage 1 and 2 students.

3. Churchward characterizes Stage 3 as one of interpersonal discipline, in which the student is out to make the teacher’s day. In this stage the student’s main question is “How can I please you?” He adds, “Students functioning at Stage 3 make up most of the youngsters in our middle and junior high schools. These kids have started to develop a sense of discipline. They behave because you ask them. This is the mutual interpersonal stage. They care what others think about them, and they want you to like them.” These children need little discipline. Ask them to settle down and they will. They rarely need a heavy-handed approach to classroom discipline.

4. The last stage of classroom discipline involves self-discipline. This is the social order stage, characterized by the student belief that “I must behave because it is the right thing to do.”

“Students functioning at Stage 4 rarely get into any trouble at all,” Churchward says. “They have a sense of right and wrong. Although many middle school and junior high school students will occasionally function at this level, only a few consistently do. These are the youngsters we enjoy working with so much….You can leave these kids alone with a project and come back 20 or 30 minutes later and find them still on task.” Many adolescent students do not operate at this stage, but they are near enough to it that they understand how it works. “Cooperative learning activities encourage students to function at this level,” he adds. “The teacher who sets up several groups within the classroom gives students a chance to practice working at this level.” You should wait close by, though, ready to step in when needed.

Churchward’s ideas are useful and relevant, and he does a good job of developing a practical application for Kohlberg's theoretical concepts. Put in the context of managing the classroom, his thinking offers a helpful understanding of the psychology of our younger learners, and contributes to the larger issue of class management.

On Churchward's website – which also promotes a computer system for managing classroom discipline (free trial available) – is a description of 11 techniques for better classroom discipline. I recommend you take a look at it.

The Great Motivators

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

For teachers, four key factors affect the rate at which a student learns a second language. (I am referring to external factors. Although they clearly have roles to play, such considerations as attitude, aptitude and previous experience in language learning don't count in the context of this discussion.)

The most important factor relates to the student's primary motivation. Language theorists often describe a language student's primary form of motivation as either instrumental or integrative motivation.

Instrumental motivation is the weaker form. Common among those learning English, for example, with no intention of ever living in a country like Britain or Canada, instrumental motivation is the prime mover of those who want to learn a language as a tool for some secondary purpose – talking to tourists, for example. Integrative motivation is a greater force. It is the motivation of those who are learning a second language in a new country, and they are learning the language so they can integrate into a new society.

The second fundamental factor affecting language learning is the amount of time the student spends in class and practicing the language. Generally speaking, more motivated students spend more time; less motivated students, less.

The third factor is the teacher’s approach (for example, communicative language teaching or audiolingualism) to language teaching. The fourth is the instructor's teaching effectiveness and style.

You can probably see a big problem here. The myth of the great teacher whose motivational abilities inspire her students to world-shattering achievements is essentially flawed. I think of this as the paradox of motivation. The student's main motivator - integrative or instrumental motivation - is the one factor the teacher essentially has no control over. And that motivation drives the second most important factor behind student success, time spent on task.

What's a teacher to do? Accept this reality, and develop your ability to motivate students in secondary ways. Primary motivation notwithstanding, the teacher's motivational skills are still critical for both learning and teaching.

Good teachers use many teaching qualities to motivate students. These include a combination of variation and structure in teaching activities. They find ways to show the practical value of learning English. They encourage and nurture their students, and many excellent teachers also bring sympathy and empathy into the classroom. They make the physical teaching space as compatible with learning as they can. They offer tools for learning (for example, mnemonics) and they conduct the class in a fair and balanced way. They also provide the students with consistency and fairness, and they do everything they can to help the students feel safe.

What TEFL teachers think: In a recent class, I discussed this problem with my TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) students, and asked them to brainstorm ways to motivate their students. They concluded that there are five areas where the teacher can really make a difference: in their lesson plans, in classroom management, in teaching style, in testing and assessment and in professional development. By no means were their ideas exhaustive, but they were good. Here is a summary.

1. Create great lesson plans: Choose great topics. Provide interesting and varied activities. Develop medium-term class themes. Have attainable goals and objectives, which provide real challenges but seek progress, not perfection. KISS (Keep it short and simple). And use authentic materials and situations for classroom teaching.

2. Classroom management: Attend to your students’ comfort and convenience. Find ways to visually represent class progress. Set up the classroom effectively and use equipment as effectively as you can.

3. Teaching style: Your teaching style consists of attitude, presence and rapport. Here are some comments on each.
• Attitude: Know your students’ names. Activate their prior knowledge and nurture their abilities. Be knowledgeable and authoritative, but modest. Be passionate about teaching. Be punctual. Dress and groom professionally.
• Presence: Empathize with your students. Enable your students to have fun. Show your personality, and vary the ways you teach
• Rapport: Appeal to different learning styles, especially kinaesthetic. Be conscious and respectful of your students’ culture or cultures. Give genuine praise and recognition. Involve the students in their learning; for example, use KWL (“what you know, what you want to know, what you have learned”) charts to develop and measure class content. Offer appropriate counsel and advice.

4. Assessment: Give your students good and regular assessment and testing. Get them to help each other. Monitor the class through feedback, and use prizes as rewards from time to time.

5. Professional development: Keep a log of your classroom performance, on occasion get someone to video your performance, and periodically ask a colleague or friend to assess your teaching. And take advantage of whatever professional development training you can get your hands on. We can always improve, and we must.

How Persnickety Should the Teacher Be?

By Peter McKenzie-Brown


There are endless debates among language teachers about how concerned teachers should be with their students’ language output. What is the best balance between the extremes of correcting most of their errors and correcting none? Do we want students to speak accurately, even if doing so limits their ability to use the language easily? Or do we want them to speak more comfortably (that is, fluently), even at the expense of accurate pronunciation and grammar? How persnickety should the teacher be?

There will always be battles between advocates of accuracy and advocates of fluency. However, most Western language teachers now fall into the latter camp, and they are supported by a large body of research and language theory. According to this point of view, there is in inevitable lag between language fluency and language accuracy. As language learners develop greater comfort in using a second language, they become better able to identify and correct their own mistakes. I believe this principle should dominate language acquisition.

If you want to visualize this idea in practice, take a look at the graphic at the beginning of this post. The upper triangle represents teacher talk, which is always accurate; after all, she is usually a native speaker. The teacher begins class by talking (call this “teacher input”). However, the good teacher steadily reduces her own talk time by introducing activities that increase language production by her students (call this “student output.”) Conceptually, the class quickly changes from one in which the teacher does almost all the communication (focus on accuracy) to one in which the students do almost all the talking (focus on fluency).

As is always the case, a good language lesson should go through several stages as you make the transition from accuracy to fluency. It should begin with language study, then continue with activation of the language through controlled, guided and free practice exercises.

Forget about spending endless hours teaching grammar or having your students repeat sentence patterns by rote. Language acquisition takes place most effectively when your students use it in increasingly life-like situations. As the band leader said in auditions, “Don't play me the scales. Play me a damned tune!”

The focus on accuracy is strongest during the language study phase of class. Here the teacher explains some points of grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary, and does most (if not all) of the talking. There’s little possibility of error, because students don’t say much. This stage of the lesson is short, however.

Teachers need to structure their classes in such a way that they say less and less as class rolls on, while the students say more and more. When they do this, students become increasingly active in later stages of class, the “three practices”.

In controlled practice, the teacher remains in control. Student activities are such that it is fairly difficult for them to make errors – and when they do, the teacher’s job is to make corrections. At this stage, teacher input (also known as “teacher talk time”) is about equal to student output (“student talk time”). But student output completely dominates the latter parts of the class. The teacher relaxes control progressively during guided and free practice activities. Sure, your students will make mistakes, but their fluency will improve. And if you design your activities well, your students will correct each other or themselves when challenged.

I haven’t described all the components of an ideal lesson plan, of course. For example, good classes begin with a warm-up, which serves to switch on the students’ second language brains. They also include a stage often referred to as “engagement” – a few minutes of class in which the teacher catches student interest and generates excitement about the upcoming topic of study.

These notes are barely more than the sketch of a notion, but the basic idea is strong. Let accuracy go in the interest of fluency. If you do, the odds are you will see immediate improvements in your students’ classroom performance.