Classroom Skills in English Teaching

A Self-appraisal Framework

Colin Peacock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351236447
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1990. This practical guide to the basic skills of teaching and class management will help both experience and beginning teachers to identify and evaluate their classroom skills. Suitable for teaching programmes at all levels, the book covers goal-setting, the directive, discursive, problem-solving, and activity modes of teaching, and the skills of explaining and effective questioning.

Chapter one

Setting realistic goals

What are the qualities that make a good teacher of English a good teacher of English? Does success depend largely on the knowledge and personal qualities you bring to the classroom, or on the professional skills you have (or have not) managed to acquire in the course of your career? If as a teacher you are to be held accountable for the success you achieve in the classroom, what qualities should count as criteria for success in the complex realm of English teaching? And, if after your classroom performance has been appraised and you are found to be wanting in some respect, what will you be able to do in order to improve? How will others be able to help?

The present book will direct attention to one of these topics in particular for detailed investigation – the professional classroom skills that the teacher may or may not acquire – but each of the questions asked will also be taken into account in the chapters that follow. Most people will readily accept the importance of the personal qualities you display as a teacher, and the knowledge and understanding you bring to your classroom. But a surprisingly large number of beginning teachers from both primary and secondary schools and from a range of training institutions claim that the one agreed key feature lacking in their own initial training was actually learning about how to teach. However, many seem to accept that classroom expertise is something you can only pick up from observing other teachers at work or by trial and error yourself. It is not, they believe, something that can be systematically taught and learned.

Certainly, one abiding memory I have of my own early days as a classroom teacher of English in a secondary school is the way in which my morale seemed to soar or plummet in response to the experiences of day-to-day teaching. I remember reaching the end of the school day sometimes filled with self-confidence and enthusiasm for the day to come, while on other occasions I was plunged into gloom and foreboding because of the disasters I had lived through. Inevitably,beginning teachers do make mistakes – and learn as a result. Obviously, experienced teachers too go on making different kinds of mistakes and also go on learning as a result. We are all of us learning to teach all our professional lives – or should be.

You learn from the mistakes you make. As a young teacher on my first day in a new school, for instance, I walked into the book store instead of the corridor when I tried to make an impressive exit from the classroom, with all eyes fixed on me. I remember, too, giving complicated oral instructions about how to set about a writing task to a class of 14-year-olds. The resulting silence was broken by a voice saying, ‘All right, sir, now tell us what we’ve got to do.’ There was also a lovingly prepared lesson to introduce an extended project which I unthinkingly scheduled for a warm Friday afternoon. As a result of this experience I never planned anything of real importance for a Friday afternoon again.

Obviously you learn from the mistakes you make. You also listen to more experienced colleagues, you read, and you reflect. As your experience grows and you learn on the job, you develop your professional skills and expertise. And a lesson that pleased you in your first year of teaching becomes run-of-the-mill in your fifth. It also gradually becomes easier to be more dispassionate and analytic about your experiences. Part of the problem for me in those early days was trying to remain objective and detached about the actual experience of teaching and the emotional reactions it brought. In a secondary school you are faced daily by a variety of different classes bringing with them distinctive problems and challenges – problems of preparing and marking work, problems of communication, management, and control. To an experienced outsider the lessons that are learned on the job by a novice teacher may appear to be obvious and the difficulties experienced to be coloured by exaggerated emotion. None the less, we should share some fellow feeling with those young teachers who say that their main objective in teaching a particular lesson is simply to get through it and survive till the end.

Part of the problem for a beginning teacher is that your self-esteem is influenced overwhelmingly by your anxieties about classroom control and a need to be accepted by the class. You want your pupils to be happy and enjoy themselves in your classroom, but not at your expense. When things go well, you are convinced that you are making a deep impression on your pupils, possibly providing them with experiences they will cherish for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, when things go badly, you feel that your contribution to the curriculum could be removed along with the subject you are teaching and nobody would notice any difference. When you reflect, though, it is very difficult to know with confidence what impact you are actually making on the classes you teach, and what has been taught and learned, beyond the signals provided by classroom responses, pen-and-paper exercises, tests and examinations.

In my own case, optimism prevailed. I continued to work in a variety of classrooms and gradually built up a repertoire of classroom skills which seemed to work well for me and for my pupils. I thought more about the nature of my subject and how it could best be taught. Then,when I first moved on to my present field of work – the training of teachers – I experienced new and unanticipated problems. When I was called upon to contribute to a range of courses dealing with different aspects of skills in classroom teaching, I found myself to be surprisingly inarticulate. Teaching is something you do; you don’t talk about it or describe it. Initially I had taken for granted that I would be able to communicate to future teachers the experience I had gained and the skills I had acquired. In practice, communication itself was not the main sturnbling block; the problem related more to an awareness of what was important and needed to be communicated. Although I possessed a large pool of knowledge about teaching, I found it difficult to draw from it, to organise and articulate it. Most of this tacit intuitive knowledge was buried inside my head and surfaced in unpredictable ways when I observed inexperienced teachers making obvious mistakes or I responded to questions in discussion. The problem is a familiar one. You are unable to recognise what you do know, and you fail to grasp what your students need to know.

How can you make professional or ‘craft’ knowledge explicit so that it can be organised and communicated to others? For most teachers the process of classroom teaching seems to be a spontaneous intuitive activity. This is not to say that teachers are therefore generally uncritical or unreflecting. It means rather that the lessons learned from self-criticism and reflection tend to be unorganised and to remain unacknowledged. You learn to teach by teaching.

In the midst of all those complex and varied activities we call ‘teaching’, the successful and experienced teacher is watching, listening and thinking. You make sudden decisions, often unconnected with your original plans, in order to move the lesson along in a particular direction. And as your lesson proceeds, your pupils too are (usually) watching, listening and thinking too. They in their turn may also take sudden decisions, usually unplanned, in order to move the lesson along in directions of their own choosing. A lesson is partly a meeting and partly a conflict of minds. Both parties in the encounter continue to learn from their experiences and develop their expertise.

From the teacher’s point of view, classroom teaching still unfortunately remains a lonely business. You close your door, work in your own classroom with a particular group of pupils, and you rarely see anyone else struggling with similar problems for better or worse. Outstanding teachers often seem genuinely surprised when others see videotapes of them at work and enthuse about aspects of their personal or professional skills. They believe themselves to be just ‘ordinary’ teachers. They assume that most other teachers are working in much the same way with similar degrees of success. On the other hand, there are some teachers who seem to find it difficult to shift their own point of view to enable them to learn from others unless there is a direct connection between their own mode of working and the example viewed. When this second group see filmed examples of other teachers at work, they find the experience hard to accept because ‘that’s not the way I would do it…’

Most teachers of English have deeply held beliefs and assumptions about the nature of their subject and how it should be taught. They feel strongly about the kinds of relationship that should exist between teacher and taught, and about the way that classes and the classroom should be organised. These beliefs sometimes create a barrier to new understanding and can frustrate change and development. And for teacher-trainers, inspectors and advisers, it is a continuing struggle to avoid seeking to impose on others the idealised model you carry in your own head of how you yourself used to teach at an earlier stage in your career.

The purpose of the present book, then, is not to urge upon the reader the right or best way to teach English. There are already plenty of enthusiasts in the field who perhaps protest too much. There is, I believe, no right or best way. Different teachers will almost certainly have contrasting aims in the way they think about the subject and about what they want their pupils to learn. They will organise and run their classrooms in different ways, establishing different ‘climates for learning’ and relating to their pupils in different ways. Different approaches carry with them different strengths and weaknesses and require different professional skills.

The book does aim to help inexperienced and beginning teachers to identify the possible range of skills that will be required of them as they grow in self-confidence and gradually build up their professional repertoire. And it sets out to help them to become more aware of the demands made of them while they struggle to teach successfully. In addition, the book aims to challenge, reinforce and extend the thinking and practice of more experienced teachers of English. It is certainly my hope that for these readers the exposition, illustration and discussion that follow will bring new insights and illumination, and will act as an important resource for their appraisal and support of inexperienced or less successful colleagues.

Certainly it is unlikely that teachers starting their careers today will be able to close their classroom doors as resolutely as earlier generations of teachers did. Nor will they be able to continue to teach throughout their professional lives without challenge. All teachers will need to reflect on their aims, methods and achievements, to exchange ideas, and be open to development and change. In fact, all teachers (not just a dedicated minority) will be expected to be ‘extended professionals’ – confident and articulate about their aims, possessing a varied repertoire of professional skills, and accountable for their pupils’ achievements.

Explicit aims and visible success

How you teach – the resources and materials you select, the way you organise your classroom, the climate for learning you establish and the decisions you take as you work with your pupils – will inevitably be influenced by your beliefs and aims as a teacher. This is why there can be no single right or best way to teach. The ‘best’ way will depend partly on the kind of person you are and partly on what you – the teacher – are trying to achieve.

If, for example, your aim is to develop your pupils’ skills in some aspect of spoken English – perhaps in giving clear directions to help a stranger find a particular place – it is inappropriate to adopt a teaching style which is likely to result in the teacher, not the pupils, talking most of the time. In traditional ‘up front’ teaching when you are working with the whole class, you are likely to talk a great deal yourself and your pupils are likely to have little opportunity to make extended oral contributions. Similarly, if your aim is to develop pupils’ initiative and enterprise as self-motivated learners, it is unproductive to adopt a teaching style that is traditionally didactic or directive. In such a context children have little opportunity to show initiative or take risks. On the other hand, if you wish to communicate essential information that has to be grasped by the whole class, it makes good sense for you to take centre stage yourself and to ensure that all attention is focused on you. In other words the ‘best’ way to teach will depend as much on your purposes and goals as a teacher as on your own personality and values.

It follows, therefore, that you need to make your aims and intentions clear and explicit not only to yourself but also to the classes you teach. Surprisingly this demand is not as simple and straightforward as it may sound. It is comparatively easy (if time-consuming) to list a collection of sham objectives before putting a scheme of classroom work into practice. They are designed to please or satisfy. others – visiting inspectors, heads of department, examiners, head teachers. They are stored in filing cabinets as unread reference documents and are rarely tested out against classroom realities. At the other extreme, many English teachers seem content to venture forth on a scheme of work with no clear objectives at all. At best they try to find out at some later stage what individual children may have gained as a result of the classroom experiences that have been provided.

‘Genuine’ objectives, on the other hand, should be an important and helpful means of expressing what a particular scheme of work is seeking to achieve and of recognising what has actually been accomplished at its conclusion. They provide a statement of intent and give both teachers and pupils a sense of purpose, direction and eventual achievement. In effect you (the teacher) are saying, ‘This is the point of what we are about to do. This is what I hope and intend we will achieve as a result of the work we are going to do together.’ Explicit goals act as reference points or benchmarks against which eventual outcomes of classroom work can be judged. Final assessment and evaluation should be directly related to initial aims and planning – what has actually been accomplished at the conclusion of a scheme of work should be measured against what you were hoping to achieve at the beginning. Obviously outcomes will sometimes surprise and sometimes depress you, because you often accomplish more or less than you originally intended, but your starting point ought to be a clear statement of your hopes and intentions for the benefit of the whole class.

Most teachers of English do at present have general aims for the teaching of their subject which they are normally very willing to discuss. Often, as in England and Wales, these aims together with associated attainment targets will make up a common curriculum in schools. Clearly, too, teachers do already constantly make judgements in assessing the work their pupils produce – outcomes in a variety of forms that result from purposeful classroom activities. What seems to be lacking at present is an essential intermediate step – the provision of a genuine and accurate statement of what a particular lesson or sequence of lessons is seeking to achieve. Such a statement can be used both while work is in progress and especially after it has been completed, to identify the levels of success that are being and have been accomplished. And the statement works to the advantage of both teacher and pupils –the teacher establishes a clear sense of purpose and direction, and the pupil has a clear idea of what is expected and what has to be done.

The demand is not for the creation of a series of pointless curriculum ‘hoops’ for children to jump through. Nor is it intended to encourage you, the teacher, to direct your attention only to the most obvious and visible outcomes of a scheme of work that can be quickly and easily identified – the ‘surface features’ of writing, for example, like spelling or punctuation, at the expense of meaning and style. Sometimes the least tangible objectives are the most important. My plea is not for an emphasis on trivial and obvious details, but for clarity and explicitness. If an aim is important, it should be articulated and shared; if an outcome is worthwhile, both you and your pupils should be able to recognise it when it has been achieved.

For example, most teachers of English will at some point in their careers have read with a class the short story ‘Spit Nolan’ by Bill Naughton (1961). If so, most will recognise that one important aim will be for pupils to enjoy the experience provided by the text. ‘A sense of enjoyment’ is not an aim with an obvious, tangible outcome. Certainly, at the end of the reading you can ask the class a direct question, ‘Well, did you enjoy that?’, which often encourages a variety of responses from pupils (not all of them helpful). Alternatively, you can put the same question to individuals quietly and without fuss once the lesson is over. Or, again, you could set a written exercise to find out what they liked or disliked about the story. But none of these strategies is necessary. You can gauge pupils’ sense of enjoyment simply by watching them as you or they read the text. You are aware of facial expressions and the intensity of their involvement. You recognise and value the absorbed silence in the classroom when the class reaches the death of Spit and the stillness that continues after the concluding words of the story have ended. An experienced teacher picks up such cues all the time in the classroom even if such moments of intense and obvious silent emotion are rare. It is not usually necessary to ask whether a text has been enjoyed. The evidence will be there before you, as you and the class read.

What counts as English?

It is not the purpose of the present book to provide you with a detailed discussion of the aims of English teaching. I am much more concerned with its classroom practice. But it is essential to remember that good practice is always underpinned by good theory, even if teachers do not always make explicit the nature of the theories which support them. If you are to be a successful practitioner, you must have a confident grasp of what it is you are trying to achieve. What is the purpose of your subject in the school curriculum? Why should pupils be compelled to study it? Should the subject labelled ‘English’ be presented to everyone in primary and secondary schools in much the same form regardless of age, ability, and social and regional background? And we are now aware more than ever that beliefs and values about the nature of English teaching are not fixed and immutable. They change from generation to generation and are likely to be influenced by economic and political conditions. The debates about whether or not to teach traditional formal grammar, about whether or not to introduce all children to the great tradition of English literature, about whether or not to insist on ‘correct’ forms of Standard English wax and wane. What follows therefore is merely a ‘structured overview’ of the field, a ‘map’ to help you to plot and organise your own beliefs and assumptions about the teaching of your subject.

First and still foremost, English is accepted as an essential core subject on the curriculum because it is believed to be the main influence in schools in helping children to use language and to communicate effectively. Parents, employers and teachers of other subjects see it as the responsibility of the English teacher to ensure that pupils can read effectively for a range of purposes, can write clearly and accurately in a variety of registers, and can talk and listen effectively in a variety of contexts.

The emphasis on variety of context and purpose is important Despite the continuing debate about the importance of Standard English, most teachers now seem to accept that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Setting realistic goals
• 2 Modes of teaching – the directive mode
• 3 Discussing
• 4 Solving problems
• 5 Activity, improvisation, and role play
• 6 Explaining
• 7 Asking questions
• 8 Evaluating your success as a teacher
• Appendices
• References
• Index