8. What are our freedoms and constraints?

Type of organization
Your teaching life will be affected by the type of institution you work in, whether it’s
a primary or secondary school, an after-school language club, a private language
school or university, a secondary or vocational school. More important than the
type of institution though will be its ‘organizational culture’, that is, its normal
practices and attitudes.
Of course, an organization’s practices and attitudes can work very much in your
favor if, for example, professional development is taken seriously, or you get loads
of free stationery, or if you drop your standards and join in the eating in the
situation above, free lunches! The best advice I can give on organizational and
community culture is to learn as much as you can about the attitude or culture of
the system you work in and to struggle to find your own peace with it. This may
involve deciding which battles are not worth fighting and saving your energy for the
ones you feel are crucial.
Type of class
Another very important factor in a teacher´s work is the type of class, whether it´s
heterogeneous, large, small, and exam class, a substitute class, or a class with
very few resources.
Heterogeneous classes
If we put a mixed class as being mixed in language skills and levels, age,
academic background, mother tongue, sex, personality, language aptitude,
learning style and other factors. We can think as a heterogenous classes as a
special category.
There are may attractions to teach heterogeneous classes. They are interesting
because of the sheer richness of their human resources. They are often bursting
with energy precisely because of all the differences they contain. They give scope
for peer teaching too and are challenging to teach. It’s tricky to find materials,
activities, topics, and a pace to suit most participants, and those who are not
catered for can soon become disaffected or bored. So, until you have some
satisfactory ploys to use while thinking on your feet, planning for heterogeneous
classes will be very important.
Practical principles for working with heterogeneous classes
Syllabus and content
 Rather than having one syllabus for everyone in the class, try having two.
One is the minimum compulsory syllabus you expect all students to follow,
the other is an optional extended syllabus.
  Jill Bell suggests altering the type of syllabus used too, from a ‘hierarchical’
one where ‘material presented in any given lesson assumes that the student
has worked with and understood previous units’ to a student skills syllabus.
This type of syllabus identifies skills that students need to practice.
 If lessons are based on interesting and varied content, even native speakers
will be engaged and can contribute to the proceedings.
 As Luke Prodromou points out, students who seem to be lacking in linguistic
aptitude are often voluble and witty in their own language and culture. We
thus need to build on what students know rather than incessantly reminding
them of what they don’t, so that all members of a mixed aptitude group are
seen to be as bright as each other, only in different ways. This involves not
only working on topics students themselves are interested in, but also on
general knowledge, questionnaires about travel, culture, and social
behavior, and using cognates, translation, and paraphrase
Materials and tasks
The option of having the same materials and tasks for each student is not a
workable one in a heterogeneous class. You can give differently graded materials
to different people and expect them all to do roughly the same task.
Working together
 It’s important to plan in some whole group time, for example, at the start of
class, to bond the whole class together despite their differences. This can
be a good time for non-language focus tasks such as moving furniture,
showing photos or listening to music.
 In large heterogeneous classes you’ll want to plan in plenty of peer
teaching. In any group activity a certain amount of peer teaching and
learning will be happening informally as people listen to and read each
other’s work, but I mean more than this. It’s not just a question of asking
advanced students to teach things to less advanced students since, if this is
done too often, the advanced students will feel they’re not learning anything
and the less advanced will feel small and a nuisance.
 Employ different criteria at different times for grouping and for assessing
group performance. Thus, while sometimes you will want to put all the
strong students together and all the weaker students together, there must
be times when groups are mixed as to level. The same goes for any other
criterion, for example, sometimes all women together, sometimes women
and men mixed.
 In class ensure that students listen to each other, despite any cliques or
differences, by periodically asking them to report back on each other’s
utterances.
Very large classes
With a definition like this, we are then mostly thinking of the problems associated
with classes that feel too large. These problems include noise, too many people
and fixed objects in a restricted space, not enough materials for everyone, not
being able to respond to differing needs, the difficulty of organizing anything more
than lockstep teaching and the lack of target language use if students speak
common languages.

Practical principles for working with large classes

Crowd control
 Plan to invest plenty of time in learning students’ names so that you can
nominate individuals, so breaking up the group and having fleeting one-to-
one encounters with lots of different students. Use clear eye contact with
individuals.
 Don’t bank on achieving group control by simply speaking more loudly, as
you’ll be hoarse within an hour. Use other systems for attracting students’
attention such as hands up, tapping on the board, ringing a little bell, or
shaking a tambourine. Remember to explain whichever system you plan to
use beforehand. Also work out how you would like students to attract your
attention.
 Plan to establish a certain amount of routine. Don’t make the routines too
fixed, though, or the class will go into automatic pilot, and it’ll be very difficult
to turn them once they’ve started.
 Keep students involved from the start of the lesson so that a working
atmosphere is achieved while social energy is high.
Group work
Contrary to what teachers of smaller groups sometimes think, teachers of large
classes need to use pair and group work a lot to give students natural oral/aural
target language practice and use. When doing group work with large classes, you
need to plan it well otherwise there will be chaos. Plan to attend to all the following
points:
 Make sure that the whole class works together quite well before you
consider breaking down into smaller units.
 Give the smaller units a chance to bond and form an identity.
 Make sure the tasks you plan are clear. Go through them before hand to
make sure that the instructions are unambiguous, the time given realistic
and the outcome achievable by your group.
  Make sure the tasks are interesting and explain to the students why they are
useful. Students need to perceive the value of a task before they feel like
putting in time, energy, and commitment as well as, nearly always,
suspending disbelief.
 Make sure that pair and group tasks involve student interdependence
 Work out who is going to work with whom and how you are going to explain
this.
 Plan clear step-by-step instructions with demonstrations and checks where
necessary.
 Work out clear timings and how you are going to communicate these.
 Work out who in the group is going to have what role.
 Plan what you will do yourself during the task work, for example, listen and
write correction slips.
 Remember to give timing warnings towards the end of the groupwork.
 Plan how you will check the work and make students accountable for it.
 Plan your evaluation stage, which in my view should include not simply an
evaluation of language used, but also of task content, how well groups
worked together, and which mother tongue utterances need translating into
target language for next time, etc.
One-to-one (or very small group) teaching
When you start (or switch to) one-to-one work, several things may strike you – that
it feels personal and intense, that instructions that include ‘everyone’, ‘all of you’ or
‘get into pairs’, which may come out of your mouth naturally, are no longer
appropriate! Yet, if you’ve found it difficult to cater for everyone in a large mixed
class, in one-to-one work you can now adjust to student pace and interests and
have authentic conversations to your heart’s content. These classes are a real
luxury. You just must learn how to keep things interesting without you or the
student feeling that the heat is on you perpetually.
Practical principles for teaching one-to-one or very small groups
Plan plenty of time at the first meeting forgetting to know each other, letting the
student take as much responsibility as they wish, and completing personal profile
forms on the student’s background wants.
 Make the encounters as equal as possible by, for example, doing the work
you ask the student to do yourself, either before or after the student does it,
sitting near rather than opposite the student, letting the student handle any
equipment, and so on.
 Make the occasions you meet a real exchange of information and underline
this metaphorically by exchanging things such as poems, books, CDs, or
cassettes with the student.
  Use the student as a resource by, for example, asking them to demonstrate
their job to you, draw a diagram of their home, tell you what they’ve been
doing and plan to do, and ask them to teach you things.
 Bring other people in (by photo, letter, phone call, anecdote, etc.) so that
neither of you feels lonely or bored.
 Use the local environment.
 Bring in more materials and activities than you would normally so that you
can be very flexible as to level and interests.
 Bring in plenty of variety in the way of movement, music, color, objects,
pictures, jokes.
 Adjust to appropriate forms of error correction such as ‘reformulation’, where
whole texts and utterances are rephrased so that they are natural.
Reformulation can also include reformatting, which is typing out or
transferring work to text, tape, or graph.
 Make plans, recaps, and summaries even more clearly and jointly than
usual.
 Try to extend your contact time with the student (unless, of course, you’re
meeting very intensively), by exchanging postcards or phone calls between
classes.
Substitution classes
Some teachers asked to stand in for a colleague who is absent for some reason,
will groan inwardly (or even outwardly!). The reasons for their disgruntlement are
not just that they’ll miss a potentially free period but that they are usually told at
short notice and thus don’t have much time to prepare, and that classes would
often rather have their own teacher. Other problems with being asked to substitute
can be that you don’t know the students or what they’ve done, especially if the
colleague who’s away is a poor record keeper. Also, you may not know how many
times you’ll see them and so you may have to teach one-off block lessons for a
while.
Classes with few resources or facilities
Just as I defined a large class as one that feels large to the teacher, I’d like to
define me agrely resourced classes as ones that don’t contain some of the
resources that the teacher and students are used to.
The unpredictability of working with people
We can do all the planning and preparation in the world for our classes, but it won’t
stop reality from happening! Sometimes often, in fact, things don’t go the way we
thought they might. This can be a great relief if, for example, the quality and
quantity of student participation in class is greater than the material deserves! But
there are other times when unpredictability is more of a problem.
Undisciplined classes
Classes can be difficult for reasons other than the fact the students don’t like each
other. The group may have very low motivation and concentration. They may arrive
late, talk to each other a lot, wander around, display dislike of the teacher, push for
confrontation, eat, shirk, shout or ignore you.
Hijacks: Pleasant and unpleasant surprises
I’ll now go on to discuss not just the natural negotiation that is part of every lesson
or the grumpiness and indiscipline of a particular group, but something a bit more
dramatic or unexpected which I call a ‘hijack’! This is when something happens that
makes it virtually impossible for you to do what you planned.
There are long-term ways of getting better at ‘going with the flow’ or accepting real
life flexibly and creatively. You can develop a repertoire of optional in-class
behaviors and learn when and when not to use them.
The internal variable: Ourselves
So far, I’ve mentioned external factors that can affect the lesson and course
planning and teaching you do. ‘Internal’ factors are very important too. By this I
mean that because of our own personalities and habits, we go about our work in
our own ways. At times we can be strait jacketed by ourselves!
All teachers engage in similar activities such as beginning and ending classes. But
the way we carry out these activities can vary enormously, creating distinctly
different learning environments for our students and different feelings in ourselves.
We could call this personal style or teacher style. It results partly from voice and
gesture, gaze, and clothing and partly from the proportion and frequency of the
various types of content and process in our teaching.
It’s not just our voice, dress, gesture, or the proportions of activities we habitually
choose and the patterns into which they’re arranged that constitute our personal
style in teaching. There’s also the way we relate to ourselves