Dr. Olga Esteve: Progressing as a teacher

EIM-AFC III Multingual Teachers' Day

 

 

Olga Esteve: Progressing as a teacher. Learning to rethink established approaches

Title slide (in Spanish) of Olga Esteve's plenary at the EIM Jornades Multilingües 11/1/19

 

Olga started her talk by pointing out that the key word in her title was actually ‘replantear’ (rethink, re-evaluate). The objective of her talk was to encourage us to re-evaluate what we understand by terms such as ‘communicative approach’, so well established in our profession that they have almost lost their meaning. She sees part of her job as drawing attention to things that we often take for granted. As an example, she highlighted the important difference between ‘Professional Development’ and ‘Training'.

 

Professional Development v Training

Teachers are by their very nature critical (meaning questioning or analytical) and simply because we are told that something is useful doesn’t mean that we will take this on board immediately. If training is perceived as overly theoretical or irrelevant to our context, we will not benefit from it. Professional development is when the teacher transforms from within, and makes a difference in their classroom practice. Training can help in this process, but is no guarantee. Put simply, training is done to you, whereas professional development is something you choose to do yourself (sometimes with the help of training!)

Olga then presented some terminology to be avoided when referring to professional development, somewhat surprisingly: apply and try out new things.

Both of these actions are linear, and our practice is anything but. Apply (see slide below) means putting new knowledge into practice in order to achieve a certain goal, e.g. to apply a law. But laws and rules are fixed and normally can’t be adapted to different situations.

Apply as a taboo word in professional development!

 

The second term to be avoided was trying out new things: what exactly do we mean by the ‘new thing’ that you’re going to try out: an activity, an attitude, an approach? This is precisely the kind of concept that she wanted us to ‘rethink’ in this talk.

As teachers, our reaction to an idea or proposal is always conditioned by a number of contextual factors, e.g. educational policy, the institution and classroom settings (no two groups are the same), but most importantly, the individual teacher’s own perception (or pre-conceptions). The teacher acts as a filter for the information received. Consequently, ten different teachers in the same school will have ten different interpretations of basic concepts such as the ‘communicative approach’ or ‘autonomy’.

Factors influencing teacher perceptions

 

Each individual will inevitably interpret their context, institution and situations in slightly different ways, so it is important to a) verbalise these different interpretations so as to b) systematise the concepts (help everyone to reach a similar understanding), but at the same time c) take into account each teacher’s capacity for creativity. Creativity involves making new associations, and changing elements within an established system to generate new possibilities.

What is creativity?

Olga pointed out the importance of fusion in our teaching practice: the ability to link or complement what we already do with a new idea: picked up from a conference, suggested by a colleague, etc. Creativity in teaching is the process of incorporating new ideas into our established practice in order to form new associations. In the slide below, Olga outlines how fusion can be carried out within a cycle of classroom enquiry:

1. Notice where a change or improvement can be made.
2. Pinpoint the different ways those involved perceive the same problem.
3. Analyse classroom activities based on the features identified.
4. Choose one activity and expand it to incorporate new perspectives and concepts.
5. Creatively contstruct a new activity fusing the ‘old’ and the ‘new’.
6. Implement the reconstructed activity and observe the effects.

Cycle of Classroom Enquiry @FerreresMaria

To conclude the session, Olga involved the audience to demonstrate this process with a couple of activities. These are summarised below: you might want to try as them your own thought experiment or use or adapt them for your own institutional INSET. 

1. She asked us to brainstorm the key features of the ‘communicative approach’ on a piece of paper. As we did this, it was clear that a group full of teachers would have a variety of different answers to this question. We were then asked to turn the paper over and repeat the process, this time creating a mind map representing the key features of ‘Real communication’ (as it takes place in the real world, rather than in a classroom) and then compare the two. Olga pointed out that the differences between the two were a result of ‘classroom influence’(she used the word ‘contaminated’): as teachers, we are primed to interpret concepts in a certain way, which doesn’t always correpsond to the reality outside the classroom walls. The new connection that Olga had previously referred to is finding creative ways of making classroom practice reflect real-life communication.

2. As a further example, Olga asked us to ‘rethink’ a communicative activity. We were asked to choose a communicative aim (e.g. agreeing & disagreeing). We then needed to think of certain ‘ingredients’ e.g. real-life context and how this would influence the communicative behaviour of those involved; type of discourse (conversational, written, etc.); criteria for evaluation (what represents a top mark for this task?).

This type of ‘interrogation’ of tasks represented examples of how we should continuously question our practice, seeing it from another perspective rather than through our usual classroom filter.