This mind map is the outcome of an EDULEAD Module on educational leadership.
Talented Sena helped me design it. Otherwise, my mind map would have been black and white with just arrows connecting ideas 😄
Thanks to NAMA Foundation for publishing it.
Published in IATEFL Blog, VIEWS
After a little more than two years of the sudden shift to online teaching, our department decided that we adopt a hybrid approach to teaching, which meant that part of the program was taught face-to-face. I was a little hesitant before I went to my first on-campus class. I had to dress appropriately, ensure that I had all I needed for my class: laptop, HDMI adapter, white board marker, coffee mug… I felt a little awkward at the beginning of the lesson; I only knew the names of those students who usually had a picture on their Zoom profile. It wasn’t appropriate on my sixth week of teaching not to be able to call students by their names. In distance learning, I was more in command; I could see each student’s full name on my screen.
I decided against group work in that first face-to-face session. I didn’t feel comfortable breaking students into groups. I thought of how malleable it was to assign students into breakout rooms where I could decide if they chose their own groups or I assigned them to random groups. Definitely in the coming sessions, I will have group work, but not now. Projecting my carefully prepared PowerPoint was another issue. Where is the cable? The remote control? The screen to project my laptop on was too high. I had to ask a student to pull it down because by no means I could reach it. I made the joke asking students if, seeing their instructors through Zoom only, they thought they were taller than they were in reality. I lost many of the PowerPoint controls I usually saw on my screen. It took me a while to find them by hovering the mouse over the lower part of the screen. A student asked me if I could enlarge the print so that it could be seen easily. Again, I had to figure out how to do something I usually did spontaneously. Navigating among webpages, videos, and different documents was so easy in my online class. Now I had to configure the wi-fi settings on my computer to access the internet. Umm. I forgot to do that before entering class. A student offered wi-fi hotspot so that I could connect to the Internet as mine would not work on my laptop. That took quite a few minutes.
The class time went well. Students were interactive and responsive. I wonder if it was fairer in the online setting where students were called on according to the order they raised their hands. It was easy to tell who raised their hands first and call on them to talk.
To take attendance, I had been taking it in the online class through a Google Form Exit Ticket where students were considered attending after responding to a question that summarized the lesson and another where the students assessed their learning on a scale from 1 to 5. No matter how large the class was, attendance was taken in no time as all the students completed the Google Form simultaneously. Now I had to do it manually and call the names of the students one by one. It was a little time-consuming.
This was how I compared distance teaching to face-to-face teaching. But the students’ story was different. I asked them to reflect on both experiences. They had positive perceptions of in-person classes. I could see the excitement on their faces and feel it in their voices. They were all smiley and happy. Very appreciative. Very interactive. Very attentive to every word said in class as though expressing their gratitude to be on campus again. We had a short reflective talk comparing online classes to face-to-face classes. The majority affirmed that they benefited more from face-to-face classroom discussions and that they were more focused on what was going on in (the) class. Although it was more comfortable for them to be at home, the home environment had many distractors. In a face-to-face lesson, they were better able to take cues on when it was appropriate to ask a question or participate in a discussion. In addition, some expressed that they could no longer bear the isolation from friends. They did not want to graduate not knowing how being in the physical learning environment felt like.
Still there were very few who were happy to have had the opportunity to continue their education online because otherwise they would have had to stop their education. Among those were students who had a full-time job or a job that did not allow flexible timing. Mothers and those who were out of the country were also at a disadvantage when it came to pursuing their degrees. Moreover, as many countries are struggling financially and inflation has been at unprecedented rates, commuting to schools and universities is costly especially for those living in remote areas.
Students’ experience during their learning matters a lot. Often, as educators, we focus on our experiences as teachers when assessing the success of a new method or technique. We need to keep in mind that teaching is not about a show that we display in the presence of our students, rather we need to be aware of what students experience and how they learn. The experiences learners go through impact not only their learning but also their mental well-being. Having experienced distance learning for a little more than two years now, and not being far from teaching fully in-person, this is the ideal time to think of a teaching/learning model that combines the merits of distance learning and face-to-face learning. A model that brings out the best of teachers and accommodates to the students' needs and learning styles.
Farhat, A. (2022). The Impact of Professional
Development on Teachers' Automaticity of Practice. In D. Bullock (Ed.), IATEFL
2021 Virtual Conference Selections - 54th International Conference (pp.
40-42). IATEFL.
Introduction
Professional development has
always been a concern for educational institutions, and much effort is put into
it as a result. Ongoing professional development has often been conducted in
the form of training sessions. However, one-shot training sessions do not
ensure that teachers acquire the practices introduced during these sessions, and
thus the content of these sessions does not necessarily become part of the
teachers’ in-class performance unless they are continuously prompted and
reminded of these practices. In this study conducted in a small private school,
language teachers (English and Arabic) took part in a three-hour session where
they were introduced to seven games[1] (language
activities) that encourage oral and written communication:
During Training
Each game was introduced to
the language teachers during the training session. First, the framework of the
game was explicitly communicated to the teachers. Then they practiced the game.
After the practice, each teacher was requested to reflect on the activity: how
it might be used in their classes, how it could improve their students’
language, how is it different from/is similar to other language activities they
do in their classes.
After the training
After the training, the participants
were asked to apply one of the seven activities in their classrooms, record
that activity, write a reflection on how the activity went in the class and
then submit to the trainer a recording of the activity and the reflection on it.
The teachers had access to the training session notes and recording of the training
session on the school website, and the trainer was available to provide any
support needed in the implementation on the new activities in their classrooms.
Findings
Teachers’ Reflections
Teachers reported to have
enjoyed the newly-introduced activities and to have found them useful in their
language teaching. They also reported that they implemented the activities and
that they were easy to use, requiring little resources.
Choice of Game/Activities
Studying the recordings of
the teachers, it was found that nine of the ten teachers chose Show & Tell
as their activity; one teacher chose the Describe & Draw activity.
Delivery of Games/Activities
The activities, as recorded
by the teachers, seemed to slightly resemble those as given in the training
session. One teacher abided by the protocol of Show & Tell as given in the
training session but omittetd key points, such as the type of questions to be
asked to the speaker by the audience.
Discussion
Self-reported data (reflections)
are not always indicative of classroom success and actual classroom
performance.
The majority of the teachers
chose Show & Tell as the activity to use with their students. This activity
was in fact a speaking activity that the language teachers already commonly
used in their classrooms from grades k – 8. It is clear here that the teachers
chose an activity that they were familiar with rather than choose a new
activity that was introduced to them during the training session. Moreover, the
delivery of this familiar activity did not change much; the protocol as
introduced in the training session was not abided by.
The choice of activities
along with their delivery shows that it is not easy to change practices of
practitioners as they are enfossiled in their performance due to long practice
with no modification. This explains why teachers continued to perform the
activities as they had done them all along before the training. In addition,
teachers tend to rely on activities that they are accustomed to even after
being exposed to training. That is evident in the teachers choosing Show &
Tell rather than any of the other six new activities.
Implications
Teachers need to be given
ample time to practice newly introduced practices before they are expected to
start implementing them in their classrooms. Moreover, they need to be provided
with sufficient, constructive feedback on their practices to help them improve these.
In this study, the teachers were able to watch the video recordings of their
selected activities and reflect on them. They had they had the opportunity to compare
how they delivered the activity with training session notes on that activity
and assess their performance; i.e., they were able to check where they abided
by the activity protocol as given in the training and where they did not.
Link to presentation recording.
I recently gave a three-hour workshop to a group of teachers. The workshop included games and activities that teachers could incorporate into their lessons to make them more communicative and engaging. One of the workshop activities, Show & Tell, was already used regularly by the teachers in their classrooms to encourage speaking. The workshop went smoothly, and the teachers were highly engaged in the activities. They reported positive feedback at the end of the workshop. At the end, the teachers were assigned a task that required each to do one of the activities in his/her class, to record it and send me the recording along with a one-page reflection on what went well in the activity and what the teacher would do differently the next time the activity would be given. Let me note that the workshop notes and recordings were made available for the teachers on the school website for their reference.
The
majority of the teachers emailed me the recordings of their activities and
their reflection reports. I watched the recordings and provided feedback to
each teacher. From the feedback I gave, I can elicit the following points:
-
Most
teachers did the activity that they had already been doing in their classrooms,
Show & Tell. Only one teacher chose a different activity.
-
Show
and Tell was given in the exact same way I had observed it in classes; a
student presents an object to the class; he might ask a question or more to his
classmates at the end. It did not take the form presented in the workshop which
I thought gave the well-known activity a whole new dimension of interactivity
-
The
other activity that one teacher chose to do with the class, did not abide by
the rules of the game I presented in the workshop; the length of the activity,
the questions to ask students, encouraging student questions…
-
A
few teachers did their own activities that only slightly resembled the workshop activities I had given.
-
One
teacher abided by the protocol I presented in the workshop for the Show and
Tell activity but still lacking some major elements I had stressed.
Based
on the above observations, I deduce that one-shot training sessions are not
enough to ensure change in teachers’ classroom performance in a specific
aspect. Thus, I propose that training be treated much like teaching in a
regular class where the trainees are learners just as students are learners.
This implies that they need not only presentation of the material in a classroom
setting and providing the content as notes or in a textbook, as I did in my
above-described training session. Much more is needed. Ample practice for new
learning is necessary and giving the trainees the chance to apply their
learning and receive feedback which should feed into further practice. Much
scaffolding is necessary after the training is over. For these reasons, I
conduct my training in the following manner:
-
Presentation
of the new material (supposedly new to most trainees) in an engaging modality
employing appropriate methods of teaching and a variety of interaction modes
-
Assigning
each group of trainees to a coach who volunteers willingly to carry out the coaching
tasks
-
Provide
the coaches and the coaches (trainees earlier) with a list of the training
objectives that they are supposed to acquire
-
Meet
with the coaches periodically and decide on an action plan so that the coachees
get to practice their new learning within their coaching groups and receive
feedback from each other and the coach. Here the coach takes the role of the
facilitator to plan for meetings and group discussions
-
Assign
a due date for the coachees to complete a task that reflects their learning.
They are to present the task within their groups first, receive feedback from group
members and modify as necessary to improve the final product
-
Submit
the final product to the trainer to evaluate. There is still room for feedback
and improvement based on the trainer’s feedback.
-
End
with a final reflection session where teachers (coaches and coachees) discuss
the process and their new learnings and how it would impact their students’
learning.
Although
these multiple steps to training are time-consuming, they allow teachers to
practice what they learn in small groups where they feel safe to make mistakes
and learn from other group members. By providing feedback to colleagues, they
are practicing being critical of classroom practices. The teachers who are
given coaching tasks are also practicing leadership and are being accountable for
the success of a whole group of teachers. Having to coach motivates the coaches
to be responsible for their own learning because they know that their group
members will refer to them when problems arise.
Now,
that teachers have practiced their new learning and that has been witnessed by
the teacher, colleagues, coaches and trainer, it is time to celebrate the
success. Cake and coffee are great, followed by distributing certificates of
completion.
Published in Iatefl Blogs October 2020
School leaders often face resistance when
introducing a new approach to be adapted by teachers. This was evident when
schools had to abruptly shift to online teaching during the involuntary closure
of schools due to the COVID-19 lock down. While administrators were pushing for
the shift to online teaching, many teachers, who are instrumental for the
success of this shift, resisted it. The stand of either side is justified since
each perceives teaching online from a different perspective.
Administrators need to lead their institutions. In
their attempts to keep up with change, maintain the existence of their
institutions, and perform their duty of educating children, they are required
to act as a driving force to cause change to occur. This is necessary but might
be countered by an opposing force from the teachers. At a first glance,
teachers might be perceived negatively for not wanting the change to occur, but
with careful study, their attitudes are justified and need to be dealt with and
understood with extreme patience and tolerance. A sudden adoption of a new
approach by the school is likely to drift teachers from their comfort zone, and
that can cause them stress and anxiety. The feeling of failure at trying
something new is enough to cause resistance to it. All this can be due to lack of knowledge and
skills and abilities in what the school is proposing.
Change should be planned well for proper
implementation. First, school leaders need to differentiate between resistance
that is caused by the individual’s indifference and resistance that is caused
by anxiety and fear of failure. To deal with the latter, educational leaders
must approach the issue empathetically. Empathizing with teachers means
understanding their points of views, their problems, experiences, feelings, and
above all the stories they have. Those stories can be understood when
conversing with teachers. Conversing empathetically, rather than interviewing
them to elicit answers to questions, is what helps teachers reveal stories
about their experiences and how those experiences have impacted their feelings
and understandings. Such conversations will allow you to know that the teacher
feels uneasy when giving a lesson via a video conferencing tool and how the
mother of one of her students interfered in the lesson unexpectedly and
wouldn’t stop giving answers to the questions asked to the class. During such
conversations, you know that a teacher has problems giving lessons early in the
morning because that is the time her toddler wakes up and wants his mommy
beside him or else he throws a tantrum. Such conversations will let you know
that the teacher feels uneasy during a live lesson because he doesn’t know how
to stop the students from annotating on the screen which disrupts the class,
and they all fall into laughter. These stories give the school leader much
insight into the struggles of teachers, and that is when the driving force of
the administration and the resisting force of the teachers unite into one force
pushing into one direction: adoption, implementation, and change.
Making informed decisions requires that the administration
and other school leaders understand the reasons behind resistance (or
acceptance) of change. Once understood, they can be evaluated and rated to
understand which can be influenced and which cannot. Then it becomes easy to
devise a strategy to enhance the points of strength and tackle the points of
resistance. In the case of integrating technology to teach online, as the case
is now that schools had to close down, the strategy might include a training
agenda to equip teachers with the skills they need, creating coaching groups to
support and mentor those who need assistance, providing resources for online
teaching, creating support groups for sharing stories of successes and disappointments,
and providing the necessary infrastructure for online teaching such as internet
and devices.
Change is a process of unfreezing a certain
situation. It is only natural to experience resistance when initiating this
process. But this resistance is not necessarily out of ill-intentions but may
be due to lack of skills, abilities, and other necessary requirements. Discerning
these needs makes it easier to make informed decisions and devise plans of
action that would achieve optimal results. Once new behaviors are adopted,
implemented, and sustained, the school culture will be functioning with a new
normal. That is change.
