The Teacher Empowering Textbook
At the moment I’m writing a statement of belief about ELT. I’m going to be using it for a project I’ve been working on that I can’t talk much about yet. This is a section that I thought was interesting, maybe controversial, and that I felt very ‘in the zone’ about when I was writing it. It’s part of a first draft, so I’d love to get some feedback if you have any ideas or thoughts.
If your first teaching experience was anything like mine, you weren’t ready at all. After a day of watching videos about the syllabus, I was thrown into the classroom with a textbook. In the first month of teaching, that textbook felt like a life raft that I was very happy to have. As time went on I started to have problems with the textbook. I felt like I was on rails and that not all of the activities were particularly well suited to my classes. My students were always happy when they finished their book work and got to do something else, I started to think ‘Why not skip the book work entirely?’
Textbooks are too often a surrogate for proper teacher training. A look at any popular ELT jobs website will find a smorgasbord of jobs that require little or no training or experience. ELT textbooks allow for this by being a life raft that can be thrown to these teachers, but they disempower teachers at the same time. They take away the autonomy, creativity, and connection with students that make English language teaching such a joy.
What would an empowering ELT textbook look like? It would be flexible. Teachers should be able to pick and choose activities for their classes without feeling compelled to use the rest of the book. They should be adaptable; every class is different, so the resources in a textbook shouldn’t only be usable in one way. Some types of activities* can be very time consuming to produce, the empowering ELT textbook would help to give time back to teachers. Finally, ELT textbooks should inspire teachers to try new things and teach in different ways.
*I love Task Based Learning, but whenever I plan a TBL class, I spend about 2 hours building a 20-30 minute activity.
tjhampson 
Marc 12:27 pm on August 5, 2016 Permalink |
Two things: check out At Work by Paul Walsh (published by The Round) for highly adaptable activities, as well as his website http://decentralisedteachingandlearning.com/
2. TBL planning gets quicker with practice. I am also working on an program to make worksheets quickly according to teacher parameters.
Lovely post! Cheers.
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Hera 12:33 am on August 6, 2016 Permalink |
Capital idea, although I use the text more as a scaffolding, in terms of using it for grammar, framework, while I would change the context to suit the students’ needs, and level of learning, with a lot of input from the student’s like working together on a puzzle.
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mariatheologidou 7:43 pm on August 6, 2016 Permalink |
I totally agree with Marc, TBL planning does get easier after a while. Organize your materials in categories and levels, so that you don’t have to search for them when you need them again. If you’re always on the lookout for new ideas and get inspired by literally everything -I’m like that all the time :)- you should use a site like https://www.diigo.com/index – it’s been a lifesaver so far for me. Although adapting the textbook to our students’ needs should be the basis of teaching, it’s shocking to see how many teachers still clutch to it and treat it as the Holy Bible of teaching/learning.
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Anthony Ash 9:33 pm on August 7, 2016 Permalink |
Hi Tim,
Great post! And I agree with you. I think sometimes, though, Directors of Studies opt for coursebooks because they don’t have the time and resources to train the staff up. I remember I was working as a DoS on a short but intensive course and there were points, after seeing the teachers teach, where I thought “a coursebook might be the solution.” We didn’t really have the time or the resources for good training, unfortunately. But I couldn’t help think, if the teachers had been following a coursebook, the structure of the lessons might have been better.
I think this is one of the hard choices DoS’s have to make. But for sure in training should always be the first option, and material selection i.e. coursebooks the back-up plan 🙂
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timothyhampson 10:22 pm on August 7, 2016 Permalink |
Hi Anthony,
It’s great to have a perspective from someone with DoS experience. I think it must be a hard choice sometimes. I was really glad to have a textbook when I was inexperienced. Lot’s of chain schools in Korea (I can’t speak as much on other areas) haven’t got much intention of moving beyond textbooks being used. I think textbooks might be more reasonably used elsewhere.
I’d really like to see more textbooks that are built to pick and choose from. There are some out there. Companies like http://www.prolinguaassociates.com are making really good stuff that doesn’t put teachers on rails in the same way.
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