My Teaching Philosophy

One day while sitting in a staffroom I overheard a teacher talking about a job interview.  She said that the interviewer had asked her what she thought the “best” method was.  This question stumped her.  Her inability to answer this question did not come from a lack of experience or education however.  On the contrary, it stumped her because she had a great deal of experience and education.  She knew that no single method could be the “best” method in all situations.  She knew that teaching had to be adapted to the situation.  She knew that teachers needed to be flexible.  My own philosophy is similar.  A question arises however.  How does a teacher know what is best in each situation?  What sort of knowledge guides a teacher’s decisions if there is actually no “best” method?  In my case, my decisions about teaching are based on various principles of instruction that have been derived from decades of theories and research on human language learning.

Language learning researcher and textbook writer, H. Douglas Brown, has written, “your theory of teaching is your theory of learning ‘stood on its head’” (2000).  In other words, all good teaching is based on some notion of the learning process.  When teachers make decisions, they need to consider how it will affect the students’ learning.  This often involves applying certain principles. 

For example, studies show that effective teachers plan lessons with clear objectives and state those objectives explicitly in the beginning of the lesson (Richards, 1990).  Those objectives clearly state the performance that the learner will successfully achieve by the end of the lesson.  In other words, what will the learner DO to prove that learning has taken place?  The following example illustrates this:

After watching a video and taking notes, each learner should be able to write a short essay describing the process of distillation described in the lecture.  The essay will accurately and appropriately employ the passive voice as taught in the grammar lesson, and will follow the model presented in the video on distillation.

Learners in such lessons know the goal of the lesson, and how the goal will be achieved.  Learners in such lessons also know the purpose of each activity or action (Nunan, 1988).  To put this principle into simple terms, instructional design should not be based on activities, but should instead be based on objectives.  The activities are then designed to help equip the learners with the declarative, and procedural knowledge needed meet those behavioral objectives (Findley and Nathan, 1980).  These ideas about teaching, although modern, are based in the behavioral psychology of the 1950’s and contributions from B.F. Skinner (1954) who thought that actual performance was key to learning and that instructors could not claim to have successfully taught unless a measurable behavior had been elicited. 

              Although, behaviorism has fallen by the wayside, in a modern classroom, eliciting performance serves a number of purposes.  From the standpoint of Ron Schwartz, an expert on teacher training from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a learner’s performance gives us “proof”, and proof is something instructors should always demand (2000).  Such assessment does not just show the failures and successes of the learner; it also shows the failures and successes of the instruction, and provides feedback for future instructional decisions.  Furthermore, in second language instruction, learners need to learn by doing.  Performance objectives guarantee that the learners will have chances to perform and thereby have chances to receive feedback.

Another theory of learning that helps me serve learners better is cognitivism.  Cognitivism differs from behaviorism mainly in that it concerns itself with the workings of the mind and the mental processes involved with learning instead of just the visible performances (Anderson and Ausubel, 1965).  For example, cognitive theories of learning tell us that learners work under certain limitations and that those limitations must be taken into account.  Just like computers, learners have certain capacity and processing limitations.  In order for learning to take place, new information must be processed, but only so much new information can be handled at one time.  Learners have limited attention when processing language and when overloaded will generally have to make decisions about what to focus on and what not to focus on based on what seems to be more important for conveying meaning.  Small details that editors and teachers might fuss over might be economized right out of the learner’s attention in favor of other items that are more global.  In this sense, it is the learners who control the learning process, not the instruction (McLaughlin, 1987).  The instruction only activates and facilitates certain processes.  A good designer takes all these cognitive variables into consideration when designing a lesson. 

This is best exemplified by lessons that present models of language in a meaningful and interesting context and later elicit performances in the same manner.  In such a lesson, the learner is compelled to attend to certain aspects of the language because they seem meaningful, necessary, and useful for communication.  In this manner, language is learned, and practiced, and thus internalized to eventually become automatic.  Later, when a similar context is encountered by the learner, the language performance can be automatically recalled (Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989).  This is much more effective than the decontextualized language study that so rarely ever transfers to the learner’s later performance.  For this reason, I generally present language in a meaningful and communicative context that is relevant to my students' needs.  And, while I focus on eliciting a visible performance, I also concern myself with the unobservable workings of their mind.

Finally, social constuctivism has also been a major influence on my teaching; and is therefore also a part of my philosophy of learning.  Social constructivism claims that learning is more than just behavior or cognition, it is also a process of socialization (Vygotsky, 1978).  For example, a person learning how to teach is not just acquiring knowledge; that person is actually becoming a member of a community of people who have that same knowledge or profession.  Those communities have their own special discourse.  We can see this most clearly in academic, technical, or business writing.  The learners are learning to “walk the walk and talk the talk”.  While the learners are capable of learning the skills of those communities on their own, they can learn them much faster if given the opportunity to interact with members of that community (Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989). 

This involves more than just being receptacles for knowledge transmitted by authorities.  In fact, the knowledge cannot actually be transmitted at all since it does not actually exist in an empirical manner or physical form.  Instead, the learner must internally construct that knowledge during interaction and direct experience (Piaget, 1970).  Part of this may be a negotiation of meaning during instruction. 

I apply the social constructivist view of learning in many ways.  For example, when teaching ESL writing I provide certain instructional elements.  First is giving the writer-learners a community with which to interact, especially, a clear audience for the writing.  Second is to expect and even tolerate some errors on the part of the learners as they go through certain stages in the construction of their competence.  Third is to see those errors as opportunities to give feedback and negotiate knowledge with the learners by focusing on the message and how it is best conveyed.  Finally, is to view pieces of writing not as final products for assessment, but as “works in progress” and testimonies to the thinking-learning process.  Writing about an event changes that event in the learner’s mind.  Likewise, expository writing is not merely a demonstration of the learners’ knowledge; it is also a process that causes the learners to reflect on their knowledge, thereby internalizing it.  Learning to write is learning to think (Arnold, 1991)(Vygotsky, 1962).

Another major influence on my teaching is humanism and the principles it offers.  For example, I appreciate the way humanism focuses on the needs of the learner, works towards empowering the learner, and tries to set the learner on a path of lifelong learning.  For example, needs analysis plays a central role in my instructional decisions.  Hutchinson and Waters (1992) have identified two umbrella categories for describing needs: target needs, and learner needs---I find this distinction useful.

The first category, target needs, includes the learner’s necessities, lacks, and wants.  Understanding a learner’s necessities involves identifying specific tasks that the learner must be able to accomplish and analyzing those tasks to identify specific subskills or prerequisite knowledge.  For example, a learner might need to be able to write clear, yet formal memos that summarize a meeting (i.e. “minutes”).  The instructor would have to first analyze the target language performance.  In the case of minutes for a meeting, the performance involves some direct and deductive style of writing as well as a formal register or voice.  It also involves the ability to find main ideas or themes in discourse.  On the other hand, understanding a learner’s lacks involves identifying which of those abilities the learner is currently lacking – it would be somewhat pointless to teach something that the learner has already mastered.  Finally, understanding a learner’s wants involves identifying which of those abilities the learner actually wants to learn and determining whether there are other abilities the learner is more interested in acquiring.  Take the earlier example of the person who needed to learn how to write minutes to a meeting.  Maybe that learner would rather learn how to write poetry.

The second category of needs, learner needs, takes into consideration more than just a target performance; it considers how the learner will best learn that performance.  For example, a child has very different learner needs than an adult.  Courses designed for adults may not be suitable for children.  Learners vary in cognitive level, learning styles, and expectations.  The instructional system has to be flexible enough to adapt to the learner.  Furthermore, as Maslow has observed, learners many other needs have to be fulfilled in order to facilitate learning (1970).  Learners may need to feel part of a community (Baumeister and Leary, 1995).  They may need to feel valued (Wentzel, 1997).  They may need learner autonomy.  They need to want to learn.  They may need to be treated with respect.  They may need to save face or protect a fragile ego.  All of this has to be taken into account.

Some may ask, whether all this be done.  Can a lesson incorporate all of these principles and account for every possible learner?  When most people envision instruction, they envision the learners adapting to the system.  I believe in adapting the system to the learners.  Now more than ever, we have the ability to do this.  We have the technology to create computer assisted learning that adapts to the students.  We have a wide variety of materials and resources to choose from that ESOL teachers didn't have 30 years ago.  We have a wide variety of techniques, activities, and routines that teachers 30 years ago didn't have.  We can do this if we try.  And, I want to be part of this endeavor.

References

Anderson, R.C. and Ausubel, D.A. (Eds.).  1965.  Readings in the psychology of cognition.  New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston.

Arnold, R.  1991.  Writing development.  Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Baumeister, R.F. and Leary, M.R.  1995.  The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.  Psychological bulletin 17. 3:497-529

Brown, H.D. 2000.  Principles of language learning and teaching.  Fourth edition.  Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P.  1989.  Situated cognition and the culture of learning.  Educational researcher 18, 1:32-42

Findley, C. and Nathan, L. 1980.  Functional language objectives in a competency based ESL curriculum.  TESOL quarterly 14, 2:221-31

Hutchinson, J. and Waters, C.  1992.  Course design in English for specific purposes.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McLaughlin, B.  1987.  Theories of second language learning.  London: Edwin Arnold.

Nunan, D. 1988.  The learner-centered curriculum.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Piaget, J.  1970.  The science of education and the psychology of the child.  New York: Orion.

Richards, J.C. 1990.  The language teaching matrix.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schwartz, R.  2000.  Unpublished materials used for training teacher trainers in the SMU TESOL program.  University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Skinner, B.F. 1954.  The science of learning and the art of teaching.  Harvard educational review 24, 2:86-97

Vygotsky, L. 1962.  Thought and language.  Cambridge, M.A.: The M.I.T. Press.

Vygotsky, L. 1978.  The mind in society: the development of higher cognitive processes.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wentzel, K.R.  1997.  Student motivation in middle school: The role of perceived pedagogical caring.  The journal of educational psychology 89, 3:411-19