VIDEO: Extensive Reading Program Design
This is a short lecture given as part of a Sendai JALT meeting (the Extensive Reading Colloquium) in January 2014. It was held at the Tohoku University Library.
Here is the ER Program Design handout that accompanies this talk.
Five local teachers also talked about their ER programs according to a common template. They answered the questions below:
- Where is ER placed in your curriculum?
- What is the disposition of faculty/administration towards ER?
- How many students/classes are doing ER?
- What are the goals of the program? Who sets them? How are they evaluated/revised?
- How do you measure student achievement? Is there any follow up after a student completes the program?
- What system do you have set up to order and manage books? How many books do you have at what levels?
- What is the future of ER at your institution?
Cory Koby
Daniel Eichhorst
Dominic Jones
John Wiltshier
Marc Helgesen
I’m afraid my video camera died during the panel session so I don’t have a video of that. I would also like to apologize to Dom -you’re just too tall, mate 😉
Thanks to everyone that presented and attended, and especially to Sendai JALT for organizing the meeting: I think we all learned a lot.
Micro or Macro Teaching?
Are you seeing the big picture?
Just as in economics, there seem to be two main approaches to education.
Micro teaching involves discrete items and lesson plans. Macro teaching, on the other hand, deals with skills, motivation, and long-term goals.
Clearly both are necessary, but it is easy for teachers to focus exclusively on micro education: after all, that is what they have control over and what students and administrators are likely to look at.
For the last couple of years, first with extensive reading and then with discussion courtesy of my collaborator Daniel E, I have been focusing on macro approaches. For certain contexts, particularly ones where students have already spent a lot of time focusing on discrete language, a focus on general language skills, independent study, input , and content works really well.
This year I will be making an effort to try something similar with students at Cambridge English.
The rumoured teacher handbook for teaching discussion classes is also becoming more real day by day. I’ll keep you posted.
Another MEXT announcement about English
Another week, another MEXT announcement about English education.
As usual, I agree with MEXT. Junior high school English classes would probably be more effective if they were done entirely in English. I remember learning French that way in the UK and it was mostly fine for me and my classmates. The main difference with Japan is that our teachers were fully trained, had opportunities to visit France to keep up their language skills, were able to use suitable materials, and enjoyed the support of colleagues, administrators, and parents. The exams in the UK also focused on communicative tasks.
I wish MEXT the best of luck with the implementation of this ambitious project, but I suspect we won’t be seeing these policies implemented in local schools any time soon. Personally, I am still trying to get our local high schools to start extensive reading programs… maybe 2014 will be the year?
Collaboration Arithmetic
Recently I have been working a lot with one of my colleagues at my university.
A lot of the time, working with others is a drag on effectiveness. Things take longer to get done, you need to agree on what to do, people don’t do their share. It tends to be 1+1 ends up being less than two, and for every person you add to the mix the final number gets lower and lower. After a certain point the results drop to zero.
However, once in a while you end up with a team that works. Synergy occurs as your complementary skill sets allow you to do things that you couldn’t do by yourself.
In that rare situation, 1+1 ends up being 3 or 4 or 5.
We have a new project in the works, and I think you will like it. More details in 2014.
In the meantime, if you don’t have a copy of our ER Program Design Manual, why not order a free copy from our Center for Professional Development?
Have you ever had a synergistic collaboration?
Another Excellent Talk on Creativity
At the Oxford Day this year, I really enjoyed talking with Goodith White.
During her keynote, she mentioned this speech by Paul Collard, which I then tracked down and found excellent. He has some interesting points on teaching, test scores, and educational systems in Japan and Korea:
Lots of takeaways for language teachers. Some of the standouts for me:
- teachers need to train students to learn outside of the classroom
- our students are going to have to make their own jobs
- students that are pushed to achieve high educational test scores often end up disliking the subject and not pursuing it in the future (English in Japan?)
- autonomously functioning (self-directed) students do much better at university or in the workforce
What did you think of the speech?