Juggler, Pixabay.com

In a comment to my post where I tried to explain my rejection of the coursebook, Paul pointed out that the coursebook provides teachers who work 20-30 hours per week with a “respite from relying on their own resources”. At first I found myself quickly agreeing that, of course, teachers who work that much should be provided (be given the skills to provide themselves) with the best coursebook for their context and that for these hard-working teachers improving their skills in coursebook evaluation and materials design is the best way to achieve ‘respite’. Later I realised that in my context I, in fact, teach 15-25 hours of formal lessons per week. However, while it seems that I can include myself in the group of hard-working teachers, the conclusion I had reached was that ‘respite’ would never come from a better coursebook but instead from a different approach to materials altogether. I also realised that I might still not have made myself clear enough regarding my views on materials – what I imagine them to be, who creates them and, importantly, how they should be evaluated in order to guarantee improvement over time. To shed further light on this I think I first have to explain in more detail what my homestay teaching situation looks like.

As I said I normally teach at least 15 hours of lessons per week. I have also mentioned before that mostly these are one-to-one lessons and that that is why many activities in coursebooks do not work often simply because the group dynamics they suggest do not exist in the homestay context and because one-to-one students (or their parents) expect a more personalised course. If I were to teach the kind of one-to-one where you and your student meet once a week I would expect to prepare at least one hour per lesson taught (after all one-to-one students pay extra for lessons tailored to their needs). In my homestay situation that is not possible. If I am lucky I have about one hour set aside for lesson preparation per day (which is laughable if your aim was to design professionally-looking, personalised materials in that time like the worksheet we were asked to create for TE714 or the worksheet in Jolly & Bolitho’s ‘Framework for materials writing’ in Tomlinson, 2001: 15-121). The rest of the time is taken up by feeding up to six people three times a day, organising afternoon, evening and weekend activities for everyone, running a six-people household and (maybe the hardest) looking after everyone’s emotional needs. I do this in the summer for several weeks in a row with students changing every 1-3 weeks – it is a 24/7 job. This situation is not the same for every homestay teacher – some do not have children of their own or their children are grown up, i.e. they (might) have more time to do lesson preparation – but it is what my teaching context looks like.

So considering these facts – the lack of time for any real preparation, the unsuitability of the coursebook and the demand for a higher level of personalisation – in my lessons I am forced to either resign myself to using unsuitable material or improvise. I often opt for improvisation not because I am amazing at it or because it comes easy to me but because the alternative is even more ‘painful’ – like fitting Cinderella’s glass slipper on the ugly sister. In the past I mostly felt guilty about improvising, doubting that ‘making things up as you go along’ could ever be called proper teaching. What has recently helped me to see this in a different light are some thoughts on improvisation and creativity that came from a talk I attended at the IATEFL conference (‘Promoting Creativity through Teacher Education and Development’ – Daniel Xerri, University of Malta). Firstly this one:

“Creativity uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole.” (Koestler, 1964: 120).

At my best I think I can and have done things with my students that fulfil these criteria. The reason why qualifying of-the-moment materials in this way has come as such a revelation to me is that it presents them in a much more positive light. Of course, this definition of creativity does not presuppose improvisation as a necessity. On the other hand I do not think you can have improvisation without creativity:

“A good improvising performer as well as an improvising teacher are both well-trained, on the one hand and, on the other, both act and respond according to the here-and-now – to the occurrences of the event as it is taking place.” (Shem-Tov, 2015: 306)

And:

“Skilful improvisation always resides at the tension between structure and freedom. Of course, expert teachers have deep intuition and are talented performers, but their performance is rooted in structures and skills.” (Sawyer, 2011: 5)

From these quotes it appears that there is a way to give improvisation validity and that a teacher who improvises does not have to be less skilful, unprepared or uninformed. In fact, Dogme could be seen as a movement (can it be called that?) which has given improvisation in the English language classroom a bit of authority, despite the fact that is has been heavily debated since Scott Thornbury first introduced the idea. When I first came across the idea of Dogme attending a workshop with Luke Meddings a while back, I certainly was very impressed with the lesson he created out of next to nothing, a skill that in my context, I thought, was hugely desirable. However I am aware that even with this approach you need ways to improve the teacher’s and students’ skills of materials creation. Like teachers who use coursebooks and who want to get better at evaluating them so they end up with the one that fits their context best or who want to design coursebook-like, professional-looking materials by themselves, I would like to produce the best possible materials for my context and be able to systematically evaluate these. After all my homestay students, like other one-to-one students, pay a premium and I feel I owe it to them to be committed to improving my teaching. The above quotes clearly state that good training and a knowledge of “structures” are essential prerequisites for successful improvisation. But what would this training consist of and what are these structures?

Another analogy from the context of music comes to mind here. I learned to play the flute in the traditional way playing classical pieces from sheet music. During practice I would take the piece apart, analyse the different parts and practise them in separation so that eventually I could perform the whole piece. After a few years of this kind of training I became interested in Jazz music and tried improvising with some musician friends. I was absolutely appalling at improvisation! My skills were to read music, interpret the mood and deal with the technical challenges of the piece. I had never learned to have a free musical conversation with fellow musicians (the kind where you need to attune to each other). My children on the other hand are learning to play the piano by listening. Their teacher started practising improvisation with them from day one. That does not mean that my children do not learn any technical skills: they practise playing scales and recognising chords by ear and by the ‘shape’ their fingers make on the keyboard, for example. In contrast to me they are not fazed by the concept of improvisation and just take it to be part of their overall musical training. At the same time their technical training equips them with the single components they need to hold a musical conversation.

I think there are some parallels with ELT materials. Two routes need to be taken in order to improve the creation and evaluation of of-the-moment materials. Firstly materials need to be created regularly in contexts of improvisation to familiarise the teacher with the overall concept of improvisation (the feeling of being unprepared and having to deal with the unexpected) and teachers should be observed in and reflect on these scenarios. Secondly taking a closer look at the smallest elements of teaching materials, i.e. tasks (Ellis in Tomlinson ed., 2011; Ellis in Tomlinson, 1998; Littlejohn in Tomlinson, 1998), can provide the teacher with the knowledge of ‘structures’ that make up successful learning materials. This seems to be in agreement with Ellis’ criticism that much materials evaluation in ELT has been overly “concerned with macro-evaluation” and that instead micro-evaluation should play a more important role with evaluation of materials in-use (or rather post-use) producing much more reliable data than pre-use evaluation (Ellis in Tomlinson ed., 2011: 236-238). With regards to improvised materials the aim of the evaluation then does not necessarily lead to the improvement of the evaluated material in preparation for future use with a different group of learners but rather it serves to hone the teacher’s skills.

While improvisation is not something I would have considered as my natural choice for teaching, it often just happened to be the only choice that made sense. Since coming across movements (e.g. Dogme) or theories (e.g. more recent trends in mobile learning) that value ‘in-the-moment’ teaching, I am starting to take more ownership of the concept of improvisation. Finding that there are other teaching environments that necessitate a different approach to materials and seeing how other teachers have turned necessity into successful learning opportunities has made it possible for me to embrace improvisation as a form of teaching in its own right. Lastly, to go back to the point I have made consistently, being a successful improvising teacher provides learners with an excellent role model. For while improvisation is not and probably never will be the default model for the formal teaching and learning environment it is an essential skill for most contexts of language use.

References:

Ellis, R. (2011) Macro-and micro-evaluation of task-based teaching. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.212-235.

Ellis, R. (1998) The evaluation of communicative tasks. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.217-238.

Jolly, D. & Bolitho, R. (2011) A framework for materials writing. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.107-134.

Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation, p38. Penguin Books, New York.

Littlejohn, A. (2011) The analysis of language teaching materials: inside the Trojan Horse. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sawyer, K. (ed.) (2011) Structure and improvisation in creative teaching. St Louis: Washington University (http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/psychology/educational-psychology/structure-and-improvisation-creative-teaching?format=PB)

Shem-Tov, N. (2015) Improvisation is the heart of creativity. RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol. 20, No. 3, 306–309