Any experienced teacher would agree with me in that real or effective teaching is not so much a set of well-defined rules, methods, lesson planning, etc. as a more subtle and dynamic process that happens in the “here-and-now” and in the “me-and-you” interaction.
In other words, a teaching approach where PEOPLE are not the main focus is not, at least in my opinion, real teaching.
In a consumer-based and intellectually complex society, where humans believe more in products than in humans themselves, often teachers forget that they are dealing with real people in the classroom; people with feelings, with lives, thoughts, worries, etc.
Most teaching in schools is adapted to suit the needs or expectations of a particular “method”, devised by the school in order to create something marketable, that is, easy to sell to the student!
After all, it is much easier to sell a course based on a well-defined method (= tangible product) than on sheer human interaction, so little valued or even totally forgotten today.
But is really effective teaching all down to mere human interrelationship? The answer is: yes, given that teachers keep in mind the one key-element (or key-skill) to effective teaching: Empathy!
Empathy is hard. Empathy means making an effort towards someone; it means getting involved with one’s feelings; it means putting one’s ego on aside. Of course, it is much easier to rely on lesson plans, on coursebooks, methods, exercises, and the more technical aspects of teaching! Reason why most teachers, who at first realize the limits of product-teaching and decide to experiment with more intuitive approaches, end up stepping back to the “old ways”.
But how boring and unproductive this type of teaching is!
Empathising with the students, understanding their needs and focusing on their lives, is what turns a potentially boring classroom into an exciting, stimulating, and often thought-provoking social event.
It is in this type of learning environment that real learning takes place, as Luke Meddings points out in his “20 steps to teaching unplugged”.
When the student is actually ENGAGED in the conversation or lesson (and, as Scott Thornbury points out, “teaching is conversing”), He or She will be motivated to produce effective language, in other words: communication!
The need to communicate particular feelings, thoughts or ideas, will naturally result in emergent “language stuggle”, needed to enhance or trigger the learning of new language structures, through help from the teacher.
Thus, if I were to pin down a set of “steps” illustrating this learning process, I would pin them down as:
1. EMPATHY.
2. ENGAGEMENT.
3. LANGUAGE STRUGGLE
4. HELP OR “SCAFFOLDING” (for those of you familiar with DOGME teaching).
To sum it all up:
After suitable steps have been carried out to empathise with the students, conversation on a particular topic should arise naturally in the classroom, as will do engagement and involvement in that very same topic.
After all, why plan in advance a topic to discuss, when the students themselves are real living “topic containers”? Their lives are full of events that are likely to become the best topics for discussion, since engagement can only take place with topics that relate to their everyday lives...
Once the students’ will to communicate something is triggered, their struggle to communicate that effectively into a different language will provide the attentive teacher with the exact material to work with throughout the lesson (grammar-work, vocabulary, etc.), in order to bring the students to the level of language they need in order to “flow” within the conversation.
Do we need a “plan” to do this? No...just a dose of good old humanity and a pinch of common sense, free from any prejudice or preconception of what teaching is and should be!
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