Newsflash: unquestioning praise considered harmful!

I have found myself for years defending the teaching profession against what I saw as unwarranted attacks. People accused the culture of praise in modern schooling as being namby-pamby liberal nonsense. I tried to explain there was a good body of evidence behind it.

But news came this week of a report rubbishing the practice.

Perhaps my mistake was in trying to educate the lay people rather than the teachers. You see, most teachers didn't get it, not because individually they aren't bright, motivated professionals, but because the news came to them filtered through layers of management, focus groups and in-service training teams, each of which reinterpreted what the last had told them in a great game of academic Chinese whispers.

The message that reached the teachers wasn't the message that the psychological studies had given, but something completely different: "Always encourage! Never criticise!" I never believed that could work. I have always hated praise or encouragement when I don't understand something. The difference between me and a "bad learner" is that when this happens, I don't lose faith in myself -- I lose faith in the teacher. (And I have lost a lot of faith in a lot of teachers over the many years I've spent in full-time and part-time education.)

No, the advice was more subtle and nuanced than that.

As I recall it, the observation came first with misbehaving children. It was noted in classroom observations (carefully managed studies involving timing of teacher-pupil interactions) that teachers spent a lot more time berating misbehaving children than they did praising them when they behaved well. There is a school of thought that sees most children's misbehaviour as a call for attention, and by giving children more attention for misbehaving than behaving, on a certain level you reward the bad behaviour. The theory was that by increasing contact time during periods of good behaviour, you would reinforce the fact that good behaviour leads to adult approval.

But it went further than that. The observers noted that the teachers' response to a misbehaving child just wasn't positive at all. There was visible relief, and the teachers would actually draw attention to the child's normal poor behaviour. By doing so, the researchers claimed, they were establishing the teachers' low expectations, and undermining the pupils' confidence.

Now, can anyone really argue against the idea that we should show kids that we appreciate their good behaviour? Does anyone think that showing a kid that us adults have identified them as a "problem child" has any possible benefits? I doubt it.

So far, so uncontroversial.

But the follow-up to this was that researchers identified similar patterns with children that didn't necessarily misbehave, but just weren't doing well. Criticism for getting it wrong, implied criticism on the occasions they do get it right.

I still think we're in pretty uncontroversial territory here, because the advice is still pretty straightforward: when an underperforming child finally answers a question right, don't say "Thank God! At last you've got one right!"

And, in fact, the most uncontroversial advice from the experts was to smile as you say it, because they saw teachers who never smiled at a correct answer from an underperforming pupil.

The experts were not calling for uncritical, undeserving praise.

How does that translate into the classroom?

Well, a couple of years ago, I was teaching English in a French university. The French (like the Italians and the Spanish) believe themselves to be incapable of learning languages. I also had the challenge of an extremely mixed-ability first year group in the law faculty, everything from people with no previous experience of English to people I could have sat and talked to for an hour or two without problems. Imagine trying to teach a room of 20+ in that situation. It was not fun.

Often trying to get answers felt like trying to get blood from a stone, and when I finally got a good answer from some of them, the relief was palpable...

... and that was it. I had caught myself falling into the trap that the experts warned about. My attitude was more or less "why couldn't you have said that in the first place?!?" and it was all too obvious. The students were reluctant to give answers, and when they did give them, I did nothing to bolster their confidence.

What I had to do wasn't a simple matter of giving out "well done" stickers, but a complete change in my attitude to the students. I was seeing them as obstacles, as problems, when the problem was the circumstance, and my reaction to it. It was easier to see this as a situation that I could do nothing about than to actually do something.

So I set about the task of finding material that was suitable for everyone (and to a great extent succeeded), but more importantly, I changed my attitude to my students. Instead of feeling relieved when I finally got the correct answer, I felt happy. Instead of dropping my shoulders and saying "why didn't you say that earlier?" I smiled and said "of course! I told you you knew it"... until I had built such a rapport with them that I could start dropping my shoulders again and saying "why didn't you say that earlier?"

Which brings us back to the report, and the suggestion that invariable praise projects low expectations onto the students.

In the end, whatever I did was projecting my expectations onto the students. I always had higher expectations of the students than they had of themselves. But my projection had to satisfy two criteria for the students to accept it: it had to be realistic based on their ability, and it had to be close to their own expectations.

If a student's confidence is five steps behind their ability, there's no point in projecting a confidence that matches their ability -- you have to project one that's one step ahead of theirs, and slowly bring up their confidence.

What's it like to lose language?

I recently started an online course about children's play with FutureLearn. One of the optional readings for week 1 was an interview with a practicing psychologist who had a stroke [journalofplay.com], triggering aphasia from which she has never fully recovered.

There's a lot of intriguing ideas in there, although it's a very long article and it wasn't interesting enough for me to get to the very end, but I figure a few of my regulars would enjoy it anyway.

Language shaped holes: looking back at my Gaelic learning

After my first couple of intensive (week-long) courses in Scottish Gaelic, I developed an analogy for how I thought language learning worked. Classes, I decided, don't put the language in your head, but instead drill "language-shaped holes" that you can later pour stuff into and, like jelly in a mould, what you get in the end is language.

A lot of my school-level language learning had worked that way too. I studied stuff, but really had no conscious command of most of it, but at some point later I mastered through a combination of self-study, practice and exposure. Adherents of the "input hypothesis" would say that only the last one counts, but I don't buy it.

The process I went through with Gaelic was all about production. The first courses I took favoured production over input (the teachers were kind of old-school) and outside of those courses, I took part in discussions on internet forums and at a conversation circle.

My strategy at the conversation circle was to read a little of a coursebook every week before going. The book was ordered grammatically, rather than the thematic units of modern TY/Colloquial and the like. This meant that I could pick a feature, read it up, and then practise it as much as possible during the hour-or-so of conversation.

Quite often, these were features that I'd studied in class but forgotten, and I don't think the book explanations alone would have done the trick.

I kind of went blank on the conditional for a long time, but I started noticing other people use it at the conversation circle. But I could not have noticed if there wasn't a conditional-shaped hole in my head.

Since then, I've decided that language-shaped holes are not the optimum manner of teaching, but as suboptimal goes, they're pretty good....

iPad for teachers? No thanks.

My laptop is stuffed. There's some kind of fault in the power circuit and it keeps refusing the mains power. As the battery is nearly exhausted and holds about twenty minutes of charge at most, it's basically unusable.

As the problem worsened, I slowly migrated as much of my daily activities as possible to my iPad. First it was web browsing, then email, an eventually I bought a Python programming environment and the Pages word processor so I could continue developing software and producing material for my students.

There are lots of articles out there that will tell you how wonderful the iPad is for teaching, but these are often little more than superficial lists of frivolous apps for presentations, flashcards and the like.

As a language teacher, there are more fundamental features of the iPad that are instantly a problem: audio and video and file access.

Sound files? No thanks!

I wanted to do an exam simulation using one of the practice papers at www.cityandguildsenglish.com, so I downloaded the paper, the answer scheme and the listening transcript onto my iPad. But all this became a bit futile when I rediscovered that e iPad will not let you download MP3s from websites, preferring to force you to use either the iTunes store or the iTunes app. With the files not being available on iTunes andmy PC out of action, I have no way to get any audio or video files I need onto my iPad. Now for listening exercises I am forced to fall back on a rather old Android phone, as it allows me to download anything I want.

Why would you want to access your own files?

Apple have gone out of their way to prevent the iPad being a computer. In one aspect, it was a clever design decision, as now rather than having the abstract concept of "a file", most file types exist as documents within their respective applications. There's less confusion for the user and less danger of malicious or faulty software interfering with the files from other applications,

However, in my current job, I don't do my own printing and photocopying, so I'm always sending multiple worksheets to the course secretary. Without file browser access, I'm currently restricted to going into individual applications, and using the "share" function on individual files to send them as emails. Where once I had one email with 8 attachments, now I have 8 emails with 1 attachment each. This makes life hard for both me and the secretary, as there is a very good chance that one of us will forget something.

Overall

Feel free to tell me about the latest app that has made your life so much easier, but I will never be able to advise other teachers to use a device that complicates the very basics of digital technology for teachers. Most of those apps, or close equivalents, will be available for Android anyway, and Android gives you the power to do what you like with your own data.

Not only that, but the iPad is actually massively overpowered for the basic functions we teachers need (have you seen the complexity of some of the games?) so you're paying more than you need.

Buy a cheap Android tablet instead - it'll save you money and time.

Musings on confusings...

Since I first learned I had got the job in Sicily, my Spanish has suffered. The day after the job interview, I was at a Spanish/English language exchange, and I kept dropping words of Italian into my Spanish. The weird thing is that my Spanish was a million times stronger than my Italian then, but somehow my brain had switched "mode".

Obviously, living in Italy for four months has only served to intensify this, with my Spanish now being half-hidden behind fairly broken bits of Italian. My assumption for a long time was that my problem was in my accent -- I still speak Italian with a bit of a Spanish twang. This belief was bolstered by the fact that my Catalan, while being very, very weak from lack of use, didn't seem so badly affected. The Catalan accent is very, very different from Spanish and Italian.

However, I was at a Couchsurfing meeting on Friday night which changed my mind. There was an Andalusian tourist visiting, and when I spoke to her, my accent was more different from the one I use in Italian than I had expected. My brain started playing tricks on me, and I had difficulty speaking Italian when she was in my line-of-sight, and for a while I was wobbling between Italian and Spanish.

But that's not the important thing.

When I was speaking Italian, I got into much deeper and more complex conversations than I normally would, and rather than jamming up as I hit the limits of my Italian, I was automatically switching to Spanish to fill in the gaps. Now, I wasn't just importing words or grammar rules from Spanish into Italian -- no, I was switching into Spanish; conjugations, pronouns and all. As I became aware I was doing this, it dawned on me that I'd been doing it for my whole stay, but normally I'd just not thought about it too much and fallen back to English.

This is a bit of a new sensation... or actually, no. The only new thing is the fact that I was unaware of it. When it was Scottish Gaelic and French, for example, it would be instantly noticeable. The difference here is that the similarity of the languages (including, but not limited to, accent) allowed it to slip through the net on occasions.

The trigger mechanism is the same, regardless of language: hit a gap in your knowledge in one language and the brain will fall back on another. The only difference lies in detection.

This makes me wonder if the only option I have now to get my Spanish back is... to learn more Italian. My theory is that filling in the main gaps in my Italian will not only stop me falling back on Spanish when I run out of Italian, but that as a consequence of this, it will reduce the strength of the linkage between the two, allowing me to speak Spanish without Italian interrupting me.

It looks like I might be practising my Italian a lot, even once I leave Italy...

Benny Lewis... fluent in 3 months...?

People who know me from sites such as HTLAL will know there's no love lost between me and Benny Lewis. The man always refuses to discuss anything, and takes mortal offence at anyone who doesn't agree unquestioning with every single word he says.

This is a shame, because Benny has a wealth of experience in language learning, and being able to "mine" this experience would surely reveal a lot of good stuff. Sadly, though, Benny's refusal to engage in any critical analysis of his own performance has led him to maintain a blog that is full of positively charged platitudes and little of practical substance.

Years ago, I borrowed a copy of his "Language Hacking Guide" from a friend, and blitzed through it making notes for a review on this site, but in the end I decided to let it slide and never published anything.

Now, though, the guy has another book out, entitled Fluent in 3 Months and published by no less than Harper Collins, and the press seems to be lapping it up.

Has Benny grown a clue recently? Has he stopped and given any serious thought to the language learning process? The writing on his blog is as devoid of content as ever, so I doubt it.

I'm hoping to get a loan of a copy of the book in a few weeks time to do my own review, but for now, you can read a very thorough review of the book by the user Big_Dog on the Polydog forum (accompanied by much discussion).

I have to say, most of what he says strikes a chord with me as typical of Benny's style. Woolly definitions, constantly moving goalposts, contradictions, overinterpretations, and just often downright wrong.

Does Benny say anything useful? Yes, he does, but then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Let's be honest with ourselves....

Well, in the last few weeks it has dawned on my how little I have achieved in 3 months in Sicily.

I learned a few previously half-learned, half-forgotten verb suffices and a handful of new words. I noticed a little bit about differences in vowels between Italian and other Romance languages. But that was about it.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought a pile of DVDs. I now have 5 TV serieses and a couple of films, totalling about 70 or so hours. I've watched two serieses and my brain feels far more comfortable with Italian already.

Why didn't I do this earlier?

Well, I was stressed out with work. But that's a weak excuse, because I still had loads of free time that I was wasting on the internet and silly computer games. I could have been spending that time far more productively, and I would have relaxed more.

I've now got a month and a half left, and I need to improve quickly, to make the most of my stay.

I never learned any Sicilian, and I think I'll have to give up hope on that front, because I was relying on my software to help me with that, and it's still not quite working.

But I will leave with better Italian, I have to.