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I’m working my way through
the Dip TESOL course now. The
theory stuff on SLA, loved it.
Action research, not so much.
And it really is getting to me.
Why don’t I dig the action research? Here’s my chance to evaluate what’s going on in my classes
and for some reason I find myself shaking my head side to side much more than
up and down. I had to critique Nunan’s Action Research in the language classroom and giving it a careful read changed my mind
somewhat. But there is still this
lingering unease.
Kemmis (2007) has said that,
“Action research aims at changing three things: practitioners’ practices, their understandings of their practices, and the conditions in which they practice.” So what could there be to disagree with. I want to improve how I teach English,
I want to have a deeper knowledge of how I see my teaching, and there is no
doubt I would like to have a mechanism for changing the environment in which my
teaching takes place.
I guess part of my problem
with action research is the idea that I can spot a problem or am aware enough
to pick out something useful in my teaching to focus on. Sure, I understand it's subjective,
that there’s no wrong thing to focus in on. If I or a co-worker identify an
issue in my classroom, then I’m good to go. I should tackle that problem with the same kind of focus I
have when I read about and try to implement SLA research in my classroom. But…but there is always the feeling of
“but.”
I did what I usually do in
these cases. I read more. I buried myself in Action Research
for Language Teacher (Wallace, 1998). Good
book. Didn’t help. Kept getting hung up on lines like,
"the process of professional development varies from one person to
another," and "[Action research] nearly always arises from some
specific problem or issue arising out of our professional practice." Am I crazy or are there other people
out there who feel that problems and issues that 'arise' might not actual be so
much of a problem as the problems and issues that somehow stay hidden?
Then I read Head & Taylor’s (1997). Readings in teacher
development. Chock full of goodness. Especially the stuff on 'Self and peer assessment.' But did it leave me satisfied? Nope. So instead of reading, I decided to take Head & Taylor's
advice and do a peer assessment.
They said watching another teacher was going to teach me loads about my
own teaching.
Luckily I have a
game fellow teacher by the name of Scott.
We teach together on Fridays.
So I hit him up and he said no problem. As suggested, I asked him what he was interested in getting
feedback on. Turns out that the
issue arising from his professional practice is, "how to give classroom
instructions." Then I sat in
the corner and took notes. Lots
and lots of notes. Scott, like me,
is a big kitchen timer kind of guy.
If you’re interested in my kitchen timer fetish, just check out my
earlier post. As I was watching him give
instructions, very similar to my own style, I started to feel kind of itchy. “OK,” he boomed out, “let’s practice
for 3 minutes. Go!” or “OK, we are going to practice for 3
times. 1st time is 2
minutes. Start!” The look on the kids faces. He said “start” and it was like the
crack of a whip. Is that what the
kids looked like when I pushed the button on the kitchen timer? Not good.
During our
feedback session, I asked Scott, “How do you come up with the times you set for
your activities.” He didn’t
know. He looked a little
depressed. I told him I only asked
because I also didn’t have any real basis for the times I set either. We both kind of agreed that maybe it
might be better to just ask the students, “How long do you think you need to
practice this language to get a little more comfortable?” or see how many times
the students wanted to practice.
That’s what I’ve
been doing in my classes since Friday.
With a little tweak. First
I give the students a ridiculously short amount of time to practice. Maybe only a minute. Just so they can see how far they can
get. It's their baseline. Then I ask them, “OK, how much time do
you really need to practice this conversation from start to finish one time.” The student suggestions are, in and of
themselves, awesomely random. Students
yell out, “10 minutes,” “3 minutes,” “5 minutes.” But they YELL out a time. They are yelling to practice English. Same goes for number of times to
practice. In my morning class today the kids built a dialogue on hobbies. One kid said he wanted to practice it 35 times. We would have been in class until 7
PM. Luckily the other students had
a bit more confidence and negotiated him down to 7 times.
Identifying an
issue, careful observation, and just a little bit of feedback has already made
my class more student centered and probably more productive as well. And I wasn't even the one being
assessed. Still, I can't shake my
doubts about how I should go about implementing action research for myself. I long for some kind of truly objective
tool to help me identify what to focus on. That being said, probably my biggest issue with action
research is just...me. I want to
learn something before I do it. I
want to break everything apart and put it back together mentally before I'm
willing to try it out on the road.
But reading text after text isn’t going to carry me any closer to a
place where I’m comfortable with action research. Just like arbitrarily setting a 3 minute time limit on
practice isn’t necessarily going to get my students any more comfortable with a
particular aspect of English.
However long it takes, it takes.
However many times I need to try it, I need to try it. To find out the value of action
research, I'm going to have to put it into practice and watch as it unfolds inside
and in-front of me.
Head, K. & Taylor, P.
(1997). Readings in teacher development. Oxford: Heinemann.
Kemmis, S. (2007),
"Action Research As a Practice-Changing Practice." Opening Address
for the Spanish Collaborative Action Research Network Conference, University of Valladolid. Retrieved 17 January, 2011
from http://www.infor.uva.es/~amartine/MASUP/Kemmis_2007.pdf
Nunan, D. (1990).
"Action research in the language classroom." In J. Richards & D.
Nunan (Eds.). Second Language Teacher Education (pp.62-81).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wallace, M.J. (1998), Action
Research for Language Teachers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
