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| A pneumatic device built by (the slightly tragic) Joseph Priestly, whose careful observations of combustion eventually led to the demise of the Phlogiston Theory. |
When I was in high
school, I was slightly mad about phlogiston. Phlogiston theory, for
anyone who doesn’t share my interest in discredited scientific ideas, was the
theory that things burned because they contained a special element called, not
surprisingly phlogiston. When something was on fire, the fire eventually
burned out because there was no more phlogiston left in the substance.
Now let’s say you took a piece of wood, which everyone was sure was just chock
full of phlogiston, lit it on fire, waited a few seconds, and then covered it
in a glass globe. After a few moments, the fire would go out. But
the wood still had plenty of phlogiston in it. Why did the fire go
out? Well, if chemists at the time had know about how combustion really
worked, they would have been able to say that the fire had used up all the
available oxygen in the air. But the scientists didn’t know how
combustion really worked. They thought it was all about phlogiston.
So they came up with a different answer. Air could only hold so much
phlogiston. When you covered up the wood, you limited the amount of air
and soon the air was saturated with phlogiston. It became
phlogisticated. It was a clever workaround for a pretty major bump in
their theory. And it was also almost the complete opposite of how
combustion actually worked.
* * *
Yesterday I sat down with
my notebook to watch Jill Hadfield present on Motivating our learners:
actualizing the vision (the presentation is available on the session list on the IATEFL site).
I’ve never met Jill Hadfield in person, but I certainly would like
to. She has a nice, easy going way of speaking. My wife was
listening in as I was taking notes and said at one point, “That woman sounds
smart, but she has a warm voice.” Jill had picked up the concept of
future ideal selves from Self Psychology and modified it so it could work as a
self-awareness raising tool in the language classroom. When I was a
social worker in Chicago, we used some similar techniques, what we called
forward thinking, to help our clients reduce risky behavior and improve their
quality of life. So I actually
thought the basic idea of having students go through a fairly structured
process of imagining their ideal L2 self and then carefully mapping a route to
that self was a great idea. I’ll touch on some of the greatness in Jill's
presentation very soon. But first I’m going to get a bit nit-picky.
Jill started off her
presentation by talking about motivation. In fact, one of her first
slides defined motivation as, “the explanation of the reasons behind human
behavior.” And she pointed out that motivation was an important concept
because motivation was, “the most common term teachers and students use to
explain what causes success or failure in learning.” And here is where I
kind of found myself getting a bit lost as to what exactly was being talked
about. You see, if we know the reasons for someone’s behaviors, I’m not
exactly sure we need to get into the whole concept of motivation at all.
Let’s take a specific example. Let’s say student A decides not to study
for a test. You could ask the student why they didn’t study, and they
might say, “I didn’t feel motivated.” But if we dig a bit further and try
and get at why they didn’t feel motivated, the student might be able to give us
all kinds of concrete reasons. They felt overwhelmed by the amount of
material they needed to learn before the test. The test material was so
difficult they didn’t know how to study. The material was so easy, they
didn’t think they needed to study. But in all these instances, the
problem isn’t really with motivation. The problem is born out of the
student’s failure to see how to be successful and the teacher's lack of
guidance on how to take the steps necessary to be successful. The idea of
motivation adds an extra layer to the situation, and like most extra layers
added to things, it obscures as opposed to reveals.
But in a way, this is a
minor point, and one that I think Jill inadvertently makes herself, because
once Jill got past the idea of why students should generate an ideal L2 self
(motivation), the whole idea of motivation dropped out of presentation.
Instead, it focused on how to ensure that ideal self was realistic, then
discussed how to help learners break down the becoming into a series of
concrete attainable steps. Here are just some of the really rich and
novel ideas Jill touched on for helping students get to that ideal L2 self:
- Counterbalancing the vision: it’s not enough for a
learner to just imagine what kind of L2 self they want to become, they also
have to have think about the kind of things that could get in the way of
achieving that goal. Taking time out to use our experience as teachers
and to help students identify common road blocks and ways to overcome them on
their way to their ideal self is going to make the learning process that much
smoother and that much more successful.
- Unifying the vision: not only do learners have an ideal
self, they also have an "Ought To Self," the self that's composed of
their ideas of what peers, parents, and friends think they should be and
do. As teachers, we can help our
students listen to some of the useful suggestions that this Ought To Self has
to offer on reaching an ideal L2 self.
Things like good study habits, asking for help, and talking out in
class, are the kinds of advice the Ought To Self might be aching to offer up if
our students listen.
- When students have an image of their ideal L2 self and
have translated that self into a set of goals, then a teacher should help
compare those goals with the course syllabus. Some of the goals will be attainable within the
syllabus. Others will require work
outside of the classroom. And if,
as a teacher, you're flexible enough, you might be able to find room in the
syllabus to help students attain goals which couldn't have been anticipated
before you met the real breathing dreaming learner who actually showed up in
your class.
- Think about group dynamics and have your students think
about group dynamics as well.
Every student is going to have their own ideal L2 self. And they aren't necessarily going in
the same direction. So getting
learners to think about and take part in the negotiation necessary for everyone
to be moving forward even if they are heading in different directions seems
like a very reasonable step to take to make sure that as many students as
possible are going to be satisfied with what is going on in class.
These were just a few of the ideas that Jill dealt with
in her 30 minute presentation.
There's much more. And I'm
hoping that this blog post has got you interested. Just as I'm hoping that IATEFL puts the presentation back up
on the Sessions page of their site. It was a
presentation full of thoughtful ways to get your students to be more thoughtful
about their learning. And even
better, it was filled with clear and memorable examples about how learners can
really map, in small achievable steps, a path to their ideal self. And I think small achievable steps, much more than motivation, is what matters when it comes to language learning. Yeah, maybe 'motivation' is the most used word when teachers
and students talk about successful language learning. But at one time, phlogiston was the most used word when
people talked about fire. And as
far as I can tell, neither phlogiston nor motivation can tell us very much about
the real reasons for why sometimes the fires of learning are more than enough
to light up every corner of our classrooms.
