Belonging to a Global Tribe of Connected Educators

Last Friday, October 20, I had the pleasure to facilitate a session in the Braz-TESOL Brasília Half-Day Seminar. Fellow teacher Leonardo Sampaio partnered up with me in this session called “Become Google Certified Awesome!” The purpose of our session was to demonstrate a little bit of the impact that becoming Google Certified Educators has had in our classes. It was a hands-on session, which took some participants by surprise, for some of them might have been expecting to hear us talk about the Google certification process, hence the title of the session. But we like to surprise people, so off we went on a collaborative 45-minute journey. (Quick and intense! Phew!)

Participants worked in trios, and each trio had an Ipad. They went into a Google Classroom we created especially for the session and were asked to discuss what 21st-century is, in their view, and how digital tools may facilitate 21st-century learning in the EFL classroom. After discussing within their groups, they had to write down a summary of their thoughts in the discussion stream of the task. Groups were then invited to read what other groups wrote in the discussion (inside their Google Classroom) and respond by writing comments.

The next task enticed participants’ creativity, for they had to access a collaborative Google Slides presentation, locate their group’s slide containing a crazy and unique image, and discuss what they thought had not gone as expected in the image. They had to write down a statement in response to that question about their image. Once they were done with that, groups were invited to look at other groups’ slides and write down 3rd conditional sentences inspired by the situation statements.

We finished our 45-minute session with a great video about 21s Century Learning and the 4 C’s. We asked participants to reflect on the tasks and activities they had engaged throughout the session to identify whether the 4 C’s had come up in their experience together, to which they said “Yes!” At the end of the session, Leonardo and I shared our views on how becoming Google Certified Educators has impacted our teaching practices and the learning experiences we facilitate in our classrooms. We feel that the very process of studying the units in the Google Training Center, which were made by teachers for teachers, helped us get in touch with a million ways teachers all around the world have been applying these tools in their classrooms in order to enhance the 4 C’s.

And what’s more, for me, the most valuable thing in having become Google Certified Trainer is to become part of a community of educators who are committed to facilitating learning experiences that help our students become global collaborators and creators of knowledge. After all, it’s never about the tech, it’s about the learning. It’s never about the tool, it’s about the pedagogy and, above all, it’s ALWAYS about the people.

Thomas Innovation Mentors: Aligning views and probing into our teenage students' perceptions

In our second innovation project session today we worked on investigating and aligning our views of our students’ classroom experiences. To that effect, we created our CSD Matrix (Matriz CSD in Portuguese), in which ‘C’ stands for certainties, ‘S’ for suppositions, and ‘D’ for doubts. We probed into our views and beliefs regarding the quality of the experience our students have in our classrooms. Individually, each team member wrote down their perceptions onto post-its (one perception per post-it) within a few minutes for each of the three categories. Once everyone was finished recording their views, it was time for us to process what we came up with. Going over everyone’s contributions generated some interesting conversations on our beliefs, and we concluded that we are pretty much aligned in our views of the kind of experience we think our students have in our classroom.

Team members were now ready to process a set of students’ responses to a brief questionnaire, a google form containing the following questions: 1. Tell us about a memorable English class you had at Thomas. Why was it a memorable experience?; 2. Considering all your trajectory at Thomas, in different levels with different teachers, what is it that you like the most about our classes?; 3. What is it that you like the least about our classes?; and 4. Write a word that represents your experience in your classes at Thomas. We managed to get responses from a mix of teenage students from different levels. We worked in two trios, and each trio looked at the responses to questions 1 and 2. What we did was go over students’ responses, which had been compiled into post-its, and try to identify patterns, tendencies or even categories that would emerge from their responses. The idea was to reach a more synthetic understanding of students’ perceptions and see if any insights would spring up in the process. As we shared our findings, we were able to make connections and identify some ideas which we felt were in the core of students’ responses. We took notes of those core findings so that they can inform actions ahead.

We wrapped up the session with some analysis and discussion around how our findings regarding students’ responses aligned with or somehow validated our own perceptions in our CSD Matrix, and we concluded that perceptions were quite aligned and coherent. As a result of this session, we were able to see a teenage student persona taking shape. A persona who has very specific perceptions of the classroom experience, who has particular needs and desires. The next step is to deepen the insights and prototype solutions to be tested in the classroom. This was quite a productive and inspiring session, and it feels like each one of us is gradually gaining a new sense that we go beyond being teachers, we are learning experience designers.

Would you like to know more about this project? Check out our site: bit.ly/thomasinnovationmentors

Interaction and Learning: A reflection between the mediator teacher, the students and the knowledge

Albert Einstein once said, “I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn”. We all know who Albert Einstein was, but why would he say those words? It is easy to understand when we look at it from a practical perspective. Teaching is not as powerful as creating and finding real opportunities for our students to develop their own knowledge. This is true for all kinds of learning, including English language learning. Among all the skills and contents to be learned, there is the facilitator teacher. Students of English benefit from a teacher-mediated focus on specific language forms, for example. 

Why is this true and what are the factual supports for that statement?

The reason why students of English benefit from a teacher-mediated focus is highly related to how our brains learn. It is interesting to notice that, according to James Zull, deep learning occurs when there is a sequence of experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing. Whenever we are lecturing, we are not providing our students with the challenge to go through all these stages. To create opportunities for them to learn and deeply acquire the language, for example, is to have them experience it, reflect upon this experience, hypothesize and finally test their hypothesis in an active way. That means that they are doing the job, not us. What Einstein tried to say is that teaching is about exposing knowledge. Learning is about creating knowledge. 

However, if students can create their own knowledge, why would they need teachers?

Students need teachers because although awareness and ability are developed autonomously, there must be an interposing between the communication environment and the students. Only by designing favorable circumstances for the students to interact, they are able to learn. In an attempt to explain the language acquisition, Krashen has stated that it happens through interaction in an environment where the learner has lots of comprehensible input. However, as Vygotsky theorized, the language input must be one step beyond the learner’s proficiency stage. Both, Krashen and Vygotsky agree with the fact that the teacher is a mediator, and the teacher’s role is to provide this favorable learning environment. 

So, how can teachers deal with this situation?

In fact, teachers deal with language acquisition and mediation situations all the time. EFL teachers are not different from that. When EFL students are learning specific structure and use of language forms, for example, their focus might not be the language study itself. According to Harmer, it should take place in a lesson sequence. It is the teacher’s responsibility to design a lesson that supports all the learning opportunities, including the ones related to language forms. However, these opportunities are better designed when covered through interaction-based activities. That means that, although the lesson includes language forms, the structures are presented, practiced and produced along with well-designed activities that prioritize interaction.

            A good example to illustrate a situation where a language form is being comprised in a lesson sequence is the following. Last year, my group of adults was learning how to make questions with the verb be. They did not know that they were learning about this because the focus was not on the questioning itself, but on the fact that they had to know about each other's information in order to fill out a survey. Their objective was to complete the sentences:

____________ is married.

___________ is single.

 _____________ is an architect.

 __________ and __________ are from Rio. Etc.

In order to complete the sentences, they had to interview their classmates. To get the right answers, they were supposed to invert the be sequence and form questions. Although they were not aware of the syntax rules for question formation, they could follow a model and apply the logical conclusion to all the sentences. For example, the model on the board was:

Are you married?

With only that model, they could produce all the other questions, practice the new structure and grasp the rule by themselves. There was no deductive explanation and the focus was not on the structure, but on the task.

Every learning process benefits from a facilitator teacher that creates real opportunities for learning to happen. Being a facilitator means making appropriate stimuli available for interaction to take place. It is only by mediating the interaction between the content and the learner that deep learning takes place. Mediating knowledge is helping our students go beyond their proficiency stage. Although teachers may focus on specific structures, the lesson objective must be interaction. It is the teacher’s role to design effective lessons that build an invisible bridge between the structure and the students’ communication in class.

Juliana Canielo de A. Benedetti

Read more:
Jeremy Harmer ( 2007) The Practice of English Language Teaching.
James E. Zull (2002) The Art of Changing the Brain.
Stephen D. Krashen (1987) Principles and practice in Second Language Acquisition
Lev S. Vygotsky (1987) The collected Works