From English Teacher to Learner Coach

By Daniel Barber and Duncan Foord

Help your students get motivated, get organised and get practising!
From English Teacher to Learner Coach is for EFL teachers who want successful students, not just successful lessons. More than ever before, English learners have the tools and opportunities to practise and become competent English users, but they will need support and guidance to make the most of them. In other words, they need a coach. This book helps you to give your teaching a coaching twist, which in turn helps your students practise more outside class and get more out of what they do in class with you.

The book has two parts:
1.A guide for teachers which includes:
•a clear rationale for a coaching approach
•ways to give your teaching a coaching twist
•coaching activities you can use in your lessons

2.A student book with 39 activities. This includes:
•activities to help students get motivated
•activities to help students get organised
•activities to help your students practise English outside class on their own or with fellow students.
Learners can buy the Student book as a separate mini-book.

From English Teacher to Learner Coach is for all types of English class: adults, teens and younger learners, general and business English, EAP classes, large groups and one-to-ones, classes with or without a course book. Many activities are internet based but there are plenty of unplugged alternatives, which require no technological resources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Barber
• Release date: Mar 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311170798

Daniel Barber

Daniel Barber. I am a teacher, teacher trainer and TESOL writer based in Cádiz, Spain. I co-authored The Big Picture Advanced course book, published by Richmond and write regularly for Macmillan and OneStopEnglish.Duncan Foord. I am the Director of OxfordTEFL a teacher training and language school with centres in Barcelona and Prague. I am based in Barcelona and am author of The Developing Teacher, published by DELTA Publishing, and co-author, with Lindsay Clandfield, of The Language Teacher’s Survival Handbook, published by iT’s Magazines.

Book preview

Introduction

Which learner will learn most in these two teaching scenarios?

1 a good teacher teaching a poor learner

2 a poor teacher teaching a good learner

Of course we may have different ideas about what good and poor mean in this case, but using your own definitions, what do you think? Who has the most influence on the outcome? Is it the teacher or the student? How far will an expert teacher be able to take a learner who shows poor learning strategies, compared to a weak teacher with a learner who shows commitment and the ability to develop on their own despite the shortcomings of the lessons?

Another way to examine the question is to consider two contrasting weeks with a class you teach:

Week one

You had two very successful classes; students came up after class and told you how useful and enjoyable the lessons were. You too were pleased with their engagement in the class, their commitment to speaking in English and practising new language. The material this week was perfectly pitched for the class and the role play activity on Tuesday was a lot of fun for them. Even Hyan Woo, who has been struggling with the level, was participating. At the end of class on Thursday, you asked the students how much time they had spent practising English outside class that week. Your 10 students had done a total of 10 hours between them.

Week two

Classes were not so successful this week you felt. Students spoke less than last week in the conversation activity on Tuesday and the listening task you chose turned out to be too difficult and a few students looked a bit lost. At the end of class on Thursday, you asked the students how much time they had spent practising English outside class that week. Your 10 students had done a total of 30 hours between them.

So which week was the most successful, week one or week two?

In week one, you performed better in gauging the level of the students and motivating them to speak. The students probably learned more in class than week two. However, in week two they spent more time practising English. Three hours each on average, compared to one hour in week one. Let’s imagine your class is 3 hours per week, two lessons of 90 minutes. So in week one the students did 4 hours of English and in week two 6 hours, 50% more! Although the quality of learning in class time is likely to have been higher in week one, it seems unlikely that this will compensate for the extra hours of English practice in week two.

As the teacher, what do you do in week three? Concentrate on making sure you prepare classes like week one? Or do you focus on finding out what your students are doing outside class and in particular, what caused them to do more in week two than week one? Of course, you might do both. But if time is limited – it usually is – which is your priority?

The learners most likely made more progress in week two. Isn’t it strange then that the focus in our profession is on teaching techniques and classroom activities, not learning techniques, motivation and self-study activities? The focus in course books, training courses, workshops, articles and websites tends to be on supporting teachers in creating effective classroom events (teacher goals) rather than supporting students in achieving their ambitions with the language (learner goals). Good lessons will always help students, of course, and can contribute to student commitment to learning the language, but if we focus exclusively on lessons, we will miss the opportunity to leverage the potential every student has to practise more and make quicker progress.

The term learner-centred has been used in ELT to describe a shift from teacher-centred, chalk-and-talk style classes, to an approach which includes more student participation in group and pair work, personalisation, eliciting and catering to learner styles. This is a positive evolution, but it still reflects a classroom-centred view of learning where the classroom event, designed by the teacher, is the focus, rather than the endeavours of the individual class members to achieve their goals with the language.

Classroom based approaches to learning made more sense when resources for practising English outside class were severely limited. Prior to the advent of the internet, the teacher and the materials she brought to class were the only readily available sources of exposure to English for most learners. Now, the internet has made authentic listening and reading material easy to find as well as practice exercises designed for learners. Skype, chat and emails make speaking and writing easier to practise. The classroom event remains a highlight of the learning experience, but the opportunities to build what we have referred to as the language life of learners are many, and the teacher can have an influential role in helping learners to take advantage of them. There is more on language life below.

The thought experiment we proposed above leads to the conclusion that students will progress faster if:

• we shift from a focus on what teachers do to a focus on what students do.

• we shift from a focus on what happens inside classrooms to a focus on what happens outside them.

In other words, we move From English Teacher to Learner Coach.

This book aims to support teachers in making these shifts, giving your teaching a coaching twist, if you will. To do this, it includes coaching activities which you can do in class, practice activities students can do out of class and a rationale for a coaching approach which includes some theoretical background, which we hope will inspire you to try out further ideas of your own.

Who the book is for

This book is for teachers who want to maximise their learners’ potential outside the classroom as well as inside. It’s for those who want to encourage learners to take greater control of their learning, set themselves goals and find more ways to practise English independently from teachers.

This questionnaire can help you decide whether and how this book can help you and your students.

Decide on a scale from 1 to 10 to what extent the following statements describe your teaching situation:

• All my students get the most they can from their time in class.

• My students need no encouragement to practise outside class.

• My students try out many forms of study and practice outside class, not just exercises from the workbook.

• My students are meeting their goals for their English.

Get a colleague to do the quiz too, if you can, and discuss your scores. Whatever your scores, this book will help you move them towards 10! If you already scored 10s, please share your secrets!

If we are to help our students achieve their full potential, there needs to be a shift in emphasis in our classes away from trying to create perfect lessons towards ensuring that students learn more effectively on their own and achieve their goals as quickly as possible. This book is about how, by taking a coaching approach in the classroom, teachers can help learners practise English more outside class and learn more effectively in class.

What’s in the book and how can you use it?

The book has 2 parts:

From English Teacher to Learner Coach

and

Student’s Book - 39 activities to get Motivated, get Organised and get Practising (available separately for your students)

From English Teacher to Learner Coach

This is divided into three sections:

1 About Coaching

This explains the theories and ideas that lie at the heart of a coaching approach. It explores what coaching is and how coaching is useful. While you read this section, you will often be asked to do mini-tasks called ‘Your turn’. These are designed to help you to think about what you have read and to relate it to your own teaching situations and attitudes. The section includes some case studies where teachers talk about their experiences using a coaching approach.

2 Teacher to Coach Starter Kit

This is a quick guide to get started. It includes a suggested sequence of activities for use over several lessons to give your teaching a coaching twist, guidance on tutorials and notes on coaching different skills and coaching in different ELT contexts.

3 Lesson Bank

Twelve lesson plans to accompany the first twelve activities in the Student’s Book (Motivate! and Organise!) plus three further ready-made lesson plans to give your teaching the coaching twist.

Student’s Book

This is divided into three banks of activities which support three key elements for successful learning from a coaching perspective. We refer to them as the Coaching MOP: Motivate!, Organise! and Practise!

1 Motivate!

Activities which help learners reflect on and boost their motivation in and out of class. You can do them with your learners in class or they can do them on their own or with other learners.

2 Organise!

Activities which help learners identify their goals and realise them, by organising their learning, monitoring their progress and sharing resources. Again, you can do these in class or encourage learners to do them at home.

3 Practise!

Activities that help your learners practise their English regularly and develop richer English language lives. They aren’t homework in the traditional sense, but training activities which give their English a workout; they are activities they can do on their own or with others, at a time and place that suits them. They are intended to help students to practise easily, frequently and independently. Some activities take a typical student habit, like listening to a song or reading on the internet in English, and provide a sample procedure to help move the student towards working with the text a little more than they would normally, but a little less than they would in class with a teacher. Other activities take a simple suggestion, like trying out an English App, and create a three-step procedure to encourage commitment and add a reflective dimension. As a coaching approach takes hold in your class, your students will invent and share their own ideas and variations on these activities.

Your students can buy the Student's Book for the price of a cup of coffee. Give them the Smashwords link:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/420315

Its price has been kept deliberately low to make it as accessible as possible to your students. The Student's Book is included at the end of this book, so you don't have to download it.

Here are a few suggested ways that you might use this book.

• You just read the first section – About Coaching. You reflect on the ideas behind coaching and what they mean to your teaching. You leave it at that.

• You dip into the Student’s Book activities from time to time. After reading About Coaching, you decide to try out some of the Motivate! and Organise! activities in your