Small Changes in Teaching Big Results in Learning: Videos, Activities and Essays to Stimulate Fresh Thinking About Language Learning

By John F. Fanselow

Dr. John F. Fanselow is the classroom mentor/co-explorer you always wanted, whether you are teaching English as a second or foreign language or simply wanting to make your classroom instruction more engaging. The author of the groundbreaking book Breaking Rules challenges you to really notice what you are doing in your classroom, offers alternative activities to make your teaching more engaging, and then shows you how the activities work in videos with actual students.

 

"One could well teach English for a lifetime with no other ESOL book than this." Robert Oprandy, Professor Emeritus, University of the Pacific

 

Small Changes in Teaching Big Results in Learning is simple enough to use as a textbook for beginning teachers in a teacher preparation course, challenging enough for experienced teachers to use for personal professional development, and the perfect companion for teachers who want to more deeply understand their reflective practice.

 

What we and our students want to do, what we actually do, and what we think we do are different. The activities, essays and videos in Small Changes will enable you to decrease the gap between wanting, doing and thinking.

 

The approach in Small Changes is at once simple and challenging:

• You watch videos introducing new activities and types of feedback.
• You read more about the activities you saw in action.
• You try them out in your own classes.

As you master the activities and types of feedback introduced in this book, you will be able to move from teaching as a ritual to teaching as discovery. You will decrease the time you spend making lesson plans, quizzes and tests, looking for the ideal syllabus, and preparing worksheets and handouts and, as a result, you will have more time to analyze transcriptions and video clips of what you and your students are doing.

 

"I have had 'many jobs, but only one career: a love affair with an attempt to understand what the hell we are doing as teachers 'in minutely organized particulars' and from multiple perspectives." (Remarks by John F. Fanselow when the President of Teachers College presented him with the Teachers College, Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2005.)

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: iTDi TESOL Online
• Release date: Nov 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781393657705

Book preview

Small Changes in Teaching Big Results in Learning

Small Changes in Teaching Big Results in Learning

Chapters describing activities, and essays to stimulate fresh thinking about the language learning and teaching shown in the videos

John F. Fanselow

iTDi TESOL

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword ? vrthng.

Preface

Part 1 Making small changes to develop self-reliance in language learning and teaching

Chapter 1

Mastering speaking, listening, writing and reading by starting to silently read materials in ways slightly different from the usual ways

1.1 Albabka fur!

Making use of the positive feelings some have for the common activity oral reading and overcoming the dread other students have of engaging in the same activity

1.2 Albabka fur! 2

Reading/thinking/speaking-listening/writing in different ways

1.3 The sound of silence

Taking a look at how altering time can hinder and/or help language production, practice, and, by implication, learning

1.4 thesoundofsilence/t.. s.. n d . . .

Discovering how novel formats and deletions hinder and/or help language production, practice, and, by implication, learning

1.5 The origin of cloze tests

Providing incomplete versus complete information

Chapter 2

Mastering speaking, listening, writing and reading by starting to listen to materials in ways slightly different from the usual ways

2.1 How’s that again? Easy keys?

Exploring a word from the past and a word from the present: Dictations & Active Listening Activities

2.2 Next steps to explore listening

Rating multiple kinds of Active Listening Activities

2.3 Twose key words other understand

Transcribing in the 16th and 21st Centuries

2.4 Talking about a sign in a commercial DVD demonstrating ESL Techniques

Noticing that the obvious can be difficult to see

2.5 People hearing but not listening

Teaching content in English to non-native speakers of English

Chapter 3

Integrating vocabulary and grammar

3.1 Here is an important rule

Looking at a few usual ways of teaching grammar

3.2 Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks yuor stutends to

Discovering the richness of using sketches, images, and icons to direct and embolden students to speak and write accurately

3.3 I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before . . . .*

Enhancing the potential of sketches/images/icons for generating language

3.4 I heard a tapping ever louder than before revisited

Matching beliefs about learning and activities

3.5 It’s too damn tight

Using language in the classroom in ways we use it outside the classroom

3.6 AT & T Integrating language and actions, tasting and touching

3.7 Lessons from dogs

Mingling scents and sounds with language

3.8 I don’t want to speak.

Encouraging reluctant speakers to speak through questioning

3.9 Fortunately, the copy machine is broken

Using alternative sources of materials

3.10 Teaching errors and explanations for them or using language correctly?

Highlighting the pernicious consequences of multiple choice language tests

Chapter 4

Learning ways to predict the meaning of what is heard, seen and read

4.1 Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Superman!

Realizing how yes/no and either/or questions can unable us to discover meanings

4.2 Is a germ positive or negative?

Overcoming the limitations of understanding isolated words

4.3 Dismounted, Horses, Saddles, Reins

Comparing school knowledge and world knowledge

4.4 Hold your horses!

Teaching or testing words?

4.5 Beyond definitions

Comparing beliefs about the value of definitions

4.6 The best place to hide a secret

Questioning to tap the information in dictionaries

4.7 Superman revisited

Going further into categorizing and grouping

4.8 Use horse in a sentence.

Looking at a common but detrimental activity

4.9 position where putted into

Exploring the defining of abstract words

Afterword

Chapter 5

Understanding and gaining control of materials by discovering ways to produce a wide range of questions

5.1 Teacher or student questions?

Exploring differences between questions students and teachers ask

5.2 Suggestions and reasons for students to engage in unusual practices for producing questions

Exploring purposes for writing questions

5.3 What did you do over the weekend?

Questioning broadly and narrowly

5.4 Asking questions we know the answer to and do not know the answer to

Wondering Is that dog meat?

5.5 Fact, Inferences, Life

Grouping Questions

5.6 The frequency of different questions in different places

Questioning in courtrooms, TV programs, etc.

5.7 Other groupings of questions

Remembering Bloom’s taxonomy

Chapter 6

Emotion

6.1 Considering the emotional component of language learning

The 5th skill

Chapter 7

Getting it right by providing feedback and enabling students to develop inner criteria for what is correct and incorrect

7.1 A blue fez wool.

Considering whether to point out and/or correct errors or not to; and if deciding to do so, how to and how not to

7.2 OK or NOT OK?

Assisting students in the development of their abilities to evaluate the accuracy of what they write, read, say, and hear

7.3 Tempting blind alleys

Asking to what extent what we think is useful and effective is not and to what extent what we think is not beneficial is

7.4 Very good. Good job. Excellent.

Considering ways that so called positive feedback can be negative

Part 2 Exploring and analyzing the results of small changes

Chapter 8

8.1 Small changes resulting in big results:

Examining a poet, Toyota, and American Express conveying the same message

8.2 Some ways to make small changes

Trying the opposite, breaking rules, asking how what you think is good might be bad and how what you think is bad might be good, etc.

8.3 The power of transcribing

Watching three teachers making small changes and analysing the results

8.4 Finding time to transcribe and analyse recordings

Integrating lesson planning and transcribing

Chapter 9

Analyzing communications inside and outside of the classroom: Beyond Rashomon

9.1 Using a technical language to note five characteristics of communications

Analyzing what we do rather than judging or evaluating what we do

9.2 Classifying speech, gestures, pictures and other mediums and the content they communicate

Going beyond visual aids

9.3 What content are we communicating?

Learning about life, procedure, study of English, and study of other content

9.4 Taking in or producing mediums?

Reading silently, tasting, listening, touching, etc. and showing engagement

9.5 Generating alternatives using the 5 characteristics of FOCUS

Considering the Source & Target of communications, Purpose of communications, Mediums used, Ways mediums are used and Content of the communications

Afterword: Our role and responsibilities as teachers

About the Videos

Informed Consent Form discussed in Video 19

References

Acknowledgments

Dedicated to Darlene Larsen, Fellow Peace Corps Volunteer and Fellow Past President of TESOL International and the New York State TESOL Affiliate, NYSTESOL

Dearest Friend

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Videos and readings Copyright by John F. Fanselow 2017 & 2018

Todd Rucynski shot videos 1 to 9 and 12 to 18.

Takaaki Hiratsuka edited videos 1 to 18, 19, 25 and 26 and with John F. Fanselow produced them.

Chiho Takayama shot and edited videos 19 to 29 and with John F. Fanselow produced them.

Kevin Watson took the photographs in video 1.

Brian Damm is the teacher in videos 3, 4, 5 & 6.

Tim Gutierrez is the teacher in video 12.

Wakako Ando, Yuzuna Furuyama, Natsuka Hagiwara, Yohei Koike, KananMiyazaki, Eishin D Urushihara, Yuka Komatsuzaki, K. Motokazu, Sari Ono, Mina Sakuma, Nami Ueki, Tomoki Yahagi and Luna Yamaguchi enriched the Videos by participating in the classes in videos 1 to 18.

Phillip Bennett and Chris Maschio enriched videos 19, 25 & 26. and Ewen MacDonald, Atsuko Tagashira and James Wang enriched videos 20 to 29 and Sakae Onoda and Noriko Takatsu enriched video 20 by participating in my classes in the MA Program at Kanda University of International Studies in Tokyo.

Thanks to Alastair Lamond and ELI publishers for permission to use the Botchan graded reader and CD.

Jon Butah, Brian Bresnihan, and Kevin Stein improved the book by editing the chapters with great care, re wrote many of my sentences to make them clearer and more engaging. And, finally, thanks to Joseph Gleeson for his contributions to 8.3 and his stressing the importance of sharing others’ voices. A big thanks to Anna Husson Isozaki for creating the subtitle of the book and for writing down many of the comments I and other teachers made in our classes in the MA Program in TESOL at Kanda University of International Studies. I incorporated many of these spontaneous comments, full of insights, in many chapters.

Deepest thanks to Anne E. Hendler for copy editing the book and to Kati Alice Bilsborough for designing the front and back cover and spine.

A very, very, very special thanks to Barbara Hoskins Sakamototo for infusing the egalitarian spirit of iTDi in all of us and for her unstinting positive spirit, her candid advice to me re many projects which has prevented me from falling into many pitfalls.

Chapters of this book have appeared in slightly different forms in the following publications:

Portions of the Preface appeared in You call yourself a teacher, 1985. In Languages and linguistics: The interdependence of theory, data, and application. Edited by James E. Alatis. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Portions of Part 1, chapter 3, section 5, It’s too damn tight: using language in the classroom in ways we use it outside the classroom originally appeared as an article of the same name in TESOL Quarterly Vol. 14, No. 2, June 1980.

Portions of Part 1, chapter 3, section 2, Nveer epxalin gaammr relus or aks your sdutens to originally appeared in the NYS TESOL Journal 1 (1), 2014.

Portions of Part 2, chapter 8, section 2, Some ways to make small changes originally appeared in a slightly different form in the European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL 3.2, 2014.

Portions of Part 2, chapter 9, Beyond Rashomon: Describing communications inside or outside of the classroom originally appeared in a longer article for TESOL Quarterly 11 (1), 1971 under the title "Beyond Rashomon: Conceptualizing and Describing the Teaching Act".

Foreword ? vrthng.

Video 1

Sandals? You’re kidding.

I wore shoes till I lived in Nigeria. When I got athlete’s foot during hot and humid summers in Chicago, I bought off the counter ointments and they relieved the symptoms somewhat.

In Nigeria the temperature and the humidity were much higher than those I had experienced in Chicago. The off the counter ointments had very little effect.

So I went to a doctor and asked for a prescription ointment. He said there was no need for ointment. All I had to do was wear sandals. Well as I said, I had worn shoes all my life and I thought of all sorts of reasons why sandals would not be a good option. They would not support my arches well, my feet would get dirty from the dust in the places where I walked, insects would bite my toes, they seemed too casual to wear with the shirt and tie that I wore when teaching, and people would smell the odor from my feet.

The doctor refused to prescribe ointments and insisted I try his suggested alternative. So I bought a pair of sandals. None of my fears materialized.

My feet had no odors, the small amount of dust that accumulated I could shake off in a heartbeat on my doorstep. The sandals I bought had strong arch support. My students said they thought that sandals were more stylish with shorts in the tropical rainforest. They said they had thought it strange for me to wear shoes.

I continued to wear sandals after I returned to New York because my feet continued to be so healthy. When I went to buy a new pair, my wife, who is Japanese, was with me. The salesperson asked me whether I ever visited Japan. I said I often did. He said that he would like me to try on a pair of sandals without straps. He knew that the Japanese remove their shoes before entering their homes. If you use these sandals, you won’t have to bend over or sit down each time you enter and leave to strap and unstrap your sandals.

I said that the sandals would fall off. He said they would not. I said that when I drive they will not stick to my right foot and, as a result, I will not be able to brake quickly. He kept saying that there is no difference between sandals with and without straps as far as keeping them on goes. I said I found this hard to believe.

He got up abruptly and returned with a pair of sandals without straps. He gently removed my sandals with straps and put the sandals without straps on. He said, Please walk.

I walked. They did not fall off. They were just as secure and comfortable as those with straps.

Skepticism

We are all creatures of habit both inside and outside of our classrooms. We follow rules that we have unconsciously learned. We get used to doing things in a particular way that we feel comfortable with.

One result of this fact is that just as I first resisted sandals and then sandals without straps, when people suggest alternative activities for our teaching we conjure up all sorts of reasons why the alternative activities will not work. When we feel comfortable doing what we do, we continue acting the same way.

I wrote this book to provide activities that are very different from many widely accepted practices in the field of language teaching, which I consider past their use by and expiration date. Many are based on claims rather than proven effectiveness.

My suggestion is for you to be as skeptical about your present practices as the alternatives I urge you to try. Ask how widely-advocated pre-reading activities (such as brainstorming, scaffolding, predicting what a text is about) might not only be useless but also detrimental to learning.

Question the value of memorizing individual words on note cards with the first language equivalent on the back of the cards. Consider ways that asking students to define words, or use new words in sentences, repeating words in isolation, memorizing rules in either English or students’ first languages, having students in pairs talk about their favorite songs, sports or whatever might be detrimental.

A singular message

I have never seen anyone else share this message at the beginning of each class or at the beginning of workshops or presentations that teacher educators make:

But if I am true to the question I started with, ? vrthng, then you must not only not believe anything I say but anything anyone else says. Do one of your usual activities, make a small change, and compare the effects, over and over and over.

If you follow these steps you will see how much more both you and your students are capable of. You will discover that inertia can be overcome with often exhilarating effects.

The changes I suggest are small, just as changing from shoes to sandals with straps to sandals without straps are small. But the results can be very big. They are also easy to employ just as changing what we wear on our feet is very easy to do.

The three biggest issues in ELT

For me the biggest issues in ELT are the lack of skepticism, which I just mentioned—the acceptance of prescriptions and labels. The second is our failure to analyze what we and our students actually do. All too often we discuss what we do and plan lessons using labels with positive connotations: pre-reading activities, scaffolding, positive feedback, pair work, communicative activities, re-casting, comprehension check, activation of prior knowledge, experiential learning to name nine of dozens.

We use the terms the same way doctors use low density and high-density cholesterol and vitamin B12. But the terms in our field are very, very imprecise. Yet we use them to say what we do rather than record and transcribe what we do.

Calling What is the title of this text? a comprehension question does not make it a comprehension question. Saying that in my combination of sketches and words with letters left out to express, Believe nothing I say! I am scaffolding does not mean the message is scaffolding.

The third issue is the belief that doing A results in B. "Pick a few key words from the text—7-10 is usually a good number. Have the students write a brief story using each word. This familiarizes students with the vocabulary used in the text. Not only will this help improve reading comprehension, it will improve writing skills as well." How can the so-called key words familiarize students with the text since they have not seen the text? How can writing a story using each word, many of which they probably are not familiar with, improve their writing? Writing is not using unfamiliar words to write a story with no purpose, no audience, and no theme.

Forget terms. Forget claims about using keywords in stories to improve reading comprehension and writing. Let’s look at the reality of what we do by analyzing recordings and 20 to 30 transcribed lines of what we and our students do. Describe what was said and done by each participant without using one label. Change what is said and done a little, record and transcribe the small changes and compare the results. Over and over and over. Describe and analyze what we do without jargon and with as few preconceived notions as possible.

In our analysis we have to be skeptical—the first issue—how is what we think is useful not useful and how is what we think is not useful possibly useful? What do our students think about what we do?

I am advocating nothing more than what explorers have urged for centuries:

Sit down before a fact as a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

T. Huxley

How it all began

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Videos 1, 8, 22, 29

My first full-time teaching position was in Nigeria. In addition to teaching English to primary school teachers in a teacher training college, I was required to supervise their practice teaching. Two problems: 1. The teachers I was supervising each had from four to twenty more years experience than I had; 2. They were teaching Nigerian history; the currency system adopted from England—pounds, shillings, pence; British systems of measurements such as poles, rods and perches; etc.—information that was all new to me.

Fortunately for me, in the primary schools where the teachers with much more experience and knowledge than I had were practice teaching, there were two primary 1 classes, two primary 2 classes, all the way up to primary 6. Also, the timetable mandated that each stream study the same subjects at the same time each day.

I decided that the only way I could be the least bit useful would be to observe the first 20 minutes of the first period in one stream and the second 20 minutes of the first period in the other stream. I wrote down as much of what each teacher said and did as I could with the intention of sharing what the teachers did with each other.

As it turned out, I was able to write down more than 50% of the interactions. One reason I was able to do this was because the teachers wrote a lot on the board for students to copy. Had they spoken more, I would not have been able to take such copious notes.

At the end of the day, when I met the two teachers teaching primary one, for example, I would say, Okon, Benedict wrote the date and all the directions on the board and had the students copy them as they looked at the board. You said the date and had the students look at the board, then look only at their notebooks and write what they remembered.

Okon, tomorrow do what Benedict did. And Benedict, please do what Okon did.

The next day, I asked them to describe what differences the small changes I had suggested had made. In some cases, they didn’t see any differences in the results. In other cases, they saw big differences.

When students wrote from memory rather than copied, for example, they made more mistakes. When the teachers saw the mistakes, they realized that they had to have their students practice more.

Imagine all the possibilities

As you know, the number of radii in a circle is infinite. But as every analysis of classroom interactions and textbook activities has shown, the number of activities done in classrooms is almost always very, very limited. The white portion of the circle below shows the usual range of interactions and activities. The rest of the circle, in blue, shows the range of interactions and activities that are possible but often not attempted.

I wrote this book to show you ways you and your students can expand the range and type of interactions and activities you experience, so you can expand your white piece of the pie.

Here are two examples of ways to expand the activities beyond the white piece of the pie.

Asking students who erase any/all the mistakes they make to keep their erasers in their pencil cases is an activity that is unusual in some countries. Mariko thought that when she gave dictations, all of her students wrote exactly what she said, because there were never any errors in their notebooks. However, when she looked at a video clip of her class, she saw that the students were erasing and writing while she wrote the correct sentences on the board. She had told them to compare what they wrote with the sentences on the board. But instead of only comparing, they were rushing to fix without time to process or question.

The next day Mariko asked them to keep their erasers in their pencil cases. After she said, I like ice cream. three times, she did not write the sentence on the board. The next time she checked the students’ notebooks, only 10 out of 40 students had written, I like ice cream. Instead, she read such phrases as I cream; I ice; I spring; like ice. After that, she asked the students to correct what they had written with a different-colored pen. This would allow the students to compare their mistakes with what was correct later on and allow the teacher to find out what the students could understand and not understand.

Ali who believed that students should read, write, listen to and say the same patterns many times found that after students experienced a text two times they became bored with the activity. So he asked his students to present the same text in different formats. Here are three versions of one sentence, created by his students:

I think that these activities also illustrate the playful spirit of language. Playfulness is very important in all learning.

Make nice, criticize and prescribe, make claims using jargon and general terms

In Nigeria, as you just read, I did not say how nice the teachers were with the students nor did I say that what they did, they should not have done. Almost all exchanges after supervisors observe practice teachers, or after principals observe teachers, consist of only three types of conversations. In one, the person in charge says how lovely the teacher’s rapport was, how the students were so enthusiastic, how good the lesson was. I call this the Make nice conversation.

Another type includes critical judgments by the person observing the class and suggestions/prescriptions for how to do things better. The supervisor selects examples to fit the judgments. Your rapport was great, but you failed to notice that the three students in the back of the class were text messaging when you stated the goals of the lesson. You must be more attentive to your students!

The third type consists of the supervisor and teacher making claims using jargon and general terms. "You used scaffolding and brainstorming and ice breakers in the beginning of the lesson which activated the students’ minds so they understood more. You had them do communicative activities in pairs after they listened to the recording so they could better understand what they had heard."

I loved your comprehension questions because the students could answer them all correctly. Is ‘What was the author’s name?’ a comprehension question? Is ‘When was the book written?’ a comprehension question? Synonyms for comprehension include grasp, perceive, interpret, be aware of, and understand.

Many so-called comprehension questions are similar to the two I just wrote. They ask for the recall of facts. It is of course possible to know the name of an author and the date of a book without having any understanding of the title much less any of the text.

What did the students and the teacher actually do?

Scaffolding, brainstorming, icebreakers, communicative activities, comprehension—these terms mean totally different things to different people. I think using jargon and general terms to make claims is detrimental to teacher awareness and development. Instead, as you just saw, in my discussions of teaching I focus on analyzing what students and teachers actually do. If you record students doing pair work and see they make two to five errors in each sentence you realize that so-called communicative activities more deeply ingrain errors rather than develop students’ language. If you see that in a class of forty students it is always the same 5 students who answer the teacher’s so-called comprehension questions, you cannot continue to claim that the questions were effective because the students answered them correctly.

In Nigeria, I described in detail one or two actions each teacher carried out and asked them to try the other’s activities, which were alternatives for them. And in our next discussions, I asked them what differences, if any, the small changes had made. Because they were busy teaching, they often could not notice any different results. But since all I had to do was observe and write notes, I could notice different or similar results. When I shared descriptions of what they did as well as the results of small changes, both the teachers and I were often surprised.

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Medical staff and economists describing in detail, making small changes and comparing the results

Nurses and doctors make mistakes when treating patients. Like students they often try to hide their errors. The nurses at one hospital were told that if they made a mistake and reported it, they would be given $200.00 with the condition that they would then agree to be video recorded while working.

One nurse reported that she miscounted tablets for a patient, a not uncommon error. Later recordings revealed that as she was counting at the nurses’ station, visitors came and asked her for patients’ room numbers. One, two pain killers, one muscle relaxant, Oh, Mr. Gray? in 205, two muscle relaxants.

As a result of seeing how the miscounting was being caused by interruptions from visitors, the nurses decided to put a sign on the desk: Please do not disturb. I will answer your question as soon as I finish counting these pills. This small change reduced the number of mistakes by 90%.

Many economists have claimed that the more choices consumers have the more they buy. A few economists decided to find evidence to support or refute this claim. They placed 5 brands of strawberry jam at the entrance of a supermarket for a few days. They tallied the number of jars consumers bought.

A couple of weeks later they placed 25 brands of strawberry jam in the same location. After a few days they discovered that the number of jars of jam that people purchased was much, much lower than when consumers had only 5 choices.

Another claim that economists questioned was that if unemployment counselors asked the unemployed they were helping to find jobs to detail what they had done the previous week to find a job, they would more likely find a job. A few counselors had told their director that few of the people they asked details about what they had done the previous week could remember. Hardly any of the unemployed had a notebook in which they noted what companies they had visited and when.

The director gave the counselors permission to change what they were doing. Instead, they jointly made plans for what the unemployed were going to do the following week rather than interrogate them about what they had done the previous week. On Monday, you can visit Seiji in the morning. In the afternoon, you can visit Rosen, which is close by. The unemployed person wrote down the week’s schedule, which was jointly planned with the counselor.

Asking what people were going to do rather than what they had done decreased the time it took people to find jobs and increased the number who found jobs by a very large percentage.

Small changes, big results occur not only in language teaching but also in most areas of our lives. Observe, change just one factor, and compare the results. Nothing new, just a short version of the scientific method. William Blake, the English poet, print maker and painter advocated focusing on details and pointed out the danger of general claims.

He who would do good to another must do it in

Minute Particulars.

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;

For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized

Particulars,

And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.

Jerusalem, (f. 55, ll. 48–53, 60–6.)

Easier to see what we are doing now than when I was in Nigeria

These days, just as hospitals can record what staff members do to better understand how they make mistakes, we can record what we and our students say. We can take digital photographs of the board, and pages from student notebooks, and students can record pair work on their cell phones. As a result, we have much more accurate data available to compare the results of making small changes than I had with only a pen and notebook when I observed practice teachers in Nigeria.

Making small changes and comparing the results

In these readings I illustrate ways you can compare the results of activities you presently use and small changes you make as you experiment with your teaching and question the value of widely accepted practices as well as your preconceived notions or assumptions about teaching.

You previously read that when Mariko told her students to put their erasers in their pencil cases, when she said sentences she wanted them to write, she realized that when she had previously dictated sentences they had erased their errors before she could see them. So she of course had assumed that they wrote what she had said correctly.

Ali’s students were bored when he asked them to read the same text more than once. But when he asked his students to produce the text in different formats as shown on page 3, they were keen to re-read the material.

So not having students use erasers and inviting students to produce texts in different formats are two small changes that produce quite different results.

You see that these conversations do not make nice, criticize and make judgments, or use jargon and general terms rather than actual communications. They are based on the analysis of transcriptions, video clips and pages from student notebooks—data, not perceptions of what teachers and students did.

In Part 1 Making small changes to develop self-reliance in language learning and teaching, the first part in this series, I present assumptions that underlie the practices I suggest. If you use the list of assumptions as you create alternative practices, you are likely to introduce activities that are more powerful than if you just produce new activities at random, as I did in Nigeria.

In Part 2, Exploring and analyzing the results of small changes, the following part, I will present assumptions that underlie the suggestions I make for analyzing your teaching. If you try to understand what you are doing, what you want to do, and what you think you are doing, using the assumptions I base my suggestions on, you are more likely to see things you did not see before, than if you just look at