Acknowledgements
Thanks to Seth Lindstromberg and Daniel Monaghan for their helpful comments on a draft of this article.

From Genesis to Exodus: The Life Story of an Idea

Tessa Woodward, UK

Tessa Woodward is a teacher, teacher trainer, and the Professional Development Co-ordinator at Hilderstone College, Broadstairs, Kent, UK. She also edits The Teacher Trainer journal for Pilgrims, Canterbury, UK. She is a Past President and International Ambassador for IATEFL and was the founder of the Special Interest Group for Teacher Trainers (now the SIG T Ed/TT). She is the author of many books and articles for language teachers and for teacher trainers. Her recent book, Thinking in the EFL Class (2011, Helbling Languages) has now been followed by ‘Something to Say’, co-authored with Seth Lindstromberg (2014, Helbling Languages). Tessa is a member of The C Group. She is the founder of The Fair List. See www.thefairlist.org

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Nothing new under the sun
An idea emerges from the language class
The idea proves useful in teacher training
Finding the language with which to talk about the idea
From language learning activity analysis to methodology
Bank plus cheque book equals solvency
Other people’s thoughts
Exodus
The life of an idea
References

Nothing new under the sun

If, as it says in the bible in Ecclesiastes 1.9, ‘...there is nothing new under the sun...’, and that ‘what has been is what will be’, then how can we, mere language teachers, dream of creativity?

But we do. Perhaps because we recognise a broad definition of creation. Here is one such. Creativity includes the bringing forth or causing of novel, valuable, and unusual alternatives, ideas, possibilities, angles, changes or products by a mixture of alertness, energy, abundance, novel combinations of known features, use of generative frameworks, collaboration with others, rest, and reflection.

Some combination of these methods must surely have aided William Shakespeare to bounce off the bible quote above and into Sonnet 59 where he declares, at the start:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child.

An idea emerges from the language class

So, back to ELT, with a greater spring in my step….. in the beginning there was a language teacher working in Japan. Well, actually, it was me, in the late 1970’s! I learned an idea there for warming up a class. It was in a green course book called ‘Building Strategies’. I tried it out with my pre-intermediate class and it worked pretty well. Then I changed a couple of things about the activity for that particular class and it worked even better. I changed it again in a different way for a higher level class. Bingo! It worked again.

I discovered that there were many components to an activity that could be changed....things like the arrangement of the students and the furniture, the materials used, the steps of the activity, and the content. Over the next couple of years I had fun experimenting with lots of different activities and realised that my initially small repertoire of language learning activities, once altered, had gone a very long way indeed.

The idea proves useful in teacher training

When I started working as a teacher trainer, I found this mutation idea really useful. In workshops for teachers we would all start by experiencing, say, a fun warm-up idea, as if we were language students. Then we would analyse the activity together by considering different components such as the ones mentioned above. For example, how we had organised the students into teams, what language we had used the activity to focus on and practise, and what beliefs about people, language, learning and teaching the activity seemed to hold within it. I found that this helped teachers to understand and to remember the activity better. Then we would change some of the components, say, the steps or the materials or the purpose or the skill used. The consequent plethora of new versions of the idea produced made the participants realise how creative they could be and how plastic an activity could be.

Finding the language with which to talk about the idea

I came across an interesting article written in 1985 by Frank de la Motte, a teacher trainer in Naples, Italy. The article was called ‘Consumerism in teacher training’ and it lamented a frequent complaint from blasé conference participants, that in all the talks and workshops they’d just attended there was ‘nothing new’. Frank discussed this apparently consumerist EFL attitude from many angles including that of a possible defensiveness on the part of the unsatisfied teachers. From his article I got the idea of linking the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra of mainstream anti-consumerists to the world of EFL. In this way I found some new language with which to talk about what I was doing in my own teaching and teacher training.

By the time I published the idea in 1988, I was using a number of metaphors to describe this process of experience, analysis, component changing and consequent creation of new variations on a language learning activity. One phrase was ‘Splitting the Atom’- because teachers were creating an explosion of new ideas. For many people though, the phrase had associations with nuclear warfare so I dropped that term. Then I used the saying, ‘If you give a teacher an idea, you help them for one lesson. If you show them how to make ideas, you help them with a lifetime of lessons.’ Apt but not exactly short or snappy. So, by the time the idea was republished in 1994, for use by teacher trainers, teacher educators and mentors, I was using the analogy of studying the ‘grammar’ or underlying structure of an activity and then using that of the ‘substitution table’, where there are fixed parts that don’t change and other parts that can be changed. An alternative metaphor came from cooking with the idea of experiencing a great tasting cake, getting the basic recipe and then baking a roughly similar cake with the ingredients that you happen to have to hand. I was finding out that there were many useful ways to refer to:

1. Experiencing what you start with, the basic recipe, the template, the framework.
2. The analysis of the components, the ingredients, the laying bare of the underlying structure or framework of the idea.
3. The experimentation, the changing of the details or ingredients and
4. The resultant ‘making new’ or creation or explosion of a wealth of new options.

And, depending on the group I was working with, I would try out different metaphors and analogies.

A more recent analogy is ‘morphing’. I got the idea from an internet programme you can use to gradually change one image or shape into another through a smooth, nay seamless, transition or transformation. Morphing with computer software is proving irresistible fun to people who wish to poke fun at politicians by, for example, gradually morphing an image of the politician’s face into one of Adolf Hitler or Wallace of Wallace and Gromit. The term ‘to morph’ comes not, as I first thought, from ‘morpheme,’ the smallest part of a word that contains meaning (such as the ‘s’ that means plural at the end of a noun) but rather from metamorphosis as in the caterpillar to pupa or chrysalis to butterfly life cycle.

From language learning activity analysis to methodology

So far then I had used the idea of experiencing, analysing and changing an activity in my work as a language teacher, and in practical workshops for teachers. Another use soon came clear to me.

When someone starts a new language they quite often do so by learning a few new words. Maybe the words ‘chambre’ or ‘pain’ if they are learning French. Words are relatively controllable and memorable and start you off usefully and quickly. From just a few words you can also learn things about the new language such as: what strange new noises there are in it, whether it is tonal, if there are articles, if gender is important, how the language is written, how singular and plural are made, if the language uses much inflexion and so on. In the same way, if you are a beginner teacher, when you learn a few language learning activities to start you off with a lesson, you can also learn quite a bit about teaching from them. If you learn to analyse the activities according to, say, 10 or more components, you will have a list of some of the most important elements of any activity, in fact of any methodology. If you look at the list of components below, you can see that they are like fractals. Fractals are the recursive elements in snowflakes, broccoli, seashells and peacock tails. They exhibit a repeating pattern that displays in much the same way at every scale. Similarly, the components below are present in and true of both an individual learning activity and the description of or definition of methodology. They are, fractal like, present at every level.

Name and basic type
Goals, reasons, beliefs behind it
Content or topic
Context
Materials and medium
Organisation of people and furniture
Steps
Preparation time
Setting up time
Activity time
Clear up time
Follow up time
Teacher set up language
Student interaction language
Focus language
Skills used and skill order
Teacher role
Student role
Cognitive processes involved
Level of challenge
Correction policy or attitude to error
How it fits into a sequence of lessons or a syllabus
Other points e.g., output, supporting theory, originator, reading references

You could use the components above to analyse and discuss the features of a language learning activity such as a dictation, or a teacher training process such as a buzz group lecture, a method such as ‘The Silent Way’, ‘Counselling Learning’, Total Physical Response, or ‘Task- Based Learning’, to move towards a definition of the word Method or Methodology itself or, finally, towards an understanding of what one’s own method or methodology seems to be.

Bank plus cheque book equals solvency

By the year 2000, I had realised that what gives a teacher a good start is a bank of ten or so traditional activities, plus the skill of morphing. Encouraging thoughts about other methods and the teacher’s own method also gives a path for future development.

Other people’s thoughts

Over the years I have worked in some collaborative school settings where fellow trainers have experienced my ‘Atom’ idea and commented on it, thus adding to my own thinking.

“If you’re going around showing teachers how to make up their own language learning activities like this,’ said one. ‘I don’t know why I continue to write teachers’ recipe books! After all, teachers can just do it themselves from now on with your Atom idea.”

“Don’t worry!’ I said. ‘Teachers are far too busy to do it. You can keep on creating new activities for them!”

Another, rather erudite, colleague said, “I see that you have passed through the modernist phase of clarity, purity and simplicity and the post-modern return to wit, ornament and reference.”

“What?” I said.

“And now you have positioned yourself within the late 80’s vogue of deconstruction.”

“I have?”

“Yes. Taking apart, disassembling, fragmentation? Leading to unpredictability and controlled chaos?”

”Gosh!” I said. “I thought I was leading to the creation of new activities which then need a good reason to be employed.”

“Same difference.”

Exodus

These days, often thanks to discussion with colleagues, I see that there are still more components to consider, such as, which intelligence an activity or methodology tends to employ, or which of the six senses is dominant within it.

I notice people are still writing recipe books and magazine articles for busy teachers and people are still reading them.

I notice that HLT Mag has a column called ‘Old Exercise, New Twist’.

I have now so totally internalised the ‘Atom’ idea that I tend to take it for granted. Recently however, when working with a group of young teachers on a Creative Teaching course, we swiftly discussed an activity that they liked, in the light of some 18 components. They were, first of all, intensely interested in all the different things we could tease out of a simple activity, in particular about the beliefs about people, learning and teaching that the activity betrayed. They then set to with a will, in groups, to vary the different components discussed, thus creating variations for different student groups and different purposes. They came up with scores of ideas, wrote up their favourites and photocopied them for the rest of the class. Abracadabra! and Hey Presto! They had created their own recipe book.

The life of an idea

In UK culture, there is perhaps a view that creativity involves one individual creating something utterly new in all respects, while working all alone and receiving a lightning bolt of intuition and inspiration. My own view is that the creative process works in a different way. You work hard. An idea comes to you. You improve it. You find the language with which to talk about it. You show it to other people. They comment and you learn more about the idea. You publish it. You change it. You give it to others. It goes walkabout. You feel pleased.

Meanwhile another idea is beginning to form.

References

De la Motte, F. 1985 ‘Consumerism in teacher training’ in The Report of the British Council Bologna Conference Oxford MEP

Machalko, M. 1998 Cracking Creativity Ten Speed Press

Stevick, E. 1986 Images and Options in the Language Classroom Cambridge CUP

Woodward, T 1988 ‘Splitting the Atom’ in English Teaching Forum 26 (4)

Woodward, T 1994 ‘Splitting the Atom’ in The Teacher Trainer Vol 8 No 2 pp 6-7

Woodward, T 1997 ‘Working with Teachers Interested in Different Methods’ in The Teacher Trainer Vol 11 No 3 pp 7-8

Woodward, T 2001 Planning Lesson and Courses chapter 6 pp 162-169 Cambridge CUP

Woodward, T 2004 Ways of Working with Teachers pp 14-17 Elmstone TW pubs

Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching with Minimum Materials course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.