Teaching Intelligence

Peter Maingay

Peter Maingay Peter has worked in the world of English language teaching for a long time, in a variety of places and in a range of roles. He is currently a freelance teacher, trainer, examiner and inspector. He is also the director of a small language school on the North Norfolk coast: Excellence in English.
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Introduction
How we manage to do things well
Teaching Intelligence
How we might develop teaching intelligence in teachers and trainers
References

In this paper I look at four connected areas: first, how we manage to do things as well as possible; secondly, what gets in the way of our doing things as well as possible; and thirdly, teaching intelligence - what it is; and fourthly, how we might develop teaching intelligence in teachers and trainers.

Everything we do in our lives, from putting on our clothes in the morning to holding conversations to driving to playing tennis to teaching and training, is a mixture of pre-programmed or proceduralised patterns and fine-tuned, contingent responses to the contextual moment. So, for example, when you put your trousers on in the morning, you don't usually have to think about it. Your ability to put your trousers on successfully and without conscious thought depends on patterns or habits acquired early in life and rapidly made automatic: to articulate the particular series of moves you make would be quite difficult as the knowledge involved is largely tacit. But if, as you are putting on your trousers, you lose your balance, you instantly adjust those patters to suit the moment.

The same applies to teaching. Novice teachers are constantly conscious of what they are doing, for much of what they do in class is new. But very quickly, patterns of teaching behaviour develop so that the teacher can devote more conscious attention to the demands of the moment. Teachers rapidly come to depend on relatively automatic routines, thus freeing conscious thought and effort to deal with the contingent, the here and now that requires particular solutions, not automatic responses.

Conversation is an excellent example of this phenomenon. As van Lier (1996) says

"Conversations are locally assembled rather than pre-planned."

Of course, much of our skill as conversationalists depends on proceduralised language, chunks of formulaic language, for example. But the actual flow of the conversation cannot be pre-planned. Its successful conduct depends on each participant paying careful attention to what is being said, who is saying it, how it is being said and so on, and then tailoring his or her contribution to fit the circumstances as well as possible. To pre-plan a conversation and plough ahead paying no attention to the contributions of others would soon leave you on your own with no one to converse with. Equally, a rigidly adhered to lesson plan, with no deviation and adjustment to fit the second by second developments of a lesson, would soon lead to an empty classroom, the teacher presumably still droning on and organising pair work according to his or her plan, regardless of the fact that no students are left to be organised.

What gets in the way of our doing things as well as possible?

First of all, insufficient knowledge. I cannot ski effectively (successfully? well? appropriately?) if I do not have the necessary skills. I cannot converse well in Turkish if I don't speak the language well. And I cannot give an appropriate plenary speech if I am not aware of the audience - its various assumptions of what a plenary at a conference like this should be like, of what the content might be, its background and beliefs. If I lecture in rapid British English about a topic that is of little interest to the audience, I may not be judged particularly appropriate or successful; if I pay no attention to my audience's knowledge of and interest in my topic, I should not be surprised if I lose my audience's attention. So I must have as much knowledge as possible of both the content of my plenary and of my audience's state. Without sufficient knowledge (or at least an attempt to empathise, as far as possible, with my audience's state), I cannot do my job as well as possible.

Secondly, behaviour can be, or can become, over-routinised. And here, I shall turn exclusively to teaching and training and leave trousers, skiing and doing conversation behind. Prabhu (1990) says:

"Mechanical teaching results from an overroutinisation of teaching activity, and teaching is subject to great pressures of routinisation. It is, after all, a recurrent pattern of procedures on regularly recurrent occasions. It is also a form of recurrent social encounter between teachers and learners, with self-images to protect, personalities to cope with etc. And, like all recurrent social encounters, teaching requires a certain degree of routine to make it sustainable or even endurable. "

We need the routine as teachers: if we had to invent every lesson, every part of it afresh every day, we would soon burn out. So the routine is positive. But there is a negative side to it too. Overroutinised teaching is often inappropriate teaching. We impose pre-programmed routines on a situation that does not fit those routines. We give a plenary talk designed for another audience; we use a whole lesson plan designed for a different class; we follow a favourite (and relatively automatic) sequence of procedures for, for example, a listening text that happens not to suit that class, at that moment, in that mood. But we don't pick up that it is not entirely fitting and we go ahead. Fine-tuning or tailoring to the occasion is not taking place.

Such mechanical, formulaic teaching has been described by Edwards and Mercer (1984) as 'brittle'. Brittle teaching breaks; it doesn't bend to fit the circumstances. Effective teaching is flexible. Good lesson plans have to have some 'give' in them. Railway lines are joined by fish-plates: these are pieces of metal that expand and contract in heat or cold so that the lines remain constantly level. They do not buckle or bend inappropriately (and with potentially disastrous results). Lesson plans need fish-plates: teachers need constantly to adjust to the moment by moment contingencies of the lesson. And mechanical teaching militates against that.

Teaching intelligence is the term I use to describe a package of generally uncodified skills and abilities that all teachers possess to some degree, all of which help teachers to teach as well as possible, paying careful attention to the moment and avoiding the trap of mechanical and inappropriate teaching.

We make choices, both before a lesson, when planning it, and during the lesson, when taking part in it. These choices we attempt to make as fitting as possible. And our skill at doing that is a large part of teaching intelligence. This skill is partly conscious, particularly the pre-planning; but quite a large part of it is unconscious, an intuitive reading of the situation and an instant response. Shuy (1991) says responsive teaching is

"closer to conversational dialogue, a two-way communication mode with both parties initiating topics, changing the direction of the lesson and relating it to their own lives."

A large part of teaching intelligence, then, is this fairly instinctive ability to both read and respond to signals coming from the classroom (and that includes signals coming from the teacher herself). van Manen (1991) calls it 'tact':

Tact is "instantly knowing what to do, an improvisational skill and grace in dealing with others. Someone who shows tact seems to have the ability to act quickly, surely, confidently and appropriately in complex and delicate circumstances". His definition (and his whole book) applies to all dealings with children, but I would extend it to all dealings with people of any age and most particularly to our dealings with our students (and, incidentally, their dealings with us). And it is my attempt to break tact into its constituent parts that takes up the rest of this paper.

Tact in the classroom involves

- being personally present. You cannot teach tactfully (and by 'teach' I mean handle any aspect of the learning process, both inside and outside the classroom) unless you are really there - and I don't mean that literally. Being on automatic pilot is no good; only listening with half an ear means you will not respond appropriately; being tired, distracted or stressed means you have to rely on those automatic procedures (and thank goodness for them!) but you will not be teaching as effectively.

- being open and not over-planned. As I have already spelled out, over-planning and rigid adherence to a plan leads to brittle and inappropriate teaching. We must be ready to change direction, pause, dwell longer on one aspect of the lesson than we had intended and spend less time on another aspect, to abandon one thing and introduce another, to allow this group to talk longer, to curtail the full teacher explanation we had planned and so on. Only that way will we teach as well as possible.

- creating and using an appropriate tone. By this, I mean two things, and the first feeds into the second. First, tone of voice matters. We don't pay enough attention to our voices. We use them badly and suffer, which is unfortunate, given that they are, perhaps, our most important tool; and we receive no training, as a rule, in how to use them, unlike actors, who do receive voice training. Good use of voice helps to create the second tone: the tone, or atmosphere, in the classroom. A strained voice, a nervous voice, an aggressive voice, a frightened voice, a tired voice - all these contribute enormously (and unawares) to the classroom atmosphere. Equally, rapport with the class as a whole and with individuals is both created and maintained largely by voice.

- genuine interest. If we liken teaching to conversation, we have all experienced those conversations (often at conferences!) where one speaker is only going through the motions. Lip-service friendliness and interest when often one speaker is both literally and metaphorically looking over your shoulder. And it hurts. In the classroom, we often see or experience the same: a teacher who is pretending interest. Students immediately recognise this. Good teaching, tactful teaching, involves genuine interest in the class as a whole and in individuals. And this interest is then often reciprocated: it often leads to genuine interest, on the students' part, both in the teacher and in the subject.

- humour. I do not mean that the teacher must be good at telling jokes, though it may help. At times, there needs to be a light atmosphere, a willingness to allow fun and laughter. The teacher should be able to allow laughter about himself; and he should be able to poke gentle fun at students. There should, at times, be light-hearted enjoyment of what they are doing. However, I don't think this is a sine qua non. Some effective teachers are always serious and students happily study in a permanently serious atmosphere. But I would suggest that language learning, because it involves so much doing, so much playing and experimenting with the language, benefits from an atmosphere in which humour and fun are tolerated or encouraged.

- being on good form. This obviously is closely linked to being personally present. It is difficult to be personally present without being on good form so I suppose we could say that being on good form underlies being personally present. And this is a lot to ask of teachers: to always be on good form, twenty or twenty-five hours a week, thirty-five weeks of the year for a career that might span thirty-five to forty years? No wonder teachers leave the profession early - or become administrators!

- being well enough prepared. This is the other side of the "being open, not over planned" coin. But it is important to stress that you are prepared. No preparation is as bad as over-preparation. Getting the balance right is part of a teacher's intelligence, and that balance will vary from lesson to lesson, class to class, day to day and year to year.

- being confident but not too confident. This one speaks for itself: if we are 0ver-confident, we don't listen, we don't pick up signals delicately. If we lack confidence, our nervousness paralyses us: we are frozen in the headlights.

- being calm and relaxed - but alert. Again, this is connected to being on good form, to being personally present. Perhaps the ideal state is that of 'flow', where the balance between challenge and excitement, on the one hand, and anxiety brought on by insufficient skills or knowledge, on the other hand, is just right. You need challenge and excitement (rather similar to Vygotsky's zone of proximal development or Krashen's i+1) to keep your fires alight as a teacher; but you don't want to be so stretched that you are terrified. Alternatively, you don't want to be bored and unstretched. Goleman (1995) describes flow as

"a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task in hand that they lose all self-consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations of daily life … Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task… People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety."

- being the right you for that situation. We do act in the classroom. We do not behave in the same way in the classroom as we do outside it. And equally, in the classroom, we are not the same 'us' all the time: we adjust our roles to suit the circumstances. Tact involves choosing (consciously? Unconsciously? Semi-consciously) the appropriate you.

I would add to this list other skills involved in teaching intelligence, particularly those of rhythm and pace, timing and all the skills usually lumped together under classroom management. Other writers cover roughly the same area but use different names. Deniz Kurtoglu Eken talked at this conference about 'jizz', her word for that 'with-it-ness' that good teaching displays. And Hargreaves(1998) talks about teaching as an 'emotional practice', involving emotional understanding (and with great potential for emotional misunderstanding). He talks of the emotional labour of teaching and, drawing on Goleman (1995), refers to emotional intelligence, listing its components as empathy, self-awareness, the ability to monitor feelings, the ability to manage emotions and handling relationships tactfully.

My attempt to codify teaching intelligence, then, is tentative and hesitant. It is an area that has remained uncodified, and is largely untouched in training and development courses, probably precisely because it is so closely related to 'personality'. But I do not think that is reason to ignore it, particularly in training and development.

The training and development implications are, in my mind, clear but sketchy and I would invite interested parties to share ideas as to how the areas I have outlined above could be incorporated in training and development courses. Too often, on pre-service training course, a prospective teacher is written off by trainers with words like "Well, it's his personality, I'm afraid…" or "She lacks presence, doesn't she?" or "His voice - he just hasn't got it". Notice that all these comments are made by one trainer to another. Generally, trainers decide that these areas are too delicate (and unreachable) to be brought out in the open and spoken to the trainee herself.. Which seems a pity. Are we to consign these would-be teachers to the rejection heap simply because of apparent failings in these rather personal areas? Some would say 'yes': "we can't change her voice" or "we're not in the business of changing personality" or "short of electric shock treatment…". But this seems unnecessarily defeatist to me.

I think that awareness-raising is the first step to take. Examining different examples of teaching to identify what it is that contributes towards more or less tactful teaching (and any interactive behaviour, not just teaching), talking about it, discussing the various aspects I have listed, must be the starting point. Teachers in training, and experienced teachers interested in developing their teaching, need to examine what it is that makes for tactful and effective communications of all sorts, not only teaching.

Courses then need to include work on voice, movement, gesture, story-telling and quick, appropriate response. Traditionally, pre-service courses may have included one-off sessions on voice or drama or NLP or role play or storytelling. But I have two objections to these sessions. First they were (or are) usually one-off sessions and are usually perceived as add-ons, not really as integral parts of a course (unless the course specifically focussed on NLP or drama); and secondly, in the case of drama or storytelling or role play, they are treated as how to "do" these things with students, not as ways to develop teachers' teaching skills.

I mention storytelling, drama and role-play because I feel that, by developing both dramatic and storytelling skills, you are developing the very skills teachers need to become more tactful and intelligent teachers. Drama school has a lot to lend our profession here: it may be that pre-service courses need to make use of the skills of people from outside the TEFL profession

I stress the inadequacy of the one-off session because I think these are areas that need to run through a course, and permeate every corner of it, in the same way that, for example, language awareness or teaching techniques run through a course at present. Trainees need to see from the word go that these skills are as central to (and as 'catcheable' as) the skills we traditionally foreground on an initial training course.

So, to sum up, it is clear to me that the areas I have tried to tease out of the overarching idea of tact or teaching intelligence need to be foregrounded more, both in pre-service training and in-service development. But my ideas remain sketchy as to how we should do this. In my workshop at the Bilkent conference following the plenary, the participants began to play with a few ideas but this was only a first scratching of the surface. I hope that in the coming months I will develop these ideas further and that I will hear from people who are already practising what I am preaching or who have new ideas.

Edwards, D. and Mercer, N. 1984. Common Knowledge London: Methuen
Goleman, D. 1995. Emotional Intelligence Bantam Books
Hargreaves, A. 1998. The Emotional Practice of Teaching in Teaching and Teacher Education Vol. 14 No 8
Prabhu, N.S. 1990. There is no Best Method. Why? In TESOL Quarterly 24/2 pp. 161-176
Shuy R. 1991 in Eisner, E. The Enlightened Eye. N. York: Macmillan
Van Lier, L. 1996 Interaction in the Language Curriculum. Longman
Van Manen, M. 1991 The Tact of Teaching: the Meaning of Pedagogical Thoughtfulness. The State University of New York Press

Editorial: This article is the summary of a plenary Peter Maingay gave at the 5^th International BUSEL Conference.

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