To Prepare – or not to Prepare

Karl Frank, Germany

Karl Frank has been working for 35 years in Germany as a secondary school teacher, inspector and teacher trainer. He holds an M.A. in General Linguistics from Manchester University. He is at present working at a private secondary school in Hanover teaching advanced students. His special interests are learning psychology and developing methods for teaching literature. E-mail: c-h.frank@web.de

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Introduction
Information required by the inspector
Application to the teacher
Means to an end or end in itself
Is there teaching or only learning?
Basic assumptions and decisions
Language learning: four components
Methapors
On communication
Confessions
References

Introduction

Considering we want to address teachers and even appeal to them concerning lesson preparation there are a variety of types that will all react differently. There are certainly two extremes: the teacher who lives on what we can call “door-handle didactics” and whose professional ethos is deposited in the bank (let’s hope it is rotting there now) and the teacher who “eats his heart out” for the welfare of his students (which reminds me of the Oscar Wilde fairy tale “The Nightingale and the Rose”). Among the good and efficient teachers we can distinguish between two types. On the one hand the one who is only concerned about his reputation, wants to be the best and therefore competes with his colleagues for pole position in the staffroom. The motives of this teacher are certainly questionable. On the other hand there is the “real” teacher who sees students as people and honestly and continuously tries to develop his “teaching persona” (Jody Keisner), a process which involves drawing the right conclusions from his post-paring, which helps him to pre-pare. This is the type of teacher most likely to take calculable risks and who invests the right amount of time and energy in his preparation.

The idea underlying this article is to sketch out the conditions and parameters that, in my very personal view, have a bearing on the learning processes and facilitate effective language teaching. Then conclusions can be drawn as to the necessity of preparation.

Information required by the inspector

In my work for the authorities I had to inspect qualified teachers who were applying for a post of responsibility or whose work was, for one reason or another, not satisfactory. The “candidates” had to prepare extensively for the inspection lesson following the guidelines below. Their lesson plan was not to exceed three pages.

Guidelines to the lesson plan:

• Describe and analyse the situation of the group as a whole, also with reference to sub-groups and individuals. In order to get a clearer picture of what they were doing I also expected them to draw conclusions as to measures taken in general and for the inspection lesson in particular. (This I considered equally important for a good and a weak class.)
• Show how the lesson is connected with content and procedures before and outline what is to follow this lesson. It was to be made clear how the lesson was embedded.
• Whereas trainees are expected to produce a wide-ranging analysis of the field, the candidates, who are qualified teachers, have to reduce this to what is called didactic analysis. So to determine what is to be taught in one lesson of 45 mins. they practically have to filter out the learning value of the matter. This usually covers two areas, content and language, but sometimes may include social and emotional/affective aspects. The teacher’s decision concerning the subject matter shows how sensitive he/she is to the issue, because a balance has to found between the government guidelines, i.e. what has to be learned, and the reality in the classroom, i.e. what is learnable in that limited time.
• The next point covers methodological decisions. Often candidates present their sequence of steps or stages as God-given or teacher-given, but I always insisted that they give good reasons for each decision based on their reflection of the teaching situation. A useful and recommendable procedure is to work with alternatives that make the teacher’s thinking and reasoning transparent. The point to note is whether the teacher just projects himself/herself upon the class with his/her own preferences or whether he/she can see things from the students’ point of view. The sequence of stages/phases also gives some indication of how smoothly the lesson will run and if pacing has been considered. One can also see how meaningful homework is integrated.
• The teaching aims must be clearly set out, which is normally a summary of the didactic analysis.
• A draft plan of the lesson concludes the whole preparation. It is optional if the candidate includes the time allowed for each stage.
• Overall it proves a valuable idea to base all the planning on minimum and maximum achievements or results.

Application to the teacher

The inspector’s demands may appear forbidding at first sight, but he just wants and has to know whether the candidate is fully aware of what he/she is doing. It goes without saying that this awareness is also necessary in the daily teaching job without the prospect and fear of being inspected and criticised. However much and in whichever form a teacher prepares to gain awareness a simple procedure that is also applicable in basic text-work may be helpful. It is asking wh-questions and could go like this:

• Who will I face tomorrow?
• Where do I have to pick them up?
• Where do I want or have to take them?
• What do I want them to learn?
• What do I want them to learn actively or receptively?
• How can they learn what I want them to learn?
• How will I start and end the lesson?
• Why would I decide this way and not that way?
• Which of my decisions is most helpful for the students?
• What role am I to play in the learning process?

With such a list of questions in mind preparation in the sense of tuning in can be effectively done while cooking a meal, working in the garden or doing the ironing! Activities of this kind lend themselves to meditating, which basically is work of the right brain. Shifting the focus to the left brain, which would involve decision-making, sequencing and timing, etc., and would also release the critic in you, completes the mental preparation. Of course before the lesson you want be certain of what you are going to do and during the lesson you want to feel secure, but how much of your thoughts have to be put down on paper depends on the individual teacher. There are certainly some teachers who need practically everything in written form (which is to be recommended to beginners), whereas others attempt to have everything, with the exception of concrete material for the students, in their head. Let there be a warning though: The more you have put down in writing the better you will probably feel prepared, but there will be the tendency that you will stick to your paper only trying to “teach” them everything that you assessed as good and worthy of learning and do not pay enough attention to the group. If they do not want your “goodies”, all your preparation has practically been for nothing.

Means to an end or end in itself

Preparation for a language class depends of course on what you want the students to learn and on how you want them to learn. This again depends on their level. Concerning the WHAT there are the “givens” such as:

• vocabulary
• grammar
• textwork
• the four skills
• literature
• content (e.g. for exams)
• etc.

all of which can divided and sub- and sub-sub-divided depending on what you want or have to focus on. Whichever area the teacher intends to focus on, however, he/she must be absolutely aware of the following: do I teach something as a means to an end (e.g. using writing so that the students will learn grammar or the other way round) or as an end in itself (e.g. practise writing as such to make them good letter writers). These questions cannot be skipped over lightly because the answers determine to a considerable extent how a certain area is taught and how far the students will get in acquiring knowledge and skills in this area. Long-term planning, which also involves how to test, appears recommendable here.

Is there teaching or only learning?

Some people claim that there is no teaching and consequently there is no teacher. It may be different in other fields, but in language learning we cannot pour things into the kids’ brains like through the Nuremberg Funnel. I would agree that there is only learning, and the so-called teacher is a facilitator, who in his/her infinite wisdom and through his/her superior knowledge, based on experience, makes learning possible. But this also presupposes that the students have to grasp the idea of Carl Rogers’ “Freedom to Learn”, which again poses the all-important question: Is this learnable? (We are not allowed any more to ask if this is teachable!) If not we are back to square one, and the conclusion we have to draw is that it is inescapably connected with the students enjoying what happens in class and their willingness or wish or even desire to come back the next lesson. How this can be achieved is an absolute puzzle to me, but it would obviously be a result of the “teaching” process, which again will always be totally dependent on the teacher’s basic concept of what teaching and /or learning means.

Basic assumptions and decisions

Language teaching, most of all in the mother tongue, is based on content, which will (help to) influence or shape or even determine the students’ thinking and feeling. It follows from this that the “teacher” has to make an a priori decision: will I use content with all its implications (e.g. different ways of looking at something) so that the students will learn the language adequately or will I use content with all its potential in meaning to help the students to become HUMAN BEINGS? Whichever way you look at the issue, it raises the question of didactic priorities, unless both aims, language learning and general humanistic education can be integrated harmoniously. A similar situation that also involves basic decisions and priorities occurs in bi-lingual teaching, as it is done in some schools here: is a subject (such as social studies, geography, history, biology) used to teach English? Or is the language used to teach a subject? The question of which side to focus on is discussed in great detail by Jody Keisner (Learner-Enforcer or Rule-Enforcer, in Modern English Teacher, Volume 17, No.4). This article makes it absolutely clear that if we focus on the learner it is always about more than language learning. One note may be added here in conclusion: Some time ago in a survey in Germany it was established that students learned most successfully from teachers who they judged to be professional (i.e. knowing their stuff) and who appeared to them as “human beings”. It was a fifty-fifty thing and nothing else seemed to matter. The conclusion to be drawn is that the choice and the corresponding preparation of the subject matter, however conscientious, are not enough.

Language learning: four components

Language teaching or, rather, language learning can and should generally be seen as a goal-directed and organized social event (Ur, p. 213), in which four components are inseparably involved:

• the teacher
• the students (as a group and/or as individuals)
• the content (i.e. the reality, the “stuff”, that is brought in from outside)
• the language (the knowledge and skills the students are expected to acquire to be able to handle that “stuff”)

The inter-relationship of the different components can be illustrated quite nicely by the so-called Organon Model below (from the 1920s!), a simple model of communication by Karl Bühler, a German language philosopher. I find this puts all the complicated processes involved in language learning in a nutshell, and everything can be derived from this. Replace sender by “teacher” and receiver by “student(s)”. The connection between them is achieved by one-way or two-way communication, depending on the situation (or metaphor, see below). Communication is always about something, the world or reality (a point which some language teachers seem to forget!). Language is the medium which connects all three. For our purposes it’s the medium to be used and built up. The point to remember and note in one’s preparation is that language learning – and probably all learning – is not possible without communication. Even if there is silence in the classroom some kind of communication is taking place.

Methapors

The teacher, even before he/she enters the classroom, must realize that he/she will always play a certain role, and most probably more than one in the course of a lesson. Bühler’s Organon model, which is so convincing in its simplicity, tells us immediately that the other components must be in agreement with whatever role you play in that particular communicative situation. For example you have found a fault in an article you bought and you take it back to the shop to have your money back or to have the article exchanged. In this situation:

• you are a complainer (sender)
• the person you complain to or negotiate with is an employee of the store (receiver)
• the faulty article represents the world or reality
• the language to be used in this situation is a certain type and of a limited range.

As you want to complain you would certainly not dream of bursting out into a song of praise. A change in any of these areas will seriously affect the others or may change the situation completely. A lack of correspondence between these areas will lead to nonsense.

With reference to language learning it is easy to think of different situations in terms of metaphors. This way of thinking helps to grasp the spirit of what is going on in a particular phase or situation or should be going on according to the teacher’s plans. If, for example, the students are supposed to speak freely about themselves the situation can be considered a talk show, which involves these components:

• the talk master: this can be the teacher or a student in a rather fixed role
• the show participants: students that talk freely along the talk master’s guide lines
• reality: the participants can talk about practically anything, mostly about themselves
• language: it will be mainly anecdotal if the talk is about the past, speculative if it is about the future, etc.; it can be a mixture of different uses the common denominator of which is casualness.

This frame of language practice can also be officially labelled talk show to motivate the students, but there are others where the labelling is just a valuable help for the teacher’s awareness of what is going on. Given the following roles of the teacher the reader may himself/herself imagine the corresponding situations together with the other components:

• schoolmaster
• driving instructor
• mountain guide
• coach of a football team (it could be in a village club or in the Premier Division)
• goal keeper
• Father Christmas
• choreographer
• conductor
• negotiator in business
• chairman of a trade union threatening strike action
• captain of a sports team (other than football)
• circus acrobat
• consulting doctor
• advisor/helper
• a member of the family

More can be added, but as stated by Keisner, if we are tempted to be therapists we move onto dangerous ground. As emphasized before there must be a high degree of correspondence between the situation and its four components. This requires discipline by all involved, which leads to a different point to note: Should a whole lesson be conducted in one of these ways? Considering the short attention span that kids have these days definitely not! So dependent on the phasing of the lesson teacher and students will slip into different roles consistent with each other, in which something will always be negotiated. This again raises the question whether it is necessary that the different phases are functionally connected – of course with good transitions – so that, ideally, each phase prepares the next, leading to a harmonious unit with a proper beginning and end. (This may leave the students untouched, but would certainly please the inspector. Still it is no guarantee for effective learning.) Or would it be appropriate to involve the students in a medley of unconnected activities? (This may please the students more, but be dissatisfactory from an aesthetic point of view.) And the last question will be how many changes of scene can a lesson “tolerate”.

Making a habit of thinking metaphorically in planning and preparing lessons may suit some teachers really well. It may direct his/her preparatory thoughts towards communication as the guiding principle and consequently make him/her feel more secure in taking decisions. In the past I personally felt the stage of not really knowing what was right in which situation the most painful, but thinking in metaphors helped me to decide with a rather good conscience when, for example, the role of a schoolmaster or of the captain of a football team or of an oriental story teller was appropriate.

On communication

As we have emphasized the vital role of communication a note has to be added on the use of language in communication itself. Each utterance – and this may also hold for writing – contains four components or, more precisely, messages (Friedemann Schulz von Thun, 1981). So when a speaker opens his mouth he/she speaks, according to the author, through four different “beaks”. On the other side the listener has four different ears that will each tune in precisely to what comes out of the corresponding “beak”. The four are:

1. The propositional side. This is just content and information (which may also include other people’s opinion) based on facts and data. For the listener the criteria of judgement are a) truth b) relevance c) the extent of information, i.e. is it enough? Here the basis can be established for information and opinion gaps.
2. The sender’s attitude concerning the proposition. By signalling for example it’s rubbish; it’s great; etc. the speaker opens up and may give something personal away. Implicitly or explicitly he/she makes clear his/her distance from or involvement in the matter and mood. He/she gives – usually involuntarily – information about himself/herself.
3. The sender’s attitude towards receiver. Here the additional message poor little thing, don’t you understand? may be sent out, mainly through paralinguistic features. The listener’s ear will be tuned in to the questions what does he/she think of me? How do I feel treated?
4. What the sender wants to happen/be done. The major language functions that are at work here are wishes, appeals, advice and directions. The listener will ask What does he/she want me to do/think/feel?

In order to get everything right in class the teacher has to be very aware of these “things”, whether he/she is conducting – metaphor again – a talk show, a competition, a cookery lesson or a car boot sale, or even a grammar lesson. Of equal importance is that the learners themselves have to be enabled to acquire and use these components, so that they can also respond adequately. In the typical question-answer game between teacher and students or in mechanical grammar practice the students will only concentrate on the propositional aspect – to give the correct answers to please the teacher and to get a good mark. Correct responses in this situation will certainly contribute to learning, but mastery of real communication and the acquisition of the necessary means are so difficult to achieve, because this is not only a matter of rhetorical devices. On the other hand it makes perfect sense to reduce the number of parameters and concentrate on only one or two aspects as it is done in TPR, but in long-term planning, in order to work towards the students’ communicative competence, ways have to be thought of that consider the integration of all four components. In this respect thinking in terms of metaphors may be helpful again for planning, making decisions and economic (and economical) preparation: which situation yields what? In the assessment of the situation as to the number of messages in the above sense the age of the students and the atmosphere in the group play a decisive part. They both would determine and in this way limit the range of their thinking and feeling.

Confessions

This is not exactly St. Augustine, but I would like to list a few ways of preparing which were and still are part of my repertoire.

In very general terms preparation must be split into WHAT is to be learned and HOW it is to be learned. The WHAT, the subject matter, is usually given, but also the first priority, because without it the HOW cannot exist. If a teacher deals with literature in class he/she has to be familiar with the whole book in general and with the passage that is coming up in particular. The necessary familiarity with the subject matter, whether it is a text or not, requires, without exception, a certain amount of time and energy in preparation. Any thinking about the methodological aspect of HOW should solely concentrate on the question of learn-ability. What is learnable is only to some extent a question of difficulty and the choice of methodological stages/phases in a lesson largely depends on the teacher’s observations of student behaviour during previous lessons. In other words, familiarity with the WHAT given, the teacher’s preparation focuses 100% on the reasons provided by the students. A teacher who cannot lift his/her eyes from his/her paper and watch out for the students’ reactions and gear his/her thoughts and preparation accordingly is doomed!

Considering these postulates the concluding remarks below, which are based on intra-personal inspection, must be, at least partly, seen as confessions!

• Dependent on the situation I may have considered preparation a waste of time and did not bother. I relied on my experience and my knowledge of the material, the WHAT, to pull something decent (=effective) off in class. This more often than not resulted in a good lesson (but the question remains what is a good lesson?)
• A crime I committed occasionally was that I had not even read the text which was homework, but I could familiarise myself with it getting the students to read it out loud!!! How to deal with that text was then routine work. (Some people will certainly object that texts should not be read out loud, but if it has a good function I would not agree with that objection.)
• If necessary, i.e. if I found the WHAT given or prescribed insufficient (which mainly concerned texts), I sometimes spent considerable time to find and provide supplementary material, which I could then deal with in a variety of ways. (My Pilgrims background, i.e. what I saw and learned there in methodology was and still is tremendously helpful.) And when I used a textbook in the past I often found that some of the suggested or even obligatory exercises and activities did not work well. I usually took the time and trouble then to adapt them or to find something better – trying to see it through the students’ eyes.
• I tend to let things ferment and decide late on the actual steps and phases in a lesson or unit. At the moment, because I teach only one group at this private school, this fermentation takes longer and is more intensive. With a full programme, teaching up to or over 20 lessons a week, with marking etc. it’s not possible. (The problem here in Germany is that the workload for teachers has become excessive with things that have little to do with the classroom, and people just moan.)
• I’ve mostly tried to teach without notes, i.e. to have everything in my head in order to train my brain! This of course requires good knowledge of the “stuff” plus preparatory thinking about methodology. (This approach is recommendable for people who are chronologically advanced!)
• At the moment I’m doing literature to prepare the students for the Abitur. This means added responsibility and I concentrate on knowing the book required for the exam (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451) really well. Reading I sometimes suddenly realise that my methodological knowledge and skill are not enough. How do I make them understand and appreciate this or that passage and the whole book beyond the content on the surface, if they have – and some of them do – language problems? The book is valuable and it can mean learning for life, because it captures the spirit of our time. The educational challenge is immense and this guides my fermentation in order to achieve process rather than product orientation. Gimmicks and methodological tricks to help the students to understand the text are one thing, but to achieve their appreciation of a text is another. One outcome of this is that I make more notes than I used to, but there is the danger, which every teacher is faced with, that he/she projects himself/herself far too much on to the students. This danger tends to increase the more precise and meticulous the preparation is – which then may become counter-productive with respect to pedagogical efforts.

I would like to conclude by making the following statement: The time I spent on preparation compared with the time I actually spent in the classroom is difficult to say. It certainly varied depending on the conditions I met in various classes. Looking back over my teaching “life”, however, I must admit that I did not spend enough time on reflecting on and assessing my own and the students’ performance. This is regrettable!

References

Karl Bühler, 1965, Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsform der Sprache, Verlag UTB, Stuttgart

Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn (various editions)

Penny Ur, 1996, A Course in Language Teaching, Cambridge University Press

Jody Keisner, Learner-Enforcer or Rule-Enforcer, in Modern English Teacher, Volume 17 No. 4, pp. 48-52

Friedemann Schulz von Thun, 1981, Miteinander reden, 1-3, Rowohlt Taschenbuch

Please check the From Teaching to Training course at Pilgrims website.