Solutions, Strategies and Suggestions for Successful Teaching Review of a new book "Dealing with Difficulties" by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Prodromou

Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr is a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer who lives in Brussels. In the 1990s, he was director of studies at International House in London and before that he worked in Morocco, Spain, France and Poland.

The difficulty in dealing with large classes of ill-disciplined, mixed-ability, under-motivated students in the less than ideal classroom surroundings of an institution where English is but one small (and not necessarily very important) part of the curriculum is one that is faced by hundreds of thousands of teachers around the world every working day. It is acutely felt on those days when the teacher is feeling tired, overworked, run down and under stress - days which are particularly frequent in the teaching profession, if the statistics are to be believed. Surprisingly, it is not a topic that is widely covered in the literature of English language teacher education, although general pedagogical theory has never fought shy of addressing these issues. The world of ELT magazines and conferences is decidedly coy about words like 'discipline' and shows a marked reluctance to consider English as another school subject. Look up 'discipline' in the index of a reference work such as 'Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching' (H. H. Stern, 1983) or a high-quality ELT 'manual' such as 'Learning Teaching' (Jim Scrivener, 2nd edition 2005), and you won't find it. Three cheers then for the publication of 'Dealing with Difficulties'!

The book is divided into 5 main chapters, which provide a wide range of practical activities related to (1) large classes, (2) discipline, (3) mixed ability classes, (4) the management of homework, and (5) the teaching of exam classes. The boundaries between these categories are inevitably slightly fuzzy. Average class sizes in North American and European secondary schools are between 24 and 30. In other parts of the world, they can be significantly higher. In other words, large classes are the norm for most teachers. Discipline is a central concern of all secondary school teachers, and the authors convincingly argue that all classes (except one-to-one!) are effectively mixed ability. One could also argue that all English classes (or at any rate, the overwhelming majority of them) are 'exam classes' since the student who doesn't, at some point during the year, have to take a test where marks will be recorded and set against marks in other subjects is rare and fortunate indeed!

These difficulties are so central to most teachers' experience that the extent to which they negotiate them effectively will determine, to a significant degree, how successful their teaching is. The book's subtitle, 'Solutions, strategies and suggestions for successful teaching' makes the point very clearly. A difficulty is only a difficulty when it manifests itself, but the strategies to deal with difficulties fall into two distinct categories: strategies that we adopt to tackle a problem that has already manifested itself, and pre-emptive strategies that we employ to decrease the probability of a problem arising in the first place. 'Dealing with Difficulties' offers a menu of both kinds of strategy, but does not always differentiate between them. At times, this would have been useful.

Some of the recommendations (e.g. learn your students' names) are so basic that they seem to be hardly worth stating, but the authors never patronise, even when they are in the land of the bleeding obvious. Far more numerous are the standard techniques - the sort that one should have come across while qualifying as a teacher, but may somehow have been missed or forgotten along the way. And there are fresher, newer ideas, or interesting variations of old ones. In short, an excellent mix of old and new, tried and tested, mainstream and 'marginal'.

Clandfield and Prodromou do not attempt to analyse the political and social factors which, ultimately, lead to teachers experiencing difficulties in their work. Instead, the 150 or so practical suggestions will help teachers, both old hands and the more recently qualified, to manage their classes more effectively. Some difficulties - persistent absenteeism, latecomers, extreme differences in level, violence, drugs, school facilities and student materials, for example - may have their causes and their solutions outside the English language classroom, but they have to be dealt with within it, too. If, by any chance, you're one of those English language teachers who occasionally buys a methodology or 'recipe' book (admittedly, our numbers are few), this is as useful a book as any that has been published in the last year or so. It'll come in more than handy if you're a trainer, too.

I would love, but will never dare, to give this book to four or five of my 15-year-old daughter's school-teachers and require them to experiment with it for a term. I wish that many of my own school-teachers had read a book of this kind. And I wish I'd had it when I was a recently qualified teacher working in a lycée on the outskirts of Casablanca.

"Dealing with Difficulties" Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Prodromou, Delta Publishing 2007.

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