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At a recent TESOL France Convention, I heard a colleague talk about a few basic 'laws', which if followed, systematically lead to higher quality learning. She mentioned the importance of awareness, motivation and memory, among other things. All other things being equal, I, too, believe that if we bear in mind a few basic principles, a lesson is likely to result in a memorable, enriching experience, whatever the subject taught, from creative writing to history. This article focuses on four such principles.

The wholeness factor

Modern Western society has traditionally demanded and reinforced left hemispheric skills. As industrialization sharpens our civilization's attention to the importance of behaviors that serve the interests of a production-oriented, business-driven and money-centered style of social organization, sadly a lot of people seem ready to bid farewell to agriculture.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, left thinking modes with their focus on facts, rationality and verbal communication have become well entrenched in our educational system, often to the detriment of more spontaneous, freer, right thinking.

Maria Montessori once said that education is not about imparting knowledge but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities. It seems to me that if we are ever to achieve that, we need to shift our focus, get rid of rigid and fairly useless dichotomies (of the left/right kind) and come to terms with the multifaceted nature of the human learner. Education is about igniting and satisfying the students' mental curiosity and fostering good thinking dispositions. This is no walk in the park: and for us as teachers to succeed, we must first of all recognize that students have unique capacities. Academics such as Howard Gardner, Robert Stenberg, David Perkins and Elliot Eisner have advanced our understanding of the nature of intelligence and how knowledge is constructed. Educators now understand that intelligence is a complex, multi-faceted construct that defies exact measurement. To be able to help the students construct meaning and develop understanding we shouldn't hesitate to stray from content, and then tap the individual's creative power. One way of doing this is using the arts in the classroom. Unfortunately, the arts are seen by our left mode thinking dominated society as pure emotion, devoid of cognitive foundations. Yet, recent neurobiological research indicates that the senses are forms of cognition, or understanding, as powerful as reason can be and that skills from the arts can transfer to other fields.

The arts provide numerous entry points into a domain or subject, allowing the teacher to operate within a multi-sensory framework and reach students on more levels.

The human factor.

The classroom is an agora: it's a place where people interact, a place where individuals meet and engage in a variety of social behaviors. The classroom is also a place where social pressures lurk about. The learner never really thinks about him or herself, but about him or herself in relation to the rest of the class. Vigotsky was probably the first one to point out the social construction of knowledge: it is now clear that learning is profoundly influenced by the nature of the social relationships within which people find themselves.

With this in mind, the teacher's job can't just be to make sure that learning material is encountered in class but also to create a trusting space founded on dialogue, help with the unfamiliar elements, and when necessary, orchestrate change. For a group to flourish the learners' emotional needs ought to be taken into consideration. Neurobiological studies show us that emotions are instrumental to patterning, which in turn facilitates the search for meaning. Emotions give shape to -or color- meaning: metaphors are an example, as Lakov so clearly describes. The brain is at its best when it's challenged in an environment which encourages risk taking. However, the brain downshifts under perceived threat. It follows that an appropriate, caring emotional climate is critical to effective education. Students are sensitive to and extremely influenced by the slightest change in the learning environment. Which is why it is paramount to create avenues of communication and help the students find their own voice. We as teachers all have our own idiosyncratic ways of doing that. Some teachers use that most potent of icebreakers: a caring smile.

Some of us like to play background music, some shake their students' hand before class starts, some tell a story, or something personal, or both. There are teachers who keep a scarf, a bean-bag or some other personal object on display. Some colleagues bring flowers to class, and I know of others who like to share cakes that they baked! There really are no limits and no matter what you do, look around you and make sure the trusting, sharing climate is always right.

The understanding factor

I'll never forget today and the shame I felt. Everything started when the teacher asked me to read a few sentences from the blackboard. In one of them there was the word 'knives' and when reading it I mispronounced the 'k'. I knew I shouldn't have pronounced it but I did inadvertently. At that moment, I saw all my classmates laughing surreptitiously. They thought I hadn't seen but I had and I shall never forget it (from Cherchalli, 1988, quoted in Allwright,1998).

A few decades ago, H.H. Stern argued that a sign of a good language learner is his/her ability to tolerate and cope with incomplete information and the ambiguities resulting from a shaky command of the language. This is certainly easier if the learning takes place in a positive, dialogic, classroom. Since students seem to fear the loss of face and the humiliation following a mistake, teachers can be instrumental in enabling their learners operate the shift from the mistakes equal negative social consequences (vis à vis their peers and the teacher), to mistakes equal experimenting, leading to understanding.

It is certainly very important to keep reminding students that mistakes are a necessary part of the learning process, and that as such, errors are welcome. And it is essential to make sure that learners don't feel uncertain about their place in the group. But most of all, we need to match our words with actions. The first step would be to take the emphasis off mistakes. The second would be to focus on tasks that promote the students' understanding. As a result, we would abandon a pedagogy of answers (corrective feedback) to adopt one based on questions, and one that would engage the students in that spirit of enquiry John Dewey and Paulo Freire were so fond of. Effective education ought to provide learners with plenty of opportunities to formulate their own patterns of understanding. If we can do this, we will have succeeded in freeing the students from a frequently seen pedagogy that involves constant evaluative judgement. There's more to teaching than simply correcting our students' errors. We sometimes worry too much about our students' production, we channel most of our energy into helping the students make language, and in so doing we lose focus on more important issues.

Some people may argue that this is what our students want to do, after all, use the language. Fair enough: however, we should spend as much time working on tasks that promote understanding, because that's what language production hinges upon. Doing the contrary is like wanting to solve a problem without knowing its nature.

The stickiness factor

Lastly, I'd like to mention the stickiness factor, which refers to the fact that what we do and say in class has a lasting impact. There are ways of presenting ourselves and changing the structure of the information for making what we say or do more memorable. A class of hostile teenagers started to like their teacher (and, -most importantly- their English lessons!) when he brought into the classroom three loaves of bread from as many bakeries and asked his students to explain which they liked best and why. He even assigned homework: take home a chunk off each loaf, he asked his students, write your impressions and next week you'll compare them with your peers'. Which they dutifully did. As the teacher in question says 'They may forget bread-related vocabulary, but what matters more and what will probably stick, is the learning experience.' Come to think of it, that's what good teaching is all about: creating meaningful, lasting learning experiences.

Coda.

It is obvious that even if one were to stick religiously to the factors outlined above, a lesson may go wrong. Claiming the contrary would mean that a teacher has total control over the myriad of variables at work in the classroom. Or that teaching may be reduced to a to do checklist. Neither of which is achievable, nor is desirable.

chazpugliese@noos.fr