Practice Makes Perfect: The 11th Myth. A Reflection on Paradigm Shifts in Teacher Training Programs

Carlos Lizárraga

Carlos Lizárraga has been involved in EFL teaching for over 25 years in different schools in Mexico City. He has worked as a teacher and teacher-trainer for more than 15 years at the Angloamericano. He is the Corporate Academic Sub-Director in the same institution. He also studied Theater and Performing Arts. He is President Ex-Officio of Mextesol’s Mexico City Chapter.  http://www.angloamericano.com.mx/.

The Map is Not the Territory

                                             Alfred Korzybski

Knowledge is Perception

                                           Socrates

Are you experienced?

                                        Jimmy Hendrix

We’re lost in this masquerade

                                      Leon Russell, sung by Carol Carpenter

Christ! You know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They’re going to crucify me

                                        John Lennon

Menu

Introduction
Background
The birth of new paradigms
Examples
Conclusions

Introduction

Paradigms and the nature of scientific and personal mental models.  Let’s say you are on holidays and you are driving along the coastline in Acapulco. You enjoy the scenery, the sea- breeze, and your car’s built-in Global Positioning System. Now, a friend of yours has told you about a beautiful spot he visited last time he went to Acapulco and you are looking forward to going there. So far so good. However, it does not matter how hard you try or how well-meant you are you will never be able to find your way into that proverbial beach if what you are consulting is the map of the French Riviera. Sorry, wrong map. That is the nature of paradigms.

Bear with me and I will tell you another story to illustrate the point. This one is about a man driving full speed on a country road. He has been driving for some time when he sees another car from a distance coming the other way. As the other car dangerously races towards him, he sees with horror that as it speeds on, now it is going straight at him. Right before the imminent accident both cars maneuver, swerve, and in the last minute they manage to pass one right by the other. At that very moment the man realizes that the other driver is a woman and just when they are next to each other, the woman yells, “PIG!” Deeply hurt in his feelings, the man answers back. What he says to the woman is unprintable in these pages. After the incident the man drives on and when he comes around a curve on the road, we lose sight of the car and hear a thumping sound. If we move in a little closer, we look at the truth: the man has crashed…….against a pig.

The woman was not being rude, she was warning him.

The man’s personal paradigm: women are bad drivers.

Background

The Cambridge International Dictionary of English defines paradigm as “a model of something or a very clear and typical example of something. Some of these educators are hoping to produce a change in the current cultural paradigms”. In a nutshell, a paradigm is a mental model. The characteristics of a paradigm are the following:

•	give us formulas on how to do something

From Newton to Einstein. The shift in paradigms in physics, for example, also clearly illustrates this shift in models. While Newton’s model was a breakthrough in the field in his time, the whole structure was blown up by the advent of a seemingly simple equation E=MC². Nothing is absolute; everything is relative.

•	are a filter of experience

This simply means that because of our own “mind maps” - pun intended. What is clear for one person might be completely invisible for another one.

Like the man that was stuck in one of the New York subway stations and while waiting for the train to move on, another man and his three children got on. The kids were out of control, yelling, jumping, and going at each other. The man, apparently their father, was simply sitting down with his eyes fixed in one of the windows. Unable to take the noise anymore, the first man approached the father and firmly asked him to please do something about his kids. The father, in a dream-like state, came back to reality and slowly said to the man, “I am sorry if they have caused you any trouble but we’re just coming back from their mom’s funeral.”

•	work when they have to work, not before, not after

This might appear self-explanatory but it has an internal, relentless logic: paradigms emerge when they are needed, not before, not after. However:

•	can become the paradigm

Paul Davies once said, “only the unsure become dogmatic.” This is a perfect example to illustrate the idea. When a paradigm becomes fixed we run the risk of suffering from of a lethal psychosocial disease where we are trapped by our own paradigms. It is known as Paradigmatic Paralysis. This is when we become ill of certainty. 

Tony Wright tells a wonderful story about his fourth grade geography teacher back in England. After many years Tony went for a short visit to his hometown Plymouth, he had been working in Mexico as a teacher trainer-trainer for some time and he paid a visit to his old beloved teacher. Sitting at the back of the room and with increasing horror he observed that the good gentleman slowly took out the same old notebook with yellowish pages and brittle scotch tape he used when he was his student. The comfort zone.

The birth of new paradigms

When a new paradigm is created everything goes back to zero. We have to start all over again and the creators of these new visions of the world are always seen and regarded as foreigners. However they are not seen as foreigners as in from another country but as in something foreign, not familiar or, for want of a better word, alien. They are threatening. New ideas are always threatening and we teachers are among those professional groups with the greatest resistance to “isms”: constructivISM, cognitivISM, cubism, or HomerISMS (not the Greek poet but the yellow guy). Think Columbus, think Einstein, think Vygotsky, think Lennon.

As teacher trainers, one of our jobs is to debunk those deep-rooted myths in our trainees’ background and re-focus their vision with fresh and ever-changing eyes. The outrageous claim that I dare pose here is about re-aligning our trainees’ as well as our own mental libraries. Michael Lewis, in a lucid and thought-provoking paper he delivered in Mexico City a few years ago, talked about the Ten Myths in the Classroom. I would hazard to add one more to the list: The Myth of Practice. In our day-to-day professional performance, I cannot help but notice that our jargon is filled with terminology that, I daresay, we can perfectly well do without.

When a paradigm, or as Paul Davies likes to call them “straw man” (the British term for scarecrow), dies out, it becomes history: gone, demised, or paraphrasing Monty Python’s John Cleese in the infamous dead parrot sketch, they become ex-paradigms. (Of course the irate pet-shop customer in the Python’s sketch refers to the dead parrot as an Ex-Parrot). You get the picture. A clear example is the background knowledge that our trainees in teacher training programs, such as the one I have been involved in for 18 years, bring into the classroom. They tend to contribute with a wealth of well-meant but misguided and commonplace notions about the teaching-learning process that have been instilled and engrained in their brains for years. The challenge lies in re-shaping that vision.

Examples

A few buttons:
“We have to reinforce that habit in children.”
“Children learn by imitation.”
“I want to transmit knowledge to my students.”
“Repeat after me.”

And my all-time favorite:

“Practice makes perfect.”

This is not to say, of course, that trainees should be kept in the dark when it comes to getting acquainted with the impact of paradigms in the ELT field in the last 40 years. On the contrary. I go by the old dictum (and paradigmatic example) that reads: Those who can’t remember their past are doomed to repeat it. Yes, old wine in new bottles. Trainees must know about Audio-Lingualism, they must know about Behaviorism and the nature of controlled practice and exercises, and they are even encouraged to get their feet wet in peer-teaching activities to raise awareness in these areas. So, the distinction here is: knowing about and knowing from.

The concept of practice is usually linked to the practice of grammar and forms. You don’t practice a situation ten times expecting the students to “master” being at the bank or at the mall. You don’t practice vocabulary by filling in the blanks exercises in U2’s “but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” because students might find the same fate as Bono’s when it comes to finding the right word to go with it.

Practicing one form ad infinitum is not evidence that it will be mastered when it comes to negotiating meaning and when such form must be used in a communicative mode. In other words, practicing the present perfect is not guaranteed to produce competent communicators when asked if they have ever been to China. 

I will join Professor John Mc Rae, my personal genius (or Uncle John as he prefers to be called), the Nottingham-based, Scottish author of a delicious book called Between the Lines, and we will set up a Society for the Abolition of Present Perfect. When you ask students in the classroom what present perfect is, you usually get an immediate reaction: a sea of hands soars into the air and the answer is spectacular: an action that began in the past but we don’t know when and may continue in the present.

So?

Another button to illustrate the point. This is about an EFL teacher in the teacher’s lounge after a class and a colleague asked, “So, what did you do today?” Her answer is iconic, myth-busting: “Well, I did present perfect but I’m not sure of what they did.” One aspect is the idealized version of the language in the classroom and something else is going out to the real world and dealing with a much more complex and descriptive form of the language.

I’ll let you in on another short story. My first class in the institute I work for was many years ago, around the end of the 80s or start of the 90s. My training, as many teachers in those years, had been cemented in Audio-Lingual approaches (what Steven Krashen calls the “drill and kill program”). So, I was confident enough. Apparently this group of diamonds in the rough (and very rough these diamonds were, I might add) had already “taken care” of five previous teachers, so tact and caution was in order.

Picture this: A group of 10 defying and challenge-the-teacher-at-any-cost-minded teenagers and young adults. Ring a bell? When the headmaster himself introduced me as “This is your new teacher,” one of them (an image I do not want to forget) slouched in her chair from afar, in a dark corner, uttered the three single little and most terrifying words a teacher can hear. She said, “If he can.” To make a long story short, after your usual warm-up, one of them raised his hand and with an evil grin in his face asked me a question that at that particular moment made me feel like fish in water. Relief filled me since that is what I had been trained for both in teacher training programs and twelve years as an EFL teacher. It was a grammar question. He asked, “What is the passive voice?”

So, what did I do? I did what I knew best. I did what Paul Selligson calls what we used to do when it came to grammar back in the day: we did not teach; we displayed. So that’s what I did: I displayed my knowledge about the passive voice, agent and prepositional phrases included. For some reason passive voice examples always involve either a dead black cat or a broken window. I used the latter. After a forty-five minute explanation, silence fell upon the classroom. Then I happened to overhear one of them saying to another in the most secretive of whispers, “this one does know grammar.” After my second week of survival with these diamonds, the environment in the classroom became more relaxed and now the questions were genuine questions about genuine doubts. I was in paradise. I displayed all throughout those two weeks until one day when this very student (he was one of the best, by the way) once again asked me about the passive voice. Only this time the question was phrased slightly different. He said, “OK, I understand what passive voice is but” and then he fired “When is passive voice used?”

You and I know that every now and then, no matter how well educated we are, how many diplomas and master’s degrees in education are hanging on the wall, there’s nothing like a good old thunderous lightning of illumination that strikes you right in the forehead at the right time, in the right place. My response to his question, after this Zen-Satori or illuminating insight, was, “You’ve just used it. When you asked me, ‘When is passive voice used?’, you used it!”

Some philosophies say that knowledge comes in triads: mind, body and spirit. That day I am sure that this student, let’s call him Jorge because that’s his name exactly, knew fully via those three channels. You could see it in his eyes. That day I also saw something else, and a semi-idea was created in my head. That day, I did not see the result of practice. What I witnessed that afternoon was the result of experience. The spark of realization in his eyes that day was the spark of learning through experiencing the language, not practicing it.

Although its origins can be traced back to the 1920s and even as far back as Socrates, the advent of full-fledged contemporary Cognitive and Constructivist approaches and paradigms was still in the oven in those years, something great was in the making. The Symmetric Approach was the “in-thing”, like the “empty bucket theory” where students are seen as empty vessels which must be filled in with knowledge by the teacher. Problem was that at some point in the process between teacher (Spoon Feeder) and student (Bucket) the information got lost and the buckets, uh, students left the classroom exactly the same way as when they stepped in: empty.

Not until much later would a complementary approach storm the classrooms with full force: The Spiral of Human Knowledge, also known as the Experiential Learning Cycle. The steps in the SHK teaching sequence are discovery, observation, conceptualization, active experimentation, culminating in discovery +1. In a word: discovery enriched. And this is not just another straw man, this is a full-blown contemporary paradigm that has paved the way and given us the possibility to “map” the future and face it with inquisitive mindsets.

Conclusions

That day, Jorge experienced the language and, curiously enough, he stopped asking about the passive voice, he started using it from experience. Meaningful learning, live and direct. Granted, that day the accomplishment was aided by sheer intuition… but intuition is also an important ingredient of the learning process in the classroom. Experiential and meaningful learning as well as task-based approaches are just the methodological embodiment of what teachers have known for many years. Old situations with new eyes.

Andrew Littlejohn put it relentlessly clear in a brilliant talk he gave at an international conference in Mexico at the end of the 90s. The gist: we can’t see our students as consumers of language anymore, we need to start regarding them as co-constructors of knowledge, and meaning, I might add. And that, I pose and promote in my own training programs, will not be accomplished just through the Ex-Parrot Effect of mastering through practice but rather through diving into experience.

The way to do this, in my own experience, is through all these new paradigms and models that must be principled. They will act as the guiding forces to turn an ordinary class into an extra-ordinary educational experience. Experiential and meaningful approaches, I have found, are not just the “in-thing”.

They are simply the Human thing.

The  Skills of Teacher Training course can be viewed here.
The NLP for Teachers course can be viewed here.
The Expert Teacher course can be viewed here.