Don’t Do Anything For Students That They Can Do For Themselves

Alex Case, Japan

Alex Case has worked as a teacher and occasional teacher trainer and writer/ editor in Turkey, the UK, Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy, Korea and Japan. Links to his over 400 articles, 1500 worksheets, and 1500 blog posts related to all things TEFL can be found on his blog at http://tefltastic.wordpress.com/publications/
E-mail: alexcase@hotmail.com

My motto “Don’t do anything for students that they can do for themselves” is based on the parenting one “Don’t do anything for children that they can do for themselves”. As with childcare, in the classroom this should lead to more self-reliant students as well as making them learn by doing. Students doing things for themselves is already present in common activities like elicitation and brainstorming, but can be taken further in those and other activities. However, students can need some support to do what the teacher would usually do, and there are times when there are very good arguments for the teacher to be the most active one in the classroom, as in a more traditional class.

Things students can do for themselves:

• Brainstorming in pairs or small groups (rather than as a class),
• Working out grammar rules (a “guided discovery approach”),
• Picking language from the lesson that is most worth revising,
• Choosing which exercises in the workbook are most important and useful for them,
• Choosing the topic of a lesson or segment of a lesson,
• Deciding when they are ready to move onto the next thing and when they still need more time on something, e.g. when they want to do a second draft of a writing task and when they are ready for something new (related or totally unrelated),
• Checking their own answers with the answer key,
• Making tasks for each other, e.g. comprehension questions about the text, progress test-style questions before the real test, or exam-style tasks in exam classes (FCE, IELTS etc),
• Chatting, e.g. asking each other how their weekend was,
• Taking the examiner’s role in exam speaking practice,
• Taking the teacher role in whole class games, e.g. describing things on flashcards for students to guess or calling out words with the two sounds on the cards that students should hold up,
• Analysing exam tasks (also a kind of guided discovery approach),
• Giving each other advice, e.g. giving exam tips or self-study tips,
• Checking their own writing,
• Asking each other needs analysis questions and making notes to hand onto the teacher,
• Using dictionaries or the internet to find out about language, e.g. check common collocations.

As well as the general theoretical merits of the “Don’t do anything for students…” approach, there are also benefits which specific activities above have, for example:

• Brainstorming in small groups should be better training for doing it on their own when writing essays etc.,
• Working out grammar rules for themselves should hopefully develop a subconscious ability to do so from language they come across outside class,
• Talking about which language to learn should help them start to learn it and help them think about prioritising,
• Choosing workbook exercises and checking their own answers should help train them to use self-study books unconnected to the class,
• Making exam tasks for each other and taking on the examiner’s role will give them insights into the exam,
• Making progress test questions will help revise the language,
• Chatting freely will help them learn to lead conversations with more reluctant conversational partner (e.g. lower level fellow non-native English speakers, a common situation nowadays),
• Giving each other advice should make them think about their own problems and priorities and remind them to take their own advice,
• Checking their own writing should give them editing skills and help them remember the corrected language better.

With all those advantages, you might wonder why all teachers don’t make sure students do everything for themselves that they can. One factor is the teacher and/ or students expecting a more traditional teacher role, sometimes stereotyped as “chalk and talk”. This can be reinforced by students experiencing bad examples of this idea being put into practice, as almost all the things above take longer when done by students and so it must really be worthwhile if you are going to choose to get students to do it. The evil appeal to teachers of things which simply use up classroom time is something you should always remain aware of, and particularly in the case of things which seem to put less burden on the teacher! In fact, if done properly most of the things above demand more work from the teacher, though often outside the classroom in setting up the help students will need to do those things properly rather than actually in class. This brings us back to the origins of this idea in childrearing, because it’s always easier to just get a child dressed but almost always better to get them to do it for themselves. For example, students will need to be given at least a list of phrases such as “Any other ideas?” and “These two things seem to be connected” to help them control group brainstorming. Guided discovery of grammar rules takes loads of setting up, with it needing to be split into lots of simple interlinked stages that they can work through with minimal help from the teacher.

Other help they might need includes:

• Criteria for picking useful language to learn, plus maybe dictionary training,
• A list of things that they can choose from,
• Training in the first couple of classes on how to use the answer key and prepare questions to ask the teacher, e.g. only giving the answer key at the beginning of the next class rather than with the first couple of pieces of homework and giving them suggested questions like “Why is this wrong?” and “Is this also okay?”,
• A list of criteria needed to make an exam question that they write for each other realistic, e.g. things that the examiner does to make the questions trickier and factors that can help candidates,
• Suggested conversation starter questions (later taken away or just given as key words),
• An oral examiner’s script and instructions,
• Phrases that they can use when they have the teacher role, e.g. phrases to describe the thing for the other students to guess,
• Questions about the exam task that they are analysing,
• Phrases for giving advice and/ or problems that they can ask each other about,
• A marking code (but a very simple one with minimal information on the kind of error which is underlined to make sure that students are still doing everything for themselves that they can).

The teacher will also need to do the task themselves before the class, e.g. to brainstorm useful language that they can add to whatever the students come up with.

Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.