TTR: Teaching under difficult circumstances

The subject of today's Teachers Talk Radio Show (the 90th show I've done), was 'Teaching under difficult circumstances'. 

Large classes, demotivated students, a lack of resources, a shortage of teachers, social problems. On today's show, I talked about these and other difficult circumstances that teachers and educational systems face, and looked at some solutions that have been implemented or which teachers could adopt.

You can listen to the show here.

Show notes

Welcome to the Sunday Lunchtime Show everyone. As I mentioned earlier, on today’s show, I will be talking about teaching and learning in difficult circumstances. I will be mainly referring to the teaching of English as another language, but much of what I’ll be talking about will be appropriate to other subjects too. Of course, there are exceptionally difficult circumstances that unfortunately some teachers and learners find themselves in. This may be due to natural disasters or because they live in a conflict zone. Rather than this type of difficult circumstance, I’ll be talking about more usual difficult circumstances that teachers and learners may find are part of the usual, or expected educational context. Depending on which part of the world you teach in, this might include large class sizes, demotivated students, a lack of resources, and social problems. 

And when it comes to teaching English, multiple language levels in the same class is a challenge. Then, of course, there are circumstances when no teachers are available - how do you provide access in that situation? 

Many of the world’s population, including children, live in difficult circumstances and it is severely affecting education. According to a recent report by UNESCO, 250 million children and young people worldwide are not in school.  Young women and girls are particularly excluded from learning. All young people deserve opportunities for quality education, and their exclusion is a major barrier to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically 4, 5 and 10. 

• SDG4 - ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all 
• SDG5 - achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls 
• SG10 - Reduce inequalities within and among countries

I will start today by looking at this macro situation, then - how policymakers in some countries and regions try to deal with problems such as shortages of teachers, but I will also be talking about the difficult circumstances some teachers and learners face within their own schools and classrooms. 

When I use the term difficult circumstances here, I may be broadly referring to one of two things. On the one hand I’ll use it to describe the situation large numbers of people find themselves in, because of the large-scale education system context, for example. 

However, I’ll also be using the term to describe the situation many individual teachers and learners find themselves in - less drastic of course, than total exclusion, but nonetheless there are many teachers who find themselves having to deal with less than idea situations when in the classroom. 

So, let’s start by looking at large-scale difficult circumstances, - the problems countries or regions face or the macro pov if you like. I want to begin with looking at large class sizes. When is a class a large class? 30 students? 60? 100? What about a football stadium full of students? 

When people don't have access to enough teachers, or provision in the formal education system is lacking, innovative solutions can emerge. 

One example is a way of providing cheap instruction of English and is often referred to as Crazy English. This method of teaching English was devised in mainland China by someone called Li Yang. Crazy English is the brand name that is used for this method of teaching the language. Believing the traditional way of teaching English ineffective, crazy English has a focus on practising English orally, and is encapsulated in the slogan ‘By shouting out loud you learn’. 

It has because of this gained disapproval in some quarters as it is anything but modest or restrained. It is also at its heart a very traditional model that owes a lot to recitation and repetition. I remember talking to a teacher trainer once about this who had lived and worked in mainland China. She said she came across this very popular movement when she was woken up at night with the shouting of English phrases. 

At first she thought she was dreaming, but then she realised that a group of Chinese crazy English students had gathered on a street corner late at night, near where she lived, to do there homework. Their homework consisted of shouting out a series of English phrases at each other. 

The method is not new. It started in the 1990s when there was an explosion in the demand for learning English but not the resources for people to do so. Li Yang was one of those people who found it difficult to speak English. 

Somehow, he stumbled upon the idea of shouting out passages he had to learn for an exam and found it made him more confident. He continued to do this and after he passed the exam, he felt he’d found a way of learning the language that could benefit others too. Yang worked as an electrical engineer, but started in his free time using this method of teaching English as a shouted language. In 1994 he started his own company to promote his technique, which he began calling Crazy English. After gaining in popularity, Li Yang was asked to try out his method to teach to a crowd of around 5,000 people and shortly after, this approach started to become very popular. 

The popularity was cemented when a documentary was made about this way of teaching English in 1999, and I recommend you all to search for Crazy English - there are lots of clips on Youtube for example, that show Li Yang addressing huge crowds. The method snowballed after the documentary was maade, with more than 20m people signing up for a course.

Li Yang gained official recognition, and was asked to teach in very unusual circumstances - not only in football stadiums in front of crowds of thousands of people, but on occasion, to teach soldiers on the Great Wall of China, and at intensive camps to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. The method is still popular, and is a multi million pound business with LLi Yang still director and principal teacher. The methodology basically consists of one teacher on stage with a microphone usually in a sports stadium, for example, screaming popular and random English phrases rapidly. It doesn't have a focus on grammar, vocabulary, or writing, focusing instead on speaking through repetition, with a lot of gesticulation being used.Li Yang or other teachers shout out words and phrases and asks his students to repeat out loud and shout back. It's all about learning through repetition, and the shouting is meant to increase confidence in speaking in another language.

 As I mentioned earlier, after class, students are encouraged to go to public places, on street corners, behind buildings, on rooftops, and shout out the EEnglish phrases and words. This is meant to help the students gain in confidence, presumably lowering the affective filter that many language learners have, and which prevents them from progressing in a language. Is it effective? Who knows, but it seems to be a very popular method and for some people it's their only contact with the language. Given its popularity, it must be working to some extent. Li Yang has taught English now to millions of students. 

He appears in stadiums, sometimes to groups of 10,000 students or more. And to think some of you complain about teaching large classes! 

Do you have experience of Crazy English or any other tips or suggestions for some of the things I  mentioned previously, join me on Podbean in the studio as a guest and we can have a chat. 

Sticking with the macro POV, another problem countries often face is a lack of teachers. Large class sizes and the problems that go with them are not only a problem in China 

In Ethiopia, where the typical primary and secondary school class sizes are from 55-100 Ethiopia, for some time they adopted a method called Plasma teaching in the early 2000s. It was meant to be part of an educational reform for students in grades 9-10. It involved the installation of a plasma TV in the classroom and the students and teachers watch and listen to a lesson transmitted by satellite or recorded previously by a teacher in South Africa. Partly the reason for doing this is because many of the Ethiopian teachers are not sufficiently qualified or they lack teacher training Local teachers are  meant to support the TV lesson by giving an introduction, conducting post-viewing activities, facilitating a discussion, and providing a conclusion or even substituting when the power is out. Plasma teaching in Ethiopia faced several challenges, including: 

• Students with special needs: Plasma lessons are both visual and auditory, which can marginalize students with hearing or sight impairments. 
• Student participation: The fast pace of instruction and lack of time for student participation can make it difficult for students to actively engage in the learning process. 
• Student needs: The plasma lessons may not address the needs of individual learners. 
• Teacher needs: Teachers may not have a positive attitude towards plasma TV. Curriculum: The plasma lessons may cover the national curriculum at the expense of students' understanding. 
• Technical issues: The plasma TV may be too fast to understand, non-rewindable, and non-repeatable. 
• Cost effectiveness: The cost effectiveness of plasma TV may be questionable. As a short to medium term solution for the country it seems to have had mixed results, with it working in some areas and not so well in others. 

In the long term, it was decided that Ethiopia needs more teachers that are better trained. Partly designed to address the lack of access to qualified and trained teachers in Ethiopia, there are other solutions that have been adopted to deal with this shortage of teachers. Again, on a macro level, there have been a number of top-down solutions to learning and teaching when circumstances are difficult. 

One of these is the Hole-in-the-Wall project. A solution to there being a lack of teachers in many villages of India, this consists of a learning station consisting of a computer with an Internet connection embedded in a hole in the wall. Since 1999 and the first computer in Kalkaji, New Delhi, the project has grown to more than 100 computers across India and elsewhere. 

Mitra took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to the wall of his research facility  in the south end of New Delhi. What he discovered was that ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English took to it and within days, they had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. What has been found is that curiosity takes over when there is an enabling environment where they can learn on their own. This type of learning has also shown results when it comes to improvement in English. 

The idea behind this is that groups of children can learn on their own without any direct intervention. Dr Sugata Mitra calls this Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). He found that children using Learning Stations required little or no inputs from teachers and learnt on their own by the process of exploration, discovery and peer coaching 

Another solution dreamt up by Dr. Sugata Mitra is something that was quickly labelled ‘The Grannny Cloud’ and is an example of using the transformative power of the Internet to solve a problem involving a lack of teachers. 

Mitra thought he could use the Internet telephony software Skype to improve literacy and education. On one trip to India, Mitra asked a group of Indian children what they would like to use Skype for. “Surprisingly, they said they wanted British grandmothers to read them fairytales.” Mitra told the Guardian. Mitra then started looking for volunteers and found about 200 story telling Grannies. “Many are retired teachers, who are now regularly on Skype teaching children in the slums,” 

The project, officiallly called “Sole and Somes” is often referred to as “the Granny Cloud” and has evolved from storytelling to the volunteers working as educational mentors. They are available online for about an hour a week for sessions involving conversations, story-telling and singing. 

There is no doubt that both of these ideas are innovative and aimed at providing tech solutions to difficulty problems. 

Do they work? Well, if you are interested in learning more, there is a lot of info and discussion out there on both the hole in the wall solution and the granny cloud - the projects have certainly been criticised and there is some controversy over the effectiveness of the projects. Donald Clark has written an interesting blog post about this, for instance: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2020/04/mitra-hole-in-wall-but-holes-in-research.html 

Moving away from to macro and into the classroom now, I am going to look at some practical suggestions for teachers who find themselves teaching under difficult circumstances, starting with dealing with large classes, though my suggestions won’t be viable if you have huge classes such as the ones I talked about earlier in China. 

So some sugggeestions for you if you have large classes 

• Divide a large class into 2-3 groups. Assign practise or review exercises to the other group(s) while you teach one group 
• Station work. Assign pupils to small groups and give them projects or simple tasks to do together. Change the group once in a while. 
• Train all the pupils how to lead a group. Give everyone the chance to be a group leader •Make use of the strongest students to help be peer tutors to the weakest students. 

Next, if you are a teacher of a language with sts in your class with Multiple levels:

• Station work. Assign pupils to small groups and give them projects or simple tasks to do together that are varied depending on level of pupils. Change the group once in a while. 
• Student tutors. Get the strongest students to ‘teach’ the weakest ones. 
• Have extra material/tasks available for the fast finishers.

Another thing IU mentioned at the beginning of the class: De-motivation: 

• Know your students. What do they like? What don’t they like? Use examples/material relevant to their lives. 
• Be a good example – pupils will be more likely to be motivated if you are. 
• Get feedback from the pupils about what you do in class – vary the activities according to this
• Give more choice/autonomy to the learners – teach them to be more autonomous learners. 

What about another common complaint: Lack of resources? 

• Share in innovative ways (station work, etc.) 
• Make more use of human resources 
• Get the ss to make resources (flashcards, etc) 
• Find opportunities for language learning in the ss everyday lives 
• Make the most of the existing (limited) resources in imaginative/inventive ways 

More generally, if you are teaching in a context where there are lots of social problems, what can you do? Difficult tto generalise here, but: 

• Know your students
• Make your class the safe/fun place to be 
• Show understanding/consideration Other, more general advice? 
• Know your students well 
• Establish good rapport with the students 
• Communicate and give feedback frequently 
• Show concern for both weak and strong students 
• Arouse the students’ interests 
• Create a safe/friendly atmosphere in class 
• Manage students through grouping in different ways 
• Keep class disciplined by establishing standards 
• Promote learner autonomy 
• Smile! 

So, that brings us to the end of today’s Sunday Lunchtime show. Many thanks to all of you who joined us live and to those listening back to the recording.