4. Findings
4.2 Building Variety into Teaching Practices to Accommodate the Diversity
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about giving him up just because he was behind most of the other students in his class.
4.2 Building Variety into Teaching Practices to Accommodate the Diversity of Students
Another key word in Joy’s talk about her teaching in large multilevel English classes was variety, which she believed to be essential to accommodating the diversity of students in such classes. Such cognition in variety, as she explained, was strongly related to her view of herself as one lacking in patience and in favor of variety:
I’m a person having scant patience, so it would kill me if I have to teach with the same materials and activities to so many classes, for so many years. I have to make some sort of change. It’s for my own sake. Yeah at the beginning I did that for my own sake, but then I found that students benefited from that too. (I1, p.55)
However, “making changes” was not simply a matter of externalizing a belief she held. In her early teaching experiences, Joy said sometimes she had to make some compromises between her belief in variety and the teaching contexts where she was situated. One time during the interview she even questioned in a bitter tone: “Why do people only start to accept your practices when you’re gaining some reputation outside the school? I had been doing this [designing and using various teaching materials and activities] for ten years inside the school, but what I received was merely disapproving words and reactions” (POI2, p. 13). She then recounted how she encountered difficulties in externalizing her belief when faced with the more
conservative parents, principles and colleagues who thought her use of various materials and activities was merely tricks with no learning potential. Such reactions
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prodded her to adopt a coping strategy: “I would ask the people in Academic Affairs Office not to assign me to teach in the classes whose homeroom teachers only care about preparing students for the entrance exam to senior high and can’t accept my teaching belief in variety” (POI2, p.30).
Despite the disapproving voice from her teaching contexts, Joy stuck to her belief in variety, and in a later interview she elaborated how she gathered ideas for variety from her experience of serving on the recruiting committee for new teacher audition and as a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High Schools in Taipei, which required her to attend lectures and workshops and observe classes conducted by other teachers:
And then, I became a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei and I received training and attended lectures, and found out more and more people…I really think it was because I often had to attend workshops and lectures, and sometimes also had to observe the classes of other teachers, because sometimes we [members of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High Schools in Taipei] were asked to observe classes and give suggestions to the teachers, or worked as a reviewer for new teacher auditions.
You could see a variety of stuff, I took all of these opportunities as learning resources, and when I found a particular idea to be interesting, I took it back and experimented it with my students. (POI5, p.15)
While she found fuel for her ideas of variety from the experience of attending workshops and lectures and observing other’s teaching, in an overseas educational visit she gained further support for her belief in variety. In the September of 2009, Joy went on an educational visit to Holland, Belgium and France. There she was deeply impressed by the various types of secondary education that were offered to students.
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In an interview, she mentioned the conversations she had with the teachers over there about the education they provided:
I told them that our students are not granted choices of different types of high school education until they graduate from junior high school. They said ‘Oh that’s so inhumane!’ They said every kid has his own talents and asked why we make them receive the same kind of education from primary school to junior high school and sometimes even to senior high school. That’s very inhumane.
Then they asked us ‘Haven’t you heard about Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?
Well if you know such a thing, why do you do that [making students receive the same kind of education]?’ They thought it’s unbelievable. And we asked them
‘How can people in your country accept this educational idea [granting students the choice of different types of education when they are at the age of ten]?
Don’t they think the kids not going to grammar school are being given up?’
They said ‘We don’t take it that way. If a child demonstrates abilities for
attending general secondary education, then he goes for it. But if he doesn’t and wants to receive vocational secondary education, we take good care of him over there.’ And they gave us an example saying they offer courses in cooking, tailoring, art and design, but they don’t have courses in carpentry, and suppose there’s a student who wants to take courses in carpentry, then they have two solutions, either that they offer him such courses, which however is not very possible as it is too costly, or that they have the responsibility to find out for the child whether any schools nearby offer courses in carpentry and if yes they need to contact the school asking whether the school bus can come over to pick the kid up for studying over there. By doing so, they truly take good care of every kid. (N1, p.25)
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Touched by their underlying educational idea of valuing the talents of every child and respecting the choices that every child makes, Joy said:
We don’t have so many types of secondary education here in Taiwan. But there’s still something that needs to do and can be done. That is, we teachers need to make some sort of change. We need to design a variety of activities where students are given the chance to explore, to know what their talents are.
(N1, p.27)
With the educational visiting experience, Joy reaffirmed her belief in variety.
Besides, informed by this experience, her perception of students as multi-dimensional individuals and her view of the aim of junior high school education as assisting these multi-dimensional teenagers in “exploring themselves” (I1, p.64), Joy took variety as a way to serve the diverse students, to assist them in exploring themselves, and for teachers to know more about them.
When put into teaching practices, Joy’s belief in variety is shown in her teaching materials, activities, assessment methods and learning aids. In talking about her teaching in large multilevel English classes, Joy made repetitive references to the various materials she offered for students, including articles she found directly on the Internet and from the booksellers, articles she revised based on the resources online, and short novels, which covered a variety of topics that might or might not be related to the content of the textbooks. But all of these reading materials, Joy emphasized, were employed to cultivate students’ reading abilities. Believing in the necessity to develop students’ skills holistically, Joy also designed and carried out a wide range of activities aiming to develop students’ four skills, including cross-cultural writing activities and 5-level oral exam. To make use of and encourage the synergy among students, Joy also conducted a variety of activities that offered opportunities for
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student cooperation. With a grammar practice task she once carried out with students to reinforce the usage of “spend” and “cost”, she illustrated what she believed as cooperative learning:
I’ve heard a lot about this kind of cooperative learning where students
cooperate within groups but compete among groups. This is not what I mean by cooperative learning. What I believe as cooperative learning promotes student cooperation within groups, and among groups. (I1, p.42)
Pausing for a while, Joy kept on expressing her view on the kind of cooperative learning activities that encouraged competition among groups:
Well I do believe that competition can enhance their [students’] desire for learning, but lower achievers are very likely to be sacrificed under such competition, because everyone wants to score high points, and they wouldn’t give these slower learners opportunities to play, well then it’s still not what we want to achieve with cooperative learning activities. (I1, p.43)
Such an understanding of cooperative learning was not born out of thin air; Joy said she developed such an understanding of cooperative learning from a book written by Sharan and Sharan (1992) on cooperative learning, which she read during her thesis writing and which prodded her to reflect on the nature of cooperative learning and derive her understanding of it.
Viewing cooperative learning in this way, Joy introduced the elements of cooperative learning to many of the activities she designed, which she believed could create three main contexts for learning that provided different sources of scaffolding that were essential in large multilevel classes. Engaging in cooperative learning tasks or activities, Joy thought, offered higher achievers opportunities to assist and
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empathize with their less capable peers. On the other hand, it also provided lower achievers the access to observe and receive guidance from their more competent peers.
Moreover, when students with approximately equal abilities worked together, they co-constructed a cooperative scaffold which however was not available when they worked individually.
In addition, such variety was built into the content and structures of activities for another reason. As Joy explained why she introduced a song to students in a particular class, she said that was done hoping to arouse students’ interest and enhance their learning motivation: “So you really need to find lots of stuff to stimulate them, to make them want to learn, to make them want to know why, to make them want to know what they can do next….So you need to design a variety of activities to stimulate them, so that they would have the desire to learn, to know, to see what’s going on, yeah” (POI6, p.12).
Joy’s belief in variety was not only built into the teaching materials and activities, but also to methods she adopted to assess students. According to Joy, the reasons for her to adopt various assessment methods were two: First, she believed that by adopting a variety of methods to assess students, she could obtain knowledge about students that was more in-depth and holistic. As she put it, “I used various assessment methods, and various learning [materials and activities] to discover and know more about each child. (POI3, P.30)” The second reason was also related to the first one, as she said; using a variety of assessment methods rendered her the opportunities to assist her students in their learning: As she employed different assessment methods to understand her students and their learning, she could build this newly acquired student knowledge to subsequent design of teaching materials and activities so to assist
students in their learning. These assessment methods, she explained, included more than traditional paper-pencil tests, but also observation of student performance in
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learning activities and tasks.
What’s also worth mentioning is that, for Joy, designing teaching materials, activities and assessment methods was not simply a matter of constructing these, but designing the materials, activities and assessment methods in a way that was oriented to assist students in their learning. To achieve this aim, Joy offered students with various learning aids that they could capitalize on according to their needs. The aids that were often reported to be employed by Joy were multi-media, which included videos, pictures and music. In a demonstration teaching that Joy gave to a group of teachers during the 1st phase of classroom observations, Joy was found to use a variety of pictures, video clips and songs to introduce the indigenous people in Australia to students. She explained in the post-observation interview following the demonstration teaching that “These [audiovisual aids] were used to construct a context to facilitate their [students’] learning. Yeah so that’s why I employed lots of multi-media when I was demonstrating the teaching of story book, Black Fella White Fella. (POI2, P.52)”
Such emphasis on variety was also approved of and perceived to be conducive to students’ learning by most of the student interviewees. When describing the teaching of Joy, most of the student interviewees, regardless of their English
proficiency levels, said the various practices employed by Joy were “interesting” and
“vivid” and thus could enhance their interest and motivation for learning English.
However, despite Joy’s emphasis on variety, the use of various materials, activities, assessment methods and learning aids however was seldom observed during the two phases of classroom observations. During the classroom observations, Joy was found to spend most of the class time conducting deductive grammar
teaching in the form of teacher-fronted lectures on the textbook and test papers that were also employed by the other teachers in the same grade level, except for one class
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near the end of the 2nd phase of classroom observation. In that class, Joy carried out an assessment activity where she used the lyrics of a popular song “Count on Me” as the assessment and teaching material to reinforce the grammatical points of noun and adverbial clauses. Below is the observation record:
Not long after the school bell rang, Joy distributed the lyrics of Bruno Mars’
‘Count on Me’ to the students and started playing the song from the CD player.
Before she played the song for the second time, she said to the students that while they’re listening to the song for the second time, they had to underline the noun and adverbial clauses in the lyrics, adding that it was a pop quiz. The students yelled out something as a complaint about having to take the quiz, but gradually re-oriented their focus to the lyrics when Joy started playing the song again. While the students were taking the test, Joy walked around the classroom to check on how the students were doing. Noticing that most students seemed to have difficulties locating the noun and adverbial clauses within the lyrics, Joy went on to the platform re-illustrating the syntactic structures of the two types of clauses and then gave them about twenty more seconds to do a final checkup.
After making sure that the students were ready for an explanation, Joy started to discuss about the noun and adverbial clauses in the lyrics with the students, and ended the activity by telling them that she was joking when saying it was a pop quiz and that the lyrics papers were not going to be graded. Joy played the song again, and then moved on to the next activity. (COR-909110602)
Here in the excerpt of classroom observation record, Joy was found to employ an alternative assessment tool, a piece of lyrics to assess whether students could identify the noun and adverbial clauses within, which were two grammatical points that had been covered in the previous classes. When asked why she decided to use the
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lyrics as the material to assess students and reinforce the two grammatical points, Joy replied that there were many noun and adverbial clauses in the lyrics, which made the lyrics a fairly appropriate material to assess students, and the popularity of the song could also add some fun to the assessment that could hardly be acquired from the traditional assessment tool, drills.
From the excerpt, one could also see how Joy strived to acquire knowledge about students and their learning from the assessment process and then employed such knowledge to inform her subsequent teaching in the class and other classes. As a matter of fact, learning that students in this class had rather weak comprehension about the syntactic structures of the two kinds of clauses, Joy, in conducting the same assessment activity later in the other two classes, adjusted the assessment process by reviewing the syntactic structures before having the students locate the clauses within the lyrics. To this adjustment, she affirmed that it was done based on her knowledge about students that she acquired in the earlier class and said to the researcher “See?
You can see how a review could make a difference! (Email, March, 31st, 2013)”
Except for the above mentioned assessment activity, Joy, however, was noted to employ very few assessment tools other than test papers, activities other than
teacher-fronted lectures and materials other than the textbook and workbook. When asked about why there existed such a gap between her cognition, practices undertaken in the 7th and 8th grade years and practices conducted during the two phases of
classroom observations in the 9th grade year, Joy attributed this gap to three major factors. The two factors that exerted the most constricting forces on her cognition in variety were pressure to prepare her students for high school studies and pressure from the grammar-oriented English teachers in the same grade level. She said with a bitter smile,
Well…there seems to be no teaching objectives other than preparing students
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for the entrance exam to senior high in the 9th grade year. Yeah, it’s already a blessing if you can finish covering the new lessons to be tested in the term exams and the old stuff to be tested in the review exams. We’re always in a rush in the 9th grade
year….Because we have to review the old stuff, and cover the new stuff at the same time. (POI1, p.1)
Shortly after saying this, she mentioned another reason for her to conduct teaching mainly in the form of teacher-fronted lectures on grammar in the 9th grade year:
I also need to take into consideration bridging between English learning in junior and senior high. I can’t let the kids enter senior high without a slight idea about grammar. Many teachers in the senior high schools now still teach in a very traditional way, in a way as if they’re preparing their students to major in English….So I have to prepare students for such teaching in senior high, and start talking a lot about grammar. (POI1, p. 6-7)
In spite of being observed to conduct teaching mostly in the form of deductive grammar teaching, Joy denied that she did so out of a belief that deductive grammar teaching was an effective way to prepare students for the entrance exam to senior high.
As the below excerpt showed:
Researcher: So you think that if we were to prepare students for the entrance exam to senior high, deductive grammar teaching is a more effective way to do so?
Joy: No, I don’t think so. But I can’t just avoid deductive grammar teaching. After all, I cannot take the risk of conducting alternative
Joy: No, I don’t think so. But I can’t just avoid deductive grammar teaching. After all, I cannot take the risk of conducting alternative