Introducing Tana Ebaugh and the Pioneer Training and Education Consortium

Tana Ebaugh and I met when we both began our journey at The SIT Graduate Institute in 2007. Since then, our lives have had the good fortune of intersecting in terms of ambition and location: teacher education in Daegu, South Korea.  Over many coffees, Tana and I would dream of a space where teachers from around the globe could come together to share a common understanding of teaching and learning. Now, Tana, and her colleague  Zhenya Polosatova (please see Mike Griffin’s excellent interview with Zhenya on his blog, ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections), have created this space in the Pioneer Training and Education Consortium (ptec).

And so it is with great honor and joy that I share with you this interview where Tana tells us a bit about herself, gives us a glimpse into ptec, and shares with us her hopes for teacher education. 

Tana, can you tell us a little about yourself?

I came to teacher education via a diverse collection of fields: electronics, microbiology, photography and graphic design. Each of these areas contribute to who I am as a teacher and a teacher educator. I have taught mostly adults in Thailand, the US, and in Korea. I believe that the learner is as important as the learning, and that as an educator in the classroom I need to involve them in the both the content and the process of their learning. Sometimes I am the holder of knowledge, but most often I see myself as a guide, a facilitator of learning.

How was ptec born? 

It starts with the professional relationship that I developed with my colleague, Zhenya Polosatova, in the winter of 2011—a meeting of education beliefs, of joy in learning, and in working with others. In the summer of 2012 we were contracted to write a TESOL certificate program for UCC Center, a teacher training organization in South Korea. Once our project was complete we realized that we had a valuable training tool that could reach beyond its original mandate. Putting that together with other trainers we know and respect, and developing a network to reach out to teaching organizations/institutions and education ministries seemed a next logical progression. This means that ptec is a space for trainers/educators and organizations/institutions to meet. It is a starting point for delivering and developing learning-centered, contextualized training and education for teachers.

If you could choose three words to describe ptec, what would they be and why?

Evolving. We are still building the concept, modifying it to more effectively connect trainers/educators with organizations. We are still clarifying what ptec is and what it is not. To borrow from the design field, you could say we are a boutique style consortium. We are a niche of trainers and organizations that cares deeply about learning, that is interested in context sensitive trainings and workshops, that realizes the preeminence of culture in all that we do vs. being a job site with everyone in mind. Consortium. We choose to be a consortium because we want to build community between organizations and trainers and learners, not just be providers. Focus. As with our Consortium at large, our blog is focused on training and education issues vs ESL/EFL teaching per se. We focus on student learning through teacher education and development.

One of ptec’s offerings is a TESOL Certificate course. What would you say makes your TESOL curriculum stand out from all the other teacher training programs?

Our TESOL curriculum is based on core principles that are carried through to the level of trainer plans. Our major accomplishments are that the course is competency based and has built-in needs self-assessment sessions so that it can be modified during the training itself to meet each particular group’s needs, e.g. Korean teachers of English, new teachers, administrators. Through the use of these needs assessments and the ongoing use of the learning log (a documentwhich details the competencies that may be covered during the course), the course participants develop an awareness of their knowledge and skills and actively engage in reflective practice. The course is geared for both native and non-native speakers, with materials with which A2 level (*see below for links)  language learners can actively engage.

If someone is interested in getting involved in ptec, what can they do?

As a potential Member, you need to be: 1) a certified trainer, e.g. CELTA and SIT’s licensure programs, or 2) in the process of being trained up, or 3) be recommended by at least two ptec members who you have trained with on a course. You must be an active reflective practitioner that is comfortable working in community and enjoy modifying courses/sessions/workshops to meet the needs of individual groups of participants. As a potential Alliance, you are an organization that partners with ptec Members to deliver and/or develop courses/workshops, or purchases ptec courses from individual ptec Members. It is easy to get in touch with ptec:  http://pioneerconsortium.com/contact-us/

What are your hopes and dreams for ptec and teacher education in general?

For ptec I wish for Alliances with institutions and organizations that value the learner and the learning process. I wish for members that want to develop in community with other trainers/educators to find a space to meet. I hope that the blog entries to add to the KASA (Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Awareness) of those involved with learning and teaching through provocative yet sensitive discussion.

For teacher education I think two of the most progressive things we can do are: 1) facilitate a personal relationship to reflective practice. A process that cannot be dictated and all must follow and 2) facilitate a teacher’s KASA: Knowledge, of their content areas and of the teaching process; Attitude, honoring themselves, their students, their colleagues, and other stakeholders; Skills, their practice—actions taken, how they deliver their content, how they interact with students, etc.; and Awareness, of their impact on others, the interconnectedness between teacher-student-content-environment, and their own needs.

With such a vision for teacher education, I am very excited to see ptec out there in the world. If you feel the same way, why not let Tana and Zhenya know? Leave a comment below, or on their website.

* A2 language level links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages
• http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/resources/european-language-levels-cefr

A Final Learning Statement at Centro Espiral Mana, SIT TESOL

On Friday, the February 2013 SIT TESOL course at Centro Espiral Mana ended. When a course closes here, participants are asked to create a final learning statement, summarizing what they have learned over the four weeks. Some participants wrote songs, poems, or essays, some created visual representations, and others recorded narratives. Each of these creations highlighted the inspiring process that goes on at Centro. Tony Paredes — a teacher from Tarapato, Peru — created the comic strip below. I asked Tony if I could share his learning statement  because I thought it was a great example of how some experienced teachers feel after taking this course. As Tony shows us, it’s truly transformative.

PS. Thank you – somewhere in Daegu a teacher trainer is smiling

This arrived in my inbox. I share this message because it warmed my heart.

“PS. I can’t recite exactly what I’ve learned from day 1 till now in your class, but I feel sure that I’ve learned about how to organize the lesson from the students’ perspective and how to build the lesson step by step. even though I have a hard time doing my lesson that way at the moment, it seems I’ve found in which direction to go. That’s a big leap for me. Thank U !”

The semester ends in two weeks.  Knowing that I reached at least one teacher is one of the best New Year’s gifts I could receive.

Learning is a…

The Creative Joy of Final Learning Statements

In three days, our training course will be over. In these final days, it’s time for participants to look back over their four months together and reflect on what’s been meaningful and what they’ve learned. To help them do this, I asked them to respond to a list of questions Mary Scholl (SIT teacher-trainer) created and kindly shared with me. Below are a few examples:

• If you were to choose 10 words to describe your experience in the course, what would they be?
• If your experience in the course were like weaving a beautiful cloth, what would be the threads that hold the cloth together?
• How would you explain your experience in this course to a five year old?
• What would your ideal motto be in the future?
• If you had to sell this course, what would your slogan and ad campaign look like?
• Go through all of your journal entries from the course. Choose the ones that are most meaningful to you. Why are they meaningful?
• Make a metaphor for how the course has affected you. Be juicy and deep in your description.

With these questions, they created final learning statements that would then become the front cover of  their learning portfolios. They kept this portfolio throughout my writing course.  I encouraged the participants to be as creative as they wanted, and as you’ll see, they didn’t hold back. During our final learning statement gallery walk (gallery walk explanation coming soon), I was inspired at each turn. I hope you feel inspired too.

Please enjoy the artistic exhbilition of learning!

Privacy tip: Notice the funky, random strips on some of the statements? To keep the anonymity of my participants, I used the smartphone app Labelbox to cover their names.

An Image of Reflection: learning from my RP workshop

Reflection is deeply personal. When I talk about reflection, you may have a completely different image of the concept floating around in your mind. This feeling is comparable to when you find yourself in a discussion about the meaning of life or spirituality. We may be using the same words, but our image of what these mean is probably quite different.

This is something I realized about the concept of reflective practice two weeks ago at the Busan KOTESOL’s Reflective Practice Symposium.

Note: Please read Anne Hendler’s summary of the day’s presentations, Meta-Reflection, at her new blog, LivingLearning: Life and Learning in South Korea. The title of her post touches on the complexity of such a discussion. Talking about how you think about thinking? Very meta. Very personal.

After listening to all the presenters, and after doing my own workshop (see my last post KOTESOL Workshop – Reflective Practice: Formulating Your Experience for the abstract), I got a better look at the mental images I hold about the concept of reflection. I realized that maybe the word “reflection” triggered a different picture in my mind.  This picture is the Experiential Learning Cycle (ELC), and the one I shared with symposium attendees.

Now I’d like to share this image with you. To do this, I’ll post parts of the script (in italics) I prepared for my workshop, comment on this, and refer to the slides and worksheet I used.

My ELC Workshop

Before learning about the concept of reflective practice, I was just a teacher trying to do the best I could. If I felt unsatisfied with something that happened in class, I’d mull things over, make a few modifications, and do it all over again. (see slide 2)

However, I noticed nothing really changed. I still had a sense that I wasn’t improving. I was still dissatisfied with the way my lessons were going. (still on slide 2)

While working on my summer MA TESOL at SIT, I realized where this dissatisfaction came from: it came from not reflecting on my lessons as deeply as I could.

The MA is based on experiential learning, so teachers who were accepted had to have at least two years experience. The program puts as much importance on our experiences with teaching and learning as it does on pedagogical and linguistic theories. The framework we used to reflect on these experiences was the ELC, which stems from John Dewey and David Kolb‘s research.

Slide 4 – The Experiential Learning Cycle: First, everything begins with an experience. Then you can see that “feelings” are off to the side. Some teachers/reflectors believe that before we can get through the rest of the cycle, whether it be during a post-observation feedback session or in your reflective journal, it is helpful to discharge the feelings are created by the experience. Then we have description, interpretation and an action plan, which brings us to our next experience. I’ll be explaining these in more depth below.

By looking at my teaching through the framework of this cycle, I finally noticed a change. I saw teaching as a place of exploration and experimentation. I started to understand why I did the things I did. I saw new possibilities and I wasn’t scared to try them out. “Mistakes” weren’t mistakes anymore; they were gifts. (This last statement may be a good topic for another blog post.) I became a more confident teacher, and if I ever felt my confidence waning, I knew that the ELC could get me out of that rut.

At this point in the workshop, I presented a classroom moment, and our task was to take it through the cycle. For the first task (see the worksheet below), attendees differentiated between an observation and an interpretation. Can you make the distinction?

The idea is that when we describe something in the ELC, we want to make the description as detailed as possible. It is something we are able to observe. This part of the workshop was intended to help attendees make a distinction between description and interpretation because we are so used to mixing them. The idea is that by simply describing, we are able to get the distance we need to make constructive judgments about what happened, which leads us into the next stage of the cycle: interpretation.

From the handout you can see that groups were asked to generate as many possible reasons as to why they thought that moment occurred, and also guess what that means for teaching and learning in general. An experience contains many dimensions, and this stage allows us to look at it from this perspective. It is not enough to guess one reason and move on the action plan. The interpretation stage asks you to exhaust all possibilities (time, linguistic challenges, culture, teacher behavior, student’s life…) so that your action plan has a stronger foundation. It was on this foundation that attendees then created their own SMART action plans (see slides 7 through 10) for future encounters with a similar experience.

What did I learn about my image?

I like my image of reflective practice. It works for me, and I know it works for some of my colleagues (one of these being Michael Griffin who did a “remix” of my presentation today). I got positive feedback from symposium attendees, but I’m still not sure that my vision of reflection stuck with them. I’m okay with this.

In my mind, if teachers are thinking and talking about teaching in constructive ways, then I’m happy. For me reflection is about raising one’s awareness. If you’re deepening your awareness about teaching and learning, I’d welcome a closer look at your image.

So what’s your image of reflective practice?

Linking Experiences: How We Learn to Teach

What do Penny Ur, Willy Cardoso, and James E. Zull have in common? They all presented at the 2012 IATEFL Conference, and they all referenced the connection between reflecting on experience and learning.

If you know me, or my blog, you know that I’m quite passionate about the subject of reflective teaching. I’ve done a few presentations/workshops on the subject, and will soon be doing another at the KOTESOL Reflective Practice Symposium in Busan on April 21. I’m very excited about this, especially since I’ll be in the good company of friend and reflective practitioner, Michael Griffin.

This shameless plug is simply to say that when I saw these three speakers on Glasgow IATEFL Online, my mind quickly made links to how their individual takes on teaching and learning connected to my understanding of the experiential learning cycle and reflective practice. Here are the links I noticed.

Making a Request: To Use L1 or L2? – Bridging Reflective Inquiry and Nonviolent Communication

After two weeks of spiraling through the experiential learning cycle (ELC), I’ve finally arrived at the last stage: Now What? otherwise known as, Active Experimentation or Intelligent Action (See Carol Rodgers).

Often those who write about reflection will stop before this final phase (…) Dewey’s notion of responsibility (…) implies that reflection that does not lead to action falls short of being responsible.

– Carol Rodgers, Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking

Well, I’ve been tempted to be irresponsible. My need to move on to a new topic has been gnawing at me all weekend. But, my desire to see this process through trumps everything else. I’ll push forward.

“How Do We Learn?” Isn’t This a Good Question for Teachers to Ask Themselves?

“Wow, that shirt simply screams, Josette.”

“Oh, those earrings are so you!”

Your friends may have qualified you with a certain look or style, and depending on your personality — or maybe just the time of day — you might feel annoyed by such comments as the ones above. Yet you may even feel pleased that your friends openly associate you with such good taste 😛

I never thought I would receive a similar comment associated to my beliefs around teaching and learning. I’ll get to that comment soon, but first a little context.

Reflection within a Reflection

Reflective inquiry came to me in a new form today. I spent the day reading and commenting on my participants final reflective journals. Through their reflections I got the chance to reflect on my own beliefs around teaching and learning. How’s that for meta!

KIETT reflective journals

The following comment helped me explore my beliefs around experiential learning:

I know some students (…) dislike some challenging and creative tasks, and just like to be passive, staying in continuous lectures. I thought I was doing them a favor, especially to the seniors applying for the SAT, while I tried to not give them burden except for memorizing vocabulary or grammar. I am thinking about making them write at least one essay a term but I am afraid that there would be a lot of objection. Josette has an excellent talent in making her students do anything she wants them to do. She really has the know-how. One of the most powerful things of her is to provide a comfortable atmosphere. She does not push, but we do it. I think I have to learn her “sneaky” skill to make students who fear doing something new manage to do it. Because of the prospect of replacing SAT English with National English Ability Test (NEAT), there would be an increase in the need for writing and speaking in class.

Not Enough Scaffolding in the Lesson on Scaffolding

I was very confident going into my lesson on scaffolding. When I did the same lesson last year, it was a success, and I had no doubt the same results would ensue this semester. So far, I’m not sure this is the case.