Don't do this

In England if you are a teacher there is a lot of paperwork. I expect its the same in the US and Canada and probably the whole of the western world. One of the pieces of paperwork is the ILP - the individual learning plan. I've ranted about them before in other forums. I'm not going to rant here because as a foreign teacher in China your life is likely to be pleasantly paperwork-free.

They do however serve as an example. The principle behind them is that every student in your class has an ILP. In it you record that student's specific needs, set DUMB SMART targets, monitor the progress and fill in more bits of paper per month than are used in a public toilet.

The focus is, they tell us, always the indivudual, and never the group.

To do it properly would involve an insane amount of time, even for UK class sizes.

To do it in China where you will probably be teaching up to 2000 students a week would clearly be impossible.

Focussing on the individual here is a recipe for disaster.

That goes for the way you actually teach your lessons. In college, in England, I had a three hour long class of twenty students. It was perfectly feasible to race around the class and ask every student the same question.

So Fatima, what did you do at the weekend?

That's very interesting, how about you Sergei?

Jan, what did you do?

and so on.

You can have all the answers in a few minutes, providing you don't linger too long on any particular student. It uses a tiny fraction of the lesson time. Moreover in such a small class all the students can listen and respond to whatever the other students say.

It flat out doesn't — and can't — work when you have between fifty and a hundred students and forty-five minutes. Even if you restrict the exchange to twenty seconds that's three students a minute and twenty minutes for a class of sixty. But there will be some students who take a minute, or two minutes or three to formulate an answer. Suddenly your whole lesson has vanished and you haven't even asked that one question of every student.

That's not the worst thing though. The worst thing is that they are teenagers and there are a lot of them. Anybody not immediately involved in the lesson — especially at the back — is probably not listening. They will be doing homework, reading magazines, chatting, playing computer games. But not listening. They will perk up and answer when their turns come but as soon as this minor interruption to their day is over they will stop listening again and go back to whatever they were doing before you asked them.

From the teacher's point of view this is a forty-five minute lesson. From the point of view of any individual student it is a thirty second annoyance.

By all means ask questions and ask multiple students the same question. It's a good technique but for any particular question only ask a few students. Spread all the questions around so that everybody gets asked something but asking sixty kids "what did you do last weekend" and expecting sixty answers is not the right way to do it.

My technique is to always start with one of the students I know is strong and will give a good answer. This does two things. It encourages the others to join in and provides a model that didn't come from the teacher. I might, for harder questions, use a couple of strong students.

Then I select students randomly — usually by tossing a ball to them — and ask the same question. I will generally ask about six more students and then move on to something different. I never let it last more than about five minutes.

The bottom line is that focussing solely on the individual here means that nobody gets an adequate lesson and nobody learns anything. You need to find and use techniques that will simultaneously engage the whole class or you have lost before you start.