Buckland Weekly #33: Paperwork

When I worked as a teacher in college, in England, I had to spend far more time doing paperwork than I ever spent teaching. If you have worked in a school or college in a western country you will be familiar with the problem. In addition to lesson plans I had to do group profiles, individual learning plans (updated monthly), schemes of work, assessment schedules, Every Child Matters documentation, risk assessments,  exam results tables (for real and practice exams) and, it seemed, other endless forms that had to be filled in, checked, authorized and filed.

It was one of the reasons I eventually just decided to throw it all in and come teach in China. It’s the number one reason that teachers who leave the profession cite as being behind their decision to quit.

Things are certainly different for foreign teachers here in China.

The ONLY piece of paperwork that you HAVE to complete is your weekly lesson plan for each class. It’s possible that some schools will ask for other things but it isn’t common and even if they ask for everything that I have come across in six years here it still won’t amount to more than a tiny fraction of that asked for routinely back home.

With that said there are some pieces of paperwork that I find it useful to have. The school I am at, at the moment, hasn’t asked me for these but I do them anyway because they help me so I’d like to give you an idea of what I do. If you find these ideas useful then use them. If not, and if your school doesn’t want them, then feel free not to.

A Scheme of Work/Record of Work

At the start of the year I prepare, for each level that I am teaching, a scheme of work for the whole semester. Usually it’s almost the same as the one from last year but with dates and class numbers changed. It has one row for each week – there are usually fewer than twenty teaching weeks in a semester - and columns headed

Week Number, Week Start Date, Week End Date, Topic, Notes, and one column for each class at the level.

The first three of those are obvious. In the column headed topic I put the topic that I intend to teach that week. (For example: Animals, House and Home, Describing People.) In the Notes column I put anything I need to remember about what the lesson(for example: “vocabulary of rooms and contents in the house”, “lesson focus on possessives – this is my/your etc”) and other things, perhaps not directly about the lesson content, that I also need to know (for example “wider vocabulary range for class 1” or “check that quiz answers are up to date”.)

The other columns – the ones for each class – I leave blank for the moment. As the term progresses I fill them in with the following codes. Y – lesson was taught to this class, C – lesson was cancelled by the school, S – lesson was cancelled because I was sick, L – lesson was cancelled because I needed to take leave, X – lesson was cancelled for some other reason.

If I subsequently teach a lesson to a class that I missed in the week it was due I go back and change the code to R – lesson was repeated at a later date.

I find this document useful for all sorts of reasons.

                It gives me an overall plan for the semester

                It lets me see at a glance if any classes missed a particular lesson

                (And that lets me see if there is a lesson I can redo for a class if I am suddenly asked to teach an extra lesson to them.)

                It can, if needed be presented to the school both as a record of completed work and an indication of planned future work.

                The notes make sure that I don’t forget important things in the lesson.

Class Notes

I keep a short paragraph about each of the classes indicating anything that I need to know about that specific class. Are they notably stronger or weaker than other classes at their level? Do they have any discipline problems? Are there any physical problems with their classroom such as a computer that doesn’t work? Are there any particular types of activity that generally go well or go badly with that class?

I update this document as often as I need to. It isn’t something that needs to be presented to the school but it’s useful for you and will also help if the school asks you for a class by class report at the end of the semester.

Disciplinary Notes

Chinese students are mostly well behaved compared to their western counterparts but you will sometimes have problems because they are, after all, teenagers with all the attitudes and problems that can bring.

I keep a long of any major disciplinary issues that I have had to deal with.  It contains the date, class number, student name (if it’s relevant and I know it), whether or not I had to report it to their class teacher (home room teacher) and what, if anything, the school did about it.

This can, if you have to, be shown to the school, and will be evidence that you are not complaining about a non-existent problem.

Exam Documentation

You are very unlikely to be asked to do exams with your students. Unfortunately, my current school does want exams (though this year I am experimenting with a more continuous assessment style of grading). I have a couple of forms I use for this but if your school requires something of the sort it would be unlikely to match exactly with the way I have to do it.

Schools often fail to realize the logistical difficulties of doing an oral exam for a class of eighty students. Their thinking is that every other subject can be examined for a whole class in forty minutes so why can’t yours?  It can be quite hard to convince them that you need at least a few minutes for EACH student to do an oral exam – and even that is woefully inadequate when it comes to providing any genuinely useful information.

If your school wants you to do exams talk to me about it and I will help you devise something suitable.

And that’s it. That’s all that I do, apart from lesson plans, and for most schools none of that is required. It is however useful and I’d recommend that you do it (apart from the exam documentation which you probably won’t need to do, anyway.)

Buckland Weekly #32: Not so SMART

I’m going to venture into an area where my views might be considered contentious (or even flat out wrong) by educational theorists back home in England. I’m going to talk about something that, because of the limited time available, I rather gloss over when I do the teacher orientations here in China. I’m going to discuss lesson objectives and SMART targets. Probably more than any other specifically teaching topic my views on this are not the mainstream ones.

The reason I’ve decided to bring it up was a post on another facebook group, where a teacher listed her lesson aims and the lesson aims that the inspector thought she should have in an observation. I’ll paraphrase her a little as the specifics aren’t relevant to the point I want to make, only the general principal. (And her aims were reading and writing aims where we focus entirely on speaking and listening.)

Let’s write some aims in the style the teacher thought appropriate. Let’s assume, for this exercise, that the lesson topic is “the environment” (and of course that it is an EFL class).

The teacher’s aims might be

1. Students will be able to express a view upon the topic and express agreement or disagreement with other students’ views.

2. Students will show an understanding of polite discourse strategies.

3. Students will be able to identify and challenge false statements and offer counter arguments.

In the post that I saw, the inspector had offered an alternative in the form of

1. Students will understand the importance of taking protective measures to ensure that the consequences of pollution on the environment are minimized.

The majority of the subsequent discussion focused on the teacher’s aims suggesting that they were too vague and not SMART enough (we’ll come on to SMART later.) Almost no one mentioned the glaring problem with the alternative.

This is a language class. The alternative is NOT a language based objective. It’s a political objective. In my view it has absolutely no place on a lesson plan unless you are teaching civics or environmental studies. As English teachers our role is NOT to shape the minds and opinions of our students. It’s to give them the tools to express their own minds and opinions. We can argue all day about whether the teacher’s aims were good or bad but the inspector’s suggestion was, in my opinion, just plain wrong.

So, let’s get more general and ask a few important questions.

How many aims should there be?

How detailed and specific should they be?

How do you go about writing good aims?

What do you do in the classroom to ensure the aims are met?

Should you include lesson aims on your lesson plan at all?

Assuming for the moment that the answer to the last question is going to be “yes”, let’s look at the others.

How many aims should you have? Well, your lesson will be about forty minutes long to a class of between fifty and eighty students. How many objectives is it feasible to have in those circumstances? I’d say two or three, similar, perhaps, to the ones in the example. You could have just one in some classes; you would find it impossible with more than four or five. I’d say one to three is a good number.

The next two questions – “how detailed should they be” and “how do you write them” are where we come to SMART targets and where I’m going to go against the conventional advice. For those who haven’t come across it before SMART is an acronym from the world of business jargon. You see it in various forms. The one I am most familiar with is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Limited. The theory is that all your aims should show all of those features. You should be specific. You shouldn’t say “Students will learn new vocabulary.” You should say “Students will learn the following list of ten new words.” It should be measurable (and you should show how you can measure it –“There will be a spelling test for the words at the end of the lesson.”) It should be achievable – “ten words” is OK, “a thousand words” is impossible. It should be realistic. The words in question should relate directly to the topic and be within the normal expected vocabulary range for discussion of it – very obscure or technical terms should be left out. And you should set a time for it – “by the end of the lesson/activity”. So, in this case you would end up with something like

“Students will, by the end of the lesson, learn the meanings and spellings of the following ten words and will be able to complete a spelling and comprehension task demonstrating their new knowledge.”

I would like to suggest that this is nonsense, especially when teaching in a Chinese state school.

And it is nonsense because of the next question – what do you do in the classroom? In a business context, where you may be trying to implement a new sales strategy or design and build a new car then this kind of thinking makes sense but a classroom isn’t like that. A classroom is filled with people and people are crazy unpredictable things. You can set all the SMART targets you like but unless you set a target along the lines of “Each student will speak one word by the end of the class.” you won’t be able to implement it. Possibly not even then.

So, the last question. Should you include lesson aims on your plan at all?

You might think from what I’ve said so far that I’m going to say “no”, but I’m not. It is important to know exactly what you are setting out to achieve in a lesson, and with each individual task you have in the lesson. What I would say is that you shouldn’t worry too much about exactly how you phrase it or about whether it is SMART or not. Just think about what you are trying to do. Is the lesson primarily intended to give students new vocabulary on a specific topic? Is it intended to practice asking and answering personal questions? Is it intended to develop their skills in taking part in a discussion?

None of those things is even vaguely SMART but I would suggest that given the class sizes and the lesson lengths – not to mention that we are employed solely to improve their speaking and listening skills - they are far more realistic aims than you would come up with in an hour of trying to bend them into something more specific. As for the other things in the acronym they all kind of come automatically with a sensible lesson plan. You know how long each activity will take, you will have designed it to be achievable, you will know your classes well enough to make it realistic. You don’t have to make your overall aims fit all those criteria too. If your lesson is well designed and planned that will be enough.

And do, please, make sure that your aims are genuine language aims, not aims intended to push your own views onto the students as that inspector’s aim so clearly was.