WORKING FOR UNDERSTANDING IN THE CLASSROOM LEILA MARIA TAVEIRA MONTEIRO

EXPLORATORY PRACTICE: LIVING THE CLASSROOM BEYOND ITS BOUNDARIES

Niteri, October 2007

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to report on a project carried out with intermediate students of English at a private institution, according to the principles set by Exploratory Practice. The term, labeled by Dick Allwright, refers to classroom research as a contribution to method. Exploratory Practice aims at investigating classroom life, for the sake of understanding teachers as well as learners queries and difficulties, referred to as puzzles. The ultimate goal of Exploratory Practice is to improve the quality of classroom life, bridging gaps between theory and practice. Exploratory Practice practitioners focus on improving the quality of classroom life via an investigative approach which involves both teachers and learners, without necessarily changing it. Key words: understanding puzzle classroom life - practitioners

INTRODUCTION WORKING FOR UNDERSTANDING IN THE CLASSROOM Will I be able to cope with it?, When are they going to realize Im not a high-tech teacher? These questions preyed on my mind as I was introduced to the keenly awaited interactive White Board. My colleagues who were in charge of presenting it to the staff seemed so comfortable and self-confident! Since I could hardly follow their hands as they clicked here and there, I feared I would look awkward and uncertain as I had to face my students and make the most of the brand new everyone-is-dying-to-know White Board. Well, maybe it is time for me to find something else to do, I thought. Luckily, it was just when Exploratory Practice came to my rescue. The lure of methods for language teaching

An ideal world

In the spirited atmosphere of academic research, pioneering pieces of work have presented a number of innovative, if not revolutionary, solutions to classroom problems. Along decades, researchers and linguists have searched for what has been popularly called a method, which would, ideally, cater for the needs of the varying audience of foreign language classrooms. This superordinate umbrella term, according to Richards and Rogers (2001), describes a generalized set of specifications for accomplishing linguistic objectives. However, it is a simple-minded evaluation to take for

granted that a method may have comprehensive answers for the highly unpredictable and individualized environment of the classroom. Methodological recipes have failed to consider that language teaching and learning is not a matter of cause and effect relationship (as the picture illustrates). In fact, it is much beyond that, since the targeted language mediates a complex social process, permeated by various factors which cannot be controlled or predicted and methods have been more or less discarded in due course of time. In addition to the limitations of prescriptive measures, the impracticability or ineffectiveness of many of them has deepened and broadened the gap between the down-to-earth world of the classroom and _ as most teachers see it _ the Alice-in-Wonderland world of language research. As the lure of methods proved untruthful, teachers have longed for a more situational-bound perception of classroom queries, which is the main target of Exploratory Practice. It waves at those who long to find a bridge between these, apparently, unrelated worlds. But, before I engage into this Xanadu land, two aspects which seem inherent to teaching and learning are worth mentioning. Planning and controlling for the sake of success Two words have been especially endeared to teachers: planning and controlling. Personally, I have never met a teacher who does not believe in planning or who does not strive to keep control of what goes on in his or her classroom. It is true that planning is, I would say, vital to teaching. As a result, most teachers strive to be in control of what goes on, and describe their lessons as being successful as long as everything turns out as planned. But, what is the criterion for defining a lesson as being successful or not?

Learning is, definitely, a personal inner process, and the notion of success is subjected to various subtleties and idiosyncrasies, so what principles can provide us with the necessary tools to assess a lesson? Besides, while the idea of assessing quality is well inherent to classroom life, the notion of quality may vary according to personal beliefs and values and, as a result, some principled criteria is welcome to lay the bases for any type of assessment. As Dick Allwright puts it, I would say that understanding what happens in the classroom is a promising start for those who seek successful lessons. And understanding is the very heart of Exploratory Practice, as we will discuss in the following section. Exploratory Practice: rethinking research in the foreign language classroom

Lighting up our way

The idea of developing practical guidelines for classroom research arose from Allwrights awareness of the fact that it was literally impossible for most teachers to use it as an applicable source for improvement. Academic researchers, as he calls himself (Allwright, 2003:117), had made it too demanding for teachers to cope with it in their daily routine. However, when working with teachers of English in Brazil in the late nineties, the author realized many of them attempted to deal with a number of situations by means of involving their students. These professionals aimed at discovering more about what lay under the surface of classroom frustrations, both for teachers and learners, whose reasons and origins they could not spot. From various meetings,

Allwright managed to perceive that, in fact, those teachers might have achieved a practical way to handle their queries without, necessarily, expecting to solve them, but understanding them. EP claims that, instead of struggling on opposite fields, teachers and learners can engage in a collaborative enterprise, from which both have to profit. But, what practical steps must be followed? As Allwright states it (ibid), Exploratory Practice brings a new set of proposals which can be summarized as the following:

* Quality of life in the language classroom, rather than quality of work, is to be prioritized. * The aim is to understand classroom life in a given situation, rather than change it. * Attend more carefully to what is going on in the classroom, to bring puzzling issues to consciousness. * Learners must play an active part in the process and can expect to profit from this mutual process of working for understanding. * Think globally, framing your work on fundamental principles of language teaching and learning. * Act and think locally: your principled work should aim at understanding your local context. * Work with puzzles, rather than with problems, since the second may sound face-threatening to teachers who want to avoid negative connotations in relation to their work. * Use regular pedagogic practices as investigative tools, adapting them slightly. * Treat EP as a feasibly indefinitely sustainable process, in a way which does not lead to burn out.

Puzzling over my puzzlement

Having learned about the basic principles of Exploratory Practice, I decided to search for understanding and discover more about my feelings, concerning the challenge the new interactive White Board posed to me. I knew I would have to involve my students and adapt some pedagogic activities. I started by choosing the group I would work with: I chose a teenage group, for they were the ones I most worried about _ they use all kinds of technological devices and tend to despise people who cannot handle them. Secondly, I had to think of my puzzle. I told them I wanted to learn more about how our lessons would be affected by the new board and they sort of laughed, because they had already realized that, although I was working hard to do my best, I was not really comfortable with the new instrument. So, I decided my puzzle would be about something I really longed to know: we need a high-tech teacher? Since we had been working with some new vocabulary and modals, these were the language items I selected for my pedagogic activities: they would serve my purpose both of revising for the coming test and researching on my puzzle. The students could choose from open sentences to complete at their discretion and/or tick adjectives that better expressed their opinions. The activities were done by eight students, who provided some enlightening answers, from which I sample some: Why do

I think........ * My teacher doesn't have to be an expert on technology to give a good lesson (6) * She must feel comfortable with the use of technology (5) * She makes our lessons better by using technology (5) * She enjoys herself when dealing with technology (4) * She can use the E-board appropriately (3) * She picked it up really easily (3) * She has a head for it (3) * She must be proud of herself (2) * She must continue practicing (1) * She should learn more (1) * She finds it hard to use the EB (1) Technology in the classroom is: Essential (5); useful (4); surprising (3); not essential (3). The teacher and the way she deals with technology is: A good laugh (6), surprising (4); laid-back (3); confident (3). I think she is: Very dedicated (5) Learning every day (4) Excellent (3) Almost perfect when dealing with the EB (3) She has Made a lot of progress (6) Learned many things about the EB (6)

Surprisingly enough for me, most students did not expect me to be an expert on the new board and many of them had a quite positive perception of how I dealt with it. Besides, negative feedback was, practically, irrelevant. The answers I got helped me feel much more confident in relation to the new challenge. I realised the investigation enhanced not only mine, but mainly the students perception on how we felt about the technological novelty. Much more than that, I have become addicted to using the interactive White Board and a keen fan of it. I know they may even find me laughable, but that is not necessarily bad. Conclusion What happens within classrooms is highly dependable on the teachers and the students perceptions and attitudes. It stands to reason that the quality of what happens in a lesson is affected by local needs and constraints which cannot be comprehensibly treated by external prescriptive norms. However, it is worth pointing out that methods are not to blame for their own sake. Teachers like the idea that a method can be trusted because holding on to a principled list of procedures is related to the teachers need to be in control. But, if controlling should not be banned from the classroom, the point is: how much control can teachers really expect to have? How much is, simply, uncontrollable and this is the way it should be? If so many changing factors are present in every classroom, what should we _ willing, well-intentioned teachers _ do? Give up planning and trust our well-known intuition to guide us through the rocky paths of teaching? I believe that this is where understanding comes to play a role, maybe much more determining to the processes involved in teaching and learning than planning or controlling.

Exploratory Practice opens up a feasible opportunity for teachers to investigate classroom life without moving away from their daily routine or their students needs. Through EP teachers change their focus from teaching to understanding and become partners of their learners in the task of knowing more about the characteristics of that particular group. As we give our students the opportunity to actively take part in what happens, we assume they are capable of independent decisionmaking and that those decisions may contribute to their personal growth, as well as to the improvement of classroom life. Exploratory Practice has drawn its ideas from teachers practical experiences. Allwright (2002:110) claims he and his peers have ...discovered Exploratory Practice in teachers current practices, rather than invented it for teachers. Due to their nature, most teachers urge for practical attitudes, but understanding our classroom, with its peculiarities, its strengths and weaknesses, its own needs and demands should, in fact, precede any change or procedure and not follow it. Thrills and spills rise from the expectation teachers know quite well about: What is my lesson going to be like? How will my students react to it? I like to compare a lesson to a chemical experience, when a scientist mixes and blends elements of different colours, shades and textures: although the recipe or formula determines what the result will be, it is impossible to know whether things will get out of control. A larger drop, a slightly higher temperature in the room, trembling hands because of a sleepless night, and the result might be completely diverse. Similarly, each lesson is there to unfold and be understood it in its perfect, seductive uniqueness.

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References ALLWRIGHT, D. 2006. Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics. In: GIEVE, S. & MILLER, I. K. (Eds.) Understanding the Language Classroom, p. 11-7. Hampshire, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. ALLWRIGHT, D. 2003. Planning for Understanding: A New Approach to the Problem of Method. In Pesquisas em Discurso Pedaggico: Vivenciando a Escola, v.2, n.1, p. 7-24. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Pesquisa e Ensino de Lnguas, Departamento de Letras. PUC-Rio. ALLWRIGHT, D. 2003. Exploratory Practice: Rethinking

practitioner research in language teaching. In Language Teaching Research, v. 7, n. 2, p. 113-41. ALLWRIGHT, D. & MILLER, I. K. 2002. Working to understand classroom life through Exploratory Practice. EP Center, Lancaster University, United Kingdom. ALLWRIGHT, D. 2001. Three major processes of teacher

development and the appropriate design criteria for developing and using them. In JOHNSTON, B. & IRUJO, S. Research and Practice: Voices from the Field. Teacher Education Conference, Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, Minneapolis, MN. 115213. RICHARDS, J.C. & Rodgers, T. S. 2001. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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