- Email: [email protected]
Loop-input: A new strategy for trainers
0346-251X/88 $3.00+0.00 Pergamon Press plc
Sysfem, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 23-28, 1988 Printed in Great Britain
LOOP-INPUT:
A NEW STRATEGY
FOR TRAINERS
TESSA WOODWARD Pilgrims Language Courses, Canterbury,
United Kingdom
A small survey revealed low awareness, in language teacher training, of process options in training sessions. The present paper, as well as the two books the author is presently working on, attempt to raise trainer awareness of different methods of transmitting information to trainees. This is done here mainly by outlining a new framework for experiential learning that requires less time than the simple transmission model and fewer manpower resources. The new model, nicknamed “loop-input” entails mirroring the content of training sessions in the process of these sessions. Two short, simple examples of “loop-input” are given, followed by a longer one.
INTRODUCTION In a recent, small survey of 18 language teacher trainers in the United Kingdom, I found that almost 100% of those I interviewed took great care to read, prepare and think about the content of the training sessions they gave to trainees but that only one paid much attention to the way in which this content was to be transmitted. The process of a session or the vehicle for the session was usually taken for granted with the trainer working from a fairly narrow inner repertoire of process options such as lecture, handout or tasks effected in small groups, followed by a plenary. Training processes were very rarely represented explicitly on session plans either by the use of diagrams, e.g.
r-
s s
s S
s
s
s
s
or by shorthand notes, e.g. “brainstorm this” or “posters here”. Once given time, however, to recall process options to mind or to invent them, with encouragement from the interviewer, virtually all trainers became very interested in the subject and inventive. I am now working to raise trainer awareness of process options, producing a resource book for teacher trainers wishing either to vary their lectures or to avoid lecturing altogether. I am also experimenting with new methods of getting information across and have written a book on a new system called “loop-input”. 23
24
TESSA WOODWARD
Very often in training contexts, trainers get trainees involved by trying things out with them practically. Thus office trainees sit down with office managers and learn to handle a telex machine, or teacher trainees are apprenticed to experienced teachers and work alongside them in real classes. This has in the past been called “the simple transmission model” or “sitting with Nellie” (Britten, 1985). In language teacher training we have often capitalized on the similarities between trainees in training classrooms and students in language classrooms by borrowing exercises from the latter and asking trainees to do them in the training group. This may sometimes answer real trainee needs, as when a new group of game usually played with students. Here, they are trainees plays an “ice-breaker” experiencing the game but also usefully breaking ice at the beginning of their own course. Quite often, however, we ask trainees to “suspend disbelief” for a while and pretend to be language students, as when we ask them to drill responses in English just to get the feel of drilling. Or we might give them a lesson in Swahili one evening, to help them feel or remember what it’s like to be a beginner. The problem with the transmission model is that it means you have to be “on site” and have plenty of time one to one. The problem with the “suspense of disbelief” model is that teacher trainees are not language students and don’t need or want to learn Swahili (Gotebiowska, 1985). These types of experiential learning are not new. They have been used to train teachers, secretaries, business managers and others for years. One method I have developed, which is new and which has been nick-named “loop-input” has the advantages of allowing trainees to experience techniques, without the necessity of being on-site, or one to one, and without their pretending to be language students or otherwise taking on artificial roles. I’ll explain how “loop-input” works, firstly by giving two small examples.
FIRST
EXAMPLE
Imagine that as a trainer you wish to get across to your trainees the importance of different spatial arrangements in the classroom. Before the session starts you could go into the training room and stack it so full of tables and chairs that no-one could move in there. When trainees arrive, before they even know what the aim of the session is, they will be confronted by furniture. They will ask you how you want it arranged. You return the question, and discussion and furniture moving will follow.
SECOND
EXAMPLE
In another session, let us say of 45 minutes, where you want to get across the idea of student concentration spans and the importance of warm-ups and breaks, give them out a graph such as that in Fig. 1.
LOOP-INPUT:
0
A NEW STRATEGY
FOR TRAINERS
25
Awful ) 5
10 15 20 2.5 30 35 40 45
Time ( minutes of a 45 - minute session ) Fig. 1. Concentration
graph.
Ask trainees how they feel, before you do anything else, and again without telling them “the point”. If the majority mark concentration as only “fair” or state that they are hungry or tired etc. . . . do a warm-up with them. Then teach them something completely different asking them to note their concentration levels every 5 or 10 minutes. When most people are experiencing a drop in concentration, perhaps after 15 or 25 minutes, do a fun, wakeup, one-minute break exercise and then get them to note if they feel better afterwards (Woodward, 1986). The two little examples I’ve given might begin to show you how “content” in the “process” of a session without anybody having to pretend to be than they are. Of course “the point” has to be brought out to trainees at some stage but after a couple of “loop-input” sessions, trainees will to the idea and will start looking for learning in all the things that happen
can be mirrored anyone different and made overt become sensitive in your sessions.
THIRD EXAMPLE Here is a more detailed example to show up the framework of a loop-input session. Let us imagine that as a trainer you have decided that you’d like your trainees to know what jigsaw reading exercises are and how they feel to do, from a student’s point of view. You would also like to give them a basic methodological model for a reading lesson, based on an idea of pre-, in- and post-reading tasks. Later on of course you’ll want to check that they can actually handle the technique with a real class. But first you want to feed the ideas in. What follows is a step-by-step session plan of how you could organize such a session using the loop-input framework. Step one Bring in some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Ask trainees to discuss what similarities there could be between a jigsaw puzzle and a reading activity in a language classroom. Step two Divide trainees into three groups using some imaginative system, e.g. smokers, non-smokers and those who are trying to give up, or brown, black and white shoe wearers, or January to April, May to August and September to December birthdays etc. Give text one to one group, text two to another group and text three to the last group. The texts could be as follows:
TESSA WOODWARD
26
Text one “In normal life we don’t usually know what someone is going to say. There’s a certain amount of unpredictability in any chat we have. We don’t know what they’re currently reading either. We can find out if we ask them. In EFL classrooms these days the idea of a ‘jigsaw reading’ is often used. Students are divided up, e.g. into three groups, A, B and C. All the people in the same group read the same text. But groups A, B and C have different texts. Once everyone has read their text and understood it, they then re-group into threes. In each three there is one person from group A, one person from group B and one from group C. The idea is that then they orally try to find out what each has just read and piece it together into some sort of whole.” Exercises/worksheet: 1. Could
you draw a digram
of the two different
kinds of grouping
here?
(A space is provided.) 2. Please answer these true/false statements and questions: i. (a) Everyone in the class has the same text. (b) Everyone in the class has a different text. (c) Some people have the same text as each other. ii.
After people have read their text they (a) stay in the same group. (b) move into a different group. (c) go home.
iii. (a) going to say. (b) are going to
-T/F? -T/F? -T/F?
-T/F? -T/F? -T/F?
When the students are in threes they know what the other group members are -T/F? Why? Why not? When the students are in threes they don’t know what the other group members say. -T/F? Why? Why not?
iv.
What do they do in groups
of three?
v.
What are the disadvantages
of a jigsaw reading?
Text two “I really hate doing jigsaw readings with my class. Finding good texts takes a while and the photocopy machine is always on the blink and then I never have a pair of scissors or any ‘whiteout’. Then I always get the text muddled up so that I give people the wrong ones. The grouping for the first reading is OK, but then there’s chaos when I try and get them into the second sort of grouping. It takes ages. Just when you think you’ve got them sorted out it turns out that one person hasn’t understood what they read anyway! Hopeless!” Please
answer
1. What’s
these questions:
jigsaw reading?
2. Why do you need a photocopier, 3. How could people 4. Why is arranging
a pair of scissors
get the “wrong” the second
texts?
grouping
5. Can you think of a way around
it?
6. HOW could you solve the last problem?
a problem?
or white-out
to do a jigsaw reading?
LOOP-INPUT:
A NEW STRATEGY
27
FOR TRAINERS
Text three “In the old days teachers used to just whack out reading texts like hot dinners. No instruction. No arousing interest. Just eyes down. Nice and quiet for the teacher, of course.” [l. What’s the writer’s attitude to the older approach to reading skills lessons?] “Then there were millions of comprehension questions for students to answer. Open, closed, true/false, multiple choice. Most of them fatuous and either answered mentally long before the students got to them or else needed long before students got to them. No such thing as an ‘in-question’, of course.’ [2. What are open/closed, example of each type?]
true/false,
multiple choice and in-questions?
Could you give an
“And then, when text was over, questions answered and checked, a few people scolded for getting them wrong, it was bang on with the next thing. Some processing of language perhaps, but no content processing at all.” 3. Have you ever had a reading lesson like this in a foreign language? 4. What did you think of it? 5. Can you think of a different way of doing one?
Step three While trainees are reading, go around and give everyone in group one a counter with a aon it, everyone in group two a counter with a 0 on it and everyone in group three a counter with a 0 on it. Step four Once reading has finished, encourage trainees to check within their groups that they understand their text and that they realise that whilst they can answer some of the questions on their sheet there will be others that they can’t answer. Step five Hold up a LL, 0 and 0 and ask trainees to re-group so that they are in groups like LI 0 0. As well as geometrical shapes (more easily reproduceable here) you can use counters of different colours. Once trainees have regrouped, hold up some pieces of jigsaw and fit them together. Explain that they have read different things and can now pool information. Step six Once the swapping of information 1. What is jigsaw reading?
2. What are the advantages? 3. What are the disadvantages?
has finished, hold a plenary. Ask these questions:
TESSA WOODWARD
28
4. What have you done, step by step, in the session? Could you break these stages into a three-step model for handling a text? Could you represent this model diagrammatically?
CONCLUSION By giving two short examples and one longer example I have tried to show how the content of a training session can be mirrored in the process of the session. The process is the content. It may take some time and help for trainees to realise that the answer to QS of text two is in what has just happened and not in the text or in words coming from the teacher’s mouth. Once trainees start to understand that the process of training sessions is used to reinforce and demonstrate content, they have always, in my experience, found it deeply satisfying and intellectually tickling. When medium and message are made consistent or congruent in this way, course credibility increases enormously. Within the field of EFL I have applied the loop-input framework to topics as various as dictation, role play, study skills, counselling learning, behaviourism and many more. Once a trainer, in any field, has grasped the trick of mirroring content in process then “loopinput” becomes a powerful framework or system that can be generalised from, and which causes learning to take place at a deeper level than learning grasped only via the ear or eye alone.
REFERENCES BRITTEN,
D. (1985) State of the art article. Teacher
GOLEBIOWSKA,
A. (1985) Once a teacher,
WOODWARD,
T. (1986) Loop
input-a
WOODWARD,
T. (1988) Loop-input.
process Pilgrims
training
always
in ELT. Language Teaching 18, 112-128,220-238.
a teacher.
idea.
ELT Journal 39, 274-278.
The Teacher Trainer 1,6-7.
Publications.
Sysfem, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 23-28, 1988 Printed in Great Britain
LOOP-INPUT:
A NEW STRATEGY
FOR TRAINERS
TESSA WOODWARD Pilgrims Language Courses, Canterbury,
United Kingdom
A small survey revealed low awareness, in language teacher training, of process options in training sessions. The present paper, as well as the two books the author is presently working on, attempt to raise trainer awareness of different methods of transmitting information to trainees. This is done here mainly by outlining a new framework for experiential learning that requires less time than the simple transmission model and fewer manpower resources. The new model, nicknamed “loop-input” entails mirroring the content of training sessions in the process of these sessions. Two short, simple examples of “loop-input” are given, followed by a longer one.
INTRODUCTION In a recent, small survey of 18 language teacher trainers in the United Kingdom, I found that almost 100% of those I interviewed took great care to read, prepare and think about the content of the training sessions they gave to trainees but that only one paid much attention to the way in which this content was to be transmitted. The process of a session or the vehicle for the session was usually taken for granted with the trainer working from a fairly narrow inner repertoire of process options such as lecture, handout or tasks effected in small groups, followed by a plenary. Training processes were very rarely represented explicitly on session plans either by the use of diagrams, e.g.
r-
s s
s S
s
s
s
s
or by shorthand notes, e.g. “brainstorm this” or “posters here”. Once given time, however, to recall process options to mind or to invent them, with encouragement from the interviewer, virtually all trainers became very interested in the subject and inventive. I am now working to raise trainer awareness of process options, producing a resource book for teacher trainers wishing either to vary their lectures or to avoid lecturing altogether. I am also experimenting with new methods of getting information across and have written a book on a new system called “loop-input”. 23
24
TESSA WOODWARD
Very often in training contexts, trainers get trainees involved by trying things out with them practically. Thus office trainees sit down with office managers and learn to handle a telex machine, or teacher trainees are apprenticed to experienced teachers and work alongside them in real classes. This has in the past been called “the simple transmission model” or “sitting with Nellie” (Britten, 1985). In language teacher training we have often capitalized on the similarities between trainees in training classrooms and students in language classrooms by borrowing exercises from the latter and asking trainees to do them in the training group. This may sometimes answer real trainee needs, as when a new group of game usually played with students. Here, they are trainees plays an “ice-breaker” experiencing the game but also usefully breaking ice at the beginning of their own course. Quite often, however, we ask trainees to “suspend disbelief” for a while and pretend to be language students, as when we ask them to drill responses in English just to get the feel of drilling. Or we might give them a lesson in Swahili one evening, to help them feel or remember what it’s like to be a beginner. The problem with the transmission model is that it means you have to be “on site” and have plenty of time one to one. The problem with the “suspense of disbelief” model is that teacher trainees are not language students and don’t need or want to learn Swahili (Gotebiowska, 1985). These types of experiential learning are not new. They have been used to train teachers, secretaries, business managers and others for years. One method I have developed, which is new and which has been nick-named “loop-input” has the advantages of allowing trainees to experience techniques, without the necessity of being on-site, or one to one, and without their pretending to be language students or otherwise taking on artificial roles. I’ll explain how “loop-input” works, firstly by giving two small examples.
FIRST
EXAMPLE
Imagine that as a trainer you wish to get across to your trainees the importance of different spatial arrangements in the classroom. Before the session starts you could go into the training room and stack it so full of tables and chairs that no-one could move in there. When trainees arrive, before they even know what the aim of the session is, they will be confronted by furniture. They will ask you how you want it arranged. You return the question, and discussion and furniture moving will follow.
SECOND
EXAMPLE
In another session, let us say of 45 minutes, where you want to get across the idea of student concentration spans and the importance of warm-ups and breaks, give them out a graph such as that in Fig. 1.
LOOP-INPUT:
0
A NEW STRATEGY
FOR TRAINERS
25
Awful ) 5
10 15 20 2.5 30 35 40 45
Time ( minutes of a 45 - minute session ) Fig. 1. Concentration
graph.
Ask trainees how they feel, before you do anything else, and again without telling them “the point”. If the majority mark concentration as only “fair” or state that they are hungry or tired etc. . . . do a warm-up with them. Then teach them something completely different asking them to note their concentration levels every 5 or 10 minutes. When most people are experiencing a drop in concentration, perhaps after 15 or 25 minutes, do a fun, wakeup, one-minute break exercise and then get them to note if they feel better afterwards (Woodward, 1986). The two little examples I’ve given might begin to show you how “content” in the “process” of a session without anybody having to pretend to be than they are. Of course “the point” has to be brought out to trainees at some stage but after a couple of “loop-input” sessions, trainees will to the idea and will start looking for learning in all the things that happen
can be mirrored anyone different and made overt become sensitive in your sessions.
THIRD EXAMPLE Here is a more detailed example to show up the framework of a loop-input session. Let us imagine that as a trainer you have decided that you’d like your trainees to know what jigsaw reading exercises are and how they feel to do, from a student’s point of view. You would also like to give them a basic methodological model for a reading lesson, based on an idea of pre-, in- and post-reading tasks. Later on of course you’ll want to check that they can actually handle the technique with a real class. But first you want to feed the ideas in. What follows is a step-by-step session plan of how you could organize such a session using the loop-input framework. Step one Bring in some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Ask trainees to discuss what similarities there could be between a jigsaw puzzle and a reading activity in a language classroom. Step two Divide trainees into three groups using some imaginative system, e.g. smokers, non-smokers and those who are trying to give up, or brown, black and white shoe wearers, or January to April, May to August and September to December birthdays etc. Give text one to one group, text two to another group and text three to the last group. The texts could be as follows:
TESSA WOODWARD
26
Text one “In normal life we don’t usually know what someone is going to say. There’s a certain amount of unpredictability in any chat we have. We don’t know what they’re currently reading either. We can find out if we ask them. In EFL classrooms these days the idea of a ‘jigsaw reading’ is often used. Students are divided up, e.g. into three groups, A, B and C. All the people in the same group read the same text. But groups A, B and C have different texts. Once everyone has read their text and understood it, they then re-group into threes. In each three there is one person from group A, one person from group B and one from group C. The idea is that then they orally try to find out what each has just read and piece it together into some sort of whole.” Exercises/worksheet: 1. Could
you draw a digram
of the two different
kinds of grouping
here?
(A space is provided.) 2. Please answer these true/false statements and questions: i. (a) Everyone in the class has the same text. (b) Everyone in the class has a different text. (c) Some people have the same text as each other. ii.
After people have read their text they (a) stay in the same group. (b) move into a different group. (c) go home.
iii. (a) going to say. (b) are going to
-T/F? -T/F? -T/F?
-T/F? -T/F? -T/F?
When the students are in threes they know what the other group members are -T/F? Why? Why not? When the students are in threes they don’t know what the other group members say. -T/F? Why? Why not?
iv.
What do they do in groups
of three?
v.
What are the disadvantages
of a jigsaw reading?
Text two “I really hate doing jigsaw readings with my class. Finding good texts takes a while and the photocopy machine is always on the blink and then I never have a pair of scissors or any ‘whiteout’. Then I always get the text muddled up so that I give people the wrong ones. The grouping for the first reading is OK, but then there’s chaos when I try and get them into the second sort of grouping. It takes ages. Just when you think you’ve got them sorted out it turns out that one person hasn’t understood what they read anyway! Hopeless!” Please
answer
1. What’s
these questions:
jigsaw reading?
2. Why do you need a photocopier, 3. How could people 4. Why is arranging
a pair of scissors
get the “wrong” the second
texts?
grouping
5. Can you think of a way around
it?
6. HOW could you solve the last problem?
a problem?
or white-out
to do a jigsaw reading?
LOOP-INPUT:
A NEW STRATEGY
27
FOR TRAINERS
Text three “In the old days teachers used to just whack out reading texts like hot dinners. No instruction. No arousing interest. Just eyes down. Nice and quiet for the teacher, of course.” [l. What’s the writer’s attitude to the older approach to reading skills lessons?] “Then there were millions of comprehension questions for students to answer. Open, closed, true/false, multiple choice. Most of them fatuous and either answered mentally long before the students got to them or else needed long before students got to them. No such thing as an ‘in-question’, of course.’ [2. What are open/closed, example of each type?]
true/false,
multiple choice and in-questions?
Could you give an
“And then, when text was over, questions answered and checked, a few people scolded for getting them wrong, it was bang on with the next thing. Some processing of language perhaps, but no content processing at all.” 3. Have you ever had a reading lesson like this in a foreign language? 4. What did you think of it? 5. Can you think of a different way of doing one?
Step three While trainees are reading, go around and give everyone in group one a counter with a aon it, everyone in group two a counter with a 0 on it and everyone in group three a counter with a 0 on it. Step four Once reading has finished, encourage trainees to check within their groups that they understand their text and that they realise that whilst they can answer some of the questions on their sheet there will be others that they can’t answer. Step five Hold up a LL, 0 and 0 and ask trainees to re-group so that they are in groups like LI 0 0. As well as geometrical shapes (more easily reproduceable here) you can use counters of different colours. Once trainees have regrouped, hold up some pieces of jigsaw and fit them together. Explain that they have read different things and can now pool information. Step six Once the swapping of information 1. What is jigsaw reading?
2. What are the advantages? 3. What are the disadvantages?
has finished, hold a plenary. Ask these questions:
TESSA WOODWARD
28
4. What have you done, step by step, in the session? Could you break these stages into a three-step model for handling a text? Could you represent this model diagrammatically?
CONCLUSION By giving two short examples and one longer example I have tried to show how the content of a training session can be mirrored in the process of the session. The process is the content. It may take some time and help for trainees to realise that the answer to QS of text two is in what has just happened and not in the text or in words coming from the teacher’s mouth. Once trainees start to understand that the process of training sessions is used to reinforce and demonstrate content, they have always, in my experience, found it deeply satisfying and intellectually tickling. When medium and message are made consistent or congruent in this way, course credibility increases enormously. Within the field of EFL I have applied the loop-input framework to topics as various as dictation, role play, study skills, counselling learning, behaviourism and many more. Once a trainer, in any field, has grasped the trick of mirroring content in process then “loopinput” becomes a powerful framework or system that can be generalised from, and which causes learning to take place at a deeper level than learning grasped only via the ear or eye alone.
REFERENCES BRITTEN,
D. (1985) State of the art article. Teacher
GOLEBIOWSKA,
A. (1985) Once a teacher,
WOODWARD,
T. (1986) Loop
input-a
WOODWARD,
T. (1988) Loop-input.
process Pilgrims
training
always
in ELT. Language Teaching 18, 112-128,220-238.
a teacher.
idea.
ELT Journal 39, 274-278.
The Teacher Trainer 1,6-7.
Publications.