The Reluctant Teacher

The Reluctant Teacher

This extract from the Introduction to Out of Your Seats addresses some of the issues that cause language teachers' reluctance to engage in drama activities.
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This type of teaching does not assume that teachers are drama experts, which teachers often cite as a reason for not getting their students out of their seats and engaging them in the types of things that this book has to offer. Teachers also fear looking foolish, which is the risk we are asking teachers to ask their students to take. Taking these risks develops the mutual trust between students and teachers and between students themselves that communicative language teaching depends on. Furthermore, no one needs to feel that they are performing unless they want to: we are not in the process of staging a play replete with costumes, lighting, ticket sales and stardom. Rather, teachers and students alike need to recognize their contributions as, well, contributions – contributions to something greater than the sum of its parts. Many of the Activities and Lessons see students working in pairs, in small groups and in whole-class activities.

Another underlying reason for not engaging in drama activities is the teacher's lack of faith in their learning outcomes. This is an admirable concern, for teachers should not engage in any teaching practices that they do not believe in. It is less admirable if teachers do believe but are constrained by the timetable, their boss and other stakeholders. Such teachers need to be able to justify the outcomes of their chosen teaching procedures through exploring the affordances that they offer. The aims provided at the top of the Lessons are a good start.

In several lessons exploring idioms, for example, the learners put the key words in order using mime. They then work with the idioms' literal meanings and then with their figurative meanings through matching and looking at them in multiple short contexts. They go on to use these short sentences to study sentence stress, visually and aurally, all the while acting out key words and building up short improvs. They conclude by performing dialogues that revolve around them. Thus, the students are having multiple learning experiences that consolidate and extend several competences.

Once the multiple affordances of an activity are listed and compared with those of the desk-bound, book-bound and transmission alternative, case closed.
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A bad reason for engaging students in activities is because it is easier to get the students up doing something than it is to teach them. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that engaging students in any way with language counts as language teaching (see Swan 2009).

Accounting for the affordances that an activity manifests should also slam the door in the face of the most common excuse, time. When we have so much to teach, recycle, revise and test, we need to find ways of doing more than one thing at a time. Comparing the affordances of these activities with those of the traditional alternative may convince even the most ardent Doubting Thomas to reconsider. If evidence fails to convince someone, their incontrovertible belief system must be preventing them from opening their minds.
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In tightly controlled and inflexible timetables, teachers find it difficult to add the activities offered in teacher resource books to their lessons. Interpolating activities mustn't short change other parts of a lesson nor short change the students. It is important therefore that teachers adapt their teaching plans to absorb the activities and lessons that they would like their students to experience. Thus, when preparing to introduce, revise or extend a grammar structure, the words and phrases of a topic or a feature of pronunciation, for example, the teacher can compare what is in their course books with what is in this book: it may then be a matter of using the format of the activity in this book with the topic in the course book, or it may suffice to simply replace the segment in the course book.

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Out of Your Seats was written by Anette Igel and James Thomas.
It was published by Versatile in 2018.