Learner Coaching ELT

Another guest post, this time from Claire Venables, who is based in Brazil and runs http://www.englishwithclaire.com. Claire shares the principles of Masterminding, the framework she uses, and some examples of how her learners are transforming the way they learn English.

There is a quote that has been doing the rounds on Facebook that goes ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ This only made sense to me after I started a Mastermind group with four other motivated and determined colleagues. As our group developed, so too did the careers of the women in it. For those of you who have never heard of Masterminding, basically, we are a group of supportive friends getting together to push each other to new heights. The Mastermind format gives us a framework to formalize that support, to give and receive feedback, help to brainstorm new strategies, and create an accountability structure to keep focused and on track.

Doesn’t this sound like the kind of environment you want to create in your classroom? It did to me and I started wondering if I could I adapt this same framework to empower my students.

In this post I’m going to share the principles of Masterminding so you can see how transferable these are to the language coaching context.  I’ll describe how my lesson is structured and the roles involved, and we’ll see examples of how learners are transforming the way they learn English with video diaries about their learning process, peer support, and learner-to-learner tips.

Principles of Masterminding

Here are a few points about my group and what our meetings involve. This is the information we share with every potential new member and that I have started using in the first session with a new group of students. It helps make sure that everyone is clear about what group is all about and the level of commitment that needs to be made.

Commitment and Accountability

One of the secrets to maintaining a successful group is definitely making a commitment to each other. That commitment comes in three forms: showing up to every class, being there for each other during the class and between classes when needed, and holding each other accountable for doing what you say you will between meetings.

Generous Two-Way Sharing

This is something that is essential in a Mastermind meeting and, when applied to my English lessons, has been incredibly empowering for the members of my group. Different from a traditional format where the teacher gives feedback to the students on their language production, the entire group gets involved with generating ideas and solutions and feedback. All members are there to ask for help and give help in a full and balanced way and this has transformed the dynamics of my lessons and really made the learners more actively involved in their own learning process and that of their classmates.

No Competitors – No Comparisons

Although this is something that should be obvious, saying this out loud in the first session makes such a difference. It is important to be able to make mistakes, share problems, goals, failures, fears and also celebrate success when we are together. We need to regularly remind each other that we don’t compare ourselves to the other or compete. These thoughts only serve to derail us from creating the mindsets you need to achieve your language learning goals.

Similar drive and attitude

The learners may have different goals and take different paths to get there but what they all need to have in common is a deep belief in their capacity and a drive to become fluent in English. We all know how important it is to surround yourself with people who are motivated and love what they do. If you can cultivate this attitude in your learners from the beginning, it will continue to grow as the course continues.

Different Skill Sets

It is impossible to be an expert at everything and when learners recognize their different strengths and weakness with the language they can begin to pool their knowledge and share resources to benefit from each other.

Do you believe that these are all things which you want or even expect from a group of students? Now, think about how often you actually make them explicit. I’ve found that by discussing these expectations at the beginning of the course, it puts them in the forefront of their minds and people make a conscious effort to follow them.

Student Roles

Note-taker – writes a summary of the session, key points raised, tips, resources, agreed upon action points and new language. This person will write up the notes and share them in the email the next day. My students have found that having the responsibility for taking notes for the group sharpened their attention and focus during the lesson. Summarizing the lesson afterwards was a great way to force them to review and process their notes. Something they rarely did on their own. For those not having to take notes, it frees them up to participate more fully in listening to others and contributing in conversation. The rotating roles means that everyone gets a chance to benefit from this role. This is a screen shot of lesson summary.

Time keeper – makes sure people are respecting the agenda for the session and will give people a heads up when it is time to move on. I have always had a timing problem in my lessons. This has been a great way of solving this!

Hot Seats – The students in the ‘hot seats’ get to share their goals or challenges of that week. As there are only a maximum of 5 people in my groups, everyone gets to be in the hot seat fairly often. Students often have similar goals and challenges so, even when they are not in the hot seat, it’s often useful for them anyway. Aside from that, brainstorming and participating in discussions is great language practice and it helps to foster a learning environment where students support each other’s development actively.

Moderator – This is me. I get the ball rolling at the start of the session and keep us on track throughout the session, contributing with my input whenever necessary. I wrap up the session at the end. I also monitor language production during the conversation and written activities and provide feedback and input.

Running a Meeting

This is how my lesson is structured using principles of a mastermind meeting.

Meet and greet

Celebrate – What are you proud of? Creating a space to celebrate the small achievements really helps students reflect on and appreciate their progress. This in turn is great for motivation and makes the journey to proficiency much more enjoyable.

Action point – People in the hot seats take turns to share their goal or something that is challenging them. This might be a specific thing they are struggling with or something they’d like to improve. For example, Thais was panicking about having to give a presentation in English at university and Melissa was frustrated with how quickly she was forgetting new vocabulary.

Discussion – in the discussion phase the group then ask open-ended questions to encourage the person in the hot seat to find their answers. I model this a lot in the beginning with questions such as…

• What do you think the main challenge is?
• What choices can you make?
• What’s your next step?

The members of the group can then offer their advice too. For Thais, they suggested ways she could improve her presentation and shared techniques for overcoming anxiety.  Some of the stronger writers in the group offered to review her presentation and so she organized to email it to them for feedback. Melissa decided to record new vocabulary on her phone so she can access it easily when she has spare time and review it more often. Someone in the group suggested she use Evernote. I was able to provide input here about different ways to record vocabulary and show a few examples on the board.

Results

Here are some of the other activities that my students have been doing to improve their English between sessions.

Reflecting on learning – Manuela “Sometimes I feel like nothing can hold me back.”

Encouraging students to create their own video reflections helps them improve on several levels. Having an audience means that they will really work on what they are going to say, looking for the right words and expressions, even writing out a script. Then they’ll video themselves, watch it back, evaluate their performance and record it again to improve as many times as necessary. This is great practice! Then, there is the process of reflecting on their learning, which is a powerful activity in itself.

Peer support – Gabriel and Rovena – “You feel more confident now!”

Rovena was having a hard time finding the courage to record herself speaking in English until her classmate Gabriel offered to help her. His may not be as fluent as Rovena but he feels much more confident in front of a camera. They pooled their skills and supported each other and made this great video. Rovena has begun helping Gabriel with his writing, a goal he has for his English.

Learner-learner tips – Ana Sara “When learning a foreign language, speaking can be the most challenging part. I decided to use strategy to improve even more”

When students are invited to share a tip for learning English, it really makes them reflect on what is working for them. The making of the video has all the benefits we’ve already discovered.   Watch the video to discover the strategy that Ana Sara has been using to improve her English at home.

Masterminding has been a tool that I have used to transform my career and there are many elements of it that I am now using to enrich my learner coaching. Obviously, this is still very experimental and certainly doesn’t suit every teaching context. My learners are all upper-intermediate to advanced and have already spent years studying English. The goal of my programme is to help them make the transition from being English students to English users.

What about your teaching context? What elements could you use from Masterminding to enhance your lessons and what would you have to adapt? Share your answers in the comments below and let’s discuss!

Regardless of whether you do language coaching or not, I hope you’ve been able to identify some elements of the masterminding framework which you can transfer to your lesson and empower your learners!

We’re lucky enough to welcome to the blog Alex Strick, a writer, researcher and expert language learner as well as a language coach. Here he talks about his approach to learning and how it meshes with From English Teacher to Learner Coach, his background in learning languages, his move to coaching others in languages, not to mention a wonderful tool that he has built for learners: CoachBot. Imagine that our book was an app; well, this would be it! I’ll leave Alex to explain…

I read From English Teacher to Learner Coach only recently. I received a glowing recommendation from a fellow language coach, Lýdia Machová, and the more I read, the more enthusiastic I became. The methods described in the book mesh pretty well with those I developed through my own studies of various languages. This was an approach suited not only to those learning English, but rather something that could (and should!) be adopted by the thousands of native English-speakers who struggle to learn a second language each year.

Indeed, the general message of the book – one I interpreted as ‘we don’t have to wait to be taught; we can learn for ourselves’ – is something that I believe has important implications for how we go about education in the coming decades. (I was especially pleased to learn a new word – heutagogy – for this somewhat hard-to-define practice of self-education). Seth Godin has written about the demise of the system of factory education and others are tackling this from various angles.

I come at language learning from the perspective of almost thirty years of non-native language learning and self-study in foreign languages. I was lucky enough to be exposed to a number of countries and the different languages that were spoken there while as I grew up, and that stimulated my desire to learn further. I was lucky to have parents who studied the language spoken in whatever new country we moved to, and this gave me the lived experience and confidence that learning languages was something that could be done.

Like many in the United Kingdom, I studied a mix of European and classical languages at primary and secondary school, but none of these stuck in a particularly profound way. After I left school, I continued to study languages on the side, eventually shifting into a bachelor’s degree in Arabic and Persian/Farsi. After university, I worked on various research and writing projects that saw me living in Afghanistan. I had to tackle languages like Pashto, for which few materials existed at the time. I grew interested in materials tackling the meta-skills involved in learning languages and self-directed learning in general.

My own personal struggles with language learning seem to revolve on finding ways to keep the process interesting, to vary the kinds of materials I’m using and consuming. I also often find it difficult to get started in my studies, so removing barriers to study is important for me.

I also work as a language coach. I had done this informally for a few years and I noticed that I would often get similar kinds of questions from friends and acquaintances. Many (if not most) of the questions, had nothing to do with points of grammar or syntax, but were rather connected to things like motivation and accountability.

This was especially true for students at the stage of the much-feared intermediate plateau. The problems that beginners face are, in some ways, much more predictable and mundane. There are some unavoidable hoops that everyone needs to jump through in the early days of learning a language – learning some basic grammar, phrases and vocabulary as a structure on which you can then build and expand further.

It was thus gratifying to read From English Teacher to Learner Coach make such on-point observations about precisely these struggles.

To bring all of this full-circle: I emerged after these years of studying languages and self-study methods with a strong sense of some techniques and approaches that would really benefit a learner working on their own to master a second language. I had been teaching myself how to code and thought I could combine a need to make a practical ‘experiment’ or prototype with my interest in language learning.

CoachBot is a free tool I designed to deal with this problem. I have personal experience of the paralysis that can come at the intermediate level: there are too many options and you just need someone to tell you what to study and for how long.

If you don’t want to do a particular task, just click to get a new one.

Initial feedback has been positive, though the numbers using the service remain relatively small. I spoke with one student working on his French who had spent a whole month only doing exercises suggested by the CoachBot tool.

My dream is to make this much more fully-functional and fleshed-out as a guide and language coach. Users will be able to store records of their previous study and the CoachBot will make recommendations depending on various parameters like whether they have been studying only one skill and neglecting others, for example. I continue to add tasks to the database on the back-end. I also use the tool in my own language studies. I’m currently refreshing my Dari and Pashto skills and the shorter exercises offer a great way to reacquaint myself with grammatical structures without feeling that I’m ‘studying’.

Alex Strick is a writer, researcher and language coach. Visit https://alexstrick.com to read his blog and http://languagecoach.io/coaching to learn more about working with him to improve your own language skills.

There’s some interesting chat going on on the blog, though it’s hidden away in the ‘About’ page comments. You can read it here. It started with a reader, Phil, asking whether we knew any coaching courses to recommend and became a chat about whether what we do should really be called coaching. If people that work as coaches get upset at our use of the title (Duncan’s met at least one), I don’t think we need to worry too much – after all, it’s not as if we’re affiliated to any organizations from which we could be struck off.

It reminds me that there are lots of types of coach out there, from life coaches to sports coaches, all with their own methods and ways of doing things. We coined the term ‘learner coach’ for our own ends, to describe a way of encouraging teachers to look outside the classroom at what learners are doing, or could do, when we’re not around, and in that respect, we don’t need to conform to any established models of coaching. (By the way, I have no idea whether we first coined ‘learner coach’, but we weren’t copying)

Helen Waldron, on her terrific blog, has posted a very favourable review of our book , From English Teacher to Learner Coach – a must read for anyone who wrote the book. In it, she mentions her ‘absolute fabby moment’ was our comparison of language classes and Weight Watchers group sessions. As she succinctly summarizes: ‘Nobody joins Weight Watchers and expects to lose weight by attending the meetings alone’. I like that bit, too, Helen. In the same way, the progress that learners make in their English takes place in and out of the classroom, and we all see the greatest progress in learners who live a rich and varied English language life away from their teacher. The ‘meeting leader’ of a WeightWatchers group still strikes me as perhaps the closest role to what Duncan and I are trying to encourage. Yet most leaders in Weight Watchers meetings probably don’t think of themselves as coaches. So what qualifies them?

Interestingly, there are no formal qualifications needed to be a Weight Watchers leader, and certainly no coaching qualifications. On the British recruitment site, the thing at the top of the list is that leaders be role models:

It’s really important to us that our Members learn to be successful with their weight loss from someone who has been successful at losing with Weight Watchers and has learnt to maintain that weight loss. Our Leaders are role models for members to learn from.

That makes perfect sense for Weight Watchers, and I think it also makes a lot of sense from the point of view of a language teacher. A good teacher is a model that learners can look at and say: ‘I want to learn languages like he has.’ Unfortunately for me, I’m a rather lazy learner of Spanish, which makes me the kind of meeting leader who’s showing a bit of flab out of the bottom of my shirt, but I know there are millions of teachers who actively learn languages and use this experience to help their learners better. I should also say that this for me is why non-native speaker teachers have an inherent head start over native speaker teachers in their qualification to teach English.

Recently I have had a small group of three advanced learners who I’ve been coaching (you can see two of them here and here). The classes we held we ended up calling ‘meetings’; I didn’t plan as such but I did write an ‘agenda’. I emphasised that I was there for them at any time if they wanted to talk and we set up a WhatsApp group to communicate throughout the week. It seemed to work.

So I’ve decided that from now on I will call myself a ‘meeting leader’ and be done with coach for ever (well, until the next post anyway).

This was a post by Daniel