Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome back to Talking elt. The easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. Today we're continuing our theme of compassion based language education. I'm joined as before by Professor Sarah Mercer and by Charlotte Rance, a senior professional development consultant. In this fourth episode, we'll be discussing how to build compassion between learners in the classroom, linking to issues around self compassion and compassion fatigue.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: One of the things you also talk about is the importance of developing compassion between learners. So it's not just the teacher learner relationship, but it's that relationship between learners.
Can you give any advice to how people can improve that compassion between learners?
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So this does overlap quite strongly with the second part of the book in that this is about relationship building and helping the grade dynamics. So this is something, quite honestly, that teachers do already is that language teachers particularly know that if they want a successful language classroom, they need their learners to work together, to be respectful of each other. They've got to feel safe with each other. Learners are not usually scared of speaking in front of the teacher. They're scared of speaking in front of their peers. They're much more fearful of peer judgment than they are of teacher judgment. So I think it's a given for most language teachers that they want to work on group dynamics. And that's essentially what compassion between the peers is, is getting the learners to be trusting and respectful of each other, to accept each other's uniqueness, to appreciate each other, to know that we're not all the but that we can celebrate and appreciate our differences. And that's just the foundations of group dynamics. That's back to the basics of things like icebreaker activities at the beginning of a course. This is not. This isn't new. This is essentially building on what we already know, but maybe expanding it a little bit more consciously to say what other aspects do we need to accommodate. Can we find ways of bringing that in? The fact that Icebreaker activities are what we do at the beginning of a course, but we need them all the way through. But we call them something different. We talk about energizers, we talk about relationship builders, that we find ways to mix learners up to get them to respect each other and that we've got, maybe that we have, as Charlotte was talking about before, maybe we have some boundaries and rules about what is acceptable or not acceptable behavior and what we expect of each other. It's an oldie but a goodie is the learning Contracts. Learning contracts was a big thing in the kind of 80s and the 90s. And I think I think there's still a lot of value to be had in having. It's not the contract that makes a difference, it's the building the contract together. That's what really matters, is that you talk together about what do we expect of each other, what behaviours are okay, what are not okay, and it includes me as a teacher. What is expected of me, what do I expect of you, what do you expect of each other, what is okay, what is not okay. And very often the learners will be the ones who will call you on it more than you will ever call on it. They will remember it.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
Charlotte, I imagine as you talk to teachers around the world, this question of how you get your students to work together and the relationships that they need to build, that must be a recurring challenge.
[00:03:34] Speaker D: Absolutely. And I think it's really important to remember that wherever you go in the world, classrooms look very different. They have different sort of volume of students. You know, I've been incredibly lucky in my teaching career that I think the biggest class I've ever had was 25. But in many cultures, that will be a small group. And when you're working sort of with large numbers of students, having opportunities for group work or pair work, you know, I can stand there as a teacher trainer and talk for hours about the benefits of it, but the reality of how you put that into practice in such a sort of large classroom can be incredibly challenging. And I think, you know, again, it comes back to that, working together and working with your peers, your. Your learning network around you, you know, where, where are the ways that we can build that? And that might be, you know, yes, having group focus in the classroom, but that might not be manageable every single day. It might not be, you know, something that you can implement in every lesson. So implementing things where you can, you know, taking a time to say, okay, I've got 80 students in my class, I can't have one to one time with all of them. I cannot give them one to one time with everybody. What can I do in the short term? You know, can I have, you know, can I focus on this group of students this week and another group of students the following week and take my notes as I go on, where are my opportunities to build those relationships in the classroom?
You know, you can do things like finding out and getting students to share what they are knowledgeable about, what they know about having building that network within the classroom. So, you know, one thing that I like to do as a teacher is have lists of ask me about.
So, you know, so if one member of the class is really good at conjugating their verbs, ask me about the grammar.
If somebody is very good at having great recommendations for how to manage your time, ask me about timekeeping, you know, and giving students guidance, facilitating them on how they can work more effectively together, I think is key in that environment as well.
[00:06:10] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, Sarah, again, in your book, you talk about that developing their understanding of different roles in a group, that this is not something that naturally comes to some students. They don't understand exactly how they work together and being quite explicit about assigning roles, explaining roles.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we can be very explicit about learning. Contracts can be on a whole class level, but they can also be for group activities that you can say, okay, we're going to do this activity. This is what we're going to do. What do we expect of each other? What roles are there? What kind of jobs do we need? Who's going to take on what job? So we can do that. You know, we can scale it. We can do that for a whole class, or we can do that for group activities so that they feel that they've had a reflection very explicitly on what do they expect? What do they need to do? What roles are there? What can I do? What can somebody else do? I think a big part of building group dynamics is building a sense of group identity, a sense of we as opposed to, you know, individuals on their own, and also finding a way for this developing of interdependence. So if we look back at, for example, jigsaw tasks. Jigsaw tasks are hugely popular, and you have to think about the period of history they came about. So they came about in desegregated states in America in that period where they were trying to get learners to work together that didn't want to work together. And what they did in jigsaw activities is they create a need for each other to complete the task. And good jigsaw activities, and I mean good, because not all of them are good. Good jigsaw activities aren't just something you go through. I'll do my bit, I'll do my bit, and we'll just fill out the table together and we're done. It creates a real need for each other to work together. And if learners can have that within small groups, within bigger groups, it helps them to see that they need each other and that they've each got strengths and individual characters that they can bring in to whatever the task is that they're doing together.
[00:08:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's what you talked earlier about transversal skills and collaboration being one of those, that it's easy to underestimate how much that has to be learned rather than being something that people come with. And I think as teachers, we're made more aware of that nowadays than we perhaps were in the past, that we have to think about what are the components of working together and how do we develop those in our students.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: And I think also accepting that investing time in setting up those skills is time well spent for the language classroom, I think there is a risk to want to just get on with the activity and get on with doing it, and that sometimes investing that little bit of extra time in setting things up properly and developing those skills will reap benefits in the long term, not just in that one activity, but in how they work together in the future, moving forward. It's like Charlotte said, these things are done gradually over time.
[00:09:08] Speaker C: And that's probably going to be your response to my next question, which is, I'm thinking of those teachers who find themselves in a class where they feel it's not coming together, you know, that there isn't a good relationship between the students, and that's making them cautious about working together, that there may be some negative behaviors in the class.
Have you got any advice for teachers about how they can try to manage that kind of situation?
[00:09:42] Speaker A: I think you can't ignore it is the first thing. And then we're back to the fact that it's effortful and courageous to be a compassionate teacher is you can't wish it away. You can't wish this problem away. So it's about having the courage to say, okay, we can't ignore this.
Why have we got a problem in the classroom? Can we work out where that comes from? Because there's not just one remedy to that. It will depend what the source of the problem is. So it's not like an easy solution where I can say, oh, do this. This will solve every difficult class. It's about having the courage to take the time to unpack where the problem comes from, and maybe creating conversational spaces, creating spaces where learners share in an atmosphere of trust, where they feel comfortable, where they don't, and remembering that the relationships in the classroom are built over time. Sometimes they have to start working with just the people they feel safe with and just the people they feel comfortable with. And then gradually you introduce another person that they work with and they work with a different partner for a bit, and then you build up and they work with somebody else. And these icebreaker activities the principle of an icebreaker activity. It's not the icebreaker activity itself that matters really so much. It's the notion that you get to know another person as an individual. They're no longer a stranger. They're not somebody random in the class whose name you kind of know and you know, kind of where they sit and, you know, they wear that kind of blue jacket. It's. Icebreaker activities are making you get to know somebody else as an individual so that they're not a stranger to you. And you build that up person by person in the classroom. And so if there is a difficult class, back to the icebreaker activities, but only if you feel that it's time that they're ready to do that. They may need just the safety at the beginning of being with people that they trust and that they feel comfortable with and just trying to gently and slowly create channels of communication to unpack where the problem lies. And we can't shy away from it. It's something we have to have the courage to just tackle head on and find out what's causing the disruption in crime.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:46] Speaker D: I think it can be really sort of quite personally challenging for teachers to put themselves into that. That vulnerable state of saying and being open. You know, it is that bravery element that we were talking about earlier of saying, okay, recognize, we've got a problem here. Let's. Let's strip that back. Let's find out what's going on. And, you know, as Sarah says, it could be a million and one things. It might not be anything to do with you or the other students in the classroom at all. You know, it could be a product of the time of day that your class is held on that they just don't gel so much at that time of the afternoon on a Friday.
There are so many, many human factors. Humans are so unendingly complex. It's.
And when you've got a group of them in a classroom that you would love to work together, there are going to be conflicts and things are going to happen. And it is a case of step by step, slowly, slowly and picking the battles as you go as well. You know, does it really matter if my student always does pair work with their best friend? If they're getting the task done and that's making the class run smoother, then maybe we don't need to win that battle today. Yep, tomorrow's another day. We've got. We've got time.
[00:13:20] Speaker C: Okay, Sarah, I want to pick up another phrase which I liked in, in your book, which is the pro Social classroom, which sounds like a good thing, but may not be obvious at first what you mean by that. How would you explain it to somebody?
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Okay, so the prosocial term came up as a response to antisocial behaviour. So there was an issue with antisocial behavior in the 1980s and 1990s. And the term pro social came with a kind of antidote to that, that it wasn't antisocial behavior, it was pro social behaviour. So it's about fostering behaviour among learners that is responsible for group functioning and living together. So social meaning, in this case in the classroom, we want the group to function as a community, as a social group, and we want them to function respectfully with each other. So pro social behaviours are those literally being kind, considerate and thoughtful about others, showing compassion essentially in how we interact in the classroom and what we expect of people. And it can be simple things like sharing a book, sharing a pencil, sharing a resource, making sure that somebody can hear what's going on, making sure that somebody's got the bags with them or whatever it is or that you share. It doesn't have to be big things, but it's about creating a sense of respect and kindness for each other. And I think you can teach kindness. I think that's something that it would be great if we didn't need to be taught. I think adults need to be taught it as well as kids. Don't think Bennett's my clock just to warn you.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: I think it's about teaching people that being respectful for others and being kind is going to make the group function better and also create stronger relationships in the classroom. And I don't see why we can't be very explicit about that as a way of the smooth functioning, as Charlotte calls it, of the classroom.
[00:15:16] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think you raise a really important point, which is, again, one of the questions that I've heard people ask is, you know, I've only just got time in the classroom to teach the language. I don't have time also to teach compassion. I think the point you're making there is that actually this makes the teaching of the language more effective, Right?
[00:15:40] Speaker A: It does. But I mean, there's so many little ways that we can do this. One of the ways that my students taught me this is their idea, not mine, is, and I'm sure it's an idea that's, that's been used in other places is at the end of the course, they had us stick a piece of paper on our backs and they had us walk around and we had to write one thing we liked about the person and what they had done during the course. And then they wrote it on our backs and you couldn't see and we had a lot of laughter and silliness and it couldn't be something physical. So you weren't allowed to say, I like your jacket or I like your glasses. It had to be something from the course, something memorable, something about that person. And at the end we were able to read these and we were able to share them with each other and they will talk about them and they got lovely adjectives and nice language that they'd used and it was a lovely activity for the group. And so there are activities that you can do that are helping them to be respectful and kind to each other and think about the positive qualities that people bring to the classroom. And you're using language to do that. I mean, that's one of the joys of being a language teacher, is that we are using the language for something. So why not also make it something that's going to help the smooth functioning of the class as well? It's like a win, win situation.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: You're right. That's an advantage we have in language teaching, which you don't have in, say, maths.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it's much harder. It's much harder for them and for us. We have to use the language to talk about, describe things and to reflect on things. So it's not a massive stretch to also add an element of, of an activity that can also foster positive group dynamics in the long run as well.
[00:17:12] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:14] Speaker D: And I think it's, you know, it's important to, to recognize that being pro social doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's best friends. You know, you don't, you don't have to like and love and get on, you know, incredibly well with every single person that's in your classroom. To be respectful, to give them space, to, to learn effectively, to give them what they need to succeed. You know, we can, we can have a quite respectful, non. Passionate, non.
You know, you don't need to be best friends to be good to someone.
[00:17:56] Speaker C: Right, right.
[00:17:58] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: I think every teacher can think in the staff room of people that they are happier to bond with and those they not want to bond with quite so closely. But we can still all be respectful in the same space.
[00:18:08] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when it comes to that relationship between a teacher and their student, we'll always have students that personally, their personalities click better with ours than other students. But we treat all of them with respect. And we treat all of them equally and we, we behave in a pro social way in that regard. And you know it, you don't need to, you don't need to have a close friendship to work effectively in a pair.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:18:38] Speaker D: You need to have certain skills like active listening, self regulation and these can all be taught in the classroom.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: So I think also this, that kind of advantage of being in a language learning classroom reminds me of the experience of going to a school in London which was very much an oracy based school. So oracy, which I'm sure you're familiar with, is in partnership with the word literacy. Literacy being the ability to read and write, oracy being able to communicate through speech effectively. So what you get in these schools is that a lot of the teaching is oral so that there's less being written down and more being spoken. And there's a lot in the lessons where students are working in groups and they're explaining concepts to each other and this is maths or, or science or other subjects.
And what you notice in those classrooms is there's a very strong bond between the students because they are speaking to each other all the time in a way that I feel when it's a more written environment, the teacher writes on the board, the students write individually at desks. It's much less of a human connection but between them. And it's one of the beauties of those schools. And that approach is that social interaction that is encouraged and which feels very familiar to a language teacher but is less familiar in say a maths class.
[00:20:26] Speaker D: It's interesting.
I think you know, myself, yourself, Ben, Sarah, we all live in Europe.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:20:37] Speaker D: And I think certainly in Europe over the last sort of 10, 15 years, we've, we've discovered a lot more language that we can use to talk about our emotional state. It's, it's become much easier in Europe to, to talk about your feelings, to, to broach subjects that perhaps Certainly in Britain 20 years ago you wouldn't talk about at all. But simultaneously we, we come back to that technology piece and that technology is sort of taking away that, that oral ability to talk.
[00:21:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:18] Speaker D: You know, we're, we're getting much more used to communicating via message, you know, with our mobile phones tapping away, sending a message like that rather than, you know, picking up the phone and having a conversation. So there's that sort of dichotomy between we have a lot more language that we can utilize to talk about these things, but we have less of an instinct to actually have those conversations. In a face to face environment. It's quite an odd situation we find ourselves in now. In many ways. I think.
[00:21:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it is that we're coming back to that dichotomy or that tension between when we talk about individualization, which can be both a positive and a negative thing, which technology is kind of bringing to us.
Okay. I think we've done justice to the topic of teaching with compassion. Or is there anything else you feel.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: I'd like to add? Maybe one thing that it goes back to, I think what Charlotte said earlier and what we've been talking about is that compassion teaching with compassion is effortful and we do it. I think a lot of teachers do this instinctively. And maybe what the book is about is about reflecting very explicitly where and when and how we can do that to foster these competences in the present and for the future. But a concern is always going to be compassion fatigue. So compassion fatigue is when it requires so much effort, we're so invested and teachers particularly are such an other oriented profession that you're so busy being compassionate to others and fostering compassion between your learners that you maybe neglect a little bit your own needs. And this goes back to what Charlotte was talking earlier about setting boundaries and sometimes boundaries to protect ourselves as teachers. So I make this point in the book in that first part and I and we're going to talk probably about self compassion in a moment when we talk about it in respect to learners. But now just feels a good time to talk about the fact that if you are going to be a compassion based educator, you're going to try and take on board some of these principles for your practice. And of course how people enact that's going to be very different and very individual. That compassion fatigue is a risk in our profession, that we just become exhausted by being continually compassionate and there for others. And so that we start with thinking about self compassion, that we start with thinking about it's not selfish to look at our own needs, our own boundaries, our own well being as a teacher, because that's what's going to help us to be compassionate and have space to be compassionate with our learners. So I just wanted to make sure that we had sort of also just added that perspective here, that self compassion, compassion, which refers to this being kind to yourself, being forgiving to yourself, recognizing that you're allowed to have needs and that you're part of shared humanity, that that's part of just being a human and you're a human and you'll make mistakes and sometimes we'll get things wrong, but that we have needs and it's okay to have needs. It's okay to say that we can get tired by things, that we get frustrated by things. That's what self compassion is. And teachers allowing themselves that space to set boundaries and be compassionate with themselves is foundational to them being able to be compassionate for their learners too.
[00:24:37] Speaker C: And of course, that reminds me of another book that you published with Oxford called Teacher well Being, which is full of really important insights, but also ideas and thoughts about how you can protect your well being as a teacher and also for managers of teachers about how they can help and support teachers.
I feel it would be useful to think about, you know, some ideas about how people can manage that. Compassion fatigue. What? Any suggestions for people who may be feeling this is. This is their concern that this could be a bit overwhelming for them?
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's about recognizing that you're allowed to have needs. Let's start at the very beginning. Let's just, you know, start with the notion that as a teacher, you're allowed to have needs, you're allowed to have emotions, and you're allowed to feel tired and frustrated by things. This isn't about repressing emotions, it's about recognizing those emotions and recognizing what you need to be able to respond to this. Now, one of the tensions that we have always experienced in discussions about teacher well being is that tension between what you can do yourself as an agent and to what extent that is constrained by systemic social, institutional constraints. And it may be that you need to reach out to your leadership or that you reach out to fellow teachers, that you need a support network. So, you know, there's it for me, there's always been that tension in giving people advice for what they can do for themselves, but recognizing that it's never just about you on your own, you're working within a system, and it's about looking for support there, looking for understanding, maybe having also some of those difficult conversations with colleagues and leadership about what is required and what is being asked and what is realistic and not realistic to ask of a teacher. When it comes to what needs to happen. There's so many things that we could talk about. I think one of the key things is about setting boundaries. Charlotte Tools about this earlier is that setting boundaries in terms of time and space, there is a time when you can be not available. It's okay to have time where you withdraw and do what we call detach. And that's about having hobbies, something that can occupy your mind and keep you away from work and that you can set those, those temporal boundaries in terms of time when you are not available, you are not at work, where you're not thinking about work, where you're doing other things, marking off time in your calendar to do things that matter to you, whether it's with your family, whether it's hobbies, whether it's leisure of some kind, and having a physical space where you've got places in your home that don't have your work spread everywhere.
Because I know that for many of us it encroaches into various parts of the house and it's good to have a space where you create a physical boundary and say work has no, no space in here. You put it in a bag, you put the bag away and that you have time and space away from work.
[00:27:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's really useful advice.
[00:27:40] Speaker D: It's certainly one of the things that hit home to me when I was sitting there reading Compassion Based Language Education on my sofa. And out of the corner of my eye I can see my desk with the mountains of work on it. And then I realized that I haven't turned turned off the sound on my work phone and it's pinging on a Saturday. And it is that just knowing that my office is also my living room is something that I got to the end of. Compassion Based Language Education. I was like, right, that's one of the things I have to change.
[00:28:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:11] Speaker D: Need a bigger house now.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:15] Speaker C: I think it's really important point because otherwise if, if people think the it's up to them and it's all within their agency, then that you can have a feeling of guilt that you're not able to manage it, which is, which is not the intention.
[00:28:31] Speaker D: And I think, you know, it's something that Sarah mentioned, certainly in Compassion Based Language Education, but also in teacher well being as well, is that it's also really important for us as teachers to recognize what we can't change in terms and what we don't have the, the right knowledge or education to change. I mean, you mentioned it earlier with the film Precious. You know, there can be a lot going on in our students lives that we potentially are not the right person to fix. And I think that we tend to feel that responsibility, that pressure to take everything onto our shoulders and perhaps we're not always the best people to fix that problem.
Recognising what we can do and what we can't.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to this episode of Talking elt the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. Tune in again next week when we will look more closely at another aspect of Compassion Based Language education.
[00:29:38] Speaker C: Don't forget to like and subscribe if.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: You if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it. To find out more about Sarah's book on Compassion Based Language education, see the link in the episode description.
