Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: 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 by Professor Sarah Mercer, author of our new book titled Compassion Based Language Education, and by Charlotte Rance, a senior professional development consultant.
In this fifth episode, we'll be talking about teaching for compassion. Compassion isn't just the way we teach, but it's also a learning goal in itself.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Okay, so one of the points that we've been mentioning in this podcast is that it's partly about teaching with compassion, but it's also teaching for compassion. Can you just give us a quick summary of what that means, Sarah?
[00:01:07] Speaker C: So I think for me there's a very strong overlap between the two, that when we teach with compassion, we model the kind of behaviors, the kind of skills, the kind of competence as we develop those in our learners. I think if you get learners to be compassionate with each other and to build up those relationship skills in the classroom, it will be easier for them to then project those skill outwards so they're not completely separate. I think one builds on the other. But teaching for compassion is about looking in terms of sort of global skills, in terms of what do I want, what can I be compassionate about, what are my spheres of compassion? So compassion for the self, so developing your well being, literacy, looking at the skills of emotional regulation, managing yourself, then there's a compassion for others. So how we are compassionate for others, people maybe that we don't know, people in the community, people in the global community, things like global citizenship education and so on. So looking beyond ourselves to where we also can express our compassion and then compassion for the planet as a form of eco literacy, this way that we care for the planet that we're on, and maybe a slightly different way of looking at environmental issues in the language classroom. So teaching for compassion is to develop these skills of critical thinking, awareness and compassionate caring for others, self and others and planet, and the skills and competences that go together with that. And they these overlap a lot with the skills of global citizenship, well being, literacy, eco literacy, those kinds of things.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: But that's really helpful. Thank you very much. That's those three layers or three spheres from self to others to the globe.
That's really helpful if we focus first of all on the self compassion and particularly on learners and self compassion. Because I found that one of the really interesting bits that parts of the book is this thinking of the teacher trying to develop self compassion among learners.
Why do you think that's important and how can we go about it.
[00:03:19] Speaker C: So we talked a little bit in some of the previous sessions where we talked about self compassion for teachers. Teachers have to know what self compassion means and be able to enact it with themselves first before they're able to enact it with their learners. So it does mean that this is a prerequisite, is that teachers have taken the time to reflect on compassion for themselves as educators, their needs and what they require and how they manage their emotions and set boundaries. And I think in the past we used to talk very openly about study skills, about teaching learners skills of how to learn, learning to learn. And this for me, this sort of self compassion is part of that learning emotional regulation, learning to manage our emotions, learning what we need as learners to be able to balance things. So that because learners experience a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety and learning to manage those emotions. Now, I'm not saying, and this is something I keep repeatedly stressing, teachers are not supposed to be psychologists. That's not their job. And they will need, if they've got stress students with serious issues, they need to know who to refer them to. This isn't their job. But helping learners to manage their emotions in the classroom, helping them to have skills to manage their learning, that's something we've been doing for 50 years, if not all eternity. We do that anyway. This is about being very explicit about that. And a very big part of this for me in the language classroom is about how we work with mistakes and how we get let go of perfectionism and how we encourage learners to compassionate about what it means to learn and use a language and that it's about not being perfect, it's about making mistakes, but it's about seeing that as an act of courage and an act of bravery and something that we want to celebrate as opposed to something to be feared and something to be avoided. So I think for me, self compassion is, yes, it's part about those skills that we develop to help learners manage their learning and their lives as learners. And it's also very much in the language classroom, a very specific set of skills about how we, what kind of attitudes we develop towards the making of mistakes and this whole notion of just deconstructing this notion of perfection.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Right. This must be a, a familiar topic for you, Charlotte.
[00:05:32] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Responding to mistakes.
[00:05:34] Speaker D: Yeah, it's, it's bread and butter for a teacher, isn't it?
You know, but Sarah's absolutely right. You, you have to, to sort of. We use the word disclosure, a Little bit earlier, you know, disclosing something about yourself as a person and in that classroom environment.
I think that you, you sort of really need to model these behaviors to your students, you know, if they, if they see you making a mistake. I mean, I must have spelled a thousand words wrong on a whiteboard over the years, and my students love to correct me when they have the opportunity. Charlotte, you spelled that wrong again.
But what I have to learn to do is demonstrate that this is part of being a human, this is part of communication, you know, and I think this is something that, it's quite an interesting perspective as a native English speaker teacher, and this is something that's come up a lot in conversations with teachers all across the world, is that when I make a mistake in front of my students, I'm given the benefit of the doubt. They'll have a lot more compassion for me if I make a mistake because, oh, you know, it's clearly not that important if the native speaker doesn't know it. And I think that as a, as a non native speaker teacher, that can actually be very uncomfortable as a space to be in, you know, because if a non native speaker teacher makes a mistake, are the students going to give them as much grace for that mistake to happen?
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:29] Speaker D: And I, it's something that I think we have to be very, very conscious of when we're, we're talking about modeling that, that self compassion in the classroom.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:40] Speaker D: Is that not everybody starts in the same position.
And for people to, to be open and honest about their mistakes, that, that can say different things and it can tell your internal monologue different things about you as well.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Right?
[00:07:56] Speaker D: Yeah. So I think that what, what comes out of that is that actually I'm not necessarily the greatest model of what's achievable for my students.
You know, I, I learned English grammar when I became a teacher. I knew it internally. I could tell you at the beginning of my teaching career what was wrong, what was right. But if you'd asked me why, I wouldn't know. And I've had to develop a lot of sort of understanding about that for my students to be able to say, okay, yes, I make a mistake, and that's a natural part of me speaking a language. You make mistakes in your mother tongue. And that doesn't mean that you're, you're not wrong or you're not right. Yeah, it means that you've made a mistake and a mistake is part of learning. And we make mistakes all the time. So trying to show those, those analogies Is, is really important.
But also being conscious that a mistake to me looks different than a mistake to someone else might and how we deal with that in the classroom. And in that respect, I'd say that the sort of non native speaker teachers are actually a much more accurate representation of, of what is achievable. They can be a much better model for their learners in that respect if they can take that bravery moment and open themselves up and say, okay, you know, I'm going to be a bit more compassionate to myself.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:38] Speaker D: And I'll be open about the mistakes that I make. I don't know.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:09:42] Speaker D: It's a challenging one.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Sarah, I don't know if you find or what you say to teachers who say, I get what you're saying, but my students ask me to correct every mistake they make.
[00:09:55] Speaker C: But then that's time to have a conversation about why. Why do they think, what's their model that they have in their mind. So one of the things that I do, I don't remember where in the book it is we talk about native speakerism and the problems that go with that whole ideology. We, we talk about celebrating linguistic and cultural diversity, but you've got to walk the talk. If we really mean that, then we need to talk about different types of English. If we need to talk about what do we really mean by right and wrong and who's setting those boundaries. And I don't feel that those conversations, I think students, particularly from secondary upwards, are certainly able to have very explicit conversations about that. And we need to be working really actively, proactively to deconstruct these ideas that there is some standard perfect form of English, that we don't recognize it as a growing living thing that is enacted by individuals based on their whole linguistic repertoire. That's a real thing. And so we have to maybe challenge ourselves and challenge our learners in having these conversations about what that means. And that means that we look at different standards. We look at different notions of what correct is and incorrect and right and not right and mistakes and what's not a mistake and that that's different things. We can be very explicit and say to learners, hey guys, you're going to have to do the exam. I don't set it. I don't agree with it. I wouldn't do it this way. I can't change that. But we in the class and how we use language and why we use language and the way that we engage with language, we can have different conversations about that. That's going to empower you to use Language as it's really used.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: So I don't see why we have to be duplicitous about that. I think we can be upfront and say, the exams, they're set. I can't do anything about it. You can't do anything about it. But we can talk about what real language means in the real world. And if we're preparing for an exam and you want me to give feedback on that, we can talk about that. Sometimes I will. Sometimes we might decide that we want to focus on fluency, but we can be explicit about those conversations. And if we really want to deconstruct these ideas of perfection, these. These ideological models of what language looks like, then I think we have to be very explicit about that. And whilst we're waiting for standard setting to catch up in that conversation, I think we can be very explicit about it with learners.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, previous jobs where I've worked a lot with corpus linguistics, and that is one of the areas where you start to realize there is very rarely a clear right and wrong about a lot of language. There are many different ways that people will consider an expression to be correct or not correct.
So there's that bit about correct and not correct. There's also the. You also, in your book, talk about the importance of students positivity, positivity being an important part of learning.
Could you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:12:51] Speaker C: Yeah. So we have. So, okay, so there's a lot of. My favorite topic now.
So, first of all, humans have a negativity bias. That's just a natural part of being a human is that we tend to focus on the negatives. We see the negatives more easily. If you think about newspapers and why newspapers report all the negative news, it's because that draws our attention more. It's more sensational. Nobody reports on all the wonderful nice things that happen every single day. And we take the positive things for granted. We just don't see them anymore because it's just. It's actually the norm. That's the joy about when you talk about things like this is that the norm is for people to be kind and to be polite to each other and to be pro social. It's just that isn't very newsworthy and it doesn't drag our attention in the same way. So we have kind of gone blind, if you like, to the positive things that happen every day. So the fact that we get through a day that we're healthy, that we've had a nice conversation with friends, that we had some good humor over lunch that, you know, we don't even comment on that. We don't notice it because it's the norm. So the norm is actual positivity for most people. But norm doesn't mean that you have only positive in your life. That's just nonsense. And it has never been the suggestion of anything to do with well being or positive psychology that there's only positives. It's just about drawing our attention more consciously to the positive. It's not about denying the negative, it's not about repressing the negatives. It's not about pretending that these things are not part of our lives in the world. That's the courage that comes with critical compassion. Yeah, but it's about saying that actually there's a lot of really good things that happen to us and a lot of positive things that we can focus on and that maybe we need to consciously draw our attention to that because we are more automatically drawn to the negative. Now, when it comes to learning, there are two things. First of all, our research has focused very heavily on anxiety. And it's always been about how to reduce anxiety. And teachers have been schooled in this for eons, and that remains one of the challenges. And some of the things that we've talked about in the book, about creating psychological safety, creating a safe space in the classroom, getting rid of notions of perfectionism, allowing for mistakes, encouraging risk, that's going to lower anxiety in the classroom. But one of the other things that we haven't spoken so much about is that when we boost positive emotions, that's what we call the broaden and build theory of positive emotion, that positive emotions are just like an antidote to the negative emotions. Positive emotions actually open our minds. We are more receptive, we are more creative, we're more willing to try new things out. We learn new skills because we experiment a little bit and we try stuff out. So boosting positive emotions in the language classroom, it's not just about enjoyment and fun. That's a whole other topic that we could probably have a whole podcast on. But Positive Emotions is about building that space that learners are open, they're receptive, they can be creative. It's not just the antidote to negative. It's creating that positive space, drawing their attention to their positives, drawing our attention to their the positives in the classroom and in our learners, and building on that as a way of expanding competence rather than just trying to remedy problems.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Fantastic. Thank you so much. That was such a clear presentation of what's a really complicated topic or there are many dimensions to it. That was really useful.
And it's drawing me onto another topic which you talk about, that beautiful phrase fierce compassion, where we talk. You talk about.
I think it comes back to a point you made right at the beginning about compassion being empathy, plus a willingness to. To act in. In response to that. And I think. I think that's where the fierce compassion comes in. Is it? Is that right?
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So partly to do with that, it's that with fierce compassion is. And actually, we talked about this with Charlotte in relation to classroom management and looking at the kind of behaviors and the kind of courage that's needed of teachers and that sometimes that fierce compassion is going to look like setting boundaries and being quite strict and so on. Fierce compassion is about the fact that when you want to advocate for yourself or for others, you may need to be very assertive about that. And that compassion is not always about just gentle and anything goes and everything's okay. That true compassion requires that courage and that criticality, and it may need you to enact it in ways that are fierce. So fierce doesn't mean aggression. Fierce means assertive, and that you assert for rights and for issues and for perspectives and so on. So compassion, when it's accompanied with that criticality and that courage, how you act on that may. Sometimes requires more fierce type of compassion, which is based in things like assertiveness.
[00:17:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Did that ring true for you, Charlotte, when you read that?
[00:17:51] Speaker D: I think it's a beautiful phrase, and you're absolutely right, you know, because compassion isn't necessarily easy at all, and the environment that you're in might not be set up for compassion to happen. I mean, yeah, I can. I can think about. Think about times where I've found myself having to be fiercely compassionate on behalf of my students. You know, whether that's unrealistic expectations from the institution where it's my job to advocate for my students and to say the standards that you're pushing here are too much. You know, it. It's not realistic and we're having a negative impact on their learning, or whether that's, you know, behaviors in the classroom, as we mentioned earlier, you know, or saying, right, okay, here's the. Here is the hard boundary, and we're not crossing this for these reasons. But it does come back to that. That sort of trust and that honesty piece. To me, certainly, it might not be easy, but doing the right thing doesn't necessarily come easy. Yeah. All we have to do is look at history to know that.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:09] Speaker D: So yeah, absolutely.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: I think this is a theme that's coming through, is that compassion is not necessarily the easy way of doing things, but it's more the right way of doing things.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: I think it's, I think it's, for me, it's a guiding principle of how I would like to be as an educator and the values I would like to embrace. I don't always find it easy and sometimes I don't and I'm still learning how to enact it. It's one of the things I think I say in the book that's important to me to get across is this isn't prescribing people how to teach this, giving them inspiration? And they will make this their own, I hope, and add to this conversation about what this looks like in practice and how we can be a compassion based language educator, what that looks like. And as Charlotte said earlier, that will look maybe different for different people in different settings. And one book is never going to cover all that, but it can maybe inspire this lens on how we look at what we do and how we do it.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: 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.
Don't forget to like and subscribe 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.
