I was ready to start class. Unlike previous days when I left my door open, I slowly closed it because I didn’t want any administrators walking down the halls to see what I was doing with my students. I was afraid that I might get fired.
While explaining a writing technique to my students, I noticed that one of them, Emily, was staring off to the side. Thinking that she was daydreaming, I wondered whether I should say her name or ask her a question to “bring her back” to the classroom.
Recently, I learned that I didn’t necessarily need to be concerned about Emily’s lack of eye contact with me. In fact, surprisingly, research suggests that other students might have benefited from doing just what Emily was doing — gazing away from me.
“David, Please report to the Director’s office as soon as your class finishes. He needs to talk to you.” A program assistant handed me a note with those sentences on it. Gulp!
In the early 1980s, my wife and I, without much thought, accepted teaching positions on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was a Greek island, so what could possible go wrong?
It was a prep school that high school students attended in the late afternoons/evenings after high school to study English. Shortly after arriving, we met one of the teachers whom we were replacing. He told us that the school had a lot of discipline problems because many of the students didn’t want to be there. He said that the teacher-turnover was quite high as a result. In fact, a couple of teacher had just disappeared a few months earlier.
On the first day of class, as we walked down the hallway, we could see students literally chasing each other around the class rooms and jumping on the desks. My first class was with 16 tenth-grade students. Although most of the students paid little attention to me but instead continued to chat as I started the lesson, there were three female students sitting in the front row appearing eager to begin. Those three became the focus of my attention. Gradually, most of the others started to engage in the lesson, while a couple slept or doodled or looked out the window.
This posting includes sample lessons of a Writing Workshop that give students a lot of autonomy.*
Since posting this back in 2019, I’ve heard from teachers who decided to try out a Writing Workshop with their ESL Writing classes even though they were skeptical at first. Their hesitation seemed to be doubtful that their students would actually be productive without more direct teacher control. However, they reported that their initial skepticism was quickly dispelled after seeing the same great benefits that I had described in the post below. Almost all of them stated that they couldn’t imagine teaching a Writing class in any other way in the future.
