The Fundamental Filter

why \”engagement\” is the core of my teaching curriculum

One of my goals for this blog is to describe my teaching methodology in ways all readers can understand, even if they don’t teach professionally. Everyone can and likely will be a teacher at some point, even if you’re not in a classroom or getting paid (far too little) for your time. I use SELC (the Saikou English Learning Curriculum) with my private students; it’s a curriculum with teaching methods that I’m still constantly updating based on my students’ reactions and responses.

Whether you’re interested in SELC or want to start somewhere more basic, it’s important to be aware of your own ideologies; what do you believe makes people learn best? These preconceptions and convictions command every interaction we have with learners. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where I’m coming from, pedagogically-speaking, and maybe reading this will help you think about your own approach.

I place a lot of importance on the factor of learning that’s most closely summarized by Stephen Krashen’s “affective filter hypothesis”. Plainly speaking, the hypothesis states that language acquisition can be impeded or completely blocked due to negative emotions the learner is experiencing at the time. Factors both inside and outside the classroom that cause stress or negative emotions raise the student’s affective filter, while other positive factors, both from environment and teaching style, lower the affective filter.

I highlight this “affective filter” factor as the number one thing that teachers need to be aware of and deal with in the classroom simply because it’s a non-starter variable. You can be the best teacher in the world, a master of every technique under the sun, with dozens of accolades and degrees to your name, and even then, you can utterly fail at teaching a student even the most basic of language lessons simply because the student doesn’t want to or can’t learn due to a high affective filter. To use a cross-context metaphor, even the fastest car in the world goes nowhere if the driver refuses to step inside.

I’d like to expand on Krashen’s theory in my own way. For one, I don’t think it’s just “negative emotions” that keep the affective filter high; the real impediment that keeps learning from happening is general disengagement. People need to be engaged in some way for learning to happen. They can feel negative emotions and still learn something, as long as their level of engagement manages to overcome those filter-raising factors. Even in stressful or extremely unpleasant situations, people manage to learn things due to circumstances demanding it; if a group were locked in a room and required to memorize a 12-digit password to get out, you can be sure that some folks would learn that password pretty quickly.

That being said, it’s important to remember that this kind of stress doesn’t work for everyone, or even for some people all the time. Also high-stress teaching styles are generally awful. Please don’t lock your learners in a room and make them learn vocabulary lists to escape. The point I’m trying to make here is, engagement is a factor separate from stress factors, and if you’re only treating stress factors, you’re not dealing with the whole picture. It’s my assertion that engagement is the master key to learning.

With SELC I’m building a teaching method based around creating engagement in lessons in simple and reliable ways, easy enough for any teacher to pick up and find success. In my next post I’ll introduce the teaching method that is the backbone to SELC; the 5 Factors of Engagement.

Thanks for reading!

 

image credit: Sheana Keane – http://www.sheanakeane.com/about/