E is for Effort

 This is the fifth of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

 “Don’t mistake activity for achievement. To produce results, tasks must be well organized and properly executed; otherwise, it’s no different from children running around the playground—everybody is doing something, but nothing is being done; lots of activity, no achievement.”  

That’s one of my favorite quotes from John Wooden, the UCLA men’s basketball coach who won ten national collegiate championships from 1948-1975. His coaching wisdom is widely-known and probably in the coaching DNA of every basketball program in America. If you’re interested, this book is a great read: Coach Wooden's Leadership Game Plan for Success: 12 Lessons for Extraordinary Performance and Personal Excellence.

I have a good reason to remember the first sentence because I was on the receiving end of a version of it from my own college basketball coach.  I’d be hustling in practice, giving it my all (or so I thought), sweating like it was monsoon season, but unfortunately not really accomplishing anything.  “Paul, you’ve got a lot of activity but little achievement!”  (Full disclosure: I wasn’t good.)

Safe to say that quote has stayed with me, and of all the sports quotes I’ve come across over the years, Coach Wooden’s words ring the truest for language training.  I recall it often to describe much of what I’ve observed in ESL/ESOL classrooms. Ironically, I had always understood it from the player’s point of view but with the full context I learned it’s meant for coaches, the teachers of the game. 

Here lands our final letter in the acronym VOICE. E is for Effort.  Let’s assume none of us are lazy.  But let’s also assume that we’ve all done activities for activities’ sake in class. Been there, guilty of that.  Bluntly put, in the field of English language training, a large proportion of class time is often spent on “stuff”.  I think the specific measurement is “waaaaay too much.”  Classes can easily devolve into an amalgam of activities with no larger training plan. Classes can also seem well-organized with the pretense of a rigid tense-by-tense unit-by-unit plan carved out for each level, but with an end result of advanced students passing but not having mastered the basics.  Virtually the same stuff has been generally accepted for oh-let’s-say forty years: fill-in-the-blank worksheets, videos, word jumbles, games, spelling quizzes, multiple choice tests, crossword puzzles (Oh, wait. Correction! They added QR codes. It’s modern!) The cold truth is that a good portion of English language learning textbooks are literally made to require minimum effort from the book-holding class facilitator. How much of your class time is dedicated to that instructional route? Do you move on to the next grammar point with more activities because that’s what you’re supposed to do in weeks 4,5,6 etc.?  If so, you could say to those students that, just like 20 year-old me, that they’ve got a lot of activity with little achievement.  

But you can’t blame the students.  They took your class. They’re looking for guidance.  They followed your plan.  They’re busy doing what you asked of them.  They’re mentally “hustling” and giving it their all (hopefully not sweating like it’s monsoon season).  But after 50, 100, 150 hours of class with you doing your verb tense activities, can they speak accurately in spontaneous, creative speech with those targeted forms?   If not, that sure was a lot of activity with little achievement.

Doing cool, fun activities in class isn’t all bad.  If your students are coming to class every day and enjoying it and making friends, great for them.  They’re getting some language exposure.  But if you were their permanent teacher, how many years would they have to be with you to achieve what we could call fluency?  The academically inclined students, the ones who need it to get a job, the ones who need it to succeed in their jobs, the ones who study on their own, the ones who fight through a Netflix series looking up every word they don’t understand–all of them will do okay regardless. Your class is just some extra practice.  Those groups are a very small slice of the English language learner pie worldwide, though. 

Exiting my off-rant, I do think the future is becoming much brighter for language training.  In the past few years I’ve met more instructors who are past the static noise.  They make plans suited for the students in front of them, collectively and individually. They’re hard on themselves, but self-critical in a healthy way. They’re not satisfied. They constantly adjust and experiment with a purpose.  They pay attention to research. They ask questions.  They debate in a pursuit of knowledge, not in a protection of ego.  

Those instructors, in my view, have the whole package. They give students VOICE, and that big E for effort is the driving force behind all of it.  I noticed that they give their students enough time and energy for a high Volume of output.  They give their students Opportunities to express themselves and make errors. They provide Intensity so that students have to be focused the whole class time with little down time for anyone.  Those instructors really know how to provide feedback and when to push and pull.  Yes, they still do fun activities, but their activities are for dessert, not the main course.  And that’s great Coaching.   The complete package takes Effort.  You’ve got it in you.