I is for Intensity

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

Last fall an experienced instructor came to observe a class I was leading and to be a rotating partner to students.  After the class completed the two-hour session, her first comment to me was music to my big ears:  “That was intense.”   To be clear, she didn’t mean it in an “I feel like we just did a crossfit workout with an instructor who got cut from his high school football team and now he is taking it out on us” sort of intense way.  She added, “The students had to be 100% focused the whole time, and so did I.”  After coaching functional speaking exercises with different students for close to two straight hours, she got a good “workout” as a teacher.

In giving students VOICE, our V stands for volume and our O stands for opportunities.  I is for intensity. In simple terms, intensity is volume of speaking output divided by time.  When students leave your class, do they feel like they got a good English workout?  Or did they get a teacher’s grammar PowerPoint + worksheets + a bunch of curated busywork?  

When I give presentations or conduct professional development on language training, my first goal is always to get “the click”– the proverbial lightbulb that switches on when an instructor realizes that if students cannot perform simple functional speaking exercises with accuracy, it makes zero sense for that instructor to move on to a brand new grammar point every class, or worse yet, more complicated grammar.  So why does that instructional error persist to a large degree?  

There’s a fairly easy answer to that, and it’s one that is patently unfair to students investing their time and effort in a class.  English language programs tend to hand a book to instructors and call it a curriculum.  It’s the School of Next Page.  The School of Next Page is entrenched.  The School of Next Page is plug-and-play.  The School of Next Page literally comes with a how-to manual for teachers most of the time.  After all, it wouldn’t be too $exy to rewrite the book to ask teachers to adopt a coaching approach–that just doesn’t [cough] tran$late.  Any seismic change would hurt the bottom line. But the bottom line in the metaphorical sense is also that students need to take and retake their ESL classes, often over the course of many years, fill-in-the-blanking their way to the next class with minimal upward trajectory in their accuracy and confidence.

It’s a broad statement, but I’ll confidently say that most English language students haven’t experienced what an intense English language workout feels like.  Because the School of Next Page likely mimics the format of the English classes they might have taken in their countries, the expectation to encounter something markedly different is low. Often the stakes are low as well. In free programs, such as adult education in the U.S., students lose nothing by dropping the class and waiting for the next term, hoping for a more dynamic instructor and approach. But once they have had that great workout once, the School of Next Page seems not only antiquated and boring, but unacceptable.  As a language trainer, when you can provide an intense workout, students and clients will seek you out.