The Power of Cute

Tags

activities, cute, Motivation

[The importance of using puppies and kittens in class]

Patrick Fagan was walking down the street one day when he saw a homeless person selling ‘The Big Issue’. As he himself says (‘#Hooked’ – p. 40), on such occasions, he almost invariably walks past. On that day however, he did not. Not only that, he bought the issue (£ 2.50), gave the man a £10 note and told him to keep the change! Why?

The answer was simple: Bob. Bob is the lovely ginger cat you see here, and he proved just irresistible. Here is the full story (ibid – p. 41): James Bowen was a homeless drug addict who decided to kick the habit, moved into assisted housing and started selling ‘The Big Issue’. One day, he discovered that a cute ginger cat had found its way into the house. He looked after it and the cat took to following him around. James named him Bob.

James also did some busking and he discovered that with Bob by his side, people would stop to listen, they would talk to him, interact with the cat – and give more money. At some point, a friend suggested that perhaps James should write a book about himself and Bob. James did. The book sold 2 million copies in the UK alone! So successful was the book that it was made into a movie! (Check out the trailer below).

You may say: ‘OK – what does all this have to do with ELT?’ Well, don’t you want your students to be engaged? Don’t you want them to wax lyrical about your lessons? Cute attracts. Cute is memorable. Cute presses all the right buttons. There is a reason why puppies and kittens feature so prominently in ads – we love them! Cat videos generated 1.6 billion views on YouTube (and that was in 2012!); the cat channel mugumogu has 750,000 subscribers… I could go on and on…

So how can we use the power of cute in class? Here are three ideas (I am sure you can come up with many more):

• Play this fantastic ad up to 0:34; get students to write what happens next, then play the rest of it ( https://bit.ly/3aIbXV4 ).

• Get students to practice listening, by playing the ‘Dear Kitten’ ad. You can find the clip and a worksheet here ( https://bit.ly/2Q8NWwV ).
• Ask students to prepare a presentation about their own pets – complete with pictures and videos.

Speaking about that last idea, one of my students is a lovely lady from Kazakhstan.  We have always had a good working relationship, but it had always been somewhat formal. Recently however, I happened to mention pets and she started telling me about her lovely puppy, Jason. That was it – she would not stop talking! Our lessons have never been the same since… 😊

The Moral: Use cute in class. Advertisers know what they are doing.

Getting People to Do Things

Tags

demonstration, Influence, leadership, modelling

[The importance of modelling in overcoming resistance]

It is a hot day. You are at some event outdoors with hundreds and hundreds of other people. The music is playing. There is a lone guy there dancing in a crazy way  all by himself. Do you join him? Watch this amazing clip:

Ok – now forget about the dancing. Has this ever happened to you? You have prepared an amazing mingling activity for your class. You give them the instructions and say ‘OK – off you go!’. And nobody moves. I am sure you know the feeling. It is even worse if you are a presenter, like I am, working with middle-aged colleagues. How do you get them to do things?

Jez Groom was facing a similar problem. As a business consultant he was running a workshop for a big company and it was important for his demonstration to get his group to do a particular activity. ‘What would this entail?’ I hear you ask. Well, nothing special – just listening to a song for 3-year olds, lying down pretending to be a sleeping little bunny when the singer goes ‘see the little bunnies sleeping’ and then jumping up and hopping around like a bunny when prompted by the lyrics. Piece of cake… 😊 Seriously: what would you say are the chances that a group of business people would do such a thing?

Groom tested this. He gave a control group a set of instructions telling them what they were supposed to do and then pressed ‘play’. Predictably, nobody moved. Yet with another group, it was a totally different story: the people dutifully lied down, and when the rousing ‘Wake up little bunnies’ came, they all started bouncing around. What was the difference? Here is the idea: Groom had told a few people in advance what was going to happen and he had got them to agree to comply unquestioningly. That was it. (Groom & Vellacott ‘Ripple’ – pp. 14-15)

There is a clear lesson for us here: people may be reluctant to do something, unless they take their lead from their peers. Here are some tips:

• First of all, your students may not know what to do – so make sure you do not just give instructions, but you demonstrate the activity as well.
• If you think your students might be self-conscious about doing a particular activity, tell some of them in advance and ask them to agree to be the first to do it.
• If you want students to organise themselves in groups, tell some people in advance and get them to initiate things.
• If you are worried people may not feel comfortable about asking questions after a talk, tell 2-3 of them to prepare some questions in advance to get the ball rolling.

Remember the crazy guy video? If he had arranged the whole thing with the first 2-3 ‘followers’, the ‘movement’ would have started sooner.

The Moral: To overcome reactance, get some people to model the desired behaviour.

How to Change People’s Attitudes

Tags

Classroom Management, dissonance, Influence, Motivation

[The importance of cognitive dissonance]

Here is a question for you: I ask you to do a boring task – say turn around some wooden pegs for no reason at all. They I offer you a reward – either $ 20 or $ 1. Are you more likely to say you enjoyed it in the former or in the latter condition?

Naturally, your answer is wrong. 😊 Watch the clip below:

But there was a reason why you got it wrong; I left out an important detail. The subjects in the study were actually asked to lie to a third person about the nature of the task. The ones who got paid $ 20 thought: ‘OK, the task was boring, but they gave me $ 20, so that’s why I lied’. With the others though, this wouldn’t work; $ 1 was a trifling sum. So why did they do it? Faced with this internal conflict, these subjects actually changed their perception of reality: ‘Oh well – I didn’t lie so much; the task was quite interesting’. This is pure magic! 😊

Think about it: most of us feel that people’s beliefs determine their actions; Cognitive Dissonance argues that in many cases it is people’s actions that shape their beliefs! (‘The Advertising Effect’ – pp. 32-33). Here are two examples:

• We value more things we paid a lot for (‘It has cost me a fortune, so either I am stupid or this is really very valuable’)
• We think worse of people we have wronged (‘I spoke badly about him, so either I was unfair or he really is a b****rd’)

So is there a way we can use this insight with our students? Yes, there is. We do not need to try to persuade them that something is good for them so they will do it; we only need to get them to do something and then their brain will do the rest! Here are some tips:

• Ask students to prepare mini videos advertising the school / the teacher / the coursebook (‘If I said I liked it, it must be good’).
• Ask students to help you with the lesson (‘If I have helped the teacher, she must be nice’).
• Ask students to participate in a project ‘as part of an experiment’ (‘If I have spent so much time, I must be a conscientious student’).
• Ask students to volunteer for a school initiative (‘If I have volunteered, this means I value the work we do here’).

By the way, here is one last tip: people feel that more expensive medicine is more effective (‘If I have paid so much, the pills must be potent’) – so make sure you charge quite a bit for your private lessons. 😊

The Moral: Get people to do things and they will change their attitude too.

Marginal Gains – Huge Results

Tags

autonomy, habits, learner independence, psychology

[The importance of improving the way you do things]

The year 2003 marked what has to be the most spectacular turnaround in sports history. For more than a century, the British cycling team had performed so badly, that they had not won a gold medal since 1908 or the Tour de France in 110 years! Then Dave Brailsford took over.

Brailsford introduced an interesting new strategy, which he called ‘the aggregation of  marginal gains’. This was the idea: there are a number of factors which contribute to a cyclist achieving a top performance; if we break down all of these and then make an 1% improvement in each one, the overall result should be very significant.

Following this logic, the team got together and analysed everything: the bike and its parts; the athletes’ clothes; the training, the athletes’ diet, their health, etc. They looked at every single detail and then made dozens and dozens of changes. For instance, they improved the saddles to make them more comfortable; they switched to lighter fabrics for the athletes’ clothes; they used biofeedback sensors to see how each athlete responded to the training so as to customize their work-outs; they even tried out different pillows and mattresses to ensure that the athletes got the best sleep possible.

Did all this work pay off? You bet it did. In the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the team won 60% of all the gold medals in cycling. In the London Olympics of 2012, they set seven world records. And in a stunning winning spree, they won the Tour de France five out of six times in the period between 2012 and 2017. Amazing! (‘Atomic Habits’ – pp. 14-15 [Watch the short clip below] ).

So what if we as EL teachers were to take a leaf out of Brailsford’s book? What if we were to look at how our students try to learn English and improved every single thing by 1% (or more)? Here are some ideas:

• If our students record single words, why not show them how to record collocations?
• If they enjoy watching TV series, why not tell them to watch them with English subtitles on?
• If they revise by re-reading their notes, why not teach them how to quiz themselves instead?

Apart from the language benefits, getting students to change the way they practice should produce a far more important change – a change in identity: ‘I am an active language learner’. That would be a huge win.

The Moral: FiShow your students how to make ‘marginal’ changes.

Going the Extra Mile

Tags

customer service, liking, Motivation, psychology

[How little things can result in huge reputational gains]

It is the middle of July, the Greek summer sun is bearing down on you mercilessly, so you head for your favourite bar on the beach. The barista greets you with a smile. ‘You know that weird cocktail you asked me for yesterday – the one I hadn’t heard of?’ he asks. ‘Well, I looked it up, found the ingredients and prepared it for you. Here it is. On the house’. Wow!

The world of Customer Service is full of little incidents like this one (taken from ‘The Power of Moments’ – p. 55). Imagine for instance being a CEO and flying off somewhere to receive an award in front of 2,000 people. Then at the very last moment you discover you forgot to pack a tie. The hotel manager who happens to be present simply removes his own and gives it to you. Fantastic! (‘The 12 Elements of Great Managing’ – p. 13)

And what about that employee at Nordstrom? A customer walked in saying she had bought something which she needed to give someone as a present, only they had forgotten to gift-wrap it for her. The employee immediately offered to do this for her. Nothing special here – except that the item had not been bought at Nordstrom but at Macy’s! (‘Made to Stick’ – p. 73).

Is there a lesson for us here? Indeed there is. Our students watch us all the time – and they talk about us. Whenever we do something unexpected, something special, whenever we go the extra mile, this registers immediately and can have a huge impact on our reputation.

Imagine for instance a parent calling the school saying that something has come up at home and she cannot pick up her child for at least an hour. Now imagine the teacher driving the child there on her own initiative.

Or imagine a teacher hearing about one of her students winning, say, a sports tournament and throwing a special party at the language school as a special treat.

What message would these actions send? That the teacher cares for her students not only as learners but as human beings as well. Think about how the students and the parents would see her – and what they would say about her. Think about how much more students would learn from a teacher they like. Then think about how these little things would change the teacher herself.

The Moral: YSeek out opportunities to shine.

Birds of a feather – any feather!

Tags

liking, psychology, similarity

[The importance of similarity in liking others]

Whenever I go into a store to buy something and I start chatting with the shop assistant, within seconds it emerges that we share at least 2-3 things in common. Now isn’t this strange?

Back in the 1990s, a young researcher by the name of Donn Byrne wanted to study how similarity affects how much we like others. He started by talking to students and finding out their attitudes and preferences on pretty much everything from religion, to politics, to films, to sports, to premarital sex. He analysed his data and distilled them down to 26 key attributes.

Next, he found some students and asked them to indicate how much they agreed with a number of statements. Some were about serious things like ‘I believe in God’, while others had to do with relatively trivial attitudes, such as ‘I dislike Westerns’. He collected the responses and then a few days later, he showed each person the responses of another individual on the same statements. (Naturally, he had made these up!) Then he asked students how much they liked these other people on the basis of their responses.

Byrne had divided his subjects into four categories. The first group got responses which were practically identical to their own. With the second group it was the other way round. What he discovered was that similarity of views / attitudes mattered enormously. On a scale of liking from 1 – 14, the first group said they loved these other guys (rating: 13 out of 14). The second group all but hated them (rating: 4.41 out of 14). This is a huge difference.

What happened with categories three and four is much more interesting however. Subjects in group three got responses which showed that the other person had similar attitudes in important matters (e.g. religion, politics) but different ones in less important ones (e.g. sports, films). With group four, it was the other way round. Now, you would expect that people in group three would really like these other people, while people in group four would dislike them, right?

Wrong! Incredibly, what Byrne found was that quantity trumps quality! In other words, it does not matter whether we share similar views on important matters, so long as we {“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“df5e4e5d-9285-435c-a4b2-7cae0b216280″],”srcRootClientId”:””}have many trivial things in common. Put another way, it does not matter if we disagree in politics, as long as we share the same name, zodiac sign and shoe-size! (Byrne 1997).

And this is the moral here: do you want your students / your colleagues / your boss / parents etc. to like you? The easiest way to achieve this is to discover as many things as you can that you share in common – however trivial (‘Yes! I too add pepper to my coffee!’). Take a leaf out of the shop assistants’ book.

The Moral: Find and stress similarities between yourself and others.

The Art of Being Selfish

Tags

happiness, Motivation, psychology

[The unexpected link between happiness and altruism]

Try this with your students: ask them to write down a list of things that would make them happier, then put their pens down. Professor Tali Sharot did that with her students, then she smiled and said: ‘I bet none of you listed ‘being kinder’ between ‘earning double what I do now’ and ‘more travelling’. Brilliant! – Read on… 😊

Imagine you are a university student in Vancouver, Canada. One day at the campus, a nice young guy approaches you and gives you an envelope. ‘Here’ he says ‘This is for you’. This actually happened to quite a few people on that particular day. Inside the envelope was some money (either a $ 20 bill or a $ 5 bill) along with a little note asking people to spend this money by buying something for themselves until the evening. Others got a different message; once again they got some money (either $ 20 or $ 5) but this time the note asked them to spend it on buying something for someone else. Later that day, these people were contacted by phone. Sure enough, they had spent the money as they had been asked. The big question was: how were they feeling? To find out, read on or – better still – watch this short clip:

OK – here is what they found: i) the people who had spent money on doing something for others, were much happier at the end of the day;  ii) significantly, it was the act of altruism that mattered – not how much money they had spent.

I remember watching this clip again and again and thinking to myself ‘Wow! This is amazing! Why can’t we use this in class? Students will be using the L2 and they should end up feeling quite a bit happier into the bargain! Here are two ideas:

i)      Get students in groups and ask them to brainstorm little things they could do to make someone happier (e.g. write a little ‘Thank you’ note to their mother [or to your teacher! 😊 ] or do the shopping for the old lady next door.

ii)    Ask students to choose one of the ideas, actually do it and then write a little paragraph about what it was and how the other person felt. You can put these up on the wall (or on a Padlet wall) and students can try to guess who it was that did what.

The possibilities are endless! And while you are at it, you might want to share the following Dalai Lama quote with your students ‘If you would like to be selfish, do it in a clever way […] work for the welfare of others’. Respect.

The Moral: Get students to do things for others – and talk about it in English.

OK – What Happens Next?

Tags

curiosity, investment, Motivation

[The power of investment]

Watching football at the pub with the lads is a favourite male pastime in the UK – but James Lang and his friends thought they’d make the whole thing somewhat more exciting. Every Thursday, they would pick three matches and try to predict who the winner was going to be. The guy with the best crystal ball won a beer from each of the others. Then Lang noticed something interesting: he could remember these games a lot better than the others (‘Small Teaching’ – p. 42).

Why does this happen? Lang gives us two answers:  i) increased attention and ii) emotional engagement. If this is the case, then this is something we could certainly use in class. But has it been tested? Well, consider the following study (‘Stumbling on Happiness’ – p. 116): researchers got two groups of children together. They told the first group that they would ask them some general knowledge questions (e.g.  ‘What is the longest river in the world?’) and then they would give them a reward for their participation – either a chocolate bar, or the answers to the questions. Guess which reward the kids went for… 😊

With the second group though, they did things differently: they asked them the  questions first and only then did they offer them the choice of reward. To everyone’s amazement, this time the children actually eschewed the chocolate in favour of the answers! This is completely counter-intuitive; before the study, the researchers had asked teachers and psychologists to predict what children would choose, and everyone had said they would choose the chocolate in both conditions.

The moral: Getting students to invest in an activity by getting them to guess/predict something is a sure way to motivate them. So how can we do this? We could get them…

… to guess the answers to the questions before giving them a text;

… to complete half-sentences before playing an audio/video track;

… to guess what certain numbers might refer to, etc. etc.

Or you could just get them to predict how a story continues. Take these three ads for instance. You ask students: ‘Why has this happened? What is going to happen next?

• A boy is standing in front of his mother’s mirror carefully applying lipstick on his lips….
• A mother is taking her little daughter to school when she is stopped for speeding. Her daughter writes something on a piece of cardboard and shows it to the policeman…
• A man is playing with his daughter in the garden. In the garden next to theirs, a wedding party are posing for photos. Suddenly, the girl runs up to them…

When the students have written a few lines about how each story unfolds, you play them the clip below. Enjoy!  😊

The Moral: To generate motivation, get students guessing!

What can Put-Pocketing Teach us?

Tags

Classroom Management, demonstration, Motivation

[How demonstrations trump explanations]

A crowded place is a pick-pocket’s paradise. How do you get people to take better care of their belongings? Well, the obvious thing to do is to put up a sign: ‘Beware: Pickpockets Operate in this Area’. What happens when you see this of course is that you automatically tap your pocket to make sure your wallet is still there – which sends just the right message to any pickpocket who may be around! 😊

What to do? The Ogilvy team came up with a brilliant idea: why not employ former thieves and magicians to actually put things inside people’s pockets? And what they put in was a leaflet with a message saying that they too could have their stuff stolen and directing them to a site where they could get more info about what they could do. The results: for every 100 leaflets dropped, 93 people visited the site. Amazing! (Groom & Vellacott ‘Ripple’ – p. 38) Watch this clip:

So what can we, as teachers, learn from this? Well, I have often noticed for instance that when I give my students tips on how to write essays, their eyes glaze over. Sure, they can repeat back the information (‘Yes, yes, we know all this’), but I can tell it has not actually registered. So what I sometimes do, is I get them to read an essay telling them how great it is, and of course they agree. Then I start taking it to pieces by pointing out all kinds of structural and linguistic mistakes which they have failed to notice…  Now the message really sinks in! 😊

But the worst offenders are of course colleagues. I often encounter this attitude at PD events. ‘We are qualified, we are experienced – we know all this stuff’. So what I do then is I challenge them. I give them a short story which describes a lesson and I get them to see whether they can spot all the little things the teacher did well as well as the moments when he slipped up. And I am going to do the same with you now.

This particular story was shared more than a thousand times when it was posted on the British Council Facebook wall. It contains 14 interesting moments – both good and bad. You read the story, you make your notes and you compare them to the commentary underneath. If you get more than 10, you are really good. Enjoy! 😊

The Moral: A good demo can really drive your message home.

One Up on Nature

Tags

Motivation, supernormal stimuli

[Exploiting supernormal stimuli]

How could a beer bottle lead to the near extinction of the Australian jewel beetle? If you are thinking toxic chemicals or the destruction of the beetle’s habitat, you are on the wrong track. The answer is that the beer bottle was just too sexy! You simply have to watch this amazing 3-min clip:

So, there you have it: the perfect example of a ‘Supernormal Stimulus’: the bottle was just as orange as the female jewel beetle, but it was much bigger and it had many more dimples. Supernormal stimuli are things which trigger certain responses in the way that natural stimuli do – only much more so. Here are three examples:

·       We have evolved to find ripe fruit deliciously sweet, but fruit cannot compete against cheesecake which (in the words of Steven Pinker) ‘packs a sensory wallop’.

·      Men have evolved to find pretty women sexually attractive, but even top models cannot compete against the digitally enhanced images we are exposed  to today.

·       We have evolved to crave belonging and acceptance, but no social circle can compete against the social media which can deliver more pats on the back in the form of ‘likes’ in a single day than some people would normally get in a lifetime.

OK – so what does all this have to do with EL teaching? Well, in her excellent book ‘Supernormal Stimuli’ (p. 159) Deidre Barrett mentions one more type which is of particular interest to us: ‘humans were rewarded by nature for seeking novel, challenging problems and attacking them […] the intellectual curiosity generates its own ‘supernormal stimuli’ – problems more intriguing than real life’.

Think about sudoku puzzles or crosswords; these do not exist in nature and they can be extremely addictive. Of course, sudoku puzzles will not help you improve your English, but crosswords most certainly would. Here are three more ideas (answers below):

·       Logical puzzles: e.g. ‘A baseball bat and a ball, together cost $ 1.10; the bat costs $ 1 more than the ball. How much does each of them cost?’

·       Lateral thinking puzzles: e.g. ‘There are a carrot, a pile of pebbles, and a pipe lying together in the middle of a field. Why are they there?’

·       Riddles: e.g. ‘If I have three, I have three; if I have two, I have two, but if I have one, I have none. What is it?’

So this is the moral: use puzzles in class. Students simply love them – and the same is true for teachers. I often finish a presentation with some rapid-fire questions like the following: ‘How many times can you take 4 from 33?’ And my absolute favourite: ‘What do you sit on, sleep on and brush your teeth with?’ Enjoy! 😊

The Moral: For top motivation, use puzzles and riddles in class.

[ Answers: $ 1.05 and $ 0.05  / They are what is left of a snowman / Choices / All the months naturally! / a chair, a bed and a toothbrush of course! 😊 ]

How to Make your Lessons Memorable

Tags

emotions, lesson plan, Motivation

[The power of emotions]

‘My mother was feeling cold… so now I’m wearing a sweater’. I came across this tweet ages ago, yet I still remember it. Why? Because of its powerful emotional content. So what is so special about emotions? Actually, there are a number of things.

Nature has crafted two ways for us to process reality: there is the rational route and the emotional route. Then nature said: ‘You can think and debate about trivial things all you want; I will see to it that you have the right responses about the important things’. Thus it is that we do not get to choose whether we feel fear – or love – or jealousy. Feelings are nature’s way of telling us ‘something really important is going on here’ (‘The Influential Mind’ – p. 40).

There is another thing too. Nature wants us to remember these things – precisely because they are important. This is something that advertisers have always known of course. In his book ‘Brainfluence’ Roger Dooley (p. 241) quotes an interesting study: an analysis of 1400 ads showed that those with an emotional content were about twice as effective as those appealing to reason. Researchers attribute this to the fact that the former are processed subconsciously – that is, instantly, and that they are more powerfully encoded – in other words, they are more memorable.

Now if you reflect on language learning, I think you will agree with me that it is for the most part a cognitive exercise. No wonder most lessons are forgettable. So how can we introduce emotions in class? Well, there are a number of ways; for example, we could…

 …use a song, instead of the listening track in the coursebook;

 …play an emotional scene from a film, instead of that video interview;

…get students to bring in class and talk about an object that is really special to them.

Or you can use my favourite way: play an emotional ad in class. For instance, you can get students to predict how this story continues:

‘There is this group of old men in their 80s – they have been friends since their teens. Then they hear that one of them has died. So they meet at the funeral. They sit around the table, sad, silent, thinking about all the health problems they have. Then one of them comes up with a crazy idea…’  You get students to write 3-4 lines about what happens next. Then you play the following clip. Chances are they will remember this lesson.

The Moral: To make an experience memorable – just add emotion.

It’s Like Magic!

Tags

Classroom Management, Motivation, psychology

[The importance of spill-over effects]

Q: How do you make chocolate taste sweeter? A: You make the blocks round! (Rory Sutherland – Psychology of Digital Marketing [27:00]). This is a perfect example of a spill-over effect. Here we clearly have a case of mental association, but what is interesting for me is how a certain quality (shape) colours our perception of another, completely unrelated one (taste). Here are some more examples. Try guessing the answers before looking at the key:

1. How can you make wine taste better?
2. How can you increase the effectiveness of painkillers?
3. How can you enhance the flavour of restaurant food?
4. How can you reduce the ‘pain of paying’?
5. How can you make someone appear taller?
6. How can you make someone warm up towards a stranger?

OK – time is up! Here are the answers:  1) pour it from a heavier bottle;   2) increase the price of the pills;  3) use calligraphic font in the menu;  4) get people to pay by credit card;  5) tell people s/he is a University Professor;  6) give them a hot cup of coffee to hold before introducing them to that person.

It’s like magic, isn’t it? Well, you may be surprised to hear that Psychology has revealed a number of similar effects that can be useful to us teachers. Once again, let us see whether you can get the ‘right’ answers:

1. How can you make an activity more interesting?
2. How can you make a session more memorable?
3. How can you improve the students’ evaluation of the lesson?

Naturally, there are a number of ways of getting these results, but here are some possible answers – did you get any?:  1) use game mechanics: teams – scoreboards – time pressure etc. (gamification!);  2) include an emotional element (e.g. a story, a song or an ad);  3) make sure you end with a bang (e.g. a joke, a quote or a fun activity).

‘Ah’ you might ask ‘but how can I get the students to like the whole course?’ Well, there are answers to this question too – at least three of them:  i) be likeable;  ii) be interesting or, if you cannot manage these…. iii) be beautiful. 😊

The Moral: Use spill-over effects to enhance your lessons.

The Valley of Disappointment

Tags

habits, homework, Motivation, strategies

[The importance of persevering in building learning habits]

In his excellent book ‘Atomic Habits’ James Clear makes some very interesting points about the nature of progress (pp. 20-23).

In most cases, when we are learning something, progress is much slower at the beginning (when we are building the foundations of learning as it were) and it gradually accelerates as we continue. Think about learning words for instance; initially, you have few other lexical items in the L2 to peg the new ones on to. Later however, you can link new vocabulary to all kinds of synonyms, opposites, similar words, collocations etc.

If one were to present this diagrammatically, the line you would get would be one curving upwards – it is exactly the same line as if your English keeps getting better at the rate of, say, 1% every week. And yet when we study, most of us expect our progress to be linear (‘I have put in so much effort – I expect to see some results’).

Look at this excellent diagram (James Clear ‘Atomic Habits’ – p. 22). Notice the grey area. Clear calls this ‘the valley of disappointment’ and it represents the period of frustration when we keep working at something and the results seem meager at best. This can go on for months and months. But notice what happens then: beyond a certain point, we experience a period of progress which just seems explosive and it is way beyond our expectations.

I have seen this time and again with my students: they study and study and complain about how poor their English is and then they travel to the UK and when they come back they are ecstatic ‘After the first few hours I started talking and talking so freely and easily and I just couldn’t believe it was me!’

So this is the moral here: choose a few learning habits and stick with them. Keep reading a few pages of that reader every day. Keep singing along to songs. Keep watching your favourite series with English subtitles. All this work is bound to pay off and when it does, you will be amazed.

The Moral: Stick with your habits even if you cannot see any progress.

A Lesson from Marathon Runners

Tags

goal-setting, goals, Motivation, strategies

[The importance of setting short-term goals]

On average, people who decide to take part in a marathon race, cover the distance of 42.2 km in around four and a half hours. Some are faster, some are slower, so if we were to create a graph of everyone’s performance, we would expect a normal distribution – something resembling a bell curve.

Yet this is not what we find. Have a look at the image below. You will notice that many runners somehow cluster just before the 3:30-hour mark, the 4:00-hour mark etc. How does this happen? The answer is that runners push themselves just that little bit harder towards the end, so they can tell themselves (and all their friends!) that they ran the marathon in less than three and a half ours, or less than four hours and so on.

So how do they manage that? Apparently, there are experienced athletes who have timed themselves repeatedly and run at such a pace that they know they are going to finish in a little less than 3:30 hours or 4:00 hours etc. These people are called pace-setters and they ran with big placards on their back, displaying their respective times. Ordinary runners who know their limits more or less, simply run behind the right pace-setter and so they do not have to worry about constantly checking their time. In this way, in the New York City Marathon, while 500 people finish with a time of 3:59, only 390 finish with a time of 4:01 (Adam Alter ‘Irresistible’ – pp. 95-97). Still not convinced? Here is what another study found. Watch this clip:

There is a big lesson for us here: whatever you do, when you set yourself a short-term goal you push yourself just that little bit harder. Why not use this insight when practicing your English? ‘I am going to try to remember the words from yesterday’s lesson, and I want to recall at least 15 out of 20’ or ‘I am going to record myself giving a mini-monologue about my job and I am going to speak without hesitation for at least 40 seconds’. This little tweak may well mean you perform 10% better than you would without a goal. It’s well worth it, don’t you think?

The Moral: Before doing an activity, set yourself a short-term goal.

Cleansing Cow

Tags

Classroom Management, interest, Motivation, warm-up

[The importance of lesson-opening rituals]

You know how when you visit some posh restaurants, they sometimes give you an acidic sorbet to ‘cleanse your palate’ – the better to appreciate the food later? OK – just keep this in mind.

Now imagine you have just walked into Denis Martin’s modernist restaurant in Switzerland. You sit at your table and the first thing you notice is a small cylinder with a cow on top of it. What is this?

Denis Martin had noticed that diners (businessmen for the most part) often failed to appreciate the dishes he so lovingly prepared because they were too preoccupied with work or other thoughts. Could there be a way of ‘cleansing their minds’ before the first course arrived?

So he came up with this strange object and placed one on every table. People just don’t know what to make of it – is it some kind of salt-cellar perhaps? At some point, someone picks up the object to look underneath, whereupon the cow lets out a doleful ‘Mooooo’. Before long, everybody else does the same and the room is full of giggling diners. And this is the cue for the staff – out come the hors d’ oeuvres. The cow is in fact a ‘mind-cleanser’! What a brilliant idea! (Charles Spence ‘Gastrophysics’ – pp. xiv-xv)

So, could we not learn something from Denis Martin? Do our students really appreciate the texts we find, the activities we organise, the time and effort we invest into putting together our lesson plans? Why not start the lesson by clearing their minds with a little story? Or an interesting ad? Or a joke?

The Moral: Start by cleansing your students’ mental palate.