from summer hill to elt abstract and article

8/4/2019 From Summer Hill to ELT Abstract and Article

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From Summerhill to ELT: promoting democracy in the classroom.

Abstract

In this article I will discuss the basics of the educational methodologies behindalternative schools such as Summerhill, and present ways of adopting some of these

approaches to English Language Teaching.

The article will present alternative methodologies but will also give practical ideas that

teachers can use in the classroom in order to make their teaching more holistic and

democratic.

From Summerhill to ELT: promoting democracy in the

classroom.I recently met an acquaintance who works as a Secondary school teacher, but who

describes himself as an anarchist. This teacher wrote his doctorate thesis on the topic of

"free schools" oranarchist education, as he calls it, such as the well-known andcontroversial Summerhill School in the UK. In fact, this school is known as a

democratic school. We have not spoken much about the content of his thesis, but at ourlast meeting we began to discuss teaching methodologies and he explained to me how

he is trying to implement his ideas in the classroom. I thought it may be interesting to

look at some of these ideas and principles and to analyse how they could be transferred

into the ESOL classroom.

Firstly, we need to look at some of the principles behind this kind of education.

Happy Children

Summerhill School freely offers on its website a list of the schools policies and other

information to aid people researching the school and I would like to discuss some of the

more relevant ones.

The main idea is that education should be a happy experience, where children learn

what they want to, having the freedom to live their lives as they please, as opposed to

how their parents want them to. The whole education system in Spain, and more and

more so in Britain is based on targets; children must pass exams to demonstrate what

they have learnt, and a school is judged on its ability to get its students through these

exams. In a free school, the objective is that the "students" acquire the skills and

abilities required to live in the real world. Summerhill is based on a democratic

community, where the students make the rules and decisions that ensure their own

collective well-being. According to the school, this equips children for life much better

than a traditional exam-based education.

Let's now look at Summerhill's specific policies and discuss how these principles could

be implemented into ELT.


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Allowing Learners to Choose

1. To provide choices and opportunities that allow children to develop at their own

pace and to follow their own interests.1

We could partially implement this idea by encouraging learner autonomy. In recentyears this has been an important part of teaching methodology. Learners take

responsibility for their own learning, and the focus is taken away from the teacher, more

a facilitator than a teacher. If the learners decide what is important for them to learn,

they then have a greater motivation to do so. A nice quote from the founder of

Summerhill about autonomy states:

"Every time we show Tommy how his engine works we are stealing from that child the joy of life

the joy of discovery the joy of overcoming an obstacle. Worse! We make that child come to

believe that he is inferior, and must depend on help." - Summerhill: A Radical Approach to

Child Rearing - A.S. Neill.

Providing learners with the option of complete autonomy is probably not ideal in the

language classroom, since this will turn it into a library or resource room instead of a

classroom. However, providing self-access resources for learners to use in class or at

home is a great idea. If you have the possibility of creating a self-access library,

however small, where your learners can choose whatever activities they prefer, you are

giving them the power to decide what they wish to practise. This makes learning much

more individual. A learner who has trouble understanding people speaking can choose

to do extra listening practice, without imposing this on the rest of the class. There

should be no time limits on these activities, so that each student may work at their own

pace. With children, you could do the same with readers or authentic children's books,

songs, games and DVDs, allowing them to choose what they would like to do in each

lesson. This ties in with the third of Summerhill's policies.

Playtime

3. To allow children to be completely free to play as much as they like.

This is not very practical in a situation where you only see the learners for two or three

hours a week, but you could set aside a period of each lesson dedicated to free play.

Play is a very important part of a child's education since it stimulates their imaginationand allows them to develop many essential skills. If our lessons are devoted to only

presentations and book work, the learners may well become de-motivated and they

won't enjoy their lessons. This is also true for adult learners, who may think games to be

a waste of time, but who need a bit of relaxation at the end of a day's work. For adults,

have a few authentic board games and plenty of game-like activities that do not practise

a specific structure, from which they can choose whenever they feel bored, stressed or

tired. For young children, any kind of toys, from a few toy cars, or Barbie dolls or a

box of Lego are fine. Try to encourage them to use English, but don't force them, and

at the end of the free period, you can ask them about what they were playing and

provide them with new vocabulary, which they will be very interested to learn. Another

option is to allow the children to play, but guide them so that they use some of the target

1 Taken from the Summerhill General Policy Statement on www.summerhillschool.co.uk


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language naturally. For example, with the topicFoodyou could organise a picnic withreal or pretend food (pictures will do) where the children ask for the items they would

like to eat.

Exam-free

2. To allow children to be free from compulsory or imposed assessment, allowing

them to develop their own goals and sense of achievement.

In Spain, children are constantly doing exams at school. It is such a shame to see that

even primary pupils do not have time to play because they have homework and exams,

and secondary students are studying until the early hours instead of getting a good

night's sleep. However, that is how the system works, and those of us who work in the

private sector can do nothing to change that. What we can do, though, is to avoid giving

them tests ourselves. Self-evaluation is becoming more and more important, and ELT

publishers now often provide self-assessment booklets with their materials, for learners

to complete. Even in state schools, you may have some leeway in deciding how toimplement assessment, or as my anarchist friend does, allow students to use reference

materials when they do their (compulsory) exams, which is probably more valid than

making them memorise fact after fact. You could possibly introduce a kind of diary in

which your learners write every few days on how they feel they are getting on. This

kind of reflection helps them to become more autonomous, as they realise what they

need to work on, without being told by the teacher. If you are guiding a class towards

taking external exams, they will need plenty of practice of these exams; however this

does not necessarily have to be done as a test. It is much more useful for learners to do

the exam-type questions as a group task than in exam conditions.

The final two policies are in my opinion inter-linked and so I will discuss them together.

Democracy

4. To allow children to experience the full range of feelings free from the

judgement and intervention of an adult.

5. To allow children to live in a community that supports them and that they are

responsible for; in which they have the freedom to be themselves, and have the

power to change community life, through the democratic process.

The latter is probably for what the school is better-known. The school holds daily

meetings in which the children bring up any problems or complaints they have with the

community. It is a kind of court where students can be fined or punished for anti-social

behaviour. In the meetings, laws are also passed or discarded. This actually ties in with

learner autonomy, as discussed earlier. It is not really relevant in the typical ELT

situation. However, the idea of having the learners decide on the rules of the school or

class is a very common one. At the beginning of the year, the class decides what rules to

impose, for example, You should always try to speak English in the classroom, and you

can also encourage them to decide what should happen to anybody who does not respect

these rules. The students could hold a kind of meeting every so often where any

problems are discussed.


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As for the fourth policy, if the children take responsibility for their own lives, or in our

case, language learning, then feelings of disappointment and failure are a necessary part

of that, when things do not turn out as expected. These feelings should be allowed: not

everybody can be feeling happy at the same time, and if a student is unresponsive one

day, they should not be punished for this. As teachers we need to understand that our

students have lives outside of school in which they may have problems, and refusal toparticipate is not always a discipline problem.

Mixed Groups

Another part of the schools philosophy is that the students are placed in groups

according to ability rather than age. This is something that we do automatically with

adults, but we tend to group children with those of a similar age. This is natural, most

children of the same age will have a similar knowledge of English, and more

importantly, the cognitive ability and motor skills are more alike. If we put a five year

old in with a group of nine year olds, we cannot expect that child to do the same tasks as

the others. However, I believe that in certain cases, children should be in a class withstudents slightly older or younger, if their level of English is appropriate. The

Cooperative Learning approach is appropriate in a multi-level class because it enables

the teacher to form groups of learners of varying abilities, a method especially

beneficial to weaker students since they are exposed to language of a slightly higher

level, but are assessed on their own individual improvement.

Other Alternatives

Another progressive educational establishment is the group of Steiner schools whose

ethos is to provide an unhurried and creative learning environment where children

can find the joy in learning and experience the richness of childhood rather than earlyspecialisation or academic hot-housing. 2

There are similarities between the principles of Steiner and Summerhill, although

Steiner education is very structured and tends to use whole-class teaching, presenting

new material to the class, who then discuss and give their own written and oral

responses. The Montessori method focuses on:

Learning through hands-on experience, investigation and research. They

become actively engaged in their studies, rather than passively waiting to be

spoon-fed.3

How many times as an ESOL teacher have you complained about how your learners

expect to be spoon-fed? Maybe it is time to rethink our teaching methodology and

consider more alternative approaches that really engage and help our learners become

more self-directed and responsible for their own learning.

We can see, then, that whatever more traditional methodologies we use, some of the

ideas behind alternative educational approaches can be useful in our teaching. Learner

2 Steiner Wardolf Schools Fellowship Website:

http://www.steinerwaldorf.org/whatissteinereducation.html3 Montessori 101:Some Basic Information that Every Montessori Parent Should Know Tim Seldin,

President of The Montessori Foundation (www.montessori.org)


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autonomy, Cooperative Learning, self-assessment, democratic decision-making and

play, can all make the learning process much more pleasurable and motivating,

providing our students with an enjoyable and worthwhile learning experience.

from summer hill to elt abstract and article

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