[A few years ago Rebecca Pomerantz, then an ESOL teacher at the Jamaica Plain Community Centers Adult Learning Program and now a teacher at International Institute of Boston, participated in a group of practitioners conducting teacher inquiry projects derived from the concept of Multiple Intelligences. This report on her project was originally written for a companion booklet to the Adult ESOL Curriculum Frameworks.--Ed.]
My class at JPALP met three evenings, totalling eight hours every week. Many of the students had been in this Level One class since September or October (about eight months), but several new students at various levels had arrived recently. All were immigrants or refugees and most had been in Boston for several years (living in one of the southern neighborhoods). They were from Africa, Latin American and the Caribbean, with no one group in the majority, though about half were Muslim. Their ages ranged from 18 to about 55. Several students had from zero to three years of formal education in their own countries.
My inquiry question was: What happens when I introduce my low level students to the concepts of the Developing Strategies and Resources for Learning strand as a way for them to become better learners? I have always been interested in how people learn and how learning styles relate to cognitive, educational, cultural and personality differences, but I felt that I had not explicitly taught this strand and wanted to challenge myself to try to. A major problem in my work in Level One classes is always how to manage such a mixture of native literacy levels and of classroom experience, so I also saw this as a way to help my students understand this issue and help us find solutions. Also my students are just generally hungry for ways to learn better or faster but we never address this directly.
I had planned to do the following introductory activity and then tackle each standard one at a time, but this ended up getting us into it in a better way, asking them for the information rather than telling them. I actually spent a large part of three consecutive class days on this "introduction." First, we talked about the difference between "study" and "learn" so that they really understood that "learn" means "remember and integrate," not just "go through the motions in class." You can study without learning and you can learn without studying. (This is especially clear with examples like cooking or driving or swimming.) Then I put up a sketch of a person. I said, "She is a very good learner and she studied in Level One before she moved to Level Two very quickly because she learned English very quickly. Tell me about her. What does she do in class? What does she do at home? In the subway? When she is trying to speak English with people? What does she have with her?" We had a nice discussion; it was fun and my students impressed me. They touched on most of the things I was hoping they would. In preparation I had drawn some pictures to illustrate the things I thought/hoped would come up. As they mentioned things, I put the picture up or I made a quick drawing or I took notes on the board--all as a way of keeping track of the points they made without a lot of language.
The second day I asked what the various pictures were--what had we said yesterday about our ideal student?--as a kind of review and to see what stuck and how it got interpreted. They easily went back and forth between things she did and things they did or think they should do and why. We ended up talking in detail about what kinds of background knowledge would help people learn English and examples of cognates and near-cognates for different language groups. They emphasized class attendance and coming on time, which they have seen correlate with language skill. They talked about homework and study habits. They clearly acknowledged the distracting counter-productive environments many of them have to study in and said that our star learner must be young and single! It took awhile for them to think of ways she learns besides "listening to the teacher," but they did come up with "reading signs in the subway," "recording in notebooks outside of class," and "listening to other students speak English."
I was quite excited by the range of ideas and the students' ability to articulate the ideas well enough for me to connect them with strategies I had been reading about. I took the opportunity to elaborate on different kinds of "intelligence" when they said "intelligent" and on the idea of schema-building or scaffolding when they said "use my language." I tried to elicit ways of remembering words other than "writing them" or "repeating them" and ways to use notebooks other than copying off the board, but that they didn't bite and I didn't feel prepared enough to teach them specific mnemonic devices or mind maps at that time.
The third day we talked about skills: job skills, study skills, learning skills. I found myself using my Somali students who had no education as examples. They had lots of language learning skills (great memory, guessing from context, asking for help, clarification and frequent feedback, etc.), but skills for writing and studying (noticing capital letters and punctuation, filling in blanks, copying quickly, etc.) were hard for them. (I think they took this well.) Then I tried to categorize the pictures we had into categories that reflected the seven standards found under Developing Strategies and Resources for Learning, but I decided not to emphasize that. Most everything they had mentioned was useful in both formal educational settings (in class and on homework, standard #3) and in informal learning situations (#4). Some of it was attitudinal (which I see as coming under #6, managing feelings). They still did not come up with goal-setting (#1) or discovering your own learning strengths, weaknesses, or preferences (#5).
At this point I got stymied by two things (though in retrospect I think in fact things were working better than I thought and I was learning a lot about students' understanding of their own learning process). First was the workshop that had been set up to help me and other participants with our projects. The presenters had spent an entire year on their Multiple Intelligences project with low-level learners. They had decided not to talk to students directly about MI categories and used the variety of lessons they did over time as a context for students to reflect back on what helped them individually and on their strengths and weaknesses. I realized that I needed to do that as well but would likely be interrupted in that process because of the second issue. As a result of attrition, funding pressure, rolling admissions, and long waiting lists, I was obliged to accept many new students into the class (to total about one-third of the group), some of whom were at a much lower level than the rest. I did not quite know how to spend time on the project other than continuing to give everyone common experiences to reflect back on. I was already worried enough about orienting the new people and also keeping the original students happy without having to try to explain learning skills and styles again.
Looking back, the discussions we had at the time about the progress of the older learners (who might be able to move up and when) and their questioning of the review I was doing to help the new students adjust was actually a way to do some of what I was thinking we wouldn't manage to do. One learner in particular was reminiscing rather exuberantly about how she had been when she arrived in class in September. She had been extremely quiet and shy, and she acted out how she would nod "yes" when she had not at all understood and had actually felt completely lost. She could look back on that now because she was no longer shy and retiring and could actually help the new people who were now in the same situation. In fact, she volunteered to be in the group of students from all levels from which one name would be drawn as graduation speaker!