When we talk about language learning, the language aspect is easy enough to understand.  It’s the learning aspect that requires more consideration.  How do we define “learning?”  Is learning the harvest of a creative endeavor that requires a genuine investment of effort and sacrifice on our part or merely a transactional act focused on how rapidly we can access and ingest information and data?  We live in an era where obtaining information has become astonishingly efficient on an unprecedented scale.  More information can be accessed through a device that can fit into our pants pocket than the sum total of information held in the estimated 164 million books housed in the Library of Congress.  iPads and smartboards threaten to outnumber books in classrooms.  This digital revolution has shifted our perceptions and ideas about how we learn.  Lately, I’ve been pondering that question as I consider my approach to language learning and really, learning in general. 

I have an incredibly talented friend named Greg whom I greatly admire who has enjoyed success in a number of diverse areas of life.  One of the things I always marveled at was how incredibly well read Greg is. He often has reported reading what I know to be very intellectually dense books that are fairly long in his free time over the course of a long weekend. One day we were talking about a book I had just recommended to him and he said he had received it the day before and read the entire book that same night. I was incredulous. I asked him how on earth he accomplished such a feat because I had been carefully reading through it over the course of a week and found the writing to be deeply fascinating and rich, something meriting a slower more deliberate pace much like a glass of fine wine or cognac would be enjoyed. As we continued to talk, he revealed that his reading technique is to quickly scan and speed read through a book to rapidly acquire the information that is most important in each chapter. He would quickly summarize and reduce entire chapters down to what he interpreted as being the primary salient points. He doesn’t see the need to read every word. He extracts the essentials with surgical precision and in doing so, saves himself an immense amount of time. His productive and efficient approach to reading enables him to allocate the time otherwise lost to other activities. I jokingly told him that doesn’t really qualify as actually having “read the book.” He said of course it does. He challenged me to ask him anything about the book and he could summarize the main points the author was trying to make.

Language LEARNING is not transactional

For my friend, reading appears to be a transactional activity where the goal is to efficiently and expediently identify and cull information. If a reader’s goal is simply to obtain information, I can appreciate the argument for this approach.  Learning a language is a reflection of the ultimate purpose of language, to communicate and relate to other people.  If we treat the language learning process like it is merely a transactional exchange of sterile information, we deprive the students of the richness of the human experience of relating to other humans.  This is what is exciting about learning a new language, the opportunity to connect with another human being who does not speak the language you grew up with.  This is why the approach I have always practiced and encouraged with my students in our business English language courses is making the learning environment a playful one where new language concepts can be extracted from the pages of an otherwise boring book and brought to life through activities that invite the student to translate the language concept into real world use. 

KNOWLEDGE A PRECIOUS RESOURCE

In this particular story, I’m referring to reading but this preoccupation with efficiency is something I also observe happening with learning in general.  When our goal is speed and efficiency, words and learning experiences are reduced to superficial consumable objects of which we have the illusion of there being an infinite supply of, perhaps feeling a compulsive and competitive urge to stockpile. The learning exchange is reduced to being a mere transaction of information that we don’t savor, digest and deeply consider but binge and bloat ourselves on. There is a lack of vitality in such exchanges that contribute to a kind of mental obesity. A recent statistic I read says we waste 40% of our food here in America. I would speculate it is one of the unintended consequences of overabundance and easy access to food. Our portion sizes at restaurants are famously enormous compared to other parts of the world—to the point that a large meal for a single adult might constitute the daily consumption quantity of an entire family in other parts of the world. As a result of over abundant access, perhaps we don’t feel the need to decide (from Latin “dēcīdere”—to cut off) so we just order everything with the knowledge we won’t eat it all and can just throw it away. Has the internet and digital technology created a similar phenomenon with information? We feel it is always instantaneously accessible so we don’t need to curate what we want to know. Perhaps we think we can “know it all.” In reality, as with our oversized restaurant portions, perhaps most information goes undigested and wasted. Perhaps the speed at which we devour information results in “indigestion?” Knowledge is no longer regarded as precious but rather as disposable. Has knowledge been reduced to being nothing more than “throw-away” information? In pre-modern times, monasteries were pilgrimage destinations not merely because of religious reasons but because they were rare places of learning. They were the original universities. To get to these sacred sites, one had to undergo a pilgrimage that required sacrifice and the suffering of ordeals. One had to possess a tolerance for mystery and not knowing what lies ahead versus today, where we will research a planned journey in almost painstaking detail so as to avoid any surprises.

It may be that, in our increasingly gadget-driven society, we have lost a certain sense of why we travel. Robert Louis Stevenson famously declared, ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ He was speaking to an audience for whom travel had a destination, and also a home to which the traveler might safely return to profit from the experience. Today’s travel has no destination. Its purpose is not to move but to stand still, to remain in the here and now or, what amounts to the same thing, to move almost instantaneously from site to site, so that there is no passage from one point to another, either in space or in time, much as in our new reading habits. Unfortunately, such methods affect not only travel and reading. They affect our thoughts as well, our reflective capacities, our intellectual muscles. Our thinking functions require not only awareness of ourselves but also awareness of our passage through the world, and awareness of our passage through the pages of a book.
–The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm

Alberto Manguel

more than containers for information

If we reduce humans to being no more than containers for information, we will approach learning from a perspective that champions and elevates efficiency as the centrally informing value. Human beings are not merely warehouses for inert bits of information.  We have a unique facility for taking arid bits of data and hydrating it into something living and vital that forms the basis for how we connect to others and our world.  This is precisely what happens with learning.  Perhaps it’s more useful to look at a book as a living organism of knowledge where its paragraphs function as living tissue comprised of a network of dynamically interconnected words that each perform a vitally important function. These word cells of information work in concert with others to animate and breathe a book to life. This is knowledge—our ability to organize and shape information into meaning by means of relationships rather than transactions. We are meaning makers. We are creators. If information is reduced to being nothing more than lifeless data that needs to be retrieved, we will be concerned with valuing it for quantity—how much of it we can hoard and regurgitate mindlessly on command. Knowledge, however, is vital, dynamic and relational. Human beings have a natural instinct to seek connection and relationships.  This is one of the main reasons I have been such a huge believer in the power of extraordinary teachers to steward deeply engaging learning experiences.  Great teachers create a wonder charged atmosphere in their classrooms by bringing their own curiosity to the learning container which cultivates a genuine sense of movement rather than the stasis that occurs with an information acquisition mindset.  They are “travel guides” that encourage learners to venture out into the labyrinth of learning with an adventurous spirit that prizes relationship to the terrain traversed to the efficiency of crossing it, reminding us of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sage admonition, that the “great affair is to move.” 

To learn more about how we translate these concepts into real world practice in our classrooms, read our blog post on the most important features of a successful business English language course.

One of the biggest disappointments for me is to see how the way so many English training programs are designed to be very utilitarian and transactional; as if the objective is to robotically transfer information about how to communicate in English from the teacher to the student.  This kind of arid approach to language learning is more about information sharing than actual learning.  The best, most memorable and effective learning experiences for me have been those that activate my curiosity like the aroma of a great meal triggers salivation and hunger.  A great learning environment should excite both the learner and the teacher. 

I love it when an experience puts me into what the great Irish writer, James Joyce, would call a state of “esthetic arrest”—when an experience stops time.  I am a teacher by profession but I paradoxically most often find myself in the role of the inquirer, what one might associate more with the student.  This learning state is most often invoked when I am waylaid by experiences that trigger my fascination.  One recent Sunday morning, my intention was to listen to a podcast recommended to me by a dear friend featuring the late great Irish poet and Celtic philosopher, John O’Donohue titled, The Inner Landscape of Beauty.  I found myself repeatedly pausing, rewinding and taking notes.  My sense of wonder was completely awakened and doing back flips as I listened to the soothing flow of masterfully curated words delivered in that euphonious Connemaran brogue of western Ireland, each blooming with the explosive vibrancy of a parched desert valley experiencing a spontaneous floral meadow after a storm.  He mentioned the word for “beauty” in Greek is kalon and how kalon has its origin in kalein, “a calling.”  For some inexplicable reason, that launched my imagination into orbit.  I’ve never heard of this connection and it really spoke to me to the point of feeling abducted by an urgent desire to know more about it.  So after the podcast was over, I started researching this association online.  The next thing I know, hours I had planned to allocate to other activities and tasks had vanished into the time span of a hummingbird’s breath.  I was completely engrossed in my online quest for more information.  My research efforts ultimately uncovered a detailed exploration of this Greek etymology referenced in a book by an obscure French philosopher, Jean Louis Chrétien, called The Call and The Response, which I hunted down and ordered immediately.  In it, he makes a very fascinating philosophical argument that “beauty,” kalon, is derived from kalein, “a calling” which originated from what he suggests to be the first uttered word, kalo, which means “I call.”  The utterance of kalo is suggested to be the original act in the great creation stories of time immemoriam of birthing our world by naming things into being from unbeing.  This “naming” or “calling” is the original act of creation which is described as kalos, “the good.”  I was totally beguiled by the notion that the simplest creative act of “naming” is an origin story for “beauty,” that beauty is animated by the subject calling itself into our attention and awareness when we place our conscious gaze on it.  I thought about how much of what passes in my own visual field on a daily basis goes unnoticed but when something connects with me on the plane of beauty, my vision collapses into a gaze and the subject of my gaze is brought into existence, into my field of conscious awareness.  This mere “noticing” is a creative act.  Chrétien goes onto say that beauty itself is intrinsically imbued with a natural unspoken calling or “homing” mechanism, unique to each person (although there are often certain subjects quite universally regarded as being beautiful), that is triggered when an observer encounters something that puts us in a state of esthetic arrest, what James Joyce would describe as “proper art,” but what the rest of us would simply call “beautiful.”  So when something in our field of vision abducts our gaze and and elevates us into the timeless state of esthetic arrest, perhaps this encounter functions as some kind of strange mirror that enables us to connect with that aspect of ourselves that is a part of the original creative act of the world being named into being from nonbeing.  Beauty, by extension of Chrétien’s philosophical thesis, might be concluded then to be the “stuff” we are made of.  I love to look at these kinds of things metaphorically, to see how they connect to my own experience of life.  What a fascinating narrative to create for a single word.  

Beauty has a vitally important presence in the great learning experiences.  Our contemporary educational model is often hostile to inviting the presence of beauty in learning.  What exactly is this “beauty” I am referring to that is to be found in learning?  In the Greek sense of the word for beauty, kalon, each person’s unique approach to how they learn from the world is honored.  Great teachers are agents in the creation of the experience of kalon in a learning environment through their ability to truly see and respond to each student’s uniqueness with respect to how they learn and the unique purpose and path they have in the world.  Great teachers have an ability to recognize each student’s genius that is trying to emerge and through the acknowledgement of the uniqueness of each student’s learning style and speed, I like to think they, in a sense, are “calling forth into being” that student’s uniqueness from a state of nonbeing, or in this case, anonymity.  Anonymity and not feeling seen are, to my mind, among the biggest barriers to an individual’s development and this is probably the area where our education system fails our students the most.  Teachers are often not encouraged, trained or given permission to meet students at the level of unique individuals but are instead often obligated to follow a set track (via rigid curriculums) that disregards the needs of the individual for the identity of the collective.  Teaching is reduced to being merely transactional in that the goal is the sterile transfer of information coupled with convergent collectively informed conclusions about how to interpret that information.  Learning, in its highest form, recognizes knowledge to be the dynamic process of assimilating organic cells of information to create a relationship to a new organism that is alive within us rather than being reduced to the accumulation and “warehousing” of inert data points.  From this perspective, knowledge is a living entity that one cultivates rather than acquires.  When this natural process is replaced by an educational model that is transactional, all students are treated the same and each student’s uniqueness is lost and unacknowledged. With the contemporary model of education, there is an agenda—a rigid destination and objective that is so unyielding, it does not permit teachers to consider how their students are responding.  Such a disconnected approach to education often feels akin to a forced march.  True learning includes a destination but where it departs from our conventional educational models is that there is a recognition that how each student may arrive at the destination will likely be unique.  The goal of the teacher practicing her craft in its originally intended spirit of creativity is to shepherd the student and support them on their own particular journey rather than force everyone to march single file on the same path toward a collectively defined destination.  True learning also honors the fact that the pace at which each student moves toward the destination will vary.  Some will move faster.  Some will move more slowly. Some will appear to be stationary.  There is an absence of the comparative preoccupation that contemporary education approaches become obsessed with because each person is inimitable and ineffable.  The acknowledgement of the uniqueness of the individual is beautiful, in the Greek sense.  It is to have one’s uniqueness called into being–called into recognition.

As teachers, I truly believe when we are deeply connected to our own sense of curiosity about life and the subject matter we teach, which for me and the teachers who work with Premiere Language is language, culture and their intersection, we are calling forth into being flint moments of imagination and creativity that light the inner flame of our students’ curiosity.  We escape the prison of the cafeteria style learning experience where every class is rigidly planned and measured out and everyone gets the same predictable standardized experience.  I remember my time, years ago, teaching freshman and sophomore English in South Korea at Yonsei University.  The temptation was to be efficient by creating your English lesson for your first class and then duplicate that lesson for the subsequent classes so you could theoretically be on “cruise control” for the rest of the week. That never really sat well with me because it was so unstimulating.  Everything would start to feel highly repetitive and boring to me.  I always feel that I can’t expect my students to be engaged and excited about the lesson I’m teaching if I’m not excited about it.  Education reformist Sir Ken Robinson satirically explains to great effect that we have to distinguish between the “task and achievement senses” of verbs in this popular TED talk .  He says, “Teaching is a word like that. You can say, ‘There’s Deborah, she’s in room 34, she’s teaching.’ But if nobody’s learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.  The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That’s it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing.”  I could write a whole separate blog post about the pathological obsession our education system has on standardized testing so I’ll refrain from diving too deeply into that.  Suffice to say, testing is really a symptom of the much larger problem of a dominant culture of education that has become highly preoccupied with efficiency in learning.  Efficiency is an undeniably phenomenal tool that modern human beings have mastered to make incredible advancements that have elevated the quality of life exponentially in the last few hundred years.  Learning, however, is an old “legacy” process we are genetically hardwired with that remains stubbornly resistant to how much it can be enhanced by efficiency (which happens to be the topic of my next blog post).  Giving students iPads and providing interactive smart boards for teachers has not resulted in more engaging learning environments.  In many reported cases, it’s had the opposite effect.  Students are more disengaged than ever.  Preoccupation with efficiency creates a hyper-arid environment that is hostile to learning being able to flourish.  An engaging learning experience, for me, naturally starts with the presence of beauty which is a carriage pulled by the horses of imagination and creativity.  If the imagination of the student isn’t activated, boredom begins to germinate and dull the mind.  Imaginative learning environments start with teachers being engaged and fascinated with the subject matter they are teaching.  Moreover, I believe great teachers have a general spirit of curiosity about the world around them.  All great teachers are ultimately great students.  This is a key to repairing the marriage between education and learning.  We, as teachers, become agents in this process through actively stewarding and cultivating our connection to curiosity, wonder, and kalon.  Let’s call into being a new era of deeply engaging learning experiences for a generation of thirsty students waiting for the rehydrating rains of imagination to rescue them from Sir Ken Robinson’s bleak “education’s Death Valley.”

This is why I feel it is so vitally important to actively cultivate a learning atmosphere that emphasizes creativity in our approach to crafting our business English course learning experiences.

In the business English learning environment, it’s important to create optimal conditions where learning can best be supported.  It paradoxically requires relaxing loosening the starchy collar of business sensibilities and allowing for a more playful dynamic to emerge–one that is most easily encouraged by letting wonder and curiosity flourish.  It’s easy to imagine a business learning environment to be quite task oriented but learning how to speak a language should not be reduced to being a task to complete.  Rather, it should be an environment where a more adventurous spirit of exploration is summoned.

Learning is a marvel to me.  I never tire of seeing how often my curiosity and sense of wonder are activated by a new experience or encounter.  Sometimes I feel there is a modern notion suggesting learning is something that is the exclusive domain of childhood, the purpose of which is to prepare us for adulthood so we can put the burden of all that “education stuff” behind us.  But my personal experience has been that learning happens constantly.  It’s also not a burden, challenging yes, but not a burden.  For the most part, it seasons my life and gives it flavor.  And it certainly (and thankfully I might add) never ceases.  A number of years ago, I was visiting a friend in Munich, Germany for a month and we decided to take a one week side trip to Paris.  I had never been to Paris and the fact that it could be reached in less than a day via my favorite mode of transportation, the train, made the decision an easy one.  I remember the wave of anticipation that swept over me as our train pulled into the station in Paris as evening approached.  At the same time, the prospect of visiting a city with so many world renowned iconic attractions was a bit daunting.  There were certainly very obvious points of interest that appear on almost every “must see” tourist list for Paris such as the Eiffel Tower, Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée Rodin, Notre Dame Cathedral, Sacre-Cœur and Moulin Rouge to name just a few.  While on the train, I had an epiphany to email my friend and mentor, Phil Cousineau, world class sojourner and author of the travel classic, The Art of Pilgrimage, for a “pilgrim’s guide” of Paris.  Knowing Phil had lived in Paris for a year writing as well as having traveled there countless times, I imagined he would be a great source for crafting a more uncommon journey that would enable me to more intimately connect to the city.  He didn’t disappoint.  In his response were some of the high profile attractions like Notre Dame Cathedral and Musée du Louvre intermingled with more obscure points of interest like Rue Mouffetard (aka ‘Le Mouf,’ the purported oldest road in Paris that dates back to Roman times), the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore that supported the work of writing luminaries such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (back when Sylvia Beach ran it), the apartment where Ernest Hemmingway wrote A Moveable Feast, Place des Vosges, the Jewish Quarter, as well as Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.  Swimming in a sea of possibilities, the approach that my friend and I settled on was to choose one destination to start with in the morning, dogear one for the afternoon and simply see what happens after the morning destination.

What resulted was a beautiful organically unfolding experience that slowly opened day by day.  Not once did we ever feel a great sense of urgency to hurry through a place so that we could race to another one in an attempt to heroically conquer an ambitious itinerary.  To the contrary, I marveled at how slow and seemingly random our pace often was.  We would saunter to our first destination and after enjoying our time there, set an intention to head to another site among our curated lineup.  There was more than one day we would either not arrive at a planned afternoon rendezvous altogether or if we did make it at all, it was typically many hours later than it should take even a marginally organized person to navigate to.  What transpired was the journey shapeshifting into a constant reveal of unexpected encounters with wonder that invited us to momentarily “step off of the path.”  We’d be waylaid by the allurement of a boulangerie or the irresistible charm of a quaint and curious shop.  I remember passing by the same kind of quiet bookshop that George Whitman wrote about on an outside wall of Shakespeare and Company bookstore; a shop with no patrons and in the back, I could see the shop owner peacefully sitting at a table reading a book, completely insulated from the happenings in the world just beyond the windows.  The only thing missing was a dog curled up at his feet.  I wondered how it was possible such a shop could survive because any enchanting place like that would die in the US and be quickly replaced by a Subway or a Starbucks.  To my great astonishment and pleasure, I did not see a single major chain branded shop in the interior of old Paris.  Every shop, cafe and restaurant seemed to be privately owned and unique.  Seemingly every street and alley was teeming with charm and magic stoking our imaginations.  Then, of course, we had to stop for lunch at a restaurant that was, as many restaurants in Paris tend to be, an experiential feast of sublime atmosphere, history, aroma, flavor and sound.  I love the experience of dining in French restaurants and cafes–listening to the slow conversational cadence of French accents swirl around me.  I would often be pacified into an almost meditative threshold between a hypnagogic state of enchantment and a ballast of elevated alertness and awareness that comes from not being in one’s familiar linguistic and cultural environment.  One day, we set an intention to walk to the Louvre from the Musée Rodin after lunch only to realize we wouldn’t succeed upon noticing the fading light of sunset.  I was incredulous at how wonderful it was to fail to achieve a goal of seeing a world treasure and not feeling our experience that day was in any degree a lesser one for it.  We had seen exactly what had called us to be seen in every moment of that day and it was richly satisfying.  We did eventually see the Louvre but there were a number of sites we never made it to, including the most iconic symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower.  Measured against contemporary approaches to travel, our slow pace and lack of efficiency in seeing a larger number of sites in Paris might be considered a disappointment.  Paradoxically, however, I discovered there was a deeply liberating quality to allowing each day to unfold moment by moment, leaving space to be surprised—even leaving room for unfulfilled desire and wanting to come back to see what we didn’t see.

As I fondly reflect back on that experience in the context of contemporary travel sensibilities, I ponder how I could have had such a seemingly disorganized journey and yet feel so deeply fulfilled.  How could I possibly go to Paris and “miss out” on seeing many of her most popular attractions and not feel disappointed in myself for not having been more “focused and disciplined” with my precious and limited time?  It’s become a common collectively informed practice in our era to take a quick vacation to a popular tourist destination like Paris, identify the most highly reviewed points of interest and chart the routes that would most efficiently allow the highest number of these places to be visited in one or two days—perhaps a week.  This volume-consumption based approach prizes quantity of experiences over quality of a single experience.  We can develop a combative relationship with time, feeling time is something that must be bent to our will and overcome.  Strangely, what I have discovered when I have allowed myself to be open to my instincts and trust using my sense of wonder as a guide (which I wrote about here), I have moved through periods where it feels time has collapsed into a singularity—where I am no longer in time but outside of it.   When our relationship to time is adversarial, a phobia of “missing out” becomes pervasive to our consciousness.  Rigid compliance with a plan can feel imprisoning and oppressive because a significant amount of value can be assigned to checking off all of the places on the list rather than enjoying what those items in print symbolize—real actual places that want to be explored.  Preoccupation with defeating time greatly diminishes the possibility of allowing space for fateful events and auspicious encounters, be it with people or place.  When a rigid agenda is directing experience, our natural child-like spirit of wonder and curiosity gets corralled into a cage on a cart hitched to the unyielding gallop of time.  Our vision is narrowed and we do not see what wants to be seen—in some cases what perhaps needs to be seen.  We ultimately deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn.  True learning happens when we give ourselves permission to be with the uncertainty that always companions unfamiliar experiences. 

Author Phil Cousineau wrote in his first book on the topic of words that fascinate him, Word Catcher, about the French word, flâneur.  He defined it as a “soulful urban wander.”  He goes on to describe it as coming from “a noble tradition, strolling to savor the city, in contrast to the flashier boulevardier, who strolls in hopes of being savored by the city.  The roots of flâneur would appear to be French or Flemish, but the word actually comes from Old Norse flana, a wanderer.  Their patron saint, poet Charles Baudelaire, writes: ‘For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it’s an immense pleasure…in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite; you’re not at home, but you feel at home everywhere.’”  There is an important component of “wandering” or “flâneuring” that true learning requires to be present in any engaging business English learning experience.  I know I wouldn’t have learned nearly as much as I could have about Paris and French culture had I rigidly adhered to the merciless demands of a tight itinerary.  When I allowed my vision to widen to fully take in each moment in this unfamiliar world, my innate curiosity became the horse pulling me rather than something external to me.  My friend and I were liberated to respond to the overtures of inchoate experiences that lie just beyond the threshold of an inviting shop window, waiting patiently for the simple act of being chosen to be conceived into an exchange that feeds our hungry imagination.  Responding to the hospitality of something that arouses our sense of wonder gifts us with a respite from compliance with time’s cold demands that might otherwise compel us to turn everything between “point A” and “point B” on a tourist map into a forgettable smear of busyness. 

Preoccupation with defeating time greatly diminishes the possibility of allowing space for fateful events and auspicious encounters, be it with people or place. When a rigid agenda is directing experience, our natural child-like spirit of wonder and curiosity gets corralled into a cage on a cart hitched to the unyielding gallop of time. Our vision is narrowed and we do not see what wants to be seen—in some cases what perhaps needs to be seen. We ultimately deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn. True learning happens when we give ourselves permission to be with the uncertainty that always companions unfamiliar experiences.

When I first started my career teaching ESL, like most inexperienced teachers, I would predictably construct these elaborate detailed lesson plans that would attempt to fill every moment of whatever allotted time I had for a class with exercises and activities.  I was almost phobic about having “dead space,” fearing the class might get bored or restless.  As I gained experience, I began to see being so dependent on my lesson plan for creating an engaging learning experience actually worked against my very intentions. The lesson plan became highly restrictive because the lesson plan can never anticipate that which cannot be anticipated, human behavior.  A lesson plan can never anticipate the energy a group of students brings to class a particular day, the energy I bring to class, how a group of students receives what I have planned, or how a particular exercise or activity might excite students to more actively engage in class or vice versa.  If I were to rigidly adhere to a lesson plan, I may ignore the fact that my class is deeply engaged and activated by a certain language concept and want to spend more time on that topic than what my lesson plan might have allotted and move on because the lesson plan demands “progress.”  It could also work in the opposite manner.  Perhaps I have allocated an extended amount of class time to an exercise or activity the students are clearly not enjoying but because of a phobia of not knowing what to do with the extra time if I were to abandon the activity, I continue with the exercise and diminish the engagement and motivation of my class.  If this pattern goes on long enough, the greater risk is that I will erode their faith and trust in me as a leader.  They will feel I do not really see them—that I do not see their lack of interest and engagement, or if I do recognize it, I callously choose to not to respond to it.  This subsequently becomes a lost opportunity to communicate to my class that I see and recognize something I planned is not working and demonstrate true leadership by electing to make a “course correction” to our original flight plan.  If I have subordinated my sense of wonder and curiosity to being in that metaphorical cage hitched to an unyielding pace of a lesson plan, I indeed won’t know what to do.  Thankfully, I was able to cultivate the courage and the belief in myself to quickly move away from dependence on lesson plans.  Lesson plans for me became what they are intended to be, guidelines.  They serve to point me in a direction toward a destination but I leave plenty of space for me to improvise and adapt the learning experience to what I am actually seeing.  Rigid adherence to plans undermines what should be an artful craft of teaching and a teaching plan can cease to become a tool and instead function as a blindfold that impairs vision.  This is just as true for teachers as it is for travelers for in the end, they both share something in common.  They are pilgrims undertaking journeys.  And considering the paradoxical possibility that the journey itself might just be the actual destination can transform our experiences of them from rapidly consumed kindling to a slow burning log of hardwood that illuminates and warms our imagination for a long time.

This type of creative adaptability to the ever changing needs of the participants is what has shaped the approach we have taken to creating successful business English learning experiences for our clients.

Corporate English: Encouraging Students to Take Risks

The natural goal of any teacher in a corporate English class is to create an environment where the students feel comfortable.  But there is a balance that needs to be honored.  If students in an adult ESL class are too comfortable, there is an absence of the tension that is needed to break through to higher levels of mastery.  Classes where comfort is over-prioritized can become unstimulating and boring. 

Recently, I had to run an errand.  I was in a bit of a hurry and had a lot of things swirling in my head so in this state of mind, I snatched my keys and stepped out the back door to go to the garage.  I pull the door open and as I step out, something below just catches my attention in my peripheral vision before disappearing under my extended foot.  I recoil mid-step and quickly look to see what lie beneath my foot.  To my complete astonishment, I see that it’s a baby bird huddled in the crease of the door frame.  I crouch down to get a better look at it.  I suspect it to be a mourning dove.  Unlike what I associate with the young of many animals, baby doves (or as my neighbor later corrects me, a dove fledgling) are not what I personally find to be proportionately beautiful to what I associate with the young of other animal counterparts.  They are gangly with ruffled unkempt feathers and outsized eyes.  But what startles me is not its appearance, it’s the fact that it doesn’t seem overly frightened of me and doesn’t make any attempt to move away from me.  Not knowing what to do, I consult with two of my neighbors and Google and the consensus is to put it into a basket and then try to place it up off the ground in hopes that its mother will return.  Thankfully, I didn’t have too much concern that the mother would not return because I noticed a particularly watchful dove occupying various perches in the trees just outside of my backdoor.  In the end, not having a basket, I found a small empty planter, put some greenery I harvested from a nearby Cypress tree in the bottom of it, and gently guided the fledgling into her temporary nest.  I placed the makeshift dwelling up on the recyling bin so that she could not be so high up that a fall would injure her but be high enough to avoid being easy prey for a neighborhood cat.  As soon as I placed the planter on top of the recycling bin, the fledgling immediately hopped up on the rim of the planter and just sat there.  She seemed quite content.  So I left her there hoping that my absence might encourage her mother to accompany her.  When I returned from running my errand, as I came out of my garage and approached my backdoor, I noticed that the mother had indeed joined her.  She was sitting across from her on the other side of the planter.  I stood and watched for a moment.  The mother would cock her head and look at her little one.  The fledgling remained motionless, only occasionally turning her head a little.  Finally, the mother starts scooting around the rim of the planter until she is right next to the fledgling.  She proceeds to examine her and then begins vigorously preening her.  Still, the fledgling was motionless.  The mother, upon finishing her chore, becomes still.  After a couple of minutes passed, momma dove suddenly bumps her little one abruptly and then cocks her head to observe the reaction.  Nothing.  It was almost like a mom trying to urge a teenager to abandon the sofa and her preoccupation with her iPhone.  Once again, the mother bumped the fledgling and stared intently waiting for a response from her recalcitrant offspring.  Once again, nothing.  

It suddenly dawned on me what the mother was doing. She was trying to “encourage” the fledgling to fly. It’s a common experience, I have since come to learn, for fledglings to fall out of their nest due to their desire to, in typical teenager fashion, “get out of the house” and see the world.  They experiment with using the feathery appendages attached to their body. Up to this point on this particular morning, this adolescent had very little interest in moving at all much less attempting to fly.  Perhaps the initial failure to leave the nest was so discouraging that it didn’t want to make a second attempt. Resigning herself to her little one’s general disinterest in movement, the mother dove seems to have decided to simply be content to provide company. So she sits, like a parent next to her child on a park bench, staring at the playground.  A couple of more minutes goes by and neither mother nor fledgling moves.  I decide to go inside the house and leave them alone.  About an hour goes by and I am sitting in my home office at the back of the house when through the window, I can see my elderly neighbor slowly approaching the recycling bin with a bowl of water.  I wonder how close she would be able to get.  Surprisingly.  Quite close.  Once she gets within three feet, the mother suddenly flies off into the neighboring tree.  The fledgling remains but now her head is moving as she is carefully inspecting her large approaching visitor.  Then, right as my neighbor is gently placing the water next to the planter on the recycling bin, the fledgling suddenly starts frantically flapping her wings and she lunges airborne to a low hanging branch just behind her.  Flight.  

Watching this scene play out made me reflect on my own experience working with language learners over the last twenty years.  I would estimate that I’ve easily taught English to a few thousand students from immersion style ESL programs to groups of kids to business English students at offices in corporate environments.  Often, as teachers, we are dealing with students who have a fledgling mindset in that there is an underlying deep curiosity and fascination with the great unknown of the landscape of the language and culture they are on the threshold of crossing into.  And yet, there is a fragility to their confidence that is in need of a good steward—someone to guide them through this unknown territory much as Sacagawea did for Lewis and Clark in their journey into the unknown vast western wilderness of the US in search of the mythical Northwest Passage.  Like Lewis and Clark, they are eager to explore their new world of a foreign language and inevitably, upon their first encounter with the language, discover that they cannot immediately take flight with it.  Sometimes, they come crashing to the earth.  Egos bruised and feeling discouraged, they too naturally resist risking further injury, frustration or humiliation.  Like that mother dove, when we as teachers are doing our job well, we have to recognize how to modulate between challenging and encouraging our students and being patient.  It’s not one or the other but rather a dance between both.  If we push too hard and too insistently, they may be tempted to quit but if we provide no prodding, they risk stagnating in their own passivity.  The beginning of a learning journey is always the most tenuous and it is in that time that the teacher recognizes that he must be the keeper of the student’s faith until such time the student is ready to take possession of it back from the teacher—until such time when he is ready to take flight under his own power.  Until then, we are there dancing on the rim of their threshold alternating between being a kind of mischievous provocateur and a silent cheerleader.  Having the discernment and the patience to know when and how to apply one or the other is what defines greatness in a teacher. 

One of my meditation teachers had an interesting way of explaining the optimal state for meditation practice.  He said you want to be relaxed but not so relaxed that you are at risk of falling asleep while at the same time being alert but not so alert that you are overstimulated and tense.  This same metaphor could apply to the optimal learning state.  In a well designed corporate English course learning environment, nudging students to get outside of their comfort zone is what enables them to break through to the next level of competency in their journey to becoming fluent in English.  In that regard, maybe we could all benefit from watching mother doves and their fledglings.

Business English ESL: The Dazzling Power of Curiosity

In my experience offering business English ESL courses to our corporate clients, learning a second language holds a natural sense of fascination for a lot the language program participants.   There is a lot of initial enthusiasm but then they discover that it can be quite a challenging ordeal to get traction towards making meaningful progress.  It’s easy to get discouraged.  And if a sense of wonder and curiosity are not activated and nurtured on a regular basis, that discouragement will start to grow into an insurmountable level of frustration.  The antidote to that is engaging curiosity.  I remember how curiosity kept me motivated on a really difficult hike in Spain a few years back.

 A bead of sweat collected at the tip of my nose as I stared at the ground between my hiking boots trying to allow my eyes to train their focus on something as my hands supported my collapsed torso on my knees.  I was trying to focus on something to distract me from the raging forest fire burning inside my legs and the weight of a small elephant standing on my shoulders for the last hour and a half that my thirty-five pounds of camera gear in my pack had started to feel like.  In my semi-delirious state of mind, I was too lazy to even lift up my arm to wipe the dangling sweat from my nose.  I just shook my head until it fell off.  Normally, these kinds of hikes that I’ve done many times under similar circumstances don’t phase me but not today.  My friend from Seville and I were about three quarters of the way up Montserrat and had only about thirty minutes more to go.  She was actually just fine.  She kept asking me, to my chagrin, “Are you okay?”

We had come to this place a couple of hours northwest of Barcelona to visit the second most famous pilgrimage site in Spain after Santiago de Compostela known as Monistir de Montserrat (the Monastery of Mount Serrat).  This little cluster of mountains looks almost like some strange interloping race of alien topography defiantly set up a colony deep inside the boundaries of Spain–so strange and unexpected their appearance is when you first encounter them rising fiercely up out of the surrounding bucolic Catalonian countryside.  Rather than take the modern train ride up the steep rugged slopes to be conveniently deposited right in front of the main entrance to the monastery complex, my friend and I elected to make the two and a half hour arduous hike from the base of the mountain in the spirit of the way pilgrims had approached this place for thousands of years prior to what is only the recent advent of mechanical transportation.  

Although that hike proved to be quite the little physical ordeal, it was so worth it.  As we ascended, we’d come around a bend in the trail and through a patch of trees we’d see it; the morning rays of sun gently caressing the limestone monastery walls like a jewel resting among the jagged peaks of a mountain crown.  The beauty of the whole scene was transfixing; functioning like some kind of mystical balm assuaging the angry flames of protest coming from my exhausted legs.  When I recall that hike, what immediately leaps to mind is not my fatigue but the insatiable hunger and desire I had to enjoy the reward of arriving to this visual feast that had been courting my eyes the entire journey up the mountain.

Traditionally, a pilgrimage site was associated with a place venerated as being sacred or holy.  Often, there was a religious association.  But over time, pilgrimage sites have come to be associated with any extraordinary place that evokes a deep sense of wonder and puts people into what James Joyce would describe as “being held in a state of aesthetic arrest.”  In the contemporary best selling classic on pilgrimage, The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau, he says; “I also believe in pilgrimage as a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler.”  I personally believe the “something” Phil refers to is a connection we long for with the experience of deep awe and wonder.  In that expanded sense of the definition, I’ve been to pilgrimage sites in a number of places that include Clonmacnoise in Ireland, Stonehenge in England, the ancient ruins of Ayutthaya in Thailand, the ruins of Knossos in Crete, Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave) in Bali, the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, ancient Delphi and the Acropolis in Greece and domestically, our “cathedrals of nature” such as Joshua Tree National Park, Yellowstone National Park, The Grand Tetons National Park, Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Crater Lake National Park.  All of them summoned and evoked a deep sense of wonder in me that was like the stoking of an internal flame through which vitality was profoundly nurtured and curiosity was aroused.  

In my experience of being involved with teaching ESL and business English learning courses for over twenty years now, I’ve increasingly come to feel that tending to the flame of wonder, both the teacher’s and the student’s, is one of the most influential factors in cultivating an engaging learning experience.  Too often times, learning is reduced to being nothing more than a delivery mechanism for information.  Instead of a vital exchange, teaching can become merely transactional and utilitarian.

I have a beguiling fascination with ancient history, old stories, architectural ruins, and origins.  For example, one of the practices I have when I travel (also one of the recommendations by Phil Cousineau in his Art of Pilgrimage book) is to find out where the oldest parts/buildings of a city are located that I’m visiting.  Likewise, the English language also lends itself quite well to gratifying my oddball fascination since English has had such a complex evolutionary history.  As someone who has spent most of his adult life involved in teaching the English language, I remember becoming curious a number of years back to investigate the origin of “teach.”  In exploring its etymology, I discovered that teach comes from the Old English “tæcen;” “to show.”  Tæcen in turn is related to the Old English “tacen;” “token or sign.”  Tacen can then be further traced to the Old German, “tekan;” “sign, wonder, miracle.”  So one might conclude “to teach” has its roots in a sense of “showing signs, wonders, or miracles.”  I can say my personal experience both as a student and a teacher confirms this conclusion.  If I think of my most memorable learning experiences in life with a teacher, they had this almost magical ability to kindle the flames of wonder within me.  There wasn’t any sense of the experience being merely a sterile indifferent dissemination of information.  Rather, I felt the arousal of an insatiable hunger and desire to attend to and feed this dormant animal of curiosity within me that had been awakened by a spellbinding wizard.  Great teachers have a kind of ringmaster ability to summon a circus of excitement within us to learn.  This is that difference between education and learning that Sir Ken Robinson so brilliantly and humorously illuminates in his virally popular TED Talk.  When my curiosity and sense of wonder are engaged, I’m engaged in the learning process, be it as a student or as a teacher.  Even though there are inevitably aspects of learning that are challenging and unpleasant, my sense of wonder fuels a deeper sense of conviction and commitment to push through those “ordeals” knowing that a great reward awaits me much like that monastery at the top of Montserrat.  In those moments of frustration when I metaphorically have my head over my knees, I’ll always have the conviction of knowing the struggle up that learning slope is worth the sacrifice. 

Curiosity and wonder are morale boosting elixirs that the best business English ESL course approaches take great care to be good steward of.  Maintaining the motivation of the business English student is critical to not only successful outcomes but to the very survival of the course.