Reviewed by Stephen Tarbuck
Introduction
After seeing Chris Roland as a plenary speaker at the International House Toruń teacher training day I had to find myself a copy of Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom. The purchase was well worth it.
The book attempts the monumental task of demystifying teenage classes by sharing insights through anecdotes, practical advice, and reflection questions for our own and our team's professional development.
Content
The book is around 300 pages long and is part of Pavilion ELT’s Teaching English series. It was also an innovation awards finalist in the British Council 2019 ELTons.
The book consists of 24 chapters with each chapter being an accessible overview of a single topic, rather than an extensive exploration of the theories and research underpinning each topic.
The author says that the topics were chosen as they were areas in which teachers have most often asked for guidance and the ones that teachers have fed back on as being most useful (Roland., 2018, p.10). Each chapter follows the pattern: Discussion of topic, practical applications, questions for reflection, things to try, things to share, and references.
Recommended Chapters
There are four chapters I particularly recommend: Planning lessons with teenagers, Autonomy and student-fronted classes, Control of the class, and Affect: speaking positively to our students.
These chapters have given me the most food for thought and I would like to summarise the contents of these chapters so you can see some of the ideas they and the book contain.
Planning lessons with teenagers
This chapter is full of ideas and from the start it shows the idea of changing our attitude towards planning lessons, from 'What am I going to do with them?’ to ‘What am I going to teach them?’
An idea here that particularly caught my attention was that having identifiable lesson aims with stages that are presented to the students helps with motivation, as your students can track lesson progress. By making the stages explicit and visible - such as by putting them on the whiteboard, as I discuss myself in Issue 52 - you can deflect distractions such as students requesting games by pointing out that you need to reach a certain stage before such ideas could be entertained.
Some other highlights are: avoiding speaking poorly about the course material, our natural inclination to appease difficult students when choosing activities, and finally some tips for making the first lesson of the academic year productive (and speaking personally here, there is a limit to the number of times you can run a ‘getting-to-know-you’ lesson, especially at the same school where students often progress in the same groups from level to level - they already know each other, so I’m glad to have Chris Roland’s advice to offer a fresh approach here!).
Affect: speaking positively to our students
This chapter revolves around the idea that there is a huge amount of value to you as a teacher of teenagers in making sure that your students know you do not hate them.’ (Roland., 2018, p.79). Straightaway we can see that this chapter delves more into psychological theory than the previous ones, but, as someone unacquainted with such theory, I didn’t feel it was overwhelming.
The chapter instead maintained its relatability by only touching on psychology theory and keeping everything centred on teenagers in the classroom. An example of this would be the psychology behind teens always seeking attention, whether negative or positive, in order to present themselves as an individual of value to their peers.
Roland addresses a lot of the different ways we respond to students and how we might reframe what we say in order to create more positive relationships with our students. An example of this is requesting a noisy student to move closer to you, not because they are noisy or disruptive, but because they are a chatty person and it would be good for you to get to know them better.
Autonomy and student-fronted classes
This chapter addresses the idea of giving students more agency and largely revolves around the possibilities of making the students the teacher; while this is not a new idea, the chapter does have some useful contributions, such as direct examples of praise and feedback that we can give to our student-teachers.
Roland offers examples of teenage students being inter-class teachers in situations such as: teens teaching other teenager classes, teens teaching primary classes, and doing presentations for outside groups. He gives tips on setting up such tasks and provides an adaptable lesson plan template to help our student-teachers plan their class - I think this template is an example of what separates useful advice from the merely good; getting your students to work as teachers is one thing, but I’ve often found that the assumption is that the students must figure out how to do this by themselves. The template here will lend structure to the activity, and I think it will prove invaluable.
Control of the class
This chapter is spent asking and addressing the question of why are classes difficult? And how, when we are required to address these difficulties, we can stick to principled procedure (Roland., 2018, p.281), by which we mean procedures as established by the teacher or the institute.
The chapter covers some classic ideas connected to classroom control, such as how ideal it would be to be the favourite teacher but it’s not important in managing behaviour. But I found new ideas here too, with one example being the idea of fronting discipline, or making your behavioural expectations clear in the task set up as part of your instructions, for example, clarifying acceptable volume levels in a team game or specifying that no running is allowed in the activity.
This chapter contains a variety of other ideas but does highlight an issue that is prevalent in the book: The book offers plenty of ready-to-go phrases for a variety of student interactions, but the examples provided are too linguistically dense for the majority of levels.
Now, in fairness, there is a chapter focused on teaching low-level teens, but it doesn’t resolve the above issue, so, if you want to use some of the go-to phrases then be prepared to adapt them to suit your class or make use of the student’s L1.
Recommendation
Previously I have said a little about the book's content and some of the pros and cons of the book's approach, so I would like to finish with some reasons that I recommend the book.
First, the ideas inside prompt you to reflect on your teaching with the overall idea of developing your own approaches to the different situations highlighted in the chapters, rather than the reader being given copy-and-paste instructions for each situation.
Secondly, the book keeps the topics accessible, which it does by keeping the chapters short and focused, with the majority of chapters I recommended being around nine pages long. This is long enough to treat the subject to a reasonable depth, without becoming so long that you have to fight through verbiage to get to the content.
Lastly, the book approaches the lofty task of understanding teen classes through a mixture of positive anecdotes, workable activity prompts, and thought-provoking self-reflection questions.
Author Biography
Stephen Tarbuck is an EFL teacher and IHCYLT Tutor in Training at International House Toruń. He also writes articles on a variety of TEFL topics and is a regular contributor to International House Journal. His ideas have been published in Modern English Teacher, El Gazette, Connections, and Humanising Language Teaching. He also blogs at stephentarbuck.wordpress.com