Education in Sarawak: an Outsider Looking In (or Why I Quit my Job)

This article originally appeared on the LoyarBurok website on 10 August 2012.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education – Albert Einstein

It’s the superficial differences you notice first, of course. Sarawakian schools are better landscaped; British schools are better resourced. British schools have a greater sense of structure; Sarawakian schools have a greater sense of community. There are superficial similarities, too – it seems that teachers all over the world have parallel concerns about government interference and volumes of paperwork. But after 18 months mentoring English teachers here in Sarawak under the new KSSR curriculum, I hope I’ve started to get (ever so) slightly under the skin of the primary education system here, and as an outsider looking in, this is what I’ve learnt about…

…classroom pedagogy

KSSR classrooms are pedagogically chaotic. Sadly that is not to say that teachers are reflectively experimenting with different approaches, but that nobody seems to know what to do for the best with the incoherent textbooks and conflicting advice foisted upon them since January last year.

The KSSR was intended to help teachers move away from chalking-and-talking by introducing contemporary methodologies such as synthetic phonics and communicative language teaching, but teachers were given no training and the textbook authors often seem as confused as the teachers. My favourite Year Two speaking activity reads, bafflingly:

‘A chicken gives us meat and eggs. Talk about camels and ostriches.’

Having a ‘native speaker’ (many of us are native-level rather than native speakers but the assumption endures) in their classrooms has barely helped my mentees to untangle the mess of the KSSR. How can it? Teachers are being asked to embrace a 180-degree culture change by spending two to three hours a week with a mad foreigner banging on about group work. What I’ve actually done for the last year and a half is deliver a piecemeal CELTA course in an attempt to compensate for the lack of theoretical foundations laid down by the MoE – but intensive four-week CELTAs (or their equivalent) could and should have been delivered by qualified local tutors before the KSSR was rolled out. That way, I might have been more of a mentor than an instructor. It’s a shame.

It’s also a shame that those in power don’t recognise that constantly using teachers as political guinea pigs makes huge dents in morale. Which leads me to…

...motivation

I’ve met some fantastically hard-working teachers in Sarawak who take their professional development seriously and who really care what happens to their charges. I’ve also met some unpardonably poor ones who’ve long since lost the will to teach, who arrive late to class or not at all, who never plan lessons and whose classroom management skills extend only to wielding (and occasionally using) a cane.

Cane aside – corporal punishment in state schools has been illegal in the UK since 1987 – I wouldn’t suggest for a second that British teachers don’t also fall into these two camps, and many in between. The difference in Sarawak seems to be that, once you’ve entered the teaching profession, it’s almost impossible to be dismissed. Incompetent teachers might receive verbal or written warnings, or be unhelpfully shunted to another school, but fired? No. In rural areas especially, legends of sacked teachers and petrol bombs abound, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the system is clogged with poorly-performing staff who do nothing to merit their salaries. But education reform is not possible without a workforce of committed educators.

Children shouldn’t move through any school system encountering just a handful of dedicated, capable teachers. The best I’ve worked with, here and in other countries, have been intrinsically motivated. They (we) enjoy their (our) work and see the value of it. Carrots such as bonuses, and sticks such as unpaid suspension of duties, are often rubbished as ineffective, short-term solutions to a lack of employee motivation, but in this context the absence of sticks is disastrous.

Let those who are jaded (for nobody could blame you), those who would rather be somewhere else, be somewhere else. And let those who can, teach.

…testing

From the moment you enter a school and see the huge display board counting down the days to the UPSR examination, it’s clear that education in Sarawak is driven by testing. Sadly, this drive swiftly and routinely breaks down the natural inquisitiveness that new pupils and new teachers bring to the classroom, and without it barely any real learning can take place. Teachers say; pupils repeat. Teachers write; pupils copy. Scoring highly on the UPSR English paper requires very little in the way of understanding.

Although the MoE has wisely recommended (rather than mandated…or has it? A definitive answer is hard to find) that testing should be abolished under the KSSR and replaced with continuous assessment, this is not happening. Why? In addition to the lack of ministerial clarity on the subject, the data entry requirements of the fledgling continuous assessment system are arduous, and at present there’s a disconnect between the communicative focus of the KSSR and the grammatical focus of the UPSR. There also seems to exist amongst headteachers an unshakeable belief that parents will not accept any means of progress testing other than, well, tests.

The UK is hardly more sensible on this front, with children sitting standardised tests at four ‘Key Stages’ during their school careers (at ages seven, 11, 14 and 16). Finland, however, widely accepted as having one of the most successful education systems in the world and from whom many of the KSSR’s principles were appropriated, does not test its students at all until the end of their final year of secondary school. Until practice follows policy here in Sarawak, children continue to be force-fed information they can parrot but not manipulate.

Another delivery of 1Malaysia chocolate milk

…the broader learning culture

The behaviour we expect from children must be modelled by the adults around them. We expect children to read, yet a 2012 straw poll of teachers in the Padawan district (where I’ve been working) revealed that, in the last year, only one person of 30 had read a whole book for pleasure themselves and only two had read stories to their kids. National statistics suggest that the average Malaysian reads just two books per year.

We also expect children to develop critical thinking skills, yet schools offer scant opportunities for them to do so. The hidden curriculum of the Sarawakian education system teaches pupils over and over again that unquestioning adherence to hierarchy – being silent or speaking (reciting) only at the command of someone higher up the food chain – is the single acceptable model of behaviour, and that deviation from this ‘norm’ is likely to land you in hot water.

On a related note, we expect parents to take an active interest in their children’s learning but insult their intelligence at every turn. Whilst a lack of parental engagement is the commonest reason offered for low student attainment, parents’ imagined beliefs are still allowed to dictate educational practice. Pupils must complete every exercise on every page of their workbooks, even those with nonsensical instructions and grammatical errors (there are several), otherwise parents will complain. Pupils must take monthly tests and have letter grades on their report cards otherwise parents will complain. Has there been a consultation? Are Sarawakian mothers and fathers really so immovable on these pedagogical matters in which they allegedly take no interest? It doesn’t make sense.

...the learning environment

Environment affects learning. It’s certainly not the most critical thing, but when you have a class of fifty in a crowded room with no soundproofing, a fan that only works between 10:45 and 11:10 on a Tuesday, nothing on the walls and holes in the floor, it’s much harder for learning to take place. Sarawakian school architecture seems not to have changed in the last thirty or forty years, although a growing body of research suggests that both teachers’ and students’ achievement is linked to the buildings in which they work. What to do?

Lack of finances is the oft-cited explanation for crumbling classrooms, but it appears that money can always be found for projects such as ours with which political points can be scored, and for the fountain of 1Malaysia chocolate milk which never seems to run dry. Cynicism aside, I’m not doubting the budgetary constraints at both government and school level, but a more even allocation of whatever meagre budget there is would go a long way towards improving the environment of most schools.

The real business of a school is teaching and learning and this is surely where money needs to be directed. Style is consistently prioritised over substance – in the cultivation of immaculate gardens while classrooms remain unfit for purpose, for example. Of course it’s not realistic to expect interactive whiteboards (or even whiteboards) in every room, but there ought to be sufficient time and money for staff to make attractive, educational decorations for their schools. Displaying pupils’ work, especially, is motivating and requires almost no effort on the part of teachers, but audible encouragement is needed from the top for teachers to spend less time on, say, testing, and more on creating places where kids are excited to learn.

…myself

Perhaps what you’ve learnt about me from this article is that I’m some neo-colonialist busybody who’d do well to go back to England and stop meddling in your education system. I’ve heard it before, and I’d struggle to argue with you at this point.

But the most significant thing I’d say I’ve learnt about myself from my experience here is that I’m a teacher first and a mentor, trainer, whatever else second. Being an outsider looking in to other people’s classrooms has fuelled my desire to get back inside one like nothing else in the past nine years, which is why I’ve left the project in spite of a deep-seated affection for Sarawak. I’d like to thank you for having me, apologise for the very little impact I’ve been able to make, and I hope for everyone’s sake that my successor is a vocation mentor with a fondness for chocolate milk.

Spirits, skulls and sweets

Hello! I’m breaking my 54-day blogging hiatus with a slightly unusual post, but I thought this was really interesting…

M is a primary school teacher in southern Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. She is a Bidayuh, one of the indigenous (Dayak) groups of Sarawak. It’s the second largest group, with a population of around 200,000; the largest group is the Iban, whose name means ‘sea Dayak’. The word Bidayuh means ‘land Dayak’.

I’ve been working with M on the British Council’s English Language Teacher Development Project (ELTDP) since February 2011 and she very kindly agreed to give a short interview on Bidayuh culture past and present, to help me with a coursebook I’m writing. I thought what she said was fascinating and decided to post (a slightly edited version of) the interview transcript, which M has seen and approved, on ptefldactyl.

Could you start by telling us about Sarawak?

In Sarawak there are many races – Bidayuh, Iban, Malay, Chinese – but we all respect each other, and when we see people from other countries we tend to smile and try to make them feel like they’re at home. And when somebody comes to our kampung we have to see they are looked after.



Bidayuh longhouse (click here for photo source)

Can you explain what a kampung is?

It’s like a village. Almost like one family. Before the missionaries came we all lived in longhouses, but those who converted to Christianity had to move out and build their own houses on their own land because they had different beliefs. In my kampung all the longhouses have been replaced now.

We have rules. We can’t interfere with the other families’ affairs. But even though we mind our own business, we care for other people in the community. When somebody passes away, or gets married, all of us go to that house and give money or food, or we offer help.

How has life changed since you were a child?

I still remember when I was young we lived in a wooden house on stilts and every day I had to go and take my bath in the pond because there’s no river in our kampung…

Why was the house on stilts? To protect the house during the rainy season?

I don’t think so. It was to protect us from animals and maybe headhunters.

Bidayuh women in traditional dress (click for photo source)

Headhunters?

Many years ago both the Iban and the Bidayuh were headhunters. My grandfather told me that other tribes used to come along the river to attack our village. He said they used black magic – that when they heard a battle gong, they could travel from one place to another in minutes. Sometimes I was very scared at night.

People took heads and brought them home. They tried to get as many as possible…it meant they were the best warrior, and they could lead the people in their kampung. We don’t practise headhunting now. It gradually stopped when the missionaries came, around the 1940s I think, before the Japanese occupation. But some people still believe if you build a bridge there should be a skull in the construction, otherwise it will quickly collapse. It might just be superstition.

Sorry, I interrupted! Tell us what you remember from when you were a child.

We had to get water from the well and carry it up the ladder, and we had to collect firewood. There was no electricity and no roads – we went everywhere on foot. When I went to primary school, a mission school, I had to walk through the jungle for half an hour. We didn’t have shoes, bags or umbrellas, so on rainy days we used banana leaves to cover our heads. By the time we got to school our uniforms were wet. But if I compare nowadays to that time, I prefer that time because at least when we walked there were trees to shade us from the sun.

The rice that we ate we grew ourselves. My father reared fish in the pond, many types of fish. We also had kampung chickens, not like the chickens we get now, and jungle products like bamboo shoots and tapioca leaf. He went to town once a month, on foot. It took hours. He went to a Chinese shop to buy agricultural tools like hoes, and knives for rubber tapping, and sweets…10 sen [US 3¢] could buy a lot of sweets at that time.

We were very poor. We only had a few dresses and our houses didn’t have much furniture, just simple things, and we slept on the floor. But now it’s totally different. We have electricity and cars and we can move easily from one place to another.



A baruk, or head-house (click for photo source)

What does Bidayuh culture mean to you?

Both the Bidayuh and the Iban celebrate Gawai on 1 June because we are both involved in agriculture. Gawai marks the end of the rice harvest. Compared to the past the celebration is different now…these days we have open house. We invite our relatives and serve them food and drinks. But what I saw from my mother-in-law was a different kind of celebration. You had to stay in the baruk for three days, and the spirit of the rice would be there so next year you would have a fruitful harvest.

You have to be careful with spirits. My ancestors still have the sword, we call it a parang, which was used to cut the heads off people, but it’s got a spirit. You were supposed to put human blood on it because if not then it may do something bad. We don’t do it any more. Many people don’t want to keep the swords now.

Is it important for children to learn Bahasa Bidayuh?

Yes, but Bahasa Bidayuh is not one language. We have nine dialects if I’m not mistaken. If we meet someone from Serian [a town approximately 30km away] we can’t understand each other. We have to use Bahasa Malaysia or English.

How do you think life will be different for your children?

We’ll still maintain our way of life but not totally. Before, people didn’t understand the importance of education but now it’s a must, especially for the Bidayuh in urban areas. They care about their children’s education; they know it can change their lives. A lot of young people will migrate to town because they no longer want to be farmers. They all want to work in government agencies or the private sector because it’s the best way to earn a living. The elders will stay in the kampung I think, they will still be farmers but now they can go into town and sell their goods.

In the past Bidayuh only married Bidayuh but because of these socioeconomic and political developments it’s mostly intermarriage now, even marriage with foreigners. It can change the traditional culture. If you still live in the village then you continue to practice Biduyuh culture, but if you live somewhere else maybe not. It depends on the race you’re married to. If you marry a Malay and convert to Islam then of course your culture will change. But from what I’ve seen, if you marry a Chinese for example then you can celebrate Gawai and also Chinese New Year. That’s the good thing about Malaysia!

Shut up! - encouraging learner autonomy through minimal instructions

Last week when I asked my Twitter PLN for tips on giving instructions, the eternally useful Kevin Stein (@kevchanwow) quickly replied:

‘Not to sound glib, but no instructions often works best.’

Interesting prospect. The reason I’d sought advice was that one of my mentees – I mentor ten primary English teachers in Malaysian Borneo – had mentioned after an observation that she was struggling to give clear instructions. We’d discussed the issue for a while and come up with the following ideas:

• KISS (a mnemonic from a previous workshop: Keep It Short & Simple!)
• break complex activities into stages and only give one instruction at a time
• draw simple pictures on the board
• use gesture or mime to accompany instructions
• provide a model of what you want the children to do
• choose the most common classroom instructions (e.g. Work in pairs), display them around the room and use them regularly and consistently
• write down and rehearse what you’re going to say if necessary

A mini-tambourine says more than you ever can

…but it hadn’t occurred to either of us that giving no instructions at all might be the way to go. When I first put Kevin’s suggestion to my mentee (who I will just call N), she looked completely confused. But as we discussed it more she realised that for certain activities, such as matching words and picture cards in groups, teacher instructions were unnecessary: the format was familiar and the task self-evident, provided that at least some of the words had been seen before.

To put this in a little more context: the fact that her class would not be fazed by a pile of picture and word cards is already a remarkable thing. The purpose of primary education in Malaysia seems to be for children to learn exactly what’s required to pass the horrific Year 6 UPSR examination and absolutely no more, and if you dropped into a random classroom you’d be likely to encounter one of two scenarios:

(1) children chorally repeating such everyday utterances as The tin is in the pit! ad nauseum; or

(2) children completing workbook exercises in silence while the teacher sits at the front desk marking or texting.

Games: not so much. Learner autonomy: NAUGHTY CHILDREN. That’s where we started from fourteen months ago. So to return to the point, N had agreed not to give instructions for part of her Year 3* class but when I arrived in school this morning she said she’d decided, as an experiment, not to speak at all. I must admit I was sceptical, but very intrigued to see what would happen.

The aim of the lesson was for the children to follow simple written instructions to make a bookmark. The class went like this:

• N maintained her normal routine of eliciting the day and date by writing a capital M on the board and looking expectantly at the children, who responded, ‘Today is Monday…[pause, more expectant looking]…the sixteenth of April’.

• As a quick warmer she prompted them to sing a song she’d taught them last week by doing the action that accompanied the first line of the song.

• She picked up her textbook, turned to the page with the instructions for making a bookmark and held it up for the children to see. They opened their books to the same page. At this point some of them stopped looking at N and started trying to read the book, and she got their attention again by waving a mini-tambourine.

• She called them to the front and showed them some word cards. Put together, the words formed five sentences explaining how to make a bookmark. They were very similar to the textbook instructions, but slightly simplified and with sequence words added. N spread out the words, picked out the card which said First and pretended to search for the next word. The pupils helped. After they had completed the first sentence together, she sent them back to their tables with a set of words each, and they built up all five sentences.

• She monitored the activity table by table, pointing to completed sentences and asking the children to read aloud what they had just constructed.

• When they had finished, N again got their attention with the tambourine. She mimed clearing up the word cards and closing the textbook, which the children did, then gave each group a worksheet. On it were pictures representing the five stages of making the bookmark, and the completed sentences they’d just made (in a jumbled order). Without being told what to do, the children started to write the sentences next to the correct diagrams.

• N monitored for spelling and punctuation, a nod to the requirements of the UPSR (in which marks are deducted for capital Ms written with rounded rather than pointed peaks. This is the kind of madness we’re dealing with). As each group finished the worksheet, they got one star on the reward board.

• N handed out card, scissors and ribbon to each pupil. She held up one group’s worksheet, pointed to the first instruction (First, draw a rectangle on the card) and then pointed at the card. When one or two children reached for their pencils and rulers, she gave them encouraging nods and smiles and withdrew. The other pupils quickly followed their lead.

• The vast majority of the students were able to follow the instructions to make their bookmarks. When there was doubt (punch a hole for example was not universally understood), the quicker kids explained to their friends what they had to do.

• Some of the pupils finished and brought their work to show N. She pointed at two children, pointed to a blank space on the back wall, and handed them a roll of double-sided tape. They immediately understood that they should display the work there, and other kids noticed what they were doing and started to take their work to the wall too.

• At the end of the class, groups whose members had all completed the task received another star on the reward chart.

• To elicit the routine lesson closer (in which the teacher thanks the class and they thank the teacher), N shook the tambourine, pointed at her watch and cupped her hand to her ear. The children dutifully replied, ‘Thank you, teacher! Thank you, Miss Laura!' :)

Standing on tables to display the finished bookmarks
(take that, Health and Safety!)

I was beaming and N was too. The children had worked together to complete the tasks without a single word from either of us.

The thing that impressed me the most was how willing my mentee had been to take a risk and relinquish control of the lesson. Here in Borneo there seems to be a belief that teachers whose classes are ‘noisy’ cannot control their pupils – that is to say, the noise of drilling, drilling and more drilling is fine, but the noise of children actually conversing is not – so to hear only the students’ voices during the lesson was quite thrilling. Drilling, thrilling: there’s a poem in there somewhere.

It wasn’t perfect. Although the children followed the instructions some of them drew rectangles pushing A5 size, which made me wonder whether they had understood what a bookmark was; we talked about maybe showing a bookmark at the start of the class and eliciting the word. We talked about possible activities for early finishers and about ways to indicate time limits for activities (I’d suggested drawing clocks with finishing times on them, but it didn’t really work). But mostly we talked about how exciting it was to take a leap of faith and for it to work so well. N is planning her next experiment.

* Year 3 pupils are nine years old. They’ve had five hours of ESL per week since Year 1, plus potentially some exposure to the language during one year of kindergarten.

The negative observer

It’s February 2011 and I’m sitting at the back of a sweaty classroom in Borneo, doing my first official observation of a Year 1 primary English teacher. The virgin white page of my new notebook is rapidly turning black, like a storm cloud coming over the sky, with scribbles such as:

No warmer

Lesson objectives?

Staging?

Teacher-centred

No variety

No meaning

Class management? CANE??

Aaaaaargh

Ffteen minutes felt like fifty, and this was fairly representative of all the lessons I saw that week.

The prospect of spending the next two and a half years as a mentor within this education system was overwhelming. Where to start? I was grateful we were under strict instructions not to give any feedback on initial observations except, ‘That was an interesting class. Thank you for having me’.

It’s now February 2012 and I’m sitting at the back of a classroom in Borneo, watching for the first time a new mentee who’s just joined the project. It’s still sweatier than a very sweaty thing, but my observation notes look totally different:

Kids loved song

Clear instructions

Nice flashcards

Good rapport

Check pron of /æ/

Phonics game in groups of 4?
Extension activities?

What’s happened in a year? Are the new teachers more competent than the old ones?  Have I tuned out the pedagogical idiosyncrasies of Sarawakian classrooms? Or have I realised that observation is not about me?

As Chris Ozog said in his excellent blog post ‘On being an observer’:

'Observations of teachers are not there to tell people how to teach, to take a teacher’s lesson to bits, to criticise, to push a certain pedagogical agenda or to show off the observer’s supposed greater experience and knowledge.'

How true that is, and how unable I was – occasionally still am – to practice what any sensible person would preach. It doesn’t matter what I would have done in their shoes. It matters whether the children enjoyed and learned from the lesson, and if they didn’t, whether it was because the teacher was missing any skills, knowledge or resources that I could help to provide.

Now, when I’m perspiring and scrawling and the teacher is nearly always trying their best in difficult circumstances, I try to start with a positive comment, even if my gut reaction is *lights flash, klaxon sounds* NO WARMER! NO WARMER! Like visualisation before a sports match or performance, it seems to trick my brain into looking at the lesson through a different filter. I don’t allow myself to write general criticisms either (Teacher-centred), but specific suggestions to improve activities that didn’t go so well (Phonics game in groups of 4?). And I watch the kids more than the teacher.

Kids settling down to class today

I was surprised and delighted last week to be approached by a mentee who’s been with me since the start of the project. She had, quite of her own volition, organised a peer observation programme for her school, and wanted me to join her on her first observation of a colleague. As we watched him, she leaned over to me and whispered, ‘This is terrible. So terrible’. I wondered whether all beginner observers fall into the same negativity trap I did, and was fascinated to see how our notes would compare when the class was over.

In short, her page was much like mine from a year ago. On one hand, I was really pleased that she could identify a lot of the issues we’ve been discussing over the last twelve months. On another, I worried that I had for too long provided a model of observation that was inappropriately vague and unduly critical. We talked about what we’d each written and constructed two columns of feedback, one containing examples of good practice and one with ideas to consider (she thought I was being too kind).

Unfortunately I wasn’t there to deliver the oral feedback with her so I’ve no idea whether, when it came to it, she was gentle or harsh or somewhere in between, and whether Mr A took it all on the chin or ran weeping into the mop cupboard. But observing her observing (to put it untidily) certainly forced me to look at my own practice as an observer, and what that communicates to the teachers who will take over my role when I’m gone. And as for effective oral feedback – well, that’s a whole separate post, isn’t it? :)

The pleasure of books: how Spot the dog inspired a family reading project

Last year I got a bit of a shock when I tried reading Who’s There, Spot? – one of those lift-the-flap books – with a class of seven year-olds in Borneo: they went mad, surging towards the book with grabbing hands as though they had never seen paper thus configured. I was delighted by their enthusiasm until it dawned on me how seldom they must be read to, and then I felt pretty sad (not to mention fearful for poor old Spot, who I’m sure would have cowered under the same flap for the rest of the lesson had he been able to).

A wearying selection of moral tales
and not much else

And then I started to notice other things. There’s no bookshop or newsagent at Kuching airport. There’s no fiction section in the state library. ‘Bedtime’ and ‘story’ do not collocate here, and school storytelling exists only to communicate moral values. In short, nobody reads for the love of reading. People read to pass a test, or follow a recipe, or find out whether the copper wire thief in the next town has been arrested yet.

Given that the main purpose of my job here in Borneo is to improve primary teaching and learning, and that there is a proven link between reading for pleasure and overall academic achievement, what to do? Of course I think kids should read. Books were one of the greatest pleasures of my childhood, and they remain so in adulthood. But is it (a) possible and (b) ethical to attempt to impose the culture of recreational reading so prevalent in England on pupils here? Or, conversely, is it (a) patronising and (b) irresponsible not to?

Although it’s a bit of a minefield, I’ve decided next month to launch a pilot project in one of my schools to encourage family reading. As a starting point, I’m using a LearnEnglishFamily (LEF) tool designed by the British Council which, whilst appearing clear and comprehensive on the whole, leaves me with a number of reservations.

First, there just aren’t enough affordable, engaging books for children here. Libraries in the five schools I work with are chronically understocked and range from averagely uninspiring to hideously dull. What are we going to use the get the kids’ interest? Imported books are available in the city, but at prices beyond the reach of most families; the annual second-hand book fair is not until August; and making our own books, in any significant quantities anyway, could turn out to be just as costly and time-consuming as ordering a stack from Amazon.

Little wonder the kids don't bother with the 'library'

Second, I have no idea how we’re going to get the parents into the school, except perhaps with the promise of curry puffs, whose efficacy as bait has been proven time and again. Optional briefings on other academic matters are poorly attended and a lot of parents, I suspect, might be intimidated because of their own (real or perceived) lack of skills. What I really need is to find a passionate teacher-advocate from the same kampung (see footnote) to act as project co-ordinator, but this is likely to be tricky since a lot of the teachers don’t seem to read for pleasure either.

Thirdly it seems, though I may be wrong, that the only real success story with this tool to date has been in a Tamil school in Kuala Lumpur, a very different kettle of fish to Borneo, and it’s not exactly clear why it worked so well there but not at the other nine schools in peninsular Malaysia where it was trialled. I’d guess that parental literacy levels in both English and L1, as well as other social and political factors, had a lot to do with it, but without any serious inquiry into why just this one school ran with it so enthusiastically I don’t know how to replicate their success.

Anyway. I just posted this by way of introduction as I’ll no doubt come back and blog about the project later, when it has either become the second LEF success story or failed so spectacularly that I am deported. Whether you have any experience of this sort of thing or not (family reading projects, not being deported from Malaysia) I’d love, as always, to hear your thoughts and advice.

Note: Kampung roughly translates as village, but not quite. A kampung is a place, but also an extended kinship network with a clearly defined hierarchy.

Teaching: like riding a bike?

Me (centre) with my ma and da, the last
time I tried to ride a bike, 2008

They say you never forget how to ride a bike once you've learned. Having spent my adolescence in rural Lincolnshire almost permanently glued to a saddle, but not riding again until my late twenties, I can vouch for this as a half-truth. Sure, I could still make it go, but I was as rusty as the handlebars: letting go to signal a left turn (never mind a right) made me nervous and wobbly, and my bum was numb for a good 24 hours after the ride.

I've been wondering lately whether teaching is one of those skills which, once learned, is never forgotten - or is it more of a 'use it or lose it' thing, like languages (by popular reputation, anyway)? I've been a trainer / mentor for over a year now and my only continued contact with English teaching is delivering joint primary classes with, and pronunciation workshops for, my mentees. And at the back of my mind I'm thinking: is this enough to keep my hand in? Am I going to be unemployable as a teacher when this project ends?

I'm enjoying lots of things about mentoring, but I never aspired to this. I started teaching because I love the English language in all its messy glory, I love trying to communicate ideas, and I love spending time with people from other countries who challenge my way of looking at the world. It still sometimes hurts, when people ask what I do, not to be able to answer, 'I'm a teacher', and the idea of the skills I spent seven years acquiring slowly draining out of my head, through my HAIR, is terrifying. Although maybe I should stop picturing it like that.

I know that my idea of what consitutes a lesson is becoming skewed. I arrived in Borneo with unfeasibly high expectations - 'let's try dogme!' rapidly became 'let's try pronouncing dog correctly!' - and things that horrified me at the start, like entire lessons spent inaccurately drilling ten unconnected words, no longer touch me (partly because I see them less often. I don't mean to say that my mentees are making no progress. But I'm still delighted, and whip out my phone to take pictures as proof, if I see productive pair or group work once a month). Is it only a matter of time before I internalise some of these bad habits? How can I make sure I don't forget how to do the job I love?

Connecting with other teachers via social media such as Twitter is extremely helpful. As is reading, and blogging, even if nobody reads what you write (like penning a vengeful letter to your ex, the therapy is just in getting it down). I've been thinking about volunteering for a while, and should probably stop making excuses and just find an unfortunate bunch of adults to coerce into sitting in an underventilated community hall with me whilst I remind myself how to present gerund vs infinitive. Any other ideas?

Team teaching as reflective practice

In a Y2 classroom this morning

I'm usually OK at job interviews until someone utters the dreaded phrase: Tell us about a time you worked in a team. Of course I've worked in teams. I've even enjoyed it. But - at risk of sounding like a sociopath - in general I can think more clearly when I'm by myself, and find most groups of people to be much less smart than their individual members (a camel is a horse designed by committee and all that). Teamwork schmeamwork. So it's a bit of a climbdown to admit that team-teaching works better, as a method of encouraging reflective practice, than almost anything else I've tried with my ten mentees here in Borneo.

Perhaps it works because it's such a complete and concrete process: we plan the class together, deliver it together and then discuss it together. Maybe the teachers are more open to discussing the lesson when it's clear that both of us did some things successfully and others less so. Either way, compared to the 'tried-and-tested' techniques we tortured ourselves with last year, from writing journals to drawing issues trees*, getting into the classroom with the teachers on a regular basis has so far been the only thing to get them thinking comprehensively about what the kids need them to do before, during and after each lesson.

To me, there are a lot of self-evident advantages to team-teaching, not least:

• the lesser burden in materials preparation;
• the diversity of voice and method that each teacher brings to the lesson;
• twice the manpower when demonstrating, monitoring or disciplining;
• the opportunity to observe colleagues in a regular, informal way and through that, picking up each others' skills; and
• the co-operative skills modelled for the pupils by the teachers.

Why, then, did I resist team-teaching for so long? Quite apart from my own prejudices and the fact that the British Council officially discourages it as a method of reflective practice (more on that below), I was trying to put myself in my mentees' shoes, but only managed to get my left foot wedged in. Let me explain: I imagined having an established class of pupils, and being told by my boss that someone would be joining me to team-teach them every two weeks. Without considering the situation too deeply, I just saw myself feeling hugely resentful. But thinking again, it would of course depend on who was joining me in the class. If it was someone who could tell and show me things I wanted to know in order to improve, would I really be so churlishly territorial? No. For better or worse - and with the acknowledgement that I have also learnt an awful lot from spending time with my mentees - my training and experience in communicative classrooms means I know things they want to know.

In a much better resourced Y1 classroom earlier this week

Of course it could all backfire any time. There are plenty of criticisms of team-teaching - it only works if both teachers are flexible and unafraid of making mistakes in front of the other; it can be hard to find a convenient time to sit down and plan together; it can also be hard to decide how often to team-teach in order to balance variety and routine, etc. To go back to the British Council for a moment, their own particular concern with team-teaching is that it is insufficiently sustainable as a method of reflective practice on a fixed-term project such as this. I get it, but isn't it only my physical presence which is unsustainable? All being well I will slowly withdraw from the process, but the skills the teachers have acquired through it will remain.

Have you ever team-taught as a tool for reflective practice? How was it for you?

* Has anyone in the history of anything really had their eureka moment after drawing an ISSUES TREE? Double, triple ugh.

Multilingualism, Manglish and me

Selamat pagi. 早安 (zǎo ān).  安早 (on zo). 早安 (hoh tsa kih). Silamat burupagi.

That's how to say good morning in five of the six languages spoken where I work: Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Hokkien Chinese and Bidayuh. The sixth language, of course, is the one I'm using now.

Although I know a handful of words and phrases in both BM and Mandarin I have no functional competence in any of these five languages, and this fascinating article I came across yesterday made me wonder how guilty I should be feeling about that. In Switzerland, a government Minister has recently spoken out about expats living in a 'parallel society' to the Swiss and suggested that learning a local language is the most important factor in integration. Whilst it's hard to disagree with her general point, the comments of some foreign workers there struck a chord:

Multilingual sign in Singapore (English, Chinese, BM, Tamil)

"Because of the multiple languages, Switzerland has got to be one of the hardest countries for a busy foreigner to integrate into."

"Some of us are only here for the short round...and it's difficult to become fluent in that time."

"Most of the time the expatriate employee does not need the local language."

Certainly the first point holds true here in Sarawak and what's more, your choice of language can be politically loaded. Mandarin is the prestige language and lingua franca of the Chinese community. BM is the lingua franca of the state as a whole although the Malays are a minority, and many Dayaks (indigenous people, including the Bidayuh) prefer to use English, also a prestige language, in situations where they cannot use their mother tongue. In addition, many local languages such as Bidayuh are not really languages at all but a collection of unwritten, mutually unintelligible dialects. All in all, less than straightforward.

The second comment could sound like something of a watery excuse, I think, given that most foreign workers stay for at least a year and usually more - enough time to acquire functional competence. But if the issue is intregation through language then functional competence is not enough - to interact with local people in a way that moves beyond, 'Is it vegetarian?' takes time, patience and consistent exposure to the target language which tends to happen less easily in multilingual societies.

And in Kuching, the Sarawakian capital city where I live, the third point is the truest. Attempts to use local languages are often met with (not unkind) laughter and an answer in English. There are many cafes, bars and shopping centres where English is used almost exclusively, certainly in written material such as menus, even though they are neither run nor exclusively patronised by native speakers of the language.

Should I make a more solid effort to learn Bahasa Malaysia? I don't know. I work in schools where it's nobody's first choice of language, and the times I've needed it in the past year have totalled precisely one. On the other hand, the smattering of Sinhala I acquired in multilingual Sri Lanka was supremely helpful if not exactly essential, and living in a country and not learning a local language seems like a wasted opportunity to get further under the skin of that culture. In the meantime, as something of a compromise, I am daily improving my Manglish (as Malaysian English is affectionately and not inappropriately known). Aiya, why you play-play lah, cannot learn like this :)

Fail to plan, plan to fail?

An excellent start: The Daily Ptefldactyl is already a bit un-daily. The thing (excuse) is, most days I finish with the schools at 13:00 but yesterday I gave my fortnightly afternoon workshop and was then pathetically tired. It’s hot and everything. Mehmehmeh.

Resource making at a cluster workshop, 2011

Anyway, had quite a remarkable morning today. This ought not to be a remarkable thing after a year in the job, but it is – I planned two classes with teachers from one of my Bidayuh schools and for the first time it wasn’t a massive struggle. Last year whenever I suggested joint lesson planning they suddenly remembered they were supposed to be at basketball club or needed to empty all the bins, and the occasions when we actually sat down together invariably ended in frustration since they’d never been taught how to stage a class and couldn’t really respond to my prompting (‘How about one of these as a warmer?’ ‘What’s a warmer?’ etc).

But lately, something has definitely clicked. They’ve been approaching me with ideas, and good ones.

I’ve been wondering whether this is partly down to having more structure this year. Last year everything felt quite woolly – the project was new, nobody knew what it was going to be like in reality and we were very much left to our own devices. I was hesitant to impose too much order on my mentees, wrongly presuming they’d resent some random foreigner coming in and interfering with their schedules, but from their feedback (and improved engagement) it appears that more order, not less, is what was needed. Compliance with ‘authority’ – not that I have a great deal – is important here and the key to making things happen, and I took too long to recognise that.

So this year we’ve started running a two-week timetable. In ‘B’ week, each teacher has their own slot when I will always join them in their class either to team-teach or to observe, then discuss the lesson. In ‘A’ week I give a two-hour workshop on an area they’ve suggested or I’ve noticed they need support with, and I’m generally around in the schools for lesson planning, resource development, a chat and a curry puff, etc.

The finished product - laminated common classroom words

On reflection, I suspect there were three reasons why teachers were loath to approach me last year for help with lesson planning: (1) they didn’t have fixed slots with fixed purposes, as they do now; (2) they were nervous; and (3) we had wildly different ideas about what constitutes a lesson plan. It’s a government requirement in Malaysia that teachers write a ‘lesson plan’ for each class in a blue book the size and weight of an occasional table, but this generally involves copying out a series of baffling aims, objectives and learning standards from the syllabus document after the event. Trying to convince them that their real lesson plan was the notes they made on a scrap of paper before the class was seriously hard work.

Anyway, I’m feeling nothing less than joyous that things are changing. Last year I gave myself a pretty hard time, and my teachers too (though I gave them a hard time inside my head. They’re all so lovely, and I felt/feel like some kind of neo-imperialistic arse asking them to do things which were culturally alien, but the training they’d be given before was so hopelessly inadequate I just wanted to bang my head on the desk, hourly).

Is it going to last, or is it a burst of new year energy? Ask me again in June…

Road to Hell...good intentions...

Since I'm congenitally unable to keep either an umbrella or a diary for longer than a week, I don't have an impressive history with blogs. I've started and abandoned more than I care to remember, and the only one I've ever managed to update regularly is an image-only tumblr, but since joining Twitter (@pterolaur) and starting to connect with the ELT community there, I've really been feeling that blogging about my work is important. Not only does it throw open channels of communication with other education professionals globally, but also seems to be a valuable tool for reflection and personal development. And so, in a triumph of hope over experience, I've set up The Daily Ptefldactyl (see what I did there?) - it may not ultimately be daily, but I'm going to try. Honestly.

Mentees making an Angry Birds reward board, 2011

Perhaps I should say a little about my background and current situation. I taught post-16 ESOL, mainly to refugees, in London for five years, then spent two years at a British Council teaching centre in Sri Lanka. I'm still employed by the BC but am now based in Malaysian Borneo on a fixed-term project (Jan 2011 to Sept 2013), mentoring and training primary English teachers. I'm responsible - eep! - for 10 teachers in five schools, two ethnic Chinese and three Bidayuh (a local indigenous group). It's been...challenging getting to grips with the public education system in another country, especially one as diverse as Malaysia, and I'm hoping that writing about my successes and failures will help me make better sense of what I'm doing and maybe even prove useful to someone in a similar situation. We'll see...

...and in the meantime, the project is recruiting the last of its 120 mentors now, so if you want to know anything about the job or Borneo please feel free to leave questions here :)