Ukrainian
academy of banking of the NBU
Associate
Professor O.M.Medvid
Sumy
State University,Ukraine
English
language teacher development through councelling
Successful organizations are learning organizations, and the potential to learn is present in all who work therein. Staff development is a way of ensuring that people learn and develop and that the organization can grow and respond to a changing environment. In order to achieve this, it will be necessary to have regular reviews of achievements, difficulties and career aspirations. Such discussions should keep in mind training possibilities to enable individuals to develop new skills. This can be effectively done through councelling.
The term ‘counselling’ is much used in English language teaching today and has come to be used as a blanket label covering a wide range of activities inside the classroom and out. The fact that it is used in such a general way leaves it open to the dangers of abuse, misconception, and the dilution of its true meaning, from a highly-developed skill that requires a great deal of training into any kind of advice-giving that might be needed.
In this article I should like to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the term and suggest that the introduction of counseling to teachers and teacher-trainers can be real benefit to institutions in our field. I shall be concerned not so much with language teaching methods based on counseling techniques (i.e. Counselling-learning, Community Language Learning) as with attempting to describe and illustrate how the acquisition of such skills can contribute to teacher development. More specifically, two vital areas in which they could have immediate application are, first, in teacher-training, getting the teacher to understand why things have gone wrong, accept responsibility for them and adjust his/her behavior in the future to avoid such situations recurring; and second, in the classroom, getting students to recognize realistic aims in terms of their time and ability, to accept the limitations of their individual aptitudes, and to understand their personal balance of strengths and weaknesses.
By counseling is meant
putting counselees in touch with their true feelings so that they may be receptive
to the kinds of insight that will enable them to work towards greater
self-knowledge and an understanding of how the conduct of their lives causes
their problems.
The ability to counsel is within every one of us, but before we can reach other people we have to be in touch with ourselves. We have to learn to recognize our own inhibitions and anxieties, ‘blocks’ and prejudices, ‘safe’ and “unsafe’ areas, and how far we are prepared to listen to other people’s feelings. To do this we must first recognize our own motivations as teachers: “A teacher cannot make much headway in understanding others or in helping others to understand themselves unless he is endeavoring to understand himself. If he is not engaged in this endeavour, he will continue to see those whom he teaches through the bias and distortion of his unrecognized needs, fears, desires, anxieties and hostile impulses [1,14]. Unfortunately however, no one of us can set about achieving this greater self-knowledge, which in turn can be used to facilitate insight in others, just by reading a couple of books by Stevick [ 2,3]. It is a long and often painful business, and requires the guidance of those trained in psychotherapy and the support of a group of similarly intentioned people over a period of time. This is what a good counseling course should provide.
The training of teachers has much to gain from observing the training of
counselors, and one of the most essential areas which is rarely questioned in
teacher-training is the basic ‘operational philosophy’ of the individual. How
many of us in teaching have searchingly asked ourselves or are aware of the
issues raised by the questions in this checklist of Carl Rogers:
The primary point of
importance here is the attitude held by the counselor towards the worth and the
significance of the individual. How do we look upon others? Do we see each
person as having dignity in his own right? If we do hold this point of view at
the verbal level, to what extent is it operationally evident at the behavioural
level? Do we tend to treat individuals as persons of worth, or do we subtly
devaluate them by our attitudes and behaviour? Is our philosophy one in which
respect for the individual is uppermost? Do we respect his right to
self-direction, or do we basically believe that his life would best be guided
by us? To what extent do we have a need and a desire to dominate others? Are we
willing for the individual to select and choose his own values or are our
actions guided by the conviction (usually unspoken) that he would be happiest
if he permitted us to select for him his values and standards and goals?[4,20].
Part of the problem of
being involved in education is that most of us have a desire to ‘educate’; that
is, to change or influence other people for what we believe to be the better.
It tends and to make us dismissive of people who do not see things in the same
way as ourselves. Our normal professional position is that of instructor,
imparter of knowledge, priding ourselves on our ability and to control and to direct.
Even if, to help us feel more at ease, we use more ‘humanistic’ terms to
describe our activity (e.g. ‘the knower’, the ‘learning facilitator’, ‘the
guide’), we cannot disguise the fact that our work makes us anxious to
influence, anxious to provide input.
We and our students have
been conditioned to think that this is what teaching is about, and so it is to
a certain extent. But these very skills and attributes which enable us to stand
up in front of a class and ‘perform’ can block our way when the need arises to
reach people (including ourselves) at a personal level.
It is important to
understand that ‘both counseling and teaching are deeply concerned with human
relationships… learning and learning processes are the heart of counseling. It
is therefore a particularly proper activity for a teacher, provided that he/she
is able to allow pupils to learn and not simply instruct them in a rigid way’
[5, 3].
How, then, do the
learning processes explored through counseling differ from, yet supplement and
nourish the basic skills learnt in teacher training? As I have already
suggested, the essential ingredient is self-exploration which is guided and
directed to enable the individual to understand and come to terms with those
elements in his/her personality which have formed blocks and blindspots and
prevented further growth. These are present in every one of us and are at the
root of our everyday anxieties and the way we conduct relationships. Unless
they are reached, the same kind of problem will occur again and again. An
example is the teacher whom students of a certain personality type invariably
complain about but who is successful with everyone else.
As soon as the process of
self-analysis is under way, the individual can begin to get in touch with
his/her own qualities as a listener, as an under-stander and as a facilitator
of others. The process, however, must derive from within.
Truax and Carkhuff state
that, apart from respect for the worth and dignity of others, the factors which
are most ‘facilitative’ in the initial stage of counselling are empathy,
concreteness, and genuineness [6,135].
One may feel that empathy
is a natural gift - something one either has or has not. Although it is true
that some people seem to be born with more empathy than others, it is also
something which can be developed. Empathy is often defined as the ability to
put oneself in another’s shoes. Empathy is ‘the power of projecting one’s
personality into, and so fully understanding, the object of contemplation’
(Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), and it is an emotion to be experienced
deep inside oneself. It implies the ability to cut through the sentiment, the
thoughts welling up, the memories of a similar experience aroused, the
day-to-day concerns filling our minds, and to feel the depth of the
counsellee’s trouble.
The ability to be silent,
with ourselves and with others, is an important constituent of empathy. In
modern society, silence is often interpreted as hostility, and most of us feel
awkward and embarrassed when silence falls in a social situation, and lost and
anxious when we have nothing to do. We must come to recognize and to overcome
this anxiety, because it prevents us from getting in touch with our own
well-being. Silence provides necessary space for people to explore their
feelings, search for the right words to express what they want and digest what
has been said. So ‘empathic’ identification is to be aimed at, in which the
counselor becomes a sort of ‘alternate self’ perceiving, even living, the
emotions, feelings, and attitudes of the counselee but at the same time
remaining emotionally whole and outside.
Another quality is
concreteness. This is involved with the skills of putting individuals in touch
with their feelings and keeping them in touch. It is the ability to get the
counsellees to be more precise in what they are saying, to search within
themselves for more accurate definitions of what they are feeling in order to
try and pinpoint the problem. On the part of the counselor it requires patience
and silence, and the skills of concentrating hard, and of timing any
intervention with great sensitivity.
One more quality needed in counselling is genuineness.
The counsellor must come to the session as an open human being. For teachers
who see themselves as ‘a character’ or ‘colourful’, this can be more difficult,
but usually genuineness shines through any surface eccentricity. Genuineness is
a necessary requisite for trust. It involves eye contact, but above all it
involves just being natural, just being oneself.
These four basic factors are a necessary foundation for the skills of counselling, as well as being necessary requirements for good language teaching. They are also disciplines (empathy, respect, and concreteness, at least) which can be largely trained and developed, and they are all vital ingredients for successful intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Once people have worked on these elements in themselves, they will feel more confident about their own strengths and weaknesses, less inhibited when confronted with feelings, and less open to manipulation.
References:
1. Jersild,
Arthur. When Teachers Look At Themselves. - New York, 1995. 2.
Stevick, Earl W. Memory, Meaning and Method. - Rowley, 1995. 3. Stevick, Earl W. A Way and Ways. - Rowley,
1981. 4. Rogers, Carl. Client-Centred Therapy. - London, 2001. 5. Hamblin, Douglas. The Teacher and
Counselling. - Oxford, 1999. 6. Truax,
C.B. and R.R. Carkhuff. Toward
Effective Counseling and Psychotherapy: Training and Practice. - Chicago, 1997.