"Old School" by Move the Clouds
The ‘unplugged’ TDSIG conference, which will be held in Barcelona on Saturday, 21st May, will retain the Open Space format used in last year’s pre-conference event to explore unplugged teaching and its implications for teacher development.
Open Space is a particularly apt way to run a conference devoted to unplugged teaching, as both approaches emphasise the interaction between the people in the room, the face to face and the here and now.
In fact, we used Open Space for the first ever dogme conference in London in 2000 – grandly named, given its modest scale, but animated by a passion and curiosity that have driven experimental practice in a growing number of teaching and training contexts ever since.
There’s an appealing sense of continuity in this, not only because I met Scott Thornbury for the first time at that mini-conference, but because Lindsay Clandfield, who co-edited our book Teaching Unplugged, and Anthony Gaughan, whose presentation of ‘Teacher Training Unplugged’ with his colleague Izzy Orde at Iatefl 2010 made such an impact, will be participating too.
I first experienced Open Space when I was co-running an experimental language school and attended a conference on managing change. I had modest expectations of the event, anticipating that my lack of business and executive experience would leave me floundering. In fact I found the approach inclusive and stimulating, and immediately identified parallels with the classroom challenges to which I was trying to find solutions.
These challenges included the constantly changing make-up of our classes, in which the impact of continuous enrolment was compounded by our students’ shift work patterns. We really didn’t know who was going to be there for a given 3-hour lesson, or even for what part of a lesson. It made orthodox lesson planning and coursebook use difficult (and ensured that any teacher doing the Delta had to cross their fingers very hard indeed when it came to external assessments). I wanted to turn this ‘problem’ on its head and present it to colleagues as an opportunity: instead of disruption, constant renewal. Instead of frustration, freedom.
The solutions that presented themselves were to treat every lesson as an experience in its own right, one which could not be anticipated in minute detail, and in which the people present were, by definition – like the participants in Open Space – the ‘right’ people.
Like unplugged teaching, Open Space is dynamic, fluid and driven by the participants – but it is not without structure. Delegates may choose to start their own discussion topics, but anyone doing this is tasked with noting outcomes and reporting back to the wider group. This echoes another of the processes I advocated in class: reporting on the lesson after it had happened, rather than mapping it in advance. I called it post-planning, and it was another of the techniques that fed into what was starting to emerge as a body of shared dogme practice.
Next week: Generation H?
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Luke Meddings has been teaching, writing and training in ELT for 23 years. In 2000 he co-founded the dogme in ELT group with Scott Thornbury, and in 2009 their book Teaching Unplugged was published by Delta. In 2010 it won a British Council ELTon Award for Innovation. His current interests include the application of unplugged approaches, the ways in which English changes in different contexts (and the implications of this for teaching), and music.
Is Open Space a catchy 21st-century name for the sort of meetings Carl Rogers came up in the 70s when he realized that he was not intersted in teaching any more because it is futile and inconsequential?
(and most likely others had a similiar idea before him)
Anyway, my first two experiences of whatever you call it were not good, I think it was because people are not used to not having a leader, so without one they don’t know what to do which is a shame, at the same time there were too many chatterboxes in the group which is also a bummer. Another reason was that the facilitators were difficultators. Nonetheless, I’ll give it a third chance in Barcelona, I hope.
Hi Willy – I really hope you will come to Barcelona and give Open Space another try. It actually dates from that old 20th century – the term was coined by Owen Harrison in the 80’s. I have a 2nd edition copy of his book, ‘Open Space Technology’, dated 1997. I’ve tried it with teachers, students and school managers and always found it worthwhile. I don’t know about Carl Rogers (I mean, I know about him, but not enough about his work) but Open Space certainly isn’t the only version of this approach. Unconferences sound pretty similar to me.
PS I love the idea of difficultators – I think we might have encountered the same people!
Hope your bad experiences don’t put you off – we’d love to see you in BCN, and with your previous experience of these types of events, you could contribute a great deal to the day.
Like Luke, I don’t know enough about Carl Rogers to comment, but I do know that there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s not uncommon for various people to hit on the same idea at different times. For as long as there has been organised society, there have been boring meetings, and someone thinking: Surely there’s a better way to do this.
I’ve started posting some videos on our Facebook page for those people who want to find out more about OST. Please check them out.
As for the chatterboxes, OST has the One Law, otherwise known as the Law of Two Feet: “If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing: use your two feet and go someplace else.” I think the free application of this rule is crucial to avoid an OST session from becoming yet another talking shop.
Hi Willy Yes, Open Space is indeed a catchy name, as is World Café, another of the new connected up conferencing formats. I don’t think there is a specific connection between OST and Rogers working formats though, other than that they share certain values (diversity, speaking honestly, speaking spontaneously, speaking about what matters, etc) and they are both fairly robust in being able to cope with however many people there are, using minimal rules. They are both products of the search for more meaningful, less structured, higher risk, events. So there is a connection in that sense….. But the aims are different. Rogers Encounter Groups were designed for people to really meet (encounter) each other person to person with minimum of defences, pretences, games etc, to discover what it is like to meet and value the person behind the fluff, and to be met in the same way. Whereas OST is to share and exchange round topics, usually professional, especially those that emerge as hot or energised at the time of the conference, and emergent through the conference process.
Well, since I have experience of both I could say a bit more: In the 80’s and 90’s I worked with Rogerian approaches (Person Centred Approaches as he preferred to call them) both in the world of 1:1 therapy and in the world of education, in which he had a profound interest and to which his three core conditions of facilitation applied well. He became well known for his Encounter Groups, which had a big impact on the whole California/Esalen movement in the 60’s and 70’s which hit Europe in the 70’s and 80’s. It is these Encounter Groups to which you are probably referring. Just experiencing them makes an impact on one’s teaching. I attended a number of these (outside ELT) before organising two which were offered by the TD SIG in Hastings in the mid 90’s. These were powerful weekends during which could affect one’s teaching in ways beyond the scope of methodology. These TD SIG events were facilitated by Dave Buck, a friend of Rogers, and the organising work was done (I think) by Katie Head and Pauline Taylor (authors of Readings in Teacher Development). At this time too I was developing my From Teacher to Facilitator model and training workshops.
I can easily believe the not so good experiences you had Willy. We are used to mainstream things being done well or not so well, but alternative things have to be done very well to cut the mustard. Yes, it is easy for both Encounter Groups and OST to go awry, partly because they demand a quality of facilitator savvy which is not always quite the same as teacher/trainer savvy. My experience with OST is that there are certain optimal conditions without which it may not flourish. For example if participants are expecting a planned and orderly procedure they may be disappointed. And if the leaders try to organise things too much or too little they make look like difficultators (to use your apt phrase). But I do think it is time to give it some real road testing in ELT, which the TD SIG is doing!
Anyway, if anyone is still interested I have just co-authored an article on OST with Susan Barduhn and Tanya Iveson, in the latest issue of The Teacher Trainer, based on an ELT event we ran in Canada.
Thanks for that!
I meant to say “Encounter Groups”, but just couldn’t remember the right name. I read a couple of books by Carl Rogers and wrote a couple of blogs about his core conditions applied to the teaching of English. I’m very fond of his approach to education and my teaching philosophy has been influenced by his, no doubt. However, I haven’t had the chance to see more of it in ELT, in practice I mean. Many authors quote Rogers, but I haven’t seen action, through something that resembles encounter groups – I would love to.
Interestingly enough, yesterday I was reading the program of IATEFL Brighton, and while there are many interesting sessions as usual, I found it would be nice to have some OST-like sessions in the middle of it all (I know TDSIG did that at a PCE, but not everyone can attend PCEs). I think it would be good to have highly interactive sessions without a frontman. I feel that at the third day of conference I’m more likely to get bored if I sit through another show-and-tell session, or if I’m asked to talk to someone next to me about a topic chosen by someone else who is not really interested in knowing what I think but rather following a workshop protocol, that of pairwork, which I don’t like. Something to think about…