Translator: Daniel Moore Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
Hello everyone, are you ready?
I'm the last one, thanks for your patience.
Let's applause ourselves, we're great!
(Applause)
So, today,
TED told us about six hours marathon.
I can congratulate you
because we have already overcome seven hours marathon.
(Applause)
So, educating your mind without educating your heart
is not education at all.
This idea was expressed
by one of the greatest educators of all times, Aristotle.
I suppose that that man even didn't imagine
that he would become a father
of a so-called "holistic" approach to education,
the approach which [engage] us as educators
to develop the whole child,
that is, his emotional and cognitive dimensions.
Speaking with the terminology of modern pedagogics,
we are going to talk about EQ and IQ.
Let's revise some basics of these two concepts.
So, IQ is the ability to learn, understand,
and apply information to skills, to word formation,
to logical reasoning, maths skills, abstract and spatial thinking.
If we speak about Emotional Intelligence or EQ,
we speak about our ability to identify, to assess
and to control the emotions of oneself,
of others and of groups.
[Daniel Goleman] identified four main domains of EQ.
They are: self-awareness, self-management,
empathy and social skills.
Which of these intelligences is more important?
When I am thinking about it,
it throws me back to my childhood which I call,
"The era of Tom and Jerry."
I really liked that cartoon
but I couldn't understand one thing:
Why those cute animals were constantly quarreling,
and that small and impudent mouse, Jerry,
was torturing the big and unlucky Tom.
One day when I came to the kindergarden, my friend told me,
"You know, Jerry is so kind that he can't get rid of Tom,
and Tom is so stupid that he can't catch Jerry."
The logic of children is very, very simple,
but now when I am adult, I can say that Tom had a low IQ level,
and Jerry had a low EQ level.
If their levels of intelligences were high,
they would put up together quite good.
Personally, I think that emotional intelligence is initial.
Now, we will make a kind of experiment.
I want you to close your eyes and relax.
Don't be afraid, I'm not going to hypnotize you.
Yeah, close your eyes and relax.
Think about the brightest moments from your childhood,
your parents' care,
lullabies,
fairy tales,
your fairy toys.
Can you feel the taste of your fairy sweets?
I hear somebody snoring, wake up!
So, thank you.
I saw a lot of smiles on your faces, why?
Our childhood is connected with positive emotions.
We, as children, perceive a lot of information
through our inner world, our feelings.
Let us speak about our school teachers.
I hope and I know exactly that all of you remember a couple of them,
and that's not because of the knowledge they shared with you,
it's because of the feelings you experienced at their lessons.
I completely agree with Maya Angelou who said,
"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,
but they will never forget how you made them feel."
I have a very typical situation for a teacher.
I have been working as a teacher of English and German for almost ten years,
and when comes a new fifth graders class,
who have just finished primary school,
I have a very few students who are afraid of learning my subject.
Why?
Maybe I'm a Frankenstein?
No, I'm not.
Maybe they are stupid. No!
I observe and I consider every pupil, every student
to be a talented child.
The reason is in their previous negative experience.
It really takes place and stereotypes which were imposed by previous teachers ;
and I have a really, really hard task.
The task is to change their attitude to my subject
from negative to positive.
It's really hard.
You know, I'm deeply convinced
that our IQ skills can be blocked
by EQ skills,
I mean by our emotional quotient.
Negative emotions may prevent children from learning my subject.
So, I have to find the key to effective learning.
What is that? Any ideas?
Good job, thank you. "Motivation."
How to motivate our students?
There are two ways.
One of them is well known: a teacher as a tamer with a whip.
Who hasn't learn my subject?
You?
I'll teach you how to learn.
I was a victim of such a teacher.
Yes, I learned the subject, but it was not learning,
it was cramming with negative attitude towards it,
and I hate that subject.
What are the other ways?
Today, I see here the teachers of the 21st century,
and all of you have your own keys to a child.
As for me, I think that we have to remember,
to keep in mind the needs of our children.
In 1991, Tom Hutchinson and Alan Waters
presented a six fold conception of motivation
and it includes six needs which we've to satisfy during our lessons:
the need for exploration,
the need for manipulation,
the need for mental and physical activity,
the need for self-expression, for knowledge and for ego-enhancement.
If I, as a teacher, satisfy at least half of them,
be sure my students will be motivated
to come to my lessons and to learn my subject.
To do that in a proper way, when I started my teaching career,
I carried out an experiment.
The matter is that I've been learning a humanistic approach
for almost ten years.
The main idea is: we should combine positive experience of our students,
with learning process, and I developed a set of humanistic tasks.
They're different because except for a learning goal,
I've an emotional goal, effective goal
which is directed at the development of some EQ skills on my students.
And I chose 13, 14 year olds -
you know they are known for their low motivation,
teenagers are always like that -
and I carried out an experimental learning for one month.
When I compared their pre-experimental and post-experimental results,
the average progress was by 15%.
Isn't that impressive?
It was an academic success which demonstrated
the level of EQ skills of my students, and their readiness to learn.
Here, you can see a so-called "Scape principle"
which I use at my lessons.
What does mean "Scape"? Sharing, Caring, Acceptance,
Positive thinking and Evaluation.
At first, we have to create a special environment for our students,
Principle 1: We have to create what?
The climate of acceptance.
To create this safe and encouraging atmosphere, I use principle one.
Everyone has the right to make mistakes.
When I enter the classroom and I say, "You're welcome to make mistakes today!"
their expression is like that: "What?
What do you mean, crazy teacher, making mistakes?
Ha, ha, we don't believe you."
The problem is that they treat mistakes in the wrong way,
but after a while, when I change their attitude to mistake
as something really necessary to make progress,
and when they are ready to be in this climate of acceptance,
their faces are like that.
"Yeah, it's cool! I make mistakes, I make progress."
The next principle is the principle of a pink elephant.
I have the question: is it possible for an ordinary human being
to eat a big, fat, pink elephant?
If you think it's possible, raise your hand.
Nobody thinks it's possible?
If you think it's impossible raise your hand.
The answers can differ but still it is,
piece by piece, every day, miam, miam, miam.
Yes! You'll do it maybe in two months, maybe in half a year,
maybe in two years, but you'll do it.
I have to set a clear goal, and I have to encourage my student.
"Climate of acceptance"
is about setting the proper psychological atmosphere in the classroom.
How do I do that?
I use energizers, warm ups, ice breakers. I break stereotypes.
Now, you'll see one of the examples of that.
I want you to give me the rhythm.
I am often rapping at my lessons.
I use military rap, you know what it is: da da da ... du du du ...
yeah, something like that.
And now, I'll rap in a way as [Fluency] MC, Jason Levine, does.
So, just give me the rhythm.
(Hand and feet claps)
"The microphone I take, took, taken, you shake, shook, shaken;
listen to the music in the style I'm creating;
do, did, done; begin, began begun;
listen to the lesson that they teach, taught, taught."
That's it!
(Cheers and applause)
So, we usually stay in a circle.
The matter is that rhyme is not important in military rap.
You can rap about everything and they're encouraged.
They see each other doing the same things, the spirit of team.
So, next thing: "Sharing."
After I set the climate of acceptance, sharing takes place.
What does it mean?
They share their thoughts, their experiences.
They share their ideas
and they take the biggest risk for teenagers:
the risk of being themselves.
It's not easy because you're afraid
that somebody in the classroom makes fun of you,
but if you set a good climate of acceptance, that won't happen.
At first, the level of their self-acceptance grows.
Then their self-esteem grows,
and then we have a kind of wonderful magic happening,
their self-confidence grows and they are not afraid of speaking English.
The last pillar for providing of that environment is "Caring."
Caring is a good thing and I like it, why?
Because of one thing: it's "educational symbiosis."
I call it so. What does it mean?
I use peer teaching, peer education and peer tutoring at my lessons.
They have to be ready for that.
When they work, for example, when they to do some projects together,
I usually do it in the way where pupils of different levels can work together.
They have their tasks.
And when they feel the responsibility for other persons,
they're ready to sacrifice their time,
and they're ready to sacrifice
some of the most important things for them,
for example, some of their hobby time, sports time, etc.
You can see that at the bottom of that is "Positive thinking" and "Evaluation."
Positive thinking is a very good thing.
What can you see there at the screen?
Any ideas?
Yeah, a drop, a drop of mud.
Oh! Anything else?
Oh, yeah, good thing thank you!
When I take a white sheet of paper and show it to my students,
the answers are the same.
But actually,
no one notices the whiteness of the sheet,
and everyone sees that muddy, tiny dot in the center of it.
Thinking about positive thinking,
we should remember that we have to shift the focus.
What I do, I empathize the strength of my students.
If cooking lessons can do it, I do that.
If rapping in the lessons can do it, I do that.
If dancing and singing can do it, I do that.
One more important thing is that we have to remember
that responsibility for good self-confidence,
is not only our school responsibility,
it is the responsibility of parents as well.
I've been a class leader for eight years, and I observed one situation.
A very tall man, daddy, scolded his child.
It was like that: "You're a goat.
Why, why, why have you got a two in biology?"
The child was like Puss in Boots, you know.
I had a private talk with that dad, and I asked only three questions.
The first one was: "Who gives birth to cows?"
He looked at me: "Cows!
- Yeah man, cows.
What animal gives birth to horses?"
Now, he started to suspect something.
"Horses. You think my knowledge on biology is poor?
I don't know anything about reproduction of horses."
The third question was... Can you guess what?
"What animal gives birth to goats?"
Then, the expression on his face changed.
He has just called his son a goat!
So, thinking and the things we tell our students are really important.
And if you name them "goats,"
at two hundred times, they will believe that they are goats,
and they will act according to the stereotype you put on them.
So, "Evaluation."
At Evaluation, I usually use this sandwich principle.
Giving feedback is very important for them,
positive, negative, positive,
but under "negative", I undermine constructive feedback.
We do not say, "You made mistake there, there."
We usually give some pieces of advice:
"I would improve that or that aspect."
And it works. I usually do that after public speaking.
My students usually prepare some public speeches,
and we analyze them afterwards.
We stress their progress, we stress the things we liked,
and it's really motivating for them to make progress as well.
So speaking about the 21st century,
let us remember, as John Steinbeck said,
that teaching is one of the greatest arts in the world
because we deal with the human soul.
Let us remember that and let us take this challenge
to preserve human soul with the best and positive feelings,
with good self-confidence.
In such cases, I usually remind myself
the words of St. Francis of Assisi who said,
"Start doing the things which are necessary,
then do the things which are possible,
and in the end, all of the sudden,
you'll discover that you do impossible things."
So, keep calm and teach on,
and be super teachers of the 21st century.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)