“Teaching Teenagers – what on earth makes them tick?”

Herbert Puchta Seminar Review

Spring has definitely decided not to come physically, but it has definitely arrived mentally! March, the 16th, 2010 was marked by the presentation of Herbert Puchta in Moscow City Pedagogical University. That was a truly meaningful event in the life of English language teachers and gave us some food for thought… So let me brief you on the personality of Herbert Puchta, the ideas expressed and the “food” that we have “fed on”.

Many of us, I believe, have seen the name of Herbert Puchta on certain manuals that we use with our students, such as “Playway to English”, “More”, “English in Mind”, “Join Us for English” etc., and books on methodology: “Multiple Intelligences in EFL”, “Teaching Grammar Creatively”, “Imagine That”. To expand on it a little bit more, I should mention that Herbert is the current President and Chair of Conference Committee of IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language*). He has a Ph.D. in ELT Pedagogy from the University of Graz, Austria, and is currently Professor of English at the Teacher Training University in Graz. He has been a plenary speaker at a number of international conferences, and has conducted workshops and given seminars in quite a number of countries, which include Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Russia.

He has also worked as a speaker for the British Council and has contributed to several British Council Specialist Seminars. Herbert is also a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. For almost two decades, he has carried out research into the practical application of findings from cognitive psychology to the teaching of English as a foreign language. Herbert has co-authored numerous course books for the teaching of English as a foreign language, as well as articles and resource books.

So, I presume there is no doubt this person can teach an elephant to fly! Truly he is able not only to lead a horse to water but he actually can make it drink. And today he has talked about a task similar in complexity to the above-mentioned one and this is – teaching teenagers. As Michael Grinder once noticed “If you can teach teenagers, you can teach anyone.” Well, Herbert Puchta mentions that teaching teenagers is both an interesting and challenging task. A group of adolescents can be highly motivated, cooperative and fun to teach on one day, and the next day the whole group or individual students might turn out to be truly ‘difficult’, so the teacher might be faced with discipline problems, disruptive or provocative behaviour, a lack of motivation, or unwillingness on the students’ part to do homework assigned to them.

Investigating these pretty typical problematic situations Herbert says that their roots frequently lie in the fact that adolescents are going through a period of significant changes in their lives. The key challenge in the transition period between being a child and becoming an adult is the adolescent’s struggle for identity – a process that requires the development of a distinct sense of who they are. A consequence of this process is that adolescents can feel threatened, and at the same time experience overwhelming emotions. They frequently try to compensate for the perceived threats with extremely rude behaviour, and try to ‘hide’ their emotions behind a wall of extreme outward conformity. The more individual students manage to look, talk, act and behave like the other members of their peer group, the less threatened and insecure they feel.

Insights into the causes underlying the problems might help us to understand better the complex situation our students are in. However, such insights do not automatically lead to more success in teaching. We need to react to the challenges in a professional way. This includes the need to:

a) select content and organise the students’ learning according to their psychological needs;

b) create a positive learning atmosphere;

c) cater for differences in students’ learning styles and intelligence(s), and facilitate the development of the students’ study skills.

Herbert also introduces a term “tweenagers” – these are the students who are not yet teenagers but who are not kids already. Differentiating between kids, tweenagers and teenagers is important since at every stage students use different cognitive tools. The cognitive tools are the mind’s operating system. Understanding how they work facilitates the teaching process a lot.

Another significant issue to have in mind is the positive emotional state of the students. The creation of a positive learning atmosphere largely depends on the rapport between teacher and students, and the one which students have among themselves. It requires the teacher to be a genuine, empathetic listener, and to have a number of other psychological skills. It is a tough task, but the feedback you can get is truly amazing and it is really worth it!

There are a number of reasons why the choice of the right content has a crucial influence over success or failure in the teaching of adolescents. Teachers frequently observe that teenagers are reluctant to talk about themselves. This has to do with the adolescent’s need for psychological security. Consequently, the further away from their own world the content of the teaching is, the more motivating and stimulating it will be for the students. The preference for psychologically remote content goes hand in hand with a fascination with extremes and realistic details. Furthermore, students love identifying with heroes and heroines, because these idols are perceived to embody the qualities needed in order to survive in a threatening world: qualities such as courage, genius, creativity, and love. In the foreign language class, students can become fascinated with stories about heroes and heroines that they can ascribe such qualities to.

In his manuals, Herbert treats students as young adults, offering them a range of interesting topics and a balance between educational value and teenage interest and fun. So learning in the adolescent classroom can be successfully organised by starting with something far from the students’ experience, but also connected to it by some quality with which they can associate. This process of starting far from the students makes it easier for the students to become interested in the topic, and also enables the teacher finally to relate the content to the students’ own world.

Personally, I was very impressed by the example Herbert has given to illustrate teenagers’ needs. It is both very trivial and very wise. He pointed out the biological basics of survival, which include:

1. Humour;

2. Novelty;

3. Social ties;

4. Food selection;

5. Mate selection.

If we look closely at those basics we understand that these are exactly the areas of interest for our teenage students. But surprisingly enough teachers often ignore these areas since they need to teach their Lesson 14, which is so close to the teacher and so far from the students… All the above-mentioned issues are impossible while concentrating on the subject. Teachers naturally ask their students to pay attention to what they want to teach. But let’s have a closer look at the expression “to pay attention” – leaving behind everything dear and interesting to you for the sake of concentrating on this impersonal, faceless Lesson 14 is a tough trade-off!..

So through the whole flow of the seminar, we have approached the idea that it is extremely important to make the educational context relevant to the psychological needs of the students. However Herbert Puchta, as a truly experienced teacher-psychologist, notes that psychologically-relevant topics to teenagers are hard to understand just by asking the teenagers themselves. They are not mature enough to classify their needs and clearly state what they want. That is actually the task for us, as professional educators to understand, to comprehend, and to feel, using all our professional and human skills.

Finally, Herbert used a smart phrase to wish us all good luck:

Success comes in cans… not in can’ts!

* to learn more go to http://www.iatefl.org/