Tony is a faculty member in the English Language Development (ELD) program and another one of our amazing Camosun instructors to receive a Teacher Recognition award this year.
Tony didn’t start out wanting to teach English. “I’ve always been interested in languages, and first completed a degree in Spanish literature intending to become a Spanish teacher. But when I finished, I thought my chances of teaching English in Montreal would be better than teaching Spanish. So, I completed a degree in English. Then I thought I would teach English somewhere in Latin America, but I ended up in Asia instead.” After teaching in Montreal and Korea, Tony came to Victoria and taught at UVic for two or three years before coming to Camosun where he been for 16 years. At Camosun, Tony mostly teaches the lower level ELD courses “and one thing that I’m teaching now is English support for the Health Care Assistant program in Health and Human Services.”
I asked Tony what he enjoys most about teaching. “When one of my students becomes gainfully employed after completing our program or has been accepted into a program at a college or university, knowing that I had something to do with that is rewarding, although we often don’t hear about those successes. But knowing that someone’s English has improved and they’re able to participate more in society is encouraging because for a lot of people, it can be frustrating when you don’t know the language.” And, like many of his colleagues, Tony also finds having the world in his classroom exciting. “We have a fair mix of students from all over the world in our classes right now, which is what I signed up for.”
When I asked Tony what impact the last three years had on him as an instructor, he told me “I was wrapping up my doctorate the first year of COVID, and relieved that it was out of the way. But the next hurdle was adjusting to teaching online. Fortunately, through the English Teachers Association (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, TESOL) in the US I was able to access a six-month online course about designing English language courses, which was a huge help for me. When I started teaching online, I noticed immediately that all those things you would normally do in the classroom you just can’t do online. I remember from those workshops the advice to sit down to consider your course outcomes and design your lessons and assessment around those. Then consider how can the online environment help you meet your outcomes, rather than wondering what I’ve always done is not working. The course was eye-opening and took me back to the basics, rethink the objectives asking, what am I trying to teach? What do I expect them to learn?” Tony has embraced backward syllabus design. “You start with the outcomes and work your way backwards: I felt I didn’t have a choice in the online environment, but I’m a backward design person now.
Tony discovered there were advantages to the online environment. “There are so many things you can do online that you can’t do on paper. Like adding videos – students love videos in their classes. I would make a video of myself explaining how to write a compare-contrast paragraph and think, no one’s going to watch this, but everyone watched it. I found the whole experience to be transformative. My fear last year was that we were going to take the great leap backward and put aside the COVID experience as a bad dream. But there were so many good things we can take from that experience, and I feel that I’m a better teacher now. I realize now how much easier it is to be organized when I use D2L; I never realized before how much that organization can empower students with learning difficulties. And for me, using tools like Teams and Zoom, I don’t have to run back and forth between campuses for meetings, I don’t carry books home anymore, and I can work pretty much anywhere.”
Tony also had some thoughts about what his program should be considering post-COVID, which I think applies to all programs at the college. “Students will encounter online courses at some point, and we in ELD need to prepare them for when they go to other institutions. For example, we need some digital course outcomes in our courses, help them with using computers, using online search engines, etc. And because so many resources are online now, we need to teach students how to use them.”
I then asked Tony to look back over his teaching years to see if any memories stood out to him. What he told me was unexpected, but really shows how we as teachers, and how we teach, can change with time and understanding. “There’s been a transformation over the past many years from making students learn all the grammar rules before using a language to supporting students to actually use the language – not hoping that by learning grammar students will suddenly be able to communicate accurately. About 12 years ago I decided, I am going to lick this issue of articles in English. I hammered the rules into the students believing they would stop making mistakes. We did lots of exercises, quizzes, routines, and then one day I said, here are some pictures of how to pot a plant. They’re mixed up. With your partner, rearrange them into the correct order, and then I want you to write a paragraph on how to pot a plant. And when I collected them, not one of the paragraphs had articles in it, after all those exercises and all those tests. I realized that just because I taught articles, did not mean my students were able to use them. We, as teachers, have to understand that it might take years for some students to acquire that ability.”
In addition, Tony spoke to some of the interactions he has had with students over the year. “I try to find value in every student in the class and to see everyone as an individual, because I think respect in the classroom is very important. I remember when I started teaching 25 years ago, I was concerned about classroom management and discipline, how was I going to get through two hours of teaching, and will they like me. But of course, those concerns have changed over time. Now I believe that with a good plan and respect for your students, you will have a managed classroom. I don’t know when that changed for me – it was probably a very gradual process.”
I wondered what advice Tony would give a new faculty member coming in to teach ELD at Camosun. “Make a good impression because you never know what will happen in future. Make an effort to learn the ‘culture,’ of the department, or at least learn the conventions of the department before you break them. And when you do break them, give a principled reason for doing so. Understand what technology is available to them at the college and take advantage of professional development opportunities as well. We are so lucky to have so many opportunities available for development, and people should take advantage of them.”
Tony also had some words about valuing the many approaches to teaching at the college and encourages new faculty to “bring in the experience and wisdom you have gained from where you’ve come and continue to maintain ties with people in other institutions. We need to know what else is going on out there to keep us all fresh. And we need to embrace the different ways we teach and support each other’s autonomy in the classroom” and may I also add, take the time to learn from each other.