Children and Learning

THERESA ZANATTA, EFL teacher and teacher trainer, author of ZOOM for primary, tells us about children, how they learn, and what they need to learn more effectively.

Theresa, what do you like most about teaching kids?
Well, I like teaching everybody: I do a lot of teacher training at the university; I do business English still; I love teaching teens; I’ve taught literature. But I think what’s great about young kids is that you really have the opportunity to open up the world, and if you just take the time to listen to kids, they have great things to teach you. I’ve learned an awful lot from kids. Plus, I think they’re tomorrow’s generation. And if you’re really interested in making a better world then the best place to start is with kids. I don’t think I’ve ever met a child that isn’t capable of becoming interested and doesn’t have a desire to learn. They only lose that desire after it’s beaten out of them at school or at home or wherever.

Does that mean you have to be a special kind of person to be a successful teacher of kids?
Well, I think parents are a child’s first teachers. And I think all parents are special. I think if whatever you do, you do it well and you love it and you learn from it, then you’re a special person.

The course you’ve written for primary is called ZOOM. What makes it different from other courses?
It’s a six-level course, and I think for the first time you’ll find a course that looks at the three cycles involved in primary teaching and tries to say, Well, what’s the coherence, what’s the strand across the whole programme that we want to maintain, what is it about teaching kids that crosses those three cycles? And also, what is it that is different in each of those cycles? So first there’s the broad overview of the things we know about teaching kids that form the backbone and the philosophy of the programme. Then within that we’ve looked at each cycle and said, yes but in the first cycle these are the characteristics, in the second these, and so on.

Could you give us an example of some of these characteristics?
You know, most children’s eyes are not fully focused until they are eight years old so you want print on white background, you don’t want print on colour. You want a certain font size. You want a certain size of flashcards for the first cycle that’s different from the second or third cycles.
So there are physical constraints related to the development of the child and there are also psychological and intellectual capabilities that need to be taken into account. All kids progress at different rates, but in each cycle, more or less, there is a common core of characteristics that need to be catered for. And this is what makes our course different. Our team of writers and I, as the author, sat down and said, Look, these are the characteristics and the needs of the first cycle, these are the characteristics and the needs of the second cycle, and these are the needs and the cha-racteristics of the third. I think this age-appropriateness is very important.

What else is important in kids’ materials?
There’s also this idea of what we call stage-appropriateness. What often happens, or what’s happened in the past is that you might get a four-level course that gets extended into a six-level course or a two-level course that gets extended into a four-level course that then gets extended into a six-level course. And what happens is you really have three different syllabuses. What we try to do is say, No, we’re not going to teach the present continuous again for the third time. We do want to review and recycle it throughout the six years but in a way that is consistent across the programme. So we have this coherence in the scope and sequence across the three cycles.

What about learning styles?
We’ve really made an effort to cater to the different learning styles in ZOOM. We can talk about four modalities of learning or we can talk about the seven multiple intelligences that Howard Gardner has talked about. What we’ve tried to do with this programme is to include at least seven or eight different ways that children learn. In every week there are activities that cover all these ways of learning because if you don’t teach the way a child learns, they don’t learn.

You’ve written a lot about the “home-school connection”. Can you tell us about that?
I’m a mother, I’m a teacher trainer, I’m a teacher and I’m an author, and the most important thing for me is connecting with the school. What I recognise and what the literature has shown is that if we don’t reach out to parents (remember that parents are the child’s first teachers) and involve them in the academic career of their children, we’re missing a really important part of the puzzle. A powerful synergy happens when parents and teachers and students work together. More than 80 studies in the last 30 years in Canada and the United States have shown, across all cultures, across all classes, that when parents are involved there are significant changes in learning abilities, in reading ability scores, in vocabulary acquisition, in attitude and in behaviour in the school.
So what we wanted to do, what was really critical for me, was to design a part of the programme that reached out to parents. So we have letters to parents every term explaining what’s going to be done. There’s an English folder that goes home with activities that the kids make, so that they can talk about something and show their parents what they’re doing. At the same time that they are informing their parents, they are also forming or developing their parents and teaching them how to talk about school and to help them as students.

Do you mean the parents become students?
For me there’s no distinction between teacher and student. If you’re a teacher you’re a student, if you’re a student you’re a teacher. And that’s the same premise behind the home-school connection. In the same way that a student can become a teacher, a teacher can become a student, so our students can go home and teach their parents. The parents that are teachers can become students. That kind of dynamism is what we wanted to capture with ZOOM. So inside the programme there are lots of different activities, lots of different aspects that support this philosophy.

How do you manage to get the parents involved? Is it up to the teacher?
There always has to be an invitation from the teacher, and that doesn’t mean any extra work for the teacher at all. More than anything it’s a belief—a belief that parents are important. I work with a lot of teachers, and a lot of teachers say, ‘I don’t have time’ or, ‘The parents aren’t interested’, or ‘The parents are working until nine o’clock at night—there’s nobody home, only the baby-sitter’. And that’s very true. But when you start to put certain systems in practice you also have a possibility of change. The home-school system is dyna-mic. And as you start changing variables within that, other things change. At the beginning of the term there’s the letter that goes home. It might say, ‘In this unit your child will be learning this, this and this. He will be taking home these activities. He will be reading this story. Take two minutes. Sit down and talk with your child. Sign the paper’. That’s all. Nothing more than that. And so if there are problems, the discussion is more focused because parents know what has been happening.
And the most important thing of all is that the whole programme is based on the idea that success is the greatest motivator of all. If we want to motivate kids then we have to make them feel that they can do it. Everybody can learn English—everyone, every single child.

How do you think that teaching children has changed over the years?
Language teaching to children, and language learning in general, has moved from learning by doing, to learning by doing and reflecting. We know that the learning cycle is not complete by just doing. The complaint of many parents is, ‘Oh they spend the whole time cutting and pasting and colouring. They’re not learning’. Well, that’s only part of it. Cutting and pasting and colouring is very important because you use lots of other learning styles, but what’s missing is using that thing that’s created as a prompt or as a vehicle for oral language development, for something to speak about. And with that, of course, comes this feeling of success. Kids can say, ‘I’ve done this’ or ‘Look at what I’ve done’. So that becomes an opportunity to reflect. Or they might say, ‘This is fantastic, I love what I’ve done. I’m going to do it again’. Or kids can look and see what someone else has done and be inspired by them. This aspect of reflection is critical to the learning cycle and is built into every single lesson of ZOOM.

Tell us about the mascots in ZOOM.
There are two mascots for every cycle. What we did was we had schoolchildren design the mascots for each level. That’s another aspect of the programme—it’s based on real kids, real language. So we’ve tried to have lots of photos and we’ve tried to get lots of profiles written by kids and about kids

Theresa Zanatta is an author, teacher, teacher trainer and education consultant. She has been teaching English in Spain and Canada for more than 15 years, and she has given courses on ELT methodology in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Cana

How did you first get the teaching bug?
I came from a family of teachers so I grew up with teaching. I remember going to my first reading conference with my mom when I was 12 years old, and my sister and I spending weekends at the school putting up bulletin boards and photocopying, and setting up teaching corners.

That was in Canada. What brought you to Spain?
I was going to travel through Europe and I came to Spain. But then I got sick and I stayed for a couple of months recovering and just thought that it would be good to take a year off. I was working in politics in Canada, working with businesses and doing a lot of political writing—speeches and information documents. So anyway, I ended up staying. I thought I’d get a teacher’s degree in English, and I got into the North American Institute right away. They needed someone to teach children and I had a little experience teaching kids from my mom, so I started there. The programme we were using needed a really big rewrite so I started writing and adapting it.

It must have been a big jump from writing political speech-es to writing material for kids.
I think it’s all kind of connected. The last thing I wanted to be was a teacher. Everybody in my family was a teacher. But I guess you kind of have it in your blood! •