So in thinking about "principles" I did a little reflecting while: a) looking at/through shelves full of course...

So in thinking about "principles" I did a little reflecting while: a) looking at/through shelves full of course books at work for a while b) at random times while surfing the internet or doing some other work c) looking back over Week 1's slides and googling more stuff by Tomlinson.

My favorite thing I found was a paragraph (image below) from https://bit.ly/2ubns2t (Tomlinson & Masuhara's "The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Language Learning"). In it, they describe the sheer variety of materials used, the multi-directionality of materials, the particularities in the countless contexts (English) language is taught.

So that got me thinking that the principle that maybe is most important to me is actually something like "complexity". Not as in 'complicated' or anything like that, but more in the sense of openness to a) difference and b) change. Good materials can be different than other good materials. What constitutes good materials can/will change.

This got me thinking about Kumaravadivelu (http://www.bkumaravadivelu.com/), one of my favorite ELT thinkers. In his book "Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language Teaching" for two reasons. #1 is: he describes different and evolving teacher roles: passive technician --> reflective practitioner --> transformative intellectual, where the first is primarily concerned with delivering prescribed content (very often via commercial coursebook materials), the second learns to be more responsive and skillful via teaching and their learners, and the third considers the larger picture and makes highly conscientious teaching decisions.

So, another principle may be that materials "don't trap the teacher". As a novice Teacher's Books were extremely valuable resources for me - in them I found precious guidance, sometimes even wisdom, for teaching as I struggled to make the materials "live" in my classrooms. But now I'm not sure that those materials always did enough to push and focus my mind on the most productive and developmental things. Reading them back now, they often seem to ignore my potential for reflection (or pre-flection, as I planned how to teach with the materials in MY classroom, not theirs); they were not as educative as I think they could be.

Reason #2 is Kumaravadivelu's rather beautiful wheel of 3 parameters and 10 macrostrategies. I often come back to this when thinking about "principles" to follow. I think what I'm getting at above is the two parameters of "particularity" and "possibility". And the macrostrategies that are most salient to me right now and I think were active in my Week 1 activity are: "facilitating negotiated interaction" (my emphasis on S-S interaction) and "contextualize linguistic input" (when I showed where the text came from, etc.).

Finally, from Tomlinson's 6 principles I'd like to highlight 5 and 6. Why? Because I want classroom materials to match the vibrance of a great person-centered classroom that is, ideally, already intellectually and emotionally arousing & involving. The materials ought not be any less so. But sometimes I've felt like sighing (and heard students doing it) when it's time to look down again at the page, after some particularly enjoyable discussion or something in class. So prioritizing this is key for me - and perhaps it's both a quality and quantity issue...

OK, see you all again soon for class #2 and thanks Katherine for this first 25% of a great course so far! :)