What if… ?

What would you do differently?

WordPress has come up with another writing prompt that got me thinking about continuing professional development (CPD) in any field, but more particularly in EAP if you plan to work with students preparing to study at university. The most confident EAP practitioners are able to think like researchers, constantly asking themselves: What if I’m wrong?

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that when experienced ELT teachers first encounter EAP teaching, they feel deskilled, as if they have returned to the status of novices and have to begin building knowledge and expertise all over again. This tends to be reported as a problem, as the word ‘deskilled’ implies. But what if teachers were confident enough to reframe the experience as a new opportunity to extend their repertoire and begin experimenting with new types of knowledge and teaching? This would require a sense of research-mindedness: a tolerance for uncertainty and a willingness to experiment and maybe get things wrong. It requires acceptance that you don’t have all the answers together with a curiosity to learn more. This is precisely the way that most successful scientists think and go about their research.

An accessible role model in this regard is Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. But he was also ‘an artist, practical joker and storyteller, whose life was a series of combustible combinations, made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal scepticism’. A series of conversations with a friend, recorded and published as Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman, is available on the Internet Archive, and shows that combination of curiosity and scepticism that is so important in research. This is a great way in for EAP teachers to begin to understand how scientists think and approach problems.

The What if… ? orientation in EAP requires that you question your taken-for-granted assumptions about what to teach and how to teach it, in order to think about how you could do things differently. Above all it requires you to explore aspects of teaching you don’t like and maybe avoid, such as keeping up to date with research developments (through your own reading) or teaching writing. On pages 11 – 13 of EAP Essentials, we set out some of the differences between teaching General English and teaching Academic English. You could use these as prompts, choosing one or two that seem most at odds with your preferred way of teaching, to think about what you could do differently.