As a teacher trainer, one of the most uncomfortable experiences in telling trainees they failed something; a class, an assignment or possibly even a whole course. We speak Trinity College London CertTESOL and DipTESOL course director with Felicity Pyatt about what to do when that happens. How to decide to ‘fail’ a trainee, how to break the news and how to help trainees bounce back.
Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast and today we have our guest, Fifi.
Felicity Pyatt: Hello, it's me.
Ross Thorburn: Welcome back.
Felicity: Thank you.
Ross: So Fifi, what are we talking about? [laughs]
Felicity: Today, I thought it would be cool to talk about the best way to fail people. I've run CertTESOL courses in DipTESOL courses, and failure is something that we have to negotiate very carefully. A really delicate thing to manage when teachers don't pass their classes.
Ross. Yeah, right. I think there's something that we don't talk about very much, right? Like how to deal with failure? I googled it, on the way here, in preparation [laughs] and couldn't find anything on how to fail a trainee. You had a story, right?
Felicity: Yeah, this was very early on when I just started working on DipTESOL observations, which is a bit more challenging. The thing about the Dip is that there are four mass parts criteria, I think you talked about this with Dedrick a little bit, a few podcasts ago.
I had a teacher on there who had lots of experience teaching in public school, back in her home country, and she had a lot of ideas about what worked very well. She had a masters, and she had a lot of research to back up her idea that contexts have no place in a classroom.
Ross: Right. Because setting a realistic context is one of the things that you have to do in order to pass those classes, right?
Felicity: Yeah, it's a really important part of the class. To have a trainee who...not that she couldn't do it, but she just refused to accept that she had to do it. I started to really dread having to observe her because I knew that it was going to be a borderline pass or failure, and I would have to give her that feedback and have that fight with her about the whole situation.
But she ended up passing, overall, so that's good.
Ross: You didn't want to tell her if she failed?
Felicity: [laughs] No, I was scared. I think I managed to approach it from the point of view of being like an assessor, so it wasn't my opinion. It was talking about the Trinity qualification guideline so this is something you must pass to get a Trinity DipTESOL.
It's not the only way to teach. They're not saying that it's the perfect thing to do. They're just saying that that's what they want a Trinity qualified teacher to be able to do.
Ross: My worst example of this was more management‑related, but it was me sitting in with a colleague on firing someone, basically in their first week, and that went disastrously wrong. This person basically trashing a classroom in a school full of students, in peak time. It was an absolute disaster.
I think before that, I never put too much thought into that like how do you handle that process and realizing when it goes wrong it goes spectacularly.
Felicity: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross: OK, so Fifi's got some top tips on how to fail people and hopefully, we can also talk about, not just from the trainer's perspective on how to fail people, but maybe also from trainee teacher's perspective. What do you do when that happens? Did you want to talk? Why do we fail people?
Felicity. Yeah, well, I think as I mentioned before, we fail people because they're not meeting the standards. It would be nice to be able to pass everybody but that's the thing to remember, is that there are guidelines, it's not just...
Ross: Yeah, I remember being at a presentation by Jason Anderson a few years ago and him saying that for trainees that find it difficult to accept feedback taking the approach of not saying "I'm doing this to make you a better teacher," or "You must do this to improve your teaching," but just saying like, "I want to help you pass the course."
"In order to pass the course, you need to change this thing and then after the course you can go back to doing whatever you were doing previously if you want." I think that's really important, isn't it? Because whatever course it is, there are these certain criteria. Someone's chosen all those criteria, obviously not completely arbitrarily, but there are values behind whatever criteria they are.
Sometimes even as an examiner you start to go, "Why do people have to do this?" It can obviously be difficult for trainees to accept, right?
Felicity: Absolutely. I don't know if you should put this into the podcast, maybe you can consider it. [laughs]
Ross: I think that's a great way to start a story...
Felicity: [laughs] One way that I certainly use failure in my courses is to give people a very strong notch in the right direction. So teachers who are not understanding or reacting to feedback, for whatever reason, maybe they don't understand what we said to them, or they don't think that they need to make changes.
If they continue to make the same errors, then sometimes failing one class will push them to get out of that groove and start teaching in the methodology that we're looking for.
Tracy: I think usually, when we heard this word "failure," the opposite should be success, so you can see we forget about the process in between. How I help you from failure to success or we need to highlight, I think, that this course is not just the final result, pass or fail, because the process is help you for future more success in your career.
We have to maybe change the definition of fail. You probably failed a criteria but it doesn't means you fail. Experimenting new techniques in the classroom.
Ross: One of those points there is that maybe it's not you failed but it's like the lesson failed. I think that's a useful distinction to make. I think it can also seem very unfair on courses where you don't really get so much credit for your improvement, right? The courses are about learning, but the things that we measure on the courses isn't how much you learn, it's where you get to.
Felicity: It's your performance, yeah.
Ross: I wanted to ask you about this. What was your second bit of advice, it was idealism versus pragmatism?
Felicity: Oh, so this is maybe you see a class that is borderline, you could choose to pass it, you could choose to fail it. In those kinds of situations you have to look at the wider context so, "Is it their first teaching practice?" If it is, maybe you want to pass it. Because if you fail on your first class, often it's so de‑motivating.
Another thing you want to consider is, "How would the other trainees react if this class passes?" Another thing to consider as well is, "Is this person in their behavior potentially driving away students?" Because anyone who runs a cert or a Dip would know it's sometimes a struggle to get students.
Ross: You mean trainees or do you mean actual students in the classes?
Felicity: Actual students for the classes. If you have a trainee who taught a fairly methodologically sound class but then they maybe intimidated the students somehow, then what is a borderline might well become a fail because you want to really strongly push them away from discouraging students.
Ross: You can't do your job anymore, right, if there are no students.
Felicity. Yeah, exactly.
Ross: It's really interesting, isn't it? There's also an issue with this, are they driving away other trainees as well on...not courses I've worked on but I think a lot of other courses when...It's a very awkward position when someone's paying you to take this course, but then you also have this option to fail the person.
I think that puts the trainer in a very awkward situation because you don't want to get this reputation, I guess, of if you take the course there then you're much more likely to fail. Obviously you can have standards to uphold the things as well, right?
Felicity: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross: Should we talk about how to break the news if that was like you're deciding if this person is going to fail or not, or if they're borderline. When would you tell someone?
Felicity: I've got a couple of strong rules. The first one is it's not you failed, it's the class failed. Because it's a high‑stress performance, that's not an indicator of who they are as a whole person. The second thing is to reduce dread as much as you can. The moment you get the chance to tell them gently and then it takes the stakes out of the rest of the conversation.
Ross: I think as well if you do that to the middle or the end of the conversation. The only thing the person is going to be thinking about in between is did I pass?
Felicity: Yeah. Actually quite recently I had a teacher who had passed but she wasn't very confident. We were having feedback and I thought that it would be self‑evident that she had passed the class, but I could see her getting more and more fidgety. Eventually I was just like, "Look, you've passed," and she immediately burst into tears because it was that incredible tension.
Tracy: I remember clearly I had a trainee. There were two classes in a row, failed. The first time, of course, burst into tears and couldn't continue the conversation. Even though, I leave it for a while and then came back and still couldn't still talk about it. So I have to write down a lot of feedback to her, and she read it.
I think that also helped. If you realize this person is already, cannot accept it, or feel really negative about it, maybe leave it or turn it into some written feedback instead. It probably the easiest way for people to accept because it's just a paper and words, no emotion. I'm going to read it when I need it or when I'm ready.
Ross: I think as well, you're helping that person learn on giving them feedback about them helping other people learning. As a teacher, if you're just bombarding your students with feedback until they cry, that wouldn't be very good. So it seems important that, as a trainer, you demonstrate the same skill with seeing, "Is this person ready for the feedback? Do we need to wait?"
A lot we are saying is leading into giving people feedback so what are some tips for people who failed and are saying, "What next?"
Felicity: One thing that you can remind your trainees of is that hopefully, their failure will be an aberration from the pattern. So the norm is passing classes and if it's their second class and say, "Look, you've passed your first class, you definitely got the ability. Here are all the areas where you did pass but this area and this area."
Ross: It sounds cheesy, but I think it is important to find some positive things to focus on. If it's a course where there are lots of criteria just talking through, "Hey, here are the things that you passed, that you did well on." Making those specific both so the person keeps doing them and to give them better confidence.
One thing to definitely avoid doing in these situations is eliciting. That usually goes wrong. If someone's failed they just want to be told, "Here's why you failed and here's how to make sure that doesn't happen again." So strongly recommend not saying, "So you failed on this and this, how do you think you could do this better?"
My example from the beginning, the person going berserk after they've been fired it was partially because the person doing the firing said, "Oh, this went wrong, this went wrong. What do you think we should do about it?" and the other person saying, "Oh, like I work harder," and then being "Well, I'm actually sorry, you're fired."
Felicity: So by the time you get to observing a trainee, you're probably going to know them enough to know how they're going to react. If you have a trainee who you feel might get aggressive with you, or be very, very resistant then this might be a good opportunity to avoid this cognitive bias called reactive evaluation, which is where an idea that comes from an enemy is automatically less valuable.
In situations where a person is likely to get aggressive, it's because they see you as the enemy. This is going to sound really weird, but what we want to maybe try and do in that situation is twist it around so that it's not you that's the enemy, it's the criteria and you are on their side and trying to get them to meet the criteria.
So you're more of going back into a trainer role, rather than an assessor role. You're just saying like, "Look, I know this criterion is really tough but I'm here to help you understand and meet them. Here are some things that you can do to get yourself to that point."
Tracy: I really like this quote this person said. "Failure is not a bag of learning, it's the feature. It's not something that should be locked out of the learning experience."
Ross: My final top tip is sit in the seats closest to the door if these things go really badly wrong and bring some tissues.
[laughter]
Ross: I have definitely been in situations several times where I regret not doing one of those two things.
[laughter]
Ross: So Fifi, thanks for coming on. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Felicity: I have a blog, it's classed the ELT Elf. I'll send you the link because...
Ross: It's already on the website.
Felicity: Oh. [laughs]
Ross: It's on links page, and I'll also put it on this page.
Felicity: Thank you.
Ross: Great. Fifi, thanks so much for coming up. A pleasure.
Tracy: Thank you and see you next time, everybody. Bye.
Felicity: Bye.
Ross: Bye.