Teaching without a coursebook Whether you're starting with a new class or just changing direction a little the decision of how to structure a course without a coursebook can sometimes be difficult for a new or even experienced teacher.
What's wrong with using a coursebook?
Well, in many cases, nothing! With the constant updating of text books to include new and relevant topics, ideas and methodology, teachers have a great set of resources at their fingertips. Students however may not see it that way. Perhaps they have had past experiences with a "bad" textbook, in other words, following a book which is not well chosen in terms of their age, interests and needs. Maybe they are lacking a little variety in their classes or perhaps you or they just want a break or a change from routine.
A topic based syllabus
What might sound like fun for the students can seem a bit daunting for the teacher. By taking away the course book we are taking away our safety net, our tried and tested syllabus written by someone who apparently knew what they were doing!
Using a topic-based syllabus as a framework, however, provides a natural stimulus for language learning in a realistic context. By starting with a topic of interest and then discussing or explaining an issue or opinion, students will find out what they want to say and whether they can say it or not. This then, provides further objectives, whether they be grammatical, lexical or pronunciation based, on which to build the course. Structuring the course What might at first sight seem like quite an unstructured course can in fact be deceptively well organised. Here are a five steps to follow to ensure that both students and teacher feel that the course is properly designed: Needs analysis The key to beginning a successful topic-based course is to clearly establish the students' interests and motivations. As part of your lesson get the students to talk about themselves and each other and find out what they enjoy, what they don't like, whether they know what's going on in the news at the moment and so on.
Keep a note of what comes up as the list of potential topics can be long and every student will be different.
Ultimately, those topics which will be successful are those which spark off an agreement or disagreement with someone else in the class as well as those the students seem well-informed about.
The students will take over the conversation and lead it where they want it to go.
Whether or not you get a long list from students, you can always use course books "behind the scenes" to help you. Take a look at the contents page of a course book for topic ideas and suggest them to students or take one of the student's ideas and back it up with more material from the book. Students will never know their ideas originally came from a book! Set short term objectives The list resulting from the needs analysis may be long with a variety of topics and areas of interest. Rather than trying to include everything, plan to focus on three or four over a certain time frame, either a term or particular number of hours depending on the frequency of the classes. Decide with the students what their objectives for the coming course will be, for example: to develop their ability to discuss certain topics with more confidence, fluency and awareness of relevant language. Endeavour to ensure that topics cover several lessons to give an idea of continuation. Even better if you can find a link between topics so the students will have some thread to follow over the course. Remedial grammar
While topics and current affairs tend to lend themselves to a great deal of discussion it is important that the students don't feel that grammar or language input has been abandoned altogether! Although they may not want to follow a structural syllabus per se, there will be structural errors which repeatedly occur both in needs analysis and during the course and these will form the underlying framework for language input.
This of course requires teachers to be more flexible and reactive to problems which are arising. Again, course books can be used as a base and exercises selected according to the needs of the students. It is still okay for the teacher to say "We'll discuss this in detail next lesson!" if something comes up that wasn't prepared.
Error correction When focusing mainly on conversation in class it is very tempting to encourage fluency at the expense of accuracy, especially at high levels.
Discuss this issue with the students encouraging them to think about when they want to be corrected. Many are keen to be corrected on the spot, some prefer correction slots throughout the class or at the end.
Trying several different approaches will allow both teacher and student to find which works best for them.
Keeping a note of errors and giving them back to the students the following lesson to correct really makes them think back and pay attention to the mistakes they are making.
Variety The wider the variety of sources and resources you and your students can find, the better. Let's take an example:
Students have all agreed they are interested in cinema. As a starting point find out which films particularly they like and ask them to explain the story and why they like them.
The Internet, magazines and newspapers can be used to research films and language of film reviews can be studied.
Video or DVD can be used to watch all or some of the films and a variety of work can be done on this involving discussion, pronunciation, accents, role plays, descriptions, predictions, translations. Don't forget it is most important to grade the task not the text so authentic materials can be used with low level classes.
Course book material can be used to add to this in terms of listening and reading material at any level.
A variety of topics could follow on from this starting point of cinema. Fame and fortune, privacy, the media, entertainment, fashion are all possibilities that could be exploited. Indeed the topics contained in some of the films may even provide links to a wider variety of discussions and areas of interest.
Conclusion
Teaching without a coursebook won't please everyone all of the time and can create a lot of extra work, but in terms of your own teacher development and as a way of keeping your classes fresh and interesting for your students, I would definitely recommend giving it a try from time to time.
The dialogues and texts used in EFL coursebooks are generally there to develop listening and reading skills. But they also contain a lot of language that the students could usefully “notice”, and this potential is often under-exploited. After the initial use of the text for comprehension, how can you recycle the texts and use them to develop the students general linguistic competence?
If you want to take a published text and adapt it in some way, you obviously face the issue of copyright. However, some publishers now accept that teachers need to adapt materials in order to make them fully appropriate for their students and their own teaching style, and waive copyright for certain portions of the book. An example is Oxford University Press which, on its website, publishes the tapescripts of some of its courses (Headway and International Express for example) in Word format, so that teachers can copy and adapt them. For the series Business Focus, there is also an extremely useful and flexible cloze maker, which can be used either for the texts in the book, or for the teacher’s own texts.
I like to bring texts back three or four times during the course, so that the language they contain is constantly recycled. They can be given to the students as a homework exercise, used as fillers at the start of the lesson while you’re waiting for latecomers, or at the end if your planned activities finish five minutes early. The types of activity you can use include :
Scrambled texts. Give the students the paragraphs or sentences of the text in random order, and ask them to reconstitute the text. They may be cut up on separate strips of paper so that the students have to physically rearrange them on the desk (as ever, if you back them on card they’re more likely to be re-usable with a later class), or simply printed on a sheet of paper with a box next to each one where the students can write the appropriate number. If you use this activity you need to be sure that there are sufficient clues to make the activity possible. These will often be cohesive clues – linguistic connections between parts of the text, such as pronouns referring back to a previous noun How was your trip? / It was fine thanks or demonstratives and synonyms with the same reference function : At the moment there is the danger that the disease will reach pandemic proportions. This risk is made more serious by … And/Or there may be clues of coherence, logical relationships between parts of the text. The sequence How are you? / Fine, thanks. is coherent, whereas How are you? / At 10.15 is not. Be careful – these links do not always exist in a text and/or there may be more than one possible answer. When preparing the activity, check for this and if there’s a potential problem write the number of the problem sentence or paragraph next to it, so that students know where to put it in the text.
Scrambled sentences. Alternatively, the sentences can be given in order, but the words of each sentence jumbled. This is a useful activity if your students have problems with word order in English.
Gapped texts. There are various ways you can gap a text, from strict cloze technique (systematically taking out every fifth, seventh or ninth etc word) to more focused gapping – for example, removing all the prepositions or simply choosing the words which you feel it would be useful for the students to focus on. Obviously, this should not be a memory test : it must be possible to deduce the necessary word from the surrounding context, as in Can you pick ….. that piece of paper please? where the only possibility is up. Where there is more than one possibility, or simply to make the activity easier, the correct words can be given in jumbled order in a box at the top of the exercise, or the first letter of the word can be given: Can you g…………. me a hand with these boxes? The OUP cloze maker allows you all these options.
Use the correct form. This is also a variant of a gapped text. It’s most commonly used with verbs – the verb is taken out of the sentence and the infinitive given in brackets (or, this time to make it harder, in scrambled order before the exercise) : I …… (go) to Spain last August. It can also be used, however, for other word classes – for example for comparatives and superlatives Barcelona is the ………………… (beautiful) city I know. or to focus on prefixes and suffixes He was fired because his work was ………… (satisfaction)
Spot the Mistake. Again there are several variations of this activity. You can :
· Insert a certain number of mistakes into the text, for example : Did you have a good travel? As before, the mistakes can be focused (verb forms, prepositions, spelling etc) or mixed, focusing on the words you want the students to notice. It helps if you tell the students how many mistakes they have to find – one per line, or eight in the whole text, for instance.
· Give alternative words : Did you have a good trip/travel? / Barcelona is the most/more beautiful city I know. The students have to choose the correct alternative.
· Add an extra word into each line of the text : I went to Spain the last August or, alternatively, omit one word from each line : I have to go to office. Again, the words you choose to add or omit will reflect the problems which you know your students have, and which you want them to focus on. This type of personalisation is the reason why this type of exercise can best be designed by the teacher rather than the coursebook writer.
Rewrite the text. The students are given a version of the text almost but not quite like the original and have to rewrite it. For example, at beginner’s level they might have a version using full forms of the verb BE. They have to rewrite it putting the contractions back in wherever possible.
All of these activities have the advantage that the students can self-correct by looking back at the original text, which as I argued in Correcting Written Work : Encouraging "Noticing" often pushes them into a deeper form of cognitive processing than just having their work corrected. However, there are other variations which need a teacher’s confirmation. For example, if two three possibilities were given in Spot the Mistake, two of which were correct and one wrong : Did you have a good trip/travel/journey? The students would be able to find one of the correct alternatives in the original dialogue, but would need help for the second. The same would happen if there were more than one possible answer in a gapped passage : Can you ……… me a hand with these boxes? The original text might use give, but lend would be equally possible. Or if students at higher levels were given an informal version of a business letter they had already studied and had to convert it back to formal style. There might well be more than one acceptable alternative for each phrase.
But won’t the students get bored with working on the same text all the time? Not if the activities are varied, increase in level of difficulty each time, and the recycling is mixed in with other, newer work. In fact, very often they may not even remember having seen the text before. This is a sign that their processing of the text has not gone very deep – however often you’ve recycled it. One way to increase the “depth” of this processing is to ask them to create the exercise to be used with the text themselves. Once students are familiar with the exercise types that can be used, distribute a different previously studied text to each person. List a number of exercise types on the board, check that the students remember them, and ask them to choose one to apply to their text. For homework, they create the exercise and in the next lesson swap exercises and do the activity which another student has created.
Cómo realizar un análisis, una síntesis y un resumen
¿Qué es un resumen? Es expresar de manera integradora, condensada, coherente y con palabras del redactor el contenido esencial de un texto. Es la exposición sumaria de un tema, obra o capítulo.
¿Cómo se hace? - Lee el texto (o escúchalo, si se trata de una exposición oral) dos o tres veces - En la primera lectura subraya las palabras desconocidas e investígalas, y después determina de qué trata el tema. - En la segunda lectura escribe la idea central de cada párrafo o subtema. - Después de esto da una siguiente lectura y expresa el contenido del texto con tus propias palabras. - El resumen no debe de exceder en extensión al 25% del original. - Si el texto es corto integra las oraciones que se producen a partir de las ideas centrales. Si es extenso, redacta un párrafo con cada idea central de los subtemas, procurando que el contenido esté integrado.
¿Qué es un análisis? El análisis es la identificación y separación de los elementos fundamentales. Se descomponen, se desintegran las ideas.
¿Cómo se hace? - Cuando se trata de un texto corto, como un artículo, un reportaje, un fragmento, etc., se realiza separando la idea de cada párrafo. Si es un texto largo, una conferencia, un folleto, un libro, etc., se separan las ideas centrales de los subtemas.
¿Qué es una síntesis?
La síntesis de un texto conduce a su interpretación holística. Esto es, a tener una idea cabal del texto como un todo.
¿Cómo se hace? - Analiza el texto -Ordena las ideas mas sencillas hasta llegar a la más compleja, suponiendo un orden incluso allí donde no hubiera - Interpreta el texto, integrando sus partes. -Si se presenta oralmente, debes redactar un esquema que sirva de pauta.
¿Cuál es la diferencia entre resumen, análisis y síntesis? El análisis y la síntesis son procedimientos lógicos que se complementan. Mientras el primero conduce a la automatización de las ideas, la segunda obliga a la integración de las partes en el todo.
De esto podemos decir que en el análisis se descomponen o se desintegran las ideas; en la síntesis se unen, se integran las ideas favoreciendo la comprensión, y en el resumen se reduce a lo esencial la exposición oral o escrita. Primero se realiza el análisis, luego la síntesis y por último el resumen pues ya se tienen las condiciones para expresar lo esencial.
Ejemplo práctico
Texto original Tenemos muchos motivos valiosos por los cuales trabajar; trabajamos para ganar el sustento diario, para poder contribuir al desarrollo de nuestra familia, para desarrollar nuestras capacidades, etc. Sin embargo parece que estas razones no son suficientes para evitar considerar que el trabajo "es un enemigo". Basta mirar como anhelamos los fines de semana y los días feriados, es decir la primera oportunidad para no trabajar o para hacerlo con el mínimo esfuerzo. En el extremo opuesto, se encuentran los adictos al trabajo, aquellos para los que no hay otra cosa que trabajar, han renunciado a su familia, amigos y quién sabe qué cosas más por su obsesión.
Pero para vivir el trabajo verdaderamente, sin eliminar nada y sin renegar de nada es preciso reconocer en lo cotidiano el significado profundo de nuestra acción, o dicho de otra manera, es preciso tener las razones que nos hacen descubrir el gusto por lo que hacemos.
Análisis del texto 1. Las estas razones por las que trabajamos parecen no ser suficientes para evitar considerar al trabajo como un enemigo. 2. Existen dos posturas extremas de enfrentarse al trabajo: - se está atento a la primera oportunidad para no trabajar. - se toma muy a pecho el trabajo dejando a un lado su familia, amigos.. 3. Para vivir verdaderamente el trabajo es preciso tener las razones que nos hacen descubrir el gusto por lo que hacemos.
Síntesis del texto Son muchos los motivos para trabajar, el sustento, la familia, desarrollo personal; pero a pesar de esto no somos amigos del trabajo, preferimos los días de fiesta y fines de semana, aunque hay muchos que se apegan al trabajo amándolo de tal modo que abandonan todo. Para no vivir esta contradicción es importante entender el porqué profundo de lo que hacemos.
Resumen del texto Es preciso conocer las razones por las que trabajamos, el significado profundo de lo que hacemos, sino se crean dos posturas del hombre ante el trabajo: encontrar la primera oportunidad para no trabajar, o ser un adicto al trabajo, descuidando lo demás.
"Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark." - Anatole France
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." - Henry Brooks Adams
"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." - Thomas Carruthers
" A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron." - Horace Mann (1796-1859)
"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance." - Sir Claus Moser
"Education...is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning,... by praise, but above all -- by example." - John Ruskin
"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." - Malcolm Forbes
"Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively." - R.D. Clyde
"Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime." - Chinese Proverb
"Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don't know." - R. Verdi
"Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers." - Josef Albers
"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think." - Socrates
"If the child is not learning the way you are teaching, then you must teach in the way the child learns" - Rita Dunn
"I may have said the same thing before... but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different." - Oscar Wilde
"I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son." - Thomas Wolfe
"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." - J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." - Albert Einstein
"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know it just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers" - Richard Bach
"Men learn while they teach." - Lucius A. Seneca
"No matter how good teaching may be, each student must take the responsibility for his own education." - John Carolus S. J.
"People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives." - Thomas Mann
"Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its values only to its scarcity." - Samuel Johnson
"Spoonfeeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon" - E. M. Forster
"Teachers should guide without dictating, and participate without dominating." - C.B. Neblette
"Teach your children by what you are, not just by what you say" - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." - Cicero
"The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know." - Carl Rogers
"The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton
"The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves." - Joseph Campbell
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - Plutarch
"There are no difficult students - just students who don't want to do it your way" - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
" The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind." - Kahlil Gibran
"To define is to destroy, to suggest is to create." - Stephane Mallarme
"To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching." - George Bernard Shaw
"To teach is to learn twice." - Joseph Joubert
"Try to present at least three options. One is no choice at all. Two creates a dilemma. With three you begin to have real choice and flexibility" - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
"We think too much about effective methods of teaching and not enough about effective methods of learning." - John Carolus S. J.
"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child." - George Bernard Shaw
"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." - John Cotton Dana
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself." - Galielo Galilei
"You can't direct the wind but you can adjust the sails." - Anonymous
For Learners
" Always do what you are afraid to do." - Ralph Waldo
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young." - Henry Ford
"A turtle makes progress when it sticks its neck out" - Anon
" Believe in yourself, be strong, never give up no matter what the circumstances are. You are a champion and will overcome the dreaded obstacles. Champions take failure as a learning opportunity, so take in all you can, and run with it. Be your best and don't ever ever give up." - Brad Gerrard
"Cherish your visions and your dreams, as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements" - Napoleon Hill
"Did you know that the Chinese symbol for 'crisis' includes a symbol which means 'opportunity'? - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
"Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world" - Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
"Every artist was at first an amateur." - Ralph W. Emerson
"I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand." - Chinese Proverb
"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got" - NLP adage
"If you find yourself saying 'But I can't speak English...', try adding the word '...yet' - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." - Derek Bok
"If you know what you want, you are more likely to get it" - NLP adage
"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and made things happen." - Elinor Smith
"It's not just about looking and copying, it's about feeling too" - Paul Cezanne
"It's ok to try things out, to ask questions, to feel unsure, to let your mind wander, to daydream, to ask for help, to experiment, to take time out, not to know, to practise, to ask for help again - and again, to make mistakes, to check your understanding" - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
"Learning is never done without errors and defeat." - Vladimir Lenin
"Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge" - Theodore Roszak
"One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he could not do." - Henry Ford
"One must have strategies to execute dreams." - Azim Premji, CEO Wipro Ind
"One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty, until you try." - Sophocles
"People learn more quickly by doing something or seeing something done." - Gilbert Highet
"Success comes in cans, failure in can'ts." - Unknown
"The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle." - Pierre de Coubertin
"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself." - Chinese Proverb
"Too much credit is given to the end result. The true lesson is in the struggle that takes place between the dream and reality. That struggle is a thing called life!" - Garth Brooks
"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work." - Aristotle
" The only dreams impossible to reach are the ones you never pursue." - Michael Deckman
" There two types of people; the can do and the can't. Which are you?" - George R. Cabrera
"Whenever you feel like saying 'Yes, but....`, try saying instead 'Yes, and....'" - Jane Revell & Susan Norman
"Whether you think you can, or think you can't...you're right!" - Henry Ford
"Worry is misuse of the imagination" - Mary Crowley
"You haven't failed, until you stop trying" - Unknown
"You've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch onto the affirmative, don't mess with Mr In-between" - Popular song
from Psychology - The Search for Understanding
by Janet A. Simons, Donald B. Irwin and Beverly A. Drinnien
West Publishing Company, New York, 1987
Abraham Maslow developed a theory of personality that has influenced a number of different fields, including education. This wide influence is due in part to the high level of practicality of Maslow's theory. This theory accurately describes many realities of personal experiences. Many people find they can understand what Maslow says. They can recognize some features of their experience or behavior which is true and identifiable but which they have never put into words.
Maslow is a humanistic psychologist. Humanists do not believe that human beings are pushed and pulled by mechanical forces, either of stimuli and reinforcements (behaviorism) or of unconscious instinctual impulses (psychoanalysis). Humanists focus upon potentials. They believe that humans strive for an upper level of capabilities. Humans seek the frontiers of creativity, the highest reaches of consciousness and wisdom. This has been labeled "fully functioning person", "healthy personality", or as Maslow calls this level, "self-actualizing person."
Maslow has set up a hierarchic theory of needs. All of his basic needs are instinctoid, equivalent of instincts in animals. Humans start with a very weak disposition that is then fashioned fully as the person grows. If the environment is right, people will grow straight and beautiful, actualizing the potentials they have inherited. If the environment is not "right" (and mostly it is not) they will not grow tall and straight and beautiful.
Maslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of needs exist. These include needs for understanding, esthetic appreciation and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied, and so on. Maslow's basic needs are as follows:
Physiological Needs
These are biological needs. They consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. They are the strongest needs because if a person were deprived of all needs, the physiological ones would come first in the person's search for satisfaction.
Safety Needs
When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviors, the needs for security can become active. Adults have little awareness of their security needs except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting). Children often display the signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.
Needs of Love, Affection and Belongingness
When the needs for safety and for physiological well-being are satisfied, the next class of needs for love, affection and belongingness can emerge. Maslow states that people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the sense of belonging.
Needs for Esteem
When the first three classes of needs are satisfied, the needs for esteem can become dominant. These involve needs for both self-esteem and for the esteem a person gets from others. Humans have a need for a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect, and respect from others. When these needs are satisfied, the person feels self-confident and valuable as a person in the world. When these needs are frustrated, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.
Needs for Self-Actualization
When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, then and only then are the needs for self-actualization activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was "born to do." "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.
The hierarchic theory is often represented as a pyramid, with the larger, lower levels representing the lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-actualization. Maslow believes that the only reason that people would not move well in direction of self-actualization is because of hindrances placed in their way by society. He states that education is one of these hindrances. He recommends ways education can switch from its usual person-stunting tactics to person-growing approaches. Maslow states that educators should respond to the potential an individual has for growing into a self-actualizing person of his/her own kind. Ten points that educators should address are listed:
We should teach people to be authentic, to be aware of their inner selves and to hear their inner-feeling voices.
We should teach people to transcend their cultural conditioning and become world citizens.
We should help people discover their vocation in life, their calling, fate or destiny. This is especially focused on finding the right career and the right mate.
We should teach people that life is precious, that there is joy to be experienced in life, and if people are open to seeing the good and joyous in all kinds of situations, it makes life worth living.
We must accept the person as he or she is and help the person learn their inner nature. From real knowledge of aptitudes and limitations we can know what to build upon, what potentials are really there.
We must see that the person's basic needs are satisfied. This includes safety, belongingness, and esteem needs.
We should refreshen consciousness, teaching the person to appreciate beauty and the other good things in nature and in living.
We should teach people that controls are good, and complete abandon is bad. It takes control to improve the quality of life in all areas.
We should teach people to transcend the trifling problems and grapple with the serious problems in life. These include the problems of injustice, of pain, suffering, and death.
We must teach people to be good choosers. They must be given practice in making good choices.
Four decades ago, almost no one was talking or writing about self-esteem in those days. Today, almost everyone seems to be talking about self-esteem, and the danger is that the idea may become trivialized. And yet, of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
I want, in this short article, to address the issue of what self-esteem is, what it depends on, and what are some of the most prevalent misconceptions about it.
Self-esteem is an experience. It is a particular way of experiencing the self. It is a good deal more than a mere feeling—this must be stressed. It involves emotional, evaluative, and cognitive components. It also entails certain action dispositions: to move toward life rather than away from it; to move toward consciousness rather than away from it; to treat facts with respect rather than denial; to operate self-responsibly rather than the opposite.
A Definition
To begin with a definition: Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think. By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change. It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment—happiness—are right and natural for us. The survival-value of such confidence is obvious; so is the danger when it is missing.
Self-esteem is not the euphoria or cheerfulness that may be temporarily induced by a drug, a compliment, or a love affair. It is not an illusion or hallucination. If it is not grounded in reality, if it is not built over time through the appropriate operation of mind, it is not self-esteem.
The root of our need for self-esteem is the need for a consciousness to learn to trust itself. And the root of the need to learn such trust is the fact that consciousness is volitional: we have the choice to think or not to think. We control the switch that turns consciousness brighter or dimmer. We are not rational—that is, reality-focused—automatically. This means that whether we learn to operate our mind in such a way as to make ourselves appropriate to life is ultimately a function of our choices. Do we strive for consciousness or for its opposite? For rationality or its opposite? For coherence and clarity or their opposite? For truth or its opposite?
Building Self-Esteem
In “The Six Pillars of Self Esteem,” I examine the six practices that I have found to be essential for the nurturing and sustaining of healthy self-esteem: the practice of living consciously, of self-acceptance, of self-responsibility, of self-assertiveness, of purposefulness, and of integrity. I will briefly define what each of these practices means:
The practice of living consciously: respect for facts; being present to what we are doing while are doing it; seeking and being eagerly open to any information, knowledge, or feedback that bears on our interests, values, goals, and projects; seeking to understand not only the world external to self but also our inner world, so that we do not out of self-blindness.
The practice of self-acceptance: the willingness to own, experience, and take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions, without evasion, denial, or disowning—and also without self-repudiation; giving oneself permission to think one’s thoughts, experience one’s emotions, and look at one’s actions without necessarily liking, endorsing, or condoning them; the virtue of realism applied to the self.
The practice of self-responsibility: realizing that we are the author of our choices and actions; that each one us is responsible for life and well-being and for the attainment of our goals; that if we need the cooperation of other people to achieve our goals, we must offer values in exchange; and that question is not “Who’s to blame?” but always “What needs to be done?” (“What do I need to do?”)
The practice of self-assertiveness: being authentic in our dealings with others; treating our values and persons with decent respect in social contexts; refusing to fake the reality of who we are or what we esteem in order to avoid disapproval; the willingness to stand up for ourselves and our ideas in appropriate ways in appropriate contexts.
The practice of living purposefully: identifying our short-term and long-term goals or purposes and the actions needed to attain them (formulating an action-plan); organizing behavior in the service of those goals; monitoring action to be sure we stay on track; and paying attention to outcome so as to recognize if and when we need to go back to the drawing-board.
The practice of personal integrity: living with congruence between what we know, what we profess, and what we do; telling the truth, honoring our commitments, exemplifying in action the values we profess to admire.
What all these practices have in common is respect for reality. They all entail at their core a set of mental operations (which, naturally, have consequences in the external world).
When we seek to align ourselves with reality as best we understand it, we nurture and support our self-esteem. When, either out of fear or desire, we seek escape from reality, we undermine our self-esteem. No other issue is more important or basic than our cognitive relationship to reality—meaning: to that which exists.
A consciousness cannot trust itself if, in the face of discomfiting facts, it has a policy of preferring blindness to sight. A person cannot experience self-respect who too often, in action, betrays consciousness, knowledge, and conviction—that is, who operates without integrity.
Thus, if we are mindful in this area, we see that self-esteem is not a free gift of nature. It has to be cultivated, has to be earned. It cannot be acquired by blowing oneself a kiss in the mirror and saying, “Good morning, Perfect.” It cannot be attained by being showered with praise. Nor by sexual conquests. Nor by material acquisitions. Nor by the scholastic or career achievements of one’s children. Nor by a hypnotist planting the thought that one is wonderful. Nor by allowing young people to believe they are better students than they really are and know more than they really know; faking reality is not a path to mental health or authentic self-assurance. However, just as people dream of attaining effortless wealth, so they dream of attaining effortless self-esteem—and unfortunately the marketplace is full of panderers to this longing.
People can be inspired, stimulated, or coached to live more consciously, practice greater self-acceptance, operate more self-responsibly, function more self-assertively, live more purposefully, and bring a higher level of personal integrity into their life—but the task of generating and sustaining these practices falls on each of us alone. “If I bring a higher level of awareness to my self-esteem, I see that mine is the responsibility of nurturing it.” No one—not our parents, nor our friends, nor our lover, nor our psychotherapist, nor our support group—can “give” us self-esteem. If and when we fully grasp this, that is an act of “waking up.”
Misconceptions about Self-Esteem
When we do not understand the principles suggested above, we tend to seek self-esteem where it cannot be found—and, if we are in “the self-esteem movement,” to communicate our misunderstandings to others.
Teachers who embrace the idea that self-esteem is important without adequately grasping its roots may announce (to quote one such teacher) that “self-esteem comes primarily from one’s peers.” Or (quoting many others): “Children should not be graded for mastery of a subject because it may be hurtful to their self-esteem.” Or (quoting still others): “Self-esteem is best nurtured by unselfish (!) service to the community.”
In the “recovery movement” and from so-called spiritual leaders in general one may receive a different message: “Stop struggling to achieve self-esteem. Turn your problems over to God. Realize that you are a child of God—and that is all you need to have self-esteem.” Consider what this implies if taken literally. We don’t need to live consciously. We don’t need to act self-responsibly. We don’t need to have integrity. All we have to do is surrender responsibility to God and effortless self-esteem is guaranteed to us. This is not a helpful message to convey to people. Nor is it true.
Yet another misconception—very different from those I have just discussed—is the belief that the measure of our personal worth is our external achievements. This is an understandable error to make but it is an error nonetheless. We admire achievements, in ourselves and in others, and it is natural and appropriate to do so. But this is not the same thing as saying that our achievements are the measure or grounds of our self-esteem. The root of our self-esteem is not our achievements per se but those internally generated practices that make it possible for us to achieve. How much we will achieve in the world is not fully in our control. An economic depression can temporarily put us out of work. A depression cannot take away the resourcefulness that will allow us sooner or later to find another or go into business for ourselves. “Resourcefulness” is not an achievement in the world (although it may result in that); it is an action in consciousness—and it is here that self-esteem is generated.
To clarify further the importance of understanding what self-esteem is and is not, I want to comment on a recent research report that has gained a great deal of attention in the media and has been used to challenge the value of self-esteem.
By way of preamble let me say that one of the most depressing aspects of so many discussions of self-esteem today is the absence of any reference to the importance of thinking or respect for reality. Too often, consciousness or rationality are not judged to be relevant, since they are not raised as considerations. The notion seems to be that any positive feeling about the self, however arrived at and regardless of its grounds, equals “self-esteem.”
We encounter this assumption in a much publicized research paper by Roy F. Baumeister, Joseph M. Boden, and Laura Smart, entitled “Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem,” published in the “Psychological Review” (1996, Vol. 103, 5-33). In it the authors write:
Conventional wisdom has regarded low self-esteem as an important cause of violence, but the opposite view is theoretically viable. An interdisciplinary review of evidence about aggression, crime, and violence contradicted the view that low self-esteem is an important cause. Instead, violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened egotism—that is, highly favorable views of self that are disputed by some person or circumstance. Inflated, unstable, or tentative beliefs in the self’s superiority may be most prone to encountering threats and hence to causing violence. The mediating process may involve directing anger outward as a way of avoiding a downward revision of the self-concept.
The article contains more astonishing statements than it is possible to quote, but here are a few representative examples:
“In our view, the benefits of favorable self-opinions increase primarily to the self, and they are if anything a burden and potential problem to everyone else.”
“By self-esteem we mean simply a favorable global evaluation of oneself. The term self-esteem has acquired highly positive connotations, but it has simple synonyms the connotations of which are more mixed, including … egotism, arrogance … conceitedness, narcissism, and sense of superiority, which share the fundamental meaning of favorable self-evaluation.”
“[W]e propose that the major cause of violence is high self-esteem combined with an ego threat [which is caused by someone challenging your self-evaluation].”
“Apparently, then, alcohol generally helps create a state of high self-esteem.”
Observe, first of all, that there is nothing in the authors’ idea of self-esteem that would allow one to distinguish between an individual whose self-esteem is rooted in the practices of living consciously, self-responsibility, and personal integrity—that is, one whose self-esteem is rooted in reality—and one whose “self-esteem” consists of grandiosity, fantasies of superiority, exaggerated notions of one’s accomplishments, megalomania, and “favorable global self-evaluations” induced by drugs and alcohol. No definition of self-esteem or piece of research that demolishes a distinction of this fundamentality can make any claim to scientific legitimacy. It leaves reality out of its analysis.
One does not need to be a trained psychologist to know that some people with low self-esteem strive to compensate for their deficit by boasting, arrogance, and conceited behavior. What educated person does not know about compensatory defense mechanisms? Self-esteem is not manifested in the neurosis we call narcissism—or in megalomania. One has to have a strange notion of the concept to equate in self-esteem the trail-blazing scientist or entrepreneur, moved by intellectual self-trust and a passion to discover or achieve, and the terrorist who must sustain his “high self-evaluation” with periodic fixes of torture and murder. To offer both types as instances of “high self-esteem” is to empty the term of any useable meaning.
An important purpose of fresh thinking is to provide us with new and valuable distinctions that will allow us to navigate more effectively through reality. What is the purpose of “thinking” that destroys distinctions already known to us that are of life-and-death importance?
It is tempting to comment on this report in greater detail because it contains so many instances of specious reasoning. However, such a discussion would not be relevant here, since my intention is only to show the importance of a precise understanding of self-esteem and also to show what can happen when consciousness and reality are omitted from the investigation.
So I will conclude with one last observation. In an interview given to a journalist, one of the researchers (Roy F. Baumeister), explaining his opposition to the goal of raising people’s self-esteem, is quoted as saying: “Ask yourself: If everybody were 50 percent more conceited, would the world be a better place?” [1] The implication is clearly that self-esteem and conceit are the same thing—both undesirable. Webster defines conceit as an exaggerated [therefore in defiance of facts] opinion of oneself and one’s merits. No, the world would not be a better place if everybody were 50 percent more conceited. But would the world be a better place if everybody had earned a 50 percent higher level of self-esteem, by living consciously, responsibly, and with integrity? Yes, it would—enormously.
Awareness of What Affects Our Self-Esteem
Self-esteem reflects our deepest vision of our competence and worth. Sometimes this vision is our most closely guarded secret, even from ourselves, as when we try to compensate for our deficiencies with what I call pseudo-self-esteem—a pretense at a self-confidence and self-respect we do not actually feel. Nothing is more common than the effort to protect self-esteem not with consciousness but with unconsciousness—with denial and evasion—which only results in a further deterioration of self-esteem. Indeed a good deal of the behavior we call “neurotic” can be best understood as a misguided effort to protect self-esteem by means which in fact are undermining.
Whether or not we admit it, there is a level at which all of us know that the issue of our self-esteem is of the most burning importance. Evidence for this observation is the defensiveness with which insecure people may respond when their errors are pointed out. Or the extraordinary feats of avoidance and self-deception people can exhibit with regard to gross acts of unconsciousness and irresponsibility. Or the foolish and pathetic ways people sometimes try to prop up their egos by the wealth or prestige of their spouse, the make of their automobile, or the fame of their dress designer, or by the exclusiveness of their brand-new cell phone or computer. In more recent times, as the subject of self-esteem has gained increasing attention, one way of masking one’s problems in this area is with the angry denial that self-esteem is significant (or desirable).
Not all the values with which people may attempt to support a pseudo-self-esteem are foolish or irrational. Productive work, for instance, is certainly a value to be admired, but if one tries to compensate for a deficient self-esteem by becoming a workaholic one is in a battle one can never win—nothing will ever feel like “enough.” Kindness and compassion are undeniably virtues, and they are part of what it means to lead a moral life, but they are no substitutes for consciousness, independence, self-responsibility, and integrity—and when this is not understood they are often used as disguised means to buy “love” and perhaps even a sense of moral superiority: “I’m more kind and compassionate than you’ll ever be and if I weren’t so humble I’d tell you so.”
One of the great challenges to our practice of living consciously is to pay attention to what in fact nurtures our self-esteem or deteriorates it. The reality may be very different from our beliefs. We may, for example, get a very pleasant “hit” from someone’s compliment, and we may tell ourselves that when we win people’s approval we have self-esteem, but then, if we are adequately conscious, we may notice that the pleasant feeling fades rather quickly and that we seem to be insatiable and never fully satisfied—and this may direct us to wonder if we have thought deeply enough about the sources of genuine self-approval. Or we may notice that when we give our conscientious best to a task, or face a difficult truth with courage, or take responsibility for our actions, or speak up when we know that that is what the situation warrants, or refuse to betray our convictions, or persevere even when persevering is not easy—our self-esteem rises. We may also notice that if and when we do the opposite, self-esteem falls. But of course all such observations imply that we have chosen to be conscious.
In the world of the future, children will be taught the basic dynamics of self-esteem and the power of living consciously and self-responsibly. They will be taught what self-esteem is, why it is important, and what it depends on. They will learn to distinguish between authentic self-esteem and pseudo-self-esteem. They will be guided to acquire this knowledge because it will have become apparent to virtually everyone that the ability to think (and to learn and to respond confidently to change) is our basic means of survival—and that it cannot be faked. The purpose of school is to prepare young people for the challenges of adult life. They will need this understanding to be adaptive to an information age in which self-esteem has acquired such urgency. In a fiercely competitive global economy—with every kind of change happening faster and faster—there is little market for unconsciousness, passivity, or self-doubt. In the language of business, low self-esteem and underdeveloped mindfulness puts one at a competitive disadvantage. However, neither teachers in general nor teachers of self-esteem in particular can do their jobs properly—or communicate the importance of their work—until they themselves understand the intimate linkage that exists between the six practices described above, self-esteem, and appropriate adaptation to reality. “The world of the future” begins with this understanding.
