Tag: TESOL

The Human Problem in TESOL: When Systems Meet Learners

June 22, 2026June 22, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

A curriculum document may describe a class of twenty learners progressing through the same lesson. The teacher standing in the room encounters twenty different experiences of that lesson.

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From “Can Do” Statements to Institutional Orthodoxy

June 13, 2026June 13, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

What begins as curriculum design eventually becomes something much larger: a system for defining educational legitimacy itself. And this is precisely where many educators begin feeling something deeply unsettling inside modern education.

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The CEFR, Can Do Statements, and the Confusion Around Learning Outcomes

May 16, 2026May 16, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Part 1 of a short ELT Vista series exploring learning outcomes, CEFR descriptors, operationalization, accreditation culture, and the growing tension between standardized educational systems and the human realities of language learning.

The Historical Confusion

It was recently suggested to me that all learning outcomes came from the CEFR Can Do statements.

Historically, this is inaccurate. However, pedagogically, the misunderstanding also reveals something much larger about modern language education and how easily different ideas become collapsed into a single narrative. If this were merely a matter of correcting revisionist history, the issue would be relatively minor. My concern, however, extends to how this false narrative affects real students, real teachers, and real classrooms—in other words, the human arena itself.

Learning outcomes did not suddenly appear with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Educational systems had already been working with objectives, competencies, performance criteria, behavioral outcomes, and various forms of outcome-based education for decades before the CEFR was formally published in 2001. Figures such as Benjamin Bloom, Ralph Tyler, and Robert Mager had already contributed significantly to broader educational theories surrounding objectives and measurable performance long before the CEFR emerged from the work of the Council of Europe.

The CEFR descriptors themselves were heavily informed by communicative-functional approaches and descriptor research during the 1990s, particularly through the work of Brian North and related European language assessment projects. In other words, the Can Do descriptors were not the origin of learning outcomes themselves. Rather, they were part of a much larger educational and assessment tradition already developing internationally.

However, over time, these distinctions became blurred. Publishers, examinations, institutions, curriculum systems, accreditation structures, and commercial educational ecosystems increasingly operationalized Can Do language so successfully that many teachers understandably began associating learning outcomes almost exclusively with CEFR-style descriptors.

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The Age of Anxiety and the Teacher

May 3, 2026May 3, 2026 eltvista.com

Extending the Moment of Hesitation

Stella Adler, acting coach and drama theorist, once remarked that “life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.” She was speaking in the context of the twentieth century, a period marked by war, economic depression, and the dislocations of modern life. Yet her observation continues to resonate today. Many writers have described modern society as an age of anxiety—a time in which institutions grow larger, systems become more complex, and individuals often find themselves navigating pressures that feel impersonal and difficult to influence.

Teachers, perhaps more than most professionals, recognize this condition. They encounter it not only in policy and institutional design, but in the daily negotiation between what is required and what is possible in the classroom.

The modern language teacher works within a dense web of expectations. Administrative structures demand documentation and measurable outcomes. Schools operate under financial pressures that often translate into part-time contracts, limited job security, and wages that struggle to keep pace with the cost of living. Experience—once considered the foundation of professional authority—can sometimes be treated as secondary to credentials, paperwork, or the latest fashionable methodology. Meanwhile, the broader culture celebrates entertainers, athletes, and now even social-media influencers with enthusiasm that rarely extends to those whose work quietly shapes the intellectual and human development of others.

And still, teachers continue to show up in classrooms every day.

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All Dogs Must Wear Pants: When the Ridiculous Becomes Communicative

April 3, 2026April 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

An Absurd Suggestion from the Constituents

Imagine presenting the following situation to a class.

A newly formed political party has invited suggestions from its local constituents about laws that might improve the community. Party members must review the proposals and decide which ones should become official policy. Among the suggestions submitted is the following:

All dogs must wear pants in public.

Students are members of the political party. Their task is to discuss the proposal and decide whether the party should officially propose the law.

To reach a decision, they might discuss questions such as:

Why would someone propose this law?
Who might benefit from it?
What problems could it create?
Would it apply to all animals?

The premise is obviously ridiculous. Yet the interaction that follows often becomes surprisingly lively. Students debate practicality, fairness, ethics, modesty, enforcement, and even fashion. They interrupt one another with alternative ideas. They defend positions and challenge arguments. They comment on how ludicrous the whole thing is because animals are not people, etc.

The scenario is absurd. The communication, however, is real.

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When Quality Became Something to Prove

March 13, 2026March 13, 2026 eltvista.com

You leave a lesson feeling that something real happened. Students were thinking. The room felt alive. Someone who usually stays quiet spoke up. A discussion took an unexpected turn and learners suddenly began using language in ways that felt genuine rather than rehearsed.

Then the observation feedback arrives.

The comments may mention pacing, clearer staging of activities, or whether instructions could have been simplified. None of these points are necessarily wrong. Yet they can feel strangely disconnected from what the teacher experienced in the room.

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Teaching Beyond Inherited Systems

February 15, 2026February 16, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Not long ago, I wrote about the distinction between presence and authority in the classroom. The response to that piece suggested that many teachers recognize the tension instinctively. This article moves the conversation forward, because once we begin questioning authority, a larger question emerges: Where did our classroom habits come from in the first place?

Teachers inherit more than lesson plans and coursebooks. We inherit systems, expectations, and professional instincts that were shaped long before we entered the classroom. Some of these inheritances serve us well. Others remain simply because they have always been there—and what’s problematic to me is that this seems to be the only reason they continue to be embraced: they are venerable, sacrosanct, ossified, and fossilized.

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SEL, Emotional Intelligence, and Gratitude: A Practical View from the Language Classroom

January 26, 2026January 26, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Emotions Are Not Extra in Language Learning

Most language classrooms are very good at helping students notice what went wrong. Much less time is spent helping them notice what helped. That imbalance matters. Over time, it shapes how learners experience risk, error, feedback—and ultimately, the language itself.

This is where gratitude enters the picture, though not in the way it is often understood. In the language classroom, gratitude is not about politeness or forced positivity. It is about attention—the ability to notice what supported learning while it was happening, rather than only what fell short afterward. In a humanistic TESOL context, gratitude is better understood as an attentional practice: a way of noticing value, effort, and relational contribution in real time.

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Humanism Without Distance: What MLK Still Asks of Teachers

January 17, 2026January 17, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Every year we quote Martin Luther King Jr.
Every year we praise his moral clarity, his courage, his vision of justice and dignity.

At the same time, teachers are told to “be humanistic,” “be learner-centered,” and “support the whole learner” while working under conditions that quietly make dignity harder, not easier, to sustain.

That contradiction is not accidental—and King would have recognized it immediately.

King’s work did not emerge from abstract moral concern. It emerged from material realities faced by African Americans: segregated schools, suppressed wages, restricted housing, blocked civic participation. When he spoke of justice, he spoke about conditions—who carried risk, who absorbed instability, and who was expected to wait patiently while inequality remained intact.

He was clear on one point: moral language without material change is not progress. It is delay.

For teachers, that insight lands close to home.

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Grades, Judgment, and the Machinery of Worth

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Grades, Judgment, and the Machinery of Worth

Nobody ever tells students the most dangerous thing about grades:
they don’t just measure performance—they train you to outsource your sense of worth.
They feel neutral and necessary. That’s exactly why they’re dangerous.

Grading is a necessary evil in education. Necessary, because institutions require some way to sort, credential, and move people through systems at scale. Evil—not in a melodramatic sense, but in a quiet, corrosive one—because grades are so easily mistaken for something they are not.

A grade is information. It is a signal within a bounded system. It is not a measure of human worth, potential, or legitimacy. Most students are never explicitly told this, which is why the signal so easily becomes a verdict. Unless that caveat is made explicit, students absorb something far more dangerous than the grade itself: the idea that judgment arrives from elsewhere, and that its verdict is final.

This is where the real injustice begins. Not because the system is intentionally cruel, but because it is largely silent about what its judgments are meant to mean—and what they are not.

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