Every so often I’ll have a student who says they’re not very interested in learning English because they’re going back to Mexico as soon as possible. My usual response, which has been pretty effective, is that the student is likely to get a better-paying job there if he/she knows English, too. That position makes sense to me and, usually, to the student, who then tends to become more serious about learning English. I have gotten anecdotal evidence from English teachers in Mexico that this statement is true, but had never been able to find any concrete evidence to back it up.

Until now.

The Guardian recently ran a story on research showing that knowing English increased your income by 25% in five countries in the developing world.

Mexico wasn’t one of the countries started, but just being able to show this kind of data to my students will be helpful.

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.

Though I do a lot of what I consider “teacher action research,” I’m sure many readers know more about it than me. My simple understanding of it is that it means teachers take on small-scale “action research” projects in their classroom. For example, I wrote about my experiment with teaching United States History to one class in the classroom and one entirely in the computer lab, and used pre-and-post assessments.

My students are pretty aware of the kind of research that I do, and know that I write about it — and them — in this blog, in articles for other publications, and in my books. They know because I share what I write with them — sometimes individually and sometimes as a class (see How I Milked A Lesson For Every Last Ounce Of Learning And Why I’m An Idiot For Not Thinking Of It Earlier).

I’ve previously thought that the major reason that sharing has always gone well is because it helps students see that I think about them when I’m outside of the classroom — not just when I’m officially “on the job.” And most of what I’ve tried in my action research has turned out pretty well, which I’ve attributed to the fact that I generally have good ideas (though, let me tell you — as others would — I’ve sometimes come up with some nutty ones, too) and that I’m a pretty good teacher.

I still think those two reasons contribute to my classroom success. However, today, I read something that got me thinking.  An extraordinarily insightful column by Joanne Yatvin was published in Education Week over twenty years ago and was just reprinted in Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post blog. It’s titled Letting teachers re-invent their own wheel.

It makes several important points, and I’d encourage everybody to go over to the Post and read it.

The point she makes that relates to the purpose of this post, though, talks about the Hawthorne Effect. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance but, though I had heard of it before, I never really knew what it was.

Here is how Joanne writes about it:

“…the Hawthorne anomaly illustrates the fact that human subjects who know they are part of a scientific experiment may sabotage the study in their eagerness to make it succeed. What it really shows is that, when people believe they are important in a project, anything works, and, conversely, when they don’t believe they are important, nothing works.”

That made a light bulb go off in my head. Perhaps the Hawthorne Effect is a contributing reason to the generally positive response in my classroom — because they know that they are part of a teacher action research project and/or they know that I am going to write about them?

If, and I suspect there are probably some big “if’s” involved, that could be the case, what better reason could there be to do teacher action research and/or for a teacher to write a blog?

What do you think? Could there be something to this connection, or is just another one of my “nutty ideas”?