the hidden curriculum of the esl/esol/tefl classroom

WHAT IS 'THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM'?

The hidden curriculum is at the heart of the classroom:

A hidden curriculum is a set of lessons "which are learned but not openly intended"[1] to be taught in school such as the norms, values, and beliefs conveyed in both the classroom and social environment.[2] In many cases, it occurs as a result of social interactions and expectations. The term hidden curriculum is sometimes seen as synonymous with, or a subset of, the implicit curriculum.[3]

And there's quite a lot of philosophy, politics and sociology behind this - as in this piece in the simplysociology website on the Hidden Curriculum:

The hidden curriculum, first described by Philip Jackson (1968), is a set of unspoken or implicit rules and values that students learn while attending school. It is often contrasted with the more formalized, official curriculum that is spelled out in a school’s mission statement or lesson plans. 

To return to the Wikipedia entry:

The hidden curriculum has been further explored by a number of educators. Starting with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1972, through the late 1990s, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire explored various effects of presumptive teaching on students, schools, and society as a whole. Freire's explorations were in sync with those of John Holt and Ivan Illich, each of whom were quickly identified as radical educators. Other theorists who have identified the nature of hidden curricula and hidden agendas include Neil Postman, Paul Goodman, Joel Spring, John Taylor Gatto, and others.

Additionally, developmental psychologist Robert Kegan addressed the hidden curriculum of everyday life in his 1994 book In Over Our Heads, which focused on the relation between cognitive development and the "cognitive demands" of cultural expectations.

Most of these educators have been featured on this blog, including: 

Paulo Freire and the tabula rasa

John Holt and how teaching interferes with learning and the most schooled generation in history is miserable

Ivan Illich on education and health and deschooling society and homeschooling and deschooling and Jay Ivan Illich: schooling, technology, and culture

teaching as a subversive activity

John Taylor Gatto: teacher, mentor, revolutionary and human resources as social engineering and is the purpose of education 'social uplift' - or 'social control'? and the Prussian school system and the factory model of education

Meanwhile, here's the rather different Wikipedia entry from 2014, as recorded on these pages: Jay Doubleyou: the hidden curriculum

WHAT IS 'THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM' IN THE ESL/ESOL/TEFL CLASSROOM?

And what about the invisible curriculum of international schools?

Writing for the E L Gazette, Ines Katsouri looks at what globally mobile students learn beyond the classroom. Here's the opening of an excellent piece where she looks at the hidden or invisible curriculum from the perspective of the teacher and student working in the ESL/ESOL/TEFL world:

International schools are often celebrated for the richness of their academic programmes and global outlook. Curricula designed to develop internationally minded learners prepare students to navigate an increasingly interconnected world. Yet alongside these visible structures, students are also learning something far less explicit.

Simply by participating in internationally mobile school communities, they encounter what might be described as an invisible curriculum — a set of social and psychological lessons that shape how they experience belonging, adaptation, expectation, and learning itself.

The idea of a hidden or invisible curriculum has long been discussed in educational research. Educational researcher Philip W. Jackson first described how students learn important social norms and expectations through everyday school life beyond official syllabi. Schools, after all, do not only transmit knowledge; they also shape behaviour, identity, and social understanding.

In international school environments, however, this invisible curriculum takes on distinctive forms. The realities of globally mobile communities mean that students often navigate experiences that are less common in more stable national schooling systems...

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improve your speaking skills: find a speaking partner

How can we improve our speaking when learning another language? 

Very formalised exercises can help, such as doing practical dictation with online texts and audio, which will help us focus on good spoken English.

There's a less controlled way to stimulate talk - and one would be using video podcasts for listening and to generate speaking.

And Robbie from EnglishHarmony suggests we talk to ourselves to increase fluency and self-confidence.

We can even try practising our English speaking with ChatGPT.

But we can find real people to talk to - and through the website 'Conversation Exchange' - finding a speaking partner online is pretty easy.

There are lots of apps and websites for language partners - but the question remains: How do you find consistent language exchange partners? And the answer tends to be: "Sadly you have to pay someone to be consistent."

However, there are ways to find a speaking partner...

The online teacher Katie has some very practical ideas on How to find a partner for speaking practice - and talking to another "non-native" at least gets you developing your fluency and confidence, as Katie says:

1. First, you should try asking all your friends if they are interested. It’s very likely that you have a friend who is learning English or maybe you can find a friend of a friend. This is probably the easiest way.

2. The second easiest way is perhaps to try social media. You can find other people who are looking for a partner on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and many more. I have a Facebook group which you can join.

3. Don’t just look at social media pages for learning English. What are your other hobbies and interests? Join groups and follow pages related to your hobbies where the conversation is in English and join in!

And others have similar ideas - such as 9 Unexpected Places To Find Real-Life Language Partners by Fluent Language

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shattering paradise - or, the difference between an 'economic migrant' and an 'expat'

As Gaby Hinsliff writing in today's Guardian suggests, influencers have sold the world a fantasy Dubai – and now it’s gone in a puff of missile smoke:

The city was portrayed as an aspirational place to live, but now those who moved there are realising the precarity that comes with being an economic migrant.

Who could have guessed that living a few hundred miles as the drone flies from Tehran might have risks? Certainly not the anonymous hedge funder who fumed to the Financial Times that “the trade was not that you were getting exposed to geopolitics”.

But if it’s hard to sympathise with the super-rich, as they discover that there are some things money can’t buy, then they are not the only Britons trapped in the Gulf. The deal Dubai offered economic migrants – which is what Britons seeking a better life in the Gulf are, much as some will hate the label – was a kind of real-life Truman Show: a sunny, shiny, sterilised low-crime haven for anyone itching to get rich or stay that way, sustained by stiff penalties for anyone publicly shattering its illusions.

Today's London Standard points out that influencers in Dubai have been warned they face prison for posting material about the conflict with Iran.

And earlier in the week, the Daily Mail's Guy Adams looked at The inside story of how the hollow Dubai dream has come crashing down... as expats are sent mysterious menacing warnings from the UAE government which hint all might not be as well as it seems.

Here we are looking at the world of the 'expat' - and a decade ago, the BBC was considering the difference between an expat and an immigrant:

The word expat is loaded. It carries many connotations, preconceptions and assumptions about class, education and privilege — just as the terms foreign worker, immigrant and migrant call to mind a different set of assumptions.

But what makes one person an expat, and another a foreign worker or migrant? Often the former is used to describe educated, rich professionals working abroad, while those in less privileged positions — for example, a maid in the Gulf states or a construction worker in Asia — are deemed foreign workers or migrant workers. The classification matters, because such language can in some cases be used as a political tool or to dehumanise — as the debate around the word “migrant” suggests.

It's not just 'semantics', it's also a question of law: Expat vs Immigrant vs Migrant vs Refugee vs Asylee Defined | American Visa Law Group

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world book day - today!

Last month, it was National Storytelling Week in the UK, when we were encouraged to read, read, read!

Today it's World Book Day 2026! With all sorts of stuff to encourage us to read.

The BBC had a whole World Book Day 2026 - Live Lesson for most of the day.

Even the UK government is getting quite enthusiastic: World Book Day 2026: from one day to everyday reading – Teaching

And across the media, we have been getting lots of fun things around reading...

In Yorkshire on World Book Day 2026 -York children show off their costumes from favourite book characters, when going to school.

Although not everyone's in favour, asking if it's extra stress or a bit of fun? Teachers and parents discuss World Book Day.

Footballers are getting in on the act, as the Premier League supports the Foundation for World Book Day.

It seems that every organisation is jumping in, from Seven international trade book recommendations from the Chartered Institute team to 10 great books about global justice.

What would you recommend?!

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gamification: "mistaking points for the point"

One way to improve your language is by increasing your vocabulary by playing word games. This is about gamification in learning - and gamification is everywhere, although we do need to be careful how we use these techniques and perhaps, for example, we need to look at both the good and the bad about duolingo - and the alternatives.

Recently on BBC radio, we heard about the usefulness or otherwise of fun and games - and one of the guests was C Thi Nguyen, who has the provocative website Objectionable where he says: I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.

He talked about his latest book - and the Guardian gives a review of The Score by C Thi Nguyen – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life and, from Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing:

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. “Value capture”, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has “redefined your core sense of what’s important”.

This is from a review of The Score by C. Thi Nguyen in the TLS:

Games and metrics are cousins of a sort. They both give us targets to pursue, often in the form of numerical scores. In the game of football, we want goals. In the metric of Fitbit, we want steps. But for reasons that C. Thi Nguyen lays out with remarkable passion in The Score, games and metrics are not the same. As the author explains, with games, the targets we strive for matter only while we are playing. Their real value is in providing a window for us to exercise our creative agency. But with metrics, we are given targets that will stay with us and divert our attention from what we really want. Nguyen’s go-to example of a metric is the fitness tracker. The user starts with a desire to get fit, but if the device only counts steps, not fitness per se, then steps will soon be all the user cares about.

In the contest between games and metrics, Nguyen comes down firmly on one side: games good, metrics bad. He insists that his view is not as black-and-white as this – “I’m not saying that games are always good and metrics are always bad” – but the truth is that games are the love of his life. Just look at how he writes about them. Like a page out of Roget’s [thesaurus], the good in games seems endless: they bring joy, refuge, freedom, loveliness, grace, softness, absorption and fizz; they are cool, delicious, pleasurable, explosive, deep, joyful, magical, beautiful, fascinating, whimsical, elegant, radiant, thrilling, ecstatic, gorgeous, purified, interesting, satisfying, real, true, valuable, delightful, pleasing, exploratory, glorious, inventive, hypnotic, arresting, subtle, tasty, raucous, wild, intense, creative, open-minded and fun. And metrics? Well, they are miserable, awful, rigid, inflexible, grinding, closed-minded, soul-deadening, insensitive and stupid; they are moral bleach, they get under the skin, they drain the life out of everything. You get the idea.

A game in Nguyen’s book is a broad category. He includes everything from “fly-fishing, rock climbing, Portal, The Mind, basketball, The Legend of Zelda, Starcraft II, chess” to cooking, yo-yoing and after-dinner charades. What unites them as games? Nguyen’s answer begins with the philosopher Bernard Suits’s definition from his classic work The Grasshopper: Games, life, and utopia (1978):

So, here's a helpful review of "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia" (1978) by Bernard Suits.

And here's a look at the book Trust in Numbers mentioned by Nguyen, which looks at how life is dominated by 'points' - and the allure of quantitative and standardized measures.

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attention residue: how to use smartphones in the esl/esol/tefl classroom

There are different ways of using digital technology in a student-centred classroom - and, specifically, if we are to have students as directing their own learning, then we need to be thinking about how to use smartphones in the English language classroom.

As a recent blog says, on managing the use of smartphones in language classrooms:

From time to time, a story hits the headlines that schools in some country or other are to ban mobile phones (cellphones for our American friends) during the school day in an effort to reduce bullying and boost academic performance. This always triggers a re-examination of the issues involved, but, of course, language lessons operate usually under slightly different circumstances...

And that's the point: this technology should be seen differently when used in the language classroom, as it does offer tools rather than endless distraction - if used well of course [and the writer of the blog piece goes on to suggest how to do that...]

There are lots of blog pieces by teachers suggesting how to use mobile devices in their ESL work. The latest look comes from Dimitris Kouniakis and Constantina Constantopoulou, as reported byBecci Knowles, writing in the E L Gazetter. Here they look at Smartphones and focus in learning: Friend, foe, or false ally?

Welcome to the concept of attention residue, a key phenomenon that helps explain why focus has become such a fragile resource in today’s classrooms and study spaces...

If attention is fragile, the learning environments must actively protect it. One of the most effective, evidence-based strategies is surprisingly simple: Create physical distance between students and their smartphones during study or learning periods.

In today’s attention-fragmented learning landscape, focus has become a skill that needs safeguarding and coaching. Attention residue reminds us that distraction isn’t just about willpower. It’s essentially about how the brain works. Leroy’s findings make one thing clear; every interruption leaves a trace that weakens attention. For students who already struggle with concentration, executive function, and cognitive overload, smartphones are quietly but significantly undermining their learning. By encouraging intentional distance from devices during study, we help learners reclaim their attention, reduce mental clutter, and engage with content deeply. Managing the learning environment isn’t optional anymore; it’s a necessity. Having said that, meaningful support doesn’t begin with new strategies but with well-designed attentional space

Smartphones and focus in learning: Friend, foe, or false ally? - E L Gazette

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rage-bait

Did you know that the Oxford Word of the Year 2025 was rage bait?

Do you know what rage-baiting is all about?

In a very long entry, Wikipedia tells us:

In internet slang, rage-baiting (also ragebaiting, rage-farming, or rage-seeding) is the manipulative tactic of eliciting outrage with the goal of increasing internet traffic, online engagement, and revenue, as well as attracting new subscribers, followers, or supporters.[1][2][3] This manipulation occurs through offensive or inflammatory headlines, memes, tropes, or comments that provoke users to respond in kind.[4][5][6][7]

For the most up-to-date and colloquial definitions, we can go to Urban Dictionary: rage bait

But what's the effect been? Here's a video looking at How Ragebait RUINED the Internet

And why is it happening? Here's a BBC report on What is rage-baiting and why is it profitable?

It's still very much in the news today.

From Maynooth University this week: The problems with coining terms like 'rage bait' and 'brain rot'

From Brussels two days ago: Rage-bait: Meet the influencers calling Brussels the 'worst city in Europe' just for views

And from Fordham University yesterday: When is Rage Bait Too Much?

Finally, is there the same use and interest in your own country?

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