Laurel Pollard

Laurel Pollard has been a language teacher and teacher educator for more than 30 years and is enjoying it more all the time. She taught ESL classes and graduate courses at the University of Arizona. She also has done teacher education in Mexico, Kazakhstan, Japan, and Chile. She developed close ties with public schools, adult education, and refugee education.

During many years of teaching, I have always tried to make my work better. Somewhere along the line, I discovered the amazing fact that if I teach less, students learn more! And it is to this philosophy that I have addressed my books.

I got the idea for the Zero Prep books during a week that may seem familiar to you, a week in which it was clearly not possible to do it all. I walked into my advanced class at the intensive language center feeling like the consummate professional. Having dealt with graduate students' needs and essential committee work as efficiently as possible, having postponed writing until next week (again), and having abandoned my exercise class weeks earlier for lack of time, I came to class prepared with a plan, a good plan, a plan carefully crafted to challenge and support every student.

The students had another agenda. A man had been shot as he withdrew money from a nearby bank machine that some of the students used regularly, and they needed to talk about it. Fortunately, I was willing to dump my plan overboard and follow their lead. Here is what happened:

• Students eagerly filled one another in on the details of the shooting (comprehensive input, information gap).

• Everyone had strong opinions about what is safe to do in our city and what is not (high-interest topic; language functions: interrupting, agreeing, disagreeing).

• Some students volunteered to clip follow-up stories from the paper for the next few days (student responsibility, skimming, reading for full comprehension).

• Students took some class time to write about the event in their daily journals (impromptu vocabulary exercise: key words on board).

• They finished their accounts of the crime for homework (composition).

• The following day they reviewed what they had written, looking for the typical writing errors I listed on the board. Then they posted those accounts on the walls of our classroom for other students in other classes to read (self-editing, writing for a real audience).

I wished for more such classes. There had been no preparation on my part, yet a great lesson happened. Was I getting lazy? I doubted it. Instead I found myself remembering a number of activities that minimize teacher preparation time, maximize student responsibility, and result in better classes than most of my carefully crafted lesson plans.

I realized that a major cause of my too-long work days was over-preparation. I began restoring to my repertoire the zero-prep activities I had somehow stopped using--and looking for more of them.

And the Zero Prep books were born!