John Fanselow
John Fanselow took his PhD at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1971 and joined the faculty there, where classroom observation and the analysis of interaction became the spine of his career. He founded the off-campus Teachers College MA programme in Tokyo, which ran for decades and trained a large cohort of ELT teachers in the region.
Two contributions define his influence. FOCUS — Foci for Observing Communication Used in Settings — is a systematic framework for describing what actually happens in a classroom interaction: who is doing what, through which medium, for what purpose. Unlike simple tally systems, FOCUS treats the move as the unit of analysis and forces the observer to describe before evaluating. Breaking Rules (1987) takes the pedagogic turn: if teachers develop by noticing and questioning their own rules, the practical move is to deliberately do the opposite and see what changes. The book is still in print as a second edition and widely used in teacher-development courses.
Career
- PhD, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971
- Long-tenured faculty at Teachers College; founded the Tokyo MA programme
- Continues to write and present on teacher observation and development
Published Work
- Breaking Rules: Generating and Exploring Alternatives in Language Teaching (1987, Longman; second edition 2010)
- Papers introducing FOCUS as a classroom-observation framework
- Small Changes in Teaching, Big Results in Learning (2018)
Influence
- Shaped how ELT approaches teacher observation as a developmental rather than evaluative practice
- "Try the opposite" has become a common teacher-development heuristic well beyond its original source
- A key bridge between Teachers College and the Japanese ELT profession