I’m not ready

I’ve just rediscovered a list a made when trying to decide if I should take my current job as Director of Studies at International House Bydgoszcz. I listed the pros and cons of taking the job.

For

• Challenge
• Next step
• New skills
• I have ideas for the school
• Good team there, communicative
• Lots of systems in place already
• Supportive network in the area, including previous DoS [Tim]
• Importance of quality at the school
• No visa needed
• Development opportunities

Against

• Overwhelming
• Do I have the right experience?
• No senior teacher experience
• Prep time (courses) [don’t remember what this meant, but I guess I felt I couldn’t prep my own lessons fast enough?]
• Health/stress

The thought process

I spent two days shadowing the Tim when deciding whether I wanted to take the job, and the main thought I had was ‘there’s no way I’ll be able to do that’. Various different people had to talk me into doing the job, including the previous DoS (at least twice), the senior staff at the time and somebody who would go on to be my ADoS. Ultimately, my excitement at the quality of the school and the opportunities for me overrode my feelings that I wasn’t ready.

The result

I’ve now been here for three and a half years, and am planning to stay for at least a couple more. There’s no denying it was a steep learning curve, but the help and support I got from the team here, and still get from them, made it all possible. I still occasionally have moments when I think ‘I can’t believe I’m making these decisions that affect people’s lives’, but those are generally moments of wonder now, rather than moments of imposter syndrome, if that makes sense! There’s also the occasional ‘When did I get this grown up’ moment. 😉

Yes, it can be stressful at times, and yes, it’s probably triggered my health problems at times, but I have learnt so much, worked with so many fantastic people, and really feel like we’re just getting better and better as a school all the time (not to say it wasn’t already a great school before!)

If people are telling you you’re ready, you probably are. Don’t let your inner voice stop you!

Teaching Lexically: Principles and Practice (a review)

I’ve been reading Teaching Lexically [affiliate link] by Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley on and off over the last few months (off because other people borrowed it!) and finally finished it this morning. It’s a beginner’s guide to understanding the Lexical Approach and applying it to your classroom practice. The book emphasises the importance of moving away from a ‘grammar + words’ approach and integrating language practice into everything we do in the classroom, providing as much repetition as we can, and helping students to integrate old knowledge with new, rather than treating each area as ‘finished’ or ‘done’.

Teaching Lexically helped me to really understand how the Lexical Approach can work in the classroom for the first time. I found The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis to be interesting, but largely impractical (a hallmark of all of his books, I feel!), and most of the rest of my understanding had come from Leo Selivan’s Leoxicon blog, like this post on lexical activities.

What I particularly like about the book is the way that it deals with each area of English teaching separately and thoroughly: six chapters on teaching vocabulary/ grammar/ speaking/ reading/ listening/ writing lexically, as well as one on revision activities. The layout of section B, with a principle, practising the principle, and applying the principle, is particularly clear and easy to follow, and there are worked examples throughout. It’s really made me think about how I think about language.

Generally I found the structure of Teaching Lexically very supportive, building on previous principles as you work your way through if you read it from cover to cover, or referring back to relevant sections if you just dip into it. I also like the fact that it’s grounded in practicalities, and there was nothing in the book that I looked at and thought ‘this would never work’. It also acknowledges the potential problems that a teacher might have in trying to teach using the Lexical Approach, and suggests some possible solutions.

I feel like this is a book I will refer to again and again. Thanks for writing it Hugh and Andrew!

Online CPD (IH Torun Teacher Training Day 2019)

Probably the topic I’ve presented on the most, but this version of the presentation was with a twist: I had no voice! That means the slides are more detailed than usual as they had to do the speaking for me. Thanks to those who attended and read along 🙂 Since the last version (already 5 years old!) I’ve added a little bit about podcasting and about ELT Playbook.

The slides include clickable links, but for ease of blog readers, I’ve also included a summary with links below as well. Feel free to ask me any questions or add other resources you think are useful for those starting out with online professional development.

Twitter

Twitter and #ELTchat are where my online professional development started, and as I’ve written before, they changed my life. The #ELTchat hashtag is one of the most active English-teaching-related hashtags on Twitter. The peak of activity is from 19:00-20:00 UK time every Wednesday, when a single topic is discussed. This continues for the next 24 hours in a slow burn on that same topic. The whole discussion is then summarised by one person in a blog post. All of the summaries are available in the #ELTchat summaries index, a one-stop shop for a huge amount of professional development. The hashtag is active throughout the week as people share ideas, resources and questions on all manner of ELT topics.

To find ELT people to follow, look at who’s posting in #ELTchat and who they follow. I’m @sandymillin on Twitter if you want to see who I follow.

Facebook

If you have a facebook account already, this is probably the easiest way to start your online professional development. Some people have two separate profiles, or a profile and a page: one for personal use and the other for professional use. I don’t, but only because I’ve been using facebook for so long it would take me hours to separate them now – I do only accept requests from people I’ve interacted with though.

There are hundreds of ELT-related facebook pages covering all aspects of the profession. The biggest is probably Teaching English British Council, which has nearly 4 million followers at the time of writing. The IATEFL facebook group, and those of the Special Interest Groups are another way to get an international perspective, as is the #ELTchat page. For those based in Poland, IATEFL Poland has an active page. Ela Wassell compiled a more comprehensive list of Facebook groups and pages back in 2013, the large majority of which are still active.

Webinars

Webinars are online seminars which you can follow live or watch as recordings whenever and wherever you like. Access to some recordings are restricted to members of particular organisations. There are a huge range of ELT webinars available now, covering pretty much every topic you can think of.

The easiest way to find webinars is to put “______ webinars” into your favourite search engine, substituting _____ for a particular topic e.g. “teaching English pronunciation”, or any of the following providers:

• Macmillan Education
• National Geographic Learning
• International House
• Oxford University Press
• IATEFL
• Cambridge University Press
• British Council
• EFL Talks
• Pearson

If you’re looking for something bite-sized, the IH Teachers Online Conferences include lots of 10-minute webinars. You could also look at my webinar bookmarks, or the regular lists of upcoming webinars posted by Adi Rajan on his blog, like this one for February and March 2019. Adi lists webinars both inside and outside ELT which he considers relevant.

Podcasts

As with facebook, if you already listen to podcasts this is a very easy way to add a bit of CPD to your life. My three favourite TEFL podcasts are:

• TEFL Training Institute podcast: 15 minutes, 3 questions answered on a given topic
• The TEFL Commute podcast: 35-45 minutes, magazine style, “The podcast that’s not about teaching, but the subject always seems to come up.”
• The TEFLology Podcast: Two formats:
  • 45 minutes with three areas: TEFL news, TEFL pioneers, TEFL cultures
  • 30-45-minute interviews with people from across the TEFL profession

The guys from TEFLology have also written a book called Podcasting and professional development [affiliate link] which tells you how you can start creating your own podcasts, as well as providing a longer list of podcasts related to teaching.

Polish bloggers

Here are four blogs which are written by English teachers in Poland:

• Lesson Plans Digger (in English)
• Authentic Teaching (in English, Polish and German)
• Trener Angielskiego (in Polish)
• Sylwia Clayton (in Polish)

Thanks to Hanna Zieba for sharing these links.

I didn’t share any more information about blogs and blogging, because Making the most of blogs was my IH Torun TTD presentation in 2018.

Online bookmarks

I couldn’t possibly keep track of all of these links without the use of diigo, an online bookmarking tool. Here’s my beginner’s guide to diigo in the IH Journal. I’m constantly adding to my professional development links on diigo, and you can also see all of my diigo links ever. They are tagged with different topics to help you find your way around (if you can understand my thinking process of course!)

ELT Playbook

Of course, no presentation I do nowadays is complete without mentioning ELT Playbook, my series of books containing tasks to help teachers improve their ability to reflect on their careers. Each task is accompanied by reflection questions and ideas for ways to summarise your reflections in a blogpost, video or audio recording, Instagram-style post, or a private teaching journal.

ELT Playbook 1 was launched just over a year ago, aimed particularly at new teachers, but also at managers and trainers who work with them, or more experienced teachers who want to go back to basics.

ELT Playbook Teacher Training is in the final stages of preparation, and will hopefully be ready to buy in the next 2-3 weeks – watch this space! It’s aimed at those new to teacher training, either in training or management positions, and also has tasks which could help those creating workshops or conference presentations for the first time.

This should give you a good starting point for your own online professional development. What other resources would you suggest? And what questions do you have?

Being creative 3: One activity, multiple tasks – a minimal preparation workshop based on ELT Playbook 1

Way back in December I ran a 45-minute conference session based on a task from ELT Playbook 1, ‘One activity, multiple tasks’, which appears in the ‘Being creative’ section of the book.

The book features 30 tasks designed particularly to help new teachers to reflect as they start out in ELT, but they are also suitable for managers and trainers who need ideas for professional development sessions. I was also partly inspired by the ideas in The Lazy Teacher Trainer’s Handbook by Magnus Coney [affiliate link], which advocates minimal planning and exploiting the knowledge in the room wherever possible. The final reason I chose this was that I was running out of time to plan my session as I was organising the whole day, and I needed to run two workshops! The other one was about how to learn a language, in case you’re interested.

Before the session, I choose an activity at random from a teacher’s book. The one I ended up with was to revise future forms, taken from page 146 of English File 3rd edition Teacher’s Book Intermediate Plus. It features a page of questions like this:

1. A   Mum! I’ve dropped my ice cream!
   B   It’s OK, don’t worry – I’ll get / I’m getting you a new one!
2. A   I’m freezing!
   B   Shall I turn on / Will I turn on the heating?

…and so on. There are 12 mini dialogues like this, each with two options to choose from – students can also tick if both are possible. At the bottom of the page is an ‘activation’ activity, where students write two mini-dialogues, one with will and one with going to. This planning stage took me about 15 minutes – 10 to decide what I was going to do in the session (i.e. which ELT Playbook 1 task I was going to exploit!), and 5 to pick and photocopy the activity.

In the abstract for the session it said that teachers would come away with lots of ideas for how to exploit activities. As the session started, I told them that those ideas would be coming from all of us in the room, not just me!

We started by them completing the original exercise. I demonstrated how to do quick feedback by getting different pairs to write their answers on the board, then just dealing with any questions where there was confusion. We were about 10 minutes into the session at this point.

In the same pairs, teachers worked together to list as many ways as they could think of to set-up, vary or exploit that same activity. They did this on the back of the sheet (minimal materials prep!) I put a few prompts on the board to help, something like: speaking, writing, listening, reading, alone, pairs, groups, class, etc. and elicited one or two examples to start them off. They had 10 minutes to make their lists.

At the same time, and once I’d checked they were all on track, I made my own list* on the back of my paper (minimal prep! Also, I ran out of time to do it before the session and thought it might be useful if at least some of the ideas came from me!)

We put our lists face up on our chairs for the ‘stealing’ stage. We read everybody else’s lists, putting a * next to any activities we didn’t understand. More *** meant that lots of people didn’t understand. This took about 5 minutes, so we were 25 minutes through the session.

Next people added any of the extra activities they liked the sound of to their own lists. 5 more minutes, 15 minutes left.

For the next 10 minutes, different people demonstrated the activities that had stars next to them in front of the whole group. As I expected, most of the ‘different people’ were me – I’d deliberately picked some slightly obscure things to stretch their range of ideas a bit!

In the final 5 minutes, I told them about ELT Playbook 1 and suggested they try this kind of brainstorming with other activities they want to use in class to help them vary their lesson planning. Right at the end, they had to tell their partner one activity they’d thought of or heard about in the session which they planned to try next week. The whole session went pretty well, I think, and I got good feedback afterwards. 🙂

*My list

These are the ideas I came up with in 10 minutes:

• Remove the options.
• Mini whiteboards.
• I say A to the group, they predict B. Then in pairs.
• Gallery walk (one copy of each question stuck up around the room)
• Evil memorisation (one of my favourite activities, learnt from Olga Stolbova – the third activity in this blogpost)
• Say all the sentences as quickly as possible (AQAP on my lesson plans!)
• Banana sentences (replace the key words with ‘banana’ for partner to guess)
• Extend the conversations (what was said before/after)
• Decide who/where/when/why it was said (by)
• Take the ‘wrong’ answer and create a context where it would be right
• Translation mingle (students translate one conversation into L1 on a slip of paper, copying the English onto the other side. They then walk around showing other students the L1 to be translated.)
• One group does 1-6/odd sentences. The other does 7-12/even sentences. Give them the answers for the other half. They check with each other.
• Say them with different intonation/voices to create different meanings/situations.
• Remember as many conversations as you can with your partner. Lots of variations for this: freestyle (no prompts), with A/B as a prompt, with (own/sketched/teacher-generated) pictures as prompts…
• Hot seat/Backs to the board with a picture prompt for student looking at the board to say sentence A, person with back to the board says sentence B in response
• Board race. Again, lots of variations: list as many sentences/conversations as possible on the whiteboard; teacher/a student says A, teams run and write B; combine with ideas above like banana sentences…
• Teacher says first half of the sentence, pausing at a convenient point. Students say second half. Then in pairs. e.g. “Shall I…” “…turn on the heating?”
• Students have A sentences. They write their own Bs on separate pieces of scrap paper, then mix them up. Another pair tries to match the As and Bs together.
• Change A to the opposite/a slightly different phrase. What’s an appropriate B? e.g. “I’m boiling!”

Thanks to all of the people I’ve stolen those ideas from over the years 🙂

Let me know if you try out the brainstorming activity, the session, or any of the other tasks from ELT Playbook 1. I’d love to know how they work for you!

Helping new teachers survive and thrive – IH World Facebook Live (recording)

Here is a screenshot from the first ever International House World Facebook Live, featuring me and Giuliana Faldetta:

The topics we covered were:

• avoiding teacher burnout
• helping new teachers combat homesickness
• what to do if a teacher refuses to teach a particular age group, but there is nobody else who can take the class
• how you can encourage new teachers to engage in CPD
• what CELTA trainers can do to prepare trainees for the reality of teaching

The recording is available here, though I believe you need a facebook account to watch it. You can also add comments and further questions to the recording.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what we discussed, and what else you’d like to know if you are a new teacher or if you work with new teachers.

International House World Facebook Live: Working with new teachers

In three days’ time I’ll be presenting the inaugural International House World facebook live. This is a great opportunity to find out a bit more about how International House supports new teachers as an international organisation and within individual schools. You can follow the event on facebook where you can also contribute questions to the discussion. There will be a recording which I’ll share afterwards. Hope to see you there!