On Tuesday 18th April 2023, I presented this talk on behalf of Cambridge University Press. This is the blurb:
Recent years have seen a growth in both online teaching and technology use in language education, with an impact on the needs of trainee teachers. This talk will address what trainee teachers need to know, drawing on content from the new edition of The CELTA Course trainee and trainer books, which I have co-authored with Peter Watkins and Scott Thornbury.
I was talking about The CELTA Course Trainee Book and The CELTA Course Trainer’s Manual second editions which were released in February this year.
Here are the slides from the presentation:
In the talk I compared 2007, when the first edition was published, to 2023, when the second edition was released. I talked about changes in technology in the world, and how CELTA courses have changed in the interim – I did my own CELTA course in 2007-2007, and am now an experienced CELTA trainer myself.
I shared materials from two units in the books, which you can see on slides 14-23 in the embedded slidedeck above.
I concluded that trainees need to know these things about EdTech (educational technology):
How to move between online and face-to-face classrooms:
Adapting activities / Choosing new ones
Choosing appropriate teaching techniques
How to identify the knowledge and skills they need to use tech successfully
How to support learners with technology
How to adapt as it changes!
…and that all of these are facilitated to some extent by units in The CELTA Course Second Edition!
If you’d like to get your own copies of the books, they’re currently available from the Cambridge website. I’ll update this post as they are released in more places.
Exciting times! The second edition of The CELTA Course Trainee Book and Trainer Manual are now available. So happy to have worked on this with Peter Watkins and Scott Thornbury, as well as Jo Timerick at Cambridge. Can’t wait to hold it in my hand (this photo is borrowed!)
Joanna’s brother recently did a course which focused on:
Planning and scripting
Noticing language, analysing language, using language
Focus on delivery: emphasis and prominence: pausing, volume
Set-up, presentation, build to a point/outcome/result
Constant monitoring of response, involvement, looking for signs from the ‘audience’
Managing stress, performance
This was to become a stand-up comedian. This made Joanna reflect on the connections between this and teaching. Does rapport mean making people laugh? Is this how we judge the success of our lessons?
How do we – experienced teachers – create rapport?
Interaction / affective features
Names – learning names, using them, putting names on the board so everybody can learn them
Role adjustment: lack of hierarchy / barriers
Natural interaction and follow up questions to show care and empathy
Sense of humour, gentle mocking, sharing jokes, self-deprecation on the part of the teacher
Group dynamic: encourage students to learn about each other, vary interactions, cross-class pin-pointing to find common ground
Lesson design
Adapt coursebook to create relevance and connection
Warm-ups and lead ins
Language work = make reference to what SS have said, use their countries, life in London
Making use of their own lives e.g. photos on their phones
Mingles, information sharing
Why do trainees sometimes struggle with rapport?
Perception of the teacher role – what does a teacher actually do? They picture the teacher as being the knower in the room imparting knowledge to the learners. This can be a challenge to break down.
Lack of attentional resources – there are too many other things to think about. Mercer and Dornyei: ‘Getting caught up in the mechanics of teaching and forgetting about the learners in the room’
Devotion to the plan / wedded to the coursebook
Personality? Is it natural? Is it style over substance?
Lack of understanding of what it is, and level-appropriateness (e.g. complicated jokes at A1 level)
Lack of awareness of its importance – ‘my job isn’t about being funny’. ‘Rapport is important’ but we don’t necessarily say how or why.
Misguided application
Time – not enough time in the plan, prioritising language work over communicative tasks; time in our courses – do we have time to devote sessions to rapport and engagement? Balancing it with everything else we need to cover
Raising awareness of rapport and the importance of it
Joanna has been working on setting it up on day one, and creating that dynamic from the beginning of the course. They start with lots of activities to reduce stress levels at the beginning of the course. Then they reflect on what they’ve done: Do you feel there’s a good classroom atmosphere in the room now? They come up with the criteria – what did they do during the day to create this positive atmosphere?
Making a connection between what’s int he room and the world around them
Variety
Groupwork, pairwork
Small, achievable tasks
Activity
What’s the difference between when you walked into the room (nervous) and now (slightly less nervous!)?
Why did this help?
A safe space
Inclusive
Collaboration
Relaxes everyone
More open to learning
Level of trust in the room that might not have been there initially
This then became their criteria for developing rapport with the students. They incorporated it into observation and self-reflection tasks. They had to tick what they felt they’d achieved within the lesson.
Creating time and space: collective responsibility
It’s not just one person’s responsibility on the course. Joanna encouraged them to create learner databases. At the end of each session, the trainers would leave the classroom and the trainees would add all of the information they’d learnt about the students during that lesson. This database was added to after every TP, and over time they built up a lot of information about the students. This provided information for the Focus on the Learner assignment too.
Another way of creating time and space is unassessed practice. It’s vital in allowing the trainees to make connections with the learners without feeling under pressure. Joanna has experimented with doing it daily – 15-20 minutes of student feedback at the end of each lesson, where trainees discuss lessons and activities with the learners. They could then use this information to plan the next lesson.
I felt much more comfortable teaching them as I knew a little bit about each of them.
I saw the students as people.
By making the students the focal point, we are better able to teach to the student’s strengths. For example, getting to know your students where/when possible and incorporating their personal interests or personalising the course materials.
Trainee comments
This conversation and database happened after the lesson and before tutor feedback, which meant that tutor feedback was then driven by the learners. Not ‘Did I do OK?’ But ‘Esme didn’t understand me when I said x. Why is that?’
Putting the knowledge into practice: planning
In one input session, trainees drew the faces of the learners in the group. They looked at the topic of the lesson. They had to design ways that they could get the learners involved in that discussion. Trainees changed their perspective: teaching individuals within a group, rather than a whole group. Planning became easier rather than more difficult, as they were thinking about the people in the room.
Incorporating knowledge into the lesson plan
Joanna added a motivation and engagement section to the lesson plan. Here’s one example of what a trainee wrote:
As a logical extension of this, differentiation started to appear in the lesson plan, and trainees started to comment on how they would work with this.
Advice from trainees
This is what trainees on this course commented on at the end – ideas for building rapport. It’s quite a similar list to what the experienced teachers commented on at the start.
Summary
Address rapport explicitly – co-create criteria with trainees, so they all feel they can build it
Establish it as criteria via paperwork
Collective responsibility
Focus on the learners in feedback
Visualisation and differentiation
Discuss humour – what is it?
This all creates care, which led to investment in what they were learning, which led to more care. This group enjoyed working with these learners so much that they’ve continued volunteering to teach this group of learners.
On 13th November 2021, I attended a truly hybrid conference. 150 trainers attended from around the world, with some of us in the building at IH London, and the rest attending online. All of the sessions were presented via Zoom so that we were all watching the same thing and could participate equally, either via the chat or by speaking to the person next to us. Those of us in the building also had catering 🙂
Here is the YouTube playlist with recordings of all of the talks.
The sessions I attended were:
International skills for better communication – Chia Suan Chong
Challenging CCQs – Yulianto Lukito and Yanina Leigh
Teaching online: construct and methods to give teachers what they need – Alison Castle (mostly about the Trinity Certificate in Online Teaching)
Online teacher training in low resource contexts – Nicky Hockly
Using WhatsApp for teacher development – Danny Norrington-Davies and Khassoum Diop
Meeting local needs in contexts new to the internet – Joe Wilsdon
Raining on prom night – James Egerton and Giovanni Licata
Learning by doing: Replanning a methodology course to prepare for online teaching – Joanna Szoke
A journey through time – Abeer Ali Okaz
Final comments by Adrian Underhill
IH London this morning 🙂
I really enjoyed this conference format. I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person, which meant that I got to see all of the sessions and to discuss them with people face-to-face too. Because the sessions ran online we heard the voices of people from all over the world, including questions by chat and on video from a range of different countries, not just the people who could make it to IH London. I saw talks presented by teachers in York, Sydney, Senegal, Barcelona, Cairo, Moscow, Rome and Budapest. The conference felt really international, and it really did feel like it was talking about the Future of Training and what is possible for us in the future – I can’t remember the last time a conference theme was actually fulfilled as well as this! I’m looking forward to watching the recordings of parallel sessions which I couldn’t attend.
International skills for better communication – Chia Suan Chong
A large proportion of our job relies on us talking and interacting with our students, and helping them to interact with each other as they communicate in English. It should naturally follow that we should be experts at interpersonal skills and communication skills. But we know that that’s not always true. A typical teacher training course might address areas like how to grade our language, how to give instructions or how to respond to students’ errors but seldom do we discuss how we can build trust and rapport with our students, how we can deal with conflict or how we can adapt our communication style to the different students we encounter. In this interactive session, we’ll be reflecting on our range of interpersonal skills and considering how we can develop them.
I attended Chia’s version of this talk at IATEFL 2021 this year. You can find the summary at the end of this post. There were a few extra points in this teacher training version (I recommended you read both posts to get the full picture!):
Transactional Communication v. Interpersonal Communication
T = Focus on information exchange v. I = Focus on building relationships
T = Getting things done v. I = Getting to know people
T = For the short term (results) v. I = For the long term (relationship)
T = Shorter turns v. I = Longer turns
T = Predictable script v. I = Less predictable
T = Often measurable result (Did you get what you needed?) v. I = Not instantly measurable
Interpersonal skills are the skills you need to interact and communicate with people….Interpersonal skills are sometimes referred to as social skills, people skills, soft skills or life skills.
Skillsyouneed.com
As teacher trainers we tend to give feedback/tips on transactional communication, rather than interpersonal communication. This is often easier or more straightforward for us to do this, not least because of the predictability of transactional scripts. Interpersonal skills like rapport, classroom dynamics, building a positive atmosphere are all much more difficult to give advice on.
Chia presents a series of training called Fierce Conversations, created by Susan Scott, who also wrote a book with the same name [Amazon affiliate link]. The idea is that the conversation is not about the relationship, it is the relationship. When we have conversations with others, we’re building relationships – we can’t separate these two areas.
What tips can we give to build rapport?
We came up with these ideas:
Remember names.
Share information about yourself.
Ask genuine questions.
Be sincere and honest.
Remember what they say.
Respect them.
Space in the lesson for relationship building.
Take account of their experiences beyond the classroom/lessons.
When you do an online search for how to build rapport, there are some useful ideas, but we might need to be culturally sensitive with some of them, for example about using humour or laughing often.
Incorporate personal stories and personal experiences: some students might find this unprofessional. They might have a different expectation of what is and isn’t appropriate in the classroom.
Allow students to make decisions on classroom activities: some students might not be happy with what they might see as an abdication of the teacher role. Menus of options might be more useful than open questions – you could also use the contents page of a coursebook to do this.
[My note: It’s also important to maintain our boundaries and our mental health, so be cautious with advising ideas like ‘volunteering your time outside class to support students’ or ‘have breakfast/lunch in the school cafe surrounded by your students’.]
Ultimately, one size doesn’t fit all with how we build rapport.
Why should I trust you?
Good question!
Because we’re teachers.
Because we’ve built up a certain level of knowledge.
Because we trust them.
If you want to read more about trust, Chia recommends The Trusted Advisorby David H. Maister, Robert Galford and Charles Green. It includes the Trust Equation (described in this post). To improve trust, you ultimately need to reduce self-orientation.
Do you ever have people who ask you for advice, but really they want you to listen to them complaining about what other people think of them? That’s one example of self-orientation. Self-orientation is when you put yourself in the centre, rather than having regard for the people you’re talking to.
We should bring trust into the conversation in teacher training courses. What efforts are teachers/trainers making to build relationships in the classroom? How do we build trust? Which strategies do we use?
Ways that we build trust:
Establish competence – I’m competent in this area, you can trust me
Finding common ground (commonality)
Empathy
Openness (information) – what you see is what you get, I don’t have a hidden agenda
Reliability – you can trust me because I’m reliable
Openness (emotion) – showing vulnerability, you have to be genuine about it!
Willingness to trust first – we trust people who trust us
In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, very precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.
Stephen Covey
Here are some critical incidents you could discuss with trainees. How would you react?
Your student arrives late for class. They don’t apologize and they don’t give any reasons for being late. We’re conditioned to believe that justifying behaviour in this way is the correct, so we’re taken aback when our social script for this situation has been disrupted. The student might not have the same social script. Who says that we should give reasons for being late? He might not feel like he’s late – it might be a different perception of time. If you haven’t specified classroom rules from the beginning of the course, then it might be different.
You tell students to address you by your first name and they keep calling you ‘professor’.
You’re telling the class a story and one student keep interrupting to comment on parts of your story and to ask questions.
You could think about your communication style, as well as the communication style of somebody you don’t get along with. What are the similarities and differences? Are your problems with communication a result of the similarities or the differences? It can help people to realise they have different communication styles. Chia has included a series of clines to help you do this in her book Successful International Communication [Amazon affiliate link/BEBC non-affiliate link]
Nothing can be said in a way in which it cannot be misunderstood.
Karl Popper
The illusion of transparency: We always know what we mean, and so we expect others to know it too. There is a tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people understand us.
The ADAPT model (developed by Chia)
Awareness: What’s happened here? Describe the situation in other ways.
Don’t judge: avoid words like ‘picking at’, ‘being negative’
Analyse: can you think of at least 3 interpretations of why this is happening in this way/why the people behaved in this way?
Persuade yourself: align the communication values of the other person with yourself
Try: Me and my style v. Them and their style. If you try and adapt 20% of your behaviour, you might get 80% of the results you want (Pareto principle)
Challenging CCQs – Yulianto Lukito and Yanina Leigh
This presentation deals with CCQs (concept checking questions) as a language clarification technique. Trainees on pre-service courses and new teachers sometimes claim this technique is rigidly based on “the CELTA method” and does not work well in the real classroom where learners desire clear explanations. This session will question the validity of such a claim and propose practical strategies to deal with issues arising in this area.
Yuli and Yanina are asking does “questioning” work? The points below say they don’t:
Observation of trainees in pre-service courses
Lack of use – don’t use them at all
Overuse – asking them when they’re not necessary
Inappropriate use – not asking the right questions
Misuse – ‘If my room is upstairs, is it downstairs?’ (no purpose at all!)
Observation of experienced teachers
CCQs ‘don’t work’ with lower levels
‘Explanation’ is simpler and more time-efficient
Students don’t answer questions, so we’ll have to explain anyway
Learner feedback (anecdotal)
Learners want teachers to ‘explain’ well
Learners expect teachers to ‘explain’
Learners may perceive a lack of explanation as a lack of knowledge
So what can we do as trainers and teachers to help trainees/teachers see the benefit of questioning approaches?
Less CCQs – More CCTs
Concept clarification techniques, rather than questions.
On many courses, CCQs tend to become the technique to be used – in lessons, in assignments. The misperception of CCQs as part of ‘The CELTA method’ could be partly our fault as trainers. Should they be an obligatory part of Language Related Tasks? Is this giving trainees the impression that CCQs are more important than other techniques?
We should assess their ability to select appropriate concept clarification techniques instead. Here’s a selection of what trainees could use as a CCT:
Antonyms/synonums
TPR/mime
Cline and timelines
CCQs
Ask for examples and extension
Visuals/Realia/Audio-visual
Scenario/presentation
Guided discovery
Explanation
Translation
Develop ‘questioning’ skills appropriate to the level
Help trainees become successful in eliciting information. Could becoming skillful at using questioning tehcniques effectively enable trainees (and teachers) to move away from lecturing learners? Explanations can be a comfort zone for many teachers, but this could be because they lack the skill of questioning well.
Focus on purpose first: to get information, opinions, check understanding
Question design and variety e.g. Funnel questions: typical CCQs. We ask quite a few questions to check the core meaning. Probing questions: allows you to gather more subjective data based on learner response. e.g. What are some examples of things which are revolting? Soup. Tell me why soup is revolting. Leading questions: If you ate soup, would you vomit straight away? Recall and process: open-ended questions. Use this promote critical thinking and discussion. Do you remember last week when we talked about….? What do you remember?
Scripting and practising
Rephrasing and adjusting: don’t give up too quickly. If students don’t answer, try to reword the question, provide more clues, though don’t turn it into a guessing game.
Consider waiting time – yes!
Being able to vary question design can help trainees avoid being in the habit of patterns like 2 questions answered ‘no’ followed by one answered ‘yes’.
This set of skills could be more useful fuel for a session than one dedicated to how to write CCQs.
Flipped approach
Trainees plan CCQs for TL allocated. Peer-teaching to get feedback on appropriacy. This can improve teaching quality as trainees have a chance to experiment with techniques.
Video trainees (with permission!) during the lessons – gather a library of weak and strong clarification stages for other trainees to watch and discuss. Trainees aren’t really watching their peers on the days when they’re teaching – this could create a wider library for them to access.
Play games with CCTs. For example, charades. This could give trainees a chance to practise these techniques.
Give trainees the chance to go back and re-teach language to peers and see what they can improve, in a non-assessed, safe environment.
Responding to learners’ expectations – Is there a place for ‘explanations’ in the language classroom?
Yes, there is, as long as we explain well.
The students might have a different understanding of what explanation means to us – we might contrast explanation with questioning, whereas students might equate explanation with clarification.
There are some situations when explanation might be better:
L1 negative transfer – it might be faster sometimes to explain in the language
Universal concepts – just tell them what it is (e.g. banana)
Lack of knowledge – if they don’t know, you can’t elicit it – just tell them!
When students ask a random language question in the middle of the lesson – it can be frustrating if students are questioned in response
Error correction technique – it can be more efficient
Thematic words/phrases – key words for the lesson, tell them what it is and move on. You could use rhetorical questions to generate interest and move on.
[Odd CCQ moment I came across recently, clarifying the meaning of some global problems. “Child mortality. Are you OK with that?” Nobody batted an eyelid at this strange question!]
In conclusion, it’s not about abandonining CCQs, but keeping a balance. Helping trainees to realise when to ask and when to tell. CCQs can be ineffective for trainees, because they haven’t developed and practised questioning skills during the course.
In our discussion at the end of the session, Richard mentioned the idea of using techniques/questions to bring meaning into focus, stopping it from being so fuzzy. I like that idea that the meaning is blurred at first, and you’re using techniques to tighten it up. You could extend this metaphor – how focussed does the image need to be? Does it need to be completely sharp, or is a little fuzzy good enough? What’s the most efficient way to make it sufficiently sharp to move on with the lesson?
Teaching online: construct and methods to give teachers what they need – Alison Castle (mostly about the Trinity Certificate in Online Teaching)
This talk reports on Trinity’s development of a new online course and qualification that supports teachers working in an online environment. We will first review how we arrived at the underlying pedagogical underpinnings and then talk about how these were implemented in the course design. Finally, we will consider data from impact studies to identify lessons learnt for future support.
Some initial conversation questions:
If you have experienced a move from in-person to online teaching, what skills or knowledge did you feel you needed in order to be as effective online as you are in an ‘in-person’ class?
What skills or knowledge do you think teahcers need in general when transitioning from ‘in-person’ to online teaching?
What types of resources are needed to help teachers develop their online teaching skills?
They started off with a webinar series called Transformative Teachers, which has been running for a number of years. At the beginning of the pandemic, they started creating free online learning resources and enable blended and online Trinity courses. This moved on to writing a full courses, piloting and trialling it, and then launching it in the autumn.
It is self-study, convenient, bite-sized, and includes lots of examples of showing how to teach English online. They’re not just perfect classes, but real-life ones with a critique of what did and didn’t work. The support is informed by research and experience. There is a communicative focus, with the learner kept at the centre of the process.
The course is designed to develop the following areas:
Developing teachres’ ability to use online tools effectively
Helping teachers identify online tools that meet learning needs
Using interaction that encourages communicative learning in an online environment
Using online assessment techniques that meet learning needs
Helping teachers create a motivating environment for online learning
Increasing teachers’ confidence in facilitating online learning
There are 10 units of study, divided into 3 modules:
Preparing for the online classroom (intro, planning, classroom management)
Developing language skills
Resources for learning and teaching (tasks and activities, resource adaptation, design and creation)
You can access separate units or whole modules, so it’s flexible. There’s a sample unit on the website. It’s also possible to get a regulated qualification, an Ofqual Level 4 Certificate (CertOT), from Trinity if you complete the whole course.
Some lessons they learnt from developing an online course:
Test, pilot and trial as much as possible. Review content from different perspectives, including welfare experts, not just teachers, schools, academics.
Ensure there is time to react to trials and reviews.
Choose a platform that works globally or for your target area.
Check copyright restrictions for content and learn about Creative Commons.
Be aware of safeguarding.
Lessons learnt about teachers’ needs:
Teachers need to be shown focussed, practical techniques to help their ‘just-in-time learning’.
Videos of real classes are just as valuable as mini best-practice videos.
Teachers need to be directed to consolidate learning, just like ‘non-teacher’ learners
Online learning must have a variety of media to help maintain interest and support local adaptation.
Teaching is a messy business: acknowledge and embrace this.
Teachers want certification for learning just as much as learners do!
Online teacher training in low resource contexts – Nicky Hockly
School closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have led to learning loss at all levels of education, including for teachers. This talk reports on fully online teacher training projects that TCE have carried out over the last 18 months in data-poor contexts in Africa. Lessons learned about designing fully online teacher training courses for low resource contexts will be shared.
The Consultants-E are members of Aqueduto and take part in research into online teacher training – there’s lots of interesting information on their website.
Through TCE, Nicky has experience of running projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, including English by WhatsApp, English Connects and a project called CoELT.
Some of the challenges to moving teacher training online during the pandemic (AQUEDUTO, 2022 – research to be published soon):
Lack of digital skills amongst trainers
Lack of access to tech
Lack of support for well-being, of teachers and learners
Resistance to working online
Positives found in the same research:
Digital upskilling
Rethinking teacher assessment
Enhanced collaboration and support
Online teacher training is now ‘on the map’ – accepted and recognised as valid
Nicky is telling us about a specific online project in South Africa.
Challenges:
Widespread school closures
Teachers unable to reach learners remotely
Rural / urban digital divide
High data costs (highest on the continent); loadshedding (rolling electricity cuts)
Lack of devices (e.g. one feature phone per family – i.e. with a keyboard, not a smartphone)
Online teaching/training via a VLE and/or videoconferencing not realistic in many SA contexts
Massive learning loss, especially in rural and deprived areas
COELT: Certificate in Online English Language Teaching: done in cooperation with the British Council and the Department for Basic Education (DBE). TCE developed the course, then trained a group of Master Trainers who took the course as participants at first then cascaded the training to teachers. The course was:
40 hours fully online
6 modules over 6 weeks
Aligned to EFAL (English as a First Additional Language) materials for Grades 1-12
Aligned to CiPELT and CiSELT training (teaching methodology certificates)
Course tools:
Self-study materials on a Google site
WhatsApp for teacher reflection and group work
Weekly Zoom sessions (for debrief and reflection)
Mentoring and evlauation:
Group mentoring via WhatsApp
Individual coaching via Zoom – several times during the cascade
Evaluation of online competencies via an evidence-based evaluation framework with indicators
As it was for a low-tech context, they kept the following in mind:
Easy to access materials: Google site, not behind a password protected VLE
Mobile-friendly: designed for mobile first
Low data demands: icons rather than photos, audio rather than video, H5P to create simple interactive elements in self-study materials (e.g. drag and drop, click on ABCD and get feedback)
South African teaching materials and local accents in audio
Downloadable PDFs for each module (many people will find wifi, download materials and take them away to read them)
WhatsApp as the main communication channel for teacher training
WhatsApp for demo live language lessons
WhatsApp Live Lessons – synchronous interaction
Some related research from MIT done in South Africa to train community leaders in rural areas: Mohlabane and Zomer, 2020.
TCE took DBE materials and thought about how it could be delivered via WhatsApp in an engaging, realtime lesson.
The live lesson starts off with rules and routines. 10 minutes/5 minutes before the lesson, they check ‘Are you ready?’ The start of the lesson is reviewing the group rules which were established in the first lesson. There’s a clear signal for when they start: *OK, everybody. Ready, steady, go.* The lessons are very intense and very fast, although it’s important to remember that typing can take longer on a feature phone. The pace of the lesson is slower on a feature phone than on a smartphone.
They demo a live lesson on WhatsApp, with the trainees experiencing the lesson as students. Then there is clear signal that they’re now teachers, and share their immediate reactions to the lesson. There can be a mix of voice notes and text.
They also used WhatsApp for reflective course tasks during the course.
Findings
The digital skills of the teachers was so much lower than they expected. Key digital skills were lacking, for example being able to copy and paste. They added a 6-hour key digital skills to the beginning of the course with these absolute basics.
Tech with low demands in terms of data, but also in terms of the digital skills required.
Videoconferencing might not be appropriate – they used it because the DBE requested it, but not everybody could use it.
They used WhatsApp in RT (real time) and NQRT (not quite real time) – a combination of these interactions was very effective.
The interaction in WhatsApp was with text, pictures and voice notes, but no videos.
They integrated ways of how to use WhatsApp in other ways for education, for example liaising with parents.
Nicky expects that WhatsApp will continue to be used in this way even after the pandemic.
Using WhatsApp for teacher development – Khassoum Diop and Danny Norrington-Davies
In this session we will share our experience of using WhatsApp to offer development opportunities to large groups of teachers or teachers working in different locations. We will offer tips and advice on how to set up groups and set boundaries, encourage sharing and participation, and how to help teacher developers manage their time and commitments. We will finish by offering suggestions on how WhatsApp might be used on teacher development courses.
Danny is a trainer from IH London, and Khassoum is a trainer in Senegal. They ran the session as a Q&A. Danny asked questions and Khassoum gave the answers.
Some initial questions:
Have you ever used WhatsApp for teachign training?
How might WhatsApp be used for training in your context?
Why do you use WhatsApp for training and development?
Lots of teachers in different and sometimes remote locations
Poor internet coverage does not allow for high tech tools
Does not require lots of training/digital skills
Can use text, pictures and voice notes
Less expensive than other tools
How many teachers do you tend to work with?
As many teachers as possible! Locally and internationally.
What do you mainly use WhatsApp groups for?
Social interactions – building rapport and community with other teachers
Sharing materials
Sharing techniques and ideas
What advice do you have for setting up and running discussions?
Set up a clear, focussed question.
Set clear time limits, e.g. the end of the week.
Situate discussions in the classroom so they are more real.
Respond to contributions and ask follow up questions so teacher do more than give lists of ideas.
Summarise and share the discussion at the end – these summaries can become training materials or articles for publication. The summaries are also shared on WhatsApp. Summaries can be written by the co-ordinating trainer, or by a member of the group.
What kinds of topics have you had discussions about?
They tend to focus discussions on a specific topic, for example, the different stages of listening comprehension, or strategies for teaching listening. The discussions can also motivate teachers to explore topics in more depth.
Discussions to develop content knowledge – for example, based on problems a student has, asking for advice, What would you say?
Discussions to develop pedagogic knowledge – for example, pair or groupwork.
Discussions framed as problems/case studies can be helpful to encourage teachers to answer.
How important is it to have rules and regulations on your teacher WhatsApp groups and how do you set this up?
A sample set of rules:
Remember that [this group] abides by these rules:
English posts ONLY
No religious or political posts
Give and take ONLY in [this group]
Do not keep silent, participate as much as possible.
No personal discussions in [this group]
Thank you for your understanding.
Tips:
Set clear rules and boundaries at the start. These could relate to content, tone and times when you can post.
Have a system to deal with transgressions e.g. give a warning before taking action/suspending a participant
Give new participants time to settle before they become active
Talk to the ‘ghosts’ (the people who watch but don’t participate) – make sure people are giving as well as taking, because everybody’s ideas are valid. They find that a lot of people contribute the following session after this.
What advice do you have for encouraging teachers to share materials? What do you have to consider when you share materials?
There is a rule that they’re not there to assess or evaluate materials, but that everybody’s materials and ideas are valid. They don’t want people to feel ashamed about sharing materials. Be clear that the thread is about sharing rather than assessment.
Set a clear task e.g. ‘What speaking activity have you used recently that your students enjoyed? Please share it here saying what the task is and why you think the students enjoyed it’
How do you limit your own time commitments with the number of groups you have?
Khassoum makes sure he has time to rest. He chooses which sessions to attend, rather than attending all of them.
Tips:
Set time limits for discussions.
Share the forum with other trainers if possible.
Have cut off times in the day when the group is closed.
Turn off your phone or mute notifications for set periods.
Make sure you have boundaries.
How do you ensure that the group is democratic rather than autocratic?
They tried to have different people running the sessions, including volunteers from the group. Some people said that they wanted to run a session because they wanted to learn something – you don’t have to be the knowledgeable one.
Tips:
Invite teachers to set discussions or ask questions.
Inform the teachers you will be absent from the discussion for a set period. (Give them space!)
Set reflective questions e.g. ‘What was the biggest challenge you have faced with your class recently and how did you overcome it?’
Question from Khassoum: How do you think these ideas would work on a teacher training course?
Set ‘office hours’ and clear boundaries around topics e.g. no planning questions, no changing the topic mid-discussion.
Create and delete groups through the course e.g. Q&A for each assignment.
Set reflection tasks before feedback and sit out the discussion.
Flip training by setting questions or readings for input sessions. You can also encourage trainees to ask you questions: Tomorrow we’re going to talk about reading skills. What would you like to know?
Set observation tasks and run discussions during TP.
Q&A/Comments
Trainers really appreciated the chance to share responsibility and to learn from each other in the WhatsApp groups.
There is no obligation for people to join groups. Discussions can be weekly, monthly, or at random. In their platform, they have Friday discussions from 4-6pm, though sometimes people share questions at other times. (A little like the #eltchat hashtag on Twitter!)
Reflective elements could be done in L1 if the English level is too low to be able to reflect in English (e.g. A1/A2), even if the trainer doesn’t understand the language.
They can see that the WhatsApp groups are working, because they see people sharing the ideas in other contexts, such as in other groups they are members of, and crediting the ideas back to the WhatsApp groups.
Group work is possible in WhatsApp too – you can have a bigger group with everyone, and smaller groups for teachers/students which you’re part of. [Teaching via WhatsApp is a whole new world to me, and sounds very exciting!]
They share WhatsApp groups organically by creating flyers which can be shared by/with other teachers. There’s a lot of word of mouth.
Meeting local needs in contexts new to the internet – Joe Wilsdon
The internet gains 700,000 users every day. The African Union plans for every individual on the continent to have internet access by 2030. With the assumption that English will remain the global language, how can language teacher training meet local needs in countries and cultures newly connected to the internet?
The internet is gradually becoming available to more and more people. Some initial discussion questions:
How has the internet changed your work as a teacher in your country?
Imagine you were training an online CELTA with candidate teachers from Nigeria, Pakistan and Canada. What, if any, information about their specific, local contexts would you want to know?
When the internet is available to the entire world, will a one-size-fits all course like CELTA be appropriate?
In some countries, internet use is on the phone, not on computers. It’s still possible to show images and short texts on phones around a large group – it’s not perfect, but it works.
The rural/urban dichotomy can often be a bigger difference than that between different countries.
The UN committed itself to as one of its infrastructure and development goals to ‘strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020’ (goal 9C). This date has passed. Access to the internet is now possible from 97% of the world’s surface. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has access. Just 54% of the global population use the internet. In the least developed countries only 19% have online access. 2018 was the 50/50 point – when 50% of the global population had access to the internet.
What does it mean to have internet access? Within global development, it means to be able to access a device at some point that has the internet, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody has it. If one person in the village has a device which they give other people access to, that can mean multiple people count as having internet access.
According to ourworldindata 27,000 people gain access to the internet per hour. One project to help increase internet acccess was Google’s Loon, though it was discontinued in January 2021. Facebook Aquila was another project. One key question is whether we want mega-corporations to be in control of internet access.
What does increased internet access mean? Increased opportunities for girls and women is just one impact.
How does the spread of the internet to more people influence the ELT industry?
In Northern and Western Africa, 141 million people are native French speakers. If only five percent of those people seek and pay for online English classes, that’s seven million new clients for the ELT industry.
More students means more teachers. More teachers means more trainers.
On the other hand, more people online means more choice for the consumer, which means lower prices, which probably means lower wages.
Joe’s advice is to specialise as much as possible. General English may well be coming to an end. By having to become an expert in a particular field, we probably have to become more professional.
What about linguistic imperialism? Philipson (1992 – Amazon affiliate link) argued that the spread of English is already:
Perpetuating native speakerism
Contributing to the death of languages around the world
Perpetuating a model of culture that is Euro-centric
Joe doesn’t say this is wrong, but doesn’t a globalised world need a globalised language? In recent decades, enormous gains have been made in lifting people out of poverty (slowly, uncertainly, hesitantly, but still). Would it be possible to have a globalised economy without a globalised language?
Some thoughts on the next 15-20 years:
The number of EFL teachers will grow rapidly.
The majority will be teaching both online and offline.
A proportion of them will come from countries where English is taught through traditional, teacher-centred methods and not communicative approaches. (Note: it’s not self-evident that communicative approaches have to be the best way to learn)
Exposure to a greater variety of international speakers through internet access will change people’s perceptions of which accents/dialects are considered acceptable.
What might need to change?
Qualifications must adapt.
EFL training could become adaptable according to the region from which the participants hail.
An increasing number of countries are teaching all subjects in English to VYL.
CELTA could pivot to prepare trainees to teach history, science and maths in English? A more CLIL approach.
CELTA could also be more specialised towards teaching adults in their professions.
In the discussion afterwards, there was a discussion of the risk of being colonial in marking speaking/writing exams. It’s a challenge that exam boards need to address. Intelligibility between candidates might be fine, but examiners might not find candidates intelligible and therefore mark them down.
Translanguaging, with the combination of English with other languages, will become increasingly common, so that people will still be able to participate in communication.
It’s raining on prom night – Giovanni Licata and James Egerton
The last 18 months have been momentous for teacher training. The online transition has not only meant reinventing the wheel in some cases, but also facing ever-present teacher training fears that had been more hidden in the 100% physical classroom CELTA. Our session will spin the audience through technical, cultural-educational and organizational moments where it felt like the rain was ruining prom night, but for which moves in the new dance must be mastered.
The idea of this presentation started a long time before COVID. It was about thinking about the problems that teachers have and how to deal with them. What do you do when you’ve been building up to somethign for a long time, then things don’t happen the way you expect them to?
Face to face or Mask to mask? There are challenges to teaching in person with COVID restrictions too, not just to teaching online. There can be restrictions on not moving from your chair, not being able to monitor – all adding extra challenges to initial teaching experiences. [You might find some useful ideas on socially distanced teaching here.]
Giovanni would like to see a lot more experimentation with using different physical environments within the same school, to give you the privacy that breakout rooms give you.
We should try to stop ourselves from thinking that everything was rosy before the pandemic. The pandemic has been an accelerator to the integration of technology in education, not a circuit break. The idea of going ‘back to normal’ isn’t a thing. We need to reconceptualise what is happening in our spaces.
Flexbiliity: We have the choice with the spaces we work in to be able to provide the best possible services for teachers and trainers. How can we combine and integrate these two worlds?
Collaboration: Working with centres around the world. Can we continue to share ideas and innovations in the way we have during the pandemic?
Integration of new ideas
Key concepts moving forward:
Assessment – being flexible
Cognitive flexibility – awareness, confidence and flexibility
Hybrid: Attention can’t be split – all students online or all students face-to-face. Mixed-mode could be better – some lessons of each.
Learning by doing: Replanning a methodology course to prepare for online teaching – Joanna Szoke
During COVID, I had to completely redesign a simple methodology course to give enough practical support to my in-service trainees in online teaching and learning. The aim was to equip them with skills they could use right away. The talk will look at the design principles of this “learning by doing” course and its main takeaways.
Jo teaches pre-service and in-service trainees at a university in Budapest. The course she’s talking about was called ‘Using ICT tools in the ELT classroom’ – it was designed for face-to-face classrooms. [I sympathise – I wrote a whole MA assignment on a two-week ICT course I was really proud of, but which didn’t mention online teaching at all. Doh!] In-service trainees were transitioning into online teaching. Pre-service trainees had their first ever experience of teaching online.
She had to redesign the course completely to meet their needs, expectations and requests. She wanted to provide efficient support to struggling trainees with minimal online teaching experience. Jo believes in learning by doing and the power of passing knowledge on. She thought that the in-service teachers would be able to pass the knowledge onto their colleagues too.
The course design process:
Identify their needs.
Find out what they have to do and how they have to do it. Environments, software, tools they have access to. Done through interviews.
Remove everything from the old course schedule to create a new course!
She wanted/needed to include:
Zoom and MS Teams
Interactive tools like Learning Apps and WordWall
Colloboration online
The course consisted of Zoom and VLE training (Google classroom), with autonomous and flipped components, and formative assessment. They got 5-minute long videos with tasks on Nearpod. They had open-ended questions at the end to serve as revision questions at the beginning of synchronous sessions. Formative assessment:
Flipped videos + required task+ optional tasks
Tasks in sync with the materials e.g. do a flipped lesson on Nearpod, then create a Nearpod lesson yourself; play a game on Wordwall, make one yourself
Option to resubmit improved assignments
Peer feedback
Nearpod allows you to track what people have completed. [There’s a guest post on it here.]
A journey through time – Abeer Ali Okaz
University total closure took everyone by surprise. Most of the training that PUA academics have previously received did not seem to fully help. This presentation focuses on the challenges that necessitated the change in the current training programme. It will take attendees through a journey to adjustment and survival, and provide tips gained from PUA’s experiment with online learning.
The University of Pharos has around 3500 students registered for English each year. Challenges they faced when the pandemic started:
No phone numbers or emails for students, so no way to contact them.
Burnt-out teachers.
Teachers without digital skills.
Connectivity issues.
Lack of access to devices.
Poor wellbeing.
They created 114 Google Classrooms for their students, but not everybody could join them. Teachers were anxious and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to prepare, they couldn’t write on screen, there was a huge amount of information about possible resources, teachers couldn’t monitor all the students carefully…they had all been through the university’s training programme before the pandemic, including some observed training and peer and formal observation.
The university realised they had to stop and reassess the training programme. They knew blended learning wasn’t going to go away – they had to redesign for the situation and for the future.
They changed their approach to training:
Bottom-up – teachers can create training content and manage its delivery. They could suggest sessions, research and share with each other. The attitude to younger teachers training older ones changed amongst the teachers.
Smaller groups
Asking teachers via WhatsApp and Google Classroom what they needed.
Using Google Classroom and Padlet for content creation and ideas and tools. One team was responsible for each of these tools and collecting information to share on these platforms. The Padlet was open to all teachers to post ideas, comment on each other’s ideas and access them later too.
Helping the teachers to be responsible for their own learning and training other teachers handed over control, in the way that we want learners to be responsible. They surveyed teachers regularly to check that this met their needs.
They scheduled training based on priority and availability. The management was only facilitating – there was more reward for teachers from this approach.
Abeer believes that this approach will continue in the future – there were common goals, there has been a lot more interaction between teachers, morale has improved – teachers are very proud of the sessions they’ve done, and there is enhanced communication between teachers.
Final comments from Adrian Underhill
[This was an excellent way to end the conference – very positive! I may have missed some points, but here are many of them!]
The discontinuity of COVID has led to a huge amount of creativity. It’s amazing how we’ve managed to deal with this situation, and it’s released a huge amount of energy which this conference has showcased. The picture of training has become much more nuanced.
Core values are important – we’re not trying to be values free. We seem to be moving from ‘It works’ or ‘It doesn’t work’ to ‘I/We work’ – a much greater sense of agency and involvement, with a commitment to values and the expression of values.
We’re not just going into detail, but zooming out and looking at the big picture and questioning systems as a whole.
Interpersonal skills, as described by Chia, are the ground out of which everything else grows. We need to build trust and reduce distance. How do we talk about empathy? When Adrian started the TD group in 1986, he meant personal development for teachers. We need to think about How can we be more facilitative in our teaching?
How can we share power? Mentoring…Reflective practice… It’s great to see that in teacher training.
There’s a need for honesty and to be who we are. Sharing real experience, sharing insecurity, learning to forgive yourself and be less judgemental of ourselves so we can be less judgemental of others.
WhatsApp allows accessibility and communication, getting lots of people talking.
Flipped learning/teaching seems to have become more relevant than ever to maximise the use of synchronous time to have discussions and create meaning together, not just to go through facts.
Each can learn from the other: online from face-to-face and vice versa. We may see new potential in being online. It might not replace reading the room when you’re all together, but it might bring other things which we don’t recognise yet.
Leadership in ELT is a key concept too and was discussed today. Adrian gave a plenary on it at IATEFL 2012, but it’s taken a while to enter other parts of ELT. It’s about empowering others.
We can make a difference through training. We can be guided by meaning, values and people. With our ingenuity and energy, we can find ways of making a difference. We are connecting with the whole world. There’s hope for the future.
When I attended the Cambridge English Teaching Awards (CETA) symposium on 12th September 2020, I found Kate French’s talk to be particularly useful. There is a recording here. Kate kindly agreed to write a guest post summarising what she shared.
The CETA Symposium was held online and brought together teacher trainers from over 49 different countries. It was an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and experience, particularly regarding teaching and learning during the pandemic.
As with all areas of life during COVID-19, teacher trainers and training courses in 2020 have had to adapt and react to the ever-changing circumstances and follow the sometimes contradictory guidelines emerging on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in order to save jobs and businesses and satisfy our ‘clients’ i.e. those wishing to complete and/or gain a teaching training qualification this year.
My own session at the conference was about the 100% online CELTA qualification and the aim was to synthesise the aforementioned guidelines and conclusions. The aim was not only to raise awareness for Centres that have yet to take advantage of this exceptional opportunity, but also to offer a review and possibly standardise delivery and ‘best practice’, which is what has always characterized the face-to-face and blended CELTA award, and which has led to its undoubted reputation as the ‘gold standard’ pre-service teaching training course. Therefore, I was very flattered to receive Sandy’s invitation to write a post for her blog to summarise the findings and offer them to an even wider public. It was also very timely, as I have just started tutoring on our second full-time, 100% CELTA course and wanted to make adjustments and improvements to our own course in response to:
recent recommendations from Cambridge Assessment English
CELTA assessor suggestions
previous candidates’ feedback
results of a brief, facebook survey I sent to teacher trainers (60 responses)
but most importantly for the following reasons:
The certificate awarded at the end of the course is exactly the same as for the face to face and the blended formats – there is no mention of the delivery format on the certificate.
The same criteria have to be met by candidates in order to pass the course.
The candidates, although studying and teaching 100% online, need to be prepared to teach in both online and face to face contexts post-course.
Employers will expect candidates to have the essential skills to teach in both online and face to face classrooms.
You can find our conclusions and ideas for achieving these in this table I have compiled:
Note from Sandy: the table is incredibly comprehensive and is an excellent starting point for anybody planning a CELTA course from this point forward, covering as it does all of the Cambridge recommendations for online courses so far, and lots of tips and ideas from Kate’s own experience and research.
Kate French started her TEFL career in Poland, at IH Bydgoszcz, before moving to Argentina two years later. [Note from Sandy – I didn’t know about that connection before!] She has worked at International House Belgrano in Buenos Aires since 1995 where she has been ADoS, DoS, In-company Coordinator, and Head of Teacher Training. She is currently DoS and Teacher Trainer, overseeing the online classes during the pandemic and tutoring on the institute’s full and part-time 100% online CELTA courses. Kate is also a Cambridge ESOL and IELTS examiner, and a CELTA assessor.
CELTA trainers, do you have anything you’d add? Change? Questions you have about the online format? It’d be great to get a discussion going!
The Cambridge English Teaching Awards (CETA) Symposium is another event which I would never have been able to attend face-to-face because of the timing and the location, but now it’s online I can go – yay! It’s aimed at trainers of Cambridge certificates: CELTA, Delta, CELT-P, CELT-S and TKT, though a lot of the content is relevant for all teacher trainers.
I talked about Life after CELTA. This was the abstract:
Even a Pass A CELTA graduate ‘will benefit from further support in post’. What might this support look like? What are the main areas that CELTA graduates continue to need help with? What can trainers do during the CELTA course to lay the groundwork? I hope to answer all of these questions in this session.
Here are my slides:
Here’s the recording:
Key areas for new teachers
When I employ an early career teacher, I know we’ll probably need to work on five key areas:
Time management
Teacher confidence/presence
Community membership
Reflective practice
Effective modelling
These are areas which many new teachers struggle with and need particular support in. I’ll look at each area below, with ideas for how CELTA trainers can develop these skills as much as possible during the course. Many of these things are already incorporated in courses, but it’s worth being reminded of their importance, so apologies if I’m preaching to the converted!
ELT Playbook
For each area, I’ve suggested a task from an ELT Playbook which could be used with trainees or as a trainer. These are the current Smashwords discount codes, valid until 5th October 2020 [affiliate links]:
You can find out more about both books, along with how to buy them, on the ELT Playbook website.
Time management
Materials preparation time: This is probably the biggest time sink for new teachers. This might be created a huge PowerPoint presentation, cutting up loads of bits of paper, or going down a rabbit hole to find the perfect image/video/text etc. I generally recommend that trainees do materials prep last, once they have a completed plan, with all of the documentation. I also try to show them how to teach lessons without PowerPoint, and challenge them to do at least one lesson like this during a course, especially if they’re a stronger trainee. Weaker trainees can aim for one or two activities per lesson without PowerPoint.
Simplify lessons: I recommend a maximum of one or two all-singing, all-dancing activities per 60 minutes. If trainees come to me with a plan with more than this, I’ll advise them to get rid of one or two, even if they can justify why it would be a great activity and incredibly useful for their students. Once I’ve told them this a few times, they start to listen!
Time-saving tips: Encourage screenshots/taking photos rather than retyping the whole exercise, even if it might look prettier! Show trainees hacks for the paper-based classroom, like putting a coloured dot on the back of each set of handouts.
Technology: Introduce multi-functional tools like Quizlet, which can also be used for printing flashcards in a face-to-face classroom. Show trainees how to find and copy existing sets, not start from scratch every time, and encourage them to save sets with the book name, edition, unit number and page number in the title so they’re easy for other teachers to find (like this). Create templates for documents on Word/PowerPoint which are reusable and easy to complete – show trainees/new teachers how to do this too if possible.
Lesson planning: I strongly believe that trainers should intervene as soon as possible if planning documentation is not up-to-scratch and be explicit about what will help trainees in lessons. There’s normally somebody else in the TP group who’s understood how to write a useful lesson plan, so I normally ask their permission to share the plan with the person who’s struggling. This is better than a generic lesson plan as the trainee knows how the lesson went, and can see how having a solid plan helped the lesson to be more successful. As a trainer, we should also provide clear feedback on the plan, with one or two specific areas to focus on each TP to improve the plan, not the just the lessons. Generally, a strong plan = a successful lesson = teacher confidence. There’s plenty of time for teachers to move towards less detailed planning later, once they’ve got the basics under their belt.
Rehearsal opportunities: Encourage trainees/teachers to rehearse things they’re nervous about, preferably with their TP colleagues, but with you if nobody else is available. This is particularly true for complicated instructions – make sure the lesson isn’t the first time the trainee/teacher has ever tried to say those instructions out loud.
Lesson plan as film script: Emphasise the importance of trainees/teachers knowing exactly what they want from the students during the lesson. Imagine it’s a film script, where everyone needs to know where to stand, what to hold, what to do at each point in the lesson. This can help trainees to add more depth to their lessons, though sometimes it can go too far! If it does, remind them that improvisation is an important part of great film-making too – there needs to be space for the actors/students to breathe too; it can’t all be about the director/teacher. This can help them to understand the idea of handing over to the students more too.
Wait time: Give trainees/teachers tricks to increase the amount of time they wait after asking questions, for example counting ‘1000, 2000, 3000’ or putting a post-it on their computer saying ‘Wait!’ The pauses add natural breaks into the lesson, allow everyone to think a little, and can reduce anxiety. They also mean students are more likely to give answers of some kind, and maybe even successful ones 😉 All of this can increase teacher confidence, and help them feel more in control of the lesson with better teacher presence.
Provide necessary support: Don’t leave trainees/teachers to flounder or spend hours trying to figure things out themselves. This is particularly true of teaching grammar: show trainees/teachers how to do this the first time out. This will add to their toolbox, and give both teachers and students a better experience. A lot of our in-house training at IH Bydgoszcz connected to lessons is about supporting teachers to feel confident in grammar lessons. One useful tip is for teachers/trainees to do the exercises themselves as part of their lesson planning, and make sure they know WHY the answers are correct, not just what. Modelling this kind of scaffolding is useful for teachers to see how to help students too.
Self-talk: There’s a free bonus activity connected to ELT Playbook 1 looking at self-talk and teacher confidence. Download it here.
Community membership
Give guidance: Show trainees how to participate in communities within their course, for example by creating Whatsapp groups for everyone on the course, their TP group, and their 3 TP colleagues. Point out chances to use these communities e.g. it’s a good idea to discuss this part of the lesson…you could vent about this…
You are not alone: Remind them that there’s always somebody they can call on, both during and after the course. Emphasise how to work together during TP prep, and tell them never to spend more than 10 minutes trying to figure something out – after that they should ask for help. ‘The people around us’ in ELT Playbook 1 can help teachers/trainees to realise who can help them with what.
Wider communities: Show trainees communities they can join during or after their course e.g. the facebook CELTA or Teaching English British Council pages, #ELTchat on Twitter, or alumni communities for your organisation.
Reflective practice
Use metaphors: This can help with managing expectations and stress. My favourite metaphor for this is about learning to play the piano/tennis.
Exemplify reflection: As a trainer, be human! Own your mistakes and tell trainees how you have learnt/will learn from them. Show them that it’s not the end of the world if something goes wrong. Also highlight areas you’re particularly proud of, especially if you were experimenting with something new. Be excited 🙂
Strength spotting: I learnt about this from Sarah Mercer, and there’s a specific task connected to it in ELT Playbook 1. Encourage trainees/teachers to learn from the strengths of others. Really emphasise this by making TP peer feedback focussed on strengths as much as possible and then telling them how other trainees can do the same thing. In your spoken feedback, highlight one thing each trainee did that you want the others to do in future TPs.
Specific feedback: Give specific feedback, including comments were possible, not just generic comments. For example: ‘Good drilling’ becomes ‘You used a consistent model with a natural stress pattern.’ This shows trainees/teachers what behaviour to repeat, in the same way that our (normally much more specific!) negative feedback shows them what behaviour to avoid/modify in future. Model this, but also encourage trainees to avoid the word ‘good’ in their own feedback to each other. Thanks to Kate Protsenko for highlighting this to me, and inspiring the task ‘What is ‘good’?’ in ELT Playbook Teacher Training.
Effective model
Practise what you preach: Teachers should model effective language learning behaviour to their students, trainers should model effective teaching to their trainees. 😉 I think most of us do this already, but it’s still worth reflecting on what you do and don’t model to your trainees. Follow through on your advice in your own demo lessons and input sessions: vary activities, give concise instructions, don’t use too many ICQs, start/finish on time…sometimes easier said than done! The task ‘Practising what you preach’ in ELT Playbook Teacher Trainingcould help with this.
Be human: Model compassion towards yourself, model taking care of yourself during courses, highlight when you need help or when you’ve found support somewhere (in a book, on a site, from another person). I’ve already mentioned owning your mistakes. Don’t try to be a computer, or to be perfect. We need to model this so that new teachers don’t feel that they need to be perfect either. Perfectionism is boring.
What’s not here?
The surface things:
TTT
ICQs
CCQs
pairwork
feedback techniques, etc.
These are generally considered to be the stuff of CELTA, but I think they’re less important than any of the five deeper areas above. Those deeper areas are universal: any teacher needs them, in any context, online or offline, wherever they are in the world. The surface things are all useful techniques to be aware of, but they’re context-dependent. A confident, reflective, practitioner who can learn from their community, manage their time well, and understand the power of modelling will learn how to do all of these bitty things sooner or later. Remove any of those five areas and the chances are much slimmer.
Do you agree? Are these areas you work on? What would you do to support new teachers with these or other areas during an initial teacher training course?
On Monday 6th July 2020 I started training on my first ever fully online CELTA course on Zoom. On the same day, Stephanie Wilbur also started online CELTA training for the first time, but on a different course. We’ve decided to compare our experiences. The post below covers week four, the final week. Here’s week one,week two and week three.
What were the highlights of this week?
SM: As always in week 4, it was great to see so much of last week’s hard work paying off. The lessons were much better contextualised, and practice had a much clearer communicative focus, with trainees commenting in self-evaluations and feedback on the fact that lessons seemed to flow better and students were more engaged. Although this is something we discuss earlier in the course, it’s normally not until week 4 that trainees have the mental space to really think about this in their planning, and that some of them manage to conquer high levels of teacher talk and teacher-centredness. This was my favourite comment (quoted with permission):
The student focus really paid off and it was incredibly gratifying to see them figuring out problems with each other – I know they learned something from me and that’s an amazing feeling! (Terri Barker)
Language clarification was much stronger, timing tightened up with more realistic planning, and the pace of lessons improved and became more varied. It’s also great to see their teacher personalities develop as their confidence increases.
In input, I ran the YL and teen session using a project-based approach which worked even better than I’d hoped. I divided the trainees into six groups, two each for each age group (VYL, YL and teen) based on a Google Form I’d sent asking them about experience they had with each age group. I supplemented their knowledge with a list of resources for each age group, then set this task:
The presentations and documents they produced were full of great ideas. They then had fifteen minutes in new groups of three to share what they’d compiled, five minutes per person. When we came back together I told them this was project-based learning, and in the follow-up email I told them how to set up successful projects. I’ll definitely try input like this again, not least because they did all the work during the session!
Lessons from the classroom (assignment 4) is my favourite assignment, because trainees use this to reflect on their progress over the course and think about how they’ll continue to progress. It’s a fascinating insight into what they feel they’ve gained from the course, and the areas that they want to focus on after they’ve finished. I also like it because most people pass it first time, so there’s a lot less marking 🙂
SW: I’ve watched so much development over the course and especially this week, watching them crack things that they had trouble with. The resistance that some trainees show in week 3 disappears in week 4 as they adjust to the higher level and expectations of the second half of the course. They can reset their priorities as the result of even short conversations as trainees realise what’s important. One example this week was rushing through lessons to get to the end, versus changing their planning to fit everything in more successfully. Once trainees made that switch, their lessons were so much more successful.
Everybody had good final lessons. It was fantastic watching one trainee who lacked confidence in her abilities make improvements in the final two weeks – she was a different teacher when she came out of her shell, with great rapport and better teacher presence.
How did trainees work with language during this part of the course?
SM: I continued to emphasise the fact that the bulk of lessons should be based around practice rather than teacher presentations, and there were almost none of this kind of presentation this week. Trainees commented that students know the rules but can’t apply them, making it easier for me to highlight the importance of feedback after practice activities, and clarifying why an answer/piece of language is right or wrong, not just what the ‘correct’ answer/piece of language might be.
SW: In the second half of the course, we did a lot more task-based learning. In my demo lesson at the start of week three, I showed trainees how to record emergent language and exploit it in the lesson. This meant they were working with emergent language a lot more in the second half of the course.
What teaching tips did you give teachers this week?
SM: As we had quite small groups of students and were often waiting to get extra students at the start of the lessons, I agreed with the teachers that I would start timing the lessons when they gave a signal, rather than starting automatically when there were two students. This gave them a chance to chat to the students a little before the lessons, rather than only interacting as part of the lesson itself.
In Zoom, you can click the three little dots at the bottom of the participants list and select ‘Play enter/exit chime’ or update your settings to make this the default for all meetings. This helps you to notice when somebody joins or drops out of the meeting, without having to double-check the list.
When you’re sharing documents, you can make them quite small on your screen and still have other things open to work on. For example, have the PowerPoint slides in one corner, the videos underneath and a document to the side to type into. Then share only the PowerPoint rather than the whole screen.
I reminded the trainees that videos and microphones don’t always need to be on, and encouraged them to switch off when reading things in input, and to suggest it to the students during reading and listening tasks during lessons. This makes a difference to the dynamic in the lesson as it gives students some space to process what they’re seeing/hearing.
I also continued to encourage trainees to really think about when to share their screen and when not to. All of my group successfully managed to run some activities without any slides, including much greater use of the chatbox, mini whiteboards/pieces of paper (especially for pronunciation features), and even just speaking (which we often seem to forget!)
SW: gyazo.com is a screen sharing piece of software – you take a screen shot and get a link which you can share instantly. This helped the students who couldn’t take screen shots.
It’s important to think about formatting – not everybody has access to Microsoft. We need to consider that students might not be able to or know how to open things we send them. We recommended pdfs and screen shots throughout our course.
What did you tell trainees about the next steps?
SM: In the jobs session, we talked about the fact that the market is currently very competitive. In another year, CELTA graduates might find a job quite quickly, but now there are a lot of experienced teachers who are also looking for work. Not getting offered an interview isn’t necessarily about trainees not being suitable, but more about the fact that it feels like much more of an employer’s market at the moment as there are so many teachers looking for work. It’s important to persevere and not give up.
SW: At the end of every CELTA course we talk about what life after the course is like. It’s harder right now to prepare trainees for the world after the course as we don’t know what it will look like, and what opportunities and problems they might have. Throughout the course I did a lot of work telling them about the difference between the online and the face-to-face classroom. This week I did the CPD session and the job session, talking about how to get support in post-CELTA jobs, but there’s so much more uncertainty than before. We don’t know how trainees will get support if the only work they can find is teaching fully online as freelancers and they never have the support of a staffroom.
Within a couple of years of working full-time in the past, you’d know grammar and understand it yourself if you were getting support. But now we don’t know how the first two years will shape up if schools are thinking about being online more than supporting the teachers with that? New teachers need to prompt senior teachers to keep sharing ideas in an online school.
How did you end the course?
SM: After their final TPs, I always ask peers to reflect on how each teacher has improved over the four weeks of the course. This time, I added a row to the Google Docs they’ve completed in peer feedback each day, asking them to identify what they’ve learnt from watching that teacher. The positive, supportive comments were fantastic 🙂
Throughout Friday I had a few opportunities for individual chats with trainees in my TP group, and heard some lovely messages about what they’d gained from the course and from getting feedback during observations.
Friday night at the end of a CELTA is normally my favourite part of the whole course. We tend to go out for a meal, and that’s when I really feel like I get to know the trainees, because they’re no longer worried about passing the course is being assessed. It provides some kind of closure. We had a final 30-minute session after their unassessed TP finished, with the main course tutor setting us a couple of ‘treasure hunt’ tasks. We had to find a piece of headgear, then a timepiece, in each case describing what it was and why we’d picked it. This was a fun bit of movement for the final session. We then shared memories in the chatbox, and we’d taken a group photo/screenshot in the morning. After all the trainees left, I spent a couple of minutes chatting to my colleagues, but I have to say it felt like a bit of an anti-climax when I closed Zoom at 6pm. I took myself out for food and spent the evening with friends, but it wasn’t the same. That’s the one thing I’ve really missed with doing the online course.
SW: After we finished the admin, we took a group photo and chatted for a bit, including sharing memories and ideas. The trainees planned a virtual wine and cheese party together. There was some closure, but I feel like we needed some kind of closing activity. It felt strange ending the course because it felt somewhat sudden. Some of the trainees sent me a message after we finished, which was really lovely.
If I run an online course again, I’d like to put more thought into a closing activity, for example doing something social online together with the trainees at the end of the course. I think this should create a better sense of the ending of the course.
What do you think 100% online trainees will need support with when they go into a physical classroom?
SM: As somebody who employs a lot of post-CELTA trainees, I need the fact that trainees were on a fully online course on the report so I know what training to give.
The main areas I think trainees will need support with are:
teacher presence in a physical classroom
monitoring when everybody is talking at once
using the space in the room
including movement in the lessons (though this is also true online!)
teaching using paper/physical coursebooks e.g. pointing to the exercise on the page while giving instructions
SW: CELTA graduates will need support with realising that the physical classroom is not that different to the online classroom. They’re going to feel different sitting in front of a group of people, or standing up with people in front of them, but this is a confidence issue rather than a problem. They could observe a group from the back of a room to see what’s the same or different. Identify what’s the same in a physical classroom, for example breakout rooms is the same as moving chairs to set up pair work. The videos they’ve seen are mostly in physical classrooms, but real-life observation could be useful.
Monitoring and pair work are different, but once CELTA graduates see it in action and do it themselves a couple of times they’ll feel much more confident. The skills are the same – instead of ‘turn off your camera’, they have to sit there and not interrupt. It’s a modified version of what they’ve already done.
Board use could be an area to work on, but people use PowerPoint in the physical classroom too. Planning a PowerPoint means they’ve thought about their board work before the lesson and how to lay everything out. Another important area is different ways of doing feedback, especially if they’ve only taught quite small groups online.
What should we consider when training online? What do we need support with as trainers?
SM: Trainers still need support and training in learning how to use the platform successfully so they can pass on this knowledge to their trainees. In input, if trainers don’t know techniques, they can’t demonstrate them to trainees. I feel like although there has been a little support, trainers have mostly been expected to figure it out for themselves, and are only one step ahead of their trainees in some cases. On the flip side, this has forced us all to be creative and I believe it has injected a level of excitement into courses which might have been run in a very similar way for a long time.
As time goes on, we need to remember to describe and exemplify the parts of our online teaching which have become natural and second nature, in the same way as we would in a physical classroom. This is particularly important online as trainees can’t see what we’re doing, whereas they might be able to pick things up from just watching us in an offline classroom – we need to comment on this to make it clearer to them.
Many people are feeling screen fatigue, especially this summer. I think it’s hard to get students who will commit to the lessons (though this can be true offline too!) Perhaps somebody could create a central database where students can sign up and trainers can tell them about courses. (Sorry that this won’t be me!)
SW: We need to remember that it’s not really that different. CELTA online is not a whole different course – there are so many similarities to the offline version. We’re still doing the same things as trainers. We still want trainees to do the same things. We need to keep looking at what matches up between online and offline. Technology can be an issue for some trainees and trainers, but it’s definitely something that can be learnt. Both Sandy and I have watched trainees over the past month who’d never used PowerPoint or other technology before the course, and are using the technology in a way that doesn’t stop them from demonstrating they are perfectly good teachers at the end of the course.
Because the course is online, we can market it to trainees and TP students anywhere, not just in the town or city where the course is based, but also (for example) people in villages who might not have known about courses before.
If we use a model of combined synchronous and asynchronous provision, the idea that you have to show huge amounts of learning into a crammed four-week course while you put your life on hold and (often) move to a new place no longer holds true. That idea can make the course seem impossible to some people, but an online or blended CELTA makes it feel more possible. Flipping the course completely could allow more time for feedback, if trainers have time to create the input to prepare such a course.
Time management is another area where trainers might need support. Everything takes longer in input, as it does in lesson. What are our priorities? How can we tighten our sessions up? How can we make them more efficient?
When will you run your next course?
SM: I only do one CELTA course a year, so I won’t be doing another one until at least next summer. At present it’s impossible to say if that will be online or face-to-face, and what kind of protective measures we will need by then. Right now I’ve got a few weeks holiday, then it’s back into my other life as a Director of Studies and working out what our school will look like from September.
SW: I’m going into a face-to-face course next week. I’d thought of everything except for passing things around between trainees, then asked myself ‘What if it’s paperless?’ Now I’ve done a course online I realise that a paperless course is possible. We’ll have an online portfolio, an online CELTA 5, and have handouts on a shared drive or email them to trainees. It’s easier for assessors too because they don’t have to chase things up – everything is more easily available for them. Trainees can email handouts to students the day before and students need to bring a computer/tablet for the lesson. If they need a pen, they have to take it from a pre-set box at the door, then return it to a different box. Pens will be sanitised before and after the lessons. We did this for IELTS exams I’ve been running, so I know it works. With all of these innovations, we don’t need to pass this things around, and thereby reduce the risk of infection. We’ll also be wearing masks throughout and using face shields.
How do you feel about online CELTA now?
SM: It’s definitely here to stay. The course was just as vigorous, just as useful, and just as successful as the fully face-to-face version I’m used to, and I’d be happy to employ graduates of fully online courses (not something I would have said in March). I think that the future is probably a blended course, with 3 hours of face-to-face TP and 3 hours online (I seem to remember reading that there’s a centre which is already doing this, but can’t remember where), with a mix of input online and offline.
SW: I wasn’t convinced about online CELTAs at the start, but now I’m a convert. We’re doing the same thing and the criteria are still relevant. I made sure to let what’s important in the face-to-face classroom guide my messages about what’s important in the online classroom, especially monitoring. I feel strongly that we should be monitoring and grouping in similar ways to the offline environment. You allow students to be in pairs and groups online for the same reasons as you do offline, and you don’t sit in breakout rooms all the time hovering over them, just as you wouldn’t stand over students in the classroom. I’m coming away from the course feeling like we’re sending a solid group of teachers out into the world.
That seems like the perfect note to end this mini-series on. Thanks very much to Stephanie for agreeing to meet me each Saturday to compare notes. It’s been fascinating learning about how everything is the same same, but different when running an online CELTA. I’ll be interested to see how teacher training continues to develop and evolve as the world settles into new patterns over the next few years, and to what extent the online CELTA model is part of that.
On Monday 6th July 2020 I started training on my first ever fully online CELTA course on Zoom. On the same day, Stephanie Wilbur also started online CELTA training for the first time, but on a different course. We’ve decided to compare our experiences. The post below covers week three. Here’s week one and week two.
Why is it a slog?
SM: Week three is often the most challenging one on any full-time CELTA course, especially one where you change groups halfway through the course. Sometimes you change groups more often but most courses I’ve worked on just change once in the middle. Everybody gets the changeover blues. You often have new language students to work with (though sometimes you’re with the same students throughout) and a new group of trainees. The trainees have to get used to you and you to them. The change in level can come as quite a shock for some trainees. They feel comfortable with the first level, in our case pre-intermediate, and working with students who expect something completely different of them can really knock their self-confidence. This is also when we’re starting to expect trainees to become more independent, and this can also knock their confidence or make them feel stressed.
Week three is when everything feels like it’s happening at the same time. Everybody has assignments to submit, and lessons to work on in more detail, and it feels like your brain is full and has no space for any more information from input. It’s like a sponge which can’t take in any more water.
For trainers, it’s also a challenging week because we have to manage the changeover and the expectations of trainees, as well as keeping students coming to the lessons. We also have to continue our preparation for input sessions, mark assignments, work with trainees on assignments which need to be resubmitted, and particularly with any trainees who are not making the expected progress. It’s always a long week. This weekend [as of Friday night] I still have to finish TP feedback from Friday and send it, mark 6 assignments and 3 assignment resubmissions, plan my input sessions for next week, or at least know which ones need more work, and prepare some tutorial documents. [Sunday update – I got everything done except the input, but finished at 23.25 to make sure I would have a full day off!]
We have TP at the end of the day. When a trainee needs more help, it takes more time to do feedback, particularly making sure that you’re highlighting the most important areas for them to work on and not overwhelming them. Thankfully I only got behind on feedback on Thursday, when I sent one lot of TP feedback at the end of the day, not the morning as I usually do.
SW: Week three was full of long days, and it’s easy to feel like you’ve hit a wall because there’s so much to get done. I was definitely feeling exhausted at certain points through the week. Our TP is in the morning, and I usually get TP feedback by the end of lunch, but had one day when I couldn’t do it until the end of the day because everything was taking longer.
There were a lot of resubmissions on our course this week, meaning trainees were feeling quite stressed. They can ask me questions by email, and often did this at very odd hours of the day and night. I spent a lot of time reassuring them and being clear about what I can and can’t tell them for their assignments, but also had to be clear that to stay healthy myself I can’t reply to them in the evenings because I need to have a break from work.
The changeover is challenging as different trainers naturally give slightly different advice. You have to develop a rapport and a feeling of trust with your new TP group, and show them what your expectations are. For example, when there are only a few students in class, my colleague has left small groups in the main room and suggested teachers switch their cameras off to monitor, whereas I’ve suggested that trainees still put students into breakout rooms. I think this better helps them to learn to monitor appropriately, know when to move in and out of the rooms, and consider when to intervene and when to close the rooms. [SM: I’ve emailed trainees to tell them we’re going to use this approach next week if we don’t have many students – Stephanie has mentioned it every week, but I hadn’t done anything about it until now. One trainee put students into a BOR when there were only three of them, and another commented that this gives the activity a clearer start and end point, which I agree with.]
How do you cope with spending so much time in front of the computer?
SM: As a manager I already spend a lot of my time in front of a computer. Obviously this increased in March, but apart from adding an occasional online lesson, it wasn’t that much of a difference for me. The online CELTA is definitely a lot of computer time, especially this week, but that’s also fairly normal for me as I’ve always typed my feedback and have all my input sessions on my computer. In some ways I think I have less eye strain because I don’t have to keep focusing on the classroom and then my computer repeatedly. I can also move around more easily if I start to get stiff. Having said that I’m getting a slight pain in my neck from turning my head to the right all the time to look at the lesson on my second screen. I also have achey eyes at the end of this week from the long days.
I try to manage the physical effects by taking regular breaks. I have a piece of software which reminds me regularly to spend one minute or 5 minutes away from the computer when I’m not in sessions. I look away from the screen and out the window to refocus my eyes. I also do stretches as often as I can, mostly on my hands and my back. I have my phone set on night mode and try to use dictation when I can (including for my parts of this post) to rest my eyes and my hands. The biggest challenge I’ve had is that my days this week have been longer than normal. I think I have had three 11-hour days, finishing late in the evening. The quality of my sleep has been affected a little though thankfully not too much. The main problem is not being able to get back to sleep if I wake up in the night because I haven’t had time to process the day before I go to bed – I find myself making mental to do lists or planning blog posts 😉
SW: In a previous career I spent a lot of time on the computer, so I’ve had experience of long periods of screen time, but this is quite different from my recent experience because I’m normally in front of people moving around a lot. CELTA is normally the most sedentary thing I do, especially sitting during observations. An online CELTA is less strenuous on my back because I can move around when I’m observing because my camera is off. I can sit, stand, move or stretch as I need to. For half of the day, I’m not stuck in a chair so in some ways it’s easier than a face-to-face CELTA.
I need a gap between concentrating on anything and sleeping, so I make sure I have a clear two hours with no work before bedtime. That helps me to relax and means that I sleep better, though I work early in the morning and at most free minutes during the day to get everything done (that’s normal for CELTA though!).
How did you manage Stage 2 tutorials?
SM: We had no inputs on Monday morning of week three. On Friday we scheduled 30-minute meetings with our trainees, and they joined our TP room when it was time to meet. I prepared all of my grades using this template, and put my comments into a separate document ready to copy and paste. The trainees filled in their ideas of their grades on Moodle before we met. As we would face-to-face, we worked through the criteria, discussing any differences between their self-assessment and my assessment. They wrote the areas they think they need to work on in the second half of the course into the chat on Zoom, while I uploaded my comments to the Moodle (so we weren’t both editing at the same time). We then discussed the comments, with specific ideas for how to work on any problem areas, and signed off on the tutorial.
SW: Our tutorials happened on Tuesday afternoon as we started TP1 slightly later than on Sandy’s course. I had 20-minute tutorials instead of one input. The second input was slightly shorter to give us time to do this. I told the trainees when to join me on Zoom. I’d already pre-written my list of grades and notes for the last page. We have everything on Google Drive, include a version of the CELTA 5 document which we can edit. Trainees download it, fill it in, then upload it again. I download it, fill my parts in then upload it again. Unfortunately we can’t both use the same document at exactly the same time because the formatting messes up in the file version we have. Normally I start with the criteria, but this time I talked about final page first, then went through the criteria with them, pasted my comments, talked about any issues they had, then uploaded the final version to Drive. When one trainee hadn’t filled in the criteria on their CELTA 5, I sent them away to do it and they came back at the end after the rest of the tutorials. On a face-to-face course, I normally do tutorials with teachers ABC one day and DEF on the next day, but doing them all on the same day was fine.
SM and SW: In the tutorials we both found that trainees all marked 5A (“arranging the physical features of the classroom appropriately for teaching and learning, bearing in mind safety regulations of the institution”) as N (not applicable), but we both believe that Zoom still has features which can be exploited, just like a physical classroom does, and there are still safety regulations (for example issues with Zoombombing). As trainers, we need to check we’re applying criteria in the same way on Zoom as we do on a face-to-face course.
What worked this week?
SM: This week I experimented with an input which was based completely around a Google Doc. I had one document with activities to work through to help trainees understand present tenses in English. The answers were in a box under each activity in white text so that the trainees could be self-sufficient. I also added some clues in white which they could use if they wanted to, and some little summaries inspired by Michael Lewis. I put trainees in pairs with one second- and one first-language English speaker in each breakout room, gave them the document link and left them to it for just over an hour. My role was to monitor progress and intervene if they were having problems. As expected, one pair managed all of the activities, some only managed two or three, and others managed about two thirds. In our brief feedback afterwards we talked about how knowing a language includes procedural and descriptive knowledge and that it was useful to work with each other to fill the gaps. It was great to hear how excited people got when they realised that they had understood something which they had originally found quite challenging. I got some positive feedback after the session as trainees enjoyed being able to work at their own speed and get and give support to each other. It took a while to prepare, even though I had materials to adapt, but I can now reuse this session every time I want to work on present tenses from now on (on a face-to-face course too).
My CPD input always involves setting up assignment 4 and talking for a bit about my career, then sharing a list of resources which trainees can explore in the rest of the session. They can also ask me questions about any area which they can’t see covered on the list. This always seems to work well as everyone can explore what they’re interested in, and I think it transferred well online.
I continued using the same feedback strategy of trainees working with a Google Doc in pairs, and realised this is useful for quotes from peers for Assignment 4 reflecting on the course. Listening to what Stephanie does though, I realise that when we come back together it’s me lecturing and summarising – quite trainer-centred!
SW: I’ve been using Padlet in feedback, with trainees making notes during the lesson. I tell them before TP what the three lesson focuses are and what their observation task is. During feedback they do a carousel in breakout rooms in pairs, so each teacher speaks to three observers and can ask questions. Looking at Padlet gives them feedback from everybody. Then we have 15-20 minutes to talk about things together. Teachers do a summary of what they’ve heard when we come back together, and I fill in any gaps. I ask any questions if there’s anything they missed, for example: What do you think about the pronunciation focus? This works well because they’re doing all the summarising.
It was interesting hearing a discussion between trainees and students this week about how weird it is having 3 consecutive lessons with 3 different teachers. We’re so used to it as trainers, sometimes we forget it could be an odd format for other people!
What challenges did you have this week?
SM: In a classroom-based CELTA, if one trainee has very high unnecessary teacher talking time, I get them to agree on an action their colleagues can do while observing to highlight that they should stop talking, for example fingers on lips or putting their hand up. This normally drastically reduces their TTT within two or three lessons. It’s harder to do this kind of thing online, though perhaps trainees could private message each other. This doesn’t work in breakout rooms though as you can only publicly message there.
At this stage on a course, trainees can get very wrapped up in their own lessons and feel like they have to do everything themselves. I think it’s important to remind them that when teaching three lessons, they should know what the other two teachers are doing, and how all three lessons might fit together for the students as one lesson, not three. Some trainees also need to be encouraged to ask for help from each other, which is good practice for working in a supportive staffroom and for sharing classes with other teachers.
Week three is when I often find myself having individual meetings with some trainees to help with real problem areas they haven’t been able to get a handle on yet, or to boost their confidence to get them through the last part of the course. This week I had three 30-minute meetings with trainees at the end of the day, and one meeting on Saturday to help people with things that I would normally do in between sessions on a face-to-face course. It’s much harder to deal with things in little bites as you go along – everything needs scheduling and organising.
To support trainees with resubmissions, I gave them one hour before input when they could schedule meetings to discuss their assignments if they wanted to. To help trainees understand how to choose activities for the Focus on the Learner assignment, I talked to them about remedial tutorials we have at our school: teachers have to choose an area for the tutorial and give the tutorial teacher an activity to do. This worked really well and I think it helped them to understand the kind of exercises it’s useful to choose. As a trainer, it’s harder to ask colleagues little questions about assignments as you go along. You end up saving up all the questions for one big meeting, again generally at the end of the day/week.
SW: Trainees can’t just grab you for quick questions between sessions. I get an email in the morning but can’t look at it until the end of the day, so rather than solving a problem in those little minutes in between, trainees are left waiting all day. Next time I do an online course, I think I’ll have office hours so trainees can make an appointment if they want to speak to me about something.
When there were low student numbers, I asked trainees to help in a speaking lesson, the same as I would in a face-to-face classroom.
An input session that works really well offline about minimal materials and which is normally interactive and fun ended up being a slide show. I was tired from marking and got sidetracked by trying to do a running dictation online and forgot about what I needed to do with the rest of the session! They still learnt about the activities, but didn’t try anywhere near as many as I would normally do with them.
What tips do you have/did you give?
SM: A couple of things I’ve told trainees:
Make sure you ‘clear all drawings’ after you use the annotate function on Zoom if you’re still sharing, as otherwise they’ll show up on the next slide. If you stop sharing, they’ll disappear.
Think about when to screen share and when not to. It’s easier to discuss things when there’s no slide on the screen, especially for students who are on a phone or tablet.
SW: You should still use breakout rooms, even if there are only one or two students in the lesson. This gives them space, in a way that just you having your camera off doesn’t do.
On Monday 6th July 2020 I started training on my first ever fully online CELTA course on Zoom. On the same day, Stephanie Wilbur also started online CELTA training for the first time, but on a different course. We’ve decided to compare our experiences. The post below covers week two. Here’s week one.
Do you feel you have bonded with the group in the way that you would on a face-to-face course?
SM: As I am working on a large course and have not done very many input sessions, I feel like I only really know my TP group. This is not that unusual for a CELTA course in my experience, as you spend so much more time with the teachers you are observing.
I observed sessions on the first two days because I didn’t have any input until Wednesday of week one. This was partly to see how online input sessions might work, but also to give me an idea of all of the trainees because I suspected this might be an issue. I have also talked to the other trainers about all of the trainees, so I feel I know a little about them. However it’s nowhere near as much as if it was face-to-face because you don’t have those little chats in between sessions.
I noticed when I was doing the first input session of the week that when I went in to break out rooms for the first group task, the teachers were having a chat about their weekend (input morning, TP afternoon). I think that the first session should perhaps include an opportunity for the trainees to chat with each other as they are missing that on this course – social time needed. ask us for extensions – CELTA is not the end of the world
On the other hand, I feel like I know my TP group better than normal because we are dealing with their everyday lives in the background. For example, we have talked about their children when we’ve seen or heard them, and discussed things you can see in their home behind them.
SW: That was one of my big surprises of the week – we ARE bonding. There’s almost more intimacy because you’re staring at each other’s faces and there’s no escape. We have TP in the morning and input in the afternoons. I normally open up breakout rooms 15 minutes before the first session. I leave my camera on so they know I’m still there but have my mike off. That was especially important this week when I was supporting trainees through the challenges of the end of week two. They can chat together, but they know whether I’m at the computer or not so are aware that I might be listening.
Week two is often exhausting and overwhelming, both for the trainees and the trainers. In one input session towards the end of the week, I gave the trainees thirty minutes to vent and to share with each other. Some of them had got to the stage where they didn’t want to have their cameras of microphones on because they were so overwhelmed. I let them talk to each other, but also encouraged them, and reminded them to wait until they’d slept to make any big decisions about what they’d do next. This point in the course is always challenging, and we were still able to help each other.
How do you stay connected to your co-trainer(s)?
SM: What I miss most is socialising with the other trainers during the course though – I’m normally ‘on holiday’ while doing the course, using the opportunity to explore a new place. My co-trainers are either in the same position, or (adopted) locals who are happy to show me around. However, there are lots of similarities to a face-to-face course. It’s the first time I’ve worked with both of my colleagues, though they’ve often worked together before. As a freelancer joining a course, I always have lots of questions. tech support + making templates, I enjoy the fact that (as in any good team) we’re able to share the different areas of knowledge. My co-trainers have done the course online before and are much more experienced CELTA trainers in general. I can bring my experience of teaching on Zoom over the last few months, and my confidence with technology.
Our trainees are all teaching pre-intermediate using the same TP points. During lessons, we can WhatsApp to discuss the lessons if we need to. This is made much easier because we’re all watching the ‘same’ lessons at the same time – we don’t need to describe the TP points to each other. We’ve also started sharing other things in WhatsApp: photos out the window, bits of information about what we’re doing in the evening, or what we did yesterday – all the things you would normally chat about.
SW: I’ve worked with my colleague on one course before, and I trained him up originally, so we know a bit about how we both work. We have one online meeting a week, and keep in touch on WhatsApp apart from that. This feels quite different to the constant communication you have on a face-to-face course, every time you’re in the trainers’ office before, after and between TPs. It also feels different outside work, as part of the experience of being a freelancer generally includes socialising with other freelancers, as Sandy described above.
What effect has being online had on your input sessions?
SM: In the first week I only had two input sessions and one video observation with a few minutes for a little input afterwards. I did two phonology sessions which I decided to completely rewrite. This obviously took a while! I based it on mistakes I had observed in the demo lessons with the pronunciation of the words ‘squirrel’ and ‘bear’. I think I will share these input sessions on the blog soon as I was very pleased with how they worked – to time, hitting all the important points, and having a noticeable effect in my trainees’ TPs. 🙂
This week I had a session on vocabulary which I had also rewritten because my views on what it is important to know about in the vocabulary session have changed in the last couple of years since I did the input my previous CELTA course. This took me 4 hours on Sunday night, creating new materials for the session, getting bogged down in materials from old versions of it, overplanning it, then boiling it down and writing the handout. Then the first two activities both took twice as long as planned, so I ended up ditching two activities anyway. I still think the trainees came away with most of what they needed as the two things that went were a revision of lesson stages and planning activities from upcoming lessons (though obviously it would have been nice to still have these).
The other input session I have done is authentic materials, and I did that largely as I would in the classroom, using the same presentation, but with breakout rooms for discussions, including a jigsaw discussion. I did this by renaming the breakout rooms (Pros 1, Pros 2, Cons 1, Cons 2 etc.), handwriting a list of names for who they needed to pair up with afterwards and then manually creating the rooms for the second round. Normally I would have a carousel of authentic materials around the room for the final stage and trainees would move from one to the next. We normally have about 30 minutes for this. This week we had 15 minutes because everything takes a little longer on Zoom. I set up a Google doc which you can see here. The trainees could find any authentic materials that they had in their homes or online, and I could give them immediate feedback because I could move from one group to the next and see everything they were writing in the document very quickly without having to decipher handwriting! I could add and highlight comments which they could deal with when they were ready, rather than interrupting the discussions. I think this worked really well, and took a lot less time to plan than the other input sessions.
I’ve been lucky to be able to take my time with my planning because it’s a large course so inputs are shared between three of us. I think it would have been a lot more exhausting on a smaller course, and I’m not sure I’d have had the luxury to change as much (though there have still been some late nights!)
SW: This week I realised that most of my input sessions were entirely paper-based. I’ve often travelled for courses so I took my folder of input sessions with me. I kept thinking of digitalising them, but never did, and now I’ve been forced to. I always had some online sessions, but mostly what I’ve been doing is turning paper versions into digital versions – it’s a lot of work to turn them into something that functions online. It can be a challenge having everything ready for the input in time.
Having said that, it’s been really interesting to try and keep activities like mingles and different grouping as part of the session. You can still make it quite interactive. Sometimes I thought of ways I could do some of these things, but they would be way more energy than they’re worth for the return on them. One thing that worked really well was in the functional language session. Normally I would cut up exponents, functions and contexts for trainees to match in a mingle, then sit with their partner. This time I gave each group one column each, and they came up with the other two. They were really engaged with this.
For me, the whole process has been great because we can get stuck as trainers doing the same session in the same way for a long time, and this becomes repetitive. This is a chance to rethink all of our sessions – we have no choice. The content is still there, but how are we going to make it into something trainees can learn from in terms of teaching techniques too?
What are the logistics of observations, especially using breakout rooms?
SM: I’m using a desktop computer with two screens, so have Zoom displayed on one and feedback on the other. When I join the room I’m the host. I make all of the other teachers co-hosts. I ask them to change their names to ‘Teacher XYZ’ and I change mine to ‘Trainer Sandy’ so we’re all grouped on the participants list.
I hand over the host role to the teacher and they make me a co-host. You lose a host role and become a normal participant when you hand it over. Because it is my room I can reclaim the host role if that is a problem but I don’t normally need to do this.
When teachers make breakout rooms for students they also divide the observers between the rooms. Only the main host can set up breakout rooms. However if you are a co-host, after you join a breakout room you can see the list of all the rooms and move between them whenever you like. Sometimes I follow the teacher to see what they see, and sometimes I stay in the rooms separately to see what problems students have with the activity and whether this is because of them or because of the teacher. By staying in one room with the breakout room list open, you can also get a feel for how long the teacher is spending in each room. We have mostly only had two or three rooms in the lessons I’ve observed.
If there haven’t been many students, I’ve suggested that we stay in the main room, but the teacher switches off their camera and microphone to give the students space to do the task alone. In feedback, we discuss what would happen if you’ve got 10 students and how this would influence the lesson, for example how feedback stages need to be different on returning from a breakout room.
During the break between each lesson, the teacher hands over the host row to the next picture. Teacher to then makes teacher one a co-host. At first I needed to remind them to do this but by the end of this week, they were doing it confidently without my intervention.
SW: I’m observing on a tablet and using my laptop to type feedback. I think the functions are more limited on a tablet, though I’m wondering if I can change that and will try again to move around the groups next week.
Trainees always put me in a BOR to see what the students are doing. I stay in the same room because of my tablet. I’ve noticed that trainees are monitoring well and coming in and out regularly to check in with students. When our class sizes are quite small, we have conversations about dealing with limited numbers of students. I suggested that teachers put students in breakout rooms as private time, but pop in and see how they do. Maybe next week I could suggest that students stay in the main room but the teacher puts themself in a breakout room to give the students space.
I didn’t specify what to do with the other trainees while teachers are first learning what to do with Zoom. It cant be overwhelming thinking about what to do with breakout rooms when you have so many people to deal with. I told teachers to put TT in capital letters after their name to help teachers see who is and isn’t a student. I think the mid-course changeover is a good time to change this, and get them to start putting observers into rooms too.
What good things have happened this week?
SM: Because everything is typed on our course, preparing stage 1 tutorials was very easy. I normally type them anyway, adapting them from my typed feedback. On this course I could make a single table with strengths and action points and copy things across from TP feedback ready to edit them. Instead of trying to make them fit into the little box in the CELTA 5 booklet when you print them out and mess about with scissors and glue, it took about 5 minutes to copy and paste all of the information across to the portfolio on Moodle.
Over the course of the week, the trainees have started to hand over control more to the students. This normally happens at this point on a CELTA course, but I still think it’s worth mentioning because of a comment from one trainee in TP prep. She said ‘But I just want to teach them!’ when we were discussing how to help students with new vocabulary without presenting each item one at a time before doing an exercise (something which I’ve never seen suggested as an approach on CELTA, but which about half of trainees do themselves despite being explicitly told not to!). This reminded me again of the long shadow that the apprenticeship of observation casts over new teachers. We talked about how there are many ways to teach and lecturing is just one of them. The TP prep group reflected on when it is they learn best, and whether this comes from having something explained to them or trying it themselves, finding solutions, making mistakes, and getting feedback. The conclusion was that the latter is better, and I started to see the effect of this towards the end of the week. I think one problem is that the teachers haven’t seen very much of other models yet, because they’re only in week 2 of the course and they probably have thousands of hours of lecturing to contend with. This is an area I want to continue to think about.
The final interesting thing from this week and the one I’m most impressed by on the part of the trainees came from a 10-minute discussion about the use of the word ‘good’ at the end of feedback on Tuesday. During TP feedback, they have been writing notes about each teacher from that day. The word ‘good’ appeared 24 times in about 450 words of comments in our Google Doc on Tuesday, including 5 times in consecutive comments for one teacher. We discussed how as feedback it’s not very useful because it’s not specific enough. We also talked about what kind of comments you would make if that was a problem and contrasted the two approaches, and also talked about the value of specific feedback for students. Their feedback has always been pretty great for the stage of the course they were at, but the next day the difference made me so excited I jumped up and down at the computer. 🙂 On Wednesday, it appeared 17 times (12 from one pair of teachers!) in about 620 words of comments from all six trainees on three lessons – it had been replaced by really valuable, insightful feedback. They had noticed so many specific things, and were able to describe them in a beautiful level of detail which I have rarely seen even at the end of a CELTA course. They also inevitably noticed things I had not seen. We discussed this change afterwards and the trainees said that because they knew that they needed to put specific examples and not just write ‘good’, they were paying much closer attention throughout the lessons.
SW: The way the trainees supported each other when one trainee was talking about quitting mid-week was amazing. The chat lit up – they were all sending her fantastically supportive messages.If that had happened in person, I’m not sure everyone would have said something to her. Everyone can join in, including the quieter people. The online element could allow for more communication between trainees in difficult situations. The bonding and the support and commiseration over where they all were and how they were all feeling on Thursday continued on Friday – they opened up and were really greeting each other at the start of Friday’s sessions.
The other great thing that happened on Thursday and Friday was the moment in the course when you see trainees break bad habits they’ve been getting feedback on, something clicks and they succeed. This is not unique to being online – it always happens at this point in the course. There was so much of that at the end of the week. Watching them gain confidence because of that, contributing more, growing and transforming as people and teachers is fantastic. It’s difficult to understand if you don’t experience or see it, and trying to persuade potential trainees of this at interview and earlier in the course can be a challenge. As a trainer, you have to keep trainees with you and encourage them not to give up, trying to convince them that the stress and struggle is normal for this point in the course. Other people have done this before, and you can do it too. And the trainee who was thinking about quitting? She taught an amazing TP on Friday. She’d got some of the stress out of her system, received an outpouring of support, and came back super strong with a great lesson.
What problems have you had this week and how have you solved them?
SM: Last week I mentioned that I was surprised at how few technical problems I had had. I spoke too soon! This week I had a power cut at the end of feedback, luckily when I was only speaking to two teachers about assignment questions and we’d pretty much finished. However I’d made a recording of the feedback session for a teacher who had to leave earlier and I thought I had lost this. Zoom recording only converts into a file when you close the room. I was very happy to find that when I restarted Zoom the next morning the recording was still there. Thank you Zoom!
I also got kicked out of Zoom randomly for two or three minutes during one TP. I didn’t miss anything important, but it made me realize that I could end up missing quite a lot. I told the trainees that if any of them noticed that I’m not in the room, they should press record straight away. Only a host or a co-host can record a meeting, and you have to have this function turned on in the settings. Luckily the meeting doesn’t end if you get kicked out and it’s your Zoom room. Somebody else is randomly allocated the host role if you are still the host. When you rejoin the meeting, you need to ask the teacher to make you a co-host again.
A couple of students have dropped out because of internet, but normally immediately come back. Some have to leave early because of work – but slightly changing numbers during TPs is normal on any course.
SW: I tell trainees to sit closer to the router if they have a connection problem. One trainee has to sit next to the router as it was on a different floor in her house. That seems to be working.
Another trainee has had technical problems and has been finding workarounds to avoid excessive teacher talk. For example, she has somebody else play the listening and/or downloads the listening so it’s not using as much bandwidth. This is reflective of the kind of real-life problems trainees will have to deal with in the classroom and online after the course, and at least now they have the support to help them resolve them.
My internet kept dropping out in one particular input session and I have no idea why. I sat by the router and it was much better. It’s the same as in the classroom – when there’s a problem, you give the trainees something to do while you try and resolve it. I was setting up an assignment, so told them to keep reading it if I dropped out again and ask me questions whenever I made it back.
What other tips do you have?
SM: Write down all of the Zoom codes that you need in a clear table on a piece of paper which you can keep next to your computer. This is invaluable when moving quickly between rooms, for example when input has finished and TP prep is about to start. The main course tutor sends out links for TP each morning to all the trainees.
I train my trainees on any course to name their files consistently. When you have a lot of computer files appearing in your inbox every day you can waste a lot of time trying to work out which generic plan belongs to which teacher. The formula I always use is TP1 Bob lesson plan, TP1 Bob materials, TP1 Bob feedback, etc. It keeps all of the files together in a logical order, and makes it easier when sending them back to the trainees. Shared screen to show them why this is useful/important to me
SW: I have all of the Zoom codes on a post-it notes. Going into the week 3 changeover, we’ll send out one email with all the links so everybody has the links in one place
Get as much done ahead of time as you can. This is particularly true of planning input, especially if you’ve previously done things in a paper-based way.
Above all, enjoy the process of thinking about and discovering new things, and rethinking old things in a new way. Don’t try to make the course exactly what it is face-to-face. Keep the integrity and standards of course, but remember that it’s a different environment. Just as you would as a freelancer moving between schools, you’re doing the course in a different place, each of which has pros and cons. You ask yourself: How does it work in this centre? When you teach somebody else’s timetable, you look how things change when they’re in a different order. So treat this in the same way: look how things change when you do them online. It really refreshes your practice. Enjoy the advantages – they do exist!
WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU LIKE US TO TALK ABOUT?
Thank you to those who commented on last week’s post here and elsewhere – I hope we’ve been able to answer your questions. Let us know what else you’d like us to discuss in the comments below.
On Monday 6th July I started training on my first ever fully online CELTA course on Zoom. On the same day, Stephanie Wilbur also started online CELTA training for the first time, but on a different course. We’ve decided to compare our experiences over the next few weeks. This is a long post as it sets the scene, but hopefully the others will be a little shorter!
What’s your previous experience with CELTA?
SM: I’ve been a CELTA tutor since August 2014. In 2014-2015 I did courses full-time around the world, and since then I’ve just done courses in the summers in between my other job as a Director of Studies. I didn’t do a course last summer as I started my MA, so my last course was in July 2018. All of the courses I’ve done have been full-time, four-week, face-to-face courses.
SW: I became a CELTA tutor in June 2015and I’ve have been working as a full-time trainer since then. I worked as a Teacher Training Manager from 2016-2017, when I did a course every month. Since then, I have been a freelance teacher trainer working on CELTAs and other training courses in the Middle East, Latin America, Central Asia, the US, and Europe. In that time, I have worked on full-time and part-time CELTA courses, but they have all been face-to-face up to now.
What’s the context?
SM: My course has 18 trainees based in a wide range of locations: the UK, Italy, Andorra, Poland, Romania, Jerusalem and Gibraltar; they’re from the UK, Ireland, China, Italy, Russia, Poland, Romania and Germany. Our students are also from many different countries: Turkey, Brazil, Chile – some living at home, and some based in the UK now. It’s one of the most international courses I’ve worked on. As I’m based in Poland and the course is run from the UK, time zones are a little confusing, and we’ve definitely had one student who’s arrived an hour early because of this! The other two trainers are based in the UK and have previously run online CELTA courses, so I’m definitely benefitting from their experience.
SW: I’m based in Slovakia and working on a course run from Gran Canaria. There are 11 trainees, all based in Gran Canaria as far as I know. They’re from Gran Canaria, Morocco, Poland, the UK, Ireland, Ukraine, and Argentina. Our students are all Spanish from different parts of Gran Canaria, mostly lawyers who are also participating in online courts sometimes have to miss some lessons. They’re mostly in their 30s and 40s. My co-trainer is in Gran Canaria.
How did you originally feel about online CELTAs?
SM: When I first heard about online CELTAs back in March, I was really worried that they would not maintain the standards of the face-to-face course. It’s hard now to put my finger on why, but I think I was worried that the technology was new to most of us as trainers, and we wouldn’t know how to train teachers to use it properly if we weren’t fully confident with it ourselves. I was concerned about how CELTA criteria designed for a physical classroom would map onto an online environment, and I also wasn’t sure how the extra layer of dealing with technology would impact on trainees who already have a lot to get their heads around. I originally felt like CELTAs run fully online should be a separate course with separate certification. As a recruiter, I was concerned that CELTA graduates from online courses would not be ready to stand in front of a classroom full of people and confidently teach them, and that as a school we would have to do a lot of extra training to get them to that point.
SW: Initially, I wasn’t completely sure about whether trainees who’d done courses online would feel fully prepared to teach in a classroom. I feel like a lot of trainers initially thought that online versions of the course wouldn’t be as high quality and we were biased against it. When we realised things weren’t going to change overnight and the world was changing, we started to open our minds more and we started to see what opportunities this situation has to offer. I’m still deciding how I feel about this, but in the near future current CELTA trainees will certainly be more trained for the environment we will probably have to teach in. There’ll be a much more blended world afterwards – we don’t know what level of safety there will be, but more people will teach, work and learn from home. However, the success of the online CELTA will depend on who the trainers are and what they’re bringing to trainees’ attention. Employers need to know what training they have to do after an online course to get teachers ready for the classroom. As trainers, we need to make it clear to trainees how it’ll be different face-to-face.
How do you feel now? Why?
SM: Over the past few months I’ve followed a lot of discussions between CELTA trainers who have been running courses online. I’ve also built up my own experience with Zoom, and learnt a lot from my colleagues at IH Bydgoszcz and other IH schools. I’ve completely changed my mind about CELTAs run fully online, and now know that they’re here to stay. They’ve offered so many people the chance to do the course who wouldn’t normally be able to.
The trainees I’ve seen this week are already better at giving and checking instructions and demonstrating activities than some trainees in week 3 of face-to-face courses I’ve worked on before. Their reflection is already deeper and more productive. They’re more aware of the students right from the start of the course: normally they’re so focussed on what they’re doing as teachers, that they forget the people in front of them. As on every course, the trainees are immediately taking what they learn from observing each other into their lessons the next day, but I feel like it’s happening across the board with the whole group, instead of just the stronger teachers doing this. These are all things I’ve seen reflected in discussions with other trainers.
There are a few possible reasons for this: not having a commute or having to get used to living somewhere new frees up time to focus on the course. Everyone being in their homes means trainees are relaxed, and therefore more able to take in what’s happening in input and feedback. When we observe lessons, our cameras and microphones are off. That means that if you need to stand up and move around, or have a snack, or have an emotional reaction to what’s happening in front of you, you can do it without fear of distracting the teacher. This makes it easier to maintain concentration when you’re observing. Trainees aren’t spending ages cutting things up, fighting with a printer or a copier, or worrying about where *that* bit of paper has disappeared to, so they’ve got more mental space to focus on what’s actually happening in the lesson and what the students are doing. Trainees are also not as aware of or distracted by the other people watching them – instead of looking for the trainer’s reaction to something they’ve just done, they just get on with it. Students might feel more confident too as only one teacher is obviously focussing on them, rather than a rather intimidating seven!
I’ve also really enjoyed the input sessions I’ve done, as I’ve been able to demonstrate various ways to use Zoom, and have also been able to incorporate technology much more easily. For example, when I asked trainees to look at a couple of websites which are useful for learning phonetic symbols, they didn’t have to find and start their laptops before they could explore the sites. Another benefit has been how easy it is to observe my colleagues. I’ve been able to watch a couple of their input sessions and they’ve watched mine, while still being able to get on with other work in the background.
SW: We know this is likely to continue for a long time. The reality might be that these trainees are more prepared for the next year of teaching than traditional teachers who are adjusting, fantastically but have old habits to break. New teachers don’t know any other way of teaching. What we’re providing them with on an online CELTA is a good thing for the future.
Technology skills are a big factor – logistical things like which link to use to go to TP (teaching practice) or input can be quite confusing. Trainees fresh out of university are generally not having a problem as they already have the technology skills and their study skills are fresh. They’re very supportive with those who are finding it harder. I emphasise that the trainees are there to support each other, as I do on every course. We have a couple of people who were unfamiliar with technology before they started and that’s been very challenging for them and us. They weren’t completely prepared for the learning curve of moving to an online environment and the pressure that adds on top of CELTA. Dealing with Google Docs, learning to use breakout rooms, understanding where to find all of the documents – we had one person drop out because of this learning curve. Some people might feel like they have to do a CELTA course because they want the qualification and now there’s time to do it. There’s pressure on them, so they dive in without being fully prepared. On the other hand, some people love all the online courses they’re able to do and get really into it. One person really enjoyed learning all of the technology that was completely new to them, and now knows how to talk about it and use it in the classroom after just one week.
Our trainees all had a 45-minute unassessed TP with feedback before they did TP1. That meant they’d had more lessons and some feedback by the time they got to TP1 – they’re further on before they got assessed for the first time. They were more insightful already at this point, and trying more challenging things. For example, some trainees were already negotiating meaning with their students in TP1. The pressure is off, and it’s not so scary by the time you get to the assessed part. I’m meant to be running my first face-to-face course since the pandemic soon, and I’d like to carry this over from the online CELTA so that they have unassessed TP before they get the pressure of assessment.
Observing lessons is much more comfortable and relaxed than in a classroom. 2.5 hours of TP always feels like a long time to sit still and observe. At home, we can move around, stand up, or stretch, and it doesn’t look awkward. I’m using my tablet to watch the lessons, with my laptop open to type everything up. Trainees aren’t watching our reactions all the time, they’re just thinking about teaching.
What are the challenges of the online CELTA and how have you dealt with them?
SM: Our course had extra sessions the week before the main course to introduce some of the functions of Zoom, particularly breakout rooms. We sent out a short tech questionnaire before the course, asking how familiar trainees were with Zoom, word processing software, presentation software, and internet functions. We also checked what kind of computer they’re accessing the course on and whether they have any recurring tech problems. This was a very useful needs analysis to help us find out who needs what tech help straight away. Trainees also had a 20-minute unassessed TP to familiarise themselves with managing the tech while teaching.
There was a big storm here yesterday and I thought I’d have a power cut, so I asked a trainee who was observing to start a recording if I dropped out of the lesson so I’d be able to watch it later. I think I’ll prepare a trainee to do that each day regardless of the weather from now on.
When trainees have had internet or other tech problems, I’ve had to decide whether their TP should be extended for a few minutes or not to compensate for this. Luckily our TP is at the end of the day, so I have the flexibility to do this.
The strangest thing for me is that I don’t feel like I know all of the trainees after a week. We had a very short getting to know you activity on day one, but then had to show them the Moodle where they’ll upload all of their documents. I can’t chat to them in breaks or just before and after input sessions as easily, so although I know the six trainees in my TP group well, I’ve only had limited interaction with the other twelve in the two input sessions I’ve done. I observed sessions run by the other trainers on the first two days so I could see the trainees in action, but haven’t interacted with them much at all.
SW: Our course had an extra day the week before when trainees had a Zoom tutorial and watched demo lessons. I taught my demo from where I was on holiday, so didn’t participate in the rest of the day, which was run by my co-trainer. That meant that I missed out on getting to know you activities, so my first input session was a challenge as it felt a bit awkward, but this was much better by the end of the week. I’ve made a real effort to pair trainees up with those from the other TP group (as I do face-to-face too) so they can all get to know each other better. At first the trainees thought I was Slovak with a really good American accent. They didn’t realise I was American until my phonology session later in the week!
One teacher had internet issues during her lesson. The video and audio were breaking up, and she was worried that if she put students into BORs, they’d disappear. She decided to keep them in the main room, but this increased her teacher talking time and reduced the student-centred activities. It’s a challenge deciding what to do in feedback in this case, as she’d clearly made a decision based on the circumstances, but that meant students got less speaking practice.
What have you learnt this week?
SM: These are the tips I’ve picked up this week.
When I was teaching on Zoom before, my students all had course books. On the CELTA course, they don’t have any materials, so they have to take a picture of the activity before they go into breakout rooms (BORs), either on their phones or by doing a screen shot.
When students are doing a reading, display the reading text on the screen and get them to take a picture of the questions. If they’re doing this task in BORs, they need the reading text in a document which one of them can share (e.g. a Google Doc link for the reading, and the questions on their phones).
When monitoring in BORs, switch off your camera and microphone to make it less intrusive. (Thanks for the tip Rebecca!) Scott Donald called this ‘ninja mode’, a term I’ve already stolen!
I’ve found I’m spontaneously interrupting trainees more to help with tech problems, for example when a reading doesn’t display or when their video is off (if the students haven’t told them). Normally I would only interrupt during TP if a trainee asked for my help. I think it’s OK to do this at the start of the course while trainees are familiarising themselves with the platform, but I’ve told them I’ll only do this in TP1 and TP2, and after that they should ask for help if they need it.
SW: I hadn’t been teaching on Zoom before, apart from one small conversation class, so I’m learning as we go as well. It can be a challenge sometimes, but it’s really beneficial learning from our trainees as well – they’re more familiar with some aspects of the tech than me. Because of lockdown, trainees know we’re probably new at the technology. This has levelled the playing field as we’re all learning from each other. You have to be open about learning along with them. I’ve found the Teaching English Online course from FutureLearn and Cambridge really useful. Here are some things I’ve realised this week:
Put all the links for rooms in one place to simplify things for trainees.
A Zoom tutorial before the course starts is essential.
Remind trainees that sometimes students should switch the camera off. This is the procedure I’m teaching them for reading lessons to students them some space.
You can move from one BOR to another directly, rather than going back to the main room each time.
How do you organise TP feedback?
SM: BORs are great for reflection on TP! I’ve adapted an idea from CELTA trainer discussions. I set up a Google Doc with a table for trainees to write strengths and action points for each teacher they saw. Above the table I display the criteria we’re working on at this point in the course, so they know what to focus on.
I did this in pairs in BORs, one teacher from that day and one observer, so there were three sets of criteria and tables in the document. I told them to start with other people’s lessons and finish with that of the teacher in the pair, i.e. if ABC taught and AD are discussing the lessons, they discuss B and C’s lessons first, then A’s. They have 15 minutes to complete the document and I look at their notes while they’re doing this but leave them in peace in the BORs.
For the other 15 minutes of our feedback, they read each other’s comments, then I talk about general strengths from all of the lessons and one specific strength and action point for each teacher. I also add any Zoom tips based on problems that day, and perhaps demonstrate one or two techniques trainees should find useful in future lessons.
Afterwards, I send them the link so that everyone has access to some written follow-up to the feedback from that day, not only the teachers.
This is different to how I’ve done feedback on face-to-face courses, when I often feel like we spend a lot of time on what problems there were because I set up more of a carousel, with each teacher getting individual feedback from each of the three observers, and having little time to reflect on the lessons they saw, instead talking about their own lesson three times.
I feel like this approach to feedback has been incredibly positive. Around 20-25 minutes of our 30-40 minutes are focussed on strengths, with only about 5 minutes on action points, and another 5 or so on how to work on the action points. Trainees are learning from and focussing on each other’s strengths, and I’ve seen them putting this into action straight away.
SW: I think it’s important to give trainees space to talk about things together without me being there. I leave them in the main room and tell them I’ll be back in 10 minutes. We also talk about the importance of trainees giving the students space, for example through activities with the video off, which creates a different dynamic. By removing yourself from the discussion by switching the video off or leaving the room, you’re not tempted to keep stepping in and solving problems. I used a Padlet I set up as their observation task. I started columns of positive points and constructive criticism for each teacher which trainees added to as the lesson went on. I could watch who was participating and what was happening, keeping trainees active in our morning TP.
What else would you like us to talk about?
Over to you: if you’ve got this far (thank you!), what questions would you like us to answer in the next three weeks?
This year’s IH Academic Managers and Trainers (AMT) conference happened in Greenwich from 9th-11th January 2020. As always, I enjoyed the conference and learnt a lot, which I’m looking forward to putting into practice as much as possible.
You can read about previous AMT conferences I’ve attended in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019 (I’ve attended them all since 2014, but forgot to write about some of them!)
Here are some of the things I’ve learnt about at this year’s conference. (As always, any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own, not those of the speakers – please correct me if needed!)
Managing performance in ELT
Maureen McGarvey asked us to draw the organisational structure and consider the organisational culture of our schools. She emphasised that without knowing the structure and culture of our school and how teachers perceive them, we can’t effectively manage performance at our schools. We need to clearly articulate the culture of our school to teachers, as you bring the culture with you from previous places you’ve worked. This can be one source of frustration for managers, and may lead us to think staff are being pig-headed, when in fact they’re butting up against the culture of the school and their perceptions of it.
She surveyed staff about how they want to be managed, using 5 questions:
What do you expect/would you like your line manager to do for you in terms of support and development across the year?
How would you like your line manager to manage your performance across the year?
What systems does your LTO (language teaching organisation) have in place for managing performance, as far as you’re aware?
Do you think the systems you identified are adequate? Any amendments or changes you’d suggest?
How would you like your line manager to deal with performance issues should they arise?
This threw up lots of interesting responses, mostly connected to personal awareness. When we talk about change and CPD as managers, we tend to present it as data. But those who changes or development are being ‘done to’ perceive it through their anxieties and fears. We need to create personal connections with staff and follow up regularly, not just check in once or twice a year. The survey showed up various variants on the idea of “regular, brief, human conversations” and “personal, face-to-face” contact, including a key focus on positives. Performance management isn’t just about managing negative performance and dealing with problems, but also about helping good teachers get better.
IH update
Every year we hear about the exciting things happening across the network. This year I was particularly interested in new IH Online Teacher Training Courses, including a new series of modules for Academic Management. If you do 5 of them, you can get the IHWO Diploma in Academic Management.
She reminded us that an interested beginner draws on every possible resource to learn, but that as we become experts in a particular area, we often stop doing this. We can also become poor listeners as we assume we already know things.
To stop being blinded by our expertise, we need to get a sense of wonder back into what we do: ‘I wonder how this works?’ We should also ask ‘What am I not asking you that I should?’ more often to keep in touch with those who are still beginners in our area, or who haven’t reached the same level of expertise that we have. This is just a taster: there are a lot more ideas in the HBR article, which I definitely recommend reading.
ELT footprint
Christopher Graham told us about the environmental impact of ELT, for example the number of students who study English in the UK every year and are therefore flying in and out of the country. Even EU-based students tend to fly, when they could potentially get the train.
He introduced us to the ELT footprint facebook group and website. There are lots of resources available to help you if you want to start reducing the environmental footprint of your school, or teach students about it. These include a charter for a greener school, advice on good practice for events and conferences and lesson plans you can use with students. They are always looking for people to share how they are greening ELT so do get in touch with them if they have ideas.
Listening skills and initial teacher training
Emma Gowing talked about how we can refocus the training of how to teach listening to make sure new teachers are really teaching listening, not just testing it. She suggested the following ideas:
Help teachers to write aims that focus on developing rather than practising listening skills.
Highlight that comprehension tasks are a diagnostic rather than a teaching tool, to help teachers find out what learners are having trouble with.
Avoid right/wrong answers in listening activities. Instead use activities that promote the negotiation of meaning.
Get trainee teachers to take notes to identify difficulties.
Show how to use the audioscript to isolate difficulties and identify whether the issue was meaning or hearing related (i.e. do they know the meaning of the word(s) but couldn’t identify it in the listening?)
Include a ‘listen again’ stage focussed on difficult parts, helping students to recognise why the listening was hard for them.
When teaching staging, reduce the importance of preparation stages (lead in/gist) in favour of more in-depth detailed/post-listening activities.
Use authentic materials, grading the task not the text, wherever possible.
She has summarised her ideas for teachers in this article for the IH Journal.
Fun at work
Lucie Cotterill’s talk was called The Fun Factor – Let’s Play Leadership. She shared ideas that they’ve used at IH Reggio Calabria to get more fun into the school, and shared the research behind why it’s important to have fun at work. It makes us more productive, improves mental wellbeing, and increases staff satisfaction.
My favourite idea was a Christmas gift they gave their staff. They created a Google form for all staff (including admin staff). Respondents had to share the first positive adjective they thought of for each staff member. One adjective was selected and sewn onto a pencil case with the teacher’s name. All of the other adjectives were put on a piece of paper inside the pencil case. Now the teachers have a reminder of how much they are valued by their colleagues, and they can see it all the time.
Better self evaluation
Manana Khvichia described how they’ve reorganised their CELTA to improve self evaluation and help their trainees to quickly become reflective practitioners. Their CELTA now only has one input session a day and much longer feedback sessions. Self evaluation forms are created personally for each teacher, with the trainer writing a series of questions during the observation. Trainees write their own thoughts first, then look at the trainer’s questions and respond to them. They can do this because they’ve seen models of the trainer’s self-evaluation after the demo lesson on the first day, analysed this together, and had a full session on how to reflect. Feedback sessions often turn into mini inputs based on what the trainees need at that point in the course.
This was the most thought-provoking session of the conference for me, and I’ve asked Manana to write about it for this blog, so watch this space!
What I’ve learnt about teaching training this year
Diana England described what they’ve done at IH Torres Vedras to make drop-in observations more effective for their teachers. She says that having regular drop-in observations makes them a positive thing, not just something that happens when there’s a problem. It also shows students that multiple people are involved in their progress, not just their teacher.
During induction week, the teachers discuss terminology related to drop-ins, and decide on their own definitions, for example of ‘rapport’, ‘classroom management’, etc. They complete a questionnaire to show their beliefs related to these areas. The drop-in observer completes the same questionnaire, with a space at the bottom for extra comments. Post-observation feedback involves comparing the responses to both versions of the questionnaire.
The questionnaire is made up of factual statements, such as ‘I can spot early finishers and ensure they are purposefully engaged’ or ‘I know and use all my students’ names’, with the responses ‘Definitely’, ‘Most of the time’, ‘Some of the time’, ‘Not enough’, ‘I need more guidance with this’. This system has evolved over time, so that now the teachers create their own questionnaires, rather than using one developed by the school.
This is definitely something I’d like to experiment with at our school.
Improving the agency and confidence of novice teachers
Marie Willoughby talked about a workshop she ran to help novice teachers adapt coursebooks to make them more engaging. It was much more teacher-centred than her workshops used to be. She designed it this way to help teachers build their confidence and realise that they are able to solve problems and ask for help, rather than relying on their own knowledge and worrying when they don’t know something. This topic was selected following interviews with the teachers, as they said they often used coursebooks to help them plan but didn’t know how to make them engaging for students.
The workshop looked like this:
Brainstorm ‘What is engagement and why is it important?’
Discuss what engagement looks like at each stage of a CAP(E) lesson and how you can evaluate this.
Teachers created a list of questions based on their own experience up to this point to help them consider engagement at each stage of the lesson. The questions showed up their current needs, and formed the basis of group discussions.
Session homework was to take a piece of material, choose two parts and evaluate whether they’re engaging, change if needed, then evaluate it afterwards. Afterwards they had to tell a colleague: I did this, it worked. OR I did this, it didn’t.
Marie said that she felt like she hadn’t taught them anything in the session, but that afterwards she got great feedback. It helped the teachers realise that they had the right to change things, and didn’t have to just use them as they were.
She contrasted classic training with agency-driven training. In class training, the outcome is pre-determined by the trainer/tasks, there is a focus on best practice, elicitation and leading questions, and a power differential in dialogue. In agency-driven training, the outcome emerges during and beyond the session, there are no right answers (open-ended tasks), a collaborative effort to explore choices and evaluate (not talking about procedures), and equality in dialogue.
By making this shift, Marie says that she has realised the power of training lies in the process, not the product, of training sessions. Returning back to Monica’s idea of being blinded by our expertise, we need to question our training routines: when are we empowering when helping and when not? Do we praise confidence, collaboration, evaluation and leave it there? Without having to give trainees the answer or find the next step: sometimes we shut down options when we help, instead of letting teachers find answers themselves. This is not to say that we shouldn’t help trainees, but rather that we should reflect on the help we give.
Sound bites
Chloe Pakeman-Schiavone told us why it’s important for us to work with different accents in the classroom. She talked about how cultural knowledge includes knowing about stereotypical accents and phrases. For example, in the UK we have stereotypical images of what a policeman, farmer, Asian corner shop owner, etc sound like. We know that in real life people don’t always sound like this, but there are a lot of reference points, for example in comedy, which rely on us being aware of these stereotypes.
We should work with a range of accents to help students gain familiarity with different models of speech. The hint that an accent might be present can impede understanding, even if the person speaking if completely clear – we put up mental blocks.
The series Death in Paradise, which is pre-watershed so contains nothing you’d need to bleep out, but has a wide range of accents
Young learner safety
Edward Evans described what they’ve done at IH BKC Moscow to put a policy in place to ensure teachers know what to do to keep young learners safe in the school, and so that the school knows what to do if there is a concern about the safety of young learners.
He reminded us of the importance of considering safety before anything bad happens, rather than only as a reaction. This is especially important in some countries where you might have issues when working with child safety: a lack of good state school policies, an aversion to procedures, training is unavailable, or where child abuse is not a ‘hot topic’. ‘Common sense’ is not a good yardstick for behaviour, as it means different things to different people. Schools need to have clear policies in place.
At Edward’s school, they drew on UK state school procedure to put policy documents in place. These are accompanied by a clear system of which offences lead to a warning, and which lead to instant dismissal. They have reporting procedures in place, along with procedures for how to handle any reports which come in. This is detailed in a two-page document which teachers need to sign when they start working at the school, and every year thereafter to remind them of the policies.
Q & A session
Along with Ian Raby, Giovanni Licata and Jenny Holden, I was part of a panel taking questions from the floor related to various aspects of training and management. I really enjoyed this, but you’d have to ask other people what we said because I (obviously!) wasn’t tweeting what happened 🙂
EdTech
Lindsay Clandfield gave an updated version of his IATEFL 2019 plenary about mythology, methodology and the language of education technology. You can watch the 2019 version of it here, which I’d recommend if you have any interest in how we talk about edtech.
He recommended the hackeducation blog, which looks fascinating.
Coaching and observations
Jonathan Ingham asked whether an incremental coaching model can improve teaching. He works at a college where he observes English teachers, but also teachers of many other subjects, like brickwork, carpentry, and media make-up.
Jonny’s school was inspired by UK state schools who have implemented this model, summarised in this blog post. Rather than 2-3 observations per year, each with a range of action points to work on, teachers are observed every one or two weeks with only a single action point to work on. Feedback is brief and on the same day where possible, with opportunities during the feedback session to practise the changes that the observer suggests. As it is much more focussed, Jonny says that teachers have responded really well: it feels less intrusive, and changes to teaching have been really noticeable. This is something I’d like to try out at our school next year.
Kieran Donaghy showed us various frameworks we can use to help students develop their visual literacy. Viewing is becoming the ‘fifth skill’ and has been added to curricula in Canada, Australia and Singapore as viewing and images have taken over from reading and the written word as the principal way we communicate.
He suggested the following resources:
Into Film’s 3 C’s (colour, camera, character) and 3 S’s (story, setting, sound) as a way of approaching videos – the link contains lots of examples of how to use them, and questions you can ask
The Center for Media Literacy’s educator resources, particularly 5 key questions and 5 core concepts
Visual Thinking Routines such as ‘see-think-wonder’ (I’ve used this routine a lot with my teens and they really like it)
He also shared work from Richard Chinn into how we can help teachers learn to work with emergent language more quickly. Working with emergent language is a skilled practice, so how can we help teachers arrive at this more quickly?
Burnout
Rachael Roberts finished off the conference by help us to recognise the warning signs of burnout. She gave us the following tips to help our teachers:
Cut down on paperwork. Is this actually helpful/useful? For example, do the agenda at the start of meetings to keep focus. Examine marking policies and whether students benefit from them.
Help your staff keep boundaries. Don’t expect teachers to reply outside school hours. Expect them to take real breaks. Be clear about your own boundaries as a manager. Only check emails when you know you can actually respond to them – otherwise you’re raising your stress hormones for no good reason!
Examine unconscious beliefs you hold about teaching. For example: ‘A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.’ Is sacrifice really the model we want to hold about teaching?
Learn to say no to people and projects, and allow our teachers to say no. This includes to things that might be enjoyable, not just things that are difficult!
Notice your feelings and attitudes towards situations. If you have a choice, choose to be positive.
Where possible, empower teachers to make decisions for themselves.
Don’t jump to conclusions about why people might be being difficult. Avoid a culture of perfectionism, and show your own vulnerability.
Explain the rationale behind what you are doing. Involve and consult staff when making decisions. Be patient with their responses/reactions.
I would highly recommend reading her Life Resourceful blog and joining her facebook group which is a very active community designed to help teachers maintain their mental health.
We are excited to share this video with you from our annual #IHConfAMT! 🤩 The community of International House DOSes and senior teachers met in London for 3 days of sessions, networking and sharing ideas. We just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody who joined us! pic.twitter.com/ST7PNLbsOX
I just wrote these guidelines for post-observation feedback to supplement an MA assignment and feel like they’re worth sharing. What would you add/remove/change?
The aims of post-observation feedback are to:
boost teachers’ confidence.
develop teachers’ ability to reflect on their own teaching.
help them build on their strengths.
identify 2-3 key areas to focus on developing and come up with concrete ideas for how to do this.
deal with any questions or concerns the teacher may have.
explain, if necessary, any areas of methodology or terminology which may be useful for teachers in examining their future practice.
Effective observation feedback is
Timely / Prompt
The closer in time the feedback is to the observation, the better, as events will be fresher in both of your minds.
Factual and non-evaluative, describing behaviour without judgment Feedback should clearly establish what, when, where, and how, and avoid commenting on why. It should address the actual lesson based on direct observation, rather than the assumptions and interpretations of the observer, or criticisms of the person (You’re not organized at all, are you?). It also avoids value judgments (The students were engaged in the activity. rather than That was a good activity.)
Specific Feedback should address specific aspects of the lesson and provide clear examples of what was observed.
Balanced Both positive and negative aspects of the lesson should be discussed, and always should always be reinforced by specific examples.
Something which can be acted upon
Action points should be based on things which the teacher can do something about, not things over which they have little or not control (e.g. Teachers can make sure late students come in quickly and quietly, but they can’t stop them from being late). Any suggestions for action points should be accompanied by discussion about how to work on these, with ideas preferably coming from the teacher rather than the observer.
A space for learning within a dialogue / Not over-directed The observer should ask relevant questions to encourage teachers to come to their own conclusions as far as possible, rather than presenting them with the observer’s conclusions (How do you think the lesson went? Why do you think the students took a long time to complete that activity? rather than I thought that lesson was too difficult for the students. They didn’t understand the activity so couldn’t complete it.) If the teacher is talking more, they have the space to formulate and articulate ideas, process thoughts and form new understandings – they are less likely to do this if they are just listening. The more the feedback comes from teacher reflecting on their lesson, the more ownership they have over it, and the more likely they are to be able to act on it. Dialogue also reduces the danger of giving advice without fully identifying the problem.
Caring and respectful The amount of feedback given should be limited to what the teacher can handle, rather than covering everything the observer would like to say. Equally, don’t be afraid to challenge the teacher to push their thinking. The teacher needs to know that we have their best interests at heart. Remember that the teacher’s nonverbal behaviour can be a clue as to how they feel about the lesson and the feedback, not just what they are saying.
Checked for clarity You need to make sure that the teacher has understood the feedback you have given, and what they need to do to work on action points. Asking teachers to summarise the feedback at the end of the meeting is an opportunity for the teacher to tell you the positives from the observation as they understand them, plus what the teacher needs to do next, and for you to clarify any confusing points.
Part of a process Emphasise that you don’t expect teachers to be able to resolve any issues you have noted instantly, and that it may take time to work on them. Request feedback on your feedback too, so that teachers see you as a learning observer and feedback giver and you demonstrate how to successfully receive feedback.
A positive experience, balancing feelings and rationality For post-observation feedback to be successful, teachers need to trust the observer and feel comfortable receiving feedback from them. They also need to feel ready to receive feedback. If they are already feeling very stressed, anxious, angry, or in any other way negative about the situation, ask them if they would like to rearrange the feedback session for a later date. If you are not sure about how to give feedback in a particular situation, discuss it (confidentially) with somebody else first if you can. Teachers have the right to have an emotional reaction to observation feedback – their feelings should not be discounted. Equally, don’t be afraid to say how things in the lesson made you feel as an observer. Emphasise strengths and improvements made, and encourage confidence and positive thinking as much as possible. Make sure the feedback meeting ends on a positive note.
References
These guidelines are adapted from the following sources, with my own ideas added:
Mann, S. and Walsh, S. (2017) Reflective Practice in English Language Teaching. London: Routledge. (page 165 and page 159-160 based on Waring 2013:104-105)
White, R. Hockley, A., van der Horst Jansen, J. and Laughner, M. S. (2008) From Teacher to Manager: Managing Language Teaching Organisations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (page 65-66 based on Porter 1982)
Wallace, S. and Gravells, J. (2005) Mentoring, 2nd edition. Exeter: Learning Matters. (pages 55, 58, 69, 70, 74).
Reflection is one of the areas of professional development which I’m most interested in, to the extent that I’ve written two books to try and help teachers and trainers to reflect when they don’t have any face-to-face support where they work. Yesterday we had a 90-minute session with ideas for helping teachers to reflect, as part of the NILE MA Trainer Development course.
Reflection doesn’t work
I’ve tried to get teachers to reflect in my sessions. I’m a bit disappointed with the results. To be honest, I’m not really sure how to get them to think. Help!
Here’s a list of questions I came up with to ask this trainer, supplemented with ideas from my partner in the group:
What techniques have you tried so far?
When did you use them?/At what point(s) in the sessions?
Are your trainees ready to reflect? (both in terms of experience of teaching and of reflection i.e. do they know how to do it?)
How do you model reflection for them?
You said you were a bit disappointed with the results. What kind of results would you like to see?
How much time do you give them for reflection activities?
How concrete or abstract is the reflection? i.e. Is it based on concrete events or abstract ideas?
How personal is it? Do they have to ‘expose’ their beliefs/their classrooms/their ideas in any way?
What kind of questions are you using? i.e. Open? Closed? Leading? Hypothetical?
What’s the balance of listening to speaking in the reflective activities?
How active is the reflection?
How consistent/patient were you with setting up reflection? Did you persevere with it?
What would you add to my list?
Reflection on short courses
We also read an article from English Teaching Professional Issue 55 March 2008 (pp57-59) called ‘Time for reflection‘ by Sue Leather and Radmila Popovic. I’m afraid you’ll need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing. It talks about “the importance of reflection on short training courses and how to structure and support it.” There are two ideas in the article which I particularly like.
The first is timetabling 30-60 minutes into the daily schedule of the course for reflection, either at the end of the day or the beginning of the next day. It should be timetabled as ‘reflection’ and not part of another session.
The other idea is including a notebook as part of the course, which will become the participant’s journal. It will be private unless they choose to share it, and could be used for free writing, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in English or not.
Has anybody tried either of these two ideas? Did they work for your trainees/context?
On 11th January 2019 I gave a 30 minute presentation at the International House Academic Managers and Trainers conference called TP Interrupted: The Role of the Trainer in CELTA Teaching Practice. I wanted to share my recent experiments with intervening in TP, clarifying what I mean by intervention; how I’ve been doing it and why. I also discussed potential problems and solutions, and gave my tips on things to consider before trying it yourself. Here’s a summary of what I said.
What
When I started asking other trainers about intervening in TP the first thing that came up was correcting trainees’ language, or information about language. That is not the focus of this talk, though it certainly is my policy that I don’t let trainees teach incorrect language; it’s not fair on students and it can have a negative impact on the following trainees.
I’ve always worked on courses where I was able to check the language analysis first to anticipate misunderstandings of the target language, so usually any inaccuracies in TP are related to incidental language that comes up. Generally, I will indicate to the trainee that something is wrong, and help them to clarify.
However, what I began experimenting with last year was intervening for different reasons, looking more at classroom management issues like positioning, instructions, pace, speed of speech, board work and even concept checking.
How
Gestures
Gestures can be a discreet way of signalling to the trainee that they need to monitor; that an activity could be done in pairs; that they should add a word to the board; reduce speed of speech; pace etc.
Stop and Intervene
Some of the others are difficult to correct with gestures alone, and this was where I started intervening a bit more, actually stopping the class and giving instructions, or asking the trainee questions. Sometimes it’s as simple as reminding them to follow their lesson plan and let students check in pairs, or encouraging them to use a CCQ [concept checking question] they’d prepared.
Here’s a clearer example from TP 2. I was observing a nervous trainee with no teaching experience. She muttered some vague instructions (to ‘have a look at the handout’) to one student at the side of the room and started to distribute handouts. I could see the students looking at each other, confused, and knew this would have a detrimental effect on the rest of the lesson. I asked her to stop, take back the handout, stand in the centre where all students could see her, show the handout and clearly indicate which activity to look at, and tell the class what to do.
Why
I haven’t found that much written about the tutor’s role in TP. The debate about whether to intervene or not gets a couple of lines in Thornbury’s CELTA course trainers’ manual [affiliate link]. He says “it can be argued thatlearning any new skill is best achieved by collaboration with a more experienced other”.
Something I feel strongly about is that CELTA is a training course and we need to be training, not just testing.
If we want to help our trainees do more, they need support. Could intervention and coaching from the side-lines be the scaffolding trainees need to achieve more?
I’m wondering if giving feedback to trainees can be equated with the feedback we give our students; consider on the spot vs delayed feedback. Could a combination be best practice?
Perhaps intervening in TP makes it more memorable – certainly the look on my trainee’s face when I told her to stop what she was doing showed that it wasn’t an experience she’d forget in a hurry. Importantly, it allows us to give information at the moment the trainee needs it, rather than after an hour or two hours, or even later on some courses. How useful is it to say to someone “two hours ago you stood slightly in the wrong place; try to avoid that next time”.
It’s the difference between show and tell – trainees can clearly see what you mean, and they can see impact on lesson, rather than everything being hypothetical.
It makes the ideas you’ve been talking about in input or feedback sessions more concrete, and you can demonstrate to trainees what you really mean, in their context. Importantly, it offers opportunities for improvement within the lesson.
Correcting my trainee on her instructions near the start of lesson led to better instructions for her next activity. She clearly remembered what I said, went back to the middle of the room, showed the handout and gave clear instructions, addressing the whole class.
But – what did she think of it? In preparation for my talk, I emailed a few trainees from the summer courses and asked for some feedback: Do you remember me intervening in your TP? Please comment on how it made you feel, and why it was/wasn’t effective.
Potential problems (and solutions)
Ambiguous gestures can be confusing and distracting; and my advice here would be agree the signals beforehand. Be aware of how much information you are trying to give, and how overloaded trainees already are. Keep it simple and make sure you reinforce it again in feedback/input etc.
Is it too prescriptive? This is a general worry of mine on the CELTA; I don’t want to impose my teaching style on new teachers. Stick to the basics, focus on classroom management and allow them to follow your instructions in their own style (within reason!)
Trainees may react badly. This is always a danger with giving any type of feedback. A large part of a trainer’s job is being intuitive to the way people react to feedback – if they are not going to react well to this approach, don’t try it.
Things to consider
Manage expectations: (of trainees and students)
If you interrupt with no warning, of course this will freak trainees out. But if they know that it’s a possibility – or even a policy – and they are prepared for it and understand the intention behind it, it will be much less alarming. As for the TP students, there may be some concern that the trainer’s intervention will cause a loss of face in front of the students, so again, it’s important that the students know the situation: that they are trainee teachers on a training course. In my experience, TP students are usually grateful for the intervention!
Personality types: Be sensitive / Ask
As with all feedback, some people take it better than others. I always say a large part of my job is managing people’s egos and giving feedback in the way that’s most acceptable to them and that they’re most receptive to. On the spot feedback is obviously no different. Use your intuition: if they’re clearly having a bad day, it might be better not to. The other option is one we use with our students: ask them how they feel about on the spot correction; if they want it or not.
Balance
Again, as with our students, you need to strike the right balance – you obviously don’t want to “correct” everything as it would be demotivating and stop the flow of the lesson.
Discuss interventions in group feedback
It’s vital that all trainees understand why you intervened – this is something that can be elicited in feedback, as well as its impact on the lesson/learners etc.
Written feedback reflects action points
If you intervene to improve a trainees positioning/monitoring/instructions etc. that should still go down as an action point in your written feedback. They need to prove they can do it successfully without intervention in later TPs.
Withdraw support as the course progresses
I intervene less and less (hopefully you find you won’t need to!) – perhaps a little again at the changeover of groups but really nothing by TP5 unless they are trying out a new technique etc.
Questions to discuss
I asked the trainers that came to my talk at the IH AMT conference to discuss two questions, and I’d encourage the same discussion here too:
What’s your experience with intervention in TP?
Do you agree with it or feel it should be avoided? Why?
I hope these discussions do continue and I’d love to hear from anyone who has experimented with this approach in TP or who has any questions about it. We’ve discussed this and similar topics on #CELTAchat which happens on Twitter on the first Monday of every month at 7pm UK time. You can find summaries of our chats on the CELTAchat blog.
Amy Blanchard was an Assistant Language Teacher on the JET programme in Japan and completed a voyage with Peace Boat before moving to Spain to work for International House. She has just taken a new job leading the CELTA programme and teaching English for Academic Purposes at a British university. She is particularly fond of whiteboard work.
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend Karin Krummenacher’s IATEFL 2018 presentation on providing differentiation on initial teacher training courses like the Cambridge CELTA or Trinity CertTESOL. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this kind of course, they generally last four weeks full-time, including workshop-style input sessions, observation of experienced teachers and peers, and (crucially) six or more hours of observed teaching and feedback from tutors. There are as many kinds of four week course as there are tutors, and no two are exactly the same as long as they meet the criteria of Cambridge or Trinity, but one thing that is extremely rare is differentiation for the trainees. Karin has kindly agreed to write up her presentation as a guest post, so we can all find out more about how this might be possible.
To differentiate and challenge our students based on their prior knowledge and current abilities is something we teach our trainees in pre- and in-service teacher training courses. At diploma level it becomes a key criterion and there is tons of literature about it. And then many of us trainers go on and make trainees with outstanding language awareness sit through over half a dozen basic grammar input sessions throughout a 4-week TEFL course in which they will learn close to nothing, most likely receive no differentiated tasks and might be asked not to reply to the next question because we already know they know. I would not be particularly impressed with a trainee handling a strong student in a lesson like this and I get more and more annoyed by us trainers doing it.
And while the reasons are obvious to a degree (that’s the course they signed up for), I don’t think they are good enough to keep doing what we’re doing the way we are doing it. Once upon a time, when the CELTA still had a different name, the groups of trainees were homogenous and what the course taught them was, in a way, revolutionary and useful. Nowadays, trainees identifying as non-native English speakers outnumber trainees that identify as native English speakers on the majority of courses. Our one “strong student” has become half the class by now and we still tell them to only answer when prompted instead of questioning our approach.
Jason Anderson has investigated at length how experienced teachers with MAs in pedagogy take 4-week initial training courses because Trinity Cert TESOL and CELTA have become a global seal of quality. The course is no longer what it used to be and the fact that very often it is still taught the way it was taught in the 1990s makes me picture John Haycraft, who first designed CELTA, rotating in his grave.
“CELTA has to change or die” said Hugh Dellar when I talked to him last year. He’s far from being the only one who’s unimpressed. Since the courses started they have been criticised (see, for example Anderson, Hobbs, Fergusson and Donno [behind ELT Journal paywall] and Borg [behind paywall]) and the voices have become louder and louder. I agree with all the criticism by experts and practitioners when it comes to short initial teacher training courses (ITTCs), but letting them die is not an option for me. It may be because I myself entered the profession that I now consider my career and vocation through an ITTC that I come from a place of great love and admiration for these courses and the educators who train people on them. I believe in the concept, I believe it works and I do not want it to vanish because I think we would miss out on some excellent teachers. Most experts suggest making the courses longer. However, as much as we would all like that, from an economic point of view, this makes little sense to course providers and is not the appeal it has to customers either.
I set out to find a way of differentiating on ITTCs. My colleagues laughed at me.
It’s too difficult, too much admin, too complex.
You’re already working 12 hour days. Do you really want to add to that?
If it could be done, it would have been done.
It may be a late effect of being the only female in a male clique when I was a teenager (strikingly similar to my work environment nowadays, by the way) but dare me and I’ll do it.
At least 13,000 candidates per year take the CELTA or Cert TESOL (based on numbers from Green 2004 and information requested from Trinity). That’s not even considering all the TEFL schools accredited by less rigorous organisations. And all Cambridge Assessment and Trinity College London tell us about these people is whether they identify as native or non-native English speakers. If you are a trainer, you will know that there is so much more to our trainees than that. One of the reasons why I, and many of my colleagues, love the job is that there is no group like any other, no trainee the same as the next. You can divide them by nationality or place of birth but there will be disappointingly few conclusions you can draw from this. In a single group of trainees, you can find so many different people with different motivations to take the course, different backgrounds and different aims. Some people take an ITTC because they want to change their lives, start a new career and plan on doing the diploma two years later. They’re in it for the long run. Others simply need to prove to their parents that the Eurotrip they paid for is not just drinking with people you met in a hostel. Many want to fund their travels before they return to their “real job” back home. Some want to lose their fear of public speaking. The ones that usually end up most disappointed are the English literature majors who want to spark the love for the English language in their students. It’s tough to love a language and make it your job to hear people butcher it 10 hours a day. Trainees have told me they wanted to build up their confidence or are just in it because their boyfriend wanted to do the course. Some see it as a challenge and aren’t planning on teaching a day in their life after the course. More than you would think are experienced teachers that want to go international.
So again, why don’t we do with our trainees what we do with our students? That is, a thorough needs analysis. The idea is to do this in two parts:
Part 1: A diagnostic test. Applicants take an online test and you feed their results into Excel. I’ve come up with a formula that will assign sessions based on performance and spit out a tailor made timetable for each trainee. Meaning the ones who answer questions on verb tenses wrong, will be assigned sessions on verb tenses. The ones who answer them right will not. All trainees will still have the same number of input sessions, just not the same ones or necessarily at the same time. Multilingual candidates will be assigned sessions on using L1 in the classroom, so they can do so deliberately and without feeling it is the wrong thing to do. Trainees that aren’t quite confident about their own proficiency will get an English for specific purposes course that really polishes their teacher language and makes them feel more confident while monolingual trainees learn a little bit of a foreign language, so they can empathise with their students. This all means we offer trainees a schedule based on their background and abilities. This is something I’m still trialling, but the diagnostic test may contain tasks such as:
Identify the verb tenses in the following sentences
Identify the parts of speech (based on a given list) in the following paragraph
Match the words with the correct phonemes
Mark the word stress in the following words
Match the sentences with the grammatical structure (e.g. conditionals, modals for obligation vs. speculation)
Part 2: Setting aims. The teaching practice tutor will agree on personal aims with their group of trainees. This means that feedback on teaching practice will be as focused and personalised as possible. The trainer and trainee assess progress in the middle and at the end of the course.
The diagnostic test can be redone as a summative test at the end of the course. Together with the achievements of their personal aims, this will then be the starting point for professional development. This is something really important that in my experience is not done at the moment or not done enough. Partially, this is down to the way ITTCs are sold. The marketing says that you are a teacher and ready to go out in the world after 4 weeks. And people take that at face value. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change and stands in contrast to the fact that these courses were never meant to provide a standalone solution to teacher training. But what we can do is equip our trainees better and make them more reflective beginner practitioners. They will benefit tremendously from having a better understanding of where they stand and what their strengths and weaknesses are. And to get our marketing teams on board, it is a unique opportunity to advertise our programmes beyond teacher training, like workshops, online courses, diplomas or in-service training.
Finding out what our trainees need is the first step. The obvious question is, how can we give it to them? Not every centre has the capacity to entirely revamp their course and I’m not saying that’s necessary, but I believe we could get a little more creative and offer more differentiated input sessions. That would mean though, that we wave goodbye to input sessions being mainly delivered face-to-face. I have thought of different ideas on how to deliver input and have come up with different puzzle pieces that can be combined as needed.
Whether trainees get tailored pre-course tasks, attend very intensive sessions on linguistic systems, such as grammar, in so called boot camps, benefit from Q and A sessions with tutors or teach each other in designated peer teaching slots, whatever works best in your context will be the right thing to start differentiating. This can be a slow addition to the course over several months and does not have to be all at once. Maybe some sessions can be added to the regular timetable, others delivered through online learning. Common needs could be addressed through video summaries. It will depend on the groups’ needs and the resources, tutors and space available. For most centres, a mix will be the right way to go.
In this way, timetables for trainees could become more varied and trainees would get more personalised content that better prepares them for the challenges they will face. It would free up timetables for more interesting content. Instead of teaching basic phonemes, these would be learned independently, and class time can be spent on how to teach phonology to students, the really interesting stuff.
Obviously, there would be some flexibility required from accreditation bodies. The Unknown Foreign Language in its current form could no longer be part of the assessment on Trinity Cert TESOL courses. And while CELTA has a very flexible syllabus, centres would benefit from being encouraged to make more use of it. At the same time, this could be an exclusive opportunity to promote more professionalism in initial teacher training and remind customers that these are in fact level 5 qualifications on the UK Qualifications and Credit Framework and therefore have an academic aspiration.
Overall, the idea is to take our trainees’ backgrounds and goals into consideration more. No matter how small we start, these initial courses need to change or die trying.
About the author
Karin Krummenacher is a freelance teacher trainer on Trinity Cert and Dip TESOL courses, researcher and international conference speaker. She holds Cambridge Delta and is currently working towards an M.Ed. TESOL, researching the role of ITTCs and their implications for professionalism in the industry. This article is based on her IATEFL talk from April 2018 for which Jason Anderson, Hugh Dellar and Ben Beaumont were invaluable sounding boards. She has recently started blogging at thekarincluster.wordpress.com. Give Karin a shout at karin.krummenacher@gmail.com or on Twitter @thekarincluster.
This is a summary of the #CELTAchat which took place on Twitter on 5th June 2017. #CELTAchat happens once a month, and is a chance for trainers to discuss issues connected to running the course. Summaries of previous chats can be found on the CELTAchat blog.
This chat was based on observation tasks, allowing us to share ideas to help us make the most of these tasks. You can work your way through a full Storify of the chat, or read my summary below.
Amy Blanchard suggested the topic, having seen this tweet from Angelos Bollas:
Observation task focused on learner errors also helps trainees develop their language analysis skills #CELTAchat#IATEFL2017
Observation tasks are given to trainees to complete while they are watching colleagues teach, mostly fellow CELTA trainees in the examples shared during the chat.
Teaching practice and the associated observations are a key part of the CELTA course. Using tasks to focus observation can benefit trainees. The process of observation also helps trainees to get to know the students more quickly, hopefully making it less daunting when they come to teach them.
Examples of tasks
Lots of possible tasks were shared, some overlapping with others. In no particular order:
Give two or three CELTA criteria to each trainee to observe for, though Giovanni Licata suggested that this is more useful in the second half of the course.
Diagrams of seating plans for trainees to annotate. Useful for observing T-SS and SS-SS relations and highlighting TTT v STT problems in an objective way. It’s learner-focussed and can show who is engaged and participating (or not!)
T-S interaction with seating plan. Looks at eye contact and who speaks, plus where T moves in room.
A task focused on recommended staging/features of a skills or systems lesson. For example, it’s good for the trainees to focus on whether there was a purpose for reading or was meaning clarified in systems lessons.
Tasks that address lesson frameworks are useful: reading/listening, grammar, vocab along with the seating plan.
Get trainees to list stages and what teachers/students are doing when. If they can’t identify the stages, it may mean the teacher wasn’t clear about what they wanted to do!
One that works for ALL lessons: make notes on what one student is doing during the lesson in relation to a given task.
Observation of SS’ progression throughout lesson important, e.g coherence between tasks and learning thread.
How trainees handle unexpected events in the lesson, e.g. dealing with language issues or responding to learner questions.
At the IH AMT conference 2017, Danny Norrington-Davis talked about the task of trainees listening to learner output and practising correcting /upgrading language. This encourages them to practise responding to learner needs.
A focus on specific points in the lesson, e.g. delivering instructions, or TTT vs STT:
Trainee-generated tasks, though in the example below Giovanni believes that it is good for observation tasks to move the attention away from teacher’s action points sometimes:
Trainees to observe whilst thinking about their own action points,not those of the person teaching.
Depending on local laws and trainee/student wishes, you could also encourage trainees to record themselves or their colleagues, or take photos, e.g. of the whiteboard or classroom set-up.
Use teaching logs, by drawing a timeline and following the stages/timing:
Here is an example of a LOG from a Listening lesson. The task is to observe what learners are doing with lesson plan stages. #CELTAchatpic.twitter.com/MGC3WcKz2p
As you progress through the course, try to make observation tasks relevant to the areas trainees most need to improve in. This can be tricky at the start, when you don’t know as much about their needs. You can also directly link observation tasks to input sessions (note to self: maybe each input session could end with a possible observation task?)
How do we address potentially waning motivation amongst trainees to observe and feedback? They have to observe a lot.
Using a variety of targeted observation tasks can help here.
It’s important to emphasise the fact that opportunities to observe colleagues when working full-time can be minimal.
Get them observing trainees in other TP groups to mix things up a bit.
You could do an observation without a written task, like the graphs or cartoons above.
Refer to observation tasks in your feedback, and encourage them to refer to them in peer feedback. This helps trainees to see connections between what they’ve observed and tutor and peer feedback.
Some trainers encourage trainees to copy peer observation notes for their colleagues. It can be useful for the reflective assignment.
My two cents
Since I only managed to join at the end, I thought it would be a good idea to write the summary and catch up on what I missed. In the process, it’s occurred to me that I’m not brilliant at setting observation tasks consistently, or on following up on them in feedback. My next CELTA course starts on Monday 10th July, so I think I’ll make this a focus to help me improve my training, having worked on making my feedback clearer in the last few courses. I’m looking forward to taking part in more #CELTAchats in the future!
Today I had the pleasure of attending the annual International House Torun Teacher Training Day, which consisted of pizza, twenty small workshops divided into four slots of five sessions each, a break with more pizza and some yummy Torun gingerbread, a walk to a local hotel, a plenary with Adrian Underhill, and a Q&A session with various experts, of which I am now apparently one 😉
Here are some of the things I learnt:
Growth mindset should be influencing the feedback I give students and trainees, by focussing on effort and process/strategy, rather than natural talent and results. James Egerton gave us examples like ‘You concentrated hard on my last comments, so well done.’
‘Yet‘ is really important in feedback, as it implies that something is achievable. Consider: ‘You haven’t learnt much Russian.’ and ‘You haven’t learnt much Russian yet.’ It turns out that even Sesame Street know the power of ‘yet’!
The reason the sentences ‘They just don’t have a language learning brain.’ and ‘You must be really good at learning languages.’ annoy me so much is probably because they imply a fixed mindset, whereas even before I had a term for it, I always believed that anyone can do anything with some degree of success if they have the motivation and put in the time.
I think it could be a very good idea to have a CELTA input session on mindsets very early in the course. I wonder what influence that would have on trainees’ ability to accept feedback?
It doesn’t matter how many times I see Kylie Malinowska do the elephant story, it’s still enjoyable, and I still can’t keep up! I discovered that it comes from Drama with Children [affiliate link] by Sarah Phillips.
There are at least 15 things you can do after doing a dictation when students have put the paper on their heads to draw the picture you describe. Before today I only ever got them to describe it to each other. Though the only one I can remember without asking Kylie for the slide is battleships!
Using MadLibs with children is actually incredibly useful, as it encourages them to solve problems and notice when language doesn’t fit, but also appeals to their love of the ridiculous. I’d always thought they were a bit pointless before!
You can bring language from a student’s family and friends into lessons through things like doing surveys, doing project work, writing biographies, sharing photographs or doing show and tell. Dave Cleary explained that even if students do these in L1 at home, they’ll bring them to class in L2, and they’ll have a real reason to use the language.
A great activity for playing with language is to take a photo of a famous person the students know, and get them to finish sentences like ‘He’d look really great/silly with…[earrings, a long ponytail, etc.]
Telling students the story behind an idiom, whether real or made up, can help them to remember the correct wording, and maybe also the context where you’re most likely to use it, according to Chris McKie.
There is a Hungarian idiom meaning something like ‘Let’s see what happens’ which translates as ‘The monkey will now jump in the water’.
Adrian Underhill may have been talking about the pronunciation chart for a long time, but he still considers it to be outside the mainstream of ELT.
He’s incredibly passionate about it, and it’s very entertaining and engaging to be taught to understand the chart by him. I knew bits and pieces about how it fit together and how to teach it before, but I now understand it in a lot more depth.
All pronunciation can be boiled down to four core muscle ‘buttons’: lips (spread and back or rounded and forward), tongue (forward or back), jaw (up or down) and voice (on or off). This helped me to understand how I produce some sounds in English in more depth, and even one in French that I managed to learn but had never been consciously aware of how to produce!
If he was a cheese, Adrian would be some form of blue cheese – he went into a lot more depth about this, and I’m glad I didn’t have to answer that question!
Thanks to Glenn Standish and the IH Torun team for organising such an enjoyable day. Lots of ideas to think about, as always!
Having written a post about my first year as a full-time DoS a few days ago, it occurred to me that this time two years ago I was training up as a CELTA tutor, and that it would be interesting to write a similar post about that journey. Then I realised I’d kind of already done that by reflecting on a year of CELTA 🙂 It turns out I’d already mentioned a few things that being a CELTA tutor has taught me, but here are some that I missed:
The mix of personalities in a TP group (the group of up to 6 teachers who observe each other and work together in teaching practice – real lessons) can make a real difference to how you need to work with them, and tutors need to learn to read this, as well as how to support the individuals and encourage them to work together as a group.
A lot of trees are sacrificed during a CELTA course, and many of these end up in trainees’ folders, which are often a good three or four inches (7-10cm!) thick by the end of the course. Input session notes should therefore be as concise and easy to navigate as possible, and trainees should be encouraged (or sometimes told how!) to file them in a logical order. Sometimes it’s amazing to see how challenging organising a set of handouts can be for some people!
There may be a lot of right ways to do things as a teacher, but the amount of information overload on a CELTA course means that for some trainees it’s often better to give them only one option, walk them through it step-by-step, and let them see the results, before offering them other options later if they have the mental processing space with everything else they’re being asked to take in. Otherwise it can get too overwhelming. Simplify.
Whenever possible, showing concrete examples of things you’re suggesting is much easier for trainees to take in than abstract talk. This particularly seems to apply to requesting a more detailed lesson plan: showing trainees what to aim for tends to result in much more solid planning, and in turn, much more confidently delivered and useful lessons.
The CELTA is as much of a learning experience for the tutors as it is for the trainees. Through reflection and experience, we can become better tutors, but we also learn a lot from our trainees, who bring so much life experience to courses. For example, on the course I’ve just finished I learnt about daily life in South Africa, something I knew very little about before.
I’ve only done two courses over the last year, one part-time in Warsaw and one full-time in Milan.
View from the Duomo terraces, Milan
I’ve also worked with a lot of teachers who are either fresh off CELTA or in their second year after the course, including doing formal observations. This has really shown the importance of the caveat (which should appear) on CELTA certificates that the candidate can ‘teach with support’. Although it seems to be forgotten sometimes, CELTA is an initial training course, and those who are newly-qualified continue to need support and development, particularly for the first year or two of their careers when they are building on what they have learnt. I’m lucky to work at a school which gives me the time and space to be able to really support our teachers in this way. An interviewer expressed surprise that one of our teachers only got a CELTA Pass when asking me for a reference for her, because she was so confident after her two years with us that the interviewer thought she must have got at least a Pass B, if not an A 🙂
The combination of these factors, plus having a bit more time to ‘play’ when preparing sessions, and often having 45- or 60-minute input sessions instead of the more standard 75 also meant that for the course in Milan I tried to make my input sessions more streamlined (as well as working on my feedback) and my handouts more useful both during and after the course. I always email them to trainees as well as giving them a paper copy, as I know that a huge binder is not normally a priority in your luggage if you’re moving around from place to place! I’m hoping to share more about how I design my input sessions in a future post.
In the meantime, here’s to another few years of learning and training 🙂
As both a CELTA trainer and a Director of Studies, a key part of my job is giving feedback to teachers after observations. I was prompted to write this post after listening to Jo Gakonga, a fellow CELTA trainer, talk about feedback on the TEFLology podcast, and looking at her new teacher feedback site. One of the things she said was that after our initial training as managers or tutors, we are normally left to our own devices with feedback, something which I’ve often wondered about. It’s useful to reflect on how we’re giving feedback, and I’d really like to develop this area of my practice more. Here’s a bit about where I am now…
I’ve just finished working on a CELTA at International House Milan, where I had two main development goals for myself as a tutor. I tried to revamp many of my input sessions to make them more practical and to make the handouts more useful and less overwhelming, and I also worked to improve both my written and oral feedback, again to be more practical and less overwhelming.
I have previously been told that sometimes my feedback can come across as negative, and that it’s not always clear whether a lesson has been successful or not. I also catch myself taking over feedback sometimes, and not allowing trainees the time or space for their own reflection or to give each other feedback. Timing can be a problem too. On the CELTA course, you can’t really afford to spend more than 15 minutes on oral feedback for each trainee, as there are other things which need to be fitted in to the day. The positive response I got from trainees at the end of the Milan course in response to changes I’ve made means I think (hope!) I’m heading in the right direction.
We had 45-60 minutes for feedback after each TP (teaching practice). By the end of the course, we were breaking it down into 15-20 minutes of peer feedback, with trainees working in pairs for five minutes at a time to give individual feedback to each of the three teachers from that day’s TP, with the person who taught reflecting on their lesson first. I then summarised the feedback and added my own for another 10-15 minutes, and answered any questions they had about the lessons. This was based on three positives and three areas to work on for each trainee, and I tried to make sure that they were given equal weight. The last section of the feedback involved taking an area I felt the trainees needed to work on and doing some mini input, either demonstrating something like how to give instructions to pre-intermediate students or drawing their attention to the good work of their fellow trainees, for example by analysing a successful lesson plan to show what they might be aiming for themselves. Where possible, I also referred back to handouts from input sessions to strengthen the link between input and TP. This seemed to work, and is a structure I’d like to use again.
Other feedback activities I’ve used successfully are:
a ‘kiss’ and a ‘kick’ (thanks for teaching me this Olga!): trainees share one positive thing from the lesson, and one thing the teacher should work on. This is done as a whole group, and everybody should share different things. The person who taught should speak first.
board-based feedback: divide the board into +/- sections for each trainee. The group should fill the board with as many things as they noticed from the lessons as possible, which then form the basis for discussion. The teacher can’t write on their own section.
Another thing I’ve been trying to do is make the links between the skill of teaching and that of learning a foreign language as explicit as possible. Reflection on teaching should be balanced between positives and negatives, in the same way that you wouldn’t let a student continue to think that they are the best/worst student ever. During input sessions, I highlighted things that trainees could steal and take into their own lessons, like how to set up particular activities, and also made clear what areas of my own teaching I’m working on, such as giving instructions, and when they were and weren’t successful, to exemplify the nature of being a reflective teacher. Although it’s often quite natural, trainees also shouldn’t beat themselves up for not taking previous feedback or new information from input sessions on board instantly, just like it’s not possible for students to use the present perfect without any problems as soon as they’ve learnt it. One mantra during our feedback sessions was that CELTA tutors are looking for ‘progress, not perfection’.
If you’re a trainer or manager, do you have any other feedback techniques you can share? And as someone who’s being observed, what do you want the observer to do/say in feedback?
So I want you to tell me what you think went well, what you think didn’t go so well and what you would do differently next time…
Sound familiar? If you’re a teacher trainer, academic manager or even just a teacher who has been through a training course, then the above is probably burned into your brain and has become a mantra. In initial teacher training, at least in my experience, these three points form the start of the post-lesson discussion. And the reason? Reflection.
Most teachers, I hope, would agree that reflection is a useful, maybe even vital, tool for professional development as it helps us dig into what we truly believe in order to then subject it to scrutiny, with the final goal being improved practice. The question I ask myself, though, is would someone on an initial training course (CELTA/CertTESOL) see things the same way? Do they see it as a route to professional competence or merely another hoop to jump through to satisfy the tutor on the other side of the table? Are the reflections that follow the prompts a genuine attempt to understand what just happened to them in the previous 45 minutes? Or strategic responses to tell the tutor what they want to hear? Or even in some cases an attempt to rescue a failing grade by showing real awareness of their class? Only one person in the room truly knows the answer to that question, but, again, from my experience I’ve had reason to believe that required reflection in such stressful circumstances doesn’t always lead to genuine reflection and may in fact be counter-productive.
I struggled with this dilemma for a long time. I came to the conclusion that forced reflection will always be unreliable, so can you engage the trainees in genuine reflection during teaching practice?
The answer…? you can’t. At least, not all of them. Genuine reflection has to come from a place of genuine desire for development and if we’re honest, we have to admit to ourselves that that’s not where the majority of our future teachers are coming from.
In the end, the solution was a simple one: to teach the trainees the benefits of reflection for future development and more importantly how to go about it. This way if they are truly invested in their future development, the tutor can allow the time and space for reflection in feedback. However, for those not interested in future development and more concerned with the certificate they need to secure their visa to work abroad, there’s no need to make them squirm or to elicit the same strategic responses that waste the tutor’s time, their time and the time of their co-trainees.
In response, I’ve created a series of activities designed to lead the trainees through the reflective process and to provide a framework to guide reflection for those interested. This was incorporated into an input session during week 1 of a four-week course.
Stage 1 – Identifying reflection as a rigorous mental process
The session starts with a look at the stages of a reflective process and trainees organise them into what they feel is a logical order. The aim is to lead trainees away from the notion that reflection is simply looking back and highlight the importance of seeking to name the issue and, more importantly, to devise hypotheses for future action. As a kinaesthetic problem-solving activity it tends to generate a lot of discussion too.
I use this process taken from Rodgers (2002:851) which is a summary of John Dewey. However, the exact process isn’t so important. What’s more important is that there is a framework to guide the trainees.
An experience is required to trigger some sort of reflective thought.
The teacher seeks to interpret the experience.
The teacher seeks to name the problem.
The teacher seeks explanations for the problem and general questions are created.
A concrete hypothesis is developed.
The hypothesis is tested.
Stage 2 – Reframing classroom events
In this stage trainees consider typical classroom “problems” and seek to find potential reasons, encouraging them to think deeper than their initial knee-jerk reactions in the classroom. Once they’ve made a list of reasons they spend some time in groups discussing possible ways of addressing each of them in the classroom, which helps to encourage the hypothesis forming described in the stage 1.
Stage 3 – Categorising reflection
In this stage I get trainees to look at real reflections taken from recorded feedback meetings (these could also be written by the trainer) to highlight the different angles we can reflect from. They spend some time reading them and then categorise them according to what the teacher is talking about. For this I use four categories inspired by Zeichner and Liston (1985).
Reflection which simply recounts the events of the lesson with no real analysis of them.
Reflection which focuses on what worked and didn’t work and how they could address it.
Reflection which focuses on why the teachers chose to do certain things in the lesson and what they hoped to achieve.
Reflection which moves beyond the lesson and questions larger curricular issues.
There is typically a lot of grey areas here, which is good to generate discussion, and leads to the creation of questions to ask themselves to elicit each type of reflection. This has been identified by the trainees as a very important stage.
Stage 4 – Analysing beliefs about teaching
Using the reflections from the previous stage, trainees discuss what the teacher’s beliefs about teaching may be and then compare them to their own beliefs and discuss how aligned they are with how they think languages are learned. This stage should bring the reflective process to a logical conclusion and encourage more critical reflection.
Results
Since introducing this session on the course, feedback has changed. It no longer starts with the holy trinity of feedback questions from earlier, but instead begins with something much simpler: “How do you feel about the lesson today?” Those invested in their own development reflect; not always in useful ways, but as with any skill it takes practice. Those interested in their grade often respond with “How do you feel about it?” or more commonly “Did I pass?” and that’s ok.
References
Rodgers, C. (2002) ‘Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking’ The Teachers College Record Vol. 104, no. 4, pp. 842-866.
Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. (1985) ‘Varieties of discourse in supervisory conferences’ Teaching and Teacher Education Vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 155-174
About the author
Dan Baines has been teaching English since 2004 and been involved in some form of teacher development since finishing his DELTA in 2008. He currently works for the British Council in Prague and as a freelance Trinity CertTESOL and DipTESOL tutor.
As a CELTA trainer and Director of Studies, I’m particularly interested in sessions connected to training new teachers. Here is a summary of some of the talks connected to teacher training, CELTA and continuous professional development from this year’s IATEFL Birmingham conference.
Images for teaching: a tool for reflective teacher learning (Matilda Wong)
Matilda teaches on an undergraduate pre-service course for secondary school teachers at the University of Macao. Students do a four-year B.Ed. programme. In their fourth year, they do two one-month practicums in a local secondary school, the same school each time. Matilda works with 8-10 students from each cohort, and tries to teach them how to better at reflecting on their teaching.
When she first started doing this, Matilda used written journals for reflection, but she felt they weren’t doing what they were supposed to. Instead, they were putting added pressure onto her trainees, and some of them were just completing it because they had to instead of really thinking about their teaching. It can lead to burnout.
While Matilda was doing her PhD, she was given paper and coloured pencils, and had to draw a picture of her ideal classroom. The teacher she drew had no mouth, and it wasn’t until analysing the picture afterwards that she realised the teacher had no mouth. The underlying thought here was that she had no voice, and she hoped that one day she would be able to draw a mouth onto her face. That was in 1999, and she still had tears in her eyes talking to us about it last week. It was a very powerful experience for her.
This led her to experiment with drawing pictures rather than writing, as it can be less tiring, and can be combined with written reflection later. It can also highlight beliefs which are difficult to articulate. Matilda asked nine students to work with her on this experiment, none of whom knew anything about reflection before working on her module.
Who am I as a teacher?
What do I want to achieve?
What does it mean to my job?
Before their first practicum, Matilda asked her trainees to write a language learning biography, describe their worries before going into the classroom, and draw a picture of their ideal classroom, then answer some simple questions.
What level are you teaching?
How many students are in your class?
What is the lesson about?
Write as much detail as you can to describe what you are doing (e.g. What re you saying? What materials are you using? With whom are you talking? What are you thinking?)
After they finished the second practicum, she asked them to evaluate their original image of an ideal class and compare it to their experience. They reflected on what was the same and what was inconsistent, and also on what they felt they had learnt from this type of reflection.
Matilda showed us lots of examples, but only one was drawn in colour. What do you notice about this student teacher’s image, bearing in mind that they come from Macao, a Cantonese-Portuguese city?
We spotted that it was odd that the teacher was blonde, since in real life, she was Cantonese. Matilda hadn’t noticed until we pointed it out in the session. It was another way of reinforcing the lack of confidence that some bilinguals have in their teaching ability. This is just one of the subconscious beliefs that was expressed through drawing, but probably wouldn’t have been through writing. Three of the teachers had smiley faces in their images, showing that they think it’s important for a teacher to be friendly. One forgot to put a teacher in the image at all, and didn’t realise until it was pointed out! For me, it was also interesting to see that most teachers were at the front of the room, and only one was in among the students.
These are Matilda’s conclusions after the study, and she would like to experiment more with it. I think it would be interesting to get them to draw another picture between and after their practicums and get them to analyse all three of them. I also think it would be interesting for them to analyse each other’s images, or those of previous participants to draw conclusions about stereotypes about teaching (like that the teacher should be front and central).
This session was one of the surprises of the conference for me, and it was a real shame there were only 10 people in the audience. I’ve asked Matilda to write a guest post on it for me, and hopefully she’ll say yes!
Training or grading? TP and the art of written feedback (Bill Harris)
I met Bill at last year’s conference and enjoyed chatting to him about his experience of working on CELTA courses around the world. I also responded to one of the surveys which formed the basis of this talk, so I was looking forward to seeing the results. 109 trainers and 90 course graduates responded to his surveys.
Because Bill has worked in so many centres, he has worked with a wide range of formats for written feedback. He often adds ‘cold’ feedback to post-lesson reflection, so trainees write ‘hot’ feedback immediately after the lesson, get their spoken feedback, then write another reflection summarising the two.
Why do written feedback?
Detailed written feedback helps the trainer process their feedback (often more for the trainer than for the trainee!)
In his survey, Bill was mainly contrasting handwritten and typed feedback.
Tutors said that 45% of them handwrote, 43% typed, and the rest said it depends on the situation. 28% of trainees said they got typed feedback, 40% said it depended on the tutor, and the rest was handwritten. [I normally type on CELTA because I have my laptop with me, but handwrite in school observations because I don’t!]
Bill separated the advantages and disadvantages into those for tutors and those for trainees but I can’t remember which were which so have combined them!
Advantages of handwriting
Used to doing it (for some!)
More personal/authentic
Seems more detailed
Penmanship can seem important
Seems to show more care and effort from the tutor
Able to add cartoons/diagrams etc
Break from looking at a screen
Can easily use different colours
Can use lots of different signposts easily to help trainees process the feedback: ticks, smileys, ?, TIP:
Disadvantages of handwriting
Can be harder to read!
Advantages of typing
Neater
Looks more professional
Easier to read
Can watch the lesson more (if you’re quick!)
Faster (if you touch type)
Easier to edit
Can copy and paste previous actions points easily
Easier to share with other tutors
Can email to trainees
You have a backup if it gets lost
Most trainees said they’d prefer typed feedback (mostly due to legibility!)
Disadvantages of typing
Can be noisy/distracting [I was once told that when I got excited I typed more quickly/loudly and they wondered what they’d done!]
Can take time/be difficult to print out
May seem formulaic/impersonal
Tutors may write too much
Can get distracted by other things on the computer [though in the face of a 40-minute grammar lecture, this may not always be a bad thing ;)]
What should be in written feedback?
Trainees said that they appreciated practical suggestions for how to improve, with clear action points. They also wanted recognition of what they were good at, and a positive spin on things when possible. One non-native speaker wanted more feedback on language [and some natives do too, especially if they are not confident with grammar].
Written v. oral feedback
Trainers said that written feedback could be digested more slowly away from the pressures of the group, and focussed much more on the individual. This was contrasted with oral feedback, which was for the group as a whole. Written feedback acted as a useful prompt when giving oral feedback.
Trainees said that both written and oral feedback was useful. Written feedback was more permanent, and they could refer back to it with time and less stress. They appreciated the interactive discussion aspect of oral feedback, but found it hard to remember all of the details. One problem was that sometimes there were differences between what was said in oral feedback and what was written. Some felt that their peers were over-positive or too harsh in oral feedback, and were not qualified to give feedback. One audience member suggested recording oral feedback too, partly for accountability and transparency.
Conversion
Up until recently, Bill had always written his feedback by hand, but he is a recent convert to typing. Then he worked at a centre where he took over part-way through a course and had to shadow the other trainer’s feedback style. Luckily they had a colour printer, and this was the result:
Tutor-trainee team-teaching: a hands-on tool for teacher training (Emma Meade-Flynn)
Emma reported on some research she has been doing into how to make use of unassessed slots during CELTA, Delta and other short courses. In a survey of tutors, she found that 60% sometimes used it for a demo lesson, 70% used it for practice with no tutor present, some for getting to know you activities with students, and some for practice with a tutor present. About 35% of her respondents were already doing some form of team-teaching in these slots.
Team-teaching: planning, delivering and reflecting on a lesson together.
Emma found that her students were very receptive to team teaching, and when asked, they always requested it. In demo lessons, they couldn’t see the students’ faces and often felt left out. Because they weren’t part of the planning process, they didn’t always understand what was happening.
Emma decided to incorporate the trainees into the unassessed lessons by giving them roles, such as collecting and correcting errors, setting up activities and monitoring. They were also used as the source material, for example in live listening activities, meaning the students go to know them better. Trainees decided what they wanted to focus on, and it was almost always collecting and correcting errors, so she does a lot more of that now. She negotiates with them about where they want her help: with planning? With choosing materials? With presenting?
Benefits
Trainees were much better able to reflect on the learners’ abilities if they had been involved in the lesson in some way.
It taught trainees how to adapt lessons to finish them on time, partly through doing some improvisation in lessons: they would only plan the first half, and base the second on what came up.
They could deal with more difficult language areas which would be challenging for the trainees to work on without support.
Trainees saw lots of techniques in action, which they were then able to incorporate in their own lessons.
They were much more aware of student language, and used the pro-formas Emma corrected to help them focus on particular areas.
This lead them to teaching and helping each other more within the group, without always relying on the tutor.
Emma could explain the rationale of activities more clearly before the lesson, and evaluate them more easily afterwards.
It can be tailored to the trainees’ emergent developmental needs.
You can help trainees to notice things on-line during the lesson.
Learners can offer feedback, and they generally don’t worry about having lots of different teachers when they can see they are working together.
A word of caution
Emma said it’s important to decide the boundaries of the team-teaching with trainees before you start. Will you intervene? How will you handle transitions? Be aware that it won’t suit some trainees. Careless (2006) says there must be pedagogical reasons to team teach, it must be logistically possible and it must be interpersonal, with everyone cooperating equally. Make sure you identify a clear developmental objective, and don’t just do it for the sake of it.
You can find Emma’s slides here, including videos of two Delta trainees talking about their experiences of being part of team-teaching. Her blog is Teacher Development Lab.
Three speakers spoke about teacher reflection on pre-service and in-service training courses:
Daniel Baines on why feedback on 120-hour initial training courses may need rethinking, and how to integrate reflection training in the first week of the course. Hopefully Daniel will be writing a guest post on the blog about this: watch this space!
Mike Chick on dialogic interaction and the mediation of pre-service teaching learning.
Teti Dragas (one of my CELTA tutors 🙂 ) on how in-house video training materials may help ‘reflective’ teacher development and help trainees to learn how to reflect more effectively, and on how to encourage them to watch more of the videos of their collaborative lessons with more focus.
Should reflection be assessed? That’s the one key question which comes out of this interview, but I have to say a lot of the rest of the interview feels a bit wishy-washy to me. I agree that experiential learning is better than focussing on theory, and I think that what Jim is suggesting might work on a day-to-day basis for your own classroom through action research, but I’m not sure how it will work on a pre-service or further development course (like CELTA or Delta). Here are a couple of Twitter quotes from his talk:
CELTA despite issues ‘at least gets people teaching before being overwhelmed by information about teaching and learning’ @jimscriv#iatefl
Interview with Tessa Woodward about the 30-year history of the Teacher Trainer Journal, talking about how it has developed and grown over this period.
Tweets from other teacher training/CPD-related talks
These were talks I attended vicariously through other tweeters. I found these snippets of information interesting. Maybe you will too 🙂
Unfortunately nobody seemed to be tweeting from Pam Kaur Gibbon’s talk on the impact of technology on CELTA courses. I spoke to her as part of the her research and would have been interested to see the results, as I’ve written about it previously.
Katherine Solomon from @Bell_English observed 4 lessons and counted 428 teacher qs, only 48 student qs! #iatefl2016
A couple of days after the conference, Hugh Dellar wrote a post called CELTA, the native-speaker bias and possible paths forwardquestioning the future of the CELTA. It generated a lot of discussion in the comments and Anthony Gaughan responded on his blog: A critique of Hugh Dellar on CELTA. You might like to join in with the discussion on one of their blogs. It certainly makes for thought-provoking reading 🙂
For the last year I’ve been CELTA training around the world. Here is a collection of random thoughts about what the CELTA does and doesn’t do, and what being a trainer has taught me.
What the CELTA does
Improves the confidence of trainees Even those who are particularly shy at the beginning of the course are able to stand in front of a group after a few lessons and project confidence, even if they’re still worried!
Shows them some ways of staging a lesson logically Though of course the list is not exhaustive, it is a good grounding and can help them plan their own lessons later, whether or not they choose/have to use a course book. Simple things like giving students an activity to do before reading/listening, rather than saying “Read this’, then springing questions on them afterwards, or important steps like providing feedback after activities, may seem obvious to a seasoned pro, but they rarely are to a complete beginner.
Encourages trainees to think in depth about planning a lesson and setting up activities The lessons which fall flat are normally the ones which have had the least amount of thought dedicated to them. One or two of those and the trainees soon realise that they really need to think through what they’re planning to do more carefully.
Makes them think about the instructions are going to give and the way that they talk to a class I sometimes take for granted how easy it is for me to grade my language for different levels of student, and forget that it takes real effort when you’re a new teacher. The key area which this normally affects is instruction giving and activity set-up, often requiring careful planning.
Starts to make trainees adapt materials so that they are more suitable for their learners Although this only done to a limited extent on many courses, stronger trainees show they can adapt to learners’ needs by changing the topic of a text or updating it to make it more relevant to the present day. The ‘Focus on the learner’ assignment also encourages trainees to think about learner needs and finding or adapting materials to meet them.
Makes them analyse language so that they are ready to teach it
Teaching grammar is seen as a big scary thing by most trainees, and language analysis is actively avoided by some and misunderstood by others. The same is true of vocabulary lessons, but to a lesser extent. However, once they’ve observed or taught a language lesson they normally see the value of analysing language carefully before teaching it, and this process also encourages them to start using reference materials to help them.
Gives them the basics of theory for them to build on later
A 120-hour course can never cover everything, and doesn’t claim to either. Instead, trainees are offered an overview of teaching, with ideas about how to further their professional development in one or more sessions in the final week of the course. This grounding in theory is a good basis to build on and the reflection built into the course is designed to encourage them to reflect on this theory and to begin to question it.
Gives them a collection of activities to draw on when they go into the classroom
My friend once told me her German teacher used to suggest the only way to become a good language speaker is ‘Vorsprung durch Diebstahl’ (progress through theft – a play on Audi’s ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’). I think the same is true of any skill you learn, teaching among them. By ‘stealing’ from teachers observed during the course and used in input sessions, trainees have a good bank of ideas to vary their lessons when they first start teaching, and find their teaching style (because let’s face it, that’s what new teachers are doing way more than adapting to their learners!)
Gives trainees the opportunity to observe about 36 hours of classes
When else do you get the chance to observe so intensively, outside of the Delta or something similar? On the CELTA course, trainees are required to observe six hours of experienced teachers’ classes and approximately 30 hours of their peers’ lessons. I often think that this is actually where most of the learning on a CELTA takes place, with the input sessions just providing the language to talk about teaching, and a few of the ideas to steal. Until you’ve seen it put into action and noticed what does and doesn’t work, nothing really sinks in.
Shows them whether they really want to teach or not
Not to be underestimated! By exposing trainees to the classroom and making them teach, instead of just concentrating on theory, the CELTA helps trainees to realise whether the classroom is really the right place for them.
What the CELTA doesn’t do
Show them how to placement test students The main question I’ve been asked by trainees towards the end of the course or soon after it’s finished is something along the lines of ‘X has asked me to organise some classes for them. Do you know a placement test I can give the student(s) to find out their level(s) and decide which materials to use?’ Thus far, I don’t, so if anyone else can recommend something free, online and fairly reliable, I would be very grateful.
Show trainees how to teach materials-light or materials free
While there are some CELTA courses which focus on this, they are few and far between. I’m not sure what else to say about this as I don’t want to ignite a whole new debate – it’s just a fact.
Tell the trainees everything they ever needed to know about teaching
As I said above, a 120-hour course could never hope to do this. Doing a CELTA is not the be-all and end-all, and does not negate the need for continuing professional development. It is an initial teacher training course and should be treated as such. It frustrates me when a CELTA can trump somebody without a CELTA and relevant experience. If there is no follow-up training or development, it’s worth is diminished. I suspect this is particularly so for trainees who had prior experience before the CELTA, as they may well slip back into old habits (although feel free to prove me wrong!)
What being a CELTA trainer has taught me
How to give clear, concise instructions And about time too! This is something I’ve always struggled with, and it turns out that watching lots of trainees get it wrong, offering tips on how to do it better, and reflecting on it constantly throughout the year have finally sorted out this problem. I even discovered that I highlighted it as an issue in my own end of CELTA reflection, a document I’d completely forgotten about until I was training as a tutor last August!
How to time lessons more accurately As with instructions, this is a long-time issue of mine. Again, offering guidance to others on how to do it has really helped me, and I’m much better at prioritising to achieve my aims, something which seems more key in the intensive CELTA input sessions of a four-week course, than it ever did on a seemingly ‘never-ending’ language learning journey (!) I even came up with some formulae after my trainees kept asking for them.
No two CELTA courses are ever the same While there are the inevitable differences brought on by location and trainees, I didn’t realise that each CELTA course is put together by the Main Course Tutor and others working at the same centre if relevant. It is the result of experience and is constantly tweaked, so each course I worked on this year had slightly different documentation and assignments that were set up in different ways, as well as timetables that we organised very differently from one place to the next. Having said that, all of the courses are judged on the same criteria, covering the same basic set of input sessions, and with the same requirements for teaching and observation. The assessor’s visit on each course and annual Cambridge standardisation ensure that wherever you get your CELTA, it has the same value.
I’m ready for some stability
For anybody coming to this fresh or who has got a bit lost in my adventures of the last year (I don’t blame you – I can’t believe them myself!), this is where I’ve been:
Until August 2014: Director of Studies in Sevastopol, Crimea and trained as a CELTA tutor
September-October: Action English Language Training, Leeds, UK
Apart from in Thailand where I had the luxury of nine weeks, I spent four weeks in each place, living in a range of accommodation including apartments, a residential hotel and lodging with two different couples. I improved my packing skills, and felt like I was living out of a suitcase. In between, I was at home for up to a month, ‘camping out’ at my aunt’s house, then off again. I’m really looking forward to my next adventure, when I’ll be moving to Poland to start a new job, and hopefully staying for at least a couple of years, enough time to build up a bit of a (social) life there! I also can’t wait to have my own kitchen again 😉
Click the map to see where I’ve travelled this year, including photos
I love my job
Well, I knew that already. But a year of sharing it with other people, and helping them to enter the wonderful world of EFL teaching has reaffirmed it again and again. I have no regrets whatsoever about the career path I have chosen, and I know that I have been incredibly lucky to have the year I have just experienced, despite commenting on the lack of stability above. The people I have met and the places I have been will stay with me forever, and I hope it won’t be the last time I work with these inspiring people or visit these amazing places. Now, on to the next adventure!
I was very happy to be asked to write a guest post on the ETpedia blog. John Hughes’ book has been very useful to me on CELTA courses recently, and I would highly recommend getting yourself a copy. If you use this link, I’ll get a few pennies too.
This post is aimed at new CELTA trainers, especially those about to start their training (thanks to Amy for inspiring it!) If that’s not you, the jargon probably won’t make sense and the post isn’t really relevant 🙂
One of the most challenging things I found as a new CELTA tutor was knowing how to manage my time on the courses, so I thought it might be useful to share the main things you have to think about each week. The questions below are based on my diary of to-do lists for the past year, something I’ve found incredibly useful to keep me sane! Of course, the rhythm may differ from centre to centre, but it could serve as a starting point. (This is also a reminder to me in case I have a gap between courses!)
Before the course
Do you have the trainee profiles?
Are you familiar with the templates for giving lesson feedback? Will you type or handwrite your feedback? (Tip if you’ll type them: create a template so you can’t accidentally save over anybody’s feedback!)
Do you know the timetable for the first week, particularly which input sessions you’ll be doing?
How long do you have to prepare feedback? When do trainees need to hand in their self-evaluations after lessons?
Have you familiarised yourself with the assignments, particularly any which will be set in week one?
What materials will you be using? Do you need to prepare TP points? In how much depth?
Do the trainees need specific observation tasks for TP? Or will they be encouraged to write whatever notes they choose? Or a combination of the two?
Will you be with the same group of students throughout the four weeks (e.g. always elementary) or will you change throughout the course (e.g. weeks 1/4 with one group, 2/3 with the other)?
When do the trainees change tutors?
How much of the course is paper-based? Does the centre use methods to share information/files, like Dropbox or Google Drive? Is this only between tutors, or do the trainees have access to it too?
If you’re freelancing, there are a few additional questions:
Do you know how to get to the school? How long will it take?
Is there a chance to go into the school before the course starts? This is a good opportunity to ask about things like photocopier codes, wifi, and printer access, as well as which rooms be used during the course and what resources are available for trainees.
Will your transport be paid for (both international and local)?
What is the accommodation like?
Where is the nearest supermarket? When will you have time to cook? (!)
Do you need travel/health insurance?
What about visas? Who’s responsible for them? How long do they take to get?
Week one
Are there any assignments to be set this week? Who will do it?
Stage 1 tutorials: When do you need to write them by? Do you need to meet any of the trainees?
Which input sessions do you need to prepare for week one?
Which ones do you need to start thinking about for week two, especially if you’ve never done them before?
When do the trainees start handing in plans and language analyses (straight away, or do they wait for specific input sessions first)? What is the deadline for them each day? What time do you have to mark them by? Do you need to give any feedback on them to the trainees before they teach?
Are you changing levels/trainee groups? How does the handover work? (e.g. When is assisted lesson planning? How will you arrange this with your co-tutor(s)?)
Do you need to write TP points for week two? Does the level of depth change?
Week two
Are there any assignments to be set this week? Who will do it?
Are any assignments due this week? When do you need to mark them by? What time do you have available to mark them in? When are resubmissions due in?
Stage 2 tutorials: When do you need to write them by? What time do you have available to do this? Is there a specific format at your centre? When will you meet the trainees?
Does anybody need a warning letter? What’s the procedure at your centre for this?
Which input sessions do you need to prepare for week two?
Which ones do you need to start thinking about for week three?
Are you changing levels/trainee groups? How does the handover work?
Do you need to write TP points for week three? Does the level of depth change?
Week three
Are there any assignments to be set this week? Who will do it?
Are any assignments due this week? When do you need to mark them by? What time do you have available to mark them in? When are resubmissions due in?
Does anybody need a stage 3 tutorial?
Does anybody need a warning letter? What’s the procedure at your centre for this?
Which input sessions do you need to prepare for week three?
Which ones do you need to start thinking about for week four?
Are you changing levels/trainee groups?
Do you need to write TP points for week four? Does the level of depth change?
When is the assessor coming? Factor in time to meet them (you’re unlikely to have time for much else that day, e.g. writing assignments)
When do you need to complete the information about trainees for the assessor? What format does it need to be in? What time do you have available to do this in?
Week four
Are there any assignments to be set this week? Who will do it?
Are any assignments due this week? When do you need to mark them by? What time do you have available to mark them in? When are resubmissions due in?
Which input sessions do you need to prepare for week four?
Is the assessor coming this week? (see above!)
When do you need to write final reports by? What time do you have available to do this? What format does it need to be in? Who needs the reports (e.g. main tutor, receptionists etc)? (If you’re a freelancer, do you need to sign them? When?)
Is there anybody who needs the final page of their CELTA 5 completed (e.g. because they’ve had a warning letter earlier on the course)?
When and where is the post-CELTA party? Are you invited? Do you want to go? 😉
The places you can go with a CELTA (my photo)
Is there anything I’ve forgotten?
Postscript
I know people look on my blog for some tips about training as a CELTA tutor, and it’s something I’m planning to write about, but haven’t got round to yet. One day… In the meantime, you might also be interested in my diary of a course I did in February 2015: week one, week two, week three, week four.
When I was at IATEFL I decided to use some of my birthday money to buy a couple of books in the sales on the final day. Because of my current role as a CELTA tutor and my move into management as a Director of Studies, I’ve been thinking a lot about professional development recently. I thought it would be a good investment to read some of the literature about it and get a few more ideas about how to help the teachers I work with to continue their development. Here are brief reviews of the two books I bought. Clicking on their titles will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get a few pennies if you decide to buy them via these links.
Books in the Delta Teacher Development Series (DTDS) are always easy to read and full of great ideas, and this one was no exception. I saw Duncan speak at IATEFL 2012 and as well as being a good communicator, I got the impression he must be a very good person to work for because he seemed to really care about the people he managed. That care comes across in this book.
Each DTDS book is divided into:
Section A: a look at the current theory underlying the area being discussed;
Section B: practical ideas to try out;
Section C: further areas to explore.
In this case, section B was further divided into five areas of investigation or ‘circles’, moving out from the teacher and gradually involving more and more participants:
You
You and your students
You and your colleagues
You and your school
You and your profession
(I don’t have my copy in front of me, so I hope I’ve remembered those correctly!) Each circle starts with a checklist of possible tasks, where the reader is encouraged to identify what they have already done and what they would like to try. This is then followed by a variety of different activities, broken down into the aim, the reason for doing them, and the steps needed to achieve them.
Section C focused on longer term projects, such as how to set up action research. The projects could draw on some of the activities from section B, or be completely independent of them.
Overall, I felt the book would be particularly good for less experienced teachers or for those looking for inspiration to put together a professional development programme, and less so for more experienced teachers. Through the schools I’d worked at and the online development I’ve done, I’d tried most of the ideas already. There are still some I’d like to experiment with, though I can’t recall any specific ones now a few days after I finished it. It will be a useful book to refer back to when I want to try something a bit more unusual for my development.
This is the first book I’ve read from the Cambridge Language Education series, which Jack C. Richards is also the series editor for. It was easier to read than I expected – even though this has been the case with most of the methodology books I’ve read, I’m still pleasantly surprised when they are written in such an accessible way.
It is divided into 12 chapters (again, no copy here so do correct me if I’m wrong!), plus a brief introduction explaining how to use the book. Each chapter focuses on one particular approach to professional development, including:
Observations
Teacher journals
Critical incidents
Case studies
Action research
In each case, a definition is given and the benefits and potential drawbacks of engaging in this kind of development are examined. This is followed by a step-by-step guide to how to approach it. Throughout every chapter there are vignettes to show real-world examples of how they were used by teachers around the world.
I had only heard about the concept of peer coaching from Ela Wassell in the last year, but this book had a different definition of it, seeming to express it as something closer to a form of delegation of training. Critical incidents was a term I’d heard, but didn’t really understand before reading this, and case studies were completely new to me. The information about action research and teacher journals complements Foord’s book, and taking the two together would be a good starting point for anyone wanting to try either of these for their development.
One frustrating thing for me was the lack of a contents page or index, so you have to flick through the book if you want to find a particular section again. The depth of the book was useful to me as an experienced teacher, as was the way that the chapters and ideas fed into each other. For example, critical incidents were suggested as possible fuel for a teacher journal. However, I feel this depth and difficulty of navigation might be off-putting to newer teachers, and they may feel overwhelmed. For them, the suggestions in the book may need to be mediated or introduced chapter by chapter rather than being read in one go as I did.
Having said that, it has given me a lot of ideas for possible professional development sessions over the next couple of years – I just hope I can remember some of them!
I had a Stage Three tutorial with a trainee. I watched a very weak lesson by another trainee who I haven’t seen since week one. On top of that, I didn’t feel completely well.
On the plus side, my input session on guided discovery worked really well. Trainees had to come up with their own guided discovery tasks based on an article called Ten Ways to Make Someone Smile. The session was also designed to help them think about how to prepare for TP8, where they can’t use material from the book.
Day Two
When you imagine a teacher, what do you see?
For most people, it’s someone standing at a (white/black?)board, pointing at something written there and talking to (at?) their students. Even if they’re not at the board, they’re generally standing at the front of the room.
When you’re in ‘teacher position’ for the first time funny things start to happen. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
You talk more, because you feel like you should be explaining things and/or you need to fill the silence.
You talk louder, often louder than is necessary, to make sure all of the students can hear you. Alternatively, you get so quiet that nobody can hear you.
You write all over the board, generally in a pretty haphazard manner, because that’s how students learn, right?
You never sit down, because you can’t be a teacher if you’re sitting down, even if there are less than 5 students in the room.
You become the centre of attention, which either goes to your head or petrifies you.
In the first week of a CELTA course, my aim is to help the trainees feel comfortable in the role of teacher, then to move past this image, and start to realise all of the other things that being a teacher involves.
Over the four-week course, I hope to see the following changes related to each of the points above:
You realise when it’s appropriate to talk and when not. You learn to grade your language so that students can understand you. You lose your fear of silence.
You learn the correct volume to speak at so that students can hear you, but you’re not shouting at them.
The board becomes a tool which is used wisely and well, with only the information that needs to be there, beautifully laid out so that the students can follow it and get some use out of said information.
You vary your position depending on the stage of the lesson, the size of the group, and your role at a given time. You feel comfortable as you move around, and don’t feel you need to maintain ‘teacher position’ throughout.
You realise that it’s all about the students, and that attention should be focussed on them. If you were petrified, you repeat the mantra “I am the teacher. This is my classroom. I have a right to be here and I’m in control of the lesson.” until you believe it.
This week we returned to the TP groups we had during week one, and it’s been great to see how much some of the trainees have improved since I left them. They’ve managed to address most of the areas above. The hardest one to deal with is the first half of 5, but two experiments with guided discovery lessons, one yesterday and one today, show that the trainees are at least attempting to do this. There were mixed levels of success with there, but that’s what experimenting is all about.
They’re the first steps along a long road, but hopefully the techniques we’ve taught them during the course will help them to cope with the rest of the lesson successfully enough that they can concentrate on the students, because they don’t have to think about everything else as it starts to become second nature. We can but hope.
Day Three
TP was eventful, with last-minute changes due to circumstances beyond most people’s control. That’s all I’ll say about it, because I know trainees from the course may read this.
We’re starting to wrap up the course now, with half of the trainees having their final TP tonight, and the other half tomorrow.
I’ve marked most of my assignments, with a handful of outstanding resubmissions still to do.
I’ve only got one input session left, on literacy, a topic I’ve never covered before. I just had a 10-minute break from writing this for a quick look at the materials I have for it. Even though it’s 22:20 now, I can’t stop thinking about what I want to do in the session. Too many ideas, not enough time!
Also still to do: finishing off feedback for my TP group for TP8; update the provisional grades sheet with information about TPs since the assessor’s visit; write reports; relax.
Day Four
More difficult circumstances which I won’t go into, meaning we had to reorganise the timetable for the day. The new version of the timetable worked well, and everything was completed on time.
Day Five
The course finished well after yesterday’s blip 🙂
I was very pleased with my first attempt at a literacy session, thanks to using Wingdings as the language for a mini ‘literacy test’, an idea I stole from a conference talk at IATEFL Glasgow I think. It works nicely for putting everyone in the room on the same footing, and avoids you having to work out who speaks which languages in the group.
Once that was done, it was time for report writing and provisional grades, updating the report sent to the assessor showing the progress of the candidates since their visit, and confirming which grades should be awarded, pending the assessor’s approval.
To finish the evening I had my final two TPs, which were a great note to end the course on. The candidates in question have shown huge progress over the course, with their final lessons being useful to the students and fun too.
Because we were the last people at the school, we got a taxi together for the 20 minute ride into Chiang Mai. About half of the candidates from the two courses were at the final party. It was a fun evening, and as always, my favourite part of the CELTA course 🙂 With the pressure off, it’s a chance to really get to know the candidates, find out more about their history and their future plans, and finish off the course on a high.
The end, for now
I’m very happy that I’ve finally been able to blog about my experience of being a tutor, mostly because this is the first CELTA I’ve done where I’ve managed to avoid working at home! My work-life balance has been much better, and I’m hoping to maintain this on future courses.
I feel like I’ve finally got the hang of managing my time and knowing what I need to do when during the four weeks of the course, and I’ve built up a stock of input sessions which mean I don’t have to spend so much time preparing them.
I’ve enjoyed my first course in Chiang Mai, working with a group of experienced and interesting tutors. I’m looking forward to doing three more in the same place and learning a lot more from them!
There’s not much leeway, because you almost always have exactly the number of tutors you need, no more, no less. There’s no time to be sick, and any other absence is a very bad idea, particularly on days when you’re observing teaching practice (TP), when it’s vital to have one tutor per group of trainees.
We were lucky that we have a little bit of slack on the courses in Chiang Mai because of the number of trainers. Today we had demo lessons with no TP because of the level change half-way through the course, so if you have to be down a tutor, it was the best day for it. One was off sick, and another had to go to Bangkok to renew their visa.
Luckily, the one who was ill doesn’t do input, only TP, and we’d already arranged cover for the input sessions for the one in Bangkok. We shared guided lesson planning between the rest of us, and because there were no classes on Friday, we didn’t have feedback, which meant there was time to do this. The major change was having just two demo lessons in the evening, with larger than normal classes: 16 students and 10 trainees in the elementary one, and 11 students and 15 trainees in intermediate with me. We’re very lucky that we have rooms big enough to hold that many people! The lessons were useful for both the trainees and the students, and it was good to demonstrate techniques that can be applied to larger classes.
In the end we coped today, but hopefully we’ll be back to full strength tomorrow! Another reason to look after yourself…
Day Two
On CELTA courses, I find the most often skipped part of language-related TPs is phonology/pronunciation. Trainees check the meaning of the language, spend ages checking the form (especially if they’ve been let loose on a whiteboard), then skip merrily along to controlled practice, without teaching students how to actually say this beautiful new piece of language they’ve taught them.
Trainees get more guidance in early TPs, and this reduces as they progress through the four weeks. At the start I can remind them repeatedly that they need to cover meaning AND form AND pronunciation, but there comes a time when they have to remember it for themselves. For two of my trainees today, that’ll be after tomorrow’s feedback.
Why do they skip it?
Often, it’s not mentioned in the plan at all, and if it’s not there, then it won’t be in the lesson unless they have a last-minute brainwave and remember it. I therefore encourage trainees to have three separate rows in their plan: one each for ‘focus on meaning’, ‘focus on form’ and ‘focus on pronunciation’, to make sure they remember to cover all three areas.
Sometimes it’s in the plan, but they blank and forget to do it in the lesson.
Still other times, it’s there, but they’ve spent hours on the warmer, the focus on form or something else earlier in the lesson, they notice they’re running out of time, and as pronunciation is clearly the least important part of introducing new language (!), they decide to drop it. Since to hit the Cambridge criteria it’s important for the students to get at least a bit of practice with the new language, this can be a sensible decision mid-TP, but I’d rather they tried to get to the point faster and gave pronunciation it’s due: what’s the point of knowing what a structure looks like if you can’t say it yourself?
No solutions here, just a general complaint…
And while we’re here, I’ll reiterate a point I made in my week two post: why, oh why, aren’t the way that meaning, form and phonology are covered in the lesson three separate criteria rather than being lumped together as one? Assessing the trainees on it as a single area frustrates me, but opinion is divided as to whether you can/should separate them out.
Does anybody know when the criteria were last updated? And when are Cambridge likely to update them again?!
Day Three
Easing off in guided lesson planning isn’t easy – the temptation is always there to help too much. Trainees need the opportunity to make their own mistakes, but they also need the chance to shine without you too.
I find TP6 to be the hardest one to do guided lesson planning for, assuming a total of 8 TPs. In the first four, trainees need support to help them focus when planning, not get carried away with materials or too stressed about introducing new language, including logical stages and not dominating the classroom too much, thereby leaving little room for students to experiment with the language themselves.
In TP5, they’ve normally just moved to a new level, so guidance is about how this will affect their teaching, and how to work with the higher/lower students.
In TP7 and TP8, trainees should be showing us how independent they can be, since they’ll be going out into the real world soon, where they’ll have to work alone. They can still ask us key questions and we’re there in emergencies, but generally they should be seeking the support of their peers rather than us.
But what do you do in TP6? Mostly I just have to try and restrain myself, making sure I’m only asking questions, and encouraging the trainees to think for themselves. Definitely an area I still need to work on…
Day Four
a.k.a. Assessor Day
The assessor’s visit looms around the end of week 3/beginning of week 4 on any CELTA course, and is dreaded by the trainees because they’re petrified about having another person watching their TPs. I have to say that since you already have up to 6 people watching, I’m not sure what difference a 7th one makes, but there you go.
Far from being there to judge the trainees, the assessor’s role is actually to standardise the course and make sure that the CELTA ticks all the correct boxes and everything is running as it should. They check some of the portfolios, particularly (but not exclusively) for borderline candidates where another opinion would be welcomed. They also observe some of the TPs that day and can observe/participate in feedback if it’s on the same day.
Before their visit they get lots of documents to look over, including an overview of the performance, strengths and weaknesses of each trainee. These are the basis for a grading meeting, where the assessor and tutors discuss what candidates need to do to pass/fulfil their potential/avoid failing. Earlier in the day, the assessor meets with the trainees to collect anonymous feedback about how the course is working, and they pass this on to the tutors after the grading meeting. Finally, they make recommendations about what the centre needs to do to maintain standards.
If there’s a tutor in training on the course and the centre is not a training centre, the assessor may stay for an extra day to observe the TinT doing an input session, taking notes in TP and giving feedback, as well as checking their portfolio and offering advice.
All in all, assessment day is long for the tutors, but it’s an important way of making sure that all is as it should be.
Day Five
The joys of CELTA are many.
Watching people who’ve never taught before learn the buzz of being a teacher, knowing that their students have learnt something from them.
Knowing that the more experienced teachers appreciate the opportunity to develop and reflect that the course offers.
Seeing the lightbulb moment when a trainee finally cottons on to something that they haven’t really understood the point of before.
Watching the trainees’ development over the course.
When you see something used successfully in a lesson that you suggested in feedback to another trainee less than two hours before.
Terminology slips in assignments and lesson plans producing new and interesting terms that will never again feature in any ELT literature.
When a new input session you’ve never done before works.
Finally figuring out how to do something you’ve never been quite sure how to do in your own teaching because one of the trainees has just asked you how to do it, and you’ve got to answer them.
Teaching people to reflect.
Having a TP group who work together like clockwork, so you don’t really need to be in the room because the support network and bond they’ve built up between them does your work for you.
Working with inspiring people and learning their stories.
Sharing my love of teaching.
Playing: with the room, the space, feedback sessions, interaction patterns, normal sized classes (not just 2 or 3 students!), teaching style, new activities, ideas, thoughts…
Hearing that somebody you’ve trained has got a job and is excited about starting their new life.
Knowing that you’ll be working with a great trainee, and have the chance to help them build on the initial course.
I could have sworn I’d done an input session on functions before, but I can’t find it anywhere on my computer, so it must have been a figment of my imagination. The system I’ve developed for creating a new input session is:
If I can’t make an educated guess, check what areas need to be covered in the session, especially if I know it can have different interpretations, e.g. ‘Phonology 1’ could be sounds and the phonemic chart, or a general introduction to phonology.
Find all the documents I think might be relevant/interesting and put them all in a dedicated folder on my computer/lay them out on my desk. For example, for this session I found the centre’s folder for the functional language session, went through all the activities and laid out the ones I thought I could use on my desk. I also looked at the handful of related documents I have on my computer, all of which I’ve inherited from various other tutors.
On a piece of scrap paper, come up with a rough running order for the session, including timing. Today that consisted of writing a list of the documents, crossing out duplicates, linking ones that could be combined, numbering them in order, and adding times.
Type out a running order, underlining the materials I need as I go along. Number the file ‘0’ so it always appears at the top of the folder and is easy to find.
Create/adapt/type up/resave any documents I need for the session, numbering them in the order they’re needed.
Print.
Do session.
Scribble notes all over the printed running order.
Try to remember to do something with said notes, if I can find time.
I’ve got much better at timing my inputs now too, working on the basis that if I think it’ll take 5 minutes, it’ll probably take 10; if 10 minutes, 15; and so on. By adding 5 minutes to everything, I seem to get it roughly right, although I still need to drop an activity every now and again, or just give things as reading rather than dealing with them in the session.
The whole process took about 3 hours, plus printing off yesterday’s feedback and eating, which took me up to 2 minutes before the session was due to start. It’s true that tasks expand to fill the time allotted to them!
I was watching a different TP group and a different set of students (still elementary) tonight, and there were some timing issues. Two of the three trainees went 7/8 minutes over their 45 minute slot, making the whole lesson 15 minutes longer than it should have been. That prompted me to finally get round to blogging about timing, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Thanks guys, but please don’t do it again!
Day Two
Two days into week two, and illness has struck. Three trainees had to go home today for various reasons and lots of others looked pretty tired all day.
In general, the trainees haven’t had enough sleep, and they’re feeling stressed out and under pressure, no matter how much we try to reassure them and calm them down. This is not unusual for a CELTA course, due to its intensive nature. I’ve reminded a few of them individually about looking after themselves, but today decided to give the whole group a bit of a pep talk. It went something like this:
I know that some of you are tired and feeling a bit sick, and that the stress and pressure of the course don’t help, but you need to look after yourselves. The CELTA might seem very important right now, but your health is more important. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep, and that you take at least a few hours for yourself at the weekend, preferably half or even a full day. It might seem like you’re wasting time, but it’s a false economy to work all the time because you’ll regret it later. You’ll exhaust yourself and/or make yourself ill, and nobody is at their best when that happens. I’d rather see an adequately-planned lesson and you’re still alive, than a perfectly-planned lesson but you’re half dead.
I didn’t do CELTA full-time; I did it part-time, but when I did Delta, also part-time, I was working for about 20 hours every weekend on top of my full-time job. I started in September and took the whole of December off sick from work, then triggered a condition I’ll have the rest of my life, which is the reason you see me eating all the time. I don’t want any of you to make yourselves ill, because it’s not worth it.
Remember that work expands to fill the time you have available. If you say you’re going to go to bed at 11pm, stick to it, because you’ll be much more productive for it, rather than saying that you’ll work until you’re done. That way you’ll end up being up until three in the morning. The same is true at the weekend. Give yourself a specific amount of time to do each thing, and be strict. You’ll get a lot more done that way, rather than just starting blankly at a computer screen waiting for inspiration to strike.
Take breaks while you’re working too. Stand up, stretch, give your eyes a bit of a rest. You can download apps to help you. If you have a Mac, TimeOut blocks out your screen every 30 minutes, and I’m sure there are similar things for Windows.
Sometimes the mum just comes out in me. 😉
It was nice that one of the trainees noticed that my input was much smoother today – she asked me whether I’d done it before. It’s the fourth outing for that one, and you can really tell!
Day Three
‘Not to standard’ lessons are never easy to give. On my part, at least, there is a lot of soul-searching and questioning, but ultimately you have to follow the criteria. So far I’ve never given this grade without discussing the lesson and checking carefully with other tutors on my course to make sure I’ve made the right decision and have justified it clearly and accurately. Every lesson is graded against a set of criteria from Cambridge, and I have to use it objectively, no matter how difficult that may be at times. I know how much work goes into every lesson, and I know how much of a disappointment it is when it doesn’t turn out the way you planned. (Two of my four Delta lessons were below standard due to weak planning, and I put a lot of hours into each!)
Giving feedback on these lessons is also not easy, but thanks to my co-tutor in Vancouver, I’ve found one way to do it which seems to work. Divide the board into as many columns as there were trainees teaching that day (2? 3?). Then create the following rows: name, main aim, (secondary aim – optional), stages. Give the group time to complete the table. The teacher whose column it is can’t contribute to that one, but can to any of the others, e.g. if A was teaching, they can’t write in column A, but can (and should!) in B and C. (By the way, this isn’t the only time I use this method of feedback, but it’s particularly effective for these lessons.)
Using this method today made it very clear that the ‘not to standard’ lesson was that way because teacher A wasn’t clear about the aims of their lesson and lacked the necessary level of detail in their planning to successfully introduce the grammar point they were trying to teach, partly since they didn’t really understand the grammar themselves. It also affected the pace of the lesson as there were long pauses while the teacher tried to work out what should happen next. Their peers didn’t identify language as one of the aims at all, and struggled to come up with the stages of the lesson. It also boosted the confidence of teacher B, as they believed that their lesson was ‘a disaster’, but their peers could reconstruct it very easily, were clear about the aims and could see how the students had benefitted from it.
Teacher A took this feedback very well, and asked lots of questions about how to improve, especially since this was their second ‘not to standard’ on the course, out of three lessons so far. Today their first tutor and I have given them a series of steps to take to help them use their time and plan more effectively, since they tend to spend a very long time on creating excellent materials, at the expense of really knowing how to use them in class. The audio recording produced for this lesson was a case in point – it was written by the trainee, recorded by them and a friend, and even had a phone ringing at the beginning to make it sound more authentic!
The way teacher A took their feedback is in stark contrast to a trainee I had on a previous course, possibly due to the way I gave feedback. I think this was before I learnt about the stages/aims method, although I’m not 100% sure – my memory is a bit hazy on this. I tried to introduce it as gently as possible, since the trainee had been struggling with the course in general as it was very different to the ‘chalk and talk’ style they were experienced in delivering in their home country. On being told that it was ‘below standard’ for that stage of the course, the trainee asked if the grade could be changed. I said it couldn’t, and started to explain why with reference to the Cambridge criteria (although I thought the points had already been made clear during the preceding few minutes of feedback). The trainee stormed out of the room and slammed the door at this point. This was a shock to me and the rest of their TP group, and I wasn’t really sure how to react. In the end, I did the only thing I could, which was to apologise and move on to the final trainee’s feedback.
It’s a little ironic that the same trainee has chosen today to post two comments on my blog, which I don’t plan to approve due to the lack of context, but will share here for the sake of completeness and to avoid being accused of censorship. I hope doing it this way will also protect the identity of the trainee in question:
Sandy is extremely rude to her students. She enjoys student’s failure. She hates to see students performing well. How could such a vicious one be a teacher?
She tortured me spiritually in 28 days.
And about 5 hours later on a different post:
Sandy Millin wants her students to worship her. If you don’t, then she steps on you. She is too proud of her being born in the UK. She feels superior than any student. It’s her personality that she treats her students with the attitude of being unfair. If you lick her ass, she will give you an A, otherwise, a C.
These blogs help others to teach, it’s useful. But can Sandy learn a lesson that teaching is to promote students, not to kill us. I got a very subjective judgement from her. Why does she work so hard? She wants to be worshiped only for she can speak some English, which everyone can.
You can’t render your rude judgement on me. I will appeal and appeal till I get the justice.
I’m very sorry that this is how I came across to this student. My aim during the course, and I think that of any self-respecting tutor, is to build on the trainees’ strengths and to support them to become the best teachers they can be within the confines of a four-week course, and hopefully instil in them the desire to keep reflecting and developing once they’ve finished the course. In case you were wondering, this trainee did pass the course, although it was a weak pass, as they continued to struggle through the course. If they’d failed, I might understand the feeling behind these comments a little more.
Does anybody have any other suggestions on how to give feedback on ‘not to standard’ lessons, so that I can try to avoid a repeat of the situation with the latter trainee?
Day Four
There are four assignments on any CELTA course. Although each centre has slightly different variations on them, they are all designed to cover the following areas:
Focus on the learner: finding out about either one learner from your TP group in depth, or a little about all of the learners in the class, or both (depends on the centre), and providing materials to deal with two (normally) of their specified language problems, specifically related to grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation;
Language awareness: analysis of items of grammar, vocabulary and functions to prove that you can use reference materials to find out information about language, and break it down sufficiently to be able to deal with it in class;
Skills task: creating tasks based on a piece of authentic material, normally two receptive tasks and one productive;
Lessons from the classroom: reflection on your strengths and weaknesses as a teacher based on observations of you and other teachers during the course, and an action plan for how to continue your development.
Candidates are allowed to resubmit each assignment once if it doesn’t meet the criteria the first time, and they receive clear feedback on what they need to work on.
Today we were looking at the language awareness assignment, which tends to be the one with the highest rates of resubmission because so many people find it hard to break language down sufficiently to be able to teach it. In my experience, those who have learnt English as a second language are normally OK with this area, but may still have trouble with detailing how to check the language, whether it be with CCQs or otherwise.
Language awareness is a particular problem for native speakers, and is one of the reasons why I don’t think CELTA should necessarily be seen as the benchmark for employment that it can be in some countries/schools, since it needs to be backed up with a knowledge of how the language works. That’s not to say that people with CELTA shouldn’t get a job, just that if you’re teacher (often a non-native) with a good command of the language and no CELTA, you shouldn’t automatically lose out just because somebody else has a CELTA.
The areas trainees really ought to find out about before the course are:
the difference between parts of speech (noun, verb, preposition etc);
the names and forms of the basic pedagogical tenses in English;
the main functions of each of these tenses.
Of course, that’s only a tiny slice of the English language, but it’s a good grounding to start off with. It’ll be a bit of a confidence booster once the course has started.
Here are a couple of useful books [both affiliate links, so I’ll make a few pennies if you buy them through here]:
Grammar for English Language Teachers by Martin Parrott – designed with teachers in mind, it includes possible problems students might have, and tasks for you to do to help you understand the language better;
Teaching English Grammar by Jim Scrivener – very easy to find your way around, including possible timelines, ways of checking the concepts, and contexts to introduce each language point in.
Assignments are one of the places where being a CELTA tutor can feel pretty stressful, since there’s normally a very quick turn-around, and you mark them in any spare moment you have. That’s been at home on all of my previous courses, but this time I decided that work will be at work, even if it means going in early, and home will be for me, including getting some of the posts written which I’ve been meaning to do for ages! As a result, I’m feeling a lot more relaxed on this course. I hope it continues!
Day Five
We’re half-way through the course, so today the trainees planned their lesson focuses (foci?) for the next two weeks, aiming for two skills and two language lessons each to cover the remaining four TPs.
The tutors also had a relatively light day, doing feedback on yesterday’s classes and preparing for and administering Stage 2 tutorials, a 15-minute or so individual meeting with each trainee updating them on their progress on the course so far, dealing with any questions the trainee raises, and telling them what they need to do to meet their potential. It’s based on a list of criteria which the trainees mark themselves against, then the tutor assesses them too, a comment by the trainee and a comment by the tutor, making sure everyone is on the same page and that there won’t be any nasty surprises later in the course (at least, that’s the plan!)
Other progress reports done during the course are a brief one at the end of Stage 1/week 1 and a Stage 3 tutorial at the end of week 3 if the trainee is not performing as expected. They can also request informal tutorials.
I have to say that I find some of the criteria a bit odd/unnecessary, the main one being 2f: The candidate shows an awareness of register. I’m not really sure why this is given it’s own criteria when analysing form, meaning and phonology is a single criterion, as is teaching those three things – many trainees are really good in one or two of those areas, but not necessarily in all three. Another odd Cambridge thing is that the first group of criteria on the list (connected to planning) are all numbered 4, followed by 1, 2, 3, 5. A strange way of counting!
There was no TP tonight, so I took advantage of the early finish to have a peaceful evening bike ride. Here are a three of the beautiful views I saw:
Information overload, getting your head around so many different things, asking loads of questions, trying to get all the right documents, getting to know everyone…and that was just me!
fifth approach to giving TP points (the guidance trainees get for their teaching practice =observed lessons)
fifth variation on assignments
fifth procedure for doing feedback
and probably many other fifths…
It’s a good job I’m flexible, adaptable, and settle in quickly 🙂 I’m looking forward to staying in one place for the next four CELTAs though, if all goes to plan.
There are worse places to spend the next four months…
15 trainees, 3 TP groups/classes, 2 levels (elementary and intermediate), with another CELTA running parallel with 10 more trainees, meaning 5 tutors in total, plus a tutor-in-training. Lots of people to learn from, and you end up sharing some of the work, which makes things easier.
The 45-minute demo lesson I did tonight went fairly well, as did my Russian lesson in input [note to self: really must learn how to say ‘stand up’ and ‘sit down’ in Russian!], although I forgot to set time limits for a few tasks that really needed them, so I dropped a task and still went five minutes over. My instructions have improved a lot since I became a CELTA tutor, but I shouldn’t repeat them so much. I also need to make sure that I anticipate problems with vocabulary a bit more carefully when doing a reading text. Timing and instructions were problems identified by my tutor when I was doing CELTA, and I still haven’t managed to sort them out completely!
Day Two
The joys of using a coursebook you don’t really like for TP (no, I’m not going to tell you which one):
when referring to it in an input session on receptive skills, I struggled to find a decent reading text which the trainees could use to plan a sample lesson (most of the ‘reading’ texts in the book were isolated sentences or glorified gapfills);
students don’t really need to understand any of the language to answer many questions in the book; they just need to be able to recognise that what they’ve read/heard is identical to what’s in the question;
there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, especially in the first week, to help the trainees to be able to use it.
Luckily, I don’t have to write the TP points for it, as my co-tutors have done that. Another plus side is that it’s good practice for the trainees in adapting materials.
The three trainees who taught today all survived their first lesson, and the students seemed to enjoy it. They may even have learnt something! For most trainees, the most important thing about TP1 is getting through the lesson, especially if they’ve never taught before. It’s a scary thing to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers, one of whom is assessing you, and 2-5 of whom are making notes on your every move, and try to behave like this is an everyday occurrence and you are confident and competent in every why, while at the same time a million things are going through your mind, the most important of which is “What the hell am I meant to be doing now?” Well done, guys!
Day Three
Generally on a CELTA course you share input with one other trainer. There are two input sessions a day on most days of the course, each lasting 75-90 minutes depending on the centre/timetable, meaning one each. This week, though, there’s a special arrangement here, where one trainer gets two linked inputs one day, and the other gets two linked ones on day four. Today was my ‘day off’. Why, oh why, did I therefore nearly fail to plan either of my inputs for tomorrow today, given I had all this extra free time?! I wish I knew the answer to that. I ended up managing to do one of them this evening after TP as I unexpectedly had an extra 45 minutes at school, but now I need to go in extra early tomorrow at the start of what is already a long day to put together the other one. Grrr. Must learn from this in future and get to school earlier, as it seems I can’t work well at home at the moment. Normally I’m less productive at school, but here it seems the opposite is true.
On the plus side, because we only have 5 trainees in each TP group, we have a ‘free’ teaching slot every other day, meaning we get to finish 45 minutes earlier, which is nice 🙂 The two who taught today also survived!
Typical TP1 problems I’ve seen (and ones which I’m still guilty of at times!):
over-explaining activities, rather than just demonstrating them;
echoing all the students’ answers;
random words all over the whiteboard.
Amazing things I’ve seen in these TP1s:
getting to know the students really quickly;
showing real interest in what they’re saying, and treating them as human beings, rather than as learning machines present only for you to teach at;
real teacher presence and confidence in front of the class from all five trainees;
dealing with materials that didn’t fill the 45-minute slot as trainees expected by filling the time effectively and usefully.
Day Four
Today was a bit of a killer.
The day started with me having to plan the session I didn’t get round to yesterday, then teaching two sessions based on somebody else’s materials because I hadn’t found the time to put together my own for the second session. I had stuff for the first one already, but no time to put together a linked lesson planning session, and there are materials at the school and ready to go for it, so I couldn’t really say no! I’m not a fan of working from other people’s materials as is, and I struggled a bit with the lesson plan in the text-based presentation because I hadn’t internalised it as much as I thought I had, but I managed to survive in the end, and I think both inputs went relatively well.
Because TP finishes so late (20:15), we have delayed feedback the following day. Trainees can sleep on their self evaluation, instead of having to write it immediately after their lesson when it’s difficult to be objective, and the trainer has a bit more time to finish off their feedback too, which is useful for me while I figure out how the documents work here. My favourite comment today was when one trainee described how pleased she was they’d all survived TP1, and that they felt like a family already 🙂 We’ll see if they still think that in three weeks’ time!
TP rounds off the day, and after two inputs in the morning, I was really flagging. At some points I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, but a biscuit between watching the second and third trainees helped me to stay focussed.
When I got home I realised my unusual tiredness today, despite a good night’s sleep, wasn’t just because of the long day. Instead, it was because I’d only had five (small) meals on day three, rather than my usual six, because of the times I ate at. Due to the vagaries of my diet, I have to eat 300g every three hours, and I should avoid snacking as much as possible. I try very hard to look after my health now, and I don’t normally miss a meal. The last time I did it was quite a while ago, and I’d forgotten the effect it has on me. I won’t be doing it again any time soon!
Day Five
As with most of my work, my favourite thing about CELTA is the mix of people I meet. Before the course starts, we put together a document with basic information about the trainees, mostly limited to their prior experience, any languages they speak (for the foreign language lesson) and their age, so we can have a fairly even spread of age/gender/experience between the TP groups. I like to look at it again at the end of week one to see whether the dynamics I expected before the course have played out, and whether there is any other information I can draw on now that I’ve spent a week with the trainees.
There are a lot of people on this course with prior teaching experience. That means that sometimes they know more about things than I do, particularly if they’ve specialised in certain areas. Today I did an input session on phonology to introduce the phonemic chart, and one of the trainees was very helpful when it came to coming up with examples for certain kinds of sound which I had forgotten to prepare, like a glottal stop to show the epiglottis at work.
CELTA is designed for people with no experience whatsoever, so if you do have some, it can both help and hinder you. Sometimes there are bad habits that you need to break, like spending too much time at the board, or treating your adult students like children. That’s not to say that complete newbies don’t do the same too! Sometimes trainees have already done a lot of professional development and self-reflection before the course, and they are aware of the areas they need to work on. They are also already comfortable in front of a class, which can’t be underestimated.
For completely fresh teachers, there are also two types: those who panic when all those staring eyes look at them for the first time; and those who are complete naturals and seem like they were born to teach. Luckily, we don’t seem to have any of the former type on this course.
Regardless of the level of experience, the most common complaint on CELTA is about the workload, and this is compounded in week one by a few other feelings:
Information overload;
Why does planning take so long? Will I ever get faster at it?
How many things do I have to think about?!
When can I sleep? No, no sleep. Can’t sleep. Must work.
To anyone considering CELTA, I would always recommend making sure you have at least half a day off a week and that you get a semi-decent night’s sleep every night. Your lesson plan may be perfect, but if you can’t stay awake to teach the lesson, there’s a problem, and you won’t take anything in in input either!
To the trainers, especially if you’re in your first few courses, leave the work at work! If you have to take it home, keep at least one day a week for yourself. For the first time, I’ve managed to not really do any work at home on this course, as I’ve been able to prep my input sessions at school. I’ll also be taking the whole weekend off.
I’ve just sent this to my trainees to round off the week (always my first port of call when wanting to cheer people up or give them a 5-minute break):
Tomorrow I start the next stage of my teaching life as I begin training as a CELTA tutor.
For those of you who don’t know, CELTA stands for Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults. It’s an entry-level qualification accredited by Cambridge, designed to provide the basics of the communicative approach. In theory, those with a CELTA know the basics of what they need to be let loose in a classroom, although there is controversy about that which I won’t go into here. It can be run part-time or full-time, with the latter being the most common. I did my course part-time from October 2007 to February 2008, which seems like a very long time ago now!
My CELTA group, way back when!
If it’s full-time, the whole course lasts four weeks, which is what we run at IH Sevastopol. This will be my first experience of the four-week course, so it will be interesting to see how the trainees (and I!) deal with it.The group will have nine trainees, and there are two tutors besides me. I’ll be a ‘Trainer in Training’ or ‘TinT’ (thankfully this abbreviation has changed!) I’m looking forward to meeting the trainees tomorrow and getting to know them over the next four weeks.
I’m excited about the prospect of helping a group of people develop into teachers, and learning about how a CELTA course works from the inside. As part of my training I have to keep a reflective journal, which I’ll be doing in notebook form, but I will, of course, blog about the process too!
Danny was a tutor on my Distance Delta course, and his presentation at IATEFL Glasgow was one of the most useful I went to all week. I’m hoping to be trained as a CELTA tutor in the near future, so this was an ideal talk to go to.
There are three main strands to Danny’s talk:
Encouraging trainees on pre-service courses to work with emerging language during observed lessons.
Exploring how trainees feel before going into a lesson like this…
…and after (both after the lesson, and after the course).
Some issues (from trainees)
They don’t believe they can do it.
They worry about being put on the spot.
They worry about losing control.
They like the security of pre-planned input (however much they might moan about planning!)
They don’t notice emerging language or “can’t hear it”.
They can’t decide what’s important.
They worry about putting students on the spot.
Danny believes from this that trainees think emerging language means ‘error’. He says that it’s also about questions students might have, like “What’s the word for ____?”
How do we encourage trainees to work with emerging language
On day 2 of Danny’s courses, they look at the meaning of language from a text he uses. They look at the questions students have in relation to that text. It helps the trainees to notice that they know more than the people they’re teaching – it’s not just about meta-language,
On day 4, they explore the kind of questions learners might have when setting up activities and giving feedback.
On day 6, they look at a coursebook double-page and how five different teachers interpret them. One of those interpretations is task-based learning, another is using emergent language,
On day 9, they have a session on TBL and working with emerging language. They think about what is likely to emerge from the interaction.
Day 9 then has the correction and reformulation slot, after emerging language has been dealt with.
Other parts of course design include:
observation tasks which include a focus on emerging language. It’s better as an observation task than as input.
no language analysis form in the lesson plan.
retrospective language analysis forms, after the lesson.
The data is mostly drawn from students who have done this once from eight teaching practice sessions.
Danny also doesn’t mind if trainees ask for help during their teaching practice, if they get stuck.
Lesson planning
When trainees come to him with these questions:
When should I deal with language?
What language should I focus on?
What problems will the students have?
… he used to help a lot with this, but now he asks ‘Why don’t you see what happens?’
This helps to build up the trainees’ confidence with dealing with language.
Feelings beforehand
“I felt quite nervous about it, not having specifically practised how to do it.” (Elizabeth)
“I’m not sure I’ve planned enough.” (Stefano)
“I was worried about only going into the lesson with a piece of an A4 and an anecdote and every other lesson took a lot longer to prepare, so I was more nervous.” (Neil)
Praise what your trainees are putting in front of you.
How did new language emerge?
From six or seven candidates’ lessons, they came up in questions about texts, Q&As…
How was the experience different?
It felt like it went better than when I planned it.
I felt like I was really present in the lesson.
I felt like I was teaching the students, not the plan.
I didn’t concentrate on one particular point, so I felt less constricted.
I felt for the first time like I’d actually been teaching, rather than presenting. [this can often be a problem on Celta courses]
I felt like a real teacher. (she felt like stuff would happen in the class – students would ask questions, she would answer them)
New techniques and skills
“I learnt to listen and help them say what they want to say, rather than make them use a grammar point.” (Ros)
“I realised I could take my time, which allowed me to use some techniques I’d learnt on the course.” (Joanna)
“I realised I can answer questions about meaning if I know what they want.” (anon)
“I realised it was just like monitoring, but to everyone.” (anon)
Planning for future lessons
“It was nice not to have to guess what all the problems were going to be.” (Ros)
I didn’t have to plan for 24 hours.
I don’t need to overplan – if I leave spaces, things will emerge.
Some significant impacts
It didn’t really impact the course, but now I do it all the time. (Elizabeth)
It gave me more confidence in addressing students and braking down barriers. (Neil)
It taight me I quite enjoyed teaching, which came as quite a shock. (Neil)
Suggestions
You have to encourage trainees. They don’t trust themselves.
They need to be reminded that they do have time.
They will notice what emerges if they have to. They won’t if they’re teaching their plan.
Feed it in early, demystify it.
Make sure they know it’s not all about errors and jargon.
Encourage them to look at teachers working with emerging language in observations.
– Duncan Foord
– Jack C. Richards and Thomas S. C. Farrell
by Martin Parrott – designed with teachers in mind, it includes possible problems students might have, and tasks for you to do to help you understand the language better;
by Jim Scrivener – very easy to find your way around, including possible timelines, ways of checking the concepts, and contexts to introduce each language point in.
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