PARK Conference – April 2022

These are notes taken on my phone during the day, so apologies for any odd typing! I presented twice, so there are two plenaries and one session here.

Quantum ELT (or The Things Wot I Learnt) – Fiona Mauchline

In the shift to online, Fiona really noticed that what the students needed wasn’t the content, it was the pastoral support and emotional connection.

Why Quantum? Physics used to be about actions and reactions. When Quantum came along, it was about interactions, the stuff between the particles, and to a large account we hypothesised what was there, rather than seeing what was there ourselves. That’s what we can look at in ELT too: what happens between us, how we interact, not just action and reaction.

Connection to self – emotional connection

Fiona’s opening activity: draw an emoji and hold it up. It’s a good way to take the temperature of emotions/feelings in the room.

Alternatively, in the chatbox, use an emoji to show how you feel. This works for kids and adults.

Emojis can also be used to change the emotional feeling in an activity. When you are working on pronunciation, hold up an emoji to show how students should say the sentence or dialogue. You can print/show the emojis, but even better, the students can draw them themselves (or reuse them from earlier).

If we make objectives and check in on them frequently, we can feel more connected with what’s happening around us. We can make our own objectives: talk to a friend, learn 3 new words… and at the end reflect on what you’ve achieved. It feels like it takes up time but it actually keeps people on track.

4 call and response options:

• 123 – eyes on me.
• Holy moly – guacamole.
• To infinity – and beyond.
• Ready to rock – ready to roll.

Me grids: good for Zoom, using the annotate function, mark this, or in the classroom use it as a poster:

This grid can also be a form of vocabulary review. You could also use it as a preview. Show them the words before they meet them: which one looks funny, difficult to say, interesting, looks like it sounds nice, any you can guess what they mean. Students make an emotional connection with the words before they study them.

Connection to others – social connection

At lower levels, you can add more speaking easily through a grammar or vocab rap. They can create and say new verses (not write, just say).

This is my home.

Welcome to my home.

This is the kitchen.

We cook in the kitchen.

This is my home.

At A1, just changing a verb and a room adds a new verse.

Fiona suggests WH Auden’s poem The truth about love as an alternative framework for adding verses.

Another idea is classroom art. A school Fiona visited had murals in black and white painted by a local artist, then the colours were added by the kids. Anybody can produce art, bring it in, and add descriptions, stories, anything else. Adding any art by the students can help them to have a personal connection to the room.

Use photos before a text to ask students to create a reading activity before they read, helping them to connect to the material before they read it.

Drama can help to build self esteem, by pretending to be someone else. After working with a song, show students the lyrics and ask them to perform the song as said by a Shakespearean actor.

Connection at home

Homework buddies: encourage them to do their homework together, collaborating to help each other. It’s more sociable. Best to do in pairs, not bigger groups.

Waxing, waning, ebbing, flowing, coming, going. – Dr Claudia Molnar

Confidence gets in the way of a lot of fluency, and students’ willingness to communicate. Confidence building can be important for both teachers and students. Small tweaks can help to make activities more interesting and energising, and help students use the language more.

Asking a question about routines can have extra questions: When? Why? What are the exceptions? This can add engagement.

Preparing for a trip, in a roleplay. Allocate seasons or weather conditions to each group before the discussion. My group just listed nouns with no grammar. You can stop students partway through to create a change in the situation which might force the students to actually use the grammar you want them to practise if necessay. For example, on your trip you can now only take one bag, not three bags. That forced us to use more conditionals.

My favourite activity was an alphabet story, where each line had to contain a verb with the next letter of the alphabet.

Teaching is a form of art (more than acting) – David Fisher

David works with The Bear Educational Theatre https://www.thebeartheatre.com/ which runs in person and online theatre experiences for English learners of all ages and levels, providing interactive educational experiences. An interesting idea I like is A guest in your classroom, where students can interview an actor in their classroom either as themselves or as a famous person.

Teachers are not entertainers, but we can learn a lot from the world of entertainment. Questions to think about: what do a teacher and an entertainer have on common? How is preparing an English lesson and a show the same or different?

They both have an audience. They have to keep the audience’s attention. For David, the most important thing in a lesson is the energy in the room, not the techniques themselves.

An entertainer’s job is to entertain, though sometimes they teach us something new. A teacher’s job is to teach, though they can also use principles from the world of the entertainment to manage the classroom and the energy to make a better environment for learning.

When students act, they often change emotions too quickly. All good scenes are about a change. By the end of a good scene scene, something should change, and that is often an emotion. We practised shifting from nothing to showing the emotion over 10 seconds, not instantly.

We then added it to an advert. Start with one emotion, like sad, then get the product, then move to happiness slowly.

Presentation skills are another useful area which can be developed through drama. We can work on speaking slowly and clearly so that everyone can understand us. When somebody listens to someone they don’t really know, most of what they focus on is the body language rather than the words. As a presenter, you need to stand still and keep your hands still, holding them a little above your waist, make eye contact if you can, and speak a little bit louder and a little bit more slowly than normal. Combine all of that, and people will concentrate more on the words rather than all the other things you’re doing.

To get the volume, students can practise counting 1 to 10 normally, then repeating it again but starting from 1 very quiet, 5 at normal volume, to 10 as loud as possible. The first time they do it 10 will probably still be quite quiet, and when they do it again, it will probably be louder. Another thing we tried was counting 1-5 in the highest possible voice, then 6-10 in the lowest possible voice. We often don’t give ourselves permission to play with our voices and use them in different ways.It’s important to build the confidence to speak out loud and use our voices effectively when presenting.

Music is one way to create atmosphere and influence the mood. You can simply play a little music and ask students how it makes them feel. You can play music and ask students to imagine it’s a film soundtrack: what film are you watching with this music as the soundtrack? This is a simple creative activity. It’s almost impossible to not see a film – it’s original content students have created for themselves. This brings emotion into the classroom.

These short activities can be used as pruners. You can use an upbeat activity to energise students, or a calm activity to get them ready for a test. Those 5 or 10 minutes aren’t wasted, as it sets the tone for tasks to be more successful in the rest of the lesson.

Another question: what does a film director actually do? What makes them good at their job? What does a musical conductor do?

We said that they need to have an idea of where they are aiming at, and know how to get a group of people there. David said he had no idea! 🙂

Follow up question: what does a teacher actually do? We might not actually be clear about it, but we know because we do it every day. But what is useful is being aware of our audience, and thinking about what they need from us. Are we speaking too fast or too show? If they’re not engaged, we need to slow down because they’re not understanding.

People who are famous are not necessarily famous because they’re good. They have been given status and we get status from associating with them. Just because you’re doing the same thing in a different context, it doesn’t mean you’re any less good at it than a famous person is who might be doing that job. Just because anybody can do it, it doesn’t mean that anybody can do it will.

Teaching is more of an art than acting. As an actor you get a lot of prep time, and a lot of people to help you, then when you do your show you do it many times, and you can’t necessarily see your audience. As a teacher you get minimal prep time, you mostly work alone, you do your ‘show’ once, and you can see your audience and on top of that you have to teach them something to – despite all of the distractions, the people who give criticism apart from your audience (the parents, the management…). It really is valuable, what we’re doing. And learning entertainment principles can enhance our teaching too.

26th PARK Conference, 6th November 2021 (face-to-face!)

Today was my first face-to-face conference since before the pandemic started. According the Czech event law, this was required:

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Covid-19 Measures
Circumstances force us to check everyone at the entrance. Please have the following ready in paper form or in an app on your mobile phone:

• A Covid-19 Certificate 
• Proof of having had Covid-19 recently
• A negative Antigen test (not older than 24 hours) or a negative PCR test (not older than 72 hours).

We kindly request that everyone:

• wear a respirator (not a normal mask) for the duration of the conference
• disinfect their hands
• wash their hands regularly
• maintain distances.

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This made me feel much better about going to the conference, though it did involve trying to find respirator masks in the UK. This proved impossible (even normal masks were challenging to find!) and I ended up ordering them online from a Czech company and collecting them from a parcel box once I’d arrived in Brno…the miracles of the internet!

Mark Andrews, Nikki Fortova, me, and Phil Warwick during the panel discussion to round off the conference

I presented a talk called One activity, multiple tasks, and took part in a panel discussion at the end of the day. These are my notes from the sessions I attended – the opening plenary and two other talks.

The next PARK Conference will be 2nd April 2022.

Going with the flow: Making our learners fluent, well, actually confluent! – Mark Andrews

Mark started by playing a little of Smetana’s Vltava. Write the name of a river you like, 3 words to describe it, and think about what it might be like to talk to the river. Mine: Kennet, changeable, mixed, shallow.

Confluences have been a big part of Mark’s life. He grew up in Appledore, and lived in Belgrade.

Listenership is a concept he’s interested in.

A conversation is not a monologue, it is two- sided, we not only express our thoughts but we listen to the expression of other people’s thoughts.

Harold Palmer, 1921, The Oral Method of Teaching Languages

Mark believes we need to create more activities which build confidence in our learners, but also prompt more spontaneous reactions. How do we put the con(fluence) back into conversation? There are still lots of students who do English at school for 10 years but aren’t able to speak English.

Try this structure:

• The thing is…
• The other thing is…
• The (worrying/strange/etc.) thing is..

Have you ever taught this?

• You see…
• I see… (to mean I understand, is often taught quite late)
• Well,…
• OK,…
• Right…

We separate productive and receptive skills, but what about interaction. [I believe the CEFR does highlight interaction now…]

We can use a corpus to find common phrases from interaction.

The exercise above is a kind of drill. It doesn’t separate accuracy and fluency…maybe we should be combining them more.

Teacher talking time has been a taboo for a long time, but maybe we can say short things and get students to react.

• Did you?
• Really?
• What happened?

How could we react? What could we say?

The COBUILD project and John Sinclair had a revolutionary effect on language study. Developing the largest English language corpus led to many changes in research.

IRF:

• Initiate
• Response
• Feedback

…is a common classroom pattern. Feedback is often ‘good’ – we don’t take the opportunity to push the conversation further. Wong and Waring (2009) showed that teacher falling intonation signals the end of conversation and closes the door for student interaction.

Discourse analysis started in 1975, finding out how real communication really happens.

Push learners beyond IRF: Tell your partner about your last week. Make sure you both speak at least 4 times.

How collocations with ‘vaccine’ have changed over the last few months

A lot of repetition is good for learning languages. Mark gave lots of examples of what linguistics calls ‘vague language’, but they’re the lubricants that make fluent communication possible. We can do this in the classroom, like this:

These writers make listeners feel like we’re fluent.

Etymology is interesting to learn too. [The slide above shows one of my favourite Czech words, and I never knew where it came from!]

Hello? Goodbye? Or…

• Hi
• Hiya
• Alright?
• See ya
• See you later

You can introduce this kind of diversity of phatic communication even at very low levels. Get the students interested in language right from the start.

Teach them how to build relationships, not just engage in transaction.

• Do you want a drink?
• No. (I’m OK for now. Thanks, but not now…)

‘Must’ in spoken English is used almost exclusively for speculation, but we associate it with obligation.

Good listenership involves responding.

We can drill this kind of thing fairly easily – getting students to respond in simple phrases.

Going back to the start of the talk: I talk like a river is the Best Children’s Book of the Year 2020 according to Publishers Weekly. It was written by somebody who stutters, about overcoming it. It could be a way to think about how to encourage children/ students to talk. Some people have a bad experience in the first year of English classes, and are quite ever after.

Here’s Ed Sheeran reading the story:

Definitely worth watching!

The Sounds and Shapes of Words: Teaching reading effectively – Steve Lever

Steve was presenting a hybrid session from Greece, something I think will be increasingly common in future conferences. There was a facilitator in the room and Steve was on the screen.

He discussed teaching early literacy for young learners, including how frequency can influence your choice of what to teach.

We watched a scene from I Love Lucy where Lucy’s Cuban husband is reading in English, demonstrating the vagaries of English spelling and pronunciation.

How many characters are there in the English alphabet? Not 26 as you might think, but 52, as capitals and lower case look different.

How many sounds are there? 44, depending on the variety.

How many spellings represent the English sounds? 250

How many consonant clusters are there in English? 30 initial and 100 final

Why have capital letters increased in importance? Because keyboards use them.

A letter may have more than one phoneme. A phoneme may be represented by more than one letter or combination of letters.

These are all issues those learning to read in English have to contend with.

We associate meaning with sound. Reading is not an innate, natural skill. Learners go from the letter to the sound to the concept. Readers become prudish when we see the image of the word and automatically get to the concept of the word.

Early literacy teaching has moved towards a frequency focus: what are readers most likely to encounter?

A possible sequence:

1. Introduce most common sound pictures in CVC words. Single letter consonant pictures: b p t d l m. Single letter vowel pictures: a e i o u.
2. Introduce consonant blends (2 letters, 2 sounds): st, br, bl, gr etc.
3. Introduce digraphs: sh, ch, etc. (2 letters, one sound)
4. Introduce split vowel digraphs – explore magic ‘e’: Tim/ time
5. Introduce proper vowel digraphs: ai in rain, ou in house etc.
6. Make learners aware of initial, mid, final position sound pictures.
7. Present alternatives: snow/now, dog/egg.

Frequency: /k/ in duck (3), kitten (2), queen (5), school (4), cat (1). Which is most common? I think ‘cat’ – I was right! The numbers in brackets show you the order from most to last frequent.

/i:/ is tree (3), key (4), me (1), pony (5), beach (2)

3 key skills:

• Blending (running sounds together)
• Segmenting
• Phoneme manipulation (how a word sound changes if you change one of the letters within it)

We’re not looking at saying the names of the letters, we’re looking at the sounds of the letters.

Sight words (e.g. the, and, to, he, she, that, in, it, is, are, be, but, one, said, was, at, I, you, he, she, his, her…):

• Build learners’ confidence
• Help children focus on more challenging words
• Provide clues to understanding the meaning of a sentence/ text.
• Many sight words defy decoding strategies.
• Builds learning behaviours that will help learners read new and more complex words.

Practical tips:

• Balance ‘sound’ approaches with letter pattern and ‘sight word’ activities. Encourage recognition of patterns, getting learners to actively focus on words in a text. Work with words systematically and in context.
• Get learners into the habit of ‘looking with intent’ – paying attention to the eyes.
• Point out that print is all around them (this really helped me with Cyrillic). You could have labels or word cards around your classroom.
• Take an interest in words as you read. Ask them to predict the spelling of one or two words before you read for example.
• Encourage students to take mental pictures of words in their mind.
• Get students to write down words and to see if it feels right.
• Be multi-sensory.
• Word shapes – what words are above, below, on the line? You can draw lines around the word for the shape, or have hand up for above, down for below, flat for on.
• Show words on the screen. Close your eyes. Which word is missing?
• Bingo works for writing and reading.
• Overwriting/Tracing works for letter formation. Green dot where we start to write it, and a red one where we stop, without fully writing it.
• Visualise words within words. An animal in education: cat. A part of the body in learn: ear.

Angels or Demons? ADHD and other white elephants – Claudia Molnár

What does SEN look like? All of these people have/had one or more of dyslexia, ADD or ADHD.

Fragile X syndrome was new to me – it’s a mutation in the X gene which brings many other things with it: dyslexia, dyscalculia, limited short term memory, limited executive control, emotional behavioural diaorder, autistic spectrum disorder etc. It’s rarely tested for.

Many people with SEN go undiagnosed for a while.

Teachers of English do not usually get adequate preparation for teaching children with SEN, or we might not be told about a diagnosis, or we might suspect but not be able to communicate that with parents.

Meeting the needs of children with SEN requires a lot of commitment, energy, professional knowledge and skills. Not only do English language teachers need specific knowledge and skills to accomplish this important task, but the crucial pre-requisitve for success in the EL classroom is their cooperation with class teachers, specialists in school or local community, and parents.

Claudia Molnar

How do children learn a foreign language? Exposure, repetition, etc. These are hard enough anyway, but can be much harder with the additional barriers to learning caused by SEN. Building confidence is important.

Inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity: 3 features common to ADD/ADHD, though they might be differently balanced for different people.

Symptoms of inattention:

• Failure to give close attention to detail or making mistakes
• Often forgetful in daily activiites
• Easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
• Often losts things necessary for tasks of activities
• Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
• Difficult sustaining attention during activities
• Difficulty in following instructions for activities
• Avoidance of activities that require sustained mental effort
• Often has difficulty organising tasks and activities

Hyperactivity can easily exhaust people. Symptoms of hyperactivity:

• Often fidgets with hands or squirms in seat
• Often runs about or climbs excessively in situations in which it is not appropriate
• Often leaves seat in situations in which remaining seated is expected
• Often talks excessively
• Often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly
• Is often ‘on the go’ or acts as if ‘driven by a motor’

Symptoms of impulsivity:

• Often blurts out answers before questions have been completed
• Often interrupts or intrudes on others
• Makes important decisions without considering long-term consequences
• Reckless behaviour and accident-prone
• Often has difficulty awaiting turn

Potential knock-on effects, which can also influence each other:

• Segregation
• Anxiety
• Motor skills problems
• Depression
• Fear
• Phobias
• Insomnia/sleep disorders
• Emotional disorders
• PTSD

What does that mean for language learners? Bilingual learners with ADHD have more difficulty with code-switching, not necessarily being able to keep up with which lanugage they are supposed to be in. The lesson they had immediately before might influence their ability too, for example if they had a German lesson before their English lesson. Translation activities could be quite challenging. Claudia is running studies on this now.

Dyslexia manifests itself in different ways with different people. Again, it can have huge knock-on effects on other areas of people’s lives, not just the stereotype of problems with reading. [Note: Dyslexia Bytes has excellent resources to help you.]

People with dyslexia might use their peripheral vision more than those without it.

Ways we can adapt our lessons in a range of ways for successful inclusive practice:

• Applying appropriate teaching methodology
• Using appropriate teaching material
• Having extra time for individual work with the child
• Acquiring specific knowledge, skills and experience in dealing with diversity in class.
• Adapting the curriculum

Considerations when planning:

• Pre-teach vocabulary
• Give learners a title/ context when writing
• Allow learners to draw rather than write everything, they speak it loud
• Give them the opportunity to discuss the difficulties they have and share possible solutions through peer discussions.

Go back to basics. Think about how to make things easy access.

Reading:

• Don’t insist that all learners read aloud
• Use prediction techniques for each upcoming section
• Read short sections
• Stop and ask Wh- questions for comprehension and clarification, and to check predictions
• Use visuals – images, comic strips (see the CIELL project), etc.
• Repeat these steps for each section.

Writing:

• Build in planning time (as a group)
• Brainstorm text organisation
• Create sub tasks for the writing process
• Give enough time, release the pressure of in-class writing (though might be a problem for exam prep)
• Set a linguistic focus (e.g. use of mixed past tenses) (Komos, 2020)

All SEN students can learn! But we may need to find ways to change our teaching to help them to learn.

Claudia finished by sharing this video:

Clearer communication (ACEIA 1st virtual conference)

On Saturday 17th October I presented as part of the Asociación de Centros de Enseñanza de Idiomas de Andalucía (ACEIA) 1st virtual conference. It was a new management talk:

Communication is the keystone of management, with the quality of your communication making the difference between a team that resents every change you make and one that will follow where you lead. While I can’t promise to resolve all your communication problems, I can offer various tried and tested tips to improve the effectiveness of online and offline communication with your team, hopefully leading to a more positive, supportive environment for all of you.

This is a topic I feel very strongly about, as my experiences of bad and good managers have largely centred around the quality of their communication. In my own management experience I’ve noticed that as my ability to communicate successfully and clearly has improved, I’ve gained confidence and I feel like the people I manage trust me more. They are also very open to giving me feedback on my management in general and my communication specifically. The tips in my talk are primarily aimed at managers, but many of them would be useful for teachers and general communication in life too.

These were my slides:

Listen

Before you do any broadcasting, it’s important to listen.

Don’t interrupt. I have a tendency to finish other people’s sentences or assume I know what’s coming next and start replying. A colleague once told me this was stopping him from speaking to me properly – he suggested I use my finger to stop myself from being able to speak! This really works: when I shouldn’t interrupt, I adopt a thinking pose with my index finger on my lips and it makes it much harder to start speaking.

Pay full attention. Stop what you’re doing and really listen. Make eye contact. Listen with your brain as well as your ears – don’t just spend the time working out what you’re going to say next or how you’re going to solve the problem.

What are they not saying? Notice body language and patterns of communication (or lack of communication) which may indicate hidden messages. Perhaps the person you’re speaking to is very stressed about something but doesn’t know how to communicate this. Perhaps they’re feeling overwhelmed in general. Perhaps they really don’t like communicating with you and are avoiding it (not necessarily because they don’t like you – perhaps they don’t know how to speak to somebody they perceive as an authority, or perhaps they don’t want to interrupt you because they think you’re busy, or perhaps they don’t feel like they trust you enough to talk to you yet.) There’s a lot of ‘perhaps’ there, because we never really know, but be open to hidden messages, not just the ones which are explicitly stated.

General tips

Consider your medium carefully. What is the best way to communicate your message? Options might include:

• Face-to-face conversation
• Online conversation e.g. via Zoom
• Phone call
• WhatsApp call
• SMS
• WhatsApp message
• WhatsApp voice recording
• Facebook messenger
• Email
• Meeting with a group of people/all of the staff
• (Regarding students) Speaking to/Phoning/Emailing parents

We have so many options for communication now. The method we use says something about how formal or serious particular communication is, whether a written record is required (either to track information or simply so information is easy to refer back to), how much (perceived or real) time we have available, and how we might want our interlocutor(s) to respond.

Be clear about what information doesn’t exist. If you don’t have information yet, make sure the other person knows this. Otherwise, they may assume you’re keeping it from them for some reason. For example, if you know that a one-to-one student is in a teacher’s timetable, but said student hasn’t confirmed the start date of the lessons yet, tell the teacher that you don’t know the start date.

Be realistic about when communication will happen. Following on from the previous point, ensure that people know when they are likely to get any missing information and what factors will affect this. For example, when will the school contact the student to confirm the start date? Knowing when you will get information can reduce anxiety, and mean you can more easily postpone worrying about something until later.

Remind people to help you with communication. As managers, we’re normally spinning a lot of plates, and inevitably we’ll lose some of them. Get your staff on board to help you. Ask them to prod you if you don’t reply within 3 working days for example, and be clear about what is their responsibility to follow up on and what is yours.

Be open about mistakes in communication. Apologise when needed. We’re humans. We make mistakes. This is just as true in our communication as it is in any other area. Sometimes the things we do or say (or don’t do or say!) can be stressful for somebody else, or make their jobs harder. If you realise that your actions have made this happen, apologise for it. This is far more likely to build relationships of trust than brushing such mistakes under the carpet or pretending they didn’t happen.

Timing

Consider the timing of your communication carefully. What messages are you sending out about…

• response times?
• working hours?
• availability?

By instantly replying to every message you receive, you are putting unnecessary pressure on yourself and probably interrupting your life outside work. You are also implicitly indicating that you expect instant responses from the people you work with, and are therefore adding unnecessary stress to them.

By replying to messages at unusual times, such as very early in the morning or late at night, you’re also implying that your employees should do this too.

By being available all the time, you’re losing the chance to have a life outside work, or at least drastically reducing that chance.

To help yourself to communicate more healthily, set working hours and consider what notifications you have, and pass this information on to your team. For example, our senior team have clear working hours which all the teachers know, WhatsApp notifications, but no email notifications. We have told teachers that we will respond to phone calls or WhatsApp messages as soon as possible within working hours (or I’ll respond to early morning phone calls too to arrange cover for sickness), but emails will be responded to when we get to them.

You can also make use of the scheduling function which most email providers have to ensure that your messages are sent at reasonable working hours or at the point of need, rather than when you wrote them at 6am, or 5 days before a teacher needs to see it.

Meetings

Is it really an email? We’ve all sat in a completely pointless meeting which should have been an email. Only have meetings for things which require some form of discussion or Q&A.

What is the meeting for? Who is it (really) for? Know why you are requiring people to be in the same place at the same time. Make sure it’s not just for you, but that they are benefitting from the meeting too. Our school meetings happen every Friday for 30 minutes. They have two purposes. The first is to pass on information which is important for that point in the year and to ensure teachers know how to fulfil their responsibilities concerning things like writing reports or marking written work. The second is a social reason: it’s the only time in the week when we are a single school and a single team, all in the same place. This is why it was so important for us to continue these weekly meetings when we were all working from home too, to reduce the sense of isolation.

Do you need to say it all? At some points in a meeting, you may not need to read all of the information. Let people process information for themselves if it’ll be faster. For example, in our (deliberately fuzzy) agenda below you can see bullet points at the top. There are two sections: Please can you… for things they don’t need to hear me say, and Reminders for things like dates for their diary which I’ve already spoken about before. There is also colour coding, as suggested by our teachers at the end of last year. Orange indicates I’m telling you for the second time, red would be for the third time. [The document is titled ‘agenda’, but also acts as minutes – it’s edited during the meeting, printed out and put on the wall, and also available on Google Drive for teachers to refer back to as needed.]

Break up the info dump. As you can see, we share a lot of information during our meetings. They normally take the full 30 minutes allocated to them, sometimes a little longer. It’s impossible for somebody to focus on one person talking for all of that time and actually process the information. At one or two points in the meeting I normally have some kind of discussion, for example ‘What do you need to remember to do from the meeting so far?’ or ‘Have you picked up anything while teaching on Zoom this week which would be useful for everyone else?’ This gives me a little break, changes the pace, and allows teachers to process the information a little. It also creates a couple of extra beginnings and endings during the meeting, meaning information is a tiny bit more likely to be retained and acted on.

Are the next steps clear? At the end of the meeting, make sure everybody knows what they’re expected to do next and what the deadlines are.

Include positives/thank you. In a general meeting, include positive things too. I found that I used to feel like I just spent 30 minutes every week telling the staff off or nagging them. I still do sometimes, but ending on a positive note has reduced that feeling.

Emails

Clear subject line. Make your subject line as clear as possible to avoid guessing games and make it easier to find emails again later. If it’s new topic, start a new thread with a new subject line. Be selective about your use of the word ‘urgent’ in subject lines.

One big email? Lots of little emails? If you have lots of information to convey to the same people in a single day, it’s better to send out a single longer email than lots of short emails. This is less overwhelming in inboxes and easier to refer back to.

Signpost big emails. Use headings and highlight key points to help readers navigate the block of text. Put new topics into new paragraphs, and use bullet points to break down topics as needed.

Make it easy to use your emails. Don’t expect recipients to read between the lines. Be explicit about what kind of reply is needed and when. Include links to anything external so the recipient doesn’t have to hunt for them.

It may seem like it will take longer to write emails like this, but it will probably save you time in the long run as you’ll have to do less chasing, and won’t need to resolve issues like people filling in the wrong document because you didn’t include the link to the right one.

Here are two examples of emails I’ve sent recently:

Documents to check + creating Zoom IDs

Morning all,

Here are all of the documents you need to check your timetable against:

– Room timetable
– Level meeting timetable
– Cover timetable
– Register links (these will appear in your Google Docs later in the day – please don’t ask for them – I’ll put up a note on the door when they’re ready)

Your register links document takes you to various general links for teachers, including the Zoom IDs list. Please create meetings for all of your Zoom classes on Friday 18th. Make sure they recur until 30th June 2021 so you never have to change them through the year. Add the ID and password to the Zoom ID document so it’s available for cover and if the office need to tell a student.

When you have added all Zoom IDs to the list and checked all of your documents, reply to this email. Say ‘Fine’ if it’s all complete. List any problems if not – be as clear as possible. Please do not send the email separately – I want to keep it all in one thread so I can keep track of who’s replied.

In this email you can see:

• a clear subject line;
• clear instructions on how to complete the task;
• information about how exactly they should reply and what information I need;
• why I’m asking them to do things in this way.

Welcome to the 2020-2021 academic year (please reply by Monday 7th Sept 18:00)

[This email image is deliberately blurred.]

In this email you can see:

• a clear subject line, including exactly when I need a reply by;
• headings;
• topics highlighted in blue;
• all documents needed are attached;
• all links to be followed are included in the email.

Keeping track

We’re managing a lot of communication, and potentially there are a lot of versions of documents flying around.

Date any documents you send out, rather than having the same file name or calling them 1, 2, 3, etc. Reverse order sorts them nicely: 2020.10.17. I normally keep all previous versions in a folder called ‘Archive’ and only the active version in the top folder to help me navigate. Here’s an example from the presentations on my personal computer:

Note any deadlines you set for replies in your diary or calendar. Follow up only with those who didn’t meet deadline, rather than sending out a blanket email to everyone. Don’t start following up until the deadline arrives – otherwise you are creating extra implicit deadlines, and causing yourself and your colleagues unnecessary extra stress.

Giving feedback

This can be one of the most challenging parts of our jobs, whether as teachers, managers or trainers, and can often be the cause of a lot of stress.

Use a feedback model (this one is from Manager Tools). This structure can help you to keep feedback neutral and ensure that the person on the receiving end is receptive to it (whether positive or negative). There are four steps:

• Ask Can I give you some feedback?
• Describe the behaviour: When you…
• Describe the impact: …it makes me feel / …students find it difficult to… / …students are really engaged.
• Discuss next steps: Keep it up! / What can you do about this? How can I help you?

It’s important to get the person you’re speaking to to say what the next steps are themselves, and preferably the ideas will come from them. They’re much more likely to act on the feedback if they say it rather than if you say it.

Focus on behaviour and actions, not personality. This keeps things more neutral and means feedback feels more constructive and less like a personal attack. It takes practice! If you’re not sure if your feedback does this successfully, run it by somebody else you trust and ask for help with rephrasing it as needed before you give it to the person concerned.

What expectations are teachers holding themselves / you holding teachers to? Teachers can often be their own worse critics, and beginner teachers in particular may not allow themselves to be beginners. Ensure that any expectations are realistic for the level of experience of the teacher, and that they know what you expect of them is fair.

Boost confidence and spot strengths too. Aim to give at least as much positive, confidence-boosting feedback as you do feedback on areas to improve.

Compassionate communication

Ask, don’t assume. Ask questions, rather than thinking you know why something happened or what somebody is feeling or experiencing at a given point.

Be patient and supportive. Aim for communication which helps rather than hinders or stresses out your colleagues. Keep this in the back of your mind, and don’t let your own stress or frustration at the fact this is the 18th time you’ve asked come through (easier said than done, but vital to remember!)

Provide training on your bug bears. To reduce your own stress levels, teach people how to do things which frustrate you when they do it ‘wrong’. For me this is the use of ‘Reply all’ rather than ‘Reply’ to group emails – you can also avoid this by BCCing all of the receiving emails, because then people can only reply to the sender rather than everyone!

Be on the receiving end of your own communication. Copy yourself into your group emails using your personal address, so you realise just how many emails you’re sending out. Record a meeting and sit through the whole thing without fast-forwarding it. You’ll soon send fewer emails and run shorter meetings!

Be a learning communicator

Reflect on particularly successful / unsuccessful communication. Why did that observation feedback run so smoothly? Why did that interview feel horrible throughout?

Seek out feedback. Ask for feedback on your communication. This includes when communication went wrong – wait until the emotion has gone out of the situation, then ask for advice on how you could have made the situation run more smoothly. If your staff trust you, they’ll be very willing to give you this feedback.

Choose an area to focus on. For me, this is currently all of the points in ‘listen’ at the start of this post!

Be kind to yourself 🙂 Your communication won’t always be perfect, but don’t dwell on it when things don’t work out. Model learning from problems and mistakes, seeking feedback, and moving forward rather than dwelling on the past.

What tips would you add to improve communication as a teacher, manager or trainer? Have you had any experiences of particularly good or bad communication which have helped you to become a better communicator?

ExcitELT 2020

One of the positives of the situation in the last 3 months is the fact that many events are now held online and are therefore accessible to people from a wider range of locations. This was the case for the ExcitELT conference, held online on Sunday 14th of June 2020. I joined around 40-50 other teachers from all over the world to talk about overturning norms in ELT. As the conference was based in the Japan time zone it meant 7 a.m. start for me, but it was well worth getting up for!

The format of the conference is worth mentioning as I think this was one of its great strengths. Each one hour block was broken into three sections. First we had a short presentation from one or two people interested in that area. Then we went into break out rooms on Zoom in small groups of three to six people. We had access to a Google Doc containing questions to help us talk about the topic. We made notes in the document during or discussions and the final few minutes of the block involved a summary of interesting points which came up. This format works really well as it allowed us to dive into a topic in more depth and share our experiences of it. I feel like this led to a richer conference experience and I hope more conferences are run like this in the future.

(Note: you might also be interested in reading Zhenya Polosatova’s much more concise and pro-active reflections on the event!)

Overturning norms around teacher conformity – Anna Loseva

This was the first of two topics from the conference which I had never considered before. Anna invited us to think about which areas teaching involve conformity. Examples might be the feeling that we need to get particular qualifications to progress in the career, the pressure to conform to student expectations like playing lots of games, or perceived market pressures such as the perception that students only want teachers who grew up speaking English.

Anna started to think about teacher conformity when she was looking for a job in Vietnam. A lot of people advised her to get CELTA to make the job hunting process easier, including me. Anna decided that if she did this and got a job it would validate the system which says that CELTA is worth more than a teaching degree and the many years of experience which she already had, though she also acknowledged the usefulness and worth of a CELTA course. She managed to get jobs and has proved to herself and others that it is possible to work in a foreign country teaching English without getting a CELTA first. This prompted her to ask when conformity is and is not useful, which was the topic of our group discussions.

How can conformity be helpful?

• It helps us to learn new things from people around us as we trying to fit in. This is especially true for new teachers fitting into the profession.
• Our group discussed the need to know what the rules are or might be before you feel comfortable breaking them.
• If we conform to a particular set of requirements, for example how a course works within a school, it can make it easier to support each other. We have a common point of reference for discussions and a kind of shared language.
• Having restrictions can push our creativity.
• It helps us to learn the culture of the system, for example how a local education system works.
• It helps us to know when we have met expectations.
• It allows us to set standards, and develop and evaluate ourselves and others against those standards.

How can conformity be detrimental?

• It can lead to burnout, frustration and disappointment.
• Students and teachers can end up losing motivation.
• Students don’t necessarily know what is best for their education, so if we conform to their requests or expectations all the time it might be detrimental to their education.
• When people conform without questioning it can lead to keeping guidelines which we no longer need.
• The rules which we conform to might be outdated or inhibit creativity. They can limit autonomy and differentiation.
• We might end up doing things which we do not understand the reason for or the point of.
• Constructive disobedience can lead to progress and innovation. Making mistakes and trying something new are useful paths towards development.
• We can forge our own path.

Thinking points

Anna left us with two questions to consider.

• Do you see some of the accepted norms in our industry as questionable? Should they be questioned?
• Is gaining approval important where are you? Is it a big part of ELT culture?

This session was a great way to start and really set the tone for the rest of the day.

Overturning norms related to teacher well-being – Tammy Gregersen

Tammy introduced us to the concept of positive psychology. She described the difference development based on strengths can make compared to development based on a concept of deficit and what’s missing. She introduced us to the work of Seligman, who says that if you use your ‘signature strengths’ you:

• Have more ownership over development and feel more authentic
• Have an intrinsic motivation to use your strengths
• Have a more rapid learning curve
• Feel invigoration, not exhaustion
• Have a sense of inevitability with the feeling of ‘try and stop me’
• Excited about displaying what you are good at
• Feel creative and one stupid shoe projects revolving around your strengths
• Engage in continuous learning
• Own your strengths

(Apologies for any mistakes while paraphrasing – its from 2008 but I could find the original list!)

Tammy asked us to do a survey our strengths. We had to take the top five and find two of them which we had in common with another member of our group. We then had to consider two ways we could use our strengths in new or novel ways in the next 2 days.

Since I did the survey, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the top five things which came up from my list. I was very pleased with the points that it picked out because they are all things which I have consciously tried to develop in myself:

1. Hope
2. Curiosity
3. Love of learning
4. Gratitude
5. Leadership

When discussing it with my friend later, we talked about how this type of survey could feel like an equivalent of a silly quiz in a magazine telling you what kind of person you are, but the fact that it keeps going round in my head means I think that this could be a very interesting avenue to explore. I’d be interested to know how similar or different the ranking of the 24 strengths on the list would look if I did the survey again in a few months or years. I also want to find out more about positive psychology and Seligman, starting with exploring his website Pursuit of Happiness in a lot more depth.

Overturning norms around ELT conferences – Shoko Kita, Tim Hampson, Peter Brereton

One of the reasons which I wanted to attend this conference was the fact that the ExcitELT team have been running interesting conference formats for the past few years. In this session they asked us to think about three main areas:

• How to make conferences more diverse
• How to narrow the gap between the presenter and the audience
• How to make conference has more friendly and accessible, including more affordable

They started with this quote from Haruki Murakami:

The questions which we were given to consider are useful for anyone who wants to plan a different kind of conference I think. They were:

• How can we address and balance all areas of diversity?
• How do we reach a wider range of participants?
• How do we follow up on new presenters?
• What can we do differently to make parents more welcome and make sure we have an affordable family policy?
• Can video or online sessions be used for people who are distant? How can video sessions be more interactive?
• What are the time demands of social events organized alongside conferences? Does this affect who got to them?
• How much time is optimal between sessions for discussion?
• How can you overcome the problems of one-time workshops?

By organizing an online conference which included a lot of group discussions and responses to participants’ experiences, the ExcitELT team started to work towards answering some of the questions that they posed. I will be interested to see how new modes of training and conferences develop in the post-pandemic era.

Overturning norms around second language teacher education – Geoff Jordan

Geoff started his presentation by describing the current training norms in place for elt. He described the craft model of CELTA where you hone techniques to become a teacher and the applied science model of university degrees where you learn the theory and think about how to apply it to the classroom. Norms in in-service teacher education include observations, sponsored courses, seminars and conferences, and perhaps also visiting trainers.

Geoff says that these methods of training pay little attention to how people actually learn a second language and lead to inefficacious teaching as most teachers use a course book to implement a grammar-based synthetic syllabus.

He described a common norm now of training focusing on teacher cognitions, which requires teachers to understand and articulate their own beliefs, assumptions and knowledge (BAKs) about the subject matter and pedagogical practice. These BAKs explain the mismatch between what teaches are told and what they actually do, and between what teachers say they do and what they actually do.

Geoff would like us to change the norms of second language teacher education sorry that we concentrate on doing real, relevant things in the target language, not just talking about the target language. He would like our teacher education to support and sustain this model, recognizing that implicit learning is the default mechanism of second-language learning. Focusing on BAKs ignores the elephant in the room of the form of the syllabus and how it is delivered.

To make these changes Geoff wants us to push for reform of the CELTA, conferences, and in his words ‘globetrotting gurus’. He wants us to encourage locally organized second language teacher education, promoting teacher collaboration, local teacher organizations, and ensuring that local teachers can discuss local issues. Above all he says that the guiding principle of second language teacher education should be to promote efficacy.

Neoliberalism in ELT – Tim Hampson

Tim’s talk was a replacement for a presenter who couldn’t attend and I’m glad to have seen it because it was another idea which I had never considered before. Despite having listened to the BBC sociology podcast Thinking Allowed for many years I had never really understood the concept of neoliberalism, so I will start with one definition which Tim gave us which I think was very clear.

Neoliberalism believes that free markets and competition maximize human well-being.

Harvey (2005:21)

One of the key points of neoliberalism is the fact that it seems to be a pervasive ‘truth’. It’s difficult to imagine a world that is not neoliberal, and it just seems to be the way things are. Some of the ideas that this leads to can be questioned. For example there is an idea that when individuals make choices, the result of your choices is what you ‘deserve’, but my choices as a white British middle-class woman with a university education very different to those of poor black man in the deep south of America. Another idea is that competition drives progress, but we can ask what that competition is, what that progress is, and whether it is actually beneficial.

Linked to neoliberalism is the idea of cultural, linguistic, economic and social capital introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. For example by learning English you might gain linguistic capital which you can turn into economic capitals by getting a job, or social capital by using your accent to fit in or helping you to interact more smoothly which leads to social connections or a job. Examples of English being seen as cultural or linguistic capital include learning English to get into a university course as a basic requirement, even if the course doesn’t require you to use English. English is also used as part of a drive to internationalize universities. Some people have to get an English certificate to look good in the job even though they may never use English at work. There is also the thorny question of learners asking how they can sound more like a native speaker, as there is a perception that a native speaker accent could give you more capital. In a neoliberalist view of the world it might feel like everyone is trying to gain capital, as it is hard to see the world in a different way once you know about this theory. But are they really?

Tim pointed out that we might view learning English for social or linguistic Capital as being preferable to learning full economic capital, but often you have to be in a place of privilege to even have the choice of prioritizing social or cultural capital Iva linguistic capital. Learning a language to get a job is just as legitimate as learning it for social or cultural reasons.

In our discussions Tim asked us to consider what kinds of capital are present in ELT and how we think about them. As he said, this idea of capital is an interesting lens through which to consider our profession.

Overturning language ideology norms – Heath Rose

The final session of the day was led by Heath Rose, who writes a lot about global Englishes. He started by telling us about how we might teach English as an international language, based on proposals by Galloway and Rose (2015:203):

1. Increase World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) exposure in the curriculum. This will reflect ‘the complex reality of how English is used worldwide’ (Saraceni, 2009).
2. Emphasize respect for multilingualism.
3. Raise awareness of global Englishes.
4. Raise awareness of ELF strategies.
5. Emphasize respect for diverse English-using cultures and communities.
6. Change teacher hiring practices.

Heath suggested ideas such as using a listening journal to encourage students to listen to a wider range of English voices, or you think a presentation to ask them to research different types of English. He talked about getting students involved in discussions about Global Englishes, raising their awareness and helping them to consider the identities as multilingual language uses. Accommodation strategies which we could teach students include helping them to deal with speakers of greater or lower proficiency than themselves, dealing with speakers with different accents or cultural norms, and helping them to join different linguistic communities.

Some of the barriers we discussed were the lack of suitable materials, knowing how to assess language and the requirements of particular exams, teacher education and training, an attachment to ‘standard English’ by stakeholders such as parents, and teacher recruitment practices. In our group we focused a lot on the final points and on the fact that in some countries it is very difficult to challenge days due to circumstances beyond the school’s control, such as national visa policies. However we all agreed that it is very important to do what we can.

Overall thoughts

As I hope you can say from what was described here, this was a very different kind of conference and one which has given me a lot of food for thought. If you get the chance to attend, I would highly recommend it. Thank you to Shoko, Tim and Peter for organising it, and to all of the attendees who shared their ideas and experience.

The end (kind of)

This is the last of my weekly posts, started when the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools in Poland. I still have a couple of weeks of work left, but my teaching is done for the year and life outside the classroom seems to be opening up again, so this is a general reflection on what I’ve learnt since lockdown started.

Personal stuff

When we first went into lockdown I thought that it was going to be very difficult for me because I live by myself. I thought I would get lonely and depressed because that’s what’s happened to me before when I didn’t have friends I could easily meet. However, it was the complete opposite. I don’t think I have ever felt more connected to the world and to my friends and family since I started living abroad. As we all discovered the power of Zoom and how easy it is to connect groups of people for all kinds of different reasons I started to have regular group meetings with three different lots of friends as well as regular conversations with my mum and with two other friends. Together with professional conversations and online events, my social life has been very full, including games afternoons, pub quizzes and just having conversations on every topic under the sun, starting with the inevitable “What it’s like for you there now?”

Apart from the social side of things, I have continued to work on my cooking and baking. I can now confidently bake with live yeast, and have added a range of meal options to my menu, including pizza and experimenting with chickpeas. I have had more time to cook and bake than previously and I hope to maintain this to some extent when life opens up again completely.

Health-wise, it was a challenge not having physio for so long and since I went back a couple of weeks ago it has been quite painful, but nothing I haven’t had to deal with before. I have bought a bike and started to use it in the last couple of weekends and I’m really enjoying the new places it can take me to, including where I am standing right now. I dictated most of this post into my phone while standing in the forest taking a break from a bike ride. 🙂

I have hugely enjoyed all of the cultural offerings which have been made available to us during lockdown. I have watched almost all of the productions from the National Theatre and have learnt to notice staging in a way I never had before because of their simple but incredibly effective productions. I have filled a lot of gaps in my Shakespeare knowledge, watching at least five plays which I had never seen before, and appreciating all over again why he is such an amazing playwright. I’ve also seen a few musicals, and other plays and productions I would never have considered watching if it wasn’t for lockdown. I have given money a few times and hope to continue being able to support the arts in more ways after this.

Final lessons

My final two lessons with my groups were a grammar, vocabulary and writing test which involved me making sure they could all access the test successfully, then waiting for them to finish and providing activities for the fast finishers.

In the final lesson I shared the test results and we looked at websites that the students can use to practice English over the summer.

In the last Polish beginners lesson we did general revision from our 20 or so hours of lessons this year. We started with an ELTpics image of a person which my students had chosen and they answered simple questions about the person in a Google Doc. To help them do this we had Quizlet breaks, replaying set from earlier in the year including demonstrating the Gravity function. Pat way through the lesson we added a second image to the document and they answered more questions about that lesson. The lesson was only 1 hour long, so we didn’t have time to create conversations between the two people set in some of the locations we have practiced language for this year, for example the supermarket, the train station, or the police station. I think the structure of this lesson works nicely, particularly for the small group of three students I had, and it’s a lesson that worked very well in an online setting because we could move smoothly between the documents and the Quizlet sets.

My teaching

Like pretty much every teacher in the world, my teaching has undergone a huge transformation over the last 3 months. I have gone from knowing nothing about Zoom to being able to run a range of lesson types on it and integrate lots of different types of activities and tools to make sure that my students benefit from the lessons. I have learnt that it’s an incredibly versatile tool, and I know that it will be a part of my teaching from now on. I have also been able to incorporate many things that I probably could have used in a face-to-face classroom but never had the incentive to do so, or tried once a long time ago and never used again. There is no doubt in my mind that my teaching has developed a lot due to the challenge of the last few months, and I have found it very exciting and interesting to try to work out how to teach in this different way. I wish that it didn’t need to have happened in this way but I think that education will be richer for it.

Training and conferences

Today I attended the #excitELT conference online, which was a great format – 15-20 minute presentations, followed by 20-30-minute discussions in small groups with Google Docs, followed by a 5-10-minute round-up and a short break before the next session. This is just one of the new training formats I have been privileged to take part in over the last three months. I previously wrote about the IH Moscow event which I attended which had short presentations by lots of different teachers, and I will shortly be sharing a post by Alastair Grant about the weekly We’re all in this together meetings which features very vibrant chats run via Zoom based on prompts or guest speakers. If you know of any other interesting new training formats, please let me know.

All of this has come about out of the need to provide training and support with the sudden move to online teaching, and it has yet again demonstrated the innovation of the teaching community. A lot of conferences have had to move online and this has broadened access to these events, and enabled a wider range of speakers to take part. I hope that these models are maintained when the pandemic is over, and we can continue to look for new and innovative ways of supporting as many teachers as possible.

Management

The pandemic has probably thrown up the most challenges for me as a manager. Working with the rest of the management team, we were lucky enough to have two days to make the transition to online teaching and be able to provide training for our teachers to make this move as effective as possible.

I have had to learn to be more effective with my email communication, as in the beginning there was so much information which needed to be given to the teachers, and the only way to pass it all on seemed to be via email. I tried to speak to every teacher over the phone or on Zoom at least once a week. While this was not always possible I know I managed to speak to people at least every two weeks. I created a virtual staffroom on Zoom so that people could meet me easily and I could remain as accessible as possible, as I would in my office at school.

We continued with weekly meetings and workshops, and I tried to maintain the social aspects of this by having some time for us to have a chat at the beginning of the meeting before we started the main event. I’m not sure how successful these things were, and the last three months have shown areas where our admin needs to become more efficient, as it’s not possible just to pop into another room and have a quick chat with somebody if there’s a problem. When you have to make an appointment or send yet another email, it’s all more screen time and shows up the holes in the system.

We now have two weeks at the end of the school year to try to work out some of these problems before the summer, and I have time during the summer to think about what I can do to improve the situation. The fact that we will inevitably enter some new mode of working in September gives us the chance to have a kind of reset. I’m not sure we would have done that without the need to work in such a different way during the pandemic.

Reflection

Writing weekly posts since the beginning of the pandemic has allowed me to really think about what has happened to me and to our profession and lives over the last 3 months. I have thought about my teaching more deeply than for a long time. Overall, I know that I have been very lucky to always have a little bit of freedom during lockdown, to continue to have work to keep me busy, to have a range of challenges, and to not have to deal with the challenges of having children suddenly at home. I have been very grateful for the support and comments I have received in response to my posts.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope that the end is in sight for you as well before too long. I hope that the end is really here for us in Poland too, and that it’s not a false sense of security before a second wave comes. As always with these major events, we are reminded that life is short and we never know when it will change dramatically, so we should continue to live every moment to the best of our abilities, including when we are in lockdown. Good luck and stay safe.

Tips and useful links

If you need to present from PowerPoint via Zoom, go to File > Set up show > Browsed by an individual (window). (Thanks Kelly Cargos)

If you’re having trouble downloading the chat now, there’s been a setting change in the latest version of Zoom, which you may need to change back. (Thanks Ruth)

John Hughes has five activities for introducing Zoom to students, including functional language they may need to use when things go wrong.

Peter Clements talks about peer observation, and what’s changed with it since he’s started online teaching.

Rachel Tsateri talks about connecting classrooms using Flipgrid.

Jade Blue suggests four activities to help teens build social connections.

ELT Campus has some incredibly useful tips for giving instructions online, and a whole series of webinars for teachers on how to teach English online. Thanks to Katherine Martinkevich for bringing their site to my attention on her ever-useful blog. She also led me to this Padlet of fun activities for the Zoom classroom.

Sharon Hartle reflects on the experience of teaching online at Verona University, and provides tips on using a combination of Moodle and Zoom.

Leo Selivan has a Zoom activity using the photos of the week on BBC, The Guardian or The Atlantic.

James Egerton talks about how IH Rome Manzoni have taken the CELTA course online.

Hana Ticha was back in the classroom with some of her younger students.

THE REST OF THE SERIES

Each week I’ve summarised what our teachers and I have learnt during the transition to online teaching. Every post includes some tips about using Zoom, activities we’ve tried out (many adapted from the face-to-face classroom), and reflections on how my teaching and management have been affected by working from home. Here are all of the posts so far:

• Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom
• Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom
• The transition to working from home
• The world is changing
• The new normal?
• Half a week
• Calmer seas
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching
• Testing times
• The end (kind of…) (this post)

You may also find some other posts on my blog/which I’ve written useful:

• Separating work and life when you’re quarantined in one room
• Adding movement to online lessons (a guest post by Olga Stolbova)
• Adding movement to your online lessons (crowdsourced from IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• 4 tips for teaching teens online
• Online activities that really work when teaching teenagers online (a compilation of activities used by IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• Using NearPod for asynchronous online teaching (a guest post by Katie Lindley)
• Moving teaching online (IATEFL panel discussion recording – I was on the panel)
• How do we teach when we’re teaching online (a guest post by Laura Edwards)
• Mentimeter and word clouds
• TEFL (online) Tantrums (a guest poem by Jenna Edmondson)
• Fortune teller decision maker
• A post-corona SWOT analysis
• 100 ideas for exploiting activities, a webinar I did for IH Bucharest, including ideas for the physical and online classroom, none of which should take longer than 5 minutes to prepare

Fortune teller decision maker (IH TOC 12)

It was the 12th IH Teachers Online Conference (TOC) on Friday 22nd May 2020. Nearly 40 people presented for 15 minutes each on the theme of online teaching.

For my presentation, I decided to go for something low-tech that you could still do online, and what’s better than making a fortune teller. It’s a very simple origami project, one I think most of us have probably made in the past. Here’s a video of how to make one:

 

My decision maker

As a lot of us are working on our mental health while we deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, my fortune teller was a way to choose your response to different people in different situations. The three sets of choices are:

Who are you talking to?

• your boss
• your colleague
• your student
• a parent

What are you talking about?

• an activity you tried
• how you feel
• your plans tonight
• something you’ve read
• the news
• IH TOC 😉
• your lesson
• your day

What do you say in that situation?

• I give up!
• I need chocolate!
• Thank you!
• That’s great!
• Tell me more.
• Help!
• What should I do?
• (Don’t say anything…take a deep breath!)

Other ways to use them

You could also use fortune tellers for:

• predictions
• practising spellings
• practising lexical sets
• question forms
• making decisions in a role play
• choosing with activity/game you’ll do next

And they’re not just for children: you can use them with teens and adults too with the right topics. Most people like to make things 🙂

What else could you use them for? Have you tried them out with your students?

Here’s the video if you want to watch the whole presentation:

What I learnt at the ETAI 40th anniversary conference

On 3rd and 4th July 2019 I attended the English Teachers’ Association of Israel (ETAI) international conference. They were celebrating their 40th anniversary, so there were a few special events. This included a musical celebration hosted by Leo Selivan and Jane Cohen, which I really enjoyed. Attendees were mostly from Israel, but Poland, Serbia, Greece, Austria, and other countries were also represented. I learnt a lot about how the Israeli school system works, and particularly the shift to try to get more speaking in the classroom, hence my own session on Richer Speaking.

Ideas from the conference

Penny Ur has written A guide to talking which is a useful beginner’s guide for getting more speaking in your classroom, including a selection of ready-to-use activities.

There are resources available for 7th grade students to help teachers get their students comfortable with speaking (aged around 12). Let’s Talk includes games to teach the language of basic role plays. We were shown these by Rachelle Borenstein and Renee Binyamini.

Early on in her courses, Timna Hurwich asks her students to discuss the Einstein quote below and answer the questions ‘When is a mistake good?’ ‘When is a mistake bad?’

I happened to see the same quote in this street art two days before this conference presentation!

Mitzi Geffen said “There is no glue on the bottom of your shoes!” which I think is a great way to remind teachers to move around the classroom, or ‘circulate and facilitate’ as she put it.

She shared how she helps reluctant students get over their fear of speaking in an achievable way, in this case when she wanted them to talk about a project they had done at home.

• Step 1: each person stands at the front and says “My name is [Sandy] and my project is about [Einstein].” Everybody claps. They sit down again. When they’ve all done that, Mitzi points out that they all spoke and nothing bad happened!
• Step 2: in the next lesson, other students have to ask questions about the project. They can use the questions they based their project research on. As everybody has the same questions, it’s easy to be successful, and takes the pressure off the presenter to work out what to say next.

Mitzi also suggested a really simple structure for brainstorming ideas for a debate, using the phrases “Yes, and…” or “Yes, but…” Anybody can add an idea. For example:

• Chocolate is really delicious.
• Yes, but it’s unhealthy if you eat too much.
• Yes, and you can get fat.
• Yes, but you can exercise more.
• Yes, but exercise makes you tired.
• etc.

Marta Bujakowska woke us up with a series of lively activities, including a conditional chain of actions, and countable/uncountable conversations. I’ve asked her to write a guest post so won’t say any more here!

James Kennard suggested we rethink some of the terminology connected to leadership and management. He emphasises that we often talk about them both like they should be part of the same job, but that the role is almost always given the title ‘manager’, unless you’re in a political party! Would it make a difference if we changed the terminology? He tried it at his school and it didn’t change much, but still something to think about. He also believes that ‘focus’ is a better word than ‘vision’ when it comes to describing your priorities as an organisation. Leaders need to identify the focus of the organisation and articulate it to others, so that members of the organisation can make the right decisions every time, in line with this focus.

Books as bridges: why representation matters

The two talks given by Anne Sibley O’Brien were probably the most influential for me. She was born in the United States, but when she was 7 her family moved to Korea, and she grew up there. You can read more about her story in the interview Naomi Epstein did with her. Her background has led Anne to work in diversity education, and she is the author and illustrator of various children’s books. She talked about the development of our identities, including racial identities, bias, and contact theory. Her perspective is unusual as she grew up with a minority identity, but a privileged one. We all have a mixture of identities, and generally some of them fall into majority and some into minority categories.

We learn who we are by the mirrors that are held up to us and what is made salient to us.

For Anne, she was constantly told that she was American and white, but her Korean friends were never told they were Korean, thus emphasising her difference. Majority identities are taken for granted because they are ‘normal’ and they end up disappearing. Minority identities are highlighted and everything you do becomes tied to that identity.

For example, consider being the only girl in a football team, versus being a boy in the same team. The fact of being a boy is unlikely to be commented on in this case, whereas being a girl will probably always be commented on. Members of a majority identity stop seeing what is actually there or can never see it, whereas members of a minority identities can often say quite incisive things about the majority identity because they have to be aware of the other side too, not just their own. For example, white Americans often don’t see how race affects the everyday lives of non-whites.

Children already notice racial and cultural differences from a very young age – I think Anne said that it’s around 6 months old. They get their attitudes about race from community norms, more than from parental norms (consider the analogy of accents and where children pick them up from) and from their environment, including who visits their house and what is and isn’t talked about. Three year olds already know that we don’t talk about skin colour. Consider when you’re describing pictures in a book to a child: you would probably say that it’s a blue ball, or a yellow car, but you’re unlikely to say it’s a brown or a pink baby. This is an example of our silence when it comes to race.

We all see the world through lenses, but we’re often not aware of what we see.

Our brain uses cognitive processes to make it easier for us to deal with the world. It sorts things in an unbiased way all the time, for example familiar/unfamiliar, same/different, like me/not like me, etc. This sorting initially does not contain judgement, but then we layer associations onto the categories, which can add bias. For example, same = good, different = bad.

The brain creates bias based on what it’s fed. If it only sees ‘white’, it will create white bias, but by making conscious decisions about what we feed our brains, we can change the bias. We all carry bias, but if we don’t understand this, how can we help others? If you’d like to find out more about your own biases, Anne recommends projectimplicit.net.

We can also help children by referencing people they know and books they have read to start a discussion about race, instead of staying silent.

Aren’t we amazingly different? Look how we’re the same!

As we get to know each other, it can reduce prejudice and inter-group anxiety. This is known as contact theory. Anne has worked on something called The Storybook Project (?), where children and their teachers looked at 1 book a week for 6 weeks showing positive interactions between people of different races, followed by a short discussion of how much fun the children are having in the book. They found this made a difference to how children felt about interacting with people from the groups represented.

She also works on the diversebookfinder.org website to help people think about who is represented in the books they use, and how. Are there interactions between two named characters of different races? Are they positive?

Her two latest books I’m New Here and Someone New [Amazon affiliate links] tell the same story of three children arriving at a new school (one Guatamalan, one Korean, one Somali) from the perspective of the children themselves in the first book, and from the perspective of the other children in the class who don’t know how to react in the second book. I will definitely be getting copies of these!

Thank you to everyone at ETAI for organising the conference, and especially to Naomi Epstein and Leo Selivan who encouraged me to attend. As you can see, I had a really good time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*My list

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

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

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

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

IH AMT conference 2016

From Thursday 7th to Saturday 9th January, I had the pleasure of attending my third IH DoS conference, or the AMT conference as it’s now known: Academic Management & Trainers. As always, the conference was a very useful weekend, not least for the networking. It was a great opportunity to meet with representatives from across IH Poland since I started as the Director of Studies at IH Bydgoszcz:

Monica Green‘s presentation about how to maintain positivity and morale in our schools was one of the highlights of the first day. A key point was that the focus should be across the school, including support staff, not just in the staffroom. As she said, “You’re paying the same whether teachers are happy or not, but it’s nicer to work somewhere everyone is happy.” Here are a few of her tips:

• Morale has to start with managers. If they’re positive, their team is more likely to be.
• Simple things make a big difference: say ‘Good morning’. Be warm, kind and considerate, show an interest, and listen to people.
• Be approachable. If you have your own office, leave your door open whenever you can.
• Make the physical environment pleasant to be in.
• People who eat together work better together.
• Make a particular effort with THAT member of staff, rather than avoiding them and hoping they’ll go away.
• Build relationships based on trust and fairness. Be genuine and believable. Be consistent.
• Give credit. Show respect. Define your expectations. And avoid micro-management!
• And if all else fails, great wifi is a good way to increase morale 🙂

The change in name led to a slight change in focus, with two tracks of afternoon sessions for day one, one covering management issues, and one focussing more on training. It was a difficult choice, but I ended up spending all of my time in the training sessions.

It made a pleasant change to hear Paula de Nagy speaking up for pre-service courses, and highlighting all the ways they really do help teachers, rather than focussing on all the problems with these short courses, which is all too often the dialogue we hear.

Magnus Coney shared some of the things he’s learnt from three books. All of them sound interesting, and the first was mentioned a few times during the conference. [These are all affiliate links, so I’ll get a few pennies if you buy through them.]

• Visible Learning by John Hattie.
  A meta-analysis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in learning in general, including a ranking of which factors have the most impact on learning. The two excerpts from the list we saw during the conference included some surprises! Hattie has also published a couple of other books following up on the original.
• Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham
  An explanation of how and why students learn, courtesy of a cognitive scientist.
• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel
  Magnus shared a few interesting tips from here about how to help students remember things. One of the most interesting was that students learn things better if they’ve been tested on them before learning. I assume this is because they notice what they don’t know and are therefore motivated to fill in the gaps – a definite argument for test-teach-test! Another idea which I’ve got personal experience of is that things which are harder to learn stick better because you’ve processed them more.

By far the most useful talk on day two of the conference was by Jon Hird. His title was ‘Reaching every student in the classroom: dyslexia and learning English’. I’d highly recommend heading over to his blog and downloading the handout to find out more about what causes dyslexia, and how you can adapt materials so that they are more accessible for dyslexic students. Spoiler: dyslexia doesn’t just mean problems with reading and writing, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the person is not intelligent.

Day three brought my first experience of an Open Space event, ably coordinated by Josh Round. Here is a brief description of the format. We started by suggesting ideas/posing questions on post-it notes, which were then loosely grouped. I ended up in a group with questions about supporting newly-qualified teachers. Each group had a secretary who summarised the discussion, and all notes were shared on the IH management pages after the conference. It was a fascinating way to deal with issues pertinent to us, and to remind us that we’re not alone, and many other people have had the same problems as us!

Looking forward to next year already!

An announcement: Innovate ELT 2016

It is a huge honour for me to announce that I have been invited to speak at the second InnovateELT conference, which takes place in Barcelona on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th May 2016. It’s organised jointly by OxfordTEFL and ELTjam. It will be the first time I’ve been an invited speaker at a conference, and it’s incredibly flattering to see my name up there with Ben, Chia and Jamie, who are all people I look up to and have learnt a lot from.

The conference itself is something quite different from other ELT conferences, which is another reason I’m excited to take part. Ceri Jones wrote about a live class she taught with students during the first conference – one of the features of InnovateELT is the involvement of students, not just teachers, in the whole experience. Another idea is ‘mini plenaries’, just 10 minutes long (here’s Scott Thornbury’s rehearsal for his 2015 plenary). Topics covered also ranged into more unusual areas than standard conferences, including mental health and social inclusion in ELT and English for the Zombie Apocalypse. You can get an idea of the general atmosphere at last year’s conference by watching this video and find out all of the talks which were included by visiting the ELTjam website.

The theme for the 2016 conference is ‘Grassroots: Power to the teacher!’ If you want to get involved, you can find out more via the iELT 2016 website or the Eventbrite listing. Early bird tickets are available until 30th November 2015.

The call for papers has also gone out, with the following options:

1. 60-minute session with learners
   These sessions will involve you teaching a class of 6–10 Spanish-speaking, B1/B2-level learners observed by delegates. The session should include opportunities for feedback and discussion of the lesson. The room will have an Internet connection and a projector. The students should be included in the feedback sections, which can be in groups or plenary or a combination.
2. 30-minute workshop/talk
   These sessions will be in rooms with Internet connection and a projector.
3. 10-minute plenary
   These will take place in the garden. You will have a microphone but no other technical aids. We are requesting submissions from people within and outside the ELT community.
4. 5-minute pitch
   These will take place in front of a panel of experts from the world of publishing, EdTech and business. If you have a great idea, this is the time to pitch it. All pitches will receive 5 minutes of feedback from the panel.

You have until 1st December 2016 to submit your talk, and you get free entry to the conference if you are accepted for type 1, 2 or 3.

Finally, you can follow all of the announcements related to the conference via Twitter and facebook.

I hope to see some of you there!

IH Teachers’ Online Conference (TOC) 7

The dates: Friday 8th and Saturday 9th May 2015.

The place: the internet.

The event: the 7th IH Teachers’ Online Conference.

On Friday, a series of 10-minute presentations, including one by yours truly taking you on a tour of IH schools

On Saturday, sessions dedicated to teaching languages other than English, including French, Spanish, Russian and German.

Here’s the full programme, including information on how to join the sessions, and the timetable (with a tab at the bottom to change from Friday to Saturday’s session).

There will be recordings of all of the sessions available after the event.

And if you can’t wait, why not watch a few of the presentations from previous incarnations of the conference: IHTOC60 (for the 60th anniversary of IH) and IH TOC6.

Five ways to raise your professional profile (IH TOC6)

For those who don’t know IH TOC is the regular International House Teacher’s Online Conference. This time round the conference has returned to the successful 10-minute presentation format of IHTOC60, which celebrated the 60th anniversary of IH.

My presentation offered advice on how to raise your professional profile. You can watch the video below:

Feel free to ask me questions about any of the ideas, or to ask for more advice. I’m always happy to help! You can also watch all of the other talks.

IATEFL Harrogate 2014 – a summary

[I wrote the first half of this post back in May last year, and now that it’s February 2015, I thought it was probably time to finish it! The first sentence is still true though, so I won’t change it] 🙂

IATEFL Harrogate was over a month ago now, and I’m still digesting what I learnt there. In this post I’ll attempt to summarise my conference experience and the talks I attended based on tweets and blogposts from the week.

Wednesday 2nd April

English and economic development – David Graddol’s plenary

Education systems geared up to produce B1/B2 learners, but that’s the level employers are least interested in #iatefl @graddol
— Sandy Millin (@sandymillin) April 2, 2014

English is becoming a way of competing between individuals in getting jobs/promotions, but might not be needed for job #iatefl @graddol
— Sandy Millin (@sandymillin) April 2, 2014

David gave a lot of evidence about the relationship between English learning and economic development. The quotes above were the most interesting, because it questions the standards we set for school leavers, and the reasons why we require potential employees to be able to speak English. What is the point of training learners to a standard that isn’t good enough to get them a job? And/or what is the point of forcing students to learn more of the language than they’ll ever need to be employed? And is English just another piece of paper to show you’re qualified, or is it actually a necessary skill? You can watch a recording of the plenary.

Due to the dodgy wifi, I blogged the rest of the talks I went to on Wednesday:

• Developing ‘Teaching English’ – Ann Foreman and Paul Braddock
  Ann and Paul describe changes they’d like to make to the TeachingEnglish British Council website.
• Don’t believe in fairy tales: critical thinking in teacher development – Damian Williams
  Damian explores some of the teaching myths we tell ourselves.
• Leaping before you look – Danny Norrington-Davies
  Danny describes CELTA lessons where trainees were encouraged to deal with emergent language.
• Be the DoS you want to be – Josh Round
  Josh gives excellent advice about how to be the best possible Director of Studies.

I also liked these tweets from Hugh Dellar, because the first one summarises how I felt there too. I don’t drink though, so I’ve only experienced the second one via other people’s delicate heads! 😉

If you’ve never attended #iatefl, imagine being propelled round a human pinball machine containing everyone you’ve ever met in ELT
— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 2, 2014

#IATEFL with added alcohol
— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 2, 2014

 Thursday 3rd April

It was my birthday so I decided to have a slow start! 🙂 Ela Wassell started my day off beautifully with a card which she’d got signed by lots of people there. Thanks Ela! I Speak Meme – Nina Jerončič How to use memes in the classroom, in the talk with the best title of the conference. She might be writing a guest post for me summarising the talk, although since I asked her a long time ago and forgot to remind her, I’m hoping that she’s still willing to do it!

How does the silent way work in the classroom – Roslyn Young ‘The Silent Way’ explained in such a way that I finally understood it!

Adam Simpson and I were interviewed by Ann Foreman and Paul Braddock from British Council Teaching English. We spoke about blogging and offered advice to those of you who(‘d like to) blog.

Mark Hancock’s talk ‘Pronouncing meaning – rhythm and stress games‘ was full by the time I arrived, but he’s shared the materials on his site.

Practical pronunciation ideas for teaching in an ELF context – Laura Patsko and Katy Simpson Lots of things you can do to help your students deal with English as a Lingua Franca, in both multilingual and monolingual classrooms.

While I’m on pronunciation, Richard Cauldwell’s name was mentioned a few times during the day, and his book ‘Phonology for Listening‘ [affiliate link] was one of my birthday presents (thanks again Ela!). When I’ve read it, I’ll share my impressions, but until then, here’s what Hugh Dellar has to say:

#iatefl Check out Richard Cauldwell’s site – http://t.co/w0usbBDcxs. Full of inspiring ideas that are both practical yet deeply principled.
— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 3, 2014

Mike McCarthy ‘Collocation and the learner: wading into the depths’ was on at the same time as Laura and Katy. Luckily, Cambridge ELT were tweeting some of the highlights:

McCarthy will be talking about Cambridge international corpus, at 1.9 billion words, CANCODE Corpus, and Cambridge Learner Corpus #iatefl
— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014

McCarthy: delexical verbs aren’t easy to avoid – they’re used by everyone, not just fancy native speakers. #iatefl
— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014

McCarthy: both B1 and B2 learners make mistakes with “make” and “do”, but this improves at C1. #iatefl
— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014

I found it particularly interesting that these mistakes could be divided by level:

McCarthy shares some examples of collocational mistakes made at different levels: #iatefl pic.twitter.com/ZaRc9Eq0Bk
— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014

McCarthy shares a curious phenomenon of near synonyms being used as collocations “a horrible stench smell”. #iatefl pic.twitter.com/HhoQRcgUbZ — Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014

I finished the day with Lizzie Pinard’s talk ‘Bridging the gap between materials and the English-speaking environment‘ in which she described the process of putting together materials to help students take advantage of studying in an English-speaking environment. She later won a well-deserved ELTon for the same materials.

Other tweets which caught my eye on Thursday:

#IATEFL The listening class is… pic.twitter.com/LNJb7QUYh7
— Oxford ELT (@OUPELTGlobal) April 3, 2014

# of panic attacks witnessed @ #IATEFL thus far bc a presentation’s fancy audio/video weren’t working: too many. Keep it simple, people.
— Jennifer MacDonald (@JenMac_ESL) April 3, 2014

You don’t just learn by accumulating information – you learn by sharing it. @Marisa_C talking at #IATEFL
— David Petrie (@teflgeek) April 3, 2014

Friday 4th April

I had another slow start on Friday and missed a lot of sessions. The first one I went to was Emina Tuzovic’s ‘Spilling or Spelling? Why do Arabic EFL learners stand out?‘ Emina shared some very practical tips and activities for helping Arabic learners with their spelling, which was something I’d been looking for since I realised they had a particular problem not shared by any other L1 background. Emina was kind enough to write a guest post on my blog sharing ideas from her talk.

I took a break to prepare for my presentation. It’s available as a recording on my blog: ‘Stepping into the real world: transitioning listening‘. I was happy to see so many people there:

Lots of wonderful people at my IATEFL 2014 conference presentation

Cecilia Lemos taught us about ‘Making lesson observation a teacher’s best friend, not the enemy’, with a very interesting idea about a menu of observation tasks, which I’m looking forward to reading more about when she finds time to put it on her blog 🙂 In the meantime, you can read Lizzie Pinard’s summary of the session.

I used to work with Amy Brown at IH Newcastle, so it was a no-brainer that I would attend her talk ‘Reading for pleasure: a path to learner autonomy?’, especially because it is about extending the Personal Study Programme into a new area – PSP was my IATEFL topic in 2013. Amy discussed a project she implemented in partnership with The Reader Organisation, where trained readers came to the school to run guided reading groups. Again, Lizzie blogged about Amy’s talk.

My last ‘proper’ talk of the day was Pete Sharma introducing the ‘Vocabulary Organizer: a new way to organize lexis’ [affiliate link to Amazon – I’ll make a few pennies if you buy via this link]. This was my only publisher talk of the conference, and I got a free copy of the organizer. 🙂 I really like the fact that there are two separate sections in it for ‘vocabulary to recognise’ and ‘vocabulary to use’. It’s specifically designed for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) students, but I think it might be useful for other students too. You can see Pete’s slides on slideshare.

That night, I was lucky enough to be one of the speakers for the Pecha Kucha evening, which was a fabulous experience. You can find out what Pecha Kucha is and watch the recording here – it’s a very entertaining hour, even if I do say so myself 🙂

Saturday 5th April

Sugata Mitra’s plenary generated a huge amount of debate, which I’m not going to get into here (as I haven’t got round to reading a lot of it yet!) Instead, I’ll give you a link to said plenary, and let you Google ‘Sugata Mitra IATEFL 2014‘ to find out what happened next…

The next talk was a reunion of sorts, since it was given by Teti Dragas, one of my CELTA tutors, who I hadn’t seen since I asked for advice a few weeks after the course finished. Her talk ‘Exploring culture in teacher education: reflections on a corpus-based study’ was based on a module done the MA TESOL at Durham University. In it, she compared Chinese attitudes to teaching and training to those in the UK, and the implications of this on the MA TESOL programme. She recommended moving away from assessed teaching practice towards a more general culture of reflective practice.

My final talk of the conference was another reunion, this time with Alex Cann, who did his Delta at IH Newcastle while I was teaching there. He was presenting on a similar topic to me, ‘Helping high-level learners understand native speaker conversations’. He shared some interesting activities to help students deal with pronunciation issues and activate their knowledge before starting to listen. He also shared my favourite video of the conference, demonstrating the importance of pronunciation and listening:

I wish I’d been able to go to this talk too:

#iatefl @AnthonyGaughan analyses #PLN phenomenon in his talk. What about people in our local practice?
— Ela Wassell (@elawassell) April 5, 2014

You can see the full text of Anthony’s talk ‘The place is here and the time is now’ on his blog.

Jackie Kay, a poet, finished off the conference with a lovely selection of readings from her work and stories from her life. It was livestreamed but not recorded. Here’s an example of her reading Old Tongue, about losing her accent, so you can hear her lovely accent 🙂

Other people’s blogging

IATEFL runs a scheme where anyone can register as a blogger, regardless of whether they are at the conference or not. This creates a great picture of the conference as a whole, and promotes a lot of discussion. Here is the full list of Harrogate Online registered bloggers. It’s definitely worth taking a look – there are a lot of posts about the conference, and it’s a good place to start looking for other blogs you might want to read in general.

TeachingEnglish highlighted Lizzie Pinard’s coverage of the conference as being particularly good, and I’d second that! You might also enjoy Nicola Prentis talking about a glut of ELT celebrity encounters.

Not done yet…

As I write this [back in May!] I’m over a month behind on blog reading, and still have at least three talks I missed during the conference which I’d like to watch the videos of, with more probably being added to this list as I catch up with my reading. I still have one or two posts in my drafts which I’ll add to this summary as I publish them. I’ve also asked a few speakers to write guest posts based on their talks, which I’ll add too, so there’ll definitely be more to come from this year’s conference. Watch this space!

[February 2015 update: I think I’ve shared all of the planned posts, and I’ve caught up on my blog reading, but I still haven’t managed to watch the videos I want to, starting with Russ Mayne’s ‘Guide to pseudo-science in English language teaching‘ which I’m still hearing about regularly despite it being nearly a year since the conference. Russ, the buzz hasn’t died down at all!]

My first DoS conference

Every January International House organises a conference for Directors of Studies (DoS) from across the IH network. I’d heard about it, followed the tweet stream and watched videos from previous conferences, but this year, I finally got the chance to go, and it was worth the wait!

The conference took place from 9th-11th January 2014 at Devonport House, Greenwich, London, a beautiful venue right next to Greenwich Park. It was a flying visit to London, so the only photo I managed to take in the area was of the ship in a bottle outside, so you’ll have to take my word about the location.

The conference was kicked off by Lucy Horsefield and Monica Green talking about how to show students their progress. There was a lot of discussion of different ideas from DoSes around the world. One area I’d like to think more about is how to help general English students to see their progress, as I often feel we neglect them somewhat in favour of young learners and business students, where we have to be accountable to the people paying for the course, or exam students who are working towards a clearly defined goal. What do you do at your schools for these students?

Chris Ozog did a session about ‘Teacher Development and the DoS’ which I talked about for the IH World YouTube channel. (Sorry for mispronouncing your surname Chris!)

Other speakers from the first day included Peter Medgyes on native and non-native speaker teachers, Nick Kiley entertaining us with anecdotes and lessons about management from his experience of being managed, and the team from ELT Teacher2Writer introducing their training courses and their database of teachers interested in doing writing work, which I’ve now signed up for.

Jane Harding da Rosa finished off the day with a great talk on fostering learner autonomy. I particularly liked her emphasis on demonstrating the tasks you want students to do in their own time by dedicating class time to them. We can’t expect students to take responsibility for their own learning if they don’t know how to do it. She also drew a couple of neurons and showed how everything a student does in English strengthens the connection between them, by drawing a line, then another on top, then another on top, until there was a very thick line linking the two. Simple, but very effective (and better when you see it than when you read about it!) – definitely one I’ll be using with my classes.

Day two was reserved for guest speakers. Hugh Dellar told us twenty things he’d learnt in twenty years of teaching, which was very entertaining, and fed nicely into Andrew Walkley’s session of later in the day. This was the one which I think I took the most away from. Andrew discussed  language-focussed teacher development, and how we should emphasise language awareness more in our teacher training. He showed us examples of language awareness tasks like ranking words in order of their frequency, and writing example sentences with language we might teach. The latter was particularly interesting; for example, ‘beard’ is much more likely to be used in a sentence like ‘Have you seen that guy with the beard?’ than ‘He has a beard’, and yet we’re much more likely to teach the second sentence. Andrew pointed out that when we think quickly we tend to come up with the easiest possible example (‘He has a beard’) because it’s easily accessible. If we focus on language and examples during our planning, we’re more likely to give students chunks and sentences which they will actually need and encounter. He advocated a change in emphasis in both teacher training and school culture in general, from activities and grammar towards language. One point which particularly resonated with me was that in (preparation for) observations we tend to focus on procedure rather than the language which we expect students might produce, or which we could introduce to them. This related back to Hugh’s recent blog posts about exploiting lexical self-study material (part one, two, three). It is important to remind ourselves that ultimately we are language teachers, and language should be at the heart of what we do, something which we often forget in our quest to find the ‘best’ activities or adopt the ‘most suitable’ methodology. They have inspired me to try and find out more about the lexical approach, and to try and incorporate more language awareness into our fledgling teacher training at IH Sevastopol.

Patsy M. Lightbown, Maureen McGarvey and Fiona Dunlop also gave sessions on day two. I realised I really need to read ‘How Languages are Learned’ (no idea how I got through Delta without it!)

The IH World Quiz Night finished off the second day, and was a great example of how a conference social event should be run (thanks Shaun, Nick and Mike!). I was on a team with representatives from IH Bristol, IH Manchester, IH Newcastle, IH Brno, and IH World, and I really enjoyed it, even though we didn’t win.

On day three, Robin Walker gave us a three-hour workshop on priorities and practice for teaching pronunciation, the slides for which are available on his blog. It was an interesting comparison of the differing pronunciation requirements for students who are going to be speaking mostly to natives, and mostly to non-natives. It also links nicely to the ideas of English as a Lingua Franca and the ELFpron blog of Katy Davies and Laura Patsko, who was sitting next to me during the workshop.

The final afternoon of the conference was ‘speed dating’, a very entertaining, highly-paced event, full of great ideas. It involved about 22 presenters, divided into three sessions of 7-8 presenters each, giving 10-minute presentations five or six times over the course of an hour. My presentation, about online professional development, is available on my blog. Here is the video I recorded to introduce it (YouTube could have chosen a better still for it!):

The whole conference was a very enjoyable experience, but as always with conferences, the best thing about it was being able to connect with passionate teachers from around the world, like Chris Ozog, Kylie Malinowska and Laura Patsko in the photo below.

Roll on 2015!

 

Ten blogs in ten minutes (IH TOC 60)

I’ve just finished my presentation at the International House Teachers’ Online Conference to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the IH organisation. All of the presentations are 10 minutes long, and there are 60 presentations in total. All of the videos are (will be) available on the blog. There’s something for everyone!

For my presentation I had the difficult job of choosing 10 blogs to share with the world. I decided to choose blogs which I go back to again and again and/or which lead readers to other great bloggers. Sorry if I had to miss you out! Here is the presentation, handout and the video. Ten blogs in ten minutes (IH TOC 60)

Thanks to Mike Griffin for inspiring me to do this by celebrating his PLN.

Note: I made a little mistake with the ELTsquared blog, which is actually at http://www.eltsquared.co.uk – sorry Chris!

Happy birthday IH!

Update

Kevin’s blog, The Other Things Matter, has now moved to wordpress: https://theotherthingsmatter.wordpress.com/

The blog starter list has also moved.

Teaching English British Council interview – IATEFL 2013

Just before IATEFL started I was interviewed by Ann Foreman and Paul Braddock for the TeachingEnglish British Council facebook page as part of a series of interviews with those of us who have been awarded ‘Blog of the Month‘ (the blue badge at the top of the blog). Each of us will be asked three or four questions suggested by members of the TeachingEnglish British Council facebook page. Here is my interview, talking about IATEFL, building and retaining vocabulary and helping students learn to love English:

International House Newcastle Personal Study Programme (IATEFL 2013 presentation)

My presentation for IATEFL Liverpool 2013 is an introduction to the Personal Study Programme (PSP) which we run at IH Newcastle. It was part of the Learner Autonomy SIG day.

If you couldn’t be there, or you want to relive it, here is a recorded version:

You can also read about PSP on the IH Newcastle website.

Feel free to leave me a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.

Note: thank you to Amy Brown for helping me to put the presentation together.

Update:
A few bloggers have very kindly responded to my presentation. I will post the links here if you are interested. Please let me know if I have missed any:

• Charles Rei – Business English Ideas
• Tim Gifford – The Lone Initiate
• Kevin Stein – The Other Things Matter
• Sanja Bozinovic – IATEFL roving reporter

English UK North

The English UK North conference took place at my school, IH Newcastle, on 6th October 2012. I presented on ‘Twitter for Professional Development’.

Here are all of the links I shared during my presentation:

• Twitter
• Russell Stannard’s introduction to Twitter
• Me on Twitter
• Barbara Sakamoto’s starter PLN: recommendations of tweeters for you to follow
• My list of International House schools on Twitter (please tell me if I have missed any)
• ELTchat
• ELTpics and the ‘Take a photo and…‘ blog
• Tweetdeck – a way to organise Twitter
• Diigo – a social bookmarking site
• Google Reader – a way to keep track of blogs you are following

You can see the slides from the presentation here:

(for some strange reason, slideshare has changed some of the formatting so a couple of slides look a little odd – apologies)

For a more detailed explanation of how to make the most of Twitter, look here.

And if you join, please let me know by tweeting me @sandymillin

IH TOC 50

International House is celebrating 50 years of teacher training courses. The first course took place in 1962, and was the forerunner to what is now the CELTA. As part of the celebrations, a one-day online conference has been organised for Friday 25th May 2012, and I am one of the presenters.

As it is my first webinar, I thought I would present on a topic I am familiar with, so I chose ‘Twitter for Professional Development’.

Here are all of the links I shared during my presentation:

• Twitter
• Russell Stannard’s introduction to Twitter
• Me on Twitter
• Barbara Sakamoto’s starter PLN: recommendations of tweeters for you to follow
• My list of International House schools on Twitter (please tell me if I have missed any)
• IHTOC50 on Tweetchat (IH Teachers Online Conference)
• ELTchat
• ELTpics and the ‘Take a photo and…‘ blog
• Tweetdeck – a way to organise Twitter
• Diigo – a social bookmarking site
• Google Reader – a way to keep track of blogs you are following

For a more detailed explanation of how to make the most of Twitter, look here.

Thank you to International House for providing me with the opportunity to present this webinar, and to Oxford University Press for providing the platform to host the workshop.

Conferences: Spreading the Love (an #eltchat summary)

This is a summary of the 9pm BST #eltchat on Twitter from Wednesday 6th April 2011. The topic was:

How can participants at conferences best ensure that what they learn lives on and spreads?

The chat involved people with a large variety of experience regarding conferences, ranging from none at all to serial presenters, as well as conference organisers. It fell nicely into various categories, making summary writing nice and easy!

Why go to conferences?

• @cerirhiannon: “I find really motivating talks usually lead to experimenting, blogging and eventually presenting”
• @TyKendall: “He who dares to teach must never cease to learn” John Cotton Dana.
• @naomishema “I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to last year’s TESOL and it was an eye opening experience which led to blogging and twitter.”
• @cioccas: “I always feel reenergised after a conference & buzzing with new ideas I want to share with colleagues. Also after every #ELTchat !”
• @lauraesol: “After a session last year at IATEFL, I found I got so excited about the content I had to repeat it all to friends!”
• @bcnpaul1: “Last year was my first IATEFL & changed my outlook hugely. Maybe people just need to get the development bug”
• @ELTmethods: “Conferences are not only about collecting ideas. The social element is vital, too: meeting people with the PD bug”
• @sandymillin: “Definitely worth it! Motivating, great for networking and fun too (mostly!)”
• @theteacherjames: “If you benefit, your students benefit, & that makes it worth it. Anything else is a bonus.”
• @Marisa_C: “Going to a face-to-face conference is very important – recharges human batteries”
• @springrose12: “If nothing else happens, educators get to meet with each other and share good practice as well as socialize. It’s good to know that you’re not alone and others can help you with difficulties.”
• Meeting the ‘stars’: @lauraesol “Won’t ever forget John Wells and feeling so much more confident about pronunciation after talking to him.” “Biggest moment was getting Jim Scrivener’s autograph!” / @marekandrews: “@lauraesol I got Jeremy Harmer to sign his book, asked him to write advice for my trainees+showed it to them next time”

How to decide which sessions to attend

• Think about what is most useful for you and your colleagues
• Try to find articles, blog entries, videos of talks or tweets from speakers you’re interested in seeing
• Coordinate with your colleagues to attend different sessions, then share experiences, insights, handouts etc afterwards.
• Decide whether you want to go to practical sessions, theoretical ones or a mix of both.
• Take a chance on some less well-known presenters – that’s how they become well-known. Also, they are often in the classroom more regularly so can be more relevant.
• Prioritise! Try not to get overwhelmed.

What presenters can do to make their presentations memorable

• Keep it as simple as possible.
• Get to the point.
• Include a variety of activities in workshops: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic…
• Try alternative visual aids: flipcharts are still in!
• Let participants talk so they don’t get restless.
• Don’t be afraid of using technology.
• Be genuine
• Have something to say
• Try to make a connection with the audience: engage.
• Get ‘personal’.
• Upbeat, but not too up!
• Listen to your audience.
• Don’t read aloud from your Powerpoint.
• Provide handouts (laminated if possible for reading in the bath!), or a link to a blogpost – or one handout, with everything else online so your session can be discussed at lunch
• If the audience fall asleep, start being controversial
• Inject a bit of humour and originality
• Think about what your audience wants and needs to know
• Chat to some of your audience after you’ve finished to get feedback and learn from them too. Good for shy people too.

What participants can do during a conference

• Give a workshop at the conferences you attend.
• Try to go to the conference with other teachers and chat about what you have seen.
• Try to talk to the presenter and other participants to keep it in your memory.
• Use Twitter to share your thoughts – those who cannot normally attend conferences are especially grateful for this. You can also use it as a form of note-taking. Consider asking the speaker beforehand and / or only tweeting during Tweeter’s talks. Take a look at the debate on Jeremy Harmer’s blog about whether or not you should tweet.
• Follow Twitter hashtags during a conference: you might notice something you’ve missed / OR Don’t follow them, you might miss something!

What participants can do after a conference

Find out what works for you: old school or new school. Take a look at some of the ideas below:

• Tell your colleagues about what you saw. “When I was at…I met… and he/she…”
• Blog about what you saw, thus prompting further discussion of topics. Conferences even prompted some to start blogging for the first time.
• Even if you don’t want to blog about the conference, you can make comments on other people’s posts.
• Type the notes you take, then categorise them into files on your computer, making them easy to retrieve when needed. This also makes it easier to email them to people if you want to share them.
• Go back to your notes a while later and remind yourself of what you’ve read.
• Try things out in class as soon as possible so that you don’t forget them.
• Keep a teaching diary (which could be a blog) to use for post-conference reflections.
• Watch any post-conference videos and share them with colleagues.
• Correspond with speakers at conferences to inspire you to make the transition between listening and doing (@naomishema: “Even famous David Crystal answered me!”)
• Share your knowledge in small groups / during department meetings
• Follow up on any recommended reading.
• Follow up on contacts to consolidate connections made. This may lead to forms of cooperation in the future.
• Set aside a quiet hour to go through what documentaton you have and think through what you got out of the conference.
• Look at your notes on the way home and decide which ideas to apply next.
• Keep the conference booklet.
• Not all ideas may be practical for your classes – be selective.
• Introduce Twitter and other sharing tools to your colleagues to help them become more digitally aware and to be able to participate in the post-conference sharing.
• Rely on your memory!

What presenters / conference organisers can do during/after a conference

• Make a list of seminar participants and their contact details and email them to each other.
• Ask speakers if they mind being filmed / recorded.
• Stream sessions online, as ISTEK did. Alternatively, release them online for people to watch (months) later.
• Provide wifi for attendees to share their impressions.
• Share materials online. For example, the IH Brno Conference (a one-day one at my school) created a group on Edmodo and gave attendees the code so that they could get any handouts they wanted. Alternatively, put slides online using a tool like Slideshare, a wiki or a blog.
• Put out a newsletter after the conference with summaries of lectures a couple of months later.
• Create an informal ‘buddy’ system with your PLN to give feedback on each other’s talks at a conference.

What schools can do after a conference

• Encourage teachers to give a workshop / CPD session to share what they learnt. Small groups could prepare a demonstration about a topic if a few of them saw the same talks.
• Ask colleagues to choose ONE topic which deeply affected them each time: demanding to share everything could be too overwhelming.
• Keep a collective training blog for teachers.
• Create a wiki with colleagues and link powerpoints or videos plus start a discussion.
• Record speakers, then create worksheets based on the sessions – have a bank of talks and tasks.
• Have a staff email list dedicated to post conference sharing.
• Sponsoring teachers to go to conferences could really boost staff morale.
• Encourage a culture of sharing in general – this makes it easier for teachers to share after conferences.

Possible problems and solutions

• Other people in the staffroom are not interested in the conferences you attend.
  Keep sharing – your enthusiasm will hopefully get through to your colleagues eventually! You could also try to spend more time with people who ARE responsive. Teacher development is a mindset.
• Some conferences are very expensive to attend.
  Try to access the materials in other ways, through videos, Twitter, blogs etc. Sometimes it’s better to bite the bullet – conferences offer you many benefits. If you’re paying for it, go for what you’re interested in. Your teacher development comes first.
• Speakers often have to pay to present.
  Some people were annoyed about this, but others said that they are presenting for 45 minutes and watching 1-3 days of sessions, so are happy to pay. Dave Dodgson blogged about speakers paying to attend conferences too.
• Tweeting during conferences (Jeremy Harmer’s blog discussion) could be bad for the presenter. Also, some people complained about the lack of context.
  Many people would still go to see a talk even if they had seen it tweeted.
• Online conferences don’t match up to a face-to-face environment
  Use Twitter to get some of the socialising / networking side. It’s also better to watch online than not take part at all! Online conferences can also make people more willing to participate.
• The number of ideas can be overwhelming
  Be selective: just a handful of ideas can make a big difference .

Conferences to look out for

• IATEFL Brighton (UK) 2011: online here
• ISTEK 2011 / 2013 (Turkey)
• Virtual Round Table online conferences

Other links shared

• An example of conference materials shared on my blog: Teaching 2.0 in the One-Computer Classroom
• And on Mike Harrison’s blog: Making Dreams Touchable
• And on Mike Harrison’s other blog: Before Words: Drawings, Images and Sound in the Classroom
• Sue Lyon-Jones’ highlights from the IATEFL Conference 2010
• A journey to IATEFL by Eva Simkesyan