IATEFL is… laughter (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 summary)

The last week has been so full of laughter, and I’ve enjoyed it so much.

The video below will give you a taster of that laughter.

I’ve been at the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 conference, and everywhere I looked I saw laughter, the laughter of people getting to know each other, the laughter of realising what we have in common, and the laughter of old friends reunited.

Sandy and Marjorie

I’ve always found the IATEFL conference to be the best week of my year, but this year it felt like something truly special. After 2 years of cancelled face-to-face conferences in 2020 and 2021, then the IATEFL Belfast conference where it seemed we were still trying to work out how to be in the same spaces again and what the impacts were of the previous two years, this year felt like a huge sigh of relief at a return to being able to really enjoy being with our community again. And enjoy it I did!

Chia, Sandy and Peter

Learning from sessions

Of course, I also learnt a lot. I’ve been blogging the talks I’ve been to all week, and I’d like to summarise some of the ideas I’ll be taking away with me. These are my interpretations – the speakers may have intended something different!

• The language in our coursebooks, our classrooms, and our exams doesn’t match the language that many users of English produce and need to understand when they go into the workplace. (Evan Frendo)
• Teachers are amazing in the ways that they support each other and their students. (Divya Madhavan and Lesley Painter-Farrell) [Of course, I knew this already, but it’s always good to be reminded!]
• ELT teaching is like no other field of teaching, because most of us start teaching and then get qualified, rather than the other way around. Even those who study it at university have probably already done some tutoring at some point before they start studying. (Divya Madhavan)
• ESOL teachers need a lot more support from our industry, support in terms of consistent training, understanding of the challenges they face, and managing the mental load of the traumas in their classrooms. They need this support so they can continue with what they’re already doing, an amazing job supporting their learners. (Lesley Painter-Farrell)
• We’re not born part of a particular race, we learn to be part of that race by learning the ‘language’ of what it means to be a member of that race. There are no black people in Africa – they only become black once they go to a country where Black becomes an over-arching label, where all of the other individual identities are subsumed in one, removing all of the individuality and variety. (Awad Ibrahim)
• Learners coming up with their own rules for why language is used in a given context can give us insights into how language is used that we might not realise if we remain bound by the rules we repeat from what we’ve learnt. (Danny Norrington-Davies)
• Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats are a useful tool for learners when planning extended writing, though it will take time to help them understand how to use them. They can provide independence and broaden learners’ understanding of topics. [though the white / black colour choices are problematic] (Chang Liu)
• The future of English learning is in completely different spheres to ones I know about. Making materials for Instagram and TikTok audiences requires a whole set of skills and knowledge which I had no idea of before. (Claire Bowes) [I feel like Claire embodies the next generation of teachers coming after me, and it really excites me to see where this will lead] It’s all part of ‘microlearning’ (Evan Frendo) [something I already did, but had no term for]
• When creating teacher training materials, one approach is to take activities we use with learners and change the content so it has a teacher training focus. (John Hughes)
• What we’re currently doing in the majority of teacher training isn’t actually having a huge impact on what happens once teachers go into the classroom. The apprenticeship of observation is still very strong, and we need to change our approach if we really want to change teacher cognitions (beliefs and ideas about teaching) and therefore teacher actions in and beyond the classroom, and give teachers the tools they need to keep developing on a deeper level. (Gabriel Diaz Maggioli, Ben Beaumont)
• We’re assessing teachers on the language learning materials they develop, but we’re not actually teaching them how to develop materials effectively. (Luis Carabantes)
• The ‘curse of knowledge’ can stop us from understanding what it’s like to not know something when we are in a position of knowledge already. This has a particular impact as teacher trainers, and we need to get back in touch with our novice selves (among other things) to understand what it is that we should focus on in our training. (Ri Willoughby and William Morrow)
• There are many ways we can build the confidence of pre-service teachers, particularly young ones, to help them realise that they can take on a teacher role. If we don’t do this, we’ll lose them and we’ll lose TP students. (Laura Khaddi) [Another one I knew, but good to be reminded.]
• The design cycle is a potentially useful tool for teacher training. You could ask teachers to bring problems they (might) have in the classroom, hand over those problems to others to come up with potential solutions, and then bring the solutions back to the original teacher. (Kim Chopin)
• Delivering training via WhatsApp is a hugely underexploited area, and could reach so many teachers who aren’t being served by our current teacher training models. (Kristina Smith and Anna Young) [Having worked on WhatsApp projects last year, I know this, but I wanted to state it explicitly here!]
• There are a myriad of different ways of finding out what your teachers actually need in terms of professional development [and I wasn’t really using any of them as a DoS!] (Jim Fuller)

Great tips for academic management and teacher educators about meeting everyone’s needs by @elt_sponge #iatefl2023 pic.twitter.com/e7aD8FnpGo

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 20, 2023

• Digital materials have many affordances which paper materials don’t, but we’re still creating most digital materials as if they were purely interactive coursebooks. There’s so much more we could and should do to increase engagement. (Laura Broadbent and Billie Jago, Nergiz Kern)
• There’s a lot that materials writers can learn from lexicographers in terms of approaching the writing of definitions and example sentences in our materials. (Julie Moore)
• We need to think really carefully about the implicit messages we include and assumptions we make when creating materials, including but not only materials related to science (James Taylor) and money (Lottie Galpin).

Good food for thought by James Taylor this morning #iatefl2023 @theteacherjames @MaWSIG pic.twitter.com/L8FxyVMXKP

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 20, 2023

• When helping learners to create videos, there’s a huge range of potential materials we can make to support them in the process. (Armanda Stroia)
• Having a mentor can have a huge impact on your professional development. (Shilpa Pulapaka and Fabiana Crispim) [I need to find myself a regular mentor who I can meet up with]

Learning beyond sessions

For me, one of the best parts of a conference like IATEFL is the learning that happens beyond the sessions. It’s in the conversations you have in the corridor, in the exhibition hall, over dinner. Often these are about other sessions, but they’re also about people’s backgrounds, how they came to ELT, and the interesting things they’re working on now.

Mark, Sandy and David, and the book we worked on together 🙂

Here are some of the things I’d like to remind myself of later, with the sources if I remember them! Some of these might be somewhat corrupted in my memory, so feel free to correct me.

• ‘Personal information management’ is a term you can use to summarise how you deal with all of the information that comes in. Academic managers have two strands of PIM to manage: the practical side, for example who needs to be where and when, and the inspiration side, for example ideas about how to develop the CPD programme. The techniques you need for each strand of PIM in this case are different. (Mike Riley, via Pippa Wentzel)
• It’s not often we given learners the opportunity to produce something genuinely funny that can be easily shared beyond the classroom. Memes can provide this opportunity very easily. (Ciaran Lynch)
• When creating social media content, if you want it to be effective you need to really analyse how it’s being used and viewed. You need to consider ideas like what’s in the picture, what direction people are looking in in images, whether there is a clear ‘call to action’, what time it’s posted, and many more factors. (Marcus Morgan and Karen Waterston, via Ciaran Lynch and Paula Rebolledo)

An interesting and informative session by Karen Waterston & Marcus Morgan at #iatefl2023. Considerations when creating engaging and meaningful content in social media. pic.twitter.com/SecQenGaI4

— Paula Rebolledo del 38% (@prebolledoc) April 20, 2023

• Many of the books of photocopiable materials which were created for discussions 10-20 years ago are very out-of-date and wouldn’t / shouldn’t be published today. They really need to be updated. (Peter Fullagar, via everyone who saw his talk and thought it was brilliant, including Jo Szoke – sorry I missed it!, Richard from the University of Chester) [I knew this, but again, worth the reminder. Check out Peter’s blog and Raise Up! if you’re looking for replacement ideas.]

Really inspiring workshop, thanks Peter! #iatefl2023 @MaWSIG pic.twitter.com/oxyB2MAPoE

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 20, 2023

• The position of women in ELT has improved, but there’s still work to be done. (Julie Norton and Heather Buchanan, via Jo Szoke)

Women in ELT: Where are we now? by Heather Buchanan and Julie Norton #iatefl2023

There was an interesting question from the audience: is it just men who tend to make negative comments or are a woman’s worst enemy another woman? pic.twitter.com/pFMXtjS9ZK

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 19, 2023

• There’s a growth in awareness that online learning materials need their own guidance, different to paper learning materials. These are now being shared. I went to Billie Jago and Laura Broadbent’s talk, and Jo Szoke supplemented what I learnt with her notes from Carol Lethaby’s talk.

Great guidelines for designing online learning materials presented by Carol Lethaby #iatefl2023 pic.twitter.com/WEkZ4hjVNY

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 19, 2023

Thank you

Thank you to Chang Liu for her enthusiastic endorsement of my How to present at an international conference talk. She came last year in Belfast and again this year in Harrogate, and said that it was the reason why she was presenting this year, and that my post about writing an abstract helped her apply to present. Another attendee this year said she was presenting later that same day and it had relieved her nerves. If you appreciate what a presenter has done, please don’t be shy to tell them – it really does leave a warm glow!

Thank you too to Ciaran Lynch and Claire Bowes, as well as Vicky Margari, for telling me that my blog and hearing about IATEFL from me encouraged them to apply for a scholarship (Vicky) and apply to talk (Ciaran and Claire). Look at the IATEFL website and conference pages to find out more about upcoming conferences.

Take Your Time Delta mini meet-up: Ciaran, Sandy, Pippa, Claire

Thank you to Rose Aylett for mentioning my lessons you can watch online blogpost. One day I’ll have time to update it!

Thank you to the many people who’ve mentioned my Delta content.

Thank you to everybody who’s mentioned my IATEFL 2023 blog posts. I first experienced IATEFL through the tweets and blog posts shared from the IATEFL Brighton 2011 conference. I got so much out of them, and it’s wonderful to be able to pay it forward now.

It’s always lovely to hear about the impact of things that I’ve done – it really does make the time and effort worth it.

Thanks to the MaWSIG committee for being such a lovely group of people to work with, and especially to Clare and Jen, who are leaving the committee. We’ll miss you!

Thanks to Thom Jones for giving me a very entertaining start to Wednesday morning.

Thanks to James and Jo for being wonderful flatmates and making me laugh so much. Thanks to Jo for share beautiful sketch notes and showing me the Bamboo app.

Thank you to all of the IATEFL staff and volunteers who have put so much effort into keeping IATEFL alive throughout the pandemic and the huge financial challenges of recent years, and who have worked so hard at putting this year’s conference together.

Thanks to all the people I had lunch and dinner time conversations with, and to everyone I had corridor chats with.

I can’t wait to do it all again in Brighton next year!

IATEFL Belfast 2022 – Environmental sustainability and ELT in 2022: which way now? Geoffrey Maroko, Owain Llewellyn, Ceri Jones

This was the closing plenary for the IATEFL Belfast 2022 conference.

Ceri and Geoffrey beamed in via Zoom, and Owain was in the room. Sarah Mount coordinated the debate.

Ceri is in Spain, where there is a May heatwave – with 40 degree temperatures inland today (it’s May 20th). She’s one of the co-founders of the ELT Footprint community. You can join in on social media, mainly on facebook, but in other places too. Go to the website to find out more.

Geoffrey is in Kenya. He’s a university lecturer in Applied Linguistics. He’s interested in traditional environmental knowledge.

Owain is based in Wales. He’s got a website called ELT Sustainable, with language lessons focussing on environmental issues.

Indigenous environmental knowledge

Geoffrey talked about community-based organisations who share traditional environmental knowledge.

The UN has declared 2022-2032 the international decade of indigenous languages.

There are a lot of opportunities to work around this area to come up with information to sustain and protect our environment.

Contextualisation

Owain has been creating materials to be used globally, but one of the challenges is how to make it relevant across different contexts. It’s not always possible. You either have to make lessons locally, or make them adaptable for different local contexts if they’re global materials.

Sarah Mercer, Nayr Ibrahim, Kath Bilsborough and Ceri Jones recently conducted a survey which will hopefully be published in ELTJ soon. There seems to be a ‘place-based eco-pedagogy’, with lots of local action happening. Students are looking really closely at their own local ecosystems, and learning to think about the consequences of actions locally. This gives them the chance to grow eco-literacy and systems thinking.

The starting point for learners should be the world that they know.

Owain used to teach in Bulgaria, where rural to urban migration is very common. He wanted to do a lesson about this. In Bulgaria, you’re very likely to find abandoned houses as people had moved to the city, many of which had a big walnut tree. He found a poem called ‘An elegy to a walnut tree’. This lesson was used in Bulgaria and Algeria, and was relevant in those contexts, but you might need to change this tree / plant if it was in a different context. In the Kenyan village Geoffrey is from, it might be the mguwe (sp?) tree, but in other communities, it might be different. The learners might not respond in the same way.

In Kenya, many places were named after the plants which were grown there. Now the names are still there, but the plants have often gone. A conscious effort needs to be made to grow those plants there again.

Context is an important starting point for designing our materials.

An idea from the audience: the starting point is the local, and this is taken to the global.

Another question: how much should these lessons be developing over time? Over time, the situation is becoming more urgent, but there’s no sense of urgency to the lessons and materials. The focus is on the individual and what can the individual do, without a focus on collective action to pressure the big polluters. But it can depend on the age we’re teaching: we don’t want to create eco-anxiety in our learners. We can work together as professionals to learn more ourselves and to lobby within our sphere of influence in whatever way we can, and taking the action we can: walk the walk, and not just talk the talk.

Health and climate change

Many health problems which exist in the world today can be linked back to climate change. Geoffrey’s university is working with indigenous people in parts of Kenya to collect information about the plants they work with, including language information, usage of the plant, and descriptions of the plant covering as many areas as possible (sight, touch, if not poisonous (!) the taste). They are constructing a database. They thing that once this database exists they should be able to use machine learning to analyse what’s in the database, to create bilingual dictionaries (for example English can borrow from Ekegusii), to create materials based on these – making languages more relevant to the learners, by including references to these plants and how they’re used in materials, in texts, in stories.

Collective responsibility

This is a model of levels at which we can have responsibility:

• Individual: e.g. not eating meat, not buying things in plastic
• Family and friends: e.g. influencing people around you, so they start considering issues
• Professional: e.g. influencing students, staff, institution – this is probably the level at which we can have the most influence to lobby for change or to be examples of action
• Macro: e.g. when we’re voting, protesting, trying to exert pressure on governments and large businesses

Being part of a collective and a community can really support us, and also helps us to stay on track with remembering and using our professional responsibility. This is what Ceri has found connected to ELT Footprint (and I’ve found this too). She mentioned making materials for a training project (which I was lucky enough to work on) where because she knew there were other colleagues from ELT Footprint working in the team, it helped her keep on track when writing the materials and having a relevant environmental focus where she could.

‘Developing materials for the more-than-human world’ (I like this phrase!) and making environmental sustainability a social practice.

If it’s a social practice, it needs to start with the government creating the right policies, moving on to creating the right curriculum which integrates the environment. If the government aren’t doing this, environmental lobby groups should push the government to take up these issues.

Teachers can become researchers, but they also deserve support from organisations. However, teachers might feel overwhelmed by the scale of the topic and feeling a bit lost about the amount of information they might need to cover. We need to develop frameworks and support systems to help teachers, and relate them to linguistic and communicative competences – how do we integrate them? For example, Owain and Ceri have been involved in reviewing a sustainability framework which is being developed by Cambridge University Press.

We need to create practical examples of can do statements that teachers can take into their classroom.

I can understand, explain and give examples of greenwashing.

This is an example of a can do statement which combines language and environment. This develops into a practical lesson, which is practical, project based, and can be local or global.

Teachers also need training to be prepared to teach these topics, and do it in an environmentally-friendly way. This needs to come from teacher training colleges, and other courses. It also touches on the curriculum.

British Council are developing a MOOC connected to sustainability. Colm Downes reminded us that we need to keep an eye on general education too, not just our ELT bubble. The UN have replaced the term ‘Climate Change for Education’ with ‘Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE), and this could be a positive term for us to take into ELT.

In the past, Owain has been told that he’s trying a form of indoctrination through doing environmentally focussed lessons. He’s an English Literature graduate, not a scientist, which has also been considered a problem. But he said we have very relevant skills: we’re used to getting people communicating. Focus on your strengths, to facilitate a discussion where learners are going to come to their own conclusions, and to facilitate a classroom community.

If you want to start teaching about the environment, start from something that you know and that feel strongly about. This will be engaging for you and the students. Take the first step, and don’t worry about it too much.

Look for practical activities, for example helping students to do what they’re read about – litter picking, creating a seed bank.

What lessons have we learnt from the past two years and how do we move forwards?

Start with our learners. Give them a sense of empowerment to deal with this pressing crisis which is already upon us. These issues shouldn’t be brushed under the carpet. We needs to empower our language learners to take part in a dialogue around sustainability and to feel that they can act.

Teachers can’t do this on their own. In training, we need to have a dialogue about what a (language) teacher’s role is in bringing sustainability into the classroom.

Publishers and materials developers should bring environmental issues in, not just focussing on individual actions, but what are the root causes of climate issues?

There is also a research agenda looking at the intersection between eco-literacy and language teaching.

Our health is dependent on the health of our environment. We need to create materials to make this clear.

Make sure that eco-literacy is given the same level of importance as areas like critical thinking and communicative skills.

Let’s not forget that the situation is really urgent. Let’s walk the walk, not just talk the talk. And let’s build hope by taking action together.

Sponge Chat with Jim Fuller

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending over an hour chatting to Jim Fuller, who writes the blog Sponge ELT. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you do too. You can find the YouTube link and Spotify audio on Jim’s blog.

We covered a whole range of topics connected to teacher training and academic management. This was the list of bookmarks Jim made:

01:50 Introduction and purpose of Sponge Chats
04:30 Who is Sandy Millin?
06:00 Sandy’s view on freelancing
09:10 Some benefits of blogging
18:21 Why the move into teacher training and management?
26:00 Why have teacher training and development programmes?
34:00 Managing expectations
36:00 Challenging aspects of teacher training and management
44:00 Getting feedback on your feedback
48:30 Managing time as an academic manager
54:00 Advice for teachers looking to move into teacher training or management
56:30 Diploma-level courses and teacher training
1:01:30 Sandy’s Delta Module 1 preparation course Take Your Time
1:09:00 How does Sandy develop?
1:11:30 Sandy’s book recommendations

Reflections on leaving IH Bydgoszcz

For almost half of my professional life, I’ve been working as the Director of Studies at International House Bydgoszcz: six years here, out of a total of thirteen. To say it’s hard to leave is an understatement, but it’s time for the next person to take their turn, and for me to go on to new adventures.

Most of the teachers finished their contracts a couple of days ago, so now we just have the last few lessons to finish, and a few days to prepare for next year before our summer break. I’ll be back briefly in August and September for the last part of the handover, but my full-time management of a team of 20 teachers has come to an end.

TL;DR: the word cloud shows some of what my job has involved over the past few years, and just how much I’ve learnt 🙂

Coming to Bydgoszcz

In January 2015, I was at the IH Academic Managers and Trainers (AMT) conference, representing IH Sevastopol. A few days earlier, we’d decided that I wouldn’t be returning to the school full time as there weren’t enough students to justify it. I was a DoS without a school. Then I sat next to Tim, who changed my life in one sentence: “We’re looking for a new DoS next year.” A couple of weeks later I was in Bydgoszcz for a long weekend. I shadowed Tim for two days, during most of which I wondered how he managed to juggle so many things and thought I wouldn’t be able to do that. Thanks to his confidence in me, and that of Luke, Sam and Lisa, I was persuaded to take the position, and after that initial wobble I’ve never regretted it.

The Director

Grzegorz Chruszcz started IH Bydgoszcz in 1992, and the school wouldn’t be what it is without his vision. He cares so deeply about every aspect of the school: the teachers, the students, all of the other staff. He’s easily the best boss I’ve ever had, and I feel very grateful to count him as a friend too. He’s been by my side during all of the ups and downs of the past six years, professional and personal. Together we’ve celebrated successes, made difficult decisions, and striven to maintain the best quality school we can, while caring for all of the people involved. Grzegorz has been particularly amazing during the COVID pandemic, driving all over the city to drop off things we needed to keep on working from home, and bringing us Easter gifts along with the less exciting masks and disinfectant we needed to stay safe.

The senior teams

Luke and Sam were my first senior team. They had been working at the school for a few years before I came along, and gave me all the support I could have wished for to learn how the school worked and to settle in.

Helen, Rose, Sarah and Nick were my next team. They joined the school while I was here, and really helped me to grow and refine the systems that make the school run.

Emma and Ruth have been my senior team for the last two years. They have helped me to deal with so many challening situations during that time, including but not limited to the pandemic of the last 15 months.

I know that the school is in safe hands as Emma takes over as DoS next year, and Ruth stays on as ADoS. They’ll have the support of Connor and Ash, our two new senior teachers, staying at the school to take the next step in their careers.

The teachers

Whether they’ve stayed for one year or far longer, the teachers I’ve worked with over the past six years have been professional, caring, enthusiastic, and willing to learn. They’ve dealt with all kinds of different things being thrown at them, and provided the feedback and support we needed to keep on improving the school. Many of them I now count as friends, and I’ve really enjoyed continuing to see what they do after they leave the school.

Watching brand new, fresh-off-CELTA teachers come into the school, and turn into confident, competent, flourishing teachers over the course of their time at the school has been one of consistent privileges and pleasures of working at the school, and is one of the things I’ll miss the most.

The important people!

Mariola, Sandra, Marta, Monika: running the office of such a thriving school isn’t easy. Dealing with all of the admin of managing hundreds of students across four locations, contacting parents and students, running a Cambridge exam centre, and dealing with paperwork and the random questions of a team of twenty plus teachers, many of them foreigners, is really not easy, but the ladies in the office have always supported us and kept everything running smoothly.

Ania manages the accounts and accommodation for our teachers, and Marek manages the IT sides of things, both dealing with my random questions and last-minute requests admirably and with a smile on their faces.

Pan Wlodek, and the sadly missed Pan Piotr, the caretakers, greet students with a smile as they come into the building. Pan Piotr ran a mean barbecue for the end of year school social, and Pan Wlodek fixes everything which goes wrong in the school flats, apart from all of the things they do around the school. They may not speak much English, but they always find a way to communicate with the teachers, often prompting much hilarity 🙂

The school

We are lucky to have the whole school building to ourselves. Grzegorz has created a lovely environment for us to work in, with well-equipped staffrooms, and a wonderful office for me right next to them. The classrooms all have their own personalities, some including original features from the building like ceramic stoves, while others have balconies. There’s a garden area at the back, and a conference room and ‘club’ area for socials and other events. I’ve also had the chance to travel out to other schools in the area where we rent classrooms, and companies where we teach too.

The overall environment in the school is one of support. Questions fly around the staffroom, and there is always somebody to answer them. Feedback runs in every direction, including upwards, and we all improve as a result. As Emma put it so well, there is a lack of ego. I will miss being part of such a strong team at the school, year after year.

So what have I learnt?

So, so much!

I think the biggest area I’ve developed in has been my ability to manage my emotions, especially during challenging situations. When I first came to the school, if somebody got angry, I would probably be likely to raise my voice back and argue at a similar level. I’ve learnt to stop myself from doing that, to stay calm, and to know when to walk away from a situation and come back later when we have both calmed down. I also used to get very emotional when we received staff feedback. I’ve worked with our staff reps over the last few years to move towards more balanced feedback, but have also learnt not to take things to heart so much. Many of the most useful changes I feel I’ve been able to implement have come as a direct result of the feedback staff have shared with us.

Those who’ve been with me at the school for a while know that I still cry, but it’s pretty much always happy tears now. One of my happiest memories was during the craziness that was the beginning of the COVID pandemic. We had decided to close the school for two days to give us all time to learn how to use Zoom. Watching the whole team rise to the challenge and support each other made me realise (yet again!) just how privileged I was to work at this school with this team of people, and I ended up crying while I watched them all working together.

My communication skills have developed hugely. I choose my words more carefully, and slow down and reflect on the potential effect of what I’m saying or writing much more than I did when I first became DoS. I’ve also improved my ability to share information effectively in meetings and emails, and to keep everyone who needs to know in the loop with information. We’ve strengthened systems to communicate with students and parents across the school, and to share relevant information about students within the school. Thanks to the hard work of the teachers and the office, I feel like as I leave we’re in the best position ever with regards to everybody knowing what they need to know about student progress, and about the needs of students in their groups.

Introducing Google Drive is probably the biggest change I’ve implemented over the past few years. We moved from paper to online registers in my second year. The registers have been refined since then to meet the needs of the teachers and the school, making it ever easier to complete admin requirements, track progress, and write reports…though I still have to remind myself to stay calm when asking teacher X or Y to complete their registers for the umpteenth time! We use Google Forms to collect information about various things across the school, and as a key step in teachers communicating information to parents and students – it’s something of a running joke that I create a form whenever I need to know something 😉 My ability to exploit the functions of Excel and Google Sheets has grown exponentially, and there are all kinds of functions and formulae that I can work with now, but had no idea even existed six years ago. We also use Sheets to track things like report writing and checking, information about struggling students, and who needs to create tests by when. We’ve also introduced online placement testing, thanks to the support of Barrie at IH Seville.

When I started at the school, there was already a very strong focus on professional development, particularly on supporting early career teachers. There are weekly workshops, collaborative planning meetings, regular developmental observations, and the chance for returning teachers to do the IH Certificate in teaching Young Learners and Teenagers (IHCYLT). To that mix, I’ve added mentoring and video observations (somewhat accidentally!) I’ve become much better at understanding how collaborative planning meetings can be organised to best scaffold teacher development. We now get regular feedback on the success of our workshops, though there’s still work to be done on evaluating the long-term effectiveness of our workshops. My workshops are tied much more strongly to what actually happens in the classroom, including time for teachers to consider how they can apply what they have learnt rather than just throwing information at them.

Interviewing potential new teachers was one of the biggest challenges for me when I first arrived. I didn’t really know what questions to ask or how to structure an interview. Thanks to other IH DoSes and Josh Round, we now have a much clearer process, including a pre-interview lesson plan task, and a consistent set of interview questions. As I became familiar with the kind of questions it was and wasn’t useful to ask, I also became more comfortable with personalising interviews to each applicants. All interviews are now conducted by two members of the senior team, which has removed some of the issues with recruitment we had earlier on in my tenure as there is always somebody else there to discuss things with.

I’ve learnt how to manage the puzzle that is the timetable, aiming to provide teachers with the most friendly timetable I can. This includes carefully considering the levels they teach, the double-ups they have, the one-to-ones they work with, the hours they work within a single day and across the week, and many other factors. I’ve become more efficient at this over the years, and I don’t think I’ve had any complaints for at least three years, so hopefully I’ve been doing something right!

I have tried to introduce more standardisation across the school, with clearer guidelines for teachers and senior staff about different processes they are involved in. For new processes, this has generally created two or three years of teething problems – you know that the process is working when people don’t remark on it any more! These have included standardising continual assessment and testing, how information is communicated outside and within the school, and how information is recorded. We also have a bank of ‘how to’ documents which any of us can refer to. This maintains institutional knowledge, meaning that it isn’t lost when staff leave the school. Hopefully it makes things easier for teachers working with new kinds of classes (for example, conversation classes or exam clubs) and senior staff joining the management team.

My time management has gone from strength to strength. I’ve always been pretty good at juggling things, but the challenges of managing a team like this have really pushed me. I’ve experimented with all kinds of different ways to track the tasks I need to complete and the meetings I need to have – it took about three years to settle on the system that works for me. My weekends have also become much more clearly delineated, and I’ve learnt to say no to things outside school at challenging periods of the year, choosing when is best for me to take on extra responsibilities – I’m looking forward to having more flexibility to choose how I manage my time as I move to freelancing!

The last thing I’d like to highlight is just how supportive the wider International House community is. IHWO have always been on hand to answer my questions, as have other DoSes who I’ve got to know from the online community and by attending the IH AMT conferences. Many of the changes I’ve made within the school have been inspired by what they’re doing, from big things mentioned above to much smaller things like Monica Green mentioning how important it is to say positive things to people too. I hope I already did that, but until I heard her say it, I wasn’t conscious of how often I did it. Since then, I’ve tried hard to keep my communication as balanced as possible, and encourage teachers to come to me with positive things too, not just when they have problems (I need balanced comments coming my way too!)

What’s next?

Having developed so much over the last few years, I’m really looking forward to passing that on to others as much as I can. Once the handover to Emma is complete, I’ll be fully freelance from October. I’m aiming to work on a combination of projects, including training for others and on my own courses (watch this space!), CELTA tutoring, materials writing, methodology writing, working on my own books, and consultancy work. I’m also planning to complete my NILE MA. If you’re interested in working with me, please contact me via Twitter @sandymillin or on my Work with me page.

Farewell IH Bydgoszcz! On to the next adventure…

TEFL Commute: Women

To mark International Women’s Day, it was a great pleasure for me to co-host an episode of The TEFL Commute Podcast with Ceri Jones.

In this episode, we celebrate International Women’s Day with a takeover by Sandy Millin and Ceri Jones. They look at the history of the day, talk about their experiences as women in ELT, reflect on representation in ELT, and maintain the TEFL Commute tradition by having not one, but two quizzes!

Here are links to a few of the things we mentioned during the episode:

• EVE: Equal Voices in ELT
• The Fair List
• Research by Nicola Prentis and Russ Mayne for an IATEFL 2015 talk

Thanks to James, Shaun and Lindsay for handing over a whole episode to us – I hope you like what we did with it!

Trainer Conversation

Zhenya Polosatova kindly invited me to take part in the series of Trainer Conversations she has been running on her blog for the past few months. As always with this kind of conversation, it made me realise new things about what I think about teaching and training – thanks Zhenya! You can read my conversation or explore the whole series (definitely recommended!)

2020

It’s been quite a year. Sometimes it’s felt like hard going, but there have been a lot of highlights, and that’s what I want to look back on at the end of the year. Here goes…

January

I caught up with a friend who I hadn’t seen for 16 years, then went to the IH AMT conference.

I submitted my assignments for my first NILE MA module in Trainer Development, and got a distinction.

I travelled to the UK for a family christening. That week I managed to meet up with my best friend too (that’s important as it’s the only time I’ve seen her in person this year).

February

My mum’s 60th birthday cake, as made by Amber, my amazing cousin

The following weekend we all got together again for my mum’s 60th. I saw my mum on the morning of her birthday on February 3rd (hope it’s not too much longer before I see her again!)

The aviation museum in Toulouse

I got the train to Toulouse for a few days with a friend, my first time in that part of the world, then carried on to Barcelona for the IH Barcelona conference, where I presented a few ways to tweak speaking activities. The day I arrived I had time to visit Tibidabo for the first time.

I started gardening for the first time, with the aim of making better use of my balcony and perhaps growing something I could eat.

March

We managed to move our school fully online in two days, thanks to the help and support of IH World. I cried more than once at the amazing way that our staff pulled together to make it all happen so smoothly…just one of many times this year I was grateful to be at IH Bydgoszcz and part of the IH family.

I wrote the first post in my series connected to teaching on Zoom, and it’s been by far the most successful post on my blog all year. My blogging generally stepped up a notch at this point, as it felt like there was so much to process – writing about it really does help. Thanks to everyone who’s read and shared these posts this year.

April

I was a bit worried about my birthday, but I needn’t have been. One lovely friend organised a Zoom birthday party for me, and our teachers had a social that evening where we all played games. It was a lovely day in the end.

Our amazing school Director hand-delivered all of the teachers things to help us stay safe during the first lockdown, and a clockwork Easter chick and a traditional Easter biscuit to make us smile too.

I made my first hot cross buns.

I organised games on Zoom for the whole family for Easter.

Two groups of old friends and one group of new friends started to meet regularly on Zoom – I’ve definitely grown closer to all of them this year.

I took part in my first panel discussion, an IATEFL online event about moving teaching online.

May

My baking experiments have continued all year, but these cinnamon whirls were a particular success 🙂

I moved my garden outside and the first flower appeared on a courgette – I was so excited to know I’d grown this!

June

I bought a bike and used it to do a lot of exploration in the forest. I’ve spent more time in the forest over the last six months than I probably did in the 4.5 years before that!

At the end of the month I managed a couple of day trips with my colleagues as Poland opened up again, both to places I’d been wanting to visit for a long time. The first was to Inowroclaw, the site of this fascinating piece of architecture designed to collect salt from the local water.

The second was to Malbork, a castle built by the Teutonic knights, and the largest castle in the world.

July

I did my first online CELTA, and blogged about it with Stephanie Wilbur. It was fascinating comparing our experiences of the course.

I got my first harvest from my little balcony garden – some tiny carrots, beetroot and courgettes.

August

I visited a local beauty spot and saw more butterflies than I’ve ever seen in one place outside a butterfly house. They posed nicely for photos too 🙂

I managed a short holiday to the Polish coast, including a trip on the ‘boat on grass‘ near Elblag…

In Frombork, I saw the grave of Copernicus. This is probably the closest I’ve ever got to having a spiritual moment (I’m not religious at all) – standing so close to a person who moved the world, in a place I know he had lived and worked and stood too. I also fulfilled a lifelong dream: I saw Jupiter and three of its moons, and Saturn and its rings, through a telescope – I’d always wanted to see planets up close.

I had a weekend away in this beautiful place near Bydgoszcz, dancing flamenco and eating amazing food with interesting people who were patient with my Polish 🙂

Most importantly, August was when I met my boyfriend online and we clicked instantly.

September

Our flamenco concert, postponed from June, happened – there were lots of restrictions (rightly!) but we managed to do it. Well done to Dorota, our amazing teacher, for pulling it all together.

We started off our new school year successfully, combining in class and online lessons in case of a second lockdown – it was so good to be in a classroom with students again! Socially-distanced teaching wasn’t too bad either.

My balcony garden was at its peak.

I got to actually meet my boyfriend in person 🙂 My first trip to the UK since February.

October

I managed another quick trip to the UK before lockdowns and restrictions came into force again.

I celebrated my 10th blog-iversary – time flies!

November

Despite my flights being cancelled, I managed to spend a relaxing 5-day holiday apart together with my boyfriend.

I was a plenary speaker for KOTESOL.

December

I had fun joining the TEFL Commute team for an episode of their podcast.

Despite not being able to get on my planned flight to the UK, I managed a relaxed Christmas Day, and have had lots of love and support from family and friends.

Overall

I’ve spent more time outside, learnt to garden done more cooking and baking, spent more time appreciating my flat and balcony, chatted more often to more friends, presented at and attended more conferences, learnt far more about teaching in a far shorter period of time than I ever expected to at this point in my career, and met my amazingly lovely boyfriend. So yes, some things haven’t happened, and I haven’t been able to be in the same place as many people I love (soon, I hope!), but on balance, I have to say it’s been a pretty good year.

What good things have happened for you this year?

Life after CELTA (CETA Symposium)

The Cambridge English Teaching Awards (CETA) Symposium is another event which I would never have been able to attend face-to-face because of the timing and the location, but now it’s online I can go – yay! It’s aimed at trainers of Cambridge certificates: CELTA, Delta, CELT-P, CELT-S and TKT, though a lot of the content is relevant for all teacher trainers.

I talked about Life after CELTA. This was the abstract:

Even a Pass A CELTA graduate ‘will benefit from further support in post’. What might this support look like? What are the main areas that CELTA graduates continue to need help with? What can trainers do during the CELTA course to lay the groundwork? I hope to answer all of these questions in this session.

Here are my slides:

Here’s the recording:

Key areas for new teachers

When I employ an early career teacher, I know we’ll probably need to work on five key areas:

• Time management
• Teacher confidence/presence
• Community membership
• Reflective practice
• Effective modelling

These are areas which many new teachers struggle with and need particular support in. I’ll look at each area below, with ideas for how CELTA trainers can develop these skills as much as possible during the course. Many of these things are already incorporated in courses, but it’s worth being reminded of their importance, so apologies if I’m preaching to the converted!

ELT Playbook

For each area, I’ve suggested a task from an ELT Playbook which could be used with trainees or as a trainer. These are the current Smashwords discount codes, valid until 5th October 2020 [affiliate links]:

ELT Playbook 1 (for new teachers): TB33T

ELT Playbook Teacher Training: NH97T

You can find out more about both books, along with how to buy them, on the ELT Playbook website.

Time management

Materials preparation time: This is probably the biggest time sink for new teachers. This might be created a huge PowerPoint presentation, cutting up loads of bits of paper, or going down a rabbit hole to find the perfect image/video/text etc. I generally recommend that trainees do materials prep last, once they have a completed plan, with all of the documentation. I also try to show them how to teach lessons without PowerPoint, and challenge them to do at least one lesson like this during a course, especially if they’re a stronger trainee. Weaker trainees can aim for one or two activities per lesson without PowerPoint.

Simplify lessons: I recommend a maximum of one or two all-singing, all-dancing activities per 60 minutes. If trainees come to me with a plan with more than this, I’ll advise them to get rid of one or two, even if they can justify why it would be a great activity and incredibly useful for their students. Once I’ve told them this a few times, they start to listen!

Time-saving tips: Encourage screenshots/taking photos rather than retyping the whole exercise, even if it might look prettier! Show trainees hacks for the paper-based classroom, like putting a coloured dot on the back of each set of handouts.

Technology: Introduce multi-functional tools like Quizlet, which can also be used for printing flashcards in a face-to-face classroom. Show trainees how to find and copy existing sets, not start from scratch every time, and encourage them to save sets with the book name, edition, unit number and page number in the title so they’re easy for other teachers to find (like this). Create templates for documents on Word/PowerPoint which are reusable and easy to complete – show trainees/new teachers how to do this too if possible.

Exploiting activities: Emphasise as much as possible how to exploit single activities in multiple ways, rather than introducing new activities all the time. Demonstrate this during input sessions. You can also use One activity, multiple tasks from ELT Playbook 1 .

Teacher confidence/presence

Lesson planning: I strongly believe that trainers should intervene as soon as possible if planning documentation is not up-to-scratch and be explicit about what will help trainees in lessons. There’s normally somebody else in the TP group who’s understood how to write a useful lesson plan, so I normally ask their permission to share the plan with the person who’s struggling. This is better than a generic lesson plan as the trainee knows how the lesson went, and can see how having a solid plan helped the lesson to be more successful. As a trainer, we should also provide clear feedback on the plan, with one or two specific areas to focus on each TP to improve the plan, not the just the lessons. Generally, a strong plan = a successful lesson = teacher confidence. There’s plenty of time for teachers to move towards less detailed planning later, once they’ve got the basics under their belt.

Rehearsal opportunities: Encourage trainees/teachers to rehearse things they’re nervous about, preferably with their TP colleagues, but with you if nobody else is available. This is particularly true for complicated instructions – make sure the lesson isn’t the first time the trainee/teacher has ever tried to say those instructions out loud.

Lesson plan as film script: Emphasise the importance of trainees/teachers knowing exactly what they want from the students during the lesson. Imagine it’s a film script, where everyone needs to know where to stand, what to hold, what to do at each point in the lesson. This can help trainees to add more depth to their lessons, though sometimes it can go too far! If it does, remind them that improvisation is an important part of great film-making too – there needs to be space for the actors/students to breathe too; it can’t all be about the director/teacher. This can help them to understand the idea of handing over to the students more too.

Wait time: Give trainees/teachers tricks to increase the amount of time they wait after asking questions, for example counting ‘1000, 2000, 3000’ or putting a post-it on their computer saying ‘Wait!’ The pauses add natural breaks into the lesson, allow everyone to think a little, and can reduce anxiety. They also mean students are more likely to give answers of some kind, and maybe even successful ones 😉 All of this can increase teacher confidence, and help them feel more in control of the lesson with better teacher presence.

Provide necessary support: Don’t leave trainees/teachers to flounder or spend hours trying to figure things out themselves. This is particularly true of teaching grammar: show trainees/teachers how to do this the first time out. This will add to their toolbox, and give both teachers and students a better experience. A lot of our in-house training at IH Bydgoszcz connected to lessons is about supporting teachers to feel confident in grammar lessons. One useful tip is for teachers/trainees to do the exercises themselves as part of their lesson planning, and make sure they know WHY the answers are correct, not just what. Modelling this kind of scaffolding is useful for teachers to see how to help students too.

Self-talk: There’s a free bonus activity connected to ELT Playbook 1  looking at self-talk and teacher confidence. Download it here.

Community membership

Give guidance: Show trainees how to participate in communities within their course, for example by creating Whatsapp groups for everyone on the course, their TP group, and their 3 TP colleagues. Point out chances to use these communities e.g. it’s a good idea to discuss this part of the lesson…you could vent about this…

You are not alone: Remind them that there’s always somebody they can call on, both during and after the course. Emphasise how to work together during TP prep, and tell them never to spend more than 10 minutes trying to figure something out – after that they should ask for help. ‘The people around us’ in ELT Playbook 1  can help teachers/trainees to realise who can help them with what.

Wider communities: Show trainees communities they can join during or after their course e.g. the facebook CELTA or Teaching English British Council pages, #ELTchat on Twitter, or alumni communities for your organisation.

Reflective practice

Use metaphors: This can help with managing expectations and stress. My favourite metaphor for this is about learning to play the piano/tennis.

Exemplify reflection: As a trainer, be human! Own your mistakes and tell trainees how you have learnt/will learn from them. Show them that it’s not the end of the world if something goes wrong. Also highlight areas you’re particularly proud of, especially if you were experimenting with something new. Be excited 🙂

Strength spotting: I learnt about this from Sarah Mercer, and there’s a specific task connected to it in ELT Playbook 1.  Encourage trainees/teachers to learn from the strengths of others. Really emphasise this by making TP peer feedback focussed on strengths as much as possible and then telling them how other trainees can do the same thing. In your spoken feedback, highlight one thing each trainee did that you want the others to do in future TPs.

Specific feedback: Give specific feedback, including comments were possible, not just generic comments. For example: ‘Good drilling’ becomes ‘You used a consistent model with a natural stress pattern.’ This shows trainees/teachers what behaviour to repeat, in the same way that our (normally much more specific!) negative feedback shows them what behaviour to avoid/modify in future. Model this, but also encourage trainees to avoid the word ‘good’ in their own feedback to each other. Thanks to Kate Protsenko for highlighting this to me, and inspiring the task ‘What is ‘good’?’ in ELT Playbook Teacher Training.

Effective model

Practise what you preach: Teachers should model effective language learning behaviour to their students, trainers should model effective teaching to their trainees. 😉 I think most of us do this already, but it’s still worth reflecting on what you do and don’t model to your trainees. Follow through on your advice in your own demo lessons and input sessions: vary activities, give concise instructions, don’t use too many ICQs, start/finish on time…sometimes easier said than done! The task ‘Practising what you preach’ in ELT Playbook Teacher Training could help with this.

Be human: Model compassion towards yourself, model taking care of yourself during courses, highlight when you need help or when you’ve found support somewhere (in a book, on a site, from another person). I’ve already mentioned owning your mistakes. Don’t try to be a computer, or to be perfect. We need to model this so that new teachers don’t feel that they need to be perfect either. Perfectionism is boring.

What’s not here?

The surface things:

• TTT
• ICQs
• CCQs
• pairwork
• feedback techniques, etc.

These are generally considered to be the stuff of CELTA, but I think they’re less important than any of the five deeper areas above. Those deeper areas are universal: any teacher needs them, in any context, online or offline, wherever they are in the world. The surface things are all useful techniques to be aware of, but they’re context-dependent. A confident, reflective, practitioner who can learn from their community, manage their time well, and understand the power of modelling will learn how to do all of these bitty things sooner or later. Remove any of those five areas and the chances are much slimmer.

Do you agree? Are these areas you work on? What would you do to support new teachers with these or other areas during an initial teacher training course?

Lessons learned: First steps towards reflective teaching in ELT (review)

I bought this book at the IH Barcelona conference in February 2020, in what feels like another life entirely!

Key details

Title: Lessons Learned: First Steps towards Reflective Teaching in ELT

Author: Gabriel Díaz Maggioli and Lesley Painter-Farrell

Publisher: Richmond

Year: 2016

Place of publication: Oxford

Affiliate links: (none – the first book I know of that doesn’t seem to be on Amazon!)

Other links: BEBC (You’re supporting a great bookshop if you use this link)

What’s in it?

Here’s the description from the Richmond page (retrieved 23rd August 2020):

Lessons Learned: First Steps towards Reflective Teaching in ELT is a coursebook that introduces aspiring teachers to the main principles and practices associated with reflective teaching in the field of foreign and second language instruction. It can also be used as a reference and resource in professional development programs for more experienced language teachers wishing to update their professional knowledge base.

Written in accessible language.

Departs from comments on teachers’ and students’ needs for language teaching and learning.

There are reflective tasks throughout each chapter to consolidate and personalize information.

Content is clearly introduced and diagrams in mind maps for each unit.

Reflective Journal Tasks, Observation Tasks and Portfolio Tasks at the end of each chapter help to consolidate and keep record of the information learned along the chapter.

Written by well-known and world wide experienced authors from the world of ELT.

Pictures and diagrams in each chapter facilitate understanding and bring information alive.

The 12 main sections of the book are:

1. Learning about our students
2. Reflective teaching
3. Observation: a learning tool
4. Managing our classrooms
5. Lesson planning
6. Organizing language lessons
7. Understanding and teaching language
8. Developing literacy skills
9. Developing oracy skills
10. Integrating language skills
11. Assessment and evaluation
12. Mindful, corrective feedback

There’s also how to use this book, a glossary, a bibliography and a list of online links.

Good points

The structure of the book mirrors the principles it is trying to get across, with lots of opportunities for the reader to reflect on what they have read. This is particularly true of the final two pages of each chapter, where there are tables to complete and portfolio tasks, all of which are designed around the reflective principles described in the book. There’s plenty of space to take notes throughout the book, including wide outside margins.

The order of the chapters is logical and feels different to other books I’ve read aimed at the same target audience: starting with the students, where all of our teaching should begin, introducing reflective principles, applying them to observing other teachers, then moving into our own teaching.

Quotes and references from teachers and students begin each chapter, introducing a range of voices beyond the authors’ and encouraging the reader to consider different perspectives on their teaching. Having said that, the authors’ voices are strong, and they include clear examples from their own personal experiences to back up their points.

The book is generally full of useful tips and examples, such as a teacher’s reflection on their lesson on page 61.

Teaching language skills is covered in an appropriate level of depth for teachers with this level of experience, and is very accessible. I also like the fact that the language section starts with lexis rather than grammar. There is a balanced discussion of different approaches to assessment in chapter 11, and a real focus on assessment for learning (rather than of learning) with practical tips for how to go about it.

Some of the pages/features I particularly liked were (numbers = pages):

• 159-161: the rationale for telling students the aim of the lesson, and the description of lesson rhythms
• 175: the idea of lessons which are student-centred but teacher-designed
• 181-184: the list of techniques for scaffolding learning
• 184-192: the description of lesson shapes (a new way of thinking about them for me)
• 242-243: the list of general questions for clarifying use when teaching language
• 271-275: the comprehensive list of writing activities
• 384-385: the characteristics of a good test
• 386-389: practical advice for writing test items

Even as an experienced teacher and trainer, there were new concepts in there for me. One of these was Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) (p390-391). The idea is to evaluate language skills in an integrated way, as they would occur in real life, rather than as isolated skills.

Areas to improve

It frustrates me when reference books don’t have an index. Although the contents page is very detailed, I have to guess which section to look at if I want to find out about a particular topic and it’s not listed in the section headings.

Occasionally assumptions are made about what the reader might know, with some terminology introduced which isn’t in the glossary. For example, on p180, the terms ‘inductive’ and ‘deductive’ are introduced without being explained, or on p215, ‘Audiolingual Approach’.

One or two assertions are made without being fully referenced:

For example, at a recent conference, a presenter suggested that the optimal number of iterations of a word is nine. (p208)

Who was this presenter? What was the conference? When is ‘recent’? What research did they base this ‘optimal number’ on? Having said that, these woolly sections only happened a couple of times in a 400+ page book, and the book is generally very well researched with appropriate amounts of references to possible further reading.

Both ‘he’ and ‘she’ are used interchangeably throughout the book. Generally this is fine, but when it’s done in a single example lesson plan, it makes it difficult to follow.

Most frustratingly, I found there were a number of typos/proofreading errors. However, while this distracted me when I was reading, it’s not enough to stop this book from being useful.

Apart from the index, all of these issues suggest that the book would have benefitted from one more edit before publication.

General comment

It provides a comprehensive basic introduction to ELT, and clearly exemplifies reflective practice. I feel like it’s mostly aimed at Masters students based in the USA (unsurprising, as the authors both teach/taught on The New School MA TESOL programme), but a lot is relevant to teachers in other areas of ELT as well. This would be a useful book for early career teachers to have a copy of and I think it’s one I’ll come back to.

ELT awards

What is the function of awards within a profession?

I’ve just asked Google that question expecting to find some kind of philosophical discussion on the topic. Instead I found links to all kinds of different awards schemes across a range of professions: engineering, medicine, project management, human resources, safety professionals, supply chain professionals, recognition professionals, and yes, even education.

The closest thing to an answer I could find came from the Wikipedia ‘award‘ entry, on page 3 of my search:

An award, sometimes called a distinction, is something given to a recipient as a token of recognition of excellence in a certain field.

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Award on 21st August 2020

According to the references, this is a combination of definitions from the Oxford and Cambridge dictionary definitions.

I tried a new search: Why do awards exist?

That got me what I was looking for. Buried in amongst all kinds of discussions of film and TV awards ceremonies are a few interesting posts, starting with How important are awards anyway?:

We all apply with the same goal in our mind – to win. If we lose (and it has happened), we get irritated. Maybe we say: ”Heh, what do they know.” But then we try to figure out why we lost. We try to learn from each new contest, and we try to figure out how to be better.

Move on to page 2 of the search, and you get Awards: why you want them and how to get them. I’m not sure what an ‘Extension program’ is either, but there are some interesting quotes in there, like these:

Awards are the most conventionally accepted method for proving to others that your work is necessary, complete, and effective.

On the surface, applying for awards may seem self-serving, or even pretentious. Winning awards, however, does much more than bring attention to you as an individual. Documented proof that programs are of the highest caliber facilitates recruitment of external support and resources for future programs (Bradley, Driscoll, & Bardon, 2012). Administration, funding agencies, local governments, and even potential future employers acknowledge the value of peer recognition. Agencies with funding and in-kind resources tend to divert their efforts toward projects with the greatest potential for success. They often base decisions about who might be qualified to accomplish a task on prior successes of individuals or agencies under consideration.

How To Go After Awards And Recognition (And Win) and why it matters is from Forbes:

After all, if there’s one thing that can make us as women squirm uncomfortably, it’s nominating ourselves for awards and public recognition. Some may not be drawn to the competitive rivalry of a contest. For others, they may erroneously see themselves as not-strong-enough a candidate to apply in the first place. And yet, the effects of not self nominating can be far reaching.

Putting our distaste for self-promotion aside—awards, funds and recognition are a form of currency. In the world we live in, they matter. They are bargaining chips! They can help you demand a higher fee as an entrepreneur, reinforce your request for a higher corporate salary to your employer, and provide external validation of how you measure up against your peers.

Decide today, right now, that you are a worthy applicant for that interesting award, publishable article, or conference presentation. Then go for it.

Going after, and winning, awards makes you more appealing to employers and clients, yes. But it can greatly help you materially, and perhaps most underemphasized, it can permanently lift your confidence. […] By applying for recognition, you too will learn a lifelong skill – how to identify and speak about your value…and how to bet on yourself.

The last article I’ll quote from is The benefits of awards — even if you don’t win, which is full of lots of useful ideas and tips:

But recognition aside, merely applying for awards or seeking to be nominated also brings a multitude of career benefits. Putting together an award application can help you reflect on your skills and career progress. It may push you to become more competitive by filling gaps in your CV and increasing your visibility. Seeking out senior colleagues who will cheer for you can help you build a strong support base for the future. Competing for awards also creates an opportunity to receive useful feedback about your work and how you are perceived from those who nominated you or awards committees, Gomez notes.

Studying the award criteria and looking at past winners may help you get a sense of what you want to strive for and identify skill gaps. Trying to fill these gaps will not only increase your chances of getting the award, but also put you in a stronger position for your future career planning and progression, Maguire says.

Current awards in ELT

Philip Kerr recently wrote about Current Trends in ELT, including mentioning the British Council ELTons awards for innovations in English Language Teaching. This is one of the quotes which prompted this post:

You could be forgiven for wondering what is especially innovative about many of the ELTon award-winners, or indeed, why neophilia actually matters at all. The problem, in a relatively limited world like language teaching, is that only so much innovation is either possible or desirable.

The ELTons are one of only three awards schemes I can think of within ELT. The other two are both related to balance and representation at conferences. The Fair List was set up by Tessa Woodward to encourage gender balance at UK ELT events. Eve: Equal Voices in ELT recognises events for parity in gender, highly proficient speakers (not just native English speakers), and how representative they are of their local teaching community.

The ELTons has a glitzy awards ceremony (not this year of course!), with various categories recognising innovation and a lifetime achievement award. The Fair List has an awards ceremony at IATEFL each year (again, not this year). EVE has a calendar which they will include events in which meet the parity requirements, and award a badge recipients can display. All of them are useful for highlighting achievements of the ELT industry, and I think The Fair List and EVE have gone some way to starting discussions about and encouraging change within conference line-ups. Just being shortlisted for an ELTon can increase the profile of a project and (presumably) increase sales/buy-in/author profiles.

(Please let me know if you think I’ve missed any from this list.*)

Accreditation and inspection schemes, such as those from British Council, EAQUALS, AQUEDUTO (online training) and IH inspections for affiliated schools also fulfil some of the functions mentioned in the quotes above: they require data gathering, identify gaps and encourage applicants to fulfil them to meet requirements. The resultant badges that those who pass the inspection can display are a sign of professional recognition/recognition by the profession, though there’s no official awards ceremony for any of them.

Applying to present at conferences also prompts reflection and can lead to increased professional recognition too, and is open to individuals, thereby meeting some of the requirements mentioned in the first part of this post.

What’s my point?

I’m not really sure…this blogpost is more about thinking out loud than an actual point!

To my knowledge, the awards schemes which currently exist in ELT focus on innovation, lifetime achievement, and conference line-ups.*

Accreditation schemes are aimed at organisations.

Maybe there’s room for something else, awards which are more wide-ranging. Something which demonstrates the range and scope of our profession. Something which individuals can apply for, not just organisations. Something which can throw a spotlight on more than just the big names and recognise those unsung members of our profession who work away diligently year in, year out.

What could we recognise?

Here are some possible award categories:

• Teacher
• Trainer
• Manager
• Materials writer
• Support/Administrative staff
• Course
• Course provider (school/educational organisation)
• Employer
• Methodology book/materials
• Training course/event (including conferences)
• Teaching association
• Social media group/account

I’m sure there are many more I haven’t thought of!

How could it work? What are the problems?

Allow time for nominations. For example, nominations include 5 reasons why that nominee should receive the award, and what makes them unique/different compared to other possible nominees.
How long? Who nominates (the potential winner or a third party)? What needs to be included in a nomination? How are the nominations submitted? What about GDPR?

Anonymise the nominations. Remove any identifying features.
Who gets that job?! How long would it take?

Have a panel for each award, or one for all of the awards. Each panel member creates a long list of four nominations who they think should receive the award.
Who would be on the panel? How do you remove bias and ensure representation within the panels? How long would that process take? Who would pay for the time or would it have to be voluntary? 

Combine the separate long lists into a master long list. Each panel member individually comes up with their own shortlist of three nominees who they think should receive the award with reasons.
As with the previous point.

The panel meets to discuss the shortlists and negotiate who should be the award winner. One person from the panel is selected to check the votes and make a note of the eventual winner.
How long do you allow for this? How do you de-anonymise the nominations and ensure the winner remains a secret?

Run an awards ceremony. Glitz! Glamour! Awards!
Who pays for it? Who presents the awards?

Will it ever happen?

Unlikely!* Somebody would need to pay for it, and within ELT that normally means publishers sponsoring the event. Somebody would need to organise it, and that requires a lot of time.

But still, it’s interesting to think about.

What impact could an awards ceremony that’s more wide-ranging have on the profession? Would it make it feel more like a profession? Would it lead to any changes, as The Fair List and EVE already seem to have done? What do you think?

*Search first, write later (!)

I got to the end of this post and did a Google search for ELT awards. It looks like some of my questions are answered by these awards and my post is a little more pointless than it was before, but I’m not going to rewrite it now! Here’s what I found:

There are ELT Excellence Awards in Greece – it costs quite a lot to apply. Presumably that covers some of the costs I mentioned above, and public schools get one free entry each, but that still rules out individuals applying. It covers a wide range of areas, including a few I hadn’t thought of.

The Pearson English Global Teacher Award gives five winners the chance to attend the IATEFL or TESOL conference all expenses paid. It looks like it really does recognise individual teachers. I can’t find information about how to apply, but I think you probably apply yourself, doing the job of encouraging teachers to identify and speak about their value, as described above.

Oh, and there’s this post from David Deubelbeiss about teacher of the year/best teacher awards and how they’re a pet peeve of his, providing a useful balance to points above. You should definitely read that too.

5 DOSsing years

Last Friday marked the end of my fifth year as the Director of Studies at International House Bydgoszcz. When I moved here I thought that I would be a bit bored with the job after 5 years and it would be time to move on. I’m very surprised and happy to say that that is not the case at all, and I’m not planning to go anywhere anytime soon. I’ve written this post to share some of the things I’ve learnt from five years as a Director of Studies and some of the highlights of the job for me.

The first photo of me in Bydgoszcz, August 2015

What I’ve learnt

Perspective is difficult to achieve, both for teachers and for you. Once you’ve got it, it’s both important to remember and hard to understand that others might not have it.

Time helps.

Patience helps, both with yourself and others.

Emotional reactions are a normal part of any job, but you need to learn when it’s OK to let them happen and when it’s better to wait.

You’ll deal with the same issues and hear the same complaints repeatedly, and it’s a lot less frustrating when you accept this.

The timetable is a monster.

The effort isn’t seen, the results are. Think about how they’ll be perceived.

There will always be accusations of favouritism, regardless of how much work you put into making things as fair as possible. 

Difficult decisions are still decisions that have to be made. Know that they’re the best decision you can make at that point in time and move on.

Communication is key.

Gratitude makes a huge difference to how everybody feels. Express it sincerely and often.

Managers need feedback just as much as teachers do, but it’s hard to create an environment where you get it. When you get negative feedback, don’t fight it or get defensive about it. Accept it and learn from it. Show gratitude for it. Model how you want your staff to respond to feedback.

Crisis points are where huge amounts of learning happens.

Sometimes your teaching gets neglected when there are so many other things to think about.

You have to take care of yourself and your physical and mental health.

You are not alone.

What I’ve loved

Watching teachers develop.

Seeing their confidence and skills improve week on week and year on year.

Seeing what they go on to do next, and how our school has help them to do that.

Watching senior staff develop.

Seeing how they grow into their roles.

Helping them develop their skills.

Watching myself develop, as a manager, trainer and person.

Learning how to be kind to myself and accept the decisions I’ve made, including when they go wrong.

Improving my communication skills.

Seeing our school grow and change.

Seeing students progress through the school, especially when I’ve made decisions about their progress in the past.

Working with fantastic colleagues who make going to school something I look forward to.

What I’m looking forward to

Trying new things out at our school.

Watching our students continue with their progress through the school.

Hearing about what our teachers do next, both inside and outside teaching.

Continuing to grow and learn, and help others do so.

Seeing what happens next.

Conversation shapes

Have you ever watched in despair as students have a ‘conversation’ which is actually just two monologues? Or tried in vain to interact with a student who only gives one-word answers, however encouraging you are?

I know when I’m B1 or below, it’s difficult for me to pull my weight in a conversation and I need a lot of support from whoever I’m talking to. In the classroom we can provide this support in a variety of ways. We can supply sentence stems that students can complete, we can show them the first two or three turns of a conversation, or we can provide them with a whole range of questions or other functional language which might be useful in the conversation they are having.

These are all interventions we can make before or during students speak in class. But what about after the conversation? How can you help students to reflect on the success of that conversation? Here’s one idea I haven’t tried yet but it would like to: show students the conversation shapes below and ask them these questions:

• Which shape is like a conversation you might have in your own language?
• How would you feel in each of these conversations if you were a person A or person B? How actively would you participate in the conversation in each example?
• Which shape is like the conversation you just had? Do you think you were person A or person B?
• How successful do you think it was as a conversation?
• What could you change in the conversation you just had to make it more like shape 3? What help do you need from the teacher to do this?

You can download a PowerPoint of all of the images at Conversation shapes if you want to adapt them for your own lessons, though please retain the credit.

I think this activity is an example of metacognition, which is the act of monitoring and making changes to learning strategies you use. The reflection helps learners to become aware of the processes they use when they are having a conversation, and what they can do to have more successful conversations in the future. Here’s a beginner’s guide to metacognition from Cambridge.

What other strategies do you use to help learners have more successful conversations?

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

TEFL (online) Tantrums (guest post)

Last weekend my colleague Ruth shared a poem by her friend, Jenna Edmondson. It made me laugh and I think a lot of teachers can empathise with it right now. Jenna kindly agreed to share it with the wider world on my blog. Thanks Jenna!

TEFL (Online) Tantrums

Just a second, I’m logging on

Teacher can you hear me?

Oh no, what’s wrong?!

I didn’t realise I was doing a hearing test today

Teacher can you see me?!

Yes I can, go away

I’ve 2020 vision of how this will pan out

Now please be quiet, no need to shout

Wait a moment are we all here?

Maria was signed in, now she’s just disappeared

Pablo please, can you unmute your mic

I can tell you’re not listening, you’re playing fortnite

OK class, cameras on please

I want to check you’re not watching TV

Great, now Maria’s back let’s begin

Teacher I can’t see you

(Honestly it’s fine)

Have you tried logging out and back in?

Let’s not waste any more time.

Can we check the homework? Page 52

I haven’t done it teacher, I didn’t know what to do

Well, the instructions were there in the chat and classroom

I had too much work

                           a project

                        a test

Ok class, just give me a rest,

Teacher Maria’s in the list twice

Great, I don’t know why

Maria is that your evil twin

Perhaps one of you

could speak or type?

I don’t mind which

ignore the glitch

Just please join in

Teacher Can I go to the toilet?

Yes…you are at home

You can do what you like

Just don’t take your phone

What’s that sound

Quick run for cover

Oh you’re just eating your mic

Or were you fighting your brother?

Maria, Question 1; oh, where has she gone?

Can you please tell me the answer, anyone?

Teacher you’re muted

We can’t hear what you said

OK, I type, let’s do some speaking instead

Can I work with him

Can she work with me

Teacher Sara can’t talk

OK you can work in 3s

5 minutes, great off you go

Pablo click on the link

Leave me alone

Give me time to drink a tea

Give me strength

For my headache to leave

I join the room

SPEAK ENGLISH please

And what is this you’re drawing

All over slide 3?

Answer the questions,

That’s all you’ve to do

Or there’ll be no more games or breakout rooms.

TEACHER kahoot!

Is that my name now?

Right let’s try

Everyone-phone’s out

I’ve got no data

The wifi’s gone

What’s the code

My battery’s run out

(Turn down the kahoot theme tune

This is torture, can we end this soon?)

Teacher I’m bored

Thanks, me too

I’m trying my hardest

What about you?

Time for a video

Let me share the screen

no, mute your mics,

just listen to me

now there’s an echo

I can hear myself speak

God I sound awful

I can’t hear myself think

Let’s stop this now

It’s time to say goodbye

Oh Maria, you’re back!

With your parents… hi!

No I can’t go through her progress with you right now

If she was here the whole class we’d have something to talk about

Teacher it’s the time

Teacher bye

Bye Teacher

WAIT I haven’t given you the homework yet

Now half the class has gone

and we’re back to square one

I’ll mute myself before I say something I regret

The Teacher Show has come to an end

I’m slowly going round the bend

I’ve planned for hours and taught for less

Please believe me, I’m doing my best

I can see my flaws on the screen for six hours straight

I’m not a vain person but this angle’s not great

I struggle through when the tech is down

And try to ignore family in the background

The reality is that the time goes quite fast

I think most students enjoy this virtual class

As I do too, now and then

But I can’t wait to be in the classroom again!

 

Dear Class,

With each day we’re closer to the end of term

And I hope there’s a lot you’ve learned

Hopefully patience; to be kind to others and yourself

To know you’re resilient and to appreciate good health

That the book doesn’t have the answers

Maybe your parents or teachers don’t too

If you want to learn something it has to come from you

Go from these few months knowing you can cope

And see you back in the classroom soon, I hope.

My name is Jenna Edmondson and I’ve been teaching English for 13 years. I’ve worked in Hong Kong, Sydney and now Spain. In my free time I love writing poetry (and occasionally performing it) painting and making silver jewellery. I really enjoy teaching and the connections we make with people, and putting these small observations into words. I studied English Language with Linguistics at the Uni of Sheffield and have always been interested in word play and sharing a love of the language with other people. I currently teach at ELI (English Language Institute) in Seville.

Calmer seas

The title of this week’s post is inspired by Zhenya Polosatova. I’ve just read her post comparing the current situation to being in a boat – you can’t decide how the sea behaves, or what the weather conditions are, but you can decide what’s happening in the boat. I feel like this is the first week that’s been anything approaching a standard 5-day work week since the middle of March when all this started. The seas are definitely calmer now. About 90% of what I did was what I’d normally be doing at this time in the year: teaching, helping teachers, admin work for this point in the year, and some forward planning for next year. I feel like most of us have now reached the acceptance stage of the change curve, and some are moving to the problem solving stage.

Away from work, I’ve been going back to some of my favourite books in the past few weeks. I read Winnie the Pooh again after a gap of at least 20 years. I’d forgotten how full of wisdom it is. Here’s my favourite, a reminder not to worry about things you can’t do anything about:

My Zoom lessons

Testing times

Our first elementary teen lesson this week was a test lesson as we’ve reached the end of the unit. Revision was creating sentences from pictures using all the different forms we’ve studied, and a few minutes playing collaborative Quizlet Live with a bumper set of vocabulary (I described how to play this on Zoom here). The test was done through Google Docs, as described in the ‘Testing’ section of last week’s post. These were some of the problems I had and how we resolved them:

• Before they started, I shared my screen and demonstrated how to fill in the test.
• One student couldn’t copy and paste the link, then was pasting it in the search bar, not the address bar (she’s 11). The other students explained to her in Polish, and I managed to get her to share her screen to check she was pasting it in the right place.
• Another student couldn’t open the link at all. I sent her a version of the link I’d shortened using bit.ly so she could type it out more easily. (Top tip: you can edit the link so it’s words instead of a random string of letters and numbers. Don’t use capital letters as the links are case sensitive.)
• The same student then couldn’t edit the document. She hand-wrote the answers in her notebook. I saw her notebook and know she did this, but am waiting for her to email them to me!
• Speaking to students to solve problems disturbs the others. For the second class, I created three breakout rooms. You can rename rooms, so I called them ‘Doing test’, ‘Problems’ and ‘Finished test’. Once all students had their tests open, I moved everybody from the main room into ‘Doing test’. You can move students from one room to another as needed during the test by clicking ‘reassign’ next to their names. This is also a good way to keep fast finishers engaged.

• I had all of the tests open in separate tabs so could see that everyone was working, and roughly how far through they were. This is a low stakes unit test, so I’d asked them to put their books and phones on the other side of the room, but wasn’t too worried if they cheated – at least they’d learn something that way (I know none of mine did though – the test was well within everyone’s capabilities!)

With the first group, dealing with the test problems meant it took almost the whole lesson. With the second group, they had a few minutes at the end. When asked what they wanted to do, they said play Quizlet. Half of them played Match, posting their fastest time in the chat box, and the other half played individual Quizlet Live. This worked really well for 10 minutes, and I know they were all actively engaged, though I wouldn’t do it for much longer than that in a lesson as both of those are receptive, and there’s no productive practice there. It was a nice reward for getting through a whole unit of the book while being taught online 🙂

Pacing makes all the difference

We started a new unit in the second lesson, Entertainment. The first set of vocabulary is TV programmes. I thought that since the students enjoy Netflix, this would be very motivating for them. This was true, but it was too much so in the first group! It felt like chaos at certain points, when they all shouted over each other debating which shows are good and bad entirely in Polish. This was entirely my fault: I’d let test feedback drag on for too long in the first part of the lesson (20 minutes instead of the 10 I managed in the second lesson), and they’d lost interest, which meant that it was hard to get their focus back, and chaos ruled for most of the rest of the lesson. One student out and out told me he was bored!

As part of the test feedback, I experimented with annotation tools for the first time, having seen a teacher use them successfully during a drop in observation on Tuesday (thanks Ash!). I only realised I could do this once I’d already lost the first group, so it wasn’t very efficient as I tried to work things out on the spot. With the second group it worked like a dream, and I could hear them asking in Polish ‘What’s teacher doing to the screen? How’s she doing that?’ 🙂 I’ll definitely use annotation tools again, but plan more carefully how and when.

To introduce 12 items of vocab, we broke it down into 4 groups of 3, with the following sequence:

• Look at four pictures on the slide. What kind of shows can you see? Call out.
• Reinforce any they already know. e.g. Yes, well done! 4 is a reality show.
• Fill the gaps by introducing the other words, combined with the drilling below. If they were confused, elicit Polish examples of each type of programme.
• Drill the words a few times. Go backwards and forwards to keep reminding them, in as fun/pacy a way as possible. e.g. word 1, 1, 1, word 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, word 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1 2, 3 2, 1 3, word 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2 3, 4 3, 4 2, etc.
• They copy the four words into their notebooks, along with an example of that kind of show (in Polish if necessary).
• Repeat the cycle for 5-8. When drilling flick back to the 1-4 slide sometimes and re-elicit some of the words. Then repeat for 9-12, going back to 1-4 and 5-8 sometimes.

This kind of sequence works well in a face-to-face classroom, and I think it was passable in Zoom, but I feel like there are probably other more efficient ways to introduce these words. Let me know if you have one!

I held up a mini whiteboard and demonstrated step-by-step the creation of a TV guide, inspired by another drop-in observation (thanks Jodie!). The students made their own in their notebooks as we went along, ending up with something like this:

They then copied two questions into their notebooks: ‘What’s your TV channel?’ ‘What’s on at 6?’ This enabled them to go into breakout rooms and get a fuller TV guide. I realised afterwards that I should have added ‘What’s that?’ to give them a clear question for the genre. Both groups were engaged with this task, and there were some very creative TV programmes.

With the second group, there was time to drill this conversation and for them to practise it in breakout rooms:

This is their first encounter with the grammar we’re going to (!) study next week. Thanks to Jude G for suggesting the use of pictures and colour-coding to make the turn-taking clearer and to brighten up the slide.

Polish

In our Polish lesson we had a similar short dialogue between a victim, a police officer, and a thief. As well as using pictures and colour-coding, I also held different toys up to the camera who was speaking as I introduced then drilled the conversation. We all agreed that this made it much clearer which student (there were only 3!) should be speaking at each point.

Bydgoszcz bear (the victim), an IH money box (the police) and the penguin from the Wrong Trousers (the thief)

Mini reflection

If nothing else, teaching on Zoom has finally got me into the habit of providing very clear functional language and making sure students write it down, something I’ve only ever done sporadically before.

However, yet again there was no movement in any of my lessons (apart from at break time!). I’m finding it challenging to incorporate movement seamlessly with these groups, and the activities I’ve used previously involving movement meant me speaking a lot, and the students not really producing much (an 80-20 ratio according to the observer who saw me run it). Something to think about more for next week…

Management

The only major thing that came up this week was figuring out a way to test the youngest students’ progress (beginner/elementary 7/8 year olds). We realised that if you display the questions one at a time on slides, the students can write the answers in the chat box and you can then download the chat to mark later. For students with minimal literacy, they can be given two options and just type 1 or 2. To push them a little, you might have a choice of words for an item, or you show them the vocab and they type the word. (Thanks Char!)

Of course, this is also an excellent time to re-consider the place of testing in our classrooms, and decide how necessary it actually is. This ‘long read’ from the Guardian is worth it to see what one family have learnt from two months of home schooling in Italy, and how it’s changed some of their attitudes to education.

Useful links

Lots of teachers are sharing their reflections on the current teaching situation. Here are a few I know about:

• Rose Bard in Brazil, teaching small groups in Brazil
• Hana Ticha, teaching secondary in the Czech Republic
• Emma Johnston, teaching private language school students in Chile
• Rachel Tsateri, teaching private language school students in Spain
• Naomi Epstein, teaching deaf and hard of hearing students in Israel

I’ve linked to one post per blog, but it’s worth exploring: there are lots of useful things on all of their blogs. It’s interesting to hear how different people are adapting to the situation, and what they’re learning in the process.

If you prefer to listen rather than read (well done for getting this far down my post!), TEFLology created a podcast episode with the reflections of Anna Loseva (in Vietnam), Rob Playfair (in the UK) and Mustafa Nazari (in Iran). TEFL Commute have started a new series of short podcasts called Who’s Zooming who?

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 (this post)
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching

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

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

My IATEFL history

Today was supposed to be the first day of IATEFL Manchester 2020, but what with one thing and another during The Great Pause, plans have changed, and instead it’s the first day of the IATEFL Global Get-Together. Inspired by Katherine Martinkevich and a huge bout of nostalgia, here is a self-indulgent post of some of my favourite photos from the IATEFL conferences I’ve been lucky enough to attend, along with links to my talks from each year. Putting it together led me down a lot of rabbit holes of talks and links I’d forgotten about!

Glasgow 2012

My first conference, which I attended when I was lucky enough to win one of the two IH John Haycraft classroom exploration scholarships, alongside Ana Ines Salvi, who has now become a friend.

Go online: getting your students to use internet resources was my first IATEFL presentation, and I’m very pleased to see that the tools I spoke about then are almost all still available. Quizlet and Edmodo are particularly useful right now. These two photos were taken at the end of my talk, and summarise the key part of the IATEFL conference and organisation for me: the people.

The PLN after my talk

The Twitterati after my session 🙂 (photo by Cecilia Lemos)

Liverpool 2013

One of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had, with these wonderful people:

I presented about the Personal Study Programme at IH Newcastle, where I was working at the time.

Harrogate 2014

This photo is in my office:

It was my first IATEFL birthday, with Ela Wassell getting lots of people to sign a card for me.

The day ended with a birthday meal at Wagamamas, with a waiter holding a lighter over a plate of plain rice and chicken for me to blow out while my friends sang happy birthday. This was the second week of my crazy diet – without my IATEFL friends, I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to go to restaurants and push them to cater for me.

My presentation was Stepping into the real world: transitioning listening.

I was also very excited to take part in the Pecha Kucha night with these fantastic people, talking about 19 things I’ve learnt about as an EFL teacher. < You can still watch the PKs in that post.

Manchester 2015

A great quiz night team:

Ela’s surprise baby shower:

This was the first year I attended a Materials Writing Special Interest Group pre-conference event, probably the single most useful day I’ve ever spent at IATEFL. It was called The Material Writer’s Toolkit.

My talk was called Write more! Making the most of student journals.

I shared lots of other conference photos in this summary.

Birmingham 2016

This was the first year that I attended as part of the IATEFL Membership Committee (now the Membership and Marketing Committee), and the first year I mentored another presenter. This was the year the IATEFL blog was born, which I curated until September 2018, and through which I met a lot of wonderful people and enjoyed hearing their stories. (The blog now lives here and is called Views.) It was great to feel like I could give something back to this community that has given me so much.

I was excited to see my name in print for the first time:

My talk was Taking back time: how to do everything you want to do.

Here’s my summary, with lots of my people photos.

Glasgow 2017

I took part in the Pecha Kucha debate on whether teachers should be paid more than bankers. There’s a recording in my summary blogpost. I didn’t present as my talk wasn’t accepted (completely justified – my idea was very wishy-washy!)

Apparently this was the year of no photos – I was clearly too busy having fun, including another IATEFL birthday, this time on the day of the MAWSIG PCE 🙂

Brighton 2018

By this stage, IATEFL is about meeting up with old friends.

James (who appears in both of those photos) showed a group of us around the stunning Brighton Pavilion, seen in the background below beyond other friends.

I presented my first How To session, jointly with Mike Harrison. We told people How to use social media at IATEFL and beyond. Mike also produced a fantastic Sketchnote version of my talk, in which I introduced ELT Playbook 1 for the first time:

Introducing the #eltplaybook number one by @sandymillin #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/vuxuzTWdUJ

— Mike (@harrisonmike) April 10, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My conference summary is here.

Liverpool 2019

The inaugural TEFL Commute Games Night took place in Liverpool, immortalised in this podcast episode:

It was the third time I had an IATEFL birthday, my favourite kind of birthday 🙂

I How To-ed again in Liverpool, this time on How to present at an international conference. This morning was supposed to be a reprise of this talk for Manchester. My main talk was called Examining the impact of a low-level of teacher proficiency on student learning, in which I described my experienced of teaching Polish with a B1 level in the language.

I haven’t got round to writing up my tweets into posts from Liverpool yet – it’s a good job I’ve got another year to do it 😉 though hopefully it won’t take that long!

2020 online get-together

This year life is all a bit different. Instead of another MAWSIG PCE yesterday, and day one of the conference today, it’s day one of a two-day online get together. It’s open to anyone, and videos will be available to members afterwards. So far I’ve attended two fascinating sessions by David Crystal on language change and Tammy Gregersen on teacher wellbeing. The full programme is here. I’ll be speaking as part of a panel on online learning at the end of day 2. See you there!

The world is changing

The title of this week’s post is inspired by this cartoon from Michael Leunig which appeared on my facebook stream this week:

Thanks to Lesley Cioccarelli for bringing it to my attention.

The personal stuff

This week has been my first full week of being at home – I left the flat on Saturday morning to do lots of food shopping, then the next time was Friday morning to treat myself to a 30-minute walk for my birthday (which was far more stressful than I expected as I was constantly looking to see what everyone else was doing).

I live by myself, so the thing I was most worried about when I knew that we might end up being at home was feeling isolated, but actually I think I feel more connected than ever. Yes, I don’t have actual humans in front of me, but I’ve had more social conversations with friends in the last few days than I have for a very long time, and my birthday was far more fun than I expected. It included a virtual birthday party (thanks Laura!) and a group of teachers playing online games from Jackbox (thanks Connor!).

It’s been a week of learning to adjust to the new normal, and of maintaining a sense of perspective: my birthday was the day the world hit the milestone of 1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide. Just over 20% of those people have recovered, but over 50,000 have died.

If you’re not already, please, please, please STAY AT HOME. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, the weather is getting nicer in the northern hemisphere as spring arrives. Walks are good for your mental health, but how far do you need to go? Can you stay close to home? Have you got a garden you can go out in instead or a balcony you can use? By staying at home, you are protecting other people, and giving health services and scientists valuable time to respond. You’re also reducing the likelihood that COVID-19 will enter your home in the first place. Please also think before you buy anything that needs to be delivered – do you really need it? Is it worth putting that delivery person at risk?

THANK YOU to those who are continuing to do essential jobs, like working in health services, making deliveries of food and medicine, and caring for vulnerable members of the community, and to every single one of you who is staying at home.

Management

On Tuesday and Wednesday I worked my way through all of the teachers, having a 10-15-minute chat with each to find out how everything’s going. Somebody from the IH DoS group suggested this – I can’t remember who, but thank you very much! This covered each teachers’ groups, their 121s, whether the tech was working, their general mental health, and any other problems or questions. I’m really glad I did this, and hope to repeat this periodically while we’re still on this pattern. I learnt that attendance is generally very high, barring a handful of students with tech problems (many of which were resolved between the first lesson and second), some exam students are handing in more work than ever, some teen groups are speaking more English than ever (they can feel the need for it now!), teachers are experimenting with functions on Zoom, and we’re still a strong community.

My Zoom lessons

This week we revised comparatives and added in superlatives in my elementary teen lessons.

At the start of Zoom lessons, I prefer to have something that students can get on with using the chat box for the first few minutes while we wait for everyone to join the lesson and deal with any technical problems. We repeated the comparatives challenge from last lesson the first time round, then in the second lesson one student called out an adjective, and everyone had to race to write the comparative and superlative forms. This helped me to see what aspects of the form students remembered and what they needed to revise.

Exploiting the chat box part 1: functional language

In the first lesson, the context for introducing superlatives was a multiple-choice quiz about geography. For example: Which is the longest river in the world? In order for students to do this in breakout rooms, they need some functional language. Here’s how I staged this:

• Get them to open their books to the quiz page and show me.
• Lay the book face down (I showed them this on my camera).
• Tell them: “You’ll work together to do the quiz. You need some English to help you. Look at the chat box.”
• Paste the first phrase with one word blanked out (I had them all prepared in another document). Elicit the missing word – a student comes on the microphone to say it.
• If nobody can guess, give them the first letter.
• Gradually add letters until somebody knows it.
• Ask all students to copy the phrase into their notebooks.
• Repeat for the other three phrases.
• Paste all four phrases into the chat and ask students to check they have them all.

We had four phrases in total, and the chat looked like this by the time we’d finished:

Exploiting the chat box part 2: post-activity feedback

As students returned to the main room after they’d completed the quiz in breakout rooms, they wrote all of their answers in the chat, but nobody pressed enter until I counted down 3-2-1. That way I could see everybody’s answers at the same time, and there was no risk of copying from other people. It’s also a good way of double-checking that everyone participated (though I knew they had from popping into the breakout rooms). We then checked the answers as a group, with me telling them the answer and them debating if they disagreed. Feedback took 5 minutes, but they were definitely engaged throughout. Here’s what our chat looked like at the end of this stage:

Both of these strategies worked really well and I’ll definitely use them again.

I didn’t think this one through properly…

In contrast, the final activity of the lesson absolutely didn’t work the way I wanted it to. The vision:

• A student calls out an adjective.
• Everybody runs to find something ‘superlative’ matching that adjective, e.g. the oldest, biggest…
• We choose which is the ‘superlative-est’ in the class.
• Students write a sentence in the chat box using the superlative.

The reality:

• A student chose ‘long’.
• Everybody went to find the longest thing they could. This took about 3-4 minutes.
• I tried desperately to get students to produce a superlative sentence in the chatbox.
• Instead, they told me the measurements of the thing they’d got, and in some cases wrote it in the chatbox (the funniest was the pug who accompanies most lessons, who I now know is 26cm long thanks to T and his ruler!)
• I realised that any sentence they produced needed the word ‘thing’ as we hadn’t specified a noun and few people knew the names of the things they’d grabbed.
• I tried not to laugh at the inappropriateness of the sentence I was trying to elicit: ‘XYZ has the longest thing’. Oops!

The whole process took the final 7 minutes of the lesson – thankfully I’d already set their homework, so I could just let them go once we were done.

If anyone has an idea for how to exploit students’ environments to produce superlative sentences at elementary level, please comment!

Raising interest

The second lesson was based around a cartoon story in the coursebook about the characters going camping. I had the first panel on a PowerPoint slide, and used a simplified see – think – wonder thinking routine to raise interest. Students wrote sentences starting ‘I see…’ in the chat box for 90 seconds, then ‘I think it’s / he’s / she’s…’ for the next 90 seconds. I tried to elicit potential problems when you go camping, including some of the language they’d shared in the chat box – the first group didn’t get it, but the second group did (they’re a little older). We then watched the story video to check their predictions. I’m still feeling out how much I can push this level – my teen experience is limited, and I’ve only had these groups since late February.

Performing a story

After checking comprehension of the cartoon story, I wanted to experiment with students performing it. I’ve had mixed success with this kind of activity in the physical classroom and haven’t tried it with these groups before, but it seemed to work quite nicely in the end, with students generally engaged, and a few of them getting really into it.

• (Group 1 only) Microphones off: I read the story line by line, students shadowed my reading.
• (Group 2 only) Microphones off: I drilled some of the words group 1 had struggled to pronounce.
• Breakout rooms: in pairs, students decided who’d play each character. They read out the story a few times. When I dropped in, I corrected pron and encouraged them to add emotion.
• Main room: pairs performed one panel each, with everybody performing the punchline of the story together.

Zoom learning, tips and activities

• Various posts/articles have been shared about privacy/security problems with Zoom this week. Zoom are working hard to combat these issues as quickly as they can. We’re already using waiting rooms on all of our classrooms, so teachers have to approve anyone who joins. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to read any of the links, but thanks to Phil Longwell for linking to this video produced on April 3rd:

 

• When students are having connectivity problems, try communicating with them using the ‘rename’ function, as they may not be able to hear you or use the chatbox. I haven’t tried this year, but it might work.
• There’s a lag of 5-10 seconds between when you share a screen and when the students can see it.
• Some students appear twice in the room, with a separate video/audio feed. We suspect this happens if they’re on mobile devices and use the ‘dial in’ function for audio, though we’re not sure. This is a function you can disable in the settings. (Thanks Ruth!)
• If students are working in groups on different Google Docs simultaneously, you can have them all arranged on your screen at the same time. You can then highlight anything that’s a problem for them to sort out. (Thanks Ruth!)
• If you want to screen share and also see all of your students at the same time, arrange your screen(s) so that the software/document to share only takes up half of the screen. Share only that document, not the whole screen. Then use the other half of the screen for their videos: click on the gallery view icon, and resize the box until all of their videos are there. This is particularly useful if teaching young learners. (Will hopefully have a screenshot of this next week)
• After setting up breakout rooms, go to each briefly to check everyone is on task. Then stay in the last one for a little longer to do some correction/upgrading. Vary which room is last each time. If time, sit in one or two other rooms for a longer period too. This ensures students still get hot correction/upgrading of their spoken language, without it being in front of the whole class.
• Breakout rooms have various options, including:
  • Move all participants automatically – this means students don’t have to click on anything.
  • Close automatically after X minutes – good for timed activities.
  • Countdown timer after closing – I’ve found 30 seconds allows students to finish what they’re saying and come back. 60 seconds is too long if everyone comes back except one student!

• Post-activity feedback ideas:
  • Teacher reads out answers (good if only one or two are there)
  • Student reads out answers
  • Nomination chain
  • Chat box simultaneous typing (see above)
  • Chat box – fast finisher types
  • Teacher types in chat
  • Display on slide/doc and screen share
  • Display with one or two mistakes for students to find
  • Display on course book software (if you have it) and screen share
  • Any other ideas? Please comment in the chat
• ‘What’s missing?’ works really well and can be run in a range of ways (thanks Jodie!) For example, a series of pictures on a PowerPoint slide with a white box on one of them. Screen share the slide on edit mode, students say/write what’s missing. Stop screen sharing, move the box, share, repeat. Alternatively, students go to breakout rooms. They show the pictures in their books/on homemade flashcards, but cover one up. Their partner says what’s missing.

Questions I/we have

All ideas gratefully accepted – please add comments!

• How can you quickly ensure students have successfully completed activities in their course books/notebooks during the lesson, especially if their video isn’t working or the image is poor? (I’m mostly taking it on trust at the moment, but maybe you have other ideas)
• Providing feedback on spoken language is challenging to do evenly across the group (and I only have 8-11 students!) I feel like the balance has shifted from the physical classroom. There I can give hot feedback on speaking to everyone throughout the lesson, and spend a little more time with individuals on writing while ‘ignoring’ others at that moment (obviously not ignoring them, but that’s the best description I can come up with!) Online, they get lots of hot feedback on writing in the chat box, but when speaking in pairs/groups I have to ‘ignore’ the others as I can only be in one breakout room at a time. It’s great that everyone is getting so much writing practice and feedback, but we don’t want to neglect their speaking. Apart from ‘sitting’ in a breakout room as mentioned in the tips above, any other ideas for what we could do to increase feedback on speaking?

Useful links

Laura Patsko did a webinar called Moving your instruction online – fast!

Russell Stannard continues to add to his Zoom playlist, including ideas for keeping lessons student-centred.

A timely reminder from Kirsty D. Major, just as I was about to post this: Walk a mile in their shoes – or stay a day in their self-isolation house.

And, as every week, this one: Phil Longwell’s Covid-19 Mental Health and Wellbeing post.

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 (this post)
• 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

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

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

The transition to working from home

The week started with a discussion with the school Director in which we decided to switch to working from home. Our teachers had been working from school for the first week of online teaching, and Poland is not (yet) on full lockdown, but it’s safer for all of our teachers to make that shift. Tuesday was about getting everybody set up at home, including me.

Management

I don’t think I’ve ever used my phone as much as I did on Thursday – 7 or 8 calls, none of which was shorter than 15 minutes, plus texts, WhatsApp messages, facebook messages, emails, and a Zoom call. It was really hard to know what to focus on! In between all of that, I did manage to update everybody’s timetables and get them sent out, but it took all day. It made me appreciate how much I benefit from being able to just pop to the staffroom or reception to pass on messages or ask questions when we’re at school. Thankfully on Friday things had settled down somewhat. We ran our weekly meeting and workshop via Zoom, looking at examples of online dictionaries and corpora.

I feel like the biggest management challenge for me in the coming weeks will be loneliness and a lack of balance in my interactions, missing informal chats in between bursts of work, as most conversations I have during the working day will inevitably be problem solving. That’s something I’ll need to actively seek out. On the plus side, it was nice to eat lunch in my own kitchen 🙂

Yet again, I’m incredibly grateful to the rest of the management team (Grzegorz, Ruth, Emma) and the office staff (Mariola, Sandra) for all of the work they’ve put into making the transition smooth and keeping lines of communication open. And to the teachers for all of their hard work!

My Zoom lessons

This week, we practised weather phrases and introduced comparatives. I’ve stuck to using the chat box, screen sharing, audio and video this week. That’s enough, I think, as I don’t want to overwhelm myself or the students too much.

I taught my first Polish lesson online too. There were three students and we did parts of the body, making use of teddies to show the parts of the body that are more challenging for the camera to get to, like ‘back’, ‘foot’, and ‘legs’! It was pretty entertaining 🙂 After every few words, the students predicted the spellings in the chat box, so we did more work on sound-spelling relationships, and looked at some plurals in the process too.

I feel like I’ve been able to do a lot more focussed correction than I can in the physical classroom, and my teen students have definitely had a lot more writing practice in the last two weeks.

I started using nomination chains, with each student saying who the next one to speak would be. This is something I generally avoid in the face-to-face classroom – I’d always associated it with feedback stages that go on for too long and in which students lose interest and the pace drops. In Zoom it worked really well for creating prompts for activities that everybody could participate in, as in the two examples below.

Drawing activity on Zoom

To test what weather students knew, they looked at a weather map of Poland and wrote their ideas in the chat box. I then filled in a couple of gaps by referring them to their coursebook and checking problem phrases.

Once I knew they had the basics, they all got a piece of (real) paper. I said a kind of weather and they had to draw it. We then had a nomination chain of what to draw next, and I joined in. After each one, they put their paper to the camera once they were done and I helped anybody who didn’t understand and commented on any similarities, for example “Look, N, we’ve both drawn a sad flower for ‘It’s dry'”. If their camera wasn’t working, they just had to say they’d finished.

I elicited the questions ‘What’s the weather like?’ and ‘What are you doing?’ by drawing a gapped sentence on my paper and getting words from the students. They copied it to their paper and again showed me when they were finished.

Equipped with the question and their pictures, students went into breakout rooms. They showed each other pictures and asked the two questions. If they didn’t have a camera, they asked ‘What are you doing?’ and the other student guess the weather ‘Is it sunny?’

This worked quite nicely for an activity I made up on the spot, but could probably do with a clear communicative purpose if I did it again.

Comparatives challenge

I choose two things, for example ‘summer’ and ‘winter’. The students wrote their ideas for ways to compare them in the chat box. I praised their attempts, especially if they tried to write more complex sentences, and corrected those who needed it, mostly using prompts: ‘W, how do you spell ‘than’?’ ‘T, you need an extra word.’ The students wrote the corrected sentence in the box without prompting. Once everyone had a couple of ideas, a student chose the next two things to compare.

This also worked well, with students being quite creative with their ideas. It was a good game to focus on the form of the comparative structure, but didn’t really have a clear communicative purpose again. Definitely something I need to focus on in next week’s lessons.

Zoom learning and tips

In breakout rooms, students can share their screen with each other. (Thanks Jude!)

Last week, Ash mentioned putting all of the Google Docs your students may need into a single folder and sending them one link. This week, he’s updated that to suggest numbering them in order to help you and the students work out what’s next. It seems like such a simple thing, but hadn’t occurred to me!

Useful links

If there’s one thing we’re not short of right now, it’s links to further development (sorry for adding to them!) Anyway, here are a few you may want to explore.

Activities

• Teresa Bestwick has a series of visualisations you can use with students – this works well as mindfulness and a break from the screen for them: the park, going to school, going shopping, the beach
• James Egerton is posting a series of relevant lesson plans, including one on coronavirus myth busting
• Jennie Wright has a coronavirus find someone who activity, particularly good for adults and business classes
• Lots of activity ideas from Rachel Tsateri
• Jim has advice on how to make sure you’re developing all four skills, including activities for each, and also has a whole ton of other links to explore.

Tips and advice

• Susan Lee Scott works in Vietnam, where she’s now been teaching online for 8 weeks. Here’s her advice.
• Russell Stannard has a full set of Teacher Training Online videos connected to using Zoom, including a 12-minute guide to using breakout rooms.
• Julie Moore has tips on ergonomics when using a laptop to work from home, helping you to reduce the aches and pains which I know I’m already feeling.
• I shared Phil Longwell’s Covid-19 Mental Health and Wellbeing post last week, and will continue to share it – so much useful advice here.

To finish off, here’s an infographic from Angelos Bollas about how to plan and run activities in breakout rooms:

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 (this post)
• 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

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

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom

Our school, IH Bydgoszcz, has successfully completed a week of teaching teen and adult groups using Zoom. We’ve made plans (largely facilitated by Ruth and Char – thank you!) to move our young learner classes online, with a staggered start – half from Monday 23rd, the rest from Monday 30th. Our teachers are still able to go into the school building, which has made it easier for us to support them with problems throughout the week, and to continue to share ideas.

This week has truly demonstrated the power of a supportive team, as we all simultaneously became beginners again in our move to online teaching. Ruth and Emma, our ADoSes, have worked tirelessly to support teachers in their planning (often more so than me as I’ve often been coordinating other things). Grzegorz, our Director, and Mariola and Sandra, our office staff, have helped it all to come off smoothly. But of course, without the teachers’ willingness to try this, we couldn’t do anything – thank you, thank you, thank you! We’ve had generally good feedback from our students so far, and attendance has been pretty high. This is testament to everyone’s planning and hard work to make it all happen.

Reflections on my Zoom lessons

I’ve now taught three lessons on Zoom (you probably have more experience than me!), two with one group, and one with another. They were all with high beginner/low elementary (A2.1) teens, aged 11-13.

I really enjoyed them 🙂 It’s been a fantastic chance to get to know my students better. We’ve had visits from a rabbit, a dog, a cat, and a sister. 😉 One student spontaneously played her piano and violin during the break – I had no idea she was musical. We’ve also had a toy sword, spontaneous dancing, putting on make-up, and rather more eating than I would have liked!

Lesson 1 was an introduction to Zoom. We then played a guessing game. Students went to their kitchens for 3 items of food or drink (our most recent topic in class), which they had to keep secret. In breakout rooms they asked ‘Have you got a…?’ ‘Have you got any…?’ to guess what they others had. If they were right, the student had to show it on the camera. When they came back to the main room, they typed what they’d found out in the chat box. For example: ‘Sandy has got some oranges.’ ‘Sandy hasn’t got any cheese.’ This activity went down really well, lasted for about 15-20 minutes, and was a great opportunity to use their homes.

Most of the students adapted to Zoom pretty quickly, though two students still struggled to find functions at the end of lesson 2, and one student missed the Zoom tutorial in the first lesson. Another had huge connection problems in the first lesson, but this was much better in the second.

Lesson 2 was a continuation of our book (Project 2 from OUP), planned mostly by Jude (thanks!) After revision and a homework check, I screen shared a Quizlet set to introduce country vocab, with students calling out the words on their microphones, or writing them in the chat box. We stopped every few words for them to call out what they could remember. They matched the words in their books. To prepare for a short listening, I asked them to type what these measurements could be: 1000m, 6km, 10,000m etc e.g. a river, a bridge, a road. We listened to the audio – they filled in the correct number. We checked them one at a time using the chat box. I then introduced them to ‘high’, ‘wide’, ‘long’ and ‘deep’ from the listening by using gestures and asking them to draw different arrows next to the words in their books, e.g. an up arrow for ‘high’, a down arrow for ‘deep’. I set up the homework (the reading from the next page of their book) and did the first example with them. For the last couple of minutes they typed all of the new words from the lesson in the chat box.

If I taught the lesson again, I’d skip me introducing the vocab through Quizlet. Instead, I’d send them the code quizlet.com/491240605 and get them to play Quizlet match and learn modes – they’re used to doing this from classroom lessons. I’d then do a quiz, showing them three or four pictures at the same time and getting them to write all of the words. The listening and adjectives were fine, but there wasn’t much time left by this stage. I’d like to have something creative in every lesson, and I assumed we planned this but 5 days later can’t remember what it was! There certainly wasn’t time for it in the lesson.

Overall, I think my students have done more writing this week than in the entire proceeding month, and they’ve spoken to students in the breakout rooms that they wouldn’t dream of talking to in class, both without any complaints. Classroom management has been fine, because I can switch off microphones and videos if necessary – often the threat of this is enough to get students to concentrate again. If students consistently misbehave, you can put them into the waiting room for a minute or two to calm down, or speak to them individually in a breakout room (thanks for that idea Jude).

Let’s see how long the novelty of online learning lasts!

Zoom troubleshooting

• Do a sound/video check at the start of each lesson. Get students to switch on their sound and video to make sure it’s working. If they’re having problems, put them in the waiting room (three dots in the top right corner of their video = move to waiting room) and let them come back in again. They may need to restart their computers/apps.
• When one student is having lots of technical problems, give the others something to do while you help them out. You could put them in breakout rooms, with the ‘tech problem’ student in a room by themselves for you to help. Or give others something to do in their books. Make it clear to the other students that you’re helping the person with technical problems and how long this might take. If the technical problems are coming and going, make sure that student is in a 3, not a pair, when put into breakout rooms.
• It’s better to have your computer plugged in or not at all through the lesson – it might not cope with the transition between two different battery settings. (Thanks Connor!)
• If you’re having problems with the internet connection, switch off the video. If you’re at home, ask other people not to use internet-heavy apps at the same time as the lesson, like streaming.
• If students are using Zoom on their phones, they need to be looking at the video (not the chat/participants list/screen share) when you put them into breakout rooms. That’s where the message pops up to invite them to the room. Alternatively, tick the option that says ‘Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically‘ and it doesn’t matter what they’re looking at!
• If you’re kicked out of the meeting, one of the students will become the teacher with host privileges. Log back in, and (I think!) you’ll automatically become the host again.

Zoom tips

• With small groups, prepare a piece of scrap paper with all of your students’ names before the lesson. Write C for computer/M for mobile/T for tablet – check what device they’re on as they come in. Don’t assume it’s the same as the previous lesson. That way, if they can’t find something, you know what instructions to give them to find it (the menus are different on different devices). I also used my list for noting which groups I’d put students in, tech problems they had, and how many K points (classroom management points) the group had got, plus reminders to myself about problems with Zoom/things to consider next time.
• Recurring meetings: extend the date on your meetings for ages. If you let the last date pass, you’ll have to resend new links later. (Thanks Ruth!)
• When you’re on mute, hold down space bar and speak – students will hear you only while the spacebar is depressed. (Thanks Emma!)
• Make sure you remind students how to find functions – don’t just assume they remember.
• In some browsers (Android phone?), the participant menu is a speech bubble with three dots in it. This is almost the same as the ‘more’ button, so students may be a little confused. (Thanks Ruth and Jude!)
• Students can use the chat while in breakout rooms, but only they can see it. Nobody from another breakout room or the main room can see it. If you join the breakout room, you can’t see what’s come before, only what’s added after you join. A student without a working microphone can therefore still participate in the activity. (Thanks Connor!)
• You can make the chatbox text bigger/smaller when you’re on a computer (not sure about a phone). Click into the chatbox. Press CTRL and + to make it bigger (CMD + for Mac), CTRL and – to make it smaller (CMD – for Mac), and CTRL and 0 to make it the default size (CMD 0 for Mac).

Google Docs tips

• If you’re coupling Zoom with Google Docs, make the files directly on Google, rather than on Word then uploading them. If you have pre-existing Word documents to upload, make sure you save it as Google Docs if you want students to edit them. It’s not strictly necessary, but it makes things a little smoother.
• If you’re using lots of Google files during a lesson, put them all into a single folder and send students the link to this before/at the start of the lesson. Then tell them which file you want them to open at the right point in the lesson. You can change from can view to can edit during the lesson if necessary. (Thanks Ash!)
• Create designated sections of the document for students to write in. For example, we used red team/blue team/green team/purple team in the lesson I described above. (Thanks Jude!) Once students have accessed the document, ask them to write their name next to their team colour – this helps you to check instructions. (Thanks Connor!)

Lesson planning tips

• Plan for a 60-minute lesson, not a 90-minute face-to-face one – everything takes longer! However, if you often spend a lot of time dealing with classroom management, you may find that your lessons are faster thanks to mute/stop video buttons. 😉
• Keep the lessons simple. If you’re going to try something new, stick to a maximum of one new tech tool per lesson to avoid overwhelm.
• Have a couple of zero-prep revision games to play at the end or discussion questions where they can go into breakout rooms, e.g. Pictionary, define the word and guess it (from anywhere in the book).
• Put students into breakout rooms for the amount of time that you have groups. For example, if you have 3 breakout rooms, put them in there for a minimum of three minutes. If you have 5 breakout rooms, 5 minutes. 10 rooms = 10 minutes. That gives you time to check them all. It’s probably not really worth putting them in there for less than 3 minutes though as it’s a lot of faff and time, and sometimes the tech breaks!
• Include breaks in the lesson. We normally have one 10-minute break in our 90-minute face-to-face lessons, but with my students I changed this to two 5-minute breaks. Even if you don’t normally have a break, it’s good to include stretching time and eye breaks to reduce muscle pain and eye strain. If you’re having problems with your neck or back because you don’t have an ideal position/posture, consider raising your computer. For example, put a couple of reams of paper under a laptop, or even put a chair on the desk and stand up during the lesson.
• Include time when students don’t need to interact. For example, a drawing activity. They could switch off their video/audio while they’re doing this, then switch it on to signal that they’ve finished. You can switch off yours too.
• You can ask students to do grammar controlled practice at home because they have grammar references, then use the lesson for problem solving, rather than trying to present the grammar from scratch.
• For vocabulary, supplement with Quizlet sets – students can hear the pronunciation and practise the spelling.
• Reading can be done for homework. You can check reading in class, or students can email you the answers to use it as an assessment. You can also do listening this way by emailing the audio to students (though be aware of copyright rules).
• At the end of the lesson, consider sending an email summarising the content of the lesson, and including the homework, especially for teens e.g. Today we learnt some Zoom vocabulary from this Quizlet set quizlet.com/xxxxx. We practised how to use Zoom. The homework is WB p39 Ex 6. See you on Wednesday!

Activity ideas

Here are some activities that (might?) work via Zoom, some of which we’ve tried, some of which we haven’t. If you want more, take a look at Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom.

• At the start of the lesson, display a puzzle, a Where’s Wally image, or an Every Picture Tells a Story ELTpic on the screen. Students write what they can see in the chat box – higher levels could imagine what’s happening, or what people are saying (reported speech revision?) This gives time for you to help people with connection problems. (Adapted from Lisa Wilson’s idea to display a wordsearch.)
• Show an album from ELTpics that is connected to your lesson topic. Students brainstorm what they can see in the chatbox. Give them a sentence frame if you don’t want them to just write single words, e.g. There’s a… / There aren’t any…
• To get students (of all ages!) moving, play run and touch. (Thanks Rosie!) e.g. run and touch something blue, green, red, new, old, wooden, metal, complicated, funny…
• Ask students to make things out of the objects around them. For example, make a person, a house, etc. Other students have to guess what they’ve made. If planned with the responsible adult in advance, this could work particularly well with children – they could have a plate of e.g. pasta to make pictures out of (not rice – it’ll get stuck in the computer!)
• With smaller groups, experiment with all of the students having their microphones on simultaneously at certain points in the lesson. For example, this worked really well with the homework check and drilling in my lessons. Students can also drill without their microphones on – they can practise repeating, then come on the microphone when they’re more confident.
• Use Jazz Chants for drilling. Your students can make them too. They can say them with the microphone on or off.
• Total cloze: before the lesson, write a sentence on a Word document. Set the text to white, but the underlining to black. Share the screen. Students guess what words are missing. If they guess correctly, you change the text colour to black for that word. (If you have a less fiddly way of doing this, please tell me!)
• Organise for remote guests to visit the lesson. Students can prepare to interview them, or to listen to a short speech/presentation from the guest. There are lots of people looking for things to do right now!
• Ask if you can observe other teachers remotely by joining their class as a student – this is much easier now. Make sure that schools and students are OK with you doing this if you’re the observed teacher before you invite anyone else in. (Please don’t ask me for the moment – I’m not quite ready!)
• Fast finisher idea: students can build up a single picture using all of the vocab introduced during the lesson. For a few minutes at the end of the lesson, or as a warmer at the start of the next, they hold up their picture to the camera and describe what’s in the picture. You may need to demo this is a whole-class activity in a previous lesson.
• Get students to write emails to their future selves using FutureMe. These are incredible times we’re living in right now, and it could really help them to consider that this is not how life will always be. (I hope!) 

Useful links

Here are a handful of the many, many resources that have been shared in the past couple of weeks. Feel free to add others in the comments:

• Planning online lessons for groups of primary young learners – a blogpost by Elisabeth Jackson
• Tips for moving your preschool/primary classes online – a blogpost by Alice Glass
• Teaching online – week one – a blogpost by Rachel Tsateri listing various tools for teaching online, including an alternative to Zoom (LearnCube)
• 2 short webinars on using your coursebook online and using breakout rooms by Lindsay Clandfield and Carol Rainbow, broadcast by Teaching English British Council and organised in collaboration with The Consultants-E
• Teaching Online – a webinar from the SLB Coop in Barcelona on using Zoom, Flipgrid and Microsoft Teams
• Pairing Google Docs with Breakout Rooms for better feedback – a blogpost by Sean Hutchman
• How to create fillable PDF forms with PDFescape – a YouTube video by Language Teaching ES, useful for making worksheets students can complete without printing
• Covid-19 mental health and wellbeing – a blogpost by Phil Longwell on how you can maintain your mental health and look after your wellbeing right now (these ideas are useful at any time though!)
• Lots more links at the end of James Taylor’s post, and a full post of tips for teaching online (these are practical things, rather than activities)

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 (this post)
• 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

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

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

IH AMT conference 2020

This year’s IH Academic Managers and Trainers (AMT) conference happened in Greenwich from 9th-11th January 2020. As always, I enjoyed the conference and learnt a lot, which I’m looking forward to putting into practice as much as possible.

You can read about previous AMT conferences I’ve attended in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019 (I’ve attended them all since 2014, but forgot to write about some of them!)

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt about at this year’s conference. (As always, any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own, not those of the speakers – please correct me if needed!)

Managing performance in ELT

Maureen McGarvey asked us to draw the organisational structure and consider the organisational culture of our schools. She emphasised that without knowing the structure and culture of our school and how teachers perceive them, we can’t effectively manage performance at our schools. We need to clearly articulate the culture of our school to teachers, as you bring the culture with you from previous places you’ve worked. This can be one source of frustration for managers, and may lead us to think staff are being pig-headed, when in fact they’re butting up against the culture of the school and their perceptions of it.

She surveyed staff about how they want to be managed, using 5 questions:

• What do you expect/would you like your line manager to do for you in terms of support and development across the year?
• How would you like your line manager to manage your performance across the year?
• What systems does your LTO (language teaching organisation) have in place for managing performance, as far as you’re aware?
• Do you think the systems you identified are adequate? Any amendments or changes you’d suggest?
• How would you like your line manager to deal with performance issues should they arise?

This threw up lots of interesting responses, mostly connected to personal awareness. When we talk about change and CPD as managers, we tend to present it as data. But those who changes or development are being ‘done to’ perceive it through their anxieties and fears. We need to create personal connections with staff and follow up regularly, not just check in once or twice a year. The survey showed up various variants on the idea of “regular, brief, human conversations” and “personal, face-to-face” contact, including a key focus on positives. Performance management isn’t just about managing negative performance and dealing with problems, but also about helping good teachers get better.

IH update

Every year we hear about the exciting things happening across the network. This year I was particularly interested in new IH Online Teacher Training Courses, including a new series of modules for Academic Management. If you do 5 of them, you can get the IHWO Diploma in Academic Management.

Blocked by our expertise

Monica Green summarised a Harvard Business Review article called Don’t be blinded by your own expertise.

She reminded us that an interested beginner draws on every possible resource to learn, but that as we become experts in a particular area, we often stop doing this. We can also become poor listeners as we assume we already know things.

To stop being blinded by our expertise, we need to get a sense of wonder back into what we do: ‘I wonder how this works?’ We should also ask ‘What am I not asking you that I should?’ more often to keep in touch with those who are still beginners in our area, or who haven’t reached the same level of expertise that we have. This is just a taster: there are a lot more ideas in the HBR article, which I definitely recommend reading.

ELT footprint

Christopher Graham told us about the environmental impact of ELT, for example the number of students who study English in the UK every year and are therefore flying in and out of the country. Even EU-based students tend to fly, when they could potentially get the train.

He introduced us to the ELT footprint facebook group and website. There are lots of resources available to help you if you want to start reducing the environmental footprint of your school, or teach students about it. These include a charter for a greener school, advice on good practice for events and conferences and lesson plans you can use with students. They are always looking for people to share how they are greening ELT so do get in touch with them if they have ideas.

Listening skills and initial teacher training

Emma Gowing talked about how we can refocus the training of how to teach listening to make sure new teachers are really teaching listening, not just testing it. She suggested the following ideas:

• Help teachers to write aims that focus on developing rather than practising listening skills.
• Highlight that comprehension tasks are a diagnostic rather than a teaching tool, to help teachers find out what learners are having trouble with.
• Avoid right/wrong answers in listening activities. Instead use activities that promote the negotiation of meaning.
• Get trainee teachers to take notes to identify difficulties.
• Show how to use the audioscript to isolate difficulties and identify whether the issue was meaning or hearing related (i.e. do they know the meaning of the word(s) but couldn’t identify it in the listening?)
• Include a ‘listen again’ stage focussed on difficult parts, helping students to recognise why the listening was hard for them.
• When teaching staging, reduce the importance of preparation stages (lead in/gist) in favour of more in-depth detailed/post-listening activities.
• Use authentic materials, grading the task not the text, wherever possible.

She has summarised her ideas for teachers in this article for the IH Journal.

Fun at work

Lucie Cotterill’s talk was called The Fun Factor – Let’s Play Leadership. She shared ideas that they’ve used at IH Reggio Calabria to get more fun into the school, and shared the research behind why it’s important to have fun at work. It makes us more productive, improves mental wellbeing, and increases staff satisfaction.

My favourite idea was a Christmas gift they gave their staff. They created a Google form for all staff (including admin staff). Respondents had to share the first positive adjective they thought of for each staff member. One adjective was selected and sewn onto a pencil case with the teacher’s name. All of the other adjectives were put on a piece of paper inside the pencil case. Now the teachers have a reminder of how much they are valued by their colleagues, and they can see it all the time.

Better self evaluation

Manana Khvichia described how they’ve reorganised their CELTA to improve self evaluation and help their trainees to quickly become reflective practitioners. Their CELTA now only has one input session a day and much longer feedback sessions. Self evaluation forms are created personally for each teacher, with the trainer writing a series of questions during the observation. Trainees write their own thoughts first, then look at the trainer’s questions and respond to them. They can do this because they’ve seen models of the trainer’s self-evaluation after the demo lesson on the first day, analysed this together, and had a full session on how to reflect. Feedback sessions often turn into mini inputs based on what the trainees need at that point in the course.

This was the most thought-provoking session of the conference for me, and I’ve asked Manana to write about it for this blog, so watch this space!

What I’ve learnt about teaching training this year

My talk, which is the already a post on this blog.

Drop-in observations

Diana England described what they’ve done at IH Torres Vedras to make drop-in observations more effective for their teachers. She says that having regular drop-in observations makes them a positive thing, not just something that happens when there’s a problem. It also shows students that multiple people are involved in their progress, not just their teacher.

During induction week, the teachers discuss terminology related to drop-ins, and decide on their own definitions, for example of ‘rapport’, ‘classroom management’, etc. They complete a questionnaire to show their beliefs related to these areas. The drop-in observer completes the same questionnaire, with a space at the bottom for extra comments. Post-observation feedback involves comparing the responses to both versions of the questionnaire.

The questionnaire is made up of factual statements, such as ‘I can spot early finishers and ensure they are purposefully engaged’ or ‘I know and use all my students’ names’, with the responses ‘Definitely’, ‘Most of the time’, ‘Some of the time’, ‘Not enough’, ‘I need more guidance with this’. This system has evolved over time, so that now the teachers create their own questionnaires, rather than using one developed by the school.

This is definitely something I’d like to experiment with at our school.

Improving the agency and confidence of novice teachers

Marie Willoughby talked about a workshop she ran to help novice teachers adapt coursebooks to make them more engaging. It was much more teacher-centred than her workshops used to be. She designed it this way to help teachers build their confidence and realise that they are able to solve problems and ask for help, rather than relying on their own knowledge and worrying when they don’t know something. This topic was selected following interviews with the teachers, as they said they often used coursebooks to help them plan but didn’t know how to make them engaging for students.

The workshop looked like this:

• Brainstorm ‘What is engagement and why is it important?’
• Examine Jason Anderson’s CAP(E) paradigm, as this is how coursebooks generally work.
• Discuss what engagement looks like at each stage of a CAP(E) lesson and how you can evaluate this.
• Teachers created a list of questions based on their own experience up to this point to help them consider engagement at each stage of the lesson. The questions showed up their current needs, and formed the basis of group discussions.
• Session homework was to take a piece of material, choose two parts and evaluate whether they’re engaging, change if needed, then evaluate it afterwards. Afterwards they had to tell a colleague: I did this, it worked. OR I did this, it didn’t.

Marie said that she felt like she hadn’t taught them anything in the session, but that afterwards she got great feedback. It helped the teachers realise that they had the right to change things, and didn’t have to just use them as they were.

She contrasted classic training with agency-driven training. In class training, the outcome is pre-determined by the trainer/tasks, there is a focus on best practice, elicitation and leading questions, and a power differential in dialogue. In agency-driven training, the outcome emerges during and beyond the session, there are no right answers (open-ended tasks), a collaborative effort to explore choices and evaluate (not talking about procedures), and equality in dialogue.

By making this shift, Marie says that she has realised the power of training lies in the process, not the product, of training sessions. Returning back to Monica’s idea of being blinded by our expertise, we need to question our training routines: when are we empowering when helping and when not? Do we praise confidence, collaboration, evaluation and leave it there? Without having to give trainees the answer or find the next step: sometimes we shut down options when we help, instead of letting teachers find answers themselves. This is not to say that we shouldn’t help trainees, but rather that we should reflect on the help we give.

Sound bites

Chloe Pakeman-Schiavone told us why it’s important for us to work with different accents in the classroom. She talked about how cultural knowledge includes knowing about stereotypical accents and phrases. For example, in the UK we have stereotypical images of what a policeman, farmer, Asian corner shop owner, etc sound like. We know that in real life people don’t always sound like this, but there are a lot of reference points, for example in comedy, which rely on us being aware of these stereotypes.

We should work with a range of accents to help students gain familiarity with different models of speech. The hint that an accent might be present can impede understanding, even if the person speaking if completely clear – we put up mental blocks.

Some resources Chloe recommends are:

• Helping learners understand different accents from ELF Pron
• Stephen Fry’s fantastic post about language
• The series Death in Paradise, which is pre-watershed so contains nothing you’d need to bleep out, but has a wide range of accents

Young learner safety

Edward Evans described what they’ve done at IH BKC Moscow to put a policy in place to ensure teachers know what to do to keep young learners safe in the school, and so that the school knows what to do if there is a concern about the safety of young learners.

He reminded us of the importance of considering safety before anything bad happens, rather than only as a reaction. This is especially important in some countries where you might have issues when working with child safety: a lack of good state school policies, an aversion to procedures, training is unavailable, or where child abuse is not a ‘hot topic’. ‘Common sense’ is not a good yardstick for behaviour, as it means different things to different people. Schools need to have clear policies in place.

At Edward’s school, they drew on UK state school procedure to put policy documents in place. These are accompanied by a clear system of which offences lead to a warning, and which lead to instant dismissal. They have reporting procedures in place, along with procedures for how to handle any reports which come in. This is detailed in a two-page document which teachers need to sign when they start working at the school, and every year thereafter to remind them of the policies.

Q & A session

Along with Ian Raby, Giovanni Licata and Jenny Holden, I was part of a panel taking questions from the floor related to various aspects of training and management. I really enjoyed this, but you’d have to ask other people what we said because I (obviously!) wasn’t tweeting what happened 🙂

EdTech

Lindsay Clandfield gave an updated version of his IATEFL 2019 plenary about mythology, methodology and the language of education technology. You can watch the 2019 version of it here, which I’d recommend if you have any interest in how we talk about edtech.

He recommended the hackeducation blog, which looks fascinating.

Coaching and observations

Jonathan Ingham asked whether an incremental coaching model can improve teaching. He works at a college where he observes English teachers, but also teachers of many other subjects, like brickwork, carpentry, and media make-up.

Jonny’s school was inspired by UK state schools who have implemented this model, summarised in this blog post. Rather than 2-3 observations per year, each with a range of action points to work on, teachers are observed every one or two weeks with only a single action point to work on. Feedback is brief and on the same day where possible, with opportunities during the feedback session to practise the changes that the observer suggests. As it is much more focussed, Jonny says that teachers have responded really well: it feels less intrusive, and changes to teaching have been really noticeable. This is something I’d like to try out at our school next year.

Jonny’s slides are available on his blog.

Visual literacy

Kieran Donaghy showed us various frameworks we can use to help students develop their visual literacy. Viewing is becoming the ‘fifth skill’ and has been added to curricula in Canada, Australia and Singapore as viewing and images have taken over from reading and the written word as the principal way we communicate.

He suggested the following resources:

• Into Film’s 3 C’s (colour, camera, character) and 3 S’s (story, setting, sound) as a way of approaching videos – the link contains lots of examples of how to use them, and questions you can ask
• The Center for Media Literacy’s educator resources, particularly 5 key questions and 5 core concepts
• Visual Thinking Routines such as ‘see-think-wonder’ (I’ve used this routine a lot with my teens and they really like it)
• Ben Goldstein on visual literacy in ELT

He also reminded us that we need to use these methods repeatedly with students – it takes 10-12 times before students can use them independently.

Emergent language

Danny Norrington-Davies described research he did with Nick Andon into how experienced teachers work with emergent language in the classroom.

They found 10 types of teacher intervention in the lessons they transcribed.

• Explicit reformulation (live or delayed)
• Recast
• Teacher clarification/confirmation requests
• Metalinguistic feedback
• Elicitations
• Extensions
• Interactional recast
• Recalls
• Sharing
• Learner initiated

The definitions of these are available on a handout on Danny’s website.

He also shared work from Richard Chinn into how we can help teachers learn to work with emergent language more quickly. Working with emergent language is a skilled practice, so how can we help teachers arrive at this more quickly?

Burnout

Rachael Roberts finished off the conference by help us to recognise the warning signs of burnout. She gave us the following tips to help our teachers:

• Cut down on paperwork. Is this actually helpful/useful? For example, do the agenda at the start of meetings to keep focus. Examine marking policies and whether students benefit from them.
• Help your staff keep boundaries. Don’t expect teachers to reply outside school hours. Expect them to take real breaks. Be clear about your own boundaries as a manager. Only check emails when you know you can actually respond to them – otherwise you’re raising your stress hormones for no good reason!
• Examine unconscious beliefs you hold about teaching. For example: ‘A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.’ Is sacrifice really the model we want to hold about teaching?
• Learn to say no to people and projects, and allow our teachers to say no. This includes to things that might be enjoyable, not just things that are difficult!
• Notice your feelings and attitudes towards situations. If you have a choice, choose to be positive.
• Where possible, empower teachers to make decisions for themselves.
• Don’t jump to conclusions about why people might be being difficult. Avoid a culture of perfectionism, and show your own vulnerability.
• Explain the rationale behind what you are doing. Involve and consult staff when making decisions. Be patient with their responses/reactions.

I would highly recommend reading her Life Resourceful blog and joining her facebook group which is a very active community designed to help teachers maintain their mental health.

We are excited to share this video with you from our annual #IHConfAMT! 🤩 The community of International House DOSes and senior teachers met in London for 3 days of sessions, networking and sharing ideas. We just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody who joined us! pic.twitter.com/ST7PNLbsOX

— International House (@IHWorld) January 17, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I’m already looking forward to next year’s event!

10-year challenge

You may have seen the 10-year challenge meme on facebook or Instagram. Here’s my take, and something of a reflection on the decade, one in which I’ve grown and developed enormously as a person, and learnt so much.

Here’s the first photo of me I can find from 2010, from January 9th:

I was halfway through my second year of full-time teaching after university/CELTA. I’d completed the IH Business English Teaching Certificate and was partway through the IH Certificate in Teaching Young Learners (before teens were included).

It was another 10 weeks before I presented at a conference for the first time (March 2010 – though I’d attended a few one-day events in Brno, Bratislava and Prague), 6 months before I joined Twitter (June 2010) and 10 months before I started my blog (October 2010).

Here’s a picture of me from Christmas Day, three days ago:

Here are 20 things I’ve done in the intervening period, ready to launch into 2020:

1. completed the IH Certificate in Advanced Methodology, IH Certificate in Online Tutoring, and Cambridge Delta.
2. started a Masters in Professional Development in Language Education with NILE.
3. become a CELTA trainer, and worked on 14 courses with a range of great trainers.
4. realised that I can be a Director of Studies, and been one for 4.5 years.
5. published 674 blogposts (this is number 675) on this blog, and many posts and articles in other places too.
6. written three books, and contributed to a few others.
7. tweeted over 29,000 times, mostly at conferences I think!
8. helped to curate #ELTpics and the #ELTchat summaries page.
9. become addicted to IATEFL conferences, volunteered on the IATEFL Membership and Marketing Committee, and set up and run the IATEFL blog for a couple of years.
10. presented at a lot of other conferences and online events.
11. been diagnosed and learnt to live with ulcerative colitis and become a much better cook and a considerably healthier eater in the process.
12. got a Fitbit, and drastically increased the amount of exercise I do.
13. visited a lot of new cities and countries.
14. learnt 2 new languages to a reasonable level, and had a go at 7 others to fuel my addiction.
15. met a lot of fascinating people and made a lot of new friends.
16. taken around 60,000 photos, give or take.
17. become increasingly aware of my massively high carbon footprint, and started trying to reduce it.
18. bought a flat.
19. found other people who enjoy board games as much as I always have!
20. learnt to answer back to my inner voice, deal with my thoughts in a much more constructive way, and stay calm and manage my emotions in challenging situations.

So what’s next?

The biggest thing I’d like the 2020s to bring for me is an answer to this 2016 letter, though point 20 means that it’s not even close to the issue I felt like it was before. I don’t think about it anywhere near as much as I used to, but it’s always there a little bit. I know time will tell, and I’m happy either way, but a family would be nice (yes, I know there are other ways that can be achieved!)

Apart from that, more of the same please. That includes the next ELT Playbook, which I’ll be starting soon if all goes to plan. I love my life, I don’t regret anything from the past 10 years, as even the bad things have been experiences I’ve learnt from which have made me who I am today, and I’m excited about what the future holds.

Have a great decade. Enjoy!

Trainer Development – a NILE course

I’ve just finished two weeks at NILE in Norwich where I completed the face-to-face component of the MA Trainer Development module. It can also be attended as a stand-alone course, without the MA.

The course consisted of three sessions a day of input covering a wide range of topics including:

• working with teachers’ beliefs
• input and process options for sessions
• planning different course types
• course design
• mentoring
• evaluating published training materials
• observation and feedback

Our group of six had two trainers who shared the sessions between them. I was particularly impressed at how seamlessly the sessions fed into each other, something I hope to achieve if I’m co-training in the future. Briony and Simon were very receptive to our needs and requests, and were able to adapt sessions and the course as a whole to meet them. They are very knowledgeable about teacher training, particularly in terms of where to find extra resources to explore areas further. They also practise what they preach: I think I learnt as much from observing them in action as I did from the actual input itself, especially regarding techniques and activities for reflection on sessions and the course as a whole.

The course was well-paced, and allowed plenty of space for discussion and reflection on the concepts we were learning. It was a great chance to learn from the experience of the others in the room, and to think about my own training in the past and future, both as a participant and trainer. Towards the end of the course we had a chance to try out what we’d learnt by micro-training, putting together 40-minute workshops for our colleagues.

If you’re interested in reading about some of the concepts we discussed on the course, these are the blog posts I wrote as I went along:

• Professional pride
• Making input processes explicit
• Uncovering teachers’ beliefs
• Using taxonomies to order workshop activities
• The consequences of INSET
• Helping teachers to reflect

To complete the requirements for the MA module, I now need to write three assignments in the next six months. This is not required if you attend it as a stand-alone course. I will continue to receive support for this from one of our trainers on the face-to-face course – I like the fact that I won’t just be interacting with a name on an email address, but somebody who I’ve got to know and who knows me.

For anyone who would like to find out more about becoming a teacher trainer or developing their knowledge of training-related theory, I’d highly recommend the two-week NILE Trainer Development course, whether or not you want to do an MA with them. They also offer a range of other face-to-face courses, mostly in the summer, and online courses which run all year.

Helping teachers to reflect

Reflection is one of the areas of professional development which I’m most interested in, to the extent that I’ve written two books to try and help teachers and trainers to reflect when they don’t have any face-to-face support where they work. Yesterday we had a 90-minute session with ideas for helping teachers to reflect, as part of the NILE MA Trainer Development course.

Reflection doesn’t work

I’ve tried to get teachers to reflect in my sessions. I’m a bit disappointed with the results. To be honest, I’m not really sure how to get them to think. Help!

Here’s a list of questions I came up with to ask this trainer, supplemented with ideas from my partner in the group:

• What techniques have you tried so far?
• When did you use them?/At what point(s) in the sessions?
• Are your trainees ready to reflect? (both in terms of experience of teaching and of reflection i.e. do they know how to do it?)
• How do you model reflection for them?
• You said you were a bit disappointed with the results. What kind of results would you like to see?
• How much time do you give them for reflection activities?
• How concrete or abstract is the reflection? i.e. Is it based on concrete events or abstract ideas?
• How personal is it? Do they have to ‘expose’ their beliefs/their classrooms/their ideas in any way?
• What kind of questions are you using? i.e. Open? Closed? Leading? Hypothetical?
• What’s the balance of listening to speaking in the reflective activities?
• How active is the reflection?
• How consistent/patient were you with setting up reflection? Did you persevere with it?

What would you add to my list?

Reflection on short courses

We also read an article from English Teaching Professional Issue 55 March 2008 (pp57-59) called ‘Time for reflection‘ by Sue Leather and Radmila Popovic. I’m afraid you’ll need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing. It talks about “the importance of reflection on short training courses and how to structure and support it.” There are two ideas in the article which I particularly like.

The first is timetabling 30-60 minutes into the daily schedule of the course for reflection, either at the end of the day or the beginning of the next day. It should be timetabled as ‘reflection’ and not part of another session.

The other idea is including a notebook as part of the course, which will become the participant’s journal. It will be private unless they choose to share it, and could be used for free writing, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in English or not.

Has anybody tried either of these two ideas? Did they work for your trainees/context?

ELT Playbook Teacher Training e-books

ELT Playbook Teacher Training is now available as an ebook via Amazon and Smashwords (affiliate links). It’s currently retailing for around £7.50/$8.99 on both platforms.

The 30 tasks in the book are in 6 different categories and are designed to help teacher trainers reflect on their practice (please ignore the ‘coming soon’!):

Don’t forget that you can earn badges for your CV/blog/etc. if you share your responses to the tasks using the #ELTplaybook hashtags across social media.

You can also buy the book as a paperback from Amazon and Book Depository.

For teachers

If you’re still in the classroom, you might also be interested in ELT Playbook 1, 30 tasks particularly designed for early-career teachers, but useful to anyone I hope!

These are the 6 categories for the tasks:

…and the badges:

Buy it at Smashwords, Amazon and Book Depository (affiliate links).

Find out more at eltplaybook.wordpress.com.

Please tell everyone you know! 🙂

2018 Self-reflection challenge

Happy New Year!

I like a bit of reflection to end one year and start the next. This year’s is brought to you courtesy of the This is Evil blog, via Emma Johnston who did it first. Here are the questions:

As I only spend a few hours a week in the classroom I’ll change some of them to other areas of my teaching-related career.

Day 1: your favourite activity from 2018

Teaching people how to use Quizlet Live. It’s quick and easy to set up, and students and teachers get really engaged.

I taught a group of elementary men from Yemen in the summer – normally at the end of the lesson they were out of the room like a shot. On the day when I showed them Quizlet Live ten minutes before the end of the lesson, they were still there ten minutes after the lesson finished and hadn’t noticed it was time to go because they were so engaged in the game.

Day 2: most memorable story from 2018

Lots of great memories, but this one was particularly fun…

Presenting at the IATEFL online conference for early career teachers, working with Ruth to talk about how to approach lesson planning. We spent 10 minutes describing our own lesson planning, then 50 answering questions from all over the world. It was an adrenaline rush and I loved it – we could have continued for much longer, except I had to teach and my students were knocking on the door! 🙂 If you’re an IATEFL member, you can watch the recording in the webinars section of the members’ area. If you’re not, why not join?

Day 3: the best piece of advice you were given in 2018

When you self-publish, create a paperback as well as an ebook. Thanks Dorothy Zemach!

Day 4: the moment in 2018 you felt proud as a trainer

When two teachers who I’d worked with on a technology course at York Associates in the summer took what they’d learnt from me and turned it into their own presentation for their colleagues in Serbia.

Day 5: your favourite memory as a student

Performing in our flamenco concert in June. It was third time lucky, as I missed the first year due to having a sprained ankle, and the second year due to illness on the day. It was so much fun and I’m really hoping I make it to this year’s one!

Day 6: the funniest story from 2018

Erm…not sure.

Day 7: your favourite coursebook in 2018

I don’t really use coursebooks that much, but I really like how useful the Outcomes teacher’s books are, especially if the teacher who’s using them doesn’t have much training.

Day 8: a new idea you implemented in 2018

We introduced mentoring at our school this year. Every teacher has been assigned a mentor who they meet for 30 minutes a week. The system was worked out with the help of the senior team at my school, and we have some second year teachers who are also volunteering as mentors. I’m really pleased with how it’s going so far and we’ve had some great feedback. We’ve also got quite a few ideas for how to improve it next year.

Day 9: your favourite teaching aid in 2018

Quizlet – games, printable flashcards, self-study at home, Quizlet Live…

Day 10: the best joke you’ve heard in 2018

Not a joke, but something else that makes me laugh. I love the ‘Role call’ videos featuring on James Corden’s show. Here’s a recent one of him doing musicals with Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda:

Day 11: the moment in 2018 when you felt proud of your student

When Emma got the results she wanted in her Delta 🙂

Day 12: your favourite teaching website in 2018

Probably Hana Ticha’s blog – so many ideas and things to think about!

Day 13: the person who inspired you in 2018

Phil Longwell. Read his blog to find out why. Inspired by Phil, and other educators who are talking about mental health, we have started to make changes to how we provide support at our school, and we are already seeing the results. Some examples include the mentoring mentioned above, a specific session focussed on wellbeing in our induction week, and a generally open atmosphere where we make it clear that mental health is just as important as physical health.

Day 14: the moment in 2018 you realised WHY you’re doing your job

Seeing teachers from our school feeling confident enough to share what they’ve learnt with the wider teaching community, through online conferences (IH  – Emma, Ruth; IATEFL – Ruth and me), the IH Journal (Helen, Amy), and their own blogs (Emma, Ruth).

Day 15: your greatest challenge in 2018

My health, as always.

Day 16: your strongest point as a teacher

Networking. Drawing on the knowledge of the amazing teaching community that I’m part of, both online and off.

Day 17: most motivational idea/quotation/picture in 2018

I curated the IATEFL blog until August 2018. Reading all of the stories of how IATEFL has helped teachers from around the world is truly motivational.

Day 18: 3 reasons why you became a teacher

• To help other people.
• To explore.
• To learn.

Day 19: your favourite teaching application in 2018

The new ‘word’ function on the BYU corpus pages.

Day 20: a piece of advice you would give to a rookie teacher

Ask for help!

(and buy my book) 🙂

Day 21: the best CPD book you read in 2018

I’m re-reading The English Verb by Michael Lewis [affiliate link – but it’s super expensive 😦 ], which is probably the book that has most influenced the way I think about English. I’m trying to work out how to convey the way he describes language to students and teachers in a succinct and accessible way (watch this space).

Day 22: your greatest frustration in 2018

That people don’t read adverts properly when they apply for jobs, or do and ignore the requirements stated. You’re wasting your time and mine.

Day 23: one thing you want non-teachers to understand

Just because you grow up speaking a language, doesn’t mean you can automatically teach it. You still need to learn how to be a teacher, work hard at it, and continually develop. Pay for good quality, trained, professional teachers, not just the cheapest person who happens to have the ‘right’ passport – all of us will benefit, and you’ll get your money’s worth.

Day 24: your most memorable teaching experiment in 2018

Teaching Polish to our teachers. Although I started with a few lessons in 2017, 2018 is when I’ve realised that I can do it, even as an intermediate learner myself. It’s so much fun, and I can sneak in some teacher training by modelling activities too 🙂

Day 25: your personal success in 2018

Launching ELT Playbook 1, my self-published ebook aimed at helping new teachers. I’m really pleased with the reception it’s got, and am looking forward to finishing the next one in the series.

Day 26: one thing you plan to change in 2019

An ongoing project: my ability to completely switch off – much improved, but not there yet.

Day 27: your greatest discovery in 2018

That I should stop saying ‘I don’t have time’ and instead say ‘I have prioritised my time differently.’ We probably have time to do everything we might want to, but we don’t always make time for it. Life is about choices, and sometimes we choose (not) to do something at a particular time – how we prioritise the things we do is our responsibility, not some abstract thing from outside us.

Also, how much better I feel when I have proper time off, prioritising it over other things. I did know this before, but had forgotten. By the way, thanks to Neil for making sure the CELTA course I did in the summer had lots of space in it for time off and reflection, and for reminding me how much I enjoy riding a bike!

Day 28: which superpower would make you a Super-DoS

Staying calm all the time in all situations. I’m better at it than I used to be, but it still needs work!

Day 29: one area to improve in your teaching in 2019

Reusing language that has come up in class, not just recording it. The recording part has improved massively over the last couple of years, but I need to follow through better.

Day 30: how do you plan to start your first lesson in 2019

By teaching our teachers vocabulary to name places in a town in Polish. And the second lesson will be introducing a Proficiency group to the joys of pantomimes.

Day 31: the most important thing you want to remember tomorrow

To go to my physio appointment at the right time – changes in routine are confusing!

Time travelling

Here are different challenges I’ve completed in previous years if you fancy writing something similar but this one doesn’t appeal:

• 2013 – WordPress automatic stats
• 2014 – the ups and downs of the year
• 2015 – 30 questions to ask yourself
• 2016 – things I’ve enjoyed this year
• 2017 – 17 things I’ve learnt in 2017

It’s been fascinating reading back through them and remembering the bad times and the good.

Here’s to a peaceful and prosperous 2019!

Teenagers losing their luggage

Today I taught two low-intermediate teen classes at the same level, covering for another teacher. The first half of the lesson was a test. The topic of one of the recent units they’ve done is travel, so I finally got the chance to try out Mike Astbury’s lost luggage activity, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages. The basic idea of Mike’s materials is that students role-play travellers who’ve lost their luggage and airport workers who take the details. Here’s what I did with it.

Setting the scene

You’re going on holiday. You’ve just arrived at the airport. Your luggage didn’t arrive. What’s missing?/What was in your suitcase? How do you feel about it?

I said this and students discussed it in pairs or small groups, then I took a general poll of feelings for feedback. This also served to generate some ideas for later in the lesson.

Describing luggage

I projected the second page of Mike’s handouts with 8 images of different items of luggage. Students had two minutes to describe what they could see using the language they had available. I didn’t really do any feedback for the first group. In the second we talked about Polish ‘It has green colour.’ versus English ‘It’s green.’ which came up for most groups.

I’d prepared pieces of paper with Mike’s descriptions of the luggage which I laid out on the floor. They had to discuss which description matched which item. Feedback was them using magnets to stick them to the board.

We checked them as a class, and I pulled out items of vocabulary to check the meaning. Examples were ‘buckle’, ‘handle’, ‘strap’ and ‘lock’.

They then described the cases again, with me gradually removing the descriptions.

Preparing their luggage

On the board, I showed students what I wanted them to write on the back of their luggage cards.

I handed out one luggage picture per person at random. They had 90 seconds to write a few items that were in their luggage and to make up their address. They then put their luggage under their chairs for later.

Working out questions

I organised students into pairs or small groups, with one notebook and pen shared between them. I displayed the lost luggage form (page 4 of the handouts) on the board and elicited a couple of example questions – a simple one (What’s your name?) and a more challenging one (What time did you land/arrive?)

In their groups, students had to write a question for each part of the form. I told them that flight details are things like the airline (Lufthansa) and the flight number (ZX 123). I monitored closely and did a lot of on-the-spot error correction, aiming for grammatically correct questions by the end of the exercise.

As soon as a pair/group had a full set of questions, they had to test each other by saying e.g. ‘flight details’ with the reply ‘What are your flight details?’ or ‘What was the airline?’ Each group had different questions. All groups had a couple of minutes to try and memorise the questions.

At the airport

Half of the students had time to look at their luggage cards again, then had to hand them to me. That way they were remembering the information, probably imperfectly – I don’t know about you, but I can never remember exactly what’s in my case or the finer details of what it looks like!

The other half lined up their chairs and stood behind them, as if it was an airport counter. They each had a pen and a lost luggage form. They had to ask questions and complete the form as accurately as possible. Then they put their completed form under the chairs and switched roles. When there were three students in a group, first one person had to collect information from both of them, then two of them had to collect the same information from one person. One student in the second group got particularly into it and kept bothering the airport worker by trying to rush them and asking ‘When will I get my luggage back?’ 🙂

Finding their luggage

I laid out all of the luggage on a ‘carousel’ on the floor. Once everybody had performed both roles, they used their forms to try to identify the luggage. They had to give it back to the owner asking ‘Is this your luggage?’

To round it all off, I asked them to put their hands up if they didn’t get their luggage back, and told they how successful our airport is. In both groups about a third didn’t get it, which I suspect reflects real life nicely!

In sum

The activity worked really well with this group of students, although we were a bit rushed at the end. I allocated 45 minutes, but I think 50 would have been enough, and 60 ideal.

I completely forgot to give them tickets from page 3 of Mike’s handouts, even though I’d prepared them, but this didn’t matter as most students seemed to enjoy making up this information. One student got a bit flustered about it though, and definitely would have benefitted from having something to draw on, although she managed to work around it in the end. The rush at that stage probably didn’t help either!

They were a bit confused by the way that we arranged the room for the role play at first, but as soon as they worked out what was going on they seemed to appreciate it.

They were definitely trying to use some of the new language to describe luggage, and I didn’t hear any ‘green colours’ in the second group during the role play 🙂

All in all, I’m really glad I finally got a chance to try out this activity from Mike’s blog. The students were engaged and it generated a lot of language and helped to further practice travel vocabulary and past tense question formation (which some of them had struggled with in the test). It worked well as a task-based lesson, which is something I’m trying to experiment with more, with students pushing themselves to speak as much as possible. Thanks for sharing these materials with us Mike, and I would encourage everyone to take a look at the materials on his blog!

Ironically, I’ve lost my picture of my lost luggage after it was returned to me, so instead here’s a picture of Poppy the cat (not) helping me to pack

Writing ‘ELT Playbook 1’

I’ve been thinking about what support we can give newly-qualified teachers for a while now. I was very lucky when I started out as a teacher, because I ended up in a school with a strong development programme for fresh teachers, but I know that’s not always the case. In February 2018, I published the results of this thinking, which eventually turned out to be ELT Playbook 1. Inspired by a talk given at IATEFL Manchester 2015 by Jill Hadfield, I also decided to document the process behind putting together the finished result, which is what you’ll find below.

The roots of the idea

The original idea I toyed with was to put together an ebook of tasks that could be worked through week by week in the first year after qualifying from an initial certificate course, like CELTA or Trinity CertTESOL. Tasks would build on each other and cover areas that had probably been included in the initial course, like classroom management, teaching grammar and teaching reading. I put together a speculative proposal and sent it off to a publisher, but they didn’t accept it as they said they had something similar in the works.

This then developed into something in the form of a course, similar to the International House courses that I’ve done throughout my career. I was thinking along the lines of a CELTA revision course which goes over the main areas of the course again, but with the trainee having more time to absorb the ideas and to experiment with them with real students over a period of time, instead of intensively in just six hours of teaching practice. However, there were various problems with this approach.

• Participants might not have completed an initial certificate course.
• The initial certificate might have covered very different areas, so it was hard to make assumptions about what they’d covered.
• Contexts could differ widely, so it would be hard to produce generic tasks that all participants would work through.
• The timing of academic years varies widely, adding another variable that would make timing a course very challenging.
• The whole thing would require a lot of work from the trainer.
• It would be difficult to decide on assessment criteria.
• How do you decide how much to charge?

I shelved the idea for a year after this, and continued in my position as a Director of Studies, working mostly with freshly-qualified teachers. Through this job, I developed a better understanding of what teachers in this position might need in the way of early career support.

Initial planning

Gradually I came back to the idea of an ebook, partly due to a very positive experience working with The Round and Karen White. This time, though, it would be arranged such that it could be followed in a range of ways, depending on the teacher’s preferences:

• from beginning to end of the book;
• category by category (there are six strands in the book, each with five tasks);
• by looking at how long a task might take and seeing what can be fitted in;
• by choosing a task completely at random.

I wrote up the basic idea for the ebook in my shiny new MaWSIG notebook after the Pre-Conference Events at IATEFL 2017, with the initial strands chosen as:

• Back to basics
• Exploring your context/The wider world of ELT
• Being creative
• Examining language
• Upgrading skills
• Health and wellbeing

I also wanted to use the taskbook to encourage teachers to reflect on their own teaching, perhaps through a blog, a teaching journal, or video- or audio-bites. This was partly inspired by Shelly Terrell’s excellent 30 Goals Challenge, something which I took part in a couple of times when I started out with my blogging.

At IATEFL 2017 I was very happy to see Sarah Mercer’s plenary, where she focussed a lot on the psychological health of teachers, which validated the decision to include the final category. ‘Health and wellbeing’ then became the first one that I wrote notes for when I had nothing else to do on a train journey to Torun. I decided at this point that I would like to include a quote before each strand and each task which would somehow link it back to the literature and back up the suggestions I was making. Hopefully this would also give teachers an idea about where to find out more. It would also force me to do research to support my ideas, and not just include things I instinctively felt would help.

The name The Teacher’s Taskbook came to mind pretty quickly, and after searching for it a few times and discovering that the title didn’t seem to be in use either for a book or a website, I decided it was worth using (though see below…)

As I thought about the ebook more, I realised that 30 tasks wouldn’t be enough, and have since decided that I’d like to put together a series of ebooks, so watch this space for more!

Developing the structure

At the beginning of June 2017 I watched a webinar by Nik Peachey about becoming your own publisher, organised by the IATEFL Materials Writing SIG, and available on the IATEFL webinars page for IATEFL members if you’d like to watch it yourself. He shared lots of tips from his own experience of self-publishing.

A few days later I came across a blog post by Adi Rajan on Open Badges for CPD. Although I’ve been somewhat sceptical about badges in the past, I thought it might be a good idea to offer people the chance to collect badges to document their progression through the tasks in the book.

On the same day I decided that if I want to put together a series of books, and perhaps accompany them with badges, it would probably be a good idea to have a logo, but had no idea what I wanted to do. See below…

A few months later

It’s now 4th July 2017, and things have moved on a bit. I’ve got a clear idea for the structure of each task, with about half of the tasks now written out on paper, plus the titles for the rest of them, and a bit of my introduction. I’ve also changed the title from the original idea of The Teacher’s Taskbook: Year One, which I thought was a bit too functional, to ELT Playbook 1, inspired by a conversation with Adi Rajan. To find out why I chose this title, take a look at the introduction of the book 🙂

Other things I’ve done:

• Sketched out a rough logo with a graphic designer friend.
• Researched the possibilities for awarding badges, though the costs for many of these seem to be quite prohibitive.
• Decided to use icons for sections of each task, inspired by Nik Peachey’s webinar mentioned above. Watching another webinar by Lindsay Clandfield today, I came across The Noun Project, which is the perfect source for my icons – I’ve just paused in my search to write this update!
• Started a spreadsheet to keep track of what I spend when preparing the book, though there are no entries yet.
• Shared the idea with a few people, and it seems to have got a positive response so far. Here’s hoping I can get it published by September, ready for the new school year in a lot of the world!

Draft one complete!

It’s 16th August 2017, and today I’ve finished hand-writing the last of the tasks. I decided to write everything out longhand first as I find it easier to think of ideas that way (unless I’m blogging!), and it meant that typing up the tasks would then be a process of redrafting. By limiting myself to one small piece of paper, it also encouraged me to keep the tasks short and of a similar length.

I started typing up some of the tasks a couple of weeks ago, in between some teacher training I was doing. I’ve now got about 24 of the 30 tasks on the computer, and will hopefully type the rest of them up tomorrow, as well as looking for the quotes to accompany each task.

I’ve also contacted an editor in the last couple of days, as I want to make sure a professional looks over what I’ve been doing before it goes public. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been building up a list of questions I’d like her to answer, covering things I’m not sure about or which I think could be expanded or changed.

Coming together nicely

A couple of weeks ago I sent off a complete typed first draft to my editor, Penny Hands, along with a list of questions I would like her opinion on and some of the conventions I’ve used throughout the book. These are both things I’ve picked up as tips during previous IATEFL MaWSIG events – the Materials Writing SIG is a great one to join if you’re interested in writing materials at all. They have so much helpful advice.

I’ve also just had an email from my friend who’s working on a logo for me. She sent me a range of different options for me to choose from. It was very exciting to think about which one most suits the idea I have for the book, and I’m looking forward to seeing the final results.

So that’s it for 18th September 2017: apart from choosing the logo, I’m taking a short break as our induction week started today. It’s a very busy time for me, helping new teachers settle in at our school and working out the timetable. Listening to them talk about qualifying and hearing their hopes and fears for their new jobs and lives reinforces my feeling that a book like this is necessary – I hope it proves that way!

Looking back at my previous entries in this post, it doesn’t look like the book will be ready by the end of September, but hopefully it won’t be too long after that. I’ve also now decided against awarding badges with the book, as it seems like it would involve a lot of complicated logistics and/or a large financial outlay on my part. If anybody has suggestions for how I can get around this, I’d really appreciate them!

Here’s a quote from a blogpost I read today which kind of chimes with what I’d like ELT Playbook 1 to do:

Maybe the provision of so much scaffolding for trainees on a course like the CELTA helps fuel things ‘forward’ and accounts for why I’ve enjoyed and been positively affected by it so much…scaffolding which does provide ‘data’ (written and oral feedback galore), at least some collaboration (in teacher-tutor guided lesson co-planning, minimally), plenty of non-written forms of reflection (though I do wish I’d already have tried giving the option to replace written post-feedback reflections with other kinds!), and detail, detail, and more for sure. Now if this aspect of an intensive one-month course like the CELTA could just be unfurled, exploded, and evenly distributed throughout an entire career path!

Collaboration

In the last week I’ve received logos for the different parts of my book, which I really like. For me, they capture the essence of ‘play’ which I would like to be central, while also incorporating both analogue (book) and digital (the mouse) elements. This one’s my favourite colour too 🙂

Designed by Ola Walczykowska

A couple of days ago I got an edited version of my book, along with a few questions covering areas which I’d been a bit concerned about too. One of these is how much I’ve emphasised the community/sharing in many of the tasks. While I believe this is an important element to the book, I don’t feel that it should be highlighted as much as it is, as I don’t want people to feel like they have to share with the community if they don’t want to. I think it should be an option that’s available, but not something obligatory. I’m going to try to rewrite the reflection ideas to make them mirror my beliefs more.

It’s the beginning of October, and I originally hoped to publish the book in September, but I’ve now realised I was too ambitious in terms of managing my time around my work. I’m not going to put pressure on myself for the sake of having it published – I’d rather it was ready to the standard I want it to be, and that I have a work-life balance, than that it’s published before it meets the standards I want it to.

Editing

A month later on the 29th October, I’ve finally got time to take a look at the edits that Penny has suggested, almost all of which I’ll keep, as they certainly upgrade the text. I think it’s really important to have a professional editor for a project like this, as Penny has caught many things I wouldn’t have noticed. She’s also been able to point out some of the ways in which my book might not be clear to a reader, like places where some of my assumptions have come across. The biggest change is the addition of a subtitle: ‘Teacher development in an online community’, which conveys what I hope is one of the key characteristics of the book, as can be seen in this section from the introduction.

Learning together

A key objective of ELT Playbook is to give teachers who are new to the profession the chance to become part of a wider community. You can find other members of the community on the following social media channels:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eltplaybook/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashtag/eltplaybook
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/eltplaybook/

Via these forums, you will be able to benefit from looking at and commenting on the reflections of other people, and sharing your own reflections if you want to.

We also took out a quote which didn’t really fit the structure of the book. I liked it though, so I’m going to share it here 🙂

Many teachers find that writing a short journal about their experiences and lessons is a great way to reflect constructively on their teaching. Putting your ideas down on paper sometimes gives you a clear perspective on the problems and issues that arise, and may help you to reflect on possible solutions. These days, more and more teachers even make their experiences public by sharing them on blogs. It might be worth reading some of them to discover you are not alone!

John Hughes (2014) ETpedia: 1,000 ideas for English Language Teachers. Pavilion Publishing and Media, page 25

Another thing I’ve really benefitted from when writing the book is sharing the concept with friends and colleagues, and taking on board their ideas and suggestions. For example, this week my friend Natasha suggested publicising the book using the #weteachenglish hashtag on Instagram, something I’d never heard of before.

Finally, I now have a cover (though the subtitle means it’ll need a bit of editing). Thanks to Ola, Penny and Natasha for their help!

A bit of a hurdle

I’ve just looked at the 2nd edit of my ebook, and in Penny’s email she let me know about something that had never occurred to me: if you use a lot of quotes in your work, it’s a good idea to find out whether you need permission to use them or not. This is something I now need to follow up on, as I don’t want to get into trouble. This is why it’s important to have an editor! Thanks Penny 🙂 (though it does mean delaying the publication date while I make sure…it’s 20th November, and I’d hoped to publish next weekend)

Hiatus

Oops…it’s Christmas Eve and I haven’t looked at my book for over a month. Instead I’ve been prioritising differently at weekends and doing a lot more baking, as well as consciously trying to relax more. However, if I ever want this to be published, and to get back the money I’ve paid my editor it’s time to crack on again. So Guys and Dolls is on TV, and I’m refamiliarising myself with the manuscript. (I don’t usually double-screen, but Christmas is different…)

A few hours later, and I’ve responded to all of the comments from Penny, and added a few quotes to try and balance out the male/female balance. I’ve also managed to write a contents page for ELT Playbook 2, which I hope will make the process of writing the follow-up a little faster than this one!

On Boxing Day, I’ve opened it up again and spent another 90 minutes or so checking all of the hyperlinks in the document, and adding a further reading section to make it easier for readers to explore further if they want to, as suggested by a couple of people. I’ve now sent it to my mum for a final proofread before I write to the publishers to ask for permission to use their quotes.

Permissions

29th December – Things I have discovered while writing to publishers to ask for permission to use quotations from their books:

• I should have written down ISBNs for every book. I can find them on Amazon, but it would have been faster to write them down originally.
• It’s easier to do this with the books in front of you, not in a different country (they’re in Poland, I’m in the UK for Christmas!)
• Each publisher does things very differently. My favourite is Cambridge at the moment, because they currently grant permission to use up to 400 words of prose freely as long as it is accompanied by a full citation (according to their permissions page as of 29th December 2017) [Please check there – don’t take my word for it!] Some publishers require word counts, some have email addresses, some have forms to fill in. One publisher has a Word form to fill in and send back, where the formatting is quite troublesome. Another couple use external sites to do their permissions.
• If a publisher no longer exists, you might be able to find out who bought their list using the Association of American Publishers lookup function.
• Some places charge, some don’t. This is something to factor in when you’re thinking about costs.
• Asking for permissions takes a good 2-3 hours if you decide you want to use 30 or so quotes from at least 15 different sources!

A major change

11th February – by a week ago, I’d only received about 25% of the permissions I need to publish the book. Apart from that, everything else is ready. After discussing it with a couple of people, I’ve decided that the inclusion of quotes in the book doesn’t add enough to the book to justify the amount of work it’s taking to get permission to use them, and that a further reading list is enough of a pointer. It’s disappointing as I do think they added something, but if I want to write a series of these books (and I do!) then I need to make the process as easy to repeat as possible.

In the last week I’ve also decided that the official launch date will be Valentine’s Day, a nice easy date to remember, and conveniently in the middle of a two-week school holiday, so I have time to get everything finalised before I publish, including putting together a blog to complement the series, an idea I toyed with previously and have now decided I definitely want to have.

The big day!

14th February 2018 – I went through the book one last time, making a couple more minor tweaks and making sure that none of the questions referred to the quotes I’d removed. I also set up the facebook page, and put together a page of content for the new ELT Playbook blog explaining what the book is and where to get it from.

Once everything was ready, I uploaded the ebook to Smashwords and Amazon’s KDP platform. These were the hitches:

• My cover image was a bit too small for Smashwords. I used http://resizeimage.net/ to make it the required 1400 pixel width.
• When I downloaded a sample .epub file from Smashwords, I noticed that the icons for the sections were all giant, even though they were only about 2x2cm in the file. I then had to save small versions of each icon onto my computer, and replace 214 of them. Luckily that only took about 20 minutes, and also reduced the file size from 10.5MB to 1MB, which means Amazon will hopefully not charge me as much when people download the file.

A few months down the line

It’s 3rd June 2018, and the ELT Playbook 1 ebook has now been available for a few months. By my calculations I’ve sold 22 copies on Smashwords and about 21 copies on Amazon (it’s a bit harder to work it out there!) I’ve talked about it at IATEFL and in a webinar for EFLtalks.com (see below), as well as in passing at the IH Torun Teacher Training Day and in a webinar for International House as part of the latest Teachers’ Online Conference. IATEFL was also a great opportunity to get ideas from people like Dorothy Zemach about what to do next with the book and the series.

As part of the prep for IATEFL 2018, Rob Howard gave me the excellent idea of making postcards advertising the book, with a space to sign or write notes on the back, and I was one of the authors who benefitted from the chance to do a signing session at the independent publishers’ stand.

On 2nd May I went back to the idea of badges that I discarded earlier as being potentially too much work. This was as a direct result of the fact that thus far nobody has posted their responses to any of the tasks on the social media platforms (facebook, Twitter and Instagram) – I just need somebody to be first, so if that’s you, I’ll be incredibly grateful! If you complete all of the tasks in one section or in the book, you can get one of these badges:

The badges aren’t proper Open Badges, as the expense of me paying for an Open Badges scheme is prohibitive, but I think these ones will do for now. I look forward to adding names to them and sending them out!

Rereading this post before I publish it, I also noticed that in the end I didn’t use the subtitle that was suggested ‘Teacher development in an online community’ – I can’t remember why, but I suspect I simply forgot about it. What do you think? Should I use it? I ended up adding the strapline ‘Learning to reflect, together’ on the ELT Playbook blog – maybe that would be better?

It’s been great to hear people’s responses to the book and the idea of a series, and I’d love to hear from you if you’ve tried out any of the tasks. I already have the contents page for two more books (ELT Playbook 2 and ELT Playbook: Teacher Training) and have started writing tasks for the teacher training book. I can’t wait to share them with you, so watch this space!

Free CPD on demand: Boardshare as a tool for unseen peer observation (guest post)

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to Dan Baines‘ talk on sharing whiteboards at IATEFL this year, so I asked him to write a guest post to share his ideas, especially because one of the tasks in ELT Playbook 1 is all about taking photos of your whiteboard and reflecting on them. He’s previously written a post on this blog about Rethinking reflection in initial teacher training. Over to Dan…

When I finished my CELTA many years ago in Prague, I was fortunate enough to be offered a job at the school which I took, starting the following Monday. So, after a very brief trip back home to say my good byes and almost missing the flight back to Prague I started work. It was intimidating. I got 2 days of induction and then received my timetable and the intimidation continued. As is the case for many teachers, my first day of professional, paid teaching consisted of more hours than I had taught in the preceding 4 weeks.

At this time, the school had a very large core of teachers and a really communicative staffroom. Most of the teachers were very experienced and many were also DELTA-qualified. Around peak teaching times, the room was buzzing with people talking about teaching: what they’d just taught, what they were going to teach, what had gone well and what had fallen flat. This was the start of my own teacher development story and how I went from being a nervous new teacher who thought he’d be exposed as a fraud any minute to a competent and then a good and confident teacher. The endless discussions filled my head with ideas and the advice and support was invaluable. The teachers I met in the first two years are still some of the biggest influences on my teaching as I sit here a decade and a half later.

That wasn’t the only perk. I had a full-time teaching schedule and paid holidays. I got lunch vouchers, phone credit and a travel pass provided. The money was poor, but I had real job security and after committing to staying a number of years I had my diploma paid for. Teacher development wasn’t only encouraged, it was compulsory and time was set aside for it every week. CPD just seemed… normal. It was what teachers did.

After taking DELTA and becoming a much better teacher, I did what most people in my situation do. I left the classroom and went into academic management, running the CPD programme in a very similar school to where I started (in fact the same school in a different city) with similar working conditions. After a couple of years of this, I returned to Prague and went into full time pre-service teacher training, effectively leaving the world of language schools behind me.

In June 2016 I returned as the DoS of a small language school in Prague tasked with, amongst other things, developing the teachers. The teaching landscape had changed since I began. Teachers on full-time contracts wasn’t the norm any more – they mostly worked on trade licences. There were no paid holidays and cancelled lessons meant teachers not getting paid. Many schools operate more like agencies than language schools, meaning that their teachers spend a big chunk of their day travelling from company to company. Language schools were in so much competition that rather than selling courses on the expertise and experience of their teachers, they sold them on price, the knock-on effect being that teachers were paid less and had no job security.

In designing a CPD programme I needed to find options that would that would meet the needs and fit the schedule of my teachers. I went for the more traditional approaches.

• Workshops – They were received well. However, it was impossible to find a time when all the teachers could attend. There are many times in the day when none of the teachers are working for me, but none where they aren’t working for someone else.
• Peer observations – A great development tool and a huge influence on me. Unfortunately, most of our teaching happens in peak times, meaning that if the teachers aren’t all teaching for me at that time, they are for someone else.
• Lesson planning surgeries – A nice idea, but never took off. Mostly due to lack of time and availability on the part of me and the teachers.
• Developmental observation – I do this a lot, all teachers are observed 3 times a year with a strong developmental focus. It’s stressful, it’s time consuming and because of clashing schedules, it can sometimes be a week or more before there is chance to do feedback.
• Action research – This was discussed with the teachers, but the time investment was more than they could realistically commit to as some were working more than 20 classes a week just to pay bills.

If the CPD on offer wasn’t accessible to all teachers equally, it felt token at best and far too exclusive, and therefore pointless at worst. So, the challenge was to create something that was:

• Free – rent prices in Prague have rocketed in recent years, teacher salaries have not.
• Inclusive – in the private sector, the working day in Prague is typically any hours between 7.30 – 21.00. Any successful development would be able to be done by all teachers and at their leisure.
• Guided – autonomous development is one thing, but many of the teachers I employ are fairly newly-qualified. Not everyone is really aware of how to begin their CPD journey.
• Classroom-focused – much of the teachers’ time is spent in the classroom and many are fairly inexperienced. The development should reflect their daily life.

I’m an occasional Twitter user (@QuietBitLoudBit for anyone interested). I use it almost exclusively for following accounts related to ELT and it could be said that my posts are a bit… samey. Basically, I like posting pictures of my whiteboard after I’ve taught and looking at others. Maybe I’m an exhibitionist and/or a voyeur, but either way, it’s great to see into the classrooms of others and it has given me some great ideas.

If it could give me inspiration, I figured that sharing pictures of whiteboards with some discussion could be an interesting way to carry out professional development with my teachers, so I set up a Facebook group and added some teachers (some local and some from far away). The idea was to post a weekly or bi-weekly “task” for teachers to carry out, which involved taking pictures of and sharing their boards at some point during the lesson. They were then encouraged to comment on the pictures of their peers.

It ticked a lot of boxes. It allowed some form of peer observation, but importantly without the teachers needing to cancel their own lessons or travel. It was development that could be done from anywhere – most of the teachers involved used Facebook on their mobiles, so they could participate from trams or buses as they bounced round the city from class to class or just from home, in bed, at the end of the day. The tasks provided reflection in a guided way, an unseen peer observation task.

This was the first task…

It was deliberately left very open and general. I posted the first one (a picture of a substitution drill I’d done that day) and encouraged them to do the same. The response was underwhelming. One person responded with a picture and explanation, someone else with a description of an activity (both great), but nothing much else. I decided to change the way the tasks were set up. For the posts that followed I posted my board with commentary and encouraged them to comment on mine and discuss a few questions. There was greater interaction this time with good discussion based around how (or whether) to teach subject questions, confidence using the board and phonology related activities. Some, however, fell flat and got no interaction at all. I was pretty disappointed.

As a final attempt to get some interaction and engagement I mixed it up again. I didn’t post my board, but found two similar boards on Twitter (using #ELTwhiteboard – a great hashtag to look up) and asked members to compare them and find a board that they liked and explain why. This was the first task to get the teachers sharing pictures to discuss and it raised some interesting conversation. It was a small victory, but I was still left disappointed at the relative failure of a project I had such high hopes for.

I decided to seek some feedback on the group and why the teachers didn’t participate. A couple of things became apparent quite quickly. Firstly, sometimes people get so involved in teaching that, unlike me, they focus more on the students than taking pictures of what has gone on the board and simply forget. Others feel that what they have produced just isn’t interesting enough to share with the rest of the group or are too self-conscious to open this window into their classroom. Others just prefer to watch from afar.

The biggest surprise was how positively the group was received. When asking a colleague if she found it useful, it was met with a heart-felt “HELL YES!”. She never gets to see what other people do and even just seeing my boardwork helped her with ideas and made her feel better about what she was doing. Others said it had given them great classroom activities to try out and others just liked reading the discussions under the posts, but just didn’t feel the need to contribute. I’d been disappointed, but only because the project didn’t pan out the way I’d envisioned it. It wasn’t a hotbed of activity, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t useful. Teachers don’t need to actively participate to take something from it, or at least that’s how it seemed.

It’s hard to design effective CPD that serves everyone equally and effectively, and this isn’t it, but it is a nice supplement to a more traditional CPD programme and is very easy to set up and maintain. A few things I realised for anyone attempting to do the same:

• Facebook works well. People use it (at least for the time being) and the nested comments on posts are perfect for replying to other people’s pictures.
• It needs a “leader”. Someone needs to make the posts that serve as reminder for people to participate. It doesn’t need to be someone more experienced. The person responsible can be rotated.
• Pictures can come from anywhere. You don’t need to take the pictures yourself. Twitter has a nice community of people sharing theirs that can be good for discussion.
• Language related tasks work well. They generated a lot of discussion, particularly those tasks related to phonology. Boards showing actual activities also tend to get more engagement.
• Tasks should be simple. At times I let things become over-complicated and I think they just looked intimidating. One person actually commented that they didn’t know where to begin.
• Not everyone will actively participate. And that’s just fine.

I’ve checked my expectations and I’m satisfied overall. The group exists and I’m getting back to posting more regularly in it. If people don’t engage, I don’t take it personally and hope that everyone involved takes something from it and that maybe one day they’ll decide to photograph their work and share it with us all.

About the author

Dan is director of studies at Oxford House Prague as well as a CELTA and Trinity DipTESOL trainer. He really likes whiteboards. Join the group and share your board or follow him on Twitter @QuietBitLoudBit.

IATEFL 2018: The talks I missed

Here’s a selection of nuggets of information from talks which I didn’t manage to attend during this year’s conference but did get bits out of via Twitter. They are loosely categorised to help you find your way around. Thanks to everyone who shared what they were watching! I’ve included videos if they’re available, as I hope to watch them at some point myself.

Looking after ourselves and our students

The talk I most wanted to go and see unfortunately clashed with a meeting I had, but I’m happy to say it was recorded. This tweet says it all:

Please watch Phil Longwell’s talk on the important but until now overlooked issue of mental health issues in ELT. It was the best session I saw in the main conference. It was a measure & honour to mentor Phil for his first ever talk at a conference. I’m proud of you, Phil 🙂 https://t.co/c7iKb2OgQx

— Kieran Donaghy (@kierandonaghy) April 13, 2018

Phil Longwell used his talk to describe the findings of research he has done over the past year about the mental health of English language teachers. You can read about his findings here. The recording is here:

He also did a 10-minute interview for the IATEFL YouTube channel:

I’ve now added both of these links to my collection of Useful links on Mental Health in ELT. Here’s one of my favourite pictures from the conference too 🙂

Me with James and Phil

Jen Dobson spoke about online safety for primary learners. As part of it, she shared this advert which should promote a lot of discussion:

Teacher training

Jason Anderson asked what impact CELTA has on the classroom practice of experienced teachers. The full talk is available here:

Jason’s CAP framework was referred to in (I think!) Judith G Hudson’s talk ‘Helping teachers understand and use different lesson frameworks:

“Trainees crave structure during and after the course” A session on lesson frameworks #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/ha514kDwdl

— Georgia K. Papa (@Papamihailidou) April 10, 2018

It is explained in more detail in this article and this handout.

Karin Krummenacher suggested an alternative way of approaching CELTA input sessions, starting with a needs analysis and encouraging trainees to go to the sessions they need, creating a flexible timetable. This is an interesting idea, though another person pointed out it could prove quite challenging if some trainees feel like they are made to go to more sessions than others.

Video in Language Teacher Education is a project I’d like to explore further, particularly since we’ve been introducing video observation into our school this year. You can get a taster by watching the videos on their website.

As a polyglot myself (I think I can say that!), Scott Thornbury‘s talk on hyperpolyglots and what we can learn from them would have been interesting. Here are three tweets from it:

Successful strategies of hyperpolyglots as shared by @thornburyscott #iatefl2018 #elt #esl pic.twitter.com/ci5kfL6BWA

— ELTjam (@eltjam) April 10, 2018

Aspiring polyglots need:

– The neural hardware
– A sense of mission for learning languages#iatefl2018 #elt #esl @thornburyscott

— ELTjam (@eltjam) April 10, 2018

Takeaways for teachers @thornburyscott on Hyper online polyglots #IATEFL2018 pic.twitter.com/yMCfcaVCPA

— Ayat Tawel (@ayatawel) April 10, 2018

This slide from Simon Brewster’s talk made me smile:

How critical can you be when self-evaluating? Simon Brewster on self-evaluating for teachers #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/V1BI4zYogZ

— Georgia K. Papa (@Papamihailidou) April 10, 2018

Here are some other tweets from the same talk:

The self-evaluation process. It all starts with asking yourself “how well am I performing?” #IATEFL2018 #selfevaluation #teachertraining pic.twitter.com/nRwhyi6NmR

— Georgia K. Papa (@Papamihailidou) April 10, 2018

A self-evaluation questionnaire – some good question to use in pre- and post-observation meetings. #IATEFL2018 #teachertraining #selfevaluation pic.twitter.com/ZzruYDZ84z

— Georgia K. Papa (@Papamihailidou) April 10, 2018

Alastair Douglas spoke on why observation is such a key part of teacher training and on how we should rethink observation tasks. You can watch Alastair’s full talk on the Teaching English British Council page.

Silvana Richardson and Gabriel Diaz Maggioli described ‘Inspired professional development’. You can watch their full talk here:

Here’s one tweet from the talk as a taster:

‘Mini-action research’ brilliant ideas for language schools. #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/Xpbv0quVlv

— Cathryn Bennett (@Teaching_Cat) April 12, 2018

Katherine Martinkovich summarized their talk here, along with a selection of other related ones she saw. You can read their full whitepaper on the Cambridge website. Having now watched the talk, I’m going to look at the CPD I’m involved in and see how we can make it more sustained, as this seemed to be the glaring omission from most of what I’m doing.

In the classroom

If you’d like to examine your use of Teacher Talking Time, here are some aspects you might consider, courtesy of Stephen Reilly:

Aspects of your TTT to consider when analyzing yourself. #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/OB75hdzWYf

— Tyson Seburn (@seburnt) April 13, 2018

Thanks to Liam for clarifying that PPBP is Pose, Pause, Bounce and Pounce – there seem to be two alternatives: PPPB or PPBP.

Here’s an idea for Use of English activities from Stuart Vinnie’s talk…

Would this work in your exam classes? #IATEFL2018 pic.twitter.com/6gkCu4gIJX

— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 10, 2018

…and another for cloze answers…

Stuart Vinnie: divide cloze answers between pairs and ask them to memorise, then work together to complete the gaps. Alternatively divide into 4 groups, ABCD, and divide the answers between them #IATEFL2018 pic.twitter.com/GgoVZkD0PF

— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 10, 2018

There are lots more ideas like this on the Cambridge Practice Makes Perfect site.

Gareth Davies, a.k.a. Gareth the Storyteller, asked whether English lessons are fairytales in disguise. You can get a taste of his storytelling here, in a 1-minute clip which is perfect for the classroom.

You can watch Zoltan Dornyei’s talk on how to create safe speaking environments here. You can also read a summary of his talk here, written by Jessica Mackay. It also seems silly not to advertise my ebook, Richer Speaking, at this point, since it includes lots of ways to extend and adapt speaking activities. 🙂

Edmund Dudley was talking about motivating teenagers to write, and promoting the new ETpedia Teenagers book [Amazon affiliate link] which was recently published.

Edmund Dudley on motivating teenagers to write. #IATEFL2018 #elt pic.twitter.com/4oGffBsfkz

— ETpedia (@ETpedia) April 12, 2018

His slides are available here – I’m already thinking about which teachers I can pass them on to at school!

Another talk connected to writing includes the phrase ‘sentence energy’, which sounds intriguing. That was Sarah Blair’s presentation on ‘Teaching writing visually, which you can watch on the TeachingEnglish IATEFL 2018 page, or get to directly here.

Working with language

Jade Blue had some interesting ideas for using learner-generated visuals to conceptualise language. I know this image isn’t perfect, but it gives you the idea I think. Definitely something I’d like to find out more about, and nicely complementing David Connolly‘s presentation.

#IATEFL2018 pic.twitter.com/d9gEH5v9Nk

— Erica (@erinapoli) April 13, 2018

Kerstin Okubo described how to help academic English students build their vocabulary for spoken production, not just for comprehension:

Kerstin: Ts often pick out the level 3/out of reach vocab & try to move it straight into production … unrealistic as new words need time to sink in #iatefl2018

— Julie Moore (@lexicojules) April 12, 2018

Kerstin: it’s much more useful to focus on shifting words already in Ss receptive vocab into productive use #iatefl2018

— Julie Moore (@lexicojules) April 12, 2018

I’m not sure exactly which talk this was from, apart from that it was part of the Materials Writing SIG showcase on Wednesday 11^th April, but it looks like it could be useful for working out how good a particular vocabulary activity is:

#IATEFL2018 #Mawsig #MaWSIGSIGSHOWCASE Ways of assessing vocab activities: Taken from How Vocabulary is Learned pic.twitter.com/zWxFh0Mr3s

— MaWSIG (@MaWSIG) April 11, 2018

Being critical

Here’s one way to promote inclusivity and a critical approach to materials use by students. I think it was from the talk entitled ‘Incorporating diversity: best practices for materials and/or the classroom’ by Ana Carolina Lopes:

1. Ask Ls to review a CB and see what is missing, then ask them to redesign a page themselves and make it more inclusive #iatefl2018

— Angelos Bollas (@angelos_bollas) April 10, 2018

John Hughes discussed critical thinking and higher order thinking skills for lower levels.

John Hughes shares simple sentences teachers can say in class to activate critical thinking in learners. #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/jleoxecWXS

— Cathryn Bennett (@Teaching_Cat) April 12, 2018

A1*, A2**, B1*** verbs to use in materials to move into higher order thinking for lower levels. #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/eplTOToA5Q

— Cathryn Bennett (@Teaching_Cat) April 12, 2018

Finally, Brita Fernandez Schmidt gave a plenary called ‘Knowledge is power: access to education for marginalised women’ which generated a lot of conversation. You can watch it here.

 

What else do you think I missed?

Why won’t they speak?!

Following on from Monday’s lesson, I deliberately made sure that my intermediate class today would have lots of opportunities to speak, starting immediately with the first activity. I hoped this would make a difference to the atmosphere in the room, and briefly, it did. After a while though, regardless of what I tried to do to get a response, it seemed that nobody wanted to say anything. I’d done everything ‘right’: put them in pairs, given them thinking time, played music (at their request) so they weren’t speaking into silence, suggested possible answers (yes, no, maybe for some questions), given them chance to make decisions (do you want to listen to anything again, or shall we move on?) and was generally greeted with silence, increasingly so as the lesson progressed. There were only 6 students, we’ve been working together since the end of September, and they seem to be quieter and quieter rather than more confident as the year goes on. They get on well with each other, and have been happy to speak to everyone else in class when we do mingling activities. I’d spoken to each of them individually during tutorials before our winter holiday in February, and talked about reasons to speak more and what might be stopping them. I know that none of them are particularly introverted in Polish and have regularly heard them conversing without any problems, even with people they don’t know. So what was stopping them?

I decided to ‘pause’ the lesson as we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. On the board I wrote a long list of possible reasons that could be stopping them from speaking, then stood in front of it and told them about my experience of learning Polish. I didn’t speak at all really during my first year, once I’d realised that I was mixing Czech, Russian and Polish and people couldn’t understand me. The turning point came when I went for a flamenco weekend. When people asked me conversational questions, I had two choices: ignore them and stay silent, or try to reply. Because I felt comfortable, I tried to reply, and this made me realise people could understand me, which was the kick-start I needed to start speaking. I haven’t really looked back since. I asked the students to look at the list of reasons on the board and write as many of them as necessary on paper I gave them, or any other reasons they may have for being reluctant to speak. Here are some of them (I probably had about 15 in all, but don’t remember them all now):

• I don’t know enough words.
• I’m worried about my grammar.
• I’m worried about my pronunciation.
• I’m not interested in the topics.
• I don’t have enough time to think.
• It’s too quiet in here.
• Sandy scares me – she puts too much pressure on us.
• I don’t have any ideas.

A couple of students mentioned being tired, and one said ‘Just a bad day’. Afterwards I asked them if they’d be comfortable sharing their feelings with their classmates. They agreed, so I put them in a circle and left the room, telling them they could choose whether to speak Polish or English, and suggesting they respond to each other, not just listing their ideas, telling each other whether they feel the same. They opted to have the discussion in Polish, and exchanged a little, though it was mostly monologuing. I could hear some of it from outside, but the background music and my intermediate Polish meant I couldn’t catch all of it.

When I returned to the room, I then spoke to them in my best Polish, saying something along the lines of ‘Language is communication. You’re here because you want to speak more, but if you come and sit in silence, then it’s just grammar, and you can do that at home. I’m making a lot of mistakes right now, but you can understand me, right? Grammar is not the important thing, communication is.’ I then switched into English and said that I’m tired too, and while I can try to give all 7 of us energy, it’s hard work and I need them to help me. I also explained a bit about the process of learning, going from knowing nothing to things being automatic, saying that some bits of their English are already automatic, things like using ‘I’ in the first person, or being able to spell ‘good’ or ‘bad’ without thinking about it. To help them make more things automatic, I need to be able to hear them so I can correct them if necessary, and they need to practise more.

We spent the last few minutes coming up with either/or debate topics, like cats or dogs, winter or summer, PC or PS…which they wrote all over the board. They will be the topics for a speaking assessment we’ll do next lesson, when I’ll see whether they can use the phrases for giving examples and expressing your opinion which were the actual topic of today’s lesson, as well as monitoring their interactive communication. They’ve got five days to think about what we discussed, practice the phrases and mentally prepare themselves for the assessment – I told them what it would involve and what they’d be marked on. I’ll be interested to see if any of this makes a difference…

At the end of the lesson, one of the students checked a bit of extra homework she’d done, and stayed for longer than the rest. I asked her if she thought this kind of discussion was useful, and she said she hoped it would help. She mentioned that at school, sitting in silence and listening to the teacher is considered respectful, and at uni you sit in silence because you’re taking notes, and you work out how to understand them later, so this is quite different for her now she’s an adult. As well as contained this idea to make me think, it was also the longest stretch of English I’ve heard from her all year. As I keep telling all of them, they’re much better than they think they are!

Discussing it with my colleagues afterwards, one suggested that it could also be because we’re at (I hope!) the tail end of winter, a lot of students have been ill recently, it’s still dark and pretty cold, and maybe that’s tipping over into a relative lack of enthusiasm in the classroom – it’s definitely reduced as the year has progressed. Another said it could be a good idea to ask them to have discussions in Polish first, then in English, which I’m certainly going to try. I’ve only ever used that strategy once or twice, and it’s always worked before. She also suggested getting them to set goals, even if it’s just ‘I’ll answer three questions in class before Easter.’ That fits in quite nicely with the topic of our next lesson.

Do you have any other thoughts or suggestions on this? I’m not sure I’ve ever had a class quite this silent before!

Teaching the same thing all over again (paragraph blogging)

This week I’ve taught six 90-minute classes at a company, working through needs analysis and getting examples of speaking and writing as we are working with them for the first time. I had the same plan for all six lessons, covering every level from elementary to advanced, but it panned out completely differently in each group. The general structure was:

• Students write questions for me and their teacher (who was observing and data collecting), then ask them.
• Annotate a copy of the contents page of the book they’ve been using for lessons before we started teaching them, to show which things they’ve done, what they’d like to do, and what they’d prefer to avoid.
• Individually, divide up 40 points between the speaking, listening, reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation to show their course priorities (an idea I adapted from Teaching English One-to-One [affiliate link] by Priscilla Osborne and now use all the time!). Write this on the back of the contents page.
• Write a paragraph about their job, roles and responsibilities, when/if/how they use English at work, their hobbies, and anything else they choose, also on the back of the contents.
• Extend the paragraph by finishing various sentence starters from a choice of 10, such as:
  • I prefer English lessons which…
  • I am confident/not confident about ____ in English because…
  • I generally have good/bad memories of learning English/Russian/German/… at school because…
  • A good English teacher…

Pretty straightforward, right? None of the lessons are encapsulated in that plan though! At various points this week, I (sometimes with my colleagues) have done error correction based on questions, looked at the grammar of questions in general, created indirect questions, discussed at length good places to visit in London, talked about the etymology of Wolverhampton and Chichester, discussed learning strategies and how to make English a habit, shared websites that can be used in addition to doing homework, explained various Polish/English differences, discovered all seven students in a single class prefer dogs to cats, encouraged (elementary) students to speak up so that I can give them feedback and then praised them a lot for speaking pretty much only English for 90 minutes, and probably many more things that I’ve forgotten. It’s a reminder, if one was needed, to teach the students, not the plan 🙂

Lady Wulfruna, the source of the name of Wolverhampton – Image by David Stowell [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Why I don’t have a smartphone (paragraph blogging)

This is my phone. It is frequently the butt of jokes, especially when people know about my online presence. And I don’t really care: I do not want or need a smartphone. I know that having one would actually cause me more problems than not having one in my life as it is at the momtent. My Nokia does everything I need it to: make calls, send texts, cost me a minimal amount of money (about 50 Polish zloty every three or four months or so, depending on how much I use it – that’s around £10/€12), only need recharging for a couple of hours once a week or so, fall apart when I drop it (about once a week!) and be easy to put together…and all for only £10 three and a half years ago. At one point, I did have a secondhand iPhone for a year, and it was undoubtedly useful. It got me started with recording my steps using a pedometer app, it got me into reading ebooks when I had to commute on the Tube during London 2012, and it can be useful to quickly check something when I’m out. But…I generally spend 5-7 hours a day at work on a computer, plus another 1-3 hours at home. Most weekends I probably spend a minimum of 6 hours each day in front of screen, and often more. I have an iPad (2, hence the photo quality above), a pedometer, a camera, an iPod shuffle, and a Macbook. I do not have any notifications switched on, and I try very hard to switch my computer off by 9:30pm in the evening if I’m not using it to watch a film on my projector. I look at social media when I want to, not when my phone dictates and my hormones respond by telling me I need a fix – and I still spend too much time scrolling. I do not need more screen time. On nights when I have switched off the computer in good time and had a couple of hours with no screen  before bed, I sleep better. Sometimes I get text messages like Google map links when people assume I have a smartphone, and sometimes I think maybe I should invest, but then I think I can’t be bothered with the mental effort of having to control my impulse to look at it all the time. Like not having chocolate at home, it’s easier just not to buy it in the first place! 

Inspired by Matt Noble

If you’re interested in breaking up with your phone, there’s an interesting interview with the author of a book of the same name on a recent Science Focus podcast (from 16:07 onwards) with tips on how to go about it.

Starting out

Yesterday we finished induction week for our teachers, including nine new to school, and five who are completely new to teaching. This, and Tyson Seburn’s recent post ‘Frosh me‘, made me think back to when I was just starting out. Depending on how strictly you define it, I could select a few different points to focus on.

I’ve been keeping a diary since I was 17, and now that I have my own flat, I’ve recently been reunited with my boxes of diaries again for the first time in many years. Writing this post was the perfect excuse to have a look back through some of them.

Malaysia

My first ever lesson was working with children in the jungle in Borneo. I got incredibly homesick while working there, and filled multiple notebooks in the 8 weeks I was in the village. If I could go back and do it again, I would spend a lot more time talking to the people in the village and getting to know them better. Instead I stayed in my room, wrote in my diary and cried a lot for most of the first three weeks. This wasn’t helped by us having absolutely no contact with the outside world, not even letters unless somebody was driving out to the local town which was 3 hours away – we got letters once in that time.

We had a couple of chances to observe classes before we started teaching. One of my main memories is watching a middle-aged male teacher use his knuckle to hit a little girl behind her ear when she couldn’t answer his questions. In my diary it says:

[B]’s english lesson was dire and he was amazed that the children didn’t understand – he hadn’t ever prepared his lesson!

I don’t seem to have mentioned the corporal punishment in my diary (not sure why) – it was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that, and it really shocked me. About seven weeks after that, my final two lessons with the two girls he taught and two others who joined them later made me cry because it was the first time I really knew that somebody had learnt something because I’d taught it to them. The memory still brings tears to my eyes.

Paraguay

Starting out in Paraguay during my year abroad from uni, I decided to take a photo of myself before my ‘first ever lesson’. I suspected I would be doing this for a while 😉

There’s some form of getting-to-know-you activity on the board behind me – no idea what. To the right of the board is something students asked me about pretty quickly. I assumed it was just another pretty picture, like the other posters in the classroom. A couple of months later I found out it was actually Adrian Underhill’s phonemic chart! Unfortunately the diary I wrote about this lesson in was in a bag which was stolen a few months later. What I do remember is that the class was 6:50-7:50 in the morning, and there were only three of us teaching at that time. It was a lovely group of students, ostensibly preparing for FCE, but probably about two levels lower if I were to placement test them today!

CELTA

My first day of CELTA was almost 10 years ago – I started it on 17th October 2007.

And so it starts…

I walked to Elvet for our first CELTA class. There are 8 of us: me, […]. We played some introduction games, then did some admin, including receiving our files. We met the students for about half an hour in a very noisy room (!), then discussed which groups we thought they should be in.

I don’t remember any of that! This is when I’m really glad that I write my diary 🙂

My first teaching practice was a week later, and I was first up:

The students didn’t arrive until 6:30, so I started about 6:35. There were 7 Japanese girls who came together, 2 Chinese women, a Ukrainian, a Yemeni woman, a Polish woman, and 2 Polish men called Przcemek! I had the first slot, doing the ‘small difference’ – everyone’s name on the board, on person goes out of the room, 2 swap places. […] Afterwards we had feedback – no major problems – and divided up our roles within the group.

I don’t remember that activity either, and don’t think I’ve ever done it since. It seems like it could be fun with low-level groups, especially with kids. These were pre-intermediate adults. I also know that it’s Przemek, not Przcemek now 🙂

Summer school

My CELTA was part-time during my final year of university, so that I would be ready to teach full time once I left. I had my graduation ceremony in Durham on Thursday, mum and I drove down south via Wolverhampton to drop off my things on Friday, induction for summer school started on Saturday, and our first lessons were on Monday. It was quite hectic, and I was a bit scared of teaching teenagers.

This was when I discovered just how small the EFL world can be. I had applied for jobs with IH at four different schools, which I had to put in priority order. I had no idea, so just picked at random. 1st was a school in a relatively small city in Poland (not Bydgoszcz!) that ran a young learners course, which I thought might be useful. 2nd was Brno, because it was still a small-ish city. 3rd was a capital city, and 4th was Odessa, purely because it was by the sea! On arrival at summer school, I discovered that two of my colleagues had worked at the Polish school previously and didn’t really like the town, so I wasn’t that disappointed when the school said they had all the teachers they needed. Two of my other colleagues were Czech, and from Brno. Everything they said about the city made me desperate to go there, so when I had my interview a week into summer school, I was really hoping to be successful. Thankfully I was, and I still have a very soft spot in my heart for the city – everything they told me was true!

Brno

Brno Cathedral on my first morning in the city

This is where I really feel like I started out – all of the other places feel like pre-cursors. This was a full-time, nine-month contract in a professional school. I was made to feel welcome as soon as I arrived, and still am every time I go back.

This morning I was up and ready pretty quickly. Mum and I got to Stansted at 11, had a drink, then did my check-in. They didn’t weigh my hand luggage so I added in my extra books. We had lunch at O’Neills. I went through security at 12:50, luckily very quickly as I had just realised boarding should have closed at 13:10 – not that they started letting us on until 13:15 – and after I’d run too! :s Apart from that, the flight was uneventful and we landed 5 mins early.

As we flew in, the main thing that struck me was how many trees and wooded areas there are around the city – might even get me walking more! [It didn’t much!] SV, the school director, met me at the apart [sic!] and drove me to my new home. A flat (13) in a red block in the Vinohrady area of the city – think the street is Mutenicka. She gave me a map of the city and showed me where the school and flat and how to travel between them.

[Note – I’m disappointed in the level of my English here – must have been tired!]

The next day:

I left at 8:15 to walk into Brno – it took 55 mins – a bit too long to be a regular occurence! I found the school, wandered around the city, found the cathedral & then went shopping at Tesco – very confusing as it had 4 floors & you had to pay separately on each :s I went back to school and was introduced to I and E in the office, P & Magdalena? [It wasn’t!] I went for lunch with P, & she then took me to Vodafone to buy a SIM card. I couldn’t work out where to get the tram from so got it from the first stop outside the centre, then had to get off as roadworks meant it was going an unusual route. I tried out my Czech, but had to rely on the pointing rather than the answer.

I’m so pleased I wrote about it in this much detail (though you might not be!) It brings back my feelings of disorientation, and the little things that I found so challenging. That was the first time I’d been to a country where I wasn’t already at least intermediate level in the language, so it was a huge challenge for me when I’d been used to at least being able to get my basic message across. It really motivated me to try and learn more Czech as soon as I could!

Induction started a couple of days later. This is what I wrote at the end of my diary entry for that day:

I’m now exhausted and have information overload!

Our Brno induction was just three days, and in Bydgoszcz our teachers have a week. I feel for them 🙂 On Thursday (two days ago as I write this) I gave the teachers their timetables, having run around like crazy for most of the day to get them finished. The session immediately before they get their timetables is an activity swapshop which everyone contributes to, which was inspired by my first week at IH Brno. Most of the teachers new to the school seemed pretty nervous when they came to see me, whereas the returners were very calm. Here’s what happened when I got my timetable in Brno:

The afternoon started with the other half of the swapshop, then a meeting with other teachers doing the same intensive courses. [Students had 3 hours a day, Monday to Friday, with a different teacher each day] I”ll be doing KET on Monday afternoon, which means they’ll be absolute beginners (!), followed by FCE on Tuesday morning. We then had to wait for ages to get our timetables. I replied to stuff on facebook, hung around for a bit, went to get a holepunch [all the important things!], then ended up having a manic hour between 5 & 6 when I got my timetable, went to the copy shop to get copies of my passport photo, went to the transport shop with D to get my travel pass and got my books from the office. It sounds simple, but in reality involved climbing 2 flights of stairs about 10 times, coupled with a lot of manic stress. I got it all in the end through, as well as my local health insurance card.

I find it odd that I wrote far more about the manic hour than about my timetable. I guess I had no real idea what any of the classes meant for me, apart from the absolute beginners, which I was clearly a bit worried about. I had remembered the waiting, but not the ensuing crazy hour or two. Hopefully it wasn’t quite the same for our teachers – maybe they’ll tell me if they read this 😉 I also had no idea that the swapshop I remember so well from Brno had also been almost immediately before we got our timetables – there’s a funny kind of symmetry.

The second weekend involved another learning curve:

After lunch I put some washing on, which took ages as we [my flatmate and I] couldn’t work the machine. I planned FCE, interspersed with monitoring the washing. It eventually turned out that the machine wouldn’t spin, so my clothes are stuck in it. There was a burning rubber smell, and I have a nasty feeling the fan belt might have broken. I phoned S, not expected her to be able to do anything, and she hasn’t replied yet.

Neither of us had ever encountered a top-loading washing machine before, and we had no idea you were supposed to lock the drum before switching on the machine. The result: it did half a spin, tipped all my clothes out, got stuck, and tried to continue. That was a valuable life lesson as I’ve lived with many similar machines since! 🙂

My first class was with a 121 student. I was driven out to the car showroom he owned, about 20 minutes from the centre. For the whole journey, I remember wondering why this 50-something successful businessmen should listen to me, 23, fresh out of uni, and just embarking on this career. I didn’t mention any of those feelings in my diary though, only that:

He needs a lot of work on accuracy when speaking, but is generally a pretty good communicator.

He ended up being one of my favourite students, and I taught him for three years. 🙂

In sum

It’s been fascinating looking back at my old diaries and seeing what I did and didn’t choose to write about. There are lots of little life lessons scattered in just these few incidents, some of which I’d remembered when and where I learnt them, others that I’d completely forgotten.

What do you remember about your first day(s)?

Questions

As an experienced language learner, I know that it’s important for me to speak as much as possible in order to improve my language. That can be easier said than done though (no pun intended).

Since I came back to Poland after a few weeks away this summer, I’ve noticed I’m much more confident when speaking Polish. There’s been a real difference in my interactions, which I think marks a step change in my progress. Reading Scott Thornbury’s recent post W is for (language learning in) the Wild, I finally realised what this difference is: questions.

Let me explain.

In my first year in Poland, I went through somewhat of a silent period. Having previously learnt Czech and Russian really helped my understanding of Polish, since they are all Slavic languages. However, it meant that whenever I spoke, it was some kind of weird mix of all three languages, and people often struggled to understand me. Without realising what was happening, I mostly stopped trying to interact, and would switch to English whenever I knew it was possible.

Last summer, I went for a weekend away with organised by my flamenco teacher in Bydgoszcz. At least half of the people on the trip couldn’t speak English, but they were curious about why I was there, and wanted to share their own experiences of English and/or the UK – many of them have family who live there. They were also very patient with me, and supported my efforts to communicate.

A few fellow flamenco learners in the beautiful surroundings of Gzin

A couple of weeks after that I moved into my new flat, and shared it for six weeks with the previous owners, who didn’t speak English. I’ve written previously about that experience of immersion and how much it helped my confidence.

Despite these positive experiences, I still felt like I could only make statements, or follow where my conversation partner led.

Now I’ve realised that I’ve started to be able to instigate conversations too, because I’ve begun to experiment with asking questions. I’m still not hugely confident with the grammar of questions, and mostly stick to question words and rising intonation, but I now feel like I can steer what’s happening or fill lulls in the conversation when my conversation partner has run out of things to ask. It also now feels rather less like the Spanish inquisition.

What particularly made me think in Scott’s post was the fact that the Japanese hitchhiker he describes had been prompted to use a particular list of questions by his English teacher. Maybe I should come up with a list of Polish questions that I can use in a variety of situations, to help improve my confidence and make it easier to start conversations.

Have you ever done anything like that with your students? What kind of questions would you include on the list?

Going through the attic

Over the long May bank holiday weekend I’ve spent a lot of time in the attic of the house I grew up in, finding all kinds of ‘treasures’ and things I’d completely forgotten about. This page was in a notebook which I think I was writing in while I was working in a factory in Germany during the summer of 2003. It shows a list of things I wanted to do at that point in time – I’ve clearly long been into writing lists of goals!

Looking back on the list of things that I prioritised as an 18 year old, some things haven’t changed:

• I still want my (hypothetical) kids to speak more than one language.
• I would love to find a partner.
• One day, I’ll add playing an instrument to my daily habits, and I’ll make some form of progress with it.
• Australia is still a dream destination, though now I think it’s topped by New Zealand, Japan, China, South Korea… looks like I’ll just have to do a tour of East Asia and Down Under 🙂
• I’d like to be able to ride a horse, though I’m not quite sure my body will be up to it. At some point, I’ll have a go and see what happens!

I’ve achieved three things:

• I teach 🙂
• I’ve bought a flat – it has two floors, so it’s almost a house 😉
• I own a Traveller’s Atlas.

Some things are highly unlikely:

• See Will & Grace be recorded – although they’re returning for a new series, I’m pretty sure I won’t have enough time or money to make it over there!
• Go to a Robbie Williams concert – again, money and time make it unlikely, though maybe, just maybe…
• Have a company in Germany. I love the country, but I didn’t know about the rest of Central Europe back then 🙂 Also not sure I can be bothered with the stress of owning my own company!

I’m part-way there with a couple of them:

• I finished my degree, but clearly didn’t know that a Masters normally comes before a doctorate 😉 Not sure if I’m enamoured enough of studying to pursue that one through to it’s conclusion, but you never know. I have a tendency to get bored and then agree to things that I occasionally regret when I’m in the middle of them!
• At one point at the end of my degree, I was C1 level in three languages, French, German and Spanish. Pretty sure that counts as fluent 🙂 And I’ve made a start with quite a few others…

And I don’t really remember what these were for:

• Japanese business: I’m pretty sure I never intended to be part of a Japanese business. Maybe I just wanted to keep learning about some of their management techniques which I’d been introduced to at school?
• Psychology: I’m guessing that’s something else I wanted to find out more about. I should probably rekindle that interest, especially following Sarah Mercer’s IATEFL 2017 plenary.

So there you have it: proof that dreams don’t just come true, they evolve and develop 🙂 What do you think your 18-year-old self dreamt of that you’ve achieved now? And what is still a work in progress?

Behind the scenes

tekhnologic commented on 100: Behind the Scenes of Tekhnologic.

in response to Sandy Millin:

A fascinating post, and I completely agree with Svetlana. Your blog is truly inspiring! Here’s to the next few hundred posts 🙂

Thank you Sandy. Let’s see if I can make it to two hundred first! Will you join #ELTbehindthescenes and share with us what goes into making your blog?

How could I refuse? Thanks for the invitation T!

Last week I put together a series of posts about the IATEFL Glasgow 2017 conference. It’s something I’ve started to do every year, and every year I forget just how long it takes 😉

While I’m at the conference I tweet throughout any and all of the talks that I go to, providing I can connect to the wifi. This is for two reasons:

1. As notes to download later ready to put together my posts
2. To help other people feel like part of the conference: I started out on the receiving end of the tweet stream, and I know how lucky I am to be there.

Here are some fascinating graphs from TweetStats that show you when I’m at conferences 🙂

Tweets per day in the last year

Guess when the conference was

If the wifi’s not working, then I use the iPad Notes app, but still write as if I’m tweeting.

I’ve been tweeting throughout conferences for six years now, and it feels fairly automatic. I’m also pretty quick now 🙂 I can take most of it in, but obviously I don’t always notice everything, so that’s where it’s handy when other people are tweeting from the same talk. I also look at the conference hashtag regularly to retweet things from other talks that I’m interested in.

After the conference, I look back at the list of talks I went to using my paper daily planners, and categorise them, so for example this year I had Listening and Pronunciation, Teacher Training, Materials Writing… It’s the first time I spot what the main themes of my conference were. I set up a draft post for each theme, plus ones for Miscellaneous, Things I Missed, and a summary to bring all the posts together.

I use Tweetdownload to get a .txt and a .html file of my tweets. I start with the .txt file open from the beginning of the conference/the bottom of the stream, deleting tweets as I put them into the relevant blogposts. If I want to embed a tweet or follow a link, I use CMD+F to find it on the .html file. Clicking the tweet in the Tweetdownload file automatically opens the original on Twitter. This is when the learning happens, as I have to organise my thoughts into something coherent and logical. It’s also when I go down a lot of rabbit holes, following up on things that I didn’t have time to investigate during the conference itself.

Normally I only have a handful of tabs open in my browser, but when I’m writing up the IATEFL posts, it’s a bit different:

The top right window has all of my posts. Bottom right is the Tweetdownload .html file, and a tweet I’m getting ready to embed. Bottom left is the .txt file to delete things as I write them. Top right has everything else, like the British Council IATEFL links for me to find videos, Amazon if I want to put in affiliate links (the only way I make any money from this), and various other things that I can’t remember now.

Because there were so many tabs open, I didn’t switch my computer off overnight, something I normally do religiously. It would have been too much faff to open them all again! This time round, it took me about five hours on Monday, and thirteen or fourteen on Tuesday to write everything up. It must always take me that long, but I’ve never really noticed it before!

I think in the past I’ve done one theme at a time and looked for the tweets for the relevant talk, so I’ve published the posts as I go along. This year I published them all simultaneously, apart from the last one, so that I could put the live links onto the summary straight away.

So there you have it: that’s how I turn just under 1000 tweets into 8 blog posts. 🙂

If you blog, I’d be fascinated to hear something about how you go about it. Let’s find out more about #ELTbehindthescenes

IATEFL Glasgow 2017: In sum

These are all of the posts I’ve written about IATEFL Glasgow 2017:

• Materials writing
• Teacher training
• In the classroom
• Continuous professional development
• Listening and pronunciation
• Miscellaneous
• The things I missed

If you’d like to watch other talks and interviews from the conference, there are a few recordings available:

• IATEFL Online
• Cambridge ELT
• YouTube videos by participants on teacher research for difficult circumstances

My first IATEFL conference was Glasgow 2012, and it’s interesting to reflect on how much I’ve grown and changed as both a teacher and a person since then.

The IATEFL conference is the best week of my year every year, partly because my IATEFL family just keeps growing.

Baby shower at #iatefl2017 for our Eleanor! Congratulations 🙂 pic.twitter.com/vCEUL2kqer

— IATEFL (@iatefl) April 6, 2017

These are still two of my favourite photos of my PLN, both from Glasgow 2012:

The PLN after my talk

Lunch with some of the PLN (photo by Chia Suan Chong)

It’s wonderful to be able to keep bumping into so many people who I know online in the rest of the year as the conference continues, and to meet a whole lot of new people, all of whom are passionate about the job they are doing and learning about how to get better at it.

Generally I find the conference a much more relaxed affair than when I first attended, as I’ve taken a lot of pressure off myself to try and attend absolutely everything, instead going with the flow and listening to how my body feels: there’s a limit to how long you want to sit in a stream of windowless rooms lit by fluorescent strip lighting before you need to go outside! I’ve also learnt to book accommodation as early as possible, and as close to the conference site as possible, making it much easier to pop back and get rid of heavy books and things before the evenings.

The kind of talks I’ve chosen to attend have changed gradually, as there are now more materials writing, management and training talks, reflecting the development in my career, but I still enjoy learning practical ideas for the classroom too, especially since these are the easiest to pass on to my colleagues when I return to school. I’ve also found myself more and more interested in corpora, listening and task-based learning, partly as a result of going to previous sessions on all of these topics at IATEFL.

The International Quiz night and the Pecha Kucha are my two favourite evening events at each IATEFL, and I’ve now been lucky enough to take part in the PK twice, first at Harrogate in 2014, and this year at Glasgow as part of the debate team. Phil Longwell talks about the 2017 PK evening in his post, including a recording of Marisa Constantinides. Shay Coyne was kind enough to record this year’s first ever IATEFL PK debate for your viewing pleasure:

Since last year, I’ve been on the IATEFL Membership and Marketing Committee, as part of which I curate the IATEFL blog. Here’s an interview from the conference where I talk about the blog and how you can write for it.

I’m also (I hope!) better at summarising my experience of the IATEFL conference each year. The first time round, there was an emotional and a functional post, and I don’t think I really processed what I’d tweeted. This time, it’s taken me about two days/at least sixteen hours to go through all of my tweets and go down a lot of rabbit holes (!) to put together my summaries of the week, but I feel I’ve gained a lot more from the process than I did the first time round, and I hope readers of my blog have too!

Roll on Brighton 2018!

2016: things I’ve enjoyed this year

After a year that has come across as pretty negative in many ways, it seems like a good idea to focus on the positives that have been thrown in my direction. Here are some of the things I’ve enjoyed in 2016:

Reading other people’s blogs

It feels like Elly Setterfield (aka The Best Ticher) has been blogging forever, but it turns out that she only started out in March 2016. In that time, she has produced various gems, including but not limited to beginner’s guides to teaching kids, teens and beginners, a series of posts about surviving summer school, and tips on some of the non-teaching aspects of being an EFL teacher, like what (not) to pack for your first job, avoiding illness, and spending Christmas abroad. They are full of useful, easy-to-understand tips. I also had the great pleasure of meeting Elly last week. We spent nearly three hours chatting, and it could have easily been much more 🙂

Teresa Bestwick has moved back into teaching from management this year, and has chosen a different area to focus on every fortnight for her professional development. Each Fortnightly Focus is a post on her blog, and has given me lots of ideas for how I could work on my own teaching and to pass on to my colleagues. It’s definitely something I’d like to play with if and when I ever return to a classroom full-time.

It’s always worth reading Michael Griffin’s blog. His series entitled ‘Please teach them English‘ was prompted by an initial post he wrote, then continued with the help of a few guest writers. It looked at the clash between teaching English and 21st century skills from the perspective of a teacher, a language school manager and two different students in the ‘class’. As well as the fact that it was thought-provoking, I particularly enjoyed the unusual form, as it was written as a series of emails and diary entries.

Laughing at YouTube

I’d never really watched that many videos on YouTube, but this year that changed. When I’m looking for five minutes of laughter, I find myself heading over to watch clips of James Corden and co., listen to interviews with Benedict Cumberbatch or relive old Kermodian rants. Here are a few of my favourites:

Attending conferences

Two conferences particularly stood out for me this year.

IATEFL is always the highlight of my year, and this one was especially good for me because it was in Birmingham, just 20 minutes away from where I grew up. As well as learning a lot (as always!), I got to relive memories of my childhood and share them with my friends. Here’s a video made by the organisers that gives a taste of the 50th anniversary conference:

TWIST 2016 was organised by the LangLTC school in Warsaw in November. It was probably the most representative conference I’ve ever been to, with what I considered to be an appropriate balance of male/female, native/non-native, theory/practical across their programme. It was also great to be able to introduce some of my colleagues to teaching conferences for the first time.

Going to the cinema

For the past couple of years I’ve had an unlimited card from my local cinema, which has enabled me to see a whole range of things. Particular highlights were:

• Arrival

• Zootopia (though I’d like to see it again in English!)

• Deadpool (which also allowed me to Vancouver-spot!)

Learning

This year I’ve been able to make massive strides in my Polish, progressing to what I would guess is around low B1 level. A couple of months ago I decided to return to Mandarin as well, largely thanks to memrise. Having a few other people who are using the site and seeing their points each week is motivating me to do more – clearly I’m a sucker for some aspects of game-based learning!

2016 has also been the year when I’ve finally started to get a handle on task-based learning, something I’ve always wanted to find out more about but never really had time to. I dived into the world of MOOCs, and the Coursera one about TBL and reading started me off with really investigating TBL. I’m now reading Doing Task-Based Teaching [affiliate link] by Dave and Jane Willis to deepen my understanding, and am hoping to experiment with some of what I’ve learnt once I’m back in the classroom.

Working abroad

I’ve been lucky enough to take my first trips to Italy and Kazakhstan this year, both helped along thanks to people I’ve previously met (thanks Marcus, Julie and Iryna!) This enabled me to experience the beauty of Italy…

View from the Duomo terraces, Milan

Varenna on Lake Como

Bergamo from San Vigilio

Venice – gondola and coloured entrance

Verona – view from Castel San Pietro

…and the warmth of the hospitality of Kazakhstan.

Hopefully it won’t be the last time I go to either place!

At home

Exploring Poland has also led me to further appreciate how under-appreciated it is. A few days in Gdansk and Sopot with my friend showed me some of its beauty:

Even closer to home, it’s been a pretty momentous year for me as I became the owner of my very own flat, something which I wasn’t sure would ever happen. Now I finally have somewhere to put all of those ‘things for my future house’ I’ve been collecting on my travels…I just have to get them over to Poland from the UK!

But probably the biggest joy is watching my cousin and friends whose families are expanding. It may sometimes feel like my facebook stream is full of babies and small children, but quite frankly that’s infinitely preferable to some of the negativity that it’s been filled with at certain points in the year (and yes, I have been guilty of adding to this). When you see the pride and joy of a new parent, and the happiness of a child exploring and experiencing the freshness of the world, it’s hard to stay negative for long. The Internet can be a wonderful place.

So that’s my New Year’s Resolution: focus on the positives in life, and notice myself enjoying them. When it all gets a bit too much, move away, and come back to a post like this to remind myself of all of the things in life that are there to enjoy. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you who read this blog, and thank you for your support!

500 (+1)

About two weeks ago I shared something without realising it was the 500th post to appear on this blog. Wow! That’s quite a scary thought.

Thank you to everyone who’s supported me throughout, to the people who’ve offered me advice on how to improve my blog, pointed out my typos, shaped my teaching ideas, shared and commented on my posts, and to those of you who are reading all of this stuff that I write. I find it constantly amazing and humbling to know that so many people have spent time visiting and using my blog. It started out as a way of building up a professional presence online (that seems to have worked!) and of sharing some of my assignments from my IH Certificate in Advanced Methodology. It’s developed into a place to share activities, offer advice (hmmm…), and appreciate my luck in being part of this career and this community. Although I haven’t managed to write as many posts over the last year, I’ve still got a lot of ideas, and I keep hoping I’ll be able to put more of them out there.

Here are a few stats for you:

• 500 posts
• 350 views/220 visitors so far today
• 825,948 all-time views
• 440,570 all-time (or at least since they started counting) visitors
• 11,180 views on 1st May 2014, my best views ever in a single day (on a post I didn’t even write!)
• 31 comments by Rachel Daw, my number 1 commenter!
• 1,493 subscribed followers/606 WordPress followers (no idea how much of that crosses over…)
• Useful links for CELTA: my most popular post this year (ever?)
• And the one I find the most breathtaking: countries people have visited from in 2016 (white means no visitors from there so far):

Thank you so much to everyone who has made this possible!

On immersion

For the past six weeks or so I have been sharing a flat with a couple who only speak a few words of English and German. When I moved in my Polish was probably hovering around A2, having received a boost over the summer from my reading, writing and use of a grammar book. I was still quite hesitant about speaking, and had only really started to build my confidence during a weekend away organised by my flamenco teacher, again with a few people who didn’t speak any English but who still wanted to communicate with me. Both the people on the flamenco weekend and the couple I was living with were great interlocutors for me, patient, happy to rephrase and repeat themselves as much as necessary, and supporting me in trying to communicate my ideas. The woman I lived with was also very good at correcting me consistently which had a massive impact on my grammar.

One of two kittens entertaining us when we weren’t dancing flamenco 🙂

Six weeks on, it’s like I’m a different person. I feel like my Polish is probably now into B1. I can speak about most everyday things, my accuracy has improved in quite a few areas, and my confidence is at similar levels to my much stronger languages. I’m not normally shy about pushing myself to speak, which is why the last year has been so strange for me as I was very reluctant to speak Polish if I didn’t have to. I felt like I didn’t really know what language I was speaking in, and it was a real mix of Polish, Czech and Russian. I’m very glad to be past that point, and feel like I’m now in a very good place to continue improving.

On reflection, I’m also wondering whether having such a long (almost) silent period has also helped me to speak more fluently and more confidently at this point than at the same point with other languages. A year of building my vocabulary and listening to and reading whatever I could has certainly helped me improve my understanding, and I feel it’s also made me more accurate when I finally did speak, although I’m sure Czech and Russian probably also had something to do with it.

This is the most conscious I’ve ever been of my speaking progress, as I’ve either already been at least B2 when I’ve been immersed in a language, or I haven’t been in a complete immersion situation for more than a couple of hours at a time. Six weeks of having to speak Polish most mornings and evenings for at least a few minutes meant I had no choice but to communicate. Talking about things which were relevant to me and trying to explain things which had happened during a very eventful few weeks, sometimes with Mr. Google’s help, extended my language and provided a huge amount of motivation.

I know that it’s theoretically possible to create similar situations through the use of Skype conversation partners for example, but I’ve never had the motivation to do it before, confident that I’d eventually learn as much as I needed to through constantly plugging away at the language. After this experience of immersion, I think I might try harder to recreate it with the next language I want to study (not sure what yet!)

I’ve only had two or three Polish lessons, and I’m wondering just how much and how accurately I can learn without having any, even though I know I definitely want some at some point as I need correction. Watch this space…

On leadership and teamwork

Zhenya has just posted her answers to the 11 questions challenge (Thanks! See mine here and here) and posed some of her own, including three which I’d like to respond to here.

Have you ever tried to lead a team of people? If yes, what are your impressions and learning? If no, would you like to (one day)?

I’ve now been working as a Director of Studies for two years in two very different schools. The first was small, with only a handful of part-time teachers and one other full-time teacher (the school Director) besides me. Most of the time I was teaching full-time as well as being the DoS. The second has about 20 teachers, including me, and I only teach for a couple of hours a week. I work in close collaboration with two ADoSes and the school Director.

I had an excellent induction, but have also learnt an incredible amount on the job, not least in the last two weeks. It has not just taught me about what it takes to manage a language school, but also about working with a team of diverse personalities, and about my own personality. It has shown me how I and my team respond to a crisis (or five!), how everybody’s personalities and characters can complement each other to complete a team and also how sometimes there are things I just don’t or can’t notice which I need other people to be willing to share with me.

It’s not an easy job, but it’s not impossible either, and the challenges it throws at me keep me interested and invigorated, if a little tired at times 😉

When do you think someone is ready to be a leader of a team?

Not long after becoming a full-time DoS, I wrote some advice for people considering moving into management. It includes a series of questions you can use to help you decide whether you are ready to be a manager.

For me, it’s important for a leader to have experience of being part of a team or environment similar to the one they are managing in. That way they are much more likely to be able to empathise with their team. If they are ready to learn what it takes to be an effective leader, then they are probably ready to become a leader. If they think they know it all already, then I would probably steer clear!

What’s your best tip on working with people?

Communicate.

And remember that part of communicating is listening.

Without good channels of communication, it’s impossible to work effectively with people. There will always be rumours, backbiting and negative comments if people don’t understand what is going on and why.

You also need to be willing to listen when members of your team have something they want to tell you, whether it’s positive or negative (and let’s face it, it’s usually negative). Don’t get defensive or be accusatory – let them talk, and find out what they need from you. Sometimes it’s just to let off steam. Sometimes they don’t know what they need, and you need to help them work towards finding out.

Another part of communication is about being open to the world around you. By learning more, you will be able to connect more easily and effectively with more people, which will hopefully benefit both you and them. By being open, team members are also more likely to be willing to share those things with you which you can’t see, as I mentioned above.

How would you answer Zhenya’s questions?

Things I’ve learnt about my teaching this week

This week I have taught:

• 3 hours with my new upper intermediate adult class (who are actually mostly older teens);
• 3 hours of cover with a low A1 kids’ group;
• 2 hours with a 121 who I’ve been working with over the summer;
• 3 hours of cover repeating the same lesson with two different high A1 adult groups.

This is easily the most teaching I’ve done in a single week for over two years, since I started out as a CELTA tutor and then a DoS. It’s also probably the largest number of students I’ve had contact with in a week since I finished my Delta. While it’s been pretty tiring on top of my DoS responsibilities, it’s also been very invigorating, and has helped me to realise a few things about how my teaching has developed over the last couple of years of self-reflection and training others.

I never used to enjoy teaching kid’s classes. Despite knowing the theory of how to approach them, I could never put it into practice. I’ve now spent a year working in an environment where there is a lot of training for teaching kids and teens, with teachers who are great examples to learn from, as well as tried and tested routines and discipline systems which are used across the school. I was also the local tutor for a teacher doing the IHCYLT for teaching young learners and teens. This was useful revision, as it’s six years since I finished mine. I discovered that I now really enjoy these lessons 🙂 It’s been a long time coming! Having the security of routines wasn’t just good for the kids: it also meant that I knew what to do at any given time in the lesson, especially for the all-important beginning and end of the lesson. It probably helped that it was a relatively small group, but I felt in control throughout the lesson, and felt that my plan was right for the level and interests of the kids. This is a huge step forward for me, and I’m even considering timetabling myself for a kids’ class next academic year, something I was very reluctant to do before (!)

Another area where I’ve noticed a massive improvement is my activity set-up and instructions. This is particularly important for lower levels, and between the four lessons I taught with them last week, I only had one activity where the students didn’t understand what I wanted them to do. This was entirely my fault, as I knew it would be a potentially complicated activity, and I hadn’t thought through the instructions carefully enough, but I managed to rescue the situation pretty quickly through a demonstration, which is what I should have done to start off with. Although I still forget them sometimes, demos have now become much more natural for me, and have led to a massive decrease in the amount of time I spend setting up activities and solving problems when the students don’t understand what to do.

With the upper intermediate group, I also set up a series of routines right from the first lesson. One of these is journal writing, and another is extensive reading, something which I already knew was useful, but now understand more of the theory behind thanks to the Coursera course I’ve just completed.

My 121 student showed me that my language awareness is now pretty comprehensive, as I was able to deal with pretty much any language question she threw at me without having to look it up. When I did need to use a reference tool, I was able to confidently access a corpus, something which I had no idea how to do a couple of years ago. I also managed to explain some of the fundamentals of grammar based on what Lewis says in The English Verb [affiliate link] using this diagram, something which I’d like to develop more in the future – this one was created on the spur of the moment!

The way that my own teaching has come on makes me feel much more confident about supporting all of the teachers I’m working with. We’ve got another exciting year ahead at IH Bydgoszcz, and another great team. I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes us.

The pains of being abroad

I have been so homesick that it hurt three times in my life.

The first was in Germany when I was 18 and working in a factory for six weeks at the beginning of my gap year. I was staying with a family friend, but two weeks after I arrived, she went back to the UK for the summer, as she did every year, leaving me alone in her house. She’d introduced me to a few people in the tiny Bavarian village she lived in, but it was during the 2003 drought, absurdly hot and with only 30 minutes rain during the whole time I was there, so I didn’t really want to go outside once I got home from work. I stayed in the house as much as I could, and ended up being by myself all the time. The only way I got through the day doing the dullest job I’ve ever done was the thought that at about 6pm every evening I could watch Will and Grace, one of my favourite programmes at the time, plus occasionally being on the same job in the factory as someone my age, who unfortunately lived in a completely different place and was impossible to meet up with after work. On the last weekend I finally did a bit of exploring, visiting Regensburg by myself. I wish I’d discovered I could go off on adventures by myself earlier, but I’ve certainly never forgotten it!

The second time was a few months later, working at a jungle school in a (very) rural village for the second half of a four-month volunteering trip to Borneo. I was there with two other girls my age who had been in the jungle with me. Unfortunately I didn’t get on very well with one of them, and the second one became more and more like the first as our seven weeks in the village went on. They spent all of their time together. I only had 8 hours of teaching a day, and spent a long time planning, but once I did that I didn’t have much to do to fill my time. Instead I shut myself in my room with the fan on (when the electricity generator was working: during school hours and 7-10p.m. every night) and wrote pages and pages in my diary, consisting mostly of lists of things I would do when I got back home, and all of the things I missed. Sometimes I would use my book to try and learn some Bahasa Malay, but I spent very little time with the people in the village unless we were explicitly invited to their houses.

The third and final time (I hope) was in Paraguay. I worked there from July 2006 to June 2007 as part of my year abroad from university during my languages degree. I’d decided to go to South America and France, but also need to practise my German. I knew there were a lot of Mennonite and other Germans in Paraguay, so wanted to find a German family to live with. The first person I found fell through in November, and my (very) split shifts meant that I’d had huge trouble making friends beyond the three people I went with, who had all found their own friends by this stage. Skype was only just starting to grow, and I couldn’t really speak to my family much and the bandwidth wasn’t good enough for video. It was the year that facebook was opened out to the world, proving very important to me, but it didn’t really become popular until the end of my time in Paraguay. This was my longest ever period of homesickness, lasting about a month. I was very disillusioned by Paraguay, sad that I wouldn’t be able to go home for Christmas, and feeling incredibly lonely. So what did I do? I stayed at home, cried, and generally felt sorry for myself.

In both Borneo and Paraguay, I managed to turn it around, and ended up crying my eyes out at the end because I didn’t want to leave. In both cases, this was because I found ways to fill my time and crush my homesickness. In Borneo, this was by helping the kids and the other two English teachers at the school to create a snakes and ladders board:

In Paraguay it was by finally finding a German-speaking family, starting classes at the Goethe Institute, and helping to sort out the resources in the school library.

The most important thing, though, was that I had to stop wallowing in the feeling, tell people about it, and go out and do something about it. Since then I have never really felt homesick for more than a day at a time. It’s never possible to completely avoid the feeling, especially if things aren’t going well at home, and you can’t be there, but you can reduce the likelihood of it striking. Remember: you are not alone, you are not the only person who feels/has felt like this, and you are not impinging on other people if you tell them how you’re feeling. Good luck!

This post was inspired by Elly Setterfield’s post Teaching English Abroad: What if I hate it? which is full of great advice for new teachers. I highly recommend reading her blog. Thanks Elly!

Two years as a CELTA tutor

Having written a post about my first year as a full-time DoS a few days ago, it occurred to me that this time two years ago I was training up as a CELTA tutor, and that it would be interesting to write a similar post about that journey. Then I realised I’d kind of already done that by reflecting on a year of CELTA 🙂 It turns out I’d already mentioned a few things that being a CELTA tutor has taught me, but here are some that I missed:

• The mix of personalities in a TP group (the group of up to 6 teachers who observe each other and work together in teaching practice – real lessons) can make a real difference to how you need to work with them, and tutors need to learn to read this, as well as how to support the individuals and encourage them to work together as a group.
• A lot of trees are sacrificed during a CELTA course, and many of these end up in trainees’ folders, which are often a good three or four inches (7-10cm!) thick by the end of the course.  Input session notes should therefore be as concise and easy to navigate as possible, and trainees should be encouraged (or sometimes told how!) to file them in a logical order. Sometimes it’s amazing to see how challenging organising a set of handouts can be for some people!
• There may be a lot of right ways to do things as a teacher, but the amount of information overload on a CELTA course means that for some trainees it’s often better to give them only one option, walk them through it step-by-step, and let them see the results, before offering them other options later if they have the mental processing space with everything else they’re being asked to take in. Otherwise it can get too overwhelming. Simplify.
• Whenever possible, showing concrete examples of things you’re suggesting is much easier for trainees to take in than abstract talk. This particularly seems to apply to requesting a more detailed lesson plan: showing trainees what to aim for tends to result in much more solid planning, and in turn, much more confidently delivered and useful lessons.
• The CELTA is as much of a learning experience for the tutors as it is for the trainees. Through reflection and experience, we can become better tutors, but we also learn a lot from our trainees, who bring so much life experience to courses. For example, on the course I’ve just finished I learnt about daily life in South Africa, something I knew very little about before.

I’ve only done two courses over the last year, one part-time in Warsaw and one full-time in Milan.

View from the Duomo terraces, Milan

I’ve also worked with a lot of teachers who are either fresh off CELTA or in their second year after the course, including doing formal observations. This has really shown the importance of the caveat (which should appear) on CELTA certificates that the candidate can ‘teach with support’. Although it seems to be forgotten sometimes, CELTA is an initial training course, and those who are newly-qualified continue to need support and development, particularly for the first year or two of their careers when they are building on what they have learnt. I’m lucky to work at a school which gives me the time and space to be able to really support our teachers in this way. An interviewer expressed surprise that one of our teachers only got a CELTA Pass when asking me for a reference for her, because she was so confident after her two years with us that the interviewer thought she must have got at least a Pass B, if not an A 🙂

The combination of these factors, plus having a bit more time to ‘play’ when preparing sessions, and often having 45- or 60-minute input sessions instead of the more standard 75 also meant that for the course in Milan I tried to make my input sessions more streamlined (as well as working on my feedback) and my handouts more useful both during and after the course. I always email them to trainees as well as giving them a paper copy, as I know that a huge binder is not normally a priority in your luggage if you’re moving around from place to place! I’m hoping to share more about how I design my input sessions in a future post.

In the meantime, here’s to another few years of learning and training 🙂

My first year as a full-time DoS

I saw this quote on Jane Cohen’s blog a few days ago, and feel like it sums up my job at IH Bydgoszcz pretty perfectly, as well as being from one of the managers I admire most.

When my predecessor, Tim, first mentioned the possibility of taking over from him as Director of Studies (DoS) managing a team of 18-20 teachers, I really wasn’t sure I could do it. After all, I’d only finished Delta a year or so earlier, and had done very little teaching since then to see if I could apply what I’d learnt. I was a fledgling CELTA tutor with only four courses under my belt, and still very much felt like I was learning how to do that job. Although I’d worked as the DoS at IH Sevastopol, it was a very different school with a much smaller team of only 3-6 teachers, and where I was still teaching 18-24 hours a week. Thankfully Tim talked me into visiting the school to see what the job really involved.

Less than a month later I spent four days in Bydgoszcz and Torun, visiting the school and the surrounding area and shadowing Tim at school for two days. I spent the first day continuing to think there was no way I could possibly do this job, and it took a couple of conversations with some of the teachers on the second day to persuade me that I would manage it. Thank you – you know who you are!

The result was that when the end of August 2015 rolled around, I found myself moving to Bydgoszcz, and entering a near-empty school just waking up from the summer break for the best induction I could possibly have hoped for. Tim spent nearly three weeks with me, introducing me to various procedures at the school and helping me get a handle on many of the things I’d need to do the job. He’s always been on call to help me throughout the year, and I’m immensely grateful for his help.

At the beginning of September, the senior teachers arrived and together, with Tim’s help, we planned the induction week for new and returning teachers. Throughout the year Luke, Sam and I have worked well as a team (in my opinion!) to support the teachers and keep everything running smoothly. I have relied on their prior knowledge of systems at the school to help me work out what needed doing, when and how. This is also true of the admin staff, and especially of the school Director, who is amazingly supportive, and one of the best bosses I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

Together, we have:

• placement tested new students and organised the timetable
• done drop in and formal observations to help our teachers develop
• provided weekly professional development workshops
• run collaborative level planning meetings covering about half of the groups at the school
• had weekly meetings and senior meetings to keep everybody up-to-date
• organised a teacher training day, two adult social events and two young learner socials
• run a day of Cambridge mock exams
• coordinated and checked reports for students
• organised tutorials and parents’ meetings
• recruited new staff and organised accommodation for them
• dealt with problems that teachers, students and parents have had
• chosen new course books for the next school year
• and probably many other things which I’ve forgotten!

Needless to say, I had no idea how to do a lot of those things before I started the job! I was lucky to have inherited a lot of systems which I’ve been able to build on, making the whole thing a lot easier for me. A selection of the skills I think I’ve learnt or developed over the past year include:

• using many features of Excel I had no idea even existed before!
• how to use Outlook (something I’d thankfully managed to escape before – I hate it!)
• communication skills: when to listen, what to ask, when to talk, what to say, how to say it
• awareness of relationships around the school and how they impact on people
• recruitment
• balancing timetables fairly and taking into account the needs of teachers, students and the school
• helping teachers fresh off the CELTA to build on what they’ve learnt
• classroom management with teen classes (I had my own teen group for most of the year)
• time management, and knowing how to manage my office door
• balancing school work and out-of-school activities (I’d say ‘life’, but a lot of it has still been work this year – already have plans afoot to change this next year!)

Of course, there’s still a lot I need to work on, including many of the areas mentioned above. To help me with this, I’d like to get some more formal management training, as like many people I’ve been learning on the job. So far I’ve been relying on a combination of instinct, past conversations with my mum when she was managing a large organisation, Business Studies from school, management books I mostly read as a teenager, and asking for help from my ever-supportive network.

As I enter my second year at IH Bydgoszcz and am now more aware of the background I’m working with, I’m starting to make deeper changes, beyond the occasional rewriting of a document or update of a system. These include modifying the already very strong professional development structure, changing the way registers are set up with the aim of making them easier to fill in, and introducing some shared groups. Watch this space to find out what works and what doesn’t!

Future Learn Italian course – week 3

This is a continuation of my reflection notes made while doing the Future Learn Beginner’s Italian course. You can also read about weeks 1 and 2.

One of the benefits of doing the Future Learn course in the correct weeks is that you benefit from the moderators being online. It’s possible to sign up for a course and complete it whenever you like, but during the set period of the course (in this case six weeks), various moderators are available to respond to questions in the discussion thread, normally within 24 hours. Last week I posted a comment to ask about online dictionaries, and was referred to a list by one of the moderators which included both translation and monolingual online dictionaries. I was impressed at how quickly I got a response. This was useful, though in future it might be more beneficial to have a page on the course where you can go to for extra resources like this, as I would never had found it without the moderator. Moderators would then be able to refer participants to it if they can’t find it themselves.

Another advantage of studying the course in the specified time is the ability to use the tips sent out in the summary email at the end of each week. These are pulled together based on comments and questions from the discussion threads. At the end of week 2, this included a response to user requests which I was very pleased to see:

To help you to practise listening comprehension, a downloadable audio version the dialogues will available from next week.

Perhaps the dictionary links could also have been included here?

Week 3

The video story is working well for me. I’m enjoying learning more about the characters, and am quite pleased that they don’t seem to be going down the line I’ve seen before in this kind of video of boy meets girl, lots of slightly strained sexual tension, then they fall in love at the end of the story. Instead, Mike and Anna both have partners (Sarah and Leonardo) who they tell each other about in the first video for this week, introducing descriptive language. As mentioned previously, I also like the fact that the videos are at normal speed, but you have lots of options to help you: no, English or Italian subtitles; watching at half speed, downloading the transcript, and from this week, downloading the audio.

Generally, the videos are very well produced, both for the story and the language introductions.

As in previous weeks, the ‘Try it yourself communication’ activity again relies on you being able to use the four or five phrases they’ve introduced so far, or going off and finding your own phrases/using what you know already. These are examples of what has been introduced: https://quizlet.com/132508088/focus-on-communication-7-flash-cards/ If they don’t have long, black hair or aren’t tall or thin, there aren’t many people you can describe 🙂 I know they’re trying to separate the functional language and the vocabulary sections, but I don’t really feel like commenting because I don’t know what to say. I feel like a more specific prompt would be useful. This is the task at the moment:

Do you have any questions about how to describe people and things? Are you unsure about something? Share your comments and questions in the discussion below. Don’t hesitate to help other learners if you know the answer, or to share links to helpful resources.

I clicked ‘mark as complete’ without adding anything.

The vocabulary introduction is the next stage. To me, it would make sense to flip these two steps in the course. There is an extra practice activity though you have to do a bit of guesswork – are her eyes green or light? Is her hair short and black, curly and black, short and curly?

Noun and adjective agreement video: refers back to previous grammar units very clearly, so it’d be easy to find them again if you wanted to. Slight confused by this random question at the end of the grammar quiz, which doesn’t appear to practise noun and adjective agreement, and must have slipped past whoever was checking the course!

The ‘Exploring Italian’ section throws out a whole load of new language again, and does nothing with it apart from showing us a couple of example sentences. The phrases include: “stare insieme con (to date someone)” and “essere fidanzat-o/a/i con (to be engaged to)” Questions in the comments section reflect this: can we have the audio or hear the pronunciation? Speculation on the grammatical forms… On the plus side, the examples mostly use the characters from the video, so at least the context is maintained. [In the end of week email, the moderators said that audio files will be available for these sections from next week. Great to see how they respond to the comments.]

Italian sounds: vowels. Aha, it turns out they can easily put in sound files, as there is one to accompany each of the words used to introduce the vowel sounds. I feel like this would be a more useful way of introducing the vocabulary, or at least they could have a vocabulary list with the audio to accompany the videos so you can listen repeatedly to particular words you want to practise with ease. Lots of comments in this case to show that the differences between /e/, /ε/ and /o/, /ɔ/ haven’t been made clear. It’s OK for me because I understand the phonetics, have lots of practise differentiating sounds, and the example words they’re using to equate the sounds are from English, my mother tongue, but a lot of the course participants will have trouble distinguishing these pairs as they are so similar. A little more explanation would be useful, or indeed, a video showing you the physical differences between the sounds, rather than just an audio file!

The directions video goes nicely with where I’m up to on the Memrise Learn Basic Italian course: level 5 is called ‘Here, there and everywhere‘ and covers directions too (and, randomly, numbers and times!) The first question in the comprehension quiz asks you where Mike wants directions to. The answer was given in the introduction to this video, when the phrase ‘post office’ is pre-taught. This is an example of the importance of choosing which language to pre-teach carefully and/or ensuring that comprehension questions actually require you to comprehend the materials! The use of a map in the video with Mike and a stranger is also reflective of my experience as a tourist. I’m enjoying seeing clips of Sienna, and like the fact that it’s not just in the sunshine! Mike feels like a real person in a real city with (fairly) real reasons for needing to speak Italian.

I like the fact that the ‘focus on communication’ video begins by the teacher acknowledging that although we often use GPS nowadays, it’s still useful to be able to ask for directions. The communication quizzes generally test passive recognition of collocations, which I think is fairly useful. There was another quiz on Learning Apps to help us, this time matching the two halves of sentences. It’s good to explore this app, which I learnt about last week. Lots of people have been motivated to post in the comments, mostly writing short conversations with directions in them. These add extra reading practice. There is also peer support when people have questions about the language, for example what ‘vicino’ means, which was mentioned in the video, but never explicitly taught. I learnt it from memrise yesterday! (They teach it in the next video)

More vocab for directions in a video (the previous video was focussed on communication, or what I would class as functional language). It’s noticeable that the previous three or four stages have had about 200-300 comments, but this stage has nearly 1000. This is the difference when there is a clear task to complete. I’m not sure if this would be possible, but perhaps the interface could be adapted so that you can post your comment, then read the others. At the moment, you have to view all of the comments to see the box to post your own, so often it’s difficult not to look at other people’s answers before you write yours. There are so many different ways that people have chosen to give directions to Mike to help him find Anna – a genuinely engaging and motivating productive task, probably the first one on the course so far!

It’s now two days into week 4 and I haven’t finished week 3 yet, and didn’t have time to do any over the last three days since the last things I wrote…

Because I know I won’t have time to catch up next weekend either, and want to finish the whole thing before I get to Milan, I’m tempted to rush (though not enough to stop writing this!) Instead of watching the full video for the conjugations of ‘andare’ and ‘venire’ I listened to enough to hear the pronunciation of the verb forms, then looked at the transcript. This was probably more useful than watching the video more times as I spent time thinking about and trying to memorise the verb forms, instead of just listening to the next thing the teacher said. I’d like to be able to see the forms and listen to them individually, as I’ve said before about the vocab. Managed to get most of the quiz right, but have trouble with tu/lui/lei endings because of Spanish – I feel like there should be an -s for tu!

Introduction to consonants – good that there are Italian example words which you can listen to as many times as you like. However, I don’t really like the fact that there are English example words because these can be misleading. For example /p/is aspirated in the British English ‘pit’, but not in the Italian ‘papà’, at least that I can hear.

Discussion point task at this point:

Write a description of you or someone that you know in the comments. You may include:

• Hair colour
• Eye colour
• Height
• Etc.

For example: Mia moglie è bionda, ha gli occhi marroni, non è molto alta, ma è molto carina e simpatica!

I have no idea! I can’t really remember any of these words and initially thought we hadn’t even studied them, then looked back up this post and realised they were at the beginning of this section. Directions in the middle confused me – seems like a very random order! Having looked back, this was my contribution, which required quite a lot of effort to produce:

Mia mama ha capelli longhi. Non ha capelli neri. Lei non è alta, non è piccola.

The final section for the week promises to introduce these things:

You will learn to ask for the time and the related vocabulary. Moreover you’ll also learn the names of public places and the present tense of the verbs ending in –ere and –ire.

This feels like a lot, though it may be the fact that it’s 21:30 as I write this. Not sure I’m mentally in the right place to manage all of this, but I want to try and finish the week!

The video has a few lines of dialogue, then some text messages. I think that’s the first real reading practice we’ve had so far on the course, and it’s an interesting and different way to introduce it, again well-produced too. The subtitles have the times in numbers and in words, which is great. In the comprehension quiz, I have no idea what some of the words in the final question mean ‘Anna incontra Mike oggi pomeriggio:’ but have managed to guess the answer. ‘incontra’ is like ‘encontra’ in Spanish, so I know that means ‘meet’, but I have no idea about the last two words.

How to tell the time: “You have already learned the numbers.” Hmm…not really. I’d recognise them at a push, but I wouldn’t say I’ve learnt them yet. Just started doing them on memrise, which will probably be what helps me to remember them.

There’s a Quizlet quiz to help you practise some of the questions. This is good for recognition, especially the scatter mode, which is the only one I can be bothered to play at this time of night. One of my bugbears in general (not just on this course, but in many online materials) is the disregard for punctuation, especially capital letters. Learners need to see how and where capitals are used correctly, as rules for capitalisation vary and some languages don’t have them at all. There are no capital letters at all in the set at the moment 😦

The second video about time has lots of examples of times, in sentences too. Very clear. It was also good that they clarified that in informal spoken Italian you normal use 1/2/3, but when talking about official things e.g. opening hours or train times, you use the 24-hour clock. The ‘try it yourself’ quiz tests whether you recognise if times are formal or informal, rather than your understanding of the numbers themselves.

The extra practice quiz involves writing out a time in words, but only accepts one possible answer in each case, which is a bit frustrating when you have something like 20.45 and there were three possible ways to say it in the video. I couldn’t be bothered with this after one question (again, time of day/tiredness).

The next grammar video introduces new conjugations for verbs ending in -ere and -ire, comparing them to -are. It’s all in a clear table on the slide, so you can see that many of the forms are the same across all three conjugations, reducing the processing load needed to retain the information. “Don’t worry if it seems difficult. It will become familiar very quickly.” – I like these supportive messages 🙂

The grammar test always puts the options in the ‘correct’ order (I, you, he/she/it etc), so if you can understand the question, you don’t necessarily need to remember the verb form very confidently, just the order. Having said that, it’s helping me to remember that -i is a second person ending, not third person (Spanish again), because I keep seeing it in the same position in the list.

The last set of consonants are introduced to round of the unit. These ones are different to English, or have no equivalent. If they have no equivalent, there is an example from Spanish, though I’m not sure these match up, at least to my South American experience. I guess many people may know those sounds, but otherwise it seems odd. I’ve just noticed that all of the phonetic symbols are there too – my eyes had completely skipped over that column with the consonants! Two new symbols in my IPA arsenal now: /ɲ/ for ‘gn’ in ‘gnocchi’, /λ/ for ‘gl+i’ in ‘figli’ and ‘gli+a/e/o/u’ in ‘familia’ etc. The latter sound is equated to ‘ll’ in Spanish ‘llave’ or ‘llamar’ which I don’t think is the same sound.

OK, it’s 22:11 now, and I’m not sure how much of this I’ll actually retain, but I’ve at least seen it. Numbers continue to be a challenge, and I clearly can’t remember the description vocabulary, so should probably revise both of them. I know it’s not going to happen though, because I’m busy and unless it comes up on the course I won’t make the time to do it.

I haven’t downloaded any of the slides or extra resources yet, and just go back to the page I need using the ‘to do’ list if I’m not sure about something. Still feel like I’m learning, but pretty passively. This is mostly my own fault, but I also don’t feel like the course is making me be particularly active at points when I should be able to produce target language. It tests you at various points, but normally before rather than after the fact.

Roll on week four…

FutureLearn Italian course – weeks 1 and 2

I’m in the process of completing the FutureLearn beginner’s Italian course, which is free to participate in, although you need to pay if you want to get a certificate of completion.

While I’m doing the course, I’m hoping to write notes on my responses to the activities from a teaching perspective. Week 1’s are a few general thoughts on the course, and from week 2 onwards they’re quite in-depth reflections on how each activity is set up, my responses to them and what I feel I have learnt/could learn from them. Not sure how useful they are to anyone other than the course creators (or even to them?!) but since I’ve written it, I thought I’d share… 🙂

Very happy that due to a couple of weekends with no other plans and a national holiday, I’m on track with the course (it’s halfway through week 2 on the timeline at the moment). I’m mostly watching the videos in between doing other things, like my physio in the morning or the washing up in the evening, so it fits nicely around life. Not sure if that will continue, but I hope so, since week six is timed perfectly to end on the day that I fly to Milan for my first ever trip to Italy 🙂

Week 1

Videos at normal speed – options for half-speed, subtitles in English/Italian, can watch as much as you like. Pre-teaching some vocab and set up context beforehand – all positive points and help the learner get supported exposure to ‘normal’ Italian. Comprehension task is more of a memory test – can you remember which city she said?

Multiple-choice questions can sometimes be guessed without having looked at the content, but better on this course than on the dyslexia one, where you really didn’t need to read the content to answer them! (By the way, I’m half-way through the dyslexia course and will write about that when I’ve finished it…currently looking like that will be at some point in August)

Jobs – spelling test. Useful! Interesting activity design.

Scaffolded nicely through the week. Could be useful to have the vocabulary in some kind of clickable form so you can just listen to the words you want to, not all of them (they’ve done this a little with some Quizlet grammar quizzes, but not with the vocab) All slides are downloadable for review, but would be more useful with the sound too

Grammar videos, e.g. intro to regular -are verbs and fare is clear, and he says that it’s normal to make mistakes at the beginning – supportive message. Would be useful to have more time to repeat the phrases after each one, and perhaps a ‘can you remember’ type activity within the video to aid memorisation, though I know it makes videos longer than current 4 minutes.

Week 2

Clear task before you watch video: “Watch the conversation between Mike, Anna and Lisa. Who is oldest? Who is youngest?” Advice to switch off subtitles, or use Italian only – little bits of learner training are useful.

Focus on communcation (ages) – one brief question and answer, then a little test – good way to introduce functional language.

Numbers and age (vocab) – all of the numbers, plus six phrases connected to stages of life (e.g. baby, teen, middle aged) in about 5 minutes. Woah! First time I’ve struggled to keep up (thanks to French/Spanish) – information overload. Receptively (the numbers he asked at the end and the multiple choice – can guess from three options), not too difficult because of other languages. Productively, no time to repeat, though you can watch the video again as many times as you want to and download the slides – lack of opportunity to drill yourself repeatedly on one word. Perhaps better to break into separate videos (0-10, 11-20, 21-100, ages), with some practice between each. A Quizlet set would also be very useful at this point (there have been a few scattered through the course so far, mostly for conjugations)

Grammar – conjugation of ‘avere’ (to have) – practise it alone, then combining it with ‘essere’ (to be) – good to see some revision. Comments on the quiz remind you of which forms you’re using once you’ve answered, though that only helps if you know grammar terms like ‘second person singular’ All quizzes have short sentences – good that it’s not just matching person to conjugation, but giving you a tiny bit of context.

Exploring Italian gives you some useful extra phrases for conversations from the original dialogues, e.g. ‘Veramente?’ ‘Really?’ – not accompanied by audio or any practice at all though. For example, maybe you could watch the original video again at this point to hear them being used in context. Or a little gapfill? Feels like this is extremely useful language that isn’t really being taught

Personal details comprehension questions are pretty impossible – the address one is OK, but you need to memorise an entire phone number, then answer a question using the word ‘indirizzo’, which hasn’t been introduced previously. ‘Mike ha un indirizzo di posta elettronica.’ – I interpreted this as ‘Mike doesn’t like email.’ (!), not Mike has an email address. Again, comprehension questions should be at same time as video, not a memory test.

Introducing formal/informal in a clear, easy way – the clips from the videos are great because they put all of the functional language into clear contexts and add a bit more language around them.

Culturally the difference between via/viale/strada is interesting, and sets you up for the quiz afterwards where you have to decide whether a word is connected to an address, email or telephone number, but that’s a minute that would perhaps be better spent elsewhere.

Lots of grammar terminology being thrown at you in the grammar videos at this point, without necessarily checking/glossing e.g. singular/plural, definite article. Should become clear as you work through the video, but a brief definition/comparison to English the first time it’s introduced might help e.g. ‘singular, when you have one, or plural, when you have many’ (see later…)

Discussion point 2/3 of the way through week two asks you to describe your family. There’s an example, but it’s before you’ve been introduced to any of the family vocab (which is the last third of this week’s course), so it relies on you understanding the example, making guesses, and using what other people have written. I guess it’s test-teach-test, but could be off-putting. Why not get us to do this after we’ve been introduced to the vocab? On the plus side – lots of reading practice in the comments. 859 things for me to read if I so choose 🙂 Comments demonstrate that a lot of the people doing the course have some level of Italian already, as they’re adding lots of things which haven’t been introduced. Fairly normal for a beginner’s course in any of the big languages, but could be off-putting for someone who is genuinely a complete beginner.

Good to see a Quizlet set after the communication video to help you practise some of the family vocab (family, sister, father, mother), along with some of the other things which have come up – extra jobs, one or two numbers. Would be good to have other key family words in there (brother, child, son, daughter, husband, wife) rather than using ‘sister’ so many times, though all sentences seem to be taken from the video – good for context. There’s one English mistake in there ‘How is your family?’ rather than ‘What is your family like?’

Family vocabulary video is good because finally the words are introduced twice over with time for you to repeat them, once in the context of Marco’s family tree, then repeated again. At the end, they ask you to find some words yourself (cousin, grandchild, uncle) ‘using the family tree and a dictionary’. It would be useful if they recommended an online dictionary to use, as for learners with no experience, they will probably just go to Google Translate. Actually, that’s what I did too. From that, I don’t know if ‘cugino’ is the same for masculine and feminine – there’s no information to support the learner as there might be in a learner’s dictionary.

For practice, there’s a link to a crossword. Would be useful to see more of this kind of thing throughout the course as an option to go further. This really tested whether I’d taken it in, and made me go back and look at the words again, something I haven’t really been motivated to do at any other point in the course so far. The only other repetition I’ve done is to watch each video in Italian twice, and to watch the numbers one twice. I didn’t bother to do any more practice with them, as I know I can recognise them, but I’m also very aware that I can’t produce many of them at all. I learnt about a new app in the process which looks brilliant – lots of options for creating interactive activities.

Definite article video is much more scaffolded than previous grammar videos, with an explanation of what that terminology means and when you use the definite article. Grammar quizzes separate the singular and plural articles, and as with all the grammar quizzes, if you get it wrong, there’s a comment underneath to help you self-correct. Might be useful to add one more quiz pulling them together and making you choose between singular or plural. I know that adds time to the week, but the two 10-question quizzes could be reduced slightly to balance it.

Summary of the week video seems a bit pointless to me (but then I’ve never been a fan of that kind of thing!) I just clicked on the transcript as it’s faster to skim. To me it would make much more sense to have the discussion task where you share family info at this point in the week, after you’ve studied it, so you can actually put it into practice.

General feelings about week 2: useful language has been introduced, but there’s a lot of it, and not much opportunity to practise. Receptively, I feel like I know more; productively, I’m not so sure, especially the numbers, and the family words which are more different to English.

Rethinking reflection in initial teacher training (guest post)

So I want you to tell me what you think went well, what you think didn’t go so well and what you would do differently next time…

Sound familiar? If you’re a teacher trainer, academic manager or even just a teacher who has been through a training course, then the above is probably burned into your brain and has become a mantra. In initial teacher training, at least in my experience, these three points form the start of the post-lesson discussion. And the reason? Reflection.

Most teachers, I hope, would agree that reflection is a useful, maybe even vital, tool for professional development as it helps us dig into what we truly believe in order to then subject it to scrutiny, with the final goal being improved practice. The question I ask myself, though, is would someone on an initial training course (CELTA/CertTESOL) see things the same way? Do they see it as a route to professional competence or merely another hoop to jump through to satisfy the tutor on the other side of the table? Are the reflections that follow the prompts a genuine attempt to understand what just happened to them in the previous 45 minutes? Or strategic responses to tell the tutor what they want to hear? Or even in some cases an attempt to rescue a failing grade by showing real awareness of their class? Only one person in the room truly knows the answer to that question, but, again, from my experience I’ve had reason to believe that required reflection in such stressful circumstances doesn’t always lead to genuine reflection and may in fact be counter-productive.

I struggled with this dilemma for a long time. I came to the conclusion that forced reflection will always be unreliable, so can you engage the trainees in genuine reflection during teaching practice?

The answer…? you can’t. At least, not all of them. Genuine reflection has to come from a place of genuine desire for development and if we’re honest, we have to admit to ourselves that that’s not where the majority of our future teachers are coming from.

In the end, the solution was a simple one: to teach the trainees the benefits of reflection for future development and more importantly how to go about it. This way if they are truly invested in their future development, the tutor can allow the time and space for reflection in feedback. However, for those not interested in future development and more concerned with the certificate they need to secure their visa to work abroad, there’s no need to make them squirm or to elicit the same strategic responses that waste the tutor’s time, their time and the time of their co-trainees.

In response, I’ve created a series of activities designed to lead the trainees through the reflective process and to provide a framework to guide reflection for those interested. This was incorporated into an input session during week 1 of a four-week course.

Stage 1 – Identifying reflection as a rigorous mental process

The session starts with a look at the stages of a reflective process and trainees organise them into what they feel is a logical order. The aim is to lead trainees away from the notion that reflection is simply looking back and highlight the importance of seeking to name the issue and, more importantly, to devise hypotheses for future action. As a kinaesthetic problem-solving activity it tends to generate a lot of discussion too.

I use this process taken from Rodgers (2002:851) which is a summary of John Dewey. However, the exact process isn’t so important. What’s more important is that there is a framework to guide the trainees.

1. An experience is required to trigger some sort of reflective thought.
2. The teacher seeks to interpret the experience.
3. The teacher seeks to name the problem.
4. The teacher seeks explanations for the problem and general questions are created.
5. A concrete hypothesis is developed.
6. The hypothesis is tested.

Stage 2 – Reframing classroom events

In this stage trainees consider typical classroom “problems” and seek to find potential reasons, encouraging them to think deeper than their initial knee-jerk reactions in the classroom. Once they’ve made a list of reasons they spend some time in groups discussing possible ways of addressing each of them in the classroom, which helps to encourage the hypothesis forming described in the stage 1.

Stage 3 – Categorising reflection

In this stage I get trainees to look at real reflections taken from recorded feedback meetings (these could also be written by the trainer) to highlight the different angles we can reflect from. They spend some time reading them and then categorise them according to what the teacher is talking about. For this I use four categories inspired by Zeichner and Liston (1985).

1. Reflection which simply recounts the events of the lesson with no real analysis of them.
2. Reflection which focuses on what worked and didn’t work and how they could address it.
3. Reflection which focuses on why the teachers chose to do certain things in the lesson and what they hoped to achieve.
4. Reflection which moves beyond the lesson and questions larger curricular issues.

There is typically a lot of grey areas here, which is good to generate discussion, and leads to the creation of questions to ask themselves to elicit each type of reflection. This has been identified by the trainees as a very important stage.

Stage 4 – Analysing beliefs about teaching

Using the reflections from the previous stage, trainees discuss what the teacher’s beliefs about teaching may be and then compare them to their own beliefs and discuss how aligned they are with how they think languages are learned. This stage should bring the reflective process to a logical conclusion and encourage more critical reflection.

Results

Since introducing this session on the course, feedback has changed. It no longer starts with the holy trinity of feedback questions from earlier, but instead begins with something much simpler: “How do you feel about the lesson today?” Those invested in their own development reflect; not always in useful ways, but as with any skill it takes practice. Those interested in their grade often respond with “How do you feel about it?” or more commonly “Did I pass?” and that’s ok.

References

Rodgers, C. (2002) ‘Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking’ The Teachers College Record Vol. 104, no. 4, pp. 842-866.

Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. (1985) ‘Varieties of discourse in supervisory conferences’ Teaching and Teacher Education Vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 155-174

About the author

Dan Baines has been teaching English since 2004 and been involved in some form of teacher development since finishing his DELTA in 2008.  He currently works for the British Council in Prague and as a freelance Trinity CertTESOL and DipTESOL tutor.

30 questions to ask yourself

This time last year, Anna Loseva posted a list of 30 questions to ask yourself on New Year’s Eve. I thought this idea was so good I set a reminder to answer them, so here goes:

1. The best moment of the year.

This is a hard one to choose – I’ve had a pretty amazing year. Having said that, I think it was probably meeting my best friend’s new baby for the first time 🙂

2. What inspired me the most this year?

The amazing trainers and teachers I’ve worked with throughout the year. I’ve learnt so much from everyone, including remembering what it’s like to be fresh to the job again.

3. The major news of this year.

Becoming the Director of Studies at IH Bydgoszcz in August.

4. Anthem of the year 2015.

Even though it came out in 2013, I only discovered it a couple of months ago:

5. The most important people in my life.

As always, my friends and my family, but especially some of the new babies who have entered the world this year. There have been a lot of them!

6. What was most difficult for me to do this year?

Saying goodbye to Sevastopol again, this time with no prospect of going back any time soon. And hearing about the ongoing problems there, currently including daily power cuts. Thinking about all of my friends who are going through it, and hoping it ends soon 😦

7. What colour was this year?

Erm…not really sure about this kind of question! Possibly blue, but only because of all the blue skies I was lucky enough to experience from February until July as I was in a lot of hot places. Here are some examples from Crimea:

8. Which event of the year would I choose to remember forever?

The end of the first week of teaching at IH Bydgoszcz, when I realised that I could do the job and it would all be OK 🙂

9. Which word did I use most often?

Probably ‘amazing’. Because it was.

10. My most ridiculous purchase of the year.

A double bed. Mostly ridiculous because of what it signifies – a complete change in my lifestyle and hopefully being a bit more settled. That and how much I spent on it!

11. I shouldn’t have experimented with …

Saying yes to two writing projects at the same time. Not good for the work-life balance!

12. This year was wonderful because …

I got to live the dream, travelling to Thailand, Palma, Barcelona and Sevastopol, and now living in Bydgoszcz. I made new friends and had a huge range of amazing experiences that will stay with me forever. My health improved once I became more settled, and I can now eat considerably more than this time last year, including enjoying all the Christmas food I missed out on in 2014.

13. Which inner problem did I solve successfully?

Not sure if this counts as an inner problem, but probably the doubts I had about whether it was the right time to take on a DoS job, or whether I needed more experience behind me. It was, and I didn’t: I love it 🙂

14. Who did I hug at night?

‘Bydgoszcz bear’, a gift I was given on my first visit to the city in January, and who has sat by my bed ever since.

15. Whose wedding did I have fun at?

No weddings this year, unfortunately. It was all about the babies instead!

16. What was my average salary this year?

Enough to finally get some savings behind me, for the first time in my career!

17. Did I have a conversation that turned everything upside down in my head?

Maybe not one that turned everything upside down, but certainly a couple of life-changing ones (only one of which is mentioned in that post!)

18. What new project did I start in 2014?

My two biggest writing projects so far: watch this space to find out more!

19. If I could become a superhero for just one day, what would I do?

Fly around the world and give all of my friends big hugs, especially the ones who most need them when they need them, instead of months later when we finally get to meet up.

20. What am I dreaming about now?

A family. And a more permanent home.

21. What do I consider to be my most important achievement?

Having built up enough of  a reputation to be asked to speak at the Innovate ELT conference in May 2016. 🙂

22. This year until this moment in one sentence.

A rollercoaster of emotions.

23. The latest message I’ve sent.

🙂

Yep, that was it.

24. A quote that is most suitable for my year.

Difficult to pick just one, so here are three:

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” – Shirley MacLaine

25. Did I achieve everything I’d planned for this year?

The last couple of years haven’t really involved a plan. Things have changed frequently and they’ve brought me to where I am now. I’ve pretty much given up on planning my career – just waiting to see where it takes me 🙂 Lots of ideas, but not much that’s specific!

26. How many new friends did I make this year?

A difficult one to count – lots!

27. Who did I help this year?

Erm…Being completely immodest, I hope I helped CELTA trainees, teachers and students at IH Bydgoszcz, friends, family, randoms on facebook, Twitter, my blog…oh, and cancer research scientists.

28. Where did I travel?

To many more places than I expected, all but one of which I had no idea I’d go to this time last year. What a difference twelve months can make! I feel incredibly lucky.

29. Which projects am I putting off till next year?

The ones I haven’t had time for this year!

30. What do I want to achieve next year?

Ideas brewing for a course, a book, a reinvention of my Infinite ELT Ideas blog, and quite a few things at IH Bydgoszcz. And one or two other things which I won’t write about here…

Happy New Year everyone! Thanks for inspiring me Anna 🙂

Returning to the classroom

On 23rd September 2015 I went back into the classroom properly for the first time in over a year, teaching my first class with a B1 intermediate teen group who will be my students for the whole academic year. As a CELTA trainer in 2014-2015, the only opportunities I’ve had to teach English have been in one-off demo lessons, which aren’t quite the same. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to reflect on my teaching, seeing trainees do things I know I’ve often been guilty of, then offering advice about how to get over problems like over-complicated instructions and poorly timed lessons. Time to see if I could practise what I preached!

Anthony Schmidt started a blog challenge asking ‘What did you teach today?‘ Hana Tichá joined in and I decided to record my lesson so I could contribute too:

Out of curiosity and intrigue, and as a means of reflection, write what you did in your class(es) today, from checking attendance to giving a test to blowing students’ minds with the most dogme-inspired, task-based, mobile-assisted, coursebook-free, PARSNIP-full lesson non-plan ever. You don’t have to explain why, unless you’d like. Just give the raw, nitty-gritty details.

• Circle game: to learn each others’ names. There are nine students, four girls and five boys, aged 13-15. This took about 10 minutes.
• Setting up routines: I told students that they should only have pens, paper and books with them, and bags and coats should go on the hooks on the wall. They had time to rearrange themselves. (Five lessons later I still need to remind a couple of them!)
• Getting to know you: I demonstrated a triangle on the board with three pieces of information about me. In pairs, students had to guess why the information is important to me. Listening back I didn’t give them enough time to guess (less than a minute), so only stronger students contributed in the open class stage. A couple of the boys decided the triangle was an Illuminati symbol, added an eye, and have since put it on the whiteboard at the beginning of every lesson.
• Students wrote their own triangle with information on it. They had plenty of time to do this.
• Mingle: students had to find out about their classmates. Instructions have always been a problem for me, and although they have improved a lot, the way I set up this activity wasn’t completely clear. The instructions themselves were fine, but to make it completely clear I should have done a T-SS and a SS-SS demo first. I thought the demo I’d done with my information would be enough, but I didn’t factor in that students needed to make notes based on what they heard. I also didn’t specify before the activity that I wanted them to speak English only, so some of the boys were making it a race at the beginning and doing it in Polish. They had about ten minutes, but it could have been shorter if I’d been clearer.
• Pair check: students tried to remember one thing about each person in the class. Here I had to remind them to expand on what they said, as some of them started with e.g. ‘Sandy – blue, M – cat’ instead of making full sentences.
• Open class: I moved students into more of a circle to encourage them to speak to each other, not just to me (although in a relatively small, rectangular room this isn’t easy!) ‘Who can tell me something about A?’ A then nominated the next person who we found out about, and so on. This stage was quite relaxed and there was a lot of laughter, but it was also long and the pace dropped. Students had written their notes on scrap paper, so I got them to put them in the bin before moving on. I do like a tidy classroom 🙂 )
• K points: this is the school-wide points system used for teen classes. I introduced it to them, telling them what they needed to do to win points as a class, and what would mean losing points. Five of the students had the system last year, so I should probably have got them to explain it (especially because it’s new to me!) but I didn’t think about that until afterwards.

• Break time: students have ten minutes to go to the club, a room at the bottom of the school with vending machines, tables and places to sit. The teacher goes with them, and if they behave well, they get K points on their return to class.

The second half of the lesson was based on a reading text from the coursebook. There are six classes at the school who are at the same level, and each week the teachers meet and plan together in a level meeting. I’m the level head, coordinating the meeting, but all of the teachers contribute to the plan. We work through the book during the year, but I aim to help the teachers adapt it to their students, as ages range from 12-16, and group sizes from 3-12. What follows is the plan we came up with together…

• I showed students the image above. We have projectors and netbooks, but they were still being prepared when I did the lesson, so they were printed on a couple of A4 sheets in black and white. In pairs, students had to say what’s happening, who the people are and where they are. One student immediately said ‘capoiera’ to the whole class, which kind of stalled the conversation! I still got them to predict in pairs, then asked that student to fill in the gaps once they’d shared their ideas.
• ‘Capoeira’ was drilled briefly as students would need to say it a few times during the lesson. I wasn’t bothered about spelling or being completely correct though, since it’s not a high-frequency word for this group.
• Gist reading: students read the text and matched four titles to the four paragraphs.
• Feedback: students checked in pairs, then I read the answers and they confirmed them. The whole feedback stage took less than a minute. From my monitoring while they read I knew most students had got it right already, but one student hadn’t.
• Reading for detail: yes/no/not given task. I demonstrated it first, showing students they needed to underline the answer in the text and write the question number next to it. Students did this without a problem. Meanwhile I was monitoring, and checking answers from fast finishers. They became the teachers and checked specified students’ answers.
• Feedback: We only focussed on question 6, as students had the rest of the answers. There was a problem with an item of vocab (‘slave’) which I should probably have pre-taught, but it came up in the following vocabulary task too, so I’d decided not to. Oops. I gave them an example and got them to look at the text again for number 6, making sure they all underlined the right sentence.
• Vocab race: changed student groups so they were working in new threes. I read a definition, students had to find the word in the text, then one person from their team ran to the board to write it. The procedure for the task was clear, and I set up the room to make sure nobody would fall over anything, but I should have made the points system clearer, and drawn lines on the board to show where they should write – one group tried to fill the whole board so the others couldn’t write.
• Written record: returning to their books, students remembered and wrote the words down. I rushed the set-up of this, and had to repeat my instructions.
• Preparation for speaking: divided the board in half and elicited ‘martial arts’ and ‘dancing’, one in each half. Students worked in two groups to brainstorm as many of each as they could, then switched to add to the other list. I was prompting students for extra ideas when they ran out, and eliciting corrections of spellings if things weren’t clear. There was a lot of Polish at this stage – I should have offered K points before the task to encourage them to speak English, and perhaps fed in some functional language, like ‘Can you think of anything else?’
• Speaking: students worked in new pairs (trying to divide up the boys who can be a bit crazy when they work together, and encourage the quieter girls to speak up) to discuss if they’d tried/would like to try any of the dancing/martial arts. To add some challenge, I asked them to see which pair could speak for the longest. They repeated it with a second partner. I could have done a bit of feedback in between the two tasks to make the repetition more useful, but hadn’t come up with anything to tell them! I was taking notes about their confidence when speaking, and some info about what they’d tried/liked.
• Feedback on content: one student shared their experience of martial arts, and one of dance. Other students were interested in what they had to say, and only those who wanted to contributed – I didn’t force everyone to share something.
• Setting up homework: students looked at the list of dances and said which three they thought I’d tried. I told them a little about my experiences of dancing, and what I do to keep fit. Their homework was to write 50-100 words about what they do to keep fit – I made sure they wrote it down, and reminded them that if everyone had their homework in the next lesson, they’d get K points.

Reflection

I’m much happier with my lesson pacing now, particularly at feedback stages. They often used to drag, but now I have a range of techniques to call on, and feel like they’re much more appropriate to the stages of the lesson. My monitoring has improved too, which also contributes to making feedback more efficient and useful.

Although my activity set-up has improved a lot, and I’ve drastically reduced the amount of waffling I do, I still need to remember to demonstrate activities clearly before setting students off on them. Since this first lesson, I’ve been making a conscious effort to do that (I had lesson six on Friday) by writing it on my plan – I don’t always remember to do that though.

I sit down a lot more in my lessons now, and that’s made a real difference to the dynamic in the room. I feel like the atmosphere was quite relaxed and comfortable throughout, but that I could still be authoritative when necessary.

I was a bit worried about teaching teens as they haven’t been my favourite age group in the past – I normally prefer adults. However, with the K points system, I feel like I finally have the classroom management technique that was missing from my previous attempts, and I’m looking forward to the challenge of keeping lessons interesting and motivating for the group through the year, and helping the other teachers in our level meeting to do the same. Five lessons later, I feel like I’m getting to know the group well, and am enjoying the lessons a lot more than I expected too. I just hope they are too!