These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Many factors lead to a lack of confidence for these teachers. This leads to a lack of teacher presence. This can impact on success in TP, and this can become a spiral – one TP is less successful, they feel less confident going into the next TP, etc. It can also impact on other trainees in the group – they’re not providing such a useful model for each other. It can also impact on numbers of TP students.
These are things that York St. John University have donee.
Pre-course: before applying
The trainers go into the TESOL course and do occasional sessions so the future trainees can get to know them.
They run general English classes at the university, and everybody on the TESOL courses can apply to be teaching assistants. This gives them the chance to try somethings out.
They’re encouraged to join groups at the university like the Korean society to build greater cultural awareness.
The trainers give a presentation to potential applicants to manage their expectations.
Pre-course: after applying
They cap the number of internal places on the courses, so there’s a range of types of trainee. It’s not just another university module.
They monitor the pre-interview tasks and give feedback.
There is a rigorous selection procedure. There’s no automatic place on the course just because they’ve done the TESOL course. Sometimes they suggest different course types or going away to build knowledge in a certain area before they join the course.
They do language workshops for internal trainees before they join the CELTA. These are ‘language for English language teaching’ – some areas they would need to know.
During the course
(In addition to the normal CELTA courses)
At York St. John, they have a maximum of 10 trainees, capped 50/50 internal and external. There are 2.5 tutors per course. When they have online courses, they leave meetings open during and in between input and TP so that students can continue informal discussions if they want to. They also try to involve professional links, for example somebody coming in to do a Q&A about future careers.
New features they’ve tried to add:
More unassessed TP, with some quite simple tasks given to them by the trainers to develop the confidence and try new things (without all the heavy lesson planning)
‘Copycat’ teaching – using lessons the trainers have delivered in input, which they’ve analysed in input, taking those and delivering those in one of the free TP slots
Increased observations – live observations of the trainers working with the students the trainees know
Input on preparing to teach: ‘What if…’ – case studies, what their actual fears are
Considering what actually makes a good teacher – things they need to know beyond the CELTA
Post-course
University of Sanctuary – they have an ESOL drop-in group, a conversation group. It’s not run by the trainers, but there a lot of links. A lot of CELTA graduates volunteer there.
They also run ongoing TP sessions, which CELTA graduates can volunteer to keep teaching. This is especially useful if they haven’t got a job to go straight into. The people who’ve taken up that opportunity have tended to be from the external half of the group.
They’re looking at setting up a ‘buddy system’ with CELTA graduates and current undergraduate and post-graduate students. Laura has seen that working well in nursing and state education, but they haven’t managed to try it yet.
What did trainees say about building their own confidence?
These helped trainees already:
This is the same slide with their wish list added:
What boosted trainee confidence? The more yellow there is, the more helpful it was for them.
Slightly worrying: reflecting on own progress and student reactions in TP aren’t very helpful. Question from the audience: were you able to go back and investigate those areas further? Is it perhaps because they’re not very good at doing those things?
Ideas from IATEFL 2023
Analysing the criteria and getting trainees to understand what they actually mean in real life (rather than developing their own).
Ring-fenced TP rehearsal time without the tutor, but rehearsing with each other.
Sharing trainee lesson plans with each other. Cathy’s trainees used those to fuel online chat after the lesson.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
We entered the room and saw this on our chairs. What do you think we’ll do with it?
Kim is a teacher educator working with teachers who will go on to teach in the primary and secondary classroom.
What is the design cycle?
When we think about design thinking, we can look around ourselves and find things which are designed.
This is a more elaborate definition:
It’s a non-linear, iterative device that you use to come up with solutions to a problem. You go in circles and revisit stages.
It’s also a methodology for creative problem solving.
What problems might it solve?
A ‘wicked problem’ is a problem that is known for its complexity. It’s often difficult to actually define the problem, and therefore it’s hard to find solutions. Because it’s so complex, because it’s large-scale, it’s difficult to test things out – you have to just jump and try things, and you may find you cause problems as you solve them.
Climate change is a typical example. It’s a ‘super wicked problem’ – an extreme example of this.
What other wicked problems can you think of? There are lots and lots of them!
Design thinking is also useful for ‘everyday’ problems. For example: design the perfect pizza. It might not be a wicked problem, but it is an important problem 🙂
Designing is a process, and there are lots of versions of design cycles.
Let’s design something!
We did a task from the Stanford design school’s website: d.school. It was called the ‘foil challenge’. They have lots of activities you can try in the classroom. This activity is designed for younger learners.
We had 8 minutes to interview each other (4 minutes each) about a favourite food, perhaps one with cultural significance. I learnt about biscuits made in Egypt for Eid, baked together with the whole family and eaten after prayers.
Next we have 2 minutes to sketch a custom eating utensil for our partner to eat their food.
Then we had 2 minutes to create a prototype of our item.
Then 3 minutes to share what we built and get feedback.
Here’s my idea and my partner, Nashwa’s:
This is a complete design cycle.
How can we use this in the language classroom?
For me (Sandy), this cycle feels very useful in a training situation. Teachers can share a problem from their classroom, another teacher can design a solution, then bring it back to the first teacher for feedback.
This is one example of a design cycle (there are many!):
Steps:
Empathise first. Find out needs first: what problems do they have that can be addressed? This is the phase of data collections – interviews, observations, surveys, etc.
Define the problem. Frame it – the way it’s defined will determine possible design solutions. Example: children aren’t moving enough in school. ‘A problem well stated is a problem half-solved’ – Charles Kettering
Ideate. The brainstorming phase – come up with as many ideas as you can that might address the problem that you’ve defined. How many ways can you imagine to address the problem you’ve defined? Example: in-school activities? Out of school activities?
Prototype. Jump in and building something. Design thinking is a bad name. Really is should be called ‘Design action’. Example: A sketch of a school-wide ‘activity trail’
Test. What works with your prototype…and what is lacking? Let your design recipient try it out…and be prepared to find out what is lacking. Then move onto the ‘empathy’ stage for the next cycle. Example: What works with the activity trail? What could be improved?
This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.
John talked about creating materials for teacher training. He showed us that there are perhaps more similarities than you might expect between materials for language learning and materials for teacher training and development.
John talked to us about materials for input sessions, materials for helping teachers to reflect on their teaching (including for more experienced teachers), and materials for further reading (articles, teacher resources etc.)
Materials for input sessions
This can be based on materials you would write for students, and turning it into materials for teachers. Teachers can then benefit from understanding the process of the activities. For example a classic ‘Find someone who…’
…might look something like this for teachers:
Another activity might be ranking activities. You could ask teachers to rank ideas like spoken error correction techniques from most effective to least effective.
This is the idea of loop input, as created by Tessa Woodward. It’s about processing with content, so you’re experiencing the process, but it’s combined with the content. Here’s the start of a gapfill you could try which demonstrates how this works:
After a grammar point or vocabulary item has been 1__________, we often give students a controlled practice 2__________. One of the most common types of exercise is the 3__________ or fill-in-the-blank exercise. Typically, we give students sentences or a text and 4__________ certain key words…
You might need some kind of ‘decompression’ afterwards, where you need to unpack the stages of the activity afterwards as they might not be able to process both things at the same time.
Materials to help teachers reflect
This is about getting content from the teachers, rather than supplying it. Less is more, because you want them to provide the content. You have to get very good at writing questions. A useful framework:
Think – what do they think about it?
Feel – how do they feel about it?
Do – what will they do as a result?
You need to cover all of these areas to make your materials effective.
This part of your materials is often quite short.
Visuals can often work better than text. Graphs can help, e.g. length of the lesson v. increase/decrease in some area.
You might choose teacher talking time, error correction, student engagement, or anything…this then encourages teachers to reflect on what happened in the lesson.
Heads up / heads down is another possible graph you could use, for example for reflecting on materials you write:
We know visuals work from student materials, but we don’t seem to use them as much in teacher training. The same is true of images. For example, here’s one possible reflective activity. Create two or more sentences inspired by the pictures which start ‘Writing materials is like this because…’ Here’s one picture:
John would like to see more images in teacher training materials.
Materials for further reading
This would be writing articles, blogposts, and you’re trying to train and develop trainers by getting them to read an article. After a session, you can write an article to arrange your thoughts and to act as a summary of the session. Teacher’s books are another material for further reading – a lot of teachers get their training this way.
This is a list of phrases which John found in teacher training materials:
It’s useful to work out your writing style for teachers. Do you prefer something which is more of a paragraph, or more bullet pointed?
For me, the bullet points are clearer and take less time to read, but they don’t have the rationale so might not be as useful as training materials. You need to think about your audience as a materials writer – what do they prefer? The context is also something to keep in mind – is it a teacher’s book? Is it in a journal? Sometimes there’s a mix of the two styles.
John says the first one is maybe more developmental and allows reflection time. The second is more about survival. Penny Hands said that when editing, it’s not always clear who the subject of the sentence is, and might switch between the teacher as subject and the students as the subject.
John has changed his office set up now. He’s switched to video rather than blocks of text, and this is his set-up as a ‘content creator’ now:
Teachers have shifted to watching videos rather than reading resource books. The statistics for the two ways of sharing are very different.
John divides video content into four categories:
Record a lecture – more similar to classic input sessions
Interview experts – they do all the talking, not you! Lots of people watch because they’re experts
How to demonstrations – short video, lots of views, and way more than a blogpost!
Thought provokers – 1-minute / 2-minute ‘think about this’ e.g. the hamburger approach to feedback, what do you think about this? Is it the correct way to do it?
This is his theory of how teacher training materials are created online 🙂 The videos are used by trainers as warmers for input sessions. Video might be the future, rather than writing articles.
6 takeaways from John
Materials for input
Copy the process for student materials
Adjust the content
Materials for reflection
Think, feel, do
Less is more with visuals
Materials for further reading
Balance your writing style(s)
‘Watching’, rather than ‘reading’ now
‘A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT’ by John Hughes
‘ETpedia Materials Writing’ by John Hughes
John Hughes and Katherine Bilsborough run courses to help teachers develop their ability to write effective ELT materials. Find out more on their website.
Joanna’s brother recently did a course which focused on:
Planning and scripting
Noticing language, analysing language, using language
Focus on delivery: emphasis and prominence: pausing, volume
Set-up, presentation, build to a point/outcome/result
Constant monitoring of response, involvement, looking for signs from the ‘audience’
Managing stress, performance
This was to become a stand-up comedian. This made Joanna reflect on the connections between this and teaching. Does rapport mean making people laugh? Is this how we judge the success of our lessons?
How do we – experienced teachers – create rapport?
Interaction / affective features
Names – learning names, using them, putting names on the board so everybody can learn them
Role adjustment: lack of hierarchy / barriers
Natural interaction and follow up questions to show care and empathy
Sense of humour, gentle mocking, sharing jokes, self-deprecation on the part of the teacher
Group dynamic: encourage students to learn about each other, vary interactions, cross-class pin-pointing to find common ground
Lesson design
Adapt coursebook to create relevance and connection
Warm-ups and lead ins
Language work = make reference to what SS have said, use their countries, life in London
Making use of their own lives e.g. photos on their phones
Mingles, information sharing
Why do trainees sometimes struggle with rapport?
Perception of the teacher role – what does a teacher actually do? They picture the teacher as being the knower in the room imparting knowledge to the learners. This can be a challenge to break down.
Lack of attentional resources – there are too many other things to think about. Mercer and Dornyei: ‘Getting caught up in the mechanics of teaching and forgetting about the learners in the room’
Devotion to the plan / wedded to the coursebook
Personality? Is it natural? Is it style over substance?
Lack of understanding of what it is, and level-appropriateness (e.g. complicated jokes at A1 level)
Lack of awareness of its importance – ‘my job isn’t about being funny’. ‘Rapport is important’ but we don’t necessarily say how or why.
Misguided application
Time – not enough time in the plan, prioritising language work over communicative tasks; time in our courses – do we have time to devote sessions to rapport and engagement? Balancing it with everything else we need to cover
Raising awareness of rapport and the importance of it
Joanna has been working on setting it up on day one, and creating that dynamic from the beginning of the course. They start with lots of activities to reduce stress levels at the beginning of the course. Then they reflect on what they’ve done: Do you feel there’s a good classroom atmosphere in the room now? They come up with the criteria – what did they do during the day to create this positive atmosphere?
Making a connection between what’s int he room and the world around them
Variety
Groupwork, pairwork
Small, achievable tasks
Activity
What’s the difference between when you walked into the room (nervous) and now (slightly less nervous!)?
Why did this help?
A safe space
Inclusive
Collaboration
Relaxes everyone
More open to learning
Level of trust in the room that might not have been there initially
This then became their criteria for developing rapport with the students. They incorporated it into observation and self-reflection tasks. They had to tick what they felt they’d achieved within the lesson.
Creating time and space: collective responsibility
It’s not just one person’s responsibility on the course. Joanna encouraged them to create learner databases. At the end of each session, the trainers would leave the classroom and the trainees would add all of the information they’d learnt about the students during that lesson. This database was added to after every TP, and over time they built up a lot of information about the students. This provided information for the Focus on the Learner assignment too.
Another way of creating time and space is unassessed practice. It’s vital in allowing the trainees to make connections with the learners without feeling under pressure. Joanna has experimented with doing it daily – 15-20 minutes of student feedback at the end of each lesson, where trainees discuss lessons and activities with the learners. They could then use this information to plan the next lesson.
I felt much more comfortable teaching them as I knew a little bit about each of them.
I saw the students as people.
By making the students the focal point, we are better able to teach to the student’s strengths. For example, getting to know your students where/when possible and incorporating their personal interests or personalising the course materials.
Trainee comments
This conversation and database happened after the lesson and before tutor feedback, which meant that tutor feedback was then driven by the learners. Not ‘Did I do OK?’ But ‘Esme didn’t understand me when I said x. Why is that?’
Putting the knowledge into practice: planning
In one input session, trainees drew the faces of the learners in the group. They looked at the topic of the lesson. They had to design ways that they could get the learners involved in that discussion. Trainees changed their perspective: teaching individuals within a group, rather than a whole group. Planning became easier rather than more difficult, as they were thinking about the people in the room.
Incorporating knowledge into the lesson plan
Joanna added a motivation and engagement section to the lesson plan. Here’s one example of what a trainee wrote:
As a logical extension of this, differentiation started to appear in the lesson plan, and trainees started to comment on how they would work with this.
Advice from trainees
This is what trainees on this course commented on at the end – ideas for building rapport. It’s quite a similar list to what the experienced teachers commented on at the start.
Summary
Address rapport explicitly – co-create criteria with trainees, so they all feel they can build it
Establish it as criteria via paperwork
Collective responsibility
Focus on the learners in feedback
Visualisation and differentiation
Discuss humour – what is it?
This all creates care, which led to investment in what they were learning, which led to more care. This group enjoyed working with these learners so much that they’ve continued volunteering to teach this group of learners.
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
On 13th November 2021, I attended a truly hybrid conference. 150 trainers attended from around the world, with some of us in the building at IH London, and the rest attending online. All of the sessions were presented via Zoom so that we were all watching the same thing and could participate equally, either via the chat or by speaking to the person next to us. Those of us in the building also had catering 🙂
Here is the YouTube playlist with recordings of all of the talks.
The sessions I attended were:
International skills for better communication – Chia Suan Chong
Challenging CCQs – Yulianto Lukito and Yanina Leigh
Teaching online: construct and methods to give teachers what they need – Alison Castle (mostly about the Trinity Certificate in Online Teaching)
Online teacher training in low resource contexts – Nicky Hockly
Using WhatsApp for teacher development – Danny Norrington-Davies and Khassoum Diop
Meeting local needs in contexts new to the internet – Joe Wilsdon
Raining on prom night – James Egerton and Giovanni Licata
Learning by doing: Replanning a methodology course to prepare for online teaching – Joanna Szoke
A journey through time – Abeer Ali Okaz
Final comments by Adrian Underhill
IH London this morning 🙂
I really enjoyed this conference format. I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person, which meant that I got to see all of the sessions and to discuss them with people face-to-face too. Because the sessions ran online we heard the voices of people from all over the world, including questions by chat and on video from a range of different countries, not just the people who could make it to IH London. I saw talks presented by teachers in York, Sydney, Senegal, Barcelona, Cairo, Moscow, Rome and Budapest. The conference felt really international, and it really did feel like it was talking about the Future of Training and what is possible for us in the future – I can’t remember the last time a conference theme was actually fulfilled as well as this! I’m looking forward to watching the recordings of parallel sessions which I couldn’t attend.
International skills for better communication – Chia Suan Chong
A large proportion of our job relies on us talking and interacting with our students, and helping them to interact with each other as they communicate in English. It should naturally follow that we should be experts at interpersonal skills and communication skills. But we know that that’s not always true. A typical teacher training course might address areas like how to grade our language, how to give instructions or how to respond to students’ errors but seldom do we discuss how we can build trust and rapport with our students, how we can deal with conflict or how we can adapt our communication style to the different students we encounter. In this interactive session, we’ll be reflecting on our range of interpersonal skills and considering how we can develop them.
I attended Chia’s version of this talk at IATEFL 2021 this year. You can find the summary at the end of this post. There were a few extra points in this teacher training version (I recommended you read both posts to get the full picture!):
Transactional Communication v. Interpersonal Communication
T = Focus on information exchange v. I = Focus on building relationships
T = Getting things done v. I = Getting to know people
T = For the short term (results) v. I = For the long term (relationship)
T = Shorter turns v. I = Longer turns
T = Predictable script v. I = Less predictable
T = Often measurable result (Did you get what you needed?) v. I = Not instantly measurable
Interpersonal skills are the skills you need to interact and communicate with people….Interpersonal skills are sometimes referred to as social skills, people skills, soft skills or life skills.
Skillsyouneed.com
As teacher trainers we tend to give feedback/tips on transactional communication, rather than interpersonal communication. This is often easier or more straightforward for us to do this, not least because of the predictability of transactional scripts. Interpersonal skills like rapport, classroom dynamics, building a positive atmosphere are all much more difficult to give advice on.
Chia presents a series of training called Fierce Conversations, created by Susan Scott, who also wrote a book with the same name [Amazon affiliate link]. The idea is that the conversation is not about the relationship, it is the relationship. When we have conversations with others, we’re building relationships – we can’t separate these two areas.
What tips can we give to build rapport?
We came up with these ideas:
Remember names.
Share information about yourself.
Ask genuine questions.
Be sincere and honest.
Remember what they say.
Respect them.
Space in the lesson for relationship building.
Take account of their experiences beyond the classroom/lessons.
When you do an online search for how to build rapport, there are some useful ideas, but we might need to be culturally sensitive with some of them, for example about using humour or laughing often.
Incorporate personal stories and personal experiences: some students might find this unprofessional. They might have a different expectation of what is and isn’t appropriate in the classroom.
Allow students to make decisions on classroom activities: some students might not be happy with what they might see as an abdication of the teacher role. Menus of options might be more useful than open questions – you could also use the contents page of a coursebook to do this.
[My note: It’s also important to maintain our boundaries and our mental health, so be cautious with advising ideas like ‘volunteering your time outside class to support students’ or ‘have breakfast/lunch in the school cafe surrounded by your students’.]
Ultimately, one size doesn’t fit all with how we build rapport.
Why should I trust you?
Good question!
Because we’re teachers.
Because we’ve built up a certain level of knowledge.
Because we trust them.
If you want to read more about trust, Chia recommends The Trusted Advisorby David H. Maister, Robert Galford and Charles Green. It includes the Trust Equation (described in this post). To improve trust, you ultimately need to reduce self-orientation.
Do you ever have people who ask you for advice, but really they want you to listen to them complaining about what other people think of them? That’s one example of self-orientation. Self-orientation is when you put yourself in the centre, rather than having regard for the people you’re talking to.
We should bring trust into the conversation in teacher training courses. What efforts are teachers/trainers making to build relationships in the classroom? How do we build trust? Which strategies do we use?
Ways that we build trust:
Establish competence – I’m competent in this area, you can trust me
Finding common ground (commonality)
Empathy
Openness (information) – what you see is what you get, I don’t have a hidden agenda
Reliability – you can trust me because I’m reliable
Openness (emotion) – showing vulnerability, you have to be genuine about it!
Willingness to trust first – we trust people who trust us
In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, very precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.
Stephen Covey
Here are some critical incidents you could discuss with trainees. How would you react?
Your student arrives late for class. They don’t apologize and they don’t give any reasons for being late. We’re conditioned to believe that justifying behaviour in this way is the correct, so we’re taken aback when our social script for this situation has been disrupted. The student might not have the same social script. Who says that we should give reasons for being late? He might not feel like he’s late – it might be a different perception of time. If you haven’t specified classroom rules from the beginning of the course, then it might be different.
You tell students to address you by your first name and they keep calling you ‘professor’.
You’re telling the class a story and one student keep interrupting to comment on parts of your story and to ask questions.
You could think about your communication style, as well as the communication style of somebody you don’t get along with. What are the similarities and differences? Are your problems with communication a result of the similarities or the differences? It can help people to realise they have different communication styles. Chia has included a series of clines to help you do this in her book Successful International Communication [Amazon affiliate link/BEBC non-affiliate link]
Nothing can be said in a way in which it cannot be misunderstood.
Karl Popper
The illusion of transparency: We always know what we mean, and so we expect others to know it too. There is a tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people understand us.
The ADAPT model (developed by Chia)
Awareness: What’s happened here? Describe the situation in other ways.
Don’t judge: avoid words like ‘picking at’, ‘being negative’
Analyse: can you think of at least 3 interpretations of why this is happening in this way/why the people behaved in this way?
Persuade yourself: align the communication values of the other person with yourself
Try: Me and my style v. Them and their style. If you try and adapt 20% of your behaviour, you might get 80% of the results you want (Pareto principle)
Challenging CCQs – Yulianto Lukito and Yanina Leigh
This presentation deals with CCQs (concept checking questions) as a language clarification technique. Trainees on pre-service courses and new teachers sometimes claim this technique is rigidly based on “the CELTA method” and does not work well in the real classroom where learners desire clear explanations. This session will question the validity of such a claim and propose practical strategies to deal with issues arising in this area.
Yuli and Yanina are asking does “questioning” work? The points below say they don’t:
Observation of trainees in pre-service courses
Lack of use – don’t use them at all
Overuse – asking them when they’re not necessary
Inappropriate use – not asking the right questions
Misuse – ‘If my room is upstairs, is it downstairs?’ (no purpose at all!)
Observation of experienced teachers
CCQs ‘don’t work’ with lower levels
‘Explanation’ is simpler and more time-efficient
Students don’t answer questions, so we’ll have to explain anyway
Learner feedback (anecdotal)
Learners want teachers to ‘explain’ well
Learners expect teachers to ‘explain’
Learners may perceive a lack of explanation as a lack of knowledge
So what can we do as trainers and teachers to help trainees/teachers see the benefit of questioning approaches?
Less CCQs – More CCTs
Concept clarification techniques, rather than questions.
On many courses, CCQs tend to become the technique to be used – in lessons, in assignments. The misperception of CCQs as part of ‘The CELTA method’ could be partly our fault as trainers. Should they be an obligatory part of Language Related Tasks? Is this giving trainees the impression that CCQs are more important than other techniques?
We should assess their ability to select appropriate concept clarification techniques instead. Here’s a selection of what trainees could use as a CCT:
Antonyms/synonums
TPR/mime
Cline and timelines
CCQs
Ask for examples and extension
Visuals/Realia/Audio-visual
Scenario/presentation
Guided discovery
Explanation
Translation
Develop ‘questioning’ skills appropriate to the level
Help trainees become successful in eliciting information. Could becoming skillful at using questioning tehcniques effectively enable trainees (and teachers) to move away from lecturing learners? Explanations can be a comfort zone for many teachers, but this could be because they lack the skill of questioning well.
Focus on purpose first: to get information, opinions, check understanding
Question design and variety e.g. Funnel questions: typical CCQs. We ask quite a few questions to check the core meaning. Probing questions: allows you to gather more subjective data based on learner response. e.g. What are some examples of things which are revolting? Soup. Tell me why soup is revolting. Leading questions: If you ate soup, would you vomit straight away? Recall and process: open-ended questions. Use this promote critical thinking and discussion. Do you remember last week when we talked about….? What do you remember?
Scripting and practising
Rephrasing and adjusting: don’t give up too quickly. If students don’t answer, try to reword the question, provide more clues, though don’t turn it into a guessing game.
Consider waiting time – yes!
Being able to vary question design can help trainees avoid being in the habit of patterns like 2 questions answered ‘no’ followed by one answered ‘yes’.
This set of skills could be more useful fuel for a session than one dedicated to how to write CCQs.
Flipped approach
Trainees plan CCQs for TL allocated. Peer-teaching to get feedback on appropriacy. This can improve teaching quality as trainees have a chance to experiment with techniques.
Video trainees (with permission!) during the lessons – gather a library of weak and strong clarification stages for other trainees to watch and discuss. Trainees aren’t really watching their peers on the days when they’re teaching – this could create a wider library for them to access.
Play games with CCTs. For example, charades. This could give trainees a chance to practise these techniques.
Give trainees the chance to go back and re-teach language to peers and see what they can improve, in a non-assessed, safe environment.
Responding to learners’ expectations – Is there a place for ‘explanations’ in the language classroom?
Yes, there is, as long as we explain well.
The students might have a different understanding of what explanation means to us – we might contrast explanation with questioning, whereas students might equate explanation with clarification.
There are some situations when explanation might be better:
L1 negative transfer – it might be faster sometimes to explain in the language
Universal concepts – just tell them what it is (e.g. banana)
Lack of knowledge – if they don’t know, you can’t elicit it – just tell them!
When students ask a random language question in the middle of the lesson – it can be frustrating if students are questioned in response
Error correction technique – it can be more efficient
Thematic words/phrases – key words for the lesson, tell them what it is and move on. You could use rhetorical questions to generate interest and move on.
[Odd CCQ moment I came across recently, clarifying the meaning of some global problems. “Child mortality. Are you OK with that?” Nobody batted an eyelid at this strange question!]
In conclusion, it’s not about abandonining CCQs, but keeping a balance. Helping trainees to realise when to ask and when to tell. CCQs can be ineffective for trainees, because they haven’t developed and practised questioning skills during the course.
In our discussion at the end of the session, Richard mentioned the idea of using techniques/questions to bring meaning into focus, stopping it from being so fuzzy. I like that idea that the meaning is blurred at first, and you’re using techniques to tighten it up. You could extend this metaphor – how focussed does the image need to be? Does it need to be completely sharp, or is a little fuzzy good enough? What’s the most efficient way to make it sufficiently sharp to move on with the lesson?
Teaching online: construct and methods to give teachers what they need – Alison Castle (mostly about the Trinity Certificate in Online Teaching)
This talk reports on Trinity’s development of a new online course and qualification that supports teachers working in an online environment. We will first review how we arrived at the underlying pedagogical underpinnings and then talk about how these were implemented in the course design. Finally, we will consider data from impact studies to identify lessons learnt for future support.
Some initial conversation questions:
If you have experienced a move from in-person to online teaching, what skills or knowledge did you feel you needed in order to be as effective online as you are in an ‘in-person’ class?
What skills or knowledge do you think teahcers need in general when transitioning from ‘in-person’ to online teaching?
What types of resources are needed to help teachers develop their online teaching skills?
They started off with a webinar series called Transformative Teachers, which has been running for a number of years. At the beginning of the pandemic, they started creating free online learning resources and enable blended and online Trinity courses. This moved on to writing a full courses, piloting and trialling it, and then launching it in the autumn.
It is self-study, convenient, bite-sized, and includes lots of examples of showing how to teach English online. They’re not just perfect classes, but real-life ones with a critique of what did and didn’t work. The support is informed by research and experience. There is a communicative focus, with the learner kept at the centre of the process.
The course is designed to develop the following areas:
Developing teachres’ ability to use online tools effectively
Helping teachers identify online tools that meet learning needs
Using interaction that encourages communicative learning in an online environment
Using online assessment techniques that meet learning needs
Helping teachers create a motivating environment for online learning
Increasing teachers’ confidence in facilitating online learning
There are 10 units of study, divided into 3 modules:
Preparing for the online classroom (intro, planning, classroom management)
Developing language skills
Resources for learning and teaching (tasks and activities, resource adaptation, design and creation)
You can access separate units or whole modules, so it’s flexible. There’s a sample unit on the website. It’s also possible to get a regulated qualification, an Ofqual Level 4 Certificate (CertOT), from Trinity if you complete the whole course.
Some lessons they learnt from developing an online course:
Test, pilot and trial as much as possible. Review content from different perspectives, including welfare experts, not just teachers, schools, academics.
Ensure there is time to react to trials and reviews.
Choose a platform that works globally or for your target area.
Check copyright restrictions for content and learn about Creative Commons.
Be aware of safeguarding.
Lessons learnt about teachers’ needs:
Teachers need to be shown focussed, practical techniques to help their ‘just-in-time learning’.
Videos of real classes are just as valuable as mini best-practice videos.
Teachers need to be directed to consolidate learning, just like ‘non-teacher’ learners
Online learning must have a variety of media to help maintain interest and support local adaptation.
Teaching is a messy business: acknowledge and embrace this.
Teachers want certification for learning just as much as learners do!
Online teacher training in low resource contexts – Nicky Hockly
School closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have led to learning loss at all levels of education, including for teachers. This talk reports on fully online teacher training projects that TCE have carried out over the last 18 months in data-poor contexts in Africa. Lessons learned about designing fully online teacher training courses for low resource contexts will be shared.
The Consultants-E are members of Aqueduto and take part in research into online teacher training – there’s lots of interesting information on their website.
Through TCE, Nicky has experience of running projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, including English by WhatsApp, English Connects and a project called CoELT.
Some of the challenges to moving teacher training online during the pandemic (AQUEDUTO, 2022 – research to be published soon):
Lack of digital skills amongst trainers
Lack of access to tech
Lack of support for well-being, of teachers and learners
Resistance to working online
Positives found in the same research:
Digital upskilling
Rethinking teacher assessment
Enhanced collaboration and support
Online teacher training is now ‘on the map’ – accepted and recognised as valid
Nicky is telling us about a specific online project in South Africa.
Challenges:
Widespread school closures
Teachers unable to reach learners remotely
Rural / urban digital divide
High data costs (highest on the continent); loadshedding (rolling electricity cuts)
Lack of devices (e.g. one feature phone per family – i.e. with a keyboard, not a smartphone)
Online teaching/training via a VLE and/or videoconferencing not realistic in many SA contexts
Massive learning loss, especially in rural and deprived areas
COELT: Certificate in Online English Language Teaching: done in cooperation with the British Council and the Department for Basic Education (DBE). TCE developed the course, then trained a group of Master Trainers who took the course as participants at first then cascaded the training to teachers. The course was:
40 hours fully online
6 modules over 6 weeks
Aligned to EFAL (English as a First Additional Language) materials for Grades 1-12
Aligned to CiPELT and CiSELT training (teaching methodology certificates)
Course tools:
Self-study materials on a Google site
WhatsApp for teacher reflection and group work
Weekly Zoom sessions (for debrief and reflection)
Mentoring and evlauation:
Group mentoring via WhatsApp
Individual coaching via Zoom – several times during the cascade
Evaluation of online competencies via an evidence-based evaluation framework with indicators
As it was for a low-tech context, they kept the following in mind:
Easy to access materials: Google site, not behind a password protected VLE
Mobile-friendly: designed for mobile first
Low data demands: icons rather than photos, audio rather than video, H5P to create simple interactive elements in self-study materials (e.g. drag and drop, click on ABCD and get feedback)
South African teaching materials and local accents in audio
Downloadable PDFs for each module (many people will find wifi, download materials and take them away to read them)
WhatsApp as the main communication channel for teacher training
WhatsApp for demo live language lessons
WhatsApp Live Lessons – synchronous interaction
Some related research from MIT done in South Africa to train community leaders in rural areas: Mohlabane and Zomer, 2020.
TCE took DBE materials and thought about how it could be delivered via WhatsApp in an engaging, realtime lesson.
The live lesson starts off with rules and routines. 10 minutes/5 minutes before the lesson, they check ‘Are you ready?’ The start of the lesson is reviewing the group rules which were established in the first lesson. There’s a clear signal for when they start: *OK, everybody. Ready, steady, go.* The lessons are very intense and very fast, although it’s important to remember that typing can take longer on a feature phone. The pace of the lesson is slower on a feature phone than on a smartphone.
They demo a live lesson on WhatsApp, with the trainees experiencing the lesson as students. Then there is clear signal that they’re now teachers, and share their immediate reactions to the lesson. There can be a mix of voice notes and text.
They also used WhatsApp for reflective course tasks during the course.
Findings
The digital skills of the teachers was so much lower than they expected. Key digital skills were lacking, for example being able to copy and paste. They added a 6-hour key digital skills to the beginning of the course with these absolute basics.
Tech with low demands in terms of data, but also in terms of the digital skills required.
Videoconferencing might not be appropriate – they used it because the DBE requested it, but not everybody could use it.
They used WhatsApp in RT (real time) and NQRT (not quite real time) – a combination of these interactions was very effective.
The interaction in WhatsApp was with text, pictures and voice notes, but no videos.
They integrated ways of how to use WhatsApp in other ways for education, for example liaising with parents.
Nicky expects that WhatsApp will continue to be used in this way even after the pandemic.
Using WhatsApp for teacher development – Khassoum Diop and Danny Norrington-Davies
In this session we will share our experience of using WhatsApp to offer development opportunities to large groups of teachers or teachers working in different locations. We will offer tips and advice on how to set up groups and set boundaries, encourage sharing and participation, and how to help teacher developers manage their time and commitments. We will finish by offering suggestions on how WhatsApp might be used on teacher development courses.
Danny is a trainer from IH London, and Khassoum is a trainer in Senegal. They ran the session as a Q&A. Danny asked questions and Khassoum gave the answers.
Some initial questions:
Have you ever used WhatsApp for teachign training?
How might WhatsApp be used for training in your context?
Why do you use WhatsApp for training and development?
Lots of teachers in different and sometimes remote locations
Poor internet coverage does not allow for high tech tools
Does not require lots of training/digital skills
Can use text, pictures and voice notes
Less expensive than other tools
How many teachers do you tend to work with?
As many teachers as possible! Locally and internationally.
What do you mainly use WhatsApp groups for?
Social interactions – building rapport and community with other teachers
Sharing materials
Sharing techniques and ideas
What advice do you have for setting up and running discussions?
Set up a clear, focussed question.
Set clear time limits, e.g. the end of the week.
Situate discussions in the classroom so they are more real.
Respond to contributions and ask follow up questions so teacher do more than give lists of ideas.
Summarise and share the discussion at the end – these summaries can become training materials or articles for publication. The summaries are also shared on WhatsApp. Summaries can be written by the co-ordinating trainer, or by a member of the group.
What kinds of topics have you had discussions about?
They tend to focus discussions on a specific topic, for example, the different stages of listening comprehension, or strategies for teaching listening. The discussions can also motivate teachers to explore topics in more depth.
Discussions to develop content knowledge – for example, based on problems a student has, asking for advice, What would you say?
Discussions to develop pedagogic knowledge – for example, pair or groupwork.
Discussions framed as problems/case studies can be helpful to encourage teachers to answer.
How important is it to have rules and regulations on your teacher WhatsApp groups and how do you set this up?
A sample set of rules:
Remember that [this group] abides by these rules:
English posts ONLY
No religious or political posts
Give and take ONLY in [this group]
Do not keep silent, participate as much as possible.
No personal discussions in [this group]
Thank you for your understanding.
Tips:
Set clear rules and boundaries at the start. These could relate to content, tone and times when you can post.
Have a system to deal with transgressions e.g. give a warning before taking action/suspending a participant
Give new participants time to settle before they become active
Talk to the ‘ghosts’ (the people who watch but don’t participate) – make sure people are giving as well as taking, because everybody’s ideas are valid. They find that a lot of people contribute the following session after this.
What advice do you have for encouraging teachers to share materials? What do you have to consider when you share materials?
There is a rule that they’re not there to assess or evaluate materials, but that everybody’s materials and ideas are valid. They don’t want people to feel ashamed about sharing materials. Be clear that the thread is about sharing rather than assessment.
Set a clear task e.g. ‘What speaking activity have you used recently that your students enjoyed? Please share it here saying what the task is and why you think the students enjoyed it’
How do you limit your own time commitments with the number of groups you have?
Khassoum makes sure he has time to rest. He chooses which sessions to attend, rather than attending all of them.
Tips:
Set time limits for discussions.
Share the forum with other trainers if possible.
Have cut off times in the day when the group is closed.
Turn off your phone or mute notifications for set periods.
Make sure you have boundaries.
How do you ensure that the group is democratic rather than autocratic?
They tried to have different people running the sessions, including volunteers from the group. Some people said that they wanted to run a session because they wanted to learn something – you don’t have to be the knowledgeable one.
Tips:
Invite teachers to set discussions or ask questions.
Inform the teachers you will be absent from the discussion for a set period. (Give them space!)
Set reflective questions e.g. ‘What was the biggest challenge you have faced with your class recently and how did you overcome it?’
Question from Khassoum: How do you think these ideas would work on a teacher training course?
Set ‘office hours’ and clear boundaries around topics e.g. no planning questions, no changing the topic mid-discussion.
Create and delete groups through the course e.g. Q&A for each assignment.
Set reflection tasks before feedback and sit out the discussion.
Flip training by setting questions or readings for input sessions. You can also encourage trainees to ask you questions: Tomorrow we’re going to talk about reading skills. What would you like to know?
Set observation tasks and run discussions during TP.
Q&A/Comments
Trainers really appreciated the chance to share responsibility and to learn from each other in the WhatsApp groups.
There is no obligation for people to join groups. Discussions can be weekly, monthly, or at random. In their platform, they have Friday discussions from 4-6pm, though sometimes people share questions at other times. (A little like the #eltchat hashtag on Twitter!)
Reflective elements could be done in L1 if the English level is too low to be able to reflect in English (e.g. A1/A2), even if the trainer doesn’t understand the language.
They can see that the WhatsApp groups are working, because they see people sharing the ideas in other contexts, such as in other groups they are members of, and crediting the ideas back to the WhatsApp groups.
Group work is possible in WhatsApp too – you can have a bigger group with everyone, and smaller groups for teachers/students which you’re part of. [Teaching via WhatsApp is a whole new world to me, and sounds very exciting!]
They share WhatsApp groups organically by creating flyers which can be shared by/with other teachers. There’s a lot of word of mouth.
Meeting local needs in contexts new to the internet – Joe Wilsdon
The internet gains 700,000 users every day. The African Union plans for every individual on the continent to have internet access by 2030. With the assumption that English will remain the global language, how can language teacher training meet local needs in countries and cultures newly connected to the internet?
The internet is gradually becoming available to more and more people. Some initial discussion questions:
How has the internet changed your work as a teacher in your country?
Imagine you were training an online CELTA with candidate teachers from Nigeria, Pakistan and Canada. What, if any, information about their specific, local contexts would you want to know?
When the internet is available to the entire world, will a one-size-fits all course like CELTA be appropriate?
In some countries, internet use is on the phone, not on computers. It’s still possible to show images and short texts on phones around a large group – it’s not perfect, but it works.
The rural/urban dichotomy can often be a bigger difference than that between different countries.
The UN committed itself to as one of its infrastructure and development goals to ‘strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020’ (goal 9C). This date has passed. Access to the internet is now possible from 97% of the world’s surface. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has access. Just 54% of the global population use the internet. In the least developed countries only 19% have online access. 2018 was the 50/50 point – when 50% of the global population had access to the internet.
What does it mean to have internet access? Within global development, it means to be able to access a device at some point that has the internet, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody has it. If one person in the village has a device which they give other people access to, that can mean multiple people count as having internet access.
According to ourworldindata 27,000 people gain access to the internet per hour. One project to help increase internet acccess was Google’s Loon, though it was discontinued in January 2021. Facebook Aquila was another project. One key question is whether we want mega-corporations to be in control of internet access.
What does increased internet access mean? Increased opportunities for girls and women is just one impact.
How does the spread of the internet to more people influence the ELT industry?
In Northern and Western Africa, 141 million people are native French speakers. If only five percent of those people seek and pay for online English classes, that’s seven million new clients for the ELT industry.
More students means more teachers. More teachers means more trainers.
On the other hand, more people online means more choice for the consumer, which means lower prices, which probably means lower wages.
Joe’s advice is to specialise as much as possible. General English may well be coming to an end. By having to become an expert in a particular field, we probably have to become more professional.
What about linguistic imperialism? Philipson (1992 – Amazon affiliate link) argued that the spread of English is already:
Perpetuating native speakerism
Contributing to the death of languages around the world
Perpetuating a model of culture that is Euro-centric
Joe doesn’t say this is wrong, but doesn’t a globalised world need a globalised language? In recent decades, enormous gains have been made in lifting people out of poverty (slowly, uncertainly, hesitantly, but still). Would it be possible to have a globalised economy without a globalised language?
Some thoughts on the next 15-20 years:
The number of EFL teachers will grow rapidly.
The majority will be teaching both online and offline.
A proportion of them will come from countries where English is taught through traditional, teacher-centred methods and not communicative approaches. (Note: it’s not self-evident that communicative approaches have to be the best way to learn)
Exposure to a greater variety of international speakers through internet access will change people’s perceptions of which accents/dialects are considered acceptable.
What might need to change?
Qualifications must adapt.
EFL training could become adaptable according to the region from which the participants hail.
An increasing number of countries are teaching all subjects in English to VYL.
CELTA could pivot to prepare trainees to teach history, science and maths in English? A more CLIL approach.
CELTA could also be more specialised towards teaching adults in their professions.
In the discussion afterwards, there was a discussion of the risk of being colonial in marking speaking/writing exams. It’s a challenge that exam boards need to address. Intelligibility between candidates might be fine, but examiners might not find candidates intelligible and therefore mark them down.
Translanguaging, with the combination of English with other languages, will become increasingly common, so that people will still be able to participate in communication.
It’s raining on prom night – Giovanni Licata and James Egerton
The last 18 months have been momentous for teacher training. The online transition has not only meant reinventing the wheel in some cases, but also facing ever-present teacher training fears that had been more hidden in the 100% physical classroom CELTA. Our session will spin the audience through technical, cultural-educational and organizational moments where it felt like the rain was ruining prom night, but for which moves in the new dance must be mastered.
The idea of this presentation started a long time before COVID. It was about thinking about the problems that teachers have and how to deal with them. What do you do when you’ve been building up to somethign for a long time, then things don’t happen the way you expect them to?
Face to face or Mask to mask? There are challenges to teaching in person with COVID restrictions too, not just to teaching online. There can be restrictions on not moving from your chair, not being able to monitor – all adding extra challenges to initial teaching experiences. [You might find some useful ideas on socially distanced teaching here.]
Giovanni would like to see a lot more experimentation with using different physical environments within the same school, to give you the privacy that breakout rooms give you.
We should try to stop ourselves from thinking that everything was rosy before the pandemic. The pandemic has been an accelerator to the integration of technology in education, not a circuit break. The idea of going ‘back to normal’ isn’t a thing. We need to reconceptualise what is happening in our spaces.
Flexbiliity: We have the choice with the spaces we work in to be able to provide the best possible services for teachers and trainers. How can we combine and integrate these two worlds?
Collaboration: Working with centres around the world. Can we continue to share ideas and innovations in the way we have during the pandemic?
Integration of new ideas
Key concepts moving forward:
Assessment – being flexible
Cognitive flexibility – awareness, confidence and flexibility
Hybrid: Attention can’t be split – all students online or all students face-to-face. Mixed-mode could be better – some lessons of each.
Learning by doing: Replanning a methodology course to prepare for online teaching – Joanna Szoke
During COVID, I had to completely redesign a simple methodology course to give enough practical support to my in-service trainees in online teaching and learning. The aim was to equip them with skills they could use right away. The talk will look at the design principles of this “learning by doing” course and its main takeaways.
Jo teaches pre-service and in-service trainees at a university in Budapest. The course she’s talking about was called ‘Using ICT tools in the ELT classroom’ – it was designed for face-to-face classrooms. [I sympathise – I wrote a whole MA assignment on a two-week ICT course I was really proud of, but which didn’t mention online teaching at all. Doh!] In-service trainees were transitioning into online teaching. Pre-service trainees had their first ever experience of teaching online.
She had to redesign the course completely to meet their needs, expectations and requests. She wanted to provide efficient support to struggling trainees with minimal online teaching experience. Jo believes in learning by doing and the power of passing knowledge on. She thought that the in-service teachers would be able to pass the knowledge onto their colleagues too.
The course design process:
Identify their needs.
Find out what they have to do and how they have to do it. Environments, software, tools they have access to. Done through interviews.
Remove everything from the old course schedule to create a new course!
She wanted/needed to include:
Zoom and MS Teams
Interactive tools like Learning Apps and WordWall
Colloboration online
The course consisted of Zoom and VLE training (Google classroom), with autonomous and flipped components, and formative assessment. They got 5-minute long videos with tasks on Nearpod. They had open-ended questions at the end to serve as revision questions at the beginning of synchronous sessions. Formative assessment:
Flipped videos + required task+ optional tasks
Tasks in sync with the materials e.g. do a flipped lesson on Nearpod, then create a Nearpod lesson yourself; play a game on Wordwall, make one yourself
Option to resubmit improved assignments
Peer feedback
Nearpod allows you to track what people have completed. [There’s a guest post on it here.]
A journey through time – Abeer Ali Okaz
University total closure took everyone by surprise. Most of the training that PUA academics have previously received did not seem to fully help. This presentation focuses on the challenges that necessitated the change in the current training programme. It will take attendees through a journey to adjustment and survival, and provide tips gained from PUA’s experiment with online learning.
The University of Pharos has around 3500 students registered for English each year. Challenges they faced when the pandemic started:
No phone numbers or emails for students, so no way to contact them.
Burnt-out teachers.
Teachers without digital skills.
Connectivity issues.
Lack of access to devices.
Poor wellbeing.
They created 114 Google Classrooms for their students, but not everybody could join them. Teachers were anxious and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to prepare, they couldn’t write on screen, there was a huge amount of information about possible resources, teachers couldn’t monitor all the students carefully…they had all been through the university’s training programme before the pandemic, including some observed training and peer and formal observation.
The university realised they had to stop and reassess the training programme. They knew blended learning wasn’t going to go away – they had to redesign for the situation and for the future.
They changed their approach to training:
Bottom-up – teachers can create training content and manage its delivery. They could suggest sessions, research and share with each other. The attitude to younger teachers training older ones changed amongst the teachers.
Smaller groups
Asking teachers via WhatsApp and Google Classroom what they needed.
Using Google Classroom and Padlet for content creation and ideas and tools. One team was responsible for each of these tools and collecting information to share on these platforms. The Padlet was open to all teachers to post ideas, comment on each other’s ideas and access them later too.
Helping the teachers to be responsible for their own learning and training other teachers handed over control, in the way that we want learners to be responsible. They surveyed teachers regularly to check that this met their needs.
They scheduled training based on priority and availability. The management was only facilitating – there was more reward for teachers from this approach.
Abeer believes that this approach will continue in the future – there were common goals, there has been a lot more interaction between teachers, morale has improved – teachers are very proud of the sessions they’ve done, and there is enhanced communication between teachers.
Final comments from Adrian Underhill
[This was an excellent way to end the conference – very positive! I may have missed some points, but here are many of them!]
The discontinuity of COVID has led to a huge amount of creativity. It’s amazing how we’ve managed to deal with this situation, and it’s released a huge amount of energy which this conference has showcased. The picture of training has become much more nuanced.
Core values are important – we’re not trying to be values free. We seem to be moving from ‘It works’ or ‘It doesn’t work’ to ‘I/We work’ – a much greater sense of agency and involvement, with a commitment to values and the expression of values.
We’re not just going into detail, but zooming out and looking at the big picture and questioning systems as a whole.
Interpersonal skills, as described by Chia, are the ground out of which everything else grows. We need to build trust and reduce distance. How do we talk about empathy? When Adrian started the TD group in 1986, he meant personal development for teachers. We need to think about How can we be more facilitative in our teaching?
How can we share power? Mentoring…Reflective practice… It’s great to see that in teacher training.
There’s a need for honesty and to be who we are. Sharing real experience, sharing insecurity, learning to forgive yourself and be less judgemental of ourselves so we can be less judgemental of others.
WhatsApp allows accessibility and communication, getting lots of people talking.
Flipped learning/teaching seems to have become more relevant than ever to maximise the use of synchronous time to have discussions and create meaning together, not just to go through facts.
Each can learn from the other: online from face-to-face and vice versa. We may see new potential in being online. It might not replace reading the room when you’re all together, but it might bring other things which we don’t recognise yet.
Leadership in ELT is a key concept too and was discussed today. Adrian gave a plenary on it at IATEFL 2012, but it’s taken a while to enter other parts of ELT. It’s about empowering others.
We can make a difference through training. We can be guided by meaning, values and people. With our ingenuity and energy, we can find ways of making a difference. We are connecting with the whole world. There’s hope for the future.
These are summaries of the talks I attended during day two of the OxfordTEFL Innovate ELT online conference on 1st and 2nd October 2021. Day one is here.
Note: when I’ve included links, sometimes they’re the ones the presenter included, sometimes they’re others which I’ve found. If you’re one of the presenters and would like me to change any of the links, please let me know!
Plenary – Writing for yourself and the rest of the teaching community – me 🙂
Plenary – Not just diversity, but unity – Fiona Mauchline
If we’ve learnt anything in 2020-2021, it’s that we need people: to shape our lives, and to learn. Emerging from such isolating times, let’s reflect on how to employ not just ‘people in the room’ ELT approaches, but ‘between people in the room’ approaches. Connection: what language is for.
Fiona reminds us that while of course it is important to get more voices in the room and to focus on diversity, it is also important to consider the connections between the people in the room. She asked us:
What two things did you most miss about life while in lockdown or under restrictions?
What do you most miss about face2face conferences/ELT events?
How do you feel about group communication in a Zoom room with more than 3 people?
She reminds us how important it is to get students talking as early as possible in a session or lesson to break the ice and help students to feel comfortable sharing ideas – these questions were an example of that kind of activity.
Most of the answers in the chat showed that we missed the social aspects of life. There has been a lot about changing narratives and diversity over the past year, but the most important thing Fiona has noticed has been the need for connection and unity. Cohorts who met entirely online and never had any contact face-to-face first seemed to have less effective learning. Fiona shook up her teaching, for example by including sessions where she set things up and left the lesson for a while to give the students space and to move the focus away from her.
In many classrooms, both face-to-face and online, we all look in the same direction, which our brain interprets as a non-communicative situation. We’re all separate online, in different boxes, which our brain interprets as being apart and non-communicative. Even face-to-face, it’s hard to find images of classrooms with people really looking at each other – again, the body language implies not communicating.
We need to look at physically moving learners into communicative modes, rather than just having them speak to each other. Build on the social in your classrooms. Here are some ideas to do this:
Fiona said her plenary last was a ‘call to arms’ and this year it’s a ‘call to hugs’ 🙂
Fostering Learner Autonomy in Virtual Classes – Patricia Ramos Vizoso and Urszula Staszczyk
We all want to see our students bloom and become more autonomous learners. In this talk we will look into some practical ideas that can empower them to be more active and conscious participants in their language learning process, making the whole learning experience a memorable one for both them and us.
Learner autonomy is important because it leads to more efficient and effective learning (Benson, 2011). It helps them to become lifelong learners. Learners are more invested in their learning, and therefore more motivated, because they choose what works for them. They also understand the purpose and usefulness of lessons. Class time is not sufficient – learners need more time to really learn a language.
These are possible ways of focussing on learner autonomy:
In this talk, Ula and Patricia will focus on learner-based and teacher-based approaches.
To implement learning autonomy in class, be aware that it’s a process – it needs to be done regularly, step by step. For example, start by giving them choices (Do you want to do this alone or in pairs? Who do you want to work with?) You have to be consistent and patient – results might not be immediate. The teacher is a facilitator, not the source of knowledge. Try different things, and don’t be afraid to take risks – different things will work for different groups.
We could say that there are 3 phases of learner autonomy:
Kick-off: All learners have the potential to be autonomous, but we need to develop this potential. Teachers are there to help learners understand what that potential is and what options learners have.
Action: This is the ‘doing’ phase.
Reflection and Evaluation: Learners decide what worked and what didn’t.
Kick-off
Set goals: SMART objectives, a class goal contract, or unit objectives. Discuss these goals, keep track of them, and when learners lose motivation or go off track, discuss the goals again. Possible headings to help learners frame their goals:
What is your goal?
How do you plan to achieve this goal?
When and how often will you do the work?
How long will it take?
Who will evaluate your progress? How?
Learners might not know how to create goals like this, and will probably need support. Here is an activity you could do to help them, by presenting problems and solutions which students match, and learners decide which strategies they want to try out.
Acting
Give students choices in class:
Who will they work with? When?
How will they do tasks? Written, oral, video…?
What materials will they use?
What do they want to improve?
Encourage them to think about why they make these choices, not just what the choices are.
Another idea is a choice board:
The phrases on the right are feedback Patricia got from her students, which she conducted in their first language.
Other ideas for action: encourage peer correction, create checklists with students, flip lessons, micro presentations (1-3 minutes) based on topics they’re interested in, task-based learning, project-based lessons.
You can adapt activities from coursebooks or other materials you’re using to make tasks more autonomous – you don’t have to start from scratch. Small changes in instructions can make a different. For example, rather than ‘Write a summary’, change it to ‘Produce a summary’, then discuss what that might mean. Ula’s learners produced a mind map, bullet points, a comic strip, and a paragraph as their summaries, then did some peer feedback before they handed in the work. This is what Ula’s learners thought about these twists to the task:
This could happen after an activity, after a class, or after a specific period of time. It can be individual or in groups. As with all parts of the learner autonomy process, it’s gradual and you need to support students to do this effectively.
‘Can do’ statements
Guided reflection questions
What did we do today?
Why are we doing this?
How will this help your English?
What makes it difficult?
How can I make it easier next time?
Do you prefer to be told what to do or to choose what to do? [Helps learners/teachers to think about goals and strategies for achieving them, as well as encouraging students to take risks and try something new and not just do things which are easy for them]
3 things I’ve learnt, 1 thing I’ll do better next week, 2 things I enjoyed
Reflective diaries (good for helping learners to see how their goals have/haven’t changed over time, what strategies they’ve tried to use, what’s worked and what hasn’t)
Emoticons work with young learners:
The reflection stage gives you as a teacher useful feedback too about how to improve your implementation of learner autonomy in the classroom.
“Why not just google it?”: dictionary skills in digital times – Julie Moore
This session will explore the unmediated world of online dictionaries, what ELT teachers really ought to know about online reference resources, and how we can pass that information onto our students to point them towards appropriate tools that will prove genuinely useful in their language learning journey.
Julie started off by telling us about the boom in learner dictionaries which happened in the late 1990s and how much the landscape of dictionaries has changed in the interim. Dictionaries are expensive to produce, but sales have plummeted.
Many teachers might still think about dictionary skills in relation to paper dictionaries, even if they use online dictionaries themselves. They also might not think about how to train learners how to use online dictionaries.
Paper v. online
Paper dictionaries are somewhat cumbersome and require some skill to access. HOwever, if learners bought a dictionary they were generally teacher-recommended, reliable and audience-appropriate (designed for learners).
Online lookups are quick, familiar and intuitive. You can use them wherever, whenever you like. You’re not tied to a single dictionary – you can look at lots of different resources. They’re ‘free’ (at least to some extent). However, they’re unmediated and can be difficult for students to navigate. Dictionaries online are for very different audiences and are often inappropriate for learners. They’re sometimes misleading, and it can be demotivating if learners don’t understand.
Dictionary sources
Teach learners to ask: Where is the information from? In the screenshot above, it says ‘Oxford Languages’, but who exactly is that? In this case, it came from Lexico, the Oxford University Press dictionary, and is aimed at first-language English speakers. There are specific Oxford dictionaries for learners though.
Collins Cobuild is aimed somewhere between first language and monolingual learners
Merriam Webster is useful for American English speakers. Their main site is aimed at L1 speakers, but they have a learners dictionary.
The differences between them are mostly about formats – they are all high quality.
How much information is there?
The screenshot above is actually an excerpt from the longer entry. Here is the full entry from Lexico:
Vocabulary in definitions
In L1 dictionaries, the definition is often a higher level than the target word, often abstract and grammatically dense. This is not a problem for most L1 speakers, but can be a real challenge for learners. You can see examples above.
Compare these to learner dictionary definitions:
Learner dictionary definitions generally draw from a set list of words to create definitions, typically a list of 2000-3000 words. This means that B1 learners, maybe even A2 learners, should be able to access the definitions. Definitions are grammatically simple and accessible. Collins Cobuild use full sentence definitions, putting the word into a sentence.
Other information
In learner dictionaries, there is often extra information like word formation, pronunciation audio, Collins has video pronunciation for many words too and a curated set of example sentences. The first example sentence is often a ‘vanilla’ example – how the word is typically used. Many learners won’t read beyond the definition or the first sentence. Further sentences show colligation (grammar patterns), often with with bolded words to highlight the patterns. Sometimes the grammar patterns are spelt out separately, but not always. Other example sentences show collocations.
Learners need to know that all of this is available. Dictionary skills are still vital to teach to help learners work independently.
Teaching dictionary skills
When students ask what a word means, use it as an opportunity to look at a dictionary. In feedback on writing, you can give learners a link to help them find out more about vocabulary – they’re far more likely to follow up than if you just say ‘look it up in a dictionary’. It’s hard to resist clicking on a link!
If lots of learners have had the same problem, bring it into class.
Show learners how to use collocations dictionaries too – the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary is free, the Oxford one is a paid service.
[Unfortunately I had to miss the last few minutes of this very useful talk!]
Some feedback on your feedback – Duncan Foord
Tools and techniques for giving feedback to CELTA trainees and experienced teachers
The workshop is aimed at CELTA tutors and anyone who observes teachers and gives them feedback.
Despite the fact that this activity is probably the key element in the CELTA course and probably the most crucial developmental activity for practicing teachers, CELTA trainers and Directors of Studies are given relatively little training and guidance on how to do it well. In this workshop we will look at effective ways of providing feedback to novice and experienced teachers after observing them teach. Come to this workshop for some tips on how to do it better and how to continue to develop your skills as a trainer and mentor.
Constructive Feedback
Uses facts in support of observations
States the impact this had
Indicates what is preferable
Discusses the consequences (negative and positive)
Destructive Feedback
General comments, unsupported with specific examples
Blames, undermines, belittles, finds fault and diminishes the recipient
Gives no guidance for future behaviour
Delivery is emotional, aggressive or insulting
The first area of giving general comments, is probably the most common one that I’ve been guilty of – I’ve worked hard on this part of my feedback.
Thinking about comments
Are these observer comments useful? Is so, why? If not, why not, and how would you improve them?
You didn’t correct students enough in the lesson today.
Tell me one thing that went well and one that didn’t go so well.
Did you achieve your aims today?
It’s difficult grading your language to a new level.
Some students arrived late, but that wasn’t your fault.
Tom (peer trainee), what did you think of Marta’s lesson today?
Vladimir and Keiko were very quiet in the pair work activity. Why do you think that was?
Do you think you used ICQs enough?
How could you set up that conversation task more effectively next time?
This task prompted a lot of discussion in our breakout room. We talked about the usefulness of questions like:
How did X affect your students?
How did the students respond to X/when you did X?
What evidence do you have that X was useful to your students?
These were Duncan’s ideas:
‘Tell me about one thing that went well and one that didn’t go so well’ – this doesn’t give a lot of support in terms of what ‘well’ means, and turns the lesson into some kind of talent show. I’d never thought about this before – definitely going to stop asking that!
Aims – what if the aims weren’t very good in the first place? The changing the aims question invites the teacher to reflect on how useful their aims actually were.
It’s not useful to wallow in the idea of difficulty. It would be better to look at solutions.
We should mention the students in our feedback, rather than focussing only on the dynamic between the tutor and the teachers.
Frame the question from the point of view of its outcomes: Did students understand what they had to do in the role play activity? If trainees can see the consequence, they’re more likely to look for solutions.
Look to the future: How could you…more effectively next time? Rather than How would you have…?What would you have…?
It’s important for teachers to see the consequences on the students, rather than the consequences on the ticklist in yours/the teacher’s head.
Feelings: if the teacher needs to grieve something, or is really upset, you can ask ‘How did you feel about the lesson?’ but if not the question isn’t necessarily that useful.
Key takeaways
Be specific and mention students all the time. How well did students understand the language point you were teaching them? How did Vladimir and Lucia deal with that activity?
Work with facts not opinions, the lesson not the teacher. Abdellah did not participate in the pair activity.
Focus on key points, don’t get distracted with trivia. What did students learn/practise? Was it useful? What was the atmosphere in class like?
Duncan boils down the essentials of a lesson to:
Did the students learn or practise anything?
Was it any use?
What was the atmosphere like?
This is one way to start feedback. It’s also probably what students are asking about lessons themselves too.
You ask them those questions, and can lead on to ‘What are the consequences of this?’ / ‘What does all this mean?’ It can make it easier during a course for trainees to realise that that’s why a lesson has failed to meet criteria too. If it’s a fail lesson, it can also be easier to tell the trainee right at the start as otherwise they could well be distracted trying to work out if it’s a fail; then the discussion is about what you can do to make it a pass next time.
Coffee break
There were regular one-hour coffee breaks throughout the conference. I went to the final one from the conference. This was a great way to have chats with small groups of people. I chatted to teachers in Toronto, Benin, Moscow, and Saudi Arabia, among others. I really liked this feature 🙂
We were also told about the Oxford TEFL online community for teachers OT Connect, particularly for newly-qualified teachers or for those who don’t get CPD elsewhere, but it could be good for lots of people.
Engaging learners online with hand-drawn graphics – Emily Bryson
Simple drawings are an effective tool to teach vocabulary, make grammar intelligible, and support students to attain essential life skills. This workshop demonstrates innovative graphic facilitation activities to use in class—and will convince you that anyone can draw! Get ready to activate your visual vocabulary to engage your learners online.
Emily stopped drawing as a teenager, but then a graphic facilitator visited her college a few years ago and now she uses it all the time. She trains others in how to use it, and is constantly learning to improve her own drawing.
There is research to show that drawing helps learning to remember vocabulary. There can be a wow factor to drawing too – it’s not as hard as people think.
This is an example of a visual capture sheet:
Emily asked us to use the stamp tool in annotate to mark the wheel to show what we do with drawing already – I like this as a Zoom activity 🙂
Ideas for including drawings in lessons:
Include images in classroom rules posters.
Ask students to draw pictures to accompany their vocabulary.
Introduce icons which learners can draw regularly, as a kind of visual vocabulary.
Draw a notebook to show learners exactly how to lay out their notes, especially if you’re trying to teach study skills.
Use gifs – make sure they’re not too fast as they can trigger epilepsy. You can save a powerpoint as jpgs, then upload it to ezgifmaker. A frame rate of 200 works well.
Have a set of icons/images – each one could be a new line of a conversation, or the structure of a writing text, or to indicate question words as prompts for past simple questions, like this:
Create an image to indicate a 5-year plan. Two hills in the background, with a road leading towards them. What would be at the top of the hill for you? What would your road map be?
Use visual templates (in the classroom or on Jamboard):
Draw a mountain and a balloon. The students have to work out how to get the balloon over the moutain. The mountain was the challenges facing them in their English learning, the balloon was the learning itself.
Visual capture sheets can be more engaging:
Drawing storytelling. Emily uses this to teach phonics as part of ESOL literacy, especially for learners who can’t write in their first language. It gives them something they can study from at home. Emily showed us how she uses a visualiser to help the students see the story as she draws it, with them sounding out the words as they understand the story.
Use images to check understanding – learners annotate which image is which, or to answer questions.
Encourage critical thinking, for example by having some images in grey and others in colour.
Start with a blob or a squiggle. Learners say what it could/might be, and can draw on top of it too:
Anybody can draw 🙂 Emily showed us how to draw based on the alphabet. For example, a lightbulb is a U-shape, with an almost O around it, a zig zag, a swirl, and you can add light if you want to:
For listening, the icon might be a question mark with an extra curl at the bottom, and a smaller one inside, with sound waves too if you want them to be.
For reading, draw a rectangle for the cover, two lines from the top for pages, and some C shapes down the side to make it spiral bound.
For writing, draw a rectangle at an angle, with a triangle at the bottom = pencil. Add a small rectangle at the top, plus a clip = pen. Draw a larger rectangle behind = writing on a piece of paper.
If you’re not sure how to draw an icon, just search for it – ‘motivation icon’, ‘study skills icon’ for example – it can be much easier to copy an icon than to copy a picture. The Noun Project has lots of different ideas too.
As Pranjali Mardhekar Davidson said in the comments, all drawings can be broken down into basic shapes. This makes it much less intimidating!
Emily’s message: Feel the fear, and draw anyway! 🙂 and if you’d like to find out more, you can join one of Emily’s courses. Her blog is www.EmilyBrysonELT.com where there are lots more ideas too. You can share your drawings using #drawingELT
This was originally going to be the topic for my IATEFL Manchester 2020 talk, so the ‘this year’ referred to in the title is 2019-2020. Although the IATEFL conference moved online and to 2021, it’s still relevant and still true, and serves as a good reminder to me about what I was thinking a year ago when I first presented it at the IH Academic Managers and Trainers conference in January 2020. If you’ve read that post, you’ll find that this is the same thing again but with a few minor tweaks for online training 🙂 I gave this version of the talk on Saturday 19th June 2021.
Here is a video of the session which I recorded before the big day in case of technical problems:
Background
Although I’ve been doing teacher training since August 2014, 2019 gave me a much better theoretical background due to my MA Trainer Development module and the associated reading I did for it. I discovered there are a lot more resources out there about training than I realised. It’s helped me make my training more principled, in the way that Delta did for my teaching. Here’s a summary of what I learnt and how it’s influenced the training I do.
Working with humans
Pay attention to group dynamics before you do anything else, because without that nothing else will work: use icebreakers, share experience and manage expectations. In the live version of this session, I started by asking participants to write a definition of teacher training before the session started, then introduce themselves and compare their definitions. Online, you could use the chatbox for a similar activity, or put people into breakout rooms. Another idea (thanks Simon Smith) is to use post-it notes at the start of a course for participants to write one thing they are excited about during the training and one thing they’re worried about. They can compare these and generally find that there are similarities with their colleagues.
Training is about changing how somebody thinks about something. This can mean needing to get at their beliefs and that means in a small way changing who they are. Without making people feel comfortable, they won’t feel ready to share and take risks during training. I could have talked a lot more about beliefs but didn’t have much time – it’s (still!) something I’m planning to return to on my blog as I experiment with them further.
Group dynamics are also important at the end of a training session or course for a sense of completion – I’d always done some form of icebreaker at the start but never really at the end before, and had only focussed on getting to know you, not expectations or worries. I used the post-it idea on a course in summer 2019. We left the post-it notes on the wall all week (I’d done one too), then returned to them at the end of the week to see whether these hopes and fears had manifested themselves during the course. This served as an interesting way to reflect on the week.
Start where they are
This is mentioned in a lot of the literature, but particular in Wright and Bolitho. Start with trainees writing down questions they want the training to answer, or get them to brainstorm ideas connected to the topic. We can learn a lot from each other and this puts everybody on an equal footing, rather than the trainer being the only ‘knower’.
Brainstorms that you use at the beginning of a session can also be added to at the end and displayed. For example we have them in our kitchen at school so teachers can refer back to them. This helps teachers realise what they’ve learnt and shows you what you don’t need to spend as much time on in the session. Online, you can use tools like Google Jamboard, Mentimeter or AnswerGarden for a similar activity.
Experience-based rather than information-based
We know teaching works better when you experience it but for some reason training often ends up being more lecture-based.
I used to give people a lot of information and not really any time to think about it because I thought they’d do that later. That tends to be how I work because I’m lucky to have a good memory and I like collecting information 🙂 but I realised that that’s actually quite unusual.
I’m learning more about experiential learning and I’m in the process of getting more of it into my training room so this is still a work in progress, but I’m moving towards less content and more depth. My past workshops might have included seven or eight activities in 60 minutes and now it’s just three or four with more processing time.
As we shifted online, I moved to completely the other extreme content-wise. I ended up having almost no content as I thought that teachers had far more first-hand experience of the online classroom than I did and would therefore appreciate being able to share their ideas with each other. After a couple of workshops which fell flat, I realised I still needed to include content which came from me, and I’ve hopefully moved towards a better balance now.
Increase impact
I’m trying to maximise transfer from the training room to the classroom with more action planning time and reflection time.
In most of my workshops I now have a section where teachers use a coursebook or a lesson plan and talk about how they can adapt it in light of the workshop. If it’s a list of techniques like error correction, teachers choose two or three to try in the next week and (ideally) their mentors ask them about it to see how it’s gone. I aim to dedicate at least 15 minutes of a 60-minute workshop to this.
I’m still thinking about how best to do this on CELTA courses, but if anyone has any ideas I’d really like to hear them. I always try to make explicit connections in input sessions to particular lessons I know trainees are going to teach, as well as referring back to input sessions and handouts when doing assisted lesson planning, but I’m not sure how successful this is.
Learning through dialogue
Reflection and discussion time is maximized. This enables teachers to learn from each other, formulating their own thoughts and getting at their own beliefs through the questions of others.
Mann and Walsh recommend reflection through dialogue as the best way to develop and I’ve realised the importance of this in my own development since I read their book. It also helps group dynamics and helps everybody to feel valued if they’re learning from each other and reflecting together.
As part of this process, I emphasise that there’s no one right way to teach but that teachers should experiment with different things to find out what works for them and their students. This also comes from finding out about how other teachers talk about teaching and learning, so teachers can see what they have in common and where they differ and realise that it’s OK to have different teaching styles.
Model
Practise what you preach throughout. If you tell trainees to do something, make sure you’re doing it yourself! For example, if you tell them they must include a variety of activities, make sure you’re doing it too. This was something else I had trouble with when we moved to online workshops, as I fell into a trap of always having experience sharing sessions with ideas pooled in a Google Doc – this got old very quickly! I feel like I’ve been able to move past that now with a lot more online workshops under my belt. Walking the walk means that teachers/trainees are more likely to respect your advice, not least because they are experiencing what it feels like to benefit from techniques you’re recommending.
Having said that, trainers need to make connections explicit between what happens in the training room and what could happen in the classroom – they can be hard to notice, especially for new teachers, when trainees are in ‘student’ mode.
Evaluate
Get feedback. We introduced a post workshop feedback form with 5 questions:
What do you need more help with?
What will you take from this session into your lessons?
What should we keep the same?
What should we change?
Anything else you want to tell us?
This has helped us to refine our workshops and make them more suitable for our teachers. It also models how to get and respond to feedback. I realise I haven’t carried this through to online workshops, but we’re done with them for this year!
I’m still quite form-based in the way that I get feedback on training I’ve done, so would welcome ideas from others.
Does your training follow similar principles? Will you reconsider anything in your training based on anything here?
If you’re interested in developing as a teacher trainer, you might find ELT Playbook Teacher Training a useful starting point for reflection (and there’s 10% off on Smashwords ebooks using the discount code ZX79U until 17th July 2021).
There are 30 tasks with reflective prompts, and if you complete 5 of them in any one section you can get a badge to display wherever you like:
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!)
On 18th and 23rd January I presented my talk on communication tips at the IH Academic Managers and Trainers conference. Here is the blurb:
Communication is the keystone of management, with the quality of your communication making the difference between a team that resents every change you make and one that will follow where you lead. Clear, supportive communication is something I feel very passionate about, and have worked on a lot over the past few years. In this talk, I can offer various tried and tested tips to improve the effectiveness of online and offline communication with your team, hopefully leading to a more positive, supportive environment for all of you.
This was a variation of a presentation I originally did for ACEIA in October 2020. You can see the presentation written out in full in this post. You can watch the video from the IH AMT here (and links to other talks from the event in this blogpost):
Here are my slides from the IH Bielsko-Biała Teacher Training Day, where I also did a 30-minute version of the talk:
What tips do you have for communicating more clearly with students, teachers and trainees?
On 28th November 2020 I had the honour of being the opening plenary speaker for the IH Bielsko-Biała Teacher Training Day. The theme of the day was ‘From the Heart’, with speakers discussing topics they’re passionate about. For me, that’s the importance of clear communication.
This was a variation of a presentation I did last month for ACEIA. You can see the presentation written out in full in this post.
Here’s the video, including a link to the playlist for the rest of the day:
Here are my slides from Bielsko-Biała:
What tips do you have for communicating more clearly with students, teachers and trainees?
When I attended the Cambridge English Teaching Awards (CETA) symposium on 12th September 2020, I found Kate French’s talk to be particularly useful. There is a recording here. Kate kindly agreed to write a guest post summarising what she shared.
The CETA Symposium was held online and brought together teacher trainers from over 49 different countries. It was an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and experience, particularly regarding teaching and learning during the pandemic.
As with all areas of life during COVID-19, teacher trainers and training courses in 2020 have had to adapt and react to the ever-changing circumstances and follow the sometimes contradictory guidelines emerging on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in order to save jobs and businesses and satisfy our ‘clients’ i.e. those wishing to complete and/or gain a teaching training qualification this year.
My own session at the conference was about the 100% online CELTA qualification and the aim was to synthesise the aforementioned guidelines and conclusions. The aim was not only to raise awareness for Centres that have yet to take advantage of this exceptional opportunity, but also to offer a review and possibly standardise delivery and ‘best practice’, which is what has always characterized the face-to-face and blended CELTA award, and which has led to its undoubted reputation as the ‘gold standard’ pre-service teaching training course. Therefore, I was very flattered to receive Sandy’s invitation to write a post for her blog to summarise the findings and offer them to an even wider public. It was also very timely, as I have just started tutoring on our second full-time, 100% CELTA course and wanted to make adjustments and improvements to our own course in response to:
recent recommendations from Cambridge Assessment English
CELTA assessor suggestions
previous candidates’ feedback
results of a brief, facebook survey I sent to teacher trainers (60 responses)
but most importantly for the following reasons:
The certificate awarded at the end of the course is exactly the same as for the face to face and the blended formats – there is no mention of the delivery format on the certificate.
The same criteria have to be met by candidates in order to pass the course.
The candidates, although studying and teaching 100% online, need to be prepared to teach in both online and face to face contexts post-course.
Employers will expect candidates to have the essential skills to teach in both online and face to face classrooms.
You can find our conclusions and ideas for achieving these in this table I have compiled:
Note from Sandy: the table is incredibly comprehensive and is an excellent starting point for anybody planning a CELTA course from this point forward, covering as it does all of the Cambridge recommendations for online courses so far, and lots of tips and ideas from Kate’s own experience and research.
Kate French started her TEFL career in Poland, at IH Bydgoszcz, before moving to Argentina two years later. [Note from Sandy – I didn’t know about that connection before!] She has worked at International House Belgrano in Buenos Aires since 1995 where she has been ADoS, DoS, In-company Coordinator, and Head of Teacher Training. She is currently DoS and Teacher Trainer, overseeing the online classes during the pandemic and tutoring on the institute’s full and part-time 100% online CELTA courses. Kate is also a Cambridge ESOL and IELTS examiner, and a CELTA assessor.
CELTA trainers, do you have anything you’d add? Change? Questions you have about the online format? It’d be great to get a discussion going!
Sometimes a chat over dinner can be a wonderful catalyst. A couple of weeks after IATEFL 2019 I went for dinner with a colleague. We discussed all kinds of things, and one of the things that came out of the discussion was a plan for a different kind of workshop, one where the teachers chose the topic.
This plan was inspired by sessions I attended during IATEFL, and my reading for the NILE MA trainer development module. It’s a general format which could be applied to any workshop. Each section should last about 15 minutes.
What you (want to) know: In groups, teachers brainstorm what they know about the topic and write the questions they have about it. You can do a quick survey of how confident the teachers feel about the topic. You can prepare prompts to help the teachers direct their thinking if you want to.
Investigation: Teachers find out more about the topic using whatever resources they choose from whatever you have available. If you don’t have much, you could use my diigo links as a starting point. This step could take longer if you want it too. Emphasise that there won’t be time to look at every resource – they should pick and choose one or two things to read/watch/listen to.
Sharing: Back in their original groups, teachers share what they’ve learnt. They add to the brainstorms, discuss whether their questions were answered, and think about what other questions they might have.
Forward planning: Teachers decide how they can apply what they’ve learnt in the session to their own teaching.
(Brief) Feedback: Get feedback from teachers on how the session went and how confident they feel about the topic now.
Noticing progress
On discussion with the teachers, we chose the topic of noticing progress for this experimental workshop. These are the slides I used:
The letters on the slides (A-E) refer to the five areas on slide 2 to help teachers choose which resources to investigate during step 2 of the session.
Teacher feedback on the workshop
These comments are shared with permission.
Positives:
(my reflection) Preparation before the session meant that I was free to monitor, answer questions and feed in extra information during the workshop.
I enjoyed this session and being able to share ideas with others and find out what they learnt as it gives me ideas which I didn’t think of. Charting ideas on paper as a team works well and is encouraging and confidence boosting. I would like to do another session like this.
I like that I can go back to the powerpoint afterwards and check out what my group members have told me about. It’s nice to have a lot of options (choice). I would like to do workshops in this style again.
Good balance of self research and group feedback. Self-driven= more natural and less ‘forced’.
Can go at our own pace and do what interests us.
I really liked how personalised it was and practical. I think this type of session helps people know what’s out there. I’d definitely do this again – thank you very much!
I liked the freedom to look at what I wanted and it was nice being in groups with people who were interested in different things. Can we do something like this again please?
Time to research independently. It was good to have a range of media (video, reading etc) for different preferences.
Own pace and autonomous.
Autonomy, could learn what I wanted, not dictated to. Discussion at end was good in groups.
Good staging, reading time, multiple sources and discussions.
I liked how there was more time for personal reading (being an introvert).
Time to digest before talking. Could explore what interests me/will be useful for my students. More like this please.
I liked the staging and found it very logical and useful. I think I would’ve liked more time alone to read/watch/get the input but appreciated that this was quiet and independent this week. I would like to do workshops in this style again.
Could focus on an area I was interested in.
Freedom to research what you’re interested in and what you need. Good stages to gain information from others and share ideas/knowledge. An interesting workshop – would be great to do again!
I enjoyed having quiet time to read and learn about things. I also liked not having things thrown at me. Timing was adequate. We should now go and explore on our own. I think more time would have resulted in us just sticking to one particular topic, instead we want to look at as many different things as possible. Please let’s do this again!
Generally like the format.
Areas to improve:
(my reflection) The session worked really well, but the slides took a long time to compile. If I ran it again, I’d include a lot fewer resources to choose from, not least because it would take less time to put together! On the other hand, this workshop can be reused again in the future as is with no preparation at all.
People need to be able to speak/discuss what they want to e.g. one classroom is for silent investigation and another classroom is for teachers to discuss with each others. [Note: during the investigation stage I asked teachers not to discuss anything as some teachers present struggle to concentrate when reading with noise in the background. I told them they’d be able to discuss everything later.]
The titles and summaries on each slide could have been clearer e.g. a summary such as ‘This page has lots of ideas for…’
Hard to find a specific direction.
Timing was OK, although not really enough time to explore properly/in enough detail.
I think the initial brainstorm could be a bit shorter.
There were too many options (things to look at/explore) – not enough time for detail.
Would be good to have a follow-up session of what we’ve tried and how it went. Have several rooms with ‘noise levels’ so those that want to discuss and research at the same time can – more sharing will happen if we can talk.
Very broad – a lot of information to sift through.
Put the stages of the workshop on the board too please.
Would be good to have a bit more time in the research stage.
Maybe too many points to discuss? 3 might work better than 5.
As you can see, the workshop went down well, but as always, there’s room for improvement 🙂
I’ve just found some old notes from a workshop we ran at our school after a round of lesson observations where we saw every teacher, and thought it might provide a useful model for somebody somewhere.
I started by summarising all of the positive points which came out of the observations – I think it was probably the third and final round of observations for the year. This was the list:
Clear effort and planning that had gone into the lessons
Huge progress through the year
Demonstrating an obvious response to feedback we had given
Points and routines used more consistently in young learner and teen classes
Anticipating problems and being able to deal with them efficiently
Varying lessons effectively
Demonstrating ideas the observers could steal (one of my favourite things about observing!)
Teachers knew their students and there were no surprises with students having trouble with what happened in the lessons
Teachers were challenging themselves, not just coasting with their teaching
Experimenting with ideas from workshops
We then had about 30-40 minutes left. Each member of the senior team was in charge of an area of development we’d noticed when observing. The four areas were:
Feedback
Getting attention and monitoring
Brain breaks/stirrers and settlers
The aim of activities/where is the learning happening
The teachers were free to spend as much or as little time as they wanted with each of us, to visit all of us or stay focussed on one area, to move around as they pleased and to participate as much or as little as they wanted to (side conversations were fine!). This gave the teachers autonomy within the session.
The final area on the list was mine. If I remember rightly I had a few of the course books we used at the school. Teachers chose a book, opened it at random, and had to decide what the aim of given activities/pages in the book were. They also had to decide what help or support they perhaps needed to add to make sure that learning would definitely happen if they used that activity. This was designed to help them think more deeply about what they could and should use from the course book, how it might or might not help the students, and what scaffolding they might need to provide.
What happens at your school after observations to build on observation feedback?
I use Feedly as a blog reader to collate posts from the blogs I follow. I love the simplicity of the format, and being able to see at a glance what is waiting for me to read. I generally look at it for a few minutes each day, sharing posts that I think would be useful for others on social media and bookmarking them for future reference using Diigo.
Since I started reading posts on my phone this workflow has become a little more convoluted, and I often end up emailing myself things to bookmark for later as it’s not as convenient to bookmark from my phone. This post is a collection of many of those posts as I clear out my email folder, and could serve as a good starting point if you’re looking for blogs to follow. They show a cross-section of what I read, and demonstrate just how varied the ELT blogosphere is.
On a side note, if you’ve considering starting a blog but think ‘Nobody will care what I write’, remember that there’s room for all kinds of teachers and writers, and your voice is interesting too. You never know what will click for somebody else when they read what you write. The blog is also there as notes for yourself later – I’m often surprised when I come across posts from my archive!
Happy reading!
Health and wellbeing
Lizzie Pinard summarised an IATEFL webinar on Mental health, resilience and COVID-19, adding her own experiences too. Lizzie also recommends Rachael Robert’s webinar on avoiding burnout for ELT professionals, and shares how she has been managing her workspace and mindset while working from home. I’ve been doing inbox zero for about two months now, as recommended by Rachael in a talk I went to in January, and it’s made me feel so much better!
Activities for very young learners and young learners
Chris Roland’s ETprofessional article on Managing online fun is full of activities and classroom management tips for working with young learners online.
Anka Zapart talks about the benefits of online classes with very young learners, many of which are applicable to young learners too. She shares a useful site with online games with VYLs and YLs, and introduced me to colourful semantics as way of extending language production for children. She also has a very clear framework for choosing craft activities which would and wouldn’t work for a VYL/YL classroom, and this example of a very reusable caterpillar craft.
Pete Clements has a lesson plan for young learners (and older ones too!) which combines all kinds of different areas: environmental awareness, drawing, used to, modals of advice…all based on a single student-generated set of materials.
Activities for teens and adults
Making excuses is a game to practice making requests and making excuses, including both online and offline variations, from Mike Astbury’s incredibly practical blog.
Jade Blue talks about the benefits of drawing to learn language, including a range of simple activities that should help students to remember vocabulary and grammar structures, and process texts they read and listen to. She also shares ideas for exploiting authentic materials, both for intensive and extensive use.
Ken Wilson has started to post English language teaching songs he and colleagues wrote and recorded in the 70s and 80s. They still seem very relevant now and could still promote a lot of discussion. The first three are What would you do? (second conditional), It makes me mad (environmental problems) and Looking forward to the day (phrasal verbs / the environment).
Leo Selivan has a lesson plan based on the Coldplay and Chainsmokers song Something just like this. David Petrie using sound effects as the basis for a review of narrative tenses.
Julie Moore has written ten posts with vocabulary activities based around coronavocab. The last one has examples of phrases which learners might need to describe how coronavirus has changed their lives.
Marc Jones suggests ideas for and asks for help with speaking assessments online when your students just won’t speak.
Matthew Noble is writing a teaching diary of his fully online blended Moodle/Zoom courses, with lots of interesting insights and learning shared. Here’s the post from week two (on building group dynamics) and week five (on making sure your computer will work properly and encouraging students to have good online etiquette).
Rachel Tsateri shows how to exploit Google Jamboard as an online whiteboard, including vocabulary revision, brainstorming, and sentence structure activities.
Naomi Epstein describes the journey she went on when trying to add glossaries to reading texts for her students, and the problems she encountered when she was on a computer but they were on a phone.
In my trainings I like to use the example of the students taking a class on how to fold a parachute that will be used the next day to jump out of an airplane. The students tell me “It was a wonderful class—the teacher explained and showed how to fold the chute step by step. Then the camera moves to the students and they are taking notes—very engaged in the lecture. They all pass the written test. The question is, will they now be able to successfully fold their parachutes in a way that they will have a successful jump? What would you suggest that the teacher did differently? I have always loved Michael Jerald’s (my SIT TESOL Cert trainer) question(s), “What did they learn and how do you know they learned it?” Now we are talking about skills, not knowledge—and effective communication is a skill. The parachute teacher had no way of knowing that they would be successful, even though they had aced the written test. So, whether or not face-to-face or by way of video, the nature of student engagement is the most important issue. It needs to be observed!
Zhenya also wrote about a reflective activity called Four suitcases, which could be particularly useful for anyone feeling down about the current state of the world and their place in it.
Distractions can make the writing process much longer than it needs to be. Rachael Roberts offers tips on how to deal with them on the IATEFL Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MAWSIG) blog.
In a guest post on the same blog, Kip Webster talks about the importance of explicitly teaching directness and indirectness, particularly for maintaining group dynamics, and taking advantage of ‘teachable moments’ during lessons. In another guest post, Miranda Crowhurst shares an excellent range of tips for using social media to advance your teaching career. (As you can see, it’s a blog well worth following!)
If you’re thinking about alternative approaches to lesson planning post-CELTA, Pete Clements talks about the steps he went through when moving towards materials-light teaching. This reflects my experience too.
Pete Clements reflects on the differences between an MA, PGCEi or DipTESOL, all of which he’s done. He also hosted a guest post from Michael Walker on the benefits of student and teacher reflection journals, particularly how it worked as an avenue for him to get regular feedback from his students which influenced future lessons.
Philip Kerr’s posts are always thought-provoking. Mindfulness for beginners questions the strength of research behind the attention mindfulness is now receiving in education.
Russ Mayne asks should we use translation software, especially questioning its role in EAP contexts, and how we might need to update our teaching and assessment criteria to assess the inevitable student use of this ever-improving tool. He also writes about retraction in ELT and shares examples of research which has been retracted. (This BBC Inside Science episode has an interview with Stuart Ritchie which I would also recommend.)
Classrooms and coronavirus
David Petrie talks about how he helped his exam students prepare for doing speaking exams in masks.
Alex Case shares ideas for coronavirus changes for EFL classes. While this might be tongue-in-cheek, I’m sure some of them aren’t that far from things we might be seeing in our classrooms/schools over the next couple of years!
One of the positives of the situation in the last 3 months is the fact that many events are now held online and are therefore accessible to people from a wider range of locations. This was the case for the ExcitELT conference, held online on Sunday 14th of June 2020. I joined around 40-50 other teachers from all over the world to talk about overturning norms in ELT. As the conference was based in the Japan time zone it meant 7 a.m. start for me, but it was well worth getting up for!
The format of the conference is worth mentioning as I think this was one of its great strengths. Each one hour block was broken into three sections. First we had a short presentation from one or two people interested in that area. Then we went into break out rooms on Zoom in small groups of three to six people. We had access to a Google Doc containing questions to help us talk about the topic. We made notes in the document during or discussions and the final few minutes of the block involved a summary of interesting points which came up. This format works really well as it allowed us to dive into a topic in more depth and share our experiences of it. I feel like this led to a richer conference experience and I hope more conferences are run like this in the future.
Overturning norms around teacher conformity – Anna Loseva
This was the first of two topics from the conference which I had never considered before. Anna invited us to think about which areas teaching involve conformity. Examples might be the feeling that we need to get particular qualifications to progress in the career, the pressure to conform to student expectations like playing lots of games, or perceived market pressures such as the perception that students only want teachers who grew up speaking English.
Anna started to think about teacher conformity when she was looking for a job in Vietnam. A lot of people advised her to get CELTA to make the job hunting process easier, including me. Anna decided that if she did this and got a job it would validate the system which says that CELTA is worth more than a teaching degree and the many years of experience which she already had, though she also acknowledged the usefulness and worth of a CELTA course. She managed to get jobs and has proved to herself and others that it is possible to work in a foreign country teaching English without getting a CELTA first. This prompted her to ask when conformity is and is not useful, which was the topic of our group discussions.
How can conformity be helpful?
It helps us to learn new things from people around us as we trying to fit in. This is especially true for new teachers fitting into the profession.
Our group discussed the need to know what the rules are or might be before you feel comfortable breaking them.
If we conform to a particular set of requirements, for example how a course works within a school, it can make it easier to support each other. We have a common point of reference for discussions and a kind of shared language.
Having restrictions can push our creativity.
It helps us to learn the culture of the system, for example how a local education system works.
It helps us to know when we have met expectations.
It allows us to set standards, and develop and evaluate ourselves and others against those standards.
How can conformity be detrimental?
It can lead to burnout, frustration and disappointment.
Students and teachers can end up losing motivation.
Students don’t necessarily know what is best for their education, so if we conform to their requests or expectations all the time it might be detrimental to their education.
When people conform without questioning it can lead to keeping guidelines which we no longer need.
The rules which we conform to might be outdated or inhibit creativity. They can limit autonomy and differentiation.
We might end up doing things which we do not understand the reason for or the point of.
Constructive disobedience can lead to progress and innovation. Making mistakes and trying something new are useful paths towards development.
We can forge our own path.
Thinking points
Anna left us with two questions to consider.
Do you see some of the accepted norms in our industry as questionable? Should they be questioned?
Is gaining approval important where are you? Is it a big part of ELT culture?
This session was a great way to start and really set the tone for the rest of the day.
Overturning norms related to teacher well-being – Tammy Gregersen
Tammy introduced us to the concept of positive psychology. She described the difference development based on strengths can make compared to development based on a concept of deficit and what’s missing. She introduced us to the work of Seligman, who says that if you use your ‘signature strengths’ you:
Have more ownership over development and feel more authentic
Have an intrinsic motivation to use your strengths
Have a more rapid learning curve
Feel invigoration, not exhaustion
Have a sense of inevitability with the feeling of ‘try and stop me’
Excited about displaying what you are good at
Feel creative and one stupid shoe projects revolving around your strengths
Engage in continuous learning
Own your strengths
(Apologies for any mistakes while paraphrasing – its from 2008 but I could find the original list!)
Tammy asked us to do a survey our strengths. We had to take the top five and find two of them which we had in common with another member of our group. We then had to consider two ways we could use our strengths in new or novel ways in the next 2 days.
Since I did the survey, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the top five things which came up from my list. I was very pleased with the points that it picked out because they are all things which I have consciously tried to develop in myself:
Hope
Curiosity
Love of learning
Gratitude
Leadership
When discussing it with my friend later, we talked about how this type of survey could feel like an equivalent of a silly quiz in a magazine telling you what kind of person you are, but the fact that it keeps going round in my head means I think that this could be a very interesting avenue to explore. I’d be interested to know how similar or different the ranking of the 24 strengths on the list would look if I did the survey again in a few months or years. I also want to find out more about positive psychology and Seligman, starting with exploring his website Pursuit of Happiness in a lot more depth.
Overturning norms around ELT conferences – Shoko Kita, Tim Hampson, Peter Brereton
One of the reasons which I wanted to attend this conference was the fact that the ExcitELT team have been running interesting conference formats for the past few years. In this session they asked us to think about three main areas:
How to make conferences more diverse
How to narrow the gap between the presenter and the audience
How to make conference has more friendly and accessible, including more affordable
They started with this quote from Haruki Murakami:
The questions which we were given to consider are useful for anyone who wants to plan a different kind of conference I think. They were:
How can we address and balance all areas of diversity?
How do we reach a wider range of participants?
How do we follow up on new presenters?
What can we do differently to make parents more welcome and make sure we have an affordable family policy?
Can video or online sessions be used for people who are distant? How can video sessions be more interactive?
What are the time demands of social events organized alongside conferences? Does this affect who got to them?
How much time is optimal between sessions for discussion?
How can you overcome the problems of one-time workshops?
By organizing an online conference which included a lot of group discussions and responses to participants’ experiences, the ExcitELT team started to work towards answering some of the questions that they posed. I will be interested to see how new modes of training and conferences develop in the post-pandemic era.
Overturning norms around second language teacher education – Geoff Jordan
Geoff started his presentation by describing the current training norms in place for elt. He described the craft model of CELTA where you hone techniques to become a teacher and the applied science model of university degrees where you learn the theory and think about how to apply it to the classroom. Norms in in-service teacher education include observations, sponsored courses, seminars and conferences, and perhaps also visiting trainers.
Geoff says that these methods of training pay little attention to how people actually learn a second language and lead to inefficacious teaching as most teachers use a course book to implement a grammar-based synthetic syllabus.
He described a common norm now of training focusing on teacher cognitions, which requires teachers to understand and articulate their own beliefs, assumptions and knowledge (BAKs) about the subject matter and pedagogical practice. These BAKs explain the mismatch between what teaches are told and what they actually do, and between what teachers say they do and what they actually do.
Geoff would like us to change the norms of second language teacher education sorry that we concentrate on doing real, relevant things in the target language, not just talking about the target language. He would like our teacher education to support and sustain this model, recognizing that implicit learning is the default mechanism of second-language learning. Focusing on BAKs ignores the elephant in the room of the form of the syllabus and how it is delivered.
To make these changes Geoff wants us to push for reform of the CELTA, conferences, and in his words ‘globetrotting gurus’. He wants us to encourage locally organized second language teacher education, promoting teacher collaboration, local teacher organizations, and ensuring that local teachers can discuss local issues. Above all he says that the guiding principle of second language teacher education should be to promote efficacy.
Neoliberalism in ELT – Tim Hampson
Tim’s talk was a replacement for a presenter who couldn’t attend and I’m glad to have seen it because it was another idea which I had never considered before. Despite having listened to the BBC sociology podcast Thinking Allowed for many years I had never really understood the concept of neoliberalism, so I will start with one definition which Tim gave us which I think was very clear.
Neoliberalism believes that free markets and competition maximize human well-being.
Harvey (2005:21)
One of the key points of neoliberalism is the fact that it seems to be a pervasive ‘truth’. It’s difficult to imagine a world that is not neoliberal, and it just seems to be the way things are. Some of the ideas that this leads to can be questioned. For example there is an idea that when individuals make choices, the result of your choices is what you ‘deserve’, but my choices as a white British middle-class woman with a university education very different to those of poor black man in the deep south of America. Another idea is that competition drives progress, but we can ask what that competition is, what that progress is, and whether it is actually beneficial.
Linked to neoliberalism is the idea of cultural, linguistic, economic and social capital introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. For example by learning English you might gain linguistic capital which you can turn into economic capitals by getting a job, or social capital by using your accent to fit in or helping you to interact more smoothly which leads to social connections or a job. Examples of English being seen as cultural or linguistic capital include learning English to get into a university course as a basic requirement, even if the course doesn’t require you to use English. English is also used as part of a drive to internationalize universities. Some people have to get an English certificate to look good in the job even though they may never use English at work. There is also the thorny question of learners asking how they can sound more like a native speaker, as there is a perception that a native speaker accent could give you more capital. In a neoliberalist view of the world it might feel like everyone is trying to gain capital, as it is hard to see the world in a different way once you know about this theory. But are they really?
Tim pointed out that we might view learning English for social or linguistic Capital as being preferable to learning full economic capital, but often you have to be in a place of privilege to even have the choice of prioritizing social or cultural capital Iva linguistic capital. Learning a language to get a job is just as legitimate as learning it for social or cultural reasons.
In our discussions Tim asked us to consider what kinds of capital are present in ELT and how we think about them. As he said, this idea of capital is an interesting lens through which to consider our profession.
Overturning language ideology norms – Heath Rose
The final session of the day was led by Heath Rose, who writes a lot about global Englishes. He started by telling us about how we might teach English as an international language, based on proposals by Galloway and Rose (2015:203):
Increase World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) exposure in the curriculum. This will reflect ‘the complex reality of how English is used worldwide’ (Saraceni, 2009).
Emphasize respect for multilingualism.
Raise awareness of global Englishes.
Raise awareness of ELF strategies.
Emphasize respect for diverse English-using cultures and communities.
Change teacher hiring practices.
Heath suggested ideas such as using a listening journal to encourage students to listen to a wider range of English voices, or you think a presentation to ask them to research different types of English. He talked about getting students involved in discussions about Global Englishes, raising their awareness and helping them to consider the identities as multilingual language uses. Accommodation strategies which we could teach students include helping them to deal with speakers of greater or lower proficiency than themselves, dealing with speakers with different accents or cultural norms, and helping them to join different linguistic communities.
Some of the barriers we discussed were the lack of suitable materials, knowing how to assess language and the requirements of particular exams, teacher education and training, an attachment to ‘standard English’ by stakeholders such as parents, and teacher recruitment practices. In our group we focused a lot on the final points and on the fact that in some countries it is very difficult to challenge days due to circumstances beyond the school’s control, such as national visa policies. However we all agreed that it is very important to do what we can.
Overall thoughts
As I hope you can say from what was described here, this was a very different kind of conference and one which has given me a lot of food for thought. If you get the chance to attend, I would highly recommend it. Thank you to Shoko, Tim and Peter for organising it, and to all of the attendees who shared their ideas and experience.
Alastair Grant and Florencia Clarfeld have been doing amazing work over the past couple of months, running a weekly gathering on Zoom called ‘We’re all in this together’. I saw Alastair share links on facebook to the resources they created, and it seemed like an intriguing and original response to the crisis and the need for teacher support, so I asked Alastair to tell us more about what the community is and how it’s organised. Here’s his response. Thanks for writing this Alastair! (Note: the post was written on 4th June, but I’ve been slow to upload it so some of the time references are wrong.)
Crises bring out the best and the worst in people, especially on social media. And by midnight on Friday 20 March, a few hours after quarantine was announced here in Buenos Aires, there was plenty of both.
Facebook here is the preeminent form of media (social or professional) for teaching. From posts asking how we would be able to teach our students now, to offers of help with online tuition (most of which came at a price), Facebook seemed have become a pedagogical free-for-all in a matter of hours.
I coordinate the English department of a local secondary school and my teachers wanted ideas and so did I. But it wasn’t only us – everyone seemed to be asking for the same, whether it was advice on using Google Classroom, what Zoom was and how to use Live Worksheets, there was a huge and sudden need. And I wouldn’t call it a need for help with what I’ve seen described as “emergency teaching”. I’d describe our situation more as “response pedagogy”, whereby the way we lead our students (as the original Greek suggests), needs to effectively respond and evolve to fit with a new situation.
Back to Facebook, and there was everything and nothing on offer at the same time. But certainly what there wasn’t, was a space for people to share or ask for advice on teaching under lockdown. Nonetheless, Facebook was still the connecting thread for everyone, so I decided to create a forum for people to share material and experiences of this new way of teaching. And it was a way of teaching that needed to be constructed pretty fast, as here at least, we were in lockdown in a matter of hours, with only the weekend to prepare for a new world on Monday morning.
My partner, Florencia Clarfeld, who has been working on this with me since day one, chose the name of the event which is now a weekly meeting: “We’re All In This Together”. I love the name, because it feels like a counterpoint to the social distancing that has been enforced. We decided that the event should be held on Zoom but that they were to be meetings, rather than webinars. I wanted to give teachers a space where they would be able to share their experiences and ideas rather than just listen to one person speak, because that was not the point at all.
The first invitation to the event drew nearly 200 enrolments. Now, when you ask 200 people, most of whom have never met, to starting chatting about a totally unfamiliar situation, you might well be met with total silence. So I prepared some PowerPoint slides in advance to help things along. The slides were a collection of about six games and warmers and my idea was to show/demonstrate one and then ask the teachers if they had anything similar. So that was the plan. But would it work?
Not only did it work, but something very unexpected happened. As soon as I asked people if they had any similar activities to the one being shown, the Zoom chatbox flooded with links, website names, activities and apps that teachers were using. Without wishing to sound corny, it was quite an emotional moment. So then it became clear that the meeting was going to do its job, whereby the chatbox became the main source of material.
Now after every “We’re All I This Together”, I put the session video and the PowerPoint into a Google Drive folder. You can find the link at the bottom of this page. But, like I say, the real “pull” of the sessions is the chatbox transcript. In every chat transcript (we’ve had eight session so far), there are hundreds of tips, ideas, suggestions, games and activities shared by teachers from all over the world. Each session has its own topic, so future teachers coming to the Drive folder will be able to find them.
For the first Zoom meetings, I had only room for 100 people, and for a while there were many people left outside, which was a great shame. Then we were offered a 500-person Zoom room by a bookshop from called Advice here in Argentina and since then we have had space enough. Until, that is, I invited Dr. Stephen Krashen along to be interviewed on his thoughts about teaching during Coronavirus and his parting of the ways with The Natural Approach. The meeting was oversubscribed but well over two hundred people, so we had to live-stream it by Facebook, the video to which has now been viewed nearly 18,000 times.
Events like this are normally paid, but I believe that under the circumstances everyone should, for example, benefit from the privilege of hearing what Krashen has to say as well as being able to ask him questions. For me, education is both a right and a privilege – but not for a privileged few.
This coming Sunday we have Adrian Underhill joining us for an interview and we expect another full house. [Note from Sandy: this has already happened as has an interview with Sarah Mercer, and the recordings are in the folder.] The generosity of the interviewees is overwhelming. People might well ask for some kind of fee but I have explained the situation and people have been more than willing to be interviewed pro-bono. In Dr. Krashen’s own words, he said, “I’d love to”.
So now the meetings have evolved, just as our teaching has evolved. Some are interviews with inspirational figures from ELT and some are workshops. We want to keep this mix as it is, so that the original mission statement, the “why”, is never lost. We’re All In This Together is a safe space for teachers to share ideas and exchange suggestions and experiences.
There’s a new world coming after COVID-19, and we, the teachers, are the ones who are helping to build it. As always.
Alastair Grant is an English Teacher, Teacher Trainer and ELT materials writer. He is the Academic Director at Colegio Nuevo Las Lomas and a teacher trainer for International House Montevideo, where he runs the Cambridge Delta 1 teacher-training course. He is a consultant on the profesorado de inglés at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional in Buenos Aires, where he has currently lectured in Discourse Analysis and Methodology.
He holds an Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Warwick in the UK, has completed the International House Certificate of Advanced Methodology, all modules of the Cambridge Delta and the Cambridge Train the Trainer Certificate.
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.
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)
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:
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
This year’s IH Academic Managers and Trainers (AMT) conference happened in Greenwich from 9th-11th January 2020. As always, I enjoyed the conference and learnt a lot, which I’m looking forward to putting into practice as much as possible.
You can read about previous AMT conferences I’ve attended in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019 (I’ve attended them all since 2014, but forgot to write about some of them!)
Here are some of the things I’ve learnt about at this year’s conference. (As always, any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own, not those of the speakers – please correct me if needed!)
Managing performance in ELT
Maureen McGarvey asked us to draw the organisational structure and consider the organisational culture of our schools. She emphasised that without knowing the structure and culture of our school and how teachers perceive them, we can’t effectively manage performance at our schools. We need to clearly articulate the culture of our school to teachers, as you bring the culture with you from previous places you’ve worked. This can be one source of frustration for managers, and may lead us to think staff are being pig-headed, when in fact they’re butting up against the culture of the school and their perceptions of it.
She surveyed staff about how they want to be managed, using 5 questions:
What do you expect/would you like your line manager to do for you in terms of support and development across the year?
How would you like your line manager to manage your performance across the year?
What systems does your LTO (language teaching organisation) have in place for managing performance, as far as you’re aware?
Do you think the systems you identified are adequate? Any amendments or changes you’d suggest?
How would you like your line manager to deal with performance issues should they arise?
This threw up lots of interesting responses, mostly connected to personal awareness. When we talk about change and CPD as managers, we tend to present it as data. But those who changes or development are being ‘done to’ perceive it through their anxieties and fears. We need to create personal connections with staff and follow up regularly, not just check in once or twice a year. The survey showed up various variants on the idea of “regular, brief, human conversations” and “personal, face-to-face” contact, including a key focus on positives. Performance management isn’t just about managing negative performance and dealing with problems, but also about helping good teachers get better.
IH update
Every year we hear about the exciting things happening across the network. This year I was particularly interested in new IH Online Teacher Training Courses, including a new series of modules for Academic Management. If you do 5 of them, you can get the IHWO Diploma in Academic Management.
She reminded us that an interested beginner draws on every possible resource to learn, but that as we become experts in a particular area, we often stop doing this. We can also become poor listeners as we assume we already know things.
To stop being blinded by our expertise, we need to get a sense of wonder back into what we do: ‘I wonder how this works?’ We should also ask ‘What am I not asking you that I should?’ more often to keep in touch with those who are still beginners in our area, or who haven’t reached the same level of expertise that we have. This is just a taster: there are a lot more ideas in the HBR article, which I definitely recommend reading.
ELT footprint
Christopher Graham told us about the environmental impact of ELT, for example the number of students who study English in the UK every year and are therefore flying in and out of the country. Even EU-based students tend to fly, when they could potentially get the train.
He introduced us to the ELT footprint facebook group and website. There are lots of resources available to help you if you want to start reducing the environmental footprint of your school, or teach students about it. These include a charter for a greener school, advice on good practice for events and conferences and lesson plans you can use with students. They are always looking for people to share how they are greening ELT so do get in touch with them if they have ideas.
Listening skills and initial teacher training
Emma Gowing talked about how we can refocus the training of how to teach listening to make sure new teachers are really teaching listening, not just testing it. She suggested the following ideas:
Help teachers to write aims that focus on developing rather than practising listening skills.
Highlight that comprehension tasks are a diagnostic rather than a teaching tool, to help teachers find out what learners are having trouble with.
Avoid right/wrong answers in listening activities. Instead use activities that promote the negotiation of meaning.
Get trainee teachers to take notes to identify difficulties.
Show how to use the audioscript to isolate difficulties and identify whether the issue was meaning or hearing related (i.e. do they know the meaning of the word(s) but couldn’t identify it in the listening?)
Include a ‘listen again’ stage focussed on difficult parts, helping students to recognise why the listening was hard for them.
When teaching staging, reduce the importance of preparation stages (lead in/gist) in favour of more in-depth detailed/post-listening activities.
Use authentic materials, grading the task not the text, wherever possible.
She has summarised her ideas for teachers in this article for the IH Journal.
Fun at work
Lucie Cotterill’s talk was called The Fun Factor – Let’s Play Leadership. She shared ideas that they’ve used at IH Reggio Calabria to get more fun into the school, and shared the research behind why it’s important to have fun at work. It makes us more productive, improves mental wellbeing, and increases staff satisfaction.
My favourite idea was a Christmas gift they gave their staff. They created a Google form for all staff (including admin staff). Respondents had to share the first positive adjective they thought of for each staff member. One adjective was selected and sewn onto a pencil case with the teacher’s name. All of the other adjectives were put on a piece of paper inside the pencil case. Now the teachers have a reminder of how much they are valued by their colleagues, and they can see it all the time.
Better self evaluation
Manana Khvichia described how they’ve reorganised their CELTA to improve self evaluation and help their trainees to quickly become reflective practitioners. Their CELTA now only has one input session a day and much longer feedback sessions. Self evaluation forms are created personally for each teacher, with the trainer writing a series of questions during the observation. Trainees write their own thoughts first, then look at the trainer’s questions and respond to them. They can do this because they’ve seen models of the trainer’s self-evaluation after the demo lesson on the first day, analysed this together, and had a full session on how to reflect. Feedback sessions often turn into mini inputs based on what the trainees need at that point in the course.
This was the most thought-provoking session of the conference for me, and I’ve asked Manana to write about it for this blog, so watch this space!
What I’ve learnt about teaching training this year
Diana England described what they’ve done at IH Torres Vedras to make drop-in observations more effective for their teachers. She says that having regular drop-in observations makes them a positive thing, not just something that happens when there’s a problem. It also shows students that multiple people are involved in their progress, not just their teacher.
During induction week, the teachers discuss terminology related to drop-ins, and decide on their own definitions, for example of ‘rapport’, ‘classroom management’, etc. They complete a questionnaire to show their beliefs related to these areas. The drop-in observer completes the same questionnaire, with a space at the bottom for extra comments. Post-observation feedback involves comparing the responses to both versions of the questionnaire.
The questionnaire is made up of factual statements, such as ‘I can spot early finishers and ensure they are purposefully engaged’ or ‘I know and use all my students’ names’, with the responses ‘Definitely’, ‘Most of the time’, ‘Some of the time’, ‘Not enough’, ‘I need more guidance with this’. This system has evolved over time, so that now the teachers create their own questionnaires, rather than using one developed by the school.
This is definitely something I’d like to experiment with at our school.
Improving the agency and confidence of novice teachers
Marie Willoughby talked about a workshop she ran to help novice teachers adapt coursebooks to make them more engaging. It was much more teacher-centred than her workshops used to be. She designed it this way to help teachers build their confidence and realise that they are able to solve problems and ask for help, rather than relying on their own knowledge and worrying when they don’t know something. This topic was selected following interviews with the teachers, as they said they often used coursebooks to help them plan but didn’t know how to make them engaging for students.
The workshop looked like this:
Brainstorm ‘What is engagement and why is it important?’
Discuss what engagement looks like at each stage of a CAP(E) lesson and how you can evaluate this.
Teachers created a list of questions based on their own experience up to this point to help them consider engagement at each stage of the lesson. The questions showed up their current needs, and formed the basis of group discussions.
Session homework was to take a piece of material, choose two parts and evaluate whether they’re engaging, change if needed, then evaluate it afterwards. Afterwards they had to tell a colleague: I did this, it worked. OR I did this, it didn’t.
Marie said that she felt like she hadn’t taught them anything in the session, but that afterwards she got great feedback. It helped the teachers realise that they had the right to change things, and didn’t have to just use them as they were.
She contrasted classic training with agency-driven training. In class training, the outcome is pre-determined by the trainer/tasks, there is a focus on best practice, elicitation and leading questions, and a power differential in dialogue. In agency-driven training, the outcome emerges during and beyond the session, there are no right answers (open-ended tasks), a collaborative effort to explore choices and evaluate (not talking about procedures), and equality in dialogue.
By making this shift, Marie says that she has realised the power of training lies in the process, not the product, of training sessions. Returning back to Monica’s idea of being blinded by our expertise, we need to question our training routines: when are we empowering when helping and when not? Do we praise confidence, collaboration, evaluation and leave it there? Without having to give trainees the answer or find the next step: sometimes we shut down options when we help, instead of letting teachers find answers themselves. This is not to say that we shouldn’t help trainees, but rather that we should reflect on the help we give.
Sound bites
Chloe Pakeman-Schiavone told us why it’s important for us to work with different accents in the classroom. She talked about how cultural knowledge includes knowing about stereotypical accents and phrases. For example, in the UK we have stereotypical images of what a policeman, farmer, Asian corner shop owner, etc sound like. We know that in real life people don’t always sound like this, but there are a lot of reference points, for example in comedy, which rely on us being aware of these stereotypes.
We should work with a range of accents to help students gain familiarity with different models of speech. The hint that an accent might be present can impede understanding, even if the person speaking if completely clear – we put up mental blocks.
The series Death in Paradise, which is pre-watershed so contains nothing you’d need to bleep out, but has a wide range of accents
Young learner safety
Edward Evans described what they’ve done at IH BKC Moscow to put a policy in place to ensure teachers know what to do to keep young learners safe in the school, and so that the school knows what to do if there is a concern about the safety of young learners.
He reminded us of the importance of considering safety before anything bad happens, rather than only as a reaction. This is especially important in some countries where you might have issues when working with child safety: a lack of good state school policies, an aversion to procedures, training is unavailable, or where child abuse is not a ‘hot topic’. ‘Common sense’ is not a good yardstick for behaviour, as it means different things to different people. Schools need to have clear policies in place.
At Edward’s school, they drew on UK state school procedure to put policy documents in place. These are accompanied by a clear system of which offences lead to a warning, and which lead to instant dismissal. They have reporting procedures in place, along with procedures for how to handle any reports which come in. This is detailed in a two-page document which teachers need to sign when they start working at the school, and every year thereafter to remind them of the policies.
Q & A session
Along with Ian Raby, Giovanni Licata and Jenny Holden, I was part of a panel taking questions from the floor related to various aspects of training and management. I really enjoyed this, but you’d have to ask other people what we said because I (obviously!) wasn’t tweeting what happened 🙂
EdTech
Lindsay Clandfield gave an updated version of his IATEFL 2019 plenary about mythology, methodology and the language of education technology. You can watch the 2019 version of it here, which I’d recommend if you have any interest in how we talk about edtech.
He recommended the hackeducation blog, which looks fascinating.
Coaching and observations
Jonathan Ingham asked whether an incremental coaching model can improve teaching. He works at a college where he observes English teachers, but also teachers of many other subjects, like brickwork, carpentry, and media make-up.
Jonny’s school was inspired by UK state schools who have implemented this model, summarised in this blog post. Rather than 2-3 observations per year, each with a range of action points to work on, teachers are observed every one or two weeks with only a single action point to work on. Feedback is brief and on the same day where possible, with opportunities during the feedback session to practise the changes that the observer suggests. As it is much more focussed, Jonny says that teachers have responded really well: it feels less intrusive, and changes to teaching have been really noticeable. This is something I’d like to try out at our school next year.
Kieran Donaghy showed us various frameworks we can use to help students develop their visual literacy. Viewing is becoming the ‘fifth skill’ and has been added to curricula in Canada, Australia and Singapore as viewing and images have taken over from reading and the written word as the principal way we communicate.
He suggested the following resources:
Into Film’s 3 C’s (colour, camera, character) and 3 S’s (story, setting, sound) as a way of approaching videos – the link contains lots of examples of how to use them, and questions you can ask
The Center for Media Literacy’s educator resources, particularly 5 key questions and 5 core concepts
Visual Thinking Routines such as ‘see-think-wonder’ (I’ve used this routine a lot with my teens and they really like it)
He also shared work from Richard Chinn into how we can help teachers learn to work with emergent language more quickly. Working with emergent language is a skilled practice, so how can we help teachers arrive at this more quickly?
Burnout
Rachael Roberts finished off the conference by help us to recognise the warning signs of burnout. She gave us the following tips to help our teachers:
Cut down on paperwork. Is this actually helpful/useful? For example, do the agenda at the start of meetings to keep focus. Examine marking policies and whether students benefit from them.
Help your staff keep boundaries. Don’t expect teachers to reply outside school hours. Expect them to take real breaks. Be clear about your own boundaries as a manager. Only check emails when you know you can actually respond to them – otherwise you’re raising your stress hormones for no good reason!
Examine unconscious beliefs you hold about teaching. For example: ‘A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.’ Is sacrifice really the model we want to hold about teaching?
Learn to say no to people and projects, and allow our teachers to say no. This includes to things that might be enjoyable, not just things that are difficult!
Notice your feelings and attitudes towards situations. If you have a choice, choose to be positive.
Where possible, empower teachers to make decisions for themselves.
Don’t jump to conclusions about why people might be being difficult. Avoid a culture of perfectionism, and show your own vulnerability.
Explain the rationale behind what you are doing. Involve and consult staff when making decisions. Be patient with their responses/reactions.
I would highly recommend reading her Life Resourceful blog and joining her facebook group which is a very active community designed to help teachers maintain their mental health.
We are excited to share this video with you from our annual #IHConfAMT! 🤩 The community of International House DOSes and senior teachers met in London for 3 days of sessions, networking and sharing ideas. We just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody who joined us! pic.twitter.com/ST7PNLbsOX
*or at least, very very low prep! Thursday night: nobody had suggested any queries or problems for our one-to-one troubleshooting session tomorrow. What should we do instead? There wasn’t really time for me to prep anything else, and Ididn’t know what to pick anyway. Cue a quick email:
At the start of the 60-minute session I spread out a pile of A4 scrap paper on the floor. Everybody took a piece, folded it in half, and wrote two questions they had, one on each half. They put them on the floor for later. They then took another piece, folded it again, and wrote the two things they were proud of. This took a lot longer, and I had to point out that ‘proud of’ doesn’t have to mean finished or perfect, just something you’ve worked at and know you’ve improved. We got there in the end! It reminded me of Sarah Mercer’s IATEFL plenary, when she told us to spot our strengths, the inspiration for the strength spotting task in the Teacher Health and Wellbeing section of ELT Playbook 1. Everybody mingled, chatting to everybody else, holding up their strengths in front of them, including me. We talked about why we chose them, what we’d done to work on them, and asked each other questions. That took about 10-15 minutes. I asked for a show of hands to see if any of the strengths matched any of the questions. Only 3 or 4 of the 20 teachers put their hands up, so I changed my mind about the next step. Instead of pairing people off, I ended up putting them in groups of 4 or 5. They had about 15-20 minutes. This time they all read out their questions in their group, then chose which ones to discuss and offer answers to in a free discussion. Meanwhile, I took photos of all of their questions and wrote them into a single list. It was an excellent indication of the range of concerns that our teachers have, from classroom management and better pacing to more effective listening lessons and challenging students more. This is a great starting point for deciding the topics of our upcoming workshops. At the end I asked for another show of hands: who’s learnt something today that will help them with their teaching? Every hand went up. The feedback was very positive. Teachers said they particularly enjoyed the small group work and the freestyle nature of the session. It worked well at this point in the year as everyone is settled and feels comfortable as a group. Definitely a format I’ll use again!
I just wrote these guidelines for post-observation feedback to supplement an MA assignment and feel like they’re worth sharing. What would you add/remove/change?
The aims of post-observation feedback are to:
boost teachers’ confidence.
develop teachers’ ability to reflect on their own teaching.
help them build on their strengths.
identify 2-3 key areas to focus on developing and come up with concrete ideas for how to do this.
deal with any questions or concerns the teacher may have.
explain, if necessary, any areas of methodology or terminology which may be useful for teachers in examining their future practice.
Effective observation feedback is
Timely / Prompt
The closer in time the feedback is to the observation, the better, as events will be fresher in both of your minds.
Factual and non-evaluative, describing behaviour without judgment Feedback should clearly establish what, when, where, and how, and avoid commenting on why. It should address the actual lesson based on direct observation, rather than the assumptions and interpretations of the observer, or criticisms of the person (You’re not organized at all, are you?). It also avoids value judgments (The students were engaged in the activity. rather than That was a good activity.)
Specific Feedback should address specific aspects of the lesson and provide clear examples of what was observed.
Balanced Both positive and negative aspects of the lesson should be discussed, and always should always be reinforced by specific examples.
Something which can be acted upon
Action points should be based on things which the teacher can do something about, not things over which they have little or not control (e.g. Teachers can make sure late students come in quickly and quietly, but they can’t stop them from being late). Any suggestions for action points should be accompanied by discussion about how to work on these, with ideas preferably coming from the teacher rather than the observer.
A space for learning within a dialogue / Not over-directed The observer should ask relevant questions to encourage teachers to come to their own conclusions as far as possible, rather than presenting them with the observer’s conclusions (How do you think the lesson went? Why do you think the students took a long time to complete that activity? rather than I thought that lesson was too difficult for the students. They didn’t understand the activity so couldn’t complete it.) If the teacher is talking more, they have the space to formulate and articulate ideas, process thoughts and form new understandings – they are less likely to do this if they are just listening. The more the feedback comes from teacher reflecting on their lesson, the more ownership they have over it, and the more likely they are to be able to act on it. Dialogue also reduces the danger of giving advice without fully identifying the problem.
Caring and respectful The amount of feedback given should be limited to what the teacher can handle, rather than covering everything the observer would like to say. Equally, don’t be afraid to challenge the teacher to push their thinking. The teacher needs to know that we have their best interests at heart. Remember that the teacher’s nonverbal behaviour can be a clue as to how they feel about the lesson and the feedback, not just what they are saying.
Checked for clarity You need to make sure that the teacher has understood the feedback you have given, and what they need to do to work on action points. Asking teachers to summarise the feedback at the end of the meeting is an opportunity for the teacher to tell you the positives from the observation as they understand them, plus what the teacher needs to do next, and for you to clarify any confusing points.
Part of a process Emphasise that you don’t expect teachers to be able to resolve any issues you have noted instantly, and that it may take time to work on them. Request feedback on your feedback too, so that teachers see you as a learning observer and feedback giver and you demonstrate how to successfully receive feedback.
A positive experience, balancing feelings and rationality For post-observation feedback to be successful, teachers need to trust the observer and feel comfortable receiving feedback from them. They also need to feel ready to receive feedback. If they are already feeling very stressed, anxious, angry, or in any other way negative about the situation, ask them if they would like to rearrange the feedback session for a later date. If you are not sure about how to give feedback in a particular situation, discuss it (confidentially) with somebody else first if you can. Teachers have the right to have an emotional reaction to observation feedback – their feelings should not be discounted. Equally, don’t be afraid to say how things in the lesson made you feel as an observer. Emphasise strengths and improvements made, and encourage confidence and positive thinking as much as possible. Make sure the feedback meeting ends on a positive note.
References
These guidelines are adapted from the following sources, with my own ideas added:
Mann, S. and Walsh, S. (2017) Reflective Practice in English Language Teaching. London: Routledge. (page 165 and page 159-160 based on Waring 2013:104-105)
White, R. Hockley, A., van der Horst Jansen, J. and Laughner, M. S. (2008) From Teacher to Manager: Managing Language Teaching Organisations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (page 65-66 based on Porter 1982)
Wallace, S. and Gravells, J. (2005) Mentoring, 2nd edition. Exeter: Learning Matters. (pages 55, 58, 69, 70, 74).
This was the topic for my presentation at the IH Academic Managers and Trainers (AMT) conference in Greenwich on 9th January 2020.
Background
Although I’ve been doing teacher training since August 2014, the last year has given me a much better theoretical background due to my MA Trainer Development module and the associated reading I’ve done for it. I discovered there are a lot more resources out there about training than I realised. It’s helped me make my training more principled, in the way that Delta did for my teaching. Here’s a summary of what I’ve learnt and how it’s influenced the training I do.
Working with humans
Pay attention to group dynamics before you do anything else, because without that nothing else will work: use icebreakers, share experience and manage expectations. In this session, I started by asking participants to write a definition of teacher training before the session started, then introduce themselves and compare their definitions. Another idea (thanks Simon Smith) is to use post-it notes at the start of a course for participants to write one thing they are excited about during the training and one thing they’re worried about. They can compare these and generally find that there are similarities with their colleagues.
Training is about changing how somebody thinks about something. This can mean needing to get at their beliefs and that means in a small way changing who they are. Without making people feel comfortable, they won’t feel ready to share and take risks during training. I could have talked a lot more about beliefs but didn’t have much time – it’s something I’m planning to return to on my blog as I experiment with them further.
Group dynamics are also important at the end of a training session or course for a sense of completion – I’d always done some form of icebreaker at the start but never really at the end before, and had only focussed on getting to know you, not expectations or worries. I used the post-it idea on a course in the summer. We left the post-it notes on the wall all week (I’d done one too), then returned to them at the end of the week to see whether these hopes and fears had manifested themselves during the course.
Start where they are
This is mentioned in a lot of the literature, but particular in Wright and Bolitho. Start with trainees writing down questions they want the training to answer, or get them to brainstorm ideas connected to the topic. We can learn a lot from each other and this puts everybody on an equal footing, rather than the trainer being the only ‘knower’.
Brainstorms that you use at the beginning of a session can also be added to at the end and displayed. For example we have them in our kitchen so teachers can refer back to them. This helps teachers realise what they’ve learnt and shows you what you don’t need to spend as much time on in the session.
Experience-based rather than information-based
We know teaching works better when you experience it but for some reason training often ends up being more lecture-based.
I used to give people a lot of information and not really any time to think about it because I thought they’d do that later. That tends to be how I work because I’m lucky to have a good memory and I like collecting information 🙂 but I realised that that’s actually quite unusual.
I’m learning more about experiential learning and I’m in the process of getting more of it into my training room so this is still a work in progress, but I’m moving towards less content and more depth. My past workshops might have included seven or eight activities in 60 minutes and now it’s just three or four with more processing time.
Increase impact
I’m trying to maximise transfer from the training room to the classroom with more action planning time and reflection time.
In all of our workshops we now have a section where teachers use a coursebook or a lesson plan and talk about how they can adapt it in light of the workshop. If it’s a list of techniques like error correction, they choose two or three to try in the next week and their mentors ask them about it to see how it’s gone. We aim to dedicate at least 15 minutes of a 60-minute workshop to this.
I haven’t done a CELTA recently so I’m still thinking about how to do it in that case, but if anyone has any ideas I’d really like to hear them.
Learning through dialogue
Reflection and discussion time is maximized. This enables teachers to learn from each other, formulating their own thoughts and getting at their own beliefs through the questions of others.
Mann and Walsh recommend reflection through dialogue as the best way to develop and I’ve realised the importance of this in my own development since I read their book. It also helps group dynamics and helps everybody to feel valued if they’re learning from each other and reflecting together.
As part of this process, I emphasise that there’s no one right way to teach but that they should experiment with different things to find out what works for them and their students. This also comes from finding out about how other teachers talk about teaching and learning, so teachers can see what they have in common and where they differ and that it’s OK to have different teaching styles.
Model
Practise what you preach throughout. If you tell trainees to do something, make sure you’re doing it yourself! For example, if you tell them they must include a variety of activities, make sure you’re doing it too. It means that they’re more likely to respect your advice and they are experiencing what it feels like to benefit from techniques you’re recommending.
Having said that, make connections explicit between what happens in the training room and what could happen in the classroom – they can be hard to notice, especially for new teachers, when trainees are in ‘student’ mode.
Evaluate
Get feedback. We introduced a post workshop feedback form with 5 questions:
What do you need more help with?
What will you take from this session into your lessons?
What should we keep the same?
What should we change?
Anything else you want to tell us?
This has helped us to refine our workshops and make them more suitable for our teachers. It also models how to get and respond to feedback.
I’m still quite form-based in the way that I get feedback on training I’ve done, so would welcome ideas from others.
Follow up
Does your training follow similar principles? Will you change anything in your training based on anything here?
If you’re interested in developing as a teacher training, you might find ELT Playbook Teacher Training a useful starting point for reflection (and there’s 10% off on Smashwords ebooks using the discount code MG24Z until 14th January).
There are 30 tasks with reflective prompts, and if you complete 5 of them in any one section you can get a badge to display wherever you like:
In August 2019 I started doing the NILE MA Trainer Development module and discovered there’s actually quite a lot of information out there to help teacher trainers, a lot of which had passed me by. This post aims to collect what I’ve found. Please let me know if there’s anything you’d add or if any of the links are broken.
Training for trainers
International House offer a Teacher Trainer Certificate. It’s a 14-week online course, with 12 weeks of input and 2 weeks to finish your portfolio. There is also a new (at the time of writing) Observation and giving feedback course, which I think is around 7 weeks long. IH teachers get a discount on both courses.
NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) offer a Trainer Development course. This can be taken as 2 weeks face-to-face or 10 weeks online. It can form one 30-credit module of the full NILE MA programme, the MA in Professional Development in Language Education (MAPDLE). I’ve written quite a lot connected to the MAPDLE on my blog.
IH ILC Brno run an annual trainers’ weekend. The first one was in 2019. Full details on their website.
British Council have a comprehensive teacher educator framework which you can use to help you identify gaps in your skills and work out what to develop next.
Training blogs
Jacqueline Douglas writes bite-sized blogposts covering all kinds of aspects of teacher training.
Matthew Noble currently writes the Muddles into Maxims blog, and previously wrote the Diary of a newbie CELTA trainer. Both contain lots of thought-provoking posts and first-hand experiences of training.
Zhenya Polosatova is a teacher trainer and educator from Ukraine. She regularly blogs ideas and reflections on her Wednesday Seminars blog. I particularly enjoyed her series of Trainer Conversations, for example this one with Rasha Halat (part 2).
John Hughes has written a lot about observation and teacher training on his blog and in various other places.
Rachel Tsateri has also blogged a lot about her teacher training experiences, including what she learnt as she completed the NILE MA Trainer Development module.
On the first Monday of each month, CELTA trainers meet on Twitter for CELTAchat. Even if you’re not a CELTA trainer, I’m sure you’ll find useful ideas there. Summaries of chats are published on the CELTAchat blog. The Twitter handle is @aChatCELT and you can read the hashtag even if you don’t have a Twitter account: #CELTAchat.
I’ve listed all of the teacher training books I’m aware of, including affiliate links to Amazon and BookDepository (meaning I get a few pennies if you order them that way) and a non-affiliate one to BEBC if possible, plus my posts about them if I’ve written one. I’m working through the backlog of books I’ve read for the MA and will be adding more over the next year or so if all goes to plan. Quite a few of these books are available secondhand a lot cheaper than you might expect!
TrainerDevelopment by Tony Wright and Rod Bolitho (Amazon, Book Depository, Lulu, my post)
Very practical: a focus on the humanistic side of training and working with the people in front of you as much as possible.
Teaching Language Teachers: Scaffolding ProfessionalLearning by Gabriel Diaz Maggioli (Amazon, Book Depository, my post)
Possibly more for MA TESOL trainers? But good for general theory too.
Reflective Practice in English Language Teaching by Steve Mann and Steve Walsh (Amazon,Book Depository)
I devoured this, and got so many ideas from it – highly recommended!
Language Teacher Education by Jon Roberts (Amazon, Book Depository)
A classic, I believe. Great for background theory, and has lots of examples of courses.
Teaching Teachers: Processes and Practices by Angi Malderez and Martin Wedell (Amazon, Book Depository)
Another good one for background theory, with a worked example of how to approach creating a course.
Mentor Courses: A Resource Book for Trainer-Trainers by Angi Malderez and Caroline Bodóczky (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository)
Specifically for mentoring and training mentors, but has some useful things for general training.
Advising and Supporting Teachers by Mick Randall with Barbara Thornton (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository)
Particularly good for those doing longer-term advice and support.
Ways of Training by Tessa Woodward (Amazon, Book Depository)
A recipe book with loads of ideas for different ways to tweak your training.
Models and Metaphors in Language Teacher Training: Loop Input and Other Strategies by Tessa Woodward (Amazon, Book Depository)
The origin of loop input, full of worked examples of training sequences with a bit of theory at the end to tie it all off.
Readings in Teacher Development by Katie Head and Pauline Taylor (Amazon, Book Depository)
A collection of excerpts from various different sources touching on a wide range of areas for teacher development, including mental and physical health.
The Lazy Teacher Trainers Handbook by Magnus Coney (Amazon, Smashwords (affiliate), the round)
Ready-made workshops that largely depend on the input of the trainees and involve minimal preparation but maximum output. e-book only, but you can print it (I did!)
Professional Development for Language Teachers by Jack C. Richards and Thomas S. C. Farrell (Amazon, Book Depository)
While aimed at teachers, this is good for ideas of different modes of training.
The Developing Teacher by Duncan Foord (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository)
Another one aimed at teachers, but covering with lots of different tasks you could adapt for the classroom.
Classroom Observation Tasks by Ruth Wajnryb (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository)
[I haven’t actually read this one yet, but I know it’s a classic!]
ELT Lesson Observation & Feedback Handbook by Jeanette Barsdell (Amazon)
[I haven’t read this one either, but have heard good things about it.]
The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teacher Education edited by Steve Walsh and Steve Mann (Amazon, Routledge, Book Depository)
[The price of this 2019 617-page book means I’m unlikely to get my hands on a copy any time soon, but the sample chapters and pages I’ve managed to read through Amazon LookInside and Google Books show that this is a fantastic compendium of up-to-date information about teacher training. P.S. If you buy a copy through my Amazon link, I’ll probably be able to afford one of the other books on this list!] 😉
A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT by John Hughes (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository) – I think this is the best basic introduction to teacher training, and as practical as the title claims.
And last but not least, the book I wrote 🙂 ELT Playbook Teacher Training:
…for which you can get badges if you share your responses to the reflective tasks included in the book using social media:
This is part of a series of posts summarising the contents of some of the books I’ve read for the NILE MA Trainer Development module. They aren’t really intended as traditional book reviews, more as a way of reminding myself of what’s in each book and helping other people decide which ones might be useful to them.
Key details
Title: Trainer Development
Author: Tony Wright and Rod Bolitho
Publisher: Self-published
Year: 2007
Place of publication: Published online
Affiliate links: Amazon, Book Depository (I’ll get a few pennies if you use one of these!)
The awareness-raising process and its consequences
Talk in training courses
Creating meaning: new learning
Planning for action
Feedback, assessment and evaluation in training
Inside a training course 2
Developing as a trainer
Chapters 1 and 11 describe a training course in full, with commentaries from the authors describing the principles the courses demonstrate (they ran one of the courses each). Chapters 2 to 10 expand on these principles, including acknowledging potential problems if you follow through with them in your own courses, all drawn from the authors’ experience. Chapter 12 summarises these principles and shows how the two authors have developed and will continue to do so.
235 pages of content, including a range of activities that can be used in the training room. These often have examples of responses to the activities taken from Wright and Bolitho’s real courses. There is a focus on the processes of training, and social and affective factors trainers should consider. There are also quotes from their previous course participants throughout to support their points.
Comprehensive list of resources for trainers (a little out-of-date now, as the book was published in 2007, but a lot is still relevant)
No index, and the typos are somewhat distracting at times, especially in chapter 11. One or two diagrams are missing and page numbers are sometimes incorrect when referencing other parts of the book.
What I found useful/thought-provoking/myself saying ‘yes!’ to
(These could be concepts, ideas or descriptions. Please note that quotes are obviously decontextualised here, and for the full effect you should read the book. Bold and italics are from the original source, not mine.)
The focus on starting from where the trainees are:
We have to be prepared to start where they are and to make the journey of professional learning with them, hand in hand, rather than starting from where we are, exhorting them to come over and join us and follow us. (p225)
We believe that the participants themselves are the preferred starting point in training courses. They come to courses with experience. They also possess a system of beliefs, attitudes and values about teaching and learning, and about how people relate to each other in a variety of contexts. They also come with expectations. We believe that it is imperative that a course begins with an exploration of all these elements, in any order that seems appropriate to the group in question. (p4)
Work from existing to new knowledge and constructs. (p16)
Training means change, and change isn’t easy:
Even if participants volunteer for courses (as opposed to being ‘selected’), they do not, as a rule, come looking for change. Or they might be unaware of the need to change in order to accommodate new knowledge or skills. (p107)
By involving them [participants] in activity to experience new ways of teaching and learning, we may invite irritation, anger, fear or silence. Reactions are more often than not defensive, no matter how well intentioned or motivated a group might be. (p108)
The unknown is frightening, possibly overwhelming. (p107)
As well as being uncertain, unable to make decisions, believing contradictory ideas, holding opposing positions, we are also ‘fragile’. We want the new awareness to go away. Its consequences scare us. (p107) [I’ve realised this myself over the past couple of years, and have therefore been more forgiving of trainees/new teachers when they’re stressed, and have been able to stay calmer myself when helping them.]
Talk is an important part of this process (Chapter 7):
We need to move away from a transmission approach to training towards a more participatory one. (p122) [This is something we’ve been trying at school over the past 6 months or so, based on an instinct of mine and my colleagues but without really knowing why or how to do it – this book helps! We’ve had good results so far.]
Change is unlikely unless we make our principles public. (p78)
The role of talk in the processing of ideas is pivotal, and the generous allocation of time allowed for focused discussion of issues is crucial. (p8)
…with the trainer’s role being one of facilitator and summariser:
We often find that, in the excitement of open discussion, so many ideas are reverberating around the training room that no-one can see the wood for the trees. Our responsibility in this case is to pull things together, to pick out and highlight key themes from the discussion so that a set of priorities emerges for the group to focus on. (p123)
True learning and development are about something deeper:
The real confrontation on any training course is between each individual participant and herself. The sense participants make of a course is essentially derived from the degree to which they are prepared to explore their own thinking and to relate it to their own context in the light of wider trends and findings. (p98)
The challenge for us, as tutors, is to provoke and promote the kind of thinking and conceptualisation which reaches the level of values and beliefs, and which involves participants in a principled reappraisal of their practices. (p227)
…and it takes time:
Our experience is that professional learning cannot be hurried if it is to be valuable and that time spent on follow-up procedures […] is an investment in depth and quality of learning. (p89)
People change and develop in unpredictable ways; the messages in a course component may take years to digest, and it may only be 5 years after a programme that real summative feedback can be given, usually by the participant to us. (p188)
This also means it’s worth following up on a course six months or so after it’s finished [I’m going to try this with the course I’m currently running]:
Many will not really know what the course means to them until long after it is over, and they have had time to digest all the ‘lessons’ they have learned and to try out their ideas in practice. (p177)
It gives us more useful balanced feedback than we could ever get through reviewing the course formally on the final day. (p177)
Emotions are integral to training, but rarely acknowledged as such:
When a trainee learns how to teach she makes a huge personal and emotional investment in the process, which is very close to our being or essence. (p106)
We believe that in the initial stages of reflection, participants need to ‘unload’ their feelings about an experience before proceeding to describing or reconstructing it. (p26)
The emotional side of being a trainer is one that poses us some of the greatest challenges in our own development and learning. (p61-62)
We would contend that one of the key development areas for us as trainers is in understanding the world of the emotions. (p106) [I think this is important for managers too.]
It’s important to be careful with our words and work on our interpersonal skills:
Participants are often at their most vulnerable in one-to-one sessions (especially after the high level of emotional investment in an observed lesson or an individual presentation in the training room). (p226)
[When we feel frustrated, often due to our expectations of participants] An ill-chosen comment in such circumstances can have a negative effect that is difficult to ‘undo’ later. (p228)
Some of our participants may not even be fully aware that they are ‘censoring’ their own contributions, since the avoidance of self-disclosure or public self-doubt may be so ingrained in their ways of behaving. (p71)
Listening is a key part of this, but it needs work:
A commitment to listening attentively to a participant as they make a contribution is not easy. (p119)
We have, on occasion, sat in with participants as they attempt to resolve a problem. It demands intense patience and we find ourselves having to resist the temptation to offer solutions. (p56)
Group formation and group disbanding are both really important, shouldn’t be rushed, and should involve the trainer where possible (p36, p180):
When things have gone wrong in a training group, and we wish to diagnose the problem, we find that this is a good place to start – to ask whether or not we have done enough facilitation of the ‘getting to know you’ process. While we can attempt repair, we have often, to our cost, found that it is difficult ever to achieve this fully. The learning experience suffers as a consequence. (p49) [Definitely something I’ve experienced with a couple of English classes, and to a lesser extent on training courses.]
We see it as a major task of the trainer to provide the conditions for the group to explore this experience [the collective experience of the group], to share their diversity and to establish points of commonality. (p113)
Trust and honesty are the basis of effective communication in groups, and are built progressively (and not without difficulty) through activities which promote disclosure. […] Disclosure can help to build mutual respect, and enable members to cope with the inevitable conflicts and disputes that characterise a working group. (p112)
Mutual trust cannot be taken for granted. (p36)
Add destabilisation and uncertainty to the group process, where people are struggling to establish identities and relationships, with perhaps undeveloped communication skills, and the training room is an even more stressful environment. (p107-108)
Thinking questions can be added to the end of written summaries of discussions and prompt further reflection. (p102-103)
‘Suitcases’ are a good way to start and/or end courses (mentioned on p44-45 and on p181, plus in an article we received when we were in Norwich)
Activity grids and ‘degridding’ (mentioned in chapter 5) can be used to go deeper into activities done in the training room. [Something I’m learning to do more consistently.]
It is necessary to go beyond the activities themselves and to ‘excavate’ them to uncover the principles which lie behind them. (p90)
In order for meaning to be derived from any activity, structured and, if necessary, guided reflection need to take place. (p25)
Better to explore activities in depth and to gain insights that are generative than to attempt to cover too much and spread ourselves to thinly. (p90)
All of this reading I’m doing is worth it!
Professional reading has a vital part to play in teacher and trainer development. It is an opportunity to be alone with ideas, to make connections, to find support, to open horizons, to excite, to inspire, to consolidate and to help gain ownership of ideas. (p156)
Part of the process of training should be to enable participants to select and add to their bookshelf titles which they find useful. (p155)
…but it’s vital that theory is connected to participants’ experience whenever possible:
We have found that completely abstract ideas on training and training processes mean little to participants without the concrete reference point of personal history or shared experience in the training room. (p29)
Experienced teachers and trainers have often well-developed and well-thought-out personal theories on teaching, learning, people and so on. These personal theories inform action and reaction. They are usually developed, maintained and used unconsciously. (p144)
Training that explicitly draws upon participants’ personal theories and the capacity to theorise is likely to be perceived as more ‘relevant’ by participants. […] A specific time when we can do this is when exploring training or teaching experiences. (p144-5)
Assessment on training courses should be as practical as possible, reflecting things they need to do in their professional lives (Amen!) and should be based on clear(ly communicated) criteria. (Chapter 10)
Assignments should have professional face validity. (p175)
We believe that the basis of a developmental assessment and evaluation system is the effective communication of intents, purposes, process and outcomes. (p173)
For training to be truly effective, it’s important for trainees to do some form of action planning at the end of their courses, both to summarise what they have learnt and to prepare for the transition (back) to their workplaces. (Chapter 9) [I’ve tried this for the first time on the course I’m running at the moment for participants leaving after one week, and I think it worked pretty well.]
Our aim is always to try to pace our courses in such a way as to allow time and opportunity for participants to plan for this [their return to teaching or training] towards the end of their course by bringing together the ideas they have accumulated and putting them into some kind of organised framework for implementation on their return to work. (p158)
There is no guarantee that transfer will take place, that participants will change and develop, and adopt new principles, and put them into practice. (p168)
We can easily forget the strains on a course participant whose worldview has been disturbed to the point that they are still in flux when the course is finishing. (p168)
They will benefit if they can go back to work not only with renewed vigour and zeal, but with usable materials and plans, and a clear notion of what they might achieve. (p172)
The authors demonstrate a continued desire to learn and be challenged, including in public: [something I hope I share!]
Our knowledge and expertise will always be incomplete. (p1)
We have to remain flexible in order to respond to these twists and turns, and it is from the surprises and unexpected turnings that we learn and develop. (p231)
[Going public] Both of us speak regularly at conferences and participate in other professional activity in publishing, examining and consultancy. In all these endeavours we find our principles challenged, open to the scrutiny of our colleagues and we value this immensely. (p233)
The act of articulating one’s thought processes is a valuable way of clarifying why we take certain courses of action. (p141)
Once we take the decision to involve training participants in an open discussion of training issues, to interact as a learning community, to acknowledge the resources for learning available in a group, and to set out deliberately to understand and work with the social and emotional world of trainees, we create a challenging agenda for all concerned. (p63)
Questions I still have
To what extent could a transmission approach work on pre-service courses? Especially if they really are pre-service and don’t include experienced teachers!
Why has it taken me so long to realise that group dynamics are such a key part of teacher and training?! Really need to find the time to read Classroom Dynamics by Jill Hadfield, which I’ve dipped into before, but never gone through completely. [Amazon affiliate link]
General comment
I really liked this book, and often found myself agreeing with points made about social and emotional aspects of training. I liked the way that the two courses described were for teacher trainers, so there was a kind of meta aspect in two of the chapters. All of the activities described as part of those courses could be adapted for other training contexts. There was a real sense of the authors’ voices, and what it would be like to be trained by them. I also liked the exploratory nature of the book, with the recognition that they are not ‘finished’ as trainers and still have things to learn.
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts summarising the contents of some of the books I’ve read for the NILE MA Trainer Development module. It’s not really intended as a traditional book review, more as a way of reminding myself of what’s in each book and helping other people decide which ones might be useful to them.
Key details
Title: Teaching Language Teachers: Scaffolding Professional Learning
Teaching Teachers Online [I didn’t read this chapter, as it’s not currently relevant to me]
Sustaining Professional Learning
Each chapter starts with a quote, a list of objectives, and a few questions for the reader to think about, plus space to write notes to answer them. It ends with a conclusion summarising what was covered in the chapter.
At the back, there’s one task file per unit, including a way to ‘Act on it!’ (though these don’t seem to be referred to in the rest of the book)
Introduction plus 151 pages of content, 12 of tasks
Comprehensive index and bibliography
What I found useful/thought-provoking
(These could be concepts, ideas or descriptions. I’m afraid you’ll have to read the book or do a search to find out more details.)
Traditions in teacher learning (pp. 8-14):
Look and Learn
Read and Learn
Think and Learn
Participate and Learn
Four domains of foreign-language teacher’s knowledge (p28):
Language and Culture
Pedagogy and Assessment
Professionalism
Adaptive Expertise
‘Adaptive Expertise’ is “the teacher’s process of enacting the other domains in real-life contexts and reflecting on the impact of his [sic.] actions.” It “allows them to effect positive changes in their situation, with the aim of improving their students’ learning opportunities.” “It uses the other types of knowledge to prompt changes in current pedagogy.” (all p28)
The range of ways in which teacher learning can be scaffolded, including through assessment. (whole book, but particularly chapter 3)
The idea that knowledge, skills and dispositions (not sure exactly what the latter are?) can be divided into (p63):
essential
relevant as support to the essential
interesting
…and this implies different approaches to assessment. You can use this to help you decide what to include in courses/sessions.
The ‘Question Exploration Guide’ to help you determine what areas might be useful to explore in a training course. (p65)
The example rubric for discussion board participation in an online course (p72) and assessment criteria for a course and the written assignments on it (p76)
Two different sample rubrics for ‘Teacher’s Use of the Foreign Language’, one analytic/task-specific, and the other holistic/task-specific (pp. 88-89)
The charactistics of constructive formative feedback (p92) and the steps of the CARE model for delivering it (p93), the latter based on Noddings (1984)
List of possible foci for classroom observation (p105, adapted from Diaz Maggioli 2004:86)
The most accessible breakdown I have yet seen of Heron’s six-category intervention analysis (pp. 112-113)
Questions I still have
How do you identify desired results if teachers/other stakeholders aren’t clear about what they want a particular training course to achieve? You can obviously make these decisions yourself, but it’s better to have stakeholder involvement. In that case, how flexible can/should your course be and to what extent is this determined by context? (pp. 57-61)
What might constitute acceptable evidence of ‘expert performance’ on in-service courses? I feel this is much easier to identify for new(er) teachers, or where there are clear teaching standards to be achieved such as on the MA TESOL course that was referred to through the book. (pp. 57-61)
Which of the ideas from this book would transfer from the MA TESOL context to the private language school context and which wouldn’t?
General comment
I think it’s mostly aimed at trainers on MA TESOL courses, rather than trainers in general, and a lot of the descriptions are geared towards “aspiring teachers”. It’s therefore not always relevant to me as I work at a private language school and train teachers on CELTA or other short INSETT [In-service Teacher Training] courses.
Generally very readable, though I had to re-read some of the theoretical sections a few times to get my head around them (not sure if I actually did or not!) Definitely ideas in here which I’ll be coming back to.
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 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.
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!
For homework last night we read The consequences of INSET, an ELT Journal article from 1995 by Martin Lamb (Volume 49 Issue 1, pp72-79). I’m really sorry to keep sharing articles which are hidden behind paywalls 😦 but hopefully my very short summary will give you the general idea. This article was a real eye-opener for me, and I hope you get to read the original at some point!
Abstract
Teachers attending short INSET courses are usually exposed to a great amount of new information and ideas. While this can be exciting at the time, the after-effects may be less salutary. This article describes one particular INSET course and the reactions of the participating teachers one year later. It suggests that very few of this ideas presented on the course were taken up in the way anticipated by the tutors, mainly due to the mediating effects of the participants’ own beliefs about teaching and learning. Any INSET course which is seriously concerned with long-term change in teachers’ practice will have to take these beliefs into account.
Before reading this article, I knew that training that I do is not always taken wholesale into the classroom and incorporated into teachers’ practice – if anyone could manage that, it would be a miracle! But I suspected there were three states for any given activity/theory/idea I might present:
No uptake
Confusion
Complete uptake
How wrong I was! In fact, according to a study done by Lamb there are lots of different ways that ideas from courses can be taken up. Interviewing and observing teachers one year after a 2-week, 25-hour course, Lamb found “seven different ways in which participants had reacted, consciously or unconsciously, to ideas presented on the course” (p75):
No update
Confusion
Labelling (applying a term to an activity they were already doing)
Appropriation (justifying changes in teaching not anticipated by the tutors)
Assimilation (transferring techniques without necessarily understanding the rationale)
Adaptation and rejection
Engagement
In short, very few of the ideas from the training were actually incorporated into the practice of the participants, although they had responded positively to the course.
As a result, Lamb highlights the importance of making participants aware of their routine practice and the values [beliefs] behind it. He also reminds us that participants should decide which areas to develop and “formulate their own agenda for change” (p79).
For me, it’s another example of the importance of including an examination of teacher beliefs in training courses, something which I rarely remember being included in any of the training I have done or delivered (!) but will definitely be adding to my training!
We looked at two different taxonomies you could use when planning workshops, in a session on the NILE Trainer Development course today.
The first was proposed by Rod Ellis in a 1986 ELT Journal article called Activities and procedures for teacher training. It lists 10 different kinds of task for teachers on training courses, arranged loosely from less to more cognitively/linguistically demanding:
Listing
Rearranging
Comparing
Ranking
Selecting
Adding/Completing
Adapting
Preparing
Evaluating
Improving
We also looked at Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl), again from ‘easier’ to ‘more difficult’:
Remembering
Understanding
Applying
Analysing
Evaluating
Creating
With a coursebook page as a prompt, we used these taxonomies to come up with 6 teacher training tasks laddered from easier to harder, with the caveat that the taxonomies are guidelines, not straitjackets.
The aim my partner and I chose for our imagined group of middle school teachers was ‘to learn how to adapt coursebooks to increase student engagement’. The 6 tasks we came up with were:
List ways you already know to engage students with a coursebook page. (Listing/Remembering)
Categories those methods in some way, e.g. heads up/down, stirrers/settlers, individual/pair/group activities. (Rearranging)
Read this blogpost – what else can you add to your categories? [On reflection, that should probably be something like ‘Choose one thing to add to each category.’ as otherwise it could be overwhelming!] (Adding)
Which of the activities on your list would/wouldn’t work with your students? What would you change? (Analysing/Evaluating)
In pairs, plan your own lesson based on the coursebook page. (Preparing/Creating)
Look at another pair’s lesson plan. Decide what works and what you could improve. (Evaluating/Improving)
Feel free to try out this session with your teachers. I’d be interested to know how it goes 🙂
Teachers often talk about what and how, but often don’t say why or why not.
That was a quote from a session on teacher beliefs (the why/why not of what we do) on the NILE Trainer Development course today. We talked about various ways of uncovering beliefs, and I’ve thought of one more. What would you add?
Have 2-3 statements connected to beliefs teachers could discuss at the beginning of a session.
Say a statement – they stand to the left or right depending on whether they agree or disagree, or somewhere in the middle if they prefer.
Have statements which trainees tick/cross/modify.
Create short case studies with some kind of dilemma – each ‘solution’ is valid, but discussing them can show up beliefs.
Today on the NILE trainer development course we read an article by Briony Beaven about how to make trainees aware of all of the different methods of input that we use on a course, as well as the variety of interaction patterns and activity types we use. She suggested using a poster at the end of each session with a tick list that can build up over the course. Trainees are often not able to notice input processes because they are so focused on the content of sessions. The poster draws explicit attention to input processes and will hopefully help trainees to vary their own input, activities and interaction patterns in their lessons. The original article appeared in English Teaching professional issue 74, in May 2011 and includes examples of such a poster. We’ve started using one for our course too.
We read this article today as part of a session on the Trainer Development module at NILE (part of my MA). I really like the idea of developing professional pride and confidence in teachers I work with – I know confidence is an area I’ve definitely thought about before, but I’m not sure about professional pride. Here are my ideas so far for how to do this:
Today I arrived in Norwich, the first time I’ve been here.
A gateway to new places (The Ethelbert Gate, one of two entrances into Norwich Cathedral close. Fittingly, the upper chamber is now a classroom)
I’ll be here for the next two weeks for the MA Trainer Development course, the first module that I’m doing on the NILE MA in Professional Development for Language Education, or MAPDLE for short. For those who don’t know, NILE is the Norwich Institute for Language Education.
I registered for this module in March, got my approval in April, and since then have been doing lots of background reading. This has been fascinating, and has really inspired me so far, with lots of ideas swirling around in my head. It’s also confirmed some of the thinking I already had about what does and doesn’t work in teacher training. The most frustrating thing is that I have so many ideas for blogposts at the moment, and no time at all to write them!
The books I’ve read so far are [Amazon links are affiliate ones, BEBC is the Bournemouth English Book Centre]:
Reflective Practice in English Language Teaching by Steve Mann and Steve Walsh (Amazon,Book Depository) – I devoured this, and got so many ideas from it – highly recommended!
Teaching Teachers: Processes and Practices by Angi Malderez and Martin Wedell (Amazon, Book Depository)
Mentor Courses: A Resource Book for Trainer-Trainers by Angi Malderez and Caroline Bodóczky (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository)
Advising and Supporting Teachers by Mick Randall with Barbara Thornton (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository)
…and two others from the reading list I read a while ago and keep recommending!
Professional Development for Language Teachers by Jack C. Richards and Thomas S. C. Farrell (Amazon, Book Depository)
A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT by John Hughes (Amazon, BEBC, Book Depository) – I think this is the best basic introduction to teacher training
I have another three or four books on my shelf waiting for me to read when I get back to Poland too.
Tomorrow I start two weeks of face-to-face input as part of the blended course, and I will then have until 31st January 2020 to complete three assignments (retrieved from the MA Module -Trainer Development page):
A portfolio (50%) containing TWO of the following three options:
A criterion-referenced evaluation of a piece of published training material in relation to a specified context.
Production or analysis of an in-house developmental scheme for monitoring and/or supervision of a specified group of teachers.
A piece of self-produced training material for use on an INSETT or PRESETT course in a specific context, accompanied by a rationale and evaluation.
A main 3,000 word assignment (50%) consisting of a fully worked out design for a short in-service or pre-service course for a specific context, including a rationale, a means of evaluation and a statement of staffing and resource provision.
I already have ideas for the two portfolio tasks, and ‘just’ need something for the course I have to create.
Why this MA?
I like the fact that I can pay for the modules as I go along, and that my Delta means that I don’t have to do the Core module. It also seems to be a very flexible course, and you can work around what’s happening in your life.
The assignments look like they will be highly practical and applicable to my job – I prefer that to lots of theory.
The blended modules mean I can spend two weeks in the summer completely focussing on the course, without having to work at the same time as taking in new information. I also get to meet the people I’m doing the course with, something I really feel I missed out on by doing the Distance Delta.
NILE has a great reputation, and I’ve heard lots of good things about the course. I’ve also found them to be really helpful so far.
But mostly, I chose this MA because of its flexibility – I think it’s possibly the most flexible MA in the world 😉 Here’s an excerpt from their FAQs:
Do I have to enrol for the whole MA programme?
Yes, you do need to enrol for the whole programme, but you enrol and pay for each module within it separately, according to your individual needs. There are then two possible exit points where you can withdraw from the programme with a ‘contained award’: a Postgraduate Certificate (after gaining 60 credits) or a Postgraduate Diploma (after gaining 120 credits). The Core module counts for 60 credits and the elective modules count for a further 30 credits each.
Feelings before the course
I was super motivated about the course, and really fired up by all the reading I’d done. Then I had two weeks’ holiday and lost my momentum 😉 …but in the few days since that finished I’ve started to get excited again.
I’m most looking forward to getting external feedback on my professional development, as most of my CPD for the last few years has been things I’ve done independently.
I’m also intrigued to find out who else will be on the course, and to learn more about where they work and who they work with.
It’s also great to be able to really focus on my CPD for two whole weeks, without worrying about anything else (apart from a little recruitment!)
Oh, and I already really like Norwich and am looking forward to exploring it more fully!
Norwich Cathedral cloisters
Watch out for more MA-related posts, though they might be a while in coming (and I still need to write my IATEFL ones too…)
Every May, International House World Organisation runs their Teachers’ Online Conference (TOC) event. This is a day or two of short talks on a huge range of topics presented by teachers from across the IH network. They are recorded and you can still watch talks from previous years. I’ll add the recordings from this year once they’re available (in the next week or so).
This year, the event happened on Friday May 17th. My presentation was designed to help you reduce your planning time, but still teach an effective lesson. It’s based around adapting a double-page coursebook spread to maximise the usefulness for my students while not adding huge amounts of planning/materials creation to my day.
The questions I suggested you could use when thinking about planning are:
INSTEAD OF
How can we do these pages?
ASK YOURSELF
What do my students need the most?
What do they already know?
How much time do they need to bridge the gap?
How can I maximise engagement?
What can the book support the students in?
What’s missing? What do I need to add/change?
How much variety is needed? How can I add it?
Another possible set of questions I’ve come up with in the last couple of days is:
What do my students want to know (how to do)?
What aspects of that language/skill/function etc. do they already know? How will I find that out in the lesson if I’m not sure?
How can I help them bridge the gap between what they can already do and what they want/need to do? What problems might they have with this language/skill/function? What can they/I do about them? (Is there something in the book that already deals with this? Do I need to add/change something?)
How can I check/make sure students realise they’ve improved?
I’d be interested to know what happens if you try out either of these sets of questions as a planning approach as they’re a reflection of what I think I do when I approach planning, and I’ve only written them down this week!
Elementary functions lesson
These are my notes for the Speakout Elementary coursebook spread above, which I used to generate the questions. You can see me voicing them and adding extra detail in the recording of my session.
“Teaches itself” – Everything is here – could work through page from start to finish, and SS would learn. But book-bound, little variety and most importantly… probably too long – potentially 2-3 hours of lessons here if you really exploit it. Start with timing – 90-minute lesson, take away warmer/homework check = 70 minutes-ish left over.
Need to prioritise. What’s main aim? What’s most useful to my students? Unlikely to have time to do justice to both function and telling a story so pick one to really work with in depth. Ask students which one in previous lesson? At elementary = aim should be building confidence, rather than rushing through and ‘finishing’ everything. Repetition, practice, chances to use the language.
So I choose apologies (I think my students will be able to use this every lesson – they’re always having problems! And useful when they travel/meet new people) Stories are great too, but I’ve got to pick one – not enough time to do justice to both.
Where could you start? How can you engage them in the topic?
The image in 3A might not generate much conversation, though the story is good. Set up situation – clear context. Going into work. You had this problem from image (either cartoon or p93 pictures). What did you say to your boss? Mini roleplay – test what they already know. Start from communication rather than language (TBL) + help students to notice the gap. Tells you how much you need to teach them later.
Could also start with images from p93 – what are the problems? Who apologies? Why? Start with finding out what students already know.
Or the excuses vocab from 2A/2B if they’re a lower level and really need the help, or this could follow looking at the images if it turns out they don’t know the language – they’re producing ‘lost keys’ ‘didn’t wake up’.
> Materials needed = images scanned/photoed from your phone (with copyright information!) rather than spending time Googling other images, or the book software if you have access to it, or a quick cartoon you can draw on the board of one of the situations from the book, or you need 3A/3B from book/board. If in book, ask students to cover ex 4 onwards.
Various options for next stage: if you’re confident, you can work with student-generated language and build up dialogue with them on board, adding in phrases from 4A/4B/4C as needed – could be engaging if you can keep everyone involved, could also be very teacher-centred! Less teacher-centred = they write out their roleplay in pairs/groups and you go round feeding in language. If less confident, work through 4A/4B/4C as is. = meaning, form. Language bank gives some extra practice if needed.
BUT what’s missing? What about pron, drilling, memorisation, student confidence? Will they be able to use these phrases accurately and fluently later? This is where your time will probably go in an elementary functions lesson! What could you do that’s minimal prep here? Key word drill, deletion drill, first letter drill, remember/test/write – all useful. Decide how much needed in the lesson.
> Materials needed: book, board, choice of key words (but students can help you decide those in the lesson – better if from them!)
Lots of practice of phrases, now back to context and communication.
Show them the framework from 5A (in book/photo on board with copyright/key words written on board – up to you, but minimal prep!) – pairs think of conversations between teacher and student, practice for a couple of minutes, ask if anyone wants to perform.
Could use 5B to show who apologises to who, or could elicit from students on board – probably more engaging and creative
They come up with more conversations, perhaps in a mingle – they haven’t moved yet in the lesson! Or use 5C as is – they listen and guess = engaging, reason to listen. Feed back on what they’ve done / Language upgrades / Ask if they’ve improved their confidence.
Intermediate grammar lesson
I ran out of time to discuss this in my presentation – I wanted to show how you could use the questions generated by the elementary spread to plan with another coursebook/level. I’m imagining planning a lesson for a group of 12 students, aged 16-45, about half and half teens and adults, with a 90-minute lesson of which the first 20 minutes are revision/HW check.
Here are my answers to the seven planning questions:
What do my students need the most?
Aim is to get them using relative clauses (which I know my intermediate students don’t use from observing them in previous lessons), not learning about Che; communication key – lots of speaking.
What do they already know? (in this case, at the planning stage what do I think they already know?)
Have seen defining clauses before, but probably don’t use. Maybe first time with non-defining within our school, but teens are likely to have seen it at school fairly recently and will probably be faster.
How much time do they need to bridge the gap? (in this case, what’s my prediction when I’m planning?)
Time spent on seeing what they already know about relative clauses, and giving them plenty of time to produce their own = start planning with the end of the lesson? Adults will need more time than teens.
How can I maximise engagement? (when answering this, I ended up writing out a whole plan!)
Teen students unlikely to know about him, and I’m not sure the adults will be that interested in him either. So raising interest important (could find another person to describe, but that creates loads of work and we want minimal prep!) Right from start, get them talking about films about famous people & they could return to this at end of the lesson producing their own description of person/film for example. Should be more accessible for all ages (could be real film or one they wish existed) – so a twist on the topic.
To segue to the reading, do a KWL chart. Or they could write 5 questions they want a film about Che to answer, rather than testing their knowledge (which I suspect most of them don’t have!) – student-generated = more interesting. Or use the photos but not the quiz? Lots of options!
When they were talking about their own people/films, did they use relative clauses? Probably not – so point this out to them before 1d to give them a reason to pay attention. 1g is OK as text follow-up, but won’t use that many relative clauses. But you could use it as another test of whether they’re producing relative clauses, since they’ve seen examples of them now – retelling a text is a great way to see what language they already use.
Bridge the gap by working with sentences you collected while monitoring when they were talking about their films, or predicted they’d get wrong before the lesson (this is a good approach if you’re less confident/find it difficult to hear what students say) – with relative clauses, the biggest problems are normally the form (word order, which relative pronoun to use, producing sentences like GGB is the actor who he played Che where the word the pronoun replaced isn’t removed) and the intonation difference between defining and non-defining clauses (Can they ‘hear the commas’?), so these are the things you should plan to help them with. Do memorisation work with Ex 1d to keep it in context – get students to reproduce sentences without looking (probably with some form of key word prompt), or read-remember-cover-write-check, or translate the sentence into their mother tongue then back into English with their books closed. In all cases, compare the differences between what they wrote and the original – they’ll notice the problems and you can point them out if they don’t! None of these ideas require extra prep! Keep the grammar bank in reserve if they really need extra form help, but you’ll lose the context of Che/famous people here.
For pron work, they read all of the sentences in 1d in pairs as quickly as possible, though without worrying about the pron of words like Che, Bernal and Rosario! You can get them to write he or it above the sentences to make it easier. Do an open class drill of any sentences that cause problems, including pointing out the commas and the difference that makes to intonation if they had trouble with it.
Another possible activity for practice: students write out a sentences from 1d, but separated (The photo is probably one of the best known photos in theworld. It was taken in 1960.) on scrap paper, then test each other by mingling with one piece of paper each and asking their partner to recombine them verbally. You don’t need to prep this – it’s a challenge to work out how to separate the sentences and students will learn from this, also chance to mingle and move around. This activity can take quite a long time though, so decide in the lesson whether it’s needed and have your scrap paper ready. No point spending ages prepping it yourself if you’re not going to end up using it! Could be reused as revision in future lessons too if you collect the scrap paper.
Then they do the writing/speaking about their film again at the end but with a new partner, and you can praise them on how many (more) relative clauses they’re using and/or how accurately they’re using them now compared to before!
What can the book support the students in?
See point 4.
What’s missing? What do I need to add/change?
See point 4.
How much variety is needed? How can I add it?
They’ve moved, changed groupings, worked with heads up and heads down, and produced something creative (talking about their films). There’s speaking, listening (to their partners), writing (if you do the scrap paper activity), reading, grammar, pronunciation, and probably a bit of vocab from the reading or fed in during the speaking activities.
In conclusion
The lessons as described above:
are relatively flexible
leave the students space to show what they know
allow you to respond to their needs by filling gaps in their knowledge instead of trying to cover everything because it’s in the book (and are therefore more focussed and engaging)
require no extra materials, or some quick-to-prepare materials if you want to do this, using what’s in the coursebook as a jumping-off point
include time for memorisation and confidence-building
prioritise communication
upgrade language
have a range of activity types, not just completing exercises from the book
give students the chance to notice their progress
require minimal preparation beyond thinking about the answers to the questions! No cutting up 🙂
If you want to have a go at this kind of brainstorming yourself, there’s a task called ‘One activity, multiple tasks’ in ELT Playbook 1. Find out how to get your copy via the ELT Playbook blog and share your ideas on social media or in the comments below.
On 11th January 2019 I gave a 30 minute presentation at the International House Academic Managers and Trainers conference called TP Interrupted: The Role of the Trainer in CELTA Teaching Practice. I wanted to share my recent experiments with intervening in TP, clarifying what I mean by intervention; how I’ve been doing it and why. I also discussed potential problems and solutions, and gave my tips on things to consider before trying it yourself. Here’s a summary of what I said.
What
When I started asking other trainers about intervening in TP the first thing that came up was correcting trainees’ language, or information about language. That is not the focus of this talk, though it certainly is my policy that I don’t let trainees teach incorrect language; it’s not fair on students and it can have a negative impact on the following trainees.
I’ve always worked on courses where I was able to check the language analysis first to anticipate misunderstandings of the target language, so usually any inaccuracies in TP are related to incidental language that comes up. Generally, I will indicate to the trainee that something is wrong, and help them to clarify.
However, what I began experimenting with last year was intervening for different reasons, looking more at classroom management issues like positioning, instructions, pace, speed of speech, board work and even concept checking.
How
Gestures
Gestures can be a discreet way of signalling to the trainee that they need to monitor; that an activity could be done in pairs; that they should add a word to the board; reduce speed of speech; pace etc.
Stop and Intervene
Some of the others are difficult to correct with gestures alone, and this was where I started intervening a bit more, actually stopping the class and giving instructions, or asking the trainee questions. Sometimes it’s as simple as reminding them to follow their lesson plan and let students check in pairs, or encouraging them to use a CCQ [concept checking question] they’d prepared.
Here’s a clearer example from TP 2. I was observing a nervous trainee with no teaching experience. She muttered some vague instructions (to ‘have a look at the handout’) to one student at the side of the room and started to distribute handouts. I could see the students looking at each other, confused, and knew this would have a detrimental effect on the rest of the lesson. I asked her to stop, take back the handout, stand in the centre where all students could see her, show the handout and clearly indicate which activity to look at, and tell the class what to do.
Why
I haven’t found that much written about the tutor’s role in TP. The debate about whether to intervene or not gets a couple of lines in Thornbury’s CELTA course trainers’ manual [affiliate link]. He says “it can be argued thatlearning any new skill is best achieved by collaboration with a more experienced other”.
Something I feel strongly about is that CELTA is a training course and we need to be training, not just testing.
If we want to help our trainees do more, they need support. Could intervention and coaching from the side-lines be the scaffolding trainees need to achieve more?
I’m wondering if giving feedback to trainees can be equated with the feedback we give our students; consider on the spot vs delayed feedback. Could a combination be best practice?
Perhaps intervening in TP makes it more memorable – certainly the look on my trainee’s face when I told her to stop what she was doing showed that it wasn’t an experience she’d forget in a hurry. Importantly, it allows us to give information at the moment the trainee needs it, rather than after an hour or two hours, or even later on some courses. How useful is it to say to someone “two hours ago you stood slightly in the wrong place; try to avoid that next time”.
It’s the difference between show and tell – trainees can clearly see what you mean, and they can see impact on lesson, rather than everything being hypothetical.
It makes the ideas you’ve been talking about in input or feedback sessions more concrete, and you can demonstrate to trainees what you really mean, in their context. Importantly, it offers opportunities for improvement within the lesson.
Correcting my trainee on her instructions near the start of lesson led to better instructions for her next activity. She clearly remembered what I said, went back to the middle of the room, showed the handout and gave clear instructions, addressing the whole class.
But – what did she think of it? In preparation for my talk, I emailed a few trainees from the summer courses and asked for some feedback: Do you remember me intervening in your TP? Please comment on how it made you feel, and why it was/wasn’t effective.
Potential problems (and solutions)
Ambiguous gestures can be confusing and distracting; and my advice here would be agree the signals beforehand. Be aware of how much information you are trying to give, and how overloaded trainees already are. Keep it simple and make sure you reinforce it again in feedback/input etc.
Is it too prescriptive? This is a general worry of mine on the CELTA; I don’t want to impose my teaching style on new teachers. Stick to the basics, focus on classroom management and allow them to follow your instructions in their own style (within reason!)
Trainees may react badly. This is always a danger with giving any type of feedback. A large part of a trainer’s job is being intuitive to the way people react to feedback – if they are not going to react well to this approach, don’t try it.
Things to consider
Manage expectations: (of trainees and students)
If you interrupt with no warning, of course this will freak trainees out. But if they know that it’s a possibility – or even a policy – and they are prepared for it and understand the intention behind it, it will be much less alarming. As for the TP students, there may be some concern that the trainer’s intervention will cause a loss of face in front of the students, so again, it’s important that the students know the situation: that they are trainee teachers on a training course. In my experience, TP students are usually grateful for the intervention!
Personality types: Be sensitive / Ask
As with all feedback, some people take it better than others. I always say a large part of my job is managing people’s egos and giving feedback in the way that’s most acceptable to them and that they’re most receptive to. On the spot feedback is obviously no different. Use your intuition: if they’re clearly having a bad day, it might be better not to. The other option is one we use with our students: ask them how they feel about on the spot correction; if they want it or not.
Balance
Again, as with our students, you need to strike the right balance – you obviously don’t want to “correct” everything as it would be demotivating and stop the flow of the lesson.
Discuss interventions in group feedback
It’s vital that all trainees understand why you intervened – this is something that can be elicited in feedback, as well as its impact on the lesson/learners etc.
Written feedback reflects action points
If you intervene to improve a trainees positioning/monitoring/instructions etc. that should still go down as an action point in your written feedback. They need to prove they can do it successfully without intervention in later TPs.
Withdraw support as the course progresses
I intervene less and less (hopefully you find you won’t need to!) – perhaps a little again at the changeover of groups but really nothing by TP5 unless they are trying out a new technique etc.
Questions to discuss
I asked the trainers that came to my talk at the IH AMT conference to discuss two questions, and I’d encourage the same discussion here too:
What’s your experience with intervention in TP?
Do you agree with it or feel it should be avoided? Why?
I hope these discussions do continue and I’d love to hear from anyone who has experimented with this approach in TP or who has any questions about it. We’ve discussed this and similar topics on #CELTAchat which happens on Twitter on the first Monday of every month at 7pm UK time. You can find summaries of our chats on the CELTAchat blog.
Amy Blanchard was an Assistant Language Teacher on the JET programme in Japan and completed a voyage with Peace Boat before moving to Spain to work for International House. She has just taken a new job leading the CELTA programme and teaching English for Academic Purposes at a British university. She is particularly fond of whiteboard work.
Over the last 18 months, we have accidentally made video observations a ‘thing’ at our school. There was no grand plan – it just kind of happened, and I’m very glad it did!
As far as I remember, it started with the senior staff recording some of their lessons and making them available to the teachers to watch in a video bank on the school server. If we think particular teachers need help with something specific, we might recommend they watch a specific video or clip.
Then we had some teachers in satellite schools who needed to be observed, but we were not able to send an observer out for the 45 minutes they needed. Video was logistically much easier to set up, and had the added bonus that the teacher could see themselves too. Some teachers have also chosen to record themselves to look for specific things in their lessons, without having it formally observed.
Another technique is when a senior teacher and an inexperienced teacher would film themselves teaching the same lesson plan (we plan collaboratively) with their respective groups, then watch both videos and compare how the lesson plan manifested itself with two different groups. This is particularly useful for demonstrating differences in pace and in running feedback.
The final way in which we use videos is to back up in-person observations, with the observer recording clips of the lesson to show the teacher during feedback.
Logistics
Although it is now possible to easily record lessons on a smartphone, most of the teachers use my Canon IXUS camera and GorillaPod tripod.
Mine looks a bit more beaten up than this one!
It’s magic! You can attach it to all kinds of things 🙂
They can set it up anywhere in the room and it will record non-stop for 60 minutes (if I’ve remembered to charge the battery and empty the memory card!) I then put the video into their individual space on the server for them to watch when they are ready.
If it’s for a more formal observation, we do it in two different ways. Sometimes the observer watches the video first, then does the post-observation feedback in the same way as they would for a standard observation, but showing any relevant clips from the observation. Alternatively, the observer and teacher watch it together at the same time, having already decided what they’re looking for. They pause and discuss the video at relevant points, and decide together what the action points are coming out of the observation, and what positive things were spotted.
Permissions
On joining the school, all students sign a list of terms and conditions. One of the items is that they are happy to be filmed or audio recorded. Teachers also sign permission slips in our induction week professional development sessions. Videos are for internal use only, and they are entirely within the control of the teacher. It is up to the teacher who sees them and whether they choose to put it into the school video bank for other teachers to see.
Results
Video observations are a shortcut in a lot of ways. They enable teachers to see and hear:
the reactions of students to what they are doing, including who is not paying attention (and why?)
their activity set-up and how effective it is
how well students work with each other
pacing
which activities do and don’t work with a particular group
how other teachers do things, particularly managing young learner and teen groups (it’s not always possible for us to organise peer observations)
and much, much more.
Overall, video observations have enabled us to provide richer professional development to our teachers, enabling them to see into a variety of classrooms, including their own. If you haven’t tried it with your own teaching yet, I would highly recommend it. If you want to introduce it at your school, start with your own teaching – if you lead by example, it’s easier for other teachers to want to join in as it can feel less threatening. Good luck!
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
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).
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:
Christian Tiplady asked me if he could share his ideas for shifting the focus of official observations with the readers of this blog. I think you’ll agree that they are minor tweaks that could make a big difference.
Why do we focus on the behaviour of teachers during ‘official’ classroom observations? Is there an alternative way that is more in line with current thinking on learner-centred approaches?
So many institutions, including ones where I have worked, still cling to the idea that teachers need to be evaluated for quality assurance and that the best way to do this is with a formal observation, often compartmentalised and homogenised, taking the form of an hour-long observation by a senior member of staff. The observer uses a standardised feedback form with variables by which the teacher’s lesson is graded, and then leads feedback analysing what went well or badly. Oftentimes this observation takes place only infrequently, perhaps once a year, and there is often no follow-up to assess observation outcomes.
This style of evaluative observation is not only outdated but also ill-conceived. It assumes that the activity of ‘teaching’ can be rated, and that this can be done with the kind of standardised grading to which we have grown accustomed. In order to have much value at all any assessment of teaching needs to be thought through carefully. It needs to be done over a longer period with more frequent observations to avoid a ‘snapshot’ view and therefore the danger of misguided evaluation. Feedback needs to be cyclical and iterative in nature and co-constructed with the teacher as part of a reflective process to ensure that the teacher is on board with continuing development.
But there is a much more important point to be made here, which is that to focus on what the teacher is or isn’t doing in a classroom (and to rate that) is surely at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous if this is without explicit reference to the world of the learner. My contention is that we still do this way out of pure habit, and that at least in part, this undoubtedly comes from vestiges of ingrained beliefs that still linger, even if as teachers we know these things to be untrue.
Firstly, the status quo derives from the mistaken belief that teaching equals learning. However in reality we know that the teaching is only part of the equation and that learners will learn in their own way and at their own rate. As Freeman reminds us “teachers are influential in classroom learning but that does not mean they cause it to happen.” (Freeman, 2006; 254). Indeed we can teach what we might consider to be the best lesson, only to note that in terms of the learning it did not have the impact that was desired. Or conversely we can teach a lesson which at first sight did not go to plan or very ‘well’ in practice, but where there was nonetheless significant learning.
Secondly it comes from the implicit assumption that teaching behaviours can be classified and evaluated and that ‘more’ or ‘less’ of that thing is better. For example, typically ‘student talking time’ is inevitably valued within today’s language teaching, where a premium is placed on communication, and ‘teacher talking time’ should be reduced at all costs. In reality, purposeful teacher talk can be very useful as part of the learning process and in some lessons it may be vital.
Another example is the use of the English in the classroom versus the use of the student’s L1. The former has conventionally been highly valued (probably to encourage an element of immersion), whilst the latter i.e. the use of L1, has been relegated to the fringes with infrequent activities such as ‘translate these sentences into your own language’ given for homework, but with little real acknowledgement that use of L1 in the learning process can be extremely useful.
Although such thinking has increasingly been challenged over recent years, it still tends to be pervasive in the realm of teacher observations. We continue to focus on what the teacher should and should not do in the classroom (theories on this will likely come and go), and judge things by our own semi-conscious ideas of what is right and wrong. More importantly, by taking our eyes off the ball, we often miss the real action i.e. we neglect the impact (or lack of it) of the lesson on the learner. A typical example might be the types of praise given for a communicative speaking activity, which a teacher organised well and the learners dutifully performed with high levels of talking time, but which had little intrinsic value in terms of developing the learners or engaging them in meaningful expression.
By focusing on the behaviours of teachers in the classroom, we are also reinforcing a model that is teacher-centred and are thus potentially affecting teachers’ beliefs and behaviour. If we (learners, teachers, teacher trainers, managers etc.) desire lessons to be learner-centred then surely we need to promote that in everything we do, including the observations of teachers. Evidently, the main thing that is useful to focus on is learning and the learning process for the learner. In short, we need to rethink our observations of teachers to refocus on how teachers may best facilitate this learning.
So how do we do this? Assuming we still have to follow an institutionalised system of official observations, (which I still think can be reclaimed for the good), these can be redesigned with an onus on the learners with surprisingly minor structural adjustments, but with a fairly radical shift in our philosophy.
First of all, the usual observation template can be changed to make all criteria more learner-centred. Criteria such as ‘relevant learner outcomes established in conjunction with the learners’ and ‘lesson managed in a way that promoted achievement of lesson outcomes’ can be included to promote learner-centredness. The emphasis of wording is all-important; thus a criterion such as ‘use of English in the classroom’ can be amended to ‘English/L1 used appropriately for learner needs’ and ‘teacher talking time’ can be amended to ‘learner talking time suitable for learner needs’. These changes may seem somewhat pedantic, but in my experience such small adjustments can promote a major shift in the thinking of both the observer and the observed teacher alike. For instance, the phrasing of the latter criterion on learner talking time intrinsically leads both parties to ask themselves questions such as: ‘What was witnessed in terms of learner talking time?’ ‘Was the learner talking time appropriate in amount, form and quality at various stages of the lesson, as well as overall in the lesson? If not, why not?’ ‘Did the amount, form and quality of learner talking time mean the aims of the lesson were achieved for the learner? If not, why not?’ Clearly this change of emphasis might necessitate some ongoing training for both teachers and observers of lessons, but is nonetheless quite possible.
Secondly, the observer needs to truly focus on the learner – on their reactions, behaviour and likely learning – during the observed lesson. Often the observer sits at the back of the classroom to watch the teacher but cannot see the students’ faces or reactions. What the teacher does in terms of facilitation is important, but how the learner responds and whether they demonstrate that they are learning is of ultimate importance. Therefore the observer should try to ‘climb into the learners’ skin’ and see it from their perspective. The simplest act of the observer positioning their chair to the side of the classroom, to see the learners’ faces, how they react, and what they are doing, can make a huge difference to the observer’s understanding of the effects of the lesson on the learners and their learning.
Thirdly, the information gathered by the observer should ideally be backed up with further evidence to reduce subjectivity, preferably in the form of a video recording. Silvana Richardson (2014) has done some interesting work in this area, which she calls ‘evidence-based observation’. Software is also available which allows the observer to annotate the recorded video with questions and comments for the teacher, thereby facilitating a feedback process focusing on the learner, though it’s not always particularly easy to access.
Finally, however much the observer and the observed teacher try to adopt the mindset of the learner, and back it up with evidence, they can never claim to know the thoughts of the learner. The learners’ voice therefore needs to be included within observation feedback for any lesson or series of lessons. Thus the observation process should seek to include feedback from the learners, for example, their assessment of how engaging the lesson has been and how successful they think the lesson has been in terms of their learning. This can be factored into evaluative feedback as long as the process is handled sensitively.
Any additional comments learners have on the lesson(s) are also vitally important to inform the feedback process and can change the evaluation of a lesson significantly if they happen to disagree with what the observer and/or the teacher believe. When experimenting with this approach, I observed a lesson where I thought the learner might have been overloaded with the amount of topics that she was asked to speak about. However, in her feedback the learner maintained that that the amount of topics was at about the optimum level for her. This first-hand vantage point significantly changed my perception of the lesson.
In most institutions, how often does the observer of a lesson really solicit the opinions of the learners as part of the observation process? I would suggest very seldom. By contrast, including the learners’ voice in the observation feedback implicitly encourages the teacher to engage with learner feedback in the same way. Reframing the observation in terms of the learners not only allows a more relevant learner-centred perspective but also models good practice for the teacher as part of wider classroom culture.
Can this focus on the learner be equally beneficial as a basis for peer observations? Absolutely, yes! In fact gathering information on the learners provides an excellent focus and helps to avoid any evaluative critique of teaching, which many teachers may have come to habitually expect as the ‘default model’. So whilst evaluative observations look set to stay, let’s at least focus on what matters, namely the learners.
References
Freeman, D. Teaching and Learning in Gieve S. and Miller, I. (2006) ‘The Age of Reform’ in Understanding the Language Classroom. Basingstoke: Pelgrave-Macmillan.
Christian Tiplady
BSc (Hons), Trinity Cert. TESOL, PGDip TESOL, MA TESOL
Christian is a freelance teacher trainer based in the UK. He has worked in both EFL and Modern Foreign Languages (MFLs) sectors for over 25 years, teaching, teacher training and managing in private language schools, NGOs and government organisations. Most recently he served as Pedagogy Manager at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office organising CPD for tutors who teach MFLs to diplomatic staff. He has set up TrinityTESOL and Cambridge CELTA courses and is currently a CELTA tutor and assessor. He specialises in the creation of CPD programmes, developmental observations and feedback. Christian currently produces the teachers’ podcast Developod for the IATEFL Teacher Development Special Interest Group (TDSIG).
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend Karin Krummenacher’s IATEFL 2018 presentation on providing differentiation on initial teacher training courses like the Cambridge CELTA or Trinity CertTESOL. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this kind of course, they generally last four weeks full-time, including workshop-style input sessions, observation of experienced teachers and peers, and (crucially) six or more hours of observed teaching and feedback from tutors. There are as many kinds of four week course as there are tutors, and no two are exactly the same as long as they meet the criteria of Cambridge or Trinity, but one thing that is extremely rare is differentiation for the trainees. Karin has kindly agreed to write up her presentation as a guest post, so we can all find out more about how this might be possible.
To differentiate and challenge our students based on their prior knowledge and current abilities is something we teach our trainees in pre- and in-service teacher training courses. At diploma level it becomes a key criterion and there is tons of literature about it. And then many of us trainers go on and make trainees with outstanding language awareness sit through over half a dozen basic grammar input sessions throughout a 4-week TEFL course in which they will learn close to nothing, most likely receive no differentiated tasks and might be asked not to reply to the next question because we already know they know. I would not be particularly impressed with a trainee handling a strong student in a lesson like this and I get more and more annoyed by us trainers doing it.
And while the reasons are obvious to a degree (that’s the course they signed up for), I don’t think they are good enough to keep doing what we’re doing the way we are doing it. Once upon a time, when the CELTA still had a different name, the groups of trainees were homogenous and what the course taught them was, in a way, revolutionary and useful. Nowadays, trainees identifying as non-native English speakers outnumber trainees that identify as native English speakers on the majority of courses. Our one “strong student” has become half the class by now and we still tell them to only answer when prompted instead of questioning our approach.
Jason Anderson has investigated at length how experienced teachers with MAs in pedagogy take 4-week initial training courses because Trinity Cert TESOL and CELTA have become a global seal of quality. The course is no longer what it used to be and the fact that very often it is still taught the way it was taught in the 1990s makes me picture John Haycraft, who first designed CELTA, rotating in his grave.
“CELTA has to change or die” said Hugh Dellar when I talked to him last year. He’s far from being the only one who’s unimpressed. Since the courses started they have been criticised (see, for example Anderson, Hobbs, Fergusson and Donno [behind ELT Journal paywall] and Borg [behind paywall]) and the voices have become louder and louder. I agree with all the criticism by experts and practitioners when it comes to short initial teacher training courses (ITTCs), but letting them die is not an option for me. It may be because I myself entered the profession that I now consider my career and vocation through an ITTC that I come from a place of great love and admiration for these courses and the educators who train people on them. I believe in the concept, I believe it works and I do not want it to vanish because I think we would miss out on some excellent teachers. Most experts suggest making the courses longer. However, as much as we would all like that, from an economic point of view, this makes little sense to course providers and is not the appeal it has to customers either.
I set out to find a way of differentiating on ITTCs. My colleagues laughed at me.
It’s too difficult, too much admin, too complex.
You’re already working 12 hour days. Do you really want to add to that?
If it could be done, it would have been done.
It may be a late effect of being the only female in a male clique when I was a teenager (strikingly similar to my work environment nowadays, by the way) but dare me and I’ll do it.
At least 13,000 candidates per year take the CELTA or Cert TESOL (based on numbers from Green 2004 and information requested from Trinity). That’s not even considering all the TEFL schools accredited by less rigorous organisations. And all Cambridge Assessment and Trinity College London tell us about these people is whether they identify as native or non-native English speakers. If you are a trainer, you will know that there is so much more to our trainees than that. One of the reasons why I, and many of my colleagues, love the job is that there is no group like any other, no trainee the same as the next. You can divide them by nationality or place of birth but there will be disappointingly few conclusions you can draw from this. In a single group of trainees, you can find so many different people with different motivations to take the course, different backgrounds and different aims. Some people take an ITTC because they want to change their lives, start a new career and plan on doing the diploma two years later. They’re in it for the long run. Others simply need to prove to their parents that the Eurotrip they paid for is not just drinking with people you met in a hostel. Many want to fund their travels before they return to their “real job” back home. Some want to lose their fear of public speaking. The ones that usually end up most disappointed are the English literature majors who want to spark the love for the English language in their students. It’s tough to love a language and make it your job to hear people butcher it 10 hours a day. Trainees have told me they wanted to build up their confidence or are just in it because their boyfriend wanted to do the course. Some see it as a challenge and aren’t planning on teaching a day in their life after the course. More than you would think are experienced teachers that want to go international.
So again, why don’t we do with our trainees what we do with our students? That is, a thorough needs analysis. The idea is to do this in two parts:
Part 1: A diagnostic test. Applicants take an online test and you feed their results into Excel. I’ve come up with a formula that will assign sessions based on performance and spit out a tailor made timetable for each trainee. Meaning the ones who answer questions on verb tenses wrong, will be assigned sessions on verb tenses. The ones who answer them right will not. All trainees will still have the same number of input sessions, just not the same ones or necessarily at the same time. Multilingual candidates will be assigned sessions on using L1 in the classroom, so they can do so deliberately and without feeling it is the wrong thing to do. Trainees that aren’t quite confident about their own proficiency will get an English for specific purposes course that really polishes their teacher language and makes them feel more confident while monolingual trainees learn a little bit of a foreign language, so they can empathise with their students. This all means we offer trainees a schedule based on their background and abilities. This is something I’m still trialling, but the diagnostic test may contain tasks such as:
Identify the verb tenses in the following sentences
Identify the parts of speech (based on a given list) in the following paragraph
Match the words with the correct phonemes
Mark the word stress in the following words
Match the sentences with the grammatical structure (e.g. conditionals, modals for obligation vs. speculation)
Part 2: Setting aims. The teaching practice tutor will agree on personal aims with their group of trainees. This means that feedback on teaching practice will be as focused and personalised as possible. The trainer and trainee assess progress in the middle and at the end of the course.
The diagnostic test can be redone as a summative test at the end of the course. Together with the achievements of their personal aims, this will then be the starting point for professional development. This is something really important that in my experience is not done at the moment or not done enough. Partially, this is down to the way ITTCs are sold. The marketing says that you are a teacher and ready to go out in the world after 4 weeks. And people take that at face value. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change and stands in contrast to the fact that these courses were never meant to provide a standalone solution to teacher training. But what we can do is equip our trainees better and make them more reflective beginner practitioners. They will benefit tremendously from having a better understanding of where they stand and what their strengths and weaknesses are. And to get our marketing teams on board, it is a unique opportunity to advertise our programmes beyond teacher training, like workshops, online courses, diplomas or in-service training.
Finding out what our trainees need is the first step. The obvious question is, how can we give it to them? Not every centre has the capacity to entirely revamp their course and I’m not saying that’s necessary, but I believe we could get a little more creative and offer more differentiated input sessions. That would mean though, that we wave goodbye to input sessions being mainly delivered face-to-face. I have thought of different ideas on how to deliver input and have come up with different puzzle pieces that can be combined as needed.
Whether trainees get tailored pre-course tasks, attend very intensive sessions on linguistic systems, such as grammar, in so called boot camps, benefit from Q and A sessions with tutors or teach each other in designated peer teaching slots, whatever works best in your context will be the right thing to start differentiating. This can be a slow addition to the course over several months and does not have to be all at once. Maybe some sessions can be added to the regular timetable, others delivered through online learning. Common needs could be addressed through video summaries. It will depend on the groups’ needs and the resources, tutors and space available. For most centres, a mix will be the right way to go.
In this way, timetables for trainees could become more varied and trainees would get more personalised content that better prepares them for the challenges they will face. It would free up timetables for more interesting content. Instead of teaching basic phonemes, these would be learned independently, and class time can be spent on how to teach phonology to students, the really interesting stuff.
Obviously, there would be some flexibility required from accreditation bodies. The Unknown Foreign Language in its current form could no longer be part of the assessment on Trinity Cert TESOL courses. And while CELTA has a very flexible syllabus, centres would benefit from being encouraged to make more use of it. At the same time, this could be an exclusive opportunity to promote more professionalism in initial teacher training and remind customers that these are in fact level 5 qualifications on the UK Qualifications and Credit Framework and therefore have an academic aspiration.
Overall, the idea is to take our trainees’ backgrounds and goals into consideration more. No matter how small we start, these initial courses need to change or die trying.
About the author
Karin Krummenacher is a freelance teacher trainer on Trinity Cert and Dip TESOL courses, researcher and international conference speaker. She holds Cambridge Delta and is currently working towards an M.Ed. TESOL, researching the role of ITTCs and their implications for professionalism in the industry. This article is based on her IATEFL talk from April 2018 for which Jason Anderson, Hugh Dellar and Ben Beaumont were invaluable sounding boards. She has recently started blogging at thekarincluster.wordpress.com. Give Karin a shout at karin.krummenacher@gmail.com or on Twitter @thekarincluster.
Regular followers of this blog may have noticed I’ve been writing and talking a lot about working with new teachers, particularly over the last year. In the last month, International House have shared three of the things I have produced on this theme.
In the talk I suggested a range of different ways that managers and trainers can support teachers as they take their first steps in their careers. I based it roughly around an extended version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’m not going to share the slides separately, as I don’t think they’ll tell you much by themselves, so you’ll just have to watch the presentation! 🙂 You can watch all of the other sessions from the day here and there was also a parallel Modern Language Conference, with sessions on teaching Arabic, Italian, Russian, French and Spanish.
The second is part of my series for the IH Journal, published in Issue 44, entitled ‘Working with new teachers: the things they say’. It’s the first of two parts (the next one will be in the autumn edition) where I list some of the typical comments I hear from new teachers at our school, and the things that I normally say in response. It’s written for both new teachers themselves and the people who work with them. Again, I’d recommend reading the whole journal, as it really showcases the diversity of knowledge within International House.
The final thing is another video, recording at the IH Academic Managers and Trainers Conference in January this year, and published this week.
This one is aimed directly at new teachers, and gives 3 minutes’ worth of tips to help them out.
If you’re a new teacher, I hope you enjoy your time in this amazing career. If you’re working with new teachers, I hope there are some useful reminders here for you. 🙂
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
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:
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:
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:
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:
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 #IATEFL2018pic.twitter.com/GgoVZkD0PF
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.
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.
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
I’m not sure exactly which talk this was from, apart from that it was part of the Materials Writing SIG showcase on Wednesday 11th April, but it looks like it could be useful for working out how good a particular vocabulary activity is:
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
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.
I started off the IATEFL Brighton 2018 conference at the joint Pre-Conference Event (PCE) run by the Leadership and Management (LAMSIG) and Teacher Development (TDSIG) Special Interest Groups. I have already summarized what I learnt that day, but have included more detailed information from the sessions here, interspersed with ideas from the main conference, hence the combination of topics in the title of this post. This is by far the longest of my IATEFL posts this year, but I couldn’t work out how to separate the streams, so apologies in advance. I hope it’s worth it! 🙂
The #LAMTDSIG PCE was the first time I heard what became one of this year’s conference buzzwords for me: culture. Many speakers mentioned the importance of creating and maintaining a culture of CPD (continuous professional development) within their school.
How can we create a culture of CPD?
The first was Liam Tyrrell, who reminded us that the shared ideas, values and direction that make up the culture of a workplace or team are important. They are what lead to success. Organisational culture is the number one predictor of development outcomes and improved classroom effectiveness, according to Matthew A. Kraft in his 2014 paper with John Papay entitled ‘Can professional environments in schools promote teacher development?’
Liam detailed four questions he asked when aiming to change the culture at his school:
What does it look like when the culture is changed?
If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, how do you know the steps you need to take to get there? What is the pathway for teachers and the organisation? Small success will carry your organisation.
Who are the silent majority?
Run down the list of names of people in your staffroom. The ones you come to last, or not at all (!) are the ones you probably need to shine a spotlight on. Find out about their successes and encourage them to share them. By amplifying them, other teachers can learn from them too. (Liam credits this idea to @nikkitau from TESOL France last year.)
What options can you give to people?
The trick is not to have everyone doing the same thing (one size fits all), but to have everyone do SOMETHING!
How can you get recruitment right?
Make sure people you recruit know what kind of culture they’re coming into, and that they’re comfortable with that. A team is a delicate balance, and every person entering or leaving it can change the balance, and with it, the culture. Is it better to recruit NQTs who see what you do as norm? Or experienced teachers who can mentor and drive change? Who will be able to create and sustain change?
(Side note: Clare Magee (see below) mentioned that during their recruitment process, they include a description of key challenges in the job, to ensure teachers know what they might be faced with. She also said that whenever possible, they try to recruit two people at the same time so that they’re going through the processes of joining the school together, and can empathise with each other.)
Finally, Liam emphasised that change takes time, and that half of the stuff you try is probably going to fail. This echoes one of my favourite ever things I’ve heard at an IATEFL conference: you have to kiss a few frogs to find the one that’s for you.
I am lucky that I inherited a healthy culture of CPD at the school I currently work for, and ‘all’ I have to do as Director of Studies is maintain and develop it, but if you don’t already have that a CPD culture at your school, Liam’s questions and the ideas below could help you to move towards one.
As part of the main conference, Oliver Beaumont and Duncan Jameson also described how to create a culture of CPD, using the metaphor of a garden. You have to create the right conditions if you want things to grow there. They centred it around three key words:
Engage: if teachers aren’t engaged, they won’t be interested. Show them how CPD can help them, and how it fits in with the school’s vision. Creating the right environment also helps, for example a classroom with posters from previous CPD sessions. Carve out time where CPD is a priority: if you value it, teachers will too.
Energise: give autonomy and ownership, and encourage collaboration.
Empower: ensure there is meaningful action to follow the session, so they can put what they have learnt into action immediately. If you include feedback and coaching in the sessions, a lot more of what they have learnt will stick.
Lizzie Pinard summarised the talk in more detail here.
Creating a welcoming culture
Patrick Huang described a transgender candidate’s experience of a CELTA course, with important points for the inclusion of all candidates who might be part of potentially vulnerable populations, and regarding culture changes which may need to take place to allow this. He noticed that there might be something different with this particular candidate due to the combination of a typically male first name and female second name – the example he gave was ‘Robin Jane’. Because of this, he asked the candidate to speak to him about their experience and to share what could have improved it. The main things Patrick learned were:
Safety should be key. Candidates should not be forced to disclose whether they are transgender/non-binary. For example, on the entry form, have an option for ‘Other’ in gender, not just male/female. Forcing candidates to select from a closed list of options could also have legal applications on a form if they have to sign something saying they did not knowingly give false information.
A pre-course meeting could include the question ‘Anything else you would like to tell me about yourself?’ rather than anything more direct, like ‘I notice that you…’ Again, this means candidates are not forced to disclose if they are not comfortable doing so.
Toilet facilities should be available for everyone. Consider converting an existing bathroom by changing the signing, for example to ‘Toilets for everyone’.
Pronouns should be used as indicated by the candidate. (If this is something you’d like to find out more about, I would highly recommend the BBC Word of Mouth episode ‘Language and gender identity’.)
For relationships and safety, consider introducing a code of conduct. Discuss these things with staff and candidates, preferably before you have transgender students on your course, so that they are aware of how they can help candidates feel safe. Make sure that this policy is adapted to the needs of individual candidates. There should be buy-in from the community, with the option to opt out if they really can’t cope with the situation.
Teacher-centred CPD
Another buzzword I noticed was bottom-up, with many of the speakers I saw talking about the need to move away from CPD which is imposed on teachers by management from above, and instead to create the structures for teachers to be able to work more independently on areas which they want to prioritise. As a couple of people said, ‘one size fits all’ fits noone.
As part of the #LAMTDSIG PCE, Clare Magee and Fiona Wiebusch from Australia talked about a very successful initiative which some of their teachers started, without prompting from management. They set up a Google Plus space to share 2-minute videos of ideas which make their jobs faster, better, or easier. Other people can comment on the videos too, and it often starts face-to-face discussions too. If teachers still have access after they leave the school, I think this could serve as a kind of institutional memory, and an alumni-type space, which they could still participate in if they choose too. This is probably my favourite idea from the whole conference. Once it was started, the institution ran some CPD sessions on how to create videos and how to interact politely on the platform, both in response to teacher requests.
Other ideas that Fiona and Clare described were:
#pdfest, one-day events organised by teachers for teachers to share their practice
They suggested that it might be time to move away from the concept of change, and towards that of evolution and revolution. Hamel and Zanini (2014) say anyone can initiate change, recruit confederates, get involved and launch experiments. It’s not the leader’s job to do the process, but to build the platform. Fiona and Clare also said that in order to get all of these things working, managers should:
Give teachers time and money, and get out of the way!
I agree with this sentiment up to a point, but I believe that quite a lot of new teachers probably need a base level of knowledge about the teaching profession and about CPD opportunities before they can organise and run this kind of thing themselves. Most of the teachers at our school are in their first or second year of teaching. I have tried to provide the second-years with more space to direct their own development, but it has been challenging to work out and provide the amount of support that they really need to do this. It’s all well and good saying that they can develop however they want to, but if they aren’t aware of the possibilities and opportunities, it can become very directionless. This is where I think they next idea might help.
Josh Round and Andy Gaskins talked about Personalised Development Groups (PDGs), an idea Josh introduced in his school 3 years ago, and in Andy’s a year ago, and which has now gone through several successful cycles. Research which backs up their approach includes the Sutton Trust 2014 report on what makes great teaching. That and other reports show that effective CPD leads to great teaching, so it’s important to get the programme you offer right.
Teachers chose a first-choice or second-choice pathway, which enables them to be put into groups of 6-8 people. These pathways enable classroom-based, collaborative professional development, based on the choices of the participants, rather than the more top-down programmes traditionally offered by schools. They were based on areas that teachers had requested, or where they often needed more support. The school wanted a balance between structure and support, and autonomy.
Of course, PDGs aren’t perfect! Initially, they underestimated how long it might take teachers to come up with research questions, so they started to suggest examples within each pathway. It took time to put the scheme into place: change always takes time to be effective. There can also be problems with some members of groups not fully contributing, absence or sickness, and lack of structure – these are all problems I’ve found with a similar scheme I’ve tried to set up at my school.
Josh and Andy encourage teachers to be transparent with their students about what they’re doing – students seem to really engage with the teachers’ research. At the end of the cycle, there are feedback presentations which have become inspirational to other teachers at the school.
Lizzie Pinard summarised the talk in more detail here.
At the #LAMTDSIG event, Ed Russell described using the idea of PDGs at his school, once he’d got over the idea that he needed to ‘do some managing’, a feeling I’ve had occasionally too! As part of this, he created a new screensaver for staffroom computers to remind teachers about the stages of the PDGs. Generally, Ed wanted to make what happened in the classroom as visible as possible so that his teachers could share their practice and learn as much as possible from each other. He said it has led to greater discussion in the staffroom, and more of a feeling of cooperation between teachers. I was pleased that he mentioned using my post of ideas for alternatives to the Friday afternoon seminar as inspiration – always good to know! Ed’s school also used ‘cooperative development’, with one teacher talking for 15 minutes while another actively listened to them, then switching roles. Another change they made was in their use of language, talking about ‘my puzzle’ rather than ‘my problem’. Ed has shared some of the resources he uses on Google Drive.
The language of CPD
Ania Kolbuszewska extended the idea of the importance of language, a particular problem in her large school in Switzerland, a country where people are only prepared to take a risk if they are 100% sure of the outcome! She described her attempts to be more aware of the intercultural aspects of her job, something she had never been trained in. As she said, there is a lot of intercultural training available for students and businesspeople, but nothing specifically for managers in language schools, where we are very often working with people from other cultures who may have different expectations to our own.
In Ania’s experience, her teachers generally felt that institutions benefit from professional development, but teachers don’t really, especially if they’re not being paid for it. For some Swiss people, the status of teachers is like that of actors working as waiters until something better comes along. For others, CPD is a checklist for managers, and not something personal.
Cultural diversity in her school provides an additional problem: not everyone in her team speaks English and not everyone speaks German. She described the problems created by the fact that the term ‘CPD’ in English doesn’t have a direct equivalent in German or French, the two other languages she works with. The translations do not cover the same range of concepts, and are much more connected to training than development. Sending out emails in three languages meant that teachers who spoke more than one might compare the different versions and read into them meanings which weren’t intended. Ania therefore decided to use ‘CPD’ across all languages at the school, as well as replacing ‘workshops’ with ‘labs’, a more universal term which encompasses the idea of experimentation, not just learning. She also renamed all of the types of observation she wanted to use to make them as widely and easily understood as a possible.
The language you teach dictates the way that you teach it.
By making sure that the key terms being used were clearly defined and understood in the same way across the organisation, it has started to contribute to culture change. While Ania acknowledges that this process is top-down, she emphasises that this is to minimise problems with understanding the key concepts, in order to create the conditions for more bottom-up development further down the line.
Another change in their organisation is to have cross-language teams. Previously there were separate heads of French, German and English, but now teams are mixed. Echoing what Liam Tyrrell said (see above), these changes are a slow process, but they are gradually moving towards the CPD culture her school wants to have.
Action research
The cooperative development at Ed Russell’s school mirrors the first talk I went to in the main conference, which looked at how to help teachers come up with appropriate questions for their own action research. Paula Rebolledo and Richard Smith demonstrated a dialogue approach with a mentor to help teacher researchers come up with specific questions. When you’re listening to the potential researcher, you can guide them towards questions by noticing when they say ‘I think…’, ‘I guess…’, ‘I assume…’ For example, if they say ‘I think they enjoy it.’ ask questions like ‘What evidence do you have of that?’ If they have none, that could be one of their questions. It’s important that the listener doesn’t come up with answers, but pushes towards questions.
Potential researchers who don’t have a dialogue partner could use question frames like these:
When checking if the questions researchers come up with are suitable, you can use the slightly rephrased version of SMART:
Study-oriented (oriented towards the study of the situation rather than action on it)
Measurable
Accurate
Realistic
Topic-focused
If action research is something you’d like to explore further, there is a free publication written by Paula and Richard available on the British Council website: A Handbook for Exploratory Action Research. It includes everything (as far as I know!) that was covered in the talk, along with a lot more. You might also be interested in ELT Research in Action, a free ebook edited by Jessica Mackay, Marilisa Birello and Daniel Xerri, published by IATEFL in April 2018.
Supporting new teachers
A cooperative practice of a different kind is mentoring, which Alistair Roy covered in his presentation. After 12 roles in 12 years at private language schools, Alistair has had one mentor. He’s had 26 ‘mentees’, including 7 at one time (as he said, how can you mentor people properly like that?!) When asked whether they’d ever had a mentor, I think less than a quarter of the 100+ people in the room put their hand up to say yes, not including me.
When Alistair asked colleagues for help with how to mentor, he was just given checklists, so he started to talk to teachers about what they want from mentoring. He pointed out the amount of questions that we have on the first day of a new job, and how this is multiplied on your first ever day as a teacher, when you’re on your own in the classroom for the first time. He described the story of one new teacher who was given a checklist of things they should know soon after joining the school, and returned it with more than half of the items marked ‘I don’t know’, even though he knew they’d been given that information. This is something I’ve also wondered about in our intensive induction week model (anyone got any other ideas?!)
The whole situation was very different in his first year as a teacher at a UK state school, where he was given a mentor and an effective and useful process:
Alastair found that a lot of teachers seemed to want mentors in a similar position to them, rather than people with a lot more experience. They wanted people who could empathise with them and remember what it was like to be in their position. Josh Round also mentioned something similar at his school, where they have a buddy system for new teachers, with each being assigned a buddy who has been at the school for a little longer than them.
After 5 years, 91% of teachers who have a good mentor stay in the profession. Only 71% without a mentor do. (Institute for Educational Science) So what can managers do to support mentors? Invest money and time, support mentor and mentee, and understand what it’s like to be in their positions.
Lizzie Pinard summarised the talk in more detail here.
CPD for teacher trainers
Of course, it’s not just teachers who need to develop their practice: trainers do too. This was another theme that I noticed: the desire for more systematic training for trainers.
Teti Dragas talked about interviews she had done with teacher trainers to find out their stories, covering how they got into training in the first place and how they have subsequently developed. Her main findings were that trainers developed through building up experience, reflecting on critical incidents, working with and talking to colleagues, and attending events like IATEFL. There was little, if any, formal training for them. Another key way that trainers improved was by listening to their trainees, especially when there was resistance to their ideas. This prompted them to think about why that resistance existed, and how to counter it. Mentoring new trainers also helped. What are important qualities of trainers according to Teti’s interviewees? Knowledge, experience, empathy, reflection and open-mindedness. You also need to give trainees time to change their practice. We also need to keep up-to-date with changes in our field, so that we can give trainees the best possible information during their courses.
Jo Gakonga’s presentation was based around the idea that trainers need feedback on their feedback, but that most of us never get it. To get around this, we can audio record ourselves, transcribe a minute or two of the feedback, and reflect on what we hear ourselves say and do. The presentation is available as a mini-course on her ELT Training website, and it’s something you can use for professional development within your organisations. We used the course during Jo’s talk, and I would definitely recommend it. I’m hoping to record myself giving feedback at some point before the end of this school year, having just missed our final round of observations. Jo also mentioned the article ‘RP or ‘RIP’: A critical perspective on reflective practice’, written by Steve Mann and Steve Walsh, which I plan to read at some point.
Trinity and Cambridge
Finally, here are two representatives of the main pre-service training certificates for the private language school market.
Ben Beaumont’s talk about the effect of washback on teacher training doesn’t really lend itself to being summarised in a paragraph. However, he did share these Trinity materials designed to help teachers improve their assessment literacy. Each video comes with a worksheet, so they could be used as part of a wider professional development programme.
Clare Harrison described extensive research Cambridge has done to find out what changes people want to see in the CELTA course, and what changes have already happened. You can watch the full talk here.
They noticed that the percentage of L1 and L2 speakers of English taking the course is now roughly 50/50, compared to 75/25 in 2005. There are also more and more teachers with experience taking this course, which was designed for pre-service teachers. The ICELT, which was designed for experienced teachers, has a much lower take-up. The young learner extension course and CELTYL both had such low take-up that they have ceased to exist, but there is a huge demand for YL to be added to the course, as well as other types of teaching such as 121 or ESP. As Clare said, these are probably beyond the boundaries of a course designed to last for only four weeks and to train inexperienced people to teach adults, but CELTA seems to dominate the market so much that other courses can’t get a foot in the door. Other requests were connected to the syllabus, such as having a greater focus on digital, but as Clare pointed out, this is entirely dependent on the centre, and she reminded trainers to go back to the criteria regularly to check that their course is fulfilling the needs of trainees. Fiona Price has screenshots of some of the changes in criteria on her blog. There are changes in how CELTA is being delivered too: quite a few courses now embed CELTA in an undergraduate or postgraduate programme, for example. After the talk, Clare asked people for any other ideas they may have. Audience members suggested ideas like a post-CELTA module that could provide an extra qualification (Jason Anderson said this), or post-CELTA or –Delta mentors, perhaps with the option of uploading videos of your lessons to be commented on. There was also the suggestion of recertification requirements. I feel like my ELT Playbookseries could address some of these needs, so please do take a look at it if you’re interested!
Find out more
Katherine Martinkevich has short summaries of quite a few of these sessions, plus a few others which I didn’t attend. Gerhard Erasmus summarised the #LAMTDSIG day for the TDSIG blog.
If you’re interested in Teacher Development, you might want to investigate some of the other things TDSIG does. They have an e-bulletin (members only), a podcast and run facebook Live sessions, all of which you can find information about on their website. For managers, you can find out more about the Leadership and Management SIG here. If you’d like to join IATEFL, find out how here.
And if you made it all the way through the nearly 4000 words of this post, well done! 🙂
It’s observation season at IH Bydgoszcz at the moment. Some of the advice I’ve given has made me think of skills that are really useful to have as a teacher, but which we are very rarely taught, or have to pick up as we go along.
Here are my examples:
Reading upside-down: really useful for monitoring to see which answers students have.
Picking out individual student’s voices from the general noise (or the Cocktail party effect): key for both monitoring and assessment, if you’re assessing speaking while the whole class is working. Also, tuning in and out of multiple conversations smoothly.
All the many functions of a photocopier.
Sitting down, standing up, and when and why it’s useful to switch positions.
Notes:
I’m a fast reader anyway, and think that this was something I may have been able to do before I became a teacher, but I’ve definitely honed this over time. I hadn’t realised that many people found it challenging until recently!
Another skill I kind of had but am now much better at. The flipside of this is that I find it very hard to tune out of conversations when I’m not in a classroom, so I can join in with staffroom conversations even when I’m sitting in my office 10m away 😉 I also sometimes find it hard to focus on conversations in restaurants etc. if there’s another interesting conversation going on nearby, or I’ll flit between the two conversations. Apologies to anyone I’ve done that too!
I think most people are probably shown one or two ‘magic’ things their local copier can do, but there are so many other functions that generally remain a mystery!
I’m mostly thinking about small groups here, up to about 16 students. I know some schools have rules about sitting/standing, but it’s often not addressed on training courses.
‘Teacher’s enemy’ by @pysproblem81, taken from ELTpics (but maybe our friend if we really understood it!)
So (how) did you learn these skills? How can you help other people to learn them? What else would you add to the list?
With industry veterans like Geoff Jordan, Hugh Dellar and others out there swinging their hammers at CELTA, I thought I’d take the opportunity to defend the pre-service ELT teaching certificate. Not the CELTA, mind you, but its oft-snubbed, dubiously legitimate little brother. I’m here to defend the humble TEFL certificate.
For the record, I completed a 120-hour TEFL program with 6 hours of teaching practice at the now-defunct ITC Prague (i.e. not an internet-only certificate). The instructors were Geoff Harwood and three other guys whose names I no longer remember (Geoff’s was written on my end-of-course certificate). ITC Prague (as I found out later) eventually failed as a business, but the teaching instruction these guys gave was excellent. The TEFL has had a sort of slow-drip effect on me, and some of what I learned only really struck a chord years later.
As both a CELTA trainer and a Director of Studies, a key part of my job is giving feedback to teachers after observations. I was prompted to write this post after listening to Jo Gakonga, a fellow CELTA trainer, talk about feedback on the TEFLology podcast, and looking at her new teacher feedback site. One of the things she said was that after our initial training as managers or tutors, we are normally left to our own devices with feedback, something which I’ve often wondered about. It’s useful to reflect on how we’re giving feedback, and I’d really like to develop this area of my practice more. Here’s a bit about where I am now…
I’ve just finished working on a CELTA at International House Milan, where I had two main development goals for myself as a tutor. I tried to revamp many of my input sessions to make them more practical and to make the handouts more useful and less overwhelming, and I also worked to improve both my written and oral feedback, again to be more practical and less overwhelming.
I have previously been told that sometimes my feedback can come across as negative, and that it’s not always clear whether a lesson has been successful or not. I also catch myself taking over feedback sometimes, and not allowing trainees the time or space for their own reflection or to give each other feedback. Timing can be a problem too. On the CELTA course, you can’t really afford to spend more than 15 minutes on oral feedback for each trainee, as there are other things which need to be fitted in to the day. The positive response I got from trainees at the end of the Milan course in response to changes I’ve made means I think (hope!) I’m heading in the right direction.
We had 45-60 minutes for feedback after each TP (teaching practice). By the end of the course, we were breaking it down into 15-20 minutes of peer feedback, with trainees working in pairs for five minutes at a time to give individual feedback to each of the three teachers from that day’s TP, with the person who taught reflecting on their lesson first. I then summarised the feedback and added my own for another 10-15 minutes, and answered any questions they had about the lessons. This was based on three positives and three areas to work on for each trainee, and I tried to make sure that they were given equal weight. The last section of the feedback involved taking an area I felt the trainees needed to work on and doing some mini input, either demonstrating something like how to give instructions to pre-intermediate students or drawing their attention to the good work of their fellow trainees, for example by analysing a successful lesson plan to show what they might be aiming for themselves. Where possible, I also referred back to handouts from input sessions to strengthen the link between input and TP. This seemed to work, and is a structure I’d like to use again.
Other feedback activities I’ve used successfully are:
a ‘kiss’ and a ‘kick’ (thanks for teaching me this Olga!): trainees share one positive thing from the lesson, and one thing the teacher should work on. This is done as a whole group, and everybody should share different things. The person who taught should speak first.
board-based feedback: divide the board into +/- sections for each trainee. The group should fill the board with as many things as they noticed from the lessons as possible, which then form the basis for discussion. The teacher can’t write on their own section.
Another thing I’ve been trying to do is make the links between the skill of teaching and that of learning a foreign language as explicit as possible. Reflection on teaching should be balanced between positives and negatives, in the same way that you wouldn’t let a student continue to think that they are the best/worst student ever. During input sessions, I highlighted things that trainees could steal and take into their own lessons, like how to set up particular activities, and also made clear what areas of my own teaching I’m working on, such as giving instructions, and when they were and weren’t successful, to exemplify the nature of being a reflective teacher. Although it’s often quite natural, trainees also shouldn’t beat themselves up for not taking previous feedback or new information from input sessions on board instantly, just like it’s not possible for students to use the present perfect without any problems as soon as they’ve learnt it. One mantra during our feedback sessions was that CELTA tutors are looking for ‘progress, not perfection’.
If you’re a trainer or manager, do you have any other feedback techniques you can share? And as someone who’s being observed, what do you want the observer to do/say in feedback?
As a CELTA trainer and Director of Studies, I’m particularly interested in sessions connected to training new teachers. Here is a summary of some of the talks connected to teacher training, CELTA and continuous professional development from this year’s IATEFL Birmingham conference.
Images for teaching: a tool for reflective teacher learning (Matilda Wong)
Matilda teaches on an undergraduate pre-service course for secondary school teachers at the University of Macao. Students do a four-year B.Ed. programme. In their fourth year, they do two one-month practicums in a local secondary school, the same school each time. Matilda works with 8-10 students from each cohort, and tries to teach them how to better at reflecting on their teaching.
When she first started doing this, Matilda used written journals for reflection, but she felt they weren’t doing what they were supposed to. Instead, they were putting added pressure onto her trainees, and some of them were just completing it because they had to instead of really thinking about their teaching. It can lead to burnout.
While Matilda was doing her PhD, she was given paper and coloured pencils, and had to draw a picture of her ideal classroom. The teacher she drew had no mouth, and it wasn’t until analysing the picture afterwards that she realised the teacher had no mouth. The underlying thought here was that she had no voice, and she hoped that one day she would be able to draw a mouth onto her face. That was in 1999, and she still had tears in her eyes talking to us about it last week. It was a very powerful experience for her.
This led her to experiment with drawing pictures rather than writing, as it can be less tiring, and can be combined with written reflection later. It can also highlight beliefs which are difficult to articulate. Matilda asked nine students to work with her on this experiment, none of whom knew anything about reflection before working on her module.
Who am I as a teacher?
What do I want to achieve?
What does it mean to my job?
Before their first practicum, Matilda asked her trainees to write a language learning biography, describe their worries before going into the classroom, and draw a picture of their ideal classroom, then answer some simple questions.
What level are you teaching?
How many students are in your class?
What is the lesson about?
Write as much detail as you can to describe what you are doing (e.g. What re you saying? What materials are you using? With whom are you talking? What are you thinking?)
After they finished the second practicum, she asked them to evaluate their original image of an ideal class and compare it to their experience. They reflected on what was the same and what was inconsistent, and also on what they felt they had learnt from this type of reflection.
Matilda showed us lots of examples, but only one was drawn in colour. What do you notice about this student teacher’s image, bearing in mind that they come from Macao, a Cantonese-Portuguese city?
We spotted that it was odd that the teacher was blonde, since in real life, she was Cantonese. Matilda hadn’t noticed until we pointed it out in the session. It was another way of reinforcing the lack of confidence that some bilinguals have in their teaching ability. This is just one of the subconscious beliefs that was expressed through drawing, but probably wouldn’t have been through writing. Three of the teachers had smiley faces in their images, showing that they think it’s important for a teacher to be friendly. One forgot to put a teacher in the image at all, and didn’t realise until it was pointed out! For me, it was also interesting to see that most teachers were at the front of the room, and only one was in among the students.
These are Matilda’s conclusions after the study, and she would like to experiment more with it. I think it would be interesting to get them to draw another picture between and after their practicums and get them to analyse all three of them. I also think it would be interesting for them to analyse each other’s images, or those of previous participants to draw conclusions about stereotypes about teaching (like that the teacher should be front and central).
This session was one of the surprises of the conference for me, and it was a real shame there were only 10 people in the audience. I’ve asked Matilda to write a guest post on it for me, and hopefully she’ll say yes!
Training or grading? TP and the art of written feedback (Bill Harris)
I met Bill at last year’s conference and enjoyed chatting to him about his experience of working on CELTA courses around the world. I also responded to one of the surveys which formed the basis of this talk, so I was looking forward to seeing the results. 109 trainers and 90 course graduates responded to his surveys.
Because Bill has worked in so many centres, he has worked with a wide range of formats for written feedback. He often adds ‘cold’ feedback to post-lesson reflection, so trainees write ‘hot’ feedback immediately after the lesson, get their spoken feedback, then write another reflection summarising the two.
Why do written feedback?
Detailed written feedback helps the trainer process their feedback (often more for the trainer than for the trainee!)
In his survey, Bill was mainly contrasting handwritten and typed feedback.
Tutors said that 45% of them handwrote, 43% typed, and the rest said it depends on the situation. 28% of trainees said they got typed feedback, 40% said it depended on the tutor, and the rest was handwritten. [I normally type on CELTA because I have my laptop with me, but handwrite in school observations because I don’t!]
Bill separated the advantages and disadvantages into those for tutors and those for trainees but I can’t remember which were which so have combined them!
Advantages of handwriting
Used to doing it (for some!)
More personal/authentic
Seems more detailed
Penmanship can seem important
Seems to show more care and effort from the tutor
Able to add cartoons/diagrams etc
Break from looking at a screen
Can easily use different colours
Can use lots of different signposts easily to help trainees process the feedback: ticks, smileys, ?, TIP:
Disadvantages of handwriting
Can be harder to read!
Advantages of typing
Neater
Looks more professional
Easier to read
Can watch the lesson more (if you’re quick!)
Faster (if you touch type)
Easier to edit
Can copy and paste previous actions points easily
Easier to share with other tutors
Can email to trainees
You have a backup if it gets lost
Most trainees said they’d prefer typed feedback (mostly due to legibility!)
Disadvantages of typing
Can be noisy/distracting [I was once told that when I got excited I typed more quickly/loudly and they wondered what they’d done!]
Can take time/be difficult to print out
May seem formulaic/impersonal
Tutors may write too much
Can get distracted by other things on the computer [though in the face of a 40-minute grammar lecture, this may not always be a bad thing ;)]
What should be in written feedback?
Trainees said that they appreciated practical suggestions for how to improve, with clear action points. They also wanted recognition of what they were good at, and a positive spin on things when possible. One non-native speaker wanted more feedback on language [and some natives do too, especially if they are not confident with grammar].
Written v. oral feedback
Trainers said that written feedback could be digested more slowly away from the pressures of the group, and focussed much more on the individual. This was contrasted with oral feedback, which was for the group as a whole. Written feedback acted as a useful prompt when giving oral feedback.
Trainees said that both written and oral feedback was useful. Written feedback was more permanent, and they could refer back to it with time and less stress. They appreciated the interactive discussion aspect of oral feedback, but found it hard to remember all of the details. One problem was that sometimes there were differences between what was said in oral feedback and what was written. Some felt that their peers were over-positive or too harsh in oral feedback, and were not qualified to give feedback. One audience member suggested recording oral feedback too, partly for accountability and transparency.
Conversion
Up until recently, Bill had always written his feedback by hand, but he is a recent convert to typing. Then he worked at a centre where he took over part-way through a course and had to shadow the other trainer’s feedback style. Luckily they had a colour printer, and this was the result:
Tutor-trainee team-teaching: a hands-on tool for teacher training (Emma Meade-Flynn)
Emma reported on some research she has been doing into how to make use of unassessed slots during CELTA, Delta and other short courses. In a survey of tutors, she found that 60% sometimes used it for a demo lesson, 70% used it for practice with no tutor present, some for getting to know you activities with students, and some for practice with a tutor present. About 35% of her respondents were already doing some form of team-teaching in these slots.
Team-teaching: planning, delivering and reflecting on a lesson together.
Emma found that her students were very receptive to team teaching, and when asked, they always requested it. In demo lessons, they couldn’t see the students’ faces and often felt left out. Because they weren’t part of the planning process, they didn’t always understand what was happening.
Emma decided to incorporate the trainees into the unassessed lessons by giving them roles, such as collecting and correcting errors, setting up activities and monitoring. They were also used as the source material, for example in live listening activities, meaning the students go to know them better. Trainees decided what they wanted to focus on, and it was almost always collecting and correcting errors, so she does a lot more of that now. She negotiates with them about where they want her help: with planning? With choosing materials? With presenting?
Benefits
Trainees were much better able to reflect on the learners’ abilities if they had been involved in the lesson in some way.
It taught trainees how to adapt lessons to finish them on time, partly through doing some improvisation in lessons: they would only plan the first half, and base the second on what came up.
They could deal with more difficult language areas which would be challenging for the trainees to work on without support.
Trainees saw lots of techniques in action, which they were then able to incorporate in their own lessons.
They were much more aware of student language, and used the pro-formas Emma corrected to help them focus on particular areas.
This lead them to teaching and helping each other more within the group, without always relying on the tutor.
Emma could explain the rationale of activities more clearly before the lesson, and evaluate them more easily afterwards.
It can be tailored to the trainees’ emergent developmental needs.
You can help trainees to notice things on-line during the lesson.
Learners can offer feedback, and they generally don’t worry about having lots of different teachers when they can see they are working together.
A word of caution
Emma said it’s important to decide the boundaries of the team-teaching with trainees before you start. Will you intervene? How will you handle transitions? Be aware that it won’t suit some trainees. Careless (2006) says there must be pedagogical reasons to team teach, it must be logistically possible and it must be interpersonal, with everyone cooperating equally. Make sure you identify a clear developmental objective, and don’t just do it for the sake of it.
You can find Emma’s slides here, including videos of two Delta trainees talking about their experiences of being part of team-teaching. Her blog is Teacher Development Lab.
Three speakers spoke about teacher reflection on pre-service and in-service training courses:
Daniel Baines on why feedback on 120-hour initial training courses may need rethinking, and how to integrate reflection training in the first week of the course. Hopefully Daniel will be writing a guest post on the blog about this: watch this space!
Mike Chick on dialogic interaction and the mediation of pre-service teaching learning.
Teti Dragas (one of my CELTA tutors 🙂 ) on how in-house video training materials may help ‘reflective’ teacher development and help trainees to learn how to reflect more effectively, and on how to encourage them to watch more of the videos of their collaborative lessons with more focus.
Should reflection be assessed? That’s the one key question which comes out of this interview, but I have to say a lot of the rest of the interview feels a bit wishy-washy to me. I agree that experiential learning is better than focussing on theory, and I think that what Jim is suggesting might work on a day-to-day basis for your own classroom through action research, but I’m not sure how it will work on a pre-service or further development course (like CELTA or Delta). Here are a couple of Twitter quotes from his talk:
CELTA despite issues ‘at least gets people teaching before being overwhelmed by information about teaching and learning’ @jimscriv#iatefl
Interview with Tessa Woodward about the 30-year history of the Teacher Trainer Journal, talking about how it has developed and grown over this period.
Tweets from other teacher training/CPD-related talks
These were talks I attended vicariously through other tweeters. I found these snippets of information interesting. Maybe you will too 🙂
Unfortunately nobody seemed to be tweeting from Pam Kaur Gibbon’s talk on the impact of technology on CELTA courses. I spoke to her as part of the her research and would have been interested to see the results, as I’ve written about it previously.
Katherine Solomon from @Bell_English observed 4 lessons and counted 428 teacher qs, only 48 student qs! #iatefl2016
A couple of days after the conference, Hugh Dellar wrote a post called CELTA, the native-speaker bias and possible paths forwardquestioning the future of the CELTA. It generated a lot of discussion in the comments and Anthony Gaughan responded on his blog: A critique of Hugh Dellar on CELTA. You might like to join in with the discussion on one of their blogs. It certainly makes for thought-provoking reading 🙂
From Thursday 7th to Saturday 9th January, I had the pleasure of attending my third IH DoS conference, or the AMT conference as it’s now known: Academic Management & Trainers. As always, the conference was a very useful weekend, not least for the networking. It was a great opportunity to meet with representatives from across IH Poland since I started as the Director of Studies at IH Bydgoszcz:
Monica Green‘s presentation about how to maintain positivity and morale in our schools was one of the highlights of the first day. A key point was that the focus should be across the school, including support staff, not just in the staffroom. As she said, “You’re paying the same whether teachers are happy or not, but it’s nicer to work somewhere everyone is happy.” Here are a few of her tips:
Morale has to start with managers. If they’re positive, their team is more likely to be.
Simple things make a big difference: say ‘Good morning’. Be warm, kind and considerate, show an interest, and listen to people.
Be approachable. If you have your own office, leave your door open whenever you can.
Make the physical environment pleasant to be in.
People who eat together work better together.
Make a particular effort with THAT member of staff, rather than avoiding them and hoping they’ll go away.
Build relationships based on trust and fairness. Be genuine and believable. Be consistent.
Give credit. Show respect. Define your expectations. And avoid micro-management!
And if all else fails, great wifi is a good way to increase morale 🙂
The change in name led to a slight change in focus, with two tracks of afternoon sessions for day one, one covering management issues, and one focussing more on training. It was a difficult choice, but I ended up spending all of my time in the training sessions.
It made a pleasant change to hear Paula de Nagy speaking up for pre-service courses, and highlighting all the ways they really do help teachers, rather than focussing on all the problems with these short courses, which is all too often the dialogue we hear.
Magnus Coney shared some of the things he’s learnt from three books. All of them sound interesting, and the first was mentioned a few times during the conference. [These are all affiliate links, so I’ll get a few pennies if you buy through them.]
Visible Learning by John Hattie.
A meta-analysis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in learning in general, including a ranking of which factors have the most impact on learning. The two excerpts from the list we saw during the conference included some surprises! Hattie has also published a couple of other books following up on the original.
Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham
An explanation of how and why students learn, courtesy of a cognitive scientist.
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel
Magnus shared a few interesting tips from here about how to help students remember things. One of the most interesting was that students learn things better if they’ve been tested on them before learning. I assume this is because they notice what they don’t know and are therefore motivated to fill in the gaps – a definite argument for test-teach-test! Another idea which I’ve got personal experience of is that things which are harder to learn stick better because you’ve processed them more.
By far the most useful talk on day two of the conference was by Jon Hird. His title was ‘Reaching every student in the classroom: dyslexia and learning English’. I’d highly recommend heading over to his blog and downloading the handout to find out more about what causes dyslexia, and how you can adapt materials so that they are more accessible for dyslexic students. Spoiler: dyslexia doesn’t just mean problems with reading and writing, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the person is not intelligent.
Day three brought my first experience of an Open Space event, ably coordinated by Josh Round. Here is a brief description of the format. We started by suggesting ideas/posing questions on post-it notes, which were then loosely grouped. I ended up in a group with questions about supporting newly-qualified teachers. Each group had a secretary who summarised the discussion, and all notes were shared on the IH management pages after the conference. It was a fascinating way to deal with issues pertinent to us, and to remind us that we’re not alone, and many other people have had the same problems as us!
I just looked at the IH YouTube channel and found my face looking back at me 🙂 I’d forgotten that I was asked to talk about my experience of doing the IH COLT course while I was at the IH DoS Conference in January.
Here’s my 3-minute testimonial about the course.
If you’re interested in doing it too, you can find out more information on the IH Online Teacher Training Institute. The courses are available to anyone, and there’s a discount for IH teachers. I hope you find it useful!
Tomorrow I start the next stage of my teaching life as I begin training as a CELTA tutor.
For those of you who don’t know, CELTA stands for Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults. It’s an entry-level qualification accredited by Cambridge, designed to provide the basics of the communicative approach. In theory, those with a CELTA know the basics of what they need to be let loose in a classroom, although there is controversy about that which I won’t go into here. It can be run part-time or full-time, with the latter being the most common. I did my course part-time from October 2007 to February 2008, which seems like a very long time ago now!
My CELTA group, way back when!
If it’s full-time, the whole course lasts four weeks, which is what we run at IH Sevastopol. This will be my first experience of the four-week course, so it will be interesting to see how the trainees (and I!) deal with it.The group will have nine trainees, and there are two tutors besides me. I’ll be a ‘Trainer in Training’ or ‘TinT’ (thankfully this abbreviation has changed!) I’m looking forward to meeting the trainees tomorrow and getting to know them over the next four weeks.
I’m excited about the prospect of helping a group of people develop into teachers, and learning about how a CELTA course works from the inside. As part of my training I have to keep a reflective journal, which I’ll be doing in notebook form, but I will, of course, blog about the process too!
CELTA stands for ‘Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults’. It is a four-week full-time initial teacher training course, designed to introduce you to the basics of teaching English as a foreign language.
It is suitable for native English speakers, and non-natives who have achieved an English level of at least C1 on the CEFR.
Why do CELTA?
CELTA is internationally recognised as an introductory qualification for English teachers, and opens the door to good quality schools around the world.
For those who have already been teaching for a while, it is a good introduction to Communicative Language Teaching.
What does CELTA involve?
During the four-week course, you will do a total of six hours of observed teaching practice, where you try out what you are learning in a real classroom situation.
From theory to practice
To help you do this successfully, you will receive 120 hours of input covering a wide range of topics. including how to teach grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and the four language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking), as well as how to plan your lessons, use materials effectively and manage the classroom, among many other things. You will be introduced to a wide range of activties which you can take straight into the classroom.
Before and after each observed lesson you will work with tutors and your peers to ensure that you improve as much as possible over the course of your CELTA.
There are also four short written assignments during the course, one per week. There is no exam: assessment is based on your written assignments and your observed teaching practice.
How much is it?
Anyone who registers for our courses before 1st June 2014 will get a 15% discount, meaning the whole four-week CELTA will only cost you £850, including Cambridge registration fees, considerably cheaper than it is in most places, where it can cost up to £1300! Even with travel costs and accommodation, you will pay considerably less than at many other centres.
If you register after 1st June, it will still only cost £1000.
IH Sevastopol can help you to arrange travel and accommodation, and anything else you may require during your stay.
Why do CELTA at IH Sevastopol?
Every summer International House Sevastopol runs two CELTA courses: one in July and one in August. In 2014 the dates are:
June 30th-July 25th
July 28th-August 23rd
The course is run by two experienced trainers, Olga Stolbova, the Director of IH Sevastopol, and a guest trainer from Kharkiv, Ukraine. In July 2014, I will be training as a CELTA tutor, so I will be there as a third trainer if you decide to join the first course.
You will be teaching students in a private language school in a classroom setting much like you might expect to go into once you have finished your CELTA course.
International House has affiliates all over the world, and while we cannot guarantee you a job, we can offer advice on where to apply for work once your course has finished.
Sevastopol itself is a fascinating city, and at the weekends when you have finished planning and writing assignments, you can explore its history or go out into beautiful Crimea. Sevastopol and Crimea have been in the news a lot recently, and this is your chance to discover what it’s like here first-hand! You can read a lot more about Sevastopol on our site, and see pictures and videos of the city, including BBC Top Gear‘s visit in November 2013.
Here’s what Ryan Williams, a Canadian who trained on our 2013 CELTA, said about the course:
I left the Canadian oil field and started my teaching career with a TESOL certification. Within my first year of teaching it was clear that I wanted more education to fall back on. The decision to take a CELTA course was an easy one and based on some key factors, career advancement, stability, self-confidence and professionalism played a key role.
IH Sevastopol offers a great experience in a city rich with culture and history. Also, the early schedule for the course gives you a competitive edge when interviewing for September start. The tutors are top notch and committed to providing you with the tools needed in a modern teaching environment in order to be successful in the classroom. A four week course is intense, no question. However, by applying yourself the rewards are fantastic. I can attest by saying that a CELTA certification has opened doors for me that we’re not achievable in the past and I am now enjoying a fruitful career with teaching English.
by John Hattie.
by Daniel T. Willingham
by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel
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