Teresa

Hub digest – 23rd July, 2021

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It’s Friday and time for our weekly Hub digest and there have been lots of excellent questions coming up in the Hub over the previous week. We shared thoughts on what a good teacher might look for in a school and if you’re involved in ELT management and hiring, it’s well worth checking out what some of the suggestions are. There were also discussions around alternatives to the n-word, a question about selling editable resources and a link to a podcast episode of teachers talking about working with learners who are neurodivergent or who have dyslexia or other first language difficulties.

Our Wednesday Question this week was a follow-up to a great webinar about developments in ELT over the next five years. In the Monthly Management Meet Up on Tuesday, we chatted about what the more immediate future holds, thinking about COVID and the problems we might continue to face moving forward. And we rounded off the week with our fortnightly coffee breaks, with interesting chat including working in multilingual classes and how we imagine materials might become more inclusive and representative in the future.

Coming up next week, we have our inaugural Speakers’ Corner event on Tuesday – three speakers sharing their thoughts in a five-minute presentation followed by time to discuss their topics in groups. And on Thursday, we’ll be joined by the amazing Romina Muse in a webinar on stories to transform challenging behaviour. See you there!

Shared languages and shared experiences

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We kicked off with a chat about multilingual and monolingual classes and reflected on the potential internationalism of online courses (reflecting initially on a member’s current experience tutoring on a DipTESOL course). We remembered back to days of summer schools in the UK where we didn’t necessarily know our learners’ first languages, where an “English only” environment seemed natural and it was always “always fun” (or maybe that’s some rose-tinted spectacles there!) At those summer schools we were able to see all sorts of Englishes in action.

We went on to talk about the monolingual classroom and the advantages of students having a shared first language. We talked about the potential efficiency in occasional translation and possible uses of L1 within a predominantly English-speaking framework. We thought we shouldn’t rush into using the L1 and also acknowledged the need for nuance when we have the L1 available. Should we pretend we don’t speak the students L1? We thought not, it’s good for language teachers to show they are language learners too. We recognised the need to give students all the tools we can as language students and also noted the classroom management issues (in YL classes and beyond) with a controlled approach to L1 use. We acknowledged the differences between younger learners and the teenagers, the latter likely to suffer from more self-consciousness. We wondered whether using the L1 actually does students a disservice, robbing them of the chance to develop their communicative skills.

What then of translanguaging? (A popular topic on the Hub!) We agreed that a careful, thoughtful approach is best. If students are struggling with a task, we can perhaps ask students to create a model in their L1 and then transfer to English. The example we used was describing a photo to encourage speculative thinking and imagination. This kind of thing might be particularly effective at the start of the year where we can and perhaps should just ease in to the year and try to avoid stress, instead we should build routines and give our students the framework and the tools they need.

Talking about the beginning of a course, the writers were asked about how much freedom they had, how much things come from Language Acquisition Theory and why do books always seem to start with the present simple and present continuous?! I use “and” here rather than “vs” as we mused on why we set up a fight with “vs”.  Whatever the arrangement might be in the book, we agreed on the need to “fore-shadow” the language before they officially meet it; we can sprinkle it into the routines and then teach 7 year olds, “Would you rather…?” type structures.

We moved on to our role in helping students prepare for exams. We want to explain to our students that speaking examiners are like detectives looking for evidence of language use. We rued the fact that it’s so easy to see students who haven’t been trained in the exams. Later on we wondered if we are too focussed on exams and therefore limited linguistically. We agreed that we can and should all still do natural English and that is all part of our students’ linguistic development. 

We noted that for teachers with less experience and less confidence, it’s often easier and perhaps advisable for them to stick to the book and from there we can lift the language off the page, bring it to life and extend. A good teachers’ book is a thing of joy, full of guidance and extra ideas, it can really help us all. And of course we need to think about selecting what’s best for our students, adapting the materials and supplementing where necessary.

We talked about how newer teachers really need to be given help and support around planning; planning the lesson, the unit, the term and the whole year. We reflected on the need for that for our students too, they need to be able to see what they’re trying to do. We talked about mini-plans on the board with some assessment/evaluation at the beginning and the end of the lesson. We want students to be able to understand and evaluate what they’ve done in the class. We also admitted that sometimes we don’t have a proper plan but we can still evaluate what the learners achieved.

This brought us on to more philosophical matters; how do we know if students have really learnt something? John Hattie was mentioned in relation to these big questions. Hattie works in mainstream education trying to find out what really makes a difference in learning. We thought that learning languages is more like training for a sport rather than learning a series of facts. Silvana Richardson speaking on Continuous Professional Development at the Future of English Language Teaching Conference was given high praise. 

We talked about ourselves doing courses and developing. We shared the excitement of learning new things and also acknowledged the decline in enthusiasm and the feeling of needing more. Is CPD like a drug? Is the Hub your supplier?! 😉

And talking about current trends in ELT, we dived back into another Hub favourite topic, inclusivity. We agreed that representation in materials is a great place to start. We wondered whether books with international reaches would ever be as inclusive as they should? Should materials be more country or more context specific? Could there be extra online materials for these different contexts? Are things getting better? On the whole, yes, there is still much to do (especially around gender and sexuality) but it’s getting better. In recent exams there are pictures including people in wheelchairs but it all still feels very binary. There are more and more mainstream examples of representation and inclusivity and we believe that our students will notice if it’s in the mix. We need to let our students know that we are including and addressing them. It can be dolls of different colours, boys as dancers, etc, etc. and always 3D characters. Asking children to draw things can be so revealing and they can be so open to so much. Is society becoming less binary in general? Perhaps that depends on which society we’re talking about, identity is built ealy on and we can give broader choices. We are in the middle of so much change.

In many parts of the world there is a discussion about inclusive language and it is invariably met by the dismissal that it’s just playing politics but then we are language teachers, so we are interested in the power of language. Other questions hang in the air; are we imposing our values on the classroom? Is this ideological colonialism? The UN defines rights and arguably that gives us a blueprint to follow. We agreed that we should present possibilities wherever we can. 

How can we get involved and help move towards an inclusivity in ELT? One way is to to engage with publishers and the representatives at all levels on social media, at conferences, etc.. Simply by asking how inclusive a book is has the potential to make a difference. We can also ask questions to those who choose the books in our schools and in our training courses, ask about inclusivity and offer alternatives (like Raise Up!). Another thing is to make changes to how we do things; we use different images in our classes, instead of using one picture of a family, use 20 with different family types. Presenting things as normal makes them normal. And what if students giggle or mock? Well, that gives us the space to talk about it. Look for similarities rather than differences, open dialogue.

Will COVID continue to cause us problems moving forward?

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One potential participant decided not to come to the meeting because they wanted to, in their own words, “bury their head in the sand” until they had to deal with it all again. This resonated with several of us as it’s been a long 15 months and we all need a break. We were determined to be realistic and positive, it turned out to be both! And so with a combination of looking at the reality of where we are now, where we might be in a few months time and what we can do about it all, the conversation began.

More of the same?

We largely agreed that moving forward there probably wouldn’t be many changes from where we are now in terms of the practicalities of ELT. We simply can’t take risks. We envisage a similar mixture of online, hybrid and face-to-face teaching as we’ve had up to now. All involved; students and their families, teachers and managers have been adaptable and we just need to keep going.

We need to remember that vaccinated people are, of course, testing positive and mask wearing will remain in place for the foreseeable future. We need to protect students and staff alike for everyone’s sake. We also reminded ourselves about how difficult the two-week absence has been for us all.

There is a concern about this coming winter and the perfect storm of COVID, the flu and a significant decrease in immunity across the board (after 18 months of social distance, mask-wearing and handwashing). We need o be prepared for it to be pretty bad again. We all commented on kids being in quarantine for 2 weeks at a time now and the rise in “stomach flu”.

In June we had felt more positive than we do now as numbers go up everywhere. We also noted that while numbers are shooting up, there are far fewer hospitalisations and deaths so perhaps we do need to learn to live with it.

Registrations for courses for the next few months generally seem to be down on previous years as some students are waiting to see what happens and when they are signing up a significant number are saying “only if it’s face-to-face” people seem to be tired of online and hybrid learning.

We talked about the distinction between the “concurrent classroom model” with students in quarantine join online temporarily and the “hybrid” model where the course is designed to be 50/50 online and f2f. Of course, our ability to run the concurrent classroom model depends on classroom sizes and available space and wasn’t an option for many of us. We talked about the changing restrictions in some places it’s back up to 85% of the normal capacity along with 1’5m distancing. We also talked about the problems of screens both in terms of usefulness in stopping the virus and also in terms of the challenges it poses for classroom management. 

Hitting learning objectives… in whatever way

On a happier note, it appears that students had, generally speaking, been “successful”. Early exam results seem to be more positive than many had been hoping for. Importantly, we thought, our message needs to focus on our expertise in helping students reach their objective rather than how we get there. “Students with us are passing their B1, B2, C1 exams”. Why should students come to us? Because we’ll help you get where you need to go. Traditionally we have often focussed on the classroom experience in all it’s different ways but now perhaps we need to change that focus.

We are confident that we can adapt to whatever we need to do and should do so always with responsibility and safety as our highest priority. We talked about moving away from synchronous courses towards an interactive asynchronous approach where students can work in their own time and then have sessions where we all come together. We had a look at Miro as a really open and necessarily collaborative way of working. Here’s a few examples of what it might look like…

We appreciated that we had all learnt so much so quickly and that we need to continue to get better at it and make the experience as good as it can be. Most people want classes to be f2f but at the same time most seem to understand that it needs to be different given the current circumstances.

How can it work better for our young learners? 

One manager talked about how their system had worked well with parents taking a greater role in the class with the school providing training to the families. In the 4-7 year old classes a parent was expected to be present and with 8-11 year olds it was sometimes necessary. The key is high-quality communication with parents; a handbook for parents coupled with a session where they’d be essentially talked through a lesson using a lot of the zoom features followed by a question and answer session. This kind of parent on-boarding and then a continual follow up seems to be one of the key elements in making it all work.

And so what’s next? How can we improve? We talked about encouraging students to use some more tools and continuing to work with parents to show them how, maybe we’d need a short list of “approved” sites to keep it all as simple as possible and at the same time to ensure sufficient safeguarding. We also thought we need to keep involving parents as much as possible, helping them see progress and that they’re getting “value for money”.

Are teens the biggest problem we face?

We shared the difficulties that we face with our teenage classes being hybrid and online; distraction, decreased motivation, cameras off and a general low level of engagement. School has to be the number one priority for many and “extra” language learning is not a priority. 

We also recognised the mental health problems that are kicking in for many teenagers. 

Better prepared?

We took comfort in the fact that at least now we are better prepared for what was ahead. Last summer we were guessing, now we have some experience. We need to think carefully about forward planning. One participant suggested planning around different scenarios and anticipating some difficult decisions in the worst case scenarios. We need to have plans and we need to be agile enough to react to the situations we face as they arise. Even if things are bad, if we have a plan, we can feel more comfortable.

And what about holidays? We need to look after ourselves and that means time to recharge our batteries.

Hub digest – 16th July, 2021

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Did you know that the phrase ‘spill the beans’ comes from Ancient Greece? That’s something I learnt this week and which became the theme of our Wednesday Question, with Hubsters sharing their favourite idioms as well as talking about their attitude towards teaching idioms in class. Do you make a mountain out of a molehill when faced with a question about an idiom in class? Some learners request to learn them and some others don’t find them useful; whatever floats your boat, I guess!

In our live events this week we were joined by two amazing ELT professionals: on Tuesday, Rachael Roberts joined us to share her knowledge and expertise as a business coach and gave us some hints and tips on using social media. There are notes on the session on the blog. Then in Thursday’s webinar, Zhenya Polosatova came along to talk about reflective practice, sharing different cycles of how reflection can happen with some incredibly practical formats, including mindmaps, journalling and working with a critical friend.

Coming up next week, we have a Monthly Management Meet Up on Tuesday and Coffee Breaks on Thursday. 

Reflective Skills: making theory (more) practical

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Reflective Skills: making theory (more) practical - with Zhenya Polosatova (webinar)
Watch now

We were really lucky to be joined by Zhenya Polosatova for this webinar as she’s passionate about the topic of reflective practice and teacher development. In fact, she even has a mantra on her blog: inspired teachers inspire learners.

This was the third time which Zhenya has presented about reflective practice recently and you can read more about all three sessions on her blog:

Zhenya started by asking some key questions about how we currently reflect and mentioned how reflective practice has affected her own work as a trainer, a teacher and a materials writer. Some participants mentioned blogging as well as recording their classes and reading the transcript as ways of reflecting on their practice. There was also a suggestion of thinking about one aspect of the lesson, such as TTT, which can help you to focus your reflection. Later in the session, someone mentioned the idea of giving each lesson a score and then working out your average for the day – this can help you to see more balance if one particularly bad lesson has knocked your confidence. Another suggestion was to add notes to your plan as the lesson progresses and one participant mentioned having specific sections on their plan for ‘what went well’ and ‘what I’d do differently’.

We chatted very briefly about how reflection is a big part of most pre-service qualifications, but that we often stop doing it so well when we start teaching full-time.

After sharing a wonderful anecdote about her experience trail running and ways she reflected afterwards, many other participants commented on how “‘failure’ moments are an opportunity to grow and learn if we take the time to reflect” and “mistakes are learning opportunities”.

Zhenya has kindly shared her slides from the presentation, so you can see the experiential learning cycles which she refers to. Below is one of the more popular and Zhenya also shared Gibbs’ reflective cycle, which encourages a reflective moment on our feelings as well as an analysis of what happened and how well it worked. On the CertTESOL course at Active Language, trainees do bullet point reflections immediately after the class and then have time to reflect more deeply later and we talked about how when you reflect can have an impact on what you see. Zhenya raised the point that expressing feelings in feedback can be a culturally sensitive issue and that as trainers we need space and time to help our teachers to develop their reflective skills.

Another reflective tool which Zhenya shared was Farrell’s framework, which is less of a cycle but more areas to consider when reflecting. He also suggested dialogic reflection – a critical friend – who can offer another viewpoint. As Zhenya mentiones, Farrell has shared lots of his resources through his website, Reflective Inquiry, so if you’re interested in learning more, check it out. There were some other great resources mentioned in the comments:

Zhenya is a huge fan of reflective practice groups, which is a way of not only sharing your reflections on your own teaching, but stealing ideas from your peers as they describe what happened in their lesson as part of the process. There was then a lovely group reflective practice process in the world of art, with the idea that people take on different roles in their assessment of a piece of art in the same way that different people can approach reflection on a lesson in different ways. 

There was another lovely comment in the chat: “cycles and systems are there to guide us when we are new to reflection. The more we practise reflection, the more we start finding our own different ways”. And Zhenya shared a fantastic variety of tools we can use to help us reflect (on the left).

Here are some more incredible resource which Zhenya shared at the end of the presentation:

So many things to think about and reflect on from the webinar. As always, we like to include some questions for you to think about:

  • How easy will it be to build reflective practice into a part of your schedule?
  • Which of the tools Zhenya proposes would you be most interested in trying?
  • Would you be interested in a reflective practice group facilitated by the Hub? Let us know!

Using social media for business purposes

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This morning we were joined by the fabulous Rachael Roberts of Life Resourceful who shared her social media know-how with us. We’d had some great questions come in ahead of the chat and some other popped up during the session as well.

Is it better to focus on a particular market?

Rachael has experience of niching and says that it’s a good choice as you can focus on the areas of ELT which you particularly enjoy. It makes you more memorable and more referable. She says that a danger of trying to appeal to everyone is that your message gets lost, whereas if you focus on one aspect, you can market yourself on social media more easily and appeal to people in a specific context. That said, she added that this doesn’t mean that this becomes ALL you do. Many ELT professionals enjoy the variety of working with different age groups or in different areas and choosing to market yourself in a particular way doesn’t mean that you have to give anything else up. Similarly, if you find that you’ve ‘fallen into a niche’ and are trying to climb out of it, rebranding yourself through social media can be a great way of reestablishing yourself.

Is it true that to succeed in business on social media you either need lots of money or lots of time?

The feeling here was that time is more important than money. Although you can pay to boost posts or turn posts into ads, ads only work well if you have organic growth. Rachael mentioned that a social media marketeer had said that you need to be investing at least £300 a week to see any significant impact on Facebook. 

Another approach is paying people to create content for you. This might not be the best idea if you’re trying to market yourself: you need to be authentic so that clients – whether that’s students or publishers – know what they’re getting. There are lots of tutorials you can find about setting up your own website, how to write a blogpost, what image sizes work best on different platforms and learning to do it yourself will be better in the long run. Furthermore, if you’re using Canva, you can select to create an image which is the right fit for different platforms and if you have the Pro version, it will resize content for you.

So, time is the best option. Rachael suggests being strategic and focussed: going into your social media profile to do that one thing and then get out again, rather than getting stuck scrolling for an eternity. She also has a handy hint about how to be more visible, such as the ‘juice and boost’. Deliberately don’t reply to all comments on a post in one go, but instead respond to a couple, then go back a couple of hours later and reply to more, and so on. 

Consistency vs. flexibility

It’s better to get into the habit of being active on social media: posting twice a week regularly is better than have a full-on month of posts followed by a month of nothing. In terms of what you post, it’s a good idea to plan content as trying to think of what to post each time you do will end up taking your more time.  

Some people like to batch content and spend a chunk of time once a month to prepare all their content, which can be a more efficient way of working. 

What about scheduling posts?

This is also a time-saving option. However, it’s better to schedule your posts directly through the platform rather than using a third-party tool such as Hootsuite. This is because the platform recognises that you’re not on it to schedule content and so reduces the reach of your posts.

Do I need to vary the content for different platforms?

A social media guru would say ‘yes’. However, Rachael suggests a better approach is to focus on using one or two platforms and ensure that you’re sharing quality content on each. In terms of identifying which platform is right for you, it’s important to think about the audience you’re trying to sell to and another hint here is to make use of as many features that the platform offers as possible. For example, to be more effective on Instagram, use reels, stories and IGTV as well as the platform is moving away from being just a ‘square photo-sharing app’. 

Another aspect to think about with different platforms in the life of a post. Posts on LinkedIn have a long life, whereas Instagram is a much more ‘in the moment’ platform. An additional plus of sharing content through LinkedIn and Facebook is that when someone comments on a post, it becomes visible again. There was also a question around sharing content in groups and Rachael’s advice here is to look at the type of posts in the group and the group rules: in some groups there are lots of posts of people ‘selling’ themselves, whereas in other groups this happens less.

*As an aside, in the Hub group on Facebook, we’re more than happy for people to promote themselves and what they’re doing as long as posts have a question to encourage members to reflect and engage with the content 😁

Another tip from Rachael is to ensure that the post itself is engaging. This is not only important in terms of getting people’s attention, but also because linking to an external source (such as a blogpost) reduces reach. A couple of ways around this are to post a link to your blogpost in the comments or apparently you can trick the algorithm if you post and then edit the post to include the link.

What about the analytics?

You can learn A LOT about post reach, engagement and more. However, not all of the data may be relevant to you. For example, for some people it might be more important to know where followers are based so they can identify what sort of content will be mor relevant; other people might be interested in knowing the time when most people engage with their posts; other people might want to know how people come to their site…and so on.

One thing Rachael suggests looking at is the engagement and reach and working out the engagement by reach rate. This is the total engagement (likes, comments, shares) divided by reach times 100. Apparently the average engagement by reach is about 2% so any more than that and you’re doing well! 

You can then start to think about why a particular post does better than others: was it the design? the content? the humour?

‘Done is better than perfect’

This was an idea that Rachael came back to a couple of times during the Q&A. We chatted a little bit about getting over the fear of ridicule and not bothering to do hundreds of takes of a video before posting. People also mentioned that although it can be scary to put yourself out there at the start (in terms of posting video content or selfies), it does get more comfortable. One tip for producing video content was to use Filmora which is user-friendly video editing software. Rachael highlighted as well that images with your face will often do better as people like to put a face to a name. Another tip here is around brand consistency and Rachael suggests picking a few templates rather than re-inventing the wheel each time you create content. She added as well that colour branding can be quite impactful and make your posts stand out as someone’s scrolling through.

SOS!

If you’re interested in learning more, Rachael has a few spots left on her next Switch off Stress, Switch on Success programme starting in September.

During the 12-week course, you’ll look at a variety of different aspects of business management, such as niching and pinning down your message, building an effective social media profile, identifying the client journey, selling in a way that makes you feel comfortable, negotiating and much, much more. There are weekly input sessions, group coaching sessions and a supportive community channel on Slack.