Teresa

Coffee and a catch-up

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What are we up to?

Studying for diplomas, applying (and getting) new jobs for next year, finishing training courses, doing examining tours, writing (boring) workbooks… “like tennis balls bouncing around in my head”.

Loving meeting teens on examining tours… restores faith in humanity; they’re so hopeful and full of dreams. They keenly feel the loss of this year.

And more on teens…

We went on to talk about teens and for many of them this year has been about studying and exams rather than music, sports, etc. 

We talked about their growing autonomy as learners and noted that this was likely to be true only for a set of students, not necessarily all or indeed most. Teens are in that interesting time of fighting for independence and needing support. Some note how much time is wasted at school and they can learn more effectively and efficiently at home. We need to increase the value of the new skills sets they are learning, like flipped learning in operation, setting up independent study groups, finding resources, etc., etc. Good on (some of) them! 

Podcasts and learner coaching

We asked about good podcasts for learners and the conversation moved on to talking about learner coaching.

We agreed that it all depends on the learner and we should try to personalise recommendations to match with learners’ interests. We tied this in with a conversation about learner training and there was some resistance to us as “coaches”; “everyone is a coach these days, it doesn’t mean anything.” But what are we? Teachers, facilitators, coaches? All of the above?

If we accept the role of coach in our classes, then we should make time in class to help students to reflect on the process and share what they’ve done. We appreciated that the number of resources available for lower levels is limited. YouTube channels and audio books were mentioned, as was “English Central” (on YouTube) where you can record your voice and compare with the original (sounds like fun!). And what of authentic resources? TED talks, BBC learning (not necessarily language learning specifically) and The Guardian all got honourable mentions as places to find authentic resources. Do teachers still make lessons around songs, articles, etc.? Some do, yes, maybe less than before. Someone shared a BBC Learning resource about the Suffragettes and another the beginning of a poem that students needed to complete, “When all this is over…” and record it for homework. 

We wondered whether we will increasingly see courses being sold in different ways; a total number of hours for the course with x number of classroom hours. We talked about different course structures and what we can learn from them; e.g. pre-sessional university courses often have an INPUT – STUDY GROUPS (with task) – LESSON approach. Hours outside the classroom don’t necessarily need to have a teacher present but still constitute formal study; they can be collaborative tasks and can be timetabled elements of the course. We can also have more informal study groups and networks.

A move towards “translanguaging”?

Should we expect or even insist that students do the tasks in English? If, in the study groups, the students all share the same language, why wouldn’t they talk about it in their language first before creating the product in English. This started us thinking about translanguaging, interlanguaging, code-switching, etc. (Read more in Scott Thornbury’s Big questions in ELT.) 

We thought about the difference between code-switching and translanguaging. We felt that the former had a negative connotation, we switch because we lack certain language as opposed to the latter which encourages access to all resources to solve a problem and help us learn using critical thinking skills and our world knowledge. Others thought that code-switching is a more natural approach and translanguaging is a strategy to be implemented. Should we do listening and reading comprehension tasks in students’ L1? Maybe one way would be for us to scaffold translanguaging in the classroom, with YLs in could start with “Can I speak in (L1), please?” We agreed that it would be interesting to understand the subject better and to think about a principled use of L1 in the classroom, to challenge the dominant and rigid “English Only” view. Using L1 can build trust, allow students to express themselves and then find the language they need. One for a focussed forum, we concluded!

What do teachers want in their coursebooks?

Apparently publishers understand that teachers want coursebooks based around the PPP model (presentation, practice and production) and we can still see it in operation with books for very young learners. 

Task Based Learning is, we agreed, much harder to manage and Enquiry Based Learning needs high confidence from the teacher. EBL often starts with a topic and then participants share what they already know and what they want to know and then what they do end up learning. 

Perhaps there could be a teachers’ guidebook about how to implement this kind of approach.

DIY materials – from tiny acorns…

Michelle shared Five Six Seven – a book she wrote for a soft CLIL approach where she taught science and maths through English, she’s looking to rewrite it!

As Fiona said in her webinar, lots of people start making materials and writing by addressing their own needs and then sharing them. Within the group there are people who write materials as their main source of income and others who use it to top up their income.

We mentioned Peachey Publications as a place to self-publish. And, does anyone know, is The Round still going?

Thanks to all for coming and for the conversions which were as stimulating and interesting as ever!

See you all soon.

Does your teacher training encourage similar approaches and standard procedures, or teacher freedom and creativity?

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These were the sub-questions we shared in case people needed a starting point, but it was great to see how conversations developed naturally in groups as well:

  • When we’re thinking about training staff we’re working with, how much does it depend on the teachers you are working with and how much is school policy? If it was just down to you, what would you do?
  • For teacher training courses (like Cert/DipTESOL or CELTA/DELTA), the scope of many initial teacher training courses can be limited, what can we do to push certain trainees further while at the same time helping others reach minimal levels?
  • Thinking about initial teacher training courses as well – and leading on from Jason Anderson’s talk with DublinTEFL last week – should trainees be limited to a particular teaching model on a course? What are the pros and cons of introducing them to different approaches?

It was really interesting to get perspectives from different contexts: in-house trainers, those involved in pre-service qualifications as freelancers and those who train with one centre, trainers who have experience working with teachers around the world or in different contexts such as CLIL and EAP.

Experience

One area we chatted about was teachers’ motivation to develop; some people said they found new teachers were more open to professional development, whilst those with more experience were less motivated to attend training courses or sessions.

We also spoke about how it can sometimes be challenging to work with experienced teachers on a pre-service qualification (or indeed on a further qualification) as sometimes people can be less open to change. It can also be difficult for people who have been teaching for a number of years to then be observed and have their approaches and delivery critically assessed. It’s essential that we acknowledge people’s prior experience and approach feedback carefully.

Another challenge mentioned around working on a pre-service qualification was finding the balance of pushing stronger trainees whilst supporting those who need it, and we talked about the fact that trainees will often compare themselves to each other and need to be encouraged to focus on their own progress.

Thinking as well about initial training, that it may be very different to how you were taught at school – both in terms of how you’re expected to approach the content as well as the methodologies you’re being encouraged to use.

Communication

A key area which was discussed in relation to being a freelance trainer was in the centre communicating their values and beliefs – though it’s equally true that a centre should share their fundamental principles with any trainers they employ. One person mentioned not wanting to feel they were “selling their soul as a trainer” if they were asked to train in a way which was contrary to their beliefs. There was a brief bit of amusement as we shared some of our training pet peeves – things which are often demonstrated on courses to raise trainees’ awareness of certain things but which can easily be overdone (the main two mentioned were ICQs and eliciting).

We talked about how it can cause unnecessary stress for a trainee to get mixed messages about approaches to learning and teaching if trainers have different views on a topic. For example, if one trainer tells a group of trainees that they shouldn’t pre-teach lexis and then another trainer demoes a lesson pre-teaching lexis, it gives trainees a mixed message. It’s essential that we highlight to teachers that there are different ways of doing things – and this applies not only to approaches, methods and frameworks, but also thinking about how we might do things differently in an online class compared to a socially-distanced class.

Coursebooks

Most initial training courses will have trainees follow a coursebook and we talked about how it’s important that teachers know how to use them effectively – critical SAS (select, adapt, supplement), identifying what each part of the coursebook page is doing and knowing what could be used as a lead-in and where there is scope to personalise the language.

As trainers, we all tend to be quite prescriptive at the start of our courses, allowing trainees more freedom in their planning as the course progresses and, thinking about using different frameworks during a pre-service qualification, we discussed how difficult it can be for teachers to see them in action. This was particularly true for trainers who work in centres which have 40-minute lessons.

Adding to the chat around frameworks, there was some discussion over whether trainees get a little overwhelmed by being shown different teaching models in such a short amount of time.

In-house development through Covid

There was a sense that many teachers aren’t feeling inspired to attend training this year. “We just want to get through it” was a feeling mentioned, as well as the fact that teachers were forced to develop their teaching skills so much last year that they’re less inclined to do further development this year. There was again the sense of Zoom fatigue but also the stresses of being back in the physical classroom – remembering all the various protocols which are in place, honing emotional intelligence, working with windows open and the strain on the voice of teaching wearing a mask and in a classroom where learners are often speaking more loudly than before as they are socially-distanced. Also the fact that many of the things we did intuitively in the past have had to be reimagined; in all, it felt for some that Covid had taken the fun out of teaching.

Thinking as well about in-house development, questions came up which might be more suited to the Management Meet Up around the obligation to provide development for teachers or the obligation to attend in-house development. There’s so much available online now – often giving teachers the flexibility to watch recorded sessions in their own time. Furthermore, some people mentioned that difficulty of bringing people together and not just with social distancing regulations, but also in terms of finding a time which works for everyone’s schedule, especially in bigger schools or in contexts where people work in different places.

One member mentioned that teachers at the schools she’s at are required to complete a minimum number of hours CPD – but that this can be in-house, attending conferences or online sessions. For this school, the system is based on trust and teachers don’t need to provide evidence of the professional development they’re doing.

There was also a question around in-house development of who decides the topics to be covered: is it top-down with management saying, “This is what we’ll be doing”? Or are teachers asked at the start of the year or during appraisals what they would like to focus on?

Thanks everyone for coming!

Final thought…we didn’t discuss specific frameworks during the morning, but if you didn’t get a chance to attend Jason Anderson’s talk on lesson planning frameworks from DublinTEFL, I recommend giving it a watch.

Hub digest – 7th May. 2021

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We’ve hit 200 members in the Facebook group this week, so thank you to everyone who’s supported us so far. We’re really enjoying seeing the Hub grow and develop and it’s wonderful to be a part of such a vibrant international community. There’s been some wonderful discussion in the group this week, with our Focused Forum looking at authentic materials and then an engaging Wednesday Question about class size.

Thursday was an absolute treat in the Hub when we were joined by Daniel Barber to talk about normalising environmental issues. He talked a little about why we should and then encouraged everyone to add their own ideas to a community padlet – a really engaging format for the webinar and a wonderful resource for people to refer back to as well.

Next week we’ve got our next Trainer Talking Time on Tuesday – it will be interesting to see which topic tops the poll! And then on Thursday it’s Coffee Break Day – looking forward to seeing you there!

Normalising environmental issues in our classes

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Normalising environmental issues in your class - with Daniel Barber (webinar)
Watch now

Daniel Barber has had (and continues to have!) an extensive career in ELT, working as a teacher, teacher trainer, learning coach, materials writer and more. He’s one of the founding members of ELT Footprint and is passionate about the environment and how we can do more in the climate emergency. The group has over 3,500 members and has been going since the 24th May 2019, so soon to celebrate its second birthday. It’s a place for ELT professionals to share ideas, lesson plans and projects about how we as a profession can reduce our carbon footprint and become more sustainable in the long run.

There was a great new format in this webinar: we started with a typical webinar format and then Dan shared a padlet for people to share their own ideas.

What do we mean by ‘normalise’? It’s a bit of a buzzword at the moment with ‘the new normal’ but it’s difficult to define what ‘normal’ is…your normal might be very different to someone else’s. We’ve adapted quickly to taking a mask with us wherever we go now (though some of us still sometimes forget) and the idea is to make talking about the environment a part of our daily routine in the same way.

Ideally, on a teacher training course, one of the criteria that we use for assessment would be: How does your lesson address issues of sustainability and the climate crisis? This would help it become a more automatic part of our lessons, thinking about the language learners are looking at, the lesson objectives and how we can integrate the environment into that.

1. Dan says the first reason is a no-brainer and quoted Greta Thunberg: “I want you to act as if your house is on fire – because it is.”

We’re doing so much at home (recycling, upcycling, watching our water consumption) that we should be doing it in our professional spaces too as the crisis extends into these spaces.

2. The 21st century is facing up to be a very different century than that which we imagined back in 2000 and Dan suggests that our learners will need a greater awareness and understanding of the climate emergency as we prepare them for the future. Evaluating human activity and its consequences on the planet is a key skill for the next generation.

3. There was a recent article in the EL Gazette about how English is the language of protest, even in places where a small percentage of the population speaks English. Using English puts the issue much more on the global stage as it will be covered more by international news agencies. As English teachers, we can equip our learners with the tools they need to fight social injustice and to be activists on the global stage. A lot of the recent global protests (#FridaysforFuture, Extinction Rebellion) have been taking place with people from around the world holding up placards and banners in English. We can easily incorporate a lot of eco-tweaks into our lessons, such as a lesson on writing placards to get a message across in an attention-grabbing or a lesson writing a letter to your local MP and an environmental issues. Steve Brown was mentioned as we were talking about social justice in education and there’s also an interesting article on his site about the sustainability of ELT conferences, but his site is also packed full of interesting articles about a variety of topics in ELT.

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.” – Paulo Freire

4. There’s a British Council report (coming out early-summer) which highlights that a clear majority of teenage learners would like to have more environmental topics in the classroom. It also demonstrated that teachers would like more training on how to introduce these topics into the classroom. Check out The Climate Connection through the British Council and ELT Sustainable for more support.

How can we integrate the environment into our professional life?

Lesson content

Tweak the coursebook content – add critical thinking questions to have your learners think about the information included (and more importantly NOT included) in a text, or have them think about the purpose for the text – who benefits from the text, what was the writer’s motivation? Look for resources outside the book – what more can you find out about a topic?

Also, many of us have coursebook or syllabus constraints – adding in eco-tweaks as part of every lesson is more sustainable than doing one-off lessons when we find the time.

Classroom

Daily routines, the posters on the wall, the furniture and so on – Dan suggests sharing the current CO2 level with your class and comparing it to previous levels.

School / institution

It could be a survey about how much paper is used and how much of it recycled.

People’s lives outside of school

For example, imagine you cycle to school – leaving your helmet on the desk might encourage learner to ask questions about it. Using yourself, or your students, as a role model to encourage others to think about their habits and changes they can make.

Dan shared a link to the padlet for the community to add to – during the webinar and afterwards – with ideas on eco-tweaks for these four areas. There are also some great resources in the first column to learn more about these issues. And in the final column, there are ideas for What next?

Whilst people started posting, we carried on chatting about various things (I won’t write down all our chat!). We also looked at the padlet at points, so I won’t add those here again!

The difficulty sometimes people can face within institutions if they want to instigate change because of company policy or because there isn’t a climate of social activism within the company. It seems that this isn’t the case in ELT (yippee!) at school level, but perhaps when we think about other areas of ELT, such as publishers: glossy coursebooks, flying speakers across the globe for events, etc. it might be more difficult to effect change.

Greenwashing – the idea of covering over your environmental inequities by promoting something green you are doing. For example, an airline company which advertises how fabulous they are for swapping single-use plastic cutlery to metal (whilst still contributing to the climate emergency by flying). There’s an interesting article shared in the chat about carbon offsets. It’s important to be vigilant and teach our learners critical thinking skills so they’re more able to spot it too.

The term ‘carbon footprint’ was actually invented by BP back in the 1980s! It shifted the blame onto the individual, when in fact it was the large companies. Read more about it here.

There was some chat (in the chat too) about the climate crisis in the media. It’s becoming more integrated into shows, with characters buying their coffee in a reusable cup or talking about the climate emergency in conversation.

Dan mentioned as well using storytelling and personal anecdotes to raise our learners’ awareness – his example was of cleaning bugs off the car as a child when there was much more insect-life about. You can check out the WWF Living Planet Report for information about wildlife and habitat changes. And a link to A Manifesto for Rewilding was also shared in the chat. And here’s a link to the research article which Dan mentioned about the reduction in biomass distribution.

Green Standard Schools is a recent initiative in which schools can be inspected and awarded accreditation for their dedication to the environment. FECEI (a Spain-wide association of language schools) has a similar initiative (in Spanish), as does IH World.

It was an incredibly engaging session and the idea of using a padlet to turn it into more of a workshop was very well-received: you can always add ideas after the event or listen to us nattering on and focus on sharing ideas during the session!

Huge thanks again to Dan for coming along and to everyone who has posted ideas so far – it’s a great community-generated resource for us all to use and add to.

What authentic materials do you use in class?

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We had a smaller group today so stayed in the main room for the whole chat. The original questions around the topic were:

  • What authentic materials do you use in class?
  • Where do you find them? How do you use them?
  • What do we need to consider when bringing authentic materials into the classroom?

These were some of the sites and ideas mentioned for where we can find materials to use in class.

For ESP / Business English, company websites were mentioned as a resource to use as this will give you topic-based vocabulary which your learners need. It can also be trickier to source materials for ESP – for example, research papers written in English on a topic may only be available through a paid subscription site; in other cases the material may be redacted if it includes sensitive information.

In terms of working with reading materials, there were also suggestions of using readers, short stories (such as Roald Dahl) and making the most of video transcripts from authentic sources, such as TED. Some teachers mentioned doing an extensive reading project with higher-level groups and using an original text to find idiomatic language.

We touched again on an issue which has come up before, that learners don’t have the patience to work with longer texts and that teens seem to be reading less in general. Fiction Express is trying to make reading a more interactive process and works in a ‘build your own adventure’ format – a chapter is published each week and readers vote on what will happen next.

There was also some chat around reading as part of the class – though it’s something many of us did pre-Covid, it somehow feels like the time online should be used more efficiently than asking learners to read a lengthy text and do some comprehension activities around it.

Another aspect we discussed was finding resources which were age- and/or level-appropriate. There was consensus that what some of our teen and younger learners are seeing outside the classroom isn’t necessarily what we would feel comfortable working with as a resource in a lesson. We started off thinking about the sort of music videos our learners sometimes request but then also considered the idea of bringing ‘authentic issues’ into the classroom and how sensitivity is needed to ensure that we don’t trigger learners.

Related to this topic was the question of what ‘authentic’ really is – for example, BBC newsreaders will often use quite flat intonation, have very limited or unclear body language and no false starts. This idea that if learners learnt English from one particular media – such as the news – then they would have a very one-sided view of the language was mentioned at some point (possibly by David Crystal?) but I can’t find a link to a quote now!

We also talked about how to exploit materials in the best way – one suggestion was to look for videos which are linked to common coursebook topics as then you’ll be more likely to be able to rewatch it with a different group. We also chatted briefly about using the same material with different levels – you could have a ‘complex’ video with a very simple task for a lower-level group and watch the same video with a more challenging task for higher levels. Another idea was watching videos with the sound off to focus and asking learners to look for certain things or to imagine what the conversation is, etc.

One issue which came up frequently was time – the time to find a material and plan a lesson around it which you can make the most of. There were also comments that working in a context without a coursebook gives you much more freedom to find your own materials for a class, but conversely you don’t have the security of a coursebook when you need to plan a lesson quickly.

Hub digest – 30th April, 2021

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It’s been a chatty week in the Hub with our live events on Tuesday and Thursday. In Tuesday’s Monthly Management Meet Up, there were discussions around what might happen in the next academic year with many of our Europe-based members already planning – or trying to plan – for September intake. Things are very much still up in the air here though and nobody can really forecast what stage we’ll be at come September.

There were some interesting comments to this week’s Wednesday Question. Interestingly in the Coffee Break on Thursday, one of our members was saying that BRAZ-TESOL had been holding events online pre-pandemic and so she was more accustomed to this style of conference – one of the great things about the Hub is hearing about people’s experiences from different perspectives.

As well in the Thursday chats we talked briefly about mediation, native speakerism and the potential misconceptions of advertising yourself as a pronunciation coach, and much more. Notes will be coming out shortly with a round-up of the takeaways from this engaging conversations.

Next week, we have a Focused Forum on Tuesday and the poll on Facebook is looking fairly tight at the moment so who know whether we’ll be discussing authentic materials, error correction or tech tools? And then on Thursday we’re back with a webinar and Daniel Barber will be coming along to share some tips on normalising environmental issues in our classes.