Teresa

Hub digest – 5th March, 2021

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There’s been some great chat on the page this week as we shared our pet hates on a grammar-based syllabus to celebrate Grammar Day. There was also a crowdsourcing post from one of our members about things we wish we’d known when starting out with VYLs and Primary. Looking forward to reading her Teaching Tips.

We tried out a slightly different format in the Coffee Break on Thursday, breaking into smaller groups to extend the conversations which had been happening on the Facebook page and then coming back together to share our takeaways.

And there’s a lot of interest around our webinar next week, when George from Hubbub Labs will be coming along to talk about selling our skills through social media.

From the end of the world as we know it to puppets with head lice

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We’ve now had a number of Coffee Breaks and the evolution continues… 

The Coffee Breaks are a moment for members to get together in an informal way, to connect and to share and, of course, to develop. They have no agenda, no structure… a sort of “dogme” approach as one member said recently. We’re trying to create a new version of a staffroom.

There are usually a number of questions floating around from the conversations on the Facebook page and that often provides a springboard for the chat but certainly doesn’t limit things… this week conversations varied from international professional development groups to puppets with head lice! Quite a mix!

Due to the popularity of the Coffee Break and to allow for closer interactions, in the morning session we played with breakout rooms on Zoom. We quickly moved into small groups and then shared and extended our conversations with the whole group in the second half of the session. It proved popular; although some people missed the unified approach, most people liked the change. The notes are, of course, incomplete, please do share other things you talked about in the thread, it’d be great to share as much as possible from all the groups. Zoom and breakout rooms are to be continued.

The possible conversation starters were…

  • What are your top tips for teaching primary and pre-primary?
  • What’s your relationship like with the phonemic chart?
  • What are your grammatical pet hates?
  • How are you thinking about continuing your development beyond the classroom?
  • What do you hope is covered in the upcoming webinar “Selling your Skills on Social Media”?
  • Are you a puppeteer? How do you or how could you use puppets in class?
  • How do you or could you use break times in online classes?
  • How can you find a good school?
  • What makes a good manager?
  • What other groups and professional associations do you like? (Are you going to the TESOL-Spain conference?)

… all providing the opportunity to continue to conversations from the previous two weeks, part of the aim to put the Continuous part back into Continuous Professional Development (CPD), to move away from one-off events and into a longer, more reflective process.

Professional associations

Honourable mentions were given to TESOL-Spain, TESOL Arabia, Nile TESOL (the river not the training organisation!), IATEFL, ELT Footprint as well as groups on social media like “TEFL teachers in… Spain/Seville/etc.”

There is some excitement around the availability of online conferences but “they’re so tiring!” Some people liked taking a “podcast” approach, listening to sessions while doing other things meaning cameras and mics off. Other people preferred to be “present”, being active and taking notes. 

A good manager is…

… a good listener, patient, calm under pressure, well-organised. Friendly and professional relationships with staff are appreciated and an adult/adult interaction much preferred. A good manager has vision and is a good decision-maker.

Are ex-teachers better managers? In some ways yes, they often understand teachers better but that’s not always the case. 

Do managers enjoy their roles? Normally, yes, but during this COVID time, no!

Expectations and entitlement?

We shared a conversation around “traveller teachers” and “teacher entitlement” where teacher expectation was said to be unrealistically high despite a lack of long-term commitment to the school, the profession and even to the students. Other people said that teachers are often barely paid enough to cover their costs and that recently we’re all being asked to work harder and more for the same money (and in some cases less) than before. Wages have changed very little over the last few years. It was acknowledged that the situation is more and more precarious for everyone; for teachers and managers alike and we were left with the question “Is the golden age of TEFL behind us?”

(Note from Simon: This conversation was sensitive, worrying and beautiful all at the same time. I’ve never been in an environment where people from different sectors of the profession have come together as equals with no hierarchy, no sense of “us” and “them” to listen and to talk about these issues with respect. Moving beyond the binary, beyond the black and white to explore shades of grey feels so important. This is perhaps one of the special things about the TEFL Development Hub.)

A race to the bottom?

The conversation continued… there is a feeling that, especially online, there is an upswell of unqualified teachers who need to create an income, this seems to be contributing to falling wages and a decline in the reputation of the sector. This can also be seen in the change in training provision with the traditional Trinity CertTESOL and CELTA courses being challenged by all sorts of cheaper alternatives (often lacking any teaching practice, etc.) Teachers with little experience are being offered work at 10€/hr while more experienced and qualified teachers can command 20/25€/hr, will online companies continue to pay higher rates when they can pay less? Will it just get worse? Is it a “race to the bottom”? Teachers and language schools are all “scared” about these changes. It’s also worth thinking that cheap classes have always been available, the difference now is that they’re on the internet rather than just shared on lampposts. Perhaps when the pandemic passes, there will be less competition. Will people want to go back to the classroom? We need to consider new models of classroom-based, online and blended courses.

Selling our skills online

It is often said that specialisation and finding our niche is what we need to do to be able to differentiate online. We are TEFL professionals and not good at selling ourselves. Do we need a mindshift? Do we need to value ourselves higher?

And what of puppets?

Some wonderful ideas and experiences were shared… puppets writing letters to the group, the need to make puppets seem real (breathing, moving, not just stuck on the end of your hand!), you can make anything a puppet with goggly eyes and online puppetry can give things a whole new twist. A sad story was shared of the early retirement of one puppet due to a nasty case of head lice! Is it time to pick up your puppets again?

 

This is just a flavour of the conversations. It would be great if those others could add other things that you talked about. There’s something beautiful about the Coffee Breaks, and that’s down to you for coming and participating, let’s share it with everyone.

Thanks for coming, see you soon! 

Hub digest – 26th February, 2021

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It’s been another wonderful week in the Hub, with new members joining us from Spain, the UK, Germany, Brazil, India, Italy and Hong Kong – our community is becoming more global every week!

This week we hosted our first Monthly Management Meet Up which was a fabulous event with lots of food for thought. Topics discussed included the impact of COVID and Brexit on staffing and the skills managers need to lead effectively during these changing times. The next Meet Up is on March 23rd at 11am (UTC+1).

There was lots of discussion around our Wednesday Question this week which was on the ENORMOUS topic of observation. Feelings were mixed, but there were also good suggestions about different approaches people have tried from drop-ins to self-observation, getting involved with the class yourself and observing someone else teach one of your groups. This is definitely an area we’ll look at in more detail in the future.

Then Thursday’s webinar was hugely successful and the chat during the live event and after was full of wonderful comments and suggestions. If you’re looking for advice on time management, it’s definitely worth a watch on #catchup

Do you manage your time or does it manage you?

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Do you manage your time or does it manage you? - with Rachael Roberts (webinar)
Watch now

It was great to have Rachael Roberts joining us for this week’s webinar. As we mentioned in the introduction, she has an extensive career in ELT which puts her in a great position to help other ELT professionals. Here are the links to some of Rachael’s resources:

Not enough time – what’s the problem?

Is it a case of not saying no to things and taking too much on, or not managing your time effectively? For a lot of people, it’s likely to be a bit of both.

There’s also ‘fire-fighting mode’ where you’re constantly trying to catch up, with a never-ending to do list and get to the end of the day exhausted but with a feeling of not having achieved that much.

The problem is that you might not have enough time to think about time management and to consider what you need to prioritise, what you can say no to and how you can manage your time more efficiently.

Tracking time

Use an app like Toggl or Clockify to look at how much time you’re spending on each project. Observing what you do and change what you do, so having an app on might make you more efficient but either way, you may be surprised by the results. There was a comment about feeling ‘caught out’ but becoming more aware of just how much time you spend scrolling through social media or doing other ‘time-wasting’ activities can help you make conscious decisions to change those habits and as Rachael says, you don’t need to share your time audit with anyone else!

Budgeting time

We’re generally very good at budgeting our money – we have limited money to spend each month and have to make conscientious decisions about how to spend…to ensure we have enough money to cover the basics before we splurge out on something else.

We need to be careful to budget our time too and think about covering the basics before we splurge our time on something else.

The Eisenhower Matrix

This is a good grid to use to prioritise what you need to do. One point to note is that things in Not Important/Not Urgent (Box 4) are important too – things we do to relax and have fun shouldn’t not get done J It’s important as well to think about what things we put in this box – for example, exercise might seem Not Important and Not Urgent, but if we don’t include it as part of our routine, there will come a point where it is Important and Urgent (Box 1).

A lot of us don’t spend enough time in the Important/Not Urgent box (Box 2) – however, things we don’t focus on here tend to move to the Urgent box, which is how we can suddenly become overloaded. If you procrastinate, spend more time in Box 2 before things move to Box 1. Consciously make time for Box 2.

When you look at Box 3, it’s important to think carefully about what’s there – is it actually something Urgent which you need to do? Can it be delegated? Often these feel like the easy-wins – little tasks which feel urgent, and so we don’t get around to the big tasks in Box 1.

There was a comment as well about how in ELT we’re often focussing on the day’s lessons – so it’s worth setting aside time during your schedule to look ahead. There were lots of comments about the benefit of block planning, as well as some suggestions for new teachers to help them to plan more efficiently. One suggestion was to focus on one tool to showcase each week, rather than trying to incorporate too many different things from one week to the next. We also have more things up our sleeves as we gain more experience and having a list of fillers means that we can plan less as we know we have something we can use if we have an extra five minutes at the end of class. We also shared Chris Roland’s 300 Questions which are a great resource to have on hand – they’re in the Files section – and here’s a link to a thread from a while back about ways of storing and remembering games to use in class.

And this was a lovely quote in the comments box: It’s all about scheduling your priorities, not prioritising what’s on your schedule.

Saying No

We often have a tendency to be very excited in projects or not want to let people down and those two things together can lead to us being overwhelmed. Also, we know we’re competent people and feel we can do all these things! When you say yes to something, what does that mean you’re actually saying no to?

For example, if I say yes to this new class, I’m giving up that time which I usually spend with my family or the time I spend exercising, or the time I spend cooking a decent meal.

Three steps:

  1. recognise the pattern of always saying yes
  2. working out why you find it difficult to say no
  3. train yourself to step back and think before you agree to anything – ask for time to think about things rather than agreeing immediately

Check out Rachael’s post How to say no (without feeling bad about it)

Why time management isn’t enough…

There are two other important things you need to manage and budget: energy and focus.

How aware are you of the impact of what you’re eating on your energy levels and sustained energy?

Are you drinking enough water? Regular sipping is better than downing a whole glass when you realise you’re thirsty. There was a good tip in the comments to put marks of a 2l bottle to show how much you should be drinking every hour. You can also get apps which track your water intake.

Caffeine has a half-life of 6/7 hours and can affect your sleep but more importantly, it doesn’t stop you being tired – it’s like a painkiller in that it blocks the receptors that make you feel tired. Having too much coffee means you’re constantly blocking your body from telling you what it really needs.

Are you sleeping enough for you? Are you resting enough – meditating, napping (for a max. of 20mins so you don’t go into a deep sleep and feel groggy) or just doing nothing? Cal Newport (Deep Work) identified that the brain can only focus in a deep way for up to 4 hours a day so the things which are in Boxes 1 and 2 are good to focus on during those four hours. Scheduling rest into your day is a good way to ensure it happens.

How much are you moving during the day? This is not just about exercise but also moving around. Sitting too long has been shown to shrink the hippocampus (the part of the brain to do with memory). Again, there are apps which can give you reminders to move or stretch.

Time of the year, time of the week and even time of the day can have such a huge impact on our energy levels. Although it may feel like it makes sense to start the day checking your emails and ticking the easy things off your to do list, this is often the time of day when we are most able to concentrate and do the ‘deep work’ so you might prefer to leave those admin tasks til later in the day.

Scheduling the tougher tasks for earlier in the day can also help with procrastination. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”

Couple of further suggestions here:

Avoiding distractions

These can be external or internal. Dealing with an external distraction could include getting up earlier to work when others are still asleep, putting a Do not disturb sign on the door or working with headphones and having ambient noise on – such as Coffivity which provides the background noise of a café.

What other external distractions are you able to control? Turning off notifications is a great way to help you focus and help you to feel less stress. These can affect your adrenaline, dopamine and cortisol levels and your fight/flight response, which impacts your ability to work. It’s easy to become addicted to the dopamine hit you get every time a new notification comes in but each time you switch from one task to another – pausing your lesson planning to see who’s commented on your Facebook post – there’s a price to pay. A day’s worth of flipping between tasks could mean we waste around 40% of our working time!

How mindful are you of tech distractions? Forest is an app which can help to keep you off your ‘distraction sites’ as you can set it for a certain amount of time during which a tree will grow if you steer clear of your blocked sites. It will tell you to get back to work if you try to visit one of those sites and if you ignore it, the tree will eventually die. Study Bunny was also mentioned in the comments.

Pomodoro Technique

Work for 25 minutes straight and then have a five-minute break to get up and move around. You do four Pomodoros and then you can take a longer break. You can find it makes you more efficient J

There’s also the Japanese principle of Kaizen – doing things for one minute.

What’s the attraction of the distraction?

 If you’re still avoiding doing things, it’s important to dig deeper and think mindfully about why you’re looking for distractions. Are you feeling anxious about what you’re doing? Are you feeling resentful of the amount of work you have and feeling you’re not being paid enough?

Mindfulness has a positive effect on the brain and can strengthen the links between the pre-frontal cortex and the amygdala and can help you to understand why you’re behaving in certain ways.

Rachael mentioned the Mindfulness and EFL group which Simon set up and her ebook 30 ways to Mindfulness.

Do we, as managers, need new skills moving forward? If so, what?

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This was the first management forum on the TEFL Development Hub, it was a very successful event where honest opinions, tough experiences and some workable solutions were shared. The Hub aims to connect, share, develop were evident. Many thanks to those who came. In the group there were managers and owners from language schools big and small, as well as trainers from CELTA and Trinity CertTESOL courses. We all manage people, be it in the staffroom, the training room or the classroom and it became clear that there are many shared experiences.

We began by talking about our experiences, challenges and learning through the pandemic.

  • Building team identity – it’s challenging to create identity through online weekly team meetings. For some it has meant more meetings, others have tried to have more 1:1 meetings where there is more space to talk about personal situations. 
  • Make time for the personal connections – Morning check-ins with staff have been extremely useful.
  • “I can’t lead” – How can we lead when we feel unskilled, when we don’t know the answers or when we’re falling apart? Have we had points when we are at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, struggling with basic requirements like safety and security? Are we disappointing our teams? It has created friction between teachers and managers as everyone is used to us having the answers. 
  • “We’re flying a plane at the same time as we’re building it!” It feels scary and somehow freeing. Being honest with our teams is so important.
  • Modelling behaviour – How should we behave? How honest can we be?
  • Staff are so tired – We want to help but teaching hybrid is so hard, we feel bad and sad. One survey said that over 50% of teachers no longer enjoy their work. They can do it but they don’t like it. Start honest conversations, “How are you feeling?” We can’t solve problems necessarily but we can listen, accompany and empathise.
  • Training in webinars – It’s always interesting but not always exactly relevant for our teams.
  • Managing customers – Parents and students need us to help them too. Everybody is under stress and it shows in all sorts of ways. Be calm and confident. Customers are quick to anger, are these real complaints or are they exaggerated as expressions of frustration and a lack of control in their lives?
  • High quality customers – should we focus more on those we have who trust us rather than those who have left and didn’t even try?
  • Self-care – We also need to take care of ourselves.

What is a good leader?

  • Different types of leadership – recognising and communicating that we don’t have the answers is so important. Humility can lead to magical conversations. Look for the bright spots, find out what’s going well and share it amongst the team. Then we all gain experience and know-how.
  • Servant leadership vs controlling, directive and “heroic” leadership – share power, put the needs of staff first, be there for them instead.
  • Transitions in leadership styles – Do we sometimes need to adopt a military style directive approach, especially during times of high anxiety? Is the important thing in communicating the move between different management styles?
  • A directly relevant webinar can be found here, Andy Hockley, “Academic Leadership in the time of COVID”, many of the themes here are echoed and expanded upon within the webinar, there is also an extensive set of references at the end for deeper reading. 

What might be the future effects on staffing from Brexit and COVID?

This came second in the list of most interesting topics from the poll in the Facebook group.

  • Moving away from the “native speaker model” – Will teachers from other countries have a better chance of finding good work? Schools need to be strong and confident in saying that we guarantee good teachers, regardless of their nationality.
  • Bi-lateral agreements between the UK and other countries – The legal wheels turn very slowly and while this may happen in the longer term, we shouldn’t hold our breath. The UK needs workers from the EU so the possibility is there.
  • Online remote teaching from other countries – It’s very complex in terms of accounting. Some teachers who normally go back in the summer and work university pre-sessional work have been told that they cannot do so from outside the UK. 
  • Fewer teachers travelling to new destinations because of COVID – Is our competition local? Are we competing with our neighbour schools for staff? Do we need to increase salaries? If so, do prices need to go up? It’s had to put prices up in a recession. Do teachers understand what employers have to pay in terms of social security, etc.? How can we educate teachers in what a good, legal, socially responsible school looks like?
  • Training and development – How can we make our training and development programmes more relevant? A shift from the formal to the informal, towards more personalised training and a more active role for teachers in directing their training. Do teachers know what they need to develop? How can we balance the teachers’ needs with the school’s needs? Use a combination of observation, conversation, appraisal to create a needs analysis for your staff. Tie in recruitment, where possible, to align with your school.

Hub digest – 19th February, 2021

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Wow, there’s been a lot happening in the Hub this week!

In the Progress Hangout on Tuesday, we ended up chatting about phonology and accents which led on to the Wednesday Question. There were so many great resources shared in response and when we have the website fully up and running, we’ll be setting up a Virtual Library so members can easily access links which are shared.

On Thursday, we had our two Coffee Breaks. One of our main missions of the Hub is to provide a space where ELT professionals can find support and it felt like that was much needed this week, with people sharing concerns about job security and howbest we can market ourselves and find work online. There was also discussion around the Wednesday Question from last week, about providing the rationale for activities to our learners and an interesting chat about how the communicative approach works in an online environment.

And there’s no signs of the Hub slowing next week, as we’re excited to launch a new feature – a Monthly Management Meet Up. This will be a space open to all Hub members, but directed at providing support to those working in language school management. And we’ll also be discussing an important topic in our webinar with Rachael Roberts: do you manage your time or does it manage you?