Other

The benefits and challenges of being your own boss

by

As with anything in life, there are pros and cons to freelancing as well as to owning your own business and managing others. In this chat we focused more on working on our own and for ourselves and here are some of the ideas we came up with:

Advantages

Having the flexibility to choose what to take on is definitely a benefit…as long as there is enough work to choose from. One participant mentioned that around the pandemic they felt that having a stable job might have been better.

It allows you to focus on your priorities at different stages in your career and at different points in life.

It can give you the freedom to develop your own projects – though it’s important to find the balance between paid work and setting up / running other ventures.

Disadvantages

One participant talked about the isolation of working alone. Whilst the internet gives us many opportunities to interact wth colleagues – and the pandemic forced us to much more – it’s very different to sharing a physical space with someone. That said, there are lots of ELT communities online on Facebook (like the Hub!), Twitter (with #SIGTweetMeet or various #edchat meet-ups) and many ELT professionals also set up WhatsApp groups to keep in touch.

For those of us working from home, inding a suitable working environment can be tricky, particularly in these pandemic times when many of us find ourselves sharing a homeworking space with other family members. Co-working spaces are not always appropriate for teaching. A couple of suggestions for dealing with distractions if you’re working on projects were Coffivity which Rachael Roberts mentioned in her webinar on time management and binaural beats. This also led on to some chat around when we’re most productive…which became this week’s Wednesday Question. One participant mentioned finding the Pomodoro Technique (also mentioned in Rachael’s webinar) particularly useful around deadlines and that having a physical timer on the other side of the room meant that you would definitely get up to turn it off.

Another distraction which was mentioned was procrastination and the ease of going down numerous rabbit holes which turn into endless research on a project.

Speaking of projects, we chatted a little about online learning platforms. One participant has a couple of courses running through Udemy which provide a source of income without requiring much work after the initial set-up. We talked about these massive online course providers, such as Udemy and FutureLearn and identified that whilst they are very good for transmitting and receiving information, they’re less appropriate if you’re looking to build or join a community. When courses require commenting as part of the requirements, these comments tend to be rather perfunctory rather than engaging and one participant mentioned that these courses tend to have a low retention rate – perhaps because they are often free or very cheap.

It seems that some might now be trying to introduce a keyword search functionality in forums so that threads become more of a mindmap than a linear conversation.

This led us on to thinking a little about how education might change post-pandemic (if we ever get there). It feels very much like many institutions are still seeing this as a reactive period after which we’ll get back to the way things were before – but the pandemic has shown many of the failings and possibilities in education…here’s to hoping we can take some of the positives away with us.

Aptis, accentism and authenticity

by

The chat in the coffee breaks went in various different directions this week. We started off chatting about learning and teaching online, as one participant would be going back to in-person university courses soon, but with a hybrid aspect to cater to interational students. This led us to thinking about the difficulties of hybrid in a communicative classroom as well as the challenges of teaching phonology behind a mask – whilst regulations at the centre say the teacher can wear a face shield at a distance of two metres from the students, this doesn’t allow for students to practise sounds with each other with the same visual quality.

We went on to chat about the British Council Aptis exams, as another Hubster runs dedicated preparation courses for these exams. As a relatively new exam – though seemingly gaining popularity in Spain, Poland, Turkey and Latin America – preparation material was quite limited so the teacher was creating a lot of her own resources for the lessons.

We chatted a little about the popularity of different exams and exam boards in various countries – the Cambridge main suite exams are still hugely popular in Spain, Cambridge CAE and IELTS were both popular choices for people looking to move to Australia, and the Duolingo test is accepted for entry to university in Ireland. In the afternoon break, exams also came up – but then we were chatting about the inauthentictity of oral exams. As many exams are based on a script which examiners have to adhere to quite strictly, it makes conversations with candidates quite unnatural at times. For example, if you ask a candidate what they did at the weekend and they respond with something wildly exciting, ‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem like the most appropriate response!

On the topic of exams, we also questioned how well first-language English speakers would fare in a C2 exam…yet this is generally the requirement placed on second-language English users in order to get work as English teachers. This led on to talk around native speakerism and accentism, with a couple of our Irish participants experiencing discrimination because of their accents. The topic of descriptive and prescriptive grammar also came up briefly, in terms of thinking about what people say as well as how they say it – in my recent binge-watching Castle, I’ve noticed a lot of ‘What do we got?’ from Detective Beckett and one Hubster mentioned working with third-culture children and how the phrases they come out with can sometimes be seen as ‘incorrect’ by someone not familiar with their parents’ linguistic heritage.

Authenticity came up as well in thinking about coursebook materials, as well as the accents our learners are most familiar with. Working in Australia, one Hubster mentioned that her students struggled to understand the Australian background having come from Asia or Europe where American and British English was taught. Considering materials, there was a question of whether coursebooks even have authentic varieties of English – is the Australian you’re hearing really just a voice actor from Oxford? Voices – a new coursebook series from National Geographic – has a strong focus on varieties of English and using second-language English speakers as models for pronunciation activities, so there are definitely steps being made in the right direction. An excellent resource for exposing learners to more accents is the Dialects Archive in which speakers from around the world have been recorded reading a scripted text and speaking freely – great for learners to hear and compare different accents in English and perhaps a useful resource for any teachers looking to find out more about potential pronunciation problems their learners may have. It’s also worth revisiting the notes from Lina’s webinar for more ideas and useful resources.

Another suggestion for exposing learners to different accents was inviting guests to speak during our lessons. One Hubster mentioned having asked her mother and husband to record short audios for her students and another said she had invited guests to join classes, even pre-pandemic. This type of live listening is a fabulously authentic experience for our learners and we suggested it might be more beneficial for guests to be non-teachers, as we have a habit of modifying our speech to support learners’ listening. However, if anyone is interested in getting involved with a ‘guest-speaking’ project with other Hub members, let us know and we can put you in touch with other teachers.

Another project which was mentioned was a training course from Renewable English to make your classes a greener place to be – see Harry’s website for more details and look out for a post in the Hub sometimes soon… And on the topic of courses, we chatted about the difference in prices for online and in-person courses, as well as the huge difference in costs for an in-person course depending on location and a concern that if cheaper courses of the same quality are now readily available online, people will be discouraged from travelling to take an in-person course. 

And that was today’s coffee breaks. Thanks to everyone who came along – as always we had questions prepped around recent topics from the Hub, but the conversations took the direction they wanted to!

Coffee and a catch-up

by

During the sessions we covered a huge range of topics, including the weather, pets and other such tefly topics including induction, use and abuse of materials, student  motivation, etc, etc. Read on to find out more.

Getting into induction

In the morning session we kicked things off by talking about induction and the move towards a lighter touch approach, understanding that very little is actually retained in these sessions and always needs to be repeated in various different ways. We talked about differentiation between returning and new teachers and about the importance of building team too. 

One feature we thought is important in induction is making sure everyone is ok for the first lessons. One thing we all agreed on is that we probably should head to the books in the first class or two, instead it’s more important to work on connections. Harry Waters shared the first day activities that are on the TEFL teachers in Seville Facebook group. We need to create a space where the students want to be there (after a long holiday). On top of that there are a lot of “admin” things to take care of especially around the organisation of online materials. We need to give teachers time and support for online set up and also devote class time to it. And more than anything we need to build confidence, for both teachers and students.

The use and abuse of materials

And what about September, any further thoughts on where we’re going to be? In class, online, hybrid? Whatever space we’re in, the online workbooks and self-assessment materials will continue to be really useful; our ability to gather so much info about the students. We commented that there is now an overwhelming amount of material with publishers producing more and more all the time as they continue to justify their costs. What happens with all the creativity, fun and personalisation when we are confronted with all this material. We need to approach it all with care bearing in mind students’ (and teachers’) needs.

Motivation, visible learning and elite sport

We went on to talk about motivation, setting short-term goals and mused on the idea that learning a language is in many ways like going to the gym. We went on to talk about John Hattie’s “Visible Learning” in this respect and related to when students really learn something. Are exams a good indicator? They are certainly an indicator. We wondered whether students then use the language to satisfy the teacher/exam and balanced this by asserting that the use of challenging language initially needs to be “set-piece”, rehearsed and shoe-horned into language use so that students can move from rehearsed to more natural language. We try to create a naturalness into the artificiality of the classroom. We talked about the importance of teaching chunks of language and about making it automatic. We moved on to “cognitive load”, automatisation and learning to drive; it starts off as a huge effort and then becomes natural, and the same is arguably true in learning languages. Our use of group work can release pressure on the brain and reduce the cognitive load. There’s huge amounts of research into elite sports but much less into second language acquisition. What can we learn from the research?

One thing we agreed on is that there has been a shift from a focus on communicative competence to exam preparation and that many of our students are achieving more and more. Has B2 become the accepted minimum? Is there a shift from C1 to C2 as the aspiration for our students? Are we getting better at it? Are our students getting better at English within this shift of focus towards exams? Does this tie in with the “Demand High” ideas of Jim Scrivener? How much are bilingual programmes in schools part of the answer? All of this can put more and more pressure on our students, we need to be mindful of that.

Which coursebook?

One Hubber asked for suggestions for a B2/C1 book which isn’t based around exams. We talked about two year per level systems and about using the same book across two years. The favourite non-exam book still seems to be English File from OUP, we love the extra communicative activities, although people weren’t so keen on the listening activities and the big jump into exams. We talked about the challenges of making exam books interesting and accessible and the need to prevent us all from just tumbling from one book exercise to another. We talked about using shorter books, CUP’s Compact was mentioned as was the Straight to… series. Within the group there was strong support for Macmillan’s Ready for… series, especially as it often has more communicative activities too. Whatever book we chose, newer teachers will always need help and guidance to use them effectively.

And when we’ve got even the driest coursebook we can give things a twist with some easy-to-do and low preparation activities. We like to give students the answers first and then they work out why it’s this and not that. Alternatively we can give them a couple of possible answers rather than the empty space or a choice of four. We agreed that the process is more important than the correct answer.

A trip down memory lane and back to the future

We talked about some (very) old favourites and wondered if they are still useful and available. Reward Resource Packs for communicative activities, In at the deep end for a functional approach to teaching business English, Streamline English and Off Stage! all got honourable mentions. What’s your favourite golden oldie?

Teach This was mentioned as having a huge variety of usable materials. You just need to input the language focus and the level and you get all sorts of things.

Stress, guilt and saying no

We started off in the afternoon session talking about levels of stress as one Hubber had recently stepped down from a project and we talked about the need to know when to say no, and the feelings of guilt which that often entails. We then went on to talk about a project which another Hubber had recently started: setting up their own website to market courses and we chatted about the benefits of learning how to do these things to be able to edit the site in the future rather than needing to rely on someone else doing it.

Our projects

This led on to some discussion around websites and blogging, and a query as to whether the blogging boom of the early 2010s was over. A couple of coffee break participants were regular bloggers during the hey-day and reflected whether this was also due to how their timetables had changed now: whereas in the past they were working in afternoon classes and so had more time during the mornings to read blogs, nowadays they’re working in other areas of ELT and so that ‘free’ time is now part of their 9-5 working day.

That said, there are still some prolific bloggers out there with great sites. Katherine Bilsborough’s Creating ELT Materials, which was started in June 2021, was mentioned as a new favourite. 

Carrying on the chat around projects we had been working on, one Hubber shared her experience of designing and running a course to educate young people, and their families, about menstruation. This was particularly interesting as she talked about the cultural norms surrounding the topic as well as making people feel comfortable about using terminology related to the topic. It was also interesting to hear about how she designed the course: running it over a period of weeks rather than an intensive course, as she said this gave participants more time to absorb the content and provided them with adequate space and time to ask any follow-up questions they might have had. We talked as well about the benefits of running a course like this online, as participants might feel more able to discuss sensitive issues in a safe space, perhaps feeling more comfortable accessing the course from home.

Don’t get too comfortable…

From there we talked briefly about COVID and the benefits and drawbacks of moving online. Some learners thrived in an online environment and it feels a shame to force them back into a traditional classroom. However, there were many others, particularly those in underprivileged communities, whose education suffered significantly during the pandemic.

Growth mindsets, eye dialect and inclusivity

by

We love to try new things in the Hub and today we launched a new feature, Speakers’ Corner: a space for people to come along and share a short presentation, thought or query followed by time for participants to chat around a question the speaker proposes. Our aim is to give people a stepping stone towards preparing a talk for a conference, to have space for them to get feedback on a potential presentation or to offer people who don’t feel ready for a longer presentation the chance to share their thoughts. And we also wanted to provide people with a space to discuss the topics which come up, hence having a five-minute presentation followed by ten minutes to chat in small groups. The notes below aim to share a couple of key ideas from the speakers, as well as the questions which they posed for us to discuss, so please feel free to add comments in response to any of the topics. Here’s a link as well back to the post about this blogpost on the Facebook group as there are some interesting comments there too. And huge thanks to everyone who came along to our inaugural event!

Tracey kicked off the event by talking about growth and fixed mindsets, following her research into the topic. In her talk, she mentioned that that your mindset can differ depending on the task and that people with a fixed mindset often feel that things are innate so if you’re ‘not good’ at something, you’ll never get better. She also suggested we should do more to praise the process of our language learners rather than only the result, before asking us to think about how our classroom practice might (inadvertently) promote a fixed mindset. To find out more about the power of yet and developing a growth mindset, you might like to start by watching Carol Dweck’s TED talk on The power of believing you can improve. 

What are we doing to promote a fixed mindset?

Next up, I talked about eye dialect – dialogue written to represent a character’s accent. In its origins, it was often used to show the speech of uneducated characters and I also came across this idea: “writing about non-mother-tongue speakers can seem bigoted or prejudiced because a writer can try too hard to mimic the ‘otherness’ of a ‘foreign’ character’s speech”. My thoughts were evolving around whether we form an unconscious bias towards the speaker when it’s used to represent the speech of a second language English user, as well as what it does to perpetuate linguistic stereotypes. 

To what extent do you feel that eye dialect of non-mother-tongue users of English has a negative effect?

To round off our inaugural event, Simon talked about a topic he’s developing for an upcoming conference. He’s planning on presenting various ideas for how we can create a more inclusive classroom and having conference participants discuss how effective the ideas would be. His ideas included stand-alone lessons on a particular topic, using neurodivergent-friendly materials, using published materials such as Raise Up! as well as incorporating authentic materials such as The Owl House and characters created by Rick Riordan.

What can we do to create a more inclusive and representative classroom?

Shared languages and shared experiences

by

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?

by

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.