TEFL Trainer Hub

Trainer Hub digest – 7th June, 2024

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In our live sessions this month, we’ve discussed the qualities of an effective teachers (based on some research carried out by Yenus Nurie Bogale and Bantalem Derseh Wale) and whether we take a local or global approach in training sessions.

Our What if… questions have focussed on supporting teachers in using L1 in the classroom and how to help if they suspect a learner has a specific learning difference.

Following on from one of our live sessions, we also reflected on whether you can teach someone to build rapport.

How do developments in ELT feed into your practice as a trainer?

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How do developments in ELT feed into your practice as a trainer? (Trainer Talking Time)

Huge thanks to everyone who was able to attend one of the Trainer Talking Time sessions and as always, apologies for the note-taking and subsequent waffle below – it’s so difficult to write good notes when the conversation is so engaging! 

How do you find out about developments in ELT?

Google Scholar – and one trainer mentioned how having a PhD helps you to develop the skills to skim/scan academic articles to find what you need. We also highlighted how theory and ‘behind the scenes’ information is more useful than the quick tips and listicles whcih come up more frequently in regular searches. 

Being a part of Communities of Practice (CoPs) which are more researchers than teachers. Calls for papers tend to be more forward-looking, which could be quite overwhelming for teachers, but these are developments which will be coming in five years’ time.

BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) has a research SIG (Special Interest Group). 

One trainer suggested asking questions on social media, people will tend to share links.

Edutopia – a fantastic resource, you can sign up for a newsletter in an area that interests you, it has practical activities to put research into practice with different levels of teacher experience.

Facebook offers a lot in terms of professional development, but there is a lot of information overload and competing ideas. People suggested the following Facebook groups:

An exam-focused trainer said she follows exam boards and publishing houses who do exams. She mentioned that TOEFL format changed in July so there is a lot of information about that in North American forums.

Another trainer is taking the NILE Trainer Development course and said a lot of what she’s reading is ‘good old-fashioned psychology, human nature stuff that hasn’t really changed’. If you’re thinking about the course, Rachel Tsateri has a great series of blogposts covering her experience.

What makes an expert teacher? Trainers mentioned being interested in motivation and how to integrate socio-cultural dimension into their own practice – rather than looking at language skills. Similarly, moving away from a blinkered ELT/language focus, other people are looking at teaching in general, rather than a specific focus on ELT, e.g. John Hattie.  However, people who are interested in SLA/ALA, might argue that we do need that more focused input.

What opportunities do you have to discuss these developments with other trainers?

‘Feel a bit lonely sometimes’ – as a teacher you often have a staffroom and there are more opportunities to learn things online.

Building rapport with the teachers when you’re working online with teachers – how do you get teachers on-board with this idea? 

Training can be quite lonely, there’s a lot of trial and error and we often learn on the job. Many of us could benefit from support in developing our training skills. 

As a more experienced trainer, companies perhaps feel you don’t need that support.

How do these developments feed into your practice?

The gap between researchers and teachers is still very wide – they’re not listening to each other and the language of research can be quite elitist.

New ‘buzzwords’ are being invented in academia all the time. Teachers learn something, then are told that’s no longer relevant, but they know what works in their lessons.

Working with pre-service teachers, there’s a danger of overwhelming them with advanced information. They need the basics. This can also affect your motivation as a trainer to look into new developments if you can’t put them into practice.

Trying to cherrypick what is relevant for your teachers – how relevant is it to their classes? Knowing what focus your teachers need – what is necessary for them at that time? Some skills/knowledge are needed straight away and practicioners need experience and success with those things to feel motivated (e.g. a tip that transforms classroom management overnight inspires them and motivate them and then encourages them to look into other things).

How confident you feel as a trainer also has an effect on what areas you look into. There might be a significant bias that you have as a trainer, e.g. you might want to ignore AI and what it means for us as ELT professionals.

Time is an issue as well – we don’t have time to do the research for it to then feed into our practice.

How do you model different approaches in your input?

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How do you model different approaches in your input? (Trainer Talking Time)

As always, I’ve tried to group the thoughts which came up into different threads and there are lots of questions in there to reflect on. In the session on Monday, we chatted quite a bit about the lack of focus on one-to-one teaching on pre-service qualifications, despite the fact that this is an important source of income for many teachers and requires a different approach than group teaching. This led onto a discussion about Dogme and the benefits and potential drawbacks of using it in one-to-one teaching. Across the two sessions, we also touched on what approaches are popular in teaching other languages and queried the research available to those teachers. I think one of my favourite quotes from the session, from Tracey, was 

If you’re passionate about the approach you’re using, it will work.

One-to-one teaching

How much focus is placed on teaching a single student in pre-service qualifications (or higher-level qualifications)? On the Trinity CertTESOL, there is an assignment in which prepare a lesson and study plan for an individual learner. In module 3 on the Cambridge DELTA, there is the option to focus more on one-to-one teaching. Could training courses reflect the way ELT is developing – even the DipTESOL still requires 8 minimum in their classes for teaching practice. We often teach as we were taught, rather than preparing people for their future.

Preparing teachers for working one-to-one would also give the profession that level of professionalism – preparing teachers to be better able to do different things and not just being thrown into it because of what’s on the market (similarly to YLs).

Even just working with two people instead of one is very different. 

Setting expectations and objectives may be trickier with one-to-one students – do we often ‘level down’ to the pace of the learner, particularly if they come along having had a busy day? It’s much easier to get sidetracked.

And breaking the ‘power gap’ – not always being in a position where the teacher has the ‘power’ and leads the conversation or asks questions.

Other languages or other subjects

Teaching languages is not 100% transferable skills (you can teach English, but can you teach French?). What literature is there for German / Spanish / Japanese as a foreign language?

Berlitz follows a Direct Method which they have transferred to teaching other languages.

Visible Learning, John Hattie – according to research, there are effective things we should be doing in every lesson for success. Can we say learning languages is the same as learning other languages? If there is criteria for success, do we need to limit our scope to encourage success? No – we need variety and to know what learners want (preference as well as effectiveness).

For teachers teaching in mainstream education, it can be a very different context to ELT. Lisa mentioned  she felt there were lots of benefits to having done a languages PGCE, there was an emphasis on using the L2 in the lesson and a lot of deliberate thought went into that as for teachers it was often their L2 as well. The PPP approach was mainly used in that context. Communicative Language Teaching (ELT) runs rings around other approaches because we can see how effective and wide-reaching it is.

Another challenge is the mix of levels in a class – in mainstream education in the UK, learners tended to have a similar level and were starting from the same point. But in ELT and mainstream education with English, there can be a huge range of levels within a class.

Focus on Dogme

Dogme – a logistical difficulty of incorporating it in a pre-service course. How do you get the why across to them? The benefits of breaking out of what you’re doing and focusing on the learners’ needs is so important – how can we help teachers to follow this route without it being just a conversation or winging it? How do teachers get the familiarity with the language to do Dogme effectively? How do we decide what grammar is ‘difficult’ for learners? Do teachers need to have a good grasp of the CEFR or can they be responsive to what learners are really looking for (even if it seems to be beyond or below their level)? The main names behind Dogme (Thornbury, Meddings, Gaughan) have many years of experience behind them before starting Dogme.

Until you have experience working with different learners of the CEFR, it’s very difficult to know what they ‘should’ know at different points. What are they expected to have good control / grasp of at different points? Perhaps they don’t have a good enough grasp of X in order to be able to do Y, which is what they want to do. What is the big picture in Dogme – how do learners review and revisit language? Is there a sense of structure / progress?

Student motivation – does it work better for some learners? How effective is it? Some learners are motivated by those small steps – will they feel that sense of progress with a Dogme approach? Learners bring certain expectations of what lessons should be like – will some learners be more responsive to another approach (e.g. PPP) if it ties more closely to how they’ve been taught in the past? Do learners worry about words in isolation (e.g. did) but feel comfortable with chunks (What did you do yesterday?)?

A different approach of teaching monolingual vs multilingual and groups vs individuals. Pre-service qualifications are very much focused on working with groups and the techniques you’re shown and classroom management techniques are much more group-focussed. Dogme allows for this more individualised approach.

IH Journal – Lisa’s Action Research on Dogme.  https://ihworld.com/ih-journal/issues/issue-34/dogme-a-teacher-s-view/

Demand High ELT (Scrivener and Underhill) also had some ideas on how to incorporate other approaches to get the most out of a coursebook activity, which can be responsive to students’ needs.

Other aspects of teacher development

International House Teachers’ Portal – Adrian Underhill Improvisation and including it on pre-service qualifications. Knowledge of how to deal with difficult questions, makes you feel more confident.

Interactive observation – fab idea to have a lesson by a tutor that could be stopped for trainee teachers to reflect on what they just saw (much more immediate than at the end of the hour). InnovateELT has demos lessons where participants chat to teacher and learners afterwards. Record a lesson and watch it alongside a trainer who can pause and ask questions – what were you thinking at that point? Reflects more immediate feedback.

Reflecting on the lesson – what could you have done differently (not necessarily in a negative way, but to raise awareness of different approaches.) Informed reflection – reading around the research / theory as well as having your own personal experiences. Also asking the learners about their experiences: what did you most enjoy in the lesson? what’s one thing you learnt?

How can we engage colleagues in CPD?

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How do you engage colleagues in CPD? (Trainer Talking Time)

Lots of interesting chat came up in the two sessions, so I’ll try to share everyone’s thoughts in the major threads we discussed…

Incentives

Time and incentive (not only monetary, but seeing the value of it), motivation, providing choice.

A credit-style system, does it actually work? Are people actually participating actively or just in it for the credits? You would need to reflect on quantitative and qualitative data to see whether it’s actually having an effect. National conferences often have some sort of accreditation system.

Is it different for freelancers / people contracted in a company?

Are people contracted to be at work for a certain number of hours (e.g. in the building 8 hours, but teaching 4)? In-house training is paid and contracted in some schools. Some schools also have a training budget to support teachers to do courses such as NILE, DELTA, etc. There might also be possibilities to miss one day to attend a conference and have a substitute provided.

Reasons NOT to get involved in CPD

Why do I need to learn more? (though how can someone working in education think like that!?)

Coping with people who don’t have that drive for CPD – a realisation that your perspective isn’t the same as everyone else’s. CPD does need to take a different form for people at different stages in their careers – why should we force people to engage? If they’re not motivated, they won’t get anything out of it. If they do have gaps in their knowledge, you can approach and discuss things with them and find what would be suitable for them. However, education is constantly changing (as we saw just with the pandemic, but even now with ChatGPT and other new websites, apps, etc). Potentially have a list of what’s available in terms of training and have teachers identify what they’ve attended/feel comfortable with.

CPD can sometimes get confused with administrative work in in-house training.

Mental health also plays a role – people are more cautious of taking on extra stress to take a long-term course (like DELTA) or go through the process of preparing and delivering a session. There are also people who are long-term TEFLers who are content being ‘just’ teachers – they’re happy, they do their lessons, they prepare things well, but don’t have the desire / motivation to do anything more – fair play to them!

Suggestions

A longer-term initiative, e.g. action research over a period of time. Teachers can choose a topic specific to their interests.

Peer observations – do teachers have a choice of who you observe, so you can feel that you’re learning from someone with more experience (in a certain area). Providing teachers with guidance on how to give feedback (and feeling you have the right to). Knowing what questions to ask to, especially if there are awkward moments in the lesson.

Building a more positive attitude around observation so teachers feel more open to the process. Many experienced teachers feel nervous about the experience.

Collaborative planning is a nice option (e.g. working together to plan an FCE class) – helps to share ideas and build a useful ‘project’ so teachers have something tangible to take away. Can be something more general to support teachers who don’t teach the same group, e.g. a reading skills lesson (steps, discussing stages).

Relevance

What are the prospects for the future? How will this CPD help me?

Is it possible for people to opt-in for CPD? Or does it have to be done by everyone?

Importance of planning and having a long-term view of it – can people see the connection between different sessions (threads) over a period of time?

Appropriacy for their own context (reflective questions as well – what would you use? Why wouldn’t you use other elements?).

Time appropriate too – does it come at the time of need (rather than after)?

Each classroom is different – what can I learn from your experience?

In the pandemic, we were all quite motivated and attended everything! Temptation to do more as things were available online – but doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all good. Being more selective now that work is back on track. Need time to let things sink in as well and to REFLECT on what worked and what didn’t.

Presenters

Big names attract more attendance – but have the big names moved away from the classroom? Do they address the gap between theory and practice? Are veterans just saying the same thing they said twenty years ago? New speakers bring something new to the table and might have a different energy.

Collaborative sessions – with two teachers presenting together. We’re all alone in our classrooms – does this perhaps make people feel they don’t need that connection? 

Giving teachers a voice – e.g. a mini-seminar with each person presenting for 15 minutes. Also helps to build rapport – you go along to support your colleagues. Provides experience for teachers to become conference speakers or teacher trainers. Everyone has something to offer – whether you’ve been teaching for a year or twenty.

How can you encourage people to deliver or lead in-house sessions? Do teachers feel coerced into taking on a training role if they’re asked to deliver a session or mentor a new colleague? Delivering sessions requires a different skill set – there might be gaps in people’s knowledge which you need to know how to fill (the curse of the expert).

Some centres run sessions on delivering sessions which builds to either an in-house conference in large organisations or a regional conference. 

How can conference organisers encourage new voices? Shorter sessions might be less daunting (20-30 minutes)

Guest Speaker schemes in some teachers’ organisations – a teacher from one member school does an input session in another member school.

Other thoughts…

Is there a ‘social’ element to CPD? Meeting colleagues, building rapport between the team?

The staffroom is also a place for unscheduled CPD – if there are times when people are all together there but not ‘busy’ (e.g. dashing off to their next class). More immediate collaboration and helping in those moments of need.

A distinction perhaps between training and development – personal /professional development which teachers do in their own (‘free’) time (e.g. setting up a blog, getting better at FCE marking, etc) vs. attending conferences, taking courses, going to webinars, being involved in mentoring/ coaching.

People in academic management positions also need to lead by example and be role models for their team. Some of us are CPD junkies!

NILE management course – co-constructed, highly recommended. Generational differences around incentivisation – younger generation want to be paid for their time, older generation were more inclined to do things for free. Do younger generation want a more immediate return / instant gratification? Before you did things because it could be beneficial for your future (if I do it for free this time, perhaps they’ll pay me next time). Personality type as well – are you a yes person? Have a tendency to say yes to things and end up lots of extra work. Knock-on effect of paying speakers…increases the cost for participants. Building your brand – lots of teachers have social media channels as part of their brand – exposure! 

“Hygiene factors” affect what people are looking for, e.g. money, contract, pension contributions, days off. It’s about life cycles of teachers – as you stay in the industry your needs change.

There are some great responses from Karen to some of the threads back in the Facebook group 🤩

What pre- and post-course support can we offer teachers?

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What pre- and post-course support can we offer teachers? (Trainer Talking Time)

Not sure if there was less interest in this topic or just everyone’s very busy (I know I am!) so notes are a little thin on the ground with more questions than answers😃

Pre-course support

Thinking about pre-service qualifications like the CELTA and CertTESOL, how much should/could trainees do before starting the course?

Can you contextualise something before you’re in the experience? Do new teachers have the necessary experience to draw on to make sense of everything?

Something focused on community building – getting to know the platform, each other, with tasks (forum/slack) to introduce themselves and something on beliefs (what will your classroom look like?) and expectations.

Exposing people to just how intense it is – if we know how stressful the course is for almost everyone, is it a problem with the course?

We also had an interesting chat about whether trainers are trying to fit more into the course? (as the profession has developed, there’s more things that we want trainees to be aware of, e.g. nativespeakerism, PARSNIPS, etc. but the four-week timeframe hasn’t changed)

In-course support

Reflection activities – we need to give people time/space and focus to consolidate what they’re learning.

Post-course support

What can you offer trainees as paid support and free support? e.g. careers advice could be free

You need to factor in the extra workload – both in terms of participant effort and tutor response. 

Access to materials after the course (e.g. journal subscriptions for a period of time)

Six-month check-in / reflection / feedback (reunion) – what materials are you using that you’d like to share? – also beneficial for the centre to hear feedback after course participants have had more time to reflect as we often get quite immediate feedback at the end of a course

How do you support teachers to give effective feedback to each other?

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How do you support teachers to give feedback to each other? (Trainer Talking Time)

As always, these notes were taken whilst listening to the chat, so they aren’t always full sentences 😆 These were a couple of questions I posted to kick off the chat, but it went in some interesting directions around the mindset of being observed and how who we’re observing will affect the type of feedback given:

  • What training do you currently provide teachers who participate in peer feedback?
  • What are important factors to consider regarding the affective and procedural aspects of giving feedback?

And more questions came out of the session. For example:

  • What are people’s expectations of feedback?
  • What have been people’s experiences of feedback in the past?

This tied in with exploring the teacher’s perception of what a good teacher is…exploring their implicit beliefs so we have an awareness of what they believe and can adapt our feedback appropriately.

In the case of a pre-service qualification, it’s a whole new world, with people coming from different backgrounds, cultures, ages – at the beginning can be very difficult because of worrying about hurting their peers. Time is a factor – do we have the space to provide adequate support?

We talked about creating a climate of confidence, learning by example and modelling the types of questions you would expect them to ask each other, with more tutor-led questioning at the start.

It’s also important to allay their fears – feedback coming from the tutor is based on criteria (on certain courses), it’s not personal, it’s to help them develop. Is there a teacher development criteria? Cambridge had a beta version of a self-assessment tool. Jim created a similar one and tried it out for a few years. There were issues around teachers using self-assessment and overgrading their abilities. Having a framework can also help teachers to imagine their development journey (I’m here now and this is where I could be…). This could help developing teachers see if they’re ready for a higher level qualification.

Procedural

Perhaps different for initial training sessions and peer observations

THINK (thoughtful, honest, informed, necessary, kind)

Backing things up with facts – about the lesson, rather than the teacher

What sort of feedback do people need at different levels? (e.g. trainee teacher / new teacher / Delta level teachers) Need to filter, and alter expectations of what the teacher will be doing

What language do we use and are the teachers familiar with it? (eliciting, inx) But also are they concepts which will be useful to teachers in their context? Are the teachers open to trying new things?

It’s a good idea for the person looking for feedback to ask the questions to support observers…asking a specific question can help to direct the feedback and makes it more valuable for the person receiving feedback.

Stimulus recall – describe what happened and then ask them about what they were thinking at that point.

Affective

Positive feedback is not just a compliment – it should be advice to continue with good practice (and this is as important as highlighting where there can be improvement)

The feedback is based on the lesson, not the teacher.

Feedback is not just constructive criticism.

When and how do we give feedback?

Providing written feedback before oral feedback – gives teacher the time to look at things before the feedback chat. Adding an audio note alongside the written feedback helps to make the tone clearer. You could use screencastify or something similar to record a video with audio.

Waiting to provide written feedback til after oral feedback can have its benefits, e.g. a teacher might see something very differently (perhaps with good rationale).

“This is what I saw…What are your thoughts?” (describing rather than evaluating)

Importance of including evidence in observer commentary

More exploratory questions. Direct questions can be useful but exploratory questions help teachers to explore their beliefs more deeply.

The Sandwich Method – is it sincere? 

Have teachers draw a flower – petals are things that worked well, two leaves are the things to work on

Allowing for informal feedback – on an in-person course, they would go off and grab a coffee at the end and share initial thoughts informally. Do we still allow space for this on online courses? And not only between trainees, but also on an in-person course, it’s easier for the tutor to grab a teacher and check if they understood all the feedback, chat through something in a bit more detail…

Observation

With a session on feedback, the topic of observation inevitably came up too! 

Observation isn’t the only tool that should be used to help teachers see where they need to be. With some teachers it can help them identify where they want to be, but needs to be combined with other tools to be truly effective.

The pre- and post- is REALLY important as well.

Sit down with a teacher and plan a lesson together. Experienced teacher teaches it. Then plan another lesson together and newer teacher teaches it, with feedback after each stage. A lot of teachers need that extra support around planning too

EQUALS – distinction between qualitative observation (get a snapshot of how things are going at the school level) and developmental (more focussed on the individual).

Observing the teaching and learning, not the teacher.

Stigma around observation, often used as an administrative tool rather than developmental. Teaching a ‘display lesson’, rather than showing what actually happens in the lesson on a regular basis.

Some resources