Lesson planning and resource management

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Three 'little' things great language teachers know: Resource Management and Lesson Planning in ELT - with Steve Mullen (webinr)
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For this week’s webinar, we were joined by Steve Mullen, creator of Teachwise – a platform to help teachers plan their lessons and store resources. Before giving us a tour of the site, Steve shared three things all great language teachers know and do.

Know your learners

First up, Steve talked about the importance of building rapport and getting to know your students. This is often done through a needs analysis activity at the start of the course, but is also an ongoing process as our learners develop. To build rapport with students, Steve highlighted the importance of sharing information about ourselves as well and showcased one of my favourites, the questions or cloud game. This is a really simple activity to start the year in which you give students the answers to some personal information questions and they have to guess the correct question. There are different ways of doing this: sometimes you can have students ask the question directly and other times they can only ask yes/no questions – it depends how complicated you want to make the activity.

Know what to teach

The next thing all great teachers know is what the students need to learn, as well as what’s been seen before. Steve shared a fun analogy of a house being built: you start with the foundations, build the walls and finish with the trim. However, whereas for builders it’s easy to see what’s been done and what needs to happen next in the build from one day to the next, as teachers we have more complications. For example, progress might be less visible when working with languages and we also need to remember that just because we’ve ‘done’ something, it doesn’t mean it’s been ‘learnt’ – and we had a good discussion around this in a Wednesday Question a while back.

Know how to teach

The third point Steve raised was around knowing what methodologies and resources will best suit our learners. Within resource management, Steve said we need to think about “finding, creating, storing, tracking and retrieving learning activities” and this led on perfectly to a demo of the Teachwise platform.

Teachwise

Through the site, you can schedule all your lessons. However, more than that you can also plan your lessons, adding procedural notes to all the activities you do, and track what happened in the lessons. This means that you can easily see what you did in a previous lesson and catch up on anything which you didn’t get to in the next. You can also add vocabulary notes, perfect for highlighting key vocabulary you’re planning to introduce and keeping track of emergent language as it comes up during the lesson. 

When you create an activity, you have the choice of saving it privately or making it available to the community, meaning there are lots of resources from teachers around the world for you to access as well. There’s a handy search bar when you’re looking for activities, with filters to search by skill, level, theme and more.

There is also the option of tracking attendance, which can be particularly useful if you are working with company classes and need to provide evidence to employers. Steve says the site is aimed mainly at freelance teachers and small language schools who may not already have another system in place to track students’ attendance and progress.

Congratulations to Steve and all the Teachwise team for such an innovative platform and thanks for showing Hubsters around!

Hub digest – 12th November, 2021

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We had an interesting Trainer Talking Time in the Hub where we chatted about changes we’d like to see in initial qualifications, although we went a little off-piste as well to discuss other aspect such as when TP starts and how the number of trainees on a course can affect the sort of support they receive. And we had a really interesting webinar from the team at iDialogue, a platform which encourages cross-cultural understanding through digital penpal schemes, virtual tours and other opportunities to interact with students from around the world.

In the last couple of Wednesday Questions, people have shared some interesting thoughts around exam prep classes and using graphic organisers. And questions from Hubsters about the most important turning point in ELT history, how students can use translation sites effectively (and if they should) and some chat around Trinity’s Teach English Online course. There were also videos shared by SpongeELT and Charlie’s Lessons – two great channels with lots of CPD resources.

Cultural exchange: increasing engagement and motivation

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Implementing cultural exchange in the learning process to increase engagement and motivation - with Elena Sobol (webinar)
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This week in the Hub, we were joined by Yelena Sobol a teacher with years of experience working in countries such as China, Cyprus and Kazakhstan. She is also an ambassador for iDialogue, an innovative platform enabling English language learners from around the world to connect. To start with, Yelena talked about some of the problems with students have with speaking: fear a speaking in public, a lack of vocabulary and gaps in grammar, issues with listening and in some cases, a strong accent which affects intelligibility.

As well as teaching students the linguistic aspect, it’s important to consider cultural education – in fact, one of the 21st century skills is cross-cultural understanding. This can also be a question of language – for example, Yelena talked about some of the difference between American and British English – but it also covers traditions and customs, cuisine, lifestyles, social structures, and so on.

Cultural exchanges have been taking place for years, with letter-writing schemes and visits to other countries. Whilst it’s trickier to travel abroad at the moment, there are still many ways in which we can connect. Whilst iDialogue originally started as a letter exchange programme, when they moved online, they set up a digital penpal scheme. This enables students to chat to new friends around the world in a safe environment.

Another feature of the platform is the opportunity for collaboration between classes. As well as giving students the chance to talk to people their own age in a different country, it also allows them to have a glimpse of life inside the classroom. The platform also offers virtual road trips: live videos in which people take participants on a tour of where they live. This means students can ask questions in real-time and get an answer from someone in the know.

They also run power hours with experts and in the past, guests have included astronauts, journalists, authors and robotics engineers. Meeting real-life role models is incredibly motivating for the students and again gives them the opportunity to practise English in real communication.

There are lots of other features on the site as well: students can set up debates, share their own experiences and participate in challenges. For example, in one challenge, students had to collect and weigh all the rubbish they created in a 24-hour period. They compared how much each person had, and then estimated how much rubbish they would produce in a week, a month, a year, and so on, which led on to a discussion about how to cut back on waste. Another challenge involved a happiness calendar or a period of 21 days in which they needed to complete a mini-challenge each day, such as playing with a younger sibling, meditating for five minutes, watching the sunrise…lots of fun ideas which allowed students to experience different things which they might not have done before.

There are further features for teachers, such as being able to set up assessments or set extra activities for some students. You can also see analytics to get an idea of students engagement with the different features of the platform which can help you to choose future topics for your classes.

The team at iDialogue have very kindly offered Hubsters a one-month free trial of the platform. Please note, I’m not sure if that is valid from the date of the webinar or when you sign up – best check with Maria, who posted about the offer at the start of the webinar.

Many thanks to Yelena and all the iDialogue team for sharing the platform with us!

What changes would you like to see to initial teaching qualifications?

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There were trainers from different backgrounds in the session this morning and one CELTA trainer mentioned an upcoming course being cancelled due to a lack of numbers which led on to a discussion around the benefits and drawbacks of smaller courses. With a smaller course, it’s much easier to get to know individual trainees and there’s more time to connect and focus on their individual needs – particularly in terms of helping stronger trainees to do more. On a larger course, it can often feel like you’re spending time pulling the weaker candidates through and so there’s less time to focus on what the trainer called “CELTA+1” input, such as working on decoding in a listening lesson or seeing how to really explot a reading text. On the other hand, larger courses tend to be more dynamic and on a smaller course there’s perhaps more need for trainers to help foster the community and encourage trainees to build relationships between themselves.

We talked a little about the CertTESOL and CELTA, with a feeling that perhaps the CELTA is far more prescriptive. However, this can also depend on a centre or trainer’s ‘interpretation’ of the criteria. For example, imagine a lesson where the teacher demonstrates excellent responsiveness to students’ needs and makes the controlled practice stage longer to accomodate them and allow time to consolidate their understanding, but subsequently doesn’t have time for a chunky freer practice stage: one trainer might regard this as a fail lesson, whereas another wouldn’t.

Then there was the question of a ‘paper trail’ and the need to provide evidence of what happens in the classroom to an external moderator or assessor. This can make it tricky sometimes to allow teachers to show their planning in different ways. New teachers require a template to follow in the early days of lesson planning to show their understanding of the though process behind what they’re doing, but they tend to be linear – which isn’t always the way people ‘see’ their lesson. For example, alternative ways of showing their planning process could be talking through the lesson and staging, a brainstorm or, as one trainee once did, a clock with each stage broken into the number of minutes it would take. Whilst the latter two could be included in the trainee’s portfolio of evidence of the planning process, this would be more difficult with an oral plan – though may suit some trainees much better.

We talked about the benefits of the moderation process. If I understand correctly (as I work in a Trinity centre), CELTA course providers source an assessor themselves and though there should be different assessors looking at the same centre, there may be cases when the same assessor is called to a centre as this can limit costs if they live locally – though this may be less of an issue nowadays with online courses. In the case of Trinity, courses are externally assessed by a ‘random’ moderator, which means that each course is seen by fresh eyes which might pick up on different aspects of the course to comment on. Trainers who attended this morning who are moderators / assessors themselves also commented on the bonus of being able to steal things they like from different centres to use on their own courses.

One thing we all agreed on was a feeling of a lack of time on initial qualifications, which reminded me of Mark Carver‘s comment about the distinction between learning to teach and learning teaching. We said it would be good to have more time to explain the rationale of processes to the teachers. Leading on from this, we discussed differnt course formats. For example, one centre ran an 11-week CertTESOL course which was frontloaded, giving trainees time to ‘get stuff out the way’ – such as assignments and a lot of the input – before focussing on teaching practice from week six onwards. Another course provider runs a 6-week CELTA, with heavy input in week 1, TP in weeks 2 and 3, no TP in week 4 to focus on assignments and preparation for the final weeks of TP in weeks 5 and 6, with little to no input in these final two weeks.

On the subject of TP (and moving away a little from blue-sky thinking!), we talked about when TP starts – is it better to throw them in at the deep end early on in the course, or wait a little? There was a feeling that TP can become something scary if it gets built up for too long before it starts and we went on to chat a little about the ‘performance’ of TP. We noted how sometimes teachers do a wonderful job of chatting to students naturally whilst waiting for everyone to join with a sudden change of energy and demeanour when the lesson ‘actually’ begins. Similarly, sometimes teachers aren’t quite sure how to end a lesson naturally with an awkwardness of passing over to the next teacher or an announcement of, “Well, that’s my bit done. And now…”

This idea of the lesson as a performance is perhaps negatively reinforced by suggesting teachers rehearse their lessons or script their instructions. Whilst practising the lesson or your instructions has definite benefits, it doesn’t prepare you for dealing with the students’ responses in real-time.

One fabulous idea which came up was to compare the classroom to another situation which trainees might be more familiar with. For example, a dinner party. If you’re hosting a dinner party and someone arrives early, you don’t just ignore them and carry on with your preparation. Similarly, if you see a guest at your dinner party has an empty glass, you don’t wait for everyone else to fnish drinking before topping them up. In other words, chat to your students when they arrive and push faster finishers to do something more, such as underlining their favourites words from the text, or writing another sentence in a grammar activity.

Another great tip was that anyone can correct the answers if they have the teachers’ book. Encourage teachers to do more than just say, “correct” such as asking students to think of another form of the word or asking them where they found the answer.

What changes would you like to see in initial teacher training qualifications? Add your ideas below or click here to comment on the Facebook thread.

Hub digest – 29th October, 2021

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We’re moving to fortnightly digests for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that I can kill two birds with one stone and prep the questions for the Coffee Break as I write the digest!

It’s been a very CPD-filled fortnight in the Hub. In the Monthly Management Meet Up, we talked about balancing a teacher’s development with quality control in observations. Later that week, we had a fascinating talk from Mark Carver about how to identify quality in teacher development programmes, which also led on to this week’s Wednesday Question about our own next steps in development.

The previous week’s Wednesday Question looked at using different senses in the classroom and there were some ideas shared on using visualisations, a lesson on eating bugs and a fun, reflective task for what makes our students happy.

In the monthly Speakers’ Corner event, we chatted about queer identity in education, with Jordan Putman sharing some thought-provoking questions for teachers and centre managers.

Other questions from Hubsters have included suggestions for a C1 self-study grammar resource, a query about how you store materials you create digitally and a question about the digital resources you use – which in itself is a great list of handy sites!

The limits of ELT?

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Interesting chats as always in the coffee breaks today. In the earlier session, we ended up talking about whether finding a niche in ELT limits you. Whilst people working in after-school language classes tend to be a jack of all trades, when you set up your own business, particularly online, the suggestion seems to be to find your niche. This can certainly help in terms of marketing: you can identify the ‘pain point’ of potential clients/students and provide the answer to them with your particular skill set. Another benefit of finding your strong suit and sticking to it is that it can save you time planning in the long-run as you’re perhaps more likely to repeat similar content with different students. Plus, there’s always the option of starting with your niche and then widening the net once you become established. One downside of being your own boss though, whether you have a niche market or not, is that you need to spend time growing the business.

Another area we chatted about was the vast array of options in ELT and how limited we feel in going after different opportunities. For some, the world of ELT is completely open, with opportunities to travel to different countries, spend time volunteering, or get involved in a summer school course for a change of scene. Other times though, it’s easy to get ‘stuck’ – whether that’s because of homelife, feeling comfortable where you are or perhaps even nervous about starting in a completely new environment, no matter how many years of experience you have.

The afternoon session was far less TEFL-y (!) and we ended up chatting largely about reading – although the topic came up as we were discussing reading aloud in class. One book which came up was Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style which shows how a simple story can be told in 99 different ways and another was Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, which is written in an invented language. There were others – but I have to admit I only made a note of the two which most interested me!