The walls start out bare

I have seen many useful visual displays on the classroom walls and want to share a few with everyone. 

It is really helpful to make a display of the main areas to concentrate on while doing the practice lessons/microteaching. Here is the wall display Agi prepared in Bishkek. Of course teachers aren't concentrating on all of these areas at once  - just 2-3 points each for the next round. But the posters also help them with giving feedback to each other and self-reflection. 

Below you can see what the classrooms in Almaty were like. We ran our courses at the Suleyman Demirel University because of various logistical factors. In fact we prefer to be in a school so that the classrooms look like the ones the teachers usually use.  But whatever the classroom, we have to make the best of it! And soon the bare walls were full of posters created by the trainer or the participants.  

Before: 

The white paper on the chalkboard is the home-made screen Krzysztof improvised because the .ppt slides weren't visible on the dark green and the screen was too heavy to move around easily. He also wanted to use the board, you see. Our trainers are resourceful :). 

After: 

Here are Krzysztof's posters with the microteaching program. 

And the grammar topics that each group was to present are also on the walls. 

It can be hard at first for the participants to make their 10 minute microteaching segments fit together. They should plan together and help each other. Sometimes it takes a couple of rounds before they can do that properly. 

David Dodgson also shared some classroom displays in his post. 

Finally, it always feels good to have your work appreciated. If you are working on one of our courses, please take a lot of photos and ask permission to share any with the participants themselves. 

These two teachers made prizes - a T-shirt and a trophy - for their 'students' to win in a competition during microteaching. 

What a lovely idea, right? 

And now we're looking forward to seeing your happy teachers and their work soon....   

Learn to Train, Train to Learn by Dave Dodgson

There was a time many years ago when I was a complete novice in the world of ELT, about to start work at a dershane in Turkey with nothing more than a Trinity Cert TESOL in my hand. I was very much aware (with the point having been reiterated many times during the training course) that I still had a lot to learn. I had been told that this would come with experience of being in the classroom, shadowing senior teachers, attending workshops, and so on.

So, I was aware that I needed to learn how to be a good teacher and I was keen to do so. However, looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a major flaw in that early eagerness – I assumed that after a certain period of time, maybe a couple of years, maybe more, I would become an expert. After that, everything would be easy, I would know all I needed to know, and I would be officially good at my job. 

Luckily with time I realised that this was not the case. Far from it, I started to realise that teaching is a profession in which I would always be learning, developing, and becoming better at what I do. I understood that there would be no end to this cycle and that would be a good thing. Becoming a better teacher is truly a case of valuing the journey over the destination. 

And so, fast forward to the very recent past, with me finding myself in Almaty, Kazakhstan about to lead a teacher training course for the first time. I had led many workshops before as well as some one-day training sessions but this would be my first ever extended training programme. Once again, I was a novice with plenty to learn. However, this time I was also aware that this learning process is one that will continue as long as I work as a teacher trainer. I was also aware that my ‘critical learning moments’ could come at the most unexpected times from the most unexpected sources. Of course, I benefitted greatly from working with two such experienced trainers as Krzysztof Strzemeski and Kristina Smith but I also found I learned a lot from my group of trainees, despite the fact that the vast majority of them were novice teachers with nothing more than a few months of working experience to draw upon, and I would like to share some of the things I (re)learned from them in this post. 

posters with feedback from microteaching 

Be prepared

One area where my trainees struggled initially was lesson planning. Some of them didn’t see the point, others struggled to express their aims succinctly or identify stages of their lessons. Now, I’ll be honest with you – I haven’t written formal, detailed lesson plan in years. I try to enter the class with a general outline of what I want to do, an open, and a willingness to be flexible. And so, at first, I struggled too to help them plan lessons efficiently and effectively. And so, I decided on day two that I needed to plan my training sessions in a similar way – I sat down in my hotel room with a piece of paper and defined my aims, planned out the stages of the session, what my role would be in each stage and what the trainees roles would be, how I would organise groups and so on. This really helped me help them as I reminded myself of the process and what it is like to write a plan when you don’t have a lot of experience of being the teacher (or in my case, trainer).

Getting off to a strong start

Observing my trainees in their teaching practice, it really struck me just how important it is to get off to a strong start when teaching a lesson. The trainees who got everyone’s attention at the start of their micro-teaching sessions, and/or got everyone involved in a task quickly generally had more successful sessions than those who gave a long or hesitant introduction. By the second round of micro-teaching, I had my trainees start their sessions from outside the room so they had to make an entrance rather than just get up from their desks. This helped them focus on giving off positive body language signals, getting their students’ attention, and starting the lesson with a routine and/or student-based activity. It also forced me to think about how I start off my lessons and whether or not I follow my own advice! 

Demonstrate-repeat-review-repeat-review...

The ‘classroom context’ in Almaty was, of course, very much different to what I am used to. I have worked with young learners in Turkey for many years and have trained in-service (mainly private) school teachers as well. But now, my group of ‘learners’ were student teachers who had either just graduated or were soon to graduate. However, some things stay the same despite the differing contexts. Just as my students in Turkey need time to practice and use simple language structures, my trainees in Kazakhstan needed some time to get used to implementing basic classroom ideas like T-P-S (Think-Pair-Share). We did this through a cycle of demonstration as I modelled the idea, repetition as they tried to reproduce what I had done, and review as we focused on what was done well and what needed improving. We then repeated this cycle, each time getting closer to the goal of my trainees doing it without input or support. It struck me that this is the same cycle my primary school students go through with new language and the same cycle I go through with self-reflection – some learning practices are universal whatever the age group and context. 

Some ideas I’d like to try out in the classroom

And then, of course, there were some ideas I saw when my trainees were micro-teaching and thought ‘hmm, nice idea – why didn’t I think of that?’ and they are as follows:

·    Emailing resources – with only an input session at the end of the day and perhaps the evening to plan, it was difficult for my trainees to prepare hand-outs and photocopies for use in micro-teaching. One group hit on the idea of emailing the images they wanted to use in their lesson to the other participants ahead of the lesson. As they all had smartphones and tablets, that meant they all had easy access to the materials. I started to do this too as I emailed the hand-outs and notes to go with each day’s sessions to the trainees in advance – a great way to preview, be organised and save paper!  

·      Poster paper – I came to the sessions armed with poster paper. We made rules and stuck them on the wall, we kept track of what had been done well and what needed to be worked on in teaching practice day-by-day, and we displayed the results of group work. But then one day I came to the room ahead of micro-teaching to see some poster paper on the board – it turned out that day’s first group had prepared the board in advance and covered up information they wanted to save for later. The next day, another group stuck up four blank pieces of paper around the class thus giving each group their own personal ‘board’ for a group discussion activity. They then brought the papers up to the board for easy comparison of ideas. Simple but effective.

·      Making a learning moment out of making pairs – I showed various ways to make pairs and groups, stressing the need to mix things up and get different students working together instead of just having the same partner all the time. Most of the methods I showed were random but one teaching pair surprised me by combining making pairs with pre-teaching vocabulary! They handed out 6 words from a text they had chosen and 6 definitions on strips of paper and asked everyone to get up and match the words and meanings together, thus finding partners for the next activity at the same time. 

I made sure I told all my trainees these things at the end of the course. This was not just to encourage them by saying I liked their ideas but also to help them realise that we are always learning and we can learn from those with more experience than us or from those with a fresh outlook. Most importantly, we can also learn from our students (and trainees) and we should always be open to doing so.

How did the past influence you?

When I was in Bishkek, I saw this classroom display and it brought back many memories....

"I can read and speak Russian." 

With pictures of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Blok and Sergey Esenin.

We language teachers are all influenced by our previous experience of being students in a foreign language class. We consciously or unconsciously bring elements of that experience to our classrooms. 

When I look back at my experiences as a language learner I can identify where particular teachers or methods influenced the teacher and trainer I have become now. I’d like to reminisce a bit because I ask teachers to reflect on what they bring to the classroom so it’s only fair that I am willing to do the same.

My first experience learning a foreign language was…..

French - Silent Way

I remember taking French lessons when I was 11 or 12 in America. The teacher used Cuisenaire rods and only spoke French. I was a complete beginner. The other kids had been taking lessons for a while and they understood what they were expected to do. I was lost and scared from the first lesson. That was not a positive experience. Looking back on it, she was asking me to do simple things like “Take a blue rod” and “Which rod is longer, the green rod or the orange rod.” “Put the blue rod on top of the orange rod.” But every time she spoke to me I froze.

From this I learned that the affective filter is very, very powerful. If I put someone in the spotlight, and see the ‘Help, I’m drowning look’, I try to end it as fast as possible. That happened in Almaty when I asked a teacher to stand up (in Dave’s class) and help me organise the group work. But the teacher had such weak English that she didn’t understand. My mistake for calling on her…. But we muddled through with help from the other participants. The affective filter pops up when we analyse the micro level (this activity, that learner) but also….

...when we choose a method or approach for a series of lessons. I know that I should be ready to explain what I am doing to the learners and not just throw them in at the deep end. They might not understand the methods I am using. Why do I want them to hear and say the sentences before I write them on the board? Why don’t I teach opposites (tall, short, cheap, expensive) in the same lesson? etc I usually start in a very traditional way so the students feel comfortable and gradually lead them to different or unusual methods like my box of wooden Cuisenaire rods. I love rods now that I understand why they are so powerful! 

If you're new to using them, teachingenglish.org has a good introduction and here is an article describing a grammar lesson. Busyteacher.org has a list of 15 ways to use them.  

Personally I think it is important that the teacher should develop some rapport with learners in their mother tongue if the he/she speaks or understands it. Especially with little kids. They benefit from knowing that when they speak L1, the teacher can understand them. I speak English 98% of the time in class, but I won’t sacrifice rapport for the sake of creating a 100% English language environment. This means that if students need to tell me something in Turkish, I listen and show that I understand them. I don’t necessarily answer in Turkish though! I have seen teachers pretend not to understand the children when they speak Turkish. I just think that produces a lot of potential classroom management problems.   

I don’t remember that French teacher’s name but I send a big ‘thank you’ for teaching me the importance of affective factors in foreign language learning.

French – with a traditional, strict class teacher

When I was 13 we spent a year in Geneva, where I attended a Swiss school. We had the magnificent Madame Steck all day except for German lessons with another teacher. Madame Steck was supposed to teach us enough French across one year that we could be integrated into the Geneva education system the following year. She had complete control over the class. No one talked out of turn. She did dictation, made us copy grammar rules off the board and …gosh…I remember having to memorize French poems and recite them each week. That was scary but I can still remember parts of them.

From her I learned that to be an effective teacher you don’t need to be smiley and super-friendly. You can be the ‘master of your classroom space’ and an expert in what you do. You have legitimate power as a state-certified teacher. And kids, even immigrant kids from poor countries whose parents are not very literate (as was the case for some of the other children in the class) can learn well in an orderly environment where there are clear rules set by an authoritative teacher.

If the combination of 'teacher' and  'power' seems new or shocking, check out this comprehensive website. 

I learned not to be afraid of being the boss in my own class. Thank you, Madame Steck!

Russian - Audio-lingual Method

At the end of high school I had the chance to take Russian lessons at the local state university. The teacher followed the course book/teachers book pretty exactly as far as I can understand now with hindsight. At the beginning of every unit, we had to listen to her and repeat dialogues until we had memorised them. She built the dialogues up line by line using only Russian and hand gestures, mime and little pictures on the board so we could understand.  We didn’t see the written forms (keep those books closed!) until we could say them perfectly. Then she switched to English, we opened our books and she explained the grammar rules.

Afterwards we had to go back to the dialogues and make changes to practise the grammar. These were ‘substitution drills’ as I learned in CTEFLA (the previous version of CELTA). We didn’t read much and I can’t remember writing anything.

The advantage to learning basic Russian by listening, repeating and substituting words was that using correct grammatical forms became automatic. From this language teacher and method I took into my practice the idea that the method should match the complexities of the target language. Russian has 6 cases, singular and plural forms plus masculine, feminine and neuter nouns - and adjectives agree with nouns so there are a lot of endings to learn! The audio-lingual method really helped with that. (It might not have been useful to continue learning in this way but as I didn’t take the second year I am not sure if the same method was used.)

The biggest disadvantages were that I could only say sentences that we had memorised ("I don't have any brown eggs") and I didn't know how to continue learning on my own without a teacher. 

I can’t say I have ever had to teach a wholly audio-lingual English course book but I can build up dialogues on the board, line by line and work with the oral form before showing the written form. This made sense when we were taught it on the CTEFLA many years ago since I had experienced something similar in the Russian lessons. I don’t see many teachers doing that these days so perhaps this has become ‘old-fashioned’;). But it’s a useful technique with beginners, who often make pronunciation mistakes when they see the written form straight away. Sound-spelling correlations are one area of difficulty for learners whose languages are read more or less phonetically, like Turkish students.

Thanks to that Russian teacher, when I teach English I think about the structure and difficulties the learners have coming from the mother tongue and borrow from different methods that will help them, i.e. principled eclecticism. I also learned not to make learners dependent on me. 

German – a grammar book and immersion

My father always says that the first foreign language is the hardest, the second is a bit easier and after that you can just teach yourself in a couple of weeks or months. After learning good French, a tiny bit of colloquial German and pretty solid elementary Russian, I decided to learn to speak German.

So at age 18 I set off to spend my summer holidays with my Swiss German relatives outside Berne to learn German. I bought a ‘Learn German in 3 Months’ book and worked my way through it in my free time while listening carefully to my relatives talking. They tried to speak High German to me but of course used a lot of their particular Swiss German dialect amongst themselves.

This was my first time as an adult learner immersed in the community where the target language was being spoken. By the end of 6 weeks I could explain myself fairly clearly in German and understand a lot of what was being said. (I also picked up the odd Swiss German phrase like Merci vilmal - Thanks a lot.) From this experience I learned the value of listening carefully to infer what people must be saying, the value of rehearsal and the need to create language-learning opportunities. And that what they teach in the grammar book isn't actually what people say. 

I learned to repeat words I didn’t understand when people were talking at meal times. My aunt would explain what as being said to me again. I learned to listen carefully for standard question/response patterns that were repeated at different times and fillers people used to buy thinking time. I tried to use them myself. 

A couple of weeks into my stay, I started planning. While I was in my room I decided what I wanted to talk about, imagined the conversation in my head and looked up the words and grammar I thought I would need. Later I tried to use the language at the lunch or dinner table conversations. It didn’t always work and sometimes I was too tongue-tied to follow through. There is a big difference between practising with yourself and practising with another person! But it taught me the value of rehearsal and preparation time long before I read that these two factors are important when designing speaking activities.

Repeating the same tasks meant I got a lot of chances to hear or say certain language. My aunt taught me how to bake the Sunday loaf of bread. She showed me and explained in German. Every week she gave me feedback on how well it turned out – not kneaded enough (45 minutes minimum!), too little salt, too much salt etc.  By the end of the holiday I had great ‘baking bread in German’ vocabulary plus a new skill. I love baking bread to this day. Thank you, Aunt Elspeth!

I learned that immersion and self-study is hard work and there are days when you seem to be going backwards. And it needs great persistence, which is the positive aspect of being stubborn. I’m a Capricorn and have enough ‘stubborn’ for several normal people.  

Arabic - Grammar Translation

At 17 I decided I really wanted to learn Arabic. At university we had a couple of mad professor teachers, one of whom threw chalk at you if you made a silly mistake. He would get it to explode on your desk so the dust went all over your face and clothes. After the initial three-week ‘add-drop’ period anyone who wasn’t a serious student had dropped out. (That professor then metamorphosed into an absolute darling.)

The program was solid grammar translation and actually pretty boring. We translated fun sentences like ‘The boy entered the house’ ‘The girl entered the house’ and you can imagine the mess we made when we got the words confused…. We learned to talk about 2 yellow submarines vs 3 green submarines vs 1 white submarine, etc. 

Anyway, after memorising all the language patterns and translating various pre-Islamic poems I still couldn’t say ‘Hello, how are you?’  

We were assured that being able to recite classical poetry would really help us in Egypt. Actually it did ward off a few over-eager men, who left me an my travelling companion alone on a train when we recited the opening lines of the one in the link above. They either thought were mad or we were serious students of Arabic literature. Your guess is as good as mine. A hard-bound Arabic dictionary tried up in a shirt also proved a useful weapon. So classical grammar translation is probably good for something.

But the turning point was IH Cairo. 

Arabic – the Communicative Approach

Armed with our dictionaries we set off to our first day at the intensive Arabic course at IH Cairo. The teacher, who was from England, spoke only Arabic. The first activity we had to do was listen to the opening part of a dialogue and work out what the context was. It was a customer and waiter. We listened a few times, each time for a different purpose. We worked out that the man asked what there was, ordered soup, then wanted tea. Finally he paid for his lunch. Later that week we read a newspaper article about Pepsi and Coca Cola consumption in the world. We scanned and circled all the numbers. We worked out what they must refer to. The teacher gradually led us into the text. We realised that we didn’t need to understand everything to get a lot out of an authentic text.

Some of those lessons really stuck in my memory. 

By the end of a month we were reading fairly academic texts and I could understand the Egyptian soap operas in Ramadan well enough to follow the plot.

Wow.

Three years of grammar translation vs four weeks of communicative method. The communicative method won hands down. 

When I had a chance to become an English teacher I jumped at it. I had realised there were many ways to teach language according to the students' different personalities and expectations, their backgrounds and their future needs. 

So thank you! To that Arabic teacher in Cairo, whose name I have also forgotten, but who started me on this life-time journey…..   

And I hope I have made you think back over your experiences in learning foreign languages. Whether you are a teacher, a trainer or a program administrator, you will benefit a lot from spending some time reflecting. I look forward to reading your comments as well. 

Kristina 

First date with a new group – by Agi Enyedi

Is it a blind date?

After 2 CTS courses (one in Istanbul and one in Kyrgyzstan) I still feel a little in the dark when it comes to preparing for a new one. It’s exciting, as if someone set you up for a blind date, where you don’t know what to expect, how to greet or what present to take. Perhaps you’ll find that you need to change your hairstyle after the first hellos or that you have chosen the wrong dessert… The only thing that you can be sure of is that you’ll meet great people, devoted teachers and you as a trainer will learn as much from the experience as the teachers in the group. 

So who did I meet through the CTS courses?

When the participants arrive they do not always know what to expect. Some of them may have been told as much as that they must take part in some kind of lecture. About half of them have never participated in any in-service training before. A few may be novice teachers, freshly out of the training institute with minimal teaching experience. At the other end of the scale there was the teacher who proudly showed us about a dozen certificates from various courses, all kept neatly in a ring binder, waiting to be admired. A very mixed lot, indeed.

You can find out about your participants by doing a quick 'wants' analysis, like we did using 'the suitcase' activity. 

If you want to try out this activity with a group, we are going to post our own version in the next few days. 

CTS is the type of course where you can take away as much as you are ready to put in. So, naturally, the more experienced teachers may have a stronger sense of professional development than the ones who are still trying to find themselves as teachers and aim to play safe in the classroom.  They have a lot at stake when they do the microteaching, they can easily lose face in front of their more experienced colleagues. 

How can one approach such a mixed lot then?   

My number one suggestion is: let the participants learn from each other. Whatever they can share has a huge significance because their experience comes from the context all of them share. That's one reason why creating opportunities for group work is so important on a CTS courses. 

For the same reason, it’s important to make good use of the Rules and Expectations session on the first day, and make it a rule that participants must share ideas and no ideas will be rejected without thinking twice. If the classroom becomes a safe professional environment, it is easier to accept that they can experiment with techniques they never tried before; it’s less risky to come out of their comfort zones, to give and accept feedback on what they have done or to reflect on what they have learnt. Anette's group made the visual below in the Rules and Expectations session: 

This kind of experiential learning is possibly new for most teachers. Even if the contact persons in the schools pass on the basic information to them about the CTS course (not everyone does…), the kind of learning these teachers are familiar with and are good at is knowledge-based, it is done with a trainer with a high status.  The constant changing of roles in the classroom (being a student trying out an activity then being a teacher reflecting on the experience then a colleague giving feedback) needs openness to adventures but also a sense of security. Once this is established in the first few days, the rest of the course is much easier. This process of 'Attunement', as Daniel Pinker calls it, helps teachers see an issue from more than one point of view.  And without seeing  'why' there is not much reason to focus on the 'how'. 

What did I learn?

One thing I became very aware of was the devotion and the hard work these teachers put into their teaching. Expectations are high and students in these schools are often tried and tested in competitive situations. Teachers need to motivate them but also need to motivate themselves. Some of my participants had brilliant teaching ideas but needed to be reinforced that yes, they can break away from the course book at times and they are on the right track in changing their teaching techniques in response to their students’ needs.

Another important thing I discovered was that participants in CTS courses will be very unlikely to openly question an idea; they will listen, even pay lip-service to some novel thoughts but these ideas will take a long time to find their way to their everyday practice. So it is very important that, like in a real training situation, it is not the trainer but the participants who justify a certain practice, phrase the underlying principles or consolidate the learning outcomes.

The most memorable end-of-course ideas I collected so far were “I found myself as a teacher” and “I can see now how to stay happy in my job”. These are pretty good take-aways after two weeks and I’m looking for more such encounters.

And it's not just our idea - Kristina's response 

In fact all of these ideas fit into models of professional development/growth for teachers we find in the literature. Kathy Dyer in her post for the Teach.Learn.Grow blog says, “there are four critical elements that help make teacher professional learning meaningful and worthwhile”.

1. Choice: Teachers should be able to make choices within a framework.

On CTS courses we have a basic framework of sessions that were developed to answer the most pressing points arising from hundreds of observed lessons with primary and secondary school English teachers in our context.

At the beginning of the course (while the groups are doing sessions on group dynamics, setting rules and expectations and classroom management) trainers are busy creating a supportive atmosphere where participants can identify and talk about their needs. These conversations continue in tutorials after microteaching. There, trainers help teachers to identify areas they want to explore in their teaching. Four rounds of microteaching mean many opportunities for teachers to make choices they consider relevant.

In the final session of the course, the group discusses ways to continue professional development. The trainer helps each participant set up their own action plan for the months ahead.

2. Flexibility: The opportunity to move away from what teachers usually do in order to learn new skills or try new activity types.

During input sessions they see the trainers using the techniques. Teachers analyse the techniques and can ask questions about them.

Teachers get to experiment in a safe environment, away from the students, in the microteaching parts of our course. 

3. Incremental steps: We should remember that making changes in professional practice takes time and may come in small steps. Lots of small steps can equal big change!  

Over two weeks we typically can fit in four rounds of microteaching which gives teachers time to become aware of their teaching and make small, incremental changes that add up to a more satisfying experience for them and for the students. 

Typically teachers improve on using more pair and group work, involving the learners more, creating relevant presentations and practice activities, giving clearer instructions and more focussed feedback.

4. Supportive accountability: Teachers will learn better when they are accountable both to themselves and their colleagues on the course. 

Our groups bond well and support each other well.  Participants learn to reflect on their aims and how effectively they worked towards them. They receive feedback from peers and the trainers. 

Change

Change is hard. Changing what you do means unlearning one thing and learning something new in its place. These are two separate steps! 

Extra reading: 

If reflective practice is new for you, there are some ideas for getting started on the Teaching English website. 

This article with '21 Simple Ways to Improve Student Motivation' mentions all the points in this blog post and more. We work through and recycle and model these ideas continuously on our CTS courses.