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. 

Do you have any questions? by Anette

Well, I found this is exactly the question that produces no questions or the answer ‘no’. While running the CTS course in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan we were discussing this problem. We could see that the participants had quite a few questions but would just not raise them when we offered them the chance to share.

Why are questions so important on our training courses?

….because all learners need time to explore new ideas.

…because we encourage teachers to take responsibility for their own learning. How can teachers encourage their pupils to be more autonomous if they themselves are not autonomous learners? 

…because this is where we can see how participants are interpreting the input or trying to apply it to their situation. “How can I do that when the students aren’t motivated?” or “Why shouldn’t we read the texts out loud if the students want it?” questions let us know what the participants’ needs are.

... because often if we raise the question and let it hang around for a while, they will find answers themselves in the following days.

…because it shows they are beginning to hold up a mirror and look at their own practice, the start of ‘reflective practice’. 

…because one of our main aims on CTS is to help teachers become more reflective. Reflective teachers don’t just imitate, they think through their own situation and adapt or innovate. They think about ‘how’ and ‘why’. You can read more about this in this ASCD article ‘Fostering Reflection’. 

If you don't believe us, maybe you'll believe Voltaire? 

• "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."  Voltaire  
• 
  

Question poster activity

This is how the question poster came to life, a very simple idea which worked well and hopefully will find its way also into the teachers’ classrooms. I put up a piece of paper on the wall (at least A2 sized, I used paper for the flip chart), handed out post-it notes, or just left them on my desk so that participants could take them when needed. On the poster I wrote ‘Questions ?’ and then we started the first brainstorming of questions. I asked all of them to let the last couple of days, all the input sessions, the micro-teaching, pass in font of their inner eye and then come up with a question about any what they had learnt or experienced during the last days.

This set up seemed to work quite well, as we had at least 15 questions on the poster after this. The next point was to find time to answer these questions. So we set aside some time in the afternoon to try and answer at least a couple each day. Of course, as soon as you start with activities like this more questions come up. 

One way to use the questions is to group them according to the topic of the input sessions, Agi did (see image below). These are participants' questions related to motivation that she thought they would be able to answer or at least start to answer after the 'Motivation' session. 

Towards the end of the course we had time to set a whole 90-minute session aside to give us ample time to discuss the questions and find solutions for some problems. Again, we wanted to show at the same time how to set up a session like this so that all are involved in finding answers and not just a few people or the teacher only, as this should be a very communicative and student-centred approach. So we tried different mingle activities or ‘four corners’ and the result was great as everybody was involved and some very interesting discussions started. 

When reflecting on the session it became clear that this should be an integral part of the course, as it gives time to answer course participants’ question plus share experience and ideas. 


Other suggestions to try out

If your participants need help coming up with questions, a list like the one on this wiki might helps them. Here are other questions to help teachers reflect. 

At the end of a session, have them finish the sentence, "Now that I have studied ...., I wonder...." on a post-it note and add it to the question wall. 

Another activity to promote questioning is when the trainer writes a statement on a piece of flip chart paper and gets teachers to brainstorm. Sentences like: 'Teachers shouldn't use the students' mother tongue in class' would work well. 

From a trainer’s perspective

There are times to work in ‘hierarchical mode’, i.e. when the trainer should make sense of what is going on, interpreting for the group. 

There are times to work in a ‘cooperative mode’. This means inviting the participants to give their ideas. The trainer throws in ideas, too, but they are not more important than what the teachers say. This can be hard in cultures which are more hierarchical because anything the ‘teacher’ says is seen as ‘the right answer’.  

There are times to work in ‘autonomous mode’. The trainer hands over responsibility for interpretation/ feedback / discussion to the participants. 

The trick is to move between these three modes appropriately since each has advantages and disadvantages, see link to Heron’s work, below. (For more on these three modes, see pages 20-22.)

Finally….

If you are a trainer, we hope you will find dynamic ways of working with participants’ questions. Anette’s ‘Question poster activity’ worked really well. 

If you are a Head of English reading this, we hope you will follow some of the links to learn more about reflective practice. 

Please post feedback in the comments and share your favorite ways of working with participant questions on a CPD (Continuous Professional Development) course.

Further Reading

For more information about reflective learning download this .pdf. 

Or access the materials on this wiki: 

Trainers may find this archive of articles about experiential learning useful. 

(Download the Complete Facilitator’s Handbook, Heron, 1999, p. 20-22.  ).