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Teacher Identity

This blog post was inspired by Sandy Millin’s write-up of an IATEFL 2025 panel on the subject of Teacher Identity…

I think opportunities to discuss and reflect on teacher identity, such as the IATEFL 2025 panel written up by Sandy, are invaluable, as identity is constantly evolving and growing. In the first talk Sandy summarised, the speaker, Robyn Stewart, adapted Barkhulzen and Mandieta’s (2020) facets of language teacher professional identity to highlight the influence of the world on identity, external influence on it. It also shows the interplay between personal and professional identity and the elements that can be considered to be part of our professional identity:

Via Sandy Millin’s write-up of Robyn Stewart’s talk in the IATEFL 2025 teacher identity panel.

There are so many things that influence who we are in the classroom! One of the lessons Robyn Stewart drew from her dissertation research was “Don’t underestimate the role of context”. I’m inclined to agree:

On a personal level, I’m not that interested in generative AI, generally distrust it, disapprove of the resource consumption it represents and feel the amount of money, time, expertise and so on being ploughed into it everywhere could be better spent elsewhere (e.g. use of AI in medical contexts) rather than generating infinite quantities of text.

As a language learner, if I had the time, energy and spare brain, or was as driven as summer 2014 me, such that I could overcome the lack of all the afore-mentioned (and could override my concerns about unnecessary resource consumption!), I would perhaps explore the possibilities of communicating with it in Italian/French/German and using it to help me improve my production. I could get *well* in to a project like that. (And if I were teaching general English I could use the knowledge and skills I might develop in the process to help my students benefit from using the English version.)

However, my professional identity has the greatest influence on my interaction with AI: I have to embrace AI’s existence and figure out ways to work with students in a world which it is now very much a part of. In terms of context, I work specifically in higher education, preparing students to study at university by teaching them an Academic English skills course which they do alongside subject modules. Assessments are high stakes in terms of scores but they also need to ensure that students develop the skills necessary to succeed, including that of correctly treading the line between fair use of tools and academic misconduct regulations – a line that has been evolving with the evolution of AI. We used to mutter about Grammarly and translation tools, but ignore them other than prohibiting students from using them and putting a handful forward for misconduct each assessment cycle, and then generative AI came along and blew all that out of the water and onto a whole other level. We have been grappling with it ever since. However, it will only be come September of this year that I will engage with it fully as a teacher in the classroom beyond warning students off it (rather than only from the perspective of course coordination, course/materials development – as in, integrating teaching AI – related skills into our materials, currently in progress, rather than developing materials using AI – and misconduct evaluation).

The young Vietnamese participants in the study carried out by Hang Vu, the third speaker of the IATEFL 2025 panel on teacher identity, demonstrated a high level of insight and awareness into the issues they face in developing their professional identity as teachers in a world dominated by AI, and what kind of training they need in order to do that successfully. Sandy described Hang Vu’s idea of “emerging identities”, as summarised on the slide below:

Via Sandy Millin’s write up of Hang Vu’s talk in the IATEFL 2025 panel on Teacher Identity.

There’s a lot to think about there! I suppose I have mainly been teacher/coordinator as AI inspector in professional terms, but also teacher as learner as despite my personal misgivings: I have made an effort to attend (whether live or via recording) all the training available to us regarding AI. I have been teacher as AI user when I have used it to generate discussion questions (and then teacher as critical thinker when I have deleted half of them as unsuitable and edited/adapted others!). Teacher as AI instructor/facilitator, of course, as mentioned above, is still in the “coming soon to a classroom near you” stage. I suppose will have to be “teacher as AI supporter” within the “teacher as instructor/facilitator” side of things – regarding what we decide are acceptable uses of AI…but I predict it will be more along the lines of channeling inevitable use rather than encouraging use vs non-use! And I think alongside that, I will definitely be encouraging critical discussion in my classroom regarding the use of AI and surrounding issues. It will be interesting to see what the students think. It seems to me that just as much as the youngsters in the Vietnamese study, us old fossils who have been teaching a good while also need to regularly engage with our professional identities and figure out how we are going to move with the times professionally, regardless of (although obviously also interlinked/connected with/influenced by!) our personal feelings towards the various changes (which as Catherine Walters’ plenary discussed, have been many and varied over the last 50 years!)

Sandy’s post finished with some of the questions posed by the audience, one of which was “Should we proactively work with learners about how to do AI? Maybe we should ask learners for the whole AI conversation, not just the final result.” – It’s an interesting one. I definitely want critical discussion and to find out the students’ take on it, and as with other things potentially their feedback/ideas/thoughts can feed into future iterations of the course, but ultimately, in terms of assessment, what is and isn’t acceptable has to align with university and college policy on AI use. One thing I do hope is that I will be able to persuade students of the importance of developing their own voice, as I think if I can do that, then reasonable/acceptable use (with the appropriate guidance on how) will be a natural progression. For sure, all this thinking I am doing at the moment (I’m on annual leave – I have time to think!!) will be a useful form of preparation for the task ahead!

This blog post is plenty long enough already, yet I haven’t even scratched the surface of identity, personal and professional, and the interplays between identity and classroom. But, another time… 🙂

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Generative AI and Voice

I’m a writer. I am writing right now! I have written journal articles, book chapters, (unpublished) fiction, (unpublished) poetry, materials, reflections (blog posts), combination summary/reflections of talks/workshops (blog posts) I attend, emails, feedback on students’ work, the occasional Facebook update, Whatsapp/messenger/Google chat messages, and so the list goes on. It is a form of expression, as is speaking, and drawing. These, including all the different kinds of writing I have done and do, are all forms of expression that AI is now capable of approximating. However, until fairly recently (when suddenly it was showing up everywhere!), I had not explicitly considered the relationship between AI generated production and a person’s ‘voice’. Examples of ‘voice’ vs AI can be seen in the two screenshots below:

Via an email from Pavillion ELT – abstract of a forthcoming webinar.
Via Sandy Millin’s summary of Ciaran Lynch’s MaW SIG PCE talk at IATEFL 2025.

Both of these screenshots set voice against AI-generated content. The first one (which looks like an interesting webinar – Wednesday 14th May between 1600 and 1700 London time in case you might like to attend!) seems to be about helping learners develop their own voice in another language and suggests that this aspect of language learning is of greater importance in a world full of AI output. The second is in the context of materials writing, and highlights an issue that arises in the use of AI in creating materials – “lacks teachers’ unique voice”. The speaker goes on to offer a framework for using AI to help with materials writing while avoiding the problems listed in the above screenshot. (See Sandy Millin’s write up for further information! The post actually collects all of her write-ups of the MaW SIG 2025 PCE talks in a single post – good value! 🙂 )

I teach academic skills including writing to primarily foundation and occasionally pre-masters students who want to go on and study at Sheffield University. In the last year, we’ve been overhauling our syllabus, partially in response to one of our assessments being retired and partially in response to the proliferation of generative AI. Our goal is to move from complete prohibition of AI to responsible use of it. And I suppose, one thing we hope to achieve from that is reach a point where students may or may not choose to use AI in certain elements of their assessment but actively avoid it in others. This, I think, has some overlap with Ciaran Lynch’s framework for writing materials:

Via Sandy Millin’s summary of Ciaran Lynch’s MaW SIG PCE talk at IATEFL 2025.

Maybe we need a similar framework/workflow for our students that succinctly captures when and how AI use might be helpful and when it is to be avoided. And I think voice is part of the key to that! But what exactly is voice? In terms of writing, according to Mhilli (2023),

“authorial voice is the identity of the author reflected in written discourse, where written discourse should be understood as an ever evolving and dynamic source of language features available to the writer to choose from to express their voice. To clarify further, authorial identity may encapsulate such extra-discoursal features as race, national origin, age, or gender. Authorial voice, in contrast, comprises, only those aspects of identity that can be traced in a piece of writing”.

[I recommend having a read of this article, if you are interested in the concept of voice! Especially regarding the tension between writers’ authentic L1 voice and the constraints of academic writing in terms of genre and linguistic features (which vary across fields).]

In terms of essay writing, and our students (who are only doing secondary research), if they are copying large chunks of text from generative AI, then they are not manipulating available language features to express meaning/their voice, they are merely doing the written equivalent of lip-synching. I think this is still the case if they use it for paraphrasing because paraphrasing is influenced by your stance towards what you are paraphrasing and how you are using the information. I suppose students could in theory prompt AI to take a particular stance in writing a paraphrase or explain how they plan to use the information but they would also need to be able to evaluate the output and assess whether it meets that brief sufficiently. In which case, would it save them much time or effort? Would the outcome be truer to the student’s own voice? I wonder. Of course, the assessment’s purpose and criteria would influence whether not that use was acceptable.

On the other hand, if students use AI to help them come up with keywords for searches and then look at titles and abstracts, and choose which sources to read in more depth, select ideas, engage with those ideas, evaluate them, synthesise them and organise it all into an essay, using language features available to them, then that incorporates use of AI but definitely doesn’t obscure their voice and the ownership of the essay is still very much with the student rather than with AI. They could even get AI to list relevant ideas for the essay title (with full awareness that any individual idea might be partly or fully a hallucination), thereby giving them a starting point of possible things to consider, and compare those with what they find in the literature. This (and the greyer area around paraphrasing explored above) suggests that a key element that underpins voice is that of criticality. Perhaps we could also describe it as active (and informed) use rather than passive use.

Another issue regarding voice in a world of AI generated output, which I have also come across recently lies in the use of AI detection tools:

From “AI, Academic Integrity and Authentic Assessment: An Ethical Path Forward for Education“

If ESL and autistic voices are more likely to be flagged as AI generated content, then our AI detection tools do not allow space for these authentic voices. These findings point to a need to be very careful in the assumptions we make. I’m sure we’ve all looked at a piece of work and gone “this was definitely written by AI, it’s so obvious!” at some point. Hopefully our conclusions are based on our knowledge of our students, and their linguistic abilities, previous work produced under various conditions and so on. However, for submissions that are anonymised this is no longer possible. I think, rather than relying on detection tools, we need to work towards making our assessments and the criteria by which we assess robust enough to negate the need for such tools. Either way, the findings would also suggest that the webinar described in screenshot no. 1 may be very pertinent for teachers in our field. (I wonder if the speakers have come across instances of that line of research too?! I increasingly get the impression that schedule-willing, I may be attending that webinar!)

Finally, this excerpt from a Guardian article about AI and human intelligence I think provides perhaps the most important reason for helping students to develop their voice and not sidestep this through use of AI:

“‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?” – Helen Thomson writing for The Guardian, Saturday 19th April 2025

We want those Eureka moments! We want the richness of what diversity of thought brings to the table. (It is baffling to see Diversity, Equality and Inclusion initiatives being dismantled willy nilly in the U.S. – everybody loses out from that. But then, so much of what goes on these days is baffling.) Maybe something small we can do is help our students realise that their voice, as every voice, is important and that diluting it and losing it through ineffective use of AI makes the world a poorer place. I haven’t even touched on AI and image production or AI and spoken production but this blog post is long enough already (maybe I should have got AI to summarise it for me! 😉 ) so I will leave that for another post!

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Using Adobe Firefly for Image Generation

Have you used Adobe Firefly before? Me neither. But we have free access to it via the University and the TEL team has used it, and so did a session for us on it. It can be used to for images to put in lesson handouts and slides, but also online platforms like Wooclap and Quizlet.

You write a prompt in a box and it generates images.

This was a scenario given to us:

Prompt 1: an image of 4 students in a discussion. This was the result:

Issues: There are 3 students and teacher. They look quite young while we teach university age students. Three of them are blonde so it isn’t a good representation of our students. So this is an example of the bias that exists in AI in an automatic result with no detail prescribed in the prompt.

Prompt 2: an image of 4 university students from diverse background in a discussion. This was the result:

Problems: They are not in a classroom.

Adding “seated” (to be more typical of a classroom):

Not a perfect picture (looks a bit like an airport…) but better than the first picture! In terms of the purpose of generating the image, this would probably work. Prompt writing/editing for Adobe Firefly tends to take multiple iterations before you get something you might be happy to use.

We were given the following tips:

  • add more detail to get better results;
  • be aware of bias as you engineer prompts and evaluate the outcome;
  • be picky – it may take several iterations to get what you want. Sometimes a fairly simple prompt immediately yields a satisfactory outcome but usually it takes a bit more effort. Particularly to produce an outcome that is suitably representative for an international student population.

Adobe Firefly has a lot of stock images that it draws on which means the quality is better than similar counterparts.

Once you have generated an image you can also edit it to a certain extent. Which is good as the first images you get can have arm melds, funny shaped heads and so forth! It’s not very good with limbs. A central human image may be fine but anyone in the background or if you require groups/more people, then problems abound! Despite these issues, Firefly is better at it than Gemini.

So al very cool but actually stock images like Pixabay (and creative commons licensed like Flickr – in particular ELTpics – if the context is suitable), i.e. human generated, are much less resource-intensive to use. So, don’t get too carried away by the “it’s so cool” thing. I tend to use Google image search and the appropriate level of license filter, personally.

My general impression: I can’t currently see an Adobe Firefly – shaped hole in my life that needs filling. I wonder if in 5 years time I will look back on this post with an “oh you innocent child” type lens or not?! Time will tell! It was a good session though, after being shown the prompts and pitfalls, we went into a breakout group and had to come up with prompts for another scenario. Unfortunately in my group, none of us had access sorted out yet so we couldn’t test the prompts we wrote.

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Looking forward: My Resolutions/Goals for 2025

In the interests of starting 2025 on a positive note, I thought I would set myself a few goals/New Year Resolutions. Before starting to write this post, however, I had a look at previous years and what I have blogged about at the start of the year, wondering what past goals had been, and noticed a handful of things:

  • I have actually tended to do more goal-setting at the start of the academic year rather than the calendar year in most instances, when I have done it.
  • Burnout at various points has impacted my goal-setting (before the pandemic: driving a shift from working 5 days to working 4 days which began in September 2020 but was initiated pre-pandemic; during the pandemic: well, obviously….and thank goodness for the afore-mentioned shift part way through; and since the pandemic: the combination of house-buying, house-renovating, wedding planning and moving – the latter 3 all in 2023 and interspersed with ill health – did for me quite comprehensively.)
  • When I did do it at the start of 2017, I drew on this slide from a presentation I had done for EVO (quoting EVO via that blog post – Every year in January and February, the Electronic Village Online (a project of TESOL’s Computer-Assisted Language Learning Interest Section) brings together English language educators from around the world to engage in free, collaborative, online professional development sessions, – not sure if it is still running now!):

So I suppose this blog post, once complete, will be fulfilling the grey italics regarding motivation at the bottom of the slide.

Coming up with something that is “challenging and difficult yet realistic” is, itself…challenging, I feel! Hitting that sweet spot requires both a good degree of self-awareness and, perhaps, of humility. It’s so easy to aim too high and miss realistic. On the other hand, if one lacks awareness and confidence, it might be equally easy to aim too far the other way and pick something that you duly achieve but is perhaps less satisfying than it might be. This time last year, “challenging” was simply surviving and carrying out my job duties. Nevertheless, I managed to do quite a bit of CPD last year, which goes to show that you don’t necessarily need goals in order to achieve things! It can be a more organic process. If we consider our minds and bodies as our primary tools, they won’t be good for getting anything done if we don’t look after them so that has to come first before the rest can follow. Last summer holiday was certainly much-needed recovery time for me.

So what of this year? Well, so far so good… I had an extra week of leave which meant that as well as doing the famiy Christmas visiting marathon (1 week) and being ill (10 days), I did have a couple of days of real down time and didn’t have to start work while still poorly. This makes a huge difference wellbeing-wise and motivation-wise, the latter because I have actual energy and, also important, ability to generate positivity. This year is going to be very challenging due to external factors but things will unfold as they unfold regardless of what my brain is doing. Which leads me to…

Resolution 1

Channel my brain into positive and creative pursuits (rather than only using it for worrying). Too fluffy? Well what it looks like is:

  • doing more writing: blogging – I’ve not done much blogging recently, up until the second half of last semester when I got started again. I want to do more this year!
  • doing more writing: creative writing (fiction) – I’d done no creative writing since about 2016 or so until last week (life has been a LOT) but oh the joy it’s brought already in the short time I’ve been back at it. 🙂
  • creative writing development: I’ve started a course by Malorie Blackman on BBC Maestro about writing YA fiction. My sister gave it to me for my birthday in 2022 and I’ve only now got round to using it!
  • being curious about my students and my team of teachers and using that to feed innovation in how I support them.
  • doing more piano, while not linking success or failure to specific quantities: this may seem to fly in the face of measurability but I have realised that in the past I have set myself time-limited goals e.g. do a bit every day, or x days a week or whatever, and then when I’ve missed sessions I’ve been more likely to then not do it for a spell because missing the session felt like failure. So this time, I will count each time I do it as a success, regardless of whether it’s day 10 in a row or the first day in 2 weeks. After all, it is a pleasure not a rod to beat myself with!
  • learning: doing CPD always brings me great satisfaction and so does learning new things outside of work. I want to do both whenever I can (albeit not simultaneously)! Within this lies continuing preparation and exploration for my future Ed Doc. As well as information-based things, I’d like to learn how to crochet but I’ve never done it before so it needs maybe a holiday in which I am not ill to have the brain space possibly… We shall see!

My next resolution, to balance out no.1, will focus on the physical:

Resolution 2

Prioritise physical wellbeing. I’m no spring chicken and am at that delightful age and stage where I’m actively losing muscle if I’m not working hard to maintain it! Physical health and wellbeing also have an impact on mental health and wellbeing. Too fluffy? Well, what it looks like is:

  • do a regular bouldering session at the bouldering wall: once a week on a Tuesday is doable when I have my NAW
  • Do an additional strength training session one day a week.
  • Keep running 4 times a week (on 2 x work days I go out before breakfast! Which is a lot more enjoyable in daylight once the days get longer!!)
  • Do yoga regularly – I predict being able to manage this approx 5 times a week (my timetable on Thursday and Friday isn’t so amenable to it!)
  • Do lots of gardening (great for getting fresh air and bits of exercise; a short burst of weeding or digging could be a perfect 10 minute break…)

So, that’s me…but something is missing and it is the basis of my final 2 resolutions…

Resolution 3

Put time and effort into my marriage. Too fluffy? Well, what it looks like is:

  • Support my wife in achieving her own goals.
  • Prioritise spending time with her regularly.
  • Continue team-working everything effectively!

I am lucky in having a wonderful marriage but I never will take it for granted!

Resolution 4

(On the topic of not taking things for granted…) Make time for family and friends. Too fluffy? Well, what it looks like is:

  • make the effort to get in touch with friends/family
  • make the effort to see friends/family
  • balance this with my need for solitary downtime/recovery (I need to recognise this need because otherwise I will inevitably burn out!)

So, that covers mental, physical, emotional/connectional areas and encompasses personal, social and professional domains. Circling back to the diagram, these resolutions/goals deliberately don’t have any completion dates as such, because they are ongoing, regular things rather than one-offs. They don’t appear clear and specific on the face of it but I have a clear and specific idea of what they look like in practice, which suffices. Being ongoing things, they are all both proximal and distal. In terms of measurability and ability to be evaluated, I can do this simply by looking back on each day/week/month and seeing what I’ve done. I think they are definitely realistic…are they challenging and difficult (enough)? Well, all the examples require effort to do, but they are positive and uplifting so it is effort I will be happy to make! I do think if our resolutions/goals are uplifting and/or inspire us, we are more likely to carry them out! I would add that as a principle. 🙂

What are your goals/resolutions for this year? Whatever they are, Happy 2025 to you! Let’s hope it is as kind to us all as it can be.

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Gen AI and Independent Learning

This was the title of the English with Cambridge Webinar that I watched today (linked so you can watch it too – recommended!) It’s divided into 3 parts – what autonomy is, activities learners can do with Gen AI to learn autonomously and risks to avoid. This post will offer a brief summary of that, followed by some ideas and thoughts of my own.

The first activity is to design an autonomous learner, sharing ideas in the chat. The usual kind of things came up – motivation, confidence, agency, enthusiasm. These wre compared with the literature e.g. Holec (1981) – “the autonomous learner can take charge of their own learning” but the speaker said we need to unpackage and update this. So that, it does involve the ideas that were put in the chat, as well as ability to manage their time and resources, awareness of learning strategies, resourceful (e.g. would think to ask an AI chatbot) but also critical (won’t just accept the response without evaluating it). However, teachers are also very important in the process – autonomous learners aren’t born but are made, with support from teachers. This is important because if you are autonomous, you will achieve better results and improve more quickly. Also, autonomy is important beyond language learning, in the work place, in personal lives etc – it is a lifelong learning and living skill. It goes hand in hand with critical thinking, which is also a key skill. You are also likely to be have better confidence and self-esteem.

The other speaker reminds us that most AI tools require users to be a certain age. E.g. ChatGPT is not for under 13’s and 13-18 year olds need parental consent. So, if you do any activities with students, ensure they are old enough to use them and whether you need parental consent. Then some activities:

  1. Using the Chatbot as a writing tutor. This is a back and forth process, where the student asks the Chatbot to highlight the mistakes but not correct them. The student then tries to correct the mistakes and repeats the activity. They need to tell the Chatbot explicitly not to correct them. This could go through several iterations until the learner has had enough, at which point they prompt the Chatbox to explain the mistakes. “What about this sentence? What is wrong with it? <sentence>” NB: the Chatbot can make mistakes – it can say there are mistakes when there aren’t.
  2. We were shown a sort of tabulated study plan for improving writing and asked what we think the prompt might have been to generate it. Critically: if you want something useful, you need to be very detailed in your prompt to get something useful back from the Chatbot. It was something along the lines of “My teacher says my writing has xyz problems, and I want to take a B1 writing test in 4 weeks. I will have to write x and y. Can you make a study plan for me in a table. Can you include information about what I should do and what resources I should use.”
  3. Similar to the above, we were shown a visual idiom guide and asked what we thought the prompt was. It was something along the lines of “I have to learn these phrases for next week. I’m not a patient student and I think I have dsylexia. Can you suggest some study guides. <Phrases>.
  4. Intonation – Voice chat in ChatGPT. You speak into your phone and you get audio back. “I’ve got to do a presentation. I think my intonation is flat. Can you help me? <Short extract from presentation> And ChatGPT can make suggestions. You can keep going back and forth. Say it again and ask for further suggestions.

(I recommend watching the webinar to receive a full presentation of these ideas!)

The final part of the webinar deals with the risks of using AI and how to avoid them. There was a poll asking “Has AI ever misunderstood you?” – There were a lot of answers with “yes”. AI is not faultless and doesn’t always understand. Then we are asked to think about what overreliance on AI might look at. Lack of creativity, quite formulaic answers, repetitive were ideas that came up from the audience. To avoid these risks, we need to train learners not to use AI too much. This is also where critical thinking comes in – learners need to be able to make effective choices in use of AI. We want learners to be confident users of AI but in a critical way. We want them to be thinking and reflecting on things like is AI useful, is it doing what it needs to do. Questioning them regularly, getting them to keep a journal of keeping it – when they used it, why, the result, would they use it again – to get them to think about how effective it is. Offering yourself as a resource in terms of support in using AI, that learners can talk to you and get advice when they want to. Cambridge Life Competencies Framework was talked about – there are freely available activities to use with students.

An example activity from this:

This can be used on a text that Generative AI has produced, to encourage students to question what is produced.

Another activity was to ask students to use for a chosen stage of a task. They should explain where they will use it, why they decided to use it for that stage of the task and then reflect on the outcome. This should be a supportive, encouraging environment. The key thing is encouraging reflection.

The final question was “Are you an autonomous learner?” directed at us teachers. We need to build up our knowledge and understanding of things like AI. This will enable us to be able to give support and advice to students. Turn activities into your own, adapted to your own context. We should also be a learning community in terms of AI, as it is new for us all. This would create a supportive environment rather than one of fear for using it in the wrong way.

The webinar concluded with 3 things to keep in mind: Purpose – you need a reason for using AI, don’t use it for the sake of it or because you think you should. Have a plan. Make it sure it fits the purpose. Privacy – any data that you put into GenAI chat becomes part of the data that the Chatbot uses. So anything you put it can be repeated to other users. Therefore don’t enter personal data about you, your learners or anyone else into it. You should also not put copyrighted things into it if you don’t own it. Planet – the use of GenAI has an effect on sustainability in terms of the environment and society as a whole.

My thoughts and ideas

The first thing that I couldn’t help thinking was that when I was learning Italian intensively and autonomously in the summer of 2014, I would have LOVED to have had access to GenAI! Being able to get instant basic feedback on my writing would have been very cool. I wonder how competent I would have been at handling the feedback i.e. at identifying which parts were valid and which parts were sketchy.

There’s also an AI tool we learnt about in one of the AI professional development sessions delivered at work, Google Notebook, where you can feed it a bunch of content and it converts it into a podcast which is a discussion between 2 “people”, in passably natural spoken language. It is called a “Deep Dive”. The usual AI caveats apply, in that what it churns out in the podcast may not be accurate to what was fed to it and it might make stuff up. Personally, I would have loved using it for Italian learning though. It would be really good for generating content to listen to, using topics and vocabulary that you have some familiarity with. You could read the texts in preparation. I don’t believe this is the intended purpose of the tool (it is supposed to be a research assistant, and you are effectively outsourcing reading and summarising texts to AI) but it would be a very good use of it! It would also mean the issue of accuracy was less acute, given the purpose of listening to the podcast/summary would be to practise listening rather than to make high stakes decisions based on that output!

Where I work, we’ve mostly been coming at it from the perspective of how to conduct assessments in a world where AI exists and students use it in the production of their written work. Being part of a university, the first stage was waiting for there to be university policy on it. Now we are at the stage of being able to integrate the policy into our programme. It is still a slow process as there is a lot of procedure to follow when you bring in new things. We are shifting from a zero tolerance policy, which obviously was not very effective but all we had to be going on with, to identifying how and when AI could be used effectively in students’ learning and where the boundaries are. We want to integrate positive use into lessons, which echoes what this webinar was saying. By modelling effective use and giving students opportunities to use it with support, and highlighting its limitations, we hope to help them become more AI literate and therefore less likely to use it in detrimental ways. Maybe at some point we will have to teach them about Google Note and the limitations of it, since it is likely something that they could use at university as part of their process.

It is nice to be moving towards a position in which we can acknowledge the positive elements of AI. Of course, as quickly as we adapt, so quickly will it continue to evolve. (The tools we learnt about in the session where we learnt about the “Deep Dive” – wow! I may turn my notes. or at least some of them, from that session into a future blog post…) I think, going back to the webinar at the root of this post, one of the great things about it (the webinar, that is) is that the skills and criticality, and ideas for teaching those which were presented, will continue to be equally relevant even though the ideas for using the AI itself will change and evolve. As for the part about learner autonomy, in my view they nailed it – it was so good to see them discussing it as something to bring into the classroom and develop (I have done a lot of work on that in my career – through classroom research, through publication, through conference presentations and webinars) rather than something that learners are or aren’t. So, as I said before, it IS definitely worth a watch! Also worth taking some time to look at the Cambridge Life Competencies framework and resources attached to it.

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My list of in-house workshops

On my Talks page you can find links to all the talks/workshops I have done externally i.e. at events like conferences (both online and face to face), as a guest speaker, and as webinars. In this post, I have finally got round to listing and, where relevant linking to, all the workshops and scholarship circles I’ve led or co-led as part of in-house CPD programmes, both in my previous job at IH Palermo and my current job at the University of Sheffield’s ELTC. 

ELTC

IH Palermo

  • Fostering Learner Autonomy
  • Take-away from IATEFL 2013
  • Error correction workshop
  • Using Edmodo
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Instructional Design Course

I am 8/10 weeks through the Instructional Design course (link) run by some of the good ELTC TEL team folk. Their site is called The Training Foundry and on it you can find information about the courses, but also webinar recordings and blog posts. It’s pretty cool. This is the subtitle for the Instructional Design course (IDC):

“Our Instructional Design for Language Teachers course can help experienced teachers design flipped and asynchronous materials.”

It is a 10 week course and I would quite happily recommend it to anyone who is interested in principles of online learning and learning to use a variety of tools to design asynchronous content. It has a weekly live online session (using Google Meet), and each week there are also a series of tasks to complete. There is interaction between students (sharing output, commenting on others’ output etc) via a forum.

Most of the tools that we’ve learnt the basics in were actually new to me (with the exception of Google Slides [Week 1] but even with that I learnt new things about it!):

  • Wordwall

Wordwall (link) is a very user-friendly tool. It is subscription-based but I haven’t taken out a subscription, just using the limited free version for the purposes of the course. You can make the usual array of ELT activities. One I particularly like is called Word wheel. You input words and it creates a wheel in which each word is a segment of the wheel (looks sort of like a pie chart with equally sized segment). You can “spin” it and it will stop at random on one of the words you have input. You could then get students to define it (as we had to do in one of our online lessons, using vocabulary from an article we had read), for example.

Another online-based tool for making asynchronous content. Also requires a subscription but it offers a free trial which served the purposes of the course. It is pretty versatile. You input information into a form and it spits out an activity. You can also e.g. create a voice recording tool that you could embed into a page on your platform, or whatever asynchronous content tool you were using, for students to use for an activity, make interactive video activities, activities using pictures and much more.

As you can see, my free trial is coming to an end. I’ve had a good play with it though and really like it. But it is EXPENSIVE! So it is something that a business/institution/self-employed person might invest in rather than an individual. Our TEL team has access via institutional subscription, for example. I find it really visually appealing and quite intuitive to use. Interactive elements are built in, if a little limited. But limitations are lifted because you can also embed interactive content from e.g. H5P, Quizlet or its sister tool Storyline (see below for more information about this one!).

  • Storyline

This one, you have to download a programme onto your computer to do it rather than using it in a web browser. It is part of RISE so you can find it there. No screenshot because it only runs natively in Windows and I decided therefore to use an old spare Windows laptop (creak creak creak!) rather than subject my even older Macbook to “Parallels” which is required in order to run it. (Said macbook makes enough take-off noises for using Google meet, so! But for as long as it limps along, I shall use it!!) However, it effectively looks like powerpoint when you open the programme. The area you are working with is slide-shaped/screen-shaped. But unlike powerpoint it has a lot more power in the interactivity department. It has a timeline, it has “layers”, it has “triggers” and all sorts. The newest version also has AI stuff inbuilt. All of this stuff enables you to create a lot of interactivity in various ways. It gives you a 2 week free trial before kicking you out in the absence of a giant pile of moolah. We spent two weeks of the course on it because there is a lot to learn. You would use this if you were creating materials for a course that you were planning to run multiple times because it is a big time investment that is required to create stuff. At the ELTC it is used a lot for flipped content for the summer school and at the bit where I am (USIC) it is used as the basis of most if not all of the interactive content that we embed onto Blackboard for learners, to support the learning done live online and F2F.

In terms of using the interface, I struggled because using it on a computer that hasn’t got strong processing powers and hasn’t got a big screen, it made it even more time-consuming than it should be. Everything is tiny (the parts where you control the “layers”, the timeline and all that jazz) and you have to generate previews to check what you did works properly on a regular basis, and the computer had to strain really hard each time!

The rest of the course

This week we’ve been working on using video in online learning. Which, again, is very time-consuming and requires decent (probably fairly expensive) equipment to produce high quality stuff. We have learnt a bit about video editing (which I have done a little bit of myself in a hobbytastic kind of way!). Still to come in the final two weeks is zooming out to consider more about designing a whole course rather than sub-parts of it and then a final wrapping up and moving forwards week.

It’s been really nice to learn how to use all these different tools and challenge myself in this way. The final assessment was creating a storyboard and run of lessons in Articulate RISE and I am happy with what I have made for that (I have completed it early because of the whole free trial running out thing!). I based it on an AES listening exam lecture. It was also of course interesting to study some of the theory around online learning, as well as focus on making content accessible (which is a legal requirement!). Overall I think the course works really well, building each week on previous content and progressing logically, and the live online sessions definitely complemented the tasks and forum part.

Have you used any of these tools? Which ones do you favour? Do you use any other tools which I haven’t mentioned? There is a lot to keep abreast of, isn’t there!

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Mindfulness for ELT Professionals by Trish Reilly 27 May 2022

This session was hosted by Rachael Roberts/ELT Freelance Professionals Lightbulb Moments/Earn, Learn, Thrive. (Link is to the Facebook Group that Rachael manages, where this session was advertised.)

Trish started with a little breathing exercise, breathing in and out 3 times. 3 breaths stop. Take 3 deep breaths, releasing each one fully. A little break from where we were to the present moment. Any time you need a quick reset, you can do your 3 breaths, without anyone even noticing. A quick, simple technique to learn and use – before a class, before a meeting.

She asked us “Where is your mind?”. We are often on autopilot. She told us a story of how she drove from home to ballet on autopilot and had no recollection how she got there. It’s very easy not to pay attention to what is happening. And before you know it, you’ve had 5 chocolate biscuits from the packet. Regular tasks can be done without fully engaging brains but it doesn’t help us with fully living our lives. Our bodies are here but where are our minds? We live in the story of me. We might be in the past thinking about regrets or anger or frustration. Going over and over things. Or we might be in the future worrying about something that will happen, or fearing it. The story of “what if…”

The mind is its own place and in itself can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell (John Milton). We can be in a tricky situation but if we can give ourselves space to be with what is, it can be a situation that we can gracefully take ourselves through. Our minds create our reality. How many thoughts do you think you might have in a day? is the next question. Research says we have up to 70,000 thoughts in a day, which is incredible when you think about it. Most of our thoughts are not real. Mindfulness helps us become more aware of our thoughts and emotions for what they are, thoughts and emotions not facts.

John Kabat-Zinn – “Mindfulness means to pay attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgementally.” We did a short bodyscan and I nodded off, oops. It is also a simple practice moving your attention from one body part to another to another and focusing your attention on it non-judgementally. Next she asks us to remember a stressful moment. That creates stress in our bodies. Our brains can’t tell the difference between imagining difficult things and having to deal with difficult things. So we get the same stress response by thinking about things as by experiencing things. The stress reponse activates the nervous system.

We take a few minutes to deal with that stress before we move on, by doing a short breathing practice called the 3-6 practice. Breathe in to the count of 3, breathe out to the count of 6. The parasympathetic nervous system is activated by this and activating it tells your body that it is in a safe state. Making the outbreath longer than the inbreath calms the stress system.

Next she wants to talk about stress. She asks us what comes to mind when we think about stress. All the comments are about the negative aspects of stress e.g. time pressure, anxiety, overwhelm. But the stress system actually evolved to keep us alive. It gets us active in order to deal with a threat. Short term stress is fine, long-term stress can be a problem. Short term it energises us, focuses us; it is a short cycle after which we can return to balance. Long term stress is when it becomes chronic and then it can lead to illness, exhaustion, low performance and you can’t see the big picture. In the modern world, the stress system is triggered many times a day by external stressors e.g. deadlines, meetings, tricky people, pandemics and internal stressors e.g. our thoughts and emotions. Usually a combination of both. We are hard-wired to seek out the negative/danger. If there are a dozen good things and one bad thing, we will tend to focus on the one bad thing.

Oh, brain!

Mindfulness helps us break the stress cycle and avoid getting into a chronic stress state. We pay attention, notice, things like tension in shoulders and jaw, and take a few minutes to do a body scan or some 3-6 breathing and break the cycle by returning to a calm state. The strategies are mindfulness techniques. If you regularly practice mindfulness, you are more able to respond more positively to stressful situations and you create a muscle memory which is able to become your parachute. You don’t want to start trying to do mindfulness practice when you are super stressed, you want to develop it when you are calm so you have more tools to choose from when you are stressed, in order to respond.

Breaking the stress cycle

Research shows many benefits: being happier, better focus, being able to return to calm more quickly, improved relationships, deal better with strong emotions, be better able to learn, plan, think and remember. Mindfulness is any time, any place for anyone. It’s not a religion, you don’t need to be in a particular place or do particular yoga positions, you don’t need to empty your mind. It is simple, practical techniques you can use. It is not a cure for serious depression. It can help anxiety and stress and generally improve our quality of being.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery but today is a gift and that’s why they call it the present. Mindfulness is all about being present with what it is, without judging it. The question we want to ask ourselves is do we want to be mind-full or mindful?

Mind-full or Mindful?

John Kabat-Zinn has videos you can look at. Tricia wants to run a course for ELT professionals, which she will post more information about it in the ELT Lightbulb moments group in due course. Mindfulness increases the connections between the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortext so practising is literally ‘weaving the parachute’ – do it on a daily basis don’t wait til you need it! NB it doesn’t need to be an hour a day, 10 minutes on a regular basis will have a positive effect.

And that was the end of the session. My attendance was serendipitous as I hadn’t realised it was on until a minute before it started when I happened to notice an announcement about it! None of it was new to me but it’s always good to be reminded and I’ll be interested to hear more about the course too. I liked the image of not waiting until you are jumping out of a plane to weave a parachute. I.e. develop mindfulness techniques when things are calm so you can use them when things are not calm.

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End of (another) academic year

Somehow or another, another academic year is drawing to a close. I said goodbye to another group of students today (lovely group, they were!) and all that remains is some writing exam standardisation, a pile of exam marking, and some coursework misconduct meetings next week. (Also next week, I will be getting my second dose of vaccine, woohoo!) It seems the appropriate point to reflect on the goals I set at the start of the academic year and look forward to next academic year.

I finished last year in a pretty sorry state in some ways – poor health, feeling burnt out and uncertain about continuing in my role as ADoS. A good long break helped and I came back to work with the following goals:

  1. Be curious! By being curious about everything that I encounter, all the newness that is ahead, I can open up lots of opportunities for learning and growth. 
  2. Be patient! With myself, with my colleagues, with my students. It won’t be an easy year and that is ok, it can still be a positive one.
  3. Be grateful! Look for the positives and appreciate them. Smile lots. 
  4. Be open to challenge! It’s ok, good even, for things to be difficult, challenge leads to discovery and growth. 
  5. Be kind to myself! Look after myself appropriately, maintain a good work-life balance (easier with the 4-day week!), keep meditating, eat well, exercise regularly, spend quality time with my girlfriend regularly. 

In the end, I decided to continue in the ADoS role and so now have another year of that under my belt. It has been a year fully spent working online/remotely. It has also now been a year and a half since I last worked in our building, which seems extraordinary to say the least! So, how I have done with the goals?

  1. I have learned a LOT this academic year. Amongst other things, I have put myself in online class student shoes by participating in Italian language classes once a week. I have done courses with two different providers and continue studying with the second provider. Each provider gave a very different learning experience, both of which I have blogged extensively about. What I have learned by being a student, of course, I have also been able to apply to being a teacher. I think I have become a reasonably competent online teacher, comfortable with this way of teaching. However, there is plenty of room for improvement. Use and monitoring of breakout rooms comes to mind. With a class of 20 students, I struggled with this. Feedback from my students, obtained through group discussions of a list of questions which they summarised their answers to in a Google doc will be useful going forward, as will the feedback from my line manager’s observation. I was lucky, they were a great group and I enjoyed teaching them. Other learning opportunities have included attending online TD workshops, from which I came away with ideas and food for thought, and reading – journal articles, blog posts, books. Finally, due to the high standard of my own application, I have been a fellowship assessor for two application cycles, so when people have submitted applications for becoming Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Authority (AFHEA), FHEA, and Senior FHEA (what I achieved in May last year), I have been one of a large group of people who have assessed those applications. I sat out the most recent round (as a voluntary role, you can elect to sit out for a cycle when you need to and I decided for this one I needed to!) but in the two that I did do this academic year, I learnt more about what my colleagues across the university are doing, which was fascinating. I would say yes, I did open up some good opportunities for learning and growth. May this continue.
  2. I think I have been more patient this year and allowed it to be the year that it was. I have tried to meditate more regularly but it has been sporadic. That said, I am nevertheless getting better at pausing rather than reacting, which also helps on the patience front. One of my goals for this holiday is to really get into a proper regular meditating habit as I very much believe it will help me next academic year when things are all change again!
  3. My gf and I keep a gratitude calendar together. Every evening before bed, we add in all the things we are grateful for from that day. It’s just a google doc with a table. Some days it is harder than others but on all days we can find stuff. And that in itself is something to be grateful for! (I recommend keeping a gratitude calendar – I kept one alone before my gf and I got together; we only started doing it together during the first lockdown when we were apart, as a way to continue to bond – it is a great way to cultivate a mind that finds the positives and very simple and quick to do. You could use a notebook, a word doc, whatever works for you.)
  4. Well, this was rather a vague goal wasn’t it. But here we all are. Could almost argue that by doing my job for this academic year I was by definition open to challenge! I think getting fully to grips with online teaching (last academic year was just one term and we were doing a very limited amount of live stuff) has been a big challenge, in particular how to look after my students, how to make the lessons accessible to them, how to support their learning and assessment effectively. I feel I have come a long way since September 2020 when we kicked off. In terms of ADoSing, it was my partner teacher’s second year of doing it so it has been solid. Good teamwork, pretty smooth. The odd hiccup but dealt with effectively. Next year, I will have a new partner ADoS as the current one is going on maternity leave. I think I have been in the position that much longer than last time I was in this position and hope therefore to be a better mentor – it is certainly something I will be focusing on. I will also hopefully be making SMARTer goals… 😉
  5. Ah yes. The first year of 4 day weeks. 🙂 I can say without doubt that it was definitely the right decision for me. I am in a MUCH better state than I was this time last year. While it has been a markedly less stressful academic year than the previous one, in which we were throwing down the train track as we hurtled along it, I am in no doubt that my quality of life has improved significantly with the change from 5 days to 4. The balance is just much, much better. Working from home has continued to be positive, also since I moved in with my gf. Being able to cook and eat lunch together has made eating less monotonous and we manage to do it healthily. Exercise is MUCH easier with a 4 day week because I can do my long runs or bike rides on my not at work day, while she is working, and therefore not be choosing between spending quality time with her and doing substantial exercise. At the weekends we do things like swimming and paddling together and I fit in shorter runs/bike rides sometimes too.

While I was writing this, I just received, in my email inbox, a recognition award:

Not just me, all the ADoSes. Honestly, I reckon the entire centre deserves one. Everyone has put such a lot in since this pandemic started. These awards were put on hold for a while due to financial constraints but it seems they are back again. It is always super nice to be appreciated! Very motivating.

Looking forward to next year, it is going to be a year of great change. After a year of being fully at home and online, it is back to the college for us! Something that is both scary and exciting. However, I am going to treat myself to having my holiday before I think about my goals for next academic year. That will be a job for nearer the time of The Great Return. For now, I will wrap this up and with it academic year 2020-21 (minus the final marking week, of course). Overall, I would say, a definite positive one. Hurrah!

Creative commons licensed https://www.flickr.com/photos/54724696@N07/24160789397 feels fitting for the culmination of this year, made it to the top of another academic year mountain of learning, challenges and life.

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Upper Intermediate Italian Lesson 6

Phewwww I made it just on time (and still the first!). Still got my positive attitude, also got a lot of tired because of how intense last week was. I managed to do my homework, amazingly. I wanted to do it enough to make it happen on Sunday, but I did it on my tablet so it has no accents yet <edits furiously while the others arrive> Yet another tech-related thing haha.

Homework: Quest’anno a gennaio, 582,538 persone di 209 paesi sono iscritte a uno sfida globale – Veganuary. Questa sfida richiede a ciascuno che l’accetta di evitare l’uso di ogni prodotto animale, cioè, provare di vivere vegan. Lo scopo di questa sfida e di proteggere sia gli animali che l’ambiente e, faccendo cosi, migliorare persino la salute dei partecipanti. Questa volta la gente pensano anche a Covid perche vogliono anche evitare altri pandemici. Un gran parte di loro continuano a seguire uno stilo di vita vegan.

We started with the newsletter thingy i.e. homework. Turns out Zoom is like Blackboard in that participants only see chatbox content sent after their arrival into the room. So there was a bit of confusion as the teacher hadn’t realised that.  Then I had to read mine from last week aloud, not sure why. Now we are going through one of the other students’ homework, which has given me some welcome breathing space, in between answering questions. That done, we establish that I and two others now have stories in the class newspaper and the teacher asks the remaining two (both of whom are here tonight) for their contribution. We review the 5 w’s again. Major communication issue with the student who was absent last week and doesn’t understand what we are doing – I feel you, student! Eventually we have moved on to something else instead. I’m not sure if the student understood in the end or not because I had a slight concentration lapse as the whole thing took a while. My homework was not required, after all that effort!

Now we are continuing with the grammar point from last week.

Congiuntivo trapassato + condizionale passato.

We use the rest of the exercise that we started two weeks ago and I did as review between the two weeks ago class and last week’s class (so that was nice and easy for me tonight!).

  1. Se fossimo rientrati più presto, avremmo potuto vedere un bel documentario in tv.

Now we are looking at some pictures. Describing what the person is doing and how they feel.

Oberata – overwhelmed by work

One thing I do not like about Zoom: When the teacher shares their screen, it goes full screen on my screen, meaning my notes window is hidden. So then I have to get it to shrink again. Every time.

We are spending a LOT of time on this activity. I am very curious what it will lead into! 🙂 I wonder how it would be if we had been given the pictures and had to work with a partner to say and/or write something about each one, perhaps in response to prompts to direct our attention to what is required, then share whole class quickly…

BREAK TIME! And we are told we will do some reading after the break so I guess that is what it leads into – the suspense is over!

End of break. We seem to have lost 2 students and the other 2 are still switched off but appear soon after.

Wheee I was brave. Teacher set to having us read aloud directly and I asked if we could have 5 minutes to read quietly first. I then had to then clarify that I am happy to do the read aloud thing if we could do that first, as the teacher objected defensively initially, saying they wanted to hear our pronunciation. Am now quite glad I went with my gut instinct on not giving unsolicited feedback on lack of opportunities for group work! At least this was just a simple request and that was hard enough.

Ho fatto la fame – suffer from hunger (hyperbole)

So we read silently then aloud. We didn’t discuss pron though <shrug>. Vocab, yes. So that is a bit confusing! But never mind. Then we had to write comprehension questions. Actually we did this whole activity from lead in to this point with the other text of this pair a few weeks ago, I just remembered! So I guess we will be retelling the story using the pictures after this.

My question: Che tipo di carattere ha Natalia Aspesi?

Yep, we are doing the retelling the story using the pictures thing. Fair enough. At least this time there are only 2 pages of pictures! Less epic scrolling up and down by the teacher necessary! Yay!  Ohh, also because we didn’t have to do the ordering thing this time so as they are on the page they are in the right order for the text. Everyone had to take a turn doing this. Which I only discovered when I eventually got called on. Confession time, I was splatted on the futon behind my computer at the time. Having one of THOSE evenings. But I managed just fine.

Now we have moved on to object pronouns suddenly, 9 minutes to go. A bit disorienting! And we are reading aloud a grammar explanation page. We have used this book before and it isn’t the course book (as I have discovered since getting the course book). It is aimed at English people. Teacher is explaining mostly in Italian which is nice. Then we made a list of things to take to a party and went through it saying “I will take it” or “I will take them”.  I wonder if this means we have finished with the unreal if clauses now. Next week we will do combined direct and indirect pronouns. No homework. So…I guess we have finished with the newsletter thingy? In which case I did my homework for nothing. On the other hand, if we do go back to it even though it wasn’t reset for homework explicitly this time round, I can use it. We will see…

Reflections

  • For the first time since the course began, I did not put 100% in during the lesson. My intrinsic motivation was outstripped by my fatigue and I didn’t find the lesson engaging enough to balance that out! I am reminded of Dörnyei and Ushioda (2012)

“Motivation is responsible for why people decide to do something, how long they are willing to sustain the activity and how hard they are going to pursue it” (ibid: kindle loc 259, emphasis as per original)

and also the motivation model with its ideal self/internal factors, ought to self/external factors and L2 learning experience as the three contributors to motivation (kindle loc 1852) and how motivation is not static (kindle loc 1903). It is so true. Also, I don’t blame the teacher for it. I found the pace too slow but that doesn’t mean the pace was too slow – it might have been just right for some or a bit quick for others. I feel that my motivation is my responsibility but equally I am not going to beat myself up for not putting 100% in to this lesson. Energy is limited. Good enough is good enough. Nobody died! I think we need to accept this with our students as well. Their motivation, performance, participation will all fluctuate from lesson to lesson and within lessons. And that’s ok. We do our best to create an engaging learning experience but we won’t always be able to balance out everything else that is going on. Even more so when there is a global pandemic going on!

  • I’m glad I finally addressed the reading aloud issue. I thought when he let us read silently before the jigsaw activity in a previous lesson, we had cracked it but it turned out not to be the case. I think it’s important for teachers to listen to student requests and, where possible, if they aren’t unreasonable, fulfil them. In this case, all that was requested was 5 minutes of delay in order to read quietly first before reading aloud, so a very small ask. The teacher wasn’t happy, though. I think we need to remember that a request is not a criticism of us as teachers, it is just something that the student wants/needs in order to learn better. I actually struggled to read the text in five minutes because of how tired I was. Turns out reading in another language is hard when you are tired. Despite the fatigue and struggle, though, I did the reading aloud thing much better having read to myself first. I won’t be addressing the lack of pair/group-work thing as the above response suggests the teacher wouldn’t be open to it especially as it would require a greater degree of change than the five minutes of silent reading request.
  • It’s annoying from the student perspective if homework is set and then forgotten about. I don’t mind that much because I know doing the homework helped me learn more, made me use more Italian. But if I’d known it wasn’t going to be used or submitted or anything, then I might have chosen to just go splat on Sunday (when I did it) instead, because I was exhausted from the work/mental health first aid course combination of during the week beforehand. We’ll see what happens in the next lesson. It may be we do something with it then, in which case I am ready already which could be a score – watch this space!
  • Thinking about homework has also made me think about how I have done very little autonomous learning thus far. I completed an activity we had started in class on one occasion (the one we then came back to in this lesson!) but other than that about all I manage to do is watch something in Italian about once a week (on my NAW day). Why? Because priorities and juggling. Work, obviously. But in my free time, I spend time with my girlfriend and that is important to me because I think quality time is important for a relationship to flourish. It’s not long since I moved in with her so there has been a lot of adjusting to a new way of being. It is (obviously) very different from living alone/with a housemate. I also need to exercise regularly. Plus cooking and cleaning and suchlike. Time is finite and there is a lot to pack in. I suppose also it comes back to motivation. I’m really motivated to do my best in lessons and learn what I can, when it isn’t trumped by fatigue, but doing extra work outside the lessons is an extra time commitment and I lack the motivation to prioritise it. Other things have higher priority as mentioned above. And I don’t mind if it slows down my rate of improvement either, I’m not in a hurry and have no external factors pushing on me for it (e.g. moving to the country, needing a particular level of the language for work or study etc). Yet I remember when I was in Palermo, we had a big expectation on students to do lots of autonomous learning and I did loads of work trying to get my learners to engage with that (which was far from wasted!). I think ultimately it’s about making it clear to the learners that improvement will be quicker if they do engage with autonomous learning and making sure they have the tools and know-how to do it, providing the support, but letting them make the choice as to whether and how much they engage, which will depend on their motivation for doing the course and on what else they are juggling in day to day life and how they choose to prioritise things. It may be the course is a once or twice a week time to do something nice and different for oneself but otherwise not a priority, just a bit of fun and that should be just as valid as doing it for work/to be able to move somewhere else/to get more money etc where autonomous learning may be more likely to be prioritised if the learner is aware of the value of it. As far as my current students are concerned, I am not trying to get them to do any extra stuff at all. They simply don’t have time. They have multiple modules all with a heavy workload (and at least one is attending school in her own country – China – as well!). If they do their coursework, their homework and any flipped preparation, that is enough. There is extra stuff available and signposted but it is entirely their choice how much or if they engage, so that it doesn’t become another stressor for them. They have enough of those filling their buckets!
  • Was just thinking, there are only 4 more lessons left for this course (and even this far in, I come out of it with something new to chew over every time!). This means I should start looking into other courses like I said I was going to… Time, eh. Maybe that will be my homework for this week! Before any more marking comes in on the teaching side of things…

Ok, wittering over for another week! See you next time! 🙂