professional development

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2024 – and what have I done?

It seems odd to think another year has elapsed. Feels like it began simultaneously yesterday and a million years ago! We are in our final week before Christmas. It is a non-teaching week but there are still plenty of other tasks to be done. I decided that one of mine is to look back and reflect on what I have done this calendar year…

Teaching:

  • The January cohort seems a long time ago but they completed their course between January and August this year. JFPH02 (January, Foundation, Physics, Group 2) was my group. They were a very mixed level group and a nice mixture of nationalities were represented. There were 19 of them but their attendance was abysmal so for F2F classes (of which there are 2 a week) it seemed as though I only had a much smaller group. A rotating cast of characters appeared each lesson, with only one or two whose attendance was much more consistent. Attendance was reflected in assessment scores! Low attendance was generally due to students struggling more on other modules and choosing to dedicate more time to them (or oversleeping and missing the 9am as a result of burning the midnight oil in that dedication!). It was frustrating and difficult, but I did my best with the situation, ensuring that those who attended benefitted from it, and ultimately that is all I can do.
  • This semester, I also did some teaching on a programme which consisted of 1-1 lessons on Google meet to women in a location with poor internet connectivity and limited options. They were speaking-focused lessons, with the other course component being app-based learning materials released each week. The 1-1 speaking sessions were based on the topic of the previous week’s materials. It was a very rewarding programme to participate in, as well as very intense (somewhat unsurprisingly)!. It was a very different kind of teaching to the kind I usually do and it was good to have the opportunity to experience it.

ADoSing

I started ADoSing in April 2018 so a fair bit of time ago now – over 6 years. Work is in flux at the moment and we aren’t sure how things will look on the other side but nevertheless this year I did another iteration of ADoSing the January cohort, with my co-ADoS. This included:

  • preparing January course materials
  • preparing and running induction sessions about our programme for the teachers joining us to teach on the January cohort
  • preparing and running weekly module meetings with the January cohort teaching team
  • preparing and running standardisation sessions for three pieces of coursework (reading, writing, speaking) and one exam (the speaking seminar discussion exam)
  • checking rubrics and .rbc files for coursework submissions
  • preparing Turnitin coursework submission points on Blackboard for two pieces of coursework
  • preparing Blackboard announcements for students, relating to coursework, mock exams, real exams, results, tutorials. Many of these include multiple versions due to reminders.
  • responding to queries from teachers
  • attending weekly ADoS team meetings
  • preparing writing exam standardisation materials
  • correcting any errors that show up in course materials
  • preparing submission points, Blackboard announcements, email templates and information packs about resits
  • generally ensuring the smooth running of the January cohort AES programme (to include all the other tasks not in this list but that nevertheless get done!)

This semester, while not actively ADoSing, I have:

  • co-led an SpLD project which involved preparing preview materials for students and listing content topics to act as a trigger warning.
  • worked on development for the 2025-2026 academic year course materials
  • been part of the process of deciding how to integrate the existence of AI into our assessments and course materials
  • started preparation for another January cohort which lies just around the corner!

One thing I will say about ADoSing, it is a good test of organisational and time-management skills! You have to always be thinking many weeks ahead of the current week so that everything is in place when it needs to be and all communications happen when they need to happen. You also need strong attention to detail as there are so many tiny bits of information in so many different documents (and also in things like submission points) in different locations with the potential to create big problems if done incorrectly.

Development

I’ve already written a post about the development I’ve done this calendar year so I will just mention some highlights here:

  • Instructional design course – 10 week course, now completed!
  • FutureLearn expert track on Autism (4 x 4 week courses)
  • Several online sessions about supporting students with SpLD and students with Autism
  • AI – focused sessions run by our digital lead (attended a combination of live online and via catching up on recordings)
  • Hatching a plan to do an EdDoc and doing some preparatory reading (lots more to go but the instructional design course maxed my development hours this semester! Still, there’s time! I’m not starting it until at least 2026-2027 academic year!)
  • Other than the above, I have also finally started blogging again, which I am really enjoying. I had forgotten about the joys of informal publication!

So, it’s been a pretty busy year, as ever! Another January cohort safely shepherded through two semesters. Plenty of teaching, ADoS tasks and professional development. A lot of learning.

Being as it is the 19th December and tomorrow is the last working day before Christmas break, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is probably the last blog post for this year! I will look forward to picking it up again in the new year.

Thanks to all who have read and commented on this year’s posts. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it and a happy 2025 to all!

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Tracking Professional Development

How do you keep track of your professional development? Where I work, we have a log (a Google sheet) which is shared with us at the start of each calendar year and which it is our responsibility to keep up to date. There are two elements (each with its own tab on the sheet),

1) Training log (mandatory) – “21 hours per calendar year, with a balance where possible between centre-wide development, programme-specific development and external development. These activities may include online or face-to-face training courses, talks, and workshops.”

2) Scholarship log (optional) – “…scholarship can be defined as broad and varied activities which are personal, but structured and reflective in their nature. This could be done by further qualifications or research. […] The definition of scholarship is knowledge acquired by study. In the context of learning and teaching, it might mean evaluating the impact of new approaches in your teaching or carrying out projects to answer specific pedagogical questions.”

I think it is good to have this framework for recording development, as otherwise I’ll attend stuff/watch stuff/do stuff, blog about some of it, but not have an overview. Recently 4C in ELT posted asking “How often do you actually seek out recordings to talks you missed and watch them?” – I was able to look at the log and identify at least 12 (there’s another session I watched via recording too that I haven’t yet added!) for this calendar year. I like accessing sessions via recording because then I can pause them whenever I want to (for a wee, to get a cup of tea, to have a thinking break…). Anyway, in total, in this calendar year, to date (it’s not over yet, for all it’s December already!), I’ve logged 129hrs in my training log (!)

The biggest chunk of that, weighing in at 50 hours, is the Instructional Design course I have completed this semester. 10 weeks, at 5hours per week. (The course reckons 5-6 hrs per week so I took the lower bound for logging purposes.) It includes synchronous tasks and a weekly one hour Google Meet session. There is also an optional assessment, creating materials using one of the tools which I did in a race against time, while I still had access to the free trial of the tool in question! It wasn’t a rush job but there were definitely extra hours squeezed into those weeks! I have been fitting the course in around everything else, piecemeal – Google Calendar and Google Keep have been my very good friends this semester, for keeping track of everything going on. (There are two more weeks of the course, but I’ve logged the course as one entry using the lower bound of the time, as otherwise there would be a million mini-entries of time spent! Suffice it to say it is unlikely to be *less* than what I’ve logged, much more likely to be more!)

The second biggest chunk, at 48hrs, was a FutureLearn Expert Track (which is a set of courses on a particular theme) – Autism: Developing Knowledge of Autistic Experiences:

I completed this Expert Track during the summer holidays this year – 4 courses, 4 weeks each, 3hrs per week. However, I did them in a more compressed time frame – more hours per week, fewer weeks. Hyperfocus is a wonderful thing!

So, those two, between them, account for nearly 100hrs out of the 129. It’s inevitable that a course is going to represent a larger number of hours than one-off things can. A distant third, in terms of chunks of hours, is the ELTC Away Day which accounted for 6hrs: A morning of talks and an afternoon of workshops, all F2F. For me the highlight of the day was the session in the afternoon about the EdDoc run by Sheffield University’s School of Education. In an ideal world I’d like to start doing one in the academic year 2026-2027. Since that session, which took place in late September, I’ve come up with an idea and started doing some reading around it – though the Instructional Design course temporarily moved further reading/preparation to the back burner (time is finite, however hard I hyperfocus!). Close behind the Away Day, in terms of hours, was a “slow conference” called Feminism X EAP, which I spent 4hrs on, not consecutively but over the course of a week or so. It seems a long time ago now, but it took place between the 9th and 15th May. It was really interesting, Story – by Bea Bond. It was Activity 2/3 on Thursday 9th May::

I recommend having a read! I hope there will be another slow conference next year, I’d never participated in one before but it is a format that really appeals to me.

The remaining hours have mostly been made up of watching recordings of various sessions and attending a small number of live online sessions too. Many of the recorded sessions I found via MyDevlopment which is our university professional development portal, combining internally made content and curated external content. Through it I discovered a treasure trove of webinars hosted by CareScribe – and in seeking out this link, I notice that there are a number of new ones which I am keen to watch when I can! Carescribe focus on neurodiversity and was founded by an NHS doctor, strategy consultant and software engineer in 2020, and the tag for their events page goes thus: “We run free online events to raise awareness and support neurodiversity in the workplace. See what talks are coming next and sign up below.” Highly recommended.

I wouldn’t have known about them without MyDevelopment, where some of the recordings are linked to as part of the curation side. I suppose one of the challenges of development is finding the sessions to attend (or watch via recording) in the great jungle of the internet. We are quite lucky in this regard. We have MyDevelopment, as already discussed, but it is a university-wide platform so it doesn’t curate ELT-specific content. However, our TD team put out a weekly bulletin via Google Workspace highlighting external opportunities amongst which webinars and recordings. There is also an internal one highlighting sessions the TD team is hosting and also sessions that University are running relating to education in general e.g. about AI, about Blackboard Ultra, about how to teach inclusively etc. Examples of sessions I’ve attended live online via MyDevelopment are Supporting Dyslexic Students and Students with SpLD and Supporting Students on the Autism Spectrum.

In terms of ELT-specific online sessions and recordings, there has been plenty of AI-focused content delivered and recorded by the ELTC TEL team, which I have accessed via a mixture of watching recordings on our ELTC TD portal (separate from My Development, just for our department) and attending live online when I can. I have also watched an older recording about pronunciation teaching in EAP by Gemma Archer (of Strathclyde University, at least at that time). In terms of external content, there was a recording of a Penny Ur session called “Getting them to talk in English” which lives on YouTube, recommended by Sandy Millin in one of her TYT Delta Newsletters (you don’t have to be doing the Delta to benefit from them!).

All in all, it has been a good (calendar) year for development, though I’ve not done much blogging. I think I’ve ended up instead with bits and bobs of notes – in the development log, in google docs linked to in the development log. Thank goodness for the development log, without it I would be like “ehhh I didn’t do THAT much development this year really, did I…how remiss of me” because it all becomes part of the blur of everything else we get up to at work (or in the summer holidays in the case of the Expert Track!) – but all evidence points to the contrary! Perhaps one of my New Year’s resolutions for next year will be to write more blog posts linked to the things I do for development/my reflections on it! (Perhaps I could put some of the links in the other tab of the scholarship log, which for this year is rather empty…)

Anyway, circling back to the question at the start of this post (and congratulations if you made this far!) – how *do* you keep track of your development? Do you have an effective system for it? And also do you have any links to cool stuff you’ve read or watched that you could share with me so that I can have a look too? 🙂 I look forward to hearing from you via the comments!

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Learning and Teaching Professional Recognition Scheme

On Wednesday 23rd January (yes, that long ago – life, or more to the point, work being very busy, has got in the way since I started this post!), I attended a two hour introductory session for the Learning and Teaching Professional Recognition Scheme (LTPRS). This scheme is accredited to the Higher Education Academy (HEA/Advance HE) and through it employees of this university can gain professional recognition from the HEA, in alignment with their Personal Standards Framework, for the work we do here.

There are four levels of professional recognition that can be gained through this scheme:

  • Associate Fellow (AFHEA)
  • Fellow (FHEA)
  • Senior Fellow (SFHEA)
  • Principal Fellow (PFHEA)

These are not teaching qualifications but are internationally recognised titles. In order to gain one of these titles, you need to submit a portfolio which demonstrates that you meet all the requirements of that title/descriptor. You can see what the requirements for each descriptor are in the “Personal Standards Framework” linked to above.

This post will briefly outline the requirements so that if you see/hear the terms “FHEA” or “SFHEA” or “Fellowship scheme”, you know what is involved, and, if it is relevant for you, enough of an insight to help you decide whether to embark on this path. (NB if you are working at Sheffield uni and want to apply for recognition through the LTRPS scheme, you need to attend an introductory session, like the one I attended. These are really useful as, in addition to useful background information, they help you identify which descriptor to aim for and give you opportunities for discussion with other would-be applicants and asking questions to the scheme representatives who run the sessions.) It will also, in keeping with the ethos of this blog, offer some of my own thoughts/reflections on it!

The portfolio has 4 assessed elements:

  1. An “About me/my contribution to the learning and teaching strategy” statement
  2. Mapping of practice, with evidence, to the requirements as laid out in the framework
  3. 4 Examples of practice/case studies, which give a clear, critically evaluated picture of your practice, with reference to relevant literature and to the descriptors.
  4. Two referee statements to support your claims

The “About me/my contribution to the learning and teaching strategy” statement needs to be 1000 words, of which about 500 are about who you are/what you are doing at the uni (provides context for your application, as the assessors don’t know anything about you) and about 500 about your contribution to the university’s learning strategy.

The mapping of practice requires short supporting statements using brief examples, to which you need to attach one to three pieces of evidence. A piece of evidence may be used for more than one statement but must be attached in each place and clear reasoning of relevance should be present in both places. You need strong artefacts of evidence for each area. If a piece of evidence is large, you should include direction to specific relevant points of it. This is particularly important where you are using one piece of evidence to support different statements.

The examples of practice should each be 600 words and if you are going for the SFHEA, then at least 2 must focus on D3 VII (“Successful co-ordination, support, supervision, management and/ or mentoring of others (whether individuals and/or teams) in relation to teaching and learning”) as this differentiates between FHEA and SFHEA. In these write-ups, you need to refer to the literature but the reference list is not included in the word count.

The referee statements should use the template provided. Ideally they should be familiar with the framework, which would be the case if they themselves are already fellows.

Within the LTRPS scheme, so applying for recognition through Sheffield University’s scheme, you will use PebblePad (which I keep thinking of as PebblePusher or Pebbledash but I have no idea why!) to create your portfolio which will include the above-mentioned elements. Once you have signed up and got access (which is not possible until AFTER you have attended an introductory session), it is preloaded with your “workbook” or, the skeleton of the portfolio, which you will build up by putting your words and pieces of evidence into the correct places. If you apply for recognition directly to HEA, the same things have to be demonstrated, in terms of mapping practice and examples of practice, but you wouldn’t have the structure provided by the Sheffield uni scheme (the “PebblePad” workbook, in other words).

Either way, it is important to avoid, yes, avoid, any modesty – personal pronoun “I” should be used throughout! – as you need to demonstrate what YOU, as an individual, have done, in terms of the framework. Teamwork is great but it needs to be clear what YOUR role in that teamwork was.

For the Sheffield scheme, there are three submission points per year and in order to submit you have to give notice of your intention to submit in advance, by a given deadline. This is so they can make sure they have enough assessors to look at all the applications. If you give notice of your intention to submit but then are not ready by the deadline, it isn’t a problem and you can withdraw from that submission point with no penalties or problems.

Here is a copy of the framework.

This document, Dimensions of the Framework, from the same website, is a useful break-down of the framework, giving information about how you could evidence different aspects of it. (I have found this very helpful for getting my head around the framework and the “mapping of practice” element. I put it into Mendeley and highlight/annotated the heck out of it!)

My thoughts/reflections

For me, this is an interesting approach to CPD. To map your practice to the framework (so, in my case so far, annotating that “Dimensions of the Framework”!), you have to critically evaluate what you are doing and how it relates to ‘the bigger picture’. In doing that, you are able to identify areas where you could do more and get ideas for what that “more” could be. I imagine it is entirely possible for it to be a (somewhat time-consuming!) box-ticking exercise, that you “get over and done with” as quickly as possible, but I don’t want to approach it that way. I want to use it as a springboard for development.

I am aiming for SFHEA and I think this is a plausible goal given my current role. However, I have only been in my position for just under a year (at the end of this term, it will be a year – unbelievable!) so am by no means experienced. Doing this SFHEA application will be a way to build on my experience in a systematic way and will give me a means of critically evaluating my practice as I develop it. I hope it might also give me more confidence in what I am doing. I am prone to anxiety and impostor syndrome, so in that context the framework provides some support – if I use it to improve my practice, and can provide evidence of meeting all the various aspects of the SFHEA descriptor, that will be something I can draw on for reassurance when my anxiety kicks in. So, I am not sure when I will be submitting a portfolio – there are submission deadlines in April 2019 (clearly not), October 2019 (unlikely) and then January/April/October 2020 (more feasible!)  to “choose” from. I’m not in a hurry so I suspect it will be “a 2020 thing”, but the process began with the introductory session and has already influenced my practice.

Annotating that document was my starting point, and, as mentioned, it has already started to influence my practice. However, what I am realising is that I have had a bit of a mental block going with regards to the “personal statement” and “examples of practice” elements. Partially I have just been very busy with work stuff and writing deadlines, so haven’t had time to make a proper start on them but partially I have also been putting it off because I haven’t been in the right frame of mind (hello anxiety!), which is also part of the reason why this post has taken so long to write…  The frame of mind is still a bit iffy at the moment, but for once in a way this week I have had a bit of time, at work, for CPD, and have met my other CPD-related writing deadlines, so I can’t justify putting it off any longer (hello bull, let’s have your horns!). One thing I have done is I’ve started writing a blog post about what I do here, as an ADoS, just as part of the thought process/brainstorming for the personal statement, which I need to finish and publish. What I then need to do is take the step of opening a blank word doc (or a piece of paper) and start actually writing either the personal statement or one of my examples of practice. I have ideas for the latter as well (buried amongst my previously mentioned annotations!), just need to pick one and run with it (then repeat). Rather than away from it…!

Anyway, enough wittering. I’m sure lots of people do it with a lot less fuss than me, but if any of this part of the post resonates with you, at least now you know it’s not ALL people who do it super fast, no fuss :-p Thing is, whichever way it is, we (anyone aiming to apply for recognition, including me) can all get there in the end and learn from it! 🙂

I will leave you with some questions:

  • Are you applying for associate fellowship/fellowship/senior fellowship?
  • Do you have any other kind of professional recognition where you are, which is similar yet different?
  • Whether or not you answered “yes” to the above, what do you think of this kind of professional recognition scheme?
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Scholarship Circle “TEFLising EAP” (3 and 4!)

Today was the fourth session of our new scholarship circle “TEFLising EAP”. (You can read more about what a scholarship circle is and what it does here.)

–  Yes, the fourth: the third was last week but I was buried under rather a large pile of essays so I didn’t have time to write it up. So this week is a double bill! Hurrah!

To quote from my write-up of the first session,

The idea behind this one is that EAP lessons can get a little dry – learning how to do things academically is not necessarily the most exciting thing in the world even if it is essential for would-be university students – and for the students’ sake (as well as our own!) it would be great to bring in more, let’s say ‘TEFL Tweaks’ – things that we used to do when we taught at language schools abroad (warmers, personalisation, fun activities etc!) and have got out of the habit of doing in the EAP context but that could actually be adapted for use here without losing the all-important lesson content.

 

In session 3, last week, we shared the following ideas:

1. Catch-all nouns and cohesion in pairs

This is a useful review activity for students who don’t seem to be using catch-all nouns in their writing.

For those less familiar with EAP-dom, “catch-all nouns”, also sometimes called “general nouns”, are nouns that can be used to condense ideas already put forward, so that you can refer to them and give more information about them. They are general words that take on specificity through what comes before (or indeed after) them, for example problem, issue, process, approach, trend etc.

For this activity you:

  • give each student a worksheet with some examples of catch-all nouns in use, with the noun gapped out. Each student has a different set of examples.
  • get the students to take it in turns to read out a sentence to their partner, who needs to use the co-text to guess which general noun is missing. They must also decide if they need the singular “this” or the plural “these” in front of the noun.

E.g. First the cocoa beans are picked by hand and placed in the sun to dry. Then they are put in large sacks and loaded onto lorries (sounding familiar to anyone who teaches IELTS?!). ……………….. is repeated many times a day. Answer: This process.

Here is an example set of worksheets that my colleague whose idea it was gave to us:

The benefits of this activity are:

  • it makes the students think carefully about which catch-all nouns work best in which contexts.
  • it forces the students listen carefully to what their partner is saying, and in order to provide the answer they of course need to listen AND understand, so it also provides some detailed listening practice.
  • it also makes them think about whether the noun is singular or plural, and which determiner they need – this/these – to use with it. (Something our students tend to make mistakes with!)

Variation: Have students stand in a line; read out a gapped sentence; students step forward if they can think of a word + determiner that fit the gap. Actually I think it would work really nicely with mini-whiteboards too. Ahhh mini-whiteboards. Those were the days… 😉

2) Adapting a listening

This activity can be used with any listening extract where the speaker refers to data taken from a graph, where the graph has been provided in the materials for students to look at.

Instead of showing the graph to the students, get them to listen and make notes on it. Then put them in groups and get them to produce the graph based on what they have written down.

If any of you academic IELTS teachers out there are feeling keen, you could record yourselves talking about data from a graph (make it a funny graph so the activity is less dry!) and get the the students to produce the graph based on what you say. Then you could get the students to repeat the activity themselves – group them, get them, in their groups, to prepare a graph and discuss how they would present the information in it (using IELTS writing part 1 language) and then pair them up with someone from another group. Student A talks about their graph, student B listens and takes notes and then tries to draw the graph. (Or they could directly draw if you don’t want to bring note-taking skills into it!) They swap roles and repeat. Hopefully the language becomes more meaningful through being used communicatively. 

3) Speed-reading relay

The aim of this activity, as you would guess, is to work on students’ reading speed.

  • Put students in pairs or small groups.
  • Give each pair or group one copy of the text
  • Student A reads for 30 seconds, stops and makes a mark on the page where they got to and then verbally summarises what they just read for Student B.
  • Student B reads on from where Student A stopped. Another 30 seconds. Repeat as above.
  • This goes on until a pair or group gets to the end of their text. The first pair/group to do so is the winner!

You could use this activity as a way of practising different speed reading techniques: teach students a handful of different techniques (find examples here) and then use this as a fun way to practice them.

4) Variation on a debate theme

This is less of an activity and more of a variation on an activity: when you are doing a class debate, instead of dividing the class into 2 groups, half for and half against the motion, divide them into three groups and give each group a role:

  • For (pick a group of people who would naturally be in favour of the motion. E.g. if the motion were to ban video games, perhaps worried parents)
  • Against (pick a group of people who would naturally be against the motion. Following the above example, it could be video game designers)
  • Politicians (these have to prepare difficult questions to raise during the course of the debate, imagining that they have to think about what their constituents might say in response to the arguments raised)

In session 4, today, we shared the following ideas:

1. Task-based Evaluation (mine!)

  • Do a speaking ladder. Round 1:talk about the last restaurant you went to. (Rules: students  must elaborate not just say “yeah it was ok, I ate curry”!) Round 2: tell your new partner about the restaurant your old partner visited and how they felt about it. You can repeat this so that each student talks about their restaurant twice and a partner’s restaurant twice so that more language can be generated.
  • While they are doing this, collect examples of anything evaluative that they say.
  • Then students look for example evaluative language in a text and categorise it – modal verbs, adjectives, reporting verbs, adverbs.
  • Go back to the language students produced earlier and read out each example for them to put into their tables (unless you can cunningly feed it all into the computer while they are busy on one of the identification activities and then display it when they are ready! But this way they have to listen carefully so it’s still good!).
  • Repeat the speaking ladder activity with the aim of students upgrading their language from their initial effort. Give them some planning time first and if there is time, do a repetition.

My thinking behind this activity was that in day-to-day life we do evaluate, but when it comes to academic writing, students think that evaluation is this really difficult thing and it usually therefore gets omitted, so hopefully rooting it in the students’ own (meaningful) output, it will be more memorable and make more sense.

2. Bringing evaluation into synthesis

This activity is an extension of the fishbowl synthesis activity we talked about in session 2. Once students have fishbowled (yes it’s officially a verb now – at least in the USIC staffroom!) and written the summary paragraph, usually what you will find is that they have just about managed to synthesise stuff but there will be little if any evaluation. To get them to make that extra step which is needed in order for it to be a good paragraph rather than just a collection of information, elicit from them what’s missing from their paragraphs (which are now on a Google doc) – i.e. evaluation – and then brainstorm/board evaluative language that they could use. Then give them time to edit their paragraphs accordingly.

(This could be used in conjunction with my activity…gotta love the scholarship circle!)

3. Error correction scavenger hunt

  • Brainstorm, as a class, typical mistakes that students make in their writing. (If students say “grammar” or “vocabulary”, get them to be more specific!).
  • Prepare slips of paper/post-its with one error type and example per slip before the lesson and at this point hand out one to each student. Students mingle and explain their error type to the other students. (You could then put them in groups and get them to make a list of as many as they could remember and see which group remembers the most, for a bit of fun :-p )
  • Give out an error correction scavenger list like this one:

  • Put up sentences, or chunks of two or three sentences, taken from students’ work, around the classroom on the walls. Anonymise it and number each piece of paper (on which is/are the sentence(s) from one student).
  • Students walk round looking for the errors on the scavenger list, with speed obviously being of the essence. They find the mistake and write the number of the piece of paper they found it on next to the mistake  type on their scavenger list.
  • You go round and stick a post-it above each piece of paper with the error type(s) in the sentence(s) on it.
  • Students go round in their pairs and check they have the correct error type per sentence and then try to correct the sentence.
  • In groups, students compare their corrections.
  • Whole class feedback.

The idea of the lesson is to get students looking for typical error types. It also gets them up and moving, which is always a bonus in the EAP classroom! No reason why it couldn’t work with IELTS essays and the like as well! (This idea originally came from this pdf by Ken Lackman, about getting students involved in error correction, worth a look for more ideas.)

So, two great sessions, two motivation injections, and lots of ideas. 🙂 Let us know if you use any of them and how you got on!

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Scholarship Circle “TEFLising EAP” (2)

Today was the second session of our new scholarship circle “TEFLising EAP”. (You can read more about what a scholarship circle is and what it does here.) To quote from my write-up of the first session,

The idea behind this one is that EAP lessons can get a little dry – learning how to do things academically is not necessarily the most exciting thing in the world even if it is essential for would-be university students – and for the students’ sake (as well as our own!) it would be great to bring in more, let’s say ‘TEFL Tweaks’ – things that we used to do when we taught at language schools abroad (warmers, personalisation, fun activities etc!) and have got out of the habit of doing in the EAP context but that could actually be adapted for use here without losing the all-important lesson content.

Last session, we had a series of little ideas, while this session we went into more depth on two activities:

1) Synthesis Fishbowl *

This activity takes the “fishbowl” approach to structuring a speaking activity and uses it as the basis for teaching students about synthesis. Synthesis is basically the process of using and combining multiple sources to support a point, showing where the sources agree and disagree. Linking language and particular reporting structures help the writer to do this. Here is an example of the kind language that is used in synthesising sources, taken from Manchester University’s  Academic Phrase Bank:

So now that we know what synthesis is, back to the fish bowl. In a fish bowl speaking activity, students sit in two circles, an inner circle and, around the outside of that circle (funnily enough), an outer circle. (As per the picture below, assuming that each X represents a student!)

Inner circle students face each other. They will be the speakers. Outer circle students watch the inner circle. They will be listener/note takers.

Each student/speaker in the inner circle receives a piece of paper like this:

 

On it they write their surname and a (fairly recent) year e.g. 2014.

Each student/listener-notetaker receives a piece of paper with a table like this on it:

The table would have enough squares for each student of the inner circle to be represented (which would usually be about 4 – you don’t want the inner circle to be too big! For larger classes break them down into sub-groups within each of which there will be an inner and outer circle).

The inner circle discusses whatever topic you set them, the outer circle makes notes on what they say. (You can make this harder if you have really good students: the outer circle could listen and take notes that evaluate the inner circle’s arguments  e.g. “Good example from X of……../Y needed more support for what he said about bla bla bla/ Z said he agreed but didn’t explain why” etc).

Once the discussion has finished/you have called it a halt, new groups are formed of a student from the inner circle and a couple of students from the outer circle. In these new groups they identify themes that were discussed and look for relationships between the pieces of information they have noted down. I.e. what do the speakers agree about? What do they disagree about? Does a speaker (or more than one of them!) build on anything another speaker has said?

After they have teased these relationships out of their notes, they write a paragraph summarising the discussion (you could use google docs for this). You could give them a framework to use for lower levels, you could feed in language you want them to use (particular verbs or structures), depending how much scaffolding they need. They will need to pick one of the themes discussed (which will provide them with their topic sentence) and then use synthesising language to summarise what was said about it.

This mirrors what they will have to do with academic sources in their writing. We (the teachers) have decided to film ourselves doing the activity in a future scholarship circle session, so that it can be used as the basis of a homework task to prepare students for doing the activity in class themselves.

*Obviously fishbowls are not only useable for teaching synthesis – they are a way of running a speaking activity so that students’ listening skills are worked as well. Of course students take it in turns to be listeners and speakers.

2) Nominalisation game

This is the game I put forward last week. This week I actually brought the grid to the session and everyone had a go at playing it. Click on the picture below to be taken to a pdf of that grid.

To quote from last week’s write up, it works like this:

Put students in groups of three and give each group a grid, counters and dice (they can use a phone app and the change in their pockets if needs be!). The aim of the game is to “collect” as many squares as possible by turning the verbs into nouns. To do this, students roll the dice and move their counter the corresponding number of moves. If their square has not been claimed, they can claim it by giving the correct noun form. If they are correct, they draw their symbol on that square. They can move in any direction that gets them to an empty square (backwards, forwards, diagonally, vertically etc) in any combination. They continue until all squares have been claimed or the teacher calls a halt. The winner has the greatest number of squares when the game stops. You can then get the students to group the nouns they have made according to the different suffixes used to create nouns and then try to think of any more verbs–>nouns they know that work in the same way.

That’s all for this week. Just like last week, the session gave me a real boost. There’s nothing like spending some quality time being creative with a great bunch of people! 🙂 Here are a few questions to leave you with:

Have you used a fish bowl activity before? How did you use it? Do you have any other ideas for teaching synthesis or activities for livening up lessons on nominalisation?

 

 

 

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Scholarship Circle “TEFLising EAP”

Today was the inaugural session of our new scholarship circle “TEFLising EAP”*. (You can read more about what a scholarship circle is and what it does here.) The idea behind this one is that EAP lessons can get a little dry – learning how to do things academically is not necessarily the most exciting thing in the world even if it is essential for would-be university students – and for the students’ sake (as well as our own!) it would be great to bring in more, let’s say ‘TEFL Tweaks’ – things that we used to do when we taught at language schools abroad (warmers, personalisation, fun activities etc!) and have got out of the habit of doing in the EAP context but that could actually be adapted for use here without losing the all-important lesson content.

The plan is to look at the lesson materials for the following week (all of the courses here except for the highest level one have a very structured week-by-week, lesson-by-lesson syllabus and materials) and share ideas for how to breathe some life into them. We shall be doing this between 12 and 13.00 on a Friday and all in all, we will be aiming, through some most excellent collaboration, to avoid this** happening in our EAP classrooms! 😉

 

*not necessarily the official name!

**substitute ‘lesson’ for ‘lecture’!

Here are some of the ideas that came out of today’s session:

  1. For a listening and note-taking lesson: when you want students to work in pairs to use their notes to answer questions, make it impossible for them not to (or they won’t!) – you could do this by setting up the activity with clear stipulations i.e. one student to close their folder and one to read out the questions that they then work on together to answer. This avoids students getting buried in their folders, which is the tendency.
  2. For a citation and referencing lesson: students may be good students but may not be familiar with terminology that we take for granted, such as “semi-colon” or “bracket”. To ensure that you start the lesson with all students clear about the language you are going to use in teaching the lesson content, take that terminology (e.g. semi-colon, italics, brackets, et al etc) and use it as the basis for a backs-to-the-board game. This enables you to check that students know the terminology before you use it.
  3. A pronunciation warmer for working on minimal pairs: Minimal pairs phone numbers. Number the board vertically from 0-9 and give each number a word within which is a minimal pair sound. Here are the examples we had: 0-Annie, 1-any, 2-rise, 3-rice, 4-fool, 5-full, 6-light, 7-right, 8-sit, 9-seat. (Adapt it according to the sounds that your group of learners tend to struggle with) You read out your (invented) phone number by saying the word that corresponds with each number. So 989 would be sit seat sit. The students have to write down your phone number by deciding which word you have said and writing down the corresponding number. They can then do it in pairs. This gives them practice in both recognition and production of the minimal pairs.
  4. Do a speaking ladder at the start of the lesson based on the lesson content: It takes some time to do it, but the benefits range from giving the students (who have very long days at the college) an energy-levels boost, get them mingling, get them thinking/speaking in English and make them focus (as it generates a lot of noise, they have to listen very carefully to concentrate on “their noise”). It also gives them some bonus fluency practice.
  5. (This one was mine!) A warmer for a nominalisation lesson: Make a grid of academic verbs, one verb per square. Put students in groups of three and give each group a grid, counters and dice (they can use a phone app and the change in their pockets if needs be!). The aim of the game is to “collect” as many squares as possible by turning the verbs into nouns. To do this, students roll the dice and move their counter the corresponding number of moves. If their square has not been claimed, they can claim it by giving the correct noun form. If they are correct, they draw their symbol on that square. They can move in any direction that gets them to an empty square (backwards, forwards, diagonally, vertically etc) in any combination. They continue until all squares have been claimed or the teacher calls a halt. The winner has the greatest number of squares when the game stops. You can then get the students to group the nouns they have made according to the different suffixes used to create nouns and then try to think of any more verbs–>nouns they know that work in the same way.
  6. Academic style: When the activity requires students to edit sentences to make them more academic, here is a fun way to do it in groups. Write each sentence at the top of a blank piece of paper and make sure you have enough for each student in each group to have a different sentence. They write their edited sentence at the bottom of the sheet and fold it over to hide it. They then pass their paper to one student and take a sheet from another. Repeat this until all the students have written their edited version on each of the sentences going round in their group. At the end, as a group, they can look at all the different versions and collaborate to make a final “best version”, combining their ideas, and write that best version in their folder.
  7. Working with a text: take out ten key words, do a few rounds of backs to the board; once all words have been guessed and are on the board, get students to use them to predict the possible content of the text.
  8. Summary-writing tasks: get students to record it rather than write it for a change! Put them in pairs and give them time to make notes, discuss what they want to say and decide who will say what, then get them to record that. They can send you the recordings to listen to and give some feedback on.

The hour went by very quickly, it has to be said. Looking forward to more next Friday! 🙂 (I am planning to share the ideas here regularly but marking 30×3000 word essays [in chunks of 1 and 2000 words] is likely to get in the way somewhat! Hopefully I will catch up eventually though. )

 

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British Council Webinar Series: Exploring Continuing Professional Development

The British Council TeachingEnglish (TEBC) Webinar series can be found on the TEBC website. This is the link to Paul’s webinar that took place on the 19th May 2016. This is a summary of that webinar.

TEBC summarises the webinar thus:

“He [Paul] talked about the British Council’s CPD framework for teachers and different factors that can influence successful continuing professional development. This webinar explored some of the ways we can focus on our continuing professional development (CPD). We looked specifically at the British Council’s new CPD framework for teachers, the self-evaluation tool and resources on TeachingEnglish for professional development.”

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This is the quote that Paul Braddock starts us off with, one that is apparently much-used if you look on Google. However, it’s not as universally accepted as Paul thought before he read around it. The quote has been changed in the following way:

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According to Paul, Husbands (2013) argues that what makes the most different to pupils is teaching. All teachers can be better but it’s teaching that improves and develops. Focusing on teaching focuses on more on the need to work continuously to improve the quality of teaching across schools. This is where CPD becomes essential. Especially as teaching changes and the skills needed change over time. What was a good teacher ten years ago might not be a good teacher now. Teaching needs to be develop.

Paul moves on to look at the 7 things that influence positive professional development, based on a report by Walter and Briggs (2012). What 7 things make professional development a positive thing for you?

Professional Development that makes the most difference to teachers is:

  • concrete and classroom-based (looking at what teachers do in the classroom e.g. action research)
  • brings in expertise from outside the school (Potentially expensive but expense can be kept down by use of webinars, online conferences, social media e.g. blogs)
  • involves teachers in the choice of areas to develop and activities to undertake (includes using tools to help you identify your areas for CPD and this is where frameworks come in)
  • enables them to work collaboratively with peers (physically within a context or with an online community of practice – requires time and space!)
  • provides opportunities for mentoring or coaching (again, offline or online includes being a mentor or a coach as well not just being mentored/coached)
  • is sustained over time (an action research cycle with the teacher him/herself as the focus)
  • is supported by school leadership (so the school recognises it’s important despite budget cuts etc.)

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In other words, investment in CPD is useful and worth money.

At this point, Paul introduces the British Council CPD framework:

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It is divided into 12 different aspects of professional practice:

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It is also colour coded by stages of development (Awareness, Understanding, Engagement, Integration). The BC was trying to address the misconception that CPD is linear. This is to be a tool that would more accurately reflect this. It is supposed to empower teachers by providing a framework for them to engage with CPD. Also to be used by groups of teachers for collaboration and cooperation. For more information about each professional practice see the document linked to above. He says it is designed to be flexible and teachers can change/adapt it to better fit their context. The process that you would go through is self-evaluation. The BC are currently developing a self-evaluation tool to help teachers decide which professional practice to focus on. At the integration level, this is where you’d then look at mentoring or coaching.

Next, Paul draws attention to the BC TeachingEnglish website. Within the Teacher Development tab, there is a section for Continuing Professional Development.

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Here, you can find resources linked to each of the professional practices in the CPD framework – articles, blog posts, webinar recordings etc. (Fab! Look forward to exploring this!) The idea is, once you identify areas for your own development, you can use this site as a starting point for research, to support you in your journey. Click on the picture above to visit the page. This is an example of access to outside expertise!

TEBC also already offer out-of-the-box full courses such as Primary Essentials, TKT Essentials, Learning Technologies etc. These run for about 12 weeks, moderated or self-access. They are now thinking about how they can provide training that addresses aspects of the framework more closely. So, they have started to modularise the training, so by next April there will be the option of modules packaged into courses or individual modules you can follow (a module running for about 3hrs of study). This is so that you can bring in some training once you have identified which aspects within the framework that you want to develop.

From the 5th to 9th October, there will be an online conference run by TEBC too. (5th October is World Teacher Day!)

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This CPD-focused conference is being launched to coincide with World Teachers Day.  A date for our diaries! The picture above links to the link shown, for more information. This conference is free and aimed at teachers as well as teacher trainers. It will run from approx. 11 to approx. 4 UK time.

Paul also encourages us to investigate the following names in relation to CPD.

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I’ll stick my neck out here and add Sandy Millin to the list! Her blog has a lot of useful content for developing teachers and also exemplifies reflection/reflective practice.

Here are the links provided by Paul finally:

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NB: You can access the teacher educator framework from the English Agenda website, which is a sister website to TEBC.

It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort has gone into producing all these resources to help teachers develop – the frameworks, the accompanying resource curation on the TEBC website, the modularisation of the training courses that is to come. I certainly look forward to trying out a module without having to commit to a whole course.  The abundance of resources available online for teachers looking to develop never ceases to amaze me and this is no exception. Thank you to the British Council and TEBC for doing their part in enabling this – by no means a small part.

Between discussions in the Teacher Education circle at work and watching IATEFL talk recordings such as the one by Kirsten Holt (courtesy of Macmillan) and the one by Shirley Norton/Karen Chambers (also made possible by the British Council!), I have been doing a lot of thinking about these teaching frameworks including the British Council one, so watching this webinar was the next logical step. I’m currently working on a few ideas of my own as to how teachers can use the British Council framework to develop, which should hopefully complement what’s already out there, so watch this space! 

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#300

This is my 300th post.

A little under 5 years ago, on the 8th of May 2011, I took my first faltering step into the world of blogging with my response to the first goal in the 30 Goals Challenge for teachers – Be a beam. It has been viewed by a staggering 44 people! 😉 Probably mostly the kindly souls I had discovered on Twitter not long before I started blogging (from where the idea came from, for me) taking pity on me haha! Opening it and reading it this morning wasn’t as cringeworthy as I had expected, in fact 5 years down the line, those beliefs remain intact, as do the ones I expressed in What do you believe about learning? (aka Goal no. 3) which has turned out to be my least-read post with a whole 15 views. I actually quite fancy writing another response to the ‘What do you believe about learning?‘ goal, to include everything I’ve learnt about learning since that time. (Yet another idea to join the backlog of 40 drafts including this one…)

At the other end of the spectrum, my most-viewed post, with 13,287 views, is My top ten resources for teaching IELTS – not the one I would have said if asked to guess! I would have guessed one that weighs in with around half that many, Thirty things to enhance your teaching, as that was the post that won me the British Council blog of the month award for the first time, in 2013 and it’s also older than the IELTS one, so has had longer to accrue views. Then again, the IELTS one is easier to stumble across when hunting for IELTS resources and I suppose there are enough teachers out there who are interested in finding IELTS resources for their classes!  

Here are my top 10:

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There are more than ten links listed because some of them are pages…

Pages

My website pages (i.e. all the tabs apart from what are now “About Lizzie” and “Reflections” which is the actual blog element) only came into being mostly between April and June 2013, with a couple more added in early 2014. They were the result of learning a bit more about WordPress as a site builder in my Multimedia and Independent Learning module at Leeds Met/Beckett, which led to overhauling my little blog site into something more closely resembling what it is today. The most-viewed page other than the home page/landing page is my Materials page where I have collected examples of materials I have made, for other teachers to use. It’s definitely due an update! Again, not what I would have guessed! I would have guessed my M.A. ELT/Delta page, where all my Delta and M.A.-related posts are gathered and what my blog seems to be most strongly associated with! My favourite page, though, is my Learner Autonomy page, which is also well overdue an update! This is because it brings together all my posts relating to my learner autonomy projects, learner autonomy-related materials and to write-ups of learner autonomy-themed talks that I have delivered and attended.

One statistic that I stumbled across today was that of numbers of posts in each of my categories. It’s funny I hadn’t really noticed it before, given the numbers are displayed on my site alongside each category – I just hadn’t paid them much attention…  However, it’s the Conferences category that grabbed my attention this morning: 71 posts! Most recently added to last Saturday, at the Materials Writing SIG conference down in London. That means 71 conference sessions either attended or delivered (both are included in the same category). How lucky I am! 🙂

People

Last but not least, indeed most important I would say… what about the people? By people, I mean readers. You. There are currently 869 of you who receive an email every time I publish something (poor things… :-p ). Between you, you have made 1,523 comments! Thank you ! 🙂 This blog would be pretty pointless without you, you help make it what it is. Cheesy (vegan cheese, naturally :-p ) but true!

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What comes next?

  • Other than clearing a stiff backlog of posts, which gets added to all the time, and updating the pages mentioned above, I think I want to add and backdate a Workshops category as I am doing a lot of workshops at the moment (both online and face to face) and it would be nice to group my write-ups of them in one place. In order to avoid overlap with the Conferences category, this new category would include only workshops that take place away from conferences.  I might include write-ups of workshops attended too, we’ll see.
  • You can also expect more posts relating to teacher development/education/training as this is an area of interest for me at the moment. (And there’s already a category ready for them to be filed into!)
  • Learner autonomy-related stuff goes without saying, of course!
  • A bunch more conference write-ups will, of course, be appearing during IATEFL in April.
  • Also, I would like to continue the conversation about the social side of language learning (see top ten list of blog posts above!) with David Petrie. We had planned to but haven’t quite got round to it yet. Must rectify that.

Aptly enough, given this milestone, this afternoon I am doing a session for my colleagues at the ELTC which is all about development and sharing ideas for developing as teachers. It is based on the online session I did for the TDSIG conference a few weeks ago and I think it could work really well as a face-to-face workshop – I guess this afternoon will tell! One thing for sure is that I will learn. From any participants who do attend and from the experience of delivering. (My workshop delivery goals have shifted from survival to refining and developing my technique – the same shift that happened in my teaching sometime after completing my CELTA, I suppose!)

Thank you all for visiting and reading posts on my blog over the years, it’s been great having you and I look forward to seeing more of you in time to come! 🙂

 

 

 

 

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TD Sig Web Carnival: “Time is of the Essence!”

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Yesterday, I delivered a session as part of the TD (Teacher Development) SIG (Special Interest Group)’s Web Carnival. I was one of four speakers and the opening speaker for the event, both of which scenarios were new to me! My session, as you can see, was called Time is of the Essence (the reason for which will become clear in due course…)

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This is the outline of the session I delivered. ‘Backwards time-travel’ may sound a little ambitious but in metaphorical terms it actually worked really well. I made sure to tell the attendees that their active participation would be required, and they delivered 110%! Before starting on our journey back in time, we established the definition of “turning point”:

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Then it was time to kick off!

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This is me now. An amazing likeness, don’t you agree? I’m currently working at Sheffield Uni, teaching on a General English evening course as well as delivering a workshop for my colleagues every so often. Alongside this, I am working on some materials with Onestopenglish/Macmillan, will be doing a couple of workshops for the M.A. in ELT multimedia and independent learning module at Leeds Beckett uni. Finally, I have got a book chapter coming out in a forthcoming IATEFL LT SIG book and recently had an article published in a peer review journal for the first time.

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At this point, it was the attendees’ turn to tell me about where they are now, and I can tell you, it was a real eye-opener! Such a diverse crowd all doing really exciting things! And this continued throughout the session as at each development point on MY map, I asked them to share theirs. I think I overused the word “awesome” in response, because their responses really were!

Anyway, I suppose you could say I am “Freelance”, ish. I suppose it all sounds pretty cool. *But*, I am just a normal human bean. Mmm beans. So how did I reach this point? And what about this magic turning point?

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International House, Palermo. (IHPA)

Most recently prior to Sheffield Uni, IHPA. It was a good place to develop. I did a couple of certificates (IHCYLT, IHTIT) , delivered some workshops (at work, online for IH World Organisation, online for IH Teachers online conference), was allowed to attend/speak at IATEFL each year, did a LOT of teaching. And, of course, I worked on my own little projects. You see, when I arrived at IHPA I had recently become an LA geek. Nothing to do with Los Angeles, everything to do with learner autonomy and all things related, especially metacognition and motivation. I did some classroom based research on it, trying to use all the theory I had absorbed and put it into practice with students. Thus, the following were born:

I collected feedback at the end of each term to find out what the students made of it all as a whole and it was positive by and large, making it all worthwhile.

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All this would feed into my book chapter for LT SIG. So was this my turning point? But wait…what about the materials stuff? And the journal article? So, what came before IHPA?

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My M.A. ELT/Delta!

An amazing, grueling, challenging, rewarding, exhilarating year. In the Delta portion, probably the key thing I learnt was how to reflect effectively and constructively on my practice. As well as a whole bunch of other stuff a lot of which you can see on this blog! In the M.A. portion, you would think I learnt a bunch of theory. Well, yes. But I learnt a load of practical stuff too, through the assessment. I did a research project in the research module (with the assessment being the presentation and write up of the research), created materials for the materials development material, wrote a journal article (criteria styled on the ELTJ) for the methodology in context module, and made a website for the multimedia and independent learning module. The assessment was able to be linked with the materials development, so the website linked to the materials I made for that assessment. As it happens, I used the skills developed in building that website using WordPress to completely overhaul my blog, and also developed my voice (hence now I never shut up, where before I didn’t think I had anything to say!)

So I was basically able to develop the skills that would enable me to pursue a variety of opportunities. But that isn’t all… for my dissertation project, I wrote some task-based learning materials (which I talked about at IATEFL the year before last – that long already!) which on a whim I submitted for the ELTon Macmillan new talent in writing award. Then I got shortlisted, which in itself amazed me. Then I won! Hence the earlier-mentioned materials writing…I am editing those materials to make them suitable for publication on Onestopenglish, and we are about half way there. Will miss it when it’s over!

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So that MUST be the turning point, right? Well, I would absolutely say it was. If you ask me what the turning point was, that would come to mind. But…let’s go back a bit further…

Why did I do that M.A. at that university?

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IATEFL 2012!

I went to IATEFL in 2012, my first ever IATEFL! Oh the excitement… And you know how you get a goody bag at the beginning? Who doesn’t love a good goody bag?! So, the first night back at the hotel room, I’m going through my goody bag and find a leaflet for this M.A. ELT/Delta at Leeds Met. So, 2012. Lizzie, at nearly 29 years old is feeling very old and under-qualified! I got into this ELT malarkey late, 26 and a bit years old. (Is/was it late? Lizzie thought so at the time…) Lizzie had to make up time…(hence the session title!) Lizzie had also just been rejected from a PGCE primary programme at Warwick University (thank the good Lord!) and was all “now what?” and so my guardian angel sent me the leaflet. After IATEFL finished, I applied, got accepted and the rest was, as they say… history!

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So THAT MUST HAVE BEEN THE TURNING POINT!!!! Again, absolutely yes. Except… ooops back up a bit… How did I come to attend IATEFL 2012?

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Cactus to conference scholarship! I remain indebted to them. But….how? Where was I? How did it happen?

Indonesia…

I worked in a couple of private language schools in Indonesia after graduating from my CELTA, as one does. I was feeling quite isolated so was on the internet a lot. I found a forum called I think Dave’s ESL forum or something (does anyone remember this? some of my attendees did and apparently it is still going!) and started a post on there. I can’t even remember about what, maybe about how to develop or something. Anyway, one of the respondents pointed me towards Twitter. And ELTchat. (Or did I find ELTchat after I found Twitter? I can’t really remember!) Anyway, the important thing is, I got on Twitter. Did ELTchats, summarized them (The dark beginnings of my blogging!) AND…one day…saw a link to IATEFL scholarships. Didn’t really know much about IATEFL other than it’s an ELT conference, but it seemed to be a big deal, so I applied for several and won the Cactus one, much to my amazement.

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So was THAT the turning point? Getting on Twitter? Again, there is a valid argument for it!

But… why was I bothering with looking for ways to develop, in my isolation? I could done other things than looking for ELT forums etc!!

We had better rewind some more…

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My CELTA course!!!

The beginning of everything… But in particular the professional development session towards the end of the course, where we were made aware that you could make a career out of ELT and shown some possibilities, through our tutors’ stories and suggestions of what we could do to develop in future. (For example, that there exists this thing called the Delta that you can do after you have some more experience!) Honestly, I don’t actually remember many of the details of that session, but the important thing is it awakened in me a desire to develop and make a career out of ELT, it gave me that sense of possibility. And perhaps the awakening of that desire and sense of possibility was the biggest turning point of all?

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But all the other turning points were just as important for me! How to choose only one…! As the attendees mapped backwards through their careers to date, sharing their stories as we went along, it was clear that they had plenty of turning points too…

I concluded the session with a bit of take-away…

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…warning the attendees that it might be a bit of a cheesy takeaway (but if from this drive thru it would be vegan cheese 😉 )

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Well, everything that has happened to me so far stems from this, so…

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Most of the attendees mentioned that discovering the online teaching world as key in their development. Of course, for me, if I hadn’t discovered Twitter, I wouldn’t have seen the Tweet advertising IATEFL scholarships, so wouldn’t have made it to Glasgow 2012, wouldn’t have found that leaflet…etc!

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Because they are Good Things. And if I hadn’t…well you know the story already! Be warned: they are addictive!

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If I had acted according to my confidence in my ability to succeed, then a lot of what I have done I wouldn’t have dared to embark on in the first place! (I never in a million years thought I would win an ELTon, for example!) We (attendees and I) agreed that people often fail because they don’t try in the first place. And often that not trying in the first place stems from thinking “I’m not good enough, that’s for people who are better than I am”. But if there is one thing I have learnt, it’s that you only get “good enough” by jumping in in the first place.

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Turning points may not advertise themselves to you as such. It’s often only looking backwards that we realise that such or such an event or situation was a turning point for us. Hence the importance of saying yes! (Even if saying yes all the time can make you awfully busy! 😉 Seriously, who knew the start of 2016 would be so jam-packed!!)

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What you learn needs to be part and parcel of your professional life, weaving it’s way through, not something separate, on the side. For example, if I hadn’t tried to put the theories that struck me on the M.A. into action, my projects wouldn’t have happened and thus neither would my LT SIG book chapter. Not only that, but learner autonomy/metacognition/motivation etc wouldn’t have become part of my teaching, which would have been a shame from the students’ point of view!

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Life is short. Be where you want to be. If you aren’t, then keep udging towards where you want to be. Right now, I am very happy. I am where I want to be and I can highly recommend it! 🙂

Thanks to the TD Sig for this opportunity and to all the attendees for making it such a fun, interactive session to deliver.

 

 

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My ELT Book Challenge (Update 1)

About a week ago or so ago, I invited you all to join me in an ELT Book Challenge. Judging by the number of comments it attracted (much more than I had expected), I’m not alone in looking at my collection of ELT books and thinking “I really should open you more” …!

It’s been a bit of a juggle this week (and will continue to be for a while!), as I had already borrowed two ELT theory books from the staffroom library: Garton, S. and Graves, K. (2014) International Perspectives on Materials in ELT  published by Palgrave Macmillan, and Roberts, J. (1998) Language Teacher Education published by Arnold. I chose the former because it’s come out since I did my M.A. ELT and read All The Books about materials development, which I continue to be interested in, and the latter after being inspired by the Teacher Education Scholarship Circle. However, in order to fulfil my aim to pick up also one of my own books, I decided to continue with Eggins, S. and Slade, D. (1997) Analysing Casual Conversation published by Equinox, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages – since I dipped into it for my LSA4 speaking skills essay, in fact!

Pleasingly, my choice of books spans not only a large time range (1997 to 2014) but a nice spread of topics – materials development, teacher education and spoken language analysis. I say “pleasingly” as it feeds my hunger for variety!

In terms of materials development, so far I have read the introduction of the book, Materials in ELT: Current Issues, which, as you would expect, situates the book, and the first chapter, The ELT Textbook, which was by Jack Richards and opens Part 1 – Global and Local Materials. (This is an edited book, so each chapter is by a different author and on a different topic, making it nice and easy to dip in and out of!) Richards looks at the role of the textbook in language teaching, making reference to McGrath’s (2002) metaphors for describing teacher relationships with textbooks and exploring issues such authenticity and representation (this is something I explored in my research module, as I looked at phonological representation in that well-known course book series Cutting Edge), as well as the process of choosing a textbook, distinguishing between analysis and evaluation (including pre-, during and post-use), and, briefly, adapting it. This was quite a general chapter, and for me was a useful revision of aspects of materials use that I studied in the academic year 2012-2013. I imagine those who are doing the course now would probably find it a good starting point, as it is brief and general, and would be able to use the bibliography to go into greater depth on the various elements explored.

As for Teacher Education, I am still on part one (in my defence, it goes up to page 61!), which looks at theories of learning and teacher education and is titled thus. This is an interesting read, as it revisits the theories of learning that I looked at as part of my Delta and M.A., but relates them to teacher education. So, there is a little bit of revision but also adds something new. So, it considers the behaviourist approach, where trainees are expected to follow a particular model of teaching, with no deviation, so that learning to teach is an exercise in imitation; the humanistic approach where change is enabled rather than directed by other people, giving the trainee more control; the constructivist approach, which draws on Kolb’s theory of experiential learning and draws on a trainee/learner’s existent knowledge and experience, so they are no longer a blank slate but somebody who brings something of value to the table; and finally a socialisation approach, where as well as the trainee’s own experience and background, influences on the trainee are also taken into consideration e.g. the school, the community, the education policies in play etc. According to the contents, the author is going to conclude that a social constructivist approach is the best, but I have not yet read the conclusion (that is the point I have reached!) so I am not sure exactly what reasons he will put forward. (Though, I could probably guess at some of it, as when I was studying, I, too, became a big fan of this approach in language teaching!)

Finally, as far as Conversation Analysis goes, I’ve read chapter 1, called Making meanings in every day talk, in which the authors demonstrate that language is “used as a resource to negotiate social identity and interpersonal relations”, giving examples of conversation and showing how we can begin to guess at the type of speaker (gender, class etc.) based on the language they use. Apparently what’s special about casual conversation is that it seems trivial and yet is anything but trivial. It is carefully constructed even though that careful construction is achieved without the speakers thinking about or being aware of that construction.  Casual conversation is different from transactional or pragmatic conversation (e.g. buying something) in a variety of ways, including length (casual conversation tends to be longer), formality (casual conversation is generally more informal) and use of humour (casual conversation uses humour). In the second chapter, which I have only just started, the authors start to discuss the different approaches to analysing conversation, which are sociological, sociolinguistic, logico-philosophical, structural-functional, critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis. As I have only just started, I can’t tell you the difference between them all for now, but I assume I will have a better understanding of this by the end of the chapter.

As is usual at the beginning of a project, excitement and motivation were sufficient to allow me to not only do the theoretical reading but also use one of my more practical/methodological books. I had planned to use two, but ran out of time and cut my use of the second one, though I think it will fit nicely into next lesson.

The first book I used was part of the Delta Publishing Teacher Development series: Morrison, B. and Navarro, D. The Autonomy Approach. This is a book that I discovered at IATEFl last year, and was delighted because it reflected and extended the approach I had been using with my learners in Palermo, in terms of helping them become more autonomous. The great thing about this series of books is that they combine theory and practical ideas for implementing it. In my case, I had gathered a lot of the theory during my M.A. and set about trying to implement it once I returned to teaching. I’m quite glad I didn’t discover this book until after I had tried to do that, as it was a really interesting and rewarding process to go through, but would nevertheless recommend this book to anybody with an interest in learner autonomy and its development (which surely should be most, if not all, of us!).

I chose an activity for reviewing resources, as I have been encouraging my learners to choose different activities each week to try. This activity can be found on page 67 of the book. The heart of the activity is a set of questions that encourage reflection on the use of a set of student-chosen resources. In my case, it was student-chosen activities rather than resources, but there is some overlap, as the activity tends to specify the use of a given resource. I decided to do it as a speaking ladder activity, as I wanted it to be reasonably fast-paced and I wanted the students to talk to as many classmates as possible. Why? Well, students had chosen different activities to try, so hearing about what classmates have tried could sow seeds of interest and inspiration for future weeks. I did the activity at the start of the lesson, and it certainly lifted the energy levels in the room, ready for the rest of the lesson. There was potential for chaos, as the questions didn’t explicitly ask students to tell each other WHAT activity/resource was under discussion (the activity assumes sustained discussion with the same group of people) but students are not stupid, and indeed they quickly explained their activities to their partner before launching into the discussion of the particular question at hand. There were enough questions that they spoke to some people twice, so then there was familiarity with partner’s activity and a bit more depth was gone into via the additional question.

The second book I chose to use (but didn’t get round to using) was The company words keep, another Delta Publishing special. However, as I didn’t get on to using it, I will save it for a future post!

Have any of you started the challenge yet? Have you blogged about it? If so, either link to your blog post below, or use the comments to share your thoughts on what you have read or tried. I look forward to seeing what you have all been up to! 🙂 Not sure when my next update will be – hope to strike a balance between too often and not often enough, though!