Tagged: celta

Parachute training for teachers

Parachute jumper descending on cloudy day
Photo taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/5247691488/ by hora varian, used under a CC Attribution license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Have you ever learnt to sky-dive?

If you have, you may recall receiving this instruction…

“Immediately after you pull the rip cord, shout out at the top of your lungs ONE THOUSAND, TWO THOUSAND, THREE THOUSAND – CHECK!!!!

When you shout CHECK!, tilt your head back and look above your head.

If you see your parachute canopy opening, relax and enjoy the ride.

If you don’t, reach for your reserve rip cord and pull it.

Repeat.

If you see your parachute canopy opening, relax and enjoy the ride.

If you don’t, relax anyway, because it will all be over before you know it.”

Macabre as the punchline is, there is actually a great deal of sense in this short lesson – both for novice sky-divers and for teachers of all levels of experience.

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What makes a lesson GREAT? Part 1 (and a postscript)

The original question on IATEFL's Facebook page

This was the question posed by Mike Harrison on the IATEFL facebook page  recently. Considering the space constraints of commenting on a platform like that, and given my Faible for whimsical responses to serious questions, I replied thus:

My answer to mike's question

If you are familiar with acrostics, a form of poetry where the first letters in each line (or some other regular pattern) form a message, you will see what I have done here – my response to Mike’s question is hiding in plain sight.

But afterwards, amused and satisfied as I was at my minor achievement in melding pedagogy and poetry, I felt the need to expand on this collection of ideas, as I had contributed them with more than simply the intention of showing off my (questionably) witty way with words.

So lI thought I’d look at each of my criteria for what makes a lesson great in a bit more depth over the next few days. I’ll be taking them in order so let’s begin at the beginning with G for Group Dynamic… Continue reading →

Cooking Unplugged (or: the roaring in the oven)

Recipes for Tired Teachers by Chris Sion

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about food recently. Granted, this soon after the festive excesses of the Christmas/New Year period, the last thing you may want to read about is food, but please bear with me for a while.

Recent debate over in Chia Suan Chong’s Devil’s Advocate blog series drew my attention back once more to an analogy which links teaching and food: the idea of lesson recipes.

“First, pre-heat the oven to 220°c”

The metaphor of a recipe pervades discussion of lesson structure both at pre-service level and beyond.  There was even a highly popular book based on this analogy.

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A Different Kind Of Scaffolding in ELT

Acknowledgement: Photo by Kim Traynor (hosted at Wikipedia)
Thanks to Kim Traynor for this image

There was a trainee teacher on my last CELTA course who had come to us without any academic background to speak of but with a wealth of life experience; in the end, he turned out to be one of the most interesting trainees I’ve worked with. Continue reading →

Powerful beyond measure

This is to the teachers I am working with on our current CELTA course.

We have come a long way since the beginning, two weeks ago.  Through your journals I have had the privilege of following your developmental and emotional journey.

Of all the ideas, thoughts, questions and wishes that keep recurring, one of the most frequent is that of fear.

This has been expressed by each of you, each in your own way, at some point up to now in the course. Here are two comments that caught my attention:

I’m scared to take risks because I’m being assessed.

I didn’t feel confident enough to do something new.

I can understand where you are coming from, but I would like to tell you now that the time for fear is over. Continue reading →