Hello! This is Anthony Gaughan for Teacher Training Unplugged Radio. In this episode I’d like to talk about focusing on form in the language classroom, and how not to waste time on it. Let’s get started… Quite often when people try to teach grammar, they make one or two things hard for themselves, and their […]
Author: Anthony
I am an English language teacher and teacher trainer who spends his time increasingly trying to do simple things well.
Unplugged Radio Episode 4 – this time, it’s personal
In this 15 minute episode, I talk about my teaching career and the developmental opportunities it has afforded me along the way. I recorded this mainly for my current trainees but if you like what you hear, give it a thumbs up, or leave a comment.
Celta hamburg podcast episode 3 – practice made pointless
I took a few minutes to record some thoughts about the past week on my current Celta course for my trainees, focusing on the question of what makes good controlled practice. I focus mainly on the problem of making controlled practice more than a mechanical exercise, and how to make it easier to check whether […]
Celta Hamburg Podcast Episode 2
I just made a short podcast for my current Celta trainees up here in Hamburg, where I talk a bit about our general approach to training, teacher talk, language grading, task-setting, work management (less generally interesting unless you are on the course) and tips for passing the Focus on the Learner assignment (these tips may […]
Mr. Gaughan goes to (IH) London
Back in September, I was honoured to be invited by Varinder Unlu to give a short talk for her colleagues at International House London about unplugging teacher training. IH London record these sessions and so – thanks to their efforts and the magic of the internet – I can share this with you all! Huge […]
Bits and pieces
Funny how half a year can slip by… It is with some shock and no small degree of shame that I realised it has been that long since my last post here. So I thought I would give you all a quick update on some of what I have been up to and what I’ll […]
taking a blogging busman’s holiday
Instead of writing anything for my own blog this month, I’ve had the honour and the pleasure of writing a guest post as part of the ongoing “10 Books that Shaped my Teaching” series initited by TDSIG, the IATEFL Teacher Development Special Interest Group. If the idea of finding out what kinds of books have […]
who are grades for?
Grades have become so closely associated with education these days that is is quite easy to forget that they are – historically speaking – a relatively recent phenomenon. They were unheard of in the days of Socrates, and would have seemed alien to Comenius. Unbelievable as it may sound, we didn’t always bother with grades while […]
3 things beginning with E
I spend almost all of my professional life doing one of two things: observing the work of trainee teachers on Celta initial teacher training courses, or observing the work of Celta tutors in my role as an appointed Assessor for the Celta award. Both of these jobs present various challenges and raise many questions, but […]
Where are all the unplugged teacher trainers?
Dogme ELT has been around (in the sense of having a name and a movement of people who recognize it as a legitimate and defined approach to teaching languages) for the best part of 15 years at this point of writing; what this means is there are a significant number of teachers working now who […]