We further believe that published materials (e.g. coursebooks) have much to offer the working teacher in terms of their wealth of ideas for contexts, themes, texts, task types and stimulus for focused conversation. However, to counterweight this, we believe that published materials present challenges in use which the untrained or beginning teacher is not in […]
How Dogme Are We?
We have been very excited by the fact that several readers have come to see what we have been doing on our courses, but we are a little concerned that, at some point, after we have described what we are doing and what our trainees end up doing in their lessons, some of you might […]
New Page added!
This is a short note to let you know that I have added a new page (you can find the links to them on the right hand side menu column called “Is asking ‘what does X mean?’ a waste of time?” This was prompted by recent encounters with the question during teaching practice observations and […]
Unplugging Day One
In our last post, we outlined the qualities that we felt it was important to nurture in beginning language teachers, as well as the principles we wanted to try to hold true to during the training process. Here, we would like to tae a more practical look at the development of our new course timetable. […]
The Ten Commandments of Teacher Training Unplugged
We’d like to sketch out here our thinking while going about the initial work of unplugging our course. We posed ourselves the question: “if we could create an initial language teacher training certificate course from scratch, how would we define an “A-grade” teacher?”. It didn’t take long before we had the following list
Throwing down the gauntlet
We are language teachers and teacher trainers working on initial teacher training courses in Hamburg, Germany. During the course of our work we have constantly sought to refine our course design and delivery so that it provides the best training experience for the people who come to us as possible. Over the years this has […]
Where this blog started…
This blog is emerging out of a discussion which started over on the DOGME ELT discussion group. Follow this link to read the original posting and the thread it generated!
Simplify
Welcome. This is all about simplifying language teaching and teacher education. I hope you find it useful. All the best, Anthony