This is the second instalment of a series of five posts that I have started in order to expand on a short answer I gave to Mike Harrison over on the IATEFL Facebook group page in response to the question what makes a lesson GREAT? It was the capitalisation that gave me the idea to […]
Category: Training Philosophy
posts exploring why we choose to work the way we do.
What makes a lesson GREAT? Part 1 (and a postscript)
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: If you are familiar with acrostics, a form of poetry where the first letters in each line […]
On Why The (Unplugged) Revolution Will Not Be Televised
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjaADbq_2AI (Gil Scott-Heron reciting The Revolution Will Not Be Televised) There is nothing like a conference to re-ignite debate.
Cooking Unplugged (or: the roaring in the oven)
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 […]
Christmas ELT Appeal: Worst Case Scenario Survival Toolkit
I got an email a few days ago from a teacher in Australia called Rufus. She works with teachers in parts of the world where resources that many of us take for granted can be scarce, and where others that we may occasionally get our hands on are pure pipe dream. She asked me to […]
A Different Kind Of Scaffolding in ELT
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.
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 […]
Dear Diary…
On our CELTA courses up to now, we have maintained an approach to finding out what our trainees thought about their teaching that is fairly typical of such courses: we ask them to write a self-evaluation after they have taught, which they submit to us before we sit down with them to discuss the lesson.
Teaching Tao ‘n’ Zen…
Teaching Tao ‘n’ Zen… …We have a firm opinion about our strengths and weaknesses, we believe we know enough to know our character, and recognise our limits. In this we know, strictly speaking, absolutely nothing. What we “know” about ourselves, we have learnt through comparison. All the characteristics that we have attributed to ourselves, we […]
Security Theatre in ELT
A common feature of many initial teacher training programmes is a strong emphasis on detailed paper-based lesson planning. Whether this actually increases teacher preparedness to teach is questionable. Prompted by a TED Talk on Security Theatre and risk assessment, I suggest that focusing on anticipating problems and trying to eliminate perceived lack of control in […]