So what does day two look like? Just to recap: on day one, the teachers have observed, listened and reflected; they have observed their tutors giving them feedback on the language they used when getting to know their colleagues, they have experienced being an absolute beginner (perhaps had their first Old English lesson) and they […]
Category: Training Philosophy
posts exploring why we choose to work the way we do.
Our position on Dogme and elitism
Recently, Dogme as an approach to teaching has been criticised for giving status to teachers who have high language awareness and confidence in working with emergent language. There are many teachers out there, the critics point out, who do not fall into this group, and many of them are non-natice speakers who, because they are […]
Our position on technology
The short version: we love it. Hence this blog!
Our position on language focus
We believe the language that learners produce during their conversations with each other is the richest source of potential learning available. This is because whatever learners say reveals where they are in the linguistic development and also indicates where they would like to move next – assuming, of course, that they have freedom to choose […]
Our position on texts
We do not believe it is inconsistent with Dogme principles for beginning teachers to plan a lesson around a live listening with traditional questions to check understanding, leading on to a structured conversation of some kind between the students, followed by language feedback. Lessons like this may have many similarities with listening lessons extracted from […]
Our position on lesson planning
We believe that teachers should be thoroughly prepared to teach before they enter a classroom; this does not mean that they need a formal lesson plan under their arm. Instead, it means that they need to be prepared to respond to circumstances for their learners’ benefit.
Our position on coursebooks
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 […]
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