teacher training – Page 2 – TEACHER TRAINING UNPLUGGED

On Thursday 28 June I was honoured to give my first webinar, asking the question what makes a lesson GREAT?, for the British Council Teaching English team.

Thanks go out to the 70 or so participants who gave up luchbreaks, dinner times or sleep to attend – I deeply appreciate it!

If you couldn’t make it, or if you would like to relive the experience, the recording of the whole session including Q&A is now online (duration: 67 minutes).

‘Til next time, all the best,

Anthony

February 3, 2012

Training Philosophy

What makes a lesson GREAT? Part #3

This is the third installment in a short series of posts inspired by a question posed by Mike Harrison – you can give him your own answer on the IATEFL Facebook page. To recap, I thought the following things were likely to make a lesson GREAT: Group dynamic Relevance to learners’ lives Emergent language Attentiveness […]

January 26, 2012

Training Philosophy

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 […]

January 8, 2012

Training Philosophy

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 […]

December 16, 2011

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 […]

November 25, 2011

Training Philosophy

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.

November 13, 2011

Training Philosophy

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 […]

October 30, 2011

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.

October 2, 2011

Training Philosophy

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 […]

September 2, 2011

Training Philosophy

Why ELT needs to cut like a knife

A few weeks back I was working with a group of CEF B2 learners. I had recently returned from a holiday in France and had brought a souvenir back with me: a pocket knife made by hand in the traditional heart of French blade-making, Thiers. The knife itself (as you can see in the picture) is […]

Tag: teacher training

WEBINAR RECORDING: What Makes a Lesson GREAT?