Teaching Practice: why do you need it?

This post aims at helping candidates preparing for a training course. It is addressed to teachers who have never undergone any official training, either pre-service teachers or more experienced ones. It may prove especially useful to teachers who have only had traditional academic experiences and never been on a hands-on, practical course. What makes a practical course different from more traditional course formats including lectures and written exams is the element of teaching practice. It is therefore very apposite to take a closer look at it. So, let’s get started!

WHAT IS TEACHING PRACTICE?

Usually referred to as TP, teaching practice is a series of actual lessons with real students in a real classroom, either a physical or an on-line one. It can range from informal micro-teaching sessions of 15-20 minutes, where the other trainees on the course may play the part of students, to formally assessed sessions of up to 60 minutes, which play a crucial role in your passing a course. Obviously, the first kind of TP can prepare you for the second. Most of my comments below aim at describing the more formal kind of TP.

Typically, the students are non-native speakers of English, often teenage or adults, in a monolingual or multilingual setting. They may be attending regular English classes, or they may be offered a free English course on which they will be mostly taught by the trainees. In the first case, you may or may not be the regular class teacher, but you will have to work closely with the regular class teacher anyway, in order to make the best of the situation and integrate the TP into the series of regular lessons seamlessly. This means you may choose to do your TP with one of your own classes, if that is feasible within the course limitations. In any case, however, you will have to teach at least two different levels of instruction. In the second case, which is becoming more and more common, you will have to teach a class which you have – at best – seen only once or twice being taught by an experienced teacher. If you are also being assessed at the time, which you will most probably be, you can understand that the stakes can be high and stress levels may go through the roof.

More often than not, you will have been given specific materials to work with, e.g., a page off a coursebook, and you will have received support by your course tutor on how to prepare a lesson plan via written notes and/or a tutorial. You are also encouraged to work with the other trainees on the course when preparing your lesson plan and adapting your materials. However supportive your tutor may be though, you will probably feel uncomfortable being observed while you teach, especially if it’s your first time!

WHY HAVE TEACHING PRACTICE ON A COURSE?

The obvious answer to that is that teaching is a craft, a practical trade. You can learn only so much from talking about it and analysing it but, unless you actually do it, you can never get the full picture of what it entails. So, what are the practical aspects of teaching that TP offers insight to?

Teaching techniques, of course.
Classroom management skills: an actual lifesaver in real classrooms.
First-hand experience of the actual language problems real learners are facing.
Some awareness of how different learners learn: the skills and strategies involved and the ensuing challenges.

Beyond developing these core aspects of teaching, TP also has a more dynamic character: it focuses on progress throughout the course by providing a scaffolding process for you to build upon until you feel more confident with handling lesson planning and actual teaching more independently. This is why the actual objectives of TP change as we move on towards the end of the course.

At the beginning, TP mainly aims at:

Allowing you to simulate a real teaching situation under sympathetic supervision and support.

Giving you the opportunity to try out new techniques.
Getting you used to being observed, as it is common practice in many teaching situations.
Exposing you to learners at a range of levels so that you develop some understanding of the different approaches required.
Developing a sense of responsibility for your learners.

As the course moves on, more objectives come to play:

Offering you the opportunity to have your teaching evaluated and to receive constructive criticism.
Becoming more independent as a teacher by gradually increasing the freedom to make your own choices.
Helping you develop your own teaching style.
Developing self-evaluation and self-awareness.
Assessing your progress on the course.

That last point is the one most trainees focus on, often at the expense of all these other benefits mentioned above. This “tunnel vision”, albeit quite understandable, can create two very common misconceptions:

1. Everything needs to be perfect before going into TP.

Needless to say, this is wrong. TP is an opportunity to experiment and find your boundaries. Your tutor should let you know that and should also be very clear as to what you need to focus on, to begin with. For example, no tutor expects a perfect – or even a fully completed – lesson plan in your first TP! The idea is that you make short achievable steps from TP to TP, with the full support and guidance of your tutor; and, above all, that you learn from your mistakes. Mistakes are not viewed as definitive proof of failure but rather as an opportunity for growth. You may fail again and again but everything is going to be alright as long as you show that you are learning from your mistakes and that you are improving.

2. I cannot judge my progress on the course, since we are not taking any written exams.

There are actually three channels to record your progress on during such a training course:

Woman is showing the problem in documents

–> Self-reflection and self-evaluation, by keeping regular written records and discussing them with your peers and tutor.

–> Feedback from observers, either your tutor or your peers or both. Many useful insights can be gained by comparing notes on a and b.

–> Feedback from your students, e.g., on what worked for them and what didn’t, on what their interests and problems are, etc.

Finally, I’d like to close this post with a list of what you should expect after completing a series of well-designed TP sessions:

Increased awareness of the language areas you are teaching.
Increased awareness of what helps learning in a particular class and what doesn’t.
Control of basic classroom management skills (giving instructions, making corrections, etc.)
Ability to present, practice and revise specific areas of grammar, vocabulary, etc.
Ability to use activities and texts to develop language skills, e.g., listening, writing, etc.
Ability to use your coursebook to plan a series of lessons relevant to what your students need to learn.
Ability to help learners develop awareness of how they learn and what learning strategies suit them best.
Ability to think critically and creatively about your own lessons.

Alexandra Koukoumialou

Alexandra is a CELTA and DELTA trainer with ACE TEFL. She has been a teacher trainer for over 10 years now, doing both online and face-to-face courses, while working with hundreds of trainees both locally and internationally. Her background in teaching makes her training style practically oriented, as she enjoys designing her own materials and sharing classroom tips. She has been passionate about teaching for most of her life and she brings that to her training courses, together with her enthusiastic personality.

Bibliography: TEACHING PRACTICE, Gower, Phillips & Walters, Macmillan, 2005

All pictures by Freepik.com and Lovepik.com

The Joy of Becoming Redundant

man and happy woman greeting each other with fist bump — Photo by Andres Ayrton on Pexels.com

Even though the financial rewards that you can expect as a teacher are dismally (and often abysmally) low, most teachers, perhaps partly in an effort to protect their sanity, would insist that they love their job nevertheless, claiming that teaching is rewarding in other ways; when asked about the rewards of teaching as a career, they will typically mention things like the appreciation they get from students and former students, the fact that they can help improve their students’ lives, the sense of accomplishment that they get from watching students succeed and overcome difficulties and even, for the idealists, the impact that their actions have on society at large.

And yet, essentially, teaching is a thankless activity. The whole point of teaching anyone anything is to make yourself redundant: ultimately, you are only successful as a teacher if your students can reach a stage in their learning where they no longer need you, not only because they have learnt everything that you were able to teach them, but also, more importantly, because they have developed the ability to continue learning independently of you and thus are learning more than you could ever teach them and, hopefully, much more than you, their teacher, actually know.

When their students surpass them, many teachers begin to doubt their skills, talents and accomplishments and experience feelings of frustration, self-doubt or even envy. This is, however, the only way in which human knowledge can advance: students have to surpass their teachers, otherwise knowledge will inevitably deteriorate from one generation to the next. This realization may initially be a difficult one, but it is clearly essential that as teachers we should come to terms with it and act accordingly.

When I started training teachers thirty years ago, I must admit that I used to take pride in the fact that most of the teachers I trained thought I was so much better a teacher than they were and some of them even said they didn’t think they would ever be as good as they believed I was. So insecure (and so clueless!) was I at the time, that I actually felt good when my students essentially said that the best they could hope I could teach them was less than what I had learnt at the age of twenty-five! It was not just my young age, however, that had led me up that particularly treacherous garden path; it was my ignorance of the true nature of teaching and learning, i.e. of what I was supposed to be teaching those teachers about, of the very thing that they sang my praises about! In short, I really did not know enough, and had not reflected enough, about the nature of teaching and learning to realise that there are very few easy answers and even fewer irrefutable conclusions when it comes to good educational practices and that teacher education is not about transmitting the knowledge you (think you) have, but rather should focus on the critical appraisal and re-appraisal of pedagogic principles and practice.

To this day, I think the most embarrassing incidents in my teacher training career involve a failure on my part to help teachers develop the ability for such critical appraisal and re-appraisal. There have been experienced teachers, for example, on courses such as the Cambridge DELTA, who even after months of training will ask questions like “ok, so what is the correct way to teach the present perfect?” or who will simply imitate in their lessons behaviours and practices that they have seen demonstrated by their trainers, without considering the possibility that these may be ineffective or inappropriate for their particular classes. And there are still teachers who take it for granted that the way I do something in class is the best and only way and that they will, “of course”, never manage to do it the same way, as if it was even desirable, let alone useful, to do anything “my way”.

On the other hand, I have been lucky enough to teach teachers who have doubted me, questioned my beliefs, brought things to my attention that I was not aware of, experimented with new techniques I was not familiar with, and reached their own conclusions about teaching and learning, which sometimes contradicted mine. A lot of them have developed into much better teachers than I have ever been and I have had the pleasure of learning from them by observing their classes, but also by attending presentations that they have given in conferences, reading articles that they have published in teachers’ magazines, including the ELT News, and discussing matters of educational theory, language analysis and professional practice with them, in some cases years after they successfully completed their teacher training course.

Some of the teachers I have had the pleasure of training over the decades have pursued careers in teacher training or academic careers in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. Most recently, a past DELTA student successfully completed her training as a CELTA tutor with me. I observed her deliver a training session and noticed that she had made quite a few changes to the training material we used at ACE TEFL. She also used activity types during her session, some of which I had never thought of using in training. The session was one of the most successful and engaging training sessions I have observed in my life. Even so, she was eager to critically examine every detail of her session plan and of her delivery afterwards, offering alternatives and discussing how she could improve the session further. I asked her permission to use her version of the training material. And I told her, and really meant it, that I wished I had video-recorded her session to use as an example of good training practice on future trainer training courses.

For me, this is the most rewarding experience you can hope for as an educator: when you can honestly say “I could never have done that as well as my student did it!”.

[first published in ELT News, May 2023]

George Vassilakis

George Vassilakis (BA Education, MA ELT, Dip.RSA, Dip.Trans, Dip Lit.) is an ELT teacher, author, trainer and manager. Over the last thirty years, he has taught English in a variety of contexts and trained teachers of English on courses such as the Cambridge DELTA and CELTA as well as a variety of short courses and workshops, both face to face and online.
As an ELT materials author, George has written coursebooks, teacher’s books and supplementary materials for young learners, adults and young adults, while he also has extensive experience of academic management in language teaching, teacher training and language testing organisations.
Teacher education, however, remains his main professional interest. George is the co-founder and director of ACE TEFL, a teacher development centre in Athens Greece, where he continues to train teachers on a daily basis.

Self reflection: understanding what you’re doing in class

green tree — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Not as simple as it sounds!

Teaching is the ultimate multi-tasking context: you need to check your plan/coursebook/ worksheet, keep an eye on multiple students at the same time, check your watch, monitor your voice and your language, problem-solve on the spot… I could go on, but we’ve all been there and there’s no need!

In that light, the idea that teachers should observe themselves and monitor their performance while they are teaching can look like an unreasonable expectation. Yet, being able to reflect on what you did in class is a consistent assessment criterion on teacher training courses, like the CELTA, which requires you to teach and observe others teaching, as well as give feedback to other teachers and get feedback from both your peers and your tutors. Unsurprisingly, some trainees feel that there is no point in evaluating themselves as well and can even be annoyed that they are required to do that on top of everything else.

But let us try and address some common points raised on courses regarding reflection and self-evaluation.

Why should I do this if my tutor is going to give me feedback after my lesson anyway?

The feedback you get from your tutor will be kind, constructive and detailed but its impact will be limited if you remain blissfully unaware of what happened, what worked and what did not work in class. Becoming aware of your own actions and decisions, and the students’ reactions to them, provides an opportunity for growth and development which you should not deny yourself! In other words, this is where actual learning takes place for you. For example, if you believed that explaining grammar in great detail to a class who already knew what you were talking about was a strength of your lesson, that says a lot about what you need to still learn and develop in your teaching.

How can I do this when I’m so engrossed in my teaching that I hardly remember what exactly I said or did afterwards?

Composing a self-evaluation report is not about training you in holding the minutes in a meeting, but rather about honing your teaching instincts (more about that in a minute). For a minute-by-minute analysis of your lesson, if you really need one, it makes more sense to turn to your tutor and colleagues, who were observing you and had the time to take detailed notes. What you are really working on when doing your self-reflection after the lesson is putting into words your own feelings about the lesson, the learner reactions that you perceived and your impression of the overall effectiveness of your teaching. You can do this after the lesson, at different times. What works best for a lot of teachers is making a couple of brief notes immediately after the lesson, recording feelings and first impressions while still fresh; then, revisiting these notes later, when several hours have passed, and re-examine initial ideas as well as decide what the main strengths and weaknesses were. At that point, it helps to try and remember concrete examples from the lesson to support your impressions.

But I cannot do this, no matter how hard I try! I feel I have nothing to say really.

This is more common than one might imagine. Although offering trainees the opportunity to realise how they are progressing on a course is a fundamental principle of most teacher development courses, the ability to do so is by no means an innate talent: it is a skill that needs to be practised and learnt, like most things about teaching. In order to do that, you need to:

be aware of the learner reactions and contributions during the lesson.
realise which tasks worked and which didn’t
be able to distance yourself from the actual process and observe it objectively

Concentrating on these three points, you should be able to make some headway in your reflection process. (If you would like more about how to compose a reflection report, we’d be happy to take that up in another post.)

TIP: Record yourself teaching once or twice – please do not cringe – and see what happens. You’ll be amazed by what you can learn by observing yourself teaching. I still find it fascinating after decades of experience; there are so many things I hadn’t noticed I was doing!!! And seeing something for yourself beats the tutor trying to draw your attention to it every time.

It is very disheartening to have one picture in your head about your lesson, and then, during feedback, be proven wrong in key points.

Although not all self-reflections are proven wrong like this, it does happen often, and it can be disappointing. Needless to say, the reflection process itself is not to blame for that, but it does draw attention to our own misconceptions or even shortcomings. And as much as this can be quite unpleasant to feel, it is an essential part of the growing and developing process.

Imagine we held training courses only for perfect teachers, who are never wrong! That would go well! First, we would not have any trainees, and second, even if we did, they would not have much to take from the course, thus defeating the whole point of taking one.

Accept making mistakes as the best thing that can happen to you on a learning course.

I have to prepare and teach a lesson, observe my peers teaching and offer them feedback, and then I have to reflect on my own lesson, all within a few hours. Can’t I just skip it?

It is true that a teaching practice day can be quite heavy, especially if you are doing an intensive course. And it is also true that many trainees “switch off” after their own teaching spell takes place. This may be because they are genuinely tired, or because they find the whole feedback/reflection process quite boring, feeling that all they need is be given a grade for their lesson and go home. Or it can be both! This is what usually happens in those cases:

Trainees use vague formulaic expressions both in their own self evaluations and in their feedback to their peers, e.g., good elicitation, used CCQs, great rapport, etc. They even repeat the same points lesson after lesson, but they are unable to offer ONE concrete example of these points when asked.
The whole group spends 3 or more hours teaching, observing and giving feedback and all this time is not really taken advantage of.
The tutor remains the main source of feedback, which is neither fun nor as constructive as it could be.
Trainees may leave the session without a clear idea of what they should or should not do in their own lesson, or, even more importantly, no idea of WHY they should or should not do X or Y.

The whole reflection – feedback – re-evaluation process breaks down and a core part of the course does not really function.

If you take one thing:

Please regard self-reflection as important as planning your lesson: if you do not do it, it is like throwing your lesson plan out of the window. You will not know whether the plan worked or not, why, which parts need changing, etc. Train yourself to reflect on what you did and use the conclusions as the basis for your next step.

Alexandra Koukoumialou

When teachers plan, fate guffaws!

notebook — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

Planning lessons

Lesson planning is an essential part of a teacher’s professional life. In some cases, it consists of merely having a quick look at the syllabus and/or coursebook material a few minutes before the lesson and making rough decisions about what to do during the lesson. In others, lesson planning can be a tedious process involving thinking about the learners, their progress and their needs, the learning objectives that would be most appropriate at this point in time, the activities and materials which would help achieve those objectives, the problems that might crop up and possible ways of dealing with them – the list can go on!

On most qualifying teacher training courses, teachers are expected to draw up the latter type of lesson plan and produce a document that contains details of every decision the teacher has made and, on an advanced course like the Cambridge DELTA, the reasons why they made those decisions. While this may not be the type of lesson plan the teacher will be expected to produce on a daily basis in their professional career, compiling a detailed lesson plan is seen as an essential part of the teacher learning process and is part of the assessment requirements on many qualifying courses for teachers.

Benefits of lesson planning

The general consensus both among trainers and among teachers is that detailed lesson planning is indeed conducive to the teachers’ professional development, as it forces them to carefully consider all the parameters that can affect learning, the most important of which I would summarise as follows:

the learners themselves and the learning context
the nature of the language and/or skills the lesson is intended to focus on
the methodological principles that constitute good practice in language teaching
the materials, resources and tasks that can aid learning

I asked two groups of teachers who had just completed teacher training courses with quite a heavy lesson planning and teaching practice component whether they thought lesson planning on the course had helped them and how it had helped them. All of them, with no exception, agreed that lesson planning had helped them enormously, while the reasons the novice teachers, who had just completed a CELTA course, gave included the following:

‘I had to think about what was important and what not’
‘It kept me focused while teaching’
‘It helped me organise my time better’

Experienced teachers on the DELTA course also mentioned some of these points, but they also added points like the following:

‘I was forced to think about the learners more: what they would benefit from, what they would appreciate, what they would find helpful.’
‘I found the process of anticipating problems valuable; in spite of having taught for so many years, I still find it difficult to think on my feet and racking my brain to anticipate in advance what might go wrong in each lesson has meant not only that less goes wrong in the actual lesson but even when it does go wrong I instantly know what to do about it.’
‘The best thing about planning as meticulously as we had to on the DELTA is that the learners can tell! They knowwhen you have prepared, they can sense it, and they show their appreciation in so many ways.’
‘For the first time I realized that I am not a slave to the coursebook, that I can actually select what to pay attention to.’

Planning vs. teaching

And yet, during the course, the very same teachers often complained about having to plan their lessons in so much detail. And all of them were extremely reluctant, especially the first couple of times that they were observed teaching, to make any changes to the lesson plans they had prepared, but stubbornly followed the lesson plan even when it was very clear that the activity they had proudly planned was not working. In a few cases, when an activity absolutely had to be abandoned because there was no time left to do it, the teachers had a meltdown after the lesson, experiencing very deep frustration that they had invested so much time and effort in preparing materials and activities which were then not used.

This is understandable, of course; and fair. Nobody wants to spend hours preparing for something that never happens. But then, lesson plans are just plans: sometimes they can be implemented, sometimes they have to be abandoned. More often than not, they need to be adjusted. You can anticipate what may happen, but you can never know, unless you decide to teach the lesson plan rather than the learners, i.e. to ignore the learners and just stick with your lesson plan in spite of everything. Teaching an observed (and even assessed) lesson is not really that different from teaching any lesson: the important things are that the learners should learn and that the learners should have a good time, not that the teacher should showcase all of the materials they have prepared and not that the teacher should execute every iota in their lesson plan just to prove that they planned well. In fact, willingness to adapt and adjust your lesson plan to the learners’ emerging needs during the lesson is a characteristic of a professional, experienced teacher; it even forms one of the criteria for assessing lessons on the Cambridge DELTA course.

modern train departing from train station — Photo by Kaique Rocha on Pexels.com

In fact, each and every one of the following is, for me, reason enough to depart from your lesson plan:

the learners don’t understand
the learners are not interested
the learners are tired, anxious about something else or in a bad mood; their ‘affective filter’ is up
the learners demonstrate that they can already produce what the lesson was intended to help them learn

What would I advise a teacher? In very simple words, I’d tell them to teach the learners, not the lesson plan, the material, or the book. It is the indirect object of the verb ‘teach’ that carries the weight, the fact that you teach someone something. What you teach them can in fact only be evaluated after you have made sure that you have understood what they need. So even though lesson planning is a valuable learning process for us teachers, it is the learners in the classroom that will ultimately dictate our final decisions as to how much of the lesson plan we have prepared is relevant and useful and how much will have to be abandoned or changed.

[first published in OUP’s newsletter ELT World in July 2022]

George Vassilakis

Use feedback like the tool it is …

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… and make the most of your training

Taking the decision to invest in a teacher training program is not an easy one – perhaps it never was. Leaving your comfort zone and testing your limits in search of growth is never easy, but it takes even more courage to do so in a global environment of fear, uncertainty and huge financial insecurity. So, if you are considering this or you have already committed to it, kudos to you!

What we want to do here is to share some insights gained from our training experience, regarding how you can benefit the most during the actual training phase. Some of it may seem obvious and self-explanatory but it is easier said than done! We hope to help with the done part.

Approach this with an open mind

If you have invested wisely, then you are sailing to unchartered territories. That means you have selected a reputable course, run by professional trainers, and gauged at your actual development needs. What you are looking for is going beyond what you have known – or think you have known – so far, and extending your professional abilities, your craftmanship and your perspective on the teaching/learning process.

Do not hamper yourself by sticking to stereotypes, pre-conceived ideas, or rigid expectations. Let yourself free to absorb what the journey has to offer.

Bring your own personality into the course, with your learning preferences and your individual needs
Bring your professional and cultural background: as long as they are not tying you down to a set mentality, they can be invaluable.

DON’T

Start on a defensive mode: the course is not designed to question your principles or your effectiveness

Understand the trainer-trainee relationship

It is very much like your relationship with your learners. It is neither a superior-subordinate relationship nor a service provider-customer one; or at least it should not be. It is primarily a relationship targeted towards growth. Both parties have a lot invested in it and they both stand a lot to gain from it. And it is to both their interests to work together as smoothly as possible.

Regard yourself as a willing participant on this journey which should be enjoyed at every opportunity
Regard your tutor with the same respect and positive attitude that you expect them to regard you
Expect your tutor to get you to question the validity of everything we do or do not do in class and think out of the box.

DON’T

See yourself in a passive role. This may lead to a passive-aggressive stance.
Expect to be given ready-made solutions that magically fit all occasions

Be an integral part of the feedback process

Many hands-on, practical courses centre around the reflection-feedback process. This may come in stark contrast to more traditional educational theories or clash with beliefs cultivated in more traditional educational systems or cultures. Considering that our educational background, including that of the author’s, is often traditional, one may start to see why many trainees’ attitude towards the reflection-feedback process can be sceptical.

Take an active part in feedback:
- give your own opinion
- ask questions
- compare different perspectives
Go beyond the surface:
- search for reasons behind success or failure
- look for what can be tweaked next time
- dig for the underlying beliefs that made you take this or that decision
Ask for feedback from your colleagues and offer them some as well. When doing the latter, be as specific as possible; vague comments or solely positive ones do not help your colleagues improve any more than they would help you.
Celebrate your wins! Even if there were problems, there must have been several things you did right in a particular lesson: list them, paying special attention to the ones that used to be problems earlier on the course. Then pat yourself on the back!

DON’T

Regard your reflection process as separate from feedback: realising what you have just done in class is something your tutor cannot help you with – only you can.
Just wait for your tutor to tell you how your lesson went
Automatically reject any negative feedback: ask for reasons and then examine them carefully.
Beat yourself up if your lesson was not perfect; there may be setbacks but just because everything was not positive about your lesson that does not mean you should give up entirely!

Take the next step

The biggest mistake you can make regarding the reflection-feedback process is to see feedback as the end of the line; as a definitive assessment of your worth and progress that defines what sort of teacher you are (going to be). Many trainees are trapped in that sphere of negativity and are unable to move on.

See feedback as a tool: one you have purchased at great cost in terms of time, effort, and money. Use it as such.
Base your next steps on the action points you got from your feedback. Feedback should be translated to practical, actionable steps you can follow immediately. If you feel this is not the case, please inform your tutor promptly.
Give it time to sink in: you may need time to process the feedback you have received, leave behind any strong emotions the whole process may have generated and look at the action points coolly and objectively. This is especially useful with intensive courses, provided you have at least two days between teaching practice sessions.

DON’T

Hesitate to ask your tutor for support, especially after an unsuccessful lesson. Any professional tutor should be happy to discuss your concerns, listen to your ideas for the next lesson and generally be as helpful as possible.
(On the tail of the previous point) Expect your tutor to plan your lessons for you! This is NOT conducive to your own development: professional tutors should know that and avoid doing it.
Do not be afraid to check whether you have understood what the feedback included: ask for or offer specific examples from your lesson to support a specific point.

If you take one thing…

Please don’t give up the effort after repeatedly failing to meet your action points: it takes time and a lot of effort. In any case, most reputable courses allow for a couple of failures along the line. Keep trying not for your tutor or just to get the certificate; do it for yourself and your own personal satisfaction. Nothing compares to the sense of achievement you feel when you have overcome a weakness or even turned it into a strength.

Alexandra Koukoumialou

Let’s Get Physical!

Back to normal?

As coronavirus lockdown eases in many countries, restrictions are lifted and once more teaching in a physical class is becoming a reality. It is still, though, far from a return to normal, if there ever was a normal. The imposed physical distancing and health protocols that we need to adhere to are sources of additional stress in our already demanding and stressful professional lives as teachers. Adding the very real and justified fear of possible exposure to Covid-19 certainly does not make things easier for us.

Last year, when I got back for the first time to face-to-face, I remember feeling exhausted after the first interactions. I had to tackle so many things at the same time: I had to manage my own feelings of anxiety while not distressing students and trainees and adjusting to the new reality in the classroom. This new reality meant that well-established classroom routines of practice had to be adapted in accordance with health safety protocols.

After a year or so since that first comeback, here are a few things I’ve learned. Some might seem obvious or minor, but the devil is in the details.

We are not alone in this.

Exchanging experiences and brainstorming with colleagues, talking to students and trainees, evaluating, reflecting, and adapting are always ways forward. Asking for help through our networks even for what might seem insignificant at the time does not mean that we lose face. We simply evolve through participating in a community by sharing. Collective experience and hive mind can provide more answers and invaluable emotional support.

Safety comes first.

It really does. Protocols set by health experts should not be ignored or adapted to our own way of doing things. Some rules are not meant to be broken or even bent. The health risks are simply too high for that.

Be clear and succinct.

I am not talking about giving efficient instructions during a lesson here although the same applies to it as well. I am referring to how implementation of guidelines is best achieved. Engaging in endless debates regarding the distance between desks, or the carrying capacity of people in the classroom each time different teachers enter a class can create confusion amongst students and friction between colleagues. It’s best that everyone is on the same page and guidelines are discussed and agreed upon beforehand with colleagues and administration. It is always easier to communicate to others what we already have a clear understanding of ourselves.

Plan ahead

Under the circumstances, there are simply too many things to consider for a successful outcome. From time management and how that may cause more people to be in the waiting area at a specific time to handling material and managing appropriately distanced interactions while students engage in group/pair work and teachers monitor. Going into a class thinking I’ve done it so many times, or how hard can it be simply won’t cut it. Careful lesson planning rises once again as an invaluable tool to successful lessons.

Classroom setting

Have just the allowed number of seats / desks. Often when there is extra seating, people tend to occupy the extra space by putting their personal belongings or stretching to more than one seat or even moving closer to others. If you are responsible for sanitising surfaces between groups as is often the case for teachers, you definitely do not need the extra work. If possible, have a window open at all times, even if the air conditioning is on. Ventilation is important but outside noises can disrupt lessons. Consider the length and volume of listening tasks. Extra Wi-Fi speakers placed around the class work wonders. Sharing audio files on students’ mobile phones, provided there are no copyright issues involved, works well for short texts as well.

Handling equipment and materials in classroom

Does anyone have a pen? Can you give me your unicorn eraser? Can we share books? This sort of questions is now almost obsolete since everyone is used to not sharing anymore. However, that is not always the case for both children and adults. A packet of wipes can be an indispensable accessory in any class, especially those with very young learners.

Cleaning and sanitising expensive electronic equipment needs attention. Make sure you know what is recommended before you splash sanitiser all over an interactive whiteboard or a laptop. Conventional whiteboards are cleaned and sanitised more easily but anyhow it is a good idea to avoid having more than two people on the board at the same time.

Going paperless is not wishful thinking anymore. However, it requires access to equipment, a certain familiarisation with computers and applications from both teacher and students. In most contexts nowadays personal tablets or smartphones could be used in class. Handouts could be sent before class electronically and so can any piece of homework. In class, applications such as learning apps, or Mentimeter and Kahoot can be used for tasks, questions and games. There are plenty of applications to explore and choose the one that best fit your purposes.

Physical proximity in class

Any pair or group work activity in class involves physical proximity. Because this cannot be the case anymore that does not mean that group or pair work should be abandoned altogether. On the contrary, collaboration, besides promoting positive learning outcomes, also promotes positive emotions and a sense of optimism, all very much needed in classrooms today. In my experience, raised voices are not as loud as you might expect and do not distract students from other pairs. Other activities, such as collaborative writing in class through instant messaging, though, may work for some groups of students but not for others.

Some of the most common questions from trainees and less experienced teachers regard monitoring. It is an acquired skill and does take practice to develop that unobtrusive way of being there for students and knowing how things are progressing for everyone in class without encroaching on students’ personal space and being overbearing. In fact, physical distancing in class forces teachers to practice what most experienced teachers do anyway: monitor effectively from a distance. Find a spot in class that you can be and observe from there. Arrange seating so that there is a clear view of everyone from your spot and so that you can move around easily if needed.

The elephant in the room wears a mask under its trunk

It is understandable that people may complain about wearing faces masks, especially during warm or rainy days. The amount of time spent on asking students to adjust their masks has been considerable according to some teachers. A way around this may be discussing with the class, even with young learners, commonly accepted rules, and using gestures to remind each other to stay safe. By providing space for students to exercise their own agency and become actively involved in class management, staying safe can become a non-issue.

What remains an issue, though, is the raised voices and the repetitions. There seems to be a consensus amongst teachers, students, trainees and tutors that communication is impeded because of the masks. But is this really the case? What about medical staff? Surely, they have always been communicating more vital information than what is shared in an ELT class quite successfully wearing masks for longer hours than we have to. And what about communicating in places and classes where there are people wearing face coverings for religious reasons?

Shakespeare said the eyes are the windows to the soul. Although I am not convinced about the soul part, eyes do tell more than we think. Research has shown that we identify emotions just from looking at the eyes. What research has also shown us is that we can still be understood if we’re speaking through any sort of facewear as sound and articulation are not really influenced. What I have noticed is that the incidents of people complaining about masks and comprehensibility have reduced over time, even during oral exams. Masks can be an issue for some but only if we keep thinking about them. As the most memorable line from Donnie Brasco goes “Forget about it”.

Touching, but not

The no touching of people in class is a rule that for some coming from cultures where physical contact even amongst strangers is accepted, is often hard to follow. Perhaps because touching is demonstrative of acceptance and support, and proximity provides a sense of understated commandry. Whatever the reason, unlike other contexts in which physical touching has always been a definite no-no, students talk about a feeling of “being deprived” or the “sense that something is missing”. So, there’s a negative space for us teachers to occupy with meaning. I found myself more preoccupied than usual with students’ interests and needs. I think that many teachers and trainees unconsciously go the extra mile to have lessons that are more interesting and interactive for students. And I think that the reason for that might be the need to compensate and to keep making our lessons fun in spite of everything, as demonstrated in the comment one of the students made to a trainee: “Thank you for the lesson. I had a really great time!”. Both teacher and student left the class with a smile.

Pedagogy before technology.

The last year or so has been particularly straining for teachers: online, blended, face-to-face and, depending on which part of the world you are located in, having to be able to move from one to the other at any given time. Technology has been for most the beast to tackle. Don’t get me wrong, technology can be an ally to what teaching will turn into next but, in my book, it can never substitute for critically reflecting on the pedagogical value of our practice.

Self-care is class well-being

Getting back to face-to-face is not a reason for panic attacks. It takes some planning, effort, and time on our part to ultimately transform it into a very satisfying experience. In difficult times, we need not to forget ourselves. After all, we play a vital part in the well-being of others. Social support and engaging in pleasurable activities are prescribed as good self-care strategies. For me teaching is included in these self-care strategies and is perhaps the most creative way to reclaim our lives during a pandemic.

Some further reading

Clement, M. (2017). Why combatting teachers’ stress is everyone’s job. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 90(4), 135-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2017.1323519

Glanz, J. (2005). What every principal should know about collaborative leadership. Corwin Press.

Hansson, A., Hillerås, P., & Forsell, Y. (2005). What kind of self-care strategies do people report using and is there an association with well-being? Social Indicators Research, 73(1), 133–139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-004-0995-3

Lee, D. H., & Anderson, A. K. (2017). Reading What the Mind Thinks From How the Eye Sees. Psychological Science, 28(4), 494–503. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616687364

A couple of videos to watch

Smiles. You cannot miss them even with the masks.

The eyes have it @holburne 😀 #EnjoySummerSafely #RediscoverBath #LoveCultureWeek pic.twitter.com/xXmrkQLKAL
— The Holburne Museum (@Holburne) August 21, 2020

Forget about it. Some good advice.

Elisavet Kostaki – Psoma

Elisavet has been involved in various aspects of TESOL for more than two decades: as a teacher, an examiner, a mentor and a teacher trainer. For the last two years she has also worked on various CELTA courses as an approved tutor.

Correct me if I’m wrong…

Recently I felt a strange sense of camaraderie with some unknown to me Vietnamese teachers. I was reading a case study (Ha & Murray, 2021) investigating how training can affect teachers’ beliefs and their practices regarding oral corrective feedback (OCF). It was comforting to realise that I was not alone: the questions I have had about OCF for years are also being investigated by others across contexts, cultures, and time. To date, research has, admittedly, provided some answers but there are still quite a few questions that have not been resolved. As OCF is, in most cases, an integral part of classroom practice, I thought I would share some of these questions, starting with the most obvious one:

What is OCF?

Lightbown and Spada, (2013) define oral corrective feedback as an “indication to a learner that his or her use of the target language is incorrect” (p.216). OCF can target a broad range of errors in learners’ production, can be immediate or delayed, and it can stem from different sources: the students themselves, their peers or their teacher (Loewen, 2013). It is also known as error correction or negative feedback. The latter can be contrasted to positive feedback, which is “an affirmation of the content or correctness of a learner utterance” (Nassaji, 2015, p. 11) intended to provide the learner with affective support.

Can we do without OCF in class?

Well, OCF naturally occurs in class to varying degrees, whether intended or not, especially when meaning is negotiated (Loewen, 2013). Whether OCF should be provided or not depends on our beliefs (actual or stated) regarding language learning. From the nativist perspective, for which naturalistic exposure or modified input is the sole condition for learning, OCF is irrelevant; it hardly plays a role in the language acquisition process (Li, 2018). On the other hand, theoretical perspectives such as sociocultural theory, social constructivism and interactionist approaches claim OCF has an important role to play. For interactionists, especially, providing opportunities for learners to produce output and to receive feedback are core components (Mackey et. al., 2013). Experimental studies to date, mostly from the interactionist perspective, demonstrate beyond contention that OCF can facilitate L2 development (Li & Vuono, 2019).

From the pedagogical perspective, OCF was not considered significant in a range of different teaching methods, from humanistic approaches to the Natural Approach and to early versions of Communicative Language Teaching . In later versions of Communicative Language Teaching and in Task-Based Language Teaching, though, OCF was reinstated, as it was considered important for both accuracy and fluency (Ellis, 2017). Teacher guides (e.g., Ur, 1996; Scrivener, 2005) argue in favour of a “preventive pedagogy” (Lightbown, 1998, p. 189) that leaves little room for errors, but do advise in favour of OCF and even prescribe how and when OCF should be provided, so as not to interfere with communication and negatively impact affective factors.

Do all the errors that occur need to be addressed?

Research advocates focused OCF, i.e. addressing only some of the errors made (Ellis, 2009). Finding out about this research was a great relief for me, because growing up in a red-pen culture I felt overwhelmed with the number of errors corrected. It is not just that it was demotivating, it was also that after a while one simply does not pay attention anymore. A less-is-more approach is also what my experience as a teacher has taught me: As a novice teacher I was pressured into correcting everything explicitly to satisfy a demand for total accuracy that often equated teaching with testing. Learners, of course, due to cognitive and affective reasons, were not able to notice all the corrections in a process that was, it turns out, not conducive to learning.

So, the subsequent question is if not all, then which errors need to be addressed. This, in theory at least, is an easy question to answer according to teacher guides (Ur, 1996; Scrivener, 2005): Teachers should prioritise those errors that can lead to communication breakdown or affect larger stretches of discourse (impeding, global errors) and those due to lack of knowledge over the ones that do not affect comprehensibility of whole utterances (local) and those that are not systematic (known as performance errors or mistakes). However, research does not fully support this convenient recipe: there is evidence in favour of correcting local errors as well as non-systematic mistakes in addition to impeding, global errors. In any case, it can be difficult for teachers, especially less experienced ones, to make distinctions between global and local errors or errors and mistakes in the short time afforded to OCF (Ellis, 2009; 2017).

When is the best time to provide OCF?

Both immediate OCF, provided immediately after an error occurs, and delayed OCF, provided at a later point in time, have been found to be beneficial (Ellis, 2017). Immediate correction can have the benefit of incorporating the correct form into learners’ attempts to communicate and, thus, not compromising form over meaning in communicative tasks (Li, 2018). There are valid theoretical arguments in favour of delayed OCF, too. Quinn and Nakata (2017), besides affective reasons, note from the theoretical perspective of cognitive psychology that longer intervals between error and OCF lead to better long-term retention (p.37). Empirical research has not been conclusive as to when is the best timing for OCF (Quinn & Nakata, 2017). Teacher guides (e.g., Ur, 1996; Scrivener, 2005) suggest immediate correction in accuracy work and recommend delaying it in fluency work. Research, though, does not support the avoidance of OCF in fluency work, as it has been found to assist acquisition (Ellis 2017).

Who should be the one to provide OCF?

According to teacher guides, correction should be attempted in a very specific order; self, peer, and finally teacher (Ur, 1996; Scrivener, 2005). However, this suggested good practice regarding OCF is inconsistent with learners’ beliefs and expectations: learners generally have positive attitudes towards OCF, prefer more explicit correction of all errors if possible, and expect to be corrected by the teacher rather than their peers (Li & Vuono, 2019). My own experience of observing teachers in various contexts also indicates that most teachers don’t seem to follow the suggested practice anyway.

How should OCF be provided?

This is a difficult question to answer since the contextual, individual, and linguistic features affecting the delivery of OCF are intertwined (Yu et al, 2018). Teachers are often expected to make an on-the-spot decision about how to correct, which will inevitably be influenced by their own beliefs. Teachers’ beliefs regarding the provision of OCF, shaped by education, training, and experience both as learners and as teachers, are often rigid and can even contrast with research evidence (Junqueira & Kim, 2013). For many years, I advocated in my practice as a teacher providing focused (i.e., selective) OCF in an implicit way, so as to have minimal impact on fluency, taking into account affective factors as well. I believed it was best not to spoon-feed corrections and that self-discovery was both cognitively and affectively the optimal choice. I consciously avoided using any explicit OCF strategy, although I was aware of empirical evidence attributing merit to explicit correction, including those corrections which make use of metalinguistic clues (Ellis, 2017). By following closely pedagogical suggestions, I was in fact being dismissive of research and effectively limiting the range of my OCF repertoire.

I remember once I employed an elicitation strategy for a grammatical error that occurred during a short dialogue (I not like dogs in parks) in an adult elementary class. After all learners finished their contributions, I initiated an elicitation process as I had done successfully before. This time however, it ended up being a tiresome, awkward, ambiguous, and ultimately ineffective elicitation process. It would have been best to address this error with an explicit correction after the contribution was concluded. It would have been concise, closer to the occurrence, and since the omission of the auxiliary is a common error with low level learners, it could have provided others with an accurate example of the form to use in their contributions. Apparently, even in the most accommodating of contexts, even well-informed teachers’ beliefs do not always lead to efficient OCF practices.

How can a teacher decide on a recipe for OCF that works?

Unfortunately, as is true with many things in life, there is no such thing as a single foolproof recipe for OCF across contexts. I have found this to be the case in many of my previous learning experiences as a learner and as a teacher, as my example above illustrates. In fact, there are no definite answers provided either by research or by teacher guides (Ellis, 2017). Perhaps the search for a single recipe is misguided as “the constellation of moderating variables” (Russell & Spada, 2006, p.156) cannot always be simultaneously satisfied even in the same context.

What are teachers supposed to do?

As Ellis (2017, p.14) notes “the best advice that can be given to teachers is to deploy a variety of strategies”. This is good advice, but it presupposes that teachers are knowledgeable, have a good grasp of classroom complexities, and are willing to challenge their beliefs. For those less experienced and/or less knowledgeable what emerges as an invaluable step towards more efficient delivery of OCF, is teacher education and training (Borg, 2011). Delivery of OCF in the L2 classroom is demanding and difficult for all teachers, even those with a lot of experience and knowledge. In my experience, it is not always easy to adapt successfully to the challenges posed by the dynamic process of OCF. Consideration of the profile of your class and a comprehensive language analysis in lesson planning help to identify potential problems and subsequently elect OCF strategies more appropriate to the context. Voice, posture, gestures, choice of words are important elements to consider especially since these can enhance saliency of the OCF provided.

The way teachers provide OCF can also serve as a model for peer correction. Learners need to be trained how to provide peer correction and, as with teachers, this is a process that requires time, effort, and opportunity. Planning, acting, reflecting, observing, sharing experiences of practice, are key towards a more reflective practice.

The journey of reflective practice does not only help manage even unplanned OCF more efficiently but certainly improves all aspects of our teaching (Borg, 2011). The necessary condition, though, for all the above is that the teacher should challenge their beliefs, be ready to try new recipes. A well-guided, experiential training course does exactly that: it provides the tools to challenge the ways we do things in class including the way we deliver OCF. At least, this is what training offered me: a bold new perspective on practice and a re-evaluation of my beliefs.

References

Borg, S. (2011). The impact of in-service teacher education on language teachers’ beliefs. System, 39(3), 370-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2011.07.009

Ellis, R. (2009). Corrective feedback and teacher development. L2 Journal, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.5070/l2.v1i1.9054

Ellis, R. (2017). Oral corrective feedback in L2 classrooms: What we know so far. In H. Nassaji & E. Kartchava (Eds.), Corrective feedback in second language teaching and learning: research, theory, applications, implications (pp. 3–18). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315621432

Ha, X. V., & Murray, J. C. (2021). The impact of a professional development program on EFL teachers’ beliefs about corrective feedback. System, 96, 102405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2020.102405

Junqueira, L., & Kim, Y. (2013). Exploring the relationship between training, beliefs, and teachers’ corrective feedback practices: A case study of a novice and an experienced ESL teacher. Canadian Modern Language Review, 69(2), 181-206. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.1536

Li, S. (2018). Corrective feedback in L2 speech production. The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0247

Li, S., & Vuono, A. (2019). Twenty-five years of research on oral and written corrective feedback in system. System, 84, 93-109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2019.05.006

Lightbown, P. M. (1998). The importance of timing in focus on form. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (p. 177–196). Cambridge University Press.

Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2013). How languages are learned – Oxford handbooks for language teachers (4^th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Loewen, S. (2013). The role of feedback. In S. M. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 24-40). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203808184

Mackey, A., Abbuhl, R., & Gass, S. M. (2013). Interactionist approach. In S. M. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 24-40). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203808184

Nassaji, H. (2015). The Interactional feedback dimension in instructed second language learning: Linking theory, research, and practice. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474219068

Quinn, P. G., & Nakata, T. (2017). The timing of oral corrective feedback. In H. Nassaji & E. Kartchava (Eds.), Corrective feedback in second language teaching and learning: Research, theory, applications, implications (pp.35-47. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315621432

Russell, J., & Spada, N. (2006). The effectiveness of corrective feedback for the acquisition of L2 grammar: A meta-analysis of the research. In J. M. Norris & L. Ortega (Eds.), Synthesizing research on language learning and teaching (p. 133–164). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.13

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning teaching: A guidebook for English language teachers. Macmillan Education.

Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching: Practice and theory. Cambridge University Press.

Elisavet Kostaki – Psoma

A teacher’s tale

When I embarked on my CELTA course there was no way I could imagine I would now be a CELTA Tutor and Assessor as well as a DELTA tutor and even a teacher development centre owner!

As a young man, I wasn’t sure I wanted to work as a teacher. Teaching seemed particularly challenging, even daunting back then. Instead, I briefly worked as a translator of fantasy novels – naively believing that this was going to be easier – and had to find a McJob on the side to make a living; translation did not pay much, I quickly came to realise.

One day, a friend suggested I should give teaching a try. He said it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, he explained how rewarding it could be (albeit not financially), he even compared it to what I was doing at the time and in the end asked “how much worse can it be?”. I started having second thoughts and reluctantly took his advice and started applying to language schools.

A few weeks later, one of these schools did get back to me and, after a nerve-wracking interview, I was offered a teaching job. By the way, that foreign language school located in Nikaia will always have a special place in my heart – so will the owners and the learners I got to teach there.

Ms. K.M. had given me my first opportunity to teach. I’m not going to dwell so much on all the blunders I made in my lessons – they were a lot; however, I did try hard not to let anyone down. I kept studying, asking for advice, experimenting…

When the academic year ended, I realised my teaching wasn’t good enough and I had to do something to become a better teacher. I hated the fact that, in my students’ eyes,my lessons would be considered just one more inescapable slot of absolute boredom in their heavy daily schedule. At the same time, I did not want to betray the trust the centre owner had shown me.

So, I applied for an intensive summer CELTA course. I learnt a lot, I worried a lot, I even panicked at some point. The course itself naturally had its ups and downs; but I still have very fond memories of some of my colleagues on that course! How they helped me during the stressful weeks, how much fun we had, how we learned from each other!

September came and I returned to the Nikaia school. I was feeling much more confident. I could finally see exactly what I had been doing wrong and was able to reflect on my own teaching, exchange ideas with colleagues in the teacher’s room, plan lessons of different kinds; I was able to use a number of different techniques to get the students interested, to cater to their individual preferences; most importantly, I was able to finally focus on the students themselves since the burden of not knowing the basics had stopped exclusively occupying my mind during the lessons.

As the school owner/director started noticing my improvement, she offered me more and more hours and I finally got to work for her school full time. In the years I worked there, I taught different levels and age groups, I kept learning from my students as well as from my colleagues and I developed as a teacher. I went on to teach in different contexts, gained a lot more valuable experience, and a few years later I did the DELTA and started working as a trainer – and that has been a completely new adventure, with its own challenges.

When I reminisce about my journey in ELT, however, I always think of my CELTA as the beginning of everything.

Could I have gained this invaluable knowledge and experience without having done the CELTA?
Would I have improved my job prospects without it?
Would I have met all these lovely colleagues who helped me on this journey?

The (obvious) negative answers to these questions might seem to be overly romantic and immaterial now. Yet, I wouldn’t be able to ask them if certain things hadn’t happened exactly the way they did. And the CELTA course was one of them.

It gave me the confidence I needed as a teacher to share ideas and experiment even if that meant occasionally failing to achieve my lesson aims; it gave me the ability to reflect on those failures, identify the problems, isolate them, and work on them to get better and better as a teacher – sometimes as an individual, too. Last but not least, it opened up a whole new world of opportunities in the world of English language teaching; a world I couldn’t have imagined actually existed.

One size fits all?

One-to-one lessons: some of us love them, others put up with them. Yet, they are a major part of our teaching, right? Many teachers tend to fill up their daily schedule with as many one-to-one lessons as possible. This is understandable – after all, teachers do have to make a living, like everyone else, and in many countries, including Greece, the low rates they are paid leave them no other solutions.

However, for a one-to-one lesson to be successful, and for learners to want to return for more, we do need to spend some time thinking about the learner’s needs, wants and preferences in each case, finding appropriate and relevant resources and materials and planning the lesson in such a way that the learners can derive the maximum benefit, so that they feel they’re getting their money’s worth.

The learner’s needs and wants

Even if learners are at the same level and the same ages, they may still be different in terms of their needs and wants. For example, let’s look at the image below showing the needs and wants of two teens both aiming to sit the same exam at the end of the academic year. You will notice that there is very little overlap; so, using the exact same materials with both would not be a good idea.

Planning a one-to-one lesson

We need to remember that we should not be trying to re-invent the wheel for each lesson; there is no need to aim for the unique, extraordinarily ‘magic’ materials every time we want to make something more fitting and suitable for our learners’ needs and preferences. Using a set of specific questions can save a lot of time and effort. In particular:

Why did I choose this material?
Why is it of interest to my student/myself?
How does it address my student’s needs?
What is the specific purpose of this material?
Does it cover skills/useful language my student needs/wants?
Does it include activities my student prefers or should I adapt it?
Is it culturally appropriate?
Is it at the appropriate level?
What problems can I anticipate my student to have?

At this point, we need to start thinking about the learner’s preferences and their interests so that we can make the materials even better, even more motivating.

A set of criteria we can use to make our lives easier when adapting materials is the following:

Modifying: changing the type of activity
Personalising: making it relevant to the learner and his/her personal life, etc
Supplementing: adding materials, e.g. short videos, etc
Reversing the roles: the learner becoming the teacher
Student taking control: the learner deciding what to focus on, conducting the activity, etc

Taking Student A from the image above as an example, we can safely assume that we would focus more on their writing and speaking skills rather than their reading, their accuracy and range of past tenses rather than present tenses, etc. So, how would we adapt the activity below without wasting precious time?

Modifying:
- turning it from writing into a speaking activity, e.g. an interview between Justine Klaus and an interviewer
- designing and completing a flowchart
Supplementing:
- adding a follow-up activity: a written or spoken ‘response’ from one of the relatives to the event/ an interview, etc
Reversing the roles:
- the teacher fills in the gaps including some mistakes; then the learner corrects them and explains why they were wrong.

Finally, we should not forget that the student himself/herself can be involved in the process of selecting materials or even designing material they would like to use in their lessons. In that case, we might be able to learn something ourselves from our students!

In a nutshell, we ought to remember to:

create a detailed learner profile and keep it up to date as the course progresses
base our selection and adaptation of materials on our learner’s needs, wants, and interests/hobbies
involve our learner in the selection/design of the materials
establish a line of communication appropriate to the teaching/learning context
keep a record of lessons/topics/etc covered to present it to the learner’s sponsors
encourage learner autonomy to help them achieve their goals faster

Can a leopard change its spots?

Stalking Aditya Singh—Flickr RF/Getty Images

The interview

It was one of the first few times I was interviewing candidates for a teacher training course. I remember being quite nervous myself trying to make complete strangers feel comfortable enough to maybe get a glimpse of their motives by asking for their reasons for taking the course and their expectations. And there was that young confident teacher, ticking all the right boxes, up until she looked straight at me and declared in brutal honesty: “I don’t think I’ll become a better teacher or a good teacher. I only care about getting a better job”. Hm. Sure. Fine. A good qualification helps in that direction I said, smiled, and moved on.

It got me thinking, though. The part about becoming a good teacher was perplexing. It was said in a way that made it look like being a good teacher is an unattainable goal and good teachers are only short of mythical creatures. Surely, there is no simple answer to the question ‘what makes a good teacher’. I was more concerned, though, with this teacher’s attitude towards the course, which I fear is shared by many others: almost convict-like, being resigned to do the time; keeping their heads down, avoiding trouble, reading and doing what they are told, and then finally being released into the world of ELT with a professional competitive qualification. But why take for granted that no substantial change will come of it? Why not challenge existing beliefs about teaching and learning? There are of course some valid reasons for the whys that started piling up. But still, I kept missing the point. The real question, the one that really mattered from where I was sitting, was how these beliefs could be challenged on a teacher training course.

A new set of questions

So, a new set of questions arose with the first thing to clarify being what beliefs are in the teaching training context.

There has been a lot of work from psychological and philosophical perspectives aiming to define beliefs in general. Borg (2011), based on that work, describes beliefs in our teaching training context as ideas or opinions individuals hold to be true, often tacit, with a strong evaluative and affective component, used as a basis for action and resistant to change (pp. 370 -371). Beliefs then affect teachers’ learning and their practices; so much so that the importance attributed to them in teacher education has reached the point of describing them as possibly “the clearest measure of a teacher’s professional growth” (Kagan, 1992, p. 85).

That much is clear then. For teacher education to have an impact on what teachers do it has to impact their beliefs, too. Obviously, the tricky part is how to impact those beliefs which are resistant to change. For us teachers the part of resistance is even more difficult to challenge because our initial beliefs about second language teaching (the ideas that we come to teacher education courses with) are to a great extent based on our previous experiences as language learners, or what Borg (2003) calls the “apprenticeship of observation”. This apprenticeship is a powerful thing that has been found to withstand training and not to waver even as teaching experience accumulates (Junqueira & Kim, 2013). The cards are stuck against us right from the start, it seems.

Research to the rescue

The good news is that research into the matter, and there has been plenty since the 1970s (see Borg 2009 for a comprehensive account), points to the direction that not only are there changes in the behaviours of trainee teachers but also changes in their thinking and beliefs as a result of teacher education courses (Borg, 2009). Research has also had an impact on the design of teacher training courses which acknowledge the importance of teachers’ beliefs, such as for example the DELTA, which aims at developing “candidates’ ability to reflect critically on their own beliefs about teaching and learning” (Delta Syllabus specifications, 2019, p.4).

Some suggestions

Reflecting critically on one’s beliefs is no easy task, though, especially for many teachers for whom it can be a novel experience that requires support and examples of how to start this process by asking the right questions. Teachers need to be able to distinguish beliefs from practices and theoretical knowledge; they also need to be given an explanation as to why they are encouraged to examine their beliefs. Providing a safe space, ways, and opportunities to make their beliefs explicit, is as important as it is to be able to share this process with peers. For some, questioning their beliefs about learning and teaching leads to the verification of pre-existing beliefs, for others it opens new prospects. Either way, teachers have been introduced to a roadmap of how to reflect upon their praxis (knowledge enacted into a practical and active process), an integral part of which is to challenge their beliefs, to view them as fluid rather than set in stone.

Conclusion

Teacher training courses are so much more than a welcome addition to a resumé. On top of everything else, a training course is a transformative time that equips us with tools to reflect on our practice and our beliefs. Learning how to challenge our beliefs is perhaps the secret to becoming a unicorn, the mythical unattainable creature, a good teacher. As Prodromou (2020) eloquently frames it “Good teachers are not experts with answers; they are practitioners who ask questions” (p. 309). So, keep on asking. The teacher from the interview certainly did.

References

Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81-109. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444803001903

Borg, S. (2009). Teacher cognition and language education: Research and practice. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Borg, S. (2011). The impact of in-service teacher education on language teachers’ beliefs. System, 39(3), 370-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2011.07.009

DELTA Syllabus specifications. (2019). Cambridge English. https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/Images/22096-delta-syllabus.pdf

Kagan, D.M., 1992. Implications of research on teacher belief. Educational Psychologist, 27, 65-90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2701_6

Prodromou, L. (2020). Epilogue. Good Language Teachers – What Do They Do? What Do They Know?. In C. Griffiths & Z. Tajeddin (Eds.), Lessons from Good Language Teachers (pp. 309-312). Cambridge University Press.

Elisavet Kostaki – Psoma