Job Discussion Forums

[mitsui]

What is overlooked is the usefulness of peer observation.
Teachers can observe each other, and is less stressful than when the boss does.

[adaruby]

[buravirgil]

thirded

Overlooked is a polite tack. I'm more suspicious of it being undervalued to increase the budgets of managerial hierarchies and prone to mock a term such as meta-cognition as hopelessly subjective when preceded by shows or demonstrates.

[Sashadroogie]

I wouldn't be as suspicious. Peers often aren't interested in doing observations either. Unless they are doing a course like the Delta. And timetabling them can be a practical obstacle too, when most peers teach at the same time.

[scot47]

Good opportunities for gossip, too.

[esl_prof]

Day 3

Again, lots of good stuff as usual. On the pragmatic side, I enjoyed the workshop on summary writing (with emphasis on techniques for both oral and visual learners). This is always a challenge for my comp students, and the presenter offered about a half dozen easy to do activities to help ease them into it.

The simplest activity (geared towards students with a preference for auditory learning) is to simply ask a student to share an interesting experience and, then, have another student in the class tell us what the first student just said. After that, the teacher poses the question, "What are the similarities and differences between what Student A and Student B just said?" This leads into a discussion regarding what a summary is and what makes for a good summary.

In the past, I've showed Mr. Bean videos to my students (which, evidently, are highly popular in Ethiopia, so about 1/3 of my students are already familiar with them) and ask them to summarize what they just watched. In the future, I'll probably add the debrief question above to help us hone in a bit faster on the qualities of a good summary. I might also try doing the summaries orally first before moving into writing in order to cater to a broader range of learning styles.

[esl_prof]

[esl_prof]

[Sashadroogie]

Agree totally. But I fear that is not a majority view. At least in the places where I've worked over the years.

[nomad soul]

[esl_prof]

Day 4: Final Day

Today's workshop selections were limited as we had to take off from the conference center shortly after noon to catch our flight home.

That being said, the most interesting workshop was the one on "Showing vs. Telling Grammar: Providing Grammar Feedback in One-on-One Academic Support Sessions." In addition to teaching an academic writing course, I spend quite a few hours each week tutoring ESL students in our college's academic support lab, where the biggest demand is for help "checking my grammar." While I've come up with some techniques over the years to avoid what the presenters called "the proofreading trap," I was able to pick up a few more tools and techniques from this workshop that I look forward to trying out.

One very simple tool, which I've not ever used before, was asking students to keep an error log to help create greater awareness of what their grammar problems are and, hopefully, be more intentional about finding and fixing their most common mistakes. As with everything else I've shared from this conference, I could say more, but I'll stop here for now.

[esl_prof]

[nomad soul]

Hey, esl_prof, what were some of the highlights and lowlights of the conference?

[esl_prof]

[natsume]

Thanks for the updates, Prof.

I've got my eye on participating in the MA student forum in Seattle in two years. Already looking forward to it, and I already have a general idea of what I may propose.