Job Discussion Forums

[biffinbridge]

Over the years I've worked in private schools, universities and oil companies. In some of these institutions there has been teaching development, in others there has not. Some of the development has been very useful and practical but there has also been also a lot of theoretical rubbish and 'Teflspeak'.

Where have you enjoyed the benefits of good, practical teaching development?

As a newbie, many moons ago, IH were quite good but I couldn't even subsist on their dreadful wages.

I loathe the kind of IATEFL workshops that start with some nerd saying something like;'we're not teachers we're eachers' or some nob saying;' it's about response ability. Get it?' I also laugh at the people who think that knowing the theory behind ALM or TBL somehow makes them a good classroom teacher and those who believe you can't use L1. Planning lessons down to the minute is also daft unless you're a Dip trainer that is.

So, IH were/are quite good...and.........?

[nocturnalme]

I've found them 90% useless, the worst being a 'bonding' session that kind of worked because we all ended up wanting to kill the instructor. I once sat through a session on 'How To Deal With Teenagers'. 59 minutes of this consisted of the session leader naming all the problems we have with teens, which we all empathised with, then he turned to us and said 'So, does anybody have any solutions?' Eh? That's what we're here, you numpty!
English Unlimited also seemed to suffer the same problem. I ended up contributing more than the person giving the seminar (even my fellow teachers agreed).
The most useful ones, I've found, dealt with warmers/fillers or different ways of introducing/teaching grammar.
Agreed, if a seminar veers into TEFLspeak, just spend your time drawing penises on something belonging to the person next to you. Far more entertaining and possibly just as useful.

[Richfilth]

I dont think I've ever attended a workshop, presentation or training session that didn't have some sort of agenda underneath; whether it was "please buy our coursebooks/teaching materials" or "please sell your students our certificates" to "please join our union/association/League Of SuperSchools for a ridiculous membership fee."

I've attended seminars on related topics to teaching; language aquisition, psychology, method comparison, Realia, and it's good to be exposed to different ways of thinking, but I've also seen some of my more naive colleagues (and in other schools, the DoS) swallow what's given them without taking even the tiniest pinch of salt.

My school always lets teachers know if there are any workshops or similar going on in the area; it's up to us if we want to attend them or not. Most of us don't bother.

I recently attended a 90-minute session around the sale of a group of one-to-one materials for single-student teaching. I left after an hour as all we'd done was group and pair work, topped off with the brilliant summariser from the presenter; "see how fun that was? you can't do any of that with one-to-one..."

[dynow]

good on you biff.

this thread was long overdue.

i gotta agree with TTT. i've yet to sit in a "training session" at my school where I actually walked out feeling like I was a better teacher for going to the meeting.

this profession is not an exact science. it's actually quite a free-for-all in most cases due to the large variance of clients you are bound to experience. some want this, some want that, some don't speak, etc. You could be the Yoda of ESL and still not get through to your student(s) because you're just not what they want or what they respond to. There is no training or ESL course you can take that will teach you skills to combat situations like this. You either got it or you don't.

Much of it is trial and error. You constantly skin your knee seeing what bores students, what worked only "ok", or what just flat out doesn't work at all. As you continue teaching, you start to mess it up less, that's all.

Because of these things, I scoff at the CELTA, TESOL, or whatever else there is out there. Go ahead, take the CELTA, but after 1 month, you are NOT a teacher. If it helps you land a good job, than it was worth it. I went into this line of work with a fly by night TESOL certificate, and I'm doing just fine.

On the other hand, my opinion is quite biased because I have never had a mentor of any kind. There were times I wished I had had someone to go to for advice or course strategy, but because I have never had it, I simply have learned to do it all on my own. I hear teachers complaining all the time that they would like some quality training, but it's just not available.

With that said, I hope the secret never gets out that the majority of English teachers in Poland are merely treading water, much like a man in a row boat in the middle of the ocean, the boat's got a hole in it, and all he's got is a coffee cup to scoop the water out.......and no compass.

[Sgt Bilko]

As someone who used to give training sessions it's always difficult to balance the trainees needs - a bit like teaching really. Some love the 'Here's ten activities you can use in your next lesson' style things, others prefer mulling over Michael Lewis 'when is a rule not a rule?' problems. Some trainees like to be treated like kids and get up and do drama and things, others just glare at you and refuse to leave their seats.

Big schools are good because you can have first year input (practical activities or really basic (and I mean worryingly so sometimes) language analysis) one day and meatier 'pre-Delta' stuff on another day. At a smaller school, no-one's going to bother offering that choice for half a dozen people.

My own worst sessions (probably all IATEFL) - an 'FCE reading ideas' session that consisted of one idea that we worked on for 50 minutes, 'Using World Club' which was a book selling session and the trainer/marketing bod got upset when we said we were already using it which was why we needed help 'cos it was awful and a 'Teaching kids' seminar where we had to wander round in a circle saying and acting adjectives (loving, loving, loving).

[scottie1113]

I guess I'm lucky. I'm at Bell in Gdansk and our workshops have been really good. We don't have them very often but I've come away from from every one with at least one idea and usually more which go over really well in the classroom.

And then there's always the discussions in the teachers room which produce even more ideas.

I can't imagine teaching without a CELTA or some other tefl class if for no other reason than you learn methodology. I'm not talking about learning how to use a CD player or things like that, but after doing the CELTA I felt like I had a better idea about how to approach actual classroom teaching rather than just walking in cold on the first day.

I agree that some books are almost useless. Even the better ones sometimes have lessons that don't seem to have much of a point. There's a sign in our teachers room that says Teach English, not the book. It sounds so simplistic but it's so true.

[jestert79]

I think I've found the majority of teacher training useful. At best, I walk away with great new activities; at worst I walk away remembering an activity that I'd forgotten. I've been to ones about using DVDs, using flashcards, process writing, how to adapt a text, etc.

There were some hideously useless ones though. I went to a similar one to what someone else said - "Getting Teenagers to Speak" attracted tons of people and it was just a guy, after a long discussion, giving us Cutting Edge and Reward activities we already knew about. My major pet peeve is the workshops about teens that basically say "If the kids are misbehaving it's all your fault - you're not setting up/planning the right activities."

I noticed another aspect though. A trainer may present this amazing speaking activity that works really well - when it's a room of 16 very motivated, creative teachers doing it. Then you try to do it with your class and it goes nowhere.

[biffinbridge]

I agree with the guy who said we learn most from our peers in the staffroom. I also think that many of us help ourselves by just trawling through books etc.

Profi(t)-Lingua made a big thing about their teaching development, but when I worked there, the workshops were done in Polish, which made the 4 native speakers feel really highly regarded.

[scot47]

How you teach is an extension of who and what you are. All this "teacher development' is so much hogwash. It is the sort of nonsense loved by those who read "self-improvement literature"

Incidentally I recommend my book "Seven Strategems of Succesfully Pyschotic Supervisors".

[Kootvela]

When I was working for IH, our workshops were often routine matters where teachers were intimidated with the number of exceeded copies. The few teacher development seminars that really took place were good thanks to an experienced teacher trainer.

Tmorrow I am going to an ILS managed teacher development event. Looks like many workshops with promissing titles.

The events run by publishing houses mainly deal with promoting their goods and are rarely useful as such but it's still mixing with other people socially.

[Will.]

Talk about scraping the bottom of the memory barrel Biff. You bring them memories flooding back mate.

"Recycling vocab with Wally and Grommy"

I think you were there for that one.

IH training sessions...How well I remember, and wish I could forget them. A half-hour of pointlessness on a Wednesday pm waiting to go down the rynek on my free afternoon and being obliged to stay on longer as this crappy "input session" was added to a teachers meeting to extend it into my time and make me able to deliver a better service to our students...the blind leading the visually challenged
I soon realised that once you delivered a crappy one you were not asked to do one again

"How to be a better teacher using a pen and six Rizla papers!!!"
or suchlike.
The upshot of which was the DoS, among others, being able to claim "teacher training experience" from having organised these sessions and schools claiming to deliver "on the job training" and improvement for newbies. none of these , my own included, were worthy of any major contribution towards teacher develpoment. I learnt more at the bar or on the tram or even having a coffee and a chat at conference. The main reason is the obligation to deliver them was put upon inexperienced teachers and pitched to high for the benefit to be appreciated by inexperienced teachers all struggling to survive in their classrooms and not really in need of sessions with all 600 irregular verb memory games or how to teach 13 types of phrasal verbs
Good practical teaching development?
Well it looked good on your CV if you gave a session and that is how come there were so many.. a captive audience and coercion. Needs dictate how much teachers take on board. The IH Teacher Training away days were a different deal and ... occasionally I learnt something of use from other teachers.
I agree with many of the other posters here but the main complaint is that teachers should be taught as teachers but newly qualified and slightly more experienced, but only slightly more, of one academic year only,
"senior teachers" only know how to teach students and quite often only kids, if they have any teaching ability at all.
The thick leading the planklike...

[Big_Cannon]

In my humble opinion, teaching development is merely a rehash, revamping the furniture, reinventing the wheel, force-feed the swansong of some luminary of the publishing deadline, or just some trainer who likes to listen to himself talk over the same paradigms.

I come from the Teachers College�s ideal of academic freedom absolving teachers from pedagogical competence. Trainers used to streamline their workshops, which were based on subject matter content, or how it plays out among the students, in a manner of closing ranks on the franchised curriculum or textbook. Schools started to develop their own method but failed to train their teachers effectively as a result of the teaching a method or strategy quite irrelevant. The subject matter must be representative to the student�s local needs. If learning styles differ significantly for different students, groups of students or background, the strategy has to come from self-reflective research, and similarly, the accommodation of student diversity.

Trainers and teachers must make provision for this �representativeness� in the course objectives, and the learning process is done more by accident than design. If the teacher instills in his or her students the unholy but necessary self-study round-up, they will ultimately learn. Never mind what the course objective or method says, or what the innovative but incongruent system the trainer enthusiastically displayed. While the course objectives or the method gamely continue to try to move the goal posts, at some point there has to be a reckoning. ... No amount of spin can change the math. It all comes down to continuous assessment and test scores.

[Kymro]

[Big_Cannon]

A lost cause