Freelance Teacher Self Development
For you, then your learners
//I took part in the first ever (and hopefully not last ever!) Tokyo Lesson Jam this morning.
Before I get back to the real world of shopping, laundry and cooking, some stuff that wasn’t directly related to jamming but that stuck with me.
//Since I began teaching freelance and for agencies about five years ago I haven’t had the benefit of an office in the same building I work in except for two of the regular gigs I have. With this in mind, here are my essentials.
You will lend pens out and forget to take them back in at the end of the lesson. The cost mounts up,
With these you can prep listening exercises on public transport or find supplementary/alternative materials.
Menus, transport maps, leaflets, etc. can be exploited in lessons.
Not all convenience store printers will print directly from smartphones/tablets. Carry your materials on one of these. Periodically copy stuff back and forth. Cloud storage is a handy backup, too.
Can keep documents inside without massive creases. May also work as a desk when on the train.
For cutting paper into strips or bits.
For keeping tiny bits of paper inside.
Useful for ad-hoc games or random selection of student/task type/anything else that has six options.
Monitor stuff students say. It can and will be a goldmine. You can use it for examples of common errors, more authentic gap fills and even just for reflection on task performance.
These work as bookmarks, vocabulary cards, cue cards and more.
Also, it’s useful to have a big bag to keep them in!
//I had a brilliant time at the Saitama Nakasendo Conference yesterday. I feel I have loads to do because I left with a ton of things to think about and so now have quite a few summer projects on to of DipTESOL portfolio writings and a summer course in writing for a mixture of ESL and EFL kids.
Paul Raine‘s keynote presentation made me regret forgetting most of the little JavaScript, JQuery and Python that I learned but also made me double keen to get back into it. Chatting to him before and after was interesting: plenty of sites and other stuff to read on my list, too.
Jesse Ewak demonstrated a bit of Voicethread, which is something I might use in the future after I have a bit of a mess around with it and find out what it can and can’t do.
I wish I had gone to see Vanessa Armand‘s presentation because after seeing her slides I realised that her ‘fishbowl’ idea might be useful for a reading class that I teach.
Rob Lowe‘s presentation on integrating a blind student into his classroom was a presentation that he gave at the Tokyo JALT/TEDSIG Teacher Journeys conference a few weeks ago. There were four of us in the audience and basically what seemed to come up was that:
To this end, I decided to set up a Google Plus community, SEN in ELT as a place for teachers to share information.
My presentation was quite full, probably because my title was quite simple and something that most teachers need to do (‘Teaching Listening‘). I felt almost clever by involving a bit of research that I had done and using some unusual listening material choices. It seemed to go down quite well and I felt relieved because I feel a bit like somebody’s going to point out that I’m talking through an unorthodox orifice whenever I start new classes never mind presenting in front of people with PhDs and publications and stuff.
To cap it all off, I have ideas about discourse-level language teaching and JQuery-based web apps in my head, a lesson jam to schedule and publicise and other stuff too.
Everybody I met at the conference was lovely, including the mother of one of my former junior high school students, and it was rather a festival atmosphere throughout, except I had convenience store rice balls and canned coffee instead of cold beans and a bottle of vodka for lunch.
//
It’s review week at school because my students have tests next week. I was looking at Anna Loseva’s #FlashmobELT boards for something to do to review four units with my students and saw the ‘So you said…’ activity by @annazernova (whom I cannot find on Twitter).
On the Lino board post, it says to ask the students to talk about the weekend but I changed it so they reviewing personal information, abilities and schedules.
I liked the activity as it got the students reporting speech as well as the language items above. It’s pretty snappy and it doesn’t just have to be for a warm-up activity.
I’ll definitely use it again because it’s useful having students reporting speech along with the items on the syllabus.
//OK, so in the last week, this blog has massively increased it’s readership (great thanks to all who shared the post on Coursebooks).
I gave my presentation at MEES Michinoku at Hachinohe Gakuin University and found it wasn’t as contentious as I thought it might have been. I have no scars from things being thrown at me. I also got the chance to meet a lot of cool people and I saw some interesting presentations with practical application to my classroom practice. Of particular note was John Campbell-Larsen’s plenary about discourse/conversation analysis and corpus findings about common speech and conversation. There was two particularly fascinating sections on backchannelling and evaluating in conversations that have helped my students in the last few days.
The slides from my presentation are here if you want to have a look at them, and there may be even a YouTube later so you can see just how nervous I felt!
In the meantime, I’ve had loads of back and forth on Twitter/blog comments with Rose Bard and Glenys Hanson, both of whom I wholeheartedly recommend!
//You can’t teach without reflecting. Apparently.
You sit in a staff room an listening to people moaning about “them” being idiots/dummies/dehumanized amorphous masses; about “them” not being capable of independent thought; about “them” not giving a monkey’s.
You chirp, “It’s because the students are not used to dealing with communicative classrooms and they don’t want to make mistakes. Why not try group work and reporting group opinions if they’re shy or unresponsive.”
You mean ‘I wouldn’t talk to you either if you carried that attitude about me. I’m putting in my two-pence worth because it’s frustrating listening to you.’
“Well, I’ll give it a try but…”
At the same institution you have had students enjoy TOEIC lessons by drawing the focus away from the book and on the thought processes behind the questions set. Students work together to produce their own TOEIC-style materials. You’ve had students give group carousel poster sessions about language study and motivation. You’ve had students survey their classmates and then reflect on whether their survey design was flawed or not. Only one of these was your own idea. Mostly everyone has been on task. Either you have remarkable classes or your students are just in a better mood for studying.
You are exploring your practice. You share ideas. You can advise what works for you and something that might be good to try. In a class full of “them”.
You can’t expect everyone to be enthusiastic all the time. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
//The action research I started is in full swing and the independent study that students were asked to undertake was done by around 80% students in both the sample classes, although some students changed their independent study methods from video to songs and nobody read at all.
I did the listening with my false beginner class today and they really enjoyed it although they found it difficult.
I participated in my second ever #KELTchat on Twitter and it was very informative, especially for my university classes.
Other than that, Twitter was on fire this morning due to my previous moaning arguing moaning about how rubbish bland coursebooks don’t meet student needs but teachers are forced into using them anyway.
I have bad news in that a language school I just started working for is being bought. The new owner seems nice but I do feel uneasy in my work. Conversely, I had an interview with another agency that teaches a lot of IELTS courses. I await that with bated breath, as I do my MA TESOL and Applied Linguistics application.
//Hiya. I started this blog to help EFL/ESL teachers develop and log the things I find as I develop myself. It’s also a chance to share activities and resources that are useful.
There should be more up here when I have time. If you want to say hello, send a message to getgreatenglish at gmail dot com.