Best Practices

Best practices - Team planning for methods and approaches   Jim Fuller, Sponge ELT   Experimenting with different methods and approaches is something that all teachers should do as it aids in expanding their repertoire of teaching skills, raises awareness of potentially beneficial viewpoints, and increases their ability to use principled eclecticism in the modern classroom. However, while this idea of experimental practice is not new, it is often largely left to diploma-level courses or for those teachers that are generally considered ‘the ideas people’. One way in which trainers might wish to introduce or encourage other teachers to work [...]

  Team Training   Objectives (of the activity): To observe and share best practice by team training a teacher workshop.   Materials: Possibly your school/centre’s feedback form.   As teacher trainers and educators, we may consider observing teachers teaching and offering subsequent feedback to be an essential aspect of our role. We may also recommend that teachers carry out some form of peer observation as part of their own self-development. However, how often do we have the opportunity or time to observe other trainers or educators in order to develop our own practice? An effective way to solve the problem [...]

Objectives (of the activity): By the end of the activity the participants are expected to develop an understanding of major problems in the education system, discuss specific examples in detail, listen to cases unfamiliar to them, inquire into others’ experiences, suggest and discuss solutions from multiple aspects. Materials: The activity can be designed based on the participants’ anecdotes, education related movies, TED talks or articles. Procedure: Socratic Seminars are suitable for experienced, novice or preservice teachers. They are simple discussion circles that centre on critical thinking where participants question others comments in a non-confrontational way in order to better understand [...]

“Teach Me Something” An in-house short course run at Izmir University of Economics   Teacher training is possibly the most important consideration of learner needs. At Izmir University of Economics, Professional Development (PD) is given the utmost importance and instructors receive regular training on new ELT approaches. The amount of training given in the last five years is well over 100 sessions. What kind of training could be motivating, fun and valuable for teachers who have already been exposed to a wide variety of PD activities for over ten years in the same institution? Bearing that question in mind, we [...]

Using Stories to Empower CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) classes   As a freelance teacher educator and full-time secondary teacher, I am often asked to deliver sessions to K-12 teachers especially primary or pre-primary teachers. Ambitions such as delivering interactive lessons applies to trainers as well as teachers. We always think about how to be more practical, self-exploratory, hands-on with self-discovery methods. Previously, I delivered CLIL sessions with scientific texts on different types of ostriches or reading text from Greek myths but I cannot say they were excellent learning opportunities for the audience so I felt I need to [...]

Objectives (of the activity) To help trainees self-evaluate in order to notice their professional strengths and weaknesses, (re)evaluate their professional goals and plan their future professional development activities accordingly. Materials The European Profiling grid extracted from the following document (pages 5-8) that can be reached online https://www.eaquals.org/resources/the-european-profiling-grid/ A projector to show parts of the grid.   Procedure (including stages and allocated time): A warm up (5 mins) The trainer shows pictures of different kinds of people and food, for example (a vegan, a baby, a teenager, a honeymoon couple, etc, and some baby food, some veggies, chocolate and champagne, hamburger [...]