IATEFL 2019 Talk Summaries

TTEd received a Fair List Certificate
The Fair List, UK celebrates excellence of gender balance in plenary speakers, keynote presenters or speaker panels at ELT events, annually, in the UK. (Please see www.thefairlist.org for more information). TTEd SIG was invited to the Fair List event for the PRON & TTEd Joint PCE event organized in Brighton, 2018. The event took place on Wednesday 3rd April 2019 from 7.00 to 8.00 pm at ACC Kings Dock Liverpool. The participants were asked to bring in balloons, streamers and noise makers.
A micro introduction was made about the Fair List. Then the certificates for 2018 events were presented to the representatives of the SIGs. Then it was time for refreshments sponsored by Greenall Florent Books. The scene was highly cheerful. TTEd SIG’s event coordinator Prof. Birsen Tutunis participated in the ceremony and received the certificate on behalf of the team.

TTEd’s Scholarship winners and their presentations
Teacher Training and Education Special Interest Group (TTEd SIG) had the chance to support two young colleagues’ participation in this year’s annual conference, as their application to TTEd SIG’s Gillian Porter Ladousse Scholarship were successful in 2018 and 2019. Eleni Symeonidou from Greece was our 2019 scholarship winner and Liverpool 2019 was her first IATEFL conference ever. Eleni presented her session called ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall: reflective meta-skills’. Her session highlighted how tricky oral and written reflective practices of novice teachers could be and involved practice-based techniques that were designed to guide developing teachers’ reflective skills. Eleni has been collecting feedback to improve the tools she has shared with the audience. More details of her work can be reached at TTEd SIG’s Spring 2019 Newsletter.

Elena Oncevksa Ager who come from North Macedonia is actually our scholarship winner of 2018. Elena’s scholarship had to be transferred to this year, as she was blessed with the happy occasion of being a mum. We are proud to announce that Elena’s joint workshop with Sarah Mercer took place in Teacher Development SIG’s Showcase Day ‘Drawing on positive psychology to support language teacher well-being’. Elena and Sarah emphasised how the well-being of teachers influences their work, which is instrumental the quality of their everyday work with their students. Elena and Sarah shared the details of the online course that was inspired by the principles of positive psychology they jointly developed and encouraged the participants to try out some ideas during the session. Elena will write an article to be published in our Fall 2019 newsletter.
1.4 TTEd SIG Show Case Day, Liverpool April 2, 2019

Tessa Woodward’s Workshop
Teaching and Training for a Long Time

Tessa Woodward stated at the beginning that she has been in the Teacher Development Programmes where they did lots of activities which she already knew. So, she said she would offer different ones which might catch teachers who have been in the field for long. She did four activities:

Activity 1- Generation Gap
They keep getting younger
Making a mindset would remind us the people we are working with.
Tessa wanted the audience to jot down the three things your students/trainees would do but you would never do, as well as things you would do but the trainees or students would never do.
We encourage the readers of this summary to the same.
The audience enjoyed doing this task on their own first, then sharing the ideas with the person sitting next.

Activity 2- Doing what makes sense
Tessa invited the audience to think about the following and complete the sentences below considering materials, beliefs, activities, habits).
Again, we invite the readers of this text to the same.
I used to………. and still do
I used to do…. but don’t anymore
I didn’t use to do ,,,,, but now I do

And, Tessa asked the audience to discuss in pairs ‘Why did it make sense to you to continue/stop/start?’ and we also invite you to reflect on these.

Activity 3 Talking shop
Tessa invited the audience to chat saying that good conversation can be invited but not commanded on a topic that is light hearted but heartfelt and set the ground rules as:
No interrupting
No unsolicited advice giving
It is voluntary
İt is confidential
The readers may wish to try it out with a colleague at work to get the sense of it.

Activity 4 What did I learn from this

Tessa finally invited the audience to reflect on their learning from the session and shared a reading list.

Maley A and N S Prabhu (1989) Interview The Teacher Trainer 3/3 pp 28-30 Pilgrims
Clark C (2001) Talking Shop Teachers College Press
Woodward T, Graves K and D Freeman Teacher Development Over Time (2018) Routledge

1.5 Connecting teacher education and teaching materials (Kathleen Graves & Sue Garton)

This was the first of two talks in our SIG Showcase for which we’d been allocated larger rooms – and a good thing too, as we had a really great turnout. Kathleen and Sue began by explaining the rationale for a focus on connecting materials and training: bridging the divide between trainee experiences on pre-service courses and the reality of teaching, and recognising the ubiquity of textbooks and other materials in teachers’ daily lives.

They explained that despite the prevalence of published teaching materials, most teachers haven’t been prepared as part of their training to evaluate, use or adapt materials, and that the way materials are actually used is subject to a host of external factors like teacher beliefs, class size, and so on.

Teacher educators therefore need to develop three areas:
Trainees’ understanding of the principles that underlie the materials they use – they can do this by analysing materials to uncover the principles they represent, and work to do prepare materials based on specific principles.
Trainees’ understanding of their own beliefs and assumptions about teaching – trainers can uncover these using metaphors, or sentence stems such as Language learners succeed best if…
Trainees’ skills in adapting or developing materials to meet the needs of students in specific contexts – these can be developed by evaluating materials with specific groups of students in mind, and dividing trainees into groups to design activities for specific groups of students, then comparing the outcomes and discussing differences.

1.8 From EFL to CLIL teacher in Estonia: Pain and gain (Nina Raud & Olha Orehhova)

The introduction of CLIL to state education curriculums is a growing trend, so it was fascinating to hear Nina and Olha from the University of Tartu talk us through their research on how teachers handle the transition to delivering CLIL lessons.

CLIL has a long history in Estonia as an approach to teaching Estonian in Russian-medium schools, but it’s only recently that the same approach has been applied to English. Nina and Olga tracked the progress of 17 EFL teachers embarking on a blended in-service training programme to develop their CLIL teaching skills, using two instruments to measure the teachers’ self-reported development.

What they found was that the course made a meaningful difference to teachers’ awareness and use of CLIL teaching practices, but concerns around the lack of time allowed for lesson preparation and support from school managers remained, even once the training programme had ended.