Teacher training

Behind the scenes. The emotional workload of a primary school teacher.

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Our beautiful ‘patchwork’, all 20 pieces together (one was immediately stashed in the bag to be taken home)

Last Thursday

Five lessons on a regular Thursday, English, a double Maths with 1B and a double ESL with 1A, a nice, short day, with the cherry on the cake being the fact that for me it is the last day of the week. Rounding up, in a way.

What did I do at work last Thursday? Here is the list:

  • supported a student and helped him deal with distress related to his inability to deal with a task in a subject that he normally excells at. He got upset, abandoned the task but then he calmed down and he decided to catch up and to finish the task, sacrificing his break and a part of the following lesson but he did complete the task. I told him I was proud of him for not giving up.
  • went through another refusal to deal with the task with another student. We talked about students making decisions and teachers respecting those decisions but also about the fact that if it refers to a test, the teacher will have to grade the test as it is. The student thought about it and decided to take part after all.
  • listened to two students who had a disagreement and helped to deal with anger and tears
  • created opportunities for the students to develop their social skills by sharing resources, waiting for their turn to receive them and to collect them and to learn how to respect the other students’ work, everyone’s right to work in silence and in peace
  • gave the students an opportunity to express themselves through art (see the photo above) and to be proud of their work
  • created opportunities to develop cognitive skills and to see the world through shapes and patterns
  • help to learn to deal with failure during the artistic activity by showing how to solve problems with water, paints, splashes and other artistic disasters
  • cheered on the growth and developement by listening to at least four stories about the milk teeth falling out, shaking, getting lost and found
  • took part in rejoicing the fact that the holidays at the dacha, at the seaside and at gran’s are coming
  • welcomed a child coming back after a long absence (The best entry ever, by the way. No hellos but instead ‘I think I have lost my shoes’) and heard all the stories from the past two weeks.
  • cheered, sympathised and laughed at everything that three Pikachus did over the previous 24 hours
  • gave a chance for the students to lead the lesson
  • witnessed two serious meltdowns that were handled by the children’s personal tutors.
  • taken care of the fast finishers and started a new procedure of ‘I Have Done Everything Book’

A bit much, no? But wait, I haven’t told you yet ANYTHING about the actual learning that we did that day. English and ESL: it was shapes and patterns, in Maths – division using the bus stop method. And it was not even any special day, just a regular Thursday.

Sigh.

The patchwork did it!

I do sigh a lot, actually. I have no idea what it looks like to the outsiders and the passers-by, but, indeed, it is one of the easiest way of letting at least some of the pressure out of the system. Thursday was no different, I was sighing a lot, especially because of the patchwork.

The kids had left already, the classroom was back to normal, I was just organising the finished pictures on the window sill to dry them in the sun and talking to my T.A. I looked at the pictures, the patterns wonderfully chosen, and the colours to match, the paintings looking just amazing separately and together, as a set, too. I thought that they were beautiful and that they are going to make a beautiful photograph and that I am proud of my kids. And then I realised that nobody, looking at the photograph, here on the blog, on the social media or in the parents’ chat, nobody will be able to tell how much effort went into it, how much drama accompanied it and how much it actually took, this photograph. We will file it under ‘pretty’ (where it does belong!) and we will never talk about the emotional cost of this whole adventure, this whole day.

Absolutely the same can be said about any other handout, activity, test, progress made, painting, lesson and sometimes even a sentence. Guess what, dear reader, I have seen it once and I cannot unsee it!

I started to read.

A photo from 10 Incredible Scenes In Pirates Of The Caribbean Movies Fans Still Love (screenrant.com) Clip here. This is how I see myself in the classroom.

The emotional burden of the everday teacher’s life

It turns out that teachers are the professional group among the lowest scorers as regards health and well-being (studies by Johnson et al.). We are in good company, of course, together with ambulance workers, social services, customer services and prison and police officers.

On the one hand, there is a tendency to highlight the levels of stress related to the number of years of experience, drawing attention to the fact that newly qualified teachers are at an especially high risk of falling prey to burnout (Linqvist et al.) which is easy to understand as we all, including the human behind the words here, remember the dread and the stress that came together with taking the first step in a completely uncharted territory of the school on our first official contract.

However, according to the study among the Lithuanian teachers, both primary and other specialists, the levels of stress and the issues with mental or physical health were not related to the years of experiences, the location of the school, the marital status or the length of employment at one school. Still, despite a relatively high motivation to work (‘enthusiasm was above average’) and the low levels of indolence, every third teacher ‘showed signs of of high psychological distress’ and 12% were assessed as being at risk of depression (Emeljanovas et al.).

The reasons? Well, there are many (Stefanou et al.) But, to be honest, I would like to leave all of them behind, apart from one. Away goes the personal well-being and health, motivation and classroom effectiveness. Off the list come also social behaviour, learning and performance or the particular school and how it is functioning. Or the students’ motivation and well-being. In the same vein, those ‘rapid social and technological changes and constant monitoring of society’ (Emeljanovas et al) or the parents’ and students’ expectations which have changed in the 21st century are of no interest to me at the moment.

Not because they are not important, quite the contrary. It is all very interesting and very relevant but there almost seems to be too many factors which have an impact and which the teachers are affected by on daily basis. The number and the volume of the issues might lead to a realisation that it is a hopeless task because, indeed, how can you deal simultaneously with all the requirements of the everyday teaching reality and with the 21st century outside of your window? I won’t.

The Absinthe Drinker, Edouard Manet (1875 / 76) Attention: NOT because of the alcohol in front of her, but because of the emptiness in her heart)))

The lucky ones?

Because, let’s imagine a couple of teachers that are just ‘lucky’, for the lack of a better word. They work in a private institution so their working conditions are better than average. They are experienced so they have already developed an immunity towards the pressure from the system, the regular assessment and the need to develop professionally. Over the years, they have also learnt how to work with paretns and to manage the children in class. They work in a small school, with the helpful admin staff and the kids are in year 1 so there is not so much checking, testing and reporting, although there is some. What is more, these teachers, they teach with and out of passion. They even like their students. All 21 one of them. The children are just a group of kids. They are all amazing, no one suffers from any neglect at home, some of them have some special education needs but it is not anything that cannot be dealt with. These teachers are lucky, the conditions are almost ideal.

Does it mean, then, that these teachers are not affected by the emotional challenges of the everyday life? Of course not! At the end of a Thursday, like the one described above, they look like some of those characters featured in the illustrations I chose for this post. Sitting in the teachers’ room, recovering, as if, gathering the energy to get up and to put the jacket on and to go home. On some days, walking home, thinking of all the other potential professions out there, of becoming a plumber, a librarian, a chef or a pensioner…

That is the reality and, as they say, ‘there is tired and there is teacher tired‘. It is not sadness, it is not depression, it is not burnout, it is not disillusionment, it is not apathy. Only the unbelievable, unmeasurable, undescribable, infinite exhaustion. And not because you have spent the day ploughing the field or hand-digging foundations for a house but because you have spent 5 or 7 academic hours educating, surrounded by tonnes of emotions coming at you from 21 different sources simultaneously and trying to deal with all of them.

tired teacher clipart – Clip Art Library (clipart-library.com)

Please tell me that there is a way out!

Yes, there is and no, there isn’t.

Children are and will be children and dreaming of an ideal lesson, 100% of the time, day in, day out, with everyone listening, following instructions and not getting distracted, not getting into trouble with classmates, and, generally, being ‘little angels’ (or the students that we know from our teachers’ books), that is simply not going to happen. You plan your lesson and then you go into the classroom and life happens.

The good thing is that we learn how to deal with disasters (and ‘disasters’) and with our emotional response to them. The good thing is that, eventually, we get a bit better at it. You can read about it in an earlier post here: The end of the world or Suriviving bad lessons with YL.

The good thing is also that we have lots and lots to look back on, to do the maths and to label the day as ‘good’ and that, frequently, we come home with a joyful ‘Guess what happened at school?’. There are the patchworks that we created and the photos of them that we will share and we will be happy and proud of. And maybe it is the lingering memory of these patchworks that will make us get up the following day and set off to school, one more time, erasing the not-so-good memories of the previous day, in order to try again, to make the children know Math, English or Science and to help them grow and get better and get confident.

The joys and challenges of teaching kids, you know. Which, by the way, and hilariously enough, was the title of one of the first training sessions that I have ever given. The joys and challenges. The patchwork.

tired runner – Clip Art Library (clipart-library.com)

Bibliography

Emeljanovas, A., Sabaliauskas, S., Mežienė, B., Istomina, N. (2023), The relationships between teachers’ emotional health and stress coping, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1276431

Johnson, S., Cooper, C., Cartwright, S., Donald, I., Taylor, P. & Millet, C. (2005), The experience of work‐related stress across occupation, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 178-187. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940510579803.

Kariou, A., Koutsimani, P., Montgomery, A. & Lainidi, O. (2021), Emotional Labor and Burnout among Teachers: A Systematic Review, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(23), 12760, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312760

Lindqvist, H., Weurlander, M., Wernerson, A., & Thornberg, R. (2023). The emotional journey of the beginning teacher: Phases and coping strategies. Research Papers in Education, 38(4), 615–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2022.2065518

Stephanou, G. & Oikonomou, A. (2018), Teacher Emotions in Primary and Secondary Education: Effects of Self-Efficacy and Collective-Efficay, and Problem-Solving Appraisal as Moderating Mechanism’, Psychology, 9 (4), https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2018.94053

Happy teaching!

Guess what happened at work? Or the things that YL teachers live for.

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A suggestion from a student that we should add a ‘Danny Go!’ song to our lesson, written by my student, in his first year of learning English.

Time to admit it, we are a strange breed!

First of all, our work stories are not really glamorous. There are no celebrities in them, no events that make the news, no interesting places and no brand names. Speaking from experience here, in comparison with the copywriters, marketing experts, nurses and doctors, engineers and accountants in my life who also come back home and share theirs. What teachers bring from school are the tales of behaviour issues, funny quotes, developmental stories, getting things right and getting things wrong.

And then even as teachers…a while ago, I met a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a while and we were catching up on life and work and all things related. I shared my adventures and my recent and relatively short-lived (thank heavens) period of revisiting adult EFL. My friend was at the same time in awe and taken aback. ‘In awe’ happened because this year added a nice few pretty-looking lines to my resume as the weight that would come with the names of international banks and IT companies or with the noble and serious sectors of the high levels, Business or Financial English. ‘Taken aback’ came about as a result of my attitude, a tired ‘Yeah, whatever’ that turned into bored or openly dismissive as the conversation went on. Apparently, I should have been very excited and proud.

It is not that I did not enjoy these lessons or that I did not do a good job or that I was not grateful for the enthusiasm with which my students came to class. I did and very much so (you can read it about here) but that was nothing special, just the everyday.

Take baking, for example. If you bake and if you have been baking for some time, a batch of cookies or a batch of brownie is not a holiday, it is a must. It doesn’t mean that you will eat delicious cookies every single time, things go wrong, of course, but more often than not, if you take out your flour, soda, sugar and chocolate out, you can expect that at the end of the road, there will be good cookies. You have this experience, nothing to celebrate and nothing to write home about.

Same with teaching. After all these years, putting together a good lesson for an exam class or for a C1 group is kind of a must, not a special event. And yes, the respectable clients add a layer of fine veneer to the whole experience or, if we are to go on with the baking metaphor, a layer of icing but that’s it. And, really, students are just students and everyone deserves a good lesson, a top-notch businessman, an bank CEO or a five-year old boy.

That is why there is no special pride or excitement. It is a job well done. Still, it is only a job.

Teaching kids is not only a job.

It is also a job but it is not only that. It cannot be only a job when you are not only teaching your subject, whatever it is, but you are also taking part in bringing up the little human and helping them to understand the world, to learn how to function in it and how to interact with the rest of it that is not you. It cannot be ‘only a job’ when you are surrounded by the stories of these lives, the joys and the dramas and when whatever you are planning to do in class might be affected by everything that happened out of the lesson time and that simply because the little people cannot yet disassociate. It is not only a job when you get to sing and jump to the songs or to get your own hands dirty practising for the art classes.

The things that make me gasp, the things that make me get excited.

  • My kids doing a pair-work activity: it can be a very simple activity, just a ‘guess my flashcard’ game that involves nothing but reciting all the words from the set, until you get the right now. All the exciting elements, like asking a full question, taking notes of the answers or repeating the activity with a new partner, they come later. But to see them work on their own, keeping the conversation going and moving from point A to point B of the activity, this is precious. Introducing it is a process, it does not just happen, it does not happen overnight and introducing it takes time, a few lessons, weeks or months, depending on the child’s age. But it is possible and it is beautiful. When it finally happens, it is yours and can be used forever and ever. Here you can find a post about my experiment and a controlled and conscious way of introducing pairwork with my pre-school group. A successful one, too!
  • My kids creating their own songs and producing the language because of a song: I realised (and not such a long time ago) that I introduce some songs only because they contain a pretty chunk of the language, hoping that soon (or even sooner), these structures will become a part of what we can say. A good example here can be ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ by Super Simple Song. It is my favourite colour song, not because it is the easiest (that would be just ‘I can sing a rainbow‘, because that is, mostly, just a list of the words, ideal for a beginner group) but because it includes a very good question ‘What’s your favourite?’ and a very good answer ‘I like’ which, when mastered, can be used with any topic. I love singing and my kids love singing (not everyone loves the same songs, of course) and I say that right now, six months into the course, singing and creating our songs based on what we have sung already is one of our favourite activities. Right now, we have a habit of creating a song for the month and many version of it and we also love creating our own versions of all the other songs we sing. Here you can find a post from four years ago about un-singing the song. We still do it!
  • My kids beginning to do their task truly independently: What I mean by that is the shift and the huge stepping stone from doing a task, in the coursebook, workbook or any handout, step by step, led by the teacher, not copying the teacher’s answers but taking the exercise or the task in small bites, moving on together as a group of individuals, waiting for everyone to a situation when the teacher sets the task and everyone does it at their own pace and in their own way, choosing for example parts of the exercise that they deal with. It is always a big day for me and it is a sign that kids are becoming more independent learners. The expert is right next to them but they don’t need the support that much. Why? Because their zone of proximal development has expanded a little bit! Hooray!
  • My kids making decisions: I cannot tell you how many times, in this academic year, I have used the phrase: ‘It is your decision’ in response to anything that my students did, said or asked, as regards their English, Maths or Art lessons or any actions in class or during the breaks. I actually started to wonder if they know the phrase or if they can produce it as I always use English and Russian when we talk about it…It is necessary to include opportunities to make decisions but it is also necessary to develop the awareness of the fact that some things belong in the category ‘we do it, I cannot opt out’, such as tests. It is an interesting process and I am getting a lot of joy out of it. And pride.
  • My kids improving their literacy skills: The literacy skills and their development are probably the greatest challenge of the first year of English in primary but at the same time, they are the source of the greatest joy, passion, hype, reward and happiness. Firstly, because it is a long-term process and you can enjoy bits and pieces of it throughout the entire year, every single lesson and in many different variations: blending and segmenting, writing your own name in English, checking out our alphabet poster for reference, shared reading, looking at the materials and reading things themselves, just before they saw them, not because we were actually doing it, applying the phonemic awareness that they already have, choosing to write anything in English, especially when not induced by the lesson and the teacher and so on and so forth…Or, because they are able to, they proceed with the task independently (see point 3).

The life outside of the classroom

You can easily imagine that all these stories would not be enjoyed as much by anyone who is not a teacher. I am visualising me coming back home, meeting friends or getting in touch with my brother and sharing the story from this week:

‘Guess what happened today in class? Sasha wanted us to sing ‘Danny Go!’ in class and he asked to add it to the lesson plan. And he wrote it himself, almost 100% correctly! Look at the photo! (see: above). He only started to learn English with us in September! And now he writes all two words and I only help him letters, he writes them from memory!’

I think it is fair to say that the response would be, most likely, a polite smile or a nod, or, if the people are used to these kind of stories, maybe even a funny meme. Only a fellow YL teacher would appreciate it more. Or the readers on the blog, perhaps. It is all good. These are the stories that I bring from work.

What about you? What are the things that make you happy in the classroom? Please share in the comments!

Happy teaching!

Teacher up, dear teacher!

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This is the second episode in my Made-up Phrasal Verb series which deals with the different aspects of being a teacher who works with kids. The first one is devoted to stepping out of the shoe of a Miss/Mr Serious Teacher in order to become a human in the classroom, who, first and foremost, cares for the child’s well-being and who takes care of the whole child, which sometimes means putting some (or all?) of the methodology principles on the back burner. You can find the post here.

As it often happens, right after I wrote the post I had an opportunity to ‘practise what you preach’. One of my little students got terribly upset about something she didn’t manage to and right after the class ended, she crawled under her desk and, as a result, I spent some quality time on the floor, in my freshly-washed jeans, under the desk, just hanging out and keeping her company in that difficult moment, until she calmed down. All things considered, it was the most useful thing that I did as a teacher last week…Teachering down full time!

But teachering down is the solution for some of the days and for some of the situations. Sometimes, the teacher needs to do the contrary, to be the real teacher and even more than that. Hence this post.

Teacher up!

Like many of teachers, I follow the social media in order to keep my ears to the ground and to find inspiration for teaching. Then, there are activities that my colleagues and teacher friends share and those that my trainees bring to the course, too. Up until a year ago, there was also the monthly intake of the ‘things I saw in the lessons I observed’ but at the moment, I observe less frequently. Nonetheless, there is a steady inflow of ideas or, in other words, lots of food for thought.

Statistically speaking, a lot of brilliance that can be taken into the classroom directly or after some minor adaptation and it is just great! And if you have any doubts, think about the teacher’s life ten or even twenty years ago when googling ‘ideas for a snowman craft for kindergarten was not an option. Nor was raking through your favourite and trusted bloggers’ accounts for insights. Or sharing a story about a horrible day at school to get a few virtual supportive pats on the shoulder. How did we even live back then?

At the same time, the amount of the seemingly educational material out there is just worrying. There are so many ideas that, at a glance, look like something that would work well, that, on closer inspection turn out to be only ‘the Instagram teaching’, high on the WOW factor, and ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ low on methodology and appropriacy as regards the child in the classroom.

Looking at these, the trainer’s eyebrow raises and the teacher’s muscles twitch. And a plethora of questions floods the mind of both. Why did you think it was a good idea for a group of preschoolers? What is the aim for that activity and how is it even connected to everything else in the lesson? Is it in any way appropriate? Generative? Safe? Is it in any way methodologically justifiable? Is there anything to it apart from the WOW materials and WOW photographs that you will be able to post on the social media or send to parents?

Entering the classroom full of pre-school or primary school students, we assume many roles. We become in loco parentis, sometimes a mix of a nanny and a baby-sitter, sometimes more of a governess or a nurse, sometimes a coach, sometimes a witch, sometimes an actor. But, despite all that, first and foremost, we enter the classrooms as teachers.

Teachers who have clear aims for the lesson, linguistic, personal and child development aims, teachers who have thought of the lesson as a whole and all of the puzzles in it, teachers who selected activities and materials with a full awareness of the children’s needs and abilities. There is nothing that ‘just happens to be there’ and even if there is some fluff, it is a well-thought-out and justified fluff that also has a clear aim.

It is a happy coincidence that the first post and these ponderings came at the same time as a series of posts from @abc_academia_ (Katerina Balaganskaya) and @ginger_teacher_efl (Evgeniya Kiseleva) and their project ELT Expert Hub, especially the one about the need for the teachers to focus on good quality continual professional development (see the link in the bibliography). This is all came together. Enthusiasm is great, passion is a must-have, great ideas are precious, optimism and energy in a human make the world go round but, first and foremost, in the classroom, we are teachers. And Michael, a teacher friend, kept sharing the ideas he came across.

Examples? Yes, please. Here are three.

When you are reading them, please remember about my background and context: I am a teacher and a teacher trainer, I work with pre-schoolers and primary school children, who come in groups, possibly fifteen at a time and for most of my students, English is a foreign language whereas for some it is becoming their second language. With some students we have only 2 academic hours of class a week, with some of them we have a lot more but it is in response to a more demanding curriculum. None of my students has a bilingual background or a full-time exposure to English at home. The time in class is precious.

Craft (but NOT for craft’s sake!)

If you are looking for reasons why craft should (and must) be included in the lessons for primary and pre-primary students, you have come to the right place. The best place, I could even risk saying. I love craft at home, I love craft in my classroom and I have already spent a considerable part of my life trying to convince teachers to be a little bit more excited about it. You can read about five reasons of using it in the classroom here and why craft is so important in the VYL world here.

BUT.

Regardless of how much kids love craft activities and of how passionate teachers might be about them, not everything is a lesson-friendly idea and not everything is feasible. Even in a lesson with pre-schoolers, the choice has to be made in connection with and following the methodological principles of teaching English. We are teachers and we walk into classrooms to develop linguistic skills, first and foremost. We need a language aim, we need language production, we need staging and the coherence with the rest of the lesson, the rest of unit and the curriculum. It cannot be ‘just something that we will do’, just something to kill the lesson time, to keep the kids occupied and that will make them go ‘WOW’.

As an example I decided to use the ideas from the video that I found on youtube, on the Gathered Makes channel, here. I actually love all of the ideas presented here but not one of them is a craft that would would work in the language classroom. The tissue paper wreath is pretty and it would really look good on the door or on the window but preparing them would take a painfully large portion of the lesson and it does not offer any opportunities for language production, not even as regards the functional language. A huge part of the task is repetitive and involves sticking on the green tissue and a lot of it so the kids would not be required to ask for different colours or different resources. This would, naturally, lead to a lot L1 in the classroom and, potentially, to some unwanted behaviour. You cannot even ‘talk about’ the different elements of the wreath because it is all just green. The finished product cannot be used in any speaking activity either.

Button candy canes are perfect for the fine motor skills development but I would not want to give out pieces of wire to a group of children, even with a teacher assistant and I would need lots and lots of buttons for the whole group. I am afraid, the little fingers would need help and assistance in the final stage, with tying and fitting in the candy canes and that would simply not work. What’s more, no communicative purpose here and that is one more big disadvantage.

Paper plate Christmas trees look so pretty and they require only the basic resources (the little pompons could be replaced with paint or stickers) but, again, the process is too complicated for a group of primary and pre-primary students. I love the trick with the paper clip here, to keep hold the tree in shape until the glue sets (although I would still use a stapler because I have some serious glue trust issues) but even in the video the child needed the adult’s help with the shaping of the tree. Exactly the same thing would happen in the classroom, and that could mean one pair of two adult and skilled hands AND eight or ten pairs of little hands in need. I have already tried a WOW Christmas tree craft and I simply have to say no here.

Lolly stick snowflakes. No, sorry. Glitter does not enter my classroom. It is probably the single resource that I personally hate. No matter how hard you try and how careful you are, it is tricky to use, it is accidents-prone and it stays with you forever, on the tables, on the body, on the clothes, everywhere. Even if you are using the glitter sticks. And that’s on top of all the other reasons, similar to those mentioned above.

Easy paper decorations are, indeed, easy and fun, as a way of transforming a 2-D shape into a 3-D shape. There is a little bit of cutting (5 circles for a child in the group) and I am not against cutting up things in large quantities to prepare for a lesson but I do when this helps me get lots and lots of language from the children in the proces (for example here). Here, this aim would be difficult to meet. I am not sure about the staging here as painting of the 3-D finished product would be just too messy and, potentially, too frustrating as it would involve holding a half-painted piece and getting fingers dirty and destroying what already has been done.

As mentioned above, I do love all the craft activities but the effort made, the potential complications and the potential for language and the kids’ safety and well-being are absolutely crucial to be taken into consideration. The WOW effect or the pretty photos on the social media cannot be the driving force behind the decision that a teacher makes to include or not to include something in the lesson plan.

If you are looking for any ideas how to plan craft lessons, please have a look at this blog (Chapter: Craft) where I share the ideas from the classroom, tried and tested. I would also like to recommend MadFox which is Carol Read’s creation and six word manual to the principles of craft activities in the classroom. You can read more about it 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom.

Games. Because educational fun is important

‘Fun’ is one of the most popular words added to titles in education. ‘Young children learn through play’ is probably one of the first things that you will hear in different courses, workshops and trainings devoted to teaching children. It is true, of course, and it applies not only to languages but to all the other skills. This makes our lives much easier and it helps to get the kids interested and keep them involved in the tasks that, at a glace, might be less exciting or those that might involve some hard work. For that reason, only this week, I have decided to teach subtraction to 100 through colouring dictation, through puzzle and through a bunch of reindeer with a serious problem. That is why we have been developing our reading skills through jigsaw puzzles and through Petya, my new invisible student who needed help with his English and that is why I made up a chant about classroom rules. Yes, in a way I was a marketing specialist and an advertising expert, I wanted to sell my product. I did.

In one line: games are good, we need them.

And here is a game that a teacher played with a group of kids in kindergarten. If we had an observation report with the certain standards to observe and to meet, the observer would certainly be able to tick the box: game. Yes, indeed, the teacher prepared a game for the lesson. And that would be all.

Naturally, that is only a small part of the entire lesson and there is no way of knowing what happened before or after and what the aim for the lesson was. However, judging only by this short video, there are quite a few areas for this teacher to work on. It is very difficult why this particular activity was even included in the lesson and what its aims could possibly be. There are no linguistic aims as the kids only do some counting and they use only one colour (orange), only one student is involved at a time while everyone else is watching and it is impossible to figure out whether there were even any child development aims. To be perfectly honest, none of the children taking part seem to be enjoying it and some are even forced to be in, despite their intentions.

If we had to describe the game for someone who did not watch the video, we would have to say that ‘the teacher brings one of the children into the circle, to blow up a balloon and to let the air out right into the children’s ear while the other children are watching and laughing’ and that really turns the category of the activity from a game into ‘a game’. If I had been the observer and the assessor of this lesson, the comments section on the lesson plan or the obervation report would simply say: ‘Please, don’t do this again‘.

A few years ago, there was this tendency at the YL conferences that I happened to attend. Everyone seemed to be criticising the idea of fun in the classroom and replacing it with some other, more serious, methodology-worthy words such as ‘enjoyment’, ‘motivation’ or ‘pleasure’. Maybe it was a trend, maybe just a coincidence but I did not like it. I am up for fun in the classroom, although, for my own personal use and for this blog, I have coined the term: educational fun, to differentiate it from the carefree merry-making.

There is no denying that this carefree merry-making is very necessary in life but since we are teachers, we are obliged (oh-o, the serious words have entered the building) to ensure that we happens in the lesson is deeply rooted in the methodology and child development knowledge that is not only there ‘because because’. Maybe it is true that ‘girls just wanna have fun’ but teachers want to have fun and they also want to smuggle something more while doing it.

To continue with the advertising metaphor from a few paragraphs above, I did have fun but I also had a real product to offer and to promote: a set of classroom rules, a pile of sums and lots and lots of sentences to read and to improve. My students would have done them anyway, we would have to, basically, but it was easier and more pleasant because we did it through and with fun.

Project. What’s love got to do with it?

Here is one more example of the educational path to hell that is paved with very good intentions and the social media teaching that has nothing to do with real classroom methodology but that is extremely photogenic and has ‘WOW’ written all over it. I give you: a CLIL / STEM project devoted to the moon phases.

This is a real example of an activity that one of my teacher friends, Michael, was asked to do with his group and that he happily shared with me, having his own human-adult-fatherly reservations about it. As with the craft activities above, I have nothing against the activity per se but taking it into a classroom full of kids is something that I fail to imagine.

Food allergies aside and the fact that some parents might simply not approve of teachers dishing out sugar portions in class (as, presumably such issues would be dealt with beforehand), there are a few other things that might turn this seemingly amazing and wonderfully appealing project into a complete disaster.

  • somebody needs to buy Oreos and in a situation when a school struggles with providing scissors, glue, paper, plasticine and markers, asking for Oreos is just not worth it and might simply not happen. Purchasing them by the teacher is out of the question.
  • separating the cookies into two even halves, without breaking them and with the cream staying politely on only one of the sides is…well, I don’t know. It’s been years since I played this way and not with Oreos but with my delicious local equivalent and I just don’t remember. Anyway, we separated them for fun. Our main aim was consumption and we would devour them regardless of how much cream there was on either side. At best, no one can guarantee that all the Oreos for all the kids will comply.
  • shaping the cream into the required shape to reflect the phases of the moon is not easy either and it does require something close to surgical precision. And a tool of some sorts (a popsicle stick).
  • you are allowed to eat the final product and, hopefully, there is time to talk about the changes and to admire the work done but, ideally, there has to be a lot more Oreos than the number of students x 4 Oreos. Otherwise, we are going to be the cruel people to have the kids work on the cookies, touching them, smelling them but without eating them for a long time and it is a guarantee that not all the kids will be able to stay strong. In the lesson that my friend was asked to teach, the cookies did not last and the model was never made. Either the kids were too hungry or the smell of the cookies too strong, they could not resist. The resources were eaten before the completion of the project. And, to be perfectly honest, I do get it. As an adult, I would struggle myself and I would be tempted to nibble. Or to do a full-on Cookie Monster.

Perhaps it is a fun project to do and a great way of learning about the phases of the moon. For me as a teacher and as a trainer, there are simply too many ‘but’s’ that make it simply not worth the effort. Especially, that there are plenty of other, less high-maintenance and less high-risk and more methodology- and teacher-friendly replacements that can be done with paper, paints, plasticine or ping-pong balls, craft activities and projects that would be more beneficial for the kids.

Coda

We are teachers. We think about the activities that we bring to class.

We are teachers. We respect the parents who trust us with their children and who pay for our teaching skills and the educational process that we provide.

We are teachers. We walk into the classroom with clear lesson aims, linguistic, child development and personal aims, too.

We are teachers. We want to have fun but not for fun’s sake.

We are teachers. First and foremost, we are teachers.

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

Carol Read, 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom, 2007, Macmillan Education

ELT Expert Hub, Evgeniya Kiseleva and Ekaterina Balaganskaya, Teachers’ CPD. https://t.me/eltexperthub

Teacher down, dear teacher!

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The Bosphorus

This post starts in the classroom (Surprise, Surprise!) and they are generated by me but only in connection with what I do in the classroom and how my audience reacts to it. This is everything, aside from the thoughts of the experienced teachers, aside from what we find in the coursebooks, aside from what we learn about in different workshops and lectures. How the kids react to what happens in the lesson…

And since most of my professional life is spent in the presence of the very young one, the reaction and the feedback is immediate, without the intermediary help of the admin, parents or educational supervisors or trainers. If the lesson is good, you know it. If the lesson is bad, you will know straight away. If you can read the signs and reading there must be a special part of the brain devoted to looking out and reading these signs, while teaching, learning, monitoring, supervising and growing goes on happening.

Hence this post.

Teaching the whole child

This is definitely one of the key words in the EFL / ESL methodology, which teachers, trainers, bloggers, authors are more than eager to recite, together with the ZPD, scaffolding, short attention span and many more. ‘Teaching the whole child‘ will also be on that list.

In order to understand what might be hiding under this term, it is necessary to have a look at the list of the key development areas outlined by Sandie Mourao and Gail Ellis: personal, social, emotional development, communication, language and literacy, problem soling, reasoning, numeracy, knowledge and understanding of the world, physical development and creative development. These are naturally the areas, typical for the early years child development, first and foremost age-related and not specific for any particular context, L1 education or the EFL/ESL education. But, especially, because of that, they need to be included in both and in teaching of any subjects to the early years children, be it their L1, a foreign language, Maths, Art or judo.

Carol Read can also be a point of reference. She has quoted her C-Wheel in quite a few sources and apart from the overlap with the areas mentioned above, she also included a few others that would help to better understand the idea behind the whole child. These are: care, community as well as context and connections (i.e. family and school), coherence and challenge as well as the cultural context. The most important factor, the child, is in the centre of the wheel.

But the quote that really made an impression on me comes from a post I found on Teaching Channel where, on top of some practical solutions for implementing the approach, I have also found this way of explaining what it means to be teaching the whole child: ‘by being responsive to children’s understandings, interests, and abilities, allowing them to deepen their natural curiosity and their eagerness to want to discover and learn more’.

It deeply resonates with me because of the conviction that I have held for a long time (and which I have tried to brainwash my trainees with over the years) that the most important thing that a primary or pre-primary school teacher can do is to sit on the carpet with the kids, literally and figuratively speaking, too, in order to change the perspective and to try to see the world from their point of view. This change of the point of view is absolutely crucial when it comes to classroom and behaviour management, staging, lesson planning, craft, literacy skills development and many many more.

‘That is very well but what is your point here?‘ you might be wondering.

It seems that, sometimes, regardless of our good will, professionalism and even experience (yes, I know what I am talking about), we, the teachers tend to allow our methodological principles take precedence over the child in the classroom and choosing between ‘what I need to do today‘ and ‘what the room needs‘, being the professionals that we are, we choose the standards and the rules, not the audience, not the child. It is all well-intentioned and well-meant, of course, but it might not mean that it is also the best decision as regards the said audience.

In this post today I would like to call the teachers to teacher down a little bit! Remember about the standards, methodological, institutional, cultural and what not, but to put them on the back burner and to focus more on the six-year-old beloved crowd insead.

Below, the three areas and some classroom stories from yours truly.

Storytelling

A story first. It was a lesson with my adorable monsters, in our fifth or sixth year together and it was a story lesson. I got everything ready, the audio, the text, the words to be pre-taught, the comprehension task, a game and, most importantly, a while-reading task. I wanted to be very clever and, since the story had a repetitive element and it was perfect for prediction. I wanted to have us read and listen to it but with pauses, with the kids discussing every stage (‘What happened?’ and ‘What will happen next?’). I thought it was a brilliant idea and, perhaps, it really was. However, once we started to go through the story, after two ‘episodes’, one of my students, one of the more confident ones, looked at me and said: ‘Anka, can we just listen to the story?‘

And I don’t know what it was, the tone of voice or how effectively she used intonation to convey meaning, carefully stressing ‘listen’ in the whole phrase, or maybe it was the faces of the rest of the class showing a mix of dedication but this simple human fatigue that made me realise that I overdid it.

I took a story, a great story, that we would be interested in listening to or reading, something humanly exciting and fun and I turned it into an exercise, a learning activity, a task, at the same time, and totally unwillingly, making it dull and tiring, simply because of the context – our classroom. That made me gasp in shock.

Naturally, we read to learn, to extend our vocabulary and to practise grammar and to develop the reading comprehension skills and all the other skills, too. However, a story is still a story and it deserves to be enjoyed, in a human way, even if we are in an A1 classroom full of kids, at least to some extent, at least in a balance with all the very teacherful activities with a clear learning focus.

In the classroom that can be done through: including a variety of stories, coursebook stories, YL exam stories and storybooks, traditional stories and videos, including elements of reading for pleasure, a school or class library, just listening to a story for fun before any reading comprehension tasks are introduced, giving the students an opportunity to express their views about the story and accepting different opinions, also those negative ones, basically anything that we might do with a story in our real L1-life.

‘My students don’t like to sing!’

It is one of the most common comments that my trainees make and one of the most common questions they ask right afterwards and that is: ‘Should we make them if they don’t? How?’

Well, the short version according to Murao and Ellis is 8 reasons to bring songs into the classroom. Carol Read mentions a few more in her book. In an earlier post here, written based on the materials I found in different sources, there are 60 reasons, for the kids and for the adults. There are so many of them that we have enough justification to change the famous song’s title into ‘The classrooms are alive with the sound of music!’ Or, at least, they should be!

But, with all that in mind, or, almost against all that, what we do with a song in our L1 life, as adults or kids, is to simply listen to it and to enjoy the fact that it is on. Sometimes we dance to it, sometimes we might sing some lines, sometimes not. As people, we are not expected to know all the lyrics, to like all the songs and to sing along every single time. We definitely do not listen to complete some comprehension tasks or to focus on a particular structure or an idiom. There is a danger, then, that by imposing all of these on our students we will be destroying the organic character of this resource.

Again, it would be a good idea to remember the need to teacher down songs in the classroom a little bit. Accepting that not all the students will love all the songs equally and that not all the students will want to sing all the songs every single time seems to be the first step here, although that does not mean that songs will disappear from the coursebooks, curriculums and lesson plans. In the everyday teaching, it might mean simply starting with ‘Let’s just listen to the song!’ before we get down to the vocabulary, grammar, lyrics and all the follow-up activities and asking the kids whether they like the songs or not. Getting the students involved in the song selection is another important way of teachering down here and either focusing on those that they actually really do like and including their suggestions in the lessons, too.

‘We have so many things to do today!’ or about the lesson plan

This time the story took place in my Playway 1 lesson, at the end of the year, somewhere in the food unit. Those who have used the book might remember the listening activity in which students have to listen to a boy, one of the charcacters from the coursebook, who talks about his likes and dislikes and mark these accordingly in the picture. One of my students, Sasha, a 6 y.o. boy, didn’t deal with the task very well. ‘I like pears’, would the character say and my Sasha would say: ‘I don’t like pears’ and then, to my horror, he would cross the heart in the book, instead of colouring it in. Every single time Sasha did not agree with the character in the recording, he would loudly comment and then mark the answers according to his preferences.

I was watching him thinking the following thoughts: Oh, Lord, he is not following instructions, he does not understand what to do, he will not pass any of the exams and, in general, I failed as a teacher. None of which is true. I am happy that, despite the way I felt in the lesson, I reacted as a true educator, I went for the child’s well-being and I did not insist on the ‘correct’ answers. Thinking of the lesson afterwards, I was laughing out loud at my professional silliness. My little student told me, in English, what he thought of certain food items, he clearly understood what he listened to and he reacted to the content. The problem was not me or the child but the activity itself that assumed that the little people are able to disentach themselves from the activity and to de=personalised the content in order to complete a task. This made me look in a completely different way at the YL coursebooks content and it has been a turning point for me.

This same approach can be applied to any lesson plan. We go to school not to teach the lesson plans or the coursebooks but to teach the kids, the particular kids in our classrooms. Not everything that the great authors at the famous publishing houses thought of for the particular lesson, unit, activity will be appropriate for Masha, Katya, Sasha, Tomek, Agnieszka, Juan and Pierre that are entering our classrooms. Not everything that we have prepared for the lesson might not be the best idea on a Monday morning after a long break etc.

In the everyday life teachering down might mean:

  • evaluating the coursebook material carefully as regards its relevance for the particular group of kids and appropriate adaptation and adjustments as regards the content, the cultural context, the emotional context, the personalisation or the lack of, etc
  • adapting the lesson plan on the go, depending on how the students are feeling on the day. Pushing the day agenda at all cost will not be effective and might result in frustration.
  • putting yourself in the kids’ shoes while preparing the activities for the lesson and trying to answer this simple question: Why would they want to do it?, apart from the obvious, the fact that a person in the position of authority, older and taller than them, someone that knows their parents and is also able to assess them is bringing this to class and tells them to do it. Is there anything in the exercise, activity, story, listening, song that they would want to do anyway? And if it is not there, can we add it?
  • while things are not going to plan, looking at the situation through the kids’ eyes to better understand what is going on in order to deal with it more effectively.
  • involving the kids in the decision making process about the lesson, as regards the songs to sing, the games to play, the stories to read or even the order of the activities (when possible), to share the responsibility for the learning but also to find out more about the audience and their preferences.

Coda or what this post is NOT about

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I am calling for a complete abandonment of all the methodological principles, present-practice-production, good teaching standards. Far from it. ‘Organic’ is a nice word to use to describe a lesson and a teaching approach as long as it is not synonymous with ‘I didn’t bother with planning the lesson, we’ll just go for it!’

It is an invitation to keeping your eyes open and to not forgetting that our students are very young and that the age will be very often the most important factor behind their behaviour and attitude. On the one hand. On the other hand, they are people, too and that we can act as people, too, instead of being teachers 24 / 7.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments!

And make sure you come back for more because the second part of this mini-series is coming up! ‘Teacher down!’ is ready now. The post about the need to teacher up is already being written!

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

Sandie Murao and Gail Ellis (2020) Teaching English to Pre-primary Children, Delta, page 10 – 11.

Carol Read (2007), 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom, Macmillan, p. 7.

More than a grade! Teaching the whole child from the Teaching Channel.

How to use songs in the English language classroom from the British Council.

Tea for two! Teacher training courses and individual consultations

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A new idea?

Every time we run a course at our teacher training centre, regardless of how formal or informal it is, we always give out a feedback form and ask our questions how useful they found the course and all its components.

‘We want to know what you think’ is not only a nice marketing phrase that should be a part of the end-of-course email. Neither is it a request for only positive feedback, a puff that will make us, the organisers, feel better. For me, personally, it is an opportunity to check and to confirm that I haven’t gone rusty or complacent as a trainer and that we still offer a good product. At the same time, it is also a way of brainstorming ideas for how we can further improve the course. This is post is going to be about one of the examples how these ideas are put into practice.

A few courses ago (a new, teacher training time expression), one of our trainees mentioned in the feedback form that they would really appreciate an opportunity to talk to trainers individually to ask some of more personal questions. It sounded like a great idea and that is what we did.

Tutorials and consultations

Individual communication between the trainees and the trainers hasl always been a part of our courses. We always chat before or after the sessions, regardless of whether they are run online or offline and many of my trainees keep in touch either via social media or via email. Some of the courses also include tutorials but their format and aim is a little bit different. They are run usually half-way through the course, they are obligatory and their main aim is for the trainees to reflect on their progress on the course and for the trainer to run a preliminary evaluation on the said progress.

We added the consultations as an optional individual meeting with the tutor, 30-minutes long, to be used in the way that the trainee chose, to discuss the issues of the particular interest. We arrange these meetings during the time that the course is run, usually before or after the input session.

Topics that were of the particular interest

  • a variety of questions that came up in the course of the reflection on the particular sessions
  • focused lesson planning
  • lesson planning and classroom management for the online YL
  • working with large groups
  • using L1 in the YL classroom
  • designing a curriculum and planning for a year
  • choosing a coursebook
  • bilingual education
  • problematic students and individual case studies
  • support for the novice YL teachers

What do our course participants say?

  • Love this idea! Yes, I did. Find personal consultation very useful, cause we could discuss our issues and challenging situations.
  • To my mind, the additional session is a perfect option that gives an opportunity to ask a question or discuss something.
  • The 30-min consultation helped me, too. I noted down some great ideas about the cases we discussed.
  • I had a chance to share my difficult students’ cases during our consultation and got useful advice.
  • As for the consultation, I prepared a list of questions and got really valuable answers from Anka. I really appreciate her help and encouragement. I feel much more confident and enthusiastic before starting a new page in my career (working with YL).
  • The additional session felt more personal and I believe I could participate more freely. And without being worried about judgmental eyes (not because anyone would judge me, I am just a bit shy) it was easier to ask questions that I had to ask.
  • It’s great to be able to talk about things where i don’t feel very confident (like bilingual kids) sharing experience is priceless ; it helps reminding myself that we all learn all the time and it’s ok to struggle and try. thanks for the meeting!
  • I could only participate in the 30-min individual session. That was really helpful as it helped me clarify a few questions I had about my teaching.
  • This is a very cool addition. The opportunity to ask questions that arose after the course.

What do I get out of it?

  • An opportunity to really meet my trainers. We talk a lot during the discussions in the breakout rooms and in the common room, before and after the sessions. However, the consultations are an opportunity to take it to another level.
  • It gave me a chance to cater for the needs of all the trainees even better. It is obvious that the more extrovert and confident students take part in the whole class discussions more freely and more frequently and that some trainees prefer to share their views only while in the breakout rooms. By adding the individual consultations to the mix helped me ensure that even the shyest and the least confident teachers will have their chance to talk to the trainer comfortably.
  • It is a fascinating diagnostic tool that helps us adapt and improve our courses because they show the fuller range of topics that might be interesting to teachers that are not always included in the current programme. It is a signal that some areas or aspects need to be incorporated in the existing sessions or that, perhaps, we need to start thinking about revising our courses and adding some new sessions. And, as such, they are just precious.

A bonus track, Tea for Two that lent the title to the post here, with Ella Fitzegrald.

Happy teaching!

The end of the world or Surviving the bad lessons with YL

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A folding surprise by Kolya (Renamed as: Teachers in September)

This post, like many many others, starts in the classroom when yours truly spends countless hours every week. Some of those hours are happy hours, some are very much not. Sometimes, no matter how passionate and dedicated you are as a teacher, no matter how much time you have dedicated to preparing amazing lessons, resources and activities, it is just not coming together and it does feel like it is the absolute end of the world. But, definitely, it is not. But it feels like it.

In the sessions devoted to classroom and management behaviour, there is this one activity that we do: ‘Look at the picture of the classroom. What is wrong with it?’ My trainees usually have lots of great ideas but where I am trying to get them is the fact that, beautiful as it is, this photo, a real class and a real lesson does not really look like that 100% of the time. So google, with all its amazing visuals, this time helps us create unrealistic expectations regarding our professional life.

Pre K Peoria IL | Reliable Childcare for Peoria IL Children (palschools.com)

I am not saying that it does not happen, that kids never get fully interested and involved in the task or that the teacher never has the full attention of the group. They do and when it does, it is the best thing ever, cloud number 9 and the top of the world. But, to be perfectly honest, a day like this one in the Kindergarten Cop, this is also a part of the teacher’s life.

Those bad days are perhaps more likely to happen when you are less experienced and somewhere at the start of your teaching career but (and I am sorry to be saying that), no matter how many years you have been teaching for, bad days can still happen. Although, indeed, as experienced teachers, we are more prepared for them and better equipped to deal with them, on the spot and in the long run. That is why, in this post, I decided to share how I resuscitate myself and get myself back on my feet from having crumbled into pieces after a bad day at school.

Prevention first

Apart from lesson planning and keeping your resources organised, it is very important to remember that a teacher needs to be alive and feeling well in order to remain happy, smiling and passionate about the lesson and in order to be able to give a good lesson. That means that a teacher needs to eat and drink, breakfast and lunch and snacks, and, a teacher must find time for her / his own breaks.

I know very well how easy it is to skip breakfast, lunch or the mid-lesson snacks (or, even more impotantly, the mid-lesson toilet runs) because, well, because things just happen. Kids lose things, kids need help, kids have a bad day and a meltdown and a teacher, more often than not, just brushes off her/ his needs and does whatever is necessary to help the kid. It’s just in the blood.

Then there are the unplanned meetings with the headmaster, the admin, the parents and sometimes it is possible to put them on hold or to reschedule them and sometimes it is not. Again, the break (whatever its purpose) gets cancelled or cut short. The teacher goes on teaching without food, coffee, water or worse and, naturally, that has an impact on the level of tiredness and / or stress and on the lesson.

When the bad day has already happened…take time out.

Most of the time this will be a very short time out slot, a few minutes in the teachers’ room, or even in your classroom, looking out of the window, wasting time, listening to your favourite song, or, if you are really lucky and the breaks are long enough to allow for that, you will be able to get out of the school to pick up a coffee somewhere round the corner or simply to take a walk, somewhere in a slightly different environment.

This will help to see the world from a different perspective and, naturally, to regain the peace and quiet for the teacher.

Talk to your teaching buddies

As soon as the opportunity arises, chat to your teaching buddies. It doesn’t matter if they themselves had a good day and will be able to act as the source of the energy or if they had an equally disastrous day and there will be there for you to compare the levels of the educational catastrophy. The most important thing is that this will be a chance to talk to someone who fully understands how horrible it feels to have to walk home after a bad day at school and who can offer an ear if not a real solution, although the latter is also an option, too, because the school life is full of fiascos, tragedies and all kinds of situations and, quite likely, your friends have it already happened to them and might be able to tell you about how they sorted it out. In any case, listening to their stories will help to understand that you are not on your own and that’s a lot!

Talk to your VIP, whoever they are

For me, personally, equally important is talking to my Very Important People, not only because that is what they are, but, also, because they have absolutely nothing to do with education, teaching English and teaching children.

Getting valuable advice or even having someone to talk to, in order to relate all the horrors of the day is not the main aim of these conversations. On the contrary, these help me get a completely different perspective and go back to basics, to everything else in life that matters an that is as far as possible from the young learners EFL/ ESL. Just to check that the world outside of it still exists and that it is doing great.

I love my job and I cannot imagine not teaching kids but, on some days, I need to forget about children, parents, child development, methodology and everything related to it, specifically in order to recover and to recharge my batteries, physiological and psychological.

Get a hug (real, virtual or metaphorical)

Well, yes, just that! The hug can be real, the hug can be virtual as not everyone huggable might be available physically but it can also be any way of pampering yourself and doing somethinggood for your body. A nice meal, a pint of beer, a quiet evening, an evening with your favourite music, a piece of chocolate, a walk with a dog, a bunch of flowers, a cup of coffee, a sports game, a round of your favourite computer game, exercising, a combination of a few of those or all of them together. Whatever it is that makes you feel good and that brings a smile to your face.

For example, I am a real public transport supporter but, on those really difficult days, I like to take a taxi home and being in the backseat, driven home, with my favourite city in the world blinking on the other side of the window, it really does calm me down.

Sleep on it

Or, in other words, not being too harsh on yourself and taking time to reflect and to see the whole day and everything that happened from a different angle and from a distance.

The world looks a bit different after a proper night’s sleep and only then it is possible to reflect on the day, to connect the dots and to understand better the reason behind the kids’ behaviour or the explanation why the activities fell flat on their face. Finally, this distance will also help to see the good things that also happened because they always do, although, admittedly, they are easily overshadowed by the disasters.

Try again!

Last but not least, there is always tomorrow, another lesson and another day to have another go and see what happens. With young learners especially, the first time we play a new game or try a new activity, in a new format and with a new set of rules, the very first attempt is just a reconnaissance, for the teacher, for the resources and for the kids. It is almost bound to be a failure and it is a big mistake not to give it another shot.

Happy teaching!

Teaching VYL Communicatively or About a course

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Input sessions

We have put together twelve 90-minute sessions. At the moment we run them online because it gives us an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

The 12 sessions include:

  • Introduction. The VYL student: about the child in the classroom
  • The VYL teacher: the features of a VYL teacher and approaching the material
  • Classroom management: all the techniques that can help organise the students and the learning process
  • Behaviour management: dealing with issues
  • Coursebooks and material development: how to approach the coursebook and how to design own activities
  • Flashcards: the basic resource for VYL teachers in the online and in the offline classroom
  • Craft: including and managing craft activities in the classroom
  • Music and songs: the settler and the stirrer, all in one
  • Storytelling: using different stories with preschoolers
  • Lesson planning: how to plan effectively
  • Games: why kids need games
  • Literacy: how to start developing literacy skills in the EFL pre-school group

Each session includes both theoretical and practical, with the basics to help us outline and understand the framework and the connection to the ‘adult’ EFL methodology and a lot of practical solutions for the every day teaching. We have also prepared our reading list, with articles, resource books and videos that can help each participant either prepare for the course or to develop further after the course is finished.

The course finishes with an obligatory assessment task which was designed not as a research assignment but as a written reflection task to give the trainees an opportunity to look back at the whole course experience and to summarise the main take-outs.

The additional course components

At the end of each course we always collect feedback from our participants and this is exactly how we got inspired to add these additional components to further improve our course. From summer 2023, these include:

  • Lesson planning sessions: this is an additional session, a group lesson planning session in which we work with the material from different coursebooks, usually provided by our participants, preparing together with a tutor for ‘a typical lesson’ with this material. This session focuses on selecting and formulating lesson aims, selecting appropriate activities, adapting the coursebook and selecting supplementary materials
  • Private consultations with the tutor: this is a session that can be used in any way the trainee chooses, for example lesson planning, questions related to course design, discussing classroom managment, professional development, materials and activities etc.
  • Optional homework written tasks: there are three tasks, as a follow-up to three of the sessions: lesson planning, storytelling, language production. The trainees that decide to submit any of these tasks receive a written feedback from the trainer.

Who this course is for

This course has been initially designed to support the novice teachers in the area of very young language learners and that is why the sessions cover all of the basic areas that constitute the everyday life on the EFL carpet. However, since many of the experienced teachers started their career in VYL in a way and in a situation that was far from ideal, with no pre-service training, with no support and just learning on the go*), for them this course is an opportunity to boost and to reorganise what they know already and to align with the principles of the communicative methodology and the child development psychology.

Every single time we run this course we have a beautiful mix of participants, some experienced teachers and some VYL novice teachers, teachers working online and teachers working offline, teachers from the EFL, from the bilingual education as well as teachers who are also mums of little kids who want to learn how to start teaching their own children. It is a lovely learning environment and everyone is bringing something that they can share. And, it no surprise, that we got a very positive feedback from all of our participants, the newly qualified and the experienced teachers.

Feedback from our trainees

‘I think all the sessions were very useful because we have found out more about teaching very young learners, in some cases understood the mistakes we did and found some ways to improve it.‘

‘I really enjoyed the lessons. The classes about craft, songs and storytelling were especially helpful. Thank you so much!!’

‘All of them were very useful. I love sessions about craft and storytelling. Big thank you, that was great !!!!’

‘All sessions were useful and contained interesting examples. Although, if I have to name those more useful that others, these will be sons, craft and storytelling, great examples to remember and use in my own practice.’

‘Literacy, craft and storytelling session were the most useful as they had direct and immediate impact on my teaching practice.’

‘I’d like to take this opportunity and thank you for this course. I don’t have experience in teaching VYL, so whole course was highly useful and practice-oriented.’

‘I loved the last three sessions because they were pratical and I could use the ideas and materials on my lessons! I can’t say, that there were any useless sessions, but in the beginning there was some information, that was obvious for me. Anyway, I’m happy that I was able to do this course!’

‘Classroom management (I’ve never though before why VYL classrooms are organised in a different way from the classroom devoted to teaching children of different ages as I don’t remember myself being in the kindergarten and later on my classroom at school were very bare; and I was not taught about VYL classroom design before).’

And a few words from the trainers…

I absolutely love teaching the course. It has become some kind of a joke that I start every session with ‘Oh, today we are doing my favourite session’ but it really is every session.

Every single time it is an amazing journey on which we embark together and I take a lot of pleasure in sharing my ideas and experience and to help the trainees see how they can become better VYL teachers. It does not always involve any new amazing materials, coursebooks and resources but only a change of a mindset and a different way of looking at what we already have at our disposal.

The mix and the variety of backgrounds mentioned above is another reason why I like being a trainer on this course. Regardless of what it is that we discuss and look at instantly gets to be seen and considered from a few different angles, such as a different environment for the early language learning such as a bilingual school, home, an EFL class, different time allownances or formats (online and offline) or even different institutional policies because not all the EFL schools are the same. It’s not just ‘the idea from the tutor’, that is the only truth there is. It is an idea from the tutor that gets automatically reflected in a variety different mirrors and that automatically undergoes an analysis and adaptation. Which we are all learning from.

Happy teaching!

*) I am saying this with a deep conviction, based not only on my conversations with my trainees and my mentees but also based on the results of the reseach that I did for my MA thesis a few years ago and my dissertation got its title ‘Left to their own devices?’ for a reason. I, personally, was one of these teachers, too, when I started my teaching and my VYL teaching many years ago.

What a difference a teacher makes! A post for all the novice teachers

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The beautiful tiles shown to us by engineer-history.ru

We are approaching a new academic year, new groups, new kids, new beginnings. What a happy coincidence that it is right now that I found this particular report and got to reminisce about this particular lesson that I observed many (many) years ago. Here is my start-of-the-new-academic-year post!

A quote from the report

‘It was a pleasure to watch you with that class and you have no idea what difference it makes to have a teacher who actually feels at ease in a PW class and who wants to be there. The kids can sense it and respond to it. There were many great activities and clear evidence of routine and good classroom management. Well done!’

And it was a memorable lesson for a number of reasons…

The were two teachers working at one of the branches of my school. One of them got in touch asking for help. One of her groups was a group of pre-schoolers and it wasn’t going very well. She went through the initial orientation and lesson planning with a senior teacher but, somehow, as it sometimes happens, it was not coming together. She requested to be taken off the group. It was an option that was being considered but, we wanted to see first if there was anything to be done and I went to observe the group.

Admittedly, it was not the easiest group. It was quite big, by our standards, filled up to the maximum (we had 8 as the maximum number), the kids were beginners but as it sometimes happens in language schools there were of different ages, there was a four-year-old and two six-year-olds and one of the children was also dealing with some attention disorder (according to what I could observe in one lesson).

It was not the best lesson. The teacher was trying, doing her best but, at heart, she must have already decided that this is not something that she wants to do and it was obvious, to the observer and, apparently, to the kids, too.

Two weeks and three lessons later, this group had a different teacher…

And that’s because we were lucky. During one of our training sessions, I literally bumped into the teacher and, in the hallway, in-between the training sessions, snacks and coffee, she asked me if I know of any ‘homeless’ group of pre-schoolers because she said, she would really really start teaching one. She had never done that.

And although I try to avoid doing it, this one time, I found myself observing the teacher in her first lesson with a group. I was sitting at the back of the classroom, with a piece of paper, taking notes and I could not believe my own eyes. Literally.

There must have been some magic done, some spells cast or, during these few days between the two lessons and the two teachers, these kids were tranformed into focused, well-behaved, engaged pre-schoolers! There were a different group of kids.

Everyone came, the older and the younger and the suspected ADHD, a full house! The teacher got some information about the group and the course from the previous teacher, she had some time to prepare. The teacher did her best to follow the routine of the pre-school groups that we had at the school and to manage the class. Nonetheless, it was her first lesson ever, with this group and with this age group.

Great teachers are made, not born and it was not her best lesson and it could not have been. She was just starting with the group, she was still at the stage of memorising the kids’ names and faces and yet, it was a good lesson. Not so much because of the appropriate tasks, instructions, staging and materials but because the teacher wanted to be in the classroom and, somehow, the kids knew it and they appreciated that and, as a result, they responded well to whatever it was that she brought with her. Everything else, the great results, the pleasure and the Above Standard lessons came later.

Why it is good news for all the teachers starting with a new group / level / age group / coursebook

  • Great teachers are made, not born. Even if the beginnings are complicated, stressful and scary, things are going to get better and they are going to get better thanks to the number of minutes, hours, weeks, months and years clocked in in front of a group of students. These number of minutes has its beginnings in the very first lesson.
  • You as a teacher, you can really (really) make a difference by planning the lesson and by preparing for who and what you might encounter in the lesson. By choosing the appropriate activities, by considering the things that can go wrong, by writing the lesson plan for your primary or pre-primary students, with a lot of variety, by reading about the first primary lesson survival kit and about the first pre-primary lesson survival kit, or about all the things that I wish I had known before my first lesson in pre-primary.
  • You, as a teacher, you can really (really!) make a difference by preparing yourself mentally for the first lessons and by believing in yourself! The one piece of advice that I always give my teachers about to step into the pre-school or primary classrooms is this: SMILE! That is because a smile can get us far and further! It is not so much about maintaining your muscles pulled into a shape of a croissant but about remaining cheerful. Things might not go to plan in this first lesson but it is absolutely necessary to remember that they will get better in lesson 2, 3, 4 and 5. As it is necessary to remember that we are great teachers and we love what we do. And that we do our best. When we do our best, of course, although, I personally think that most of the teacher try to do their best, on daily basis.
  • We are all a little bit stressed and feeling uneasy before the first lessons, all of us. Even those who are experienced teachers and trainers. Sorry! It is true the levels of confidence go up and the levels of stress go down with time but it is never completely relaxed. The only difference now is that at this point I am aware of the fact that things might not be perfect but I will know how to handle it. It is not ‘Oh, no! What if…’ and more like ‘Oh, ok, bring it on.’
  • Power to you, dear teacher!

What other advice would you give to a teacher who is about to start teaching Young Learners? Leave a comment in the comments box!

Happy teaching!

Picking at the seams: Potential problems and solutions in a YL lesson

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Stone drawings #5

This is the second chapter of the post devoted to lesson planning habits worth developing in a teacher of a YL teacher. Here you can find the first part of it: Variety and it is all about looking back at a lesson already planned to check that includes the necessary variety of interaction patterns, materials, settlers and stirrers and learning styles.

One more item that needs to be added to the list of Things To Think About while planning for young learners are all the potential problems and solutions. It is an indispensable element of the formal written plan for any kids’ lesson (or at least it should be). It is also a habit that a teacher needs to develop for the every teaching when no plans are written.

Here is why:

  • Looking at the lesson from the perspective of all the potential disasters and (‘disasters’) to happen can help troubleshoot
  • Problems and solutions can and should be applied to the instructions, interaction patterns, materials, activities, learning styles, behaviour, participation, time, seating arrangements and the amount of language produced.
  • Coming up with the list of everything that can go wrong helps to generate at least some of the solutions for them and get the teacher better prepared for the lesson and, ultimately, fewer surprises in the classroom.
  • This is especially important if the teacher is doing the activity for the first time ever or if it is a new approach or technique never used with a particular group of students.
  • Analysing the problems and solutions can result in the teacher having to adapt the original lesson arrangements, in order to improve the lesson.
  • Predicting what can go pear-shaped and then comparing it with a list of the things that worked out or that didn’t is another fascinating exercise that a teacher can do as part of the post-lesson reflection. How many of my predictions were true? How many of them were not? Was I overly optimistic or overly pessimistic? What were the biggest surprises?
  • Writing these down is an option but, most likely, in there everyday teaching life, with 20+ lessons to teach a week, there won’t be any time for that. It is a lot more important to allocate time for that, though, and, although it might take a bit longer in the beginning, it is definitely one of the teaching skills that become automatic and, with time, require less and less time committment. Speaking from experience here:-) Over the years, it turns you into a teacher who takes literally a second to look at a handout or a game or a coursebook page and who can see a list of its benefits and pitfalls. Upon which a decision can be made whether to use it in class or not.

Happy teaching!

One word of advice: Variety. Planning lessons for young learners

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Stone drawings #4

This is the week of the summer teacher training and may it be the first of many. I love being a trainer for many reasons and one of them is the fact that just as many ideas come are born in the classroom, in the presence of kids, in the same way, many are born in the classroom in the presence of trainees. Being, talking, observing and reflecting and, ta-dam, you find yourself talking and making mental notes for all the posts to add to this blog.

Here is the first post dedicated to my summer trainees from the June 2023 group.

Lesson planning process in three easy steps

  • Check the coursebook content, choose the lesson aims and the main activity
  • Plan the whole lesson (in the way you prefer to do it, with taking notes, without taking notes, with colours like I love to do or just on a set of post-it notes, like my teacher-friend Irina likes to do.
  • Once it is all done and ready, take another look at it and assess it, analysing it from the point of view of variety. If something is missing and/or is in excess, adapt the lesson plan

Here comes the variety…

Settlers and stirrers

This is probably the one that I would recommend starting. First of all, because it is quite straighforward and easy to spot, even for a newly qualified teacher. Young learners accumulate energy fast and they need to be given an opportunity to release it in order to be able to concentrate on those tasks that require focus. If they don’t, they will become distracted and wriggling in their chairs. In such a situation no teaching or learning is taking place.

Second of all, it is a good one to start with because it is just very easy to deal with and to fix, without any major effort. Most of the time, what it takes is to shift stages around the lesson. If a lesson is too active, a stage in which students work on their own on a task can be added. If, on the contrary, the lesson is too calm, too still, too book-bound, all you need is a song or, even better, a few songs, to punctuate the whole lesson and to give it a proper rhythm.

Materials

This one is quite easy to take care of as there will always be the board and the markers, the coursebook and the workbook, all the flashcards and a set of markers or pencils. Throw in a puppet, a soft ball, a few die, perhaps a few storybooks and some magnets and a blob of blutack and your basic set is ready. Then, to make all the dreams come true, I would add a beautiful multifunctional box, some coloured paper, a few pairs of kids scissorss and a few gluesticks, some trinkets to be the checkers, a bag of stickers, painter’s scotch and a homemade magic wand.

The computer and the screen, with the Internet access and the cornucopia of goods available online is already in the classroom.

The only thing is to make combine all the elements in a clever way and make sure that the set changes a bit, from lesson from lesson, and that some occasional pretty pieces such as playdough, watercolours or food.

Learning styles

On the one hand, ‘learning styles’ is one of the terms that features in many (if not all books) on teaching young learners. On the other hand, it is one of the most frequently mocked concepts at many (if not all) conferences, workshops and lectures on teaching English.

But, as I have been telling my trainees over the years, those who say anything about learning styles with the tiniest even traces of derision are, quite likely, the people who have never worked with children. If they had, they would have embraced any movement, action, songs, music, chants, colourful flashcards, realia, blocks and posters, not because they would lend themselves to be neatly labelled as kinesthetic, auditory and visual but because variety of learning channels means less boredom in the YL classroom and, even if only for that one reason, better results.

And it’s not that the song in the classroom is only going to be sung only by those kids who actually like singing. Quite the contrary, the song is there for all of the kids to participate only some will enjoy it more than the others. So will the flashcards, posters and realia or boardgames.

Here you can find a lovely summary of the debate on the learning styles.

Interaction patterns

I got to this paragraph in the post and I smiled. And it’s because, as soon as we get to this point in our coversations with teachers or trainees, there is always somebody who raises up a hand to say that ‘Primary school children don’t know to work in pairs’. I smile.

It is true, that on entering a classroom with a bunch of primary school kids, you cannot just assume that you will be able to go ‘Together, together, together. Work in pairs. Here is the handout’ and it will just happen. It will not but it is not because the kids, developmentally, are unable to work in pairs. It is because it is a new environment, a new teacher, a new group of peers, a new classroom and, in our case, a new language.

Pairwork is possible in primary. Pairwork is absolutely necessary in primary and it can be done. It can be done even with much younger students and here you can read about how to go about it. For that reason, and taking full responsibility for my words, I can say that in a lesson with primary students, as a trainer, an observer, a mentor, an educator and an ados, I would expect to see some whole class work, some indivdual work, some teamwork AND some pairwork.

Practical notes

  • I like to colour-code different areas to better see the balance or the lack of it.
  • I sometimes use it as a reflection task before teaching the lesson, sometimes it is a post-teaching entertainment.
  • Most of the time, I use it in my everyday lesson planning, and then I only focus on one or two areas here and that is usually when the lesson plan just ‘doesn’t feel right‘ and I am trying to identify why I am not happy with it.
  • This is also a technique that I have used in teacher training, with evaluating the lesson plans of my trainees, while preparing an observation report and, naturally, also during the lesson planning sessions of all kinds. Because of that, the main objective would be different, either to identify the weaker areas and to create the connection between the lesson planning process and the lesson itself or while lesson planning to problem shoot and to ensure that the lesson is balanced, at least on paper.
  • Here is another post on lesson planning for YL
  • A lesson for YL when you suddenly land on Mars and
  • A new take on the lesson plan
  • And, just in case, the first lesson in primary survival kit
  • Don’t forget to check out the other post related to lesson planning reflection: Potential problems and solutions

Happy teaching!