#teachertraining

When the trainer is observed by the trainees. A very special kind of stress

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This post will start from the summarising comments: experienced teachers (including trainers) should be observed by the less experienced teachres because both parties can benefit from that immensely.

There were countless occasions on which I was observed…

These involved the standard developmental observations done by my supervisors and mentors, follwed by a grade and a feedback on my teaching skills and my teacher training skills. Then, there were the newly qualified teachers or the teachers who were novices in a particular area who would visit pretty much every other lesson at the start of the academic year, in September and October. Then, there were also teachers who were struggling and needed support in one area or another and they were likely to pop in throughout the entire year. Then, there were also the teachers on our teacher trainining courses who had to clock in a certain number of classes observed (the IH CYLT course) or who just wanted to see a colleague and a mentor in action (the IH VYL course). Multiply that by ten and a half years of my work as an ADOS and add a number of your choice for my pre-ADOS career years and you get quite a few hours when you are not the only specialist in the room. Then, just for the sake of keeping the numbers’ right, I should throw in all the hours of the lessons recorded for the marketing department and all the times when I had a whole crowd in the classroom, observed by the parents in all the open classes…In a nutshell: I have been observed a lot. Nothing, however, has ever come close to the stress of the observations that I am yet to include here, namely: when the trainer is observed by trainees co-teaching on the course.

Co-teaching with your trainees and what to hate about it…

Normally, it was not our standard practice on the IH CYLT course that the trainers would be taking part in the teaching although I did hear that my colleagues at BKC IH Moscow did it on the CELTA courses regularly. However, there were a few occasions, over the years, when some of my trainees would get sick and we ran very intensive courses, we had very little flexibility and a quick cover had to be found. And this cover was me, the main course tutor.

Obviously, one would expect that the most experienced teacher in the group could raise up to the challenge and just step in and that it would be this particular person to do it with the minimal resources involved (creativity, preparation time, stress and so on). At least, in comparison to everyone else present.

It is all true and ‘they lived happily ever after’ in this particular story, however, I will be honest and I will tell you that throughout a large part of that experience, I was filled with resentment and stress.

Partially, it was due to the fact that I knew I would be observed by a 12-strong group of people whom I had been training, guiding and assessing for the past two weeks. I was aware that ‘my reputation’ was, to some extent, at stake. No matter how experienced you are and how confident you are as a professional, this particular prospect would be very difficult to dismiss in my opinion. There are lessons that I am not entirely happy with and, yes, they are an opportunity for reflection, development and improvement but when a group of people who are also your trainees are to be witnesses to this potential reflection, development and improvement, it is very difficult to be entirely calm about it. I know I was not, not when it happened the first time.

What is more, I was just angry that I had to do it because it all felt like some catch 22 situation. On the one hand, a good-quality lesson was expected of me and my trainees made sure that I knew that. ‘Oh, Anka, I am so happy that I will be able to see you with students’. On the other hand, my great lessons are such because I do have time to plan them and to prepare for them. Charisma is a nice thing to have but you reap what you sow and on this particular occasion, as the main course tutor with all the duties involved, admin and otherwise, there was very little time for me to get ready for ‘the show’ in front of the kids and in front of the trainees.

…and what to love about it.

To start with, it was definitely one more bridge to cross for me, as a teacher and as a trainer, an opportunity to expose myself to a different kind of stress and to develop some new levels of professional immunity. The first time was stressful but only the first one, especially for the teacher – teacher trainer.

My students enjoyed the lesson and I met my aims fully. I had a lot of fun teaching them and, to be honest, the stress and the anger and all the other unwelcome feelings died out as soon as I got up and into the front of the classroom, in front of my teens. They were simply gone. I was about to start teaching and all the irrelevant things had to give way. I was calm and focused.

Despite all the obstacles, I managed to put together a good lesson. I was to introduce comparatives and superlatives and, somehow, I found a connecting element and a way of generating a lot of lanugage from the kids in a rather clever way. Because of that, my trainees got a decent lesson to observe and, hopefully, to learn from. Another aim – fully met.

As a trainer, I did appreciate all the feedback that I received in the feedback session, although, I had to be careful not to forget to bring back all the areas that could be further improved because my teachers were more likely to focus on the positives and perhaps did not have enough confidence in their own beliefs to confront me about the weaknesses of the lesson or the activities. From that angle, it was also an interesting experience for me as I had to step back and try to see my lesson from a distance.

The most precious comment that was made came from Vika, who, apart from being my trainee, was, at the time, also a mother of one of my students and she had many opportunities to observe me in our open lessons. She told me that on that day she watched me, surprised, having seen me many times in a classroom with pre-primary and primary kids as a mum of one of them and she was expecting to see that same in a teenage lesson. What she was a completely different teaching persona and attitude.

Co-teaching with your trainees. The most beneficial experience so far

There is always more and that is the case here, too because two years ago we decided to include trainer teaching as a permanent element. The first teaching day on the course is always the day when everyone is teaching in order to break the ice with the students and with the situation, to feel the class and to get at least some of the stress out of the way. The lessons are always short, limited to pretty much one activity and it is an unassessed teaching practice. When we were running the course in the summer 2021, we had a small group of teachers and a long, three academic hour lesson. Esentially, there were some time slots left and we did not want to single out and to overload anyone and I took these free slots in both groups, with the teens and with the juniors.

It was a positive experience for me because

  • As a teacher, I had more time to plan
  • I had more flexibility and influence on the content because it was always the first lesson and the unassessed one and even though my mini-lesson had to combine with all the other ones in the day for the benefit of the students, there was a lot less pressure althogether. I knew that in the worst case scenario, even if I did not meet my aims at all, I would not be messing up my trainees’ lessons.
  • For the trainer, it was a unique bonding activity, because, despite the experience and the status (even now I cannot but giggle here, being serious about my status and being proud of my achievements are two different things, for me, as they have always been), I was one of them for a day and we all had to go through the stress of facing a new group of unknown students and we all had to prepare a plan B or C for all the possible scenarios
  • I was able to share some of my ‘first lesson tricks’ and ‘the uncharted territory tricks’ and ‘flexibility tricks’ with them and I hope that because that, perhaps, they were better prepared for these first lessons on the course as well as for the other first lessons in the future. I would like to think that it even added to my credibility as an expert because I was in a situation when I would have to do exactly what I preached. Which is not to say that without this option, the tutor’s credibilty would suffer in any way or that it needed to be enhanced in the first place. It did feel different, though, better.

It was a positive experience for my trainees because

  • For this one lesson, they had the trainer (aka the master and commander, giggles ensue) completely on their side and not only because that is what a good trainer would do but, because, literally, we were all in the same boat.
  • The trainer was, for a day, playing two roles: this of a mentor but also this of a more experienced peer, actively participating in the lesson planning session and sharing what she was planning to include in her mini-lesson and why.
  • Then, in the feedback session, the same teacher was able to look at how the lesson went, to reflect on that and to evaluate her own performance. The teachers were very much involved in that process, from the beginning until the very end.
  • There were two lessons of that kind and two cycles and the second one, a slightly more challenging and a slightly more imperfect (due to a bigger discrepancy between the group we were planning for and the actual group in the classroom) was even more beneficial for the trainees, not only because of the mistakes that we could learn from but, most importantly, I want to believe, from this very attitude to a lesson that was not quite up to our expectations and standards. We make mistakes to learn after all and I hope that I could model that attitude, too, on that course.
  • Even during the lesson planning, which we did as a group, I could see the positive influence of the experienced teacher that I was. Or the easy-going or even the reckless teacher that I was (and I am). I coud see that my attitude had a calming effect on them. ‘There is no need to overplan here, we do not know the kids and, hence, we do not know what is up to their level, what is going to be overchallenging or underchallenging. We can relax’. Naturally, they wanted to do their best, on the first day and throughout the course, but, at this point, back then, this perfectionism and the inducing stress were simply not necessary.

Overall, as I have already mentioned, this has been a very positive experience and, if I have a chance to choose which way to play the game, I will be choosing teaching with and for my trainees.

Happy teaching! Happy training!

An experienced teacher, bored. A professional gloom manual

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The background

This post starts with a post that I found to be discussed with my adult B2+ students.

Well, first of all, that very sentence, just as it is. Yes, they exist, these adult students. After ten years I am back in the classroom with a group of adults who are not my trainees.

The other contributing factor is one of the articles that we used as the basis for one of the lessons. My students work in the area of IT and they are top notch experts, great at what they do. It was very interesting to listen to their comments and to compare their attitude to CPD with what we do in our EFL world. This is how this article came together.

All of the ideas presented there have been divided into the usual that are the staple of our EFL lives (at least in my opinion) and the less common but interesting solutions and, later on, I added some of the things that I have tested on myself.

Our bread and butter

The most interesting thing is that, compared with the other professions, teachers do LOADS to develop professionally on daily basis and, regardless of where we are, as regards our professional expertise and the number of years in the classroom, CPD aka continual professional development, is one of the buzz words. Throughout our careers. We talk about it, we think of ways of getting better at what we do, we push ourselves and, sometimes, too, we purposefully neglect it, too. But we are all aware of it. It was somewhat a shock to the system (albeit a mild one!) to find out that not everyone does and that for some professionals the idea of, say, an appraisal meeting with a supervisor, might be of the ‘absolutely out of the question’ kind.

Some of the techniques and recommendations are indeed our typical everyday. Reading, networking and becoming a part of the teaching community, participating in conferences or just having your best teaching friend (hugs, Vita!) and your best teacher training friend (hello, Vika!) is something that we do regularly. Not to mention reflection which is a part of the everyday teaching life, day after day, lesson after lesson. Sometimes it seems that in the classroom I am like this huge searchlight, keeping an eye out for anthything that does not go to plan and that needs to be adapted.

In the same vein, although this might be more typical of the institutional teaching and less of freelancing, goes for feedback and appraisal. Presumably, it is not the easiest thing to do to accept that being an expert and an adult, you are being put in the position of a student or a child, who is being looked at and assessed and, possibly, given a grade. This might not be the easiest and the most light-hearted experience especially that this grade or the feedback might not always be a positive one.

The road less travelled

  • Journalling. This is a great one. I have been working on those with my students for some time and I have experimented with journaling in teacher training, with my trainees and as a trainer. I have kept journals and self-reflection notebooks for all of my YL groups, too and this, probably, was the most enjoyable and the most rewarding one for me as I could track my students’ progress better from week to week in all the chosen areas. It was a wonderful exercise for my brain as I managed to train it to be better able to focus not only on the lesson itself but also on reflection and on noticing things that I could put in my notes later on.
  • Getting a mentor. I have decided to put it here, in the road less travelled section, because, as I have discovered in some of my research, it is not a given that a teacher always has a mentor. Nowadays, so many of us work independently, as freelancers and so many of us work in context where there is no chance of getting a mentor or a mentor that could actually lead us somewhere in our professional field. Personally, for the past few months I have been a homeless (aka independent) teacher but I have reached out to experts to talk about the areas that I would like to venture into. Irina Malinina was helping me with writing for a journal and Sandy Millin with self-publishing. Or Olga Connolly and Heather Belgorodtseva that have been my guardian angels for years.
  • Doing your job better. Isn’t something that we should all intend to do, almost naturally? Maybe not. I have decided to keep it on the list, regardless, and I would like to treat it as the call for improvement, for continual work on getting better. Even though it is not for an assessed lesson practice or for a course with a trainer watching closely over you. Or a boss reading through your observation reports.
  • Let your mentees observe you and give you feedback. Way too often the newly qualified teachers or the trainees only pop in and out, without giving the observed teacher any feedback, based probably on the assumption that their comments would not be valuable or welcome due to the fact that they have less classroom experience. However, they are the second pair of eyes and, as such, their feedback is precious. To those who want to listen. In my case, sometimes, it would take a form of a conversation and sometimes I would actually ask them to fill in a form that we use for all the lessons.

Things I have tried recently

  • Mentoring someone, No matter how busy you are, there are always people whom you can support on their professional way. It might be formal (if this is the policy of your school) or informal (either through the buddy system or through a community) but it is fun, because you are getting someone else’s perspective and getting involved in helping them out.
  • Start teaching a new level or a new area to teach. This is one of the easiest way of broadening your professional horizons. It is also one of the most flexible. It can start with taking on a student or a new group, permanent or temporary and getting involved in everything that can help you become a better teacher i.e. reading, research, getting to know the coursebooks, observing a more experienced colleague, joining a group on the social media etc. It is fascinating to observe and to reflect on how your teaching self uses and adapts the experience gained so far to a brand new context.
  • Revisit an old area. This is almost as exciting as you get a chance to set into the same river twice and to boost and refresh your skills and to see how you have changed and developed as a teacher.
  • Write an article – There is one big disclaimer here, of course. You must enjoy writing, first and foremost. If you do, there are lots and lots of opportunities.
  • Write for a blog – This has been my joy for the past two years. I do not write all the time. I do not have an agenda, although I try to post once a week. There are the lazy weeks, either the holiday weeks or just proper ‘doing nothing’ weeks. But, overall, this blog has been the source of so much fun and entertainemt and it has been truly rewarding.
  • Share ideas – If you are a member of a community, it will happen regardless. Perhaps you might not feel like your ideas matter (but they do!) or that people will not react (but in my experience there are more readers than actual reactions).
  • Experimenting with the format, going online, going offline or going hybrid. This switch will create opportunities for you to transfer all your teaching skills into a new framework and to find ways of making the most of what you know already in the new environment and to develop brand new skills making the most of what this new envirnment offers. There is some unpleasantness to deal with which is related to the fact that, quite frequently, such transitions are generated by factors that we have no control of such as the pandemic and they might feel like an imposition. As a result, more time will be necessary for you to see the blessing in disguise and to appreciate and to fully embrace it. If you want to read about my personal adventures while moving from the offline into the online classroom, here you can find a few posts: what I thought after a few months and after two years of that experience and another one based on the feedback from my preschoolers’ parents.
  • Becoming a freelancer as a way of freeing yourself. Admittedly, it might be too early for me to offer any advice or to even reflect on that since I have been a freelancer for only two months now but it might be a direction worth taking. In my case it was a combination of different factors such as the change of circumstances, the necessity to look for a new job, the expertise and the level of experience and what the potential employers required me to do and what they were able to offer me. That was ‘not much’ and so I became a freelancer. More on that later)

Is there anything else that should be on this list? Anything else, out of the ordinary, perhaps that you have tried and that has been very beneficial for your continual professional development? Please, pretty please, share with the rest of us!

Happy teaching! Happy developing!

Material design for beginners: The resource as the source of inspiration

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(From the series: Try something new today!)

Today I am going to share these idea for YL lessons that started with the teacher (aka yours truly) finding a material that she really (but really) wanted to use in class.

Some of them have already been published here, on this blog, some of them are brand new, right out of the box, right off the production line.

Oh, also, please make sure you have a look at the introduction to the series here!

Oldies but goodies

Silly pictures are a perfect example here because I found them while I was looking for something else entirely and these just popped up. Until then, I hadn’t even known of their existance. Now, we love using them. Make sure you have a look at the original post)

Wordwall activities are all based on the templates provided by the website but they can be used in a variety different ways. The material is there but there is a lot that can be done with that.

Let’s look for pairs is a game that actually started with a visual that included a rather random set of jungle animals and, initially, were not an activity at all. I loved the animals, though, I started to think how I could use it in class. And an activity was created. I cannot find the original source but it was not very much different from this one here.

Dice is also a resource and a tool that was a starting point to a wide range of activities and I have been passionate about using it in the classroom for ages. Some of the ideas can be found here.

And, last but not least, songs can also become games and here some ideas how to do it.

And some latest finds

Two videos

There is very little that can be said about using videos in class because this is one of the hot topics in the EFL. Kieran Donaghy’s website is a great place to start if you are looking for inspiration and ideas. I have already committed a post on this blog here but today I would like to share one more idea and the mechanics of it and the journey that a video took to become an activity and a lesson.

I love running and over the years I have developed a passion and an obsession related to all the amazing people who managed to achieve something amazing in the area. No wonder that my superhero for many years has been Tom Denniss, the Australian who ran around the world. Literally. In 3 years and about 60 marathons. For many years, one of Tom’s photographs taken during that run, was pinned on the door of my fridge. And no metaphors here.

Naturally, that meant that I read and watched everything that was available on the subject, including this video, and from the moment I saw it, I knew that I would use it in class. I have used it many times since, on its own, in the lessons devoted to unusual journeys, special achievements and numbers as there are some impressive statistics related to Tom’s feat but this September I decided to take it to another level, paired up with that of another adventurer, Helen Skelton, who crossed the Amazon in her kayak. Here are the main stages of this lesson:

  • photographs of both heroes and their adventures
  • a discussion on the challenges and dangers of both achievements, choosing the more difficult one
  • a discussion on the first impressions, whether they are important or not, about our personal experience in that area, the misleading first impressions, the correct ones
  • watching the first minute of the interview with Tom and the first minute of the interview with Helen and discussing the impression they made on us
  • watching the rest of both videos to find out more about their adventures and to decide whose was the more impressive and the more dangerous one
  • a comprehension debate together
  • a discussion in groups to compare opinions regarding the challenges
  • the final debate regarding the first impression and the second impression, a discussion on whether the professions of the interviewees (Tom – a scientist and an entrepreneur, Helen – a TV journalist) might have had an impact on the impressions they made on us
  • feedback, error correction and round-up

Speaking YLE

Cambridge Young Learners Exams is definitely one of those topics that have been waiting for its own post here simply forever and I know that its day will eventually come.

Today I would only like to focus on the Movers speaking part 1 and Flyers speaking part 2 resources that have inspired me to come up with an idea for an acitivty for my primary and pre-primary kids.

The resource here is a set of two pictures which have some small differences between them. You can find the samples in the Sample Tests published by Cambridge. I had been preparing my students for YLE for a few years and I had known the visuals very well and there is no other way of putting me: it was bugging me that I could not use these beautiful visuals with my pre-schoolers because this was the material produced for A2 speakers and my students were only pre-A1 and five. Or so I thought until I realised that I can still keep the resource and keep the general idea of the activity (‘looking for differences’) but the thing that needed adaptation was the aim, especially the linguistic one. The set of complex structures had to be replaced with a simple ‘I can see…’. In order to make the task more achievable for my youngest students, I also decided to change the resources, too and to replace them, initially at least, with a much simpler set, limiting the set of vocabulary items to only one topic (ie only toys, only farm animals) and lowering the level of complexity but abandoning, for a while, the almost identical visuals and choosing simpler two pictures of a farm.

These are the two images that were used in a YLE-inpsired ‘Find the difference’ task with a 6 y.o. primary student, in the lesson on toys and with a group of 5-6 y.o. level 3 pre-primary students. The teacher and the students took turns to compare the two pictures using a simple structure (I can see…). The teacher was initially describing the toys in picture 1, the students – in picture 2.

But this idea was developed further by adding two more visuals, a toy room in the kindergarten, and the activity was adapted too. Using the four pictures, the students were looking for the same toys featuring in one, two, three or perhaps even all four rooms, for example: I can see a teddy in picture 1, picture 2 and picture 4. The most fascinating thing about it was that after a very short while we had one student describing the pictures and producing the language but the whole group were listening in order to check that no pictures were ommitted by mistake. And to support their friend, too.

One-sentence phonics stories

This particular one was created on the basis of the short phonics stories that feature in our coursebooks for primary, in this case the Superminds series by Herbert Puchta and Gunter Gerngross published by CUP.

The original material consisted of an illustration, a one-sentence story and an audio track, like the one in unit 1 of level one, focusing on the /a/ phoneme and practising in a story ‘A fat rat in a black back’ (SB p. 15, sample page 6).

Together with the PostIt notes on the MiroBoard, it gave me the idea to put together a game in which the kids could really practise reading the story in a fun way and to practise the key phonics words as well as all the words the kids have learnt so far.

This is a very simple game in which the kids have to read the original sentence, close their eyes and during that time, the teacher replaces one of the cards. The kids open the eyes and read the slightly adapted sentence. Then, step by step, during the following rounds, the original sentence keeps changing and the kids continue reading it out loud. The number of rounds can be adapted to the needs and abilities of the group and the kids can also be involved in adding the words. In the regular classroom, the same game can be played with even less preparation as the only thing you need is a whiteboard and a marker.

The original sentence, based on the task from Superminds 1
One new element
All the variants in this game

I hope you have found something useful here. If so, please come back. There will be two more episodes in this series.

Happy teaching!

Try something new today!* Material design for beginners**

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One of my favourite EFL quotes is what Katherine Bilsborough started her presentation at TESOL Greece in 2019 that we, the teachers, we are all material writers. Because we simply are, all of us. Even if we don’t ever produce a coursebook, even if we don’t ever get to share ideas on our Instagram or in our blogs. Even if we never get to be famous and renowned, we produce materials for our students, day in day out.

If you want to read more about creating materials, don’t forget to check Katherine’s blog on material writing here and her interview with some great advice here.

In this post here, I would like to share some ideas from a low-key but an advanced material writer, hoping that my everyday material creation, design and adaptation might help some of my fellow material writers, those with less experience.

Why do teachers adapt, supplement and design?

Methodology aside, the very subjective and personal answer to this question is very easy: the students are boread, the teacher has noticed that something does not go as well as planned, the teacher has found something that they really want to use, the teacher does not like whatever is in the coursebook, the teacher is bored…

The three concepts to take into consideration: the material, the activity, the aim

The material aka the physical resource that we have at hand, the photograph, the drawing, the poster, the puppet, the flashcards, realia, the song.

The activity aka the game, the reading task, the matching activity, the odd one out, in other words – a set of instructions of how to do something.

The aim aka why we bother and what exactly we want to achieve.

The understanding what these three are (and what they are not) is the absolute first step in starting your own blazing career in material design because at the stage of creation these three can be the source of inspiration and, at the later stage of reflection and readjustment, one or two of these three will be the elements that can be tweaked and manipulated in order to perfect the initial desing.

This is why, in this particular post, I am going to share ideas that had their starting point in the material, the activity and the aim.

Example #1: the coursbook

Using the sample of the unit 1 from Superminds 5 published by Cambridge University Press here, page 1 (which is page 10 of the students’ book).

The material here is an illustration, a scene from the Pompeii and three characters from the book, Patrick, Phoebe and Alex, a set of numbers and a set of words as well as the audio track which here is the list of words.

The activity is to listen and to repeat the words and to check with the partner.

The aim is for the students to become familiar with the key vocabulary in the unit and to be able to practise them before they move on to the following exercise which introduces the kids’ first adventure as time travellers.

When we started to use it in class, I kept all of the coursebook material but I decided to adapt and to extend the original activity for my students (A2 level, aged 7-8-9 years old) seemed to be ready for a more challenging task that would involve more communication and language production. One of our favourite activities here is to play riddles in which the kids work in pairs and describe one of the items in the picture either by giving their definition (It is big, it is made of, it is used for) or by providing their location in the picture (It is behind Patrick).

This way the material and the aim stay the same and only the activity is slightly adapted.

Example #2: Own materials on Miro

This is a task that I designed for my 1-1 online student, aged 6 y.o. who cannot read yet.

The material here, created using Miro Board, is a picture of a tractor, a set of photos of animals, and a set of colourful cards with simple descriptions of animals.

The activity is a riddles game in which the teacher reads out the definitions of the animals in the order chosen by the student. The student listens and guesses the animals which is later revealed by the teacher.

The aim is to practise listening skills, to develop the ability to focus and to practise the names of animals. In the long run, this activity is used also to prepare the student to start producing similar riddles about a chosen animal.

Now, the next step will be the three follow-up posts devoted to resources whose existance started from finding a new material, coming up with a new game or with a very specific aim for the lesson. Don’t forget to check them out!

Happy teaching!

*) This is one amazing slogan that belongs to Sainsbury’s, the chain of supermarkets in the UK.

**) The material presented here was first a webinar given for teachers from all around the globe, organised by BKC Moscow in September 2022

DIY peer observations aka Where to find videos to observe VYL teachers in action

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During our teacher training courses, I try to invite teachers to my classroom, for an observation. However, even in the online / offline / hybrid era it is not always possible. For that reason, to balance the theoretical and the practical we watch a lot of videoed lessons. Over the years, the teacher training department at my school has managed to compile a whole library of those, for different age groups and levels and now we have a lovely resource to use in our training sessions and workshops. I do recommend setting up this kind of a library at your school!

However, while making these videos, we received the parents’ permission for the internal use. The videos are not on youtube and we cannot make them public. For that reason I can never share any of them with my trainees or readers. Instead, I decided to put together a list of those youtube clips that we often use in our sessions hoping that you find them useful, too.

A few tips from a trainer

  • Choose a focus for the observation: classroom management, behaviour, staging, storytellings, songs, chants, literacy…
  • Think of yourself as an observer, look for the strong points and the areas to improve. There is always something!
  • Be a kind observer! Remember that no matter what you are watching, the teacher WAS on tenterhooks because the lesson was filmed and that the whole filming adventure might have affected the teacher’s and the kids’ behaviour.
  • More than anything else, please remember that whatever was filmed, it is only a part of a lesson and we have no chance of finding out what happened before and after.
  • Think about your particular context (your institution, your group, your classroom, your country and your culture), would this activity and this approach work? Why? Why not? Can it be adapted?
  • If possible, watch the video again, after some time has passed or after you have had a chance to use some of the activities or approaches in practice. Are your impressions the same?
  • If possible, watch it with some other teachers, too! It is fun to find out what others think about it and sometimes we learn more from people that we disagree with!
  • I have tried to include a variety of contexts and countries of origin.

Now the videos

  1. Wow English with Steve (from Steve and Maggie), with a big group in a kindergarten in Prague. I am guessing it is the first lesson and the first meeting with the kids.
  2. TPR with Herbert Puchta and Helbling English and Revision of words with Herbert Puchta, for those of you who want to see the author in the classroom:-)
  3. English clothing song for kids from the Magic Crayons, as an example of a simple and genious (and presumably home-made) clothing song
  4. ESL Story for Kids ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ from Scott Reeve, because this very (very) short clips wonderfully shows what can be done with a storybook used in the EFL/ESL context
  5. Kindergarten Teaching in China from Michael Roxas and almost 30 minutes of a lesson
  6. Teaching ESL in China from Teacher Jeus ESL, a big group of 5-6 y.o. and 25 minutes of a lesson
  7. The first lesson with 3 y.o. from a kindergarten in Poland from Piotr Wilk, this one is an interesting example because of the ratio of L1 and L2 (TL in English, all the explanations and ‘Why’s’ in Polish)
  8. A lesson with 5 – 6 y.o. from a kindergarten in Poland with an introduction in Polish, but the rest of the lesson is in English, the actual lesson 4’30 – 30’14. Apart from that, the video includes the introduction (in Polish, no subtitles unfortunately) aka the lesson overview and the follow-up, with a discussion on the changes that were introduced in the lesson which is supposed to serve only as a starting point.
  9. A lesson with 4-5 y.o. from Alena Fedan (Dniepropetrovsk, Ukraine), some L1 but lots and lots of production in L2)
  10. A lesson from a kindergarten in kindergarten #278 in Moscow, Russia, 20 minutes and a selection of activities.
  11. A lesson from kindergarten Rozvite, in Samara, Russia, the first class with the older pre-schoolers
  12. We learn English with teacher Sandra from Valencia, only 5 minutes but with very young kids, in the classroom and in the yard.
  13. Class routine with pre-school from Baranain, Navarra, 8 minutes, but a lovely start of the lesson and some literacy activities
  14. A lesson of English with pre-school with Graziela Leonardo (Pirai, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil), 8 min, the start of the lesson and the introduction of a new set of vocabulary and a simple whole class project
  15. A lesson of English with pre-school from teacher Lara from Recreio dos Bandeirantes, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

If there are any other videos that you know of and which you could share, please leave the link in the comments below!

Happy teaching!

What do the teachers want from their primary coursebooks?

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Dedicated to my teachers and the publishers)

The list below is the result of brainstorming I decided to include in the session devoted to working with coursebooks, as part of the Teaching YL Course I ran recently. We were trying hard to stay away from the word ‘realistic’. The whole activity was more like writing a letter to Santa and asking for a unicorn, knowing that, most likely, it is not going to happen, but…

A perfect coursebook for primary school children learning English includes (in an alphabetical order):

  • a set of simple boardgames that could be used with a variety of activities
  • cartoons series, to support the early literacy development
  • characters: a combination of real children communicating and fantasy heroes
  • Content and Language Integrated Learning activities
  • flashcards
  • games ideas and suggestions
  • a grammar book to support grammar practise
  • a presentation kit for teachers
  • an appropriate level of challenge throughout the each unit, each level and the entire course and ideas how to manipulate it for the more or less talented children
  • a literacy skills development curriculum, thorough and detailed
  • mini-flashcards, photocopiable
  • mixed ability groups ideas and suggestions
  • an online component
  • activities that help to set up pair-work
  • posters
  • preparation for Cambridge YLE
  • project ideas and suggestions
  • songs
  • stickers activities
  • stories
  • a student book
  • a teacher’s book
  • a variety of visuals: photographs, drawings, paintings
  • a video course for teachers
  • a workbook

It struck me that nobody mentioned testing or assessment. Either we don’t see it as a part of the coursebook and one of the course components or, perhaps, we just don’t care that much about testing

Then, of course, I went online, to have a look at what the major publishers have on offer and I found some nice surprises such as lots of time and effort invested in creating the online components but also some more traditional ones such as posters or home booklets (kind of graded, coursebook-related magazines for kids), wordcards or professional development programme, to name just a few.

I will take it as a good sign. Here is to even better coursebooks and to publishers listening to teacher.

Happy teaching!

P.S. Anything else to add to the list? What do you think?

My adorable monsters. About the long-term work with a group

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This post, like many others, starts in the classroom…

The thought falls on my head out of nowhere.

We are playing the game with the first conditional. There are only four of them, on the day, in-between the holidays, so we don’t even bother to go into the breakout rooms, we are playing together. It is not even a real game, either. Someone starts a sentence, someone else, called out, thinks of an ending, action – reaction, a situation – consequences. And they are just producing. Coming up with great ideas, some of the sentences just down to earth and realistic, some of them, as we call them, ‘creative’, just for laughs. And so we laugh out loud. A trainer in me suddenly realises that the lesson plan (if there had been a formal lesson plan) should include not only the traditional elements, like the staging and ‘the teacher will’ and ‘the students will’. The trainer in me realised that it might be worth considering to include a laughing fit and the necessary calming down part in the timing, in the assumptions and the potential problems and solutions…We laugh a lot with my kids.

Unavoidably, I realise, I get those constant flashbacks, those mini-trips into the past and I am looking at my students, today already 10 and 9 (or 8 and 7, still, some of them) and I remember how we walked into the classroom together, for the first time, me on my toes, all eyes, all ears, and them cautiously taking every step and every action. I do remember how we learned to say ‘Hello’ for the first time with some of them and how we first said that we don’t like broccoli ice-cream (except for Nadia, my little rebel). How I used to need lots of miming and scaffolding and modelling, with every single activity and how they’d start with single words, then move to phrases and to sentences.

And I, who was present, 99% of the time, over those seven years, I cannot believe my own eyes and my own ears now, how they throw the language at me, storytelling, or using the Present Perfect in free speech. Or the first conditional.

What does it mean for a teacher to continue for an extended period of time? What does it mean for the business? How does the methodology change? Does it change at all? What do the parents think? And, last but not least, perhaps it would be better to change the teacher once in a while?

This post will be very personal. This post will be very emotional. But I would like to look at it from the other points of view, too, thinking like a trainer, thinking like a methodology expert and, also, inevitably, thinking like a teacher and like a human, too.

In order to make it a bit more objective and more like a research, I asked my teacher friends for help. This post was written with the help, support and contributions from my amazing colleagues: Ekaterina Balaganskaya, Nadezhda Bukina, Marina Borisova and Tatiana Kistanova. Thank you!!!

Are you still up for such an adventure? Follow me.

Over to…a teacher trainer

  • You know your students very well, in every aspect, including the interests, their motivation, the family situation, the strengths, the areas that need improvement, the interaction patterns that they favour, their best friends in and outside of the group, their favourite activities and games, their role in the group. This helps a lot with lesson planning, shaping up and choosing the activities and, later on, in class, with managing the activities, the lesson time and the interaction patterns.
  • Giving instructions is much easier, after a while. The students know you very well, too, that they are almost able to read your mind and to react to any, even those less formal hints and clues. Quite likely before you give them.
  • You need to be creative because after a while, your students might get bored with the activities you usually use. This might not sound like something positive because it means that you are at risk of running out of anything that you normally keep up your sleeve in terms of games, classroom management techniques or ways of checking homework, for example, but I would like to see it a more positive light. Working with a long-term group can be a wonderful catalyst for your creativity and, as a result, there are more new games, classroom management techniques and ways of checking homework!!!
  • It is perfectly natural that with any new group, a teacher strives to build up the comfort zone in order to ensure the conditions for the effective teaching and learning. However, once that comfort zone is created (and after a few years with a group it is likely to be a very stable comfort zone, a very cozy and safe ZPD, hello Leo Vygotsky), the teacher can start dreaming of venturing out and trying out new things on a much more advanced level. Not only a new game to practise vocabulary but a new approach that you may have heard about such as introducing a new approach to storytelling after you have found out about PEPELT, setting up journals with your students, just because you read that one research article or just taking your lifelong passion for teaching English through another level. Or, actually, you might even want to start a blog at one point. An experimenter is, I believe, one of the most important teacher roles!
  • Teaching long-term, you are moving on, together with your students and that means changing and adapting the approaches and techqniues to match them to needs of the kids who are growing up. With time, kids are becoming more mature and more capable of producing the language and dealing with more and more complex tasks. They say that a rolling stone gathers no moss and the same can be said about teachers who are growing and developing with their students. Sure, some of that can be achieved within one year, but there is definitely a lot more potential for the changes and the evolutions if the learning process takes a bit longer than just one season.
  • My colleagues also mentioned the impact on the learning process and the very shaping of the curriculum as it was adapted to the particular needs of the students. Instead of just following the book (or the curriculum whichever form it came in), as might be the case with a less involved teacher (although, of course, I am not implying that working with a group for a season only equals lower quality service), with a longer term group a teacher is able to introduce a circular / spiral curriculum, introduced to the world by Bruner and to me be Ekaterina, with the teacher returning and revising the crucial elements of the language, regardless of what the coursebook or the pacing schedule says. For example, working on the past simple (served in manageable chunks) from the beginning of the year instead of waiting until April when that topic appears in the book. This was Ekaterina’s example and I realised that we have been doing the same with my kids, simply because I wanted us to have the language (or some bites of it) for us to be able to talk about the weekend and the holidays and the day at school. Tatiana also mentioned it as one of the key benefits as knowing the group helps the teacher set the pace that will be most appropriate for this particular bunch of children.
  • Over to… a manager
  • Students staying for a few years are basically your returning customers, your loyal customers and your dream come true. As they would be in any other area. They come back, month after month and year after year and they make the world go round, basically.
  • What’s more, these students are also likely to bring in other students, their friends, brothers, sisters, cousins or even parents, to join your groups or the other groups at the school. Since there has been a positive experience in the family, so to speak, these are also likely to stay.
  • The fact that you have worked out the patterns and the procedures of managing the finances, the group, the assessment or the festivities, will mean that these will be easier to implement.
  • This will be a huge advantage, should there be any changes to adapt to, even those unexpected and unplanned, as in case of the pandemic. Perhaps that was not the case in all the countries and with all the groups and students but, in my experience, many of those that went online, smoothly, were the long-term students and groups and they basically trusted their teacher to transfer online or, later on, to study in the hybrid classroom.
  • That also means that a strong bond and trust will be built and the parents will be more likely to accept any changes or even any complications such as the need to move online, the need to change the timetable, the need to make up for the class or to run the lesson online, or even, to have a cover class.
  • Staying with ‘the old’ teacher might also be easier for the parents which was a very important point made by Ekaterina. Parents are busy, they might not be able to devote a huge amount of time to looking for a new teacher, a new school or a new group and they might also worry that their child would not fit in the new set-up. Some parents fear that due to the previous negative experience, either with the school, the group or even the teacher’s professional competence. Staying is easier.

Over to… a teacher

  • The first one to mention here will be the enormous sense of achievement that a teacher can get from working with a group for an extended period of time and the opportunity to observe and to assess the same students, not only from September to May, from the beginning to the end of the level but over the years, from pre-A to A2 or even further.
  • Teaching a group over any longer period of time provides the teacher with plenty of opporunities and a lot of data for formative assessment, as pointed out by Ekaterina. It will apply to all the language skills as well as vocabulary and grammar, accuracy and fluency. Let’s take the past simple as an example. There will be the series of lessons devoted to the topic, a series of lessons per level or coursebook even, and the students might do well in these lessons. However, it will be up to the teacher to track whether and how accurately the students use it to describe the past events in free speech, recalling the events of the day at school or retelling a story. The aims of these two activities are not the freer grammar practice per se but, for example, settling in and checking understanding after a reading skills development stage. It might (and it will!) take a considerable period of time for the students to finally assimilate the structure and to start using it freely and correctly. I have also noticed in my teaching that with time I tend to prioritise formative assessment over summative assessment but this is a new discovery and I need some time to think about it before I write about. A new post? Who knows)
  • Creating a positive atmosphe in the classroom, creating the environment that will be beneficial for learning, learning about your students and their needs is something that we, as teachers, do regardless, but there is something special in the connection that you build with a group over the years. You accompany them in their lives outside of the classroom, all the good marks and bad marks, all the competitions, holidays and birthdays. You get to meet their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and all the pets. You take part in the important family events, such as the births of baby brothers and sisters or even those more traumatic events like an illness or a death of a family member and, whether you want it or not, you bond. To an outsider it might sound strange but there must be a reason why so many teachers refer to their students as ‘my children‘ or, sometimes, when in a non-teaching environment, ‘my educational children’.
  • Then, there is the pride in all their achievements and progress that they are making. Going back and reminiscing about all the milestones, all the firsts is a truly wonderful journey for a teacher to take: the first lesson ever, the first time we made full sentences, the first time we started to create in English, the first letters scribbled, the first story we did and the first time they asked to be allowed to take over the story reading, the first test, the first real grammar lesson, the first ‘OMG, I cannot stop them from chattering away‘ day or every time they took an exam, Starters, Movers, Flyers, KET, PET, FCE or, finally, also, CAE.

Over to…a human

‘If you meet with the same people twice a week for 8 – 10 years, you can’t help loving them‘ (Marina)

‘It’s a joy to see them grow, to see the progress and the results. Develop relationships and see them enter a new age group‘ (Nadezhda)

‘The best thing about it was that I knew them and they knew me, the rapport was strong‘ (Tatiana)

‘When I was moving a country, they were devastated. Luckily, we could continue our lessons online‘ (Ekaterina)

  • The group is a community. Ekaterina mentioned that the kids in the group she has been teaching for seven years became friends outside the group and that they all meet offline when that is possible, even go out for pizza or to a museum. Even when those outside events are not possible, the group can celebrate together either because they get a Christmas-themed lesson or because they all bring snack and have a little party at the end of the lesson. Even if it is an online lesson.
  • It is interesting that the personal preferences work both ways and that the resistance to change the teacher might come from the students, too, as you will see in the stories for teachers that I share in the paragraph below and that, as Marina highlighted, the fact that some students stay with you (and, of course, not all of them will) is based also on their personal preferences and attachement to the teacher. Staying for longer may be seen as a result not some intertia, the inability or laziness to find a new teacher, but, simply, a conscious decision on the part of the parents and the students.
  • Or on the part of the teacher, too. As pointed out by Tatiana, it might be related to the teacher’s own personality, if the long-term connections are important for them, as humans. Or, it might be the impact of the context in which they are working as the changes, imposed or not, are more likely to take place in different educational institutions whereas the teachers who work freelance would probably be in favour of keeping the students, unless, of course, it is impossible due to any external circumstances.
  • As for me, personally, well, I love what I do. Yes, there are sometimes duties, tasks or even groups that I am not entirely wildly excited about but, overall, I enter the classroom, online or offline, with joy and looking forward to the lesson. And one of the reasons for that are my students and, especially, my educational children aka my adorable monsters. It is thanks to them that I have blossomed as a creator, as a teacher and as a trainer. It is thanks to them that I was able to cope with the strains of the lockdown and it is thanks to them that ‘I am still standing‘, as Elton John might put it, when the world is what it is right now.
  • At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were about to transition online and change our EFL lives forever, I remember how I felt about the big unknown and how, pretty quickly, it became apparent, that no matter what (really, no matter what) we are what we are, a small (and a bit loud) community and that we had had enough experience of each other worked out and accumulated and that we can take it elsewhere. I remember one morning, just before the lessons were about to start (the first real lesson, not the free online trial and getting to know each other with zoom) how I felt the panic creep over. But I also remember the thought: ‘Hold on, they are my kids. That’s is. We will just do it, under slightly different circumstances‘. And, guess what? We did.

A change would do you good? The other side of the coin

Because, of course, there is one! Changing the teacher might be beneficial! On the one hand, as Nadezhda mentioned, the teachers themselves might feel the impact of the long-term interaction, some form of material fatigue, and in such a case a change is more than welcome. In such cases a change of a teacher might be the solution. A new teacher means new methods, new approaches, a different sense of humour…

Sometimes this ‘tiredness’ and the call for a change may come from the fact that students are growing and transitioning into another age group and the students might welcome a more official confirmation or recognition of that process. Perhaps, the change of a teacher might do the job here. If, for example, it is Mr Alexander is the teenage groups’ teacher then him taking over the group from taught so far by Miss Carolina is going to be some form of a rite of passage.

However, it needs to be mentioned, it is not as straightforward as it might seem. First and foremost, the students may not want to change the teacher at all and, in such cases, it is enough to tweak the format or the routine a bit. Then it might be that the outside circumstances change and they sort the problem out. Ekaterina shared her story of one of her groups with whom she started to consider the possible change of a teacher as the kids’ growing up and changing into teenagers resulted in some discipline issues and, as a result, the lessons not being as effective as they previously had been. However, here, the problem sorted itself out – due to the pandemic the class was transferred online and it turned out that the physical separatation (or the space and the own territory that the students gained) was the only thing that the group needed. They still continue with Ekaterina as their teacher.

This brought my own group to mind. The kids were still in pre-school, year 3, when we were asked to give our cosy kiddies classroom to a younger group. We moved and the most surprising thing was that it turned out to be an important stepping stone for the students. ‘We are real students now!’, they kept repeating and back then I was just listening to them and giggling inside that the big desks and big chairs can make anyone so excited. Today, when I look back at it, it seems to be this perfect moment in the life of a group when a change was needed. And it did take place, although, yes, without changing the teacher.

The most important thing to consider here is how the students can benefit from the new circumstances. Marina brought it up, too and, Ekaterina gave a perfect example from the British schools. In the schools her children attend, there is an obligatory change of a teacher every year, with Miss Elena only teaching the 4th-grades, Mr Peter only working with the 6th graders and so on. The system was introduced in the school to ensure fairness. This way, all the children get a change to work with all the teachers throughout their school life and the is no chance that, due to some ‘preferences’, class 4A only gets ‘the best teachers’. Not to mention that this must contribute a lot to bonding and building of the community as little Pasha will know all the teachers personally and all the teachers, after a while, will have had Pasha in their classrooms.

The end is the beginning is the end…

The most interesting thing is that, from among the teachers who waved back at me and wanted to chat about the long-term teaching of a group, there was nobody who would be a strong proponent of the Change the Teacher Every Year approach. Can it be considered a sign? I have no idea but, if, by any chance, there is anyone among my readers who has had an experience with it, please, pretty please, get in touch, I would love to talk to you!

Happy teaching!

EFL metaphors #2: Teachers about their first lessons with VYL

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1970 Brazil

This is definitely not the first post here on working with pre-schoolers and certainly not the first one written for the preschool teachers. If you are interested, you can find all of them here, and if you are looking for something written specifically for the novice preschool teachers, you can start reading about behaviour management, singing in the classroom, rewards charts, homework for pre-schoolers and lesson planning.

There is also this one here, The first VYL lesson survival kit, which for a very long time already has been one of the most popular and most frequently accessed pieces I have committed and published on this blog. A coincidence? I don’t think so.

I would like to think that the world is changing for the better and that the novice VYL teachers around the world are getting the help and support they need, either from their managers, from the methodology and resource books, or from the fellow teachers on the social media and blogs. But, even if they do, entering the room with a bunch of little children, whom you don’t know (yet), who do not speak English (yet) and who may not have any idea as regards why we have gathered here (yet!!!), well, this is not you typical ‘dream come true‘. And yes, with time, as you get more experience, you learn better how to prepare, what to expect and how to be, but there is no doubt that starting the course with all the other age groups is easier. No doubt whatsoever.

It is no coincidence, either, that my MA dissertation at the University of Leicester was devoted to teacher education for the first-year pre-primary teachers of English and that I decided to give it the following title ‘Left to their own devices?‘…

The time will come when I finally publish the results of my research in a real article (keep your fingers crossed!). Today, in the series of the EFL Metaphors, I would like to share a tiny little bit of it.

1931, Argentina

It started with…

Well, it started with an article which I talked about in the first entry in the series. The basis for my dissertation was a survey filled in by about fifty of my colleagues who had a chance to teach EFL pre-schoolers in Russia. It was a joy and a relief to find out that most of them evaluated their experience as ‘overall positive’, although, as one of them said ‘Literally, nothing was easy and everything was new’.

This inspired me to ask the participants of the study to try to describe their first year of teaching in one line (although, to be fair, I did not quite specify at the time that I wanted to get a metaphor). Here are some of them, accompanied by clipart library images selected by me.

1950 Switzerland

What was your first year in the VYL world like?

‘A ring of roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tishoo, a-tishoo. We all fall down (in a good way!)’ (Keely)

‘Positively challenging in terms of experience gained and stress dealt with.’ (Rory)

‘Pretty tough. I had to learn everything quickly and often had no time to properly reflect on my lessons. But the experience I got is valuable and helped me a lot afterwards.’ (Victoria)

‘It was like a roller-coaster. Sometimes you are enthusiatic and excited, sometimes frustrated and stressed’ (teacher 3)

‘Challenging, full of errors on my side, but at the same time joyful and full of great memories.’ (Vita)

‘Challenging but absolutely rewarding’ (Irina)

‘It was a beautiful mess’ (Cristina)

Just a few words

Apart from the fact that now, as ‘a researcher’ I am collecting these gems, I also like to use them in my teacher training sessions and workshops. They help to encourage participants to reflect on why the first lessons with the little people might be more challenging than those with any other group . They are also a great starting point in discussions between the less and the more experience VYL teachers or in discussions between the VYL teachers and the non-VYL teachers.

My dream would be to use metaphors at the beginning and at the end of a training process, in one specific area of teaching, to compare how we change our beliefs and attitudes. It is not my original idea, I got it from the same article that inspired the whole series. Maybe next time we are running the IH VYL course…

Instead of a coda

When I started to write this post, I realised that I do not have a metaphor for these first days, weeks and months as a VYL teacher. Nobody asked me then and, somehow, I forgot to ask myself when I was carrying out the research. Does it even matter what it felt like, this something that took place fifteen years ago? Probably not, but for the sake of this post and for fun, I made a promise that I would have figured it out, while writing. I did. Here we go:

‘It’s like a whitewater rafting, while you are trying hard to keep on smiling.‘

Happy Teaching!

P.S. Big, big thanks to all the teachers who agreed to take part in my MA survey! Those that I could quote in this post and all the others!

P.P.S. Please remember, even if your first lesson is not what you would like it to be, the second will be much better!

P.P.P.S. Don’t forget to check out the wonderful directory of all the useful things in the VYL world created by Sandy Millin. You can find it here.

1950s, Brazil

Teaching teens. EFL metaphors #1

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Vintage poster – Air France, São Paulo, Brasil – Galerie 1 2 3 (1976)

Metaphors in EFL? What? Why? How?

Using metaphors in teacher training is not a new concept. I found out about it thanks to Thomas S.C. Farrell while doing the research for my MA dissertation two years ago. In his ‘Novice Language Teachers: Insights And Perspectives For the First Year’ published in 2008, he included a great article by Steva Mann (all the details below) devoted to teachers ‘making sense’ of the experiences of their first year in the classroom specifically through metaphors.

I do recommend reading the whole article, of course, but just to give you a taste and to show you why it has been kind of a breakthrough for me, here are a few quotes.

Mann writes ‘Metaphors play an instrumental role in using a familiar image to explore more complex concepts and meanings’ (2008: 11) and they can be ‘consciously employed by individuals for reflective purposes’ (2008:12). A bit further on he also highlights the fact that ‘metaphorical exploration may be particularly useful for first year teachers in attempting to come to terms with the complex nature of teacher knowledge and its relationship with experience’ (2008:12). I found this quote especially interesting although I think it is true about any teacher that becomes a novice in a field (ie an experienced teacher taking the first steps in the area of exam preparation, EAP or early years) or, even more broadly, any teacher learning new things and trying to apply them in practice.

Anyway, I got inspired. First of all, I quickly added the metaphor question to my MA survey and I started to experiment with using the metaphor in my everyday teaching and teacher training, for example a few weeks ago, while running the session on teenagers as part of the IH CYLT course at our school. Here is now we did it.

Teaching teenagers in metaphors

We started with a game of hangman in which the group had to guess one of my own metaphors for what teaching teenagers is like and that is: Growing Cactuses, mainly because it is not as straightforward, pretty and easy as growing violets, tulips or even roses, but it is equally rewarding and fun. If you know how to do it, of course. If you are interested about it or if you are just starting to teach teens, you can read more about it here.

If you are here, it must be either because you already work with teenagers and you already have your own view of the teenage classroom. Or you might be a novice teenagers teacher who is about to enter this classroom and you are preparing, mostly because you have heard ‘things’.

One way or another, you are ready for the exercise that I prepared for the activity that we did with my trainees later in the session. Since all of these metaphors and visuals are open to interpretation (just look at the two different images I have found for ‘writing a novel’) and prone to be influenced by the personal experiences (which is the best thing about the metaphors, admittedly), instead of me just analysing all the metaphors in detail and telling you what to think, first I would like you to read what my trainees have created and answer these questions:

  • Why do you think the teachers expressed their ideas in such a way? What kind of classroom experiences have led to that?
  • Were your experiences the same? Do you agree?

Here are the metaphors, in no particular order. I have decided to combine the words with the images and these come either from my trainees themselves or from the obliging clipart…

Teaching teenagers is…

…writing a novel

…per aspera ad astra aka ‘Through hardships to the stars’

…touching a melting ice-cream

…playing the lead role in every play

…riding a roller-coaster

…breaking stereotypes

…about mood swings

…keeping a heart on your sleeve

…a role-play

…about the strength of materials

…working with/through moods, feelings, hormones

Just a few words…

Just as the visuals do it, the metaphor invites the audience, students, trainees or readers, to personalise the reality and to share opinions and views and, by doing so, it offers a unique opportunity to look at an item in a multitude of ways. The horizon widens straight away.

Some of the interpretations might feel like that your own thoughts expressed by someone else, something that might have been on your mind, although they were never properly verbalised. Sometimes, some of them might be contradictory to all of your beliefs, they are still valuable because they might help you understand the basis for the beliefs we hold.

It is funny that even the same set of metaphors that we put together and mine interpretation of them change, from day to day. During the session, I got really drawn to ‘writing the novel’ and ‘touching the melting ice-cream’, because these two were the most unexpected ones although they did strike a chord with what I think about working with teens. Right now, while I am typing up these words, about three weeks later, I am most drawn to ‘breaking stereotypes’ and to ‘strength of material’, mostly because of the image that popped up, which reminded me that strength is at the same time about being fragile and that is what you find out while teaching teens, that what you see is not always what really and that is a good thing to be taking with you into the classroom. As is remembering that the most important thing is to remember that we teach not some imaginary age group but a very specific Sasha, Kasia, Pedro, Pablo, Idoia, Carolina, Rita and Luis, who might or might not match the list of dos, don’ts, ares and aren’ts, likes and don’t likes of ‘a typical teenage group’.

Instead of a coda

Big thanks to all my trainees: Anna, Nico, Hanif, Olga, Oxana, Padraig, Olga, Padraig, Polina as well as Daniel and Joe, for all the amazing ideas in this session and the permission to use them here.

If you want to read more about teaching ‘the almost adults’, here you can find some bits of theory and of the activities that worked well with my groups.

And if you liked this post and you would like to add your own metaphor to the list, please comment in the box below. We will all have some more food for thought!

The original ‘growing cactuses’ metaphor

This is how this post becomes the first one in a mini-series devoted to metaphors in the classroom. The next one, almost ready, will be devoted to teachers taking their first steps in the VYL world. Coming soon!

P.S. Vintage posters from around the world will be accompanying this series, too because that is my most recent love and a great metaphor for a metaphor…

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

T.S.C. Farrell (ed), 2008, Novice Language Teachers: Insights And Perpectives For the First Year, Equinox Publishing: London.

S. Mann (2008), Teacher’s use of metaphor in making sense of the first year of teaching, In: Farrell (2008), pp. 11 – 28.

Polish Air Lines LOT . Srokowski Jerzy . promotion advertising poster . year 2018 . Poster.pl Gallery (polishpostergallery.com)

100 names aka The tutor sighs

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The tutor sighs, the manager sighs, the teacher sighs. She wonders, too, whether two cases in the last two months already constitute a tendency. Or not yet. And whether she should be so bothered by all that. Or not. The tutor (aka the manager aka the teacher) does not know. She knows that it has been a good few weeks since the most recent incident and so she is writing all these words with a cool head. None of these silly on-the-spot, emotional reactions. At the same time, somehow, it has been impossible to stop thinking about it since.

And so the tutor / the manager / the teacher is here, typing up.

The statement

‘A teacher working with very young learners must have her/his own children.’ (actually, extends to: all the teachers working with children…)

The teacher sighs

I do. Because first and foremost, I am and I have been a teacher. Whenever faced with a comment like the one above, I look very much like this amazing creature in the photo, spotted in the Louisiana swamps: I freeze, waiting to see what happens next. I freeze, trying to remain a professional, an adult and a kind human being. Whilst hoping that all these thoughts forming in my brain never get verbalised.

If I had been a bit braver (or a bit more carefree), I would have asked: ‘Excuse me, have you just told me that I do not have the right to do my job? Don’t. Mostly because it is too late. I already do it. And I do it well, too. Thank you.’

The tutor sighs, too

I do, deeply and gloomily. As a tutor, I would like to ask the world to be a little kinder. To all those newly qualified very young learners teachers and young learners teachers and to all these teachers who are novice in the world of the pre-school and primary EFL. Or to all of these teachers who are only thinking of taking their first steps in the area. It seems that they have a lot on their plate anyway, dealing with the methodology, the materials, the resources, the real children in the classroom and their parents outside the classroom as well as the school admin. They really do not need any more of that ‘entertainment‘ and of wondering they are good enough or not to do the job. Especially before they have had a chance to try and to check.

Some of them might decide that the early years EFL or ESL is not for them and it might be because they do not have children or it maybe because they discover that their vocation lies in one of the other areas. Some of them, however, might grow up to be the next VYL Superhero, the next Sandie Mourao. Or the next Leo Vygotsky. And while they are getting there, they might appreciate a tiny little bit of support. Especially from their more experienced peers. Dear world, please be nice!

The manager sighs, too. But then she gets down to business…

…and she starts digging through the files in her head and on her computer. This particular exercise starts when I am still a bit emotional and so, with a pinch of certain vindictiveness, I take out a piece of paper and I start writing the names down.

Changing anyone’s beliefs is not an easy task and it involves a serious time investment and a lot of effort. What’s more, the satisfactory outcomes cannot always be guaranteed. Some people are simply happier in the box. Their choice, I suppose.

But, if anyone is interested, I am going to share my experience as a manager, someone who for the past nine years has supervised, mentored, trained up, lesson-planned, observed and given feedback, praised and supported teachers of early years, primary and pre-primary. Nine years of that. And counting.

Since this ‘incident’ I have been bombarded by the names of all these amazing professionals, that I have had a chance work with. Some of them were young, some of them were not. Some of them were experienced, some of them were not. Some of them were women, some of them were men. Some of them were mums and dads, many were not.

What they all had in common was the willingness to sit down on the carpet and look at the world from the point of view of a five-year-old (no metaphors here!). What they all had in common was kindness and patience and dedication to their job.

Did I really sit down to write the names of all these mentees and colleagues who taught children and who were great at that despite the fact that at the time they were not parents in their private life?

Yes, I did.

Scribbling on a piece of paper and going back in time, to 2020, 2019, 2018…I stopped at the beginnig of 2016 because I got to the magic number of 100.

And then I smiled.

One hundred fantastic people. One hundred great VYL and YL teachers. One hundred case studies that, perhaps (just perhaps) will turn ‘the statement‘ above into a question, even if a very cautious one. One hundred names that immediately put me in a good mood because they came back and they all brought beautiful memories. For that I am beyond grateful. The end.

Happy teaching!

P.S. Lots and lots and lots of virtual hugs and happy thoughts to all the teachers that I have had a chance to work with over those nine years.

P.P.S. I have also had a chance to work with many teachers who were both: great parents and great teachers of early years. Lots of virtual hugs and happy thoughts to them.

P.P.P.S. I have also had a chance to work with many teachers who were great parents but who would never agree to teach pre-schoolers or primary. Just because they have other intrests in their professional life. Their virtual hugs and happy thoughts are HERE.