USING IATEFL CONFERENCE SELECTIONS as a resource for TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
This arrived in the post yesterday! IATEFL 2019 Liverpool Conference Selections. Published once a year, it’s a fantastic resource of teacher development sessions for the busy DOS, head teacher or indeed any teacher who has to lead a CPD session. It lends itself perfectly to a mixed staffroom - teachers with varied experience, timetables, interests, strengths. Like the actual conference, it reflects the wide diversity of our industry. Of course, with Covid-19 and IATEFL 2020 being postponed, this resource is even more meaningful this year.
Each IATEFL conference presenter is asked to submit a short summary, and they are grouped together in themes. This year the 12 themes are:
· Topics in teacher training
· The psychology of learning
· Teaching methods and classroom management
· Working with language
· Teaching with technology
· Inclusivity in ELT
· English for work
· English for academic purposes
· Working with young learners
· English through arts
· Evaluation of students and teachers
· Teacher development, wellbeing and empowerment
Lots of ideas already? Exactly! It’s a very rich source.
I wanted to share with you some of my tried and tested ideas for running teacher development sessions using IATEFL conference selections as the resource.
Choose a number!
Each teacher chooses any number from 10- 229. These are the page numbers! You can choose to either tell them that or not! Make it fun. This works well as an individual or pair work activity. Then the teachers go to the corresponding page in the Conference Selections. Give them a limited amount of time and then they read and share the essence of the article.
Comment: This works really well if you’re wondering what to do in your CPD session tomorrow. It’s also a great way to expose your teachers to Conference Selections and new ideas.
Prep time for you: zero
The theme is…
Choose one of the 12 themes to explore. Again – each teacher/pair/group of teachers reads – shares the main points of the article. Remember you don’t want your teachers to just reel off the summary verbatim – ask them for some practical ideas to use in the classroom, or an idea that would solve a problem/situation, or something they simply disagree with. (and why of course!)
Comment: Choose a theme which everyone can relate to. (English for academic purposes or Working with young learners might not be relevant for your staffroom).
Prep time for you: 30 mins to read all the articles so that you can guide the conversation. You need to have read the summaries for this to work best.
Buy this article
Each teacher has to choose an article (or you could choose it for them). They then have to sell it to you (the group). Create a context - for example, you want to do a session with another group of teachers but you can only use 5 articles. Which ones should you choose? The teachers have to put on their advertising hats and convince you to choose their article. This also works really well as a poster presentation.
Comment: At the end of each section, there is the author’s email. Encourage your teacher’s to interact with the authors to find out more about their session. Some authors are also very happy to share slides.
Prep time for you: Not much. You need to read the articles and be able to ask a few curly questions to your staff!
Try it out!
Each teacher finds an article which outlines one or more practical ideas. Everyone shares the activity/method and then in their own classroom tries out some/all. Everyone meets up again and shares their findings. This works really well if everyone tries out the same idea especially as we all put our own spin on an idea. Here are some articles that will work well for this activity. Have a look at these three to get going.
Letting the students choose by Kate Smook (page 177)
Lessons learnt from peer observations by Sophie Handy (page 204)
You’ve levelled up! Motivating university students through gamified e-learning by Anna Weninger and Catherine Prewett-Schrempf (Page 88)
Comment: Everyone gets to try something out in their classroom. Makes for closer reading as you definitely have to understand what to do.
Prep time: Not much but you’ll need to keep the momentum going over a week or so. Suggest everyone agrees to dates.
Yeah… nah
Teachers chose an article that has an activity which they don’t think will work. There should be something in the article that makes them think… nah. They then have 5 minutes to figure out exactly why and to explain what they would have to do to make the activity work. This often comes down to classroom context, and can result in some really interesting points about teaching in different contexts.
Comment: Sometimes what works for one context, doesn’t work for another – this could be a teacher, class, country – so many variables in teaching!
Prep time: None – unless you decide to limit the choice (possibly not a bad idea).
I do that!
And if you didn’t like the negativity of the previous idea, turn it around. Teachers have to find an article with something (a practical idea, a methodology, an opinion on language learning etc) that they agree with 100%. Again, a context can be helpful e.g. a publisher wants to publish a book based on some of the articles from Conference Selections. Your school has been selected to choose one. Make sure you ask some difficult questions so that your teachers need to ensure their thoughts and opinions are 100% watertight!
Comment: Try this idea if you didn’t like the negative focus of the previous one.
Prep time: You definitely need to know what your teachers are going to agree with so that you can prepare your counter-argument!
I’d love to know how you get on with these ideas. Leave a comment in the box below, or drop me an email.
References
IATEFL 2019 Liverpool Conference Selections (2020) Ed. Tania Pattison, IATEFL, UK