Turning CELTees into Successful NQTs

 With the second IH Teachers Online Conference approaching rapidly (Friday May 25th), as well as trying to arrange all the sessions and get the speakers up to speed,  I’ve been mulling over what to talk about myself on the day.  Since we’re celebrating 50 years of teacher training around the IH World (the first four-week course was held in June 1962) and as I’m an almost full-time CELTA trainer, I think what I’d like to discuss is how CELTA trainees can transition from the intensity of the course to a full-time teaching position, maintaining all the good habits they’ve formed on the course, while continuing to develop into more rounded teachers.

Which is where you come in!  Thinking back to your early days as an NQT (Newyl-Qualified Teacher), what helped you most to get to grips with a full timetable, a wider variety of coursebooks, completely different types of students, the need to inspire and motivate your learners, not to mention the paperwork this all entails?  And what would you change looking back over your first years of teaching.  What did you need that you didn’t have?  What would you like to take back and do over again?

I’d love to hear from you about your experiences and also what advice you’d give to today’s NQTs coming off CELTA courses and starting off in the wide world of ELT.  And as a little incentive, all contributors will receive an invite to the session on May 25th, so get commenting!

A Short Guide to Guided Discovery

The other week I was reading Adam Beale’s fab blog ‘Five against one‘ rather than doing what I was supposed to be doing and yet again I found myself chastising myself for not going to #eltchat anymore (it’s actually the fault of doing CELTA at the times that the chat is held rather than of my own choosing), since Adam had blogged a summary of the latest chat, that just happened to be on one of my pet topics and favourite ways of teaching – guided discovery.

And so I was rather surprised with Adam’s concluding paragraph and this post is my own humble attempt at helping Adam address the balance.  Here’s what he had to say:

ELTchat may not have answered my question or provided me with the plethora of examples I was hoping for, but it certainly highlighted the need for some further hands on research and investigation. Now, I may be looking in the wrong places or typing the wrong words into my search engine. So please tell me if you know of any great resources. I know that there must be research papers out there, but for teachers what we really need is examples and people writing or talking about their experiences with it. So if you do use Guided Discovery and have some ideas get them out there, blog them or put it out on twitter. 

And so my response is to share my latest foray into Guided Discovery world on Wednesday morning.  I was teaching the CELTA TP students and being watched by my CELTA candidates – having to put my money where my mouth was since we’d had a session on conditionals the afternoon before where I had espoused Guided Discovery worksheets – time to show them the power of student-centred text-based step-by-step language clarification (i.e. Guided Discovery).

K had taken the students above-standardly through the text (Global Intermediate Page 95), so I simply started with the worksheet, which you can download here:

Unreal Past Conditions Guided Discovery Worksheet

The students anwered the questions about meaning alone, checked them with a partner and then we fed back on them.  The main sticking point was the question ‘Is this staement real or unreal’, since they mostly saw it as real.  I think I need to rephrase this question to something like ‘Is the speaker describing a situation in the real world or imagining an unreal situation in their head?’, although that seems too wordy to me.

A little bit of elicitation and refining the context by asking this question helped me convince them the statement was unreal.  And this elicitation of the fact that we’re talking about the past and we¡re talking about an unreal situation made eliciting the name of the structure to the top of the handout easy peasy – Unreal Past Conditions.

Then we drilled the statement aplenty.  First lots of choral drilling of each clause, backchaining the phrases ‘If he hadn’t noticed’ and ‘this wouldn’t have been’, and they had quite a bit of trouble at first reproducing /w@d@n@bIn/ (the @ are supposed to be schwas but I can’t get them to come out) but they got there after lots of laughs and backchains:

/bIn/

/n@bIn/

/d@n@bIn/

/w@d@n@bIn/

Then they completed the pronunciation section by themselves, in pairs and we fed back to the whiteboard.

Unreal past conditions pronunciation

Unreal Past Result Pronunciation

I did a bit more drilling to consolidate it with the written phonemes, which seemed to help them a bit and then they headed on to completing the form section by themselves which they found pretty straightforward.

Unreal Past Condition Form

Unreal Past Result Form

What really pleased me is they were able to come up with different possible modals for the result clause, they weren’t limited by the ‘third conditional’ misnomer to would, they quickly proferred could and might and may and must and should as well, although lots of credit must also go to K here who had brought out this point when guided discovering Unreal Present conditions on Monday.

So they had been guided and they had discovered.  Time to practice.  Turn over the worksheet and consider the other inventions mentioned in the global text and discovered by accident.  What would have happened if their accidents hadn’t happened.  Off the students went to try and complete their own conditional sentences.  It was a very challenging exercise since they had to go back to the text to remind themselves of the accidents that had led to the discoveries.  But they were able to have a good go at it, although there were plenty of forms errors in their work.  Have was being missed out regularly, one or two weren’t using past participles and one was using the past simple and so talking about the present.  But with a few points back at my boardwork and the odd return to my CCQs – are we in the past? – they were able to self correct or at least peer correct when they got together to confirm answers.  By the time they got to the group feedback they had the correct structures between them and I elicited them to the board (after some more focused drilling) to consolidate the structure for these very visual learners.

Unreal Past Conditions Controlled Practice

Unreal Past Results Controlled Practice

Unfortunately the 40minute lesson was drawing to a close, so there was just time for a quick discussion of the inventions in Practice 2 and how things would have changed if they hadn’t been invented.  Not surprisingly, some of them had unreal present results rather than past ones, but this was a good thing as they were able to form them correctly on the back of K’s Monday lesson and they were all happy to accept these as correct answers.  No time for discussing the difference or for personalisation, but the practice activities will live to fight another day.

If I’d had more time, I’d've done more personalisation. 

We’d've discussed real and unreal results of unreal past conditions, if the lesson had been longer.  

They’d've practised more freely and probably have made even more mistakes if we’d gone any further. 

But they wouldn’t have felt such a sense of achievement if they hadn’t discovered the rules for themselves. 

There was no accident about their discoveries.

Hope that helps Adam and any other Guided Discovery newbies out there.  Let us know how you get on if you try using the worksheet yourself or adapting it to another piece of language.  Go discover!

Turning CELTA candidates into Dogme-gicians

Commenting on my post  ‘Who Needs Dogme‘, @alastairjamesgrant, IH’s very own Dogme-gician, asks me:

Be it Trinity, CELTA or whatever, we have all learnt our initial teacher training tools through the use of course books. Are they therefore essential? 

My reply got too long and took too long to write (when I should have been doing other things today) to leave as a comment, so it’s become a blog post.  Here it be: 

No we haven’t, Al. We’ve learnt our initial teaching techniques (which is what I presume you meant to say?) by teaching and getting feedback on our classes from our peers and our tutors. Course books are most often involved in this process, but the continued insistence of a lot of Dogme-gicians such as yourself to lump all the blame for ‘bad teaching’ on course books is the lazy argument that makes my Dogme-friendliness dwindle.

CELTA courses are about so much more than course books and there’s plenty of room for even a pure (i.e. all ten commandments) Dogme lesson within the CELTA framework if candidates want to teach that way. On our course at IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training we show candidates different lesson frameworks: a receptive skills lesson, a test-teach-test lesson, a text-based guided discovery lesson and sometimes a situational presentation, as well as showing videos of a TBL lesson and a functions dialogue build.  Two of these six involve course book texts, but there’s no need for them to and I’ll change them for authentic texts my past students have brought to class if you like.

The candidates are given a coursebook to work with and supporting notes from us about how to adapt the course book to these lesson frameworks and make them more communicative and student-centred at the same time.  We see this support as essential for candidates to be able to focus on certain aspects of their teaching at a time (I hope even the most Dogmatic Dogme-gician would agree doing a Dogme-esque lesson in week one of a CELTA without being able to give clear instructions, monitor or give useful feedback is a recipe for disaster).  By week three they are encouraged to become more independent and react to the course book materials with their students in mind, adapting or supplementing or rejecting them as they see fit (with tutor guidance where required) and in week four the candidates are choosing what to teach and how to teach it all by themselves.  If we added a loop input Dogme style session in to complement the other lesson-types and changed those two course book texts for more authentic ones then we’d have a very Dogme friendly CELTA course – and I’m working on it.

Why do CELTA courses get so much blame?  There is no criteria on a CELTA course that says you need to show good techniques with course books.  If you look at the CELTA syllabus, course books aren’t mentioned once and only three points even come close:

4.4 The selection, adaptation and evaluation of materials and resources in planning (including computer and other technology based resources)
4.5 Knowledge of commercially produced resources and non-published materials and classroom resources for teaching English to adult learners
5.4 The use of teaching materials and resources

That’s three points out of a total of 45 (if we include the skills breakdown points).  And the point that comes closest to mentioning course books (4.5) also discusses ‘classroom resources’, which may well mean a CD player or IWB if you’re (un)lucky enough, but aren’t classroom resources also what Dogme-gicians are meant to be using instead of course books?

CELTA is all about giving candidates the tools and techniques to teach in the classroom.  All Dogme-gicians use these tools, so please stop criticising the CELTA.  Criticise CELTA courses or CELTA trainers who put the course book before the student in their teaching practice if you want, but it’s simply not CELTA’s fault.  It’s not even course books fault that some teachers don’t put their learners at the centre of their classes, but I’ll save that for another day as I have work to do.

Comment on ‘The Dogme revolution needs to be televised’ by @bealer81

On Five Against One, @bealer81 commented:

 ’It seems that Dogme certainly allows for a greater degree of connection. Both, the teacher and more importantly the learner. By making the lessons about the learner’s lives the emotional component is enhanced and creates a more personalised feeling about the class.‘

This is the kind of claim that I was also referring to in ‘Who Needs Dogme?’, Adam. Making the lessons about the learner’s lives is not exclusive to Dogme, it’s the basis of good teaching and is much more prominent on the CELTA courses I train on that any course book is. Dogme allows for a greater connection than what? Bad teaching? I am trying to come around to the idea that Dogme as an attitude / reflective tool has an important role to play in increasing the amount of ‘just good teaching’ that goes on around the world, but then the hyperbole slaps me in the face again and asks me what I’m thinking…

A dogme close shave leads to another dig at the enemy

This morning one of our CELTA candidates simply didn’t turn up for teaching practice, without any advanced notice.  Since they were first on, I was up to teach a class of adult Argentine pre-intermediate learners for forty minutes without any preparation.

Normally I would fall back on the old substitution classics, such as dictate the answers or mini-epic writing, postcard writing or noun-phrase profiles (involves a nice dictagloss that one, not that I’m a big fan), but this morning, probably inspired by having heard talks by Jeremy Harmer and Lindsay Clandfield in the last week, having stood up to Scott Thornbury on his latest blog post, and definitely by having just started this blog and this section and wanting to have something to write about, I decided in those two minutes to completely wing it, go right outside my comfort zone (I’m normally Mister Prepared, I never go into class without at least an A4 page long set of notes with each stage of the lesson clearly worked out) and just set the ball-rolling and see where it took us.

Truth be told, it didn’t take us very far.  In the next forty minutes the students had quite a bit of speaking practice (I reckon they were probably speaking in pairs for about ten minutes of the lesson in all and were all involved in a whole class discussion for another two or three minutes) and they learnt the following phrases:

to take money out of the cash point / ATM

ATM stands for…

to look after / take care of (a grandchild)

a long / short journey

travel

a business / day trip

Or perhaps that’s far enough for a forty minute class – what do you think?

All of these phrases came out of the initial speaking activity which I thought up as I walked through the door with the aim of providing some practice of the past continuous which they’d been exposed to the previous day.  It was simply to tell your partner what you were thinking of on your way to school that morning.

I gave my true example (what I was going to buy my friend Diego to give him for birthday that night) and realised I could make that into the next stage of the lesson – getting them to discuss and decide what I should buy Diego.  In the end, we never got anywhere near that stage of the lesson.

During monitoring of the activity and the feedback on content, the above phrases all caused problems and so I clarified them in the feedback on language stage.  A few CCQs and further examples for each one helped me to check meaning was clear and then we spent quite a chunk of time drilling the phrases chorally and individually and in context.  While I must admit one of the reasons for drilling in such quantity was to give the watching CELTA candidates some models of possible drills and some adept backchaining, the students were really having problems putting phrases such as ‘I got some money out of the cash point’ together into a coherent and fluent phrase.  I felt they were benefiting from that increased focus and their happy faces and eager attempts to say the phrases seemed to back up my intuition.

I was trying to get back to some more speaking work when the difference between journey and travel came up.  I can’t resist these language conundrums that are so often badly taught so since they’d asked…next came probably my favourite CCQ of all time (you may have already guessed by the tone of this piece that I’m very proud of something about today’s class).

When checking that they understood a journey is a movement from A to B (and trying to eradicate the notion that it has to be short at the same time (drilling the phrase a long journey seemed effective enough)) I came up with the (rather culturally-bound I apologise) concept-checking question:

So have River Plate just gone on a journey?

Savouring CELTA

Celta & Delta talk 8/7/11

Here I discuss all things CELTA and probably beyond.  I guess it’s the space for training and development ideas and discussions.