[kimyushin]

Hi I am an ESL Conversation Teacher in the Philippines. I teach Koreans. Our classes are done one-on-one. We are similar to hagwons in Korea; the only difference is the large chunk of our classes are done one-on-one; that's because there are hardly any one-on-one classes in Korea. Students have very few chances to speak in English in large group classes in Korea. When we say large we are talking about 10 to 15 students per class; other classes are larger. If there are any one-on-one sessions, they are expensive.

Not only that, some Korean EFL Teachers speak both Korean and English in class which some parents and students find not helpful to learn another language. Given my teaching context, I want to explain the challenge I am facing now.

I have taught in our Academy for One year and ten months; I am the senior Conversation teacher here; the Korean principal is asking me to train our conversation teachers; however, I do not know how to train other teachers.

The principal wants me to pass on the effective methods, activities and other know-how that I learned to our teachers so that they can be effective as well. Here are the questions that I need help about:

1. What is the first step to take when training other teachers? Half of the teachers are older than me. I already did a short group interview of some of our teachers; i wanted to know what their expectations are from the training; Most of them said they want to see how things are done in a conversation class; they want to see demos; and they also want to do demos during the training themselves. These two things I do not know how to do; my second problem is related this.


2. Most of the teaching insights I learned and applied I got from first hand experience; What I mean is, I experienced a problem in class, then I researched the internet for solutions and I also formulated my own solutions; after doing research I applied them in class; I studied the failures and successes of my experiments. I have done this for quite some time and I was able to stack up on practical knowledge to handle various problems. How can I teach this kind of problem-solving mindset to our teachers? They will also be teaching one-on-one classes; perhaps they will encounter similar problems.

My point is, I can do a lecture on what and how they must do things; but somehow I am skeptical about this; lectures are sometimes too theoretical: students only get information but not the perspective and attitude I want them to have. I want our teachers to discover their unique teaching styles; I don't want them parroting what I do simply because I told them to do it or because it was effective for me, ergo, it will also be effective for them. I want them to be their own problem-solver.

3. In relation to challenge number one and two, I am thinking of doing a demo in class; for instance one of the useful practices I have done is to ask as for student input after doing an activitiy; I want to do a mock class by assigning one teacher to be a Korean student while another teacher will pretend to be a Conversation teacher. They will have to demonstrate the principles they learned in class; as they do the demo, I and their classmates will evaluate their performance.

One drawback I can see here is that the teacher might have a difficult time imagining the situation and thus negatively affect the quality of the demo. They may not be able to apply the principles quite well since they are not in the real environment; as a solution I was thinking of inviting one of our Korean students to help us out; but I still need permission from our principal.

3. I am thinking of dividing the training into two parts: It will be twice a week; one hour per training. First training day will be about theories, discussions and principles; while the second training day will be all demo and observations. I am thinking of doing it on a Monday and Wednesday schedule after work. What do you think of this training schedule set-up?

4. The training will run for the whole month of March. After that, I do not know how to track whether the training was effective or not. I myself cannot observe the classes of our teachers since I will be teaching as well. The principal can do this so I was thinking of giving her a checklist which she must use as she observes the teachers who attended the training. I do not know if this will be effective or not. What I am getting at is, how do I do a follow up after the training?

4. Do you know of any website in the internet that offer materials on training teachers?

I am a new teacher I myself am learning still, I don't feel qualified to teach other teachers; but I also believe that what I have learned other teachers can also put to good use. I hope our veteran teachers here in ESLHQ can help out

Thank you very much in advance and I really appreciate all the help you can give

[susan53]

To answer your last question first : two sites you'll find useful are :
a) The site of the IATEFL Teacher Training Special Interest Group The link takes you to the homepage, and from there you can get to articles and other info.
b) the site of The Teacher Trainer magazine. This link takes you to their archive of free articles.

I don't have time at the moment to answer all your more specific questions, but I'll come back later.

[susan53]

Some comments on your points and questions:

1) You say “I do not know how to train other teachers” : remember that a teacher training session is just a lesson. All the normal principles of lesson planning apply : you need to decide your specific objectives and work out a series of staged activities which will lead to the achievement of those objectives, thinking along the way about aspects such as participant involvement (you’re right that it shouldn’t just be you lecturing), variety, pace and timing, the possibility of overload etc.

2) One possible objective would be to bring Ts to a higher level of awareness of the pros and cons of speaking Korean in class. Don’t presume this is automatically counterproductive. It may be – but at other times can be useful. You need to get the teachers to a point where they can define the objectives behind their own use of Korean, and evaluate whether it promotes or hinders the students’ learning. For some of the pros and cons see here .

In the training session you could :
a) ask the Ts in groups to discuss if they use Korean in the class, and why/why not. Get them to brainstorm 2 lists – one of why using the L1 might increase the students’ learning and another of all the reasons why it might prevent or impede it.
b) follow up with a full class discussion, eliciting their points. You can then comments on them and add anything they’ve not come up with. Or you could then ask them to read an article on the topic and to compare it with their ideas.(Maybe two or three different articles – one or two people from each group read each article, then they report what they read about to the group.) Their aim is to say : we made this point /we didn’t think of this/ this contrasts with what we said and to add the new ideas to their lists. (They can of course discuss if they agree/disagree with the new ideas) The lists can be expanded into poster presentations if you have time.

Notice that both these options are alternatives to you just “lecturing” the teachers on what you think about using Korean. The option of using the article actually means you don’t necessarily have to provide any input at all! It is also a step towards promoting the “problem-solving” mindset which you want to develop. At the end of the activity it is the teachers themselves who have come up with the ideas – whether based on their own experience or researched from the reading.


3) You made a good start by asking the teachers what they wanted. Now you need to give it to them!
Re the demos : could you get a volunteer student (or maybe a few) to attend for part of the session so that you can do a demo/get other Ts to do a demo without resorting to roleplay. It’s much more effective. Decide what techniques and activities you want to demonstrate. (You probably already have your own, but look here and here for others that might be useful. If you try anything new, always try it out in one of your own classes first, before demonstrating it) and then try one of the following sequences:

a) Show the teachers the materials and explain the activity (or activities) in the preceding “non-demo” session. Then, when your demo student arrives, demonstrate it with him/her. I would split the hour as twenty mins introduction, twenty mins demo, twenty mins follow-up discussion. In which the Ts discuss how the activity went, if anything in the way you did it surprised them, etc. They then take away a copy of the materials, try it out with one of their own students, and report back the following week on how it went.
b) Introduce the materials/activities as above, then send the teachers away to try them out during the following week. In a following session, they discuss how the activity went, and then one of the teacher’s demonstrates it with the volunteer student. They then discuss whether s/he set it up it in exactly the same way as they had, how it went, improvements etc. Note that it’s important that any post-demo feedback is kept positive and that there is a positive, non-defensive atmosphere amongst the group. If they feel threatened they’ll just “block off” and reject everything you have to say.

4) Following up after training – I think you need a couple more sessions – one in April, one in May. A couple of ideas :

a) Get each teacher to do an action research (Google this for more info) project on one aspect of what you’ve covered, and to come to the session ready to report on what they did, what happened, and what conclusions they’ve come to.
b) Give a list of reading resources – books, web articles etc - and ask each teacher to find one activity which they like, to try it out with students and then to come to the session ready to explain it to the others.


Hope that helps.
Sue

[livinginkorea]

I agree a lot of what Sue has said and just want to add a few comments. I have had a few of my classes observed by student teachers or other teachers and they have all gave me some useful comments.

I think that after the demo that having a discussion is a great idea. If you don't know how the teachers think by this time then you will definitely will afterwards. Avoid lecturing them since you are younger and older Koreans hate to be lectured by younger people. Also try and get them to interact as much as possible and they could demo their own skills too and have others make comments on it. Since it's the end of the day, when you will have the training it's worth noting that many teachers will be tired so engaging their interest like this will encourage them a lot to pay attention!

Explain everything clearly and give them print outs of it. Expect to be critized (because you are younger and viewed as a newbie) so make sure you think of your answers.

About the amount of Korean they speak in class, demo a class where you speak no Korean and tell them that you don't need korean to speak. Sometimes I think teachers use this because they are lazy to "work the problem out." It's very easy for me to speak Korean when I want to explain something but it's not effective for the students. Also parents don't want their kids to be speaking Korean in an English class, they pay a lot of money and expect good results. It will be hard for the older teachers to change and in reality it's just a habit that they have to get out of.

I think showing different demos is a great idea. You can videotape your lesson and have them watch it or you can preform a "live" lesson. If there are any problems in the tape then don't stop it and just keep going with it - make it as real as possible.

Handing out questionnaires are a fast and realiable way of getting feedback. I think that leaving a comment box at the end of the questions will allow for the teachers to give you some extra information if they want to.

Hope that it goes well and let us know how you get on!

-Lik

[simplyesl]

I'd think about splitting the training into different modules - only focus on one area at a time.

[kimyushin]

Thank You Ma'am for your generous reply. I apologize for replying late. Your advice made up for my lack of experience to teach other teachers. The training structure you suggested gave me an idea where to begin and how to shape the training structure we needed. The first part of the training was conducted last Saturday March 17, 2007 from 3:00-5:30 pm

I was able to follow the first half of your advice:
1. I narrowed down my objectives: I only focused on teaching Level I kid and teenager students: these are students who can only utter words; they have a difficult time stringing words together; if ever they do string words, usually they only use nouns and verbs and the word order they follow is the Korean Subject-Object-Verb pattern.

2. I focused on teaching the practical application of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories: the Comphrehensible Input and Affective Filter theories. I deemed that these are the only relevant ones we needed to study given the available time and background of our teachers; some of our teachers are not yet familiar with SLA.

3. Instead of teaching the theories like a lecture, I gave them statements which they would have to label as true or false. The statements are about SLA and the descriptions of a LEVEL I student in class for example:

DURING A CONVERSATION CLASS A LEVEL IA STUDENT MUST FOCUS ON SPEAKING SKILLS, INSTEAD OF LISTENING AND READING COMPREHENSION SKILLS (TRUE OR FALSE).

After they chose an answer, I ask them to explain the basis of their answers. Some of their answers already adhere to the principles of SLA without them knowing it. I just connected their beliefs to what the SLA theory says. Others gave wrong answers because of their misconceptions on language acquisition. I explained the proper place of their belief in relation to SLA theory. Their answers were not completely wrong ; they were only applied to higher level students; their method did not fit the need of a Level IA student. In the end, they were able to absorb the basic ideas of SLA theory: to make the class comprehensible and to motivate for the student.

The discussion and the elicitation made them realize the principles of SLA without them knowing it.

After the discussion and elicitation, we divided into pairs. One teacher pretended to be a Level I student while the other was a teacher. We used only one type of material:a picture-based story:Action English Pictures. Even though it was only role-playing, it yielded fruitful results:

a. The teachers had fun portraying level I Students; they remembered their students mannerisms and expressions. The fun motivated them to really get into the play; they lost their inhibitions.

b. They also saw the various ways their co-teachers teach the same material.

The demo was quite short despite being 2 hours and and 30 minutes; we will continue the training next next week March 31, 2007. We will further focus on teaching methods and the application of SLA principles on these methods.

The training was simple but direct. It attained what it was supposed to attain.

By reading your advice and the advice of the other teachers, I was able to prepare an elegant but potent training session that did not assume too much beyond my age but also did not fail to deliver what was necessary. I am deeply grateful for being generous with your know-how, which I am sure you gained through the years of teaching.

Once again, thank you very much.

[susan53]

I'm really glad it went well. Good luck with future sessions!
Sue