It wasn’t the first time I’d suggested an ELT twitter chat topic and had it taken up only to miss the chat itself…in fact, now that I think about it this also isn’t the first time I’ve written the summary for such a chat. While I did join in during the slow burn bit, I suppose summarizing is one way to belatedly take part further (so I will go ahead add a few of my own comments as I read and summarize the chat here).

July’s #CELTAchat topic was:

Sandy Millin started off the chat proper by asking what “on a personal level” might mean exactly, and for Darren Bell the answer was supporting weaker trainees or those with special needs. Fiona Price suggested something of the inverse, ensuring stronger trainees are sufficiently challenged. Enter Giovani Licata, inviting the chat to consider both, under the umbrella of “personalization on the CELTA”.

If talking about personal needs, Sandy offered, it’s important to have a clear interview process and identify where they might need extra help. e.g. SEN. She shared that she once had an ADHD candidate who didn’t declare it until Stage 2 tutorials and it made so much sense! But surely if that were known earlier, the candidate could have been “encouraged and supported” more proactively and perhaps avoided some extra challenge. Regarding SEN, Giovanni added that the course application form needs to explicitly ask for that info. I know that at the last place I did CELTA work for the application had a write-in space where applicants added info about “any special needs” or something to that effect. Perhaps a more direct question would yield more useful info, but I think there also may be some legal limit on what we might appear to be requesting or specific ways we should be working it (this was in the US)? To be honest I’m really not sure. Fiona mentioned how important it is to disclose info in the application, letting it be known that it is so we can provide support.

The chat inspired Cathy to reflect on her application as well: it asks for a declaration of health or any other issues that may affect performance, but no one ever declares a SEN on. She wondered if they might try asking in another way. Also, when she asked about this at a conference session, she was told that candidates with SENs could be given longer to complete coursework. This could be quite tricky, however, in practice.

Adi Rajan found that many trainees don’t disclose special needs during the interview but subsequently feel that their needs are not being addressed. He had a trainee who raised this with the assessor. Speaking more of SEN, Darren shared a link to Giovanni’s appearance on the ‘Study CELTA Podcast’, talking about the topic of supporting candidates with dyslexia! It’s here. Finally, Darren shared a link to a rather thorough and fascinating report on working with CELTA candidates who are visually or hearing impaired.

Next, Giovanni said that one thing that helps keep things more “personalized” from the start is not deciding ahead of time who is teaching what. This is something we often do on CELTAs – assigning early TP lessons to incoming candidates before the course has even started and we’ve met them. Cathy Bowden described what I think it likely typical and based entirely on the normal constraints: candidates are divided into groups based on application and interview info, there’s time to meet them in person first, and they get those first TP points on day one. Sure, we consider information from their applications and interviews in this whole process as much as possible (I know me and my co-trainers tend to have a bit of fun together chatting about our perceptions of and predictions about our incoming candidates based on their apps and interviews), but it’s still a far cry from holding off until we’ve met face-to-face and making more decisions then. (I’ve tended to practice the former, but in a flexible way so I can toggle early TP lesson assignments around if its for the best; at this stage in the course the trainees rarely have any notion of how things are supposed to work anyway…then again, it’s also nice just to have everything sorted logistically SO THAT you can pay more attention to all the fresh new faces on the scene, in a way). Fiona called this flexibility important in terms of designing the course around the individual needs of the trainees so it’s more organic.

Sandy asked if other chatters might even do this for later TPs, too. And if I were in the live chat I’d have posted a GIF of some goofy character rigorously nodding ‘YESSSS!’. I think that in large part what we should aim for is “setting trainees up for success” in the TP experience, so if I think person X would do great teaching lesson Y, I’ll go right ahead and put X and Y together.

Cathy brought up Stage 1 tutorials as a good tool for giving early reassurance that candidates are doing okay (or not) and find out if they’re having trouble that might not yet be apparent from a distance. Giovanni tends to give written feedback for Stage 1s, but not face-to-face tutorials. This was/is true for me as well, but reflecting on it now I’m not sure why a little extra time to chat with each candidate at that early stage wouldn’t be a good thing. Oh yeah! It’s probably because while that’s true enough…there are a million other things to do on any given day even early on in the course so written feedback there does seem to check that box in a practical way. Perhaps I should start adding a little note at the bottom of it, though? Something like: if there’s anything here you would like to talk about, or especially anything that’s troubling you now that might be a bigger challenge as the course progresses, please let me know!

Shifting gears a little bit, Darren asked: what about creating a welcoming culture? There was Toronto CELTA tutor Patrick Huang‘s recent (IATEFL?) talk on promoting inclusivity on a CELTA course – in this case for a transgender candidate. Sandy attended and said it was a very good talk (I’ve seen Patrick speak at TESOL and also recommend his presentations!). Particularly thought-provoking, Sandy observed, were ideas about not forcing people to disclose, but setting up a comfortable environment where they can if they want to (Patrick’s talk summarized by her here).

Fiona then asked: “what about support beyond the course or trainee support?” and answered her own question by sharing that she has used Edmodo on a couple of courses, and trainees often create WhatsApp groups to support each other (another chatter mentioned Schoolology). When I worked at a CELTA center in Boston, MA we had a type of in-house LMS that included chat boards for candidates. It was clunkier than, say, FB messenger…but its being there at least introduced the idea that candidates are well served by linking up online. These communication channels can be particularly important because, as Cathy mentioned, there isn’t much slack to give time when a trainee could talk to a trainer (and the same is often true in regards to trainees talking to trainees). Everyone is constantly busy and don’t always want to make day longer. Fiona added that it’s good if there is someone else they can go to outside the course – if possible.

After the hour-long live chat ended, I came around and added some thoughts about what the topic meant to me:

• Not thinking of tutorials as the *only* time for personalized check-in (eg talk re: opinion of course, well-being, support needed? etc.). As much as possible, “sprinkling this around” during the course of each day.
• Using humor to, well, humanize yourself and the course atmosphere. Because CELTA + humorless trainers = a potentially horrid experience)
• Going out for a nip w/ interested trainees after the course and sending them off with a big final dose of personal connection (via shared anecdotes, etc. I often learn a lot of useful info about how trainees connected and support each other during the course in these sessions!).
• Adding bits of personal perspective in the initial interview (eg ‘I remember on my CELTA when..’), and elsewhere. I think trainees who do interviews are on a spectrum here and occasionally I’ve noticed how ‘impersonal’ this initial contact is and wondered what kind of effect that might have.
• Simply smiling and signaling positive support…even in those stresspool moments in the course, not letting negativity that might come up in the group dynamics, etc. reflect in your baring as a matter of course.

That topic suggestion, I said, came out of the experience of working with a number of different trainers (a privilege and a silver lining of one of my CELTA employer’s modus operandi) and finding that some tutors clearly foregrounded the personal while others did this far less. And to be clear, trainers toward both extremes worked with high degrees of skillfulness and efficacy to be sure – there’s not one ‘right’ way IMO (more ‘personal’ does not = better!). I’ve worked with trainees who be very unlikely to describe their approach as focused on any particular “personal touch”…yet are among the best and most well-loved trainers. I’m sure Adi would agree with that, but he also flagged some CELTA trainers as “less than humourless, guarding against cynicism and [having] that “this is where my job” ends attitude”.

Clearly candidates on a course like the CELTA require a good deal of support of various types, including the “personal”, and successful course trainers are aware of this need. However, I don’t think we can deny that CELTA has, for better or for worse, something of a reputation for it’s intensiveness (yay) PLUS a rather “harsh” and “impersonal” culture (not yay), and course trainers who fit Adi’s description aren’t helping matters in this area. So, if and how CELTA MCTs and ACTs provide various kinds of “personal” connection and support, and/or facilitate and encourage trainees to get and give support to each other, etc. seems like a crucial, perennial issue.

Adi seemed to agree, saying that this was my interpretation of the topic as well: creating a tutor-trainee relationship that’s not defined solely by the dispensing of knowledge, feedback and grades!

That seems like a very nice note to end on.

***

One more link shared in chat: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/coaching-emotional-intelligence-webinar-nik-peachey

Thanks for reading! Comments welcome here, or of course tweet with the hashtag. 🙂

A couple of quick notes:

• When I say I’m not framing things with these parables “intentionally” that’s not right – it’s VERY intentional…what I mean is it’s less consciously, explicitly planned than spontaneously added in. The intention is clear: provide a simple narrative frame in order to make the feedback concept salient.
• If there’s a larger take-away here it has nothing to do with any particular religious tradition, of course. As I mention, the little stories tend towards the universal – just like idioms, which are often really just pill-sized parables.

• Another little micro-parable I didn’t mention in the video was the same one I referenced in an iTDi blog post in 2015. The teacher was expressing frustration that a certain maxim which a supervising teacher forcefully insisted upon (telling this teacher they must act upon consistently in each and every class) was not, in fact, working out helpfully. I suggested that classes are all different from each other, as well as from themselves in a process of constant (sometimes subtle, sometimes gross, but constant) change and used the “Tip of the Fingernail” parable, asking the teacher to show me their fingernail, etc. just trying to “make a memory”. This is also an image that can illustrate how even the seemingly smallest things in the learning environment and/or interactions in our class spaces can be meaningful, even significantly impactful – so we should put a lot of energy into being as attentive and mindful as possible while teaching, not letting out perception too to ‘tunneled’ on, say, the tech we’re using, or following the plan to the letter, etc.
• The reason to think about any of this when it comes to feedback/advice for teachers is simply that teaching is the most or at least one of the most complex and cognitively demanding jobs in the world – therefore, whatever input into a teacher’s thinking is intended to enter into that complex system must have high salience if it’s not to simply be trodden upon by the next set of immediate calculations needed just to get through this day.
• This gives me an odd but sort of fun book idea – ELT teaching principles through the lens of Buddhist parable or something like that. Would you thumb through that? I can sort of see it being published by these guys.
• I really do find it amusing that I get to say “finally I can use that totally impractical degree I earned!” 😀
• Finally, just in case anybody is wondering the “Pali canon” to which I refer is best probably most expertly collected, translated, and made accessible for readers online here.

Are you interested in teaching English courses to future Thai English teachers, English majors, and other undergraduates? How about supervising teaching practicums? Assisting colleagues with proofreading and research support? Doing your own research and working in a small, tight-knit department at a unique Thai public university famous for its fine and decorative arts programs?

If the answer is yes, please check out the page I’ve created on this blog here. It has all the information you need to look into the position.

For a bit more of a sense of what’s what, here is a look at the full 5-year academic program of a Silpakorn English/TEFL graduate, including a 5th year practicum when students spend a full year in local schools. I’ll mention that this document is a few years old and certain aspects of the program have changed. Still, it gives some sense of what’s done here.

Follow the link above to view my university’s official job advertisement (or see it here). If you’ve got burning questions, I’m happy to discuss things with you in completely open and honest fashion and will give advice if/when requested. The goal is simply to help my department find the best possible candidate for the position (and for full disclosure, I’ll be here. We’ll be colleagues. But don’t let that put you off! ;))

I’ll end this post with a few general thoughts for anyone thinking about applying for this position to consider, especially if you’ve never lived and worked in Thailand before:

• needless to say (though perhaps not!), living and working in Thailand is not the same thing as being on holiday in Thailand.
• patience will be required to deal with paperwork, visa issues, administrative inefficiencies, language barriers, etc.
• patience and equanimity will be required to deal with unfamiliar educational practices and potentially uncomfortable cultural/communicative norms.
• patience, equanimity, and a gentle touch are recommended for those with progressive educational ideas and a strong desire to mold their surroundings accordingly; you will need to choose your battles (though this is as great a place as any to fight such well-chosen battles!).
• this is a tropical environment – extremely hot during parts of the year, hot all year round, typically very humid…this is not a comfortable climate for many people.
• Nakhon Pathom is not a particularly popular tourist spot, nor does it cater to western tastes like Bangkok does (e.g. supermarkets with good cheese, etc.) and very few Thai cities qualify as ‘clean’.
• this may sound like a tired observation but teachers are offered a good deal of respect in Thai society…and so are expected to be professional in behavior and appearance. Our corner of Silpakorn University is probably on the slightly more casual side of things, but depending on where you’re coming from and what you are used to this may require some adjustment.

Thanks for reading! 

*Please excuse the awkwardness of my attempt to catalogue this and (likely) future posts into a little sub-file, right there in the titles. LOL. Part 6 of A/ii in reference to Post11b. It’s all one big comedy joke at the end of the day and this is but a lifestyle blog. 😉

***

One bullet point in the non-existent TL;DR itemized summary of my 22-minute vlogpost yesterday might read:

• Many student-teachers appear to hold problematically negative perceptions of their learners in general, something I see as both a cause and a symptom of temporarily confounded instructor mindset (at best) and/or a potentially pernicious teacher demotivation (at worst).

Anyone who has worked with teachers in a mentor relationship has likely been there: an in-lesson critical incident is identified in reflection with some awareness, but the teacher needs nudging to defocus the learner (perhaps in apparent contradiction to what they’ve been building up intellectually) and really directly account for themselves and their influence on the situation. With novice teachers like those on CELTA courses, it’s often quite a lot more than a “nudge” that is needed; trainers are constantly on the lookout for a way to saliently signal this to their trainee teachers without tripping up on any destabilizers for an aspirational teacher identity-in-progress.

To my bullet point above might be added:

• I believe these cognitively/affectively negative cognitions have a pernicious effect on both the teachers’ efficacy and their development (as if we should even distinguish between the two).

Lo and behold, as I was taking an outdoors walking-break on campus this afternoon (just gotta avoid any number of monstrously large monitor lizards anywhere near water…there’s water everywhere, all over campus. Attentive blog readers can expect visual documentary evidence of these beasts before, say, Christmas…santa-willing) I took along one of my favorite ELT books and opened it right to this:

So I’ve got this muddle in search of a operational maxim to guide me in helping, and luckily as I read and re-read this so-good-I-take-in-on-walks-and-confidently-flip-it-open-knowing-something-good-is-likely-to-come-of-it book Mindful L2 Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Perspective on Cultivating Teachers’ Professional Development by Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek I’m able to start forming a few. To me, these two brilliant women are ELT teacher-educator visionaries; they have grown magical eyes with which to see teaching, learning, teacher learning. I must keep digging into their work.

…and I hope to dig out a photo of me posing with them looking, as you might imagine, $%&#@! over the moon at a TESOL convention. 😀

What do you think about the dynamics that passage is pointing out?

Also, do you have an ELT book that works like this, one of those books you can simply pop open and expect something perfectly suitable to roll on out? Comment section below, people!

There are definitely a handful of things mentioned in the video I’d like to write more about in a follow-up post. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, sharings, or questions use the comments section below.

Bone-us video: our Beagle puppy Lucy and the slow slippery slope to sleep…

Every now and then I find myself saying

“uh, I tweet…mostly about work stuff, ya know…mm hmm well you might be surprised how rich it can be…no, it’s not all vapid gossip and insults, there are multiple twitterverses I guess you could say?…yeah, well anyway, basically I’m a pretty active member of what’s called an online PLN”

or something to that effect, and the thought occurs to me that it’s a hopelessly minimal description of what I actually mean.

So I’m going to write a list of some of the things that lie beyond it:

• Reading maybe hundreds of tweets per day by/for/about teaching, training, professional issues, materials, critical issues, language and linguistics, critical incidents, and more.
• Responding to many of those tweets and occasionally getting involved in ongoing debates and discussions with the authors and other readers of those tweets.
• Reading several blogs per day by/for/about teaching, training, professional issues, materials, critical issues, language and linguistics, critical incidents, and more.
• Occasionally commenting on those blogs and sometimes getting involved in ongoing debates and discussions with the authors and other readers of those blogs.
• So, being in near-constant dialogue with teachers, trainers, academics and other ELT workers all over the world about any number of ELT issues both large and small.
• Following the hashtags of ELT conferences whenever and wherever they occur, getting smartly selected bite-sized glimpses into sometimes several sessions simultaneously and thus keeping up to date with thinking and trends in the field
• Writing a blog, responding to comment from readers, posting varied types of things including vlogs, journals, interviews, sometimes lists like this one, sometimes lists like this one that include trippy self-referential bits just like this, and rarely but it happens shallowdivey pop-culturally related GIFS like the one below to break the monotony.

• Building an extensive, high-quality reading file of articles and other materials linked and/or referred to by tweeters and bloggers in the course of all of the above.
• Having a(nother) network of professional and personal connections via this PLN that plugs into multiple aspects of the complex task of attending conferences (from where to stay to how to engage socially to keeping tabs on each other to knowing better how things work behind curtains, etc.).
• Being one of the people that livetweets from conferences allowing others to receive smartly selected bite-sized glimpses into sessions thus keeping up to date with thinking and trends in the field
• Attending webinars and organizing/hosting webinars.
• Attending live chats about teaching, training, professional issues, materials, critical issues, language and linguistics, critical incidents, and more, volunteering as moderator of chats, writing chat summaries, reading past chat summaries.
• Following, contributing to, and creating ELT-focused hashtags to flag and filter extremely niche interest areas fed into by PLN members with similar tastes.
• Listening to several ELT podcasts and occasionally conversing on twitter or elsewhere on issues raised therein with their creators and/or listeners.
• Conversing productively with peers about working conditions in ways that can be extremely difficult to do locally.
• Giving personal and emotional support of various types to professional peers via this PLN and receiving personal and emotional support of various types from professional peers via this PLN.
• Being informed of and offered professional opportunities by members of this PLN.
• Using these various trusted web and social media platforms populated by trusted PLN people as resources for students to engage and interact with both indirectly and directly.
• Actually, list can go on but I have to go grocery shopping.

It’s a pretty long list already though, isn’t it?

And it’s almost as if, by “being on twitter”, one is not wasting time on the internet at work. No, not at all. Hey boss, go ahead and monitor my computer usage, I dare you! You may be TRULY shocked by what you find. You may wonder why I’ve not been promoted yet…;D

I found myself trying to describe it to Michael Griffin just this morning and saying something like:

when it’s really working it kind of all flows together and feels not at all unlike a fully cohesive bricks and mortar PD experience…as if I’m at this great ELT conference, right? going to sessions, chatting between, building up dialogues, sharing, connecting, and networking, joking, laughing…but it’s futuristic: this seemingly endless conference is actually a holographic brain-stem VR program run via a microchip implant behind my ear. The chip is the ELT internets. Conference fees are zero, and the conference hotel is your apartment. (Food you pay for – yeah, it’s the grocery shopping you’re about to go do). 

Anyhoo, does it feel similar to you? Ever/sometimes? Do you ever experience ‘flow’ in the PLN, a sense of getting ‘wired in‘ to the extent that it sparks efficient, effective learning from the rich input and facilitates high-yield engagement with PLN peers?

5 minutes of general updates: it’s hot, I got my work permit, I catch myself being professionally self-depreciating, and a few other things to do with my job…

Apologies for some shaky camera work, unseemly scruffiness, and – before I caught myself – even the hint of a suggestion that I or any committed teacher should be exceedingly grateful for the timely delivery of a nominally living wage and contract-specified expenses being reimbursed. We earn everything we get and typically much more than we get.

That reminds me of something that I hope doesn’t sound to some like pointless boasting: I was told by some student teachers after 10 minutes of sketchy discussion about lesson planning (‘sketchy’ in that I sketched some ‘lesson shape’ visuals as I described a couple frameworks) that they so wished I’d been the teacher for their course on that topic when they were juniors. They didn’t feel they knew what they were doing, and recognized that I was…there to help.

This is what that suggests to me, in hashtag form because I’m a prisoner of twitter:

#iamprobablyworthit

This is a 15-minute vlog post in which I…

• Describe my role in a teaching practicum scheme. 
• Talk about the tasks I’m working on at my desk this very day.
• Talk about one way I’m learning on-the-job: 

• Describe formal lesson planning in a pretty odd way involving Vatican II. 
• Touch on a few other things as I roll along. 

…not necessarily in that order.

Update 1: since I recorded the video one more thing has been added to the upcoming *Sunday Workshop* to-do list. This is: cooperative planning for ‘substitute teaching’ by me of a lesson in each of the 3 teacher’s grades. They will observe with specific (and I hope personalized) observation & reflection tasks. Haven’t yet thought about these yet, but one thing I do know is that I’d like them to focus on the learners more than the teacher. If all goes to plan and the starts align, success will be a shift in their perception of the parameters of their learners’ capacity for success in a CLT-style interactive learning conditions that are effectively managed. And yes, this last sentence shall commence to report the juuust-perceptible “gulping” sound on the part of its author the person responsible for successfully creating those conditions in a one-off on-site demo lesson in a non-AC public high school in semi-rural Ratchaburi province some time next week.

Update 2: I’m changing my ‘loop input’ demo lessons around so rather than a reading lesson on lesson planning and a vocab lesson on teaching vocab, I’ll do a reading lesson on teaching vocab and a vocab lesson on lesson planning. (Whew, right?! I’m really quite sure you’re as glad I set the record straight here as I am).  Anyway, it’ll be slightly less loopy, that’s the idea.

Update 3: No need to do two separate demo lessons. The reading lesson about lesson planning will have a vocabulary section. Efficiency ho!

As always, please leave any kind of comment in the space provided below and do feel free to expect some kind of response – even if just in the form of a smiling emoji thing. (I’m most certainly not talking to you though, recent comment section spambots!).

And have a great weekend, dear reader… 🙂

[This blogpost is dedicated to my friend Anne Hendler, whose comment on twitter made me immediately want to go make and post something].