A map , Manchester and permanent BETA

Manchester isn't home for me, but I will feel a bit like I have gone somewhere close to home this summer when I set foot on the hallowed turf of their campus for the first time (since visiting mates as an undergraduate). Strangely, I have been studying 'at' the university of Manchester for the last two years linked only by a VPN (virtual private network), and a series of web interfaces. This VPN has many benefits including enabling me to access a lot of articles, and other texts via the John Rylands library server. I can also watch Eastenders and skip round access issues with blogspot addresses here. What is strange here is that without the VPN I can post to my blog (as the address is blogger.com) but not view my blog (at the blogspot address). Due to the slow web speeds here using the VPN is problematic, and like most of the world I 'suffer' from a lack of connectivity, thus I cannot actually view this, my own blog very often. Your comments get mailed, so please feel free, I will make the effort to get back to you when I am in a place with access.

My studies have been situated in Bulgaria, Switzerland, Mauritius, Lebanon, and Syria and the VPN has been like an anchor chain, keeping my thinking moored in the academy. Each module has been different but most of the communicating I have done has been asynchronous, but there have been occasional adobe breeze (web conferencing software) sessions where I saw a few moving faces. I have met, face to face, just a handful of course mates, and tutors including the i-Boy, the dodgester, and Dr Fry. Of course, I also feel a certain proximity to those I have interacted with virtually as well. This summer I look forward to meeting some more Manchester folks hopefully I will have a spark of research inspiration that will propel me, Olympian-like, towards a September 2012 finish.

As an aside, I am glad Manchester United got schooled by Barcelona, this should make the locals more tolerable, should I meet any who support United. I hope to do some schooling of myself as I learn more about working with teachers. I believe they are a group of Chinese English teachers. That is as much information as I have currently, still a while to go. Hopefully, I will play like Barca when the time comes and plan like Pepe Rena.

This experience with myself and Manchester has been great, I know my thinking about things education has changed, and my confidence is high. As a professional development junkie I know the good hits from the bad and this qualifies as some good stuff! Aside from affective factors I have become more aware of the industry that foreign language teaching is, the relationships between the academy, schools and so on.

Before the MA my topography of TEFL lands and sea was quite good, and like google maps I could go into more detail in some areas than others. Though my mapping isn't anywhere near complete (as an aside, incompleteness, and permanent BETA are concepts I have really taken on board over the last few years) I feel now I can zoom in on, and have street views, as well as having greater perceptual coverage then I had before. It is a tough time as I really need to specialise, both in my career and academically, and go beyond street view . To continue the metaphor I need to go macro, get microscopic and atomic views. The two areas that really stand out for me at the moment are teacher education, psychology and Inter-cultural stuff, but how many 'focus areas' is one allowed? Scott Thornbury has Dogme (a big thing), Gary Motteram has learning technology, and so on. I guess I think it may help to be known as that Dogme guy, that Tech guy, that X guy. Not only will this make me sound like a super hero, it will also stop me spreading myself to thinly, like the earth's crust.

Association of Teachers of English Lebanon ATEL 2011 14th Conference

The holiday was overshadowed a bit by being interviewed for summer work teacher training in Manchester, which I got (hurray!), and preparation for the Association of Lebanese Teachers of English conference. I didn't manage to prepare before leaving for Beirut, to my shame, and it took a while to re-jig it into a 30min workshop. I wasn't really switched on.

30mins it turned out was no where near long enough. I got things a bit wrong and my workshop turned into a fairly unstructured talk, apologies if you were there. Some teachers left. It was embarrassing. However, I think I know where I went wrong. I planned to do this:

1. Warmer GTKY – you in cultural terms

2.Introduction to context and problem

3. DMIS outline

4. Teachers apply DMIS to my problem and feedback

I did this:

1. GTKY as above

2. Talked for 15 mins about intro and problem

3. Introduced DMIS

4. Panicked as I was running out of time

I should have done this I did

1. DMIS – what does it stand for? Or Inter-cultural aspects, your approach

2. Given hand out with DMIS and mini-descrptions

3. Given sample tasks (my tasks) for teachers to rate on scale (check understanding of DMIS)

4. Asked them to respond to my problem/issue

That said I am not 100% sure that 30mins would be enough, at least with the third version, above, teachers had hands on DMIS early and were engaged in using it. Another problem was my lack of context knowledge about the attendee teachers and Lebanon, particularly culturally.

This sensation of flopping was a strange experience as just a month ago I did a very similar workshop for ISTEK that went really quite well. I was confident I would soar like an eagle. The ISTEK one was longer, 45mins instead of 30mins, my spot was better, rather than at the end of a long morning's professional development, and these may have been one of many contributing factors. Anyway, it didn't go according to plan. The plan was ill-conceived, though well intentioned.

Another noteworthy point is that, the rationale for my workshop was produced for a 60min slot, do I slavishly stick to the advertised contents (what I tried to do). Or do I, adapt adapt adapt, yet perhaps disappoint some who thought they would get something different.

My most recent MA assignment has been about the need to re-imagine conferences and workshops, perhaps this had an influence too. Either way, the process of trying to work out and improve for next time (?) has been useful, as always. What I don't have this time is any participants to keep in touch with. Last time I collated emails to continue the conversation after the event.

There were a number of positives to the trip. I got to meet some of the Levantine teacher trainers from BC and IH. I also had some nice words from someone at UNWRA. The lady also said that as a Palestinian in Lebanon she frequently suffered discrimination and racism. I also got to meet Bill from AUB, whose blog I have linked to below. He talked about an Intercultural Exchange facilitated by CMC (computer mediated communication).

I am still proud of my work on this and I'd like to do a full day training teachers in how to use the DMIS to approach intercultural aspects of their teaching, but who has a full day for something like that? Where can I do that kind of thing?

Eye! Eye!

I am the secret camera in this classroom. The more I dwell on it, the more I see my position as ethically dubious.

However, ahem, if I were a legitimate student-observer, or just an observer, how would I behave? what would I be expected to do? what should I say. What should I do? Just listen? Heap compliments? Elicit things that I felt were bad or didn't like?
The first thing to say about feedback is that the context would dictate the kind of feedback given. If I were a manager the feedback I would give would be different to how I would do things as a critical friend, CELTA tutor, DELTA tutor or mentor.

The second thing is that I think all feedback should end up as feedforward. It's far more useful to have actionable points than feedback that is backward looking, dwelling and maudlin. I would also make the useful distinction between feedback and error correction, as Dave Dodgson did recently. Feedback being constructive in its nature, correction, perhaps referring to a mistake / slip in meta-language, or similar.

It seems to be the sanctioned approach to elicit, to get the observed to speak for themselves, to encourage the post-lesson evaluation to be owned by them leading to their own action plans. I think this is beneficial and by talking the lesson through I would hope that observees could work to their own conclusions.

If I were expected to give explicit feedback I would go for a mix of positive and negative comments. I would frame these comments as controllable things, thus avoiding win / lose attributions and encouraging a learning paradigm. This would keep the observed motivated and empowered. As my MA tutor says, “the questions: what could I improve? What could I change? What went well? Are all okay questions but a more helpful question is what have / did I learn(t)?”

I have experienced various approaches to observations in my career. I have usually been forewarned that there was an observer coming and normally prepared a lesson plan. This situation was unnatural as, I would not normally go to this level of planning and it was often associated with a performance management process, thus the stakes were much higher than in any normal lesson. These were sometimes framed as being developmental, but I was cynical about to what extent this was true, particularly as it was my line manager / DOS doing the obo.
There were occasions when observers just dropped in. This was usually forewarned “at some point in the next couple of weeks I / so and so will come and drop into your class for a short time”... and no lesson plan (LP) was required.

Planned peer-to-peer observations were arranged according to availability. These have been sadly infrequent in my teaching life so far, usually stemming from a formal program than anything more organic. Again there formal nature has perhaps detracted from the learning possibilities. As a teacher I would like to be working in an environment where collegial-self-development of this nature is common. Where I get to observe and be observed in a non-judgemental way that is focused on making us the best teacher we can be.

During the observations I usually watch and / or take notes. I sometimes use a handout / template to organise my notes. Often the observed will have asked for feedback on something specific so I may just be focused on a macro-level. Sometimes I get up and monitor what learners are actually doing but usually I sit. All of these techniques I have picked up from people who have observed me.

After the class the timings between the lesson and the 'feedback' session vary between almost immediately, which is good as everything is very fresh (though not always practical on a 24hour/week teaching schedule). Often observers have given post-lesson reflection sheets to me to fill in when there is a substantial gap of more than a few hours. These are usually helpful and include open question prompts to respond to. Sometimes, I have been observed and had scant or no direct feedback.

Like any task, how the pre and post task stages are conducted is almost as important as the task itself. As an observer it is important to acknowledge that this is just a snapshot (if it's not part of a series of observations) into what life is like in the classroom. Observations are more worthwhile, when the emphasis is on growth, learning and development and not on keeping your job, or getting a promotion.