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In the last of these posts on managing teacher training course, I’ll deal with a few odds and ends. For example, here’s a quick comment on scheduling and running a tutorial with a trainee on the course…
Tutorials with course participants
Schedule at least one tutorial with the participants during a training course. This should be timetabled and offer a formal situation for the trainee to comment on their own development and the course itself. It’s useful to give the trainee a copy of a form with points to consider so the tutorial begins with a clear focus. Here’s one you might base your own tutorial form on:
| How do feel you are progressing on the course overall?
What are the areas on the course you feel you have most progressed on?
What are the areas you would like to focus on or need tutor support?
Is there anything you are particularly concerned about?
Is there anything you would like more of on the course?
Is there anything you would like less of?
Discuss these questions with your tutor who will summarise the discussion below with any action points to be taken.
Signed: ……………………………. (trainee) …………………………(trainer) Date/Time of tutorial: ……………………………….
|
If you’re in charge of teacher training, then you recruit and manage teacher trainers. These people might be well-qualified and experienced but – nevertheless – still need managing! Here are some areas you probably want to consider….
Quality control
If you have assigned another trainer to give input sessions or mentor teachers then it may be necessary to observe the training in the same way you would observe a teacher. Make it clear to the teacher trainer what you are observing for and how feedback will be given all apply.
Professional support
Trainers like teachers need on-going professional support. This type of colleague may need opportunities to develop in terms of being sponsored to attend conferences or time for reading or research. Try to hold regular meetings for trainers which perhaps take the form of a workshop or address certain issues in training.
Involve trainers
As in any management situation, involve your staff in the decision making process. For example, after a course hold a meeting with your training team for any discussion relating to the course feedback. It should be a forum for trainers to comment on the course and how things might be improved n future programmes. This could also include suggestions from trainers for possible areas of staff and personal development.
Training new trainers
When running a training course use the opportunity to train up a member of staff to become a teacher trainer on future courses. This will need you to coordinate shadowing – in which the trainer in training will sit in on input sessions and observe the teaching practice-observation-feedback process. The novice trainer will need to understand the grade criteria and standardise their own assessment alongside experienced trainer. You will probably also need to observe and give feedback to this trainer once they begin their own initial steps into the training room.
Standardisation and peer observation
Trainers will learn a great deal from observing each other in input sessions and observing their peers giving feedback after teaching practice. This kind of shadowing will also help to avoid situations where a trainee complains that they are receiving contradictory feedback after teaching practice or differing views on teaching. Regular sharing of ideas and ‘good practice’ will mean that your trainers are providing similar (though not necessarily the same) content.
(c) John Hughes 2011 www.trainingelteachers.net
For people who manage teacher training courses I came up with a checklist of things we do as TT managers. This one is based on my experience of managing courses such as the Trinity Cert TESOL and Diploma but I think it has wider applications. It might be helpful if you are planning to run a course for the first time. If you’re an experienced manager, let me know if I’ve missed anything!
Managing a training programme checklist
| Before the course…All application forms have been received and checked …The course participants have been interviewed …References have been received …Pre-course tasks and reading lists have been sent …
The course participants have completed a needs analysis … The course programme/timetable has been prepared and distributed … Trainers have been timetabled and briefed … Rooms, equipment and resources have been booked … Students for teaching practice have been enrolled … During the course… All course participants are attending punctually … Numbers of students for teaching practice are being maintained … Mid course tutorial forms have been submitted … Action plans on mid course tutorials are being implemented … Trainees and trainers have all resources required … Teachers to be observed by trainee teachers have been informed … All journals have been completed, marked and returned on time …. After the course… End of course feedback received … References and certificates sent to participants … Post course meeting scheduled with trainers … Information sent to trainees on future courses … All course work (journals, plans, records) has been returned … |
Schools with lots of internal staff training often aspire to offering external courses. So in my January 2011 series of posts about managing teacher training I thought I’d delve into this area and outline what I think are key areas.
One way a school can test the water with offering external training courses is to advertise ‘Taster’ courses where members of the public can find out more about teaching or even try it out teaching. Other centres specialise in training new teachers with an initial qualification which will allow them to get their first job. Some teacher training departments and university departments run courses for practising teachers who are taking time out of teaching for further studies.
The benefits of setting up a training department and offering courses externally include the following:
- Profile raising
Schools with training departments increase their profile in the ELT industry. Language students might be attracted to a school with teacher training over one that doesn’t. If you train teachers, you are in turn letting more people about the school who may pass on your name to other teachers or to their students.
- Mutual benefits
Educational institutions with teacher training departments tend to have a useful ‘knock-on effect’. The fact that training takes place will often affect the performance and interest of internal staff and their work.
- Employee motivation
As well as being involved in internal staff training, a teacher training department motivates employees in that it offers the prospect of working as a teacher trainer and therefore promotion opportunities and staff flexibility within the organisation.
- Income
Quite simply, training courses can increase the turnover of a school.
What have I missed? Feel free to comment. In the next post I’ll look at management issues for running such courses starting off with the application and interview process….
In the previous post in this series (post 3) I summarised types of needs analysis. So having carried out the needs analysis the next step is about defining the course objectives and designing a programme of training.
First some thoughts on defining course objectives.
Why do we need them?
- you can only measure the outcome of learning an assess the success of your training programme if you have objectives to measure.
- objectives are motivational for the teachers on the course
- objectives make the process transparent and public
- you will more easily be able to demonstrate to your line manager (perhaps the owner of the school) the benefits to the organisation of such training
Noticeable behaviour
Like writing lesson aims, the aims of training can be hard to usefully define sometimes.
it may be helpful to think of these in terms of ‘noticeable behaviour’ or what you will see once the training has taken place. For example, if the objective is to, ‘improve error correction’ this doesn’t tell us what the outcome will be. If on the other hand we write, ‘to see greater use of error correction at the end of speaking activities’, the teacher understands by what criteria s/he will be measured and the outcome is realistic and achievable.
Admittedly, objectives which are defined in terms of noticeable behaviour can lend themselves to the ‘there-is-only-one-right-way-to do-something’ philosophy of teaching and certainly with teachers at higher levels of development may be counter productive but usually they provide a very tangible path for a teacher to follow. I think it’s helpful to think of these in terms of ‘noticeable behaviour’ or what you will see once the training has taken place. For example, if the objective is to, ‘improve error correction’ this doesn’t tell us what the outcome will be. If on the other hand we write, ‘to see greater use of error correction at the end of speaking activities’, the teacher understands by what criteria s/he will be measured and the outcome is realistic and achievable.
(Admittedly, objectives which are defined in terms of noticeable behaviour can lend themselves to the ‘there-is-only-one-right-way-to do-something’ philosophy of teaching and certainly with teachers at higher levels of development may be counter productive but usually they provide a very tangible path for a teacher to follow.)
Designing a training plan
So, with the objectives, it’s time for a training programme.
A training plan may take different forms. The example below takes the form of a timetable. The teachers in a school will have a one-hour staff development session once every two weeks. The format will be a workshop lead by the Director of Studies. Note that the objectives are defined at the top of the timetable to remind everyone of the goal. It also includes practical information such as room, times and dates. The Director has also assigned different sessions to different members of teaching staff. (This is useful way to draw on the expertise of certain teachers and offer them their own area of self-development.)
Autumn term staff development sessionsOutcomes:
All sessions will be in room 8a, from 5.15-6.15. October 18th L1 interference for Taiwanese speakers and how to help them. (Karen) November 1st L1 interference for Korean speakers and how to help them. (Karen) November 15th L1 interference for Spanish speakers and how to help them. (Ruth) November 29th Workshop on adapting pronunciation exercises for pair work. (Marek) December 13th Learner strategies for pronunciation – Video / Discussion. (Hanna) |
The next example is a personalised training plan for an inexperienced teacher who is about to take over a new class at the beginning of a term. The Director of Studies combines the delivery techniques of observation and mentoring with the help of an experienced teacher.
Teacher: Carole
Monday 3.15 Observe Asia teaching Class G2. Use observation proforma attached. Monday 17.00 Meet with Asia and plan tomorrow’s class together. Tuesday 3.15 Team teach G2 with Asia Tuesday 17.00 Meet with Asia and plan tomorrow’s class together. Wednesday 3.15 Teach G2. Asia to observe Thursday 10.00 Attend level meeting with other teacher to discuss new course book. |
That’s all for this post but in the next I’ll be writing about ways to manage external teacher training courses - it’s still relevant for anyone who manages internal staff programmes but it might also be of interest if your school is thinking of offering external teacher training course too.
If you have any examples of course programmes for your teacher training courses, it would be great to add them here…
In part 2 of this mini-series of posts on Managing Teacher Training for January 2011, I outlined three teacher profiles. Perhaps these ignored many other types of profiles in our teacher’s room but they served to illustrate a range of needs and expectations that will expect a programme to respond to individual needs.
To design such a programme I think there are three basic steps: Establish the needs, define the objectives and design the course. In this part three, I’ll sum up what I think are the key ways to establish the needs before parts 4 and 5 (coming in the next few days) move onto defining objectives and designing the actual course.
Establishing needs
In its simplest terms, training is about bridging the gap between what is known (the present) and the level of skills required (the future). The ‘learning gap’ is simple to apply to certain aspects in teaching. For example, where a teacher doesn’t know how to use timelines they can be trained. However, knowing when is a good moment to correct a student and when isn’t or what to correct and what not to correct is not something quite so measurable. However, we must seek to identify and describe needs in order to measure and therefore ensure the success of a training programme. The process of identifying needs should be a cooperative process between all parties involved. (By all parties we certainly mean the teacher and the teacher’s line manager but there may be other stakeholders in the training process such as the owner of the school or fellow senior teachers.)
There are a number of tools we can use for establishing what teachers want and need from a training programme.
1 A questionnaire
Though finding out needs can be done informally though discussion and observation, a formally produced questionnaire which is given out to all members of staff has the benefit of making training accessible to all and provides you with criteria by which the success of the course can be measured.
Below is an example of a needs analysis form from a school which wanted to provide a series of fortnightly 45 minute workshops on pronunciation. The Director of Studies drew up this form as a starting point to gauge the teachers’ own perception of their needs and the type of sessions they might want.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Please indicate if this area is a priority and comment on your score in the space.
1=low priority 5=high priority
| Word stressSentence stressConnected speechIntonationUsing the phonemic chartPublished materials for pronunciation
Listening skills and pronunciation Integrating pronunciation into the course book L1 interference problems Indicate specific language learners (e.g. Turkish speakers): _______________________________________________ Error correction and pronunciation |
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5 |
| Put a cross on this scale to indicate the balance of theory and practical ideas you would like in the sessions:Theory<—————————————————————————————————————>Practical
Suggest other areas you might be interested in or make comments on any of your responses above:
|
————————————————————————————————————————–
One danger of such a questionnaire is that the teachers circle everything as high priority and require more from the training than the time and cost constraints will allow. One way to avoid this is to give each teacher a list of possible workshop titles and tell they have 20 marks in total to award. This means that they may give 10 marks to a high priority, 5 to the next, and 3 and 2 to lower priority areas.
2 One-to-one discussion and observing the teacher
Meeting teachers individually works especially well where many of the teachers are at different stages of development and you can spend time working with individuals. Discussing training needs may form part of a wider staff appraisal scheme. However, it’s advisable to combine an interview about their teaching with an observation of their lesson as this provides a focus for the discussion.
3 Student complaints/feedback
In an ideal world we would identify training needs before the customer does. But mistakes are made and in the classroom a disgruntled student may complain about the teacher. Before we assume that a teacher needs training we will of course need to find out what is happening. Students do complain about teachers and the problem may turn out to be caused by problems with peers, the classroom, the timing of the lesson and other factors. Nevertheless, student complaints can be justified and may indicate that training is required. Quite often a meeting with the teacher in question can even result in them recognising the need for further training.
4 The job description
In teaching terms a change in job description will often mean that we are asking teachers to work on courses that they have no experience with. They may have been required to teach general English courses at lower levels for the past three years and suddenly they are asked to prepare advanced students for an examination. Your needs analysis will be to identify the change in the job requirements and provide the means for training and development.
5 External assessment and validation
Many schools are subject to external assessment by validating bodies or organisations that accredit schools. For example, British Council-recognised schools are inspected and this involves observing the teachers and studying documentation including their plans. The final report that comes from these inspections will include comments on the work of the staff and recommendations for improvement which may indicate the type of training required.
© John Hughes 2011
In the next post I’ll look at defining the objectives so in the meantime, feel free to comment on the above.
This is part two in a series of posts I’m posting this month on the theme of ‘Managing Teacher Training’. Hopefully they might be of help and interest in particular to people in charge of managing ELT schools or departments. Directors of studies and ELT managers often find that they are in charge of teacher training and development as well as the million of other things they do. So this series is based on my experience of doing that job.
In this second part, I’m looking at who you have in your teacher’s room and what their needs are in terms of training. As I say in the article, the end, my three summaries of Teacher type A, B and C suffer from generalisation and come from my context of working in a private language school. Feel free to comment on and define your own teacher type and their training needs afterwards.
Who are you training?
A healthy environment in a teacher’s room is usually helped by including members of staff with a wide range of experience and knowledge. For one thing it means that you always have someone on your staff who can teach virtually any kind of class profile. But from a training point of view it also tends to mean that you have the potential for a rich resource of teachers to help each other out with ideas and support.
On the other hand I don’t think you want a staffroom full of only experienced teachers. It can become a disgruntled place with too many experts becoming frustrated at the lack of outlets for their expertise. Similarly, a school with lots of inexperienced teachers will inevitably suffer from a lack of advanced skills or the scope for staff development. So making sure you have a healthy mix will allow for plenty of impromptu staff development opportunities. However, it also means that you cannot offer a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to training and staff development.
Here’s a view of three teacher types in the teacher’s room that you might need to plan training for. These are of course generalisations (in the same way that the terms elementary, pre-intermediate etc ect are) but they help to illustrate a range of training needs.
Teacher A
A newly qualified teacher may come to the school with plenty of fresh ideas. He or she will want to try out many things learned on the initial training course and may well remind more experienced teachers of things forgotten or taken for granted. They may have little understanding of the theory and even if they have completed a more theoretical course, they will not have had the chance to put the theory into practice. This teacher will appreciate plenty of tips and practical activities in any input session. In observations and feedback they may need plenty of reassurance (as this is their first job) and expect your feedback to offer plenty of advice which they can instantly implement into their lessons.
Teacher B
There are many teachers who complete initial teacher training and a few years into their jobs have still received no professional development. For some teachers the fact that they have received no further input may be of no immediate importance or they may be ignorant that further development is an option. In a sense these teachers could be repeating what they did in the first year of teaching from year to year. If you decide to implement a training of staff development programme, don’t be surprised if everyone doesn’t rush forward to thank you. Emotions will be mixed. New training initiatives can challenge people, upset their routine or put them in a position in which they feel threatened. However, the problem – if it exists at all – will often be one of perception (see previous post in this series) and making your intentions clear and setting out the rationale will help. Note also that these teachers may still be doing much of what they learnt years ago but bear in mind that they are probably doing it very well with far greater confidence than Teacher A. They are much more ready for more consciousness-raising type input or research based peer observation.
Teacher C
If your school has the position of ‘senior teacher’, this teacher may be in that category. She or he has acquired many classroom skills in the past few years and is probably becoming more interested in the theoretical side of teaching. This is the stage at which a teacher considers taking on other challenges such as course writing, management and teacher training. Academically, they might be taking a post-graduate qualification of some kind (e.g. Diploma or MA in TESOL or Applied Linguistics). Training or developing this teacher will be more complex and the training programme may not follow more obvious routes. This is where the term ‘development’ tends to take over from ‘training’; this teacher is like the advanced language learner who has already acquired many of the strategies for autonomous learning and needs less formal guidance. Training such a teacher may in fact take the form of asking him or her to act as mentor to an inexperienced teacher (teacher A) or to run a workshop or in-house input session for the rest of the staff.
In the next part in this series I’ll talk about how to design a tailor made in-house training programme. In the meantime, feel free to add your thoughts on the above.
I thought I’d kick off 2011 with a series of posts looking at teacher training from the point of view of a manager (DOS etc) of a language school/department. I spent five or six years in this role most of my thinking comes from that period. As always, feel free to add…
This first post takes the form of an introduction…
The benefits of offering in-house training
I suppose as a new teacher you might be forgiven for thinking that having got your first job as ‘ELT teacher’ you should be allowed to get on with it. And certainly, after your initial qualification there’s a lot to say for letting a new teacher get some classroom hours behind them and learn on the job.
Also, school managers can offer further training but this is often slotted in during unpaid hours on topics which – at various stages of teacher development – might seem to have no bearing on day-to-day life in the classroom.
So one of the manager’s first jobs is to ensure that this is not the prevailing view when offering in-house or in-service training to your teaching team. In retrospect when I first started, I just assumed everyone would be on board as far as having on-going staff training in the form of workshops and observations. However, I learned that not everyone necessarily shared my enthusiasm for such things. So there is a lot of selling of the idea that needs to go first. You need to make transparent the reasons and benefits for offering further staff development.
Two good reasons for training in ELT
From a management perspective, there are two essential reasons for in-house training:
1 Responding to change
The English language is a global language and the ELT industry is global. It is therefore more subject to the effects of global change than many other services. Equally, the needs and requirements of students (the customer) change due to demands from employment or new qualification requirements. Similarly the demands on teachers in the classroom change, most noticeably in recent years from technology.
2 Motivation
Secondly, training can motivate your staff. Training says to staff ‘we care’ and shows an investment in the internal customer. To provide on-going training is to treat teachers as professionals with a desire to learn more about what they do and raise their level of consciousness beyond that of a technician.
Make training public
Having implied earlier that teachers want to be allowed to get on with teaching, it is the case – in my experience – that teachers are more likely to be complaining about the lack of on-going training rather than the fact that they are being required to attend training. It may seem strange that in a language school – an environment of learning – teachers find that less thought is necessarily given to their own learning. In Management in English Language Teaching the authors comment that:
‘English language teaching organizations are not alone in having often given little time and money to developing training and career opportunities…’
It is true that in any business or company, training is often regarded as a bit of luxury and the training budget is the first thing to be cut in times of economic difficulty. However, a growing organization is one that recognises that its staff must also ‘grow’. In addition to this, in many schools the opportunities for staff development do exist but it may be a problem of perception for the teacher who feels short-changed:
‘For management, the problem may lie in communicating the opportunities, motivating people to respond and ensuring that the knowledge learnt can be applied within the school’
(White et al Management in English Language Teaching Cambridge 1991 p61)
Making teachers aware of the possibilities can actually come via a clear procedure being implemented when setting up a programme. I’ll look at why and how we can do this in my next post.
