All Good Things Must Come to an End

First off, I’ve updated a lot of my lessons and added quite a few new ones.  I’ve forgotten to mention that for the last umpteen blogposts.  Check ‘em out and feel free to give me feedback on them if you use them .

This is a bittersweet post.  I got some bad news a couple weeks ago – the owner of my school is going through some major financial difficulties and can’t afford to keep my branch open through the summer.  For this reason, my students, my teachers, and myself have been transferred over to the main branch.  At best, it’ll be a year before the branch is able to reopen.

My responsibilities have been much reduced and my travel time to work has doubled, leaving me with a lot of time to reflect.  Lots of successes and of course a few failures, with many lessons learned along the way.

I really miss my school already.  I was DoS of it for under a year, but we sure accomplished a lot in that time.  My team and I were able to take it from less than 40 students with a 10% renewal rate to almost 90 students and an over 90% renewal rate.  No small feat in such a short time, especially with practically no support from the main branch.

I can quite honestly say that our little branch was fantastic.  It was far and away the best private language school on the Asian side of Istanbul.  Students learned English, they learned it well, and they learned it surprisingly quickly.  A majority of students went from Beginner to Intermediate in an average of between 180-240 hours.

Lessons learned along the way:

-         Teachers get really nervous about observations regardless of how they are done.  While I think they are still useful, I’m still searching for some better ways to accomplish the same goals.

-         Never fire a teacher over Christmas break when half your staff is away on holiday and you are running two schools with over 500 students and 30 staff .

-         Unfortunately, students are still not convinced of the value of non-native teachers.  For the most part, our students came around on this eventually, but there was many a struggle with it.

-         As a DoS, keep a set schedule and try not to deviate from it too much regardless of what the owner wants.  A constantly changing schedule makes it almost impossible to organize things or set up a routine for any number of programs.

-         Always have a few teachers on the backbench as possible hires in case something comes up.

-         If one of your teachers literally goes crazy, it’s best to get them outside help as soon as possible.

-         Create more long-term projects where something concrete and meaningful is produced in classes, especially for upper levels.

-         Always talk about any issues with staff or students in private.

+  Exams do more harm than good.  Formative assessment is the way to go.

+  If you trust your teachers, they can do some amazing things.

+  Intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic.

+  Students respond very well to being challenged.

+  So does your staff.

+  Emergent curriculums and a dogme approach definitely can work for an entire school and get incredible results.

+  Get students and teachers outside the classroom.

+  Hold workshops and share sessions.

+  Don’t hold a meeting if the same information can be relayed by email.

+  A school is a community and should always be treated as such.

I really got a lot out of working at my branch and have a lot of good memories:

Students coming up to me or other teachers and personally thanking me/them for helping them to learn English (and actually seeing that that was, in fact, the case)

Having a teacher get hired by another good school precisely because of the methodology at ours and the things they’d learned.

My first process drama retelling “Little Red Riding Hood” with students coming up with the most hilarious stories.

Getting pumped up before lessons even though some of my teachers thought I was more than a little strange

Students transferring to the other branch and raising hell when other teachers used the book.  The main complaint was that “we can do it at home!” (I’m quite proud of that one although I can’t say the teachers in question were very happy about it).

There was a lot more that happened at the school, but these are the things that came to mind while writing this post.

What does the future hold now?  I’m not quite sure.  Almost at the same time that my branch closed, I’ve had a number of rather interesting new opportunities fall into my lap. I was first thinking about moving on early and going somewhere else, but at least two of the opportunities would keep me in Turkey and seem too good to pass up.  The wife and I will definitely have to make some big decisions.

To all my staff and students, a big thank you for the wonderful experiences.

Pay It Forward – 10 Blogs I Love Right Now

This is a new blog trend going around.  I first became aware of it when Arjana Blazic mentioned me on her blog and am honored to have been mentioned by a number of other bloggers since then including Mike Harrison, Anita Kwiatkowska, Marta Mrozik, Diarmuid Fogarty, Willy Cardoso, and Henrick Oprea.  I really think it’s a nice idea.  The only downfall is that you can only mention 10 blogs.  I decided that instead of mentioning my 10 favorite, I would just mention the 10 I’ve enjoyed most recently.

1)  Doing Some Thinking by Henrick Oprea – Henrick is the first educator from Brazil whose blog I started following.  His blog ranges from classroom suggestions, to a bit of dogme, to worthwhile books.  I always enjoy stopping over there for a visit.  I recommend Why Bother? about things teachers should know/learn.

2)  Jeremy Harmer’s Blog – Jeremy needs no introduction.  His blog is special to me though because he is probably the best blog host around.  For such a big name in ELT, he is extremely humble and shares his experience, concerns, and knowledge in a very unassuming way.  He also has a way of involving everyone and always comes in with some sound advice.  I recommend 10 Things I Hate About PowerPoint as I also am not a big fan.

3)  An A-Z of ELT by Scott Thornbury – I read Scott’s blog for two reasons.  1)  I can’t access a lot of methodology and theory books here in Turkey as they are hard to come by and very expensive to order on your own.  I’ve learned a lot of condensed wisdom from Scott’s wealth of knowledge on ELT.  He does a great job of quoting sources.  2)  Far more important than number one is the wonderful amount of ideas that occur in the comments section of his blog.  Being such a big name, Scott draws a lot of educators and just reading through the comments you can learn so much about teaching.  Recently I liked N is for Native-speakerism.

4)  The Tao Te(a)ching by Diarmuid Fogarty – This is a blog full of ancient crack-pot wisdom for the ELT teacher.  Its passages are convoluted, its messages surrounded by a thick, dense fog.  This Taoist takes us on a journey of self-discovery where the only thing we discover at the end is what we already knew.  If you aren’t confused yet, please click on the link above  Basically, this blog makes me reflect in a philosophically absurd sort of way.  I really liked The Ideal Number of Participants in an Orgy of which I guess the number is 27.

5)  Digital Play by Graham Stanley & Kyle Mawer –  This blog is one of a kind.  It provides really useful lesson ideas based on free Internet games.  I recently used War & Conflict with great success last week with an adult class.  I also really have to recommend Machinarium – a Phrasal Verb Activity even though it’s quite an old post.

6)  Six Things by Lindsay Clandfield – I like Linsday’s blog a lot.  It’s a hodge podge of ELT.  Sometimes it’s musings, sometimes lesson ideas, sometimes controversial statements, and sometimes even cocktail drinks .  I liked a guest post by Andy Hockley on Six Ways to Survive Crisis in Professional Development.

7)  Hugh Dellar – I feel like I have too many big names on this list, but I just discovered this blog thanks to Marta of netend.  Hugh doesn’t write blogs – he writes treatises that I think are meant to hammer away at your resolve until you agree with him by the end of it.  Regardless, I like his posts when I have the time to actually get through them.  I really enjoyed his latest, Lexis, Speaking, and the Non-native Speaking Teacher.

 Teacher Training Unplugged – Of course I had to include this.  As a big fan of dogme myself, how could I not approve of a training course founded on those principles?  I’m really interested to see where this project goes.  Check out their very long video from IATEFL – Harrogate.

9)  Netend by Marta Mrozik – I started following this blog fairly recently.  It’s a mix of personal experiences and YL lesson plan ideas much like the wonderful L_Miss Bossy’s ELT Playground.  My children’s class teachers enjoyed her Easter Egg Hunt Lesson.

10)  For the Love of Learning by Joe Bower – Although not an ELT blog per se, Joe’s blog is a fantastic read.  He is out to question the way we think about teaching and advocates eliminating grades, exams, homework, merit pay, etc.  - basically everything I stand for.  He’s a great example to all teachers out there that these things can be done and he shows ways of doing it as well as giving the philosophy behind his choices.  I like all of Joe’s stuff, but his latest great post was The North American House Hippo.

This list is of course not exhaustive and there are tons of other blogs out there that I love reading.  Thanks to all you bloggers out there who have helped me grow so much as a teacher .

Teaching English in Turkey – An Idiot’s Guide by Alex Case

It is with great pleasure that I’m hosting Alex “TEFLTastic” Case on my blog today.  Alex was the first person to recommend my blog as well as one of the first (or the first?) ELT blogger out there.  Like me, Alex’s first real teaching gig was here in Turkey.  Today he shares with us some wisdom about being a new teacher, the quirks that come with living in a foreign culture, and how our perceptions of that culture may change with time.  He also raises the interesting question of whether or not one should generalize about the culture one is living in.

“I’d recommend teaching in Turkey to anyone, because I still have such happy memories of being in love, eating a kebab that has the Turkish version of my name, drinking Efes beer, and waking up to the call of the mosques or street sellers. There are, however, many problems with the country. For one thing, with inflation at 85% and wildly fluctuating currency prices, you can expect to be shopping at street markets even when doing so is no longer exotic. Also, you may be forced to live with your girlfriend of just three weeks so that the school owner can tell the neighbours that you are married. The most difficult thing, though, is teaching 50 year old civil servants who have been forced to take English language exams to get a pay rise and think they can do so by copying their homework off each other.”

Although I am the idiot of this blog post’s title, I must admit that even my naïve and newly qualified 24 year old self never quite confused his own wide-eyed sense of the alien, random place and people that he experienced, individual circumstances or effects of his love life with the average experience of a foreign teacher in Turkey- let alone with the reality of the people who were born there. However, when reading other people’s efforts to give general advice based on their own experience or doing the same (nowadays only usually when asked, but also after a couple of beers), I can’t help but feel that a more well-hidden version of the above is coming out. For example, I did the same summer camp in Turkey three years after leaving the country, and came home with the distinct impression that the kids were much more nationalistic than they had been. Hopefully I didn’t actually tell anyone that, because looking back I think that impression could just as easily be because of what I had read in the intervening years, a reflection of the three years older person teaching them, the demographic of the students we taught having changed, or one of a stack of other things. Alternatively, maybe they really had just become more nationalistic. Not having the time or money to do the sociological research that I would love to in order to settle this once and for all (and having several hundred similar questions after five years in Japan- see http://japanexplained.wordpress.com), I guess I will never know.

So, the obvious answer seems to be to leave all generalisations out. Unfortunately not. As in politics, if we let our own doubts paralyse us from making judgements, there are plenty of people who are happy to make the generalisations and decisions for us based on their prejudices or the one book or article that they’ve read on the subject. In the marketplace of ideas, there is no point shouting “Roll up, roll up. Unless you don’t fancy rolling up, as it could well be that the generalisations I am about to make about the product I have here to show you will not exactly match your reality. I’ll let you ponder on that for a few moments, and then give you the sales pitch”. Instead, as with teaching, the best we can manage is to remain aware of and questioning of all our individual judgements and generalisations, always looking for better ones but trying not to let angst paralyse us until a better theory does indeed come along.

Well dear readers, what do you think?  How far can generalizations be trusted?  If we don’t voice our opinions, then who will and to what purpose?  What’s the difference between a generalization and the apparently more valid trend or observation?  Is it simply a matter of whether we agree with it or not that is is given the negative connotation of a generalization?    Please state your opinions below

Thank You So Much!

I was waiting until Christmas to post this post, but then I realized that would not be appropriate at all.  Christmas is a time for giving gifts, but this is a post about heartfelt thanks and is better suited for Thanksgiving.

I wrote the following about a month and a half ago.  It’s the story of how one little response to a comment changed my life.

I’m a new blogger and I started blogging less than a month ago.  The entire concept of a PLN was alien to me and Twitter was a strange new world.  I entered this world because of one man, Jamie Keddie. I was a big fan of his site, TEFL Clips.  It got me using video in the class, something I had never done before.  All it took was the quick link to Savevid that let me download YouTube videos to my laptop.  In my unconnected and computerless classrooms suddenly I could bring in my laptop and do video lessons with my students.  The fact that one person was making all these great lessons and sharing them with teachers was very inspiring.  I started to make my own video lessons.

After using a number of the lessons, I posted a small comment under one of the them on the reasons I liked it.  To my great surprise, I got an email the next day thanking me for my comment and asking some simple questions about how I use video.  I sent him the lessons I had made using his site as inspiration.  Looking back with some chagrin, my lessons were a bit messy with lots of mistakes, but I think I’ve worked most of those out.  The lessons in question are now posted on my lesson plan page for teachers to use in their classes.

Anyway, after that, we emailed back and forth a few times and he informed me about an ELT conference in Istanbul being hosted by Burcu Akyol that he would be attending.  He asked if I knew about it or thought about coming.  I was shocked, an ELT conference in my city?  I didn’t even know these things happened outside the private colleges.  He then directed me to Burcu’s blog and said I should try out something called Twitter.

Well, I got on Twitter and didn’t do much with it for a while.  I looked at Burcu’s blog and followed her blogroll links to others.  I was simply amazed that there were all these people blogging about ELT.  At the time I was working at a terrible school and I’d previously worked at schools where people were professional, but no one was really interested in ELT or developing.  Suddenly there was an entire world of full of people interested in the same things I was.  Not only that, they were actively interested in helping each other become better.  It was amazing!

Soon after, the conference came around and I went to it.  I had never seen something like that in Turkey before (or anywhere else I had worked for that matter).  I didn’t even know that level of professionalism even existed here or that a school would actually pay to develop and train their teachers.  I thought, “Wow, this is what I’ve been looking for.”  I talked to a lot of people at the conference and found it was a mixed bag.  Some people were more into it than others and, to the people who were non-plussed about it, I felt some surprise.  I was thinking, “You don’t know how lucky you are to have a school and director that cares enough to do this.”

But the highlight of the conference for me was finally meeting Jamie Keddie in person.  Here was a person who I knew was passionate about teaching and sharing.  It was a far cry from what I was experiencing in my current teaching environment.  I got to see his plenary, go to one of his workshops, and talk a bit about my experiences with him.  For me, it was a great experience.

Also at that conference I got to meet the drama king himself Ken Wilson and attend one of his workshops.  I hadn’t even known he was a big name in ELT or that there actually were big names in ELT before going to the conference and starting this blog journey.  Ken Wilson gave the best workshop I’ve seen to date and his style has greatly influenced the workshop style I use when training my own teachers now.  On top of Ken, I also got to see plenaries by Gavin Dudeney and Nina Lauder, both of which were fantastic.

After the conference, I was jazzed up.  I wanted to become part of this world and try to connect with other teachers who shared my passion and commitment to teaching.  One thing I really realized after I went to the conference and started looking at a lot of blogs was that many in the field of ELT have mostly taught in environments very unrelated to what I was used to in Turkey.  They simply didn’t face the same challenges or obstacles.  The dynamics in the classrooms were different.

I made my decision right then to start my own blog to try and help out and connect with teachers specifically in Turkey.  I can’t say how successful I’ve been in that as my blog is still quite new and I’ve only had one commenter from Turkey so far, but I’m hopeful for the future.

Luckily, at the time I made my decision, I had a two week break in between jobs.  I had thankfully completed my contract at the wasteland of my last school and had gotten a job at what I believe to be one of the top 3 schools in Turkey.  I poured hours and hours into setting up the blog.  Using Burcu’s blog as a guide, I got my own wordpress blog and really started digging into all the people on her blogroll and started following the twitter contact lists she had so nicely posted for people.  At the same time, I started commenting a lot on others’ blogs and getting into a ton of wonderful discussions.  I realized that Jamie wasn’t an anomaly and that most people that ran blogs engaged in dialogues with their readers.  In fact, people even commented on the comments and got into great big discussions.  On one of Karenne’s posts she even said I had good ideas and thanked me for stopping by.  How cool was that?  I had never been told before that my ideas had any value, at least by anyone with experience that wasn’t a new teacher.

I posted a new blog post every week and to my utter amazement people actually found it and linked to it in their blog.  These two people were Alex Case and Karenne Sylvester, both people whose blogs I was amazed by and who were quite famous in the blogosphere from what I gathered.  I simply couldn’t believe it.  Google hadn’t even found my blog yet (it still hasn’t for some reason unbeknown to me) and yet they had obviously found my blog, liked it, and mentioned me on their own blogs.

My other surprise was when I got a comment from someone who wasn’t a co-worker.  It was from Darren Elliot.  I was only 3 posts in and another person had found my blog and even taken the time to comment on it.  I was quite honored that these three people had taken the time to stop by, link to me, and/or comment.  It meant that all the time and effort I had put in wasn’t for nothing.  I thought it would be months before people even noticed my blog and here I already had visitors, and famous ones at that.

Well, I was quite pleased with the way things were going.  I kept posting every week and then, yesterday morning, I posted my Keepin It Real lesson idea.  We had a work party last night and when I came back home with my wife, I of course went to check my email as I usually do.  In my inbox I found 4 comments waiting for approval on my blog.  They were from Karenne, Alex, Darren, and Jeremy Day.  I was so happy.  They had come back to my site and they had liked my idea or at least felt it was worth commenting on.  It was a great honor and so here I am, inspired to write this post now.  Thank you all very much for the help, guidance, confidence, and inspiration you have given me.  It’s absolutely amazing that there are such intelligent and caring people out there and that they are not only willing to share their ideas with the world, but to help out the new people on the block as well.  Already in my short time as part of the twitter and blogospheres I have developed so much as a teacher and it is because of you guys.  Thank you so much.

Present Day:  Well, that was a month and a half ago now. Now I have many more members of my PLN.  Some are big names and some aren’t.

There are Larry Ferlazzo, Shelly Terrell, and Ozge Karaoglu that are some kind of sharing gods.  They are always linking to tons of useful stuff on their blogs and on Twitter and generally  just happy to share.  I’m in awe of the amount of time they put in online.

There is Sue Lyon-Jones. who is as far as I know the first person to add me to their blogroll and who provides a site with tons of free resources and a wealth of links on Twitter everyday.

There is Anita Kwiatkowska who is one of the few people I have met in person and has helped my YL teachers out with her blog focused on kids.

There are also my teachers Teresa Hanlon and Thomas Christie.  Teresa is one of the most positive people I know and always always goes that extra mile for her students.  Tom has really creative ideas in his classes and is always willing to share.

There is Andy Hockley who is always good for a laugh, a counterpoint, or some information on reflective teaching practices.

Last but not least, let me not forget Diarmuid Fogarty who is always able to turn a critical eye towards any subject.

There are of course many many more and I couldn’t possibly list everyone here, but please don’t feel I’m forgetting you.

After that night I thought it would be great for some of the people who had helped me out so much to be featured with a guest post on this blog.  I thought I was still too new though and I hadn’t gotten enough of my own material on the site yet, so I wanted to wait a bit.  Now I feel the time has come.  After this week I will be posting some guest posts from some of the people above.  In the short month in a half since that night and in the 3 months since I started blogging I have met so many wonderful people that have helped me develop and grow.  Some I’m in touch with more than others.  Some people I only follow on Twitter while others I meet for coffee.  I value each member of my PLN and appreciate everything you have done.

To think, all this started because someone sent me a short email about a comment on their blog.  The little things are so important and none of us should forget the difference we can make in another teacher’s life by doing something so small.  Making other teachers welcome and helping them to start their own PLNs is something we should always think about when we get a comment on our blogs or when someone follows us on Twitter.  We can make a difference .

Keep sharing

Why Blog?

For my first post I decided I’d state what I hope to get out of blogging.  I wasn’t introduced to the world of professional blogging in ELT until about a month ago (today’s date is Sept. 29th, 2009).  I’ve always worked in developing countries and the community of professionals that exist in more developed countries is a bit lacking.  Few teachers use the Internet for more than finding pictures or the ever-present, and usually terribly designed, worksheets that litter the information superhighway.

Having discovered an entire community of professionals that communicate via blogs, Twitter, and other web 2.0 resources, I became motivated to not just passively observe this medium, but to become a fully active member of the community.  Blogging is one of many great ways to not only share information with other teachers, but to get feedback about your own ideas.  As educators we can all work together and help each other.  This is especially important for countries like Turkey where there is so little professional development and few physical forums for teachers to meet and share.  So many teachers here are disconnected from each other and lack the means to help each other out even if they wanted to.  Forums like blogs and Twitter can only help us develop ourselves and make things better for our students.

I also see blogging as a glimmer of hope.  In a world of ELT where so many teachers work in developing nations and yet so much literature is published and so many speeches are given that fail to address the problems we have.  All these wonderful ideas and approaches are batted around, but those of us working in developing countries have so many other problems to deal with before we even step foot in the classroom.  The struggle to train the learners is often more difficult than the struggle to teach them English.   What I dream of is a network of teachers that develop core strategies for dealing with these problems.    I want to see lesson plans that not only teach English, but also incorporate strategies that teach the students how to learn at the same time.

Whatever the result of this effort is, blogging helps me to organize and work out my own thoughts about teaching, connect with other teachers, and add something to the community of online educators.  In the end, we will all benefit.

The mission statement and purpose of this particular blog can be found on the About page.