No blog until the new year. Bye!

bloggers | 5 Comments »

I just got off the phone with someone who called asking what training costs. I find the price level here in Potsdam hard to gage. On the one hand, the prices I see are in fact very similar to Munich, and our rent here is actually higher than what we paid there (we were pretty lucky in Munich, frankly). In Munich I charged between 40 and 45 Euros for 45 minutes, providing clients who paid out of their own pocket with add-on services to sweeten the p/bill. I had one customer who was a very tough negotiator, and got me down  to 40 Euros for 60 minutes, but I made a point of making that the exception. With long-standing, well-placed clients, it’s been years since I’ve been short of work. I have generally charged the same for one-to-one as for company courses, as one-to-one is just as challenging if you do it properly. I earn more for specialized skills training in remote locations, to make up for the travelling and the long scripts.

I’ve invested heavily in my training skills to make up for getting older (being young and pretty is undoubtedly the most attractive thing in a language trainer) without raising my rates for training or other services for 5 years. With my most important new client here I am in fact, for the first time, asking 50 Euros an hour. I prepare extensively for these sessions, and don’t teach unprepared conversation-style lessons at all anymore. A well-prepared lesson isn’t content heavy, by the way. On the contrary. Frankly, I’m happy to leave unprepared lessons to young people, just off the boat, who need a few Euros a month just to be able to stay for a while and who see “teaching English” as “open the book or let’s just talk”. They’ll learn fast, and they’ll be getting training (CELTA etc) if they decide to make it a profession, but how long will they work at the low rate of 15 Euros an hour once they have good skills? No, wait, that’s what the organization makes, and they take home even less. Clients, are you ok with your teacher getting that little pay?

Now, I’m business woman enough to respect price. But my caller’s somewhat shocked response is making me think that low budget, “off-the-boat-English” may be widespread here, and I must say: It’s not my scene, I’m not going there. I won’t charge people for simply speaking English to me, not in this globalized world. My clients get something else.

other, teaching | 11 Comments »

Anna Pires, who seems to share all my tastes in music, got this tip from Dave Tucker: “My students think I rock when I do ‘Over my Shoulder’ in class” she says. Of course! Coming up next in my backoffice skills classes too, to get people moving through that tired patch in the afternoon. Thanks to both of you. (video 1: Paul Carrack)

Looking back over my shoulder
I can see that look in your eyes
I never dreamed it could be over
I never wanted to say goodbye

Looking back over my shoulder
with an aching deep in my heart
I wish we were starting over
oh instead of drifting so far apart

Everybody told me you were leaving
funny I should be the last to know
baby please tell me that I’m dreaming
I just never want to let you go

Looking back over my shoulder
I can see that look in your eyes
turning my heart over and over
I never wanted to say goodbye

I don’t mind everybody laughing
but it’s enough to make a grown man cry
’cause I can feel you slipping through my fingers
I don’t even know the reason why

Every day it’s a losing battle
just to smile and hold my head up high
could it be that we belong together
baby won’t you give me one more try
one more try
Looking back oh over my shoulder
(I can see) see that look in your eyes
(I never dreamed) no that it could be over
but I never wanted to say goodbye

(Looking back) looking back (over my shoulder)
oh with an aching (there’s an ache) feeling inside
(cutting me up) oh deeper and deeper
(fills me with a sadness) I can’t hide (that I can’t hide)

song of the week

songs | No Comments »

Last week I experimented with glueing paper onto a flipchart. As we progressed they drew pictures and I wrote up cards as props to hold and tell stories or explain concepts. Glueing the cards in place was the last step, defining what they were supposed to take away. Then we flipped back through in sequence at the end to reconstruct what we’d done. This was to reduce the complexity of the overall takeaways, to lower the learning threshold for people who like to have things tightly under control.

So what you see is the result of a process. It’s very different from the process of using a pinboard and moving things around together, even beyond the end of the course: I’ve sometimes given away specific cards to people who wanted or needed that particular card most to take home as a souvenir.

Lots of room for improvement: Their pictures are great, but their writing and drawings should be on the board at all stages. More co-created visuals for the board might give higher priority to the learning process, over the takeaways. Next time I’ll take magazines with pictures along so we can collaborate on some collages to visualize concepts.

PS: I didn’t use the two big sheets of paper I got for the pinboard. I need to develop some really good new backoffice tasks for the participants to do there.

other, teaching | No Comments »

photo: S. Hofschlaeger / pixelio.de

This roundup of blog posts written by BE/ESP teachers, teacher trainers and materials writers includes personal professional blogs and regular or guest posts for a magazine or publisher. Written for two separate target groups, viz. learners vs. peers, their purpose varies widely:

1. to reflect on personal development
2. to share materials and start discussions
3. to market oneself, or a group of authors, to peers and clients
4. to organize communications with students and clients.

For a summary of all of the posts,  take a quiz to test yourself on whether you’d want to read that particular post more thoroughly. Each question contains the link you need, and background on the author.

Take the quiz here:

The BE/ESP Blog Carnival Quiz

(quiz made using http://www.proprofs.com software)

A very warm thank you to all of the bloggers or featured guest authors who contributed to this carnival (in the order they arrived):

• Ian McMaster / Business Spotlight: International English
• Deborah Capras / Business Spotlight / Wise Words: Sarah Palin’s Shakespearean Tweets
• Jason Renshaw / English Raven: The best approach to exam prep is an unplugged one
• Virginia Allum / EMP English for Nursing and Health: For ESP to work, keep it real
• Nick Robinson / English for Marketing: Is there such as a thing as “general principles for the teaching of ESP”?
• Karenne Sylvester / Business English ~5 mins: Common errors
• Karenne Sylvester / Kalinago English: Wiki that company!
• Aleksandra Luczak / 1. Business and Legal English Blog for N.E.Body (the quiz refers to this post). 2. English for Polish Students of Law
• OUP ELT Global / Sam McCarter: What was the question?
• OUP ELT Global / John Hughes: Take time to teach negotiating
• OUP ELT Global / Vicki Hollett:  Activities for techies
• Vicki Hollett / Learning to speak ‘merican: Got any time to spare?
• Candy van Olst / Candy’s Blog: Is THIS dogme, perhaps?
• Eric Roth / Compelling Conversations: Have You Added Informational Interviews to Your Advanced ESL Class Yet?
• Alex Case / TEFLtastic: Getting Away with Games in Business English Classes
• Stewart Tunnicliff / Goodopenenglish: Creative Writing for English learners
• Evan Frendo / English for the Workplace: On teaching the language of meetings
• Sue Lyon-Jones / The PLN Staff Lounge: When Good Workplaces Go Bad
• Jennifer Verschoor / My integrating technology journey: Best websites to teach writing
• Mike Harrison: Techno Tool Tames Transcription Trouble
• Betty Carlson / Forever Teaching : Oh, I just don’t know where to begin
• Shelly Terrell / Teacher Reboot Camp: Goal-Setting with English Language Learners
• OUP ELT Global / Shelly Terrell: Motivating Adult Learners
• Vicky Loras: Teaching Business English in Switzerland
• Pete Sharma / PSA: Business English materials in the digital age: what’s new?
• Delta Publishing / Nicky Hockly: Teaching Online 5: Five steps to becoming a (good) online tutor

BESIG Conference in Bielefeld, 19-21 November 2010

bloggers, business | 7 Comments »

In compact business seminars, the kind where the participants expect and get a full script to take home (so much for unplugged!), I usually use cards and a pinboard to collect, sort and focus the participants’ ideas. But you can drive a good thing into the ground. The act of pinning the card is a very formal performance, making a statement, punctuated by that punching sound of the pin going in through the cardboard. If they do it, fumbling fingers. If you do it, you’re in a dominant role. I realize cards are supposed to give the participants flexibility and agency, but in fact the card format can be limiting.

I usually use the flipchart myself, and do a cover sheet detailing the road we’ll take (with room for adaption) and do a lot of careful lettering and drawing as we go along. It’s my space, for adhoc presentation. I visualize concepts in ways I’ve standardized. I feel I owe the participants something reliable to flip back through to review where we’ve been. I’d use a dry wipe board for adhoc notes that can get wiped away, but there usually isn’t one available in these seminar rooms.

But this time, after Jason Renshaw posted an invitation to teachers to show their boardwork (with lots of responses, including Emma Harrod using stickies, which is nicer for sorting than cards, the “un-stick” sound is more pleasant), I thought about how I dominate the visual space in these very structured courses, and decided I need to get out of there, and them in there, and change and simplify things, asking everyone to collect their ideas on the flipchart. As I watched my lovely participants at Bender congregate, unceremoniously and in a very relaxed mood writing things up, talking things over, moving around, coming back to add something else, I thought: This is good. Next time I’ll have participants use the board more, and in more ways. Handing over.

PS: The next morning, looking through this, I’m thinking that perhaps it’s not just the sheet of paper I want the participants to have, after all. Maybe it’s more different materials and shapes to play with and collect in a collage that maps out our course and lets us retrace our steps. I should get a bigger sheet of paper for the pinboard to glue things to. In fact, I’ve just arranged for paper to be there at my next seminar in Cologne next week

business, other | 4 Comments »

Karenne Syvester’s “Dogme challenge 1+2″, infused by Candy van Olst’s “CELTA -Schmelta”, dampened by yesterday’s “Failwhale” #Edchat, refreshed by Jeremy Harmer’s “No Dogme for EFL” combine to inspire this friendly response, the title an obvious take-off.

So Dogme means “emergent” and “co-constructed learning” on the one hand, and “essential bareness” on the other. It has little to do with whether there is in fact a book around. It seems like the most natural approach to take until you hit on some very specific snags that can’t just be solved then and there. You, the teacher, have the experience, authority and responsibility to point the way, even define the next steps once things stop “emerging”.  As Scott Thornbury’s approach is a philosophy, rather than a method, it’s more about your perspective than about what you actually do. Got that? Right. I think it’s only natural to be somewhat confused.

I started into EFL in small town Germany, with an academic background, and was, yes, a native speaker. It’s unfair, I know. I didn’t skill up beforehand because it was so easy to get a job. My very first gig was two weeks with a hospital professional on his way to Australia to manage a huge reorganization project. I knew nothing about hospitals, Australia, “TEFL”. We were given a gawdawful coursebook on the economy in general that contained a lot of utterly useless translation work from German to English. He was keen. We both did some thinking, adjourned for research, pooled our resources, made up tasks together as we went along. He was happy. I wish I could beam myself back and see whether I would be, now. Had I started out, inexperienced, wanting to apply “tried and tested” teaching tools without the option of “essential bareness”, eager to live up to a quality standard of some sort, things might have gotten pretty ugly.

My Director of Studies then promptly gave me my first company course: Deutsche Bank. Three tiers. Six learners each. Ten weeks. No guru, no method, no teacher. No CELTA. Yet an opportunity on a silver platter. On arrival, I found they had self-study materials that I wasn’t really supposed to know about, let alone use, but the participants eagerly handed them over for me to peruse. After they’d told me in detail what they actually did all day, what worried them and what they wanted to do in our course (in English naturally), we went about carefully setting up a great big simulation based on the skills featured in those books, with scenarios that all the participants were familiar with and needed to master in English. We didn’t do it all at once, I’d watch them and they’d watch each other and then we’d figure out what they needed. The atmosphere was very friendly. I was told by my advisor to “include some grammar”, and I brought along a horrid little book that thoroughly confused us all. What made most sense and came most naturally was teaching short phrases that came up in our simulations, and comparing sentences that used or varied them. Sometimes I’d show them phrases in their self-study book before we went into the simulations. Someone else would be responsible for notes each lesson. Chunks. Emergent. Co-constructed. Scaffolding.

I still like to work like that. No method, no guru, no teacher?

Actually, my initial do-it-yourself learning curve in TEFL included:

• how to assess what students need
• how to use visuals
• how to document what we are learning

It felt pretty good to figure these things out on my own, but I didn’t really get it right: An evening class student came back from an intensive course in Britain and had made incredible progress. That was very sobering. And then, one day, I met the first challenge I couldn’t handle: A woman with serious mental blockades connected to suddenly having to manage her company in English. She would shut down completely when she had to speak English. I was so sorry, and completely fascinated, and finally had the challenge I needed to make teaching my profession. So I earnestly started learning how promote language learning:

• how to prepare students to process new language
• how to review new input to really make it stick
• how to get learners to notice and accept their own progress

I began going to workshops, soaking up accepted TEFL methodology, taking every bit of training offered by the different schools I worked for, and learned

• how to facilitate groups
• how to teach people who think they can’t learn
• how to use media
• how to assess performance
• how to give feedback

I’d always used didactic approaches from museum work, e.g. responding to images and music, solving puzzles, creating and extending stories/ scenarios, acting things out, making posters etc. But there was an intensive phase where I overegged the pudding, using all sorts of therapeutic bells and whistles. I quickly realized it was just a way to keep people who like that sort of thing happy. Went mainstream again. Did the LCCI CertTEB with Mark Powell. Took the Cambridge TKT. I was always going to do CELTA, but there were always other extensive courses that seemed more applicable and interesting: intercultural competency; media in teaching; teaching ESP at college; setting up distance learning.

Today my classes are materials-light though I actually write self-study materials; I’m focussed on my learners and don’t make my students work online unless they want to, though my classes are permanently hooked up to the internet. I’d quite possibly fail CELTA, as my lesson plans hardly ever turn out the way I thought, and I hardly use my laminating machine anymore, though the guillotine does comes in handy for made-to-lesson cards. If a learner needs to be immersed in hands-on, friendly learning materials, I can still pull out the stops.

Looking back at my teaching life so far, I see I’ve missed the boat on CELTA. It should have come after about a year of teaching. I feel a bit naked around EFL movers and shakers who espouse CELTA, but that can’t be helped. It’s so easy to get too comfortable in teaching, so I’d still take a course, frankly, reviewing the whole of TEFL, with a trainer whose philosophical approach embraces dogme and who focusses on support and coaching, rather than on input and training.

bloggers, business, other, teaching | 18 Comments »