(c) Wesley Fryer, via Flickr

So, I’m sitting in a train on my way to the airport to catch a flight to Istanbul. The ISTEK ELT Conference is taking place there this weekend. I’ve been looking forward to going for several weeks, but now I’m angry. The train’s on time, and I haven’t forgotten my passport, but travelling by train gives me time to make plans or brood (depending on whether the planning is finished or not). No, the reason I’m fuming mad is because of my colleagues.

Let’s go back a few days… On the last day of term the conversation in the staff room turned quite naturally to the holidays. The activities varied from doing nothing to moving house to going away somewhere – all quite normal, until I said I was going on a training course and then attending a conference in Istanbul. Actually, the reaction didn’t surprise me too much. Some people were surprised that I was going given that I was not being sponsored, others couldn’t see the point (without even asking what the conference was focused on), and a sizeable group stated flatly that they would never do such a thing in the holidays. Even the professional conference attender on the staff wasn’t prepared to give up time during his holidays for such an event. No-one expressed any interest in getting feedback after I returned, though many wanted a report from a colleague who was going to Mallorca. As I said, I wasn’t particularly surprised by this, and I got on with more important things in my life. Until this train journey. No planning to do. Time to brood… Continue reading »

This article was originally published as a guest blog in Betty Ray’s edutopia.org blog.

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(c) trix0r, Flickr

To put it bluntly, teachers have a major image problem. Seen from the outside, teachers have excellent job security, long holidays, they aren’t accountable for their performance and then to cap it all, they are constantly complaining about their pay and conditions.

It gets worse. Although teachers may be great at presenting information, they are not usually skilled at defending themselves against adversaries in the same way that politicians, journalists and business managers are. This means the teacher is holding a really bad hand when getting involved in emotive arguments like how to reform education.

Because reform is an emotive word. If you put it together with education, you have a heady mixture. At the same time reform is an elusive thing. It’s like quality. Everyone wants it, but no-one can agree what it is. So when the #edchat discussion last Tuesday took on the issue of education reform and the role of the teacher in it, I knew it would be a dynamic discussion. Six-hundred ninety-one posts in an hour from 83 different contributors around the world confirmed my expectations. Continue reading »

(c) Gary Hayes, via Flickr

If you’re a Twitter user and you’re looking for great, thought-provoking ideas on education then a good place to start is @spedteacher.  His blog, Education On The Plate is a must-read for anyone looking for stimulating input on the subject of education.  I saw through Twitter that he’d blogged on the subject of running schools like a business – something which I feel has great advantages.  One thing that Deven did was to identify that this is not only controversial, it is also not simple.  Teachers are almost naturally resistant to the factory model for a school, recognising that students are individuals in their formative years and have differing needs and skills.  I’ve even heard a teacher use Pink Floyd’s, The Wall as an example of how school can be too focused on creating drones.  Sadly when it comes to this piece of music, I can’t forgive the band for the first line – We don’t need no education.  Countless kids know this line without understanding or even having heard the rest of the piece. Continue reading »

(c) YellowDog, via Flickr

I read a blog post yesterday challenging TEFL teachers to choose between two possible scenarios for teaching the same material.  The interesting thing is that the sequence that appealed to me most was not the one that I would use with my current English class.  A healthy discussion about the pros and cons of the two approaches has developed (and is developing as I write this).  Now Jason Renshaw, the author of the post, is a skilled teacher and published author so it’s fair to say he knows what he’s talking about, but in posting a comment on his article my thoughts went off at a tangent.

Now I’m going to take a risk and suggest you read the article and the comments before you continue reading here… (Please come back!)

OK, back with me?  Let me carry on. Continue reading »

(c) gcbb via Flickr

Personal Learning Networks are all the rage at the moment. As with a lot of “modern” things, they’re existed for a long time but have now got a snappy new name. It used to be called “advice from friends and colleagues”. But in the era of social media the word friend has taken on a new meaning. Social media has provided me with a lot of friends who I’ve never met and never spoken to. I’ve exchanged a few tweets with them, commented on or received comments on a blog article, or maybe read a few forum posts, and as a result these people are, in Web 2.0-speak, friends.

A PLN can take advantage of lots of different services – Facebook is perhaps the best-known, Ning is also very popular and offers The Educator’s PLN, but there are lots of others, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Of all the available services, the one I find the most fascinating (and the most useful) is Twitter. One of the most interesting things I learned about Twitter before I even tried it was that it is like Marmite. It polarises.

I’m constantly amazed at how many people feel the need to criticise Twitter - it’s superficial, it’s useless, it’s boring, you can’t say anything useful in 140 characters, and so on… Never one to be influenced by the crowd, I signed up. Continue reading »