Leading Learning and Culture

Published by NAMA Foundation

This summarizes much of what we need to know and practice when leading in an educational setting. By the way, mind maps are excellent ways to help us see the relationships between ideas, which in turn helps us to retain what we learn for longer. 

This mind map is the outcome of an EDULEAD Module on educational leadership. 

Talented Sena helped me design it. Otherwise, my mindmap would have been black and white with just arrows connecting ideas 😄

 

Distance or face-to-face learning, which should we adopt?

 Published in IATEFL Blog, VIEWS

After a little more than two years of the sudden shift to online teaching, our department decided that we adopt a hybrid approach to teaching, which meant that part of the program was taught face-to-face. I was a little hesitant before I went to my first on-campus class. I had to dress appropriately, ensure that I had all I needed for my class: laptop, HDMI adapter, white board marker, coffee mug… I felt a little awkward at the beginning of the lesson; I only knew the names of  those students who usually had a picture on their Zoom profile. It wasn’t appropriate on my sixth week of teaching not to be able to call students by their names. In distance learning, I was more in command; I could see each student’s full name on my screen. 

I decided against group work in that first face-to-face session. I didn’t feel comfortable breaking students into groups. I thought of how malleable it was to assign students into breakout rooms where I could decide if they chose their own groups or I assigned them to random groups. Definitely in the coming sessions, I will have group work, but not now. Projecting my carefully prepared PowerPoint was another issue. Where is the cable? The remote control? The screen to project my laptop on was too high. I had to ask a student to pull it down because by no means I could reach it. I made the joke asking students if, seeing their instructors through Zoom only, they thought they were taller than they were in reality. I lost many of the PowerPoint controls I usually saw on my screen. It took me a while to find them by hovering the mouse over the lower part of the screen. A student asked me if I could enlarge the print so that it could be seen easily. Again, I had to figure out how to do something I usually did spontaneously. Navigating among webpages, videos, and different documents was so easy in my online class. Now I had to configure the wi-fi settings on my computer to access the internet. Umm. I forgot to do that before entering class. A student offered  wi-fi hotspot so that I could connect to the Internet as mine would not work on my laptop. That took quite a few minutes.

The class time went well. Students were interactive and responsive. I wonder if it was fairer in the online setting where students were called on according to the order they raised their hands. It was easy to tell who raised their hands first and call on them to talk. 

To take attendance, I had been taking it in the online class through a Google Form Exit Ticket where students were considered attending after responding to a question that summarized the lesson and another where the students assessed their learning on a scale from 1 to 5. No matter how large the class was, attendance was taken in no time as all the students completed the Google Form simultaneously. Now I had to do it manually and call the names of the students one by one. It was a little time-consuming. 

This was how I compared distance teaching to face-to-face teaching. But the students’ story was different. I asked them to reflect on both experiences. They had positive perceptions of in-person classes. I could see the excitement on their faces and feel it in their voices. They were all smiley  and happy. Very appreciative. Very interactive. Very attentive to every word said in class as though expressing their gratitude to be on campus again. We had a short reflective talk comparing online classes to face-to-face classes. The majority affirmed that they benefited more from face-to-face classroom discussions and that they were more focused on what was going on in (the) class. Although it was more comfortable for them to be at home, the home environment had many distractors. In a face-to-face lesson, they were better able to take cues on when it was appropriate to ask a question or participate in a discussion. In addition, some expressed that they could no longer bear the isolation from friends. They did not want to graduate not knowing how being in the physical learning environment felt like. 

Still there were very few who were happy to have had the opportunity to continue their education online because otherwise they would have had to stop their education. Among those were students who had a full-time job or a job that did not allow flexible timing. Mothers and those who were out of the country were also at a disadvantage when it came to pursuing their degrees. Moreover, as many countries are struggling financially and inflation has been at unprecedented rates, commuting to schools and universities is costly especially for those living in remote areas. 

Students’ experience during their learning matters a lot. Often, as educators, we focus on our experiences as teachers when assessing the success of a new method or technique. We need to keep in mind that teaching is not about a show that we display in the presence of our students, rather we need to be aware of what students experience and how they learn. The experiences learners go through impact not only their learning but also their mental well-being. Having experienced distance learning for a little more than two years now, and not being far from teaching fully in-person, this is the ideal time to think of a teaching/learning model that combines the merits of distance learning and face-to-face learning. A model that brings out the best of teachers and accommodates to the students' needs and learning styles.

Turning classroom activities into social events IATEFL Voices Issue 286

 

The Impact of Professional Development on Teachers’ Automaticity in Performance

Farhat, A. (2022). The Impact of Professional Development on Teachers' Automaticity of Practice. In D. Bullock (Ed.), IATEFL 2021 Virtual Conference Selections - 54th  International Conference (pp. 40-42). IATEFL.

  

Introduction

Professional development has always been a concern for educational institutions, and much effort is put into it as a result. Ongoing professional development has often been conducted in the form of training sessions. However, one-shot training sessions do not ensure that teachers acquire the practices introduced during these sessions, and thus the content of these sessions does not necessarily become part of the teachers’ in-class performance unless they are continuously prompted and reminded of these practices. In this study conducted in a small private school, language teachers (English and Arabic) took part in a three-hour session where they were introduced to seven games[1] (language activities) that encourage oral and written communication:

1. Guessing Game
2. Describe & Draw
3. Paper Conversation
4. Show & Tell
5. Surveys
6. Chain Story
7. Dictogloss

During Training

Each game was introduced to the language teachers during the training session. First, the framework of the game was explicitly communicated to the teachers. Then they practiced the game. After the practice, each teacher was requested to reflect on the activity: how it might be used in their classes, how it could improve their students’ language, how is it different from/is similar to other language activities they do in their classes.

After the training

After the training, the participants were asked to apply one of the seven activities in their classrooms, record that activity, write a reflection on how the activity went in the class and then submit to the trainer a recording of the activity and the reflection on it. The teachers had access to the training session notes and recording of the training session on the school website, and the trainer was available to provide any support needed in the implementation on the new activities in their classrooms.

Findings

Teachers’ Reflections

Teachers reported to have enjoyed the newly-introduced activities and to have found them useful in their language teaching. They also reported that they implemented the activities and that they were easy to use, requiring little resources.

Choice of Game/Activities

Studying the recordings of the teachers, it was found that nine of the ten teachers chose Show & Tell as their activity; one teacher chose the Describe & Draw activity.

Delivery of Games/Activities

The activities, as recorded by the teachers, seemed to slightly resemble those as given in the training session. One teacher abided by the protocol of Show & Tell as given in the training session but omittetd key points, such as the type of questions to be asked to the speaker by the audience.

Discussion

Self-reported data (reflections) are not always indicative of classroom success and actual classroom performance.

The majority of the teachers chose Show & Tell as the activity to use with their students. This activity was in fact a speaking activity that the language teachers already commonly used in their classrooms from grades k – 8. It is clear here that the teachers chose an activity that they were familiar with rather than choose a new activity that was introduced to them during the training session. Moreover, the delivery of this familiar activity did not change much; the protocol as introduced in the training session was not abided by.

The choice of activities along with their delivery shows that it is not easy to change practices of practitioners as they are enfossiled in their performance due to long practice with no modification. This explains why teachers continued to perform the activities as they had done them all along before the training. In addition, teachers tend to rely on activities that they are accustomed to even after being exposed to training. That is evident in the teachers choosing Show & Tell rather than any of the other six new activities.

Implications

Teachers need to be given ample time to practice newly introduced practices before they are expected to start implementing them in their classrooms. Moreover, they need to be provided with sufficient, constructive feedback on their practices to help them improve these. In this study, the teachers were able to watch the video recordings of their selected activities and reflect on them. They had they had the opportunity to compare how they delivered the activity with training session notes on that activity and assess their performance; i.e., they were able to check where they abided by the activity protocol as given in the training and where they did not.

 

Link to presentation recording.

 

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[1] These games are taken from (Scott Thornbury © Mosaik Education)