October 18

RetroTEFL – Dictation

There’s been a change in how teachers’ professional development is covered at our school. In previous years, everyone got together every couple of weeks and we had a session on a particular topic – which mean that you could sometimes feel that content wasn’t immediately relevant to your teaching environment or, in some cases, that familiar content was being revisited again.

I’m really excited about the change for this year – today we had the first meeting and could choose one of three threads that we wanted to look at this term,  These fell into the categories of The Language (specifically phonology), The Classroom (with the funky term “tissues and issues”) and The Bigger Picture…which this term also had a funky title “RetroTEFL”.  (Aside: Aaaah, yet again phonology is the Cinderella of ELT.  However, despite lacking a funky title, it was the most subscribed to thread for this term!).

A really engaging first session today – we identified why we had chosen that threads and set ourselves SMART goals to work on during the next few weeks.  I’m not sure if you’ll be able to see from my handwritten notes, but I’m planning on turning the tasks I try into blogposts, as well as jotting down my thoughts in my journal.

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Posted October 18, 2017 by Teresa Bestwick in category Resources

2 thoughts on “RetroTEFL – Dictation

    1. Teresa Bestwick (Post author)

      So, confession time! I too was looking forward to it, but stuff got in the way. I wasn’t teaching as many hours as in the past and in the end, I didn’t get the chance to put much into practice. However, this did make me think that perhaps part of setting goals is knowing our own limitations. I’m very much the type of person who will want to try everything and I come away from conferences with lots of activities starred on the various handouts I pick up. However, away from the conference buzz and back into the daily slog, it’s hard to find/make time to look back at those notes and put the ideas into practice.

      Reply

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