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Former online teacher training manager Matt Courtois and I meet to talk about online teacher development and evaluation. What opportunities does online teaching create for teacher development?Opportunities in Online Teacher Development (with Matt Courtois)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, once again, we have Matt Courtois.Matt Courtois: Hey, long time no see.Ross: Last time, Matt, you and I talked about the effects of coronavirus and teaching online to serve things that teachers can do in class with students.Today, I thought it'd be interesting for us to talk about the effect that teaching online, and teachers just not being in the same physical space as either their managers, or their trainers, or their peers is having on teacher development.Matt: I think this whole teaching online thing, it's so lonely. Before all this happened, you're in here, your teacher's office, with 10 colleagues who are bouncing ideas. Here, you're sitting in possibly in an empty apartment, lonely experience.Ross: Absolutely. Before, when I at least worked in a school, sometimes you have a thing of a teacher would come in on a break and just be like, "Oh my God, that was a disaster," and you would have the chance to go like, "What's up? Can I help? What was the issue here?"As soon as you're online, those interactions in the staff room or by the water cooler, those don't happen anymore. It made the importance of formal teacher education stuff even more important than it was before.Matt: A lot of the feedback you get from your peers doesn't necessarily happen in a formal avenue, but a lot of times you're just sitting here talking about your lesson.Ross: It's like what we were talking about last time with teaching, that online is not necessarily better or worse. It's just different. There's some advantages to doing teacher education online, but taking the offline stuff and putting it online, it's not going to work.You have to think of some other potential advantages of online that maybe don't exist offline, and try to take advantage of those.Matt: There some things that you can do that are completely different from face‑to‑face feedback or coaching or training that online can be a lot more effective.Ross: One obvious place is that if you are teaching online, it's highly likely that every lesson you teach is going to be recorded. There are huge opportunities for doing self‑observation and peer observation, that in face‑to‑face settings are really difficult to set up.Matt: In a previous company that we worked at together that had face‑to‑face lessons, it's something we encourage lots of teachers to do. Video your lesson, then afterwards, you can watch it. I really think, over the two or three years that I was advocating this idea, I don't think a single teacher actually did it.Ross: Even doing the thing of peer observation. I might want to observe you teaching such and such a class, but when you're teaching that class, I also have a class. It's really difficult to ever actually make that work.Obviously, all of these problems just disappear immediately since we started talking about online teaching, where everything's recorded.Matt: One of the best things you can do is watch yourself teaching. I know the way I am. If I have that video there, and it's already done, I'm going to watch myself teaching.I know if somebody is giving feedback, you do want to be specific because it is helpful. If you, as the observer, think something didn't go well, you can refer them back to minute 5, 12 seconds, and say, watch this and watch how you interact with the student or that student.Ross: Or, let's watch it together. There's no more of this, "Oh, I didn't think this went very well. Well, actually, I thought it went fine."I think it's powerful to be able to say like, "Which part of the lesson do you want to talk about?" "This part." "OK, let's move the video forward to that part and we can watch it together. We can we can talk about it."The videos could be used in at least one of three ways that immediately spring to mind. One is that, as a teacher, you could proactively go watch this yourself and reflect on it or transcribe bits of it or whatever.Another potential use is that you could make a video available to your peers to watch, for example. Or, another bit is that your supervisor or trainer or whatever could come and watch you teach.Having things online, there's a real issue around privacy and access that is going to be really interesting.For example, at the moment, if we were in a school together, and you were the manager and I'm the teacher, and you want to come and observe me teach, you could just barge into the classroom and watch me, if you really wanted to.I might be upset about it, but I would know you were there. As soon as it's online, there's all of a sudden this thing of like, well, maybe everything's probably being recorded by the school or at least by someone.Potentially, you can observe anything that I've taught without me knowing about it. There's a flip side to this, though, of course, which does mean that when you're observing people, they're automatically going to be more nervous than they would be if there was no one in the room, the whole observer's paradox thing.Often, you'd find that a lot of the feedback I'd end up giving trainee teachers would be about teacher talk and talking too much. I sometimes wonder, are these people just talking too much because they're nervous because I'm in the room? If I wasn't here, they wouldn't be nervous.Therefore, I'm giving them feedback on this aspect of the teaching that really is not an issue for 99 percent of the time. It's only an issue when they're being observed.This is another advantage to this covert observation that, as a teacher, you can be observed, and as a manager, you can observe teachers. There's no longer this problem of people being nervous and changing their behavior because there's an observer in the room.Matt: Ideally, it's going to be a much less intimidating and less distracting experience for the teachers and the students. By having this avenue for observations online, your presence isn't going to be known at all by students and the teacher. Maybe it's less intimidating.Ross: At the moment, in terms of teacher observations, there's also different ways of doing it. You could have the manager just walks in completely unannounced, so the teacher has no control over when they're observed.You could have the manager tells the teacher in advance, I'm going to observe this class, and you spent all this time preparing. You could have the manager gives the teacher some options, so the teacher has a bit more ownership over when they're observed.Or, the teacher even could say to the manager, "I would like you to come and observe this class before I teach it." Of course, with online, it moves, it almost adds an extra part on that graph, on that continuum.You're the manager, I could say, "Not that I would like you to observe this class that I will be teaching next Tuesday." I can say, "I want you to observe this class yesterday that I had this problem with and tell me, what should I had done in the situation or what tips you could give." It could give teachers more autonomy.Matt: I know a lot of teachers who would want to impress their observer. Most teachers are going to choose one of their stronger lessons, which I actually think is a good thing. As an observer, I would like to see you at your best.You were talking about teacher talk earlier. I don't want to see some mistakes and coach you about something that doesn't really occur to you very often.I want to see you at your best and see if we can find some areas of that that we can move forward a little bit, and the teacher coming to that decision about, "This is my best lesson," and they're showing that to you.Hopefully, through that process, they watched that lesson. They're thinking about a lot of really good reflection that's going to happen automatically by trying to show their manager their best lesson.Ross: The potential there is for the teacher to choose something that they actually want the manager or the supervisor or trainer to see.Matt: Odds are, at this point, if teachers are choosing their best lessons, there's probably a lot of things that we can find in their online teaching to help push them forward a little bit.Who was your guest a couple of weeks ago? I don't remember, but he was saying most of the online lessons.Ross: This was Russell Stannard. He was saying there were a lot of terrible online lessons, which is true. The opposite of that could also be true. The other advantage of having everything filmed is to take us to peer observations for a moment.If we all, you and me and we've got five other people, who work in the same school, we could make our professional development with something. Like, you can choose one of your classes this week or an activity that you did in the last week that you thought was particularly good and show it to everyone.Normally, if you do that, it's going to be you standing up in front of everyone describing what you did. It's you actually showing everyone, "Here's a video of this activity I did. It worked really, really well." I think that's a lot more useful. A lot more potential benefits for everyone else in the school.Matt: Especially now, I talk about Bloom's taxonomy a little bit. A lot of teachers with online teaching are at the very first stage. When they see something that works, they're going to try to replicate it.They're not higher up on this taxonomy where they're trying to invent their own things. They're just trying to see what works and copy it. Showing these video examples is so useful for where they're at right now.Ross: Another interesting thing about this is that if you make a video of an offline lesson, you must’ve had this before, you video the class and afterwards, you put the headphones on and you watch it.It's like, "I can't really hear what the students are saying." I wish the board work was clearer. I feel like offline, the video is not as good as actually being in the room.Online, of course, watching the video after the class is just as good as watching the class live or even better, because you have 100 percent accurate representation of what actually happened there.Matt: You're seeing exactly what the student sees from their perspective when you're looking at a recording of an online lesson.Whereas offline, I don't know, whenever you have a mingle activity with 20 people talking at the same time, you don't feel the excitement of those people talking. You don't get to hear what they're saying. You just hear a bunch of noise. [laughs]I feel the very nature of these online lessons, that you can observe the whole thing, what's happening with every single student at every single point, and exactly what the teacher is doing, and how they're using their board exactly, how it ties into everything together to get an overall picture of this experience that students are having.Ross: That's a lot about the actual process of the observation. Observing or having classes online, observing and giving feedback or having a discussion afterwards, also opens the door to different ways of giving feedback or at least discussing lessons that wouldn't really be possible offline.Those conversations, when they do happen face‑to‑face, can often be very emotionally‑charged because the observer might be defensive. It's called hot cognition, when you're still affected by the emotion of event itself.There's also this potential by doing an observation on line of an online class. You then open up all these possibilities for it to be a much more cold cognition and for people to be more objective about the whole process.Matt: I think online, with email as well, a lot of your tone gets lost.Ross: You've observed my class. Emailing me about it afterwards is probably not ideal. What are some of the ways of trainers and trainees or supervisors and teachers actually talking about a lesson after it's happened?Matt: I can go on Skype, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever messaging device. A lot of these, there's a function to leave a video message. With video messages, you don't miss out on some of the body language and stuff that you would in an email.Your tone and maybe supportive nature as an observer can show up whenever you're sending a video message rather than an email. The observee doesn't misconstrue what you're saying. That's the benefit of writing an email.The benefit I find over face‑to‑face feedback. When you're giving face‑to‑face feedback, it's almost a confrontation. If you, as the observer, are maybe talking about an area for improvement, it's almost like an argument, or it can be, if it gets out of hand.Whereas, by giving video messages, you can, first of all, use the observer. You can try to record it a couple times. You can make sure that you're saying it in a way that the teacher can accept it.As the observer, you can say like, "Before you respond, can you look up this article? Here's a link to an article that you can read, then I want you to compare that to what we're talking about in your lesson."Also, the teacher has the chance to watch this video, with your body language and all the benefits of video. They can sit back and think about that message for a while. They don't have to respond immediately like they would in a face‑to‑face conversation.Once they've come up with what they want to say back to you, they can send the video message back to you. You'll find that the level of conversation is actually much higher.That way, it's not such a hot debate. It's a little bit cooler. You can take more time. You can actually prepare people to come up with a better response to what it is that you're saying.Ross: Matt, thanks for joining us.Matt: My pleasure, as always.Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.Matt: See you.

Regular guest Matt Courtois returns to discuss teaching groups of young learners online. We focus on some of the advantages of online teaching – what is it possible to do online, that isn’t possible to do offline? How to get students to genuinely and meaningfully communicate with each other online? And why tech problems and glitches might actually be the best part of online language lessons.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest, returning once again, is Matt Courtois.Matt Courtois: Hey, it's good be back.Ross: It's good to have you back. Matt, you and I used to work together in the same company. A large part of what you were doing was training teachers to teach online lessons of groups of students.Obviously, lots of teachers now all over the world are teaching groups of students online, so pretty cool to get your ideas and experience of doing that.Matt: Also, where I'm working now, we're doing the same thing that I think a lot of people are going through, and then we're transitioning our face‑to‑face classes to online.Ross: In your experience of doing this, both now and in the past, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges for teachers?Matt: One thing that every teacher...Actually, it was my first instinct as well, whenever I move to an online company, was thinking about, what do we do in a "real" classroom? Basically, figure out, right now, let's do that online, which is all good.It limits you because there are things that you can do online that you can't do in your regular classroom. First of all, teaching online is a real classroom. Secondly, there's a lot of advantages that teaching online has that you wouldn't even know how to do in a real classroom.Ross: I'm imagining here like a Venn diagram. It's like, what teachers tend to do online is just the stuff that overlaps often with teaching offline.Matt: One of the challenges that I still struggle with in training teachers online is trying to consider how can you get students to interact more. You've run Skype meetings, I've run Skype meetings, or zoom meetings, or whatever platform you're using.It ends up being a lecture. You don't get the participation you would in a normal training. It's just the nature of the way those platforms work. You can't get 10 people talking at the same time when working on a project.Ross: You can't do that thing of turnaround to speak to your partner now and discuss this if it's 10 people all sharing the same online space. What do you think are some ways that teachers can get students to interact with each other online in those group classes?Matt: I think the nicest way that a lot of platforms use, the most logical way to get all your students interacting at the same time is if you have six students, break them up into three different breakout rooms. They can talk for five minutes. Then you gather back together at the end, and you can debrief what they came up with in those five minutes in their breakout rooms.Ross: I can imagine there being a lot of trepidation from teachers in using them. It really is like a complete blind spot. If you're setting up group work in a class, you can kind of hear what everyone's doing at the same time, but as soon as they're in different, literally different rooms, it's absolutely impossible to hear what's going on.I guess maybe some tips for teachers in setting those up would be to be really clear about what you expect students to be able to come back at the end of the five minutes and be able to do or present and be super specific in the instructions.Matt: That goes with something I recommend telling teachers during class. Tell your students, go and get something from your house. You're talking about food, like tell students go to your refrigerator and find some food that you can present or show off.Again, you do have to consider, if you don't set a time limit, you might have some students that are gone for 15, 20 minutes. Because going on the refrigerator can be a point of distraction with some people.[laughter]Ross: Yeah, that's such a good point. I feel that's the other side of that Venn diagram. It's something that's possible to do online but not offline, is get real stuff from your house and from the students' houses, and bring them together and show them and compare them.Matt: Some obvious sets of stuff that everyone has in their house. You've got your furniture, different rooms. I had a teacher who's doing a demo with me. I was the fake student. She was doing the different rooms in the house. She basically would say, instead of take your computer to the bathroom or the bedroom ‑‑ it's too difficult; it's an invasion, almost.Instead, what she said, "Go to your bathroom and find a toothbrush. Bring your toothbrush back here and then go to your bedroom and find your pillow." It's vocabulary within the room. You can practice some of that.Different rooms, food, family members, presumably you're in your house with your family. For little children, especially, you can say, bring your parents here and introduced them to the class.Ross: You could do some cool translation activities with that as well. Like, get grandma, and you ask the question in English, the other student has to translate it into grandma's first language, then you do that back the way.Matt: Another huge way ‑‑ this is probably the best way you can get all your students talking in the same time with that breakout rooms ‑‑ is have them do the role play with their parents.It's great for parents too, because I think a lot of parents want to see that their children are learning and there's evidence of them being able to produce language in English, and they are interested. They are wanting to participate in their student's learning.Ross: They'll participate regardless. If the teacher just lets them be passive, you're really rolling the dice there in terms of what participation you're going to get. We've seen just about everything, from just shouting out the answers to telling the students that they're stupid for getting it wrong, to giving the wrong answers.If you're able to set roles for what you actually want the parents to do, then you can involve them in a way that you know is going to be productive.Another big difference for teaching kids online compared to offline, I think that's a potential advantage, is the classroom management language is really different for online to offline.If you think about just any decent coursebook, the first chapter is usually going to be things like what's your name, because you need to know your students' names, and things like stand up, sit down, pencil, eraser, pen, boom, blah, blah, blah, because students need to know and need to be able to use that language in order to actually participate in the class.I feel that most coursebooks will not have the language that you need to participate in an online class, which is all these other things. It's [inaudible 7:00] not stand up and sit down. It's like click, circle.Matt: It's an interesting thing, with teaching Lexus. I remember, a few years ago I went to a talk, and somebody was saying what are the first words that you teach to students? You teach the highest frequency words first because those are the ones that students use most.Ross: Again, it's so context specific, isn't it? I guess if you were teaching a group of students from different countries and different backgrounds, you would want your coursebook at the beginning to have things like, where did you come from?If you're teaching a group of students that are all in their home country from the same time, that language is not meaningful at all. It's even not meaningful, like if the students already know each other's names because they're in the same primary school class and have been for three years. That's not useful language.One of the things for teaching online is you really have to start assessing like, why do we teach some of the things that we teach?Matt: Along with that, here's the flip side of it that's positive is that a lot of my teachers, in the beginning of a lot of classes, they want to do something that students notice.They always ask students, "How's the weather today?" Something I point out is you and I sitting here in the same room would never ever ask that question because you're fully aware and I'm fully aware of how the weather is today, and we know that each other knows.It's not a real interaction. There's no exchange of ideas happening. It's purely a fake interaction that we create for the classroom.Whereas, all of a sudden, online, you do have some people being in different places. When I'm on the phone with you, if you're in Shanghai and I'm in Shenzhen, let's say, we would say, "How's the weather today?" I think online, now that becomes a genuine interaction. We can actually do it and have some different language appear as well.Ross: Even very simple things, like very, very low level students, like, "What colors can you see?" It's a sort of thing you'd maybe do in the classroom with real beginners. When everyone's in their own living rooms, all of a sudden, that's a genuine question. What colors can you see? Because I can't see your living room.I can just see wall behind you. You can see all these different things. All this communication that before used to be fake, or these questions, at least, that used to be display questions are now referential questions. Real communication is happening.Matt: I remember a story from our old company where one lesson, the teacher was asking students questions like that. They were looking at this PowerPoint together, and he said, "What's on this page?" The kid would say, "This is on the page, this, this, this." He just named all the items. "All right, next slide, what's on this page?" "This is on it. This is on."It's all this fake interaction because the teacher knows what's on those pages. Then all of a sudden, there was a technical difficulty. They started looking at two different pages.All of a sudden, the teacher said, "Can you tell me which page you're on? What are you seeing?" The student starts describing the page, and he's like, "Oh, so you got three pages ahead of me." You realize, it was by mistake, by a glitch in the system.Finally, we had a real interaction when they were looking at different things and trying to communicate and solve the problem together, so they could end up on the same page together. For the first time in their lesson, they're having a meaningful exchange.Ross: The teacher has a reason to actually listen to the student's answer as well. The communication is happening both ways.Matt: How many times am I going to ask you like, "What do you see?" He'd tell me, and I'd say, "Good job." That's not a real interaction. It's only for the classroom.Ross: That's a fascinating example, doesn't it? It was like, sometimes online, when things go wrong, it can be a positive thing. I've definitely seen this as well in terms of the audio quality, and then the teacher and students are not being able to hear each other.It doesn't mean you get more sort of negotiation and meaning of like, "What was that? What do you mean? Can you explain? Is there another word for that? How do you spell it?"Again, I'm not asking how do you spell it because I'm checking your spelling. It's because I'm genuinely trying to understand.Matt: Trying to understand. I remember something you used to complain about. In another previous, previous job, there's a lot of times to get that gap between students, to get that meaningful exchange in a real classroom.To get one student looking at something the other student doesn't, you end up blindfolding the student. You end up blindfolding student B, so student A can describe what to do. How many times have you been blindfolded in real life? No, don't answer that. I don't want to know.[laughter]Matt: You can understand why teachers are doing that, why they're putting the blindfold on their students ‑‑ so they can create that gap and that need for real communication, but it's just so inauthentic. Whereas online, you do have some people with camera problems and some people that don't. You can really use those to make your lessons better.Ross: Absolutely. I feel so much of this, it's really just taking the same principles as you're teaching off...I think there's so much of what is bad teaching offline. Teachers holding up flashcards and getting students to name them. That's also bad teaching online.Matt: It's a bit more obvious online as bad teaching. A teacher, when they have those flashcard activities, they can have 10 activities where they get the students up and running around.In essence, all they're doing is getting students to memorize these words on the flashcard. It is a very interactive thing where students are moving around. It can feel pretty fun.Online, if you're doing just that list of words or looking at the picture and treating it like that focus on the six vocabulary items again, and again, and again, you can't really fall back on that fun flashcard activity.Ross: Something you hit on there is the importance of doing something to get the students to move.I think half an hour, if you're six years old, to sit in the one place, that's a big ask. Trying to do those activities of whatever it is, like miming something or finding something in the room and bringing it back. Just doing something to get the students to just move away from this sitting, staring at the screen is a bit of a must.Matt: One rule I make for teachers is get your students up and moving in every class.Ross: That's obviously really easy to do offline, but I think that's something that requires a lot more thought online. Or, maybe it's not necessarily easier offline. It's just everyone has been doing it for longer.People have developed all these strategies for getting students to switch seats or look at something outside the class or do a rolling dictation. If it's online, you need to think of a new way, a new reason for the students to stand up and do something.Matt: I said in the beginning that this is something that all teachers around the world are doing, this transition from offline to online. I'm excited about it. In my profession and education, it is a pretty conservative thing.It hasn't evolved that much since I've taught. We're at a time now, right now, that we are doing something very different, and everybody's doing it. I'm excited to see what comes out of this.Ross: Good. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Matt, thanks for joining us.Matt: A pleasure, as always.Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.Matt: See you.

Ross and online teacher trainer Alex Li talk about some of the biggest differences between teaching offline and online, common mistakes teachers make teaching online and their favorite online teaching activities.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. Again, this week, we are doing something coronavirus‑related. We're talking about teaching language online. We've got dos and don'ts for those of you who are now making the transition from teaching offline to teaching online.To help us with that this week we have my friend and former colleague, Alex Li. Alex, for the last year‑and‑a‑half or so, has been a trainer, training teachers to teach online.In this episode, Alex and I will go through some of the differences between teaching English online compared to offline, some of the opportunities and a lot of common mistakes that teachers tend to make.More and more schools, it seems like, across the world are switching their classes to online for the time being. If that's you, listen on. We've got some great tips for you. Enjoy the interview.Ross: All right, let's start. Alex, thanks for joining us and doing this.Alex Li: Yeah.Ross: This is also the first podcast I've ever done while wearing a face mask.Alex: [laughs]Ross: We're obviously doing this because lots of teachers now are making the transition, we don't know for how long, from teaching offline to online. You did that yourself, obviously. You used to be a teacher offline, and then you started working in an online company.Maybe we can start off by talking about some of the differences. What first struck you as being some of the differences between teaching online and teaching offline?Alex: That would be personalization. Personally, I didn't do that when I was an offline teacher for young learners. Frankly, I don't know 80 percent of my students that much, while the rest of 20 percent I've probably talked to them after class. For one‑on‑one class, that gives teachers those opportunities to know their students more.Ross: When we are teaching kids offline, you're right. Usually, as a teacher, you don't learn that much about them. As soon as you're teaching students in their own homes, the setting gives you the opportunity to talk about so much more, doesn't it?Alex: Yeah. As you said, in a brick‑and‑mortar classroom where everybody's in the same place and the same city, if you ask how's the weather that would be pretty dull, because everybody knows that. After five students, they will be like, "Oh teacher, I know..."Ross: [laughs]Alex: ..."it's sunny."Ross: Or you have to pretend and make up like it's snowing...Alex: You show your flash cards.Ross: ...maybe when you're living in Africa and it snows. Online, there's all these natural information gaps. The teacher and the student are always going to be in different places...Alex: That's true.Ross: ...often in different cities or different countries, there's so many opportunities there to contrast and compare what's going on in the two locations.Alex: That can happen throughout the class. You can do it at the beginning as we talk about weather. You can also talk about certain target language.Ross: I remember when I was an offline teacher, and I used to teach kids. I remember sometimes trying to get kids to bring in something into the class, to do a show‑and‑tell type thing.One time it was like, "Bring in a photo of somewhere that you've been on holiday." Always, like two students would remember and the other 14 wouldn't. It would never work very well.I feel this is one of the other huge opportunities for teaching online. Students have all this stuff around them, especially for low levels. For example, if you're teaching clothes, the student can open their wardrobe and, for example, bring out their favorite clothes.You can show the students your favorite clothes as well. There's so many opportunities for personalization that you would never get if you were doing it offline.Alex: Yeah. I think you mentioned one good thing or one good model, is that the teacher gets to show the student if we are talking about clothes, his or her clothes first if it's a lower level. That's something I noticed some teachers are not doing online.Teachers have got to keep in mind that you're teaching one‑on‑one. You're still teaching, and giving appropriate model is important and essential.Ross: Offline, if you've got a class of 15 students, you might pick the strongest student to come to the front and demo that for the rest of the class. If you've only got one student, there's no opportunity to do that. What do you have to do instead? As the teacher, you have to model both parts.That's one of the biggest differences maybe, between teaching groups offline and teaching one‑to‑one online. The teacher has to take on so many different roles compared to teaching offline. For example, if you're doing group work or pair work or something offline.You put the students in pairs, and the students are conversation partners to each other. The teacher, you're still kind of in this teachery role where you're going around and monitoring. As soon as you go online, you've got to switch into a different role of being this...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...conversation partner. That's quite difficult to actually do.Alex: Yeah, that's true. Some teachers ignore that part. There's no other kids in this classroom, so they ask their student to read both parts if we are having a dialogue.Ross: I wonder why that happens if the teacher just thinks like, "Oh, I'm going to get my student to talk as much as possible?"Alex: Or they just think that those students need to read before anything.Ross: Another thing that teachers are influenced by is increasing the amount of student's talking time in the class. That's one way to do that, is to get students to play both parts of a dialogue. I feel you're losing so much in terms of it being a natural or authentic conversation. It's much better for the teacher to assume one of the roles in the dialogue.Alex: Exactly. As a teacher, if you're talking about a lower‑level student, you can select the part that is easier for him or her to read. After he or she turns into an intermediate student, you can have him or her pick the role he or she wants. That's the way personalization occurs.Ross: You could do the same role‑play twice. You guys could just switch roles halfway through. Like if it's someone asking for directions first of all, the teacher provides the answers. Then you can switch it around and give the student in the more challenging role after they've seen a model.Those are all things that teachers would do naturally offline, giving a stronger student the more challenging role in a role play. I guess you have to be the strong student if you're the teacher during those activities. [laughs]Another common problem we see a lot online is teachers getting students to read whatever is on the screen out loud. Often, it's just a page of a course book, or something. I've seen teachers that even ask the students to read the title of the page. [laughs]Alex: And the instructions.Ross: And the instructions, right. What are some of the problems with that?Alex: It's not effective. The instruction is not the target language. I get it why they would do that. They probably think that they read it. They probably can't understand the instructions. The more they read it, the more they will get to know what's going on, but actually no.Ross: It doesn't work like that. If I'm asked to read something out loud, I always find I don't know what I've just read. I'm so focused on getting the science right that I don't actually process the meaning. With those, it's better to get the student to read it silently, which is also just much more natural.You don't see people [laughs] walking around with their phones or reading things out loud. We read in our heads most of the time. Or the teacher reads it out loud for their student to listen, and they can follow along.We started talking about the materials. Another issue with teaching online that doesn't happen so much offline is that teachers will tend to use every page, if we can call it that, of a lesson of the course book. We often online call it the "courseware." They'll go through it in order rather than jump around.It's interesting, because I noticed myself doing this with having the same book on my Kindle versus having the paper copy. I find that on the paper copy, it's so much easier to flick through and read chapters out of order. On a Kindle, I find I don't do that as much. I go through it in order.Teachers teaching online will tend to do the same thing of follow every page rather than what you might do in a course book, which is skip some activities or you might do the last activity first, that kind of thing.Alex: I don't know. Maybe somebody told them that, "You've got to finish the courseware." They just feel like, "Oh, by finish, you probably mean I need to complete each page."I once had a survey with some teachers, some call‑ins. They were like, "I didn't finish those activities. I didn't finish all those pages. Is that OK?"Ross: [laughs]Alex: I actually observed this teacher's class. She was doing fine. You can see that she's got some preparation. First and foremost, she identified what to teach, what the teaching objectives are. She did that, but she didn't complete the pages. Some teachers who are listening might not notice that.Ross: It's like offline teaching where the main thing is, "Teach the students. Don't teach the plan." You're totally right. A lot of teachers feel like, "My job here is to get to the end of these pages on this PowerPoint," rather than to help the students learn something or achieve something.Up until now we've mainly been talking about speaking, but I wanted to touch on writing for a moment. This is definitely one of my pet hates online, is teachers asking students to write something using the mouse. It's not a useful skill to practice.Alex: [laughs]Ross: Writing using a mouse and writing using a pen ‑‑ I mean, just try it ‑‑ they're very, very different. I can write quite well with a pen. I cannot write well with a mouse.Alex: I really show my respect for those teachers who can write perfectly with a mouse.Ross: [laughs] Perfectly with a mouse.Alex: If your student has this learning need which is to practice their handwriting, you can ask them to prepare a notepad. They can write there, and they can show you.Ross: Something else that I rarely see online is teachers or students actually moving the camera. Most people, when they're teaching online, they're using a laptop.Usually, the screen, it's on a hinge. It's pretty easy for the teacher or the student move the screen down. You could write, and the other person would be able to see what you're doing. I feel for teaching writing online, it's pretty challenging.Alex: We can agree that the priority of teaching online would be speaking and listening.Ross: Maybe we could talk about some activities that we think work particularly well. I can start out. One of the activities I've seen that works really well is a creative activity where you get the student to make something. The teacher has to do the typing, and the student has to do the telling.You've almost got the student describing the creative thing that they want, and the teacher drawing and filling things in. One of the examples I've seen work quite well is a shopping mall. Here's a floor plan of a shopping mall. The teacher asks the student, "What shops do you want in the shopping mall? What do you want them to be called?"The student has to say them, and the teacher types them in. You got a lot of communication happening in that activity, but also the student ends up being quite motivated.Alex: You're creating something.Ross: Absolutely. The teacher has to understand what the student is saying. If the teacher doesn't and makes a mistake with writing something, often the student's very quick to correct their teacher...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...which is great because you're getting a lot of real communication happening there.Alex: I have two personal favorites kind of related to teaching texts. After you go through all those comprehension questions the courseware offers you, if you still have time, if we're talking about Bloom's Taxonomy, higher audio thinking skills at the level of evaluation, you can ask your student what are their perspective of the character?How do they think of this character? Ask why afterwards. You don't want to sound so much like what the courseware would offer. You can start with your own model. There is a stereotype going on, which is Chinese students, they are reluctant to express their opinions. This can be something to model.You can have different views on something, on somebody. It's OK. We're not judging somebody.Ross: [laughs]Alex: We're just expressing our opinions. Another one is for those classes there are texts about different cultures. Some students might be unfamiliar with those. After going through the text, say the setting is in Brazil and it's about carnival, then you can change it to the setting of Chinese New Year.That would be something that they can relate to. Back to Bloom's Taxonomy, you're creating something different with your student.Ross: With that second example there you're also taking advantage of that real information gap. If you're a teacher and you've not been to the same country as your student, you're probably not going to know very much about the culture. It's a real motivation for the teacher to be genuinely listening to what the student's saying and for the student to genuinely communicate with the teacher.Again there, we've got that thing of the teacher taking on another role, being the conversation partner and not just prompting the student to try out some target language but actually communicate something that the teacher wants to listen to.Alex: A suggestion for teachers would be to ask questions that they don't have answers to.Ross: Again everyone, that was Alex Li. If you enjoyed that, go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com for more podcasts. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

We meet with Dave Weller to discuss the issues surrounding native and non-native English teachers such as attitudes of parents and teachers, the responsibilities of language schools and how to change opinions.Tracy: Hello, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Hi, folks.Tracy: Today, we've got our regular podcast guest...Both: Dave Weller.Ross: Hello, Dave.Dave Weller: Hello, everybody. I was trying not to say hurrah again.[laughter]Dave: Regular listeners will know what I mean.Ross: Dave's here this week to talk with us about a rather controversial issue...Tracy: Which is native English speaking‑teachers versus non‑native English‑speaking teachers.Ross: Today, we've got three questions. The first one is what's all the fuss about? Second...Tracy: What do the parents and the students think about it? The third one...Ross: What can managers and schools do about it?What’s the “Native” / “Non native Teacher” debate about?Ross: Guys, what's the debate about?Tracy: Based on my understanding, just schools, parents, teachers and students feel a different mode of English ‑‑ native or non‑native...They've got advantages and disadvantages. So it seems more people, native English‑speaking teachers and have a better model of English.Ross: As well as that, it seems like there's a bit of a tendency in the industry that native speakers who are teachers will tend to get paid more. Native speakers who are teachers will tend to be given more opportunities.Dave: Actually, I read about a study that looks at higher education institutions in the UK. They found over 70 percent of them made hiring decisions for staff based on whether they were native or non‑native speakers.Ross: That doesn't surprise me a lot. It's almost like our whole methodology and approach to teaching language, doing everything in the students' L2, is almost based around having native‑speaking teachers, right?Dave: Definitely. It goes really deep. Again, there's different levels of it. It's fine if it just stayed as an opinion, but once it turns into action, policy and systems, that's where discrimination kicks in. It becomes distinctly unfair and entrenched within our industry. Despite being what a lot of people think of as a very nice and liberal industry, it hides quite a lot of trade dark secrets.Ross: Interestingly, if you do any reading on this, you find that it becomes very difficult to define what a native speaker actually is. One thing that you can't deny is that the person grew up speaking English, but when you start to look at other criteria, they're very, very woolly.It tends to be things like they can be creative with language, they don't have a foreign accent, they're aware of the culture of the language. All these things, which clearly, it's possible...Dave: Of course. Non‑native speakers have that as well.Ross: Ultimately, you get to this point where, really, the only difference between the two is that one of them grew up speaking English, and one didn't. Which, if you're learning English from someone, is pretty irrelevant, isn't it, what language or what they did in their childhood. Who cares about that?Dave: Precisely. All you really care about is how good they are as a teacher, how well then can connect with you in the classroom, they can motivate you, and all the other things that go into making up a good teacher.This whole argument actually needs to be rephrased into clearer lines. Silvana Richardson mentioned in her IATEFL that we need a new word for non‑native speakers. For me, that word would just be English teachers.There's no point devolving that word into finer detail. You should actually go back up the chain. We're all English teachers. Just some of us have different skills and backgrounds than others.If we were to do that, it would solve a lot of these problems. When you talk about a teacher, you can, "OK, which language can they speak and at what level?" That way, you can say, "Well, in the old parlance, there's this native‑speaking teacher who can speak a little bit of the learner's L1, but not to their level."Then there's a native speaker who can't speak any. Then there's a non‑native speaker who is local to the area. Then there's a non‑native speaker that isn't local from the area."Ross: Part of it is linguistic determinism. The Sapir‑Whorf hypothesis, made famous by the recent movie ‑‑ "Arrival." This idea that because of the language that we use, that we have to describe the teachers as native and non‑native teachers or speakers, that's the thing that we end up focusing on.If we changed it, and say, we called them monolingual or bilingual teachers, then which of those would you have a preference for?Dave: I agree to a point, but this is why I might be against that. I can't say everything goes as you plan. Then in 20 years' time, you actually might get a reverse situation where there's prejudice against native speakers because of the bilingualism versus monolingualism.All I think you should do is revert back to the phrase teachers and then what skills does that teacher have.What do parents and the students think about “Native” / “Non- native Teachers”?Ross: Interesting in that the research I've done on this and the survey where I looked at parents, students, teachers, and sales and service staff, and asked every group, I had a bunch of different attributes in there.For example, attitudes, qualifications, personalities, relationship with students, being native speakers, what people look like, their nationality, and their ability to speak the student's L1.The number one thing was definitely not being a native speaker. That ranked about number three or number four in people's preference. The native or non‑native speaker is...people use that as a proxy.It's something that if you don't know anything about the industry, then you can relate to that very, very easily, but if you're a parent and you don't know anything about language learning, you're not going to know what qualifications the teachers should have.It's very difficult to see what the teachers' attitudes are or their personalities, if any, or of those things. It is quite simple to check. Is this person a native speaker or not?Dave: I find it fascinating. To go back to non‑native speakerism for a second, I was reading some of Adrian Holliday's work. He said that it started out as almost a marketing ploy from various aid agencies back in the '60s to propagate the idea that native speakers were the best model.In which case, that obviously links up to the idea that Silvana Richardson said in her plenary that we can change the perception in the industry. All it takes is a little time.With research that backs this up ‑‑ research coming out that actually says that it's not just OK, but beneficial to use L1 in the classroom ‑‑ you put those things together, then this is the way forward to actually eradicate bias in our industry.Ross: Let me play you that quote from Silvana now.Silvana Richardson: Employers always have choices. Collusion with inequality and prejudice is a choice. Discrimination is a choice. As Rajagopalan says, "In our neoliberal world, who will dare challenge what the market dictates?"The answer to this is, just because the market is demanding certain things, it does not mean that the market itself cannot be made to perceive things differently.Ross: Do you think that's true? Is that realistic though, that the market can be made to perceive...Dave: Of course, it is. Yeah, definitely. If you look on an individual on a mass scale, how many times have we changed our minds over the course of our professional development over the last 10, 15 years?Precisely, it's the same thing with the industry. Industries change, ideas change, views change. It happens usually, I would argue, from the ground up rather than direct from above, especially in an industry such as ours which is quite fragmented and has no overarching body to dictate the standards.Tracy: I still think there is a huge market, because you just look at the education companies doing online or offline. The business...they create the scenario, and having native English teachers is the better choice.Ross: In that case, do you think it's an easier or difficult or a long or short task to change the way that Chinese parents and students see local teachers?Tracy: It's going to be a long way. I have to say all the non‑native teachers need to work really hard, because if you constantly made the mistakes, and you constantly misspell the word, and you constantly use the utterances or expressions that people don't normally use, and use those language to teach your students, there is a problem.Ross: It's so unfair, because I see a lot of really bad native‑speaking teachers [laughs] who don't get picked up on making teaching mistakes or methodological mistakes.Dave: Or even language mistakes of teaching language which is highly improbable, possible but doesn't often get used. They end up teaching...It's, maybe, not going technically wrong, but you'll hear people teaching language that never gets used.Ross: They're from one particular part of the Deep South in America and they use a phrase that only them and their family and the people in that village use and are like, "I've never heard it before."I don't see them getting picked up on those mistakes. They tend to get a free pass because they're a native speaker. That's really unfair.Tracy: A lot of teachers or parents always say, "Oh, I want my student or my child to speak Standard English," or "All the students should learn Standard English."Dave: There's no such thing anymore, is there?Ross: I don't think so. Is that a cultural concept that exists in China? There is a standard Chinese, but there's no Standard English.Dave: Let's play devil's advocate just for a second. I can clearly understand what they mean though. Even though we're looking at it from a technician's point of view, we're looking at it from a point of view of professionals in the industry. What parents mean...it's almost like the shadows on Plato's cave, to take it deep for a second.The concept of a horse, despite all horses can look slightly different...Again, they're using that term as a proxy of an English that will be understood around the world. No matter where they go, it'll be effortless to be able to communicate with other English‑speaking teachers and not be hindered in any way through pronunciation or grammar or phrase. That's shorthand for what they're trying to say.Ross: Indeed, but is it not also the case that a very, very small percentage of learners will learn English or an accent or something to the point where they're at that level of, "Oh, I want to sound English" or "I want to sound American," but, really, for most of the students I've taught, even after years, they sound Chinese, because...Dave: Maybe your students, Ross.[laughter]Dave: Sorry, that's such a flippant answer. No, I completely agree with your point. In fact, I'd even add to that and say, it's not about increasing their level. It's about teaching the skills to grade their language if they do encounter another non‑native speaker who has trouble understanding their accent, maybe because they're from a quite different culture. Again, you're arguing against a perception and a belief.What can managers and schools do about “Native” / Non-native Teacher” discriminationRoss: Can we talk for a minute about language schools and, maybe, what language schools can do about that? I've got another Silvana quote for you. Do you mind if I play this briefly?Dave: Please do.Silvana: This is part of the California/Nevada's position paper opposing discrimination against non‑native English speaking teachers. It says, "Teaching job announcements that indicate a preference or requirement for a native speaker of English trivialize the professional development teachers have received and teaching experience they have already acquired.Such announcements are also discriminatory and ultimately harm all teachers ‑‑ native or not ‑‑ by devaluing teacher education, professionalism, and experience.Ross: To what extent do you guys agree or disagree with that?Dave: 100 percent. Again, I really speak with authority from my background, which is as a native speaker. Again, it does trivialize my experience and the amount of work I've put in over the last 15 years of professional development, studying...Ross: Getting qualifications and things...Dave: Precisely. The extra work I've put in ‑‑ thousands of hours ‑‑ and then to be reduced to being called, "He's a native speaker. He'll do."Ross: It still happens so often. Tracy, you had something like that a few weeks ago over organizing a teacher training thing here. Again, you've obviously got your diploma, you're studying your MA, you've been a tutor and a course director on accredited courses.The people running the course said, "Oh, can you make sure there's a native speaker or foreigner for at least half the course?"Dave: Who's just finished a 40‑hour online course, perhaps.Ross: Or maybe not even that. Isn't it fascinating that that still persists?Tracy: They even didn't care about what qualifications or experience they have. Also interesting, the person from the organization even asked me, "Can you tell me more about this trainer?"I said, "OK. Maybe I can ask this person to send the CV, send the training, teaching experience." She said, "We really don't care about it. Just tell me his age, which country he's from, and also if he's white or black."Ross: What about on the flip side for a minute then, Dave? As someone who used to be a director of studies before in a school where you had to make hiring decisions, where's this balance? Were you ever in some tough situations there?Dave: [laughs] Yes.Ross: How did that work out then?Dave: The thing is, as a manager ‑‑ anyone who's been a manager, I'm sure, can relate to this ‑‑ you have to pick and choose your battles. That was the one that I'll actually go to bat for.If you had several candidates and various degrees of discrimination in different things as one that Tracy mentioned earlier about someone's skin color, also about non‑native speaking teachers, you just go and not actually ask if these persons' qualified, they're capable, they've gone through the interview process, and that they would be a good fit for this team, they'd be a good fit for this country, and they'd be a great fit for our school.Then you'd put your foot down. You'd have an argument, almost, with the culture of the school. If you won ‑‑ sometimes you did, sometimes you didn't ‑‑ often, unfortunately, it depended on how badly the school needed teachers, and how many classes waiting you had, how many students waiting to start class.Unfortunately, it was usually the deciding factor. Once the teacher arrived, whereas the students after a few lessons, would be delighted with the experienced teacher, the parents would turn and become delighted and insist on having that teacher as a future teacher for their children.What’s does the future hold for “Non-native English teachers”?Dave: It's always sad that we actually have to do this, or that it's something that we do have to get passionate about. Do spread the word on.I'm very optimistic about it. I like to think there are enough people out there that people will go back, spread the word, and take small actions. There will be this groundswell of people that do this.Ross: All right, Dave, thanks very much for coming on. It was a pleasure talking to you again.Dave: It's a pleasure to be here, as always. Thank you.[background music]Tracy: Thanks, Dave. Bye, everybody.Ross: Bye.Tracy: For more podcasts, videos, and blogs, visit our website...Both: Www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Ross: If you've got a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, leave us a comment...Tracy: If you want to keep up to date with our latest content, add us on WeChat @tefltraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoyed our podcast, please rate us on iTunes.