Podcasts about ross there

 As Lake Mead water levels dropped due to drought, the two major water intakes pulling water from the lake for Southern Nevada were getting perilously close to the surface. Doa Ross, the deputy general manager of engineering for the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), joins the Water Smarts podcast to talk about how SNWA engineered a solution and constructed a new intake deep below the lake's surface and a pumping station to push water from the intake to the water treatment facilities located uphill.  Working together, Intake No. 3 and the Low Lake Level Pumping Station ensure the Las Vegas Valley will have access to its water supply – even if  lake levels drop so low, water cannot be drawn through Hoover Dam to produce power or deliver water to downstream users. Doa discusses the construction challenges of one of the largest drilling projects in the history of the United States, and how the two major construction projects give Southern Nevada an opportunity to partner with other states. According to Ross:“There is an elevation in Lake Mead that if the water drops below 900 feet, Hoover Dam can no longer take water through it to generate power or to even release water to Arizona, California and Mexico – the three continued users down the Colorado River. So we have ensured the ability to still receive water even if we get to a point where that water can no longer make it through Hoover Dam to the downstream users.” “We were very fortunate to be able to provide a solution to this drought with engineering and construction.”“We have to have the infrastructure prepared and ready and able to deliver water to our valley, our Southern Nevada residents and customers and even tourists continuously in a way that we're not threatened by the drought.”Recommended resources:In 30 minutes, the Third Intake Documentary covers seven years of one of the world's most challenging tunneling projects Learn more about SNWA's Intake No. 3 and Low Lake Level Pumping Station.Save water and money with an SNWA Water Smart Car Wash coupon.

Going From Teacher To Business Owner (with Ed Dudley, Jake Whiddon & Peter Liu)Visit our website: www.tefltraininginstitute.comSupport the show - buy me a coffeeMore about studying the Trinity Diploma in TESOL with RossMore from Ed DudleyMore from Jake WhiddonPeter Liu from Owl ABC on starting a start-upRoss: Peter, you started your own business a year and a half ago. Before you tell us about what it is, what made you want to start your own company?Peter Liu: My current co‑founder and I, we've been good friends for several years. He's also in education. He's got 15 some odd years of experience. We saw this trend of thousands of Chinese kids going abroad to study.There was a study done several years back that showed 25 percent of Chinese students going to an Ivy League school fail, 25 percent. When I read that statistic, that blew my mind.There's a gap in skills that Chinese students have, who are attending school abroad. There are tons and tons of services that help kids in China improve their English. They can help with their test‑taking of the IELs and the TOEFL. It only ever seems to go as far as your first day of university so you can get into school.How do you actually stay in and succeed? I've been working at this education technology startup. We built a whole bunch of fancy tech. I worked very closely with the product and the engineering teams. I had a little bit of experience building an online product.Ross: This is almost like working in a startup prepared you to start your own startup?Peter: Yeah, you could say that.Ross: Did that take some of the fear out of it, as well?Peter: It's that and also our product is not technically that challenging. We're not building a technology company. We're building a services company.Ross: How has what your company does changed from what you originally visioned, compared with now?Peter: The biggest change was our business model. Originally, we were focused on a B2C model, basically, selling our services and our content directly to consumers. We quickly found that we don't have the local knowledge of how to message, how to create marketing channels to reach these consumers.We made the decision to shift our focus to B2B, licensing our content and our teaching to other education companies so that they could do the heavy lifting of marketing directly to their students. They already have students who are, perhaps, learning English from them, but who need to build their critical thinking skills. That's where we come in.Ross: Can I ask you a question about money and stuff? Let me give you an analogy here. I remember once climbing a mountain. When you're climbing a high mountain, it's a little bit dangerous. You have a turnaround time. If we don't get to the top by four o'clock, we're going to turn around. Because if we're walking down in the dark, it's really, really dangerous.Do you have that with the business where you're like, "If we're not starting to make money, or if we're not able to break even within 12 months or two years, then I'm going to quit this and go back to teaching English." How does that work?Peter: It depends what scale company you're doing, and also how disciplined you are with finances.[laughter]Peter: Basically, how much money do you have in the bank, and how long can that sustain you? What is your burn rate? How much money are you spending?Ross: Cool. Can I ask you then what would you say if there's one thing I really wish I knew or I paid more attention to when I first started this, I should have done this. What do you think that would be?Peter: I'm a big proponent of the lean startup methodology which is, basically, applying the scientific method to operating a business. You form a hypothesis. You run tests to either validate or invalidate that hypothesis. Then you either proceed if you validate your hypothesis or you change course.I wish we'd applied that methodology a little bit more rigorously to the early stages of our product development, because of the business environment that we're operating in. We were very cautious in marketing, and putting ourselves out there, and putting our product out there.Ross: In case someone stole the idea.Peter: Precisely.Jake Whiddon on starting your own schoolRoss: Hi, Jake.Jake Whiddon: Hi, Ross.Ross: You started your own kids' school recently. You've been involved in TOEFL for about 15 years. What made you want to open your own school now at this point in your career?Jake: Honestly, I felt that I had worked for long enough for big companies. I wanted to have some control over the output of what I was doing. I felt I reached, not a ceiling, but a point where there was nowhere else I could go with what I personally wanted to do with education. That's the reason.Ross: Jake, how did you choose the people to go into business with? There's so many people you know, but why did you choose the people who work with you now?Jake: It's really interesting. For a long time, I'd always wanted to start a business with another one of your ex‑guests called Dave Welleble. I realized that we were too similar. We were very similar. What I had to do was find someone who could complement my skills. I've got some skills that come up with creative ideas in trying to have operations experience.I needed someone who knew how to network, do finances, work with people, and communicate better, and then that person came along. It's someone I'd worked with 10 years ago, and they just came out of the blue and said, "Hey, by the way, I'm actually looking for someone who can work together."I think the best decision was finding someone who I knew well but can complement the way they work. That old adage of never work with your friends, I don't think that that's true. I think that you should work with your friends.A point a friend was making to me the other day was, I met this person through working with him, not through being a friend. I knew I could work with him. I think that's worked really, really well.Ross: How did you go about getting an investor then, because, obviously, opening a school requires a lot of funds?Jake: You don't find people to invest in your school, they find you. There's a lot of people in China with a lot of money that they don't know how to spend. They need to spend it on something, whether it's a gym or a hairdresser, or something they want to do. For us, it was someone who knew they wanted to do something in education, but they didn't know how to.They came to us and said, "Can you guys do something with education for us?" Which is what I find most people say. On saying that, though, people are still looking for investors.The way it happens in China is you're just constantly networking. You never know why the person that you're talking to might be the person who can invest money in you one day. That's something to remember.Ross: What skills do you think you've learned in other parts of your career that helped you the most in running your own school?Jake: Well, none. No, I want to say none. No, I say that as a joke. It's amazing how little I knew. I mean, I ran five, four different schools as a [inaudible 08:20. I ran 12 schools as a regional manager. I ran 40 schools as a national manager. I controlled budgets of two million dollars. You know what? A lot of those skills didn't help me at all.What they helped me with was operations. They helped me with efficiency. They helped me with things, like knowing that you're using classrooms at the right efficiency. You're using teachers at the right amount. You're utilizing people in the right way.It didn't teach me how to run a business. With all the experience in the world, I have learned more in the last eight months of how much I didn't know.Ross: What have you had to learn when your started your business? Is there anything that you've never experienced before, or something that you felt, "Oh, this is something brand new to me, and I have to start learning"?Jake: I'm learning that without a big budget for marketing, for example, we can't go and afford a math/science and blanket. You have to think everything we're thinking. We have to flip it over and think about it from the bottom up. That's probably the first one. The other one is people don't want to work for a company that no one's heard of.People want to work for big name companies. Who wants to work for a place that has only one school? Lastly is how much relationships matter. The relationship you have obviously with the customer but also mainly with everyone around you, everyone. The Fire Department, the Visa Office, everyone you have to have a relationship with.You're constantly having to deal with each of these people. We talk about bureaucracy, but bureaucracy might be a good thing because, at least, it means there's some bureaucratic process. Here, it all comes back to relationships.Ross: Finally, Jake. What advice do you have for teachers thinking about starting their own school?Jake: Remember, that's my last advice. The industry is never as caught up as you are. Whatever you're thinking, the market is probably two steps behind you. The market needs to be educated to get to where you are first.Ross: Thanks, Jake. Bye‑bye.Jake: Bye, Ross.Ed Dudley on going freelanceRoss: Ed, you obviously started off as a teacher teaching full‑time. Do you want to tell us about how did you go from teaching full‑time to becoming now a freelance teacher trainer and author?Ed Dudley: You're right. I began teaching full‑time. Then very gradually, I began to be invited to speak at local conferences and to do, perhaps, weekend events for teachers in the local area. Then gradually I was invited to do more work, which involved going to another country for a few days to do some teacher training. I would balance that with my school work.I would rearrange my classes, or I would get colleagues to cover my classes in my absence, which was, again, a difficult balancing act. There was no masterplan there for me. I simply did it slowly and incrementally over time. The amount of teaching that I was doing gradually reduced. The amount of training and materials writing that I was doing gradually increased.Ross: There are a lot of teachers considering becoming a freelancer. Are there any tips or recommendation for this group of people?Ed: It has the potential to cause sleepless nights if you're going to suddenly do it cold turkey. I was in a position where I could try out freelance work, freelance life with a safety net. I tend to have the philosophy that if you focus on doing a good job on what's in front of you, then that will lead to good things in the future.I've always remembered that it's important to be aware of what your strengths are. If I'm asked or invited to do something that I don't think is aligned with my strengths, then I say "no" to that. It can be tough when you're a freelancer to say "no" to something.There's a lot of pressure on us to take every opportunity that comes our way. It is important not to bite off more than we can chew as well, and to make sure we do a good job by saying "yes" to the things that we're confident we can do well, and "no" to the things that we don't think we can do well.Ross: What do you think are the advantages of the freelance life?Ed: The key advantages, that if you have the mentality or you have the personality that can deal with the uncertainties of the freelance life.In other words, if you're not too freaked out by the fact that you're not quite sure what's going to be happening 12 months from now, then that gives you an awful amount of freedom. It gives you a chance to focus on your own professional development.I find that I'm able to do a lot more reading. I'm able to find time to plan my work with much more freedom and less frazzledness than when I was balancing my training work with my full‑time job. It gives you a chance also to make last minute decisions as well.Very often, you'll find that an opportunity comes up at very short notice to travel somewhere and do some work. You have this really exciting opportunity to go somewhere you've never been before, to work with people you've never met before. That's an incredibly stimulating and enjoyable way to work.

When you've gotten your debt and spending under control, it can be comforting to hold on to your free cash for a while. Taking the leap from that safe pile of money to the Big Bad Market is not easy. However, as we've discussed before, cash is not a risk-free investment. The longer you sit on a lump sum of cash, the more risky it becomes. This is because of inflation. The effects of inflation are difficult to internalise because the rand value of your money stays the same. Let's say you put R100,000 in a low interest cash account today. The interest you earn is enough to cover the annual cost of the account, but nothing more. At an inflation rate of 5.5%, in 10 years you'd only be able to buy what R58,543 can buy you today. The rand amount is still R100,000 so it seems like you haven't lost anything, but you can afford half of what R100,000 can buy you today. In 20 years your bank statement would still reflect R100,000, but you'd be able to buy what R34,272 can buy today. As you can see, the inflation risk increases every year. This week we help three listeners figure out how to put their cash lump sums to use. The checklist we managed to come up with for a cash lump sum is as follows: Fund your tax-free investment vehicle: Commonly referred to as tax-free savings accounts or TFSAs, these products should be every South African's first investment. As an investor you are liable for dividend withholding tax, tax on interest and capital gains tax outside of a tax-free account. As we discuss in this week's episode, these accounts are not meant for cash savings. Don't speculate unless you can afford to lose the money: While cash makes it easier to capitalise on investment opportunities as they present themselves, cash can also make it easier to hop on a bandwagon that's not suitable. Don't invest your cash into a speculative investment (think alternative asset classes, sub-indices or individual companies) unless you can afford to lose that money. Lump sum vs average: While the math shows us investing an entire lump sum in one go makes more financial sense in terms of potential future earnings, going into the market one small investment at a time is a legitimate option if you're scared. If this is your first investment, think of it as a teaching tool initially. Once you feel more confident, you can add the rest. Work out the future value: If cash is giving you a feeling of safety, find an online calculator to work out the future value of your lump sum using a 5.5% inflation rate. Now play around with higher or lower inflation rates. Hopefully seeing the value of your investment deplete will be the motivation you need to get going. Diversify: If you're holding on to a large amount of cash, you are not diversified. Make sure to put your money to work. Subscribe to our RSS feed here. Subscribe or rate us in iTunes Win of the week: Matt: If I earn a salary from a foreign company and then decide to do the nomad thing and travel around low cost of living countries for, say, a year but remain a tax resident in SA. My understanding is the first R1m earned will be tax exempt- is that the case? “Tax residents in South Africa will be taxed on their worldwide income. But that is dependent that they're still SA tax residents. Offshore salary earned is taken into account. R1.25m ito the latest tax amendments will be exempt from tax in SA.” Harry This was mainly due to the fact that I did not know what the best option was, and my new employer only offered a provident fund.. I've been maximizing my tax benefit with my new employer provident fund. I'm also sitting on cash in a savings vehicle with my bank, currently returning around 3-3.5% interest. I'm living rather small (renting only, no debt of any sort) and have quite a bit of money to invest/save every month. What would you advise I do with my portfolio? The preservation fund? Should I keep maximising my provident fund contribution? What about my cash savings account? Should I consider taking money out of the country? Investing offshore? Joe I know we may have missed the boat both with gold and Tesla, would you suggest we go for an ETF with some gold in them? We don't mind going moderately aggressive. Steven I currently have free cash in my TFSA with ABSA Stockbrokers. Besides the fact that its not earning that much in the way of interest, they also charge a 1% service fee annually, which I believe is based on the value of the funds in the account? I'm reluctant to invest in the market right now as I feel there's no value and would prefer to wait for a correction, when it eventually comes? Although I have no previous experience investing in bonds I am thinking this could be a suitable option at this time. Looking specifically at the Stanlib Global Government Bond (ETFGGB), it seems to be doing very well so far but is this mainly due to the Rand's weakness over the past few years as opposed to any other factors? Considering that this is a reasonably low risk product, is it currently a better option than investing in a regular cash instrument which is offering such low yields at the moment? According to the fact sheet the time frame for this ETF is 3 years so assuming my investment period was 1 year or less, would you say that this is not going to be suitable? Santosh Based on FIRE (my FIRE btw is Fuck It, Retire Early) the rule is to have around 250 - 300x monthly income. So Kris, I know your FIRE number is R7M as you've stated this. so assume you have the R7M already and are still work and assume is sort of split into Cash, Bonds, Stocks and Property. If this portfolio yields you a modest 6% PA it amounts to your investments paying you R420,000 PA - Gross. Now this is gonna have a major impact on the tax you'll pay as there's no way that you can "hide" this from SARS and there's no way your PAYE accounts for this. You're gonna have to pay SARS either way. I know one of the solutions is to dump it all into an RA but then you are not liquid and you'll pay the tax in the future anyway. I'm sure the other FIRE guys like Patrick, Stealthy face this. What's the solution ? Does on just lap it up & pay the tax comforted in the knowledge that they're paying tax cause they've made money This tax liability is quite substantial as if you're an average earner, it pushes you 2-3 tax brackets higher and if you're a HNWI, even an increase of 0.2% of your taxable income can add R20000-R50000 to your tax bill for that year. Leon For the inflation linked option, the capital balance would increase by the cpi calculated rate at payment dates and interest is fixed at 5% of capital. The website mentions an index ratio calculated by cpi divided by base ratio or value, do you know where this base value(divisor) is obtained from? It only mentions that the cpi (numerator) is obtained from Stats SA. The fixed rate on the inflation linked 10 year bond is at an all-time high of 5%? Is this an opportunity to lock in a great rate or are the fixed rate bonds still the better option? It seems like there is more upside potential on the inflation linked bonds as it is unlikely cpi will remain at current lows over the 10 year period. I may be incorrect but it seems both options offer the roll over or restart option so you could capture any improvement on the fixed rates either way. Ross There is an awesome book by Andrew Hallam - "Millionaire expat" that details expat investing (He details options for people all around the world) He also has a blog. Another is Bogle heads investing advice and info based on Singaporean expat investing.

Jake Whiddon guest hosts the podcast and interviews Ross about interactions in online classes with young learners. We discuss the interactions that commonly occur in online lessons, what stops experienced teachers from being more creative in online teaching and how teachers can spark better and more meaningful interactions in their online classes.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Jake Whiddon: Hi, everybody. My name is Jake Whiddon and I'm here as the surrogate host of the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." We've got a very, very exciting guest today that some of you will know from previous episodes. His name is Ross Thorburn.Hi, Ross. Welcome to the podcast.Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Thanks, Jake.Jake: The reason we're interviewing Ross today is because he's just recently completed his dissertation research on online learning. As you all know, with the COVID‑19 school closures we've had students and teachers all around the world learning online ‑‑ probably one of the biggest changes in education in our lifetimes.We've had over a billion students learning online, I think, were the UNESCO numbers. Some recent surveys I have done and National Geographic have done have showed that 95 percent of teachers have now started teaching online and about 80 percent of them had never taught online before. It's a huge change.Welcome to the podcast, Ross.Ross: Thanks, Jake.Jake: Why would we be interviewing Ross about online learning is because Ross has actually ‑‑ some of you might not know ‑‑ has a background in teacher training but also in working with online teachers.This led to you doing your dissertation research. Can you just give us a brief outline of what the research was on?Ross: Basically, I picked four activities ‑‑ they were all communicative tasks ‑‑ observed 10 examples of each, transcribed what the interactions were between the teachers and the students for these 10 different activities and just looked at how much real, meaningful communication happened between the teachers and the students during these tasks.The reason being that a lot of people would say that one of the primary things you need to acquire language is to have meaningful communication.Jake: Just to get some perspective for the listeners, where are most of the students?Ross: The students were all based in China, but the teachers were pretty much all over the world.Jake: What would be the background for these teachers?Ross: Well, it depended a lot. You had some teachers who used to be, for example, primary school teachers, a lot of them were former ESL teachers or EFL teachers in a public school or a private school, and I think some people had just never done anything like that before.Jake: There's a range of experience and qualifications for the teachers.Ross: A huge range. Interestingly, the people that you maybe would expect to be the best, like the people with a primary school teaching background, actually didn't necessarily end up being the best teachers. A lot of the time, people with next to no experience actually sometimes did as well or better than people with long careers as teachers.Jake: Do you think there's a reason why teachers who had a lot of offline experience might not do as well as new...if I just started teaching and I started teaching online. My question was going to be, what did you notice were the biggest differences between offline and online teaching? It kind of relates there, right?Teachers who had offline experience, what issues do they have when they're coming online?Ross: You could almost think of this as a Venn Diagram. You've got a circle that represents all the things you can do offline and a circle that represents all the things you can do online.If you've previously taught offline, it's very easy to focus on the overlapping parts of those two circles, the things you previously did offline that you can also do online, and very easy to complain about all of the things you used to be able to do offline that no longer work online.Of course, there's this whole other part of the circle of great things that's possible to do online that you just never thought of before. A really, really quick example. A huge advantage of teaching online is the students, usually children, are in their own homes, so there's all these opportunities for personalization.If you open a course book and there's a unit on food, often the food in the course book will be generic things like pizzas and hamburger and toast, things the student might not like or even have eaten before.If you're online, there's this opportunity to say to the student, "Go to the kitchen, grab some of your favorite foods, bring them over, and we'll talk about what they are and you can practice describing them." That's something you could never do offline but it's really, really easy to do online.Jake: Yeah. Let's find out what you found out. Now, I found the most interesting part of your research was actually looking at the dialogues that you transcribed and looking at good examples and examples that could be improved upon.One of the dialogues that stood out for me as an example that could be improved on, was less effective, was the one about what students had to eat on certain days of the week. I'll just read this one."And the teacher says, 'What will you eat tomorrow? Tomorrow is Sunday. What will you eat?' The student says, 'Mushroom.' The teacher says, 'Mushrooms, good. And what will you eat on Tuesday? Tell me what you ate.' 'Pizza.' 'Oh, yum.'" It sounds so strange when you say it out loud.I've done a workshop with teachers using your research, Ross, and it seems so obvious. If a student just said, "Mushroom," would you then say, "Oh, you're just having mushroom for lunch?" or "Mushrooms and?" Has this child really understood or they're just saying one word to me because they know they have to say a food?There are so many things that happened in that one interaction.Ross: One of the issues there is, with that example, the students in China and the teachers in America or the UK or something, even if the student could describe the food that they were having, would the teacher even know what it was?I think food is something that changes so much with culture and country and what geographic region you're in. It's very difficult to be able to help students better express themselves if you don't have the cultural background to actually know what it is they're talking about.There's another one, hemp ball. "I had hemp ball yesterday." I mean, what's a hemp ball, right? The teacher goes, "Hemp ball, OK. Was it nice?" and then moves on rather than saying, "Was it sweet or was it salty? What color is it? Was it a dessert? Was it a main course?"Jake: Then there would be some really nice, meaningful interaction, learning about that child's food that they eat in their country and vice versa.Really interesting is, some recent research we've been conducting where I work is showing that the big shift used to be teachers who were teaching online were teaching the kids from another country. Now teachers are teaching the kids in their own country.That really stood out at me when I read your research on cultural relevance, that suddenly there's all this new cultural relevance now that I might be teaching kids who are just down the road but online.I can actually talk about the street and the building in my city and there will be some shared connection which will only add to the meaningful interactions between kids and teachers.Ross: Another really interesting thing that happened was another activity, that was actually the most effective one, was this nice collaborative activity. There was a blank plan of a shopping center on the screen, and the teacher had control of the pen, and the student just had to say to the teacher what shops they wanted the teacher to put in their shopping center.Generally, this prompted quite a lot of interesting and meaningful communication, but there was one example of one teacher and student. The student would say, "I want a pet shop on the third floor," and the teacher would say, "OK, great. What do you want your pet shop to be called?" The student would say, "I can buy dogs, cats, and birds."This happened again and again. The student almost seemed to have been brainwashed by previous questions of, "What can you buy in a pet shop? What can you buy in a food shop?" These very fake questions that no one in real life would ever end up asking, ended up tricking them into answering a wrong and really meaningless question in actually quite a communicative activity.Jake: Ross, can you give us another good example, another exemplar example?Ross: Sure. There was one of a student who basically didn't speak at all. I think she was the quietest student that I observed in any of these classes. This task was about filling in an invitation to a birthday party. The teacher says to the student, "When's your birthday?" because you have to write down the date of the birthday party. The student shrugs and says, "I don't know."The teacher says, "OK, well, just write down the 10th of October." The students goes, "No!" The teacher says, "OK, so when is your birthday? January? February? March?" and goes through all the months, and eventually gets to December and the student says, "Yes." She goes, "OK, we'll put December 1st." "No!" Then goes through all the days.It was brilliant because I think there's this assumption that communication really is always something that happens from the student for it to be meaningful. This was a great example of the student really listening very intensely to what the teacher was saying to try to come to this outcome of getting her birthday on this form.Even though she only said no and yes, there was a lot of meaning communicated there.Jake: What I love about that story is that it's a perfect example of learning‑centered teaching, as opposed to teacher‑centered or student‑centered. It's learning‑centered, not learner‑centered. The learning is at the center. It doesn't matter about all this stuff about student talk time, teacher talk time. No. If there's learning about to happen, let it happen. I think that's a great example.Ross, your research, I thought it was really nice how it came up with your top five findings. Do you want to give us an overview of your top five findings from your research?Ross: Sure. The most important one, maybe also the most simple one, is that the way lessons are usually structured is your communicative activities usually go at the end of a lesson. I've also noticed this interesting thing where...I have a Kindle, and I notice when I read a book on my Kindle, I tend to read it in order.But if I read a book ‑‑ especially sort of a reference book type thing ‑‑ a paper copy, I'll tend to flip back and forward through the book. I noticed teachers doing the same thing with online class materials, where they would go through the materials in order.That meant that most of the teachers most of the time would not get to the communicative tasks at the end of the lesson because they run out of time, because it's not so easy to skip activities. I think the top tip is just to put the task at the beginning of the lesson.Jake: A lot of online classes are following a linear progression. They have one PPT that goes from left to right and you click through. A really big tip from me is, if you're teaching online and you want to keep things meaningful, have a folder with a bunch of activities available. Don't have everything on one PPT. Maybe have three PPTs.You know, "OK, I've come in, and I'm meant to go this PPT first, but they're really good, so let me grab the community of tasks right now and whack it in." Or, "I've got a bunch of songs available and a bunch of photos." Sometimes you don't need anything. Just a photo on a screen is enough.Don't be so linear about your online classes. I think that people have the assumption that you should be linear because it's on a computer like it's a presentation, and that's not how it has to be, necessarily.Your other four points, Ross?Ross: Sure, so one of them was not putting sentence stems on the same page as a task. I found that if you had those, then what would happen would be the teachers would really tend to focus on accuracy a lot more than actual communication. It would really end up being something more like a drill in disguise than any use of meaningful communication.If you had something that was really much more like a task, like the thing I mentioned before, where we're going to make a shopping mall together. I'm going to draw it, you tell me what you want. The focus is much more on getting this task done and, therefore, the communication becomes the heart of it.That was also something ‑‑ and this is another point ‑‑ that really motivated the students to communicate.Without going into too much detail, a really common pattern of interactions in classes is this thing called IRS. The "I" part, the teacher initiates something, the student responds, and the teacher says, "Good," or something like that, "High five."When you had something different, where there was a tangible, meaningful task outcome, you get things like students interrupting the teacher, the teacher making suggestions to the students. For this make your shopping mall together, "Oh, why don't we add a cinema?" and the student saying, "No, I don't want a cinema, I want this other thing instead."Or the teacher saying, "Let's call your mall this." "No, I don't want that." These classroom interactions which you wouldn't normally get. Now, why is that really, really important? Because of the power dynamics of a classroom, the teacher is the person in control, so it's really unusual for students to challenge a teacher in class, because the teacher is the boss.But when you had this kind of activity, students were motivated to do that. Those are important things you need to learn to be able to do in any language.Jake: Yeah, I love that. With your point there about the sentence stems, I saw a teacher doing this with a group of eight students, they were all about ten. They just got them to write down the sentence stems and then said, "Stick them up on the other side of your bedroom."They were now doing the activity. If the kids wanted to use it as a nonverbal cue, they could look over. You know what the teacher noticed then? They knew where the child was looking. Then they could tell, this kid is using that as a cue. That's fine. It was almost like a personal scaffolding device.They would keep looking and eventually they would stop looking and get them focused on what the task was on the screen. While the child's online, they're in a room. There's so much you can be doing with that. They can be writing things down. They can be putting up cues around the classroom. Just remember to use all the space around as well.[background music]Jake: Ross, that was absolutely fascinating, and I really enjoyed reading your research and listening to these stories about the research. What I found was that a lot of your research related to offline teaching anyway is shifting some of my thinking about how I would teach in offline classes as well.Ross: There are so many principles that are really exactly the same between teaching online and teaching offline but just how you achieve them might end up being a little bit different.Jake: I'm sure all of you out there are now teaching online and you've all had experience with this. It was excellent to have such an experienced and well‑known guest on the podcast today. Looking forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.Transcription by CastingWords

The Who What How When and Why of Error Correction - TranscriptionTracy Yu: Welcome to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." The bite‑size TEFL podcast for teachers, trainers and managers.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone.Tracy: Hi, welcome to our podcast.Ross: A lot of the time when we're hanging out and we speak Chinese to each other, I often ask you to correct my Chinese if I make any mistakes. When you do, it's really annoying.[laughter]Tracy: Why is that?Ross: I don't know. It's like there's something about being corrected. You always feel that you're making a comment about how bad my Chinese is and it really annoys me. I don't know, it's funny. I always say, "Can you please correct me more?" but when you do, it's really annoying.Tracy: Do you think that helps you?Ross: Yes, but it's bad for your motivation because you feel annoyed by it.Tracy: What's the point? [laughs]Ross: The point is that today our podcast is about error correction and helping students and trainees and stuff learn from their mistakes.Tracy: As usual, we got three main questions or areas that we're going to discuss.Ross: First one is, why do students make errors?Tracy: The second one, should we correct errors?Ross: Finally, what principles are there in correcting students' errors?Why do students make errors?Ross: Why do students make errors?Tracy: One reason is, is an evidence of learning and is a part of the learning process. We learn how to drive and we learn how to...Ross: Swim. [laughs]Tracy: ...cook, how to swim and new skills. We usually make some mistakes and then from the mistakes, we can learn how to do it better.Ross: Yeah, no one does anything perfectly the first time.Tracy: The first time, yeah.Ross: That's impossible. Something I found really interesting about developmental errors is this thing called...we're not going to go too much into the weeds here with Second Language Acquisition, but I just wanted to mention this because I thought it was so cool.This is an example of U‑shaped acquisition from Rod Ellis' book, "Second Language Acquisition." Instead of me reading them out, Tracy, can you just make a sentence with each of them and I'll do a commentary?Tracy: Sure.Ross: This is for students acquiring ate, as in the past tense of eat.Tracy: I eat pizza last night.Ross: This is when you've not been able to mark the past tense, that's all, which is the first stage, and then...?Tracy: I ate pizza last night.Ross: Really interesting, right? The first type of past tense verbs that students acquire are irregular ones, which Tracy just learned. Next?Tracy: I eated pizza last night.Ross: This is after you've started to learn the past tense rule of adding ‑ed onto the end of things, but you've overused it. You've overgeneralized it.Tracy: I ated pizza last night.Ross: Here you've made some hybrid between the two, and the final one?Tracy: I ate pizza last night.Ross: Great.Tracy: Which is correct.Ross: Which is, yeah, you've now acquired it. Congratulations.Tracy: [laughs] Thank you, but the second and the fifth stage, I used the words correctly, but it doesn't mean I was at the same stage of acquiring the language.Ross: Yeah, which is so interesting. This is such a great example, because it shows how making errors is evidence that you're developing.Anyway, that was the developmental kind. What's the other main reason that students make errors?Tracy: Maybe they directly translate from their first language to the language they study?Ross: It's not always a direct translation, but yeah, call it L1 transfer.Tracy: Transfer, yeah.Ross: A long time ago, people thought that all the errors came from that. Gradually, they came to realize that that's not the case and a lot of the errors that students make are the same regardless of their first language. Part of the transfer errors, they're actually harder to get rid of than the developmental errors.Should teachers correct students’ errors in ESL classes?Ross: Let's talk about the next one. Should we correct errors? What do you tell teachers on teacher training courses?Tracy: I think it really depends. Sometime, I tell them to ignore that.Ross: Wow, OK. When do you say to ignore errors?Tracy: Two main scenarios. Number one, if it's not really in a learning setting. For example, you haven't seen the students for a while and saw the students, have a chat, and then students really talkative and very motivated and probably make some mistakes and then have errors in their sentences. Really, to be honest, I don't think that's a great context for us to correct their errors.Their motivation was not to learn much, they want to communicate with you. It's probably going to demotivate the students. The second scenario is if the error is really not impeding the communication that much, you probably want to ignore it.Ross: Yeah, right. Actually, I'm going to play you a little Jeremy Harmer quote about what you were talking about there, this process of deciding if you should correct an error or not.[pre‑recorded audio starts]Jeremy Harmer: Every time a student makes a mistake in class, you have to make a judgment. That's actually not true, you have to make about four or five judgments. The first judgment you have to make is, "Was it wrong?" The second judgment is, "Actually, what was wrong?" because sometimes it's not that easy to work out what was wrong.The third judgment you have to make is, "Should I correct it or should I just let it go?" The fourth judgment you have to make is, "Should I correct it or should somebody else correct it?" Suddenly in that one moment when students just make a mistake, you have to work out what to do.[pre‑recorded audio ends]Tracy: There are four main things that we need to consider immediately when the student make mistake. They are who, when, what, and how.Ross: What was the error? Yeah, because this is sometimes difficult to tell. Is it a pronunciation mistake or is it lexical or is it grammatical or...?Tracy: Who's going to correct it?Ross: It could be the teacher. You could try and do peer correction, you could try and get the person to correct themselves, I suppose.Tracy: Yeah, or even small groups some times. When? Should you correct the error immediately, or you're waiting? We always say delayed.Ross: The last one was?Tracy: How. What kind of techniques you are going to use?Ross: Good, hang on to that thought, because we'll talk about that in the next segment. I actually wanted to play another quote. This one's from Stephen Krashen. This is what Stephen Krashen thinks about error correction.[pre‑recorded audio starts]Stephen Krashen: Output plus correction. You say something, you make a mistake, someone corrects it. You change your idea of what the rule is. The six‑year‑old ESL child comes into the class and says to the teacher, "I comes to school every day."Teacher says, "No, no, I come to school every day." The child is supposed to think, "Oh yeah, that s doesn't go on the first person singular, it goes on the third person singular."I think that's utter fantasy, but that's the idea.[pre‑recorded audio ends]Ross: It's quite interesting. He thinks error correction is a complete waste of time. Dave Willis, the task‑based learning guru, pardon, he's someone else, just thinks error correction doesn't work.Tracy: Oh really?Ross: Not everyone says that but I just wanted to give an example of both.Tracy: That's quite confusing though. Should we correct or...?Ross: There's other research that says that you should and it does make a difference in some situations, but not in other ones. I think there's the research, not quite conclusive.Tracy: Definite law students haven't read about this research.[laughter]Tracy: They have really high demand in classroom from teachers to correct their errors, because otherwise, you don't think they learn anything.Ross: For me, that's true. That at least some of the value in coming to a language class is you get your errors corrected, because input, you can buy a book or you can watch TV. There's lots of ways you could get input, maybe not always great for practice. A lot of people in a lot countries do have opportunities to practice English.Here in Beijing, you could just go to a Starbucks and try and find a foreigner or some people might have to speak English for work. The big advantage of going to a language class is that you get correction.Tracy: This makes me think of the students actually, in my class which I just taught this afternoon. Is about some phonological aspects and she told me at the end of the class, she said, "Oh no, I've finally realized I have no knowledge, no idea and no awareness of the features of connected speech, because I study English for so long, but I always have trouble to understand people in the listening."If I didn't have that correction in my lesson, I think she'd probably not be able to aware of the features for a long time.Ross: Yeah, absolutely. Good, you should send that to Stephen Krashen.How should teachers correct students’ ESL errors?Ross: Let's talk about some principles for error correction. We'll just pretend that we've ignored Stephen Krashen, we've decided that when students actually made an error. What do you think are some good ideas or best practices or advice on correcting errors?Tracy: I will say, the first one is, don't correct all the errors.Ross: Yeah, it'd be way too many, right?Tracy: Yeah.Ross: That'd be really annoying.Tracy: [laughs] Yeah. They won't have much time to really practice.Ross: I think as well, we know from Second Language Acquisition that not all of the errors that you correct are actually going to help the students.Tracy: Just try to prioritize errors. Of course, again, the fundamental stuff. Was your lesson aims are and then what kind of language or skills that you are trying to focus on in your class. Stick to those. That should be prioritized.Ross: Another thing to add is correct errors that effect more students instead of fewer students. I agree, if it's in your plan, then correct it, but I also think if it's a problem all the students are having or most of the students are having, then it's probably worth correcting.That's a bit about what to correct, how about some how to correct? Actually, can I play you another quote? I want to make a record for the number of quotes, someone talked, it's number three.Tracy: OK, go on.Ross: This is Herbert Puchta, I think his name is, talking about an error correction technique.Herbert Puchta: Imagine a class where lots of students have problems getting the famous third person "S" right. Take a piece of paper and write an "S" on it. Stick it somewhere on the wall. When a student makes that mistake, point to the paper, wait and smile. Most probably, the student who's just made the error will notice what you want them to do and correct themselves.Ross: I thought that was interesting, he also chose the third persons "S" as his example. I think what he's trying to say there is that's a really in‑obtrusive way of correcting a student. You can correct someone as their speaking, by pointing at something, but you don't have to interrupt them.Another one for how, this may be also related to who, is to try and get the students involved in their correction.Tracy: Yeah, I get it, but sorry, I just feel like sometimes...We talk about who and we always want to encourage students themselves to correct themselves. The techniques in how teacher try to raise their awareness of their error is repeating the error.Ross: It's interesting that you bring that up because...or the other one is called a recast when the students said something wrong and you repeat it back to them, but they say it right. There's research that shows that when you do that, a lot of students don't realize that you are correcting an error. They just think you're repeating something.Tracy: Exactly.Ross: What are some ways of raising students' awareness that they've made an error?Tracy: What I experimented today was WeChat. Of course, I think there is...Ross: For those of you know in China, WeChat's an instant messenger type thing.Tracy: I ask the students to join the group.Ross: A group chat.Tracy: Yeah, group chat. Yeah, before the lesson started. Almost at the end of the class, I listen to what they said, I posted on four or five sentences into the group chat so everybody can see it.Ross: What's in these sentences? Mistakes the students have made?Tracy: Mistakes and also correct sentences together. Of course, I changed some of the words they are using or the pronouns or places. Yeah, I just, talk to your partners and then tell each other which one you think correct and which one is not correct and the then you think the one is not correct and then you can type the correct ones and then send to the group.Ross: I think you also hit on another thing there, that's something to get students involved, but another thing is that, the anonymity. Not singling someone out.Tracy: Another thing, I always tell teachers. There should be a correction circle. You raise their awareness, usually we stop and they move on, but not, there should be another step to complete the circle which is, give students another chance to use the language correctly by themselves. For example, the pizza mistakes.Ross: I ated pizza yesterday.Tracy: I mmm pizza yesterday.Ross: I ate pizza yesterday.Tracy: What did you have for breakfast today?Ross: I ate cereal for breakfast today.Tracy: Really? Do you really? [laughs]Ross: No, I actually drank coffee today, but...[laughter]Ross: ...this is a different verb. I didn't think it would fit your point.Tracy: You know what I mean, just...Ross: Yeah, give the students a chance.Tracy: It's something can be really simple. Just ask a similar question and they can answer.Errors Wrap upTracy: We talk a lot about correcting errors, but the examples we were using really focus on the language itself, but don't forget about error correction also related to performance or behavior in class.Ross: What does that mean?Tracy: For example, teaching young learners and if the student wasn't well behaved, I think we also need to...Ross: Give feedback.Tracy: ...give feedback on that.Ross: Yeah, good point. Bye everyone, thanks for listening.Tracy: Bye.

As the coronavirus causes more and more schools, more students and teachers are turning to apps to fill the gap. Ross and Jake Whiddon talk about the potential of apps for language learning, the limitations of current software and how apps will influence classrooms in the future.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, I'm talking with my friend Jake Whiddon. Jake's a diploma in TESOL qualified teacher. Over the last year or so, Jake has been working for a company that develops language learning apps.As the coronavirus is causing more and more schools to close, and more and more learning switching from offline to online, we'll find that language learning apps are going to be playing a bigger part in teachers' and students' lives than they were before.In this conversation, Jake and I discuss some of the advantages of language learning apps. How they affect the classroom? Where they will be going in the future? Enjoy the conversation.Ross: Welcome back, Jake.Jake Whiddon: Thanks, Ross. Good to be here.Ross: Jake, you are now working for a company that does language learning app. Let me just start off talking about what are some of the potential benefits of using an app to learn language.Jake: Probably, the biggest benefit is the idea of learner autonomy and motivation. If you hand over the power for them, and the control that says, "You can now take control of your learning." You have an app. You can open it. You can play some games. You can see some feedback. You can see how well you're going.It's, sometimes, a little bit more motivating, than if you have to be in a class. All your peers are around you. The teacher's telling what you're doing wrong or right. This is a very personal thing. That's one of the biggest benefits of having an app or online learning does.Ross: I was thinking about this recently with work, and with Katrina was doing in Chinese in front of a group of about 30 people on a conference call is still pretty nerve wracking. Comparing that to standing up in front of 30 people, and speaking my second language, it's much less scary.That's one of the things that people don't talk enough is how much that takes away that the fear within you. You don't have all these eyes on.Jake: Exactly. We should make the very distinct difference. Online learning is still engaging with someone. App based learning is you and the app learning together. Getting feedback, trying things.Ross: Let's talk about that. You mentioned their feedback. Answering a question and getting immediate feedback. If you're in a class, I feel the normal way that would happen, would be the teacher gives instructions for an activity in the course book. The students spend the next 10 or 15 minutes doing the activity. Then, the teacher goes through the answers with them and...Jake: Exactly, It could be the next day. It could be, "Here's your homework, go home and do it." I've got to hand it to the teacher. I have no attachment to what I was doing, once I get my feedback.In an app, if you get something wrong, it tells you instantly I got it wrong. Usually, might give you the right answer. It's very meaningful instant feedback, which is more valuable. It's not like, I'm going to get a high score in my test. It's right now, I want to get this right. It's a very personal thing.Ross: There is a huge difference in ownership there. One of them, I'm passive and I'm waiting for someone else to tell me whether I got it right or wrong.Jake: Which is crazy. Naturally, in your daily life as a child, I'm going to go try something. Climb a tree, I fall off. [laughs] I try again. I'm on my bike, I fall off. What do I do? I jump back on the bike. It's only once, we get with language learning or with classrooms, where we seem to say there's a separation between, I've done something and I'm going to find out whether I did well at it.Really what technology is doing, and software is doing, is it's enabling kids to get back into that really pure way of learning. I got it wrong. I'll try again.Ross: Another benefit here potentially, is that with the classroom version of it. The 10 questions that you have to ask, all the kids in the class are getting the same 10 questions. They might be too easy for some students in the class. They might be too difficult for others. That can become demotivating for everyone except the kids in the middle, right?Jake: It can. Where are you trying to get to here, Ross?Ross: Presently, the thing with the app, or the software or whatever, is able to push questions just at the right level of the students where they're able to get most of them right. But no...Jake: From my experience, I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of developers. Everyone says that they have some sort of algorithm that feeds back and allows kids to see what they got wrong. In reality though, Ross, I don't think that that's exactly what everyone is doing.The simplest form of it is that, "I got this wrong" and the algorithm would know, you got that wrong, and it will feed it back to you. Apps like Duolingo do that.I don't know if that completely is what we're talking about when it's this magic formula of AI, that everyone talks about when they're marketing their products. That's where it should be going. It will go eventually, that each child will be on a personalized learning journey.Ross: Kids are already on a personalized learning journey anyway, in a class. It's just the teaching doesn't match the learning...Jake: Exactly, exactly. What's happened now is that, we can have kids learning on an app and have data on every single interaction. You can get data on, if there's different games in that app, you can find out which games that they were more motivated by. If there's a quiz in the app, they can see the results on the quiz and which games were more likely to lead to a higher score in the quiz.We can see which language points lead to a higher score. If you kept on playing, which games motivated you to play more games later. All these different granular pieces of data that help with the educator ‑‑ it could be the teacher or the facilitator or the company ‑‑ to make sure those kids are actually moving forward their language learning, which then leads to efficacy, which we've never known before.Anyone who's listening has been a teacher in a classroom, they all leave, and they think, "I don't know what my kids really learned today. I know what they said in class. I know what they appear to understand. I know what they got in their test. But I don't know what they've acquired. I really don't know."Ross: Taking a couple steps back, you mentioned the different types of games, different types of interactions that might happen. You have some example? Obviously, a lot of this is based on a lot of multiple choice questions, right? But presenting those in different ways.Jake: Yeah, it's really fascinating. Something that I've learned from the coding is one fascinating thing. All the coding is the same, it's multiple choice. You get an app like Duolingo or any of the apps and it's usually, here's four choices, A, B, C, D. Tap the right button, right or wrong.What I've discovered from where I'm working now is that you can have those same four choices in a variety of ways, which I never realized. Rather than having four colors, just statically on the screen, those could be bubbles floating around the screen. Then, someone has to actually think about it, I can try to touch it and find it. There's more cognitive process happening.It's still an A, B, C, D test. The gameplay is more engaging than just seeing four things on a screen.Ross: This obviously feeds back into the motivation of the students. It's just like being in a language class where if you're doing interesting activities, that's going to keep you motivated and engaged, minute by minute. It's the same on an app. If you're doing the same multiple choice questions, it's going to get pretty boring.Jake: Often now, apps break into two types of learning games. They'll call them accuracy games or experience games. An accuracy game means there is a right or wrong answer. If you get this wrong, it's going to affect the accuracy of your score. There are other types of activities, which might be a song playing, and you just have to hit the words, but that's an experience game.That's input and seeing what happens. But, you're focusing on the input, being not wrong or right. If the word comes up, you hit it. If you don't hit it, it doesn't mean you're wrong. Some learners do better when they're doing experience games a lot. Some do better from accuracy games.What you could have is a different path. Some kids might like to see a song, a dialogue and this type of game. What will happen is, we can actually personalize journeys on the language they're learning and on the game type.Ross: Obviously, teachers in classes will be able to relate to this. You can see different students engaging more with different activities in every class.Jake: Some apps allow you to send out homework. The kids will do something on the app. Then, the teacher can see a whole class aggregate score. They'll know, how well they're doing with a certain lexical set. Say, it's colors. There's a 90 percent on blue, green, red, yellow, but orange, it's a 40 percent. What am I going to focus on in the next class?Ross: Focus on orange.Jake: I'm going to focus on orange, right? Now, the teachers are empowered by the data to be better teachers. They can focus on exactly what the kids need to know and not what they should know.Ross: Find out where the learners are and teach them accordingly. If the app's giving you all this data on where the learners are, that's going to let you do a better job.Presumably also, there's another layer to that. You're talking about the app giving data to the teachers to help the teachers teach the students accordingly. But also, the app's going to use that data to teach the student to...Jake: Exactly, right. Number one, the app already will feedback and ensure that the child, the learner, keeps getting better at that one particular language point. Parents have more information now.Parents used to drop their kids off at offline schools. Two hours sit outside. Come out and they have any idea how well they're going. Everyone's had a parent‑teacher night. Parents meet the teacher. They discuss how well they're going and the teachers feel uncomfortable. They don't really know every detail.Ross: They have 16 kids in the class. You've taught them for four hours. You're really giving feedback on the kid at the back who doesn't talk much, it's impossible.Jake: How exciting is it, that parent‑teacher night, now can happen every day. Not just every day, every hour. Anytime the child interacts with learning, the parent can see exactly how well they're going.The exciting part will be once those apps link parents and teachers up to social media. They'll say, OK, my child is struggling with, this sentence or the past sentence all orange. They'll be able to click on it and find out what all the other parents done who've had that same problem? What do the teachers recommend?The solution for the problem will be instant. They won't need to drop their kid off at school anymore because that learning was become part of daily life.Ross: You hit on one of the things that probably makes a lot of teachers nervous. The idea that apps could replace teachers completely. What's the role of the teacher?Jake: The role of the teacher would change. We already have seen this in STEM. We used to have science lectures, no one does science lectures anymore. That was a thing of the past, that's died. Now what you have is, everyone sends out what you have to learn. You watch a video and when you come to class, guess what you do? An experiment with the teacher.That's all that will happen in language learning. It will catch up to the rest of the world. You'll learn all the stuff. You'll get all your feedback. When you come into class, the teacher will have an activity for you to do. Really push you in the class to use that language.How can I help you interact better with people or communicate better or use your creativity or it's not just the language anymore? It's all that stuff that surrounds it.Ross: This reminds me a lot of an ex‑colleague talking to me about the community aspect of learning a language and that being the thing that keeps learners coming back. If you don't have that sort of interaction with real people, it's really easy to give up. That's the case with apps. If there's not that community aspect, then people tend give up pretty easily.Jake: Think about it, no one learns a language to speak to themselves.Ross: [laughs]Jake: Like in the classroom, no one learns a language to speak to a teacher, you learn language to speak to other people. Offline schools will develop into places where kids and adults can go in, use the language to interact in the community, but the learning will happen with technology.Ross: I feel here it's useful to unpack the word "learning." When we think about the word "learning," we assume that memorizing the words, which is a lot of what we're talking about can happen on the app. Whereas, there's a deeper level that needs to happen. That's the thing that happens in the classroom communicating with real people.Jake: I don't think we'll use the word "class" anymore. The idea of class needs to go because of class implies learning and the teacher. The relationship shouldn't be teacher‑student. It will become, "I've already learned this stuff, I need places to use it and keep developing it."Language doesn't exist in a vacuum without all the other experiences around it. Teachers' roles would expand into making experiences around the language.Ross: Those are the most interesting parts of teaching. Designing the interesting communicative activities and tasks. Talking about culture, facilitating discussions, that's a lot more interesting than holding up the blue flashcard. Getting students to turn it back to you.[crosstalk]Jake: Can I add the point that what's exciting is, as data and coders and language learning have become best friends. What's the code? It's a language, right? Due to social media and Internet and all these connections, all those barriers have been broken down. Now we have computer scientists talking to linguists talking to psychologists.What will happen to teachers is, they won't be thinking about, "This is the grammar point I need to teach today."They'll be talking to psychologists, they'll be talking to other discourses and making that class a more valuable experience for the kids.Ross: You mentioned, psychologists and language teaching and programming. One of the bits where that comes together is, finding the sweet spot of challenge and using gamification. That's a bit of a controversial issue.Jake: The word "gamification" is controversial because gamification can be along the lines of gambling. That's what they base it on. Challenge level and finding the challenge level is what motivates people to keep coming back. If something's too easy, you get demotivated. If it's too hard, you don't come back. You need to find that sweet spot of where's the challenge level?Essentially, that's gamification. Gamification is finding the spot where it's not too hard. It's not too easy. It's just at the point where I want to keep going. There's so many advantages.If you can find the spot where kids or people are motivated to keep learning, isn't that a good thing? But, then they become addicted to the platform that you're using to teach them to do that, that could be unethical, especially when money's involved.Ross: One more time, that was Jake Whiddon. Thank you very much for listening. For more podcasts, please go to the website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.

Ian McGrath joins us to discuss how coursebooks can be used, what affect they have on teacher autonomy and how teachers can make themselves the masters rather than servants. As Alan Cuningsworth says, “Coursebooks make good servants, but poor masters.” But who is usually the master in the language classroom? The teacher or the coursebook? Ross Thorburn: Hi Ian, and thanks for joining us. I wanted to start off by asking you about the effect that materials can have on teachers' teaching skills.You've got a section near the beginning of your book based around an argument from Jack Richards. I'll just quote to you from the bit from the book, "It's been argued that if teaching decisions are largely based on the textbook and the teacher's book, this has the effect of deskilling teachers." How much do you agree with that argument?Ian McGrath: Well, I suppose it's a theoretical possibility, but I think that rests on two assumptions. That, for example, the teacher has certain skills to begin with which can be lost, and secondly, he or she loses them because they're not required in order to teach with this particular book.I haven't seen any evidence to support this notion of skill loss, but I do think there's a real danger that teachers, let's say, who use the same book year in, year out do lose interest in the material. As a consequence, this loss of interest is communicated to the students.I've observed a lot of teachers. It's fairly obvious that enthusiastic teachers can energize and motivate students, whereas bored teachers are likely to bore their students. Once teachers have been teaching the materials for so long that they've lost interest in them, there is a danger that they start to become boring.Ross: I guess the thing that Jack Richards doesn't really mention there is teachers who maybe just never developed those skills in the first place.Ian: That's a very good point.Ross: Anyway, you've got another nice quote in the book from Cunningsworth, I think, which says, "Coursebooks make good servants but poor masters." In your experience, who usually is the master or the servant in the classroom, and why?Ian: This takes us to teacher autonomy. It depends on the mindset and the professionalism of the teacher. The teacher has to see the coursebook as a servant, although actually I prefer tool, resource, one of the resources that can be used to bring about successful learning.Ross: Going back to the Jack Richards' quote, "Coursebooks might deskill teachers or stop them from developing certain skills," can the coursebook also disempower teachers?Ian: Going back to the Cunningsworth quote, if you accept the book as your master, then you disempower yourself. As a teacher, we have to remember that we also have relevant knowledge and experience that we can pass on to students, and students, themselves, have knowledge that they can share.Why should we hand power over to the writer of a book who knows nothing about our students and their particular interests and needs?Ross: I completely agree. As a teacher, you know your students, whereas the writers probably never set foot in the school and possibly never even been to the country that you're teaching in.Does this also relate to the management of the school? I think, in some contexts, the power isn't given away by the teachers so much. It's maybe given away by the management, where managers maybe have placed a lot of faith -- probably too much faith -- in the writers of the coursebook. Have you seen that sort of thing before?Ian: Yes, I have seen that situation. That reduces the motivation of the teachers, because they aren't free to do what they feel they should be doing. If teachers feel free to be responsive and creative, then that makes every class different.Even if you're teaching the same 'teaching' -- I'm using this in inverted commas, as it were -- teaching the same material or, let's say, using the same material, you don't necessarily have to use it in exactly the same way with each class, because the class, itself, will be different.Ross: Sometimes, nowadays, we see coursebooks that just have a huge amount of detail in the teacher's notes. I can personally remember using a teacher's book that virtually told you to stand up, walk across the room, pick up a pen before writing something on the whiteboard.Do you think that going into a lot of detail in those teaching notes, is that useful help for novice teachers, or is it something that's more constricting for experienced teachers? How, as a coursebook writer, can you balance giving help to those different groups of teachers?Ian: I don't blame teachers' books or publishers for this. They're obviously try to sell as many books as they can. There's a commercial motive, but I think the writers of these books are also trying to be helpful.Teachers have very different levels of professional awareness. When you start out as a teacher, it's reassuring to be given a range of ready-made materials and suggestions for how to use them.I started teaching without having had any training. For me, one of the teacher's books that I used was, in a sense, my trainer. By following the suggestions in the book, I felt more secure about what I was doing. Over time, I felt free to vary what I was doing.It's a lot to do with experience. When you feel confident enough to select from what's being suggested, I think you will. I don't see the mass of detail procedures as an impediment to autonomy. For me, the suggestions are there to be used or not, depending on the teacher's own level of experience and confidence.Ross: It's almost like the opposite of deskilling the teachers like we mentioned at the beginning, where if it's a good coursebook, then hopefully, it can act as a good example and almost like a teacher trainer for novice teachers.That also means that, just as in teachers have to teach mixed ability classes and make the same materials work for both higher and lower-level students, the materials writers also have to write for mixed abilities of teachers.Ian: I think so. With coursebooks, I'm thinking of, this is the core material, and then there are these possible branches off from this that you may choose to follow according to the needs, interests, capabilities of the class you're teaching.It's clear to everyone what has to be done, in a sense, but not necessarily how it has to be done. Also, there are these branching possibilities which one may be able to follow, depending also on the amount of time available.Coursebooks are also written with a certain number of teaching hours in mind. There's often an expectation, on the part of learners, as well as management, that you will get through the book, so teachers inevitably have to make decisions about what they can include and what they can't include.Ross: Something else I wanted to ask you about was another nice quote about teachers finding that activities don't quite match their teaching style. You said in that situation, the teachers have a choice either to adapt the book or to adapt to the book. Do you want to tell us a bit about those options?Ian: I think it was Rod Bolitho and Tony Wright who, at one point, used the term "teaching against the grain." The metaphor here is to the difficulty of cutting wood against the grain.What they were trying to say is that, sometimes, we feel some discomfort with a particular coursebook text or an activity. That discomfort may be due to either the fact that we don't see ourselves teaching comfortably in that way, or in the case of a text, there are things in this text which don't suit culturally, let's say, the kind of group that we're working with.Basically, we have a choice to adapt the materials or to teach them as they are. You can probably guess what my advice would be.[laughter]Ian: It would be to adapt the materials, but, at the same time, try to ensure that we don't lose sight of the intended learning outcome. We're trying to achieve the same, let's say, linguistic objective if it is a linguistic objective, but doing so using other materials or other means.Ross: There is also a flip side to this though, where sometimes it's only by trying something that we think isn't going to work -- maybe from a coursebook, for example -- that we end up getting out of our routine, getting out of our comfort zone, and actually putting ourselves in a position to learn.Ian: There may be a time and place for this. [laughs] If you're on a teacher training course, you may feel more comfortable experimenting with something than in your own class, where you're a bit concerned, if something should go wrong, about the consequences of that.Again, going back to observation, it's good to encourage people to try out things in an observation that they haven't necessarily done before, because then, they have somebody present who can talk them through that experience and say, "Well, it was great. It was fantastic. You did it perfectly."Encouraging them to do it again, or if it didn't work that well, to analyze why that was and how they might modify the approach to make it more effective the next time around.Ross: Finally, as someone who's both a teacher, teacher trainer, coursebook writer, how do you go about using a coursebook?Ian: My starting point is not the materials, themselves, but what I think, how was the course planned? I've set, possibly in negotiation with the students, what I think would be appropriate learning outcomes within the time available. Then I've chosen a coursebook or a set of materials that I feel will help me to accomplish those objectives.Let's say I have just one coursebook. The first process is to select from those bits of the coursebook that will be directly helpful and useful, and to decide what I'm not going to use. Even where I have selected things, I might feel the need to adapt them in certain ways. One possibility, obviously, is to exploit the material to get more out of it.If one takes the example of a text in the book, the text may be accompanied by a series of questions -- usually the case -- but I don't think one has to rely on the questions in the book.One can get learners to talk about the topic of the text and their own experience in relation to it. If there are pictures, again, they can comment on those pictures, so that you're not necessarily using the material in the way that it's laid down. You are developing it in certain ways. You're exploiting it.Sometimes, one might need to replace material in a book with one's own material because one feels that that's more relevant to students' needs, or even get learners to bring in materials, themselves. One almost always has to supplement what's provided because, as we said earlier, no textbook is going to be perfect for the particular group you're teaching.You're likely to have to add certain things to it. It may be that more practice is needed of a particular point, or you feel the need to include more communicative activities in your course, and so on.

Find Lesson Planning for Language TeachersPrinciples of Task Design (With Dave Weller) - TranscriptionRoss Thorburn: Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Today, our favorite guest is with us, Dave Weller.Dave Weller: Hurrah!Ross: [laughs] Today, Dave and I are going to talk a bit about Task Design. Before we jump into that, why is Task Design useful or important, or worth thinking about?Dave: Good question. Mainly because when we first become teachers or, at least, I know when I did, I just ran with whatever activities were suggested to me, or games that other teachers have worked very well to get the students engaged and motivated.It was only later [laughs] that I started to question, "Hang on, are my students actually learning anything?" Then shamefully, I didn't think about that soon enough.Dave: That's when you start to realize that, is what I'm doing actually helping the learners, or is it just using time. That's where Task Design pops up, and I think, "OK, the way I run my activity, the way I've structured my activity, it can make a huge difference to what students think about, the language they use, and the practice they get."Ross: There's also maybe something about evaluating what you're already doing there, isn't there? That first step that you mentioned maybe is looking at, "What am I doing now? How good is it?" Maybe before I start designing anything else.Today, we're going to run through Dave's six top tips for ways to design tasks. We're going to look at aims, gaps, load, materials, thinking, and rehearsal. Tell us the first tip tasks should support aims.Dave: When you think about the task, think about what language is it likely to get students to produce. Is that the same as your target language? Often, especially if you're just looking for an activity or a game to fill time, you start running that activity, and the language that comes out of the student's mouth is very different.I'm using different grammar, different lexis, different from maybe that you were expecting. Sure, that is practice, but it might be something they already know really well. They default to something that they are confident using. It's not pushing to use things they're not comfortable with. Therefore, growing or getting better at the language doesn't really happen.Ross: I think as well this, it's maybe when you're lesson planning, it can also be worth thinking about changing your aim to reflect the task as opposed to just changing the task to reflect the aim. A lot of people maybe tend to start off with the aim and work forward from that. It's like forward planning, whereas, something I sometimes encourage people to do is reverse planning.Starting at the end of the class, what's a great task that you think is going to be useful for the students, and then trying to make sure that your aim, and everything you teach matches the task.Dave: If you have the luxury of doing that, that's almost the best way to do, but it depends where you're working and the context you're in. Some schools are quite strict about the syllabus they're using, or the course book you have to follow. You have to tick off certain grammar points or sets of vocabulary.If you would just let me free a context where maybe a class works, just like an English corner, then, sure, coming up with an activity you know will work well for that group and working backwards from that is freer.Ross: Again, maybe as well with that aim, it's easier practically to add things to it than to take things away from it. You're probably less likely to get a complaint if you've taught an extra few things that have gone beyond what's in the syllabus. The issue is usually when you cut things from it.Dave: Yes, totally.Ross: The next step is tasks need a gap. What's a gap, for those unfamiliar?Dave: [laughs] It doesn't mean you just stop half‑way through, and you freeze.[laughter]Dave: If there's no input for five minutes at all, you just have to take your little nap.[laughter]Ross: It's the same as a break.Dave: Yeah, I wish. Now, surprisingly, I don't see much written about this. There's an author, Prabhu, and he mentioned that in any type of communication, there are gaps. The three are the information gaps, where perhaps you and I have different information about subjects.Maybe, I want to get to the train station, and you know the way, and I don't. Then, there might be a reasoning gap. Perhaps we all have the same information, but we're trying how to use that information to achieve an objective.For example, planning a night out or choosing where to go on holiday. We're using our logic and our reason to pick the best option, and we can do that collaboratively.The last gap is an opinion gap, where students would agree or disagree with each other based on their personal preferences. Debates are a good example.Ross: I choose a new picture for the classroom or something like that, and here's a choice, which ones do you like, and justify it, why, that kind of thing.Dave: Yes. Exactly.Ross: I've also seen people add to this experience gaps or getting people to talk about what they personally have experienced in their own lives, and how that might be different between students and [inaudible 4:39] to that.Dave: For me, a lot of that could fall under the information gap because you're just talking about life experience, and I have that, and you don't. That's really good in more adult classes if you have a nice mix of students with different experience in the classroom.Ross: Do you want to talk about this for young learners for a second? Because I think with these, it's easier to think of examples for adults than for kids. For kids, we're talking about, for example, what might be a reasoning gap for young learners that would work?Dave: Sure. I'll start with the information gap. That could be, you give pairs different pictures. Student A has a picture of a toy or a character, and person B has a blank piece of paper. They're taking turns to describe that character to them, and then they got to draw it. Then I'll [inaudible 5:26] get, "Sky" and they've got a big head, they've got small eyes, or whatever it might be.Ross: [inaudible 5:31].[laughter]Dave: Yes. No hair.[laughter]Ross: It is something that is worth talking about is this classroom management aspect. When I see this going wrong, a lot of the time, someone's had this idea that student A will have this information, student B will not, and they have to talk, but what just ends up happening...Say, if it's a running dictation that the student whose gone outside to look at the picture, we detect just ends up writing the answer, or are going to find someone who activity...I've got my sheet with...Find someone who can speak more than two languages, and then I just give you the pen. Tell you to write your name in there.I've also seen one where students have to find a way from A to B on a map, but these students show each other the map, so there's no gap there. With that, it's really worth thinking about how it's actually going to play out in the reality of the classroom. How, as a teacher, are you going to make sure that students don't just take the short‑cut of showing the other person the information?Dave: Oh, absolutely. An example, just stay with the A and B describing pictures to each other, I might line mapping roads. We'll have them get one road to [inaudible 6:36] and face the other road, and fixed seats somewhere. They will have to visibly hold up their paper in front of them.As a teacher, you can immediately see if someone's not doing what you've asked them to do, and it's a point of frown on them, whatever your behavior management system is.Ross: Sure.Dave: Or even making a favorite toy, or you're going to have to design a new character when you've watched a very short clip of a monster movie, a cartoon monster, and they have to make you a monster. You give them a certain set of features.Like, you can choose from these body parts. There's a selection of ears and eyes, your legs and arms, and body types, and then they have to put them together to create the scariest monster they can.Ross: I love those. One of the problems you often get with that is that teachers assume that, because I've taught, say, body parts, that that type of task is going to work really well. What I think the actual language you get in a task like that is like, "No, I disagree. I want this one. This is better. I don't like that."I think often with those, that's something that's really worth thinking about. Like what is the language that's going to come up? Because, really probably a lot of time what you're doing is just pointing to something and say, "I want this one," or "I like that one."Dave: Sure. The trick is, again, that's just shouldn't be the main task. That should be the pre‑task almost. Actually, it's really nice. It's another one of the criteria for task design, which is, think about or consider what students are going to think about.Cognitive psychology does show us that what students think about, they will remember. There's a really nice quote that memories erases your thought. You probably heard that on here before.Ross: No, actually I think that will be the first time, but Daniel Willingham, right?Dave: Yes, from his book, "Why Don't Students Like School?" If students are over‑excited, if the task is too stimulating, I always revert to the first language, especially young learners, and start using first language to complete the task.Ross: Because almost with kids there's this maybe lack of being able to self‑regulate in both your own behavior, but I guess, also in what language you're going to use. If you've got them dialed up to 11 on the excitements scale, then the chance that you're going to be able to decide to use your second language to do this thing is pretty unlikely.Dave: Exactly. Yes.Ross: Taking that also links back to what you're saying at the very beginning, that, as a new teacher or as new teachers, I think a lot of us assume that if the students are smiling and having fun and they're excited, then it's a great class, but maybe sometimes dialing that back a bit is actually beneficial.Dave: Absolutely. The opposite is entirely true, as well. If they're bored, I'll be talking in the first language but probably off topic.Ross: It's some sweet spot in the middle [laughs] between utter boredom and complete excitement.Dave: Yeah, exactly. That thing, that example you gave of, if they are making or creating something, maybe drawing or making something out of Play‑Doh, or whatever they're doing, they won't be using the language to do that. They'd taken a product of that task and then using it to use the language that you want to. That's where the learning's going to happen.Ross: Sorry to start jumping around there, but I think this relates to your last point of mentally rehearsing the tasks and thinking about like, what is actually physically going to happen here? I think that's one example.Another one is maybe, we took the farm animals and then for the last hour people are going to make their own farm, but, of course, what language are you using there? You're probably saying things like, "Can I have a red pencil, please?" Or, "Please, pass me the scissors," which is completely unrelated to the farm animals. The students won't be thinking about that at all.Dave: Exactly. It's so simple to avoid that by very quickly putting yourself in the student's shoes and thinking, what language do I need to use to complete this task?Ross: To take us back maybe to a minute if we're teaching adults. I think if it's a very high stakes class, if you're being observed for something that's really, really important, and you've got a task. You can always just find maybe two or three students wandering around the school and trying to do the task within 15 minutes.Not the students that will be in your class later, but just to see how actually it pans out, or just turn around to the person next to you in the teacher's room and go, "Can you do this with me for two minutes?"Dave: Jump out from behind and photocopy it.[laughter]Dave: I need your help with a task.Ross: Yes, covering this farm.[laughter]Ross: How about going back to number three then, cognitive load? That's a term that certainly I was not familiar with until relatively recently. What's cognitive load?Dave: Cognitive load is the challenge of the task itself. How difficult will learners find it? If you are expecting to use language that is far above what they can do, they'll look at the task or start to think about, realize it's well beyond what they can do, and you'll see engagement just drop like a stone.Again, the idea of picking a sweet spot between something that they're able to do with help, and this is almost like scaffolding of all the idea of what they can do. [inaudible 11:20] what I can do with help today, they'll be able to do without help tomorrow.Ross: I guess, here, as well, we're not just talking about necessarily how difficult the language is, but we might be thinking about how cognitively tough the task is. Earlier, for example, we were talking about information gaps, reasoning gaps, and opinion gaps.Maybe a reasoning gap where you've got this much money, these are some different options, these are some different preferences of people in the groups. That sounds like there's going to be a lot more thinking going on there from the students than an information gap where you described...[crosstalk]Ross: Right. When that happens, maybe it's worth thinking about how the processing power and the student's brain is going to be used to be maybe more thinking about the problem rather than for producing language.You might get less accuracy and less fluency. Just like me on this podcast, I stumble over words when I'm trying to explain a difficult concept.[crosstalk]Dave: That happens to all of us, right? You can see when someone's very familiar with the topic because they're fluent, they're calm, they're confident. They're not using discourse markers like, "um," "uh," and so on. When we're trying to think about how best to explain it, we slow down, we stumble over our words.Another thing that is very worth mentioning is that this level of challenge can also apply to the incidental language in class, like teachers giving instructions. I've observed classes where the students are frazzled by the time they get to the task, because the teacher speaks very quickly, they're not creating their language appropriately for the level.The students are leaning forward, trying to follow the thread of the teacher, and then they finish, they have to clarify with their friends next to them. "Did she say this?" "Did she say that?" Then by the time they get to the task, "I've just spent five minutes of intensive listening practice," and now you can get a listening to do that.Ross: It's almost like what students will think about. It sounds like in your example there they were thinking about what on earth could the instructions be rather than what was in the lesson.[laughter]Ross: Well, Dave, thanks for joining us. All of those tips were from just one tiny part of one chapter in "Lesson Planning for Language Teachers ‑‑ Evidence‑Based Techniques for Busy Teachers" by our very own, Dave Weller. Dave, where can people get a hold of it?Dave: Thanks to the plug, Ross. This is a brand new book for me. You can find it on Amazon as an e‑book or a paperback. Planning should support learning. It should use evidence‑based best practices, and it shouldn't take long.[laughter]Dave: Yeah. I think that's the key point. With those principles in mind, I've created 9 or 10 chapters in the book using current research, tested techniques so teachers can end up planning better, faster, and with less stress.Ross: Great. All right. Dave, thanks for joining us.Dave: It's been a pleasure.

Find us our subreddit @ https://www.reddit.com/r/thecitywithinthewalls Come chat with us on discord @ https://discord.gg/Mmn2FPW Also, find us and a plethora of other Audio Drama creators, writers, and actors on the Podcast Junkie discord @ https://discord.gg/napQ3Cb Follow us on Twitter (@citywithinwalls):    https://twitter.com/citywithinwalls The website will be done soon, I promise. When its finished i will post the link here (___). Special guests include -  Emily Swan (Dr Pierce) and Zack Auld (rescue worker)   [Salistine] Sir?...sir…..commissioner Grady...hello?...sir can you hear me?   (Phones rings)   [Jarrett] Hello   [Salistine] Councilman Grady.   [Jarrett] Salistine?   [Salistine] Sir, there's been an explosion. Commissioner  Grady is...unresponsive. His vitals are there, but are slowly fading. What should I do?   [Jarrett] An explosion?! Where is he now?   [Salistine] He's buried beneath debris sir. I can still read his vitals, but they're beginning to fade...you are the profile, programmed into my emergency protocol. What do you want me to do?   [Jarrett] (Panicking) Keep...keep trying to wake him up. I have a team on there way as we speak.   [Salistine] Yes sir. (Phone call ends) Commissioner Grady! Commissioner Grady, can you hear me.   (Rubble begins to move around as the rescue team searches for Tharin)   [Guy 1] I'VE FOUND HIM! HE'S OVER HERE. COME HELP ME MOVE THIS! Grab that. One, two, three, puuull.   [Guy2] Oh wow…   [Guy1] Come on...grab his feet.   [Guy2] Are you sure we should move him?   [Guy1] Yes I'm sure. We have to get him to the hospital. Now grab his feet.   [Guy2] His legs are like rubber.   [Guy1] Just shut up and do your job!   (They begin to carry him off)   [Guy2] He's...not…going to...?   [Guy1] Of course not. Our job is to keep him alive and we're going to do that job...got it?   [Guy2] Yes...right! Keep him alive.   [Guy1] (Talking louder so the driver can hear) Get us to central med immediately! Tell them we're on the way with a code red and we need them outside and ready when we get there. Let them know the patient is fading fast and we may have to elevate statis to code blue. His breathing is rapid and BP is sky high.   [Ambulance driver] Central med, this is 501. We have a code red and request assistance upon arrival. Be advised, breathing is rapid and BP is well beyond normal ranges. (Scene fades)   (Machines are beeping. You can hear Tharin at first breathing in a mask along with his heartbeat. This transitions into a room atmosphere where we hear the machines monitor his vitals)   [Jarrett] Sooo...what is happening with Tharin, right now? Right this minute, I mean?   [Doctor] Well...he's breathing a gas that keeps him...in a near comatose state. We'll continue to give him the shots of the nano drug Vent. It will steadily repair the bone and tissue within the body. Once that's done, it's...just a waiting game. We can repair his body, but...whether he wakes up or not, is up to him.   [Jarrett] So this has worked before?   [Dr] We've never really had the opportunity to use it on someone with...this amount of damage. His injuries are---quite extensive. This really is the only option we have.   [Jarrett] Thank you doctor.   (Aleen comes in the room, she still has no idea what's going on, just that Tharin was involved in one of the explosions the whole city now knows about.)   [Aleen] Oh...councilman Grady, is he...gonna be ok?   [Jarrett] We don't know yet. The doctor was just telling me, it's...it's too soon to tell. I don't know what to do Aleen. I can't lose Tharin. I mean he's the only heir to the Grady house. If he's lost, so is the Grady name...and the only son I've ever known.   [Aleen] So what's the odds of him...   [Jarrett] The Vent is doing its job and his body is beginning to repair, but it's going to take time. Nearly every bone in his body was broken. A few organs were damaged and on the verge of shutting down. They've never used the vent like this before, but once that is complete, it will be his decision on whether he wakes or not.   [Aleen] So that's good news. If the Vent is working then we just have to wait a while right?   [Jarrett] That's... going to be a long while, I fear. (Scene fades)   (New scene, same ambience) (Phone rings) (Phone noise)   [Jarrett] Tell me something good.  …. That is not good at all.  …. Hmmm…so they found two then?... Mmmhmm... So tell me what the two chemicals prove again.  ... Ok...so they'll be taken to the lab for analysis? And the analysis tells them where the chemicals came from?... Ahhh, ok. Then what? The round room I'm guessing?... Right, so once all the Intel is gathered it goes to the round room, what happens then?... Right, but with him here and Saris missing that only leaves you and Dayton to handle the situation.  …. No you're...I mean I know your more than capable.  …. Ok James, thank you for calling. Keep me up to date.   (New scene, same ambience)   [Jarrett] Ah, doctor Peirce.   [Dr] Councilman. (Said as a greeting) The Vent seems to have its job. His bones and organs are fully healed. We will be talking him off the gas soon...and we'll see how everything holds up. We'll continue to monitor his vitals and once we determine he's good, then...we wait.   [Jarrett] To see if he wakes up, you mean.   [Dr] Yes   [Jarrett] And what's the likelihood of him not...waking up?   [Dr] This generally takes a few days to a few weeks. As I said before some handle this better than others, but really it's a waiting game. If he refuses to wake up on his own, then, don't worry we have some medications that will help.   [Jarrett] Does everyone wake up?   [Dr] That...hmmm...councilman, we'll do everything in our power to make sure commissioner Grady wakes up.   [Jarrett] (Concerned breath) Thank you doctor.   [Dr] He'll be fine, you have my word. (Scene fade)   (New scene, same room)   [Aleen] Tharin?...I don't know if you can hear me or not, but I want...he moved...he moved! Get the doctor! Tharin just moved his hand!   [Jarrett] What?   [Aleen] He moved! Get the doctor, hurry!   (We hear Jarrett run out of the room)   [Aleen] Tharin, Tharin can you hear me…   (Tharin squeezes Aleens hand. She begins to feel the emotions of happiness and relief consume her every movement. She begins to cry from the overwhelming emotions of happiness and relief and tries to speak.)   [Aleen] Oh...thank the council...you had us all so worried.   (The dr comes in the room as shes end her statement)   [Dr] You said he moved?   [Aleen] (Aleen struggles to compose herself) Yes, it was just a twitch of his hand, but then I asked if he could hear me and he squeezed my fingers.   [Dr] He responded then?   [Aleen] Yes.   [Dr] Well that's great! Let's...take a look. (The doctor begins to examine Tharin) If you can hear me Tharin, squeeze my hand. Perfect. Here, let me get this off of you...there, that's better. Can you open your eyes?...(a short laugh of relief). Welcome back commissioner. (Scene fades)   (New scene, still in the hospital room)   [Tharin] How long was I out? [Jarrett] A week.   [Tharin] Hmmm, what did I miss?   [Jarett] Well, there were 6 bombings all together. Two more on the night of your incident, one at James Corins and one at Daytons appartment. Luckily neither of them where home. James was out with his family and Dayton was off doing something, that has yet to be disclosed.   [Tharin] Sorrel still keeping secrets?   [Jarrett] Yes.   [Tharin] And the other three bombings, where were they?   (Jarrett throws a tan folder on the table next to Tharins bed)   [Jarrett] This is the report from James and Dayton. The other three appear to be in random spots, but James said they were not random at all. He wants you to call him immediately.   (Long pause, Tharin picks up the folder and begins to thumb through it.)   [Jarrett] Tharin...the city is not in a good order right now. Peoples trust in the two policing forces, Dayton and the council...have begun to wane a bit. The city is very much on edge, at this point. People are frightened.   [Tharin] (Breath) Have you heard from Ross?   [Jarrett] He just called this morning and said he had some very good news for you.   [Tharin] Did he say what the news was?   [Jarrett] No, and I didn't think to ask. I was on my way over here and...well..   [Tharin] I understand...do you think you could give Aleen and I a moment?   [Jarrett] Yes of course. (Jarrett starts to leave but stops just before exiting the door.) Tharin, I'm glad your back.   [Tharin] I'm glad to be back father (The door closes) Aleen   [Aleen] Tharin, you had us all very worried. The doctor...wasn't sure...if the treatment would work. He said they'd used it for minor repair before, but nothing this extensive.   [Tharin] Yes well it worked. I'm alive aren't I?   [Aleen] Yes, yes you are.   [Tharin] It's going to take more than the weight of a building to stop me.   (Both laugh)   I uhmmm. When I...when I was under, I could hear everything. I could hear the doctor, talking about the procedure going on with the Vent. I could hear my father, trying to keep everyone informed. All these voices...every time I heard someone's voice I'd cringe. Every voice, but yours.   [Aleen] Tharin I…   [Tharin] Please, let me finish. I've never allowed anyone to get close. This city is full of people looking out only for themselves, ready to stab you in the back if they have to. So I've always protected myself...but you...Aleen. When I took you on that date, all I was expecting was to go and then be done with it. Get it over and never look back...but you've done something to me...Aleen Harris. What I'm trying to say...is…   [Aleen] I know how you feel Tharin. Why do u think I'm here?   [Tharin] Thank you for being here...Aleen.   [Aleen] Thank you for waking up Tharin Grady.   (New scene in Ross's shop)   [Tharin] Ross   [Ross] There's a voice I never expected to hear again.   [Tharin] Nice to see you too Ross. My father told me you had something for me?   [Ross] Right, straight to business. (Breath) Ok...I have narrowed the seven signals down to three. Here are their patterns. I've also been able to determine who these three signals belong to. Here's all the information, including names, addresses, passcode numbers and employers.   [Tharin] Well I'll have to admit Ross...you've done a fine job here. Are you beginning to secretly like all this detective work? Because it seems to me your beginning to secretly like all this…   [Ross] I can not wait….commissioner Grady, til you find Saris and I'm able to get back to my work. Work which is beginning to pile up.   [Tharin] Is that a yes then?   [Ross] That is a firm no...commissioner Grady.   [Tharin] Right, I'll take it as a yes. Keep at it Ross, I'll let you know what these three turn up.   [Ross] I'll be anxiously waiting to hear back, that you've found Saris and I'm finally rid of you and your...investigation.   [Tharin] I missed you too, Ross. Have a nice day.   (Door closes)   [Ross] Still a piece of garbage.   (New scene)   [Salistine] Welcome back sir.   [Tharin] Salistine?   [Salistine] Yes sir?   [Tharin] I haven't been able to properly thank you.   [Salistine] Thank me for what sir?   [Tharin] Saving my life Salistine. If it weren't for your prompt actions I would have been dead.   [Salistine] I was merely following the emergency protocol, programmed into my...programming...sir.   [Tharin] Well at any rate, I've never thanked you so...thank you.   [Salistine] Your welcome sir.   [Tharin] Call me Tharin, Salistine. You've earned that right at least.   [Salistine] Yes...Tharin.   [Narrator] Life...what is life but a passing moment, the bat of an eye, an insignificant breeze...that blows only but a second before quickly fading away. These are the thoughts of Tharin as he begins to see his beloved city in a new light. Surpassing the old that seemed at one time...eternal. This new light is fragile, dim and flickering. Onward you March Tharin Grady. Onward you March, with your brethren through The City Within The Walls.   (False end) (New scene. Coms rings, Jones answers.)   [Jones] Hello.   [Unknown] Jones.   [Jones] (Very nervously replies) Uhh… yes sir.   [Unknown] The plan has failed I see.   [Jones] Well...sir, we...had a hiccup.   [Unknown] You call that a hiccup. Their. All. STILL ALIVE JONES!     [Jones] Our...people in the hospital weren't given clearance to get close enough to Tharin to finish the job. As far as James...he went out on a spontaneous dinner with his family and Dayt….   [Unknown] You know what this sounds like to me? It sounds like your giving me excuses...Jones. When have you ever known me to want anything...but results.   [Jones] I understand sir, but…   [Unknown] If you continue, failing to deliver...let's just say, there are others ready to take your place. Am I understood?   [Jones] Yes sir. [Unknown] Good. Now, I take it you have a backup plan?   [Jones] Yes sir, there is a contingency.   [Unknown] Good. For your sake and the sake of everyone around you, I hope this contingency works. Do not fail me again Jones.   [Jones] No, sir. I will not fail you again.   (Phone hangs up)   [Jones] (Breath) Get me Gypsy….NOW!   (End)

In this episode Ross and Trinity CertTESOL course director Allan Crocker discuss the issues related to time; how time influences how we teach, the problems it causes and how we can spend it better.Ross Thorburn: Hi, Allan.Allan Crocker: Hi, Ross.Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about who you are, Allan Crocker?Allan: Yes, I am Allan Crocker. Someone has to be. I'm a teacher trainer here in China. I'm course director for CertTESOL. I also do basic training and management training in our company. Before that, I've been a director of studies, a manager in a training school, and been a teacher for about six years teaching English. Before that, about a year‑and‑a‑half trying to teach music.Ross: We're going to talk about timing today. Then we can talk a bit about timing in the classroom with students. Then maybe, later on, we can talk about how teachers spend their time.Allan: This is interesting how it always seems to come up in self‑evaluation. This is like, "My timing was not good." [laughs]Ross: You're right. It's so interesting because I'd never thought about this before, either. It's such a common thing for people to talk about after an observed lesson, but I've almost never seen a training session on it. This is definitely the first podcast that we've done on it. Yet, that's what people always talk about.Allan: People talk about that. There's a few areas here. Firstly, my real sort of annoyance, we start with that, is the use of alarms and timers and, "OK, I'm going to give you two‑and‑a‑half minutes."At the end of the two‑and‑a‑half minutes, the alarm goes off, and they go, "Have you finished?" Luckily, I don't see many people then saying, "OK, let's go for the answers." Usually, teachers are aware that no one's finished. You put pressure on people. You slightly make them feel bad about themselves if they're not finished within the time.Where that comes from is seeing the lesson as yours. It's like, "Here's my plan, you're going to be subjected to it," rather than, "I'm going to help you learn by giving you these exercises." Then it's not, "How long is this going to take?" because that's obvious.Ross: In my plan, it says 2.5 minutes.Allan: Yeah, but the answer is until the students are finished or bored or there's something better to do. You can judge that other ways.Ross: Although to play devil's advocate to this, there is obviously a value to having deadlines. We obviously see this on teacher training courses when there's assignments. For example, one course I did before where you had to hand in 2,500 words every three weeks. Everyone did it on time.Then on other courses that we've seen, you maybe have to hand in 10,000 words after three years. Guess what happens? Everyone leaves all that work until two years, 10 months. Then they panic, and they start working on it. There's obviously some value to those deadlines.Allan: Yeah, I agree, but, in that case, it should be a focused deadline. It's like, "OK, they may be right. You have 10 minutes to prepare your side of the debate, and then we're going to do it." That will be 10 minutes.Ross: I almost see it as you want to set the time limit, but not actually use the timer to decide when it's going to finish. Like you'll say, "All right, guys, you've got five minutes to do this." There's some urgency, but then you walk around and you monitor.I don't think I ever set a timer, but I can see when people are close you need to get their skates on and go, "All right, you've got one minute left." You're using the times to motivate people to get their skates on, but you're not actually necessarily using a timer to do it.Allan: That's one point. When it gets to the evaluation of a lesson, like a real obsession with time and time management, teachers will often list as a key positive or a key negative, "I managed the time well. Therefore, I completed everything," versus "I didn't have enough time for some stuff, therefore, that..."Ross: Does that mean then that almost the aim of the lesson is to complete the lesson plan?Allan: To complete the lesson plan, yeah, absolutely. I used to do this as well.Ross: Do you think it's a nervousness thing? I often think, as observers, we see...Obviously, there's this observer's paradox thing where people are more nervous. Maybe they think the observer...Allan: It's going to be class, right?Ross: Yeah, it's a little class, also the observer is expecting them to carry out a plan or something.Allan: It could well be that they expect that. I remember talking about this fairly recently with a trainee who then said, "Well, when I'm observed in my regular job, I get told off if I don't follow the timings." There are definitely situations where you're under pressure there, or you have an observer who doesn't really know what they are talking about if I can say that.[laughter]Allan: They see the lesson plan as part of the exam. It also comes from a lack of tolerance of ambiguity or intolerance of ambiguity.Ross: Talk about that for a minute or two.Allan: Mrs. Dietrich told me all about this, and I love it. This is the idea that some people are tolerant of ambiguity and some people are not. This is a skill that can be trained.What it means is, if you have intolerance of ambiguity, it means that you feel threatened when you don't understand or they'd have confusion. Something you might do is keep asking questions used to search for a black and white answer.Ross: I've come across this before in language learning. The kids are generally more tolerant of ambiguity because, as a child, you're used to not understanding a lot of what's on TV or what your parents are saying. As an adult, especially with language reading, people get freaked out when it's like, "I don't understand one thing."Allan: A very good example of that was a recent lesson. The learner asked me a question about grammar and phrasal verbs and why we use of certain preposition. It took quite a while for me to just be essentially, "No way. You just have to use this preposition with this verb, sorry." She just wanted to know a reason.That's a very lack of tolerance for ambiguity. What it means here is, it's like, "OK, my lesson is on the plan. I can measure my success if I complete it." It requires a higher level of tolerance of ambiguity to say, "The lesson is in the learners' heads. I can't measure that. I've not really got any idea what's going on. Let's just let them work this out, and we'll try and explore together."It's really hard to measure what's impossible to measure. You have to take a leap of faith that like, "They're talking to each other about the task. Good."Ross: Something useful is coming out of this.Allan: Yeah, if we trust in our methodology, something useful is coming out of that. Let's work with it. That's a lot more tolerant of ambiguity than I completed the plan. I know I did something. [laughs]They'll learn the same thing where, in a similar way, the teacher might say, as a plus point, "Learners completed all the exercises correctly." Then me being an asshole, say, "Why is that a good thing?"Maybe a tip here for this as a trainer or observer is, if someone says, "I got through the lesson plan, I did everything on time," you can say, "OK, were there any points where you feel the learners could have benefited from more time there."Conversely, "I didn't manage to do everything." It's like, "Was that the plan or did you lose time at some point that you should have done, or did you plan too much? What was the reason there?" It might often be that "Oh, I just planned too much." Then it's, "OK, that's a learning there is you had a too complicated plan."There's the areas where time gets lost. These are, firstly, presentation where you think it's lasted a minute, but it's actually lasted about 10 and everyone's asleep. Where you'd like to elicit a few things and you just want to ask some questions, and then you get stuck there.Answer checking, I see a lot were it's, like, "Let's go through every damn answer." You already know they're all right. Let's go deeper or move on and just say, well done. A tip would be to record yourself doing that and then listen. It's like, your presentation, maybe that takes seven minutes of you presenting that. That's a bad use of time, I think.[crosstalk]Ross: It almost seems like a prioritization or like a value for time. If you could look through your lesson and think about which minutes was the most learning happening? Which segments have the highest value for time?Allan: Or which minutes where I'm not really aware of what was going on? That's where the time really matters.Ross: It could be your example there of going through the answers. That seems to be a perfect example of no one learned anything in these five minutes. Could you have cut out these five minutes? Probably.Allan: You can monitor, obviously, and then you say, "OK, everyone got everything right? Let's look at number two. What do you think about the answer to number three? Give your opinion." You can still then turn that into a learning opportunity, rather than just repeating what they already know.You mentioned before, time becomes a problem when they didn't do, say, the free practice or the core part of the lesson, which then yeah, that's a real issue. A way to get around that is to set a time, which is the latest that the core task can start.Ross: I like that. Not that I've done this much, but one of my best friends is into mountain climbing. The couple of times I've done a mountain with him, never actually gotten to the top, there's always a turnaround time of if we're not at the top, regardless of where we are, even if we're 15 meters from the top, at 4:30, we're turning around.Otherwise, we're going to be walking home in the dark, and someone might break their leg. That's a great metaphor for the free plan. It's always going to start at least 10 minutes from the end of the class, come hell or high water.Allan: Yeah, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is. Then if you want practice making sure that happens, then set a personal alarm or something that just goes off in your pocket and you go, "OK, everyone, we're going to move on to this."Ross: That's so nice. It's almost like the point of the timer is not for the students, it's for you.Allan: It's for you, right?Ross: It's for you. An interesting question's to look at...Because of the thing that we always say as teacher trainers is, "That final activity, you've got to get it done," or whatever, but why? Where is it we're spending time in a lesson on say, for example, accuracy versus fluency or input versus output? What's our rationale, maybe, as teacher trainers in those decisions?Allan: It's funny, they're right. The free practice must be done because, otherwise, they haven't applied it in the "real life" situation. Therefore, they've learned nothing. It's like, "Well, yeah, but..." The flippant answer is where learning takes place. That's where you should [laughs] spend more time, but where is that?Monitoring your learners and seeing what they're talking about, what they're saying, what mistakes they're making, finding places where you can improve, that's worth your time. It's maybe not accepting a mediocre answer.Maybe it's control practice, and someone said it with a bad pronunciation. It's like, OK, let's spend 20 seconds getting that better. That's worth your time. What else is there to talk about time other than...?Ross: Something interesting with timing is the idea of different timings with different age groups. I often find that's one of the big challenges going from teaching adults to kids, or kids to adults, or kids of different ages, is realizing that with three‑year‑olds, for example, if you have anything that lasts over five minutes, that's going to be a big problem. You need to plan.If it's a 60‑minute lesson, you probably need to plan like at least 12 different steps in there. If you do the same thing with adults, which I did before moving from teaching young kids to teaching adults, that's way too many stages. That's just not going work. Taking into account the attention span of the students of different ages.Allan: One advantage of teaching young learners in that regards is the kids will tell you. They'll tell you very loudly that they don't want to do this anymore.[laughter][crosstalk]Allan: In a way, the monitoring becomes quite easy in that respect. Stuff is being thrown, time to move on. Where adults, you have to listen a bit more carefully.Ross: Another key thing there is almost setting too much or setting these flexible aims of like saying, "You've got to write at least three sentences," or, "You have to answer at least seven questions," but maybe there's 12. Then, if people get to seven questions, and, "OK, you need to move on," people still have the sense of, I completed it.They don't have this frustration that I didn't finish, but then you don't get the early finishers just sitting around and doing nothing.Allan: Then maybe people choose different ones and then sharing at the end. Yeah, absolutely.[pause]Ross: Another thing about timing I wanted to mention was just what teachers spend their time on in general. When I was teaching 20 hours a week, I don't feel that I developed very much. I feel that the year I developed the most was when I was a director of studies and I was only teaching for about five hours a week. I could really plan those five hours. Really apply things...Allan: Are those lessons special in some way that they...?Ross: When I was teaching 20 hours a week, you were just surviving, it was keeping your head above water. Whereas I found, when I was teaching much less, all of a sudden I had this opportunity to go, "I'm going to use corpus in this lesson. I'm going to try and spend a bit more time making my materials on this."Allan: I used to work with teachers who also had customer service jobs as well and they would phone the parents. A lot of teachers worked with that dual role, and they had no time to plan lessons at all. They wouldn't develop really.Ross: Because you'd just be going in and winging it every time.Allan: Yeah, and, "Well, I'm not going to think up a new activity or new way of doing this because I don't have time."Ross: There's always some sort of teaching hierarchy of needs there like I'm going to get...Allan: Survival is first.Ross: Yeah, it's like, "If I don't mark the homework or phone the parents, I'm going to get fired. I'm going to do those things first. Then what's next? Write down the vocabulary and four activities on the back of a Post‑it note." Then gradually, if you have the time and maybe you do have the opportunity to think in more detail and reflect.Allan: Then there's some idiot does try to get you to do that jigsaw activities which involve cutting up pieces of paper.Ross: [laughs]Allan: Even in a top tip matching activity, you only need to cut one half of it. The other one you can keep there. Top tip, I've saved you hours and hours of your life.[laughter]Ross: That's amazing. I never thought of that before.Allan: Really?Ross: Yeah, really.Allan: Used to drive me mad to see people cutting both sides of it. Like, "No, you fold. You just need..."[laughter]Ross: Obviously, thanks for coming on.Allan: My pleasure.Ross: For people that want to find out more about you, no Twitter, no Facebook.Allan: No, I have nothing. No social media present at all.Ross: Wow, cool. Well, congratulations on having no social media.Allan: You'll see me on the streets.

Patsy Lightbown, Professor, author and second language acquisition researcher tells us about language learners of different ages. Are kids better language learners than adults? Who learns languages faster? Are there any advantages to learning a language later in life? Listen to find out…Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week, we have an interview with Patsy Lightbown, who is currently professor emerita at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as well as being most famous for being a second-language acquisition researcher and for the fantastic book, "How Languages are Learned."In today's podcast, we talked about language learning and specifically looked into the differences between how children learn languages and how adults learn languages. I hope you enjoy the interview.Ross: Hello. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming on.Patsy Lightbown: Hi. Thanks.Ross: Let's start off by talking about how people regardless of whether they are kids or adults, how do people in general learn a language?Patsy: I would agree with most people that language learning begins when people encounter language that they understand and that they are interested in understanding. In other words, the whole idea, the comprehensible input is the beginning of language strikes me as pretty plausible.There has to be a reason for learning. One reason for learning is to understand something that you hear or try to read. Some people have long-term goals when they start to learn a language. If you don't trigger a short-term desire to understand at the moment, then the long-term goals are hard to pursue.That's one of the things about language learning that we sometimes lose sight of in the classroom that people need to have immediate goals, immediate needs and interests, understanding, and communicating what they understand, or asking questions about it.I guess that's how language learning starts. Clearly, language learning is a long, long road. That's another thing we sometimes lose sight of, certainly in formal education the idea that people can reach high levels of competence in a language, that they are exposed to for an hour or so a day.It's also pretty misguided. What I always say is the classroom language teaching is a starting point, but what you really need to learn in the classroom is how to keep learning outside the classroom.Ross: Is this the idea of creating learner autonomy? Almost that the language classroom is giving students the skills to learn a language rather than actually the knowledge of learning.Patsy: Exactly. It seems to me what the classroom has to do is to prepare students to keep learning by helping them to learn strategies for understanding, and strategies for understanding what they hear, or what they try to read, strategies for making themselves understood to people outside the classroom.Of course, now the opportunities for coming in contact with another language, the opportunities are so much greater than they were in a previous era of different kinds of communication technologies.Now there's really no excuse for not finding ways of using the language outside the classroom. You don't have to actually live in the place where the language is spoken. You can encounter the language by using technology.You have to be motivated, and you have to have the confidence. That's another thing that the classroom can build.It's the confidence that you can keep learning outside, that you can approach another individual, or that you can approach a resource, and get something from it, that you have the strategies and the skills to learn from the encounters, that you can have either in person or online through technology.Ross: How much does that happen then? In my experience, most course books don't really do that. Most teachers, definitely being guilty of this myself, probably see the classroom as the beginning and the end of language learning and teaching rather than just really a starting point.Patsy: That's a really interesting question because, of course, like everything having to do with language teaching and learning, the variations in the answer to that question probably equal the number of classrooms there are in the world.Certainly, also it would depend on the age of the learners, and things like that. If it's not happening, it ought to be happening, I could put it that way. I can't say that it's happening more often, but I believe it should be.I don't know why it wouldn't be, but when you started out this piece of our conversation saying that unfortunately teachers do tend to believe that the classroom is the be-all and end-all, I think students may be convinced on that as well.I'm arguing that if teachers are not encouraging students to continue learning outside the classroom, then that should be a priority in teacher education that we say to teachers, "Prepare your students to learn outside the classroom."If we turn to the research domain, that would back that up. You may be aware that I've written some about phenomenon in cognitive psychology called "Transfer Appropriate Learning" or "Transfer Appropriate Processing."The idea behind that is that when we learn something, we learn not just the something that we are trying to learn, but we also internalize features and factors that are present in the environment where we're learning it.If all of our learning takes place not just in a classroom, but within the traditional definition of a classroom where teachers ask questions and students answer, then we're not preparing people to continue using language in other environments where they do the questioning.For example, or where the opportunities for using the language are very different from those of a classroom environment.Transfer Appropriate Processing would tell us that we need to get students experiences in the classroom that prepare them for using language outside the classroom.It's the thing such as making the language that they are exposed to, challenging, age appropriate, interesting, and all of those things that sometimes get lost in classroom instruction.[music]Ross: Let's talk about some of the differences between young learners and adults. How do those groups learn languages differently? Maybe, also, what might be similar between the two groups?Patsy: It seems to me that one of the biggest differences between child learners and older learners is that child learners are more willing to accept that they're learning. They're learning all sorts of things.We're talking here about a classic foreign language learning situation where the students are in a class where now we are learning English or now we are learning French. Now, we are learning science, math, or history.Young learners are more accepting of that. It's like a suspension of disbelief. You're not sitting in the classroom saying, "Why am I learning this?" You're sitting in the classroom saying, "I'm learning this because it's the English class. That's why I'm here." When you're dealing with older learners, I think the issue of why I'm learning this becomes more important to them.For one thing, they don't have as much time to lose as children do. Not time to lose, but they want to see results. The evidence is that older learners can learn more quickly than younger learners in a classroom setting. We've got lots of research to show that.Adults are certainly more able to use their intentional or explicit knowledge because they have more of it. They're able to build on it more than children can.Probably the most important thing is that adults don't have the time to learn something that's not important on the grounds that eventually it will be important, whereas I think children are more forgiving, and more willing to do what the teacher says.As students get older, they feel the pressure of time. I think that's especially true for people who are in second-language learning situations, as contrasted to foreign language learning situations.It depends on what their goals are. If they are learning the language, so let's say that they can travel or go and study abroad, then they also feel the pressure of time. Time is the thing that older learners have less of because there are so many other things that they have to do with their time.Ross: There must be a limit to that, though in that maybe adults are faster in some settings. I've read research on the critical age hypothesis. If you start learning a second language beyond a certain age, you'll never going to be able to sound like a native speaker.It's very, very difficult, whereas if you are immersed in a language before a certain age, then almost everyone ends up learning the language to the level of a native speaker.Patsy: Then you've also hit on the idea of becoming like or sounding like a native speaker. I think people have finally got over that. I hope. I'd like to think so. That is not the goal of most language teaching and learning.Sounding like a native speaker is not something that most language students aspire to. What they aspire to is reaching a level of proficiency that allows them to make themselves understood and to understand what they need to understand without aspiring to sound like native speakers.You can say the older learner learns more quickly, but may reach a certain plateau in some aspects of language learning. There are so many successful older learners. Focusing on what older learners can't do is pretty self-defeating.I think we need to focus more on what they can do and emphasize the remarkable success of many older learners if they are given the right instruction.If realistic expectations are set or how much time they need, that's part of the problem that people think they can, not just because of commercial ads, learn French in six months. People are unrealistic in their expectations of what they can accomplish in a very limited time.Adults sometimes get frustrated because they've been going to their evening class three days a week for six months, and they still can't do this x, y and z.Part of our job as teachers and as researchers is to reassure people that they are learning and that they will continue to learn that. Just because they have been studying for six months doesn't mean that they should be now fluent and competent in the language. It takes a long time.That's one thing we definitely know about language learning. It takes a long time to acquire high levels of proficiency, and it takes a long time of re-using the language in a great variety of situations.If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you'll get very good at that thing, but you need to be able to use language in a great variety of settings in order to get good at using it in a variety of settings. All of that takes time, more time than people ever realized.One of the biggest limitations for adults is not their intellectual, or cognitive, or whatever language learning ability that would allow them to acquire another language, but just the amount of time they have to devote to it.Ross: It's interesting. In my own experience learning Chinese, I found a few years ago that my Chinese was quite good conversationally, and then I moved to a Chinese company and started attending meetings that were in Chinese. It was so difficult.I found I could hardly understand anything and they're all this vocabulary about costs, and turnover, and profits. There was so much of it. It was incredibly difficult to understand even though I thought I had the background and the grammar, but in terms of the vocabulary it was so difficult.Patsy: That's really interesting. I'm sure, again, this is one of those things that we've talked about for years but when Jim Cummins first started talking about the difference between basic interpersonal communication skills and cognitive academic language proficiency.People were shocked that he said that it would take children five to seven years to achieve cognitive academic language proficiency, even though it would take them only, maybe, one or two years to achieve this interpersonal communication skill.Over and over again the research demonstrates that it takes years. It takes not just the passage of time chronologically, but the actual engagement in different kinds of activities and in different contexts, because it goes back to the transfer appropriate processing.You have to have the experience of a particular kind of language use in order to be prepared to use the language in that way outside the classroom.Ross: That was Professor Patsy Lightbown. If you want to find out more about her work, you can go to her website. There's a link on our links page. You might also want to check out two of her books. One of them is called "Focus On Content-Based Language Teaching" from Oxford University Press, or "How Languages Are Learned" co-authored with Nina Spada.Hope you enjoyed the podcast and see you again next time.

We discuss the differences between theory and practice in teacher development and the most effective was to learn from theory and learn from practice.Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. No Tracy today, but instead we have Mr. Dave Weller.Dave Weller: Hurrah! I have to say hurrah. It's become my tradition.Ross: Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast. What do you want to talk about today?Dave: One thing I've been thinking of a lot recently is the difference between theory versus practice in teacher development. There's that classic quote from that baseball dude, Yogi Berra, saying that, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice."In practice there is...[laughter]Dave: ... which is really nice. It got me thinking about have I used theory or practice? Which one have I used more to develop myself over the years? What is the difference? Why are they different? Is there a better one or is there a worse one? What are the best methods of learning theory or the best methods of learning through practice?Ross: Awesome. The three questions we're going to try and answer today are, what's the difference between theory and practice in teacher development?Dave: How teachers can learn from theory?Ross: And three, how can teachers learn from practice?What's the Difference Between Theory and Practice in Teacher Development?Ross: Again, I remember when I was doing my diploma a few years ago and reading about what teacher development should be, like reflection, team teaching, peer observations and all this kind of bottom‑up stuff. What I found in the place that I was working was it was a complete opposite. It was just top‑down observations and teacher workshops.Largely, pretty much everywhere I've worked, pretty much everywhere I've heard about, there is that huge difference between the theory and practice in teacher development. Why do you think that happens?Dave: It's just the different management style. Again, essentially, they're doing the same thing. They're recognizing patterns in what they've seen work before in teacher development. That's been quite charitable. It could just be that's the way they've always done it. No one's actually bothered to put in the thought or the time to test that out, to see if it actually is true.Ross: Another thing with those things is it's probably what is easiest to implement. I've found before, a previous company trying to implement much more bottom‑up ideas for teacher training. It just seemed to be too abstract for senior managers to understand.For them, it was like bums on seats in the training. They could see that. They could understand what it was, but if it was a teacher peer observing someone else or doing an online teacher training course, those senior managers couldn't see that and couldn't understand what it was.Dave: My personal belief is that if you have a bunch of newer teachers, say, first and second‑year teachers, normally top‑down is more effective because they don't know what they need to develop so they need that quite directive input. Go and read a chapter on this, teaching listening, or teach how to do an error correction.OK, great. Then they can try that again, that side that we talked about earlier. Once you get to those teachers, the majority of teachers in your school, they've been there a while, they're very self‑directive. They end up resenting that top‑down approach. They want to take things new directions.Their passions or their interests in teaching naturally develop from their time in the classroom. In which case, those are the guys you give free rein to go, "You develop, however, you like. Just come in to chat with me once a month about what you've been doing. We can bounce ideas off of each other. Of course, in the meantime, I'm here for input and ideas."Ross: That's interesting because you're almost dividing their quality control and development as two separate things. That's often one of the problems that we have with observations in teacher development. We lump these two different things into the same category.From a business point of view as a school, you have your students and you've promised them a minimum level of service from these teachers. If you're the manager and you're responsible for quality control, then your job is to get teachers to be able to deliver that quality of service. That's not optional.If you work there, your job is to get to that level. My job as a manager is to make sure that you get to that level. Once you're beyond that, it's a lot more open‑ended, isn't it? That's when it can open up.Dave: Exactly.Ross: Who knows where that could lead to? It could lead to you doing a podcast regularly. What have you learned from doing this one, in your development? Has it been helpful for you?Dave: Yes, absolutely. Incredibly.Ross: In some ways it means I have more conversations like this one. Maybe, you and I would normally talk about this in a bar, but I don't think we go down the rabbit hole quite as much as we do when there's a microphone recording. You're right. You wouldn't put this in someone's action plan, would you? Record it and make a podcast.Dave: [laughs] As iTunes gets flooded with podcasts in the next year.[laughter]How can teachers learn from theory?Ross: Let's talk about then how teachers can learn from theory.Dave: Sure. There's not as many ways as [inaudible 05:17] . I do think that some of these will overlap when we talk about how people learn from practice, as well. Again, it's normally seen as a slightly more buoyant one. It's typical, pick up a book, or read this, read that.I also think learning from theories is something as simple as talking to your colleagues after work, when you go for dinner with them after a long day or you find out what they worked. Find out if there's an idea behind it, or it was just something they were trying.It doesn't need to be an established theory. It can be, "Oh, I tried this." "Why did you try that?" "I don't really know." For engagement purposes, I think that the delivery channel is really important.Oftentimes, authors can be quite dry. That's a bit of a barrier to people, to picking up a book and reading through it. Whereas, if you have a YouTube channel, like a short snippet video or a podcast even, where you can multitask while you're doing that almost. You commute to work, you can get three good ideas to try in class that day.Ross: There's something very interesting about how so much of our profession is about grading your language, so that you can have people who are learning a language understand you.There seems to be a massive disconnect between our ability to do that as teachers and authors' abilities to put across ideas about teaching in language that's simple and accessible to all the English teachers in the world. Especially, when you take into the fact that most of the English teachers out there in the world are not native speakers.To quote or paraphrase Charles Bukowski, he says, "An academic is someone who takes a simple idea and makes it complicated. An artist is someone who takes a complicated idea and makes it simple." We need to be a lot better in this industry of becoming artists, as opposed to academics.Dave: I would fully agree, absolutely. I've read those same books, and guilty of reading through a page and stopping. I have no idea what I've just read.Ross: Yes, what did that say? [laughs]Dave: That's actually something I try and do on my website, barefootteflteacher.com. When I sat down to write it, I thought, "Well, who am I writing all this for?" I thought, I'm going to write this for first or third‑year teachers. Therefore, I'll keep the language simpler.I'm not going to name‑drop every single concept or idea. I'm going to try and break it down, and, basically, explain it like I'm five, using simple words, diagrams, visual aids. It's something I hope you're doing very well with this podcast as well, actually, opening these ideas, concepts, and theories to a wider world as well.Ross: What do you do running the Diploma in TESOL to help teachers apply theories more easily?Dave: Well, that's something that, hopefully, the tutorials will take care of because I always ask the students on the course to not think of it in modules. We have 10 modules. I say, "Don't think of it like a module." You start learning and then finish, then start something else and finish it. I say, "Try and think of as layers or threads running throughout."As I mentioned, we do a teacher test to start with. We do a video lesson which is observed. We pull out several points to work on based on the examination criteria, "That's OK. Pick one lesson a week. That's your experimental class. Try one of these. Do a bit of research on that aspect."Say it's error correction, learn all the different types, where the pros and cons to using that, and test it out. That will carry on throughout the rest of the course with all the other criteria.Ross: Of course, with that Dave, anyone could do that, right? You don't have to be on a teacher training course to do that.Dave: Shhh! [laughs]Ross: You could even film your own class, observe it, and figure out what things you're bad at, and you could do all those things yourself. I love that idea, by the way, of having an experimental class. I think that's such a cool idea. What do you think?Dave: The learners aren't quite so happy about that. [laughs]Ross: What are the ethics of it? Actually, I listened to a podcast the other day. They were talking about how, in Finland, they wanted to run an experiment on universal basic income.They had to change the Constitution because the Constitution says everyone gets treated equally. As soon as you run an experiment, you're no longer treating people equally. We can play that quote for you.Man 1: All the constitutions of democratic countries in the world, they say that you have to treat people equally.Man 2: By definition, if you're running experiments, you're not treating people equally...Ross: ...because they, the people who are part of the experiments, are not being treated equally.Dave: The ethics of it, as long as you're not doing something completely bonkers, doing something where it doesn't have much value, it's, in the long‑term, benefit for those learners in your class.Otherwise, every time you get a new teacher you're doing the ethic...You shouldn't let them teach until they're a wonderful teacher, because every teacher is constantly learning.How can teachers learn from practice?Ross: Let's talk about learning from practice.Dave: Sure. This is the one that everyone naturally does [laughs] because you have no choice. When you're a new teacher, it's survival mode. You end up, hopefully, just responding to the learners. You try and carry out your lesson plan.When the class finishes and the adrenaline [laughs] gets out of your system, you can hopefully reflect and go, "What went well and what didn't go well?" You do a little bit more of what did go well and a little bit less of what didn't. Over time, you learn from practice.After that survival period of, maybe, three to six months, you can start thinking a little bit more objectivity about what you're doing and spot the patterns. In the meantime, I'm sure most people have sympathetic colleagues that you can rush into the classroom at break time and go, "Ahh! Help."[laughter]Dave: They go, "Try this, try that." You get lots of useful suggestions, but I think there's no substitute from practice except to keep practicing, keep trying new things.Ross: There's a huge danger with that, though. I'll give you an example. I did this as well, in my first year. A colleague was recently telling me about this idea that you start off teaching and everyone has problems with managing students' behavior.For a lot of people, the thing that they do is they go, "OK, I'm going to be angry. I'm going to be there's going to be really strong discipline. There's going to be lots of punishment in my class." Their practice leads them down this road, which for me is really going in completely the wrong direction from what the theory would actually tell you to do.There is obviously a danger or you could learn, for example, I don't know. I tried giving instructions in English. I find that the students couldn't understand. What I learned from that is I'm going to give all instructions for all activities in the students' first language. Have you seen that?Dave: I have, and I would argue, that's just a growing stage. Hopefully, people don't become fossilized in that theory. If you continue to develop, you will discover that that does not work for a long time, or there are better ways to approach it. As a developmental stage, we've got no problem with that.Obviously, if that works better than something they were doing previously, where they had simply no control in the classroom, it was a riot. They went in a little bit too strict, but the students were able to sit down and learn something as a result. That's still better than the first thing.We can't expect people to become perfect immediately. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to learn bad theories. I remember giving a workshop on learning styles.[laughter]Dave: Along the way, you will make mistakes. You will learn incorrect theories or theories that have become outdated. They do stick in your mind.Talking the talk and walking the walkDave: I still think there's this idea about theoretical knowledge, which you have in your head. It's not being applied. Then you have this huge body of tacit knowledge, or the knowledge you gained through experience in the classroom. I really feel that's more valuable, that idea of when you speak to someone, they can talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk.Ross: I almost think it's surprising that we find that surprising, like if you take a different context...Dave: I'm surprised you think that way.Ross: [laughs] Say, you talk about football. You could be an expert on football and know so much about it. You could have watched thousands and thousands of games. You could be a commentator. You could be very, very respected. You could even be a manager, but you might not actually be able to kick a football.We, for some reason, assume in teaching the crossover between knowledge and skill is very, very small. Just by reading about something or being able to talk about something, you'll be able to apply that skill.Dave: In some cases, that's fine. The best boxers in the world have coaches who aren't the best boxers in the world, but they have the knack.Ross: The same as football, all these things.Dave: They have a knack of being able to pass on knowledge and break down technique and do that, which is fine, but they still, again, have a minimum level of that ability, as well.Ross: Dave, thanks very much for coming on. For anyone that's interested, where can they find you online?Dave: Thanks for having me, Ross. It's a pleasure as always. If you want to find out more, you can visit my blog at www.barefootteflteacher.com.Ross: Wonderful. Thanks again.Dave: Welcome.

Cognitive biases screw up our thinking. They make us make bad decisions, come to wrong wrong conclusions and for the most part we're completely unaware of them.Ross: Hi everyone.Tracy: Today we've got our special guest, Simon Galloway.Simon: Hello everyone.Tracy: Simon, do you want to...Both: ...introduce yourself?Simon: I'm mostly working with Trinity Diploma in TESOL, and Certificate in TESOL at the moment.Ross: You've done a bunch of other stuff before that, right? You were teaching in Japan, in China?Simon: Yes. I taught in Japan. I taught in China for several years. I was a director of studies and production...Ross: Regional manager as well?Simon: Regional manager for a while, yes.Ross: I remember years ago, Simon, watching you do a workshop for managers about how to do performance reviews. One of the things you spoke about was cognitive biases, right?Simon: Yes. That was focused on performance management, and all the things that managers tend to overlook when they're gauging the performance of their teachers. They might think they're giving a completely objective viewpoint, but actually these cognitive biases affect the way that they think.Ross: They don't just screw up managers thinking, they screw up everybody's.Simon: They screwed up everybody's thinking, yes.Ross: Screws up yours so much you brought a book about cognitive bias for your train journey on the way to Beijing.Simon: I did. It was quite good. It's "The Art of Thinking Clearly," by Rolf Dobelli. It's an international best‑seller.[laughter]Simon: I guess many of the people listening have also read this.[laughter]Ross: For those people that haven't heard of cognitive biases before, or don't have Rolf Dobelli's book, what's a cognitive bias?Simon: This is something that affects the way that we think and prevents us from thinking clearly, but we're probably not aware of it. As soon as we became aware of it, we gain a power over, or a power to stop it. It's usually something that we're not so aware of.Ross: Awesome. I guess over the next, whatever it is, 13 and a half minutes, we're going to try and give everyone a bit more power over their own thinking by talking about three things. First of all, cognitive biases for teachers.Tracy: Cognitive biases for trainers.Simon: And cognitive biases for managers.[background music]COGNITIVE BIASES FOR TEACHERSRoss: In terms of why cognitive biases are really incredibly important, here's a little quote from one of my favorite podcasts, which is Joe Rogan. He is interviewing, on this, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and they're talking about cognitive biases.Neil deGrasse Tyson: There should be a course called "Cognitive Bias 101". Forget college. Every high school should have a course "Cognitive Bias." The entire course should be about all the ways we fool ourselves, if we are going to emerge as adults no longer susceptible to charlatans, going forward.Joe: Yeah. We're thinking about just giving people facts instead of teaching them how to manage your mind.Neil: Yeah. Your head is your vessel, into which you pour information. Nowhere, and at no time, are we trained how to turn a fact into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into insight.Ross: An example of a cognitive bias, confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when we have our assumptions about something.Simon: Sure. Yeah.Ross: We ignore evidence to the contrary, and only listen to evidence that supports what we already think, right?Simon: Yeah. I see this a lot with teachers reflecting on their lessons. You ask them at the end, "How do you feel about your lesson?" They'll say, "Yeah, I feel really good about it. I saw this and this and this."As an observer, I'm like, "I didn't see any of that." Then I try to second‑guess myself, then. I'm like, "Maybe I missed something," but I think, really, a lot of this is that the teacher knows what they're looking for.Ross: And ignores what students didn't say.Simon: Yeah, ignores what it didn't say, exactly. That's the key about confirmation bias, is that they only look for evidence that confirms their viewpoint. They don't look for any of the conflict in evidence.Tracy: You know, they call hot or cold cognition or something? I think the hot one is definitely influenced by the people's emotion and motivation, and the cold one doesn't have much emotion involved in it.Ross: I wonder if this then affects you also in that same situation that Simon just mentioned, where just after a lesson it's more like hot cognition, so you still feel emotionally attached to the lesson, but maybe days or weeks afterward you feel less like that.Simon: Somebody's TP journal should be more objective, right?Tracy: Yeah, yeah.Ross: You'd think so, right?Simon: You'd hope, wouldn't you?Ross: After you'd had time to...Another one I'd read about before, I think it's called fundamental attribution error, or fundamental attribution bias.Simon: Attribution error, yes.Ross: This is where, if you make a mistake, you do something bad, you say it's because of the situation. But if you see other people doing the same thing, you put it down to their personality.The classic example is, you're driving down the road and you're speeding because you're late for work and you go, "I'm only speeding because I'm late for work." Then you see someone else speeding past you the next day and you think, "Oh, that person is such a reckless driver," and you ignore the fact that maybe the reason that they're speeding is because they might also be late for work.I thought this was applicable for teachers, because maybe you teach a class and it goes very well and you think, "Oh, I taught such an awesome class. That was fantastic. I'm such a legend."Then you have the opposite experience doing a class and it was just utterly awful. You go, "Why? Well, the students weren't motivated, the students weren't interested in the topic, the students were at the wrong level." You make all these excuses about why it didn't go well, based on other people rather than based on yourself.Simon: Yeah. You've got to look at it more objectively. You've got to realize that the environment has a much bigger effect than you might immediately think, right?Ross: Yeah.Tracy: How can people realize that they are experiencing the cognitive bias? How can they prevent to have the bias?Ross: I think a part of it is just knowing that they exist, right?Simon: Yeah, I think so. Just knowing that these are ways that we think is a big first step to fixing them.[background music]COGNATIVE BIASES FOR TRAINERSRoss: Should we also talk about the trainers? What are some of the biases that you think we can fall prey to?Simon: I was thinking here about trainers observing lessons. I thought of a few things here. The first one is regression to the mean and anchoring. Two different biases here, if we're actually formally assessing candidates or teachers.With regression to the mean, it's this sense that, you can watch a teacher. Maybe they did a really bad lesson. You think, "I'm going to give a load of advice and all these tips." Then in the next lesson, they do much better. You think, "Well, I'm an amazing trainer."[laughter]Simon: "I've just changed their whole outlook on teaching. Really successful." Sometimes a teacher might do a really good lesson. You tell them, "That was amazing. That was really awesome."Then the next lesson, they do much worse. You think, "Huh, praising obviously didn't help this candidate. Obviously, if I give too much praise, the candidate gets complacent and they do worse." But in reality, perhaps in both of these cases, they're just regressing to the mean.Ross: They're just going back towards the norm.Simon: They're just going back towards the norm, right? Because there's a kind of a standard‑ish lesson, which might be just a pass, or that kind of thing. If the candidates are not amazingly proficient, or else not amazingly bad, they're going to tend to regress there, regardless of the trainer's feedback.Then of course, based on a fundamental attribution bias, we tend to think, "Oh, we're the trainer. We're changing their lives. We are the big changing point."Ross: Right. Yeah. "I have this huge influence over this teacher."Simon: "I can have a massive influence, a massive impact on these teachers," when in reality there's so many other factors affecting the quality of the lesson.Ross: Almost sounds like the over‑confidence bias, as well. Like my five minutes of feedback has completely affected this person for the next week.Simon: Changed their lives, yeah.Ross: Then anchoring is where, for example, you have an expectation of where the limits are on something, and you don't want to go move too far beyond that, right?Simon: Yeah. Sometimes in my experience, I've had cases where the trainer before me has observed a teacher and told me, "This teacher is amazing. See what you think about them." Or "Oh my goodness, that teacher was awful. See what you think about them."Then when I go in to watch them, got that in my mind. I'm thinking "OK. This teacher, I don't think they're that good, but yeah, that was quite good," so I give them quite a high mark. I give them a higher mark than I would have otherwise. Or I think, "That teacher wasn't great. Yeah, OK, the last trainer was right," and I give them a lower mark. But actually...Ross: Are you really looking at it objectively?Simon: Am I really looking at it objectively, right. If I hadn't had that piece of information from the other trainer, I may have given them a different mark, regardless.Ross: I'd read about this with Donald Trump speaking about, for example, immigrants to America and saying, "We're going to deport all illegal immigrants," and that's the sort of anchor for the conversation. The one extreme end.Simon: Yeah. Pushing it to the very extreme, yeah.Ross: Yeah. You're then framing the conversation as, "That's how far I'm willing to go." Then things move back from there.Simon: Yes, exactly. In that way, Trump changed the whole narrative of how things were talked about in America.Ross: Yeah.Simon: Marine Le Pen did the same in France. With Trump, somehow, he actually managed to get into power, but say you were Marine Le Pen in France. Even though she didn't get into power, she changed the narrative in France towards a more right wing bias, through anchoring.Tracy: I think there's something also related to the outcome bias. Another example, people probably got A for their TP lesson and they thought, "Everything I did for this lesson worked perfectly," and they kept using the same thing for the next TPs. But actually it didn't work very well for another group of learners.They didn't really realize or identify what worked and what didn't work, and just go in depth and reflect on what exactly students reacted, to the materials and the teacher's behavior. They just looked at the outcome because "I got an A."Ross: There was another interesting example about cognitive bias in a book called "Black Box Thinking" that I read about, which is prisoners going up for parole. The main thing which decided whether they got parole or not was whether it was the morning or the afternoon.Simon: Yeah, right.Ross: If it was after the judges had just eaten lunch, there was a high chance that prisoners will be allowed parole, and if it was in the morning when they didn't, then they wouldn't.Simon: Yes.Ross: This relates to trainers because...Simon: Yes, yes, absolutely. This is how we first got onto talking about the subject.Ross: Yeah.Simon: I did quite a lot of analysis on trainer observations on a teacher‑training course. After doing quite a thorough analysis, it was quite clear that the trainers gave much better marks in the morning than they did in the afternoon.It seems that the trainers were not taking a lot of time to eat lunch. They were often missing lunch, or they were just having a coffee for lunch, or this kind of thing. The result was that the afternoon lessons were 5 or 10 percent lower marks than the morning sessions.Ross: Yeah.Simon: To the point where significantly more afternoon sessions were actually failing than the morning sessions.Ross: What I think is fascinating about this is obviously taking a class and passing or failing it in a teacher‑training course is much lower stakes than getting released from prison.In those examples from capital punishment or from parole, no one was aware that those things were going on until someone actually collected the data. I suppose the takeaway here is, looking at the plain numbers and seeing what story numbers can tell us, as trainers.[background music]COGNATIVE BIASES FOR MANAGERSRoss: I remember years ago having a new teacher who I was training. I think they came in late, and they were dressed too casually. They didn't impress me in training.When I was talking to my boss about it, saying,"Should I pass on this feedback to this person's manager?" he said, "Beware of the self‑fulfilling prophecy," which is, you pass that information on and that the new manager hears that this teacher has turned up late and they wore the wrong clothes.They then start to look out for all those attributes in that person, and it very quickly turns into that person ends up getting fired, but maybe they didn't actually have to.Simon: There was a very interesting study done on this. They took a class of primary school students. They just took five students at complete random and said to the teacher, "Look, these students have been identified as very high potential." They took another five at random and said, "These five, you're going to have some problems with these students. Just find a way to deal with them."They came back a year later they saw the students that they had chosen at random as high performers actually had much higher results.Ross: I thought the take away from that was...Simon: Belief in those children can really make the big difference.Ross: Presumably, having higher expectations of the students is the key there. Tell us more about the performance management, and some of those biases for managers. How do those operate?Simon: If you're rating teacher's performance, as a manager, you can be prone to a lot of different biases. I was doing this kind of performance appraisals for teachers for a long time, and I realized that I was quite prone to a lot of these biases.[laughter]Simon: A lot of new managers, and even experienced managers, will make the same mistakes. As I've said before, when you realize that you're doing it, that's the first step towards changing it.On a rating of one to three for a lot of areas, you might just think, "Well, all right. They're not too terrible and they're not amazing at this, so I'll just give them a two." And you just give them twos.Ross: Two out of three is?Simon: There's a one, a two, and a three. One is below expectations, two, meets expectations, and three, exceeds expectations. Then, what the teacher gets is just a whole lot of twos.I've seen teachers also evaluate themselves this way. It's like, "Can you self‑evaluate?" I had a teacher before. I gave them some time to fill out their self evaluation. They took about 30 or 40 minutes all together. Finally, when they gave it to me, it was a line of twos, the whole way down.[laughter]Simon: There's that one. Then there's the other ones, where you can look at a halo bias, where you've got a teacher that you think, "This is my star teacher in my team. They're great," so you just give them a three for everything.I had a center director before who did this. Every single teacher that she liked in the school, she would just give them all threes. Then there was a teacher that she didn't like, gave them all ones. It's like the opposite of that, saying that if somebody is good, then everything is good.[background music]Ross: We talked a lot there about things that can go wrong. What could people do to get around those problems, to be less cognitively biased?Simon: As I've said before, I think just by knowing what will happen, you can start to stop it. With all learning, you can start by noticing and then turn it into action. If you know what these biases are, you notice yourself doing them, kind of stop yourself.Tracy: Thanks for listening everybody. Thanks, Simon, for coming to our podcast today.Simon: My pleasure.Tracy: Bye.Ross: Bye everyone.Simon: Bye‑bye.[background music]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: And if you want to keep up to date with our latest content, add us on WeChat at tefltraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoy our podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

In this week's B-SIDES episode, we’re going to be answering a question that was asked on a recent Facebook live - the question about whether you should give music away for free, and what "free" should mean for artists in today's music industry. Enjoy! Highlights: - We talk about the benefits of giving music away for free - and what "free" should actually mean - "Rather than thinking of it as giving music away for free, think of it more as getting it to the people who are going to be part of your audience" -Ross - "There are many things more valuable than money and the instant gratification that comes along with seeing a dollar in exchange for your song." - Marcio - "An email address carries much more weight than a one-off transaction, and allows a long-lasting communication with your audience" - Even in the age of social media, getting someone’s email address is still one of the most effective ways of communicating with them - If you’re able to give something exclusive in exchange for an email address, you should definitely consider it - A free download can be a gateway to someone discovering more about you - so it’s almost an investment, rather than something that’s just being given away - We talk about potential offers or bundles you can offer to your audience in exchange for their email address - We talk about times where a free download has converted us into long-term, paying fans of an artist - "We’ve all just got to find creative ways to take control of how people get our music for free and make it a win-win for everyone" - Marcio - "It's a long game... you’re building an audience of people who know, trust and like you, and are willing to support you throughout your career" -Ross Sponsors: - Christine Infanger @ Thirty Roses - Music Entrepreneur HQ --- More: For more episodes, visit http://bridge-the-atlantic.com Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bridge_atlantic Subscribe on iTunes: http://bridge-the-atlantic.com/itunes Support us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/bridgetheatlantic See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode we look into the dark secret of the TEFL industry - teacher turnover. If you’re a manager, how many of these teacher turnover blunders are being made in your school?Tracy Yu: Welcome to the "TEFL Training Institute" podcast, the bite‑sized TEFL podcast for teachers, trainers and managers.Ross Thorburn: Tracy, how long have you worked in the same company for?Tracy: Almost 10 years. A long time.Ross: You must have renewed your contract a whole bunch of times then, have you?Tracy: Yeah.Ross: Can you tell me some of the reasons why you decided to stay?Tracy: I remember clearly the first time I renewed. I was really, really sure that I enjoyed the job teaching. I also enjoyed working with my colleagues and I liked the work environment. I listed the pros and cons and I think the schedule is not great but...Tracy: ...compared to some other factors, I think, yeah, I definitely want to stay.Ross: What about more recently?Tracy: For last two times, when I renewed contract, it's mainly because there were new challenges and the position has been changed. I can say got promoted or doing different role.Ross: When I do training with managers and I usually ask them, "What's the number one thing that motivates teachers?" Can you guess what they say?Tracy: Let me guess. I will say money...Ross: Yeah.Tracy: ...is one of them?Ross: Some people always say money and yet, again, there, none of the things that you said really were related to money. It was career development, it was your peers, it was enjoying teaching, all those different things.Tracy: I won't deny, salary increase would definitely going to be one reason why people, they are staying or they're changing jobs, but I don't think from my experience, that was the main reason why I did that.Ross: Today, we're going to look at teacher motivation and teacher retention and we've got three questions.Tracy: The first one, what are the common mistakes for teacher retention?Ross: What can managers and organizations do to retain teachers? Finally...Tracy: Why it's important for managers and organizations to keep teachers and to motivate them?What Are The Common Mistakes For Teacher Retention?Ross: Tracy, what do you think of some of the maybe common mistakes that managers and organizations make?Tracy: You mentioned earlier about money?Ross: Yeah.Tracy: I would say most people just assume, OK, no salary increase and compared to other organizations in this field, and the salary is not very competitive, that's why people leave because people live in the real world. They want to get more money, have a better living standard.Ross: Money is important, right?Tracy: Yeah. No one [laughs] is going to say no.[laughter]Tracy: Why do the managers still believe that's the main reason or the number one reason why people stay?Ross: Or why people leave? I think it's just a very 19th century, like a Victorian, very simple way of looking at motivation. A very capitalist way of looking at it. If you want people to do something, offer them money and they'll do it. I think the reason that doesn't work for teachers is because if you were someone that was really, really motivated by money, you wouldn't have become a teacher.Tracy: That's true. That's not the really wealthy industry, to be honest.[crosstalk]Ross: ...or you'd become a lawyer or you'd try to become a doctor, or you'd have become a sales person, but you wouldn't have moved to Prague and got a teaching job. At least for me, when I moved to China, I took a pay cut of about...I was getting paid, I think, a quarter or a fifth of what I getting paid before in the UK.That is not to say money is not important to me, but it's obviously not the main driving reason behind what I'm doing. Otherwise, I wouldn't take a 70 percent pay cut for a new job. I was sure that there was other factors that are important.Tracy: I think that will lead to the next one that I've been thinking about because a lot of time, the managers they believe what they believe. They never ask the teacher, "Is this the reason why you stay or is why the reason you leave?"Ross: There's a quote in the Bible, I think, isn't there? It's like, "Do unto others as you would have do unto you." Have you heard this before?Tracy: Yeah, I think so.[crosstalk]Tracy: It doesn't work...Ross: This is like treat other people the way you want to be treated.There's a quote from George Bernard Shaw who says, "Do not do unto others as they expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." Obviously, different people are motivated by different things, but I think this is assumption that what motivates me must be the same as what motivates you.The big problem in organizations is that senior managers do get a high salary and probably are quite motivated by money. They may assume, "Oh, that must be the same for teachers," but it's not.Tracy: Yeah. That's a good point. A lot of managers of organizations don't really listen to teachers and what they really need and what motivates them because I think...We talk about sit down with teachers at different time, maybe before the probation or other probation six months or one year or different year before contract.You just maybe have a regular meeting or conversation with your teacher and just find out what's going on with them and what they really need.Ross: I think listening is the key thing there.Tracy: Exactly.Ross: If you're doing a review with someone after however long, that the main person speaking in the review to be the employee not the managers so you can find out more about what interests them, what their goals are, why they're doing the job. If you don't know those things, how can you expect to motivate someone?Tracy: A lot of teacher I talk to, at least, some teachers say, "Do you really think that I'm doing this job for money? No, because I want to really help people and to see my students develop, to learn something. I want to see their happy face at the end of the class." Don't assume people do or stay this job just because of money.What can managers and organizations do to retain teachers?Tracy: You've been a manager for a few years. What are the secrets for you as a manager to keep your staff?Ross: If you care for your staff and you say, "Oh, I know that you're going to leave one day. What I want to do in the next year, we want to give you some of the skills and things that are going to help you get to the next position, either on this company or outside this company."Say, you've told me you want to run your own center, school, or your own CertTESOL school, then great. "Great. OK, let's work on having a plan for you over the next year so that you can get skills, so that you'll be able to run your own school in a year's time, or two years' time." You're much more likely to stay with me for those two years.I think it's counter‑intuitive for people because I think people think, "Oh, I don't want to encourage my staff to leave." I think you want to encourage your staff to achieve their goals and those goals will probably usually be outside the company.For me, that secret is like listening to them, finding out what is it they want to achieve in the future, and then help them to make sure they get the skills in their current job that'll help them get there in the future. Your aim isn't to keep people until they're 65.Tracy: Yeah.[laughter]Ross: Your aim is to keep people as if keeping them for one year, keeping them for three years or four years.Tracy: That's an interesting point, though, because even for employee or for teachers and they stay longer and then automatically, we believe, "OK, the reason why I stay another year because I want to have a promotion." Of course, that's fine, but after what you mentioned, and then you think about, "OK, I'm going stay another year or two. What can I get out of it?"Ross: Yeah, exactly. That's why you want to talk to people about. What do you want to get out of staying here for another year and having that conversation with people?Tracy: That's my point. Just accept the position, the title, and the real skills and the competencies and knowledge and all that kinds of stuff, and people need to consider more. You know what I mean?Ross: I think that's something that managers need to help people to realize. For a lot of people, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to be standing up in front of a room of 15 kids again for a year teaching them ABC."[laughs] There's a lot more in a way of skills that you can get out of that that can help you to get a better job or something when you leave, or you can study a qualification or something that's going to help you get a different job when you leave.It's helping people realize what are the skills that you need for the future and then how can we make sure that you get those skills in your current position.Tracy: Yeah. In another word, I think, just to try to let them see their value in this team work, in this company...[crosstalk]Ross: It's just part, I think of recognizing people. I think it's about recognizing the right things. It's not about saying, "Well, well done. You got the most student retention, or you got the highest demonstration class conversion," or, "Well done. You came to work on time every day for the last month." It's about praising people for things that they want to be praised for.Tracy: Can I ask you here? I'm just confused that should we ask them or do you want me?Ross: You don't need to ask people like, "What do you want to be praised for exactly?" You can find out what people think that they're good at doing, and I think praising people for, "You made the most money for our company every month."That's great if it's a sales person because that is the role of a sales person, it's to make money. If it's a teacher and you praise them for making money, then you're not going to keep people who are very suited for the teaching profession.That all comes down to like you were saying at the beginning, getting to know people's motivation, understand...[crosstalk]Ross: ...and then sitting down with someone on the first day in the new job and say, "Why are you here? What do you want to get out of this?"Tracy: What if the teacher says, "I just want to come here to travel"?Ross: That's fine.Tracy: How can you help them?Ross: That was what I wanted to do in the beginning.Tracy: How can you do that to relate to their retention? Because you know they're going to leave. "I don't care..."Ross: I didn't leave. I came here to travel and I'm still in the same country, in the same organization 10 years later. People's motivations change and we know, again, from research that the majority of what's called Self‑initiated Expats, SIEs, so people who make the decision themselves to go abroad.One of the most common reasons, and the most common reason for language schools is, that they want to travel. Of course, give those people opportunities to do that but they might enjoy the job as I did. Like I really, really enjoyed teaching and as time has gone by, my motivations for staying in this profession, this industry have changed.Why it's important for managers and organizations to keep teachers and to motivate them?Tracy: We talked a lot about the common mistakes and how we motivate and keep teachers. Why do we do that? Why do we care about doing it?Ross: The main, I think, reason for big organizations is just it's very, very expensive to recruit teachers from abroad. You could save so much money by just keeping teachers in the same position for longer.That's the big picture. I think if it comes down to the small picture about teachers and students, then as a teacher, the most important thing you can do is understand and get to know your students.Tracy: Yeah, that's the common feedback that I heard when I met some students in the center and just say, "Oh, OK. After my six months alternative leave, I came back and there's no teacher in this school. I really know. They all left." I think that's a really, really bad effect on the students. It's definitely bad for the students.Ross: It's not necessarily saying that every teacher who's been teaching for five years is better than every teacher who's been teaching for six months. I think it's pretty much always true that you're a better teacher after five years than you were after one year. I definitely was.Tracy: Another thing is, similar to recruitment, is training, because we're doing training. [laughs] You know how much time and efforts we spend with the teachers and then they leave.That's the most frustrating thing for a trainer, at least for me. I have the teachers, I spend all the time, I'll be one or two weeks with them, and then you'll just see in six months or a year and they just left. They can do a really good job but...you know what I mean, and have to train new people again, again, again, and again.Ross: Which is really, really costly for organizations, right?Tracy: Yeah, exactly because they have to pay us to do training and stuff.Ross: This is something that's becoming more and more common not just in education but everywhere. If you look at my parents, they pretty much stayed in the same jobs for about 30‑something years. For your parents, how long did they work in the same companies for?Tracy: Their whole life, yeah.Ross: Yeah.Tracy: Definitely. More than 30 years.Ross: Right. I think now, things are changing a lot faster and I think the world average according to LinkedIn is only something like four years that people stay in the same company.Tracy: Of course, nowadays, we don't expect people to stay in the same company, same position 5, 10 years because that's unrealistic. Again, don't want to spend a lot of time and money, keep hiring new people and training them.Wrap UpTracy: Ross, you just started a new job. If you have a chance to tell your manager three things that can motivate you, what they are going to be?Ross: The team I work with is really important in my last job. I really loved all the people that I had worked with and that kept me there for quite a long time.As a manager, having control over who you hire is really, really important. Things like your work schedule and your work‑life balance is also super important especially nowadays. That's something that research has shown as important for every generation.For me, working overtime isn't a problem occasionally, but I know of some people and friends who've had to work six days a week and 12 hours a day every day for two years. Those people obviously quit.Making sure there's some work‑life balance. Professional growth and development, it might not be getting like doing tons of training courses or anything, but it might just be the opportunity to research and present at conferences.Tracy: That's very good advice.Ross: I hope she's listening.Tracy: [laughs] Good luck. All right. Bye, everyone.