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Letterland teacher trainer Lesley White tells Ross about phonics. We touch on the history, the advantages of phonics over other approaches, different options to teachers within the phonics system and some of the differences between learning to read in your first language and in your second language.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 channelRoss Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week, I'm speaking to Lesley White. Lesley is a trainer at Letterland. She's got many, many years of experience working there as a young learner, teacher‑trainer. She's been running phonic sessions in the UK and overseas since 1992, which is indeed a lot of experience.In this episode, I got to ask Lesley all about phonics, a bit of background about where it comes from, how long it's been around for. Then we also get into a lot of practical advice for teachers. If you've ever taught any students to learn to read, then I'm sure you'll find a lot of valuable information from Lesley.Where should teachers start in teaching reading?Ross: Hi, Lesley.Lesley White: Hi.Ross: Very simple question to get us started. Where should teachers start in teaching reading?Lesley: Well, within our system, we start by teaching the very young children all the prereading and prewriting skills before they even get as far as learning to read. We want them to have those very early stages because we're working with children around about the three‑age range.Before they start even thinking about reading, they need to have the tools to be able to read. For that, we introduce them to using the knowledge they have about the sounds. We want them to then blend them together to be able to read.If they only know a couple of sounds, they don't have very much in the way of background or the very many tools to help them to read much. Start small and then keep growing.Ross: You mentioned there are prereading skills. What exactly are prereading skills?Lesley: Babies learn by imitation. That's how they develop their native language skills. That should be the same way for other languages as well. The nearer we can replicate what they do naturally, the easier it is to give them the baseline, the starting.We try to give them the prereading and writing skills, the ability to spot odd ones out, learn about logic and how things go together, think about the sequences. All those what I call prereading and prewriting activities, then provide them with a basis. Without that, the actual skill of reading becomes far more difficult because English is not a purely phonic language.We need to introduce the children to a systematic and explicit way of learning so that they have the tools to then be able to decode the message that's carried within those shapes.Ross: When I was a teacher, phonics was just starting to become popular, at least, in China. Could you give us a bit of a sense of what the history is of phonics and, maybe, how it's been used in comparison to other approaches?Lesley: I remember when I was at school, which is long before you were a teacher, and long before you were at school. I remember I was taught to use those sounds and talk about the C‑A‑T, the cat, sat, S‑A‑T on the M‑A‑T. The phonics has always been around and about for very many, many years.It goes in cycles as to whether it's popular within the educational elite, but phonics came back into vogue towards the end of the last century. The beginning of this led, in part, by the UK government's desire for all children to be introduced to phonics early in their careers, so the letters and sound document.As far as phonics for a second language, that's slightly more difficult because if the children don't have a vocabulary, then they don't know the words they're trying to create.That's why I say those early stages, those prereading, prewriting stages, includes helping the children to begin to develop a vocabulary and have some understanding of the language. It's not just picking up a book and barking at print.It is actually being able to blend the sounds together, read the words, but read them with understanding because so often parents will say to me, "My child can read these words, but they don't know what they're reading." That's as useless as not being able to read, if you like.Ross: It sounds then ike children really need that foundation in listening, maybe speaking, and definitely having vocabulary knowledge before they start to learn to read then.Lesley: Without those skills, then the next stage can't be reached. When we get children walking, for instance, they don't just stand up and start to run, they start with falling down and bringing themselves up again.We have to look at reading in exactly the same way that they have to take those steps slowly, little by little, adding to their knowledge and their understanding. The more that they enjoy and are entertained by it, the better their knowledge acquisition becomes, and the more they enjoy the experience.There are different types of phonics. There's synthetic phonics. It's the buzzword in many educational circles. That's about blending the sounds together in order to read words. We also have linguistic and analytic phonics, as well.Now, how relevant is that for very young children? It's about enjoying books. It's whatever way that they can look at print and get meaning from it. It is about getting meaning from it, not just what I call, barking at print.Stages in Learning to ReadRoss: What are some of the different stages that students go through in learning to read? Presumably then, the first stage there is for students to start to link letters to sounds. What happens from there?Lesley: I'd say the first stage is speaking and listening. As far as the silence, I think it's vitally important that the children begin to have a feel about the rhythm of the language, about the knowledge that sounds. So getting to that stage before they get as far as putting those sounds together and being able to do anything more than that.The first stage, as far as I'm concerned, is speaking and listening. We then go on, as you very rightly say, to identifying the sounds. There are 44 sounds in our English language. It's not just learning about the 26 letters and the shapes of those letters, but it's then about the combinations.If we think about it, consonants, B, C, D, are never ever confused in reading, but the vowels confuse and complicate because they make a variety of different sounds. Somewhere without making it too unfactual for young children, we have to engage them and help them to make those connections and understandings.Ross: Is there an order that is best for teachers to teach the different sounds and letters and in others, SATPIN, which is a common one? There's also A, B, C, D, which is very common. What are some such things and considerations teachers might think about before choosing the order they're going to teach the letters in?Lesley: My answer to that is it depends on your objective. If you're wanting the children to learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, that's fine. That's the order that you'll find in a dictionary, or an index, or anything else. Getting the children to sing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., is part of learning a rote about the names of the letters.That's not going to help the children blend the sounds together to make words. The SATPIN teaching order, which is a sequence that has been suggested as recommended in various publications means that you can start making words after you've covered the first four letters.Simple words, but you've got S,A,T making S‑A‑T, sat, P‑A‑T, pat. Then we can turn that round and have T‑A‑P, tap. Already, even after four letters, we're able to blend those sounds together.That teaching order also makes sure the letters that are similar‑looking to young children like the B and the D...Some children are very confused by those two shapes, because they're very similar just turned round the other way, if you will.Teaching out of sequence means the children can become used to one of them as if you're teaching A, B, C order, the B and the D are very close together. The only word you can make out of those first four letters, you can make bad. You could make cad, but not very many young children are going to need that word.Now, other schools of thought would say that you want to be concentrating more on handwriting as opposed to the voice‑sight systems that will concentrate on getting the children to make a circle, an O. There are a variety of different strategies about which teaching order is most useful. I think you pay with your money and take your choice.At the end of the day, the children have got to know all 26 letter shapes, and the sounds associated with them. Once you've decided that your objective is to help your children to read, as well as to write and to spell, then you choose the order that works for you.My one piece of advice to all teachers though is follow a system because I've come across teachers who decide that they'll just do their own thing. They dart from one letter to the other because the weather was nice and we'll use this letter for some particular topic or something.I understand why, but in all honesty, letters like Q, X, Z, they get forgotten about. I would always suggest that teachers should use a systematic approach that captures children's imagination. Whatever that system happens to be, I can justify a variety of different systems.Ross: What about some of the more difficult sounds and letters then like "th" and "ck," etc.? When would you decide to teach those?Lesley: The order that has been put together by the letters and sounds document, which is the UK government's suggested order, make sure that the children are covering the S‑A‑T‑P‑I‑N to begin with. Then we keep going, we add all 26 letters.Then, sh, ch, th, are the digraphs, which will be introduced earlier, whereas some of the more complex spelling patterns, the E‑A‑R, all those sorts of things. Whatever program, whatever system one decides to adopt to cover all the sounds, eventually. There are 44 sounds in our English language. There are over 150 different spelling patterns.If you told me that on the first day I went to school, I'm sure I'd have said, "I don't know what on earth you're talking about." It is about trying to engage the children and add to their knowledge in time.Ross: Then what do teachers do about more difficult words? They are sometimes called sight words like, the, one, you, words that don't follow this typical phonetic rules in English.Lesley: Absolutely. You've got "the," even something that looks as if it would be very simple, a word like "no." When the letters are the other way around, and you have the O coming before the N, then it makes the O‑N sounds and the word is "on," and the children think this is fine.Then we put the letters in the opposite direction having the N coming before the O, and it doesn't make the sound stand. We don't say no, we say no. Why? Yes, those tricky words, high‑frequency words, sight words called variety of different things, depending on which expert is talking, are necessary to make reading have any sense.Ross: How can teachers teach those words?Lesley: To begin with ‑‑ I'm sorry ‑‑ It's a bit of rote learning. It is a bit of just stretching the word to hear what sounds you do know and identify the known sounds, but then also thinking, "Uh‑uh, that one's not making its normal sound. I've got to remember that for the future," so they remeber that tricky word.Ross: Once again, that was Lesley White. If you're interested in finding out more about Lesley and the program that she uses at Letterland, please go to www.letterland.com. Thanks for listening. See you again soon.

A late night conversation with my dad about how entrepreneurs can protect their personal assets. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com Also, don’t forget to check out bookease.com ---Transcript--- Hey, what's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to The Marketing Secrets Podcast. This is actually a really cool late night edition. I'm at my house right now. It is getting close to midnight. I'm hanging out with my dad, who's in town and we're talking about business and some stuff and folks who know my dad, he does a lot of business structuring and accounting and stuff for a lot of the funnel hackers. In fact, almost everybody who joins the Tacoma Callbacks Program eventually ends up getting my dad to set up their books and their company and everything. So he's a lot of experience with a lot of our entrepreneurs, and we're talking about protection and how to protect yourself from creditors and predators. And not only from a business standpoint, but from personal standpoint. And so we thought, hey, while we're sitting here talking about this, we might as well record a podcast. Now, I don't do a lot of podcasts that are interviews, which is kind of fun having my dad here. And I'll also state that I'm not a lawyer or I'm not giving you legal advice, something you should definitely look into yourself. If you do want help structuring these kinds of things that we're talking about. My dad and his company is available to help that. And we'll talk about that kind of at the end of this podcast. So with that said, we're going to cue the theme song, when we come back, I'll have the chance to introduce you to my dad. All right everybody welcome back. Like I said, we're excited to hear tonight, at the kitchen table, all of the kids are finally in bed. And my dad and I are talking about business and excited to have him here and kind of share some really cool things with you guys. Things that a lot of times, as entrepreneurs don't think about, we think about creating things and selling things. And a lot of times we don't think about protecting ourselves. And so that's what people like my dad do is help us with those kinds of things. So, we can keep selling stuff, keep creating stuff, not ended up losing a lot of the things that we've earned. Anything from houses to your money, to all sorts of stuff. And so that's what we're talking about tonight. So, dad, how are you feeling tonight? Ross Brunson: I'm feeling really good, Russell. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to chat with you and with your audience tonight. I think it should be fun. Russell: Yeah. So, what we're going to start with is I know in the past we've talked about protecting your business, and how you structure entities. I know you do that for a ton of people in the ClickFunnels community, a lot of funnel hackers and things like that. I don't even know how many of our people we sent your way. I know that there's been a lot, but I'm curious, like just with all the people that you're working with, you're setting a business, people thinking past just their business structure and think about the personal stuff or just kind of the business stuff typically right now? Ross: Well, most people, when they contact me, they're interested in protecting their business and that's understandable because they're just going into business and there's a lot of roadblocks out there, a lot of pitfalls that they can step into. And so they come to me and they talk to me about what type of business should I have? Should it be a corporation? Should it be an LLC? Should it be some other type of entity? And we go through and we discuss that. And we like to discuss things with our clients, we point out three major points that we like to address as we are talking to them about their businesses. One, we like to make sure that the business that we helped them, set up around there, the structure we set up around their business. We want to make sure that it gives the best liability protection to the individual. The second thing is we want to make sure that it's easy to operate in. You don't spend all your time working on the business and not have any time to sell your products to people or develop customers and things. And the third thing we like to look at is to see if there is some sort of inherent tax savings ability within the entity that you might be able to take advantage of if you find that you are starting to make a lot of money in your business, and you're spending a lot of money in the taxes. So those are the things we've kind of discussed over time with a lot of your clients. And it's been very well-received, and we've helped hundreds of your internet marketing... Russell: Entrepreneurs, super nerds, whatever we want to call ourselves. Ross: Whatever you want to call yourselves… Russell: Funnelhackers! Ross: set up their businesses. Russell: What's funny is that, and we've told this in other times we've talked publicly, but like when I first started my business, I think I'm like a lot of entrepreneurs where we get excited, we start selling things. And then for me, I'd been selling things for like a year and a half or two years. And we were at a family reunion and I was telling my dad, like "I'm making money, selling things on the internet." And he was like, "So, who's doing your books?" I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about?" "Who's paying taxes." I'm like, "That's the cool thing on the internet. There's no taxes. You get to keep all the money." And he was like, "But you have to pay taxes, Russell." So, my dad came up and started to help me structure things way back. And it's almost 18 years ago now, which is crazy. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs come into our coaching programs or come to ClickFunnels, and all they're thinking about sending out was, which is how do I sell something? And so it's been nice as so many people who are selling things, you're coming back and like, "Okay, it's restructuring", getting your business in place. They actually having the right kind of business where you're not getting taxed nearly as much. And all those things that typically we don't think about when we're getting started. We're just excited to try to sell stuff. And so let's call that you're doing the business structure. And I think the second side of it, and this is something I didn't realize until my business started growing, right, is just the legal liability, not only to your business, but also to yourself personally I don't think I would ever believe that people sued other people until like my business started growing. And I literally have full-time legal counsel now because people through ClickFunnels, people are suing ClickFunnels clients that comes to me. There's just all sorts of stuff. And so I'm more and more aware of it all the time. And I think that's, what's fascinating we're talking about tonight is I think a lot of people have structured their business to protect themselves. A lot of them haven't thought about it from the personal standpoint yet. Protecting their personal assets as well. And the personal assets can be a lot of things. Do you want to talk about some of the things that those could be, because it could be anything like all sorts of stuff. Ross: Yeah. As you're saying, people spend a lot of time and effort protecting their business assets, but they don't think about their personal assets. When I say personal assets, I mean, things like most people have a savings account. Some people invest in money market accounts or they'll purchase CDs from banks, or maybe they'll set up a brokerage account and purchase stocks and bonds and mutual funds and things, maybe they're into Bitcoin. Russell: Yeah. Bitcoin Ross: Then... Russell: Buying cryptocurrency, we're buying Russell coin and all sorts of stuff. Ross: Right. And so people buy those things and are they also purchase homes and cars and boats. And then they create businesses. And a lot of people like to purchase rental real estate. And they do this and this is great because this is how they grow their family wealth. But the problem is, is that they title everything in their own name when they do this. Personally in their own name. Russell: It's interesting, because I sit at my big point count with all my personal name. And then we recently company ones and it's way harder to get a company one set up, because my guess is most of you guys have your Bitcoin, especially if you're using a Coinbase or Gemini or one of the big crypto things. You're probably, at least if you're like me, you just set up on your personal name, could you even think about it? You're like, oh, this is way easier. Anyway. So yeah. I'm guessing that most of us, including me have done this incorrectly at the get go. Ross: Yeah. Russell: So, the question then I'd add is, okay, so we've talked about a particular business, but like what's... It will say I have this stuff, I have my cryptocurrency, I've got my house, I got my car. I got my things, all my personal name. Why is that a problem? Why should I be concerned about that? Ross: Yeah. That's a very good question. If you think about it, if you have everything titled in your own name, it belongs to you personally and they call those personal assets and unfortunately personal assets can be taken from you. For example, let's just say, one day you're driving down the freeway at freeway speeds. Maybe you're at 65, 70 miles an hour and somebody or something distracts you for a mere second and you look away and you're dealing with this and you look up and you find that all the traffic in front of you is stopped and you don't have enough time to put on your brakes. And bam, you hit into the back end of this car at 65 or 75 miles an hour at that type of an impact, he's going to probably hurt the guy's back, break his back or snap his neck. Russell: 13 car pile-up. Ross: 13 car pile ups, yeah. And so at that point in time, let's say it was a serious accident. Let's say there was a neck broken or a back broken. And the person became paralyzed and could no longer work for the rest of his life. And in that situation, he's going to have a lot of medical bills right up front. And then he's going to have to have round the clock care the rest of his life. And the amount of money you have for your insurance policy on your cars is not going to be enough, no matter how much you have to take care of that. And so if one of those things were to occur, the courts would want to find out if you own any assets that they can take from you and give to this injured party to compensate them for that injury. And so let's say this person's files his lawsuit against you. And it looks like he's going to be able to win. The courts are going to then give you a list and say, we need you to list out all your assets for us. Russell: Give us your Bitcoin now! Ross: Do you have a savings account? Well, yeah, I guess I do. Do you have bank CDs? Yeah, I got some of those. What about money market accounts. Yeah. I got some of those. You have a brokerage account with stocks, bonds mutual funds? Yeah. I got some of that. Bitcoin? Yeah, I got some of that. Russell: Do you have a boat, do you have a car? What do you got? Ross: What do you got? Boats, cars, all these things, and you're telling them and the judge is going good, good, good, good. Russell: Now we know what you got. Ross: Now we know what we've got. And so he says, this guy is going to need round the clock care, the rest of his life, it's going to be extremely expensive and you injured him. It was your fault. So we're going to take all these personal assets that you own that are titled in your name. And we're going to change the title out of your name, into the name of this person that was injured. And so you could lose every single thing you've been building all your life for many years, possibly just because you were distracted for a mere second while traveling down the freeway. Russell: This is the reason why everyone should drive Teslas because Tesla's have auto drive, which would solve that problem. But we're not selling Tesla's tonight, but it's not just that like, it could be all sorts of things, right? It could be a car accident. It could be somebody sues you for a million things. They took one of your supplements that you sell and it got them sick. It could be... I mean, there's a million different things. I mean, the number of lawsuits that happen nowadays is insane. And people try to sue you over everything. So it could be as ridiculous as like, I didn't like your tweet, you posted the other day, as dumb as that is, people can sue you for that stuff. Or they didn't like the way you respond or whatever it is. I'm curious do you know how many lawyers do we have nowadays? How many lawsuits are happening on average? Ross: Yeah, I have some statistics actually… Russell: This makes me want to cry actually. Ross: The US financial education foundation and they have done a study. And they say that it's estimated that there's over 40 million lawsuits filed every year in the United States. And that you asked about the number of lawyers, they say that the average number of lawyers exceeds over 1 million lawyers in our country at this point in time. But if you take that 40 million lawsuits and let's say just divided it by 365 days a year, I mean, that's Saturday, Sundays, holidays. It would still come out to 109,589 lawsuits filed each day in the United States. Russell: Looking at per state, you're looking at that divide by 50. I don't know the math, but that's a lot. Yeah. They're coming after you. So, my question is, and it's fun that very first time my dad taught me this stuff. And the very first event I ever did, what is that, probably 17, 18 years ago, first time I ever did an internet marketing event. My dad came and gave a presentation and he titled his presentation, creditors and predators. And so the question is how do we protect ourselves and our assets from both creditors and predators, people who are coming after us? And I want you to understand too, like, it is insane. The amount of frivolous lawsuits, like the bigger you get, the more you're going to get. I get frivolous lawsuits. They come to us, they're just insane, where you're like just people literally trying to find money. I'll give you a good example of one is somebody signed up for ClickFunnels, And when you sign up, it says, hey, you put in your credit card, and then it says, if my billing doesn't go through, a credit card fails, please text me so that my service doesn't get interrupted, and they type in their phone number. Somebody did that. They signed up for ClickFunnels account, put their credit card in, put in their cell phone number, clicked little check boxes said, "Yes, text me if my credit card fails", it turns out they put in a credit card that was like one of those throwaway ones. And so the first bill went through, but then 30 days later, the bill didn't go through. So our system fired off a text message like that to, they got this text message. And then they filed a TCPA law case against us. And we got sued and it costs me $20,000 to fight this one lawsuit. And we won because the person who checked the box, but cost me 20 grand to fight it. Okay? And that was like one text message was sent and anyway, so it's insane. People can see you for anything, even if it's complete fake. That person that we found, Larry, find the person who did that. And they filed like a thousand TCPA cases a week or something like that. Just because they signed for everything, putting their cell phone number in and they're suing everybody. So like, there's people like that. These are the predators that are out there that are trying to do these things. And it happens to me more often, the bigger we get and it's insane to me, which is why we have legal counsel and we have these things, but I just want to put that out there because most guys you might "Oh, that's never going to happen to me", but as you start growing your business, it's going to happen. And so you got to start thinking about these things now, and protecting yourself now, because the bigger you get, the bigger target you become. Ross: Right. And so we want to be able to protect our assets and you might ask, "Well, okay, how do we do that? I understand protecting my business assets. I can go ahead and set up an LLC or corporation to protect my business assets. But how do I protect my personal assets? What am I going to do? And how is it even possible that I could protect those types of things?" Well, there was a very famous statement by Nelson Rockefeller. I don't know if you know the Rockefeller family, they're the ones that started standard oil, they're some of the major families in the world. Russell: Rockefeller Habits is an amazing book if you guys haven't read it yet. Ross: Yeah, and so they've made lots and lots of money. And of course, as they, just like Russell said, as Russell started making money, people started suing them. Well, same thing happened with the Rockefellers. They started making a lot of money and people wanted it and they started getting sued and they were losing. And they were losing their assets because people were suing them. And so they finally it came, it dawned on them and they made this really interesting statement that I think everybody should know and understand. And they said basically the secret to success is to own nothing but control everything. Russell: I like that. So, that's awesome. The secrets to success is to own everything or to own nothing, but to control everything. So how does somebody like me? How would we do something like that? Ross: Okay, great. Well, we do that by using another type of an entity. We talked about corporations and limited liability companies for your business assets, but there are really nice entity types for your personal assets. And one of them would be called the limited family partnership or limited partnerships. And so they call them nickname, and kind of limited family partnerships because families set these things up all the time they're used in estate work. if you're trying to set up a way to pass on your estate to your children and your grandchildren, the attorneys will use a limited partnership to do that. That's one of the main functions of it, but it can come into play and help us out here when we're trying to protect our personal assets. And so how can it do that? What characteristics does it have that allows it to do that? Well, the first characteristic comes from the way our laws define the term person. Now, Russell, if I was to ask you, "Who's a person? What's a person?" What would you say? Russell: I’d say human being with a brain and a heart. At least a heart. I don't know. Some of them don't have brains. I'm not going to lie, just kidding. Ross: And they’re still currently alive, right? Because if they were dead, they'd be a corpse. So, that would be a person. And yeah, that is actually a good definition of a person. But our laws say, "Well, that's not quite right. In our opinion", they say, "We feel a person as a corporation. We feel a person as a limited liability company. We feel a person has a limited partnership. We feel a person is a trust. And we feel a person as a living, breathing individual, that's alive here on this earth", so they greatly expand the definition of a person. Now, the interesting thing, when they do that, they expand that definition they have a little twist in there that's really beneficial to us. That twist is they say, "Even though you created this person, and even though you control this person a hundred percent, and even if this person owned any assets and those assets generated income, and that income you take and use for yourself, even if all those things are true and happens, that person is not you, it's someone separate and distinct from you." And this person can... Our laws give these artificial people the same rights and privileges that you and I have as individuals. They can have their own name just like we have our own name. They can have their own EIN number, which is similar to our social security number. They can hold title to any type of property that you can think of. They can open up savings accounts, money market accounts, Bitcoin accounts they can do all these things. They can, if someone's bothering them, they can sue that person under their own name. So they can do all these things in their own name. And so because of that fact, we are able to utilize these characteristics of a separate person from us to be able to provide liability protection for our personal assets. Russell: You're saying the characteristics of limit of these people sound like my own kids, except for you said that you can control them, and then they have to listen to you. So it's kind of like a teenager, except for you have no control over your teenagers. They don't listen to you. So, very similar. Ross: Yeah. So how can we use these characteristics to own nothing but control everything? Well, first off, as we mentioned, we'd like to create a limited family partnership that we can control. Remember, we control it, we create it, we control it, we reap the benefits of any income returns, so we do that. And then what we would want to do is transfer the title to your savings account out of your name and into the name of the limited partnership. Remember we said, it can open up its own bank, account savings, account money, market accounts, and things. If you have any money market accounts, you'd want to immediately change the title into the limited partnership, the name of the limited partnership. If you had stocks and bonds and mutual funds and a brokerage account, you'd want to shift those over into the name of the limited partnership. If you have bank or a Bitcoin account, what do you call those, wallets? With the Bitcoins in. You'd want to change the name into the name of the limited partnership and not your personal name. And by doing that, now this person owns those assets and you don't, you no longer own them, but as I mentioned, you control them. And if they make money, the money belongs to you, but that person is not you. So, that fact that that person is not you. How is that going to help you? Well, let's go back to that accident we talked about traveling down the freeway and you're distracted and boom, you hit into this person. And now the courts are asking you to list your assets. And you know that you've wisely beforehand, titled all these assets into the name of your limited partnership. So, now you look at their list that they're wants you to fill out for assets. And they're saying, do you have a savings account? No, I don't. Do you have a brokerage account? No. Any money market accounts? No. Any bank CDs? No. Bitcoin accounts? No. And you're answering truthfully because they're under our laws those assets do not belong to you. They belong to this other person that's not you. Russell: You control that person though. Therefore… you can ride in the boat whenever you want to. Ross: That's right. Exactly. And so the nice thing is, is if you think about it, in that accident we talked about, it was you driving the car that caused that accident to occur. Well, was your limited partnership in the car with you? No. Did the limited partnership distract you in any way while you were driving? No. The limited partnership teach you how to drive a car? No. Did limited partnership manufacture the car? No. That limited partnership didn't do anything to be involved in that accident, to cause that accident to have occurred. It has done nothing to cause that to happen. And because of the fact that that's the case, that person is innocent in the eyes of our laws. And so a court cannot go. through you, the person that caused the accident to this other person, who's not you, and was not involved in the accident and take that person's assets from them. They can't do that. So, all of a sudden, now you have a very safe place to title and hold title to your personal assets that a creditor, or predator can not get to no matter what you do in your personal life, but it's even better than that. It's also protected from anything you do in your business life. Because as an LLC or as a corporation, they had that veil of liability protection that keeps this creditor or predator that's suing your business from going through the business itself to the owners and taking their assets. So it's protected from anything you do in your business life, anything you do in your personal life. And so, as a result, you have a probably only place that you can have to have this type of protection for your personal assets. Russell: So can limited family partnerships be sued? Ross: That's a very good question. Can they be sued? Because if they could be sued all those assets you're titling there could be taken, right? Just like if they're in your name and you injure somebody, they can be taken. So can they be sued? Well, if you think about it, when it comes to a person or a business being sued, there's only about four reasons why a lawsuit can occur. One, if a person creates a product, and sells that product, and the person buys that product and it's injures them, then that person could Sue the business. Or let's say that the business was a service business, it was providing services for people. And they paid for those services, and then down the road felt that they were injured somehow or another, they could Sue the business. Or let's say if the business gave out advice and people took that advice and something happened and they felt they were injured. Well, if they did that, they could sue that person or that business who gave out that advice. And the only other way the business could be sued is if that business or that entity partners up with someone else, either another living, breathing individual, or even another artificial person. And the two partners got mad at each other and wanted to sue each other, then a lawsuit can occur. But the way these limited partnerships that we create are set up, it will never provide a product ever. It will never provide a service to anybody. It never gives out any advice. And the only person it could ever partner up with would be you and no one else, so… Russell: you can’t sue yourself. Ross: You can't sue yourself. Russell: At least you shouldn't. Ross: And so as a result, there's no way it can be sued. It's just a kind of a silent partner that holds title to all your possessions that you can control and reap the benefits from that cannot be sued. And so those assets cannot be taken from you out of that limited partnership. Russell: Okay. So, set up limited family partnership, we put our assets, we put our things into that. Then what's the next step? What do we do with the assets and stuff after they're in there? Ross: Okay. You would do like you would do if you had them titled in your own name, let's say you had a savings account. Well, as your businesses are doing well, you're receiving excess money out of your business over and above your normal monthly expenses. You most likely want to create a savings account. So you'd create a savings account in the name of your limited partnership, and you started funding money into it. Maybe down the road that's growing, you're feeling good about it. And then maybe you'd say, "Well, a money market account may give me a little better interest. So I'm going to open up a money market account as well. So I'm going to start pumping some money there." Then may be one day you're in the bank. And the banks manager says, "Look at these great CD rates we've got. You ought to purchase a CD, a bank CD", and you look at them and you say, "Well, yeah, that's pretty nice, better than I can get some other places. So yeah, I'll invest in some bank CDs." Russell: When you're on Facebook, and you're like, "Everyone's talking about crypto. That's got to be the greatest thing in the world." Ross: Right. So you would set up your crypto account in the name of your limited partnership and you start funding these things, all these things, that you're going to grow your wealth in are all going to be titled in the name of this limited partnership. So, in essence, what happens is that limited partnership becomes your family bank. This is where you hold your wealth. This is where you grow your wealth in your family bank, in this safe environment where people, they can't sue you if you injured them personally, and they can't sue you and take those assets, if you injured them in the course of your business. So that's what we would want to do is start funding these things, creating our own family bank, where we can then grow those funds. Now, as you're growing those funds, there's another benefit to it. Not only do you have a place to store your money and grow it, but most entrepreneurs that I've found they find something that they like and they set up a new business and then down the road, they say, "Well, I see 10 other businesses. I'd like to get involved in." Russell: Shiny object syndrome. Ross: Yeah. I'd like to get into e-commerce or man I'd like to get into rental real estate or man there's all these great things I can invest my money into. And I'd like to do some of that. And so let's say that you want to get into rental real estate. And you start looking at properties, and you then say, "Okay, here's a house I'd like to buy", but then you look at your personal assets. Well, do you have a savings account? No, because it's titled in the name of your limited partnership. Do you have money market accounts, brokerage accounts, anything in your name? Well, no you don't because you don't own those things anymore. So they're all owned and controlled by your limited partnership and it's controlled by you. So you had that money growing in there. And let's say that you're sitting there thinking to yourself, "I have the money to buy this rental real estate, but I would sure like to do it if I had the money." Then you could look to your family bank, which now kind of becomes the investment arm of your business, because it's going to say, "Well, I have the money I've saved all this money. I have the money available to purchase this rental real estate with." And so the limited partnership says, "Let's partner up together and I'll put the money in and you use the money and buy the rental property and we'll share the profits 50/50." And so now you have another stream of income flowing towards your limited partnership besides what you personally contribute to it. And so now you're going to have a chance of growing your wealth at a faster pace than what you would have done normally. So it not only becomes your family bank, but it becomes the investment arm of your overall business structure. Russell: Very cool. And they can use that to invest in all sorts of stuff like you said, from real estate, they can do it in Bitcoin, they could do it in a new business opportunity. They could do it in Funnel Hacking Live. They could do it in some secrets books. They could buy one funnel away challenge. They could buy all my products, my service, I’m sure that’s be the best thing they could invest in. Ross: Well, yeah, you've got a good track record there. Russell: The Inner Circle, if I ever open it up again, Two Comma Club Coaching Program. Anyway, I don't know if that's legal advice or I don't know if that's investment advice, you have to ask your legal authorities, but anyway there's a lot of things, obviously, you can use start investing money in to start growing your wealth portfolio over time. Ross: Right? Your family wealth. So it's a very wonderful entity type that can protect you and give you that confidence in that feeling of safety, knowing that your personal assets are also protected, not just your business assets through your LLC or your S Corp or whatever, not only are those protected, but also your personal assets are protected. And that's a great position to be in. And knowing that even if I slip up, accidentally, people can't get to those assets. So, anyway, it's a great way to take care of your personal assets. Russell: It makes you sleep better at night. I think that's one the biggest things I found over the last five or six years is just the more ways we protect ourselves, the easier it is to sleep at night knowing you can keep moving forward and keep fulfilling your mission and doing what you're called to do. So, all right. So my question for you next, and then we'll kind of wrap after this is for those who are listening to this, that's awesome. I need that. Or maybe they even like step back and they're like, "I don't even have my business structure, yet", so kind of both sides. If you're like, I'm a new entrepreneur, I don't have a business yet. Or if like I got my business stuff structured, I think that's correct, but I’d like someone to look at it, or number three is like, I want to do this piece of it. I need to get my personal assets protected as well, which I think a lot of people haven't done that step yet. Obviously, this podcast isn't about giving legal advice, but I noticed something that you do for a lot of people, a lot of people in our community, if someone wants to have your help getting any of these things kind of set up, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you? Ross: Well, a lot of people will find us by going to our website, which is www.bookease.com. So, that's B-O-O-K-E-A-S-E bookease.com. And on there, you'll see a picture of me. You can click on that and it'll be able to take you to my calendar. And you could then schedule a time on our calendar for us to speak. Or my email address is very easy. It's just Ross@bookease.com. So you can email me and say, "Hey, I'd like to talk with you". I will then send you a link to my calendar and we will then set up a time to talk with each other. So, either my email address, or bookease.com, the website address. Russell: Again that's B-O-O-K-E-A-S-E.com. And I want to say something, I want to say two things. Number one is I don't get anything for telling you about this other than my dad's awesome. And he's helped so many people in our community, so I don't get paid for this. But number two is my dad always undercharges on everything. I keep trying to get him to triple his prices. So just there's not someone who's going to do a better job with this for you, and honestly, at a cheaper price. So someday I'm going to convince him to charge what he's worth. And then none of you guys were able to afford him, but just kidding. But like, in all honesty, like everyone always inside of the Two Comma Club Coaching Program everyone in module one, they go get their business set up with my dad and they always come back like "He explained all this stuff to me I never understood before. And it was so inexpensive!" So it's like, yeah. So it's amazing what he does. And it'll help you guys get, again, your limited family partnership set up if you're looking for that. Or, again, if you're getting your business just started and you need that stuff set up as well. You also, if they don't have bookkeeping and there's a whole bunch of things, you can help them kind of get set up in their business, which are all good. Ross: Yes. Yep. We'd love to chat with you. And I'm the one you'd be talking to. I like to spend a good hour with each new customer and we talk about the strengths and weaknesses of entity types which one is best for them under their certain circumstances. And so we pretty much tailor make our programs for each individual. Russell: Yeah. So, take advantage of that you guys. It's an amazing service and yeah. Go to bookease.com and get started. So, dad, that said, thanks for hanging out tonight with me because that was fun, but second of all, thanks for sharing this piece of, I think, as we were talking about before we started recording, there's just so many entrepreneurs who haven't even thought about this, and usually when you think about this is when it's too late. And so it's good to kind of get this in the forefront of people's minds and help them to be aware of it and get it structured and set up, because not that hard to get it structured. And then you have it as protection makes you sleep better at night and someday when you need it, you've got it. Ross: That's right. You want it set up before the lawsuit hits. Russell: If you get in a wreck, don't call my dad up like, "Help, quick." Yeah, now is the time. That's awesome. Thanks dad. Thanks everybody. If you guys got value from this episode, please take a screenshot of it post on Instagram or Facebook or wherever you do your social stuff and tag me in it. And also all your other entrepreneur friends who are just like me and you who are chasing all the shiny objects, building businesses, and even thinking about how to protect ourselves. Let them know about this episode, so they can know about limited family partnerships. They can know about my dad. He can help them out as well and get your stuff set up and protected. And that way you can just worry about really doing what's most important in your business, which is serving your audience. But getting these things set up will make you sleep better at night and help protect you longterm. So, thank you, dad. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you guys on the next episode of the marketing secrets podcast. Ross: Yes. Thank you. Appreciate the chance to be with you today. Russell: Go to bookease.com. Let's go! See you guys.

Jake Whiddon joins me to talk about what should go in a language learning app. Do language learning apps reflect educational theory? What are apps doing better than teachers? And what tricks are app designers missing? Jake Whiddon’s teacher training webinarsGet 10% off the studycat app for your students by clicking here and using the promo code “Ross”Ross Thorburn: Welcome back to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast" everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. In this week's episode, we're looking at "What should be in a language learning app?"I think as apps are becoming more and more common, it's going to be more and more important that teachers can give students and parents informed advice about what app to choose to learn a language.In this week's episode, we have Jake Whiddon sharing insights from his research, which he's recently conducted as part of his master's program at the Norwich Institute of Language Education into apps and app‑based language learning. Now, on with the episode.Ross: Jake, to begin with, what made you want to investigate apps for language learning?Jake Whiddon: I currently work for an app company.Ross: [laughs] That's a good reason.Jake: That was the main reason. I also was interested in it because 2020 saw the rise of not just online teaching but a massive rise in the number of students and children having to use apps to continue learning while the schools were close. That's probably the other main reason why I was so focused on it.Ross: I also get impressions not a huge amount of research already out there on what works in apps.Jake: Up until 2015, no. By 2015, there were 80,000 educational apps in the App Store with practically none of them have had researched done on them.Ross: Which is so interesting because I think in most countries, if you wanted to start a school, you probably need to go through a lot of government red tape to get that open. Interestingly, if you open an app and put it online, I guess no one really has to check that.Jake: No, you just click a checkbox that says, "This is an education lab."Ross: I presume another challenge with making an effective app is that maybe a lot of the time that people building the apps...I guess there's probably not many, many people who could do that, right?You'd either be a teacher, and you might understand the learning, but you wouldn't know much about the tech. [laughs] If you've got the tech skills, you probably wouldn't necessarily know much about that educational theory.Jake: That's exactly right. There's a lot of app companies I've been looking at that are just people from the tech industry who've realized the education and edtech is going to be a big business. They have tried to do that, and they lack those things.Interestingly, [laughs] you see a lot of apps developed by educational PhDs, but they're not user‑friendly. They don't have that engagement. They don't have that gamey feeling about them. They lack there as well.You can imagine if you're a child, and you've been playing Minecraft all day, and then suddenly someone says, "Do use this app," and it's developed by an educator, they don't necessarily end up being as fun.Ross: You're already now getting into this. What are some of the things that should be in an educational or language learning's app?Read the rest of the interview here

What shapes the ways we teach? What influences teachers' views and beliefs about language learning? Trinity College London teacher trainer Karin Xie and I discuss what factors we see influencing teachers' ideas about teaching and talk about how our own experiences have informed our views of language teaching and learning.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 channelRoss Thorburn: Today, we have with us Karin Xie. Hi, Karin.Karin Xie: Hi, everyone.Ross: Karin, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do? You do teacher training. Tell us who you do teacher training for.Karin: I work with teachers who prepare students for [inaudible 0:13] exams. It's a graded speaking exam that focuses on communication skills.Ross: You were saying also for those teachers, a lot of them end up teaching in a way that they were taught before, right? Which is really quite different to what the exam measures.Karin: Yeah. In my experience with the teachers, I found a lot of them, they would still focus on teaching students the knowledge, like the grammar and the vocabulary, so that students have the knowledge for the exam but not really the skills. I wondered why. I found that relates to how they were taught when they were students. How they learned language and how they were trained.Ross: That got us into this conversation about all the different things that might affect how teachers teach to them, we just mentioned. One is how you were taught as a student backwash, and then how teachers are trained.Today, we're going to try and look at what affects how teachers teach. Let's start off by talking about backwash, you mentioned earlier. What's backwash?Karin: It's the impact an assessment has on classroom teaching. For example, for [inaudible 1:18] exams, it's a one‑to‑one, face‑to‑face conversation the candidate has with an examiner. There's no script, no question banks.To prepare students for that, the teacher has to mimic what's happening in the real exam and give the students a lot of chance to use the language at their own choice and express what they want to say, ask questions, etc.Ross: I guess a good example backwash, and maybe less good would be what? If your test is a multiple choice, pick the right tense of the verb exam, right?Karin: Yeah, exactly.Ross: In that situation, people end up just...Karin: Giving students lots of words to remember and do a lot of written exams that don't really prepare learners for real‑life languages.Ross: It's amazing how much of an effect that they can have on what happens in the classroom. IELTS, for example, the speaking part of that test, this is one of my bugbears is that the students don't have to ask any questions in the IELTS speaking exam.If you think of what effect is that going to have in the classroom? If you're preparing students for IELTS, why would you ever teach them to ask a question? Because you never need to do that.Of course, people usually take the IELTS so they can study abroad or so they can move to another country. I think we all agree that if you do move to another country, one of the main things you have to do is ask questions because a lot of the time you don't know what's going on.Karin: Yeah. Any kind of speaking exchange requires contribution from both people whereas in IELTS, the examiner is not allowed to contribute to the communication by say, giving comments or giving support.Ross: Absolutely.Karin: I think maybe we could add one point here...Ross: Sure, of course.Karin: ...about the materials teachers use, especially with new teachers. Very often you see the teachers fall into the flow, what it says, and just use it as it is.Ross: Materials can almost act as a source of teacher training if they're good materials, because teachers will get into the habit, maybe if they're new teachers, of following whatever structure there is in the coursebook.It's problematic though, isn't it, if the structure in the coursebook may be using ideal or if the coursebook has been written for first year teachers and you never move beyond that.Karin: Or if the book doesn't allow a lot of communicative activities, the teacher may not even think about designing any activities for students to talk to each other and work with each other.I remember you were really excited when you were designing materials. You were like, "If you do a teacher training workshop with the teachers, you are not so sure whether they're going to apply everything. But if you design good teaching materials, you are kind of sure that they're going to use it somehow." I don't know if that's...Ross: [laughs] I guess that must be before I'd seen the reality of how teachers use materials.[laughter]Ross: I guess those are both ways of influencing what teachers do, but all of it passes through some filter that the teachers personally have of this is work, does this is fit in with my views of teaching and learning.I remember in a previous job doing some research where we tried basically introducing different materials in this job. It was all one‑to‑one classes. Because it was online, every class was filmed. You could go back and you could watch and see the effect that the materials had on the teaching.We did a little bit of research and started including some personal questions in the materials because we noticed in general, teachers didn't ask for [inaudible 4:47] . I remember one word that was a tongue twister.It said like, "Can you change one word in the tongue twister and make a new tongue twister?" Pretty simple. Not an amazing activity, but some tiny bit of personalization. Afterwards, we watched 20 videos of teachers doing this. 18 of the 20 teachers didn't even ask the question.Karin: I found if you have that is often at the end of the unit or of the chapter. You find teachers either saying that we don't have time for that anymore or they go through it really quickly, whereas that's the most important part of the lesson. That's when the students really get to use it.Ross: I guess you think that's the most important part of the lesson but maybe the person using the book doesn't see it that way.Karin: That makes me think about why we make those different choices. We both have the same course book, but we use it so differently. That, I think, is the beliefs we have towards teaching.Ross: Absolutely. Another thing that maybe affects how teachers' beliefs are formed obviously is people's own experiences as a student. I can't remember what the numbers are, but it's something like by the time you graduate from university, you've been a student for something like 20,000 hours.If do a CELTA course or something, or an initial teaching course, if you're lucky you do like a 120 hours. You're at 120 hours versus 20,000 hours. One month versus 20 years of education. It's very, very difficult to break the beliefs that are formed and how teachers themselves have been taught as students.Karin: I always think about the teachers that taught me and the good things that they did that I think made me learn better and the things that I didn't really enjoy. I think that shaped my teaching beliefs.Ross: Which is interesting, but it reminds me of the George Bernard Shaw quote, "Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It assumes people's preferences are the same. Obviously, it's worth thinking about what you liked or disliked about your teachers might be different to what the other people in the class liked and disliked about their teachers.Karin: I was thinking about the cultural environment behind our teaching beliefs. The one reason that my teachers used to do the lecture style teacher‑centric way of teaching is because the thousand‑year‑old teaching belief of the role of a teacher is to impart the knowledge to the students.If the teacher doesn't talk enough, you feel like you don't learn enough. Same with a lot of parents today. If they send their students to a class, if the students were doing things rather than the teacher doing all talking, then they have the feeling of they don't get good value for the money. I'm not learning enough.Ross: I like your point there about the it's maybe not the 18 years that your teacher was a student...Karin: Or 2,000 hours.Ross: Yeah, or 2,000 or 20,000 hours. It's actually maybe the last 1,000 years of the culture or something that's affecting how that person teaches. There's also something in there about the culture of the school that you're in, I think as well.There's a great chapter, I think it's at the end of Jack Richards book called "Beyond Training." He has students who did his [inaudible 7:54] course. All these teachers, after doing the [inaudible 7:58] course, are really brought into communicative language teaching, task‑based learning.Then they go into these public schools in Hong Kong. The reality in those schools is very different from the context often surrounding communicative language teaching where in those public schools in Hong Kong, there's 60 students in a class. You're next towards others classes, so you can't be too noisy. Your manager expects you to do X, Y and Z in the class.It's amazing how over the course of a year, you look at these teachers, some of them just go 180 degrees, and go from being like, "Oh, I want my students to communicate. I'm going to speak English in the class. I'm going to make sure students enjoy what they're doing," to being authoritarian, grammar‑based and doing everything in the students' first language.Karin: We need to raise teachers' awareness on their own teaching beliefs because that's how they make the choices in lesson planning and delivery, but we often miss out the step of how they can adapt all those methodologies into their own teaching context.I had a similar experience of training some public school teachers where we talked about communicative language teaching, group work, student feedback and things like that. They were like, "With our learning aims, and the class size and our schedule, it's really hard to do that. We literally don't have the time for that, or if we get the students do that, they won't be able to pass all the exams."Ross: Another point here is teachers' own experiences of learning a language. This is something that I personally find really interesting, because I've learned my second language without going to any classes and without studying.I think I have a very laissez‑faire attitude towards the teaching of grammar, really anything overly formal in the classroom, because I know that's not how I learned. Implicitly, I think that's not important, but I obviously that's not true for everyone.Karin: Personally, I like the language awareness approach because my experience with the language learning is that when I was learning English in high school, I never really enjoyed the grammar lessons where we learned the rules. I liked to engage myself with different sources of the language.In the last two years, suddenly, I just became aware of the rules and I see how it works. I was like, "This is amazing." Now I like to lead my students to be aware of how language or how English works rather than giving them the rules. For example, one day, they were asking me about a brand sly. Like, "How can I say this?"Instead of teaching them the pronunciation, I said, "Well, how do you say fly?" They were able to say that. Then I said, "Now take another look at this. How do you say this?" She was like, "Oh, sly. I know how to do it. Now I'm going to find more examples of that." I think that sense of achievement as a learner, and for me as a teacher, was really important.Ross: Obviously, this end up being very personal. One of the dangers with this is that there's always some learners that will learn regardless of what you do. You could have something which is definitely not the best method of teaching a language.Let's say audio linguicism or grammar translation. There will be still have been some people that learned like that. They can then use that to justify, "Well, it worked for me, so I'm going to use it for everyone else."Karin: Our teachers didn't talk about why they did the things with us. Now, we can get the students to have conversations with us on how we learned the language, how we teach the lessons, and why we did them and how they can discover the ways that work for them the best.Ross: The last one we had here was something that affects how teachers teach is their personalities. I'm sure you've heard this before. I definitely have. Saying teachers are born instead of made, or often there's people saying, "So and so, they're just a natural teacher."That's something that really used to annoy me a lot, because to me, it just seems as devalue all the professional development, qualifications, knowledge, and research. No one would ever say that about a doctor or a scientist. At the same time, I think there are a lot of personality traits...Karin: There are.Ross: Yeah.Karin: Yeah. For example, very often when you ask someone, "What makes a good teacher?" Instead of saying all those skills, people say they need to be patient, they need to care for their learners and things like that. Those were all personality traits.Ross: Absolutely. To me, it also reminds me of the nature/nurture debate in psychology. Are we who we are because of our genes, or are we who we are because of our upbringing? Just like that with teachers. Are teachers who they are because of their personality and who they are as a person, or is it their training and professional knowledge?Obviously, I guess it is both, but it's really interesting to think and reflect on what are your own personality traits that you bring into the classroom, and how do you use them. Overall, it's a wrap‑up. I think it's useful for us to think about who we are and how all these different factors affect how we teach and what our teaching decisions are and what our beliefs are.Karin: For me, I think it's the most important thing now as a teacher that we are constantly aware of why we're making the decisions we make.Ross: Good. Karin, thanks so much for joining us.Karin: Thanks for having me.Ross: Great. See you next time, everyone. Goodbye.Karin: Bye.

1. move in with sb 与某人同居 Gary觉得和菲比的感情发展很顺利于是说I am gonna ask Phoebe to move in with me. Move in with sb 与某人同居, big step for a relationship. Monica: So it looks like it's going really well for you two, huh?Gary: I know, really well. In fact, I'm gonna ask Phoebe to move in with me.Monica: (shocked) Oh my God!Gary: What do you, what do you think?Monica: I think that is so great! When are you gonna ask her?Gary: Tonight, but don't say anything. Okay?Monica: I swear, I promise. I promise. Oh my God, I'm so excited! {And I just can't hide it! I'm about to lose control and I think I like it! Sorry, just couldn't resist it.} All right, listen let me tell you, do not get her flowers. Okay? Because y'know, she cries when they die, and there's the whole funeral…Gary: (To Phoebe) I'll see you after work sweetie. (Kisses her.)Phoebe: Okay. Bye!2. jinx 乌鸦嘴 几个人在玩投球的时候，谈到投球的时间，Joey说I don't want to jinx it. Jinx当名词指的是不祥的人或物。当动词讲是给某人或事带来厄运，倒霉。这样的人也可以说是乌鸦嘴。Joey: Hey, what time is it?Ross: (looks at his watch) 2:17.Joey: Wow! You realize that we've been throwing this ball, without dropping it, for like an hour?Ross: Are you serious?!Joey: Yeah. I realized it about a half-hour ago but I didn't want to say anything 'cause I didn't want to jinx it.Ross: Wow! We are pretty good at this! Hey! We totally forgot about lunch!Joey: Oh, I-I, I think that's the first time I ever missed a meal! (Checks his pants.) Yeah, my pants are a little loose!3. 美国红星 Shaun Cassidy Rachel说带来了一个从小就喜欢的东西。Ross问是不是Shaun Cassidy. 此君是美国影视歌加上写作四栖明星，年轻时红透美国，青少年偶像。现在已是大叔，专心从事剧本创作。Rachel: (entering) Hey, you guys…Joey: Hey!Rachel: Is Monica here?Joey and Ross: No.Rachel: All right listen umm, I just bought something I'm not sure she's gonna like it, and it's gonna seem a little crazy, but this is something that I wanted since I was a little girl.Ross: You bought Shawn Cassidy!Rachel: Noo! I wish! Okay, you ready?Joey and Ross: Yeah!4. Sphinx Cat 斯芬克斯猫 Rachel拿来一只猫叫做Sphinx Cat 斯芬克斯猫，俗称加拿大无毛猫，专门为对猫毛过敏的爱猫人士特地养殖的，比较罕见，被称为世界上最丑的动物之一，所以Ross和Joey不认为这是只猫。Ross: What-what is it?!Joey: What the hell is that?!!Rachel: It's a, it's a cat!Joey: That, is not a cat! {I have to agree with Joey on this one.}Rachel: Yes it is!Ross: Why is it inside out?!Rachel: Excuse me! But this is a purebred, show-quality Sphinx cat!5. good for nothing 一无是处 Chandler没能完成菲比交给他的任务，菲比说他是Good for nothing. good for nothing = useless，一无是处的。也可以当做名词来用,无用之人，没用的东西。Chandler: Hi!Phoebe: Hmm, did you talk to Gary about the moving in thing?Chandler: Yes I did, and I think you should do it.Phoebe: What?!Chandler: He's a great guy, y'know? And he loves you a lot, you are a very lucky lady.Phoebe: You are useless! Freaking out about commitment is the one thing you can do! The one thing! And you can't even do that right! God!Chandler: I'm sorry. (Pause) If you ask me, I'd move in with him.Phoebe: Ohh!! God! Ooh! (To Chandler) Get out of here, good for nothing.6. show cat 纯种猫 Rachel在卖猫的时候叫卖Show cat. Show cat指的是经过认证的纯种猫，是可以参加名猫博览会的猫。这种猫经过认证后体内会植入microchip芯片，不是想山寨就可以山寨的。Rachel:Show cat! Quality show cat! Show cat! (A woman approaches.)Woman No. 1: (looks into the box) Oh my God! What's wrong with your baby?!Rachel: It's not a baby! It's a cat!Woman No. 1: Eew! It's creepy looking!Rachel: Oh no! No! It's actually—it's very sweet. It's very sweet. Look! (Goes to pet it and it hisses at her.) Yeah, do you want it?Woman No. 1: (laughs) No, I hate cats.Rachel: Well, so then what are you doing to me? Okay? Just get out of here! All right? Move on!7. haggle 讨价还价 Rachel卖猫的时候对潜在的买猫客户说You know how to haggle. Haggle在这里等于bargain. 砍价，讨价还价。Woman No. 2: Wow! What an unusual cat!Rachel: Yes! Thank you! Exactly! You want it?Woman No. 2: Maybe. I was thinking about getting a cat, I was just going to go to the shelter (Good for her) but… Okay, why not?Rachel: Oh, terrific! That'll be $2,000.Woman No. 2: What?!Rachel: Okay, a thousand.Woman No. 2: I thought you wanted to adopt your cat.Rachel: Well, I do, but you're just gonna have to actually look at this as more of an investment than a cat.Woman No. 2: Okay, yeah, I just wanted a cat. Rachel: Obviously you know how to haggle, so I'm not gonna try and take you on. Okay? So $800 and I don't call the cops because you're robbing me blind! Blind! Just take cat, leave the money, and run away! Run away! Damnit!

1. be down with sb or sth 同意某人或某事 Joey说I am down with that. 我同意这个观点。 Be down with sb or sth 同意某人或某事Joey: (waving) Very funny Ross! Very life-like and funny. Okay. Oh no-no-no, I wasn't waving at you lady. Whoa, maybe I was! Hey, Monica, this totally hot girl in Ross's building is flirting with me.Monica: Get in there man! Flirt back, mix it up!Joey: Yeah, I-I-I'm down with that. Okay, here goes. (Thinks.) How you a-doin'? It worked! She's waving me over. Okay, I-I-I'll be right over. Let's see, she's on the third floor…Monica: (joining him) Wow! She is pretty, huh?Joey: Tell me about it, huh? Oh no-no-no, I'm not with her, she's just Monica! Ewwuck! 2. misspoke 失言了 Phoebe和警察男友秀恩爱引起了Monica的好胜心，Phoebe后悔了就说I misspoke. 我失言了。后面Rachel搞砸了面试因为She totally misread him. Misread 在这里当误解，会错意了 Phoebe: (Under her breath) God, I woke the beast. Sorry. (To Monica) I was wrong obviously, I just—I misspoke. It's okay.Monica: Oh no, it is okay, I mean as long as you know that Chandler and I are also very hot and fiery, just as hot as you! I mean our flame, whew, is on fire!Chandler: (entering) Hey Monica, here's your broom back.Monica: You are so cute. 3. hussy 轻佻的女子 Rachel对想要提醒她嘴上沾了的面试官产生了误解，于是说I am not hussy. Hussy口语里指举止轻佻的女子Mr. Zelner: Hi Rachel!Rachel: Hi!Mr. Zelner: Come on in.Mr. Zelner: It's really nice to see you again.Rachel: Thank you.Mr. Zelner: Oh Rachel, uhh… Rachel: What?Mr. Zelner: Just ah… (He points again.)Rachel: Excuse me?Mr. Zelner: Here let me…Rachel: (stopping him) Wh-whoa! All right, okay-okay, I see, I see what's going on here! Now listen, look-look, I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, but I am not some hussy who will just sleep around to get ahead! Now even though I (He tries to interrupt and tell her about the ink), hey-hey-hey, even though I kissed you, that does not give you the right to demand sex from me. I do not want, this job that bad. Good day, sir. 4. sleazeball 行为卑鄙的人 由于误会了面试官，Rachel回到家跟朋友们怒气冲冲地抱怨老板是一个sleazeball. sleazeball 行为卑鄙的人Rachel: (entering) Ugh, you will not believe what that sleaze-ball from Ralph Lauren did too me!Rachel: Okay-okay that-that's amazing. How did you know that?Ross: You got ink on your lip.Rachel: Oh. (Realizes.) Ohhhhhhhhh….5. be obligated to do sth 有义务做某事 Rachel已经把老板吓怕了，interview全程录像。 Feel/be obligated to do sth 有义务做某事。Rachel: Ah, first, I-I would like to say thank you for agreeing to see me again.Mr. Zelner: That's quite all right, but I feel obligated to tell you that this meeting is being videotaped.Rachel: Okay. Umm, well, first I would like to start by apologizing for kissing you and uh, for yelling at you.Mr. Zelner: Fair enough.6. tortilla chips 墨西哥炸玉米片 Chandler说Monica表现太过明显时说Torttila chips know what you mean. Tortilla chips 著名的墨西哥炸玉米片Phoebe: You tired Chandler?Monica: You better believe he's tired, after the day we had! If you know what I mean. You know what I mean?Chandler: Honey, the tortilla chips know what you mean.7. take a detour 绕远 Phoebe在跟Monica炫耀和新男友恩爱时说他们来的时候took a detour. Take a detour or make a detour 绕道而行，绕远了Monica: Phoebe, you have a, a twig in your hair.Phoebe: Ohh, (laughs) umm, we kinda took a little detour on the way over here.Gary: Yeah, we took a little stroll in the park and no one was around, so…Monica: You didn't!Phoebe: We did! We violated Section 12 Paragraph 7 of the criminal code!Monica: The park huh? A public place.Gary: Uh-huh.Monica: I hear ya. Excuse me for just a second! 8. I hear you 我懂你意思了 听到Phoebe的炫耀，Monica说I hear ya. I hear you. 你的意思我懂了9. buy 相信 Rachel放了两个模型假装看Ross的表演，Ross还演的十分起劲。Rachel说I can't believe he is buying this. Buy在这里是相信的意思。I don't buy your story. 你说的我不信。Rachel: (laughs) I cannot believe Ross is buying this!Monica: Thank God! I can't watch him anymore!Chandler: (entering) You guys ready fore the movies?Rachel: Yeah! Oh by the way, thank you for loaning us Pamela and Yasmine.

1. on the lam 潜逃 Ross终于发现了Chandler和Monica的地下恋情，于是发疯似的冲到对面，Chandler吓坏了，准备逃跑说I am going on the lam. lam 潜逃，逃亡be on the lam 或 go on the lam 潜逃中Chandler: (To Monica) Wow! Listen, we had a good run. What was it? Four? Five months? I mean, that's more than most people have in a lifetime! So, good-bye, take care, bye-bye then! Monica: What are you doing?!Chandler: Oh, I'm going on the lam..2. mess around 瞎混，胡闹 看到Ross发火，Chandler赶紧说自己和Monica不是mess around 而是真爱。 mess around 胡闹，瞎混，浪费时间例句：That Romeo tried to mess around with every lady in the office.那个自以为是罗密欧的家伙勾搭办公室里每一位女士。Ross: (To Chandler) I thought you were my best friend, this is my sister! My best friend and my sister! I-I cannot believe this!Chandler: Look, we're not just messing around! I love her. Okay, I'm in love with her.Monica: I'm so sorry that you had to find out this way. I'm sorry, but it's true, I love him too.(There's a brief pause.)Ross: (happily) My best friend and my sister! I cannot believe this. (He hugs them both.) (To Joey and Rachel) You guys probably wanna get some hugs in too, huh? Big news!Rachel: Awww, no, it's okay, we've actually known for a while.3. kick in 凑一份钱 修理工要退休，住户每人kick in 100块开party. 在口语里kick in 意思是为某项活动出钱，等于以前提到过的chip inSteve: I came to talk to you about Howard.Ross: Howard?Steve: Yeah, he's the handy man. He's gonna be retiring next week and everyone who lives here is kicking in a 100 bucks as a thank you for all the hard work type of thing.Ross: Oh that's nice.Steve: Yeah. So, do you want to give a check? Or…Ross: Oh. Uhh…Steve: Oh look, you don't have to give it too me right now! You can slip it under my door. (Points to his apartment across the hall.)Ross: No-no, it's not that, it's just… I-I just moved in.Steve: Well, the guy's worked here for 25 years.Ross: Yes, but I've lived here for 25 minutes.Steve: Oh, okay, I get it. (Starts to leave.)Ross: No wait, look. Look! I'm sorry, it's just I've never even met Howard. I-I mean I don't know Howard.Steve: Howard's the handy man!Ross: Yes but too me he's just, man.Steve: Okay, fine, whatever. Welcome to the building.4. cheapstake 小气鬼 Ross不肯出钱被人称作cheapskate cheapstake 小气鬼 类似的说法还有miser, penny pincher.Ross: …so then President Steve told everyone that I was a cheapskate, and now the whole building hates me! A little kid spit on my knee! Y'know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna throw a party. That's right. For everyone in the building, and I'm gonna sit them down and explain to them, I am not a bad guy. I am not a cheap guy! I'm just a guy who-who stands up for what he believes in. A man with principles.Chandler: (To Rachel) Sounds like a fun party.5. hit 热门的（人，影片，歌曲，书籍...) Phoebe为party出了钱所以大家很欢迎她。Phoebe说I am a hit. 我很红，我很受欢迎。类似的说法The movie is a hit. The song is a big hit.Guest #1: See ya Phoebe! Oh and hey, thanks for chipping in!Ross: You chipped in?!Phoebe: Yeah, uh-huh, a 100 dollars.Ross: Phoebe! I can't believe you gave them money! I thought you agreed it was totally unreasonable that they asked me for that money!Phoebe: Yeah, but they didn't ask me! Y'know? This way I'm just y'know, the exotic, generous stranger. That's always fun to be.Ross: Yeah, but you're making me look bad!Phoebe: No I'm not. No! If anything I'm making you look better! They'll see you talking to me and that's--I'm a hit!6. talk up 大声说，赞扬 Phoebe为Ross 说好话。I am talking you up to people. talk up 大声说，赞扬Talk sb up 为某人说好话He'll be talking up his plans for the economy. 他将夸大他的经济计划。Ross: (tapping her on the shoulder) Phoebe? Phoebe?Phoebe: Ooh. (Turns to him.)Ross: Look, this is a disaster! Can't I please just go?Phoebe: No! No! I'm talking you up to people. Just give it a little time, all right? Relax, get something to eat! Okay?

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.

Visit our website: www.tefltraininginstitute.comSupport the show - buy me a coffeeMore about studying the Trinity Diploma in TESOL with RossRoss Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute" podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. This week we are talking about green issues in ELT. To help us do that we have Ceri Jones, one of the founding members of ELT Footprint. Ceri is also a teacher, a course‑book writer, a teacher trainer, and sometimes co‑host of the "TEFL Commute" podcast.In this episode, I ask Ceri about what does the environment basically have to do with language teaching? What can teachers do to bring environmental issues into the classroom and raise student awareness of issues with the environment? Finally, how can teachers help to make their classrooms more environmentally friendly? Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Ceri, thanks for joining us. Can we just start off with, what does the environment have to do with language teaching?Ceri Jones: I think there are two ways coming at it. One is the individuals who are involved. The teachers themselves as people may be particularly interested in environmental issues. Really the last year, 2019 seemed to be this huge year of mass consciousness where global strikes led by Fridays For Future, for example, gave the issue a massively high profile.There's even things like from a language point of view into the word of the year last year for Oxford University Press's dictionary was climate emergency. The graph that shows the growth and frequency of the use of the term is amazing. It's this huge upward curve from a general educational point of view.We're not talking about English language teaching, particularly here but education on the whole. It's also coming into school curricula across the world. The inclusion of environmental studies and what you could call eco‑literacy. Italy has made it compulsory across primary and lower secondary school coming out in what the Italian Minister for Education called the Trojan‑horse approach.Not that they study it as a subject, but that it is across the curriculum. You can see it then in things like the PISA testing criteria have also included environmental awareness. In Australia, they have built a really interesting framework for further education and beyond. They have all these categories of eco‑literacy which echo the CFR for language for example.You'd have a level one, a level two, or level three awareness or, what they expect kids to be able to do. I think one of the things that chimes with ELT teachers is there's an emphasis on critical thinking, information literacy, being able to differentiate bias and fact and fact‑checking in general.Fact‑checking within the whole environmental issue is actually something that's a fantastic way of bringing the two things together in class and with teenagers, for example, by looking at what is a green issue.Ross: You mentioned, they're bringing this topic into class. What would you say to teachers who perhaps feel a bit unsure about imposing this topic on their students? Maybe for teachers who feel that this is a topic that's best left for science teachers or geography teachers to deal with?Ceri: Yes, and I think it is a very valid complaint about topic fatigue. "We're always doing this in school. We don't want to do this. It's boring." I would say the thing is that because it's in the curriculum, it's also in the exams. As teachers preparing our students for that, and also for an English speaking community beyond exams in the classroom, this is a big trending topic.We need to prepare them to be able to deal with it. From a point of view of lexis, for example, they need to be able to deal with texts on this topic. Otherwise, they're not going to be able to function maybe in an exam where one of the reading texts is on this topic.Just as you need to teach students the vocabulary or for example technology, because it's everywhere around us, you would not teach about technology. In the same way you would not teach about the environment. You're doing your students a disservice if you don't. That would be my call out to teachers who reject the idea as being maybe too political. That might be a fear that some teachers have.Ross: In terms of it being too political then, what can teachers do about that? I mean, I think you can picture almost like a graph of interesting topics along with how controversial they are. It's probably a straight diagonal line, isn't it? The more controversial the topic, the more interest it can create.Clearly teachers here need to walk a fine line where they don't want to either upset their students or their school management, or even more worryingly, maybe perhaps the governments in the countries that they're working in?Ceri: Absolutely, and as you say, it's like if there's no controversy, there's no interest at all, is that there has to be something which piques interest. Kind of like the motivation curve, you have to hit that perfect spot at the top of the curve where there's enough motivation, not too much. It's the same thing with interest. There's enough interest but not too much for it to become personal or heated or problematic.I was talking to a teacher who's working in Brazil. In one of his classes, he was working with adults who were older than him. They were climate‑deniers in his class. He wanted to talk about the environment with them. They found common ground that they could agree on, which was conservation.Even if they didn't believe the science of climate change, they were very interested in and felt strongly about the needs to conserve. At the time, there was an oil spill off the coast. They were very concerned there about the turtle population, for example. They had lots of ideas about how the government should be protecting the natural environment.He said, "Well, OK, I thought that was a way in. You can find a common ground or maybe a local issue, or something that people do feel positively about." I think that's quite an important thing. What we really need to emphasize as much as we can, the positive and the local and things that can be done. Bringing negativity into the classroom, it's a real downer educationally I think.There's a danger that we're just going to switch students off completely. That effective filter, it can inhibit people learning. All of the connections that you might be making with the language and the subject and that reacting, kind of emotively even to your learning, all of that will be switched off. That means that you're short‑circuiting the learning experience.I like to look at it from a point of view of narrative, of positive stories, of individual action, of change, that can be brought about by individuals, whilst at the same time obviously not ignoring the big picture, but trying to make it something which does have a positive and more optimistic side to it, I guess.Ross: Do you want to tell us more about those local topics? How teachers and schools can make them maybe a little bit experiential so hopefully students are involved in these rather than just reading about them?Ceri: One of the easy topics is recycling and consumption. On a school level, a school can choose to start their own internal recycling system, get these kids involved. A local school had the children actually building the recycling bins. Then there were recycling monitors, who every week would be the ones who would take the recycling from their bins and take them to the municipal bins.They were learning about the system, just waste management in general. Basically, they were learning about how much waste they were generating. At the same time, they were making suggestions for how to produce less. For example, plastic waste like, "OK, well, how else could you bring your sandwiches to school instead of wrapping them up in foil," which is a typical Spanish way of bringing a sandwich to school?You could just bring it in in a plastic Tupperware and reuse that. Plastic is fine if you're reusing it, looking after it. Beeswax wraps, but then there was this idea of, "Well, actually we're just going back to what we used to do." Then children interviewing their grandparents about what they used to do.At the same time in Spain, there was a campaign which was a week without plastic like this challenge, "Can you shop for a week without buying any plastic at all?" For example, with one of my classes, I just went to the supermarket and took loads of photos of stuff wrapped in plastic, loads of photos of stuff, not wrapped in plastic. We just talked about what was in plastic, what wasn't.Then the kids did the same thing. They went into local supermarkets with their phones and took photos and brought those into class. It just became a class project.Ross: Great examples there. I think the big advantage of talking about a local river or beach or park, is that it's generally quite a safe entry‑point into these topics. Obviously, as soon as you bring up what government should be doing on a national or international level, then that's when the topic becomes political and becomes a bit more dangerous, I suppose.Ceri: Yes, I think cleanup campaigns as well those as you say, like an apolitical or cross party or whatever you want to say, it's just local interest. It's looking after your local patch. Things like I live in a beach town, so the beach cleanups, those are perfect. It's that thing of chiming in with the students realities, which is what we do anyway.With any topic we always try and tie it in with our students experiences and their lives and their contexts. It's exactly the same with environmental issues.Ross: Ceri, I also wanted to ask you about teachers practices here. It seems to me really important that if a teacher is going to be getting their students to learn about the dangers of climate change, they don't want to do that by getting students to read information about climate change on one‑sided color photocopies...[laughs]Ross: ...because obviously, by doing that you are contributing to climate change. What can teachers do to make sure that they're practicing what they preach that as well as informing students about the dangers of climate change? They are making sure that the way that they teach and how they run their classroom is more environmentally friendly.Ceri: Photocopies are an obvious an easy target. Teachers are pretty good at cutting back on photocopies and have been doing so for quite some time. It's not only from a paper point of view, it's also from a financial point of view in a lot of schools. Also, as a teacher trainer, there's that idea of teaching our teachers to make the most of the activities they have are not to be so reliant on handouts and bits of paper.They're actually not necessary. Most of what you do, you can do without the photocopies, and things like reusing, having mini whiteboards if the material you want is something that's only going to be used in that moment. If it's something that you're going to use over and over and over. Then invest in even laminating. It's plastic, but it's plastic that's going to be reused over and over and over.If it's worth it, then you make it, you keep it and you reuse it. It can be very liberating for teachers to be told you don't have to make copies. I can remember years ago as a teacher being told, "Oh no, give them something to take home. They need a piece of paper in their hand. Otherwise, they won't feel they've done anything in the lesson."We can emphasize more helping our students to learn to take better notes, to be more responsible for chronicling their lessons. That's one side, is the photocopying. Having a little recycling corner in the classroom is another nice idea, just even if it's just for paper. Maybe even raising awareness of things, like chopping receipts, for example, can't be recycled, because they're heat‑treated, and they're full of chemicals.They have to be thrown into the general rubbish. That's you say what can do. We can only put paper into the recycling bin that can actually be recycled. If it's soiled from food, sorry, can't recycle it. There's little lessons that students can learn through a teacher just running a very simple recycling bin in the corner of the class.Again, with younger learners, swapping from pens to pencils, so that the writing material that's in the class is all pencils. They get the students to write their names on their pencil and see how long their pencil lasts. They have like a competition whose pencil lasts longest. Just little things like that, which are awakening and awareness of consumption.There's lots of ways that a teacher can very subtly influence their young learners, inducing them into this whole culture of awareness that a lot of stuff around us is single‑use and doesn't need to be.Ross: Ceri, thank you so much for joining us. Where would you like teachers to go to find more information?Ceri: Lovely, if you could give a little plug to the ELT footprint Facebook group, that would be fantastic. There's the blog, which has a section on materials which has lots of links and ideas and resources for teachers who want to start exploring using environment topics in the classroom. We're also on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn. You need to look for ELT Footprints, and all of those should pop up.Ross: Brilliant, thank you very much for joining us, Ceri. Thank you all very much for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

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

1. Mad Libs 字谜游戏 Joey在床底下藏了很多东西包括Mad Libs。Mad Libs是美国孩子们或是Party上的一种群体字谜游戏。Mad libs的书上通常是一些故事，但其中的一些关键词被横线代替，只是告诉你要填名词或动词（有点儿像四级考试的十五选十），不同的人会有不同的答案，最后大家集体编出了这个故事，通常是很好笑的结尾。Monica: Hey, Joey's ass! What are you doing?Joey: (holding a box) Well, remember when they got in that big fight and broke up and we were all stuck in her with no food or anything? Well, when Ross said Rachel at the wedding, I figured it was gonna happen again, so I hid this in here.Monica: Ooh, candy bars, crossword puzzles…Phoebe: Ooh, Madlibs, mine! (Grabs it.)Chandler: Condoms?Joey: You don't know how long we're gonna be in here! We may have to repopulate the Earth.Chandler: And condoms are the way to do that?2. boil down to 浓缩为，归结为 Ross向Rachel解释处境的时候用到了一个短语boil down to boil down to, 本意是煮浓为，浓缩为，也可以理解成归结为。Ross: Anyway it-it kinda-it all boils down to this, the last time I talked to Emily…Rachel: (interrupting) Oh my God! My dog died!Ross: What?!Rachel: Oh my God, Le Poo, our dog!Ross: Le Poo's still alive?!Rachel: Oh God, it says he was hit by an ice cream truck and dragged for nine-(turns over the note)-teen blocks. Oh. (They all come out from Monica's bedroom) Oh my God.3. take for a ride 欺骗某人 Monica在换房间的时候用到了take for a ride说饭店的人想占他们便宜。这个短语三层含义:1. 带某人去兜风 2.欺骗某人 3. 将某人绑架并杀掉。这里是第二个意思。Monica: (To Chandler) Excuse me, umm, can I talk to you over here for just a second?Chandler: Uh-huh. (He doesn't take his eyes off the TV.)Monica: Chandler!Chandler: (turning to face her) Yeah.Monica: Look, these clowns are trying to take us for a ride and I'm not gonna let 'em! And we're not a couple of suckers!Chandler: I hear ya, Mugsy! But look, all these rooms are fine okay? Can you just pick one so I can watch-(realizes)-have a perfect, magical weekend together with you.4. speak ill of sb 诋毁某人 Chandler对Monica在争论他们浪漫周末被毁的原因时说Do not speak ill of the dead. Speak ill of sb 说某人的坏话，诋毁某人Monica: Hey, don't blame me for wigging tonight!Chandler: Oh, who should I blame? The nice bell man who had to drag out luggage to 10 different rooms?Monica: I don't know, how about the idiot who thought he could drive from Albany to Canada on a half a tank of gas!Chandler: Do not speak ill of the dead.5. storm out 愤怒离去 得知Ross决定同意Emily的提议，从此不和自己见面以后，Rachel气愤地 storm outstorm out 愤怒离去，摔门而去Ross: Hey. Rachel, I-I-I've been wanting to tell you something for a while now and I really, I just have to get it out.Rachel: Okay, what's up?Ross: Okay, y'know how you told me I should do whatever it takes to fix my marriage?Rachel: Yeah, I told you to give Emily whatever she wants.Ross: And while that was good advice, you should know that what-what she wants…Rachel: Yeah?Ross: …is for me not to see you anymore.Rachel: That's crazy! You can't do that! What are you going to tell her? (Pause) (Realizes) Oh God. Ohh, you already agreed to this, haven't you?Ross: It's awful I know, I mean, I feel terrible but I have to do this if I want my marriage to work. And I do, I have to make this marriage work. I have too. But the good thing is we can still see each other until she gets here.Rachel: Ohh! Lucky me! Oh my God! That is good news, Ross! I think that's the best news I've heard since Le Poo died!Ross: You have no idea what a nightmare this has been. This is so hard.Rachel: Oh yeah, really? Is it Ross? Yeah? Okay, well let me make this a just a little bit easier for you.Ross: What are you doing?Rachel: Storming out!Ross: Rachel, this is your apartment.Rachel: Yeah, well that's how mad I am!!6. Donald Trump 懂王川普 在本集中使MC恋情曝光给Joey的一个关键人物就是他们外出幽会偶遇的美国地产之王Donanld Trump. 在电视播出时人们对此君的认识还只是美国富豪，地产之王，棒球队老板，但谁能想到十年后以他为中心制作的真人秀节目《飞黄腾达》成为收视奇迹呢？而谁又能想到18年后他竟然成了美国的总统呢？Donald名言I made more money in bad times than in good times.Phoebe: Hey!Monica: Hey!Phoebe: Oh hey, Monica, I heard you saw Donald Trump at your convention.Monica: Yeah, I saw him waiting for an elevator.7. woof 狗吠，低声说话 Joey听到Chandler和Monica在走廊里说话问道What are you guys woofing about? Woof本意是狗的低吠声，算是个象声词。在这里指低声说话。Monica: Okay, I'd like to know how much the room was because I'd like to pay my half.Chandler: Okay, fine, $300.Monica: 300 dollars?!Chandler: Yeah, just think of it as $25 per room!Monica: Urghh!!Joey: (sticking his head out the door) What are you guys woofing about?Monica: Chandler stole a twenty from my purse!Joey: Nooooo!!! Y'know what? Now that I think about it, I constantly find myself without twenties and you always have lots!8. phase out 逐步淘汰 Monica前男友曾经是Chandler的室友，分手后被大家phased outphase out 逐步淘汰Chandler: Kip, my old roommate, y'know we all used to hang out together.Joey: Oh, that poor bastard.Rachel: See? Yeah, you told me the story. He and Monica dated when they broke up they couldn't even be in the same room together and you all promised that you would stay his friend and what happened? He got phased out!Monica: You're not gonna be phased out!

In reaction to Covid19, many teachers and schools have had to move their English courses online. But where to start? Dr. Marek Kiczkowiak tells us about his experiences creating online language courses for students and what he’s learned about online platforms, marketing and social media along the way.Setting Up Online English Courses (with Marek Kiczkowiak)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest is Marek Kiczkowiak. Marek is founder of TEFL Equity Advocates and TEFL Equity Academy. He's a materials writer at the moment in Belgium.In this episode, I ask Marek about putting English language courses online. For obvious reasons, recently a lot of people are having to create online language courses for the first time. Marek's got experience of doing this, both as a material's designer and also as a teacher trainer.In this episode, you'll hear Marek talking about some of the challenges of putting courses online, the different platforms to use, and of course very, [laughs] very importantly, how to get students to actually take your courses. Enjoy the episode.Ross: Hi, Marek. We're obviously talking about this because of COVID‑19. Before we go on, how has the pandemic changed where you're teaching?Marek Kiczkowiak: Yes. I think the classes shut down late March, early April. I don't know if they're going to resume from the new academic year. I doubt it. I think maybe some classes will, the absolute essential ones like work in the laboratory that you can't do online. This might resume. I think a lot of it will be done online, still.I haven't been teaching. I've been just developing academic writing courses on academicenglishnow.com. The reason I set them up was...For three years I was teaching academic writing basically to university students in Belgium. When I started my new job in Brussels, I wasn't teaching anymore. I was developing materials.I've been thinking at the back of my mind that I could do all of what I was doing in the classroom with students, I could just offer that online. Then I'm not limited. I can be anywhere in the world and deliver the same quality program. When the lockdown happened, I was like, "That's it. If I don't do it now, then I've missed the boat."Ross: The online courses that we're talking about today Marek, can you tell us about them? I feel that online learning covers so much. You could have synchronous online classes in real‑time with groups of students in a virtual classroom. You can have asynchronous where people interact with each other, but maybe they are in different time zones, and they comment in a forum throughout the day.You can even have completely self‑accessed courses where learners are working their way through things at their own pace. They don't interact with each other very much. Tell us about the courses that you've created and why did you design them that way.Marek: Most of it is completely asynchronous, and there are two reasons for that. The first reason is that at the moment, I have most of my PhD students in Bolivia. The time difference is big. Therefore, finding a suitable time for a live class ‑‑ even now when these 15 students come from exactly the same university ‑‑ proved completely impossible.Also, because people can work through it at their own pace, they can jump through the different lectures and focus first on the ones that they feel are the most important to them. I might start at a certain point, and I, as a teacher, feel that this is the best point to start with, but maybe for other students, they have a different problem they want to tackle first.These are some of the reasons and why it's better for students. For you, as an online teacher, it's also much better because I don't have to constantly give the same material online. Time is money as a freelancer. That's why in the online courses that I offer, the basic package just includes the online work.There is no input from me apart from answering students' comments. There is a forum. They can ask each other questions, and I come in and answer their questions. The second higher tier that you can add is feedback on assignments. If you pay more money, you can do the assignments that are on the course, and then I'll check them and give you personalized feedback on them.I'm now including my time, so that's got to be more expensive. Then even above that, we've got group live sessions where we meet live and discuss any problems students have. They can send in the questions before when we have a live session. Even higher than that has to be a one‑on‑one class.It doesn't cost €20. It doesn't cost €50. It costs much more than that. Ultimately, there'll be few people who will buy it, but that's good. You want to limit yourself to people who actually really, really want to work with you. A lot of people might not need that. They'll just need the online course.Ross: You mentioned lectures there. In my experience, online courses tend to involve a lot of reading. They also sometimes have quite a high dropout rate. I think it's quite difficult sometimes to stay motivated for a long period of time when studying at a distance.What input do you use on your courses, and how do you make sure that those courses will be able to stay interesting?Marek: Sure. I guess I refer to them as lectures because my market is in universities. Otherwise, I would refer to them as lessons or maybe videos or whatever you want to call them. You definitely can't have lessons, lectures, or videos that are much longer than five minutes. People's attention span nowadays, we can hardly even finish a five‑minute video on Facebook.Maybe if it's educational and we paid for it, we'll give it more effort. I really like to think of them as little how‑to steps. To give you an example, one module is, "How to Write an Introduction." Within that bigger task, you have a smaller task, which will be, "How to Identify the Research Gap." This smaller task will consist of even smaller tasks, and those smallest tasks are individual lectures.You might have four how‑to lectures in, "How to Identify the Research Gap." Each of them takes about five minutes ‑‑ each video ‑‑ and then there is a task below it. A task could be for students to write something. Sometimes it can be as simple as writing one sentence. Sometimes it will be a longer 100‑, 200‑word assignment. It could also be a quiz.Sometimes, for example, because things vary from discipline to discipline in academic writing, I often like to give students a task to now go off and read an academic paper from their discipline. Then tell me whether what I said applies to their discipline. For example, some disciplines like to have introduction and literature review together as one section. Others will separate it.I tell them that in the lecture about organizing this. Now they need to read the text and comments and let us know how it's organized in the field.Ross: I wish I'd known about your academic writing course before I started my heavy dissertation.Marek: Well, take it, Ross, if you want to.Ross: Sadly, it's too late now. [laughs] For these courses, you need to put them online on a platform. Can you tell us about how you made that decision, which platform to use?Marek: That's a very good question because I think that's one thing obviously that's got to be pedagogically sound. There's lots of different platforms, and it really depends what you want to do and what you want to have.To give you one example, my initial TEFL Equity Academy courses were on a platform called Teachable. Teachable is free to access at the beginning with some limitations, and then it has certain plans. The advantage of platforms like Teachable or Kajabi, for example ‑‑ that's another one K‑A‑J‑A‑B‑I, Kajabi ‑‑ is that they are all in platforms.They give you free video hosting ‑‑ free as long as you pay the platform. It's video hosting. It's a payment gateway. The websites are predesigned for you, basically. Kajabi has email funnels. When somebody buys your product, they get a sequence of emails. Kajabi has webinars, for example, built‑in. It's an all‑in solution.It's a good solution if you don't have time and you don't feel very techie, and you just want something quick. However, if you want to put in a little bit of effort ‑‑ and it's not that difficult because I was able to do it and have zero website building skills, literally zero, I just watched YouTube tutorials and did it ‑‑ is to host it on WordPress.That gives you incredible flexibility. Obviously, Teachable has its website layout, and you can't really change it that much. You cannot make it look as you want it to look. To really access all the features you want to have, you'd be looking at $100 a month with Teachable and $150 with Kajabi. This is only for people who have high volumes of sales. You might not have that.Now all my courses are on WordPress, and I don't personally think it's too difficult to set up. Just to break down the numbers, instead of paying $100 a month, you're probably looking at maybe $30 a month or less. It's just you need different pieces.You need your WordPress hosting, you need video hosting, and then you need your online course plug‑in like LearnDash or something like that.Ross: Let's talk about finding students. How do you go about marketing your courses and making sure that students actually want to buy them?Marek: Sure, yeah. Never create an online course just because you think it's a good idea. Don't create a whole course before getting the proof of concept and trying to see if it actually sells. You'll spend months creating this amazing online course, but nobody wants to buy it.The simplest idea is the sales funnel. You start with something free that's downloadable, so people give you their email address. It always has to be something valuable for your audience, so maybe even before that, you need to really define who your audience is. I help university students and researches write better academic papers and thesis.I'm not interested in people who want to learn Business English. When people download it, they need to give you their email address to be able to download it. Then usually there is a very cheap offer of something. This could be a 60‑minute training session on something. This could be a mini‑course.A hundred people opt‑in to download something, maybe 10 percent of them ‑‑ if you've got a very, very good funnel ‑‑ will decide to get the opt‑in offer. You already have some initial clients. Then a smaller percentage of those might get the upsell as well. Once people opt‑in and buy something from you, you can offer them a higher package or another product.Think about it as building a relationship with someone. First, they get to know you and then maybe then read a blog post that you've written. They kind of think, "Wow, that was really, really helpful." Then they see this PDF guide that further helps them, and they're like, "Oh, I might download that."Once they really like you and feel that you're knowledgeable, they will buy something from you. Never offer a course to people that don't know you. Don't go to a Facebook group and something and post, "Hey, I've got this amazing course. Do you want to buy it?" It's not appropriate. People need to get to know you. In marketing, it's kind of the same.Ross: Really, it sounds there that a lot of it is about making sure that your potential students trust you before you try and sell them something.Marek: Yeah, I think so. I think you need to establish trust and also show people that you genuinely want to help them. If you start with the idea that I'm in this to make money, people will easily see that. The reason why you're offering a certain product is because you can't just help people for free. You can do that in a blog post but in a very limited way.It probably means you need to know your target audience pretty well. That's why I started with the academic writing courses. That's something I've been doing for a long time now. I feel I really know what problems my target audience is suffering from, what questions students have asked me over the last 10 years.Ross: Obviously, the sales funnel though is after people get to your website. Another really important part of this is getting people on to your website in the first place. Tell us about that, Marek. How do you just attract people to come on to your website?Marek: Absolutely. There are two ways of getting to your target audience. You can buy your way in which is through Facebook ads. This has got the advantage that if you run them correctly, and if you've got this funnel that I described to you, you can basically break even.You're not really spending any money because, for every hundred dollars that you put in, people buy a hundred dollars of your courses. Much quicker, you are building an audience.The second way is not buying it but through hosting content, doing content marketing that is valuable to my audience, and that Google is going to start ranking highly on the search pages. This is really, really important because if Facebook changes their advertising policies, your whole business could go bankrupt if you just rely on Facebook ads.Another really important way is to do what we are doing here, for example. Do collaborations where you, for example, do a podcast, a video, or a blog post for somebody else who already has your target audience or has people who are very similar to your target audience. Both of us reach more people, but also, if other websites add hyperlinks to your website, that increases your ranking in SEO.If you do collaborations like this, you add a hyperlink to my website, I add one to yours, and hopefully, we're going higher in the search rankings as well.Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Marek Kiczkowiak. For more from Marek, please check out his website www.teflequityadvocates.com. You can also find the TEFL Equity Academy on there with some of the online courses that Marek has created before for teachers.If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com, for more. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes or wherever you listen. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

I speak with Steve Walsh, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University about the quality of teacher talk and the effect this has on student learning. Steve talks with us about the questions that teachers ask as well as the rules and roles which influence how we interact with our students.Understanding Classroom Discourse (with Steve Walsh)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, we are looking at interactions that happen in the classroom. We're talking about classroom discourse.To help us do that, we have Steve Walsh, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University. Steve's written extensively several books and many, many articles about classroom discourse, how it affects student learning, and how teachers can use classroom discourse as a starting point for their professional development. I hope you enjoy today's episode.Ross: Hi, Steve. Thanks very much for joining us. To being with, Steve, what is classroom discourse?Professor Steve Walsh: Classroom discourse basically covers all the interactions which take place in any classroom. It's used interchangeably quite frequently in the literature. You'll see people talk about interaction. You'll see them talk about classroom discourse.Classroom discourse is the actual recording, the observation, the transcript. All of that constitutes classroom discourse. What we're really interested in ‑‑ certainly in my work, anyway ‑ are the interactions between teacher and students.The reason we're interested in it is because it shows us what's actually happening in a classroom. It gives us a clue as to whether anything is being taught or learned. You can't study learning by looking inside people's heads, but you can make a lot of influences, I suppose, by looking at what people do and what people say.That's the essence of classroom discourse and also, one of the reasons they're studying it.Ross: In terms of those interactions then, what do we know about what often happens? How do teachers typically interact with their students, and what are some of the common purposes that teacher talk for?Steve Walsh: We're interested in what you might call the teaching practices, which take place in the classroom, and all of these practices such as asking a question or correcting an error. These practices are encompassed in language. You can't do these things without using language.For example, in some of my work which I'll talk about later, we've identified a number of these practices, which are frequently occurring, which are found in any classroom anywhere in the world, which merit study. Let's take the most frequently occurring ones.This would be elicitation. Elicitation is about trying to get your students to say something by asking a question, for example, which is the most commonly used elicitation strategy.The second one would be repair, which would be the ways in which we correct errors. Something that teachers do all the time is error correction. There are huge debates, of course, around this as to whether we should correct every error or not.The third one, which is perhaps the most important one in many ways, is feedback. The feedback that we give to our students and that students give to us is hugely important because it tells us what's going on.Right now, for example in the current situation with COVID, we're all working online. We're teaching online, and we're not getting the feedback that we do depend on from our students.For example, if we don't get visual clues, if we don't get head nods, smiles, raised eyebrows, and these multi‑modal features, we don't know really whether they're actually understanding us or learning anything. Similarly, the feedback that we give to our students, the way is in which we acknowledge a contribution, for example.Typically, teachers say things like, "Yes. Good. Thank you. Excellent. Right." That kind of thing. These discourse markers. These simple single words. Although they're used to encourage and motivate, they can actually close the interaction down and signal the end of a turn.Although they are well‑meant in the work I'm doing, I'm suggesting that we need to push learners a little bit and say things like, "Oh. That's really interesting. Can you tell us a bit more about that?" We get what I'm calling pushed output using Merrill Swain's word ‑‑ output from our students.Finally, all the stuff that we do which is classed as management of learning, giving instructions, organizing, setting up pair work, bringing a task to a conclusion, all of these things are what we would call teaching practices, but they are absolutely interlinked with the language that we use.What's really important here is to understand that the language we use and the pedagogy goal that we're trying to achieve, the pedagogy goal of the moment, they have to work together. If my pedagogy goal is to promote fluency and I'm simply asking Yes/No questions, there's a mismatch between my language and my pedagogy goal.If my pedagogy goal is to give a grammatical explanation about a point of grammar, then it's absolutely fine to talk at length and have, what you might call, a high level of teacher talk. We're interested in the quality of teacher talk rather than the quantity. We're interested in the extent to which our language and our interaction promote learning.Ross: Maybe, we can drill down a bit deeper into some of those concepts then, Steve. Let's go back at questions for a second. Before, we've spoken on the podcast about how useful it is for teachers to ask questions to students that they don't know the answers to.Do you want to tell us a bit more about those kind of questions, and also display questions where teachers ask students questions that they already know the answers to? Are those sometimes useful or sometimes appropriate, or does it all really just depend?Steve Walsh: It depends. With regard to questions, we ask a lot of questions. There have been various studies on this to calculate the percentage time that teachers devote to asking questions. It's huge. It's enormous. One question for ourselves is perhaps, "Do we always need to ask a question? Are there other ways of eliciting a response?"When I first started teaching, we used to use flash cards to elicit responses. There are ways of doing this, but let's stay with questions for a minute. I would divide questions into two types ‑‑ display questions and referential questions.Display questions are questions that we use to get our students to display what they know. There are prompt. Display questions are questions that we, as teachers, know the answer to. They're not the kind of question you would ask your family or friends, because your family or friends would think you're crazy if you kept asking them question that you knew the answer to.In classrooms, it's OK to ask display questions because they prompt and they elicit. They try to encourage some kind of response. The problem is that we ask too many. In my work, we ask a lot of display questions where in fact, sometimes, we should and could be asking the other type of question, which are referential questions.Referential questions are simply genuine questions that we don't know the answer to. Questions, such as "What did you do over the weekend? How did you spend Saturday? Have you ever been to Paris?" These types of questions, which are genuine and real, are an essential part of human communication.What I'm suggesting is that we need to rebalance questioning, and perhaps try to incorporate more genuine questions of our students and fewer display questions. You'll hear people talk about these as open and closed as well.Some people, including my colleague at Newcastle, Paul Seedhouse, would suggest that every question in a classroom is some kind of display question because it's there for a purpose. It's designed to get a response from our students rather than the normal purpose of questions, which is to access information and find out about things.Some people would argue you can't actually ask a genuine question. I think you can and we should because it shows an interest in our students. It shows that we're listening to what they're saying, and we're interested. We're genuinely interested.Ross: You mentioned how your [laughs] friends and family would look at you very strangely if you ask them a display question. "What color is this pen? How many shoes are there?" That kind of thing. Obviously, that's true, but that suggests that there's a difference between how teachers interact with students inside the classroom, and how they interact with other people outside of the classroom.Can you tell us a bit more about that? Is it ever really possible for classroom interactions and classroom communication to be similar or to mirror what's going on in the real world?Steve Walsh: The simple answer is it can't. Interactions in the classroom are bound by rules. We're talking here to use a little bit of technical language. We're talking about an institutional discourse setting.An institutional discourse means any situation within an institution, which has got its own rules. For example, a visit to the doctor. You go into the doctor, it would be unusual for you to say to the doctor, "How are you today?" but it's absolutely fine for the doctor to say to you, "How are you?" and "What can I do for you?"These rules that apply restrict the interaction that we can have in the classroom. Some people say it's not genuine. The other way of looking at it is to say that the classroom is as much a social setting as any other. It's a place where people come. They have a goal.All institutional discourse is goal‑oriented. We have a purpose for being there. We have roles. In the roles that we have in the classroom, the roles are asymmetrical. They're not equal. The teacher is the authority figure, and they have control of the discourse, for example.These roles and rules, if you like, in the classroom, restrict the discourse that we're going to get. They limit us to certain patterns, but that's quite interesting because then we can say, "Well, what is an appropriate interaction in the classroom, and what is a less appropriate type of interaction?"Although on the one hand, classroom interaction/classroom discourse is not authentic and can never be genuine in the same way that an interaction with a friend can be. On the other hand, it's a social setting, which has certain norms and practices which can be studied. That's what makes it useful in terms of understanding teaching and learning better.Ross: You mentioned there the idea of rules and roles. Let's talk about the roles a little bit more. How set in stone are those teacher roles, Steve?They obviously must change a little bit depending on the culture, maybe the part of the world that you're teaching in. I wonder if they're also influenced by other things, like the expectations of students or even just influenced by what it is that the teachers are teaching.Steve Walsh: That's a good question. This is really very much about the socialization of learning that we're all socialized into behaving in certain ways in classrooms.Typically, we expect to answer questions rather than ask questions. We expect to sit quietly for much of the time. We expect to put our hands up when we want to say something or answer a question. These are the rules, if you like, the social rules of the classroom. Of course, these vary from one context to another.If you go to some parts of the world ‑‑ the Middle East, the Far East, possibly South America, places like that ‑ then the role of the teacher is very much seen as a traditional role in some people's eyes. In other words, they are there to impart knowledge.In other parts of the world, the role of the teacher might be seen in quite a different way as somebody who's there as a facilitator, as a catalyst, somebody who can help people learn but in a more possibly informal way. I don't think these two contexts that I've just described are mutually exclusive.In the work that I do, I talk about micro‑context, which vary as a lesson progresses. The teachers' role and the interactions that unfold have to vary according to what's going on in the classroom, according to the agenda, the teaching goals of the moment.At one point in the lesson, you might be dominating the interaction for 10 or 15 minutes while you've given explanation or give some instructions. At another moment in the lesson, you might be taking more of a backseat, letting the students get on with something, and interact together.But what's important for good teaching is to learn how to vary the role that you adopt and match the role according to what you're trying to achieve with the students at that point in time. Some people are good at this. I'm afraid some are not.Some people feel that they have to remain as the authority figure, what the literature would refer to as the sage on the stage, the one who has all the knowledge. Especially in language classrooms, it's probably a mistake to completely follow that rule.The other thing, of course, is that teachers are under pressure from outside the classroom. This perhaps influences their role very strongly as well. They're under pressure from parents, from head teachers, perhaps, the curriculum, assessment, and examinations. All these external, invisible or hidden factors have an important effect on how we behave in classrooms and the role that we adopt.Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Professor Steve Walsh. If you'd like to find out more from Steve, check out his books and articles. There's a list on Steve's University of Newcastle page, which I'll put a link to.If you'd like to find out more from us, please go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

I speak with Ekitzel Wood about online marketing and discrimination in teacher recruitment. Ekitzel tells us how our Facebook information change the job advertisements that we see. We also talk about racism in teacher recruitment and why many schools present a ‘white’ image of their teachers to their customers. Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. As you know, usually on the podcast, we speak to people with similar backgrounds to myself and Tracy, but today, we've got someone from a very different background. That person is Ekitzel Wood.She specializes in online branding and marketing. She's worked and consulted for many education companies in China about how to improve their brand and find more teachers.In our conversation, Ekitzel and I talk about marketing messages that work for different groups. On the second half of the podcast, we discuss some of the dangers of online marketing and how this can make discrimination easier.If you've ever searched for anything in Google, or you've liked a page on Facebook, this affects what job opportunities you see in the future. Even if you don't, this affects who your colleagues are and will be. Enjoy the podcast!Online Marketing in EducationRoss: Hi, Ekitzel Wood. Thanks so much for coming on.Ekitzel Wood: Thanks for having me. [laughs]Ross: Do you mind telling us just very quickly a bit about what you do? You're in education marketing, but you market staff to teachers, right?Ekitzel: Right. I got my start in social media working for a lot of different companies. I start to quickly specialize in Chinese companies that wanted to have a greater influence and to manage their brands better in North America. Eventually, that parlayed into a very fast‑growing education sector in regards to how to manage their digital brand, what they want to portray themselves as online.Ross: Maybe that's a good place to start. Like if you're a teacher and you've seen some online social media for school, how would you go about researching that school and finding out, is it legit?Ekitzel: Coming from the other end is I pose that a lot to schools when they approach me. What type of person do you want to attract? Specifically, one issue for a lot of Chinese English‑training centers is they want to attract more female talent.This is just a general issue in education globally is that within the domestic markets of any country, education is typically about 65/35 female‑skewed, but once you expatriate that, it flips.How do you attract or how do you appeal to female educators, or what type of messaging will most resonate with them, especially in terms of...There's a lot of messaging where you focus on having an adventure or trying something new, having access to different areas of the world, meeting new people.For women, it doesn't work as well unless they're between the ages of 22 and 26. That's the sweet spot for women. For men, that can work up until the age of 39 typically, actually. They're very different, the way they behave.Ross: What marketing then works for women, say then, over the age of 26 in education or some marketing things that resonate with that group?Ekitzel: There's two different types of tracks that you can take based on the research that I've done with a few different places.One is a new‑beginning style track where it's like, "Are you feeling all right?" or "Have you been teaching the same lesson plans for 10 years now? Is it getting tiresome? Do you want to take those skills and then adapt them for new culture, learn about a new place?"It's about self‑enrichment and about taking your experience and moving it on to something that will challenge you in a new way but won't be too challenging, if that makes sense. So making sure that you apply the side career advancement opportunities that they might have.If your English training center focus on the fact that you might give them the opportunity to write books or develop curriculum or learn about administration, mentoring, especially, is something that really resonates with a lot of...I know North American long‑term professional teachers that are over the age...They're in their like 20s.It's a difficult time even to our trained teachers in North America because the attrition rate is quite high. Most teachers in the United States, they leave a teaching profession within five years of starting. The late 20s is a very good time to attract those teachers, to give them an opportunity...Ross: This is because that a lot of them are thinking they've had it with education at that point. They're already thinking about doing something different, anyway. In some ways, that problem in the domestic market creates an opportunity, that does it?Ekitzel: Exactly. Not to sound traditional about it, but it is something that, in terms of market research, has proven true, that at that age, if that person is already married, it's very unlikely that they're going to relocate. If that person isn't married, they want to be or they're thinking about it.It's about 50/50, actually. That's a group that wants...I've tried marketing too with a couple other places, and it's proven not very profitable.Ross: What are some groups that are maybe the easiest ones to attract, the ones with the highest return on investment for ads?Ekitzel: Highest return on investment are definitely 23 to 26, male, college educated, one and a half years of spotty experience. They haven't had a solid job after graduating from college. That was a lot easier to do in 2010 to 2012 when the economy wasn't so good in North America. Now, it's not as big of an issue. It's getting harder to recruit that type of talent.Discrimination in online EducationRoss: A lot of what we talked about so far that has been marketing to specific groups. I want to ask you, if I was a language school owner and I believed that my customers really liked white, blonde teachers aged 28 to 34, is it now impossible for me to engineer something like that where I can deliberately try to attract those people?Ekitzel: Unfortunately, yes.Ross: Wow!Ekitzel: With Facebook, the way it works when you make an ad is you select an audience. That audience is divided by psychographics, which are preferences like pages you follow, interests you see list on Facebook.This is information you volunteer yourself. You volunteer that information also by liking certain types of content and sharing certain items. That's who you're going to target, so cannot be done by race. It's difficult, but there are ways obviously to do that. Not many white people follow BET, for instance.Ross: I've done, before, research into hiring practices. It turns out in my research, at least in China, if you have a white photo at the top of your resume, you're 50 percent more likely to get a job than if you have black photo at the top.That's almost somehow even scarier, that now, it's possible to almost cut out the people that you don't want based on age, ethnicity, interest, and everything. They don't even see the advert in the first place. Of course, like you say, you would hope that language schools eventually would discover that that's not what makes a successful school.But equally, if the only people that you're going to hire are white, blonde, Aryan people, maybe you never actually find out, because you never have those people from other age groups and ethnicities. You never find out that those people could be equally successful.Ekitzel: Yes, I know. Not just the companies I've worked for but the entire industry is guilty of this, where they over‑recruit online teachers and especially highly‑qualified teachers from urban areas who are not white. They will keep them active just to the point that they won't leave, but they do deprioritize them in terms of their marketplace.They have backend ways of tagging them that aren't obvious to the outside observer or to them even as a teacher in their platform. If you say, "I want a teacher who has a specialty in math because I need to improve my English master, engineering vocabulary," they'll search these two terms. Then the first page or two of options will only be these idealized profile.Ross: I never understand why that happens. I always thought that the great thing about online teaching was that...Ekitzel: Is the equalizer?Ross: Yeah, right? It gives students the opportunity to...You can choose whoever you want. If you are racist, or sexist, or whatever, fine.Ekitzel: That's your choice.Ross: You can go and choose the Aryan teacher if you want, but if you want to choose the person with the highest star rating based on feedback or the best qualifications, you can search for it however you like.Ekitzel: The market, especially, in China is highly competitive. The acquisition cost for students is very high. They're doing anything and everything they can to...The thing is, even for them, they do lots of market research where they have quality and experience are the two main drivers for student acquisition. That's what they really care about.However, unfortunately, behavioral data says something else. I don't know if that's a catch‑22, because a lot of these platforms prioritize towards this idealized image. Are they only selecting those because that's what they're being shown first, like in the first search page, or is that because that's really what they, themselves, prefer?Ross: It could be a self‑fulfilling prophecy where you choose what you show.Ekitzel: Right. Because the market is so fierce, no one that I worked with or consulted with has been willing to take that risk.Ross: If you are a teacher and you maybe already worked on one of these platforms or you're just an employee of one of them, what's a way that you can find out and investigate to what extent your company is promoting an idealized ethnic...?Ekitzel: Discriminatory...?Ross: Yes, discriminative and profile for teachers.Ekitzel: If you work inside of an online teaching platform and you have access to the students' site, how students use the portal or parents use the portal, do some testing. I think you'll find pretty quickly that even when you search very generalized terms, you'll see very little diversity in the first 20 results.Every company I worked for, that's one of the first concerns I bring up. You can be very successful recruiting teachers. That's your main goal, is quantity of teachers and quality of teachers.However, I refuse to help you with that unless you start marketing domestically, that you provide teachers that are of non‑white backgrounds, that your billboards, that your online advertising doesn't just have a white face on it, and that has a variety of faces.Once people start searching for your company and your information, they're not just going to see what's available in United States. They're going to see what's also being promoted in China. They're going to see pictures of subway adverts.If they see only white people in those subway adverts, they're going to say, "Well, you're only selling white people to Chinese people, so what's you're saying you're a diverse welcoming country?" That's hypocritical.Ross: I wonder what the reason is, what's the underlying thing that causes this racism. On discrimination, I've read before about how people of color were discriminated against in customer‑facing jobs, but in management‑facing jobs basically suffered almost no discrimination.The background to that seem to be that companies were worried that their customers were racist. They prefer to have a white person or beautiful person or whatever, but it was like the recruiters, themselves, didn't actually have a preference.What I wonder is here, is it people in these companies actually feel that way, or they just worry that this is how our customers feel? Do they think like, "I really believe white teachers are better," or is it like, "I really think that our customers are kind of racist. I'm going to discriminate on their behalf"?Ekitzel: I think it's a little bit of both. I'm a big follower of Brené Brown. [laughs] She's a social worker, just had talks and things like that. She tells the story about her own experience where she was waiting on the line at a bank. There's a teller. He was black.There's an older white lady in front of her. She was getting really upset. Something was wrong, and she's like, "I want to speak to your manager." Brené was behind of this awful lady. He's like, "OK," so he brings the manager who also happens to be a black woman. She's like "No, I need another manager."Ross: Wow.Ekitzel: She was so angry. She got upset. She's just like, "That lady was crazy." The teller was beyond professional. He's just like, "She's just worried about her money, and she's afraid. When people are afraid, they don't make the best choices."I think, especially in terms of business development, in a hypercompetitive market of English education in China, they know that it doesn't really matter, but they're afraid because they might lose one or two families. That, to them, could be a big difference in their profit margin.Everyone's trying to sell to the lowest common denominator. They think that if this will change five percent of the people's minds if they see a black person there because it spooks them or it scares them, then they'll make this safer "choice."Ross: It's better to do something that's going to appease the racist five percent, because for the other 95 percent, they don't care.Ekitzel: They don't care. Unless they are the ones not being represented, they'll just become more complacent what the imagery they're seeing.Ross: Thanks so much for coming along.Ekitzel: Oh, thank you.Ross: Do you have a blog, or a Twitter handle, or something that you'd recommend people to go to?Ekitzel: I don't have a lot of professional social media for myself.Ross: That's ironic.Ekitzel: You're welcome to follow me on Twitter. It's @ekitzel. That's my Twitter handle.Ross: Awesome. Thanks again.Ekitzel: Thank you.Ross: Cool.

Young learner and teens expert Chris Roland talks to us about giving differentiated support to students. We discuss which students we are trying to help when we differentiate, which students teachers tend to forget about when they plan and how to differentiate without needing to spend twice as long preparing materials as usual.Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn.This week we are going to take about differentiation. To help us with that, we have Chris Roland.Chris is a young learner teacher. He's based in Spain. He's also a tutor on the Trinity Diploma in TESOL course. He's also an author. He has got a couple of books out about teaching young learners, and he's also published a few articles about differentiation in the classroom.I always found as a teacher trainer, that one of the things that teachers have one of the hardest times with is just having students of different levels in the same class. So if that's a challenge that you have wherever you work, then listen on. Chris has got lots of interesting and practical ideas. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Chris. To start off with, what is differentiation? Which students are we aiming to help when we differentiate?Chris Roland: We've got the classic Carol Anne Tomlinson definition. We're helping the weaker students, we're helping the stronger students, and everybody in between get to a common goal.In a nutshell, everybody, and it is sometimes quite easy to overlook the middle ground because our attention is often drawn to the people who are struggling and the people who have completed a task easily. Not necessarily most quickly, but easily, and our attention is, in terms of behavior, easily drawn to the students who are not doing what we want, to the students that are doing exactly what we want.Against this middle ground which we often just ignore. Also, when we talk about differentiation. I think people immediately hear it and sort of inwardly cringe and think, "Oh no! Is that talking about preparing seven different worksheets of all slightly different capabilities?"I like to reduce differentiation down to helping the kids who are stuck get unstuck, and pushing anyone who finds the material too easy, pushing them so that they learn something as well. You can do those things in your lesson with very little preparation. Just maybe a little bit of thought that you don't have to produce your seven different worksheets.Ross: You mention there on‑the‑spot differentiation. Can you tell us a bit more about that kind of differentiation that doesn't involve making seven versions of the same worksheet?Chris: I wrote an article with Daniel Barber. In fact, we wrote a couple for "Modern English Teacher" a few years back, and we came up with two ideas. One was structured differentiation, which would be where we're planning in different levels of an activity.The other one, we called it differentiated support, and that, basically, is the differentiation I do now for an activity, but you can also plan for it. You're planning exercises. What am I going to do for the people that don't get it?So many times in a lesson when I'm observing, I'll see a student say, "Teacher, I don't understand," and the teacher will just repeat the explanation they've previously given. In that sort of situation, I think the best thing we can do is actually just shut up and ask the student why don't you get it? Then for a few seconds, enter into that student's world.We'll probably realize that they're coming at it from a place where something that they've learned previously is blocking what we're explaining. If we don't stop and listen and let them explain, then we can't enter into that world.The problem is, as a profession ‑‑ I say this being somebody who's ranting into a microphone ‑‑ teacher's can't shut up. It seems like when you give the student talking time in a class, especially to explain something, it seems like forever. Especially because, on an event management level, everybody else has to be quiet and suppressing themselves in order for that student to explain themselves.So, on the spot differentiation, and we can do that for the advanced learners. The class starts an exercise, and we see that two students are completing an exercise quickly, but more importantly, easily, and it's not stretching them.One of my examples that I use regularly is a vocabulary exercise where they have to match pictures from [inaudible 4:27] picture to a list of words. If we've got students who can do that and they complete that very easily, we don't have to wait until they've done it in order to complete the task.Say, "You two guys, I know you know these words already, so have a quick look. Then I want you to close your books, and I want one of you to do a spelling dictation to the other, from those words."Immediately we've moved it from just recognizing to being able to spell the words, or work your way down the words and mark up the stress on each word if it isn't already marked in the book. We're moving from just recognizing the words to knowing how they'll sound.Or if the others are still matching the words together, "You two guys, I want you to write five questions including five of those words." Then they can do something with those questions at a later point. We don't have to wait until everybody is finished to give people extra challenge to push them, to give them something that will take their learning forward.Ross: That was pushing the stronger students further. Do you want to tell us about helping the students who are maybe finding the material the hardest?Chris: Yeah, if they run a speaking test, for example, and they're going to be asking each other questions from the book, if you've got...At the end of each double‑page spread, you'll often have two, three, four questions, or those questions might appear as the lead‑in.Teachers complain to students, "You're not speaking in English," but if they don't actually have the language to formulate the answer, then it's very difficult for them to do so.If we know some students are going to struggle, we could provide four or five, I call them sentence stems, just the start of how to answer the question, or we could get them to practice writing the answers. Then we correct them.Finally, when they've got the full answers correct, we say, "Now you're going to ask the questions as they appear in the book. You're going to read your answers," and so you've layered up that speaking activity for them, but we've put them in a place where they can take part in the dialogue successfully.Last time I was doing passive, I was going to do passive voice, it came up in our curriculum, and I knew that my students didn't know the vocabulary for the exercises we were going to be doing. This was a low‑level class. It was at variance with the level of material I was giving them.It was all about inventions and where rice is grown. Where various products and different types of clothes are worn. I thought they're not going to get this. They're not going to get this because they don't have the vocabulary.It is like layers, as you say. I thought OK, and I started stripping it away like the layers of an onion. First they need the vocab. Then they don't know the verbs. They don't know all those words, and they definitely don't know them in the past participles.Then I looked at the different verbs in the exercise, so we started the lesson playing about with the verbs, all the verbs that were going to come up later. Then we moved to actually making the passive sentences.It is stripping away, looking at the end task and asking ourselves, "What would a student need in order to be able to do this task?" And ordering those skills in order of complexity.Some of them are not going to know the verbs. Some of them are not going to know the basic vocabulary, and then some of them are not going to know any of it. For those students who don't know any of it, I'm just going to give them sentences to read that are actually in the passive, and I'll explain what they mean, and they can familiarize themselves.With students who don't know the words, but they might be able to cope with the rest, you know, some of the more complicated vocabulary, we'll teach them the vocabulary and cover that, and then move forward with them.Ross: Chris, I know that you're also a teacher on the Trinity Diploma in TESOL. Something I find sometimes happens on that course is that teachers will write a different aim for either every student in the class or for groups of different students in the class.Do you think that's an effective way of planning? Or do you think that's introducing too much complexity into the process?Chris: The idea of having different aims for different students is very sweet, but I can imagine how it would translate into a cognitive nightmare for a diploma or a delta candidate. Because you start that lesson, that observed or evaluated lesson, for instance, you're only at 90 percent of yourself anyway because 10 percent is being diverted away, to watching yourself through the observer's eyes.You say something, and you think, "Oh no, how will that look?" Immediately, you're operating 90 percent efficiency to start with. Then we add in the nerves, and the unfamiliarity, and the fact that you've done a lesson plan probably for the tutor, but you've also got a lesson plan for yourself, which I recommend not doing actually.You're oscillating between the two, but then you remember you have to do some monitoring, and you've probably not made your learners aware of their progress, or some of the many things that need to be ticked on the boxes. Having different aims for different students, that's great in your day‑to‑day teaching, but in an observation situation that could be adding to the stress.There is a counter‑argument that you should risk. You should try and teach as you would teach, and the observation becomes second. But, on a diploma or a delta, to go with your conviction to do something regardless of the evaluation criteria would probably be...I'm not sure that would be advisable.In terms of aims, I would say one aim for the class, but getting there in different degrees.An example that I often use is if our aim for the class is to have students using regular verbs in past simple to talk about last weekend, then some of the students, they'll get there. Some of the students will be able to go beyond and use irregular verbs in the past about their weekend.Then some students won't get there at all because they're lacking the basic vocabulary, so we can help them. We can give them the few verbs; five verbs in the past simple, and say, "Can you make sentences about these to talk about last week? Try putting these in a sentence."By the end of the lesson, they've also used the past simple of regular verbs to talk about the past. To a lesser degree, but the way was always open for them to go further.If you've got that one aim, you can travel at different degrees, varying degrees. Remember we've got different aims for different students. We're sort of closing the door, maybe.Ross: I think of the most common practices I've seen for teachers trying to differentiate is pairing stronger students with weaker students. Can you tell us a bit about that?It feels almost like a default way of teachers differentiating. What do you think some of the disadvantages and advantages of pairing say, strong students with weak students?Chris: Doing that, I think, is a valid differentiation measure, but often teachers are doing it without really knowing why they're doing it. What pairing weak and strong students does is it makes life easy for the teacher because the strong students will help do some of the teacher's job, and it homogenizes the class.Yes, you can set up a situation where a weaker student is learning from a stronger student, but when you do that, it's much more difficult to do it in a way where the stronger student also benefits. It can be done. I'll try and give you an example.Let's say we have a weaker student and two stronger students in a three, and we've got conversation questions, and we want them all to practice.What we can do is we can give the weaker student the stop‑watch or the timer. "You are the examiner and you're going to ask Stronger Student A the questions. You're going to stop them when they've been speaking for a minute on each question."What they're doing is they're benefiting because they are getting to listen to the stronger student's answers, and they're getting to familiarize themselves with the questions and actually figure out what the questions mean because they're hearing the stronger students' answers.Stronger Student B can be the marker. They can be listening and then writing down any words that they think that the other stronger student gets wrong, and then they feed back.Then we reverse the roles, so we have the weaker student asking Stronger Student B. Stronger Student A is the examiner, so again the weaker student is getting to hear the answers. At this point, they've not done any speaking themselves apart from reading the questions, but they're getting practice reading the questions.Finally, then we get one of the stronger students to question, the weaker student gets to answer. The other stronger student, they're not writing down the errors, they're acting as a helper so they're helping the weaker student.Within that dynamic, it's quite a complex one, but you've actually got stronger students benefiting by having the weaker student working with them. The weaker student is fulfilling a useful role, but you've also got the weaker student benefiting from the examples and the guidance.If you compare that to just putting a weaker student and a strong student together to do an exercise, you've probably just got the stronger student done quickly and showing the answers to the weaker students, who just writes down a,b,a,b,b,b,a,b,c.We need to know what the rationale is, and it's a complicated thing, having mixed groupings but it can work.Ross: One more time, everyone. That was Chris Roland. If you're interested in finding out more about Chris, check out his book, "Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom."Thanks for listening. If you're interested in listening to more podcasts, check out our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.

We speak Trinity College London CertTESOL and DipTESOL course director with Felicity Pyatt about what to do when that happens. How to decide to ‘fail’ a trainee, how to break the news and how to help trainees bounce back.Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast and today we have our guest, Fifi.Felicity Pyatt: Hello, it's me.Ross Thorburn: Welcome back.Felicity: Thank you.Ross: So Fifi, what are we talking about? [laughs]Felicity: Today, I thought it would be cool to talk about the best way to fail people. I've run CertTESOL courses in DipTESOL courses, and failure is something that we have to negotiate very carefully. A really delicate thing to manage when teachers don't pass their classes.Ross. Yeah, right. I think there's something that we don't talk about very much, right? Like how to deal with failure? I googled it, on the way here, in preparation [laughs] and couldn't find anything on how to fail a trainee. You had a story, right?Felicity: Yeah, this was very early on when I just started working on DipTESOL observations, which is a bit more challenging. The thing about the Dip is that there are four mass parts criteria, I think you talked about this with Dedrick a little bit, a few podcasts ago.I had a teacher on there who had lots of experience teaching in public school, back in her home country, and she had a lot of ideas about what worked very well. She had a masters, and she had a lot of research to back up her idea that contexts have no place in a classroom.Ross: Right. Because setting a realistic context is one of the things that you have to do in order to pass those classes, right?Felicity: Yeah, it's a really important part of the class. To have a trainee who...not that she couldn't do it, but she just refused to accept that she had to do it. I started to really dread having to observe her because I knew that it was going to be a borderline pass or failure, and I would have to give her that feedback and have that fight with her about the whole situation.But she ended up passing, overall, so that's good.Ross: You didn't want to tell her if she failed?Felicity: [laughs] No, I was scared. I think I managed to approach it from the point of view of being like an assessor, so it wasn't my opinion. It was talking about the Trinity qualification guideline so this is something you must pass to get a Trinity DipTESOL.It's not the only way to teach. They're not saying that it's the perfect thing to do. They're just saying that that's what they want a Trinity qualified teacher to be able to do.Ross: My worst example of this was more management‑related, but it was me sitting in with a colleague on firing someone, basically in their first week, and that went disastrously wrong. This person basically trashing a classroom in a school full of students, in peak time. It was an absolute disaster.I think before that, I never put too much thought into that like how do you handle that process and realizing when it goes wrong it goes spectacularly.Felicity: Yeah, absolutely.Ross: OK, so Fifi's got some top tips on how to fail people and hopefully, we can also talk about, not just from the trainer's perspective on how to fail people, but maybe also from trainee teacher's perspective. What do you do when that happens? Did you want to talk? Why do we fail people?Felicity. Yeah, well, I think as I mentioned before, we fail people because they're not meeting the standards. It would be nice to be able to pass everybody but that's the thing to remember, is that there are guidelines, it's not just...Ross: Yeah, I remember being at a presentation by Jason Anderson a few years ago and him saying that for trainees that find it difficult to accept feedback taking the approach of not saying "I'm doing this to make you a better teacher," or "You must do this to improve your teaching," but just saying like, "I want to help you pass the course.""In order to pass the course, you need to change this thing and then after the course you can go back to doing whatever you were doing previously if you want." I think that's really important, isn't it? Because whatever course it is, there are these certain criteria. Someone's chosen all those criteria, obviously not completely arbitrarily, but there are values behind whatever criteria they are.Sometimes even as an examiner you start to go, "Why do people have to do this?" It can obviously be difficult for trainees to accept, right?Felicity: Absolutely. I don't know if you should put this into the podcast, maybe you can consider it. [laughs]Ross: I think that's a great way to start a story...Felicity: [laughs] One way that I certainly use failure in my courses is to give people a very strong notch in the right direction. So teachers who are not understanding or reacting to feedback, for whatever reason, maybe they don't understand what we said to them, or they don't think that they need to make changes.If they continue to make the same errors, then sometimes failing one class will push them to get out of that groove and start teaching in the methodology that we're looking for.Tracy: I think usually, when we heard this word "failure," the opposite should be success, so you can see we forget about the process in between. How I help you from failure to success or we need to highlight, I think, that this course is not just the final result, pass or fail, because the process is help you for future more success in your career.We have to maybe change the definition of fail. You probably failed a criteria but it doesn't means you fail. Experimenting new techniques in the classroom.Ross: One of those points there is that maybe it's not you failed but it's like the lesson failed. I think that's a useful distinction to make. I think it can also seem very unfair on courses where you don't really get so much credit for your improvement, right? The courses are about learning, but the things that we measure on the courses isn't how much you learn, it's where you get to.Felicity: It's your performance, yeah.Ross: I wanted to ask you about this. What was your second bit of advice, it was idealism versus pragmatism?Felicity: Oh, so this is maybe you see a class that is borderline, you could choose to pass it, you could choose to fail it. In those kinds of situations you have to look at the wider context so, "Is it their first teaching practice?" If it is, maybe you want to pass it. Because if you fail on your first class, often it's so de‑motivating.Another thing you want to consider is, "How would the other trainees react if this class passes?" Another thing to consider as well is, "Is this person in their behavior potentially driving away students?" Because anyone who runs a cert or a Dip would know it's sometimes a struggle to get students.Ross: You mean trainees or do you mean actual students in the classes?Felicity: Actual students for the classes. If you have a trainee who taught a fairly methodologically sound class but then they maybe intimidated the students somehow, then what is a borderline might well become a fail because you want to really strongly push them away from discouraging students.Ross: You can't do your job anymore, right, if there are no students.Felicity. Yeah, exactly.Ross: It's really interesting, isn't it? There's also an issue with this, are they driving away other trainees as well on...not courses I've worked on but I think a lot of other courses when...It's a very awkward position when someone's paying you to take this course, but then you also have this option to fail the person.I think that puts the trainer in a very awkward situation because you don't want to get this reputation, I guess, of if you take the course there then you're much more likely to fail. Obviously you can have standards to uphold the things as well, right?Felicity: Yeah, absolutely.Ross: Should we talk about how to break the news if that was like you're deciding if this person is going to fail or not, or if they're borderline. When would you tell someone?Felicity: I've got a couple of strong rules. The first one is it's not you failed, it's the class failed. Because it's a high‑stress performance, that's not an indicator of who they are as a whole person. The second thing is to reduce dread as much as you can. The moment you get the chance to tell them gently and then it takes the stakes out of the rest of the conversation.Ross: I think as well if you do that to the middle or the end of the conversation. The only thing the person is going to be thinking about in between is did I pass?Felicity: Yeah. Actually quite recently I had a teacher who had passed but she wasn't very confident. We were having feedback and I thought that it would be self‑evident that she had passed the class, but I could see her getting more and more fidgety. Eventually I was just like, "Look, you've passed," and she immediately burst into tears because it was that incredible tension.Tracy: I remember clearly I had a trainee. There were two classes in a row, failed. The first time, of course, burst into tears and couldn't continue the conversation. Even though, I leave it for a while and then came back and still couldn't still talk about it. So I have to write down a lot of feedback to her, and she read it.I think that also helped. If you realize this person is already, cannot accept it, or feel really negative about it, maybe leave it or turn it into some written feedback instead. It probably the easiest way for people to accept because it's just a paper and words, no emotion. I'm going to read it when I need it or when I'm ready.Ross: I think as well, you're helping that person learn on giving them feedback about them helping other people learning. As a teacher, if you're just bombarding your students with feedback until they cry, that wouldn't be very good. So it seems important that, as a trainer, you demonstrate the same skill with seeing, "Is this person ready for the feedback? Do we need to wait?"A lot we are saying is leading into giving people feedback so what are some tips for people who failed and are saying, "What next?"Felicity: One thing that you can remind your trainees of is that hopefully, their failure will be an aberration from the pattern. So the norm is passing classes and if it's their second class and say, "Look, you've passed your first class, you definitely got the ability. Here are all the areas where you did pass but this area and this area."Ross: It sounds cheesy, but I think it is important to find some positive things to focus on. If it's a course where there are lots of criteria just talking through, "Hey, here are the things that you passed, that you did well on." Making those specific both so the person keeps doing them and to give them better confidence.One thing to definitely avoid doing in these situations is eliciting. That usually goes wrong. If someone's failed they just want to be told, "Here's why you failed and here's how to make sure that doesn't happen again." So strongly recommend not saying, "So you failed on this and this, how do you think you could do this better?"My example from the beginning, the person going berserk after they've been fired it was partially because the person doing the firing said, "Oh, this went wrong, this went wrong. What do you think we should do about it?" and the other person saying, "Oh, like I work harder," and then being "Well, I'm actually sorry, you're fired."Felicity: So by the time you get to observing a trainee, you're probably going to know them enough to know how they're going to react. If you have a trainee who you feel might get aggressive with you, or be very, very resistant then this might be a good opportunity to avoid this cognitive bias called reactive evaluation, which is where an idea that comes from an enemy is automatically less valuable.In situations where a person is likely to get aggressive, it's because they see you as the enemy. This is going to sound really weird, but what we want to maybe try and do in that situation is twist it around so that it's not you that's the enemy, it's the criteria and you are on their side and trying to get them to meet the criteria.So you're more of going back into a trainer role, rather than an assessor role. You're just saying like, "Look, I know this criterion is really tough but I'm here to help you understand and meet them. Here are some things that you can do to get yourself to that point."Tracy: I really like this quote this person said. "Failure is not a bag of learning, it's the feature. It's not something that should be locked out of the learning experience."Ross: My final top tip is sit in the seats closest to the door if these things go really badly wrong and bring some tissues.[laughter]Ross: I have definitely been in situations several times where I regret not doing one of those two things.[laughter]Ross: So Fifi, thanks for coming on. Where can people go to find out more about you?Felicity: I have a blog, it's classed the ELT Elf. I'll send you the link because...Ross: It's already on the website.Felicity: Oh. [laughs]Ross: It's on links page, and I'll also put it on this page.Felicity: Thank you.Ross: Great. Fifi, thanks so much for coming up. A pleasure.Tracy: Thank you and see you next time, everybody. Bye.Felicity: Bye.Ross: Bye.

I speak with Morag MacIntosh about the reality of teaching online during the Covid-19 lockdown.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn, and before we get into this week, I wanted to play you a quote from Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens." This is him on Sam Harris' "Making Sense" podcast talking about all things online teaching.Yuval Noah Harari: This shift to online teaching. This can lead to all kinds of dangerous directions. A lot of the experience of going to college doesn't happen in class, it happens during the break time. With teaching classes online on Zoom, of course there are break times, but you're alone in your home. You don't meet the other students, for a chance in the cafeteria.I think that whatever happens to education, we should always remember the very central rule of the community and of social interaction...Ross: I wanted to play you this for two reasons. First, to me, it's amazing that people like Yuval Noah Harari and Sam Harris are now talking about online teaching. Second, that what you just heard him say about the importance of what happens outside of the classroom.I think it's so easy to forget with online teaching, and I think this is true of the podcast that we've done recently here on this topic, that we tend to focus on the changes that have happened inside the classroom.For so many of our students and obviously for so many of you that are listening, the coronavirus has really changed for millions and millions of people what's going on for them outside of the classroom. Obviously in language teaching, so much of what we do inside the classroom is based on what's going on in our students' lives.We always try to personalize lessons based on students interests, jobs, hobbies, vacations, whatever. If you're part of the world where students are also in self‑isolation, that's going to have a huge impact on what you can get students to talk about inside the classroom.I want to bring this up at the beginning because that's one of the themes I think that came up in this week's interview with Morag MacIntosh. Morag works for Live Language in Glasgow, mainly teaching Academic English and helping students there prepare for IELTS, and Morag's also currently studying for her diploma in TESOL.For the last few weeks, Morag's been teaching online, and really is an inspiration in this area in finding resources that I would have never thought to use in a classroom but using them to great effect. In this interview, Morag and I talk about the reality of teaching online, not just teaching online but teaching online during this period of self‑isolation due to the coronavirus. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Morag, thanks so much for coming on. I really wanted to talk to you about this, because to be honest, a lot of what I read on online in terms of teaching tips at the moment seems to come from people who have never actually taught online and they certainly aren't doing it now.Morag MacIntosh: No, and there's things like say to your students, "What was the best thing you did yesterday? What was the most exciting thing?" Right now, that is being published to say to your students. They haven't been out of their house, you're not allowed to go out. You can't say what's the best thing. There's no good thing about it at all. A lot of the stuff you read is not suitable.Ross: [laughs] I think that just shows how out of touch some people really are at the moment with the reality of what's going on. This is the other thing with online teaching. Simply taking what happens offline and trying to put it in an online classroom, it just doesn't work.Morag: I think it's just so intensive when you're online. Students get very tired. It's very concentrated. You can't just replicate the classroom in any way at all, that just wouldn't work out. There definitely needs to be a different approach.Why would you use pictures in a course book when you can have your own pictures that you've taken? You can share a screen of something from your country, you can show the real thing in your house.Ross: Absolutely. Let's talk, then, about some of the activities that maybe are more suitable for online teaching, especially at the moment. I presume a lot of the activities that you're doing in class now, you've just discovered through trial and error. Is that right?Morag: Yeah, I think that because we didn't have any training, we had to rely on our own resources more. We didn't have a lot of course books. We've got a lot now, because they've been produced for us, and we've been given access to them, but at first we just had to think outside the box. Use the resources that we had to. Use the environment. Just work with what we had on the spot.Ross: That environment, that you've mentioned there, Morag, is that just the students and the apartments that they're in? Where they literally physically are right now?Morag: Yes. I'm talking about their physical environment because you're in their living room or some other room, and it's their personal space. It's ready‑made, authentic materials, isn't it? You don't have to think, "Is this authentic?" or "How can I make it communicative?" or "How can I make this realistic?" It's realistic already, we don't need to have that problem.We use things, they bring things to show us. We'll go around and look at their rooms, we'll look at their furniture, ask questions about that. One day, we had somebody who had a flat type TV delivered, and we helped him. The instructions were in every language but of course, the one that we couldn't understand any of them.We needed some help with that and what tools to use. We had a lesson in that kind of vocabulary about tools like spanner, hammer. All of these things that people wouldn't normally... [laughs] Then we could see the physical things as well.Ross: I love that example. That's brilliant. I can remember teaching a unit on household tools before. It certainly wasn't very contextualized like that. Again, a great example on how actually teaching the students from home can be better for some topics. Is that something that you planned there? Or was that something that was just improvised?Morag: It sort of evolved. He was saying that he kept getting deliveries every few minutes. There would be his bell ringing in the background. Eventually I said, "What is that noise? What is happening?" and he said, "Oh, it's another delivery."I said, "What are you getting delivered?" That's what led to that. The next day, it was still lying there. We just looked at what he was doing with his package there and then there was the instructions. He was trying to read it out, and we would instruct him. It was like asking questions and directing him. What would you use?We didn't do the whole thing. Obviously he made it up after the class, most of it, but it was preparation. It was like describing a process as well, so it was helpful for their IELTS and writing. That's one of the tasks ‑‑ describing a process. I'm always thinking, how can this tie into their four skills.All the times so we had all the four skills were definitely covered. The next day, he actually took us to see the finished item. [laughs] That kind of rounded it up and it was quite good.Ross: Such a good point. It's so important in this situation that you link whatever is happening in class back either to the course book or the test that the students are studying for so that students can see the point of what they're doing in class.Obviously in the situation where course books haven't been designed for the current situation, I think it's very easy to deviate from that, and for students to feel that whatever they're learning really isn't going anywhere.Morag: Definitely. You've got to make sure that everything you do is going to be tied into that. You can just have a good time looking around peoples' houses, and it's not so productive. You need to remember that they're actually paying for a service.Ross: Do you want to tell us about how you do that in class? How do you relate the class content back to the learning goals?Morag: A lot of it's in the structure. They know the structure that my lesson's going to be. First, I would have them doing something in the chat box when they're all waiting because people arrive just at random times. It's very difficult to motivate yourself to get out of bed when you don't actually have to go out physically.I have that problem, so, when they arrive, they can do something like an activity in the chat box. Like write a sentence about something or post a comment for somebody else. Or a letter, and find an animal or a vegetable. All these kinds of things. Then after that, we usually use the flipped lesson approach.I think that's the best. They've done a lot of the work at home, maybe the fun stuff. They've looked at the video, they've run a podcast, something like that or a blog. They've sent a file and they're speaking, Vocaroo. They'll go into the chat room, and then they'll do a task connected to that. Once we come back, we'll do a fun thing.We'll maybe look out the window and see what we can see. Describe that. Or we'll show videos of what we've been doing on our walks outside. From there, I kind of evolve it from what happens, but I've got a structure in my head. I really take what they produce, and we work with that.Ross: You mentioned videos there, from students' walks outside.Morag: Yeah.Ross: Do you want to tell us a little more about those? What are they, and how do you use them?Morag: What I've done before is, because we're only allowed to go out here for an hour on our isolation walks. When they're outside, I've asked them if they could maybe take a video of where they go. That kind of motivates other people. It's quite boring to be in your house for 23 hours a day.Somebody showed the cherry blossom, and he was holding it in his hand, describing that. When we came back and we're listening to that, we're looking at what he did, then making up questions and things from that as well. Then they can follow that through with writing summaries to practice their vocabulary, and obviously focus on a grammatical point as well that's come up.Ross: Again, that's really great. Really making lessons highly personalized. With sharing those videos, again, you're doing something online that I think would be more challenging to do offline. Another thing I know that you've done before that I thought sounded fantastic was taking students on virtual tours of tourist attractions.Morag: Yes, we either do these at home, or I quite like to do them in the class so that the students are interacting with each other as well. We'll maybe share the videos as well, because they can get a lot more communication out of that.Some of the things that I've done are...When I was looking on the Internet, because we're on lockdown and it's a bit boring, a lot of things have been put online free for people to use just now. For example, Google Arts & Culture, they've made over 2,000 things free like cultural attractions and people can go and they can take a virtual tour.I thought, "I wonder if I could use this," adapt these into the lessons in any way. We can do things with going into museums. There's the British Museum. All the famous museums, [inaudible 10:57] the Louvre. For all these and you can take a virtual tour and walk around it. You can click on different artifacts and find out information about these.I can write a quiz for the students, as if they were actually going around the museum physically. Practices writing, practices speaking, and listening as well. Everything. We also had Edinburgh Zoo as well. You can look at live webcams of different animals there. They were able to choose one animal, for example, the panda.They could look and see what they were doing, and then you can go to the page on the website all about the giant panda and all the information about that as well. They were finding out information about different animals, the habitats, and the history of the animals. All that kind of vocabulary as well.Another good one that I've just done, I was doing it yesterday and today, we took a virtual tour of Buckingham Palace. I shared the screen with them, so we took the virtual tour together.We could speak about it like we were going around there in a group, rather than just looking at it. I wanted them to be interacting with each other and describing what we saw, like the materials. There was gold and plaster and all the different fabrics and the colors and all the objects.We could look in the throne room, and we could hear the queen speaking, so we can listen and making up a WebQuest for them to go around and find out different things. After that, going into the breakout rooms. They chose artifacts or a painting or the throne, something like that, and they could click on it, find out the information and they were going to write a summary. So, paired writing.Ross: Again, I think that's something that's useful on two levels, isn't it? It's great language practice, but it's also plugging a gap that students can't do these things outside a classroom.Morag: Yes, because we're missing out on all of that. They signed up to come for a cultural experience here, and they're not getting it. I'm trying to give them some of that as well that they're missing out on.Ross: Now, those breakout rooms that you mentioned there, they must be a huge help in keeping students engaged and involved.Morag: Especially if you have a large class, and especially if they're sitting with their videos turned off. People can get lost in the class. Sometimes, you don't know if they've fallen asleep, or if you've forgotten about them if you're going around asking people and someone's quiet, and you just see a blank screen, it's very easy to forget about somebody like that.Breakout rooms, they can work in twos or threes. Small groups, and you can choose the rooms. You can do it randomly, or you can manipulate it to have stronger and weaker students together. Just like in a classroom.It's good because then they have a chance to interact just with one or two other people. It really replicates the classroom situation, and the teacher can just pop out and in of each room. The only thing is you really need to set it up very, very carefully beforehand, because you can't be in two places at one time.If somebody's gone off on the wrong track, they might be the last room that you arrive at, and they're sitting there and they haven't done a thing.Ross: Yeah, I think some of those aspects of classroom management like group work are obviously so different to teaching offline. Especially when students turn off their webcams, that's the equivalent of students coming to class with a paper bag over their head.Morag: We can't enforce it, though I say to them, "It's your choice." I understand, if they've maybe just got up or something. Really, you've just got to work with that because you're going into their home. They might not want you to see their personal possessions. There's lots of reasons why they wouldn't have that video on.I feel like I understand that, but it does make it pretty difficult to gauge how they're working, if they're working quietly. That's why I don't have a lot of individual work. Ross: That was Morag MacIntosh, everyone. Thanks, Morag, for joining us. Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

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

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

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.

We speak with Study Cat CEO Mark Pemberton about language learning outside of the classroom. As the corona virus causes schools around China to temporarily close, we consider the possibilities and limits of using apps and technology for language learning. Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. Here, we usually bring you one episode every couple of weeks focusing on a topic.We usually don't do anything related to current events, but at the moment, the coronavirus, as you may have read in the news, is having a huge effect on a lot of students. A lot of listeners are also, like I am, in China. Today, we're going to do a special episode about learning English at home.To help us do that, we have Mark Pemberton. He's CEO of Studycat. Studycat's a company that makes fun and effective language learning apps for kids in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and German. Before starting Studycat, Mark was also a teacher.In this episode, I asked Mark about how students can use technology to help them learn the language at home. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Mark. Thanks for doing this at such short notice. Obviously, over here in Shanghai, a lot of the schools are shut and a huge amount of the population's working from home. It's a really strange time, with the coronavirus, both for business and for education.Mark Pemberton: I was reading today Bloomberg saying that this is going to be the largest work‑at‑home experiment in the history of mankind. From our perspective, it's going to probably be the tipping point for home education.Realistically, people might not be back at school until after Easter. In the meantime, there is no way that people can't turn towards online education to fill that void. It will be very interesting times.Ross: Right. I guess a lot of studying from home is going to happen over the next few weeks and months. That's obviously not necessarily a bad thing. What are some of the advantages of getting students to study at home in general?Mark: To me, it is obvious that if you want to learn a language, the more touch points you have with that language, the quicker you're going to achieve fluency. The gold standard for language learning is to drop yourself, immerse into a new culture, and have to speak the language, which is exactly what happened to me when I moved to Thailand.If you don't speak the language, you can't order food. It's sink or swim. Therefore, take that assumption and build immersion around the learner. When the kids go home, you put the cartoons on in English. You put the radio on in English. Put music on in English. Surround the kid with English, and the kid will do the rest.A lot of parents would say, "I don't know how to do this." Or, "I don't speak English." That's OK. It doesn't matter if you can't speak English. You can create the environment around your child where they will acquire the language very naturally and very quickly.If watching cartoons is a part of that, if playing interactive games is a part of that, then even better, because there's not a lot of research or data about this.To me, it's obvious that when a kid is in a puzzle or doing some kind of brain‑teasing activity, where they're using all of their focus and concentration, then they're learning quicker than they would be if they were just passively watching a cartoon.Ross: I suppose as well as the motivation aspect of needing to learn a language with immersion. I guess you're also just getting fewer opportunities to forget what you've learned because everything will be recycled all the time. That seems to be a big advantage of learning on an app.For example, for a few minutes every day, compared with going to a class once a week for a couple of hours at a time. Anyway, learning at home also allows parents to get a lot more involved in their kid's learning. What are some advantages of getting parents involved in the language learning process?Mark: Our brand is connected learning. What we mean by connected learning is connecting the home and the school to get the best learning outcomes. There's a couple of layers to our connected learning.The first one is connecting the home and the school. The second one is connecting parents, teachers, and kids. The kids are at the center of the learning process. If the parents are involved and the teachers are involved, and they triangulate, that is very, very powerful.I've got pictures of me teaching back in 2001 in my school. I had this hardcore cohort of parents that came to every class, which was great because they helped me manage the class. They helped me translate sometimes.Those parents would go home and they would walk with the kids. They play the tapes with the kids. They do the homework with the kids. Those kids just excelled because they were recycling. They were doing more work than the kids that weren't able to stay home work to...What we're able to say is, put the CD on, put the tape on, sing the song. There's nothing else you could set them at that time. Whereas now, you can assign them homework on their favorite devices.You can track whether they've done it or not. You could see what they did or didn't understand. It's a brave new world of language learning. I wish I had all these tools when I was teaching.Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about how parents can best be involved? Imagine that parents being involved can either have a huge positive effect or definitely also seeing have a negative effect sometimes on kids as well.Mark: The kids like it as long as the parents handle it well and don't do that overpowering, "You must do this, you must do that." If the parents play a role of like, "Let's do this together," the kids learn so much faster, and they're so much more fluent.The parents who got such clunky pronunciation, that the kids get this, "I'm doing this better than mom or dad." You get this nice dynamic going if the parents play it right.Ross: The teachers listening to this might not fit into this category, but there's definitely a lot of teachers out there who are less enthusiastic about integrating technology into the student's language learning. How do you think apps can make teachers' lives easier?Mark: When we started doing EdTech early 2000s, I thought that there would be technology in every classroom by 2007, 2008. Then I thought, "OK, well, this is going a bit slow. It's education, maybe it's because teachers are fearful of technology, or maybe it's because the ministers of education are too slow."Now, it's 2020, I would say, with the exception of China, education and the adoption of technology in classrooms have really hasn't progressed at all. Obviously, not all teachers, but why aren't most teachers embracing technology?I don't understand. I've heard people say that they find it cumbersome. Maybe it's the technology's fault. Maybe they find it's a distraction in the classroom.Maybe they find that it's hard to manage a class and manage a technology at the same time. When we were building [inaudible 6:23] schools, we were very, very aware of these issues.We never assumed that the teachers wanted their lives made easier. We assumed that the teachers wanted to be more effective teachers. They didn't want to do monotonous report writing.We don't want to waste time prepping for all these lessons. We don't want to waste time marking all these lessons. We want to walk into a classroom with the kids [inaudible 6:51] knowing the vocabulary. We can actually use their vocabulary in scenarios, in sentence building, in dialogues, and in fun stories.EdTech, I've always believed, has massive potential to level the playing field. Children can go home and learn at their own pace, at their own speed. They can do it again, and again, and again until they're comfortable with the language. Then they can bring that into the classroom and practice the vocabulary learned. I think that's a wonderful outcome.Ross: You mentioned leveling the playing field there, Mark. How can technology do that? What do you mean exactly by leveling the playing field?Mark: There's two layers for that. The first layer is, in a specific classroom, no two kids learn the same way. No two kids have the same personality. It always struck me that the silent kids that would sit in class, they would not speak for the first year, a year and a half.We're always trained how to deal with these kids. The way I dealt with them, I just let them be. They were never making any trouble. They're just very shy. They're only five years old.I remember one of the silent kids, after a year, a year and a half, put a hand up, walked over to me, and said, "Teacher, may I go to the bathroom, please? I'd like to use the toilet." This kid had never spoken one word ever but she had understood all the language. She can speak complete sentences when she was ready to do so.If you're shy and don't want to speak, how nice it would be at home, in your bedroom with the device, rather than being told to stand up and repeat this sentence, or make a sentence, or it's your turn to do this, your turn to do that. When I said level the playing field there, I was also alluding to profit on purpose.EdTech can reach parts of the world that other education solution haven't had the ability to do. You're seeing really progressive governments in Colombia, Uruguay, that are shipping devices out to rural areas, where kids can just start learning where they can't build schools.EdTech will be able to deliver education to the 1.5 billion kids that, right now, don't have access to education. Of course, they need devices to be able to do that. I believe that there will be a day where companies like ours will work with companies like Huawei and other major device manufacturers, and then major charities with big footprints like Room to Read.Then we can deliver these devices with loads of educational software uploaded, and then deliver these devices to the communities.Ross: I love that example of the quiet student just absorbing all that language. I also heard Stephen Krashen give an example of talking about, at a conference giving a presentation, and walking up to someone in the front row with a microphone and seeing the look of fear in their faces.He was saying that, as teachers, we hate being asked questions at conferences. That's something that we do with our students all the time.Anyway, your app, I believe gets used by a lot of teachers in their classes. You must have seen lots of examples of teachers in schools encouraging students to use technology at home and to help in the language learning. Can you give us an example of how that actually works in practice?Mark: We did a big launch a year ago in Shiyan with a group of 40 kindergartens. It went really well. The teachers complained that they didn't know what to do because the kids knew all the vocabulary when they came into the classroom, which always made me laugh.They did some really cool stuff. They would ask the parents to record the kids at home doing their app activities. We got all these videos of kids singing, dancing around the living room, really got lit up by the songs. They started getting the kids to sing the songs every afternoon at the end of class outside the kindergarten.When the parents arrive to pick them up, the kids are all there singing the songs and doing all these different motions and actions. The feedback from the principals of those schools was that the parents had stopped having to send their kids to after school to learn English because they were learning so much English in the school.The blended learning, the flipped learning was working. That, to me, is a success because you're saving the kid's time. The kids in China are not having much of a childhood. The pressure is on from when you're two, three years old. It's the same in Japan. It's the same in Korea.The pressure on kids to do a 7:30 start all the way through to 9:00 or 10:00 at night, when they're only four years old, I just don't think that's right. I don't think there's enough time for them to play. I don't think there's enough time for them to sleep.I would hope that by using their time more efficiently, they could get more rest, more sleep, and more playtime, which is what children need when they're growing up, especially their age.Ross: You mentioned that by using that flipped classroom approach, students learn more effectively and didn't actually need to go to after school English programs anymore. Can you imagine that time in the future when apps or other technology will eventually just replace teachers completely?Mark: Technology would never replace teachers. There will be books in classrooms for the next 50 years. There will be teachers in classrooms for the next 50 years.The notion that AI and robots and technology are going to replace education systems is a fallacy. Everyone should embrace technology as a tool to enhance your ability to teach. That's what it is.Human beings are very unique in the sense that we have this urge to teach. We have this urge to pass knowledge down. It's in our DNA, like it is in no other animals to pass on and to teach, the love to teach.We love teaching and we love being taught. The way that society is being built and developed with kids going to schools, I just don't see that changing in the next 50, 100 years.I've gone full circle as well. I've built systems in 2007. My mindset was, replace the teachers, replace the classroom, build systems that don't need teachers or classrooms. Now, I've come around to a much easier state of mind. If there is a classroom, there is a teacher.That's much easier to build and design technology because you all work together to get the outcome that you want. I'm not saying that the way we educate or the way we use education right now is optimal. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it's not going to change.Ross: One other opportunity I wanted to ask you about, Mark, was with AI. A lot gets written and said about AI. Can you tell us about what you think the potential is for AI in helping language learning in the future?Mark: AI, I'm not so sure about this. So much hype about what AI is going to do in education. It's a lot of VC hype about that right now. I wouldn't be putting my money to have into AI. We use very simple AI in our systems for adaptive learning. We are able to see whether a child has issues with certain words.Then we simply use a very simple machine algorithm method to keep reintroducing the words in reward games. We pull trouble words out and we keep re‑displaying them to the kids so that they learn them. I think that's very powerful.I don't think that the brave new world that a lot of people are investing in in terms of AI is going to be as big as people are hoping it will be.Ross: Mark, thanks so much again for coming on. I also know that because of the Coronavirus, you've open up your app for teachers and students to use for free for the time being. Can you tell us how can teacher's listening get access to that?Mark: We've just released a campaign today, Ross, that we are opening up all of our language learning apps to all communities affected by school closure for free usage until this crisis has passed. If you go to studycat.com, you will see all of our apps available there to be downloaded.In China, we have a WeChat platform. If you search for Studycat, you'll find our WeChat platform. Fun English is available there on all Android devices, all iOS devices for the next month, for free. We've survived these things before with SARS. In the meantime, Studycat will do what we can to help you entertain your kids.Ross: Great. Thanks again so much for joining us, Mark.Mark: Cheers.Ross: For everyone listening, please stay safe. We'll see you again next episode. Goodbye.

Ross and favorite guest Dave Weller talk about ethics in English education. What problems are caused by charging for teaching? What are the ethics of observing teachers? Is it fair to expect teachers to prepare for classes in their own time?Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Hurrah. Welcome to Dave Weller.Dave Weller: You just stole my thunder.Ross: [laughs] I know. What can I say? Regular listeners will understand the joke.Dave: Hello everybody.Ross: Welcome back, Dave.Dave: Thank you.Ross: Today, I thought we could talk about something that is much needed and often much lacking, which is ethics in English education.[laughter]Dave: A deep topic.Ross: Isn't it? I don't know about you, but I've definitely found that most of the schools that I've worked in, not always, but in some ways, been ethically lacking.It's something that we don't often talk about, maybe. Certainly, we've not talked about in this podcast before. It's something that teachers often talk about in teachers' rooms, right? With problems about the ethics of schools. I thought it would be interesting of us to debate here.Dave: Absolutely. People listening, it depends which context you're teaching in, but every teacher I've ever spoken to has a story or several stories to tell about unfairness, discrimination, prejudice. Definitely, there's issues in the industry with ethical behavior.Ross: Maybe, it's more important in teaching, for a lot of teachers that get into teaching, because it should be a net-positive profession. It might be different to some other higher-paying jobs that are more financially motivated, whereas teaching, very few people will get into it to make money, right?Dave: Oh, def.[laughter]Ross: Too late now.Dave: You can't.[laughter]Dave: Is it too late to change my...Ross: I think it is at this point, Dave. We want to play a little quote from David Brooks -- who's got a great book on this topic -- talking to Sam Harris.Sam Harris: What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues?David Brooks: The eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I, more or less, took from a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi in the mid-20th century. He said we have two sides of our nature.One side, which is about conquering the world and being majestic in it. Those are the resume virtues, the things that make us good at our job. Then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest, or capable of great love.We live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues are more important. We all would rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career, but we live in a culture that emphasizes the career parts. We're a lot more articulate about how to build a good career than how to build a good person.Our universities, in particular, are much more confident in talking about professional rise than a moral or spiritual rise.Ross: I would say that's probably also true in our industry, at least, in all the training courses I've worked on. I don't ever remember ethics or the ethics of education ever coming up on them. Obviously, we spend a lot of time talking about how to become a better teacher, but not better in terms of character, better in terms of ethics teacher.Dave: I would agree. It's interesting. I remember the old Greeks used to do several subjects like the triumvirate of rhetoric, logic, and ethics, because they saw it as inseparable from being able to lead a good life.Actually teaching ethics to the young citizens of the time was imperative. They would have thought it very strange not to do so. Yet, it's something missing. Well, I never got taught ethics. Probably why I am why I am now.[laughter]Ross: I thought we could start off with what are the ethics of charging people for education. Obviously, both you and I, pretty much our entire careers, we've worked a little bit in government schools at some point, but mainly it's been paying customers.What would you think are some of the ethical issues or problems there?Dave: Any ethical question, you have to look at all the variables behind it. You have to look at people's income, their wealth, what they are currently studying, government schools, their need, the company that's providing the education, its standards for their own teachers.I think that the context is inseparable. To say in general terms, it's quite tough.Ross: At least, I can see there being some advantages of having education in the private sphere rather than the public sphere. In theory at least, there should be more...In general, there should be more pressure on providers to deliver a better service, because you're getting all this pressure from your competitors.Dave: If government schools and services were perfect, there wouldn't be any need to have private education in the first place.Ross: I can see, maybe, the difficulty there. It's like who do you decide to sell to, or when do you decide not to sell things to people?I've had friends and colleagues who've worked especially with adults. People who they know can't afford an English course, or maybe they're working in a job where English is not going to benefit them very much, or they know that this person doesn't have the study skills. Most people are, maybe, encouraged to take out a large bank loan to pay for something.Dave: Even if the school or institution that's selling the courses, it depends if they do so ethically. If they have a different payment plan so you can pay monthly rather than in a yearly lump sum, which makes it more affordable. If they are offering to people who they think won't be able to complete it in time, or they have other pressures.Even how good their teaching is, which methodology do they follow? Is it up-to-date and evidence-based? If they follow an outdated system because it's easy to market, they'll definitely get more sales.Also, you need to look at the school's retention. What are their results? Can they show that they've helped learners to learn?Ross: You touched on something there, this idea of rewarding teachers for, for example, students signing on, re-signing contracts in private language schools, or demo conversions. Students come to a trial class and they've paid, or they've not paid.That, I think, is an interesting ethical question, of whether that is something that should be rewarded, obviously something that should be punished. Is that a good way of judging people?There is one side of that in that if your students have signed a year contract and they've stayed with you for a year, and they want to re-sign again. That probably does, in aggregate with a lot of people, say some positive things about you. Maybe, if they don't, it says some negative things about you.There's obviously another side to that as well. You're starting to judge teachers by how much money they're generating rather than how much learning they're generating.Dave: Precisely, because learning is such a long process. If a teacher is purely entertaining, they're going to get a very high re-sign rate. That doesn't mean learning happened.Learning is hard. You have to really think. You're perhaps frowning as you grasp a new concept. That is leading to a teacher not getting as high re-sign rate because the students don't want to think in class.The teacher could be technically brilliant and really adept at helping the students to learn. If that teacher is disincentivized from that behavior and think, "Well, actually I earn a decent salary. I enjoy where I'm living, and I want to stay." They could well change their behavior to increase whatever rate they might be being judged on, especially if it's a financial one.Ross: Then you can imagine that being a vicious circle as well, where you would promote the people that get those metrics rather than the metrics of learning, which are harder to measure. That reinforces that whole paradigm, doesn't it? That what we want is re-signs and money rather than learning.Dave: Precisely. This is a problem that I had years ago when I first became a DoS. Before all the technology that we're talking about, I was struggling with the idea of how to measure academic quality. It's really hard to do, because the only way you can do it, as far as I can see, is to directly observe it.We don't have any standard algorithm of what makes good teaching or what makes good learning, because it varies so much depending on the variables of the teacher and the students involved, that is only by direct observation you can see.It affects so many other business metrics within a school. It can affect sales. If you're doing class, you get referrals. It can affect your retention, your service department. You can measure it through the effect it has on other things, but that is a very tricky process and needs a lot of data.If you have a manager that's very business-focused, and you're an academic head, then trying to prove that becomes a real battle. I see that getting worse if the right things aren't measured. With online, with all the extra data coming in, people could well take the easy solution and make those simple correlations.Ross: It's like the old management saying, "What gets measured gets managed." It's a lot easier to measure re-signs or conversions than to measure learning, which is still a bit of an abstract idea and very, very difficult to actually assess.Dave: That's actually a Peter Drucker quote, and he has an extension to it which most people don't say, which is, "...but make sure you measure the right things."Ross: Ah.[laughter]Ross: Oh wow, there we go. Moving on, let's talk a bit about teachers. I know this is something that you wanted to talk about. Schools in general often ask teachers to do a lot of work, and preparation, and marking classes in their own time, right?Dave: If a school is upfront with how they pitch the job to teachers, then I think it's fine. I think a lot of schools don't mention what their expectations are of work upfront.They might say, "The job is this many hours per week for this salary." Then when the teacher starts work, they find out, "Oh, there are also office hours you have to attend. There are extracurricular activities you also have to be present for. There are team building activities which are compulsory." The list goes on. I'm sure [chuckles] our listeners can add a lot more to that.Suddenly, what was thought to be a 40-hour a week job turns into 60 or 70, when, as you say, you add in preparation, marking, and even the horrible situation where teachers are buying supplies from their own pocket as well.Ross: It's almost like schools are taking advantage of the good nature of teachers, of wanting to do good things for their students.I remember my dad, growing up, in my childhood, I remember him. So often the living room floor would be strewn with these cut-out bits of old exam papers which he was copying and pasting to turn into new tests for students that they hadn't had before.Maybe, teaching is different from other professions. Whereas if you're in sales or something and you're putting in many extra hours, you're probably doing that, partially at least, in the expectation that you're going to get more money. Whereas teaching doesn't have that.It's almost that the more you care about the students, the more time you're putting in, but you're not necessarily going to get any financial reward for that.Dave: There's a saying in England, in the NHS, they say it runs on goodwill. They do take advantage of the empathy that staff have. I do think that is very similar in the teaching profession as well.Ross: I also wanted to ask you about the idea of more and more surveillance in classrooms. When both you and I started teaching, there was very little oversight. Maybe, your DoS would come in and observe you. I don't know, for me once a year if I was lucky. Maybe, it could last.[laughter]Dave: That explains a lot, Ross.Ross: It does, doesn't it? Now in offline teaching you often have cameras in classrooms. Even more interestingly, in online teaching, you have not just cameras -- because obviously everything is on camera.Everything that you do in every single class can be watched back both by parents and the people measuring the quality of classes, and more and more companies investing in AI to monitor teacher behavior.Generally in public life, at least, people have a real aversion to facial recognition, whatever authority's using technology to track their behavior, their movements, and everything. I've not really heard anyone talking about this with teaching.I'm not sure if I was a teacher now, full-time, especially an online teacher, and I knew that everything I said was being recorded and monitored with AI. I'm not sure how comfortable I would be with that.Dave: First of all, the first thing that popped into my head there is the idea of privacy and intention. Privacy concerns from the students, and I'm assuming they would all sign waivers so that their recordings could be used and reused for training purposes, and shown to other people. That's where the intention comes in.If all this data is used with ethically-sound principles in mind, I can't see too much of an issue with it. If you're using it to improve their learning, to personalize resources, materials, and lessons, so they're better able to learn, then that is the positive side.Ross: It'll be interesting to see how that changes as the technology moves on and we get to a point when technology knows every single word you've said in every single class to every single student. There's a record of that. There's even a record of every single facial expression that you might have made in every single class. I think all that's coming.Dave: The immediate problem with that, though, is assuming good intentions. You could still run into pitfalls.If you have, say, the ability for AI to recognize engagement through facial expression --Will it be leaning forward in the chair, smiling, eye contact with the camera, however you judge those metrics? That's equated with a good class because they're engaged and more likely to re-sign. That's a business metric rather than a learning metric.A teacher's rewarded for that, then you could go back to the idea of edutainment. The teacher is encouraged to be entertaining rather than help the student to learn. Interestingly, that data could also be used in aggregate to see what really works and what really doesn't in teaching.That is very exciting, but it has this dark side which I think we need to be very careful of. I've not really heard any discussions or anywhere else about the potential pitfalls of this. It's really nice that you're raising people's awareness now.Ross: You heard it here first, folks. [laughs]Ross: Thanks for coming on again, Dave. Do you want to give the blog a quick plug?Dave: Sure. If you want to read more about these topics, then please visit www.barefootteflteacher.com.Ross: Great. Dave, thanks again for coming on.Dave: You're very welcome.

Join Ross and Cullen in Part 2 of our I'm free Sydney tour  Listen in and read along with part 2 of our tour through Sydney with Ross and Cullen and then answer the questions below to either test your memory, your English, or both. https://forms.gle/6FBzYXe3Uh8DaQF77 Ross: You can see across Hyde Park, the big some areas, cathedral.  Now it's the second version of it. They started one in 1821. Unfortunately, it burnt down soon afterward. So they started this one in 1868, but they didn't finish it until 16 years ago. So it's about 130 years to get it all built. They wanted it finished off for the 2000 Olympics. A view across to the Cathedral with animal art making its way through the park  looking for an Ark.   Cullen: Thanks for joining me, Cullen here, we are about to kick off in part two about our with Ross, from www.imfree.com.au and we're making our way now towards the cathedral.    And then we're going to swing around towards Hyde Park and the Greek mythological figures. And we learn a little bit there about Sydney's early convict beginnings.   And then from there, we end up in the most magnificent lookout point towards Sydney Harbour.  So let's jump straight into it.   Ross: As this is all originally the edge of the township. This area was the site of the markets, but by 1898 they wanted something more formal and official for the market.    So they built this big grand Romanesque-style building, which you can see around us. The problem was the design of the building didn't work very well as a market. So right through its history, it had a number of different functions.  In one instance, it was proposed to be demolished entirely and replaced by car parking.   And thankfully that didn't happen in 1986, a Malaysian company took control of the building, restored it to what we can say to the state. That said, there are a few interesting and odd things around the building, in particular, the clocks.    So you might have noticed one as we came in, now hiding behind the sign. There's also a similar one, same spot down the other end of the building. Ross: It shows scenes some Australian history with, but this one shows scenes from British history.  So if you go up onto level two on the hour every hour, you can see beheadings of King Charles the first. And the whole head rolls off and everything.  It's a bit weird. Also, on the second level in the middle is a letter from Queen Elizabeth the second to Sydneysiders, which is nice, but we haven't opened it yet, and we're not meant to open it until 2085. So I don't like my chances of being around to hear that one read out and she could have written anything, but I get the feeling it's still going to be pretty........, but we'll have to wait and see ……. It was written in 1986 the idea is that it not be open for 99 years, so we get to keep waiting for me or that you can head around the corner here as we do  Look up at the dome above. It's really pretty. Ross: It was in this area, had our first official horse races. You don't find horses here anymore.  It's a place for people to escape from this city. Have picnics and a place for the big white birds with the big white beaks.  They seem to be avoiding us a little bit at the moment.  The Australian white ibis (Threskiornis Molucca) is a wading bird of the ibis family. In recent years has become an icon of popular culture, being regarded "with passion and wit,   You can see someone chasing one over there, uh, for them to steal your picnic.  So watch out for that one.  It's also, for part of our out and about art festival, which is on at the moment. Ross: it's all about getting art out into the streets rather than just in museums and galleries.  So that's what all the photographs we just wandered by.  They're all photographs that are meant to represent an Australian life, interesting elements of Australian life.    But there's an extension to that exhibition over in the diagonally opposite corner of Hyde Park, which is exactly the same all photographs about Australian life except they're taken by children. So it's cool to see their, uh, views on things.    But you can see across Hyde Park, the big St Mary's cathedral.  Now it's the second version of it. They started one in 1821. Unfortunately, it burnt down soon afterward.  So they started this one in 1868, but they didn't finish it until 16 years ago. It took them about 130 years to get it all built.  They wanted it finished off for the 2000 Olympics.   A view across to the Cathedral with animal art making its way through the park  looking for an Ark.   Ross: If you're interested in cathedrals, that can be one to have a wander around inside shows a strong Irish Catholic heritage in the early colony. Other Way beside us, he can say he's fountain, which is known as the Archibald fountain.    Now the thing that confuses me about it is it's meant to show Australia and France's ties and connections during world war one, but the artist has used Greek mythological figures to show off this fact.    Nonetheless, it's a beautiful fountain, a popular place for wedding photographs.  The story behind the fountain is it was donated to Sydney by a man named JF Archibald.    So JF Archibald was a fairly important person here in Sydney as he created a popular current affairs magazine known as the bulletin.    He was, however, also a character. He was a Francophile.    He absolutely loved France so much, so he changed his name from John Feltham,    to Jules Francois, and he went with a Bere and French, mustache, and everything.   Ross: Hence we end up with a fountain which is meant to show ties to the French, but whilst we're here in the quiet of Hyde park, I'll run through Sydney's history in six or seven minutes.    So tune in or out depending on your level of interest.    In 1770 the Englishman, a captain cook, sailed up the East coast of Australia. The Dutch sailed up the West coast in 1616, but we'd like to forget about that part.    Around that time, London's jails were full of convicts and prisoners.    Art in the park dazzles in the daylight of the cranes among the trees in Hyde Park The American war of independence meant they couldn't keep shipping them over there anymore.  They had to come up with somewhere new. So eventually, it was decided upon new South Wales or as it became Sydney.    So on the 26th of January, 1788, the first fleet of ships arrived here in Sydney with 700 convicts, 700 other people that said they only managed to beat a number of French ships by four days.   Ross: So we could have had a completely different history.    The other thing was they thought the land was completely uninhabited.    In actual fact, it was inhabited by the Gadigal tribe of Australian native Aborigines.    They'd been around for at least the past 30,000 years. So at first, there was some curiosity and interest, but then there were violent attacks and outbreaks of disease, which largely decimated the Australian native Aboriginal population.    So much so, unfortunately, they only represent one and a half percent of Sydney's population to this day.    So during those first few years, the colonies started to grow as a convict colony.    A couple of years after Sydney was founded, 75% of the population were convicts, so you can understand it wasn't a very law-abiding society.    The other issue they had was that of food and famine. There were reliant on most of their food coming out on ships from England. These ships are very often wrecked or lost at sea.   Ross: So in 1790 when a ship known as the Lady Juliana, came out with 220 women and not very much food, the largely male-dominated society at the time complained at this,   By 1792 free settlers started coming out here. Farming started to work. Sydney started to prosper by the 1840s they stopped sending convicts to the East coast of Australia. Guessing 150,000 was about enough.    Then by 1851, we had the first of a number of gold rushes, which really helped Sydney to prosper, but also helped Melbourne to prosper and hence sparked off the debate between the two cities as to who is more important, which hasn't finished yet.    So in 1901 the six States of Australia came together as a Federation under the coin. This was when the debate between the two cities was most aggressive because it had to be  decided who would be the capital of this new country Australia. Ross: Sydney was like, well, we're here first. We have the most heritage and old buildings.    Clearly, we should be the capital.   Melbourne was were young, were more hip, and European, where the biggest at the time where you should be the capital.   The two cities, we're both so stubborn. They fought so aggressively. They had to build a whole new city in between the two of them.    Canberra.    That said, Melbourne was the capital for the first 26 years because that's how long it took us to build Canberra.    But war has come to Sydney in the form of infiltrations and thinkings, but these days Sydney as a focus of world events, rugby world cup, Sydney Olympics, but I'll give you brains at rest, and we'll head this way out of Hyde Park.   Ross: You can see where we are standing where we started back at the town hall, the long thin queen Victoria building with all the little green dots on the roof.    Then we headed up pass Sydney tower, which pokes up above everything else there over into Hyde Park.    You can see the triangular area of greenery and grass.    That was the domain which I mentioned from the hospital hanging off the edge of the model is the new South Wales art gallery as well.    We headed down through Martin place past the round Australia square building and were now directly opposite this middle Wharf over the road, way behind in that little square building with two orange lines on the roof. That's custom house.    So from here, we'll head around into the rocks, which is the oldest surviving part of Sydney.    So the model obviously goes from the Harbor bridge, opera house, circular Quay, all they back down the other end to central station, but you can also see to this side, this area of water, which is known as Darling Harbor, which for want of a better way of explaining it. Sort of a touristy precinct has our wildlife, Sydney and sea life, Sydney aquarium, and the point beneath me here and directly across the water; you can see the curved roofs and the two walls of the national maritime museum as well.    Also, they have free fireworks in darling Harbor at 8:30 PM on Saturday nights. So it could be worth checking out tonight if you want to.    The other thing to mention about tonight's that our clock's jump forward by an hour tonight.  Date.  Yes. So you'll get one less hours late tonight — sorry guys.   Ross: Um, but yeah, also, it can be kind of hard to photograph because of the reflection. If you really want a picture of it, they have three postcards, but we can continue back at down here.   Cullen: And great to have you with us joining us are on that snapshot as we walked around Sydney on the most beautiful day and really giving some insights into that tour.    And of course, you can get more details from I'm free. www.imfree.com.au, and you can tell we were there as we were going through the change of daylight savings. And so a lot of people had been out the night before. It was, yeah, it was kind of interesting.   Anyway, look, um, I guess one of the other things that it's important to know is that a really Ross and many of his guides are out there sort of rain, hail, thunder sun. The sun will shine and a really every day, and there's no need to book. Um, this is the perfect place where you can just turn up sort shortly, shortly before,  the tour starts, and you can find your local guide there in a bright green t-shirts.   So anyway, with that, we are also going to add in our memory test As a form inside this podcast.   Cullen: For those of our listeners want to test, test the memory,  And or there comprehension if English is your second language and you can get more details on more podcasts at eattmag.com Thanks for joining us it's great to have you.  Thank you, everybody, for your four and five-star reviews on iTunes and Stitcher and Spreaker.  It's really a great, the whole team is very, um, wrapped whenever that happens.  We just wanted to say that. And of course, you can join us for our next podcast is we continue a journey around Australia. And please don't forget to click the link inside this podcast so you can see the images that we took during the day as well. All right. We'll catch you in the next one, cheers.  Join us in part one of the podcast with Ross and Cullen. https://eattmag.com/join-cullen-in-part-one-of-the-im-free-sydneys-sight-seeing-tour/  Group bookings can be made at least 24 hours in advance. Groups of 10 or more can register with www.imfree.com.au at least 24 hours in advance.  To maintain the quality of our regularly scheduled tours, the I'm Free tour team will need to organize you a separate private tour.  And full terms and conditions can be found on the I'm Free Tours private tours https://www.imfree.com.au/sydney/private-tours/ web page. WHEELCHAIRS: The Sydney Sights tour is wheelchair friendly. Find out more about I'm Free tours in both Sydney and Melbourne and  https://www.imfree.com.au/aboutus/ More travel podcasts can also be found here https://eattmag.com/travel/ Loading…  

We talk about why performance reviews get a bad reputation, why they’re not all bad and what teachers and managers can do to get the most out of them.Tracy Yu: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our podcast today. We've got our guest, Matt Courtois. Hey, Matt.Matt Courtois: Hey, guys. How's it going?Tracy: Good. Today what we're going to talk about, Ross?Ross Thorburn: What's one of my pet peeves? I think it's one of the things that's most commonly done badly ‑‑ performance reviews and performance appraisals.Tracy: OK. I think that's maybe two sides, right? One is for the manager who are going to do the performance appraisal with the employee, and they may feel nervous or are probably not doing the right way. Also, the employee feel nervous about how they are going to be told.Ross: Yeah, it's kind of like that thing, isn't it? It's like everyone's dreading it more than everyone else.Matt: I don't know. You gave me performance appraisals. I don't know if you felt this or not, but I was always...I don't want to say nervous, but I am.Ross: You had good reasons to be.[laughter]Matt: I was always close to getting angry, I think, at a performance appraisal. I was in a defensive state of mind when going into the performance appraisal always. It's not just you. It happened before you as well.Ross: Thanks. I was feeling really guilty.[laughter]Tracy: OK. There are three questions and the first one ‑‑ what is performance review and why do we do it? Second?Ross: How can managers make performance reviews worthwhile?Matt: How can employees make performance reviews worthwhile?[music]Tracy: OK. Why do we need to do performance reviews? It seems a rule and yet a lot of companies, especially for the annual performance review. Then the manager and employee sit together and discuss how much salary is going to be increased for next year.Ross: Not necessarily. I think that's one thing that can happen, but I think it is most basic. It's just a thing where you can give someone feedback every year or every six months. Companies have built into their program that everyone's going to get feedback once a year. Even if you've got the worse manager ever that never gives you feedback, that's going to happen at least once a year.Matt: Performance appraisals have always been one of my pet peeves. You mentioned earlier that it's one of your pet peeves, but the way you just described it sounds like a decent thing. What is it that you have against performance appraisals?Ross: I think if you're a good manager, they're completely pointless. You should just be giving people feedback all the time. I think that's one thing. I think the second thing is what Tracy meant is it's like your performance gets tied to your salary.There's a quote, I think it's from this guy called Peter Schultz, and he says that...and I'm paraphrasing here, "We use tools to measure people's performance that are so rough, we wouldn't use them to weigh out vegetables in a supermarket."There's one more thing I wanted to mention why I dislike performance reviews. One common thing that happens is the employee or the teacher in this case. You have to rate yourself. How good do you think you did on these points?The manager also has to rate the same person, and it always results in conflict, because people always think that they are better than they are. Here's a little clip from Sam Harris's podcast. This is him discussing this same cognitive bias.Sam Harris: People assume that they are reliably doing what even the best of the experts are doing.Tristan Harris: This is kind of related to the Dunning Kruger effect, and some variation of that everyone is more. What was it like 90 percent of people think they're better than average drivers?Sam Harris: Yeah. I think the stat that reveals that this moves into a fairly high level of education, at least, is I think it is 95 percent of college professors think that they're above average professors.Tristan Harris: It's just the universal ways that will overestimate something or that we would assume that we have the moral or cognitive moves that everybody else has.Ross: You can hear from that that everyone's sort of like pre‑programmed to think that they're better than they are. Which probably has some advantages day‑to‑day that probably makes people feel more confident, but when you get into this kind of rating thing and performance reviews, then it's going to cause a conflict.Matt: I remember in one of my first performance appraisals in my last company, one of the categories was attendance. It was on a spectrum from terrible to excellent, and I was marked as average. I hadn't missed a single day of work. I've never been late. I've never left early. I was always there for the entire shift, and I was marked as average.I mentioned this to my manager, and she was like, "Yeah, that's what we expect of you. So you're in the middle."[laughter]Ross: You're outstanding.Matt: Yeah. How can you have...? There's this conflict that didn't...If I missed a class, you would think the manager would come to me right then and there and say, "You've got to get to work. Come to class. Don't miss class again."Ross: You don't need to wait six months to tell someone.Matt: Yeah. Even if you did deal with it at that point, what's the value in six months later, revisiting all your tenants, "Remember that one time six months ago?" There's no value in that. It's just beating a dead horse.Tracy: I think that's a very important thing for performance review, remember it's not just happened once a year, and it should be constant. Like you mentioned early on, if you give the feedback in six months' time, and it's not meaningful anymore, random people probably already forgot or changed the behavior during this period of time.Usually, for a middle‑sized company, there should be four times feedback or review with employee ‑‑ at least twice about job planning and then twice about feedback, before the annual performance review.Matt: I have seen value in having a performance appraisal because you set your goals for the next six months. It gives you some longer‑term direction on what you want to do beyond what are you doing this week. I do see some value in that.Ross: Absolutely. I think there are some things that can be good in this. I think you pointed at one, right? That you can clarify the expectations like, "These are the things that we expect you to do." Another useful thing about it is that people expect them to happen. It's almost like a sign of professionalism.If you're in a company that doesn't do performance reviews, most people would interpret that as being, "This is not very professional at fit."Matt: I do think it would be awkward for your manager to come out of the blue and, for no reason, talk about your career aspirations. I do think having some formality, and some process to this conversation is really helpful.Tracy: It's always useful for the managers to find out what kind of support you can give to the employee. Because for different reasons, maybe you are not very clear about what the needs of the employee. During the conversation, you can find out and give specific support to this person.Matt: Every performance review I did within my last round, I had this spiel that I said at the beginning of everyone that is kind of like this where I was saying, "Day to day as a manager, you know what I expect of you." We talked about it every day.If you mess up, or if there's some mistake, we deal with it then, but we don't ever have the conversation about what your expectations are of me and of the company. This is a good opportunity where you're saying what you value here. "Do you feel undervalued? What don't you enjoy?" Stuff like that. I think it's cool to give them that platform to talk about their aspirations and stuff.[music]Ross: Let's talk about what managers can do to give good performances. Maybe I can start with an example of something cool that my ex‑boss did was when I was a manager at the time. He would email all the people that reported to me and ask them about 5 or 10 questions about how easy is it to communicate with Ross. Do you feel you get enough support from him?Then we just got through face to face with the answers. It was really interesting getting that feedback because people don't often tell you that what you're doing that's annoying them. If someone asks, then they maybe will tell you, and then the opposite's also true that you do it's nice to hear, "Oh, this thing that you do for these people, they really, really appreciate that."Matt: I bet the entire time that you're going through that performance review, you were thinking, "Did Matt say this about me? Was that Tracy?" That's how I would be reacting. [laughs]Ross: You just say, "Oh, this person said this about you. This person said this about you." I think what he would do in that situation is he would say, "Let me know if you want any of your comments to be anonymous." In my experience doing this as well, because most people were quite happy.Tracy: I think for that situation, it's just like the people who are asked the questions were pretty honest and transparent. They respect this value of passing on the feedback to that person. I'm sure in a lot of environments, probably people still kind of worry about if they're probably going to be punished or losing their job and everything.Ross: I do know someone that happened to. They gave feedback on their manager, and it was meant to be anonymous. The manager found out, and the person got fired.Matt: No. [laughs] Really? That's awful.Ross: I think you obviously need to tempo what you're saying to a certain extent.Tracy: I think my experience I want to share something that could be improved is during the performance review. There were a lot of things seems very surprising for me. For example, I wasn't very clear about what the company or my manager expect from me, and I was, "Oh, OK. I really didn't know that." Clearly, at the very beginning, the goal or expectations wasn't set very clearly.Maybe what I was doing, I try to spend a lot of time and efforts my manager or company didn't recognize at the end.Ross: I think that comes down to the setting up of the review. That should be the beginning of the process. You talk about here is what we expect from you. This is what you're going to get reviewed on, at the very beginning.I think so often, that doesn't happen. I have even been asked to write what I'm going to get reviewed on the day before the review.[laughter]Matt: That's the goal‑setting we were talking about before, right? That can be useful to have you write your own. What are you going to be reviewed on six months and then for the next six months? You're working on these things, and it comes from you.Tracy: It's like planning of the lesson. Find the learning gap. You know what the students they've already know, and they're good at and then what is the lesson objective. Find out the learning moments, and then these are the achievable goals or target language for the students. I think for employee, probably something similar, right?Ross: I like that analogy, isn't it? It's almost like if you sign up for an English course, and then there's certain things that you probably have to learn or decided on by the coursebook, but there's still kind of room to negotiate, isn't there? To suit the students' individual preferences and I think it's the same with the employees.[music]Ross: We talked a bit about what managers can do there, but not everyone's blessed with having a great manager. If you're a teacher, what can you do to make sure that you get the most out of your annual review with your boss?Tracy: I think the first thing is when you started the job and probably good to talk to your manager. How many times or how frequently you want to get feedback from him or her. At least then they have an idea, "Oh, actually, this person won't want me to give feedback."Ross: I did that the last time I started a new job at the halfway point of my probation. It was at three months, I said, "Hi, can we sit down and talk about how my probation is going? I want just you to go through what you think's going well, what you think is not going well, and any other tips you think that are going to help me meet your expectations."Matt: Like I said before, I'm one of those employees who does get defensive going into a performance review. I try not to react strongly in that meeting room. I just note stuff down and let it sit for a day or two. Then I think, coming at it from a less defensive perspective, I think I can let some of that feedback get a little bit better.A couple of days later, reevaluate again. You can get a lot out of it.Tracy: The reflection ‑‑ it's probably the most important and useful stage after the conversation between the employee and manager. You really need to take some time to sit down and how could you learn from this experience, and what you'd do to make it better.Ross: To play devil's advocate to that, though, it depends on your goal. If your goal is to get some information that's going to help you develop, then great, maybe it is a good idea to sit back and take notes and everything.But if you really want to go in and you want to negotiate, to get a pay rise, then maybe it is best to be defensive and go, "Hey, I can actually show you 10 other situations when that's not the case."Matt: I think also, if you're an employee who is receiving feedback on their performance review and you feel blindsided by it, you clearly don't have good communication with your manager. I think sitting down in that room, that once every six months is in some ways, you can establish that back and forth.I wouldn't get defensive, but I think you can say whenever people are criticizing you. You can say well, like, "What's the way that we can avoid this in the future." I'd appreciate it if when that happens if we can deal with it then and there, rather than six months later. Then maybe you can look at repairing a relationship with your manager.[music]Tracy: OK. Thanks, everybody, and see you next time. Thanks, Matt.Matt: Cheers.

Reflection in Teacher Education (with Ben Beaumont) - TranscriptRoss Thorburn: Hi, everyone. This week our guest is Ben Beaumont, TESOL qualifications manager at Trinity College, London. If you've done a qualification before, like the Trinity CertTESOL or the Trinity Diploma in TESOL, those qualifications are managed by Ben.Ben in the past has also worked as a CELTA trainer and he's currently studying his doctorate into the effect of English medium of instruction on lecturers in higher education.I spoke with Ben when he was in Shanghai recently, and we talked about teacher qualifications and reflection, reflective practice, reflexive practice, and how trainers can encourage those skills in their trainees.Ross: I thought I could start off by asking about teacher qualifications, because...Ben Beaumont: What I do think?Ross: Yeah. What's been your personal experience with doing teacher qualifications?Ben: They've helped me a lot. My undergraduate degree was in English Language and Linguistics, so I learned about phonetics and phonology, and that led me to having an interest in teaching.I went out to Japan for two years. I was an unqualified teacher working as an assistant English language teacher at a senior high school in Japan.I didn't have any qualifications, but I did have subject knowledge, and I noticed I was lacking in a skill. Then, when I went back to the UK and did my CertTESOL, I learned what I was missing.There were skills that a teacher has that someone who isn't a teacher doesn't have. The course enabled me to learn those skills. I then thought I was a good teacher. I had some skills, and I had some subject knowledge.I taught for a couple of years. I then went on to do my Delta. I thought I was a good teacher. That showed me that I wasn't actually a good teacher.By doing the qualification, I learned more about what I should be doing. I know "should" is a difficult word, but it enabled me to analyze mine and others' teaching, which had a cyclical effect of just making me better and better and better as a teacher.It was a case of "You're teaching like this. Think about it. How does it work with the class you're teaching?" It made me be quite evaluative and reflective on my teaching, which then in turn made me better.Ross: Do you want to talk a bit more about those skills to reflect? What are they, and how does a trainer help a teacher getting those skills? Because it does seem to be almost more like a personality characteristic, isn't it?You're a reflective person, rather than maybe a specific skill that you might think people can learn.Ben: Some might say if you're more introverted or extroverted, as to whether or not you think more about yourself or other people, and so on. Some people have more of a natural aptitude at it than others, but I think it is something that can be learnt, because I wasn't very good at it. Now I am, I would like to think, fairly good at it.There's definitely a piece about self-awareness, and I think there's a piece about maturity there as well. The more self-aware you are in relation to your context and your fellow human beings, I think that helps.There are of course loads of different models that you can follow to be reflective. Kolb's reflective cycle. It's a very concrete experience. What went wrong? Why did it go wrong? Change it for next time. Gibbs, he talks about adding in an emotional element.There's Brookfield's four lenses, where you look at yourself from your own point of view, from a colleague's point of view, from your students' point of view, and from a theoretical literature point of view. Think, "If my colleague was watching this lesson, what would they think?"Or, "If I was that student, student X, how would they look at my lesson?" Or, "If I was Bruner or Vygotsky watching this, how would they look at my lesson through a constructivist lens?" Doing those activities, it helps you become more aware of how different people will see doing different things.I think raises that self-awareness which makes you think, "Actually, I thought that was a really good lesson, but then X student probably thought it was a rubbish lesson. Then somebody else probably thought it was an even better lesson and the best lesson they ever saw."It's all very subjective, and you start to appreciate the subjectivity. I think yes, some people are like that naturally, but it can be encouraged through using different models of reflection or simply by Socratic method. Just by asking questions.At a CertTESOL CELTA level, that's what happens on the reflection form at the end of a teaching session. What went wrong? What went well? What didn't go well? What do you plan to do next time? Those questions. Those questions are mirroring the Kolb or Gibbs level of reflection.The TESOL delta level, hopefully you're going through something a bit more, bringing in emotional elements. You're bringing in theoretical elements. It's up to the trainer very much to guide the trainee, the course participant.Just as you can't expect anyone to know something they haven't been taught, it's imperative and inherent in the role of the trainer to be able to ask the types of questions which follow the kind of models of Brookfield or whoever to guide the course participant, the teacher to make that reflection.Ross: Is that kind of Vygotsky type thing, where the trainees can't quite get there themselves, but the trainer is asking these questions and pushing the person a bit beyond that.Ben: Absolutely. You've mentioned Vygotsky, you got the ZPD, the Zone of Proximal Development, and where the teacher is, or the learner, whoever it is, and you need to help them move on. Or you might, you're on this scaffolding.What questions do we ask to scaffold that learning, to make it move to this, where you are now, plus one? If you ask a question which is too high, then of course, let's say a plus two type question, intelligence plus two, then whoever it is -- the teacher, the learner -- isn't going to get there.Ross: You're moving them beyond the zone of proximal [inaudible 6:38]. It's too far.Ben: Exactly, and it's a really important skill for a trainer to be able to develop. You said in another conversation we had earlier, if you could have one sentence about teaching, it would be...actually, tell me what it was.Ross: [laughs] I think it was like ascertain where the learner is and teach them accordingly, something like that.Ben: Exactly, and it's the same thing for the trainer. Find out where the teacher is, and train them accordingly. For some, they'll be at a basic level of Kolb or Gibbs reflective cycle, and some might be at a much deeper level and able to understand reflexive practice instead of reflective practice, and that's why you can push them that far.[music]Ross: Did you want to talk about that, and a bit about going through that reflection, how does that then impact maybe the teachers' thought processes when they're in the class?Ben: I think teachers know, when they're teaching, and I think you were alluding a bit to Schon, I guess, reflection in action and reflection on action. When you're in a class and you know that something is going well or not going well and you have that horrible feeling inside when a class or an activity isn't going well, and you just want it to stop.Or you just want to change it, but you don't know how to change it. If you can change it and make an intervention, brilliant, why we call it reflection in action. You think, "OK, this has gone wrong. I'm going to do it now and change it."Whereas after the class, it might take a bit of time to think about it, discuss it, under a Socratic dialogue model, talk about it with a colleague, with a peer, with a knowing other. Then reflect on what happened and think about, "Well, next time, how can I change that?"Ross: How do those two interact? Is it a case of you ideally want people to be the reflecting in action, where they're able to solve the problems in real time, and the reflection on action is, "Well, how did I not manage to make that happen?" Or is it more complex than that?Ben: It's probably more complex. I know that the thinking about Schon's reflection in action and on action, there's some debate about exactly what is "in action," and what is "on action."It's perhaps saying that in action is when it happens, and on action is afterwards, is perhaps a little simplistic. For the purposes of discussion, I think it's OK to talk about it like that.Yes, we do want teachers to be able to reflect in action, but there are some times there's just not the cognitive processing ability of the teacher to be able to do that.To give an example, when a student asks you a tricky question and says, "Teacher, why do we say X, Y, Z?" First thing you say as a teacher is, "Good question."Ross: [laughs] Ask me after class.Ben: "Ask me after class." One technique. The other one is, "Good question," and you pause. "Let's just get some examples on the board." You say good question. Why do you say good question? Why do you say let's get some examples on the board?You turn to the board, and you start to write some examples. The students give you examples, you write them on the board. When I'm at the board, I'm no longer looking at the students. I no longer have 10 pairs of eyes staring at me, waiting for an answer.I'm at the board and I'm just writing. Whereas my mind is furiously processing something and coming up with the answer to answer the student's question. I just need that time to think. When you're in a classroom, sometimes you don't have that time to think.You're standing in front of a group of 10, 20, 30 people. They're all looking at you wanting an answer, and you're trying to arrange a class, arrange your activities, think about what's next, think about what happened, how to respond. There isn't that cognitive ability to process it all.Sometimes we need to make the cognitive space. Cognitive breathing room, we might say, in order to reflect in action. Sometimes it's just not possible. Where it's not possible, then we might do it afterwards. It might be reflection on action, when you have that space to think about it.Ross: In terms of getting teachers to reflect in action, I've sometimes heard about trainers doing things in the class, while the teacher is teaching, to prompt the teacher maybe to do something.You're echoing, or look at the student in the back row, their clothes are on fire, or whatever it is. What do you think about that? Is that something in action? Is that something that trainers can prompt teachers to do, or is it...?Ben: I think that depends very much on what the trainer believes is an effective training method. Some trainers like to have a fourth wall, to borrow from the theater stage expression, where you go to the theater, action takes place on the stage, you pretend the audiences isn't there.Similar kind of thing. In a classroom, you're teaching the class, but then behind, off the stage, you've got the trainer watching. You pretend they're not there, but actually they are there, so this pretend situation. Is it a pretend situation that the observer, the assessor, whatever, is at the back, not interacting, or do they...How much do they lend a hand?I've heard of classes where a trainer will get up, tell the teacher to re-instruct, in a live class. There are problems with that. I have big issues with that, because I think that removes the autonomy, the power of the teacher. But it depends on the needs of the teacher or the trainee.I've had a situation where a trainee has just frozen in front of a class and I've had to take over for them while they recover and just get their stuff back together, and then they can carry on.Except in those serious situations, I'd probably say try not to be overly interventionalist. You've got to respect the teacher's role in front of the class. You don't want them to lose the trust of the students. However, saying that, you also don't want them to do rubbish stuff. It's a balancing act.Ross: You have two sets of learners, don't you? There's the students. You don't want them to have an awful experience, which means that you want the teaching to be good. But also, the teacher's a learner. You don't want to impact on their learning experience.Ben: Indeed. Just as we might say with a student, if there's some kind of discussion and the student makes an error, do you stop them straightaway mid-discussion and say, "You've made an error. Fix this." Or, "You've made the error, what's the right thing?" You've interrupted that natural flow of dialogue.Then, they start again. You say, "Oh no, you've made another error. You've made another error." Slowly, what you're doing is preventing that learner from being fluent. They stop and they hesitate, and they look at you, "Am I doing it right? Am I not doing it right?" They lose the fluency, the confidence in being able to speak.I believe that's very much the same way for the teacher. You keep interrupting the teacher and saying that, "You've done it wrong, do it this way. You've done it wrong, do it this way." The teacher is always going to be trying to second-guess the trainer at the back of the room. They're going to lose their fluency of teaching. They're not going to have that confidence.Teaching, like speaking, requires a great deal of confidence to carry it through and help the students. Of course, it does depend on the role of that person, that trainer or assessor at the back of the room. Is the person there for evaluation? Are they there for guidance or support?The role of the trainer at the back of the room will very much depend on the type of interventions they have with the teacher, if any.If there is going to be some intervention, that should be made absolutely clear with the teacher, beforehand, so the teacher knows, "OK, this trainer is going to interrupt if they think there's something bad." Then they know it's not going to be a problem.Ross: Once again, that was Ben Beaumont, TESOL qualifications manager at Trinity College, London. Hope you enjoyed the show, and see you again next time.

Technology in Language Education Part I Future (with Ray Davila) - TranscriptRoss Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week we have our friend on again.Tracy: Ray.Ross: Davila.Tracy: Davila.dRay Davila: Hi, guys.Ross: Ray, you've switched jobs since last time. Do you want to tell us what you're doing now?Ray: Oh yeah! I'm currently a development editor working in product development. I look at the academic quality of lesson plans, educational books, songs, movies, and seeing how they can be implemented as materials in lesson plans.Ross: If I'm not incorrect the name of the department you work for is called Ed Tech. Is it?Ray: Yes, yes.Ross: I thought that was so interesting. An education company. That's the name for the team that makes the teaching materials.Ray: We're trying to focus a little bit more on how we can use technology in the learning process.Ross: This week we're going to try something that I don't think...I remember we've only did it once before which is to do like a two‑parter. The first half, we're going to talk about some of the advantages of technology in English language education. Then in the second part of the podcast, next episode, we'll talk about some of the disadvantages.Ray, you had a catchy name for this that you've thought of, right?Ray: Oh yeah. It's something like, technology in the classroom, fad or future in education?Ross: Well done. That's...Tracy: That's a great name.Ross: You make [inaudible: 1:46] .[laughter][music]Ross: I guess all of us use technology quite a bit. Tracy and I have worked, at least, for the last year in online teaching, mainly and used technology. What are some of the benefits you guys think of technology in education?Tracy: The first thing I would say is fascinating actually you have a lot of class recordings, and you can definitely go back and watch those lessons. Either you are doing material development, you are focusing on like a teacher training or even just the teacher themselves. They can go back and see which area really what tallies in my class and which one didn't.It's definitely big advantage for having the technology in the classroom because either really in the traditional offline classes, I think it's quite difficult for people to do that.Ross: I presume it's the same. Maybe it's also true for the students, that students might be able to use that technology. Not quite now, I'm not sure if we're on that stage yet. In future, presumably, soon have the ability to literally listen back to what you were saying in class three months ago or six months ago and compare that with what you are doing now.It seem to be very objective way of helping students visualize or see what their progress has been.Ray: Using or having those recordings are also a great opportunity for us to take a step back and look at things that we would never have realized it could be a potential issue in our teaching or in just the students learning and just having that as a tool to reflect on. Or even I think that for teachers of young learners, it's also something they can use when they're sitting down with the parents.Tracy: I also wanted to mention something, at least in China, I think a lot of public schools from what I heard, like my university classmates and they're teaching in public school how they assign homework. They don't really use the way that when we were in school anymore. I think they also having like an app.You can log in, then you can see the homework, you can do that, and you can submit it. The teacher can check your homework or provide you the answers or suggested answers to compare with. Everything will be tracked in the app or maybe some other programs.I think that's a massive change because when I was a teacher in public school, you really have to check every single student's homework book. I needed to take them back home sometimes, and it's really heavy, but now...[laughter]Tracy: ...it's really light, you just need a phone or you need a pad, and you can just do all of this work.Ross: I think here we're getting into the idea as well of personalizing things very easily that if you have technology you can personalize things a little more easily for your students. That you could give, for example, quite easily every student individual homework, individual exercises. You can have algorithms to make sure that you figure out where people are struggling, and what they're advantages and disadvantages are.I think really it has that opportunity to individualize learning and get everything just to the right level where you're helping everyone learn because I think ultimately that's one of the most important things in education, is figuring out where your students are, and then teaching them accordingly. I think technology can help with both sides of that equation.Tracy: Yeah.Ray: Personalization, is a huge thing. You were mentioning one of the main things with algorithms. How you can, example, giving a test or giving homework, and then that can for you, instead of the teacher doing it, it can assess what a student is having difficulty with.Then from there, it could suggest other alternatives, more activities for them to do in a particular grammar points or them being able to do this.I think that one of the things about how this benefits education is that, yes, we have personalization, but then at the same time we have a lack at the moment of educational professionals currently at the disposal of helping students to get to where they need to be.Maybe either because there's just a lack of resources, there are not as many instructors as there were before. Also, there are not as many instructors with as much experience or as much passion as there were before. I think that now, we're turning toward technology where it's picking up the slack. I think that we, on the human end, we've fallen a little bit short.Ross: Not just that. Also, it can help you get resources to places where those resources are lacking. For example, if you're in a highly developed western country it is easy to get access to probably a good education. If you're not, then it's more difficult. It really depends on where you are in the world.Technology, I think, at least, all online classes and things you can now have probably a class with just about a teacher anywhere in the world, that's one thing. The other thing that it does is there's so much access to...If we're talking about English, English now, like any students can go on to YouTube or to read newspapers or whatever.I remember even as a new teacher back in 2006, how difficult it was just to get a newspaper clipping or something and photocopy that for your students, but just think now there's so much English out there.[music]Tracy: Recent years we're talking about 21st century skills. I think technology is great platform to provide people these chances to explore the culture differences and that also the soft skills is not just about critical thinking, but also being more tolerant, to understand other people, beliefs, religion.That's a great way actually to make sure our students or people, they have the opportunity to have a chance to open their mind.Ross: I definitely feel that about online classes. It's amazing that you can pull a lot of people in America, Britain, wherever, they actually know people in China, right? When they see China in the news, whatever, they're not just immediately thinking something negative about it. They have some understanding and some relationship with some students here.It's the same for children here with teachers abroad and obviously, that cause across in a hundred different countries to probably hundreds of thousands of different people that there's all this extra understanding. In this current era that we're in of nationalism, it's developed maybe over the last decade or so but that's a really wonderful thing.Ray: I think that's just it. That language learning, big language learning classroom, is not just about communication. It's about also cultural awareness. We can have a platform where a student in one country, in South America being in the same classroom virtually with a student from Asia. It's part of that age of globalization.Tracy: We've been talking about this in this podcast for a film, and it's ready, but I still think not really many people, for example, like the parents, they are aware of this. It's not just a way for your kid to learn a language is just like...Yeah, changing their mindset, their beliefs and also how they view the world, view people.These are a lot of soft skills where it's quite difficult to evaluate from the parents who are maybe these teachers or schools. It's very difficult for them to evaluate, to see the result because that's the long‑term goal or long‑term results.I also think that technology for teaching lately, the massive topic is about AI or AR. Having an AI teacher, there are a lot of debate and discussion about it. Do you think that AI teachers is going to replace a real teacher? There's something really interesting about AI because they definitely can track or catch the student's behavior sometimes.I remember I went to a conference, and they were actually showing on the screen there were maybe 40 students, and each student, AI technology can catch everyone's facial expression, and it also gives a report about the student's talk time in this class. It probably can help you see the student interaction.Also, I don't know, based on the temperature or something, and see how much they are mentally evolving in this learning process. These things are so difficult to see from the surface level and just judging from how they look like. I think that AI, all this technology they can help us to analyze this.Ray: It's funny that you've mentioned AR. I recently came back from Macau where I participated in a little VR thing.[laughter]Ray: I don't even know what to call it. Pretty much we have these harnesses on with headphones, helmet with goggles and stuff. We were put into a room. That was not very big. It was very, very bare. There was nothing in it. It was just like a concrete floor, concert wall. There was nothing inside except for a handful of us. There were like eight of us.Then we were told to put on our goggles, put on our headphones, and then we have like this gun. Out of nowhere, we were in an entirely new world. We had to walk around in this world. We were walking around, we had to shoot robots, and things like that.I just remember my heart pounding when we were doing certain things like having to cross this crosswalk which obviously your brain knows that we know that we're in a concrete room. For some reason, my mind was playing tricks with me. Out of nowhere, I was refusing to go over this crosswalk because I was looking down, it was stories up and my actual legs were shaking.It's this amazing...It was the first time I ever realized that our minds can have such an impact on the way our body reacts, the way that we think in general. Most people know what VR is but AR, I don't know if many people are quite familiar with AR.Ross: Can we pause you there for a second?Ray: Oh sorry, yes.Ross: That's an amazing story. This is huge potential there, isn't there? In a class of like, "Yeah, you pretend to be the shopkeeper. You pretend to be this person." Stick on your goggles. No, let's pretend we're in a restaurant. It's like boom! You're in a restaurant or something much more interesting than being in a restaurant.Tracy: One of my favorite activity actually using the AR technology it's quite similar to the selfie app. The students, they can really try to be another character. Like if now I'm just having a conversation asking for directions in a foreign country, and then they probably can change how they look. Now, I try to be an old person, and that's how they look.Also, on the flight, I try to be the passenger, and the flight attendant having a conversation. It's just so interesting. You can see their face it's actually replacing on the screen. The student's face is actually there. They can feel they're in that context.Ross: You think about how much of language learning is role plays and pretending to be people in certain situations? Obviously, the more I think we do in general in class to help students understand those situation through setting context, moving the seats around, and bringing in props, the better. Obviously, what we're talking about just takes that to another level entirely.[music]Ross: Tune in again next time, and we will talk about the disadvantages of technology.Tracy: Thank you for listening.Ross: Thanks, Ray. We'll see you next week.[laughter]Tracy: See you soon.Ray: See you, guys.Tracy: Bye.

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? With Carol Lethaby, Dave Weller, Karin Xie, Matt Courtois, Paul Nation Simon Galloway - TranscriptTracy Yu: Hi, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Welcome to the podcast. This, as you probably noticed, is our third‑anniversary episode. To celebrate, we're doing a special long podcast, the longest one we've ever done. We've got six special guests for you, and all of them are going to answer the same question. That question is, "What have you changed your mind about?"Tracy: First, we've got Dave Weller and Simon Galloway. Dave currently works as an online diploma and TESOL tutor and blogs at barefootteflteacher.com. Simon runs his distance learning courses for teachers and managers. Both of them have been on our podcast multiple times before.Ross: The second up is Paul Nation, emeritus professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Paul's one of the most influential writers and researchers in vocabulary acquisition in the world. You'll have heard him before in our second‑anniversary episode about reading last year.Tracy: The third is Matt Courtois, who currently works as an academic director in a young learner language school, and Karin Xie, who works as an academic manager at Trinity College London in China. You might remember Karin from our previous episode about applying learning, and Matt from episodes about observations, minimalism, and also teaching writing.Ross: In the fourth segment, we'll hear from Carol Lethaby, who's a teacher, a teacher trainer, and materials writer based in the US and Mexico. You might remember Carol from our episode about neuroscience. You can learn more from her on her website, www.clethaby.com.Tracy: Finally, Ross and myself will talk about what we have changed our minds about over the years.Ross: Great. Enjoy the podcast, the longest one ever.David Weller & Simon GallowayRoss: Dave Weller, Simon Galloway, you've both been involved in English education for what, 12, 15 years?Dave Weller: It's 15 years for me.Simon Galloway: Same, pretty much.Ross: What have you changed your mind about? There must be one thing, Dave.[laughter]Dave: You're talking about since the beginning of my teaching?Ross: It could be at any point at all.Dave: The biggest thing I've changed my mind about since I began ‑‑ for myself, and for students, trainees, and everything ‑‑ is I used to think in quite a fixed mindset. I used to think, "Well, some teachers are good, some teachers aren't. And some students are smart and some students are not."The more I do this the more I realize what it's really about. Attitude and effort are going to be the things that make the difference. It's a bit of a cliché because I know everyone starts to think that way these days. Is it a bit of a...Ross: I don't know. I think that's still true to an extent, isn't it? I'm not sure. I ultimately do think in those terms that, for trainees for example. You find some at the beginning of the course, and you probably think these guys are the stars, the A‑People, the B‑People, and the C‑People.I almost think that fixed mindset, growth mindset is one of those things that I know as a fact but I'm not sure the extent to which I'd genuinely apply it or really believe in it deep down. Have you seen courses where people who you thought they were the weakest people at the beginning, ended up becoming the strongest at the end?Dave: I don't think the courses long enough for that, but there are definitely teachers that start at about that level and end about that level because they're not really trying to grow. There are other people that actually use the effort.I can see that through my distance learning courses, too. There are some people that start with a pretty bad first assignment and by the end, they're way up here. There are other people that just...Ross: I think of people on diplomas that we run. We, for example, observe them at the beginning before they got on the course. Some people that we thought, "They're not good enough to get on the course." There was a big kerfuffle. Eventually, they got on the course and they did really well.I've also seen the opposite of people that we said, "Yep you'll have no problems on this course," and the people go on to fail.Dave: Yeah, and I wonder if actually what we're saying to them is even affecting that. If we tell them, "You're going to do great," then that actually fosters a fixed mindset in them.Simon: It goes back to what we were saying earlier about praising the effort. If you tell someone, "You'll have no problem in this course" you, in a way, set them up to fail. Maybe they won't put the effort in as much because they think they're intrinsically or naturally intelligent enough or they're already at that skill level ‑‑ they won't need to put as much effort ‑‑ and they struggle.Dave: It certainly happens with some people.Ross: It's almost like there's an unspoken assumption that these people are going to put in X amount of effort. That's the bit that doesn't get said. "You'll be fine. You're going to do really well in this course."Dave: Assuming that you spend 10 hours a week?Ross: Yeah, but a lot of people don't know. Dave, let me guess. You didn't used to believe in learning styles but now you do?[laughter]Dave: No, actually. I think that when I was a new teacher, perhaps one year or two years in, I was always so certain of everything. On my original course, I took everything as gospel. I held my opinions so strongly, and I was so sure about everything. I knew I had a lot to learn, but what I did already know, I was certain that this is just the way things are.Since then, I've changed my mind and been exposed to new ideas, new evidence. I've changed everything so many times over the years. I can't remember who said it, it was something like, "You have strong ideas, held lightly," something like that. The longer I'm in this industry, the more I fully agree with that.I fully believe in what I do and how I do it, but if you show me some evidence or a compelling study, or show me a different way of doing things, I'll willingly change and try something new. That willingness to change, I guess that's [inaudible 06:13] . My willingness to change and to be shown to be wrong, I actually welcome now.Ross: That sounds like a perfect description of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. After your cert course, you believed a hundred percent in everything, like it was the gospel. The more you learned, the less confident you've become in those things.Do you think there's a problem then in how we present information to trainees on cert courses? I always find that maybe it's at diploma level that we maybe encourage people to think critically about the things that are being shown to them. The emphasis on introductory courses is, "Here's what you need to just be OK in the classroom and survive your first year."Maybe we're giving people false confidence. Maybe the more effective learner autonomy, long‑term strategy to teach people is, "I'm going to show you these things, these principles, but you also need to be able to question them."Simon: That goes back to something I've said before. You can take it to the wider education industry as a whole. In the language class, should we even be teaching language? Should we just be teaching skills and applying motivation? If you give someone the motivation to learn and the skills to be able to do so independently, then they're inevitably going to be able to learn a language.It's the same with any course, almost. I think the days of the tutor being gatekeeper to information are long gone with the advent of the Internet. Sure, a curated course is much easier to work through step‑by‑step because you can trust the authority of the source. It's broken down and spoon‑fed to you in a certain way.I do think that, in most courses that we run, there is that lack of teaching meta‑skills at the beginning or teaching to think critically. I think every course assumes that a course before has done that, even going back to initial education from 5 to 18. It's something, I think, missing in that, but that's a much larger issue.Dave: Yeah, we assume that everyone's got a degree or whatever, so they must know this. Then the university course, "They must have learned it before."[laughter]Dave: At secondary school, "They must have learned this at primary school."Simon: They thought, "Oh, parents must have...Dave: "The parents must have taught them that."[laughter]Simon: It might make a flip‑side argument. We're saying this from a position of 10, 15 years in the industry. As a new teacher, I can still vividly remember going, "Just tell me what to do next. I just want to get through my next lesson. I want to survive."I think it is a responsibility for initial teacher training courses to be able to provide that to teachers, so they can go into the class with the confidence that the learners will probably learn something. If you just give them a bunch of meta‑skills to work with, and then throw them into a highly pressured environment, they're going to fall to pieces. They need to have something to fall back on.Ross: Maybe there's an advantage of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. If you know almost nothing and you're really confident in it, that will overcome your lack of skill. If you're a new teacher and you said, "I'm telling you all these things, but maybe they're true. Maybe they're not."You maybe go into the classroom, and you wouldn't have the confidence to make up for your lack of skills. Maybe that Dunning‑Kruger effect, maybe there is some benefit to having that and believing in something even when you don't know much about it ‑‑ as a new teacher.Dave: It is to some extent, but every time, just keep on reminding the trainees that they can make their own...Simon: "This is the best way to do something. Or is it?[laughter]Dave: Just keep on pushing for deeper questions, like, "Was that effective in your lesson today? How do you know that? What real evidence were you going on? I saw the student do this. Why do you think that was? Do you think the same thing would work in another class?"Simon: What's the point of life? Why are you here?[laughter]Simon: Yes. Is anything even worth it?Ross: It's interesting. There must be a point where it would become counter‑productive and you just end up with...[crosstalk]Dave: Yeah, there's in so much doubt.Simon: No, it's true. Again, as a good trainer or a good manager, you should be able to spot when your teachers are ready, if they're not been challenged. When I was at [inaudible 10:14] you could see teachers that are ready to be pushed to the next level. People reach plateaus, and you could see when somebody goes, "Well I know everything now."Ross: That's a good point.Simon: "Actually, you don't. [laughs] Let me introduce you to some new ideas, like differentiation in the classroom or some of the higher‑level teaching skills." They go, "Oh wow! I had no idea you could do this." When their ability to implement what they know reaches what they know, then that's the time to give them more knowledge so they then turn that knowledge into skill.Dave: I like this idea of that plateau. If someone's already on like a slope, you don't want to stick them on a much steeper slope just for the sake of it.[crosstalk]Dave: ...just pick a Sisyphean boulder something. But if you're on a plateau already, you've got to get them on the slope.Ross: If you've had a trainee at the beginning of the course who's really struggling to give instructions, and you're like, "OK, here's a three‑step way of doing it," tell them in simple language, model it, and then ask questions.Dave: Show them, tell them, ask them, give them, Ross.Ross: Right, but then you wouldn't want to do afterward, "Well, when would that not be effective?" Do you know what I mean? You're just trying to get that person to that basic level.Simon: When you're observing them, you wouldn't want to sidle up to them and, "Sorry, um, you know that, according to Vygotsky, that's actually [inaudible 11:27] what you shouldn't have really done that there. This kid's ZPD is way off.[laughter]Ross: That might be too much.Paul Nation Ross: Hi, Paul. Welcome back. You published your first paper on language teaching in about 1970. You've had a very long career as well as a fascinating one. Can you tell us what's one thing that you've changed your mind about during your time from being a teacher all the way up to the present?Paul Nation: First of all, I like to think I always got it right from the beginning, [laughs] but I guess the main change that has occurred to me is the idea of the roles of the teacher and how the role of the teacher as a teacher becomes an important role but not the major role of the teacher.I say there's four or five roles of the teacher, and I always forget one of them. You know the number one role is the planner. The number two role is the organizer of activities and opportunities to learn. The third role's something like the trainer who trains the learners in strategies to learn, vocabulary and strategies to deal with the language learning.The fourth role would be the teacher as the tester who's giving learners feedback about their progress and showing them how much vocab they know and so on. The fifth role is the teacher as the teacher who actually gets up in front of the class or guides them through an intensive reading passage or something like that.I think that those roles are sort of ranked in the order of planner, organizer, trainer, tester, and teacher. That probably would be the major change I've come to during my reading of research, doing research, and so on. On the other hand, I also have to say that just about every PhD student I've had, and I've had a lot, have proved me wrong about the topic that they were working with.That's virtually without exception, sometimes proved me spectacularly wrong. I remember, for example, Teresa Chung doing research on technical vocabulary. I'd said in the first edition of "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" that technical vocabulary probably made up about 5 percent of the running words in text.When she did her research, she found it made between 20 and 30 percent of the running words in the text, which is quite a bit different, one word out three compared to one word out of twenty. [laughs] That was sort of major changes, once people have done the research, to say, "Wow! I think I'm going to step back and change my ideas about that."I would say that the biggest one is the idea of you need a balanced approach to vocabulary learning and you need to see that teaching is a part of that, but only a part of it. You've got to make sure that the others are there. I would've given a much greater role to teaching very early on in my career.Matt Courtois Ross: Matt, what's something that you have changed your mind about, and why did you change your mind?Matt Courtois: What haven't I changed my mind about?[laughter]Matt: Looking back to my first year in Korea compared to now, I don't think there's a single belief that I still have that I had then. The biggest underlying thing that has changed in me was, at first when I was a teacher, I kind of thought the more knowledge I had about the language I could acquire, the better teacher I would become.I actually don't think that's really necessary. Being able to discuss any grammar point at the drop of the hat to me is not what makes a good teacher anymore. Having some of the skills to draw that from people, to run a good activity, and to facilitate improvement is much more essential to being a teacher than just knowing the subject matter.Ross: Can you remember when you changed your mind about that? Was it a long process?[crosstalk]Matt: It was a really long process. I taught in Korea and Russia, and probably my first year within China, I looked at teaching language in this way. Within my first year of teaching at my last company, there's a job opening for a content developer, content writer, something like that.I remember I took one of my favorite grammar skills lessons ‑‑ I think it was about the passive voice ‑‑ and I submitted it to the manager of this department. He sent me back an email that was three pages full of criticisms. The most positive things he said were basically about some of the animations that I had in my PPT...[laughter]Matt: ...not about the content of this deep analysis of the passive voice. He was just saying, "The method in what you're doing it, it's not about the grammar itself. It's how you present it," and stuff like this. I think I improved so much when that manager sent me such a critical feedback.I started approaching teaching grammar from, "What context am I going to use?" rather than having this giant scope of understanding the passive voice, every tense in English, rather than looking at myself as somebody who analyzes language. That's not my job.So many English teachers talk about how being prescriptive is so bad, but they're teachers. That's what they're doing. They're not writing dictionaries. They're not contributing to the corpus. We're not describing the language here. We're taking what those guys have and then presenting it to students in a way that they can practice it.Once I got over that mindset that, "I'm holding the key to the language, and I'm the person who's defining the language," and said, "No, I'm coming up with situations and facilitating situations in which they can use it," I think I improved a lot as a teacher and a trainer.Karin XieKarin: Teachers used to just think, "Well, my English is good, so I can teach English," or "I'm not confident in teaching English because I'm not confident in my English." Language awareness, like your knowledge in phonology, lexis, and grammar, they are important and are very helpful. It's just the teaching skills, they are very important, and they should be emphasized more.Ross: You need both, don't you?Karin: Yeah.Ross: If you don't know any English and you're the best teacher in the world, you can't teach English. Equally, if you're amazing in English and you can't teach at all, that's not going to work, either. You need a bit of both. At some point, especially for lower levels, the knowledge of English becomes less important than the skill to put it across.Karin: Because I was trained in the CertTESOL, DipTESOL way, I always believed that I need to build the classes around the learners, and I need to train teachers a reflective coaching way. I believed that was more effective than any other ways.Recently, I just come to realize that not necessarily, and use that as good challenge or good chance for me to try out different things, or give people different options and see how things goes. It's not one way better than the others. It's just there are different ways of doing things.Ross: This is one of the dangers of just working in one environment for a very long time. You're often only exposed to one way of doing things. You get transposed to another place, and you automatically just assume, "Well this isn't the right way to do things. This is wrong. This isn't the most effective." But is that true? Is there any evidence?Karin: Exactly. I think all the things that I've tried out shaped how I do training and classes now. They're definitely not the same as when I was in the old environment for such a long time.Carol Lethaby Tracy: Hi CarolRoss: Hi Carol. I think you're very well known for integrating ideas from research into your practice. We'd love to hear from you about what was one of the most important or the most interesting things that you've changed your mind about over the years.Carol Lethaby: I think the example that came to mind here certainly was not using the mother tongue in the classroom. I did my PGCE in the UK in learning to teach French and German. This was mid‑'80s, and the communicative approach in foreign language teaching then had a big hold on the profession.We were explicitly taught not to use English at all when we were teaching French or teaching German. Of course, I carried this on when I started teaching English. I did my Delta and the same thing, it came up all along the way. I remember it seemed to go against my intuition, but as I know now, don't always rely on your intuitions, because they might not be right.I actually did some research into this as a part of my master's degree here in Mexico and found out that, when you ask learners, one of the things I asked them in a piece of research I did, was, "Do you want your teacher to have English as their first language? Do you want your teacher to be a native speaker of English?" a list of pedigrees.The one that came out top at all levels, especially at beginner level, was they don't care if their teacher is a native speaker. They want a teacher who can speak their first language, who knows their first language.It made me think about, "Why then are we telling people you don't need to speak the learners' first language, you don't need to know the learners' first language, and you don't use the learners' first language. It's better not to"? Obviously, I was reading the history of English language teaching, Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism.You realize how this happened and how this idea was transmitted and perpetuated. Now, knowing more about the brain and how we learn, I really don't believe that. I am convinced that we need to use the learner's first language in order to teach them another language.Ross: How would that look like in the classroom then, Carol? Do you have any examples of what that might look like with a group of students?Carol: I remember trying to teach the difference between first and second conditionals when I was teaching the younger Mexicans in Guadalajara here. There was this explanation that I was trying to work with them with levels of probability. It depended if you were an optimist or a pessimist whether you would use the first conditional or the second conditional.How confusing that was and how unsatisfactory that was for a learner, I'm sure. Now I would just tell those learners, "This is how you say it. The first conditional corresponds to this in Spanish and the second conditional corresponds to this in Spanish."Spending ages trying to define a word or an expression when just a quick translation could really help in that case, using the learners' language for effective reasons.I remember I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I first arrived here. I was given beginner's classes precisely because it was the idea that this would be a genuine communication situation, etc. I couldn't get to know my students.It means I couldn't ask them, "How are things going? How are you getting on in these certain situations?" Or, "What things are worrying you about learning English? Don't worry about this [inaudible 23:43] . It just means this. I can help you with this later."All these kinds of things that really enhanced language learning, I wasn't able to do because the idea was that we couldn't speak each other's language and only think in monolingual situations. It's just ridiculous not to take into account and use the learner's mother tongue.Ross Thorburn & Tracy Yu Ross: We heard there from a bunch of our favorite guests over the last couple of years about things that they have changed their minds about. Tracy, to finish the podcast, what have you changed your mind about?Tracy: There are a lot of things I have changed over the last few years. One thing is how I can connect on education‑related either theories or practice and into what I'm doing, my work in context. In the past, I remember when I started being a trainer, I read a lot of books about teaching, training, and theories in ESL, TESL, exactly related to this industry.Then, I realized maybe I just focused too specific to this industry, to this area. When I listened to podcasts and watch TV, or read other books, magazines, or journals, sometimes I realize that actually something that relates to this industry could really help what I'm doing. I need to give you an example, right?Ross: Give us an example, yeah.Tracy: I read a book about how marriage works. The book is "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work." When I started reading this book, I didn't expect any connection to work, but the more I read about it, I realize actually there were a lot of principles [laughs] can apply to work, to manage a team.For example, there's one thing mentioned about criticism versus complaint. You can see the difference between these two. You can say...Ross: What's the difference? Do you want to give us an example of each?Tracy: A complaint, you can say, "Oh, you didn't do this very well," or "You didn't complete this on time," for example, at work. Criticism, it's like, "Oh, you always did this this way. You're not able to do this," something like that.Ross: It sounds like more you're talking about the person rather than the actions that they've taken or not taken.Tracy: Yeah. Of course, people can complain. You can give constructive feedback to the other person. You can talk about the facts, you can talk about the behavior, but you don't jump into conclusion and say, "Oh, this person is not able to," or "This is always like this." You're not giving the person another chance to reflect and then to make things better.When you're working with colleagues or you're managing a team, it's really important to distinguish the difference between a complaint and a criticism. Another thing is super, super useful, when I had a difficult conversation or tried to give feedback to our staff, just try not to have a harsh start‑up when you're having a conversation.Even though before you start a conversation, you knew it's probably towards some kind of a conflict or uncomfortable situation, still try to avoid a harsh start‑up in a conversation. Maybe you want to ask this person how they feel, what's going on, and what happened, and find out more information.Then provide more specific information to the person. Then give the feedback and then action plan, rather than at the beginning is said something very negative. It's difficult for the person to receive your feedback.For you, Ross, you work in different roles for the last 12, 13 years. You were a civil engineer, and then you work in education. Anything that you've changed over the last few years?Ross: Something I'm in the process of changing my mind about is a lot of the things that we talk about here and we do on teacher training courses in materials design and management is we concentrate so much on what goes on in the classroom as that's where the learning and everything takes place. That's fundamentally the most important thing.I used to believe that, but I'm coming to believe more that what happens in the classroom might not be the most important part of their learning process. What might actually be more important is what happens before the class and what happens after the class.I found a nice quote yesterday from someone called Ausubel, hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He says, "If I were to block out and reduce all of education's psychology to just one principle, I would say this. The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach them accordingly."That was really cool. How much time do we ever spend actually finding out what students already know? I would guess, generally, not very much time or not a lot of time. Certainly, on this podcast, we don't talk about that very much.I think the same thing for what happens after class. We tend to assume that things finish once the students walk out the door. We know from memory curves and things, if students don't revise what they've already learned, then they forget the vast majority of things that happen in classroom.That's something I've changed my mind about. I think we need to spend more time focusing on what happens outside the classroom every bit as much, if not more, compared to what happens inside the classroom.Tracy: How can you do that then, to find out more information before the class about the students?Ross: I don't have all the answers to it, but I think it's more important that we think, like ascertaining what students already know before lessons, finding out what problems do they have, and designing our lessons to try and solve specific issues that students have.What normally what happens is students get placed in a certain level. Then they just work through a course book, which roughly approximates what they know and what they don't know.We don't go into enough effort to find out what are the holes and the gaps, or the peaks and the troughs, in students' current ability and knowledge, and try and smooth over the troughs, to make sure what we're doing in class fills those in.Tracy: Have you ever seen any examples or some teachers who were able to focus on what happened before the class or after the class?Ross: Some things, like the whole flipped classroom principle, goes towards that. Some educational technology works towards aiming to find out what students know before the class. It has them answering questions and makes sure that they reach a level of mastery before they move on to the next topic.I don't think that's the norm in most scenarios. It's something that we don't talk about enough, and I think those things are every bit is important probably as what goes on in the classroom and deserve our attention a lot.Everyone, I hope that was interesting. I presume for a lot of people that the reason that you're listening to this podcast in the first place is so that we can change your minds about some issues that are important. Hopefully, it was useful hearing how some of our favorite guests have changed their minds about different things over the years.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening.Ross: For the last three years, thank you. Good‑bye.Tracy: Bye.

We interview ELT author and teacher trainer Edmund Dudley about why teaching teens can be so enjoyable, how to avoid sabotaging your classes and how to inspire your students with the right activities.Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Welcome to the podcast.Tracy: Today, we actually talked about something we haven't explored much, which is teaching teenagers.Ross: Right. A lot on the podcast, we talk about teaching adults and we talk about teaching young learners, but teens is a group that we've not really spoken about much.Tracy: Have you ever taught teens before, Ross?Ross: I have, yeah. I must admit they were not my favorite group to teach.Tracy: When I first started my teaching job, I was teaching teenagers like 14, 15 years old.Ross: Today's guest who's going to tell us all about this is Ed Dudley. Ed is from the UK. He's worked in Hungary for a very long time. He specializes in teaching teenagers. He's got a book out called " ETpedia Teenagers." Ed is also a freelance teacher trainer with Oxford University Press.As usual, we have three areas that we talked to Ed about. First of all, we generally go into what it's like to teach teenagers, and then we ask him about general tips related to teaching teens. Near the end, we ask him to share some of his great activities from his book that are specifically geared to teaching teenagers.What is it like to Teach Teenagers?Ross: Hi, Ed. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.Ed Dudley: It's my great pleasure.Ross: Do you want to start off just by telling us a little bit about what it's like to teach teens and how you got into that age group?Ed: I have to say that when I first began teaching, I avoided teens for the first 10 years or so of my teaching career. I think that was partly because I was very young myself, and so I felt a little bit intimidated by teenage students.It was also because I needed that difficult baptism of working in the primary classroom, which I still think is the hardest arena to teach in as a teacher. Once I got some experience under my belt, I then felt much more confident about working with teenagers.As soon as I began teaching teens regularly in a high school setting, I actually felt straightaway that it was the age group that I had most success with, both in terms of what my students were producing and in terms of how I was feeling about the interaction between this and the lessons that we were having together.Tracy: What kind of strategies or tips that we could use from teaching adults or young learners to teaching teens?Ed: I think looking back on that period of your own life is always a really useful way to start when you're working with teenagers. I remember it being quite a volatile time. I remember it being a time of great insecurity and also being obsessed with the idea of what people are saying about me and what judgments people are making about me.Very often, it's quite common for teens to be having a difficult time of things with their parents, also with their teachers. I think it is quite interesting that they're growing up very fast, and yet some parts of them are maturing and growing more quickly and more successfully than others.You have this weird combination of young people who are amazingly mature and impressive in some ways and yet incredible childlike still in other ways. That's I think unique to the teenage classroom.Top tips for teaching teensTracy: How do you build rapport with the teenagers, and then how do you win them over? Because when I was a teacher, it was really difficult from the beginning to make sure they trust you.Ed: My own approach is to bear in mind what I don't want to do. I think it's far easier to make mistakes than it is to actually build rapport in a proactive way. I often feel that it can take months, perhaps even years, to build rapport with a group of students or with a particular student.On the other hands, it's possible to ruin rapport in a matter of minutes. I think if we can avoid, for example, finding a reason to laugh at their expense, teenagers are very often quite awkward in the things they do and the things they say.The teachers that I had very often used to prey on that and would score a cheap laugh at the group's expense by laughing at one student, trying to get a laugh is exactly the way to make that one student hate you.Also to plant the seed of doubt in the minds of everybody else in the class, thinking, "What's this teacher going to say about me? What's going to happen if I do something which is awkward?" That leads straight away to the students keeping their mouths closed when they're asked questions.I think another thing that we can do is that's a mistake when working with teenagers is to be impatient with the fact that they don't want to talk. It's taken me a while to realize that a lot of our teaching in the classroom is based on promoting fluency and promoting communication. That often leads to us putting pressure on students to speak.It's ironic in a sense that teenagers, especially teenage boys, are very often at a stage in their lives when they don't want to say anything to adults at all. Being aware of this and being accepting of that is also something that I think is an important thing to do.It can also be tricky when setting up classroom tasks. If I think about, for example, pair work, in a sense when you're working with very young learners, you can be much more of an autocrat in the way you set up tasks. "OK, you two, I want you to work together. You stand up. Come here. Work with this person."That's not going to work with teenagers. There are all kinds of reasons why certain individual students are reluctant to work with other students in the class. I think those things have to be respected equally.We tend, or I tend, to overlook how very, very busy and complicated teenagers' lives are. You see this every time students come into the lesson, that they're usually distracted. There might be a couple of moments late. They're very often looking at their phones.It's easy for a teacher to think, "Well, here she is again late for class." When actually what's happening in her life right then, what was that message she just got on her phone ‑‑ it's very easy for us to assume that students have nothing better to do than concentrate on our class.In fact, I've realized that in a large number of cases with teenagers, our lesson is the least important thing going on in their lives at that particular moment. Not realizing that, instructing them to put their phones away and, "Come on, let's get down to business," this kind of approach can actually be hugely counterproductive.Ross: You mentioned using phones. What do you think about using phones with the groups of teens?Ed: To me, a lot of this context is dependent. I wouldn't like to make general points about how phones should or shouldn't be used. The problem I have personally with that is that once a phone comes out, it's quite hard to get it put away again.My own tendency or my own default is to use them towards the end of the class rather than at the start of the class, and also to do tasks which make use of offline functionality.I know from talking to Shaun Wilden who's written a book on "Mobile Learning" that there's an awful lot that we can do with the basic functionality of a mobile phone. For example, getting feedback on lessons very often using an emoji approach or using something, using Instant Messaging, can be really effective. Shaun has got all kinds of good ideas for doing that.Ross: What are some of your favorite things? I think we spoke a lot about the challenges. What do you think are some of the best things about working with that age group?Ed: The thing I love especially about younger teens is that energy and that vitality, particularly when it comes to certain topic areas or things that students are particularly interested in, and then you'll find that certain teenagers have an encyclopedic knowledge of things that you know very, very little about. You have also that kind of wonderful sense of humor as well.One of the things that I loved about working in a high school was that I got to go and spend my working day in a room with kids who are on the verge of laughter most of the time. For especially young, for 13 and 14‑year‑old boys in mixed classes can be really tough because of that kind of boisterous slack behavior.When it's channeled in a positive way and when they're really on point of making funny observations in English and are able to bring a smile to your face as well, there's something really joyful about that, that you do get sometimes with other age groups. Not as consistently as you get it with a group of good teenage student, with whom you've established a very good rapport.Great activities for teaching teensTracy: Ed, would you like to share some activities that you use with teenagers in a classroom?Ed: One activity that I love doing with teenagers is a speaking activity. Really, it's a technique for motivating students to repeat themselves or to try and polish a piece of spoken language. The reason I like this is that very often teenagers don't want to polish their work. They don't want to try it again.The way it works is they have a topic they have to talk about and maybe they've had some time to prepare something. I used to get students to talk about a photograph of some graffiti and talk about why they'd chosen it. Anyway, the students film each other. When they finish their short piece of language, what happens is they review it.Very often, the student says like, "No, that's terrible. I sound really bad. Delete that. I want to do it again." It's that power of control that students have over that work which motivates them to make it better.Unlike teachers who still don't like seeing themselves on video or hearing recordings of their voices, teenagers are absolutely fine with this. This technique of getting them to film themselves actually motivates them to do a much better job than they would have normally done.The other one that I like is a random slide show, like a random PowerPoint task. The way this works is you prepare a few slides at home and you give the students a topic. You tell them what the topic is, for example, 21st century life or something like that. They have a few minutes to prepare a short presentation of what they're going to say.The thing is they're going to have some slides as well to go with that presentation. The first time they get to see the slides, their slides, is when they're standing up to give their presentation. Each time they click on Next Slide, what they see on the screen is completely unexpected.Now, this is the challenge that can be just hilarious. The images that you have, you might just, for example, have a picture of a forest, then they have to figure out quickly on their feet what a forest has to do with 21st century life.It might be a cup of coffee and they have to talk about that, or it might be something really absurd like a picture of a rabbit with the title politics is complicated. They have to think on their feet and figure out a way that this is relevant to that topic of 21st century life. You often get a lot of laughter and then a lot of hugely imaginative and memorable answers from students.That's the random PowerPoint idea, that is one that I've had a lot of success with high‑flying students. That idea grew out of the compulsory phrase activity where you have a student who is really not interested in doing the compulsory written task that you have to do like a letter to a hotel or something.You make that task more open ended and challenge students who are willing to be challenged to include a preposterous phrase in the letter which you have given them beforehand, which has nothing to do with the topic of the letter, like, "The warm glass of Sri Lankan mango juice," or whatever it was.That's something which allows you to have task which work at two levels, the standard exam practice tasks for those who wish them to be back. They have this added value of the challenge to those who want a bit more to keep them entertained and engaged.Ross: Ed, thanks so much for coming on and being so generous with your time. Can you tell our listeners, if they want to find more about you or they want to read about your writings related to teaching to teens, where's the best place for them to go?Ed: The thing I'm most proud of at the moment is the book that I've written about teaching teenagers. That's called ETpedia Teenagers. You can find out about that at myetpedia.com. I sometimes post ideas about teaching teenagers as well. There's also a link I can give you for that. www.legyened.edublogs.orgRoss: Great. Thanks again.Ed: Thanks so much for having me.Tracy: Bye. Thanks for listening

Not sure if you’ve been teaching reading right? Listen to Debbie Hepplewhite and find out what you might have been doing wrong…Ross Thorburn: Hi, and welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week, our topic is how not to teach phonics. We have a real expert on that. That's Debbie Hepplewhite. She'll be telling us about some of the common mistakes that teachers make in teaching phonics.Debbie's worked as a phonics consultant for Oxford University Press developing their "Oxford Reading Tree Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters" programme.She's also the author of the online "Phonics International Programme" for all ages, and the author of the "No Nonsense Phonics Skills" programme published by Raintree, and the "Phonics and Talk Time" series. She's a wonderful speaker. She's a real authority on phonics.I really hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed speaking to Debbie.Ross: Debbie, I wanted to start off by asking you about one of the first big don'ts in teaching phonics which is the whole word approach. I think it's something that generally frowned upon.Are there any times when you think it is useful for teachers to teach using a whole word approach? That's like helping students to recognize words as whole blocks rather than using the phonics approach to decode the sounds.Are there any context, maybe, where you think that might work? For example, in Japan or China where students maybe are used to using that approach of memorization to learn to read in their first language.Debbie Hepplewhite: Fantastic question, and I can't give you all the answers, because what's really clear to me from the Chinese people I've met and from learning about teaching English in China is that there is a capacity for Chinese children to try to memorize whole printed words as if it's a global shape.In a way, they may be able to do in a more superior way than children who aren't taught at all they have an alphabetic system.Think about it. You've already said languages got thousands of words. It has. The English spoken language has got thousands and thousands of words. You imagine the diet of introducing a large number of printed English words and trying to teach the children to recognize the word shape day in and day out.It's a horrendous logistical exercise. Also, so many of the printed words looks similar to other printed words. Even if you've got, more or less, a certain word, but then you brought in a similar shape, similar size word, how is that learner to discern? The sheer feat of trying to learn hundreds to thousands of words as whole words is mind-boggling.What I'm suggesting is that even in this Chinese situation, bringing a good content-rich phonics program, and also at the same time you're teaching the spoken language, because they've got to take on the spoken language, and you can teach the spoken language with no print.We know the method. The children come into school in the morning. You use a common greeting. You might say, "How are you today?" You might talk about what the weather is like. You might talk about family members. You might talk about items around the room.All of those things can be done without print, because you're teaching the spoken language. Then when you're teaching the print side of it, I highly recommend that you try a content-rich phonics program to do that, to run parallel with the spoken language.Ross: You can see in China, for example. It takes students so long to learn to read here in the first language. If there's any shortcuts, I guess why don't use them. Anyway, mini whiteboards, I wanted to ask you about these.Mini whiteboards seem to be quite common in phonics teaching. I've seen teachers use them in second language learning programs as well. Can you tell us a bit about some typical activities that teachers do with mini whiteboards? How useful are those?Debbie: I'm actually against mini whiteboards in that they are overused or not used in a fit for purpose way. There is a role for mini whiteboards for some of the phonics activities and the main activities. There's two main activities.Sometimes, early phonics work or early phonics program uses magnetic letters or little piece of magnetic tiles with the letter printed on. They can be useful for changing the patterns of the letters to do some early manipulation work.You give children sounds and they can point to the letter, or you give them a simple word and get them to identify the sounds and select the letters for spelling.It's quite a good thing for early spelling. It's also good for whole group and whole class work for quick fire, show me activities. The teacher can say a sound. The child writes down the letter or a letter group and holds up the mini whiteboard. At a glance, the teacher can see the whole class.The teacher might give a spoken word and the children have to identify the sounds, write down the word and then show the teacher. In that respect, it can be fit for purpose.However, a lot of phonics work is just only mini whiteboard work, so children aren't each getting a bank of printed words for each child to practice his or her own sounding out and blending, and engaging with their own work and ticking what they know and circling what they don't know or they're not sure of.One of the things I heavily promote is that your phonic program, your provision needs to include banks of printed words for children to practice with that they can interact with. They can draw the cat on there, the dog, the ship, the jet.Teachers can have something tangible to see what the child can do, and that can be shared with parents at home or other teachers in the setting. If a child needs intervention which can be more little and often, you've got a printed work there.In that phonics teaching and learning cycle, when you go on to sentence level or text level work, each child needs that in a printed format to be able to look through to technically try and say the sounds and say what the sentence is. You know, what the sentences are.Then you can work with that print, so now let's do the meaning making. When you understand what the meaning is, you can draw a picture.I don't understand how you can give high quality phonics provision without print and for the core resources to be for each child making the print tangible and the sense of their own learning tangible. If phonics is all mini whiteboard work, it all gets wiped off. There's nothing to show. There's nothing to repeat.You can't repeat it at home. You can't show off at home with it. You're right. I spent a lot of time talking about mini whiteboards to say to teachers identify when it's fit for purpose to use them, and when it's not fit for purpose. Good phonics provision needs, at least, some core resources ready printed.[music]Ross: I also heard, Debbie, you talk about the parachute game. It's another infinite game for teaching phonics, isn't it? What are some of the issues with that game in particular? In general, how can teachers decide when they're teaching phonics what activities are useful and which ones are less useful?Debbie: There's several issues with this, because we're very mindful that often phonics provision starts with very young children, and people identify young children with needing games and activities to engage them that are age appropriate.One thing that's concerning about that is the idea that children won't enjoy working on paper, with paper, with print, and doing their own work. That's associated in many people's minds with formal teaching learning, or Draconian, or Victorian, or old fashioned, or for older children.I'd like to disavow people of that understanding because I have found and other people have found that when you give children their own work and their own phonics book or phonics folder, they absolutely thrive on it. That's one thing.The other thing is when Sir Jim Rose did a review of phonics provision back in 2006 in the UK context. What he said when he wrote about it was we can do real great multisensory things with these young beginners, but be careful that the activities aren't, what he called, extraneous.In other words, they are so convoluted or so time-consuming that the core learning is lost because the activity becomes bigger than the phonics learning.With that parachute, that was me doing a very challenging speech at a Reading Reform Foundation Conference. What we were pointing out was one that the commentator of the video that that was taken from was saying that children are not turned off by that kind of activity.That's the first thing we need to challenge, because I have just explained that they're neither turned off by sitting down with paper doing their own activities. That was really a bad steer for teachers.When you actually examined what we call the phonics parachute game, where the children are sitting round the circle of the big parachute, and they have to flip it up to get to some toys, to get to a spoken word, to be able to spell it on their mini whiteboards.In reality, it was neither a good active team work parachute game nor was it a good content-rich, fit for purpose, phonics activity. It didn't touch either spot.In reality, the children were sitting on the playground a lot waiting to take a turn and may never got round to having their own turn to get a toy, because there were so many children to get round.What we needed to challenge was the idea that you need to dress phonics up with a fluffy activity, and two, teachers need to be able to evaluate what it's covered in the lesson, because when I go into schools I observe a lot of very shallow lessons.It's not that children aren't learning, because they definitely are, but they're not learning nearly as much as they could. There is a lot to learn when we do literacy, foundational literacy.Teachers need to examine their own mindset about any prejudices or preconceived ideas they might have about what little children will enjoy, their capacity for learning. Then we need to evaluate our practices.By now, so many people have invested a lot of money in phonics games and activities, maybe card games, maybe an interactive whiteboard game. What I try to say to people is view those as enrichment outside of the main phonics lesson.As long as you are doing a very rich phonics lesson as your discrete phonics lesson, of course you can supplement that or complement that with any amount of phonics games and activities, but be aware of what is core and what is additional.Ross: You've done teacher training for phonics all over the world. What do you find that maybe are some of the challenges in training teachers to teach phonics and maybe some mindsets that teachers have that maybe prevent them from teaching phonics in a more effective way?Debbie: When I've done teacher training in other countries, I find great differences in whether the teacher passionately believes that in English lessons you should only ever speak English. You should never resort in mother tongue.I know that works well in scenarios when you get the children very young, so it's not as stressful perhaps to start to introduce the small bits of speech in the English language.I would suggest that the older children get it and just have been speaking in their mother tongue that is actually more stressful to go into a scenario where the teacher is suddenly only speaking in that new language with no explanations in mother tongue.I personally think that when you get older children, teachers should feel comfortable to depend to mother tongue for explanations and almost why wouldn't you to make things clear. [laughs]Always we have to look at the context of the country, the language, the age of the children, but we should never ever get away from the fact that the more knowledgeable the teacher is the better supported the teacher is with supportive materials for teaching and for learning.The more you're working from the language itself, the complexities, but also the understanding that we need to drip feed information. We need to repeat information and not presume too much, the better job we'll do of teaching English as a second language.Ross: One more time, everyone that was Debbie Hepplewhite. Debbie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. If you're interested in finding out more about Debbie, checking out lots of great free resources that she has, please go onto her website. It's www.syntheticphonics.com. I hope you've enjoyed the interview, 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.

Carol Lethaby is an English language teacher, teacher trainer, ELT consultant and author who has coauthored Just Right Second Edition (Cengage Learning) and English ID (Richmond Publishing) as well as articles on Neuroscience in IATEFL Voices and Neuromyths in the Teacher Trainer Journal.Tracy: Hello everyone. Welcome back.Ross Thorburn: Today, we've got a special guest on our podcast. That person is Carol Lethaby.Tracy: Carol is an English teacher, trainer, author, and a ELT consultant. She has spent a lot of time in Mexico and in Greece. You probably have noticed her name in our ITEFL podcast.Ross: Both 2018 and 2017. Today, we are going to speak to Carol about what neuroscience can do for language teaching. As usual, we've got three broad areas that we're going to speak to Carol about. The first area we are going to look at is what myths about language teaching are there.Tracy: The second main area is what teachers can apply from research and neuroscience, and the last one...Ross: ...is why findings from research often don't get applied in language teaching.Myths about language teachingRoss: Hi Carol. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.Carol: Hi Ross.Ross: How are you doing?Carol: Well. Thank you.Ross: Carol, do you want to start off by telling us about some common myths that exist about language learning?Carol: The first one is we only use 10 percent of our brain, which gets perpetuated so much in the popular media. Then, of course, there's the idea that you're right brain or left brain dominant, again, something which neuroscientists grimace every time someone says that.The idea that accommodating learning styles will create learning and the idea that we can ignore learner's first language when they're learning a new language.Tracy: It's really interesting. How did this myth change what teachers do in the classroom?Carol: Yes. That's what's really important for us as teachers. The first thing is the idea of left brain, right brain. You are either analytic or you're creative. People taking this into consideration and saying, "Oh well, there's nothing you can do about it."When really they're denying the role that education plays, your preferences, the same with learning styles. We identify them. We have these formal and informal assessments.We try to teach to the preferred learning styles to enhance in learning. We teach people on initial and in‑service training courses that is of utmost importance when there's absolutely no evidence that it helps.I think there it's more like wasting time, money, resources on things that don't work. Then with the English‑only idea, the idea that the L one shouldn't play a part in second language learning. I'd just been working with a group of teachers last week.I was talking about different ways that the first language can help us learning a second language or another language and the reaction from some of the teachers I could still see there the [inaudible 03:17] and the kind of disbelief. This idea, I think, is pretty firmly entrenched in many places.Ross: Is it almost like we could put that research into two categories then? Research that shows that what we're doing at the moment is wrong, or doesn't work, or isn't as effective as it could be. Then research that might show why things like common practices that teachers do now do work perfect.Carol: Yes, I think that's a good way to think about how neuroscience can help us. One of the things that it can help us to do is to think about things that our intuitions might tell us are true, but which evidence tells us are not true. It can also the other way around, as you've just mentioned, show us something that we do do in the classroom is actually a good idea.The big one here for me is taking into consideration prior knowledge. This is something that studies of the brain and looking at MRIs. There is something going on physically in the brain when we are learning about something we already know something about.The part of the brain where old information and new information connect is a part that has been identified. We have to say, at the same time, we do have to think too about how can we actually apply these ideas both from neuroscience and from evidence‑based teaching practice. How can we apply this to English language teacher?A lot of the studies that have been done have been done in the area of math teaching or content teaching. Language teaching is a little bit different in terms of the language itself being the content.Ross: Another theory like this that we've mentioned before on this podcast and one that I've also heard you mentioned before, is cognitive load. I always find the easiest way to visualize this is to think of the brain as being like a smartphone or a computer.The idea is that if your phone or your computer, you've got a lot of apps running at the same time, then the computer runs much more slowly. If you only have one app running at once, then it runs faster.This is similar to the brain that if you give students, for example, a task that includes a lot of higher order thinking skills and a lot of speaking, students are going to speak a lot more slowly.In other words, it's like a language app on their brain's going to be running a lot more slowly because of the increased processing power that they need to do that higher order thinking. Do you want to tell us a bit more about cognitive load and some of the things that you've spoken about with that before?Carol: Yes, that's it in a nutshell, but that's a nice little analogy with apps, etc. In language learning, we started looking at it related to the idea of overloading learners in terms of their different senses. People thinking, we're going to present this piece of language. You have to listen to it, you have to read it, and you have to look at pictures all at the same time.That, in actual fact, you think you're helping the learner, but in fact, you're making it harder for the learner because, maybe, the visuals don't support the text in some way. When are we overloading the learners?How could we avoid overloading the learners? By doing the opposite. Actually, help them using visuals that support their learning rather than actually overload the learner.What teachers can apply from research and neuroscienceTracy: We talk about teaching. We talk about neuroscience. Do you want to tell us some researching findings that from neuroscience, for example, the teachers can apply in their classes to make them more effective or, maybe, something that teachers commonly do in the classroom that neuroscience has shown benefits teaching or learning?Carol: Well, obviously, the first example is going back to the mother tongue again, using what you already know about your first language and what you already know about your second language to help you to learn new things. I'm thinking too of things, like practice testing. Just say, a quick vocabulary test after you have learned some vocabulary.Just the idea that practicing retrieving things from your memory actually strengthens those connections that you have and makes it easier to be able to do it in the future. It's just things like this that we're doing in the classroom, recycling material. We say we're recycling, but why are we doing that?Well, because it's going to help learners to actually learn new things if you remind them of what they know already. Then you add something new to it, doing pre‑tasks before we do reading or listening.That's a reason for doing that. You help learners to remember what they know already about the topic. In the case of the beginner learners, you're probably going to have to do more work for actual making up for their comprehension gap.Ross: You mentioned distributed practice there, which is something that we've also spoken about before in the podcast. Maybe, the easiest way to think about distributed practices, it's the opposite of cramming, which I think is something that we all know doesn't work very well.In the long‑term it might work OK if you've got an exam tomorrow, but it's not going to help you very much in the long‑term. Can you tell us a bit more about why distributed practice helps students remember things better?Carol: Yes, so most evidence‑based studies they call that distributed practice, but the idea of not cramming everything all at once to try and learn it, but the idea of spacing it. You start it on one day. Then you come back to it at another time. Every time you come back to it, you're adding something new so it becomes a cumulative process.Then it's really helping you, hopefully, with your neuroconnections. We could say that, doing some distributed practice with me. First of all, we do some work on a particular grammar and function structure. Say, we're working with simple past tense. We may say one day, we're going to learn some words to talk about the past.Maybe, we often do it first with the regular verbs, etc. We don't say, "Here are all the irregular verbs to learn all in one go." We say, "Next time we return to this." In the meantime, we do some other stuff.We're into leaving our practice. Perhaps, we go back and do some more vocabulary on a particular theme, for example. Then in the next class we come back to learning some verbs again, and perhaps work on more irregular verbs, learning more of them, again, in a theme, but relating them to what we did the day before.Ross: Obviously, with this podcast we're trying to get teachers to learn more about learning strategies and neuroscience. Do you think that teachers also have a responsibility to tell students about what learning strategies work?Carol: That's a great question. It's helpful to tell students why you're doing the things that you do. The idea of practice when students complain that. "Oh, we've already seen this and we practiced it." Well, why do we practice things again and again and again? Because we know that that helps you to learn it.Tracy: Can we also use them with young learners?Ross: Or is it something that works for adults?Carol: That's a good question. In terms of the cognitive strategies, that's something that needs to be dosified a little bit, depending on the cognitive level of the learner.It's very hard to talk about cognitive strategy, like making a conclusion from patterns if you don't have the cognitive abilities yet to be able to do that. That's going to depend on age, but there are some things definitely we can start working on with young children.Why findings from research often don't get applied in language teachingRoss: We've spoken a little about neuromyths, Carol. Why do you think it is that the neuromyths that you mentioned at the beginning of the show, things like, we only use a small percentage of our brain power, left brain, right brain learning‑selves. Why do these things still persist? Why is it people still believe in these? Why do they still get taught on teacher training courses?Carol: That's a good question. There are a few reasons. One of them is that going back to the women's and men's brains, for example, there's so much over reporting of studies that purport to find differences when the majority of studies actually don't find any differences, but those studies aren't reported. Why not? Because nobody's interested in them.In terms of learning styles right brain left brain, people love that stuff in the popular media, don't they? It's like you love to read a little quiz. Are you like this, or are you like this? It's very hard when that is passed on in the popular media as truth.Secondly, I think that's related to this, that a lot of the evidence for those things. The reality is a lot of it's hidden in a neuroscientific journals, for example. It's quite hard for us to access it unless there's someone helping us to read it and make sense of it and say, "Well, what this really says is this."Then the third reason, some neuromyths or ideas about the brain are actually untestable because they're black box theories, if you like. The multiple intelligences theory, for example. You can't test that because it's not something that we can look at if you like. It's a black box theory.It's a combination of those things. Probably the main one in language teaching is the idea that the myths are often not challenged.Tracy: A lot of teachers, including myself, just felt they're a lot of things going on in terms of research about learning from neuroscience. How can we make sure that we keep up‑to‑date? You just pointed out actually articles in a lot of popular media is probably quite unreliable. What can we do as teachers?Carol: Another good question. Something that I find very helpful is trying to find blogs by neuroscientists, who, in the blog, they will often explain themselves in normal person's language that we can understand.If you read the blog first, then you can go back to the actual study and make sense of it much more. I like Daniel Willingham's blog. He talks about, particularly, education and evidence based on ideas and education.More from Carol LethabyRoss: Carol, for any listeners that want to visit your website or learn more about your work and what you do, your website is www.clethaby.com That's C‑L‑E‑T‑H‑A‑B‑Y.com. Is that right?Carol Lethaby: Yeah. That's my website.Tracy: Really nice talking to you today.Ross: Thanks again, Carol.Carol: Thank you to you. It's been so nice to meet you and talk to you.

Podcast Episode #59 (feat. Dimples, Mark, Oliver and Ross) You come home after a trip to Lapland, open your church and whats the last thing you expect? A surprise party out of nowhere, but whats it all for? See us live at Red Raw at The Stand -Edinburgh - 8th October Thanks to everyone who came to see our Parrots of the Caribbean show at The Maltings, we have had a lot of really nice feedback and we loved doing it. If you would like to leave us a comment or a review of the show, we would really appreciate it. Thanks. For comedy sketches and some of our live show highlights, visit our YouTube or our Facebook by searching Damp Knight Comedy and you can find us as dampknightcomedy on Instagram or twitter @thedampknights. Damp Knight are primarily an improvised comedy group currently touring the North East of the UK. For more information and bookings, visit our Facebook page or email us at dampknight@gmail.com Thank You for Listening. Main Theme: Spacehaze by StoneOceanAdvert Music: https://filmstro.com/Our aim is never to offend, only to entertain but with the way of the world at the minute there may be subjects that some people may find offensive within these podcasts.

Ross, also known as the Natural Pharmacist, is a Certified Clinical Nutritionist. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology and holistic health. He has written  10 books including “The Pill Problem: How to protect your health from the side effects of oral contraceptives” and “The Nutritional Cost of Prescription Drugs”, and in 1999, he was named one of the Top 50 Most Influential Pharmacists in the U.S. by American Druggist magazine for my educational work in natural medicine. In today’s show we talk about his book “The Pill Problem,” and the different side effects that are associated with hormonal contraceptives. Today's episode is sponsored by my 10 Week Fertility Awareness Mastery Group Program. The next session begins in July 2018! You are invited to join us in the Fertility Awareness Mastery program! You'll have an opportunity to master Fertility Awareness, take a deep dive into your cycles, gain confidence charting your cycles, and gain deep insights into the connection between your health, your fertility, and your cycles. Click here to apply now! Don’t forget to sign up for my FREE FAM 101 video series. Click here for access. Topics discussed in today's episode: Why the pill causes more nutrient deficiencies compared to all other drugs How the changes your physiology and pheromone production The relationship between the pill and deficiencies in B vitamins (such as folate, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12) in particular Why every woman taking the pill (or other hormonal contraceptives) should take a good multivitamin to counter some degree of nutrient depletion The connection between the pill, nutrient deficiencies, and depression The relationship between the pill and sleep problems What is the most common reason women stop taking the pill? What about women who report that they experienced no side effects while on the pill? Why the pill increases your chances of developing a yeast infection The cumulative effect of nutrient depletion over time How does the pill contribute to the increased risk of blood clots and stroke? Are doctors aware of the most common side effects associated with hormonal contraceptives? Does the pill reduce your risk of developing cancer? Connect with Ross: You can connect with Ross on his Website, on Facebook, and on Twitter. Resources mentioned: The Nutritional Cost of Prescription Drugs book by Ross Pelton The Pill Problem book by Ross Pelton The Pill Problem Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion Handbook by Ross Pelton The Smart Women's Choice Natural Pharmacist Fertility Awareness 101 FREE Video Series Fertility Friday Programs Fertility Friday Facebook Group Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 182 | Depression, Weight Gain & Mood Disorders | The Truth About Hormonal Birth Control | Lisa & Lorena FFP 180 | Managing Painful Periods | Dysmenorrhea | Endometriosis | Dr. Lara Briden, ND FFP 146 | Anxiety, Depression & Low Libido | The Truth About Hormonal Birth Control | LeAnna & Samantha FFP 054 | The MTHFR Gene Mutation and Fertility | Recurrent Miscarriage, Nutrient Deficiencies, and Folic Acid | Diane Keddy Fertility Awareness Episodes | Fertility Friday Join the community! Find us in the Fertility Friday Facebook Group Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsor: Fertility Friday | 10 Week Fertility Awareness Mastery Group Program This episode is sponsored by my 10 Week Fertility Awareness Mastery Group Program! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here to apply now!

Teacher talk. It was good, then it was bad, now it's good again. Are you confused? We are! We look at teacher talk from four different perspectives - time, aim, language and quality (or TALK for short).Tracy Yu: Hi, everyone, welcome to our podcast.Ross Thorburn: Hi. Something we do a lot on this podcast is...Tracy: Talking. [laughs]Ross: Exactly. Something that teachers are often told not to do is...Tracy: Talking.Ross: Yeah, right. I put teacher talk into YouTube and here are the short clips from the beginnings of three of the videos on the first page of YouTube.[video]James: Hi, I'm James and this week, I have three tips on how to reduce teacher talk time in the classroom.Man 1: What percentage of time do you talk in your class? The typical research shows that we as teachers talk somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the time. Maybe we need to reduce that.Man 2: In this video, we're going to talk about how to reduce your teacher talk time.Tracy: It's really interesting. Seems the information kind of negative in terms of the teacher talk. Why is that?Ross: The general attitude in the industry a lot of the time is teachers should talk less so students can talk more. There's lots of other people that actually say the opposite. Penny Ur, who you know I'm a big fan of, she in her book "100 Teaching Tips" says that teachers should talk a lot.Our friend Dave Weller, he's got a blog post called Why I love Teacher Talking Time saying that sometimes it's really good for teachers to talk more.Tracy: Instead of discussing three questions, this time we are going to look at...Ross: Four aspects of teacher talk.Tracy: They are...Ross: First one is...Tracy: Time, and then how much time that the teacher should speak in the class. The second one...Ross: ...is the aim. Why are teachers talking? Third...Tracy: ...is language and what language they are using when they are talking. The last one...Ross: ...is the quality of what teachers are actually saying. Is it things that are going to be useful for the students or not.Tracy: They are T‑A‑L‑Q, no?Ross: T‑A‑L‑K.[laughter]Tracy: Kwality. TALK.TALKTracy: The first part is time. Like you mentioned at the very beginning, I think a lot of teachers were told, "Reduce your teacher talk time." What will that mean?Ross: I think before we talk about what it means, we can talk about why people say that. There's a misconception that the less teachers talk, the more students talk and the more students talk, the more students learn. I think that's a massive over‑simplification of what makes a good language class or what leads to language learning.Tracy: Yeah, because sometimes teachers, they do need to talk more. [laughs]Ross: Exactly. I remember, for example, observing classes before and marking teachers down for teacher talk because they didn't talk enough. They needed to explain something more to their students, for example, and they didn't talk enough.Tracy: That's interesting.Ross: I've heard of crazy policies from somewhere you used to work. Did they not have like, they even made a ratio of how much teachers were allowed to talk in some classes to how much students were allowed to talk, which to me is just absolutely nuts? It's crazy.[laughter]Ross: I heard teachers talking about like, "I wasn't allowed to correct a student error because my company won't let me talk more than whatever is 10 percent of the time in class." If you're doing a class that's focused on listening, then I think it's OK if the students aren't talking very much and the teachers' talking most of the time.It probably depends a bit on the level as well. If I was teaching very young learners, I'd probably end up talking a lot more than if I was teaching advanced level adults.Tracy: I think you mentioned a lot why teachers need to talk. Also, on the other hand, when you think about when teacher...Ross: ...need to shut up.[laughter]Tracy: Yeah, don't need to talk that much. For example, we also experience the silence. You see the students struggle in activities or learning process. I think teacher naturally want to facilitate and give a lot of support to the students and then move on to the next stage. That few minutes or few seconds are so precious just to let them to figure out and ask each other, have a discussion.Maybe use a first language and they can clarify the meaning. I think that's really, really important for the learners. Digest information by themselves rather than passively accept the concept from the teacher. Naturally, we are teacher, we want to help people, so we always want to give them more rather than...Ross: Rather than figure it out themselves.Tracy: Yeah. Don't steal that moment from your students. Another thing that I usually suggest to teachers is actually instead of statement, asking questions.Ross: Can you give us an example?Tracy: For example, if I say, "Hey, Ross and Tracy, you did a very good job. Well done. And you used these words correctly and you used these tenses very well, blah blah blah." You can just ask a question.Ross: You would take that and instead, you say, "Oh, guys, what do you think you did a good job of there, how did you manage to complete that activity?"Tracy: Yeah, something like that. You are giving the students more chance to reflect on what they did and how they did it rather than you summarize what you saw.AIMRoss: Let's talk about the aim. Why should teachers talk? What is the aim in teachers' talking in the class? [laughs]Tracy: I think there are some fundamental functions of teacher talk. Number one is giving instruction. The second one is probably clarification.Ross: Explaining?Tracy: Yeah, explaining. What else?Ross: Correcting errors. I think eliciting as well, we mentioned that earlier. Asking questions to get the students to reflect or to say things. Building relationships and building rapport with the students. Little things making jokes, trying to use people's names. All those things help to reduce student anxiety and all that kind of stuff.Especially with young learners, storytelling is a big one. I know Dave Wellers is a big fan of that. I think all those things together are giving students comprehensible input, which is going to help them learn the language.I think I've read Stephen Krashen talk about this, and say that one of the main things that students are paying for or getting out of a language class is someone that's speaking in a specific way that's tailored to them. You are paying for a professional that's really good at changing the way they speak for the students. All those things together should help the students pick up language.Tracy: I also think about how your language help you and the students personalize lesson or the content. For example, we watched a class together the other day. If you remember in the video, the teacher basically went through all the PowerPoints.Ross: Yeah, she was teaching how old are you but didn't actually ever take the time [laughs] to ask the students how old they were.Tracy: Yeah, I think that's a great opportunity to personalize the materials and also make the lesson more engaging relating to the kids. Like how old are you and how old is your mom, how old is your best friend? This kind of thing, and that's definitely necessary teacher talk.Also, a lot of people are actually using PowerPoint. It seems so much information included on the slide. I think that's also indirect teacher talk. Maybe teachers think, "OK, I put everything on the PowerPoint, and I don't say anything, that means I reduce teacher talk time," but actually it's not.Ross: We mentioned there then some good aims for why you might talk, good reasons why you might talk. What are some bad reasons why teachers talk?Tracy: Just repeating themselves?Ross: Yeah, or even repeating the students. Echoing.Tracy: Yeah. I think I have different ideas about echoing. I don't think it's that bad sometimes because especially with younger learners, you probably want to emphasize something, so you have to repeat. I don't think it's all bad. It seems echoing is such a taboo word in teaching, but I don't think it's that bad. Sometimes, you probably want to say something to reinforce some positive behavior.Ross: It does actually sometimes happen in real life. Actually, I can play an example of...this is Axl Rose from Guns n' Roses being interviewed. Check how often the interviewer echoes what Axl Rose says.[video]Jimmy: How old were you when you moved to Hollywood?Axl Rose: I think 19.Jimmy: 19 years old, and you came by yourself?Axl: Yeah, I hitchhiked out here.Jimmy: You hitchhiked, wow. You hitchhiked. How long was it before you guys started making money as a professional musician?Axl: A few years after we got Appetite going.LANGUAGERoss: Let's talk a bit about language. I think it's something that pretty much all new teachers, and certainly I had a very difficult time doing was grading my language, which just means simplifying what you say for the students.Before I went to university, I lived in one fairly small town my whole life. Before I went to university, I don't like I realized what words that I used were words that only me, my family used, words which only me and my friends used, words which are only from that town, words which were just...Scottish.Tracy: Aye. [laughs]Ross: Yes, that's one for yes. Maybe I knew that but for example, word like, messages, like, "Go to get your messages." Where I'm from, that means go and do your shopping, like your weekly shopping.Tracy: Really?Ross: Yeah, or right now you could say, so it's five past 8:00, you could say right now it's the back of 8:00. I remember saying something that to someone at university, "I'll meet you at the back of 8:00," and the person said, "What does that mean?" I was like, "Back of 8:00, like 5 past, 10 past 8:00." They have no idea.That process of learning to grade your language, it's very difficult to pick up quickly.Tracy: Yeah, that's a very, very good point. Actually, I'm doing training, usually we focus on language, and we try not to use difficult words but how do we define difficult words?Even you're teaching in the same foreign country, but different level students and different area they probably exposed to certain topics or things or access to Internet and what they, what they encounter every day is so different. It definitely takes time for people to realize what...Ross: What's easy and what's hard?Tracy: Yeah.KWALITYRoss: Let's talk about the quality. The thing I wanted to bring up here is the idea that students come to class, and you know the classic joke of the student says to the teacher, "Oh sorry, I'm late." Teacher says, "Why are you late?" The student said, "My dog dead today," and the teacher says, "Your dog died today. Now go and sit down." Is it not funny?Tracy: I've never heard that.Ross: It's like the teachers correcting the student instead of responding to them naturally. This idea that you want to respond to the students naturally in the class because that's how people are going to respond to them in the outside world. You don't always have to be in this teacher mode where you are giving instructions or correcting errors. You can respond to them like a real person.TEACHER TALK WRAP UPRoss: Hopefully, that helped as a bit of a model. Instead of saying that teacher talk is good or teacher talk is bad, I think when you come to think about teacher talk, you can look at it in those four different aspects. How long are you talking for, the time? Why you are talking, so what's the Aim? What Language are you using? Finally, is it good Quality or not, so T‑A‑L‑K.Anything else, Tracy, before we finish?Tracy: When we're a little baby and [laughs] we can only handle a small amount of food, but we have maybe more times every day. Maybe I don't know four or five meals per day and when we grow up and we have more food each time.Ross: Fewer meals altogether.Tracy: Yeah, so I'm thinking maybe it's similar to teacher talk. With different group of learners like young learners, you probably want to use teacher talk a little bit...Ross: At a time maybe but more for the adolescent.Tracy: Yeah, with adult learners, maybe each time that they can handle a longer period of time and then try to reduce the number of time that we are using big chunk of teacher talk.Ross: Great. Thanks for listening everyone.Tracy: Thank you, bye‑bye.Ross: Bye.

Podcast Episode #43 (feat. Dimples, Mark, Oliver and Ross) You there boy, do you listen to podcasts?You do? Good, here is a very surreal trip in to the Wild Mild West. Dates for Red Raw at The Stand -Edinburgh - 30th AprilNewcastle - 16th May We shall be returning to The Maltings, Berwick on August 3rd and 4th for another hilarious 2 night special - Parrots of the Caribbean - on sale now - https://www.maltingsberwick.co.uk/events/comedy/4676 Check out our Facebook for even more dates coming up in 2018. For comedy sketches and some of our live show highlights, visit our YouTube or our Facebook by searching Damp Knight Comedy and you can find us as dampknightcomedy on Instagram or twitter @thedampknights. Damp Knight are primarily an improvised comedy group currently touring the North East of the UK. For more information and bookings, visit our Facebook page or email us at dampknight@gmail.com Thank You for Listening. Main Theme: Spacehaze by StoneOceanAdvert Music: http://www.bensound.com

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.

No. 64“你气色不错。” – 邀你说英语经典台词【句子】Ross: You look great. 【Friends】S1E2【发音】[ju:] [lʊk] [greɪt] 【翻译】你气色不错。【适用场合】You look great. 或者 You look good. 来和别人打招呼，称赞别人气色好。比较适合比较熟悉，比较亲近的人们之间。欢迎加瑶瑶老师微信：teacheryaoyao 邀请你进入全英文微信群，每晚免费纠音。1月零基础音标班已经可以开始报名，网络授课，小班授课，作业一对一批改。