10 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in education, teacher training, university education
I have just found a very interesting article about what teacher education does not do well enough in the USA. As I have similar experience from other countries, especially from my own, I recommend reading it. I hope some of my international readers will add a few remarks below about the situation in their own countries. The article, from Education Week, “What Teacher Education Programs Don’t Tell You” can be accessed here.
by P.S.
24 Saturday Nov 2012
Tags
education, English as a foreign or second language, language correction approaches, Language education, learning to communicate, Teacher education, Teaching English as a foreign language, teaching foreign languages
My thoughts have been a bit stirred up after reading a little bit more than usual of colleague opinion and political opinion on teachers’ learning processes of teaching behaviour, on language learners making errors and on how to deal with the latter. The following article here is a very good description of most people’s opinion:
What I find outstanding is that almost everybody praises making mistakes. As to me, I can go along with Anton’s and others’ view that we may learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. The logic is actually based on our inner monitoring system that praises us for our successes, which may often have no lasting effect other than magnifying our ego, but if not that bad, at least lets us fairly swiftly forget about what was actually successful. Let me see the next … On the other hand, for most people, especially with self-monitoring types of teachers, partial or larger failures don’t leave us alone, keep our minds working on our memories of what may have caused the problems, and even keep us awake for some nights. Man is basically a problem-solving creature, we could say.
As a result, we go on experimenting and adjusting. But it usually happens on the basis of justified knowledge and on our previously successful practices. We very rarely change our whole way of teaching for the sake of change. We usually do it gradually, and according to plans, rarely on that basis of on-the-spot decisions even when we feel something’s gone wrong in class. It’s also only our consciousness that realizes the problem, not that of the students, at least for a while. It’s the normal way of professional development to reflect and then change.
We mustn’t forget, however, that a teacher occasionally making mistakes while experimenting is still a teacher, he/she has worked for years successfully to become a teacher, and then as a teacher. His and her ego is not going to be hurt for long and he or she has the expertise and knowledge to find a way or two to get around similar problems the following time. But what about students?
A totally different story, we should realize. Even if feeling the strength of being in a group, sometimes or often against the teacher as the case may be, they are still fragile, psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, faced with the group, with the teacher, with groups in the street and with their own families, while they can’t rely on a history of successes at whatever they also make mistakes of. In most cases, they make a facade of strength to cover their insecurities, in certain cultures to a greater extent than in others, but they do. This should be one basis of our handling the mistakes they make, be it social or linguistic mistakes.
The other basis is the linguistic effect of our corrections. Linguists maintain that making mistakes is not only natural, but it’s also beneficial to the students’ development of the target language, and it will be solved all by itself in time anyway. I may agree, but perhaps only to differ.
The benefits of making mistakes can be justified to some extent if we consider the students’ good feelings while they play with, fool around with the language freely. For a while. But how long? When we want them, because we have to make them, to use the real kind of foreign language, how can we explain why and why then, not later, and not before? A solution to this could be if we could devise parts of later classes as well when they are allowed to fool with the language. If only it were so easy! But, granted, playing games with the language is important for learners.
Then there’s the question of mistakes disappearing all by themselves with time. Yes, if the student has a long enough time, and a lot of casual input, they may. Over a decade or two, as it happens with lots of Dutch people. But school takes shorter, results must be achieved, or the final exam result will be less outstanding than what all concerned desired for. True, there was little pain at school, but also little achievement.
Which is alright for a lot of kids, but look, if that’s the way everybody looks at it, students, left on their own wishes to be corrected, would achieve just as little in Maths or History, Physics or Biology as in English. We wouldn’t like to argue against the notion of guidance, would we?
But guidance as far as foreign languages (or music and art, for that matter) are concerned is involved in a lot more than giving the knowledge of the teacher over to the students, explaining and then after a while giving them tests. The development and then results at “tests”, if that’s the desired end-result, is based on doing a lot of small things all the way from saying the first strange sound and word, through simple repetition of basic sentences, listening, reading aloud, making up or writing their own sentences and texts to real communication and thinking in the strange, new language that they don’t use in their lives for a while. The Dutch may also be exceptions as they watch English TV, and also those with time and enough money and the addiction who play games in English. But if even the latter type only meets language patterns used by other freak users of English, their language wouldn’t ever evolve to resemble the English language used by natives and well-educated professionals all over the world. Besides, other languages don’t have these added benefits, so the problem of correction and other teaching methods is still there, and I myself would not consider it professional behaviour to simply let my students talk whatever way they prefer.
With this last statement, I declared already, in the face of all opposition, that I’m in favour of correcting mistakes. The question is rather how and when, than whether, as I see it.
Taking the first basis discussed above, that of considering students’ fragility, I argue for soft correction approaches. I’ve seen many a student with good abilities and intentions not able to get over their weaknesses and mistakes after lots of years, in one case after nine years, simply because of the rarity of exposition to the language and to correction. People can be understood and can communicate quite well in a freak language, if that’s all they want to achieve with priorities elsewhere in life. But for real good language use, they must be corrected in school.
The soft approach means that not all mistakes deserve immediate attention. Lots of methodology books deal with how we can make a list during lessons of some of the mistakes made by the students and then we can tell them about the problems. My problem is, though, that if I start taking notes during the lesson and then later look at the notes and begin to quote their mistakes and faults, they will surely know next time when I start taking notes that they’ve made mistakes. It’s like political tricks – people and students are not stupid, even if sometimes mislead.
I like instead to make different small signs when the mistakes happen and quietly let them quickly understand that they’ve made a mistake and perhaps let them time to correct themselves. There’s also a lot in the literature about this. What I consider important is that during valuable communication in class I don’t frequently stop students to correct small faults. Communication being the ultimate goal for me, it is valued high above any problems with the language. On the other hand, if misunderstandings ensue, I must remember perhaps a chain of mistakes that led there, and I must be ready to help, which the context usually helps a lot anyway. If there have been a few smaller problems, I may quote a few by heart and we may discuss them.
Usually, if there’s a major language issue at the basis of the class and the discussion, I only concentrate on mistakes related to that. But in such cases the discussion must usually be preceded and supported by some directed, more structured task to practice the language item in focus, so not a lot of correction is necessary later, which makes it easier. But correction is feedback, a sign of developing in the right direction, so it must be given. In this respect, learning a language is different from other school subjects in that a mistake doesn’t lead the student, without being monitored, all by herself, to a realization of it – a mistake has no consequence in itself for the student because he/she usually can’t find out about what’s wrong and what’s correct on his/her own. In this respect, language learning is not the perfect way of self-experimenting with the world for the upbringing of geniuses. Only the teacher can draw the attention to the fault, reality has no other way to make its way.
After introducing new language, the ride gets tougher with group work, if the teacher employs that at all. Of course, some don’t risk group work, because he/she himself/herself feels insecure, not being able to be in charge of several groups at the same time. I admit that it’s daunting to follow a dozen students talking perhaps at the same time in groups of three or four (I don’t often find it beneficial to assign discussion tasks to larger groups unless the nature of the task demands so, because the smaller the group, the more chance everyone has to express themselves, leading to invaluable STT – student talking time). But I can assure you that with practice, most teachers can get used to identifying so many different voices in their classes, like a conductor can identify dozens of various instruments in the orchestra, sometimes each musician playing the same instrument. It takes time and practice. For me, it goes without saying that correction of mistakes during group-work is not only next to impossible, but it’s also unnecessary. The aim of group-work is fluency, remember, not accuracy, and some of us feel insecure with that in small groups. But it is a very important phase of language development. We will surely experience an enhanced wish on the part of the students to speak the language and a more relaxed atmosphere after group work, which is usually necessarily followed by class discussion, if for nothing else, at least for a summary of points collected in groups. Students will feel brave enough in that phase after well-prepared and well-performed group-work. Task-based learning is one major such system which utilizes group-work followed by class discussions, the ultimate variety being, as far as I’m concerned, the so-called ‘balloon debate’, but I’ve also created mock-political discussions as well, which led to several hours of great, meaningful and enjoyable language use.
During whole-class work, I’m sure that direct and ad hoc correction and practice of mistaken language is not a very good way of dealing with problems, except at the initial stage of presenting a new kind of language feature. Too strong criticism and correction from teachers may draw various reactions depending on the personality and the situation of the student. Some may react by closing in, and then our correction is lost on her/him. Some may react violently, provoking arguments and disrupting work. We don’t want that. Of course there may be some who take even strong correction well. The variation is endless. But I don’t jump on the opportunity to correct also because most students are vulnerable and ready to counter-attack, perhaps after class, when we don’t hear them. They feel urged to defend their pride in front of peers at the cost of the authority. I agree that they often don’t have other means of defense. So why stimulate this behaviour? If, on the other hand, they don’t feel attacked and thus intimidated by the authority, everybody has a good chance of escaping unscathed, and then the correction of the mistake can really build into the language system of the student as correct language use. And this is the aim, isn’t it?
by P.S.
22 Thursday Nov 2012
Posted in English teaching, language teaching, teacher training
Tags
Higher education, Netherlands, Secondary education, Teacher education, Teaching English as a foreign language, Teaching qualification
It has just happened. Just the way I suspected. But it wasn’t a self-fulfilling prediction. It had to happen on the basis of the laws of the land. I knew it.
My father used to say in the old ‘communist’ era that laws are worth as much as they are upheld. But what about bad laws? Or about flexibility often demanded by life?
What happened was the following. As I have been an English teacher all my professional life, which is to say over thirty years, I have tried to get an official permission to teach here as well. I got my degree, along with a degree in Geography, 33 years ago, which means that I haven’t been able to teach during the three years I’ve been in the Netherlands. I let out some steam, did some other things, and then looked for a job. In vain, as those reading my first post will already have known.
I have always taught students in secondary schools in Hungary, then sometimes above, trained trainee teachers for nine of those years, for which I received additional training, and I did all these a little bit more in China too. I tried teaching young kids too, but I felt I wasn’t really cut out for that. During my training years, I also visited a few primary classes, and then I knew more exactly why I wasn’t. In short, it’s a different psychological and intellectual world. The teacher should behave and do things quite differently as a result with kids below 14.
A few weeks ago I applied for the acceptance of my degree in the Netherlands. Fair enough, they didn’t take very long to answer. The only problem is that they let me know I can’t get the same kind of acceptance as back in Hungary. Just as I had supposed.
To make it understandable what the possibilities are, let me explain. In the Netherlands, a secondary teacher can have ‘erste graads’, that is ‘first-degree’, or ‘twede graads’, that is ‘second-degree’ level qualification (or competence, depending on how you like to translate). In the reality of secondary education, this means that the second group of teachers can teach the lower intermediate classes between the ages of 12 and 16, the first-level qualification holders can teach the upper intermediate classes, from age 16 and above. A holder of this qualification can also teach in some classes of higher education, though not at universities.
The answer I was given states that because I received university education not only in English but also in Geography during the same five-year period, I can’t have received the same depth of training as Dutch students with only one degree, that in English, receive. I can either re-apply for a second-degree acceptance, or I can ask for an additional ‘stage’, that is, training, if I still want a first-degree qualification. Fair enough, one could say, and that’s what I’d half-heartedly expected too. Though I had also hope for something better. In a way I got something a bit better with this offer of an additional training period. But I still have my strong reservations.
My first reservation is that no education below the 850 hours received count towards qualification. On paper, my 120-hour teacher-training course and 100-hour CELTA training is nothing here. Never mind that with the latter I could teach English to adults and young adults anywhere in the world. Never mind that I was able to use the first for nine years to train university students who wanted to get a teaching qualification. These count nothing in the eye of the law, all I could do is to go back to a school and get training as if I were my own trainee. It sounds ridiculous.
My second reservation is that by sticking to the word of the law, my experience of 30 years is neglected and negated. I count as if I was still sitting at university and haven’t finished. I am worth as much as I was around 35 years ago, except that I’ve become that much older.
Third, I could qualify, if I wanted, as a second-degree holder. In Hungarian terms, I count as if I had only studied those two subjects at a teacher-training college for three years, as all primary teachers did and still do in Hungary. It doesn’t make a difference that all university students received enough education to enable them to teach at and sometimes above secondary level. Back in the old days, all university students were only allowed to study two subjects, for the sake of their more flexible practical value, and there was no education above that level.
Next, it seems as if all those studies of the English and American literature, syntax, phonetics and the like were also for nothing. Or as if a Dutch second-degree-holder also gets that much and besides, uses literature for 12-year-olds. My guess is that the real difference is in the methodological preparation and that first-degree-holders are the only ones required to do what I did. As for methodology, no preparation is better than long-term practice, which, in my case, is neglected. Also neglected is the fact that I’ve never received proper methodological preparation for young students, yet I could get a second-degree licence to teach them if I wanted. But if I do, say, a half-year practice, I may get enough preparation to be declared a first-degree teacher. Which counts more: half a year of undergoing mentoring the way I did to others, or 30 years of doing teaching and 9 years of mentoring?
I think, after all, that the most important difference between the teachers who are considered first-level and second-level teachers is that the latter should be trained to do what helps young teenagers, and first-level teachers should be trained and equipped to do what suits older teenagers. There is a world of difference between a 12-year-old’s needs and interests and those of a 16-year-old, and the ability and skills to accommodate and adjust to them can only be acquired through practice, not by attending more or fewer classes at university. The latter fast becomes irrelevant. I think I must insert a quote I already used in one of my earlier posts, but this one, out of a Guardian article, is most highly relevant here:
In recent years a very dangerous idea seems to have been accepted by the decision-makers around the education system that the best teachers are the best qualified teachers, leading to a sliding scale of funding that financially disadvantages those without high-class degrees from the classroom. The reality is very different. A good teacher has to be an exceptional communicator, with patience, common sense, focus, more than a little belligerence and vast reserves of tolerance and empathy. Many prospective teachers simply do not possess these qualities and yet are accepted on to teacher training and even passed despite every indication that they do not have what it takes. The most fantastic academic background cannot make up for a lack of these qualities, but a great communicator with a third-class degree has far more than the necessary knowledge to inspire a class of teenagers.
To neglect these points is what seriously counts as shortsightedness. Cling to the letter of the law and neglect the person with experience. Is this Eastern-Europe after all?
However, it must be said to all people with an older degree from Hungary, and very possibly to all those of my friends and acquaintances from Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, or Croatia who have been doing a great job in their respective countries, that if they would like to come to the Netherlands to try teaching, they will have to undergo the same procedure. Rules are rules, we have to obey them if we want to make a living in the West. Equal opportunity may reach the younger generations, those masses who I trained too, but not those few who received their degrees in times when only a few were able and allowed to. Hours of education received counts, hours of education provided since then does not. We are equal in the EU, but still, there are some who are more equal …
by P.S.
RELATED ARTICLES
17 Saturday Nov 2012
Posted in English teaching, language teaching, work in Dutch education
Tags
CELTA, education, English as a foreign or second language, Netherlands, Teacher education, Teaching English as a foreign language
As I already dropped a hint in my first post, it is important for someone with a foreign degree to ask his degree to be nationalized by the authorities of the “Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap”. It can be done through the DUO-group, or through NUFIC. Their web-sites can be found under these names, they describe the necessary procedure and requirements. It takes about six weeks to get your diploma/degree to get what they call ‘erkenning’, or ‘waardering’, after which one can go about job-hunting. For those who are looking for such appreciation of their CELTA, or similar diplomas, I have to add here that Dutch law states that no course counts for ‘diploma waardering’ which involved fewer than 800 teaching hours. The Dutch word ‘diploma’ is equivalent to the English ‘degree’, as MA or above, but CELTA is not one, the English word ‘diploma’ is not equivalent to anything much in the Netherlands in this respect, in spite of what some dictionaries say.
While I’m waiting for DUO to answer my request, I haven’t stopped trying to collect information and submitting applications. In this post, I’d like to describe what I’ve found out in the meantime.
Language Learners and Gaming – IATEFL (Photo credit: blogefl)
First of all, though I’ve earlier written that I’ve never met a Dutch at international events, I have to admit that I’ve discovered the presence of an IATEFL-associate at the annual IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) conference this year. I mean, the presence of ONE person. Smaller countries like Hungary, or Slovakia, regularly send five-six members.
The other thing I’ve found about Dutch presence at IATEFL is that the Dutch organization as partner to this international organization is called ‘Levende Talen’, which, true to its name ‘modern languages’ in English, has 14 modern language sections. This means that the Dutch organization associated internationally has little to do with English, it is only the English section of it which is really associated. Accordingly, their web-site is written in Dutch almost without exception (the exception being a part of the small Italian section-page), and so is the ‘Newsbrief’ of the English section. Unheard of with IATEFL-Hungary, though their web-site content is still relatively weak and under construction, very possibly because of under-funding.
As to finding a job in the Netherlands, it is most advisable to sign up – for free – with some of the national search-engines, which collect a huge number of vacancies daily from throughout the country. Such are, for example, Jobrapido, Werkgever-vacatures, Jobbird, Meesterbaan, Trovit, Matafoor personeelsbank, Careerbuilder, Unique, Banenmatch, StudentZonderBijbaan (obviously, mostly for students, so here you can find possibilities for ‘stage’), or FunktieMediair. Some of such search-engines are general kinds, but most have a separate search field for jobs in education. You can also join the international site Skillpages, where you can advertise yourself as having special skills, like languages.
One piece of advice after you start receiving information from one or some other of the above search-engines: when you look at the vacancies contained in the ad, it’s worth opening even those that do not look suitable for your, for example for geographical reasons. I have repeatedly received ads saying in their titles that they concerned a vacancy in, say, Utrecht, but in reality, the job was offered in Tilburg, or Lelystad, or the like. It has also already repeatedly happened with a particular search-engine that a vacancy was said to be for Hungarian speakers in the Netherlands, while inside the text it was revealed that it was intended for German speakers in, say, Brno in the Czech republic. Another company always advertises with a time-frame of 20 to 36 hours per week given on the side-bar, but for a while the applicant is continuously perplexed to find that every second one of their ads is for “0.2fte”, which means 20% salary and workload of a full-time job, which means about 4 or 5 contact hours a week. After a while the unhappy job-seeker comes to understand that this search-engine almost never adjusts its settings to the differences inside its advertisements, so you either open up each and every one of them, or give up bothering about any.
While most schools advertise their own vacancies in the major national newspapers during the main period for job-hunting for the following year, they advertise throughout the year in their region, mostly through their school-groups, or community of schools, like Eudelta, in the delta region in Zuid-Holland and Zeeland, Plana, around Arnhem and Nijmegen in Gelderland, or VIA-scholen for Christian schools in the ‘Bible-belt’ between Gelderland and Utrecht. Besides this, they often outsource most of the selection procedure to headhunter firms, or ‘uitzendbureaus’, which are the most important channels for finding jobs in other sectors of the economy, but not so usual in education. One can find dozens of such ‘uitzendbureaus’ in the centres of all towns and villages, but those for education I’ve found work almost exclusively through on-line search-engines, so one should know about them, like http://www.upointonline.nl/, http://www.intermediair.nl/, http://www.flexibilityonderwijs.nl/, http://fairflex.carerix.net/, or http://www.match4onderwijs.nl.
As I’ve had the good luck to find out, personnel at ‘uitzendbureaus’ care a lot more about the applicant than school personnel. While most advertisements contain constraints that would scare away most applicants, like “if you are experienced in final exam training in VMBO, you’re welcome to apply”, or “we expect applicants who have a distinct affinity to HAVO/MAVO/MBO students” and the like, ‘uitzendbureaus’ have a lot more information about the school’s requirements. They then call each applicant personally and try to understand the strength of applicants while also informing them about all the advantages and drawbacks of the job on offer. Very possibly, they work on the axiom that no perfect match at a given point in time is likely. But they work hard on getting the nearest possible match for their money.
Foreigners with a degree can also approach a school or a university and choose a place where they may get a ‘stage’ (/sta:ʒɘ/, as I’ve already mentioned earlier). This means they may have to work a year full-time, or for several years part-time, but without a salary, while on the other hand they receive experience in the school-type and may have their degrees validated much more easily, but definitely can get a job much more easily than those without having done so. This path is best for those women of the younger generation who have Dutch partners to take care of their daily victuals and other supply. Those having to fend for themselves better be equipped with strong financial reserves and a good measure of optimism. Yet again, this latter kind may be willing to pay several thousands of Euros per year for obtaining a Dutch university degree (‘diploma’ here) after a few years, but they would go to ‘stage’ towards the end anyway.
Whichever way one is willing or able to choose, the need to speak ‘good enough’ Dutch is an unavoidable first requirement. It’s a bit difficult to define ‘good enough’, but judging from my peers at the Dutch course, I suspect that if one speaks very fast, understands everything a native speaker or anyone else throws at him/her, and has a strong foreign accent, his/her mistakes are shrouded up enough to pass as ‘good enough’, which means that fast thinking without translation rules. Quite the opposite of the methods I suspect foreign language teaching employs.
If someone’s Dutch is on a low level, somebody suggested the other day that he/she should not lose heart either. Nowadays, nearly half of school children are not Dutch and do not speak Dutch well either, so they may be a lot better off at an English lesson with a teacher who is only willing to speak English. Older types of teachers may be put out by such a proposition here, but if one gets through such a barrier, they may succeed with flying colours.
English: White Pine Montessori School in Moscow, Idaho, USA; from Wikipedia
A few things to know about while applying. It goes almost without saying that you have to tailor your cover letter to the needs of the school, however strange it may seem when, for example, they ask for somebody who can work and make decisions on his/her own and is an outstanding team worker, or for somebody who is experienced in drama and also in testing – this latter leaving one wonder what kind of teaching philosophy is at the heart of the school’s culture after all. It is also quite unimaginable to get a job at a Dalton-, or Montessori-school, not because we aren’t used to applying their pedagogy, or something very much like it, but because we can so rarely point to experience working in such schools outside the Netherlands, where they feature much more often than in other countries.
Writing our cover letters and CV’s, we also have to be aware that, although seemingly excellent speakers of English, most educators themselves rarely understand abbreviations from abroad. The Dutch use a shocking amount of abbreviations in their daily and professional lives as well, but English teachers have no idea what the BC, IH or CELTA means. It may be due to the isolation of the profession from mainstream English teaching trends and communities as I suggested in an earlier post. It seems imperative that we give the full versions of all abbreviations we may employ in our application. To illustrate this need, let me tell you about a very funny experience I had a couple of years ago. I was interviewed at a local private teaching institution, where I also pointed out that for me it is no problem to teach adults because I have CELTA, a qualification from the University of Cambridge for teaching adults. I was asked to give a lesson to a pair of teenagers from abroad who had until then failed to pass their English exams but would sit for a re-take the following day. Besides being criticized for not dealing with their otherwise somehow excellent pieces of homework and not giving them more test items (off the top of my head) but trying to communicate with them and covering several key grammar issues in the process that they still seemed to find difficult, I was told by the boss of the school that his colleagues also have all kinds of English diplomas from the University of Greenwich and the like, so I’m no speciality. Not that said university doesn’t exist, very much to the contrary, but it was glaringly obvious that he had no idea what he was talking about – he only remembered a famous name from Britain that sounded similar to the name I mentioned, which he might have found less known. Perhaps this was the basis for his failure to send me my meagre fee for the lesson as he had promised. To be fair to the Dutch, this guy seemed to be of Turkish origin by his looks and name. In all fairness, it’s shameful to have such an ignorant face in charge of any teaching institution in this country. Whatever their shortcomings, people here deserve better.
by P.S.
11 Sunday Nov 2012
Posted in English teaching, language teaching, teacher training
Tags
When I moved ‘up’ to Budapest, as we say, I never thought this move would send me in so many directions, and make it possible for me to live in several countries around the world. At the time, i was a successful teacher in a rural town and never imagined travelling would be possible: the socialist system didn’t let us travel to the West except on a very tight budget every third year. I had only been to Britain once, but the following year saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and opened up opportunities in professional development and elsewhere too.
I soon found myself on a course organized by the newly set-up department of the university, the Centre for English Teacher Training, or CETT and graduated as a certified teacher trainer. It was unique at the time, not only because I came off the first such course ever, but because all teacher training at the time took place at designated ‘training schools’ affiliated to the universities. That system is still in place for all subjects, so let me point out that the normal procedure for training takes place at those institutions within a semester during the last year of studies. it consists of twenty hours of visits and teaching by the university students, so in the Dutch sense of the word, it counts anything but ‘stage’. Discussions and reflexion sessions are done, but the depth and extent of it all is rather limited, and the teachers training the students there are designated to do so on account of their reputation as outstanding teachers, not because they are fully qualified in directing reflexion sessions. The system had a confidence that all getting through this stage and all the trainers do and will do a great job.
While I was doing the training course, I met a completely different system of thinking, and the most important message was that our job was not to show the trainees how to teach English, but to make them develop to their full potential as teachers without criticizing them. This is a unique feature in Hungarian education at large, which I kept myself to all through the years while I did this kind of work.
This mentor training course we are offering was developed by Caroline Bodoczky and Angi Malderez. The course material was published by Cambridge University Press titled Mentor Courses and it was the Winner of the 1999 Ben Warren Trust Award for ELT Methodology books.
(quote from the web-site of IATEFL-Hungary)
The outstanding feature of this system was that training was intensive and fully immersive. Trainees were asked to go to the school, which was not necessarily a training institution, several days a week and hold lessons for one class of students all throughout the year in pairs. These pairs were fully responsible for their teaching and evaluation and all aspects of their work, were allowed to make their own decisions, but were supervised by the trainer. Every teaching our was discussed, disseminated, evaluated in detail. Self-reflection was the order of the day. Trust was the basis for it all to work well, and it did. Even those trainees that didn’t really want to go into teaching afterwards, did their best.
Unfortunately, the system existed only for about a decade and only in Budapest (though this means a very sizable part of newly initiated students in the country), and then it was scraped by new laws. Training time was cut to half, most of staff at CETT was made redundant, and this for most meant a huge step back towards the usual, much less effective format. I did this for one more year and then left.
The old, semester-based format is the only teacher-training existing in Hungary now, except that with English, the format is filled by the same fully-responsible trainees coached by colleagues trained with me or a little later. I’m happy to see that IATEFL-Hungary is organizing a mentor training course next year, which may attract a few young teachers again to the trainer/mentor profession and will be able to train their trainee students at their local schools for at least a semester. Elsewhere, it’s twenty hours watching and doing it, counted together. With this, we are back to the old days of mostly academic training coupled in the last few months with a little look into how teaching is done. Let me quote one of the articles from The Guardian (to be found below among the articles), which clearly states the most important qualities of good teachers versus academic knowledge:
In recent years a very dangerous idea seems to have been accepted by the decision-makers around the education system that the best teachers are the best qualified teachers, leading to a sliding scale of funding that financially disadvantages those without high-class degrees from the classroom. The reality is very different. A good teacher has to be an exceptional communicator, with patience, common sense, focus, more than a little belligerence and vast reserves of tolerance and empathy. Many prospective teachers simply do not possess these qualities and yet are accepted on to teacher training and even passed despite every indication that they do not have what it takes. The most fantastic academic background cannot make up for a lack of these qualities, but a great communicator with a third-class degree has far more than the necessary knowledge to inspire a class of teenagers.
The only positive side of English teaching in Hungary is that this is the section in education whose members stick relatively strongly together, hold meetings, annual conferences, training courses among themselves, it’s all dynamic. The teaching philosophy seems to be relatively level, teachers trying to use modern, communicative methods, building on students’ interests and abilities. However, the aim is the same for all: put students through exams at the end. And that doesn’t make it easier at all.
by P.S.
