Teaching Presentation Skills
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
Before I started in my current job, I’d taught a presentation course for two years when I was part time at one university, and also as parts of courses at two others. Everyone thinks that they know about presentations because everyone has seen presentations. That is like saying everyone knows how to teach because they have been to school, or everyone knows how to drive because they’ve been in a car or bus. One of my slides I used in the course. Teaching Presentation Skills this Spring semester was one of the most successful courses I’ve ever taught. It was a mixture of in-person and in-class ..read more
Visit website
Practical Magic: 1
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
Student-led Syllabus Shake-up Hi. It has been ages. So long I dare not check. Today, I have something to report, and this is, I think, the first post about my new job. A photo of my office, complete with bare bookshelves! Today my students were giving presentations based on a discussion task from last week: design your dream university course that covers 15 weeks. Being honest, this was busy work that gave students something meaningful to work on while I assessed paired conversations. What I got was so much more than I had expected. Students overwhelmingly wanted practical courses. Learning ab ..read more
Visit website
Reflective practice: not just for teachers
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
Here in Japan it is nearly the end of the academic year. A whole academic year of the fallout from COVID-19. Anyway, clearly anything to do with that is horrid, so I want to write about something good. Maybe even useful. I have been teaching Authentic Listening at one of the universities I work at for 3 years now, although this is the first year that I have taught it at the advanced level. We had a lot of students that couldn’t go on their study abroad programmes this year and they needed courses at the appropriate level. I planned the syllabus out kind of last minute because I wasn’t 100% sur ..read more
Visit website
The ongoing mentoring experiment experience
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
A couple of months ago I put out a call on Twitter to say that I was interested in mentoring teachers who thought they might benefit from it. To be utterly transparent, I was interested in the conversation between a less/differently experienced teacher and me, the grizzled journeyman. I was not disappointed. I won’t say my mentee’s name here, but I will say that they are far too modest about their experience and knowledge. They have a first degree in TESOL and unlike arrogant/ignorant younger me who thought teaching in a foreign country would be a lark and finance my novel writing, they are v ..read more
Visit website
Pronunciation Resource Roundup Thing
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
Thanks to @ClareBurkeELT for suggesting this might be a useful post. ELF Pron: https://elfpron.wordpress.com/ – a really useful blog about English as a Lingua Franca and pronunciation. Pron Bites: http://pronunciationbites.blogspot.com/ – Marina’s blog is full of good stuff! Pron SIG: website https://pronsig.iatefl.org/ – The Pronunciation SIG of IATEFL. Richard Cauldwell’s Speech in Action: https://www.speechinaction.org/ Lots about pronunciation, more about listening. Hancock Mcdonald website: http://hancockmcdonald.com/ Home of the best IPA chart for teachers and learners, in my opinion. S ..read more
Visit website
Structuring Task Stages for Students – Resource
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
These sheets are both two-page PDFs that I have used to help students structure task-based lesson stages, especially the courses detailed in my series of posts on my role-playing game-structured courses. I also used transcription as homework as per York’s (2019) Kotoba Rollers framework. Basically, there is planning, doing, and reflecting. The sheet shouldn’t be used in the doing stage. After the reflection, the review sheet can be used a few weeks later (I used three reviews in a 14 or 15 week course). Play-Sheet-2019-2.0Download Review-Sheet-2019Download References York, J. (2019). “Kotoba R ..read more
Visit website
Radical Pedagogy Reading Group: Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin.
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
With people from Mastodon, I have joined a Radical Pedagogy reading group. It’s an area that I’ve got gaps in my knowledge about, despite my education in a post-structuralist, Marxist-sympathetic BA Film and Media programme. Freire is somebody that I’d read bits by, and I had read bits from Pedagogy of the Oppressed before, but never the whole lot. So, time to put that right. One of the main impressions that the book left me with were: This doesn’t even nearly go far enough! It seems a bit weak to be saying ‘listen to the people and learn from them’. Maybe it’s not so radical nowadays. Mayb ..read more
Visit website
Teaching Online: Problems & Learnings 1: PowerPoint
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
For my main job, I use Google Meet for teaching online and a lot of our teacher input is based on using PowerPoint slides. This is not my choice, but it was what was in place and the materials get updated every year from existing materials. Problem Sometimes the slideshow ‘jams’ in Google Meet presentations. Previous solution Don’t use slideshows, just show each slide and go through manually. This looks terrible and sometimes there are animations in the slides that really should only be visible after students have talked about the previous point. What I learned In PowerPoint 2013 (yes, I know ..read more
Visit website
The Exchange
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
I thought that maybe we’d get some sense of community to work through problems we face in society, it looks like the status quo is still very much alive and well. Instead, so many people crave normality. Normality was unfair and rubbish. The tools are there to be had in our little corner of English language teaching. We’ve got pay-what-you-want services, open source software, and even beyond that, we have exchange of services and knowledge. We should be more open to this if we truly believe that teachers can learn from students and that it isn’t just one-way transmission of knowledge. Yes, I ..read more
Visit website
Open Research in English Language Teaching – Resource
Freelance Teacher Self Development
by Marc Jones
2y ago
I would like to share the ORE Directory (Open Research in English Language Teaching). This is a brilliant resource that I came across on Twitter, thanks to Huw Jarvis. Basically, it’s a directory of Open Access journals on (English) language teaching-related topics. There is a similar function in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) but that doesn’t seem to be actively maintained. ORE would be great for anybody looking for work from a specific country, or just in general to see some different journals. It would be especially good for DipTESOL and Delta candidates, too ..read more
Visit website

Follow Freelance Teacher Self Development on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR