Weeknotes #3
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
Last of the 6 day weeks, so I’m actually not finished this week until tomorrow, but a lot has happened so it feels like a good point to stop and breathe for a minute.  ____________________________________________ Last Week: The hurricane still blows! We started a full-time teacher training course on Monday with 12 participants. This is the biggest cohort we’ve ever had, so we’re really creaking resource-wise. There’s a lot of pressure on all of us to row in and take on some extra inputs, extra observations, extra question-answering and extra-everything so it’s a really big ask for everyon ..read more
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Weeknotes #2
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
I used to love bank holidays but since I got really busy, it just means I have to squeeze 5 days work into 4 so they’re not super-beneficial anymore. I did enjoy my weekend, but as I’ve been working 6 day weeks recently it just meant I had a real weekend rather than an extended one.  ______________________________________ Last Week: Ran into a bit of a hurricane on Tuesday – there were one or two of my team struggling under pressure with things to do so I took on a couple of jobs I wouldn’t normally do. It was interesting to do them, and I certainly have a good understanding of how time-c ..read more
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Weeknotes #1
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
I’m going to try to set aside a bit of time each Friday to reflect on what I’ve done and what’s coming up over the next while. Hoping they’ll build up into a nice overview of what my day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month looks and feels like and how it changes over time.  _________________________________ Last week: I’ve started to build a nice Monday morning routine, I’ve got some reports I run off the system and send out, some logging of work that comes in, and a quick check on the numbers for the week. That sets me up for the week and blocks off my Monday morning for me – it’s that ..read more
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Disengage
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
There’s a lot going on in ELT these days. Particularly if you inhabit the corner of ELT-internet where I’ve been known to hang out. People have been bashing each other’s opinions, theories, haircuts, methodologies, whatever – and that’s fine. Let them at it I say, just keep doing your own thing – get what you get from your PLN and filter the noise. That’s becoming more difficult. We lost a couple of people this week who have switched off Twitter or gone dark for a while because the noise has become unbearable. And the noise seems to be mostly about “X said this, but didn’t respond to my point ..read more
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Problem Solving 2 – Solutions
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
As promised, here are the problems from the last post but this time with added suggestions of solutions. It was really encouraging at our meeting the other day to see how much our staff seem to be on the same page – we split into groups to discuss the problems and when we came together at the end there were more similarities than differences in the approaches. Most people said they had experienced or done at least one or two of the things on the list – I know I’ve probably done them all at some stage. Let me know if you agree or disagree with the suggestions/explanations. Like most t ..read more
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Problem Solving – Problems
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
We were originally scheduled to have a talk from one of our teachers on Classroom Management this week, but they’ve cancelled at the last minute which left me in a bit of a bind. I don’t have time to do up another talk, but I don’t want to miss out a date on our CPD calendar. Instead, I’ve come up with a list of potential problems and have posed questions after them – I’ve sent this on to teachers and on Thursday we’ll sit down for 30-40 minutes and talk about them. I’m hopeful that this will be a good way to discuss classroom management and that it will spark some interesting conversations an ..read more
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Under observation
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
Phew.. it’s been a rollercoaster couple of weeks/months since I came back to Dublin. I’ve taken on a new job – the transition to admin has become permanent, so I’ve been doing lots of interesting jobs over the past while that I’ve never done before. The first one I’d like to talk about is organising observations. In the first week that I was back I went to the fortnightly staff meeting to try and catch up on what I’d missed. The hot topic that week was observations – apparently a regime of ‘pop-in’ observations had been implemented and teachers felt in fear of their lives that someone might co ..read more
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Semi-intelligent Design
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
I’ve just emerged from the pit of hell called DELTA Module 2 (more on that another time..) and I’m back in work about two weeks. Surprisingly, my DOS didn’t throw me straight back to the lions, instead calling on me to redesign our syllabus for levels A2 – C1.. In three weeks.. Alone.. Welcome Home!! I suppose the first thing to talk about is what the old syllabus was like. We’re a big-ish school (~5-600 students) in Dublin that works with a lot of gap-year students from Latin America and Asia, and as such we need to have accreditation. The accreditaiton body dictates that these cour ..read more
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EL-FREE
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
How much free work do you do as a teacher every week? Every month? Every year? It has become very clear to me over my 6 years in the industry that there are a number of things that directors, owners, students and even other teachers expect us to do without payment. For this post, I thought about listing some of the things that I have to do for free and stating the case for why they should be paid. This is completely based on my own experiences in Dublin and is not representative of a consensus view. It’s merely the start of a conversation, no more, no less. 1. Lesson Planning. This is the firs ..read more
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DELTA Force
ltelt
by Liam
3y ago
At the start of 2014 I was at a bit of a crossroads in ELT. I was cross, and I was thinking about hitting the road. I had a chat with my DOS at the time and he told me I should be all in or all out. I went away and thought about it for a while and I came to the conclusion that if ELT was going to be my ‘real job’ I should really make sure I’ve got the right qualifications. I already had a CELTA, as you need one of those to work in (most) schools in Dublin and I wasn’t quite ready for a full-time M.A. in TESOL, so I went for DELTA. Do you think I need a gun to pass Module 1? The good new ..read more
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