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    The Lazy Teacher Trainer's Handbook
    The Lazy Teacher Trainer's Handbook
    The Lazy Teacher Trainer's Handbook
    Ebook135 pages2 hours

    The Lazy Teacher Trainer's Handbook

    By Magnus Coney

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    About this ebook

    No time to prepare a session for your teachers, and no inclination to use someone else’s microscopically detailed session plan? The Lazy Teacher Trainer’s Handbook contains dozens of ideas for professional development sessions that require hardly any planning or preparation, and leave space for you and your teachers to contribute your own ideas. In true teaching unplugged style, each is designed to encourage productive discussions of your teachers’ needs as they emerge.
    The activities are divided by area (for example Reflection, Lesson Planning), and each one includes a description of who or what it is useful for, any preparation required, a step by step description of the activity and suggested variations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMagnus Coney
    Release dateJan 12, 2018
    ISBN9781370288847
    The Lazy Teacher Trainer's Handbook

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    • 4/5
      A Practical guide for CPD involving teachers that know what teaching and learning is.

    Book preview

    The Lazy Teacher Trainer's Handbook - Magnus Coney

    Before the session

    -Make a poster. Nobody will come if they don’t know when and where the session is.

    -In the highly likely event that the poster isn’t enough, provide cake as well. People will always come for cake.

    -Tell everyone you see that you’re looking forward to seeing them at your session. A little guilt trip never hurt anyone.

    -Set the tables and chairs out so people can work together rather than listen to a lecture.

    During the session

    -Remember your primary role is facilitator, and the primary theory of learning being adopted here is constructivist, meaning that we learn by constructing knowledge from our experiences. Nobody at the session is an empty vessel to be filled. For a somewhat tortured analogy, consider them instead as the individual components of an exotic cocktail, and you are merely the shaker.

    -Being a facilitator doesn’t mean catching up with the news or social media while the students get on with a task. Move around the room, monitor what’s happening, and provide input. This individualised feedback is valuable, and generally much more memorable than prepared presentations.

    -Encourage contributions from everyone. The classic teaching skill of questioning, with random nomination and thinking time provided, is useful in this context as well.

    The end of the session and beyond

    -Extend the impact of the session. In the same way that a perfect lesson never revisited can be forgotten, one idea tried once in one session may be lost forever. Find ways to follow up with participants to see what they are trying and how it’s working.

    -Use the last five minutes of the session as a stage for participants to reflect on what has been covered and to make plans for how to apply it. Techniques include trainees telling their partner one thing they will try next week, listing the two most surprising things they learned, preparing a one/minute summary for an absent colleague, or imagining that everything in the session was wrong and imagining how they would argue this.

    -Get feedback from participants on your sessions. Much like other experiences in life, it might hurt for a bit, but it’ll be much better for you in the long run.

    How to use this book

    This book is divided into five chapters:

    1. Sharing and collaboration

    2. Feedback and reflection

    3. Lessons and planning

    4. Materials and resources

    5. Planning and reflecting on CPD

    For each activity there is a section on preparation and target audience. Step-by-step instructions are then given, followed by possible variations, where relevant.

    Below is a short description of each chapter along with a summary of the activities contained in them.

    1.Sharing and collaboration

    This chapter suggests activities in which the main objective is for participants to share ideas in order to reach conclusions or develop new practices.

    -The wisdom of crowds- Participants share questions they have about aspects of teaching and gather a variety of responses.

    -Learning to drive and driving- Participants consider the practices that they gradually stop doing as they become more experienced teachers.

    -The ultimate 121 student- Ways to make individual courses more valuable for the student.

    -Room 101- Participants share ideas for teaching practices that they would like to see consigned to the scrapheap.

    -Language tidbits- A session that focuses on teacher language awareness rather than methodology.

    -Challenging conversations- Participants role-play challenging conversations they have had in order to be better prepared.

    -Embracing failure- Participants share experiences of difficult lessons in order to learn from them.

    -Embracing success- Participants share their recent successes in the classroom.

    -Agony aunts- An opportunity to ask for and give anonymous feedback on aspects of teaching.

    -Case studies- Participants imagine difficult or unusual situations and reflect on how to deal with them.

    -Devil’s advocate- A discussion of the principles behind commonly accepted teaching practices.

    -Devil’s advocate 2- Reconsidering the value of more traditional, old-fashioned teaching practices.

    -Twenty questions- Participants ask questions to gather information before giving advice.

    -The best thing you did last week- A short activity that celebrates golden moments in lessons.

    2. Feedback and reflection

    This section contains activities that encourage participants to reflect on different aspects of teaching and their own experiences, and to give each other feedback on them.

    -Student feedback- Participants develop a questionnaire for their students to focus on a specific area of their teaching.

    -The feedback mirror- A role-play where participants play each other talking about their lessons.

    -Peer observations (in spirit)- ‘Observe’ your partner’s lesson without being there.

    -Self observations- Careful self-reflection on a recent lesson.

    -Practise what you preach- A way for participants to see whether the way they teach really reflects their beliefs about teaching.

    -What is good teaching?- A way to show participants that we generally agree on the principles of good teaching.

    -Free writing- Participants have free rein to imagine what they would like their lessons to look like.

    -The ideal lesson- Participants replan a lesson they have already taught as a means of reflection.

    -Creatures of habit- Participants identify their personal teaching habits and decide whether they should be kept or discarded.

    3. Lessons and planning

    This section is for activities in which the main objective is to plan a lesson or part of it. This is a useful area for participants who may see training sessions as something that eats into their planning time.

    -Plan my lesson for me- Participants work in small groups to plan each other’s lessons without input from the person teaching it.

    -A crowdsourced lesson- Participants share input in order to plan complete lessons for each other.

    -Ask the experts- Participants share advice on their areas of teaching expertise in order to help less experienced colleagues plan their lessons.

    -Lesson planning races- Participants look at ways to increase their lesson planning speed.

    -Snapshots- Turn a flash of inspiration into a complete lesson plan.

    -Speaking tasks with a difference- Planning a speaking lesson with a more unusual context.

    -Mirror images- Inspired by John Fanselow: if teachers aren’t sure what to change, try changing everything and see what happens.

    -Topical teaching- Participants consider how to exploit current events or local issues to plan relevant lessons.

    -The pre-mortem- A session on how teachers can reflect on a lesson before they’ve taught it in order to identify possible problems.

    -Checklists- Participants develop a checklist to help them plan their lessons more efficiently.

    -How do you review?- Participants plan an evidence-based review activity for a lesson.

    -The Pareto principle- A way for participants to identify one aspect of their teaching to focus on in upcoming lessons.

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