IATEFL 2012 - Virgin In A Wilderness of Teachers, Writers, Speakers

"So, it's (nearly) April and the things you say don't 
seem as certain as on Hogmanay".  So sang Glasgow band, Deacon Blue on one of their lesser known tracks, Twist & Shout, in 1991.   I've added a new blogroll to this two year old blog, which I have titled 'Fellow Hoodlums', which is the album from which the song 'Twist & Shout' came.   In addition, the title track has been going around my head all week as I walk through the city centre, with its mentions of the Clyde, St Enochs, Buchanan Street etc.  I consider it appropriate to use this title because I met a load of new bloggers at Glasgow in the past week. Deacon Blue are famously from the city and it kind of refers to the comment made by closing time plenary speaker, Derek Dick (aka Fish), about us being 'rock 'n' roll teachers', not the kind of teachers he used to dislike as a kid.  This twist of opinion towards (presumably school) teachers came when his teacher, 'Jimi' Hendrix called a Genesis album, 'rubbish'.  I'll try not to say it made him shout, but oooh, i just did!  It was interesting to hear him describe writing 'Kayleigh', his most famous lyric, and getting that 'BAM!' feeling - like a hand grenade to the heart - both in the plenary and in the pre-conference interview.

Fish was an inspired choice by iatefl president, Eric Barber, to close the conference.  Not everyone in the room would have heard of him but I, for one, remember purchasing 'Misplaced Childhood' by Marillion in the 80s and going back to 'Script For A Jester's Tear'  after that.  I subsequently bought 'Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors', Fish's debut album on cassette, soon after it came out, in 1990.  Fish sang 3 songs from this album - A State of Mind, Family Business and The Company. The latter, a self-described drinking song ended with getting the whole auditorium to dance like 'fairyland creatures'. OK, I cannot claim to be his biggest fan, far from it.  Plenty of my friends are bigger fans... but when Fish mentioned meeting Peter Gabriel, my favourite artist of all time, he made a reference to being disappointed to meeting Gabriel when he was young.  I had no such disappointment today, and you can see the photo below on this post.  Fish's closing plenary can be seen in full here.  The sound quality is not great on some of the songs, especially 'A State Of Mind'.  I have uploaded this song myself, along with closing song, 'The Company'. You can just about see me recording at around 56.55 into the BCGO video, around the 'russian choir/ballet dancers' bit and again around 57.36. Please check out the end of this post for my recording. ->

< Fish on stage at iatefl >

On the final day of the conference I made up slightly for a self-imposed half-day on the penulatimate day.  At least I managed to catch the plenary session this time, Professor James E. Zull.  Thanks to the brilliantly free, accessible and frequently updated British Council Glasgow Online site, however, I watched it from my hotel over an extended breakfast, whilst blogging my thoughts on the previous couple of days.  Fortunately Mr Dull's (excuse me, I apologise) Mr Zull's slow-paced delivery gave me many pregnant pauses with which to write stuff.  The Professor of Biology and Founding Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) gave the penultimate plenary session.  It was actually rather good, a biological explanation via the brain for language learning.  But it was a direct contrast to Steven Thorne's lightning speed delivery in the previous plenary on Thursday.

Steven Bukin delivers a whole load of iPad ideas for the classroom.

Over in Leven, Steven Bukin demonstrated the many uses of teaching with an iPad.  Technology is great when it works and for the most part it worked for his presentation.  The clearest benefit of a teacher using an iPad to teach is the mobility it gives him or her to wander around the classroom and still control the whiteboard or projector, as Steven showed.   There are also a number of cool apps, synonymous with apple products generally as we know, which he also demonstrated.  Most of these are free or a couple of dollars, as he put it.   However, we must remember, that iPads should only be used if they are going to benefit learning.   It is not simple enough just to use them because you have access to them.  In some well-funded institution, there is the strong possibility of making a sweeping gesture and buying their students iPads to replace laptops - I'm thinking of places in the middle east in  particular.  They will become more and more widespread but we must always remember the use of them that counts.

I begun to watch Paul Louis in Dochart demonstrating the use of moodle to support English for Academic Purposes projects.  It seemed very well researched and well presented, but I left to join the lively discussion going on in Alsh.  Here, Silvana Richardson was presenting four sacred cows.  Nothing stirs language teachers more than trying to put tried and tested beliefs to the sword.  Here, she laid out her sacred cows as shown in the photo below.   Amongst many other opinions, I particular remember the statistic about 95-98% of students cannot 'infer meaning from context'.  She expressed this as borderline impossible unless the students are higher-intermediate or above.  This is startling, if indeed true, as the idea of building up knowledge and meaning of unknown words using the surrounding words is quite an established thing to do from an elementary level upwards.  As Silvana said, if you want Spanish students to know the meaning of the world 'table' you can ask them to look up the word in a translation dictionary 'messi' or you can give them an English dictionary with its description of  'A flat horizontal slab or board, usually supported by one or more legs, on which objects may be placed...' etc etc.

4 Sacred Cows from Silvana Richardson (Bell)

After Silvana it was a quick pop to the room next door to see my Celta trainer from three years ago, Carole 'Anne' Robinson.  This was about 'personalisation', getting more out of our students' with a number of simple methods.  Carole seems to like the Dogme approach and that 'emergent language' can come from the student.  She also recognises coursebook limitations and how the two might be reconciled.

What's the meaning of this, asks Carole 'Anne' Robinson?

The end of a fabulous, inspiring week for everyone!

Final thoughts. This has been one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life, something I tweeted as I came back on the train from Glasgow.  I've been in great 'company'.  Not just at the conference.  Everyone I have met in Glasgow has been very friendly - even the homeless and the drunks.  And no, I didn't receive aye fond 'Glasgow Kiss' at any point.    A Glasgow taxi driver even dropped me off the Holiday Inn and 30 minutes later returned having been across the city and back.  I had dropped my Unibus Pass - worth over £100 to me - he didn't accept my offer of a reward but I was incredibly grateful.         WHAT.AN.AMAZING.WEEK !

With Derek 'Fish' Dick

Here are 2 songs, 'A State of Mind' and 'The Company', by Fish, which I recorded with my own camera.

IATEFL 2012 - Thursday - Twitter Symposium

After 3 hectic days, I felt I needed a lie in.  So I took one at the expense of missing Steven L Thorne rattle off on Awareness, appropriacy and living language use at a cracking pace.  When I did surface I went into Glasgow city centre rather than the SECC.  I bought a new shirt as I was running out of clean ones.  My head was also a little sore after last night's drinking. I subsequently lost the shir, same day.

Still, I got the SECC around midday and wandered around, again bumping into and chatting with people I had previously met.  I made more of an effort around the exhibition stands, too.  My first session of the day was Tessa Woodward's Thinking in the EFL class in Forth, the other main room in the 'armadillo' (Clyde Auditorium).  Having recently contributed to a Loop Input Micro-Teaching session at Warwick, it was good to see and hear the author of such teacher training ideas, where you demonstrate activities to use with students by first training the teachers in the same method.  There, I finally bumped into Sandy Millin, from International House, somewhere in the vacinity of Newcastle - and not from Guildford after all.

Sandy Millin Tweets at 100 words per minute

She had been tweeting constantly since the start of the week, although she would claim she tweeted long before that.  I think only Shaun Wilden, of ELTchat fame, could give her a run for her money in the tweeting stakes.   It's a good way of taking notes, but the way that I've seen Twitter used this week in terms of developing and maintaining a PLN (professional learning network) has convinced me of it's worth.  I also want an iPad now after the seeing the way that can be used on the go... and especially when I've been unable to access to SECC wi-fi using my laptop.

Talking of Twitter and Shaun Wilden.... the 'Continuous professional development through social networking symposium' (to give it its full title) was a packed session including 6 talks, where people could come and go.    Marisa Constantinides, from CELT Athens, opened up with a run through of #ELTchat, lots of stats and an introduction to hashtags.  Shaun, also from International House, asked the question, in a 'Life of Brian' style, 'What has #hashtagging ever done for us?'.  I must admit that I didn't stay for the rest, I had got the gist and I found that I didn't have the patience, all week, to sit down for over an hour at a time.


I wanted  a break before I met up with Jim Scrivener again and with opening plenary speaker, Adrian Underhill to discuss their concept of 'demand high teaching'.  It is not a paarticularly revelating theory and would probably ruffle some feathers of many language teachers.  The idea that you just can't get away with being in the same room as the learners and expecting them to learn using the communicative language approach.  He explains this more in this interview on glasgow online.

In the evening I went to the Glasgow School of Art to meet two of my former students, Chen YeeYang (Leo) and Zheng Li (Jenny), from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.  It was two years since they graduated and I left the programme, at the end of my 10 month contract there.  We went for a Chinese meal, but not hotpot (that came the next day).  Fellow Warwick MA students, Li Jing (Lindsay) and Hornby Scholar, Getachew Yitbarek, joined us.

IATEFL 2012 - Tuesday - Reflective Practice Blues

Tuesday at the conference.  It has been really difficult to get online with my laptop.  I thought that the SECC (Scottish Exhibition Conference Centre) signal was just overloaded with requests, but then I realised that my laptop was having a problem.  Fortunately I managed to get online briefly at the Etap hotel, where I am staying, and the much more luxurious Crowne Plaza, adjoined to the SECC, where I was been able to log on for free for 30 minutes .

Tuesday was a semi-structured trip around the conference. I started by watching  opening speaker Adrian Underhill's brilliant session (CLICK HERE OR SCROLL DOWN FOR FULL PLENARY SESSION), on 'difficulties and mess', bookended by the two 'songs'.  'Difficulties' are problems which are essentially solvable while messes are more complex, ambiguous and uncertain (see slide on right). They are subsequently harder to resolve.  He interconnected three areas: systems thinking, post-historic leadership and learning at the organistion and individual level.  He noted at the beginning that the conference was going from 'Sting to Fish with us inbetween', so it was appropriate that he bookended his speech with two 'songs' - one was a poem by Portia Nelson - Autobiography in 5 short chapters and the other was the brilliant 'Reflective Practice Blues' (see below). This was an amusing and timely contribution to my current thinking considering my upcoming essay on that very topic.
 

I stayed in the Clyde Auditorium, a.k.a. The Armadillo, for the chronically undersupported Hornby Scholars presentation, faciltated by Martin Wedell (Leeds University).  It was a shame that the venue 's size made it seem like no-one was interested to hear the experiences of ELT work in very different contexts across the globe.  My fellow Warwick MA students, Mala Palani Palanichamy (India - see video below), Yohana Gratiana (Indonesia) and Getachew Melaku Yitbarek (Ethiopia) all spoke very eloquently and I recorded the whole presentation.  Scott Thornbury attended the session, however, and here is Scott being interviewed in the SECC, by Seth Dickens, in which he says the best thing he had seen to that point was the Hornby Scholar presentation:

 

Mala speaks!

Here is Mala Palani Palanichamy, the first of the Hornby Scholars to speak in the Clyde Auditorium.  In the presentation she makes reference to 'servant leadership', comparing this with something that Adrian Underhill talked about in his plenary session:

Getachew Speaks!

Getachew and Awgichew Arega Adebe, also from Ethiopia also presented. Click below for this video:

 
They were later interviewed by Andi White for the British Council Online Sessions. Link below:
Interview with Hornby scholars: Awgichew Arega and Getachew Melaku Yitbarek (Ethiopia) | Glasgow Online 

After leaving 'The Armadillo', I grabbed a coffee in the exhibition hall, now fully set up with publishers and employers.  I ventured into the Jobs Market stall to see what was on offer and made some notes about potential employers, such as Zayed University, with a view to return with my CV.   

I bumped into some familiar faces at NILE and, directly opposite, Bell International.  At the former a promotional video for a new building purchase in Upper St Giles, Norwich, was being shown.  I met up with Maria Heron and Carole Robinson, who was one of my Celta trainers.   At the latter, Sarah Blackburn was busy dishing out sweets as an incentive to sign up for young learner summer placement of closed courses in the winter.   I also met Chris Warren of online teaching resource company Teachitworld and brother of my Warwick tutor, Tilly Harrison.

Over in Lomond, I went to see Jim Scrivener, milking sympathy for an arm injury which didn't seem to affect his performance much.  He gave a very coherent argument for active intervention and 'demand-high teaching' - a concept he is working on with Adrian Underhill. Jim feels that teachers have misunderstood or lost their way with the humanistic message which he explains in the British Council Glasgow Online interview with Nik Peachey and Kirsteen Donaghy.  He went over some techniques, such as being a 'devil's advocate' in the class, a technique I, for one, already employ.  I agreed a lot with what he had to say and promised myself to get to his post-session chat in the Crowne Plaza hotel with Adrian Underhill about the topic - which I did on Thursday evening albeit for 20 minutes only.  As a very experienced writer and observer of the ELT classroom teacher, he has unquestionable knowledge.  I would later catch up with him in person for a follow-up and to declare an interest - he works with Bell - I have seen him at Bedgebury, Kent.  Nik Peachey also works for Bell on a freelance trainer basis. Nik was employed predominantly to be an interviewer on the fabulous British Council Glasgow Online website. 

Jim Scrivener on 'Demand High Teaching'

I was already riding high on the rush of meeting some famous names - authors whose books I read and been inspired  by in the last few years - and feeling very stimulated at this conference.  This feeling continued when I met another NILE employee, Jamie Keddie, of Lessonstream.org,  for the first time.  I ended up filming his session on the story of Debbie and Cara, using his video camera.  


I spent the evening at the Hunterian Museum, the oldest public museum in Scotland, courtesy of Collins publishing.  Although a full page advert at the back of the conference had advertised a 'shindig' it was more of a gathering.  Still, can't knock free wine or 14 year old boys playing with their pipes.  There I met up with Maria Heron and Carole Robinson from NILE, where I completed my Celta qualification three years ago this week.

with Maria Heron and Carole 'Anne' Robinson



  ADRIAN UNDERHILL'S PLENARY  SESSION IN FULL*
(*MINUS THE LAST SONG WHICH WAS CUT):