Encouraging Authentic Communication on an Online Teacher Training Course at SOL. HOP ON HOP OFF

Описание: One of the features of the online "November to Remember" HOP ON HOP OFF teacher training course at SOL is leaving the session room open one hour before the first session begins. Course participants know that they can drop in at any time before the session starts to talk to whoever happens to be there.

It replicates the face2face world at teacher development sessions, where people might be sitting in the room where the talk/workshop is going to take place or on chairs outside the room or even in a cafe close to where the session will take place.

This is a recording of what happened on Wednesday November 25th. Creating a safe and welcoming space for authentic communication to take place is part of the role of a facilitator or teacher of a communicative classroom and this is how it is done on the SOL HOP ON HOP OFF NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER online teacher training course.

Allowing learner contributions and space for spontaneity is also a feature of a communicative language classroom where a teacher also has the right, in their classroom, to change their mind and do something different from what they planned as is the case in this little film.

COVID-19 has changed the world in 2020 and it has also changed the ELT world and in the words of Gavin Dudeney "We will need time now to reflect rather than a headlong reverse movement to what came before COVID"

We need now to hold teacher development sessions in our schools, in our teacher associations and at conferences around the topic of "Preserving the Best of the COVID test",

We can't and shouldn't go back to what the world was like before this pandemic and we at SOL (Sharing One Language) are exploring new possibilites of supporting teachers and learners of English ONLINE.

This HOP ON HOP OFF course allows freedom for participants to join the online space as and when they can and as and when they feel like it, recognising the difficulties and challenges that have been thrown up by COVID-19. In the spirit of Carl Rogers NOTHING is compulsory.

This 30 minute film captures the atmosphere of a communicative classroom online where participants enjoy coming together, usually in the evenings, but at the weekends in the mornings, to share stories, find a bit of human warmth in a colder and darkening November and to explore how to become better teachers.

It brings together SOL teachers in Devon with teachers in England in Chester, Liverpool and London, an ELT publisher in Scotland, SOL co-ordinators in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Ukraine and teachers from Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Belgium, Russia and the United States of America.

My co-trainer in Chester coined a new word/acronym yesterday, IKIMO, "I know I missed out" to go together with FOMO, "Fear of missing out."

The word IKIMO is testimony to how, on this course, opening the Zoom room before the session begins, a friendly and thought provoking daily email, not the Daily Mail, from one of the course leaders including the new Zoom password , a course cafe in the form of a facebook group in this case, camp fire singalongs where course participants are encouraged to bring their own songs and stories and pictures from their countries, quizzes and yoga create the conditions for communication in English and teacher development to happen both synchronously and asynchronously.

When i arrived in Hungary in September 1996, to take up a job with the British Council as British Studies Methodology Adviser, I went to the Ministry of Education in Budapest to get a copy of the National Curriculum for modern languages.One of the 7 aims of teaching languages was to help people make friends with people from other cultures and countries.

Because if we all make friends with people from other countries and other cultures with all the technology which we have now, pioneered by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in Geneva Switzerland, then we are less likely to go to war with them.

That was the aim of the man that set up my Eastern European Studies degree at Bradford University and that should be the aim of all of us, and particularly us as language teachers.

Teaching with linguistic, cultural, pedagogical and peaceful aims.

This is also the aim of this NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER HOP ON HOP OFF teacher development LOCKDOWN LEARNING ELT course.

And thanks to each and every one of you for all your contributions over the last 25 days to making this online space something that Tim Berners-Lee would be very happy about.

Happy Halloween! but remember the Wampanoag people who are often left out of the telling of this story and happy celebration.

"Be nice to your turkeys this Christmas, cos turkeys just wanna have fun." Benjamin Zephaniah