CLOSING PLENARY OF THE NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER SOL HOP ON HOP OFF ONLINE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT COURSE

Описание: A Closing Plenary with a difference, a plenary that I would have done face2face if we had been in Devon, Serbia or Slovakia. BUT actually , I think it is much more powerful on Zoom. There are multiple voices in it, it's got learner contributions in it, it reflects the philosophy and the approach of the course much better as it is not as focussed so exclusively on the facilitator or the plenary speaker and a set of slides. It is also a lesson on Scotland ,with ideas for using in class on Monday morning, TODAY, on St Andrew's day which can be enjoyed in the comfort of your own room, asynchronously. You can pause it, when you need to, get up to eat, to go to the toilet, to look after your children, to cook, to go shopping or whatever else you need to do. The whole thing exemplifies the strong form of a communicative language classroom, as envisaged by Mike Breen and Chris Candlin in their 1980 Applied Linguistics article " The Essentials of a Communicative Classroom" with me and An in the role of teachers and everybody else as learners. It was a kind of radio chat with you in a very intimate setting, in a zoom room, far more intimate than in a big plenary hall, and with you I could look into your eyes in a way that is more difficult even in a small room with a small group as you have to be moving your head all the time to have eye contact with the people who want to have eye contact with you. It was what John Peel , the BBC radio DJ from Liverpool, understood that successful radio broadcasters are audience-centered in their discourse and in their mode of speech. The language broadcasters use, the tone of their voice and the inflections they employ are all perceived by the listener as being indicative of the authenticity of the broadcaster’s persona. It is the same with a teacher trainer facilitating an online course on Zoom and also what a good plenary talk can be like on Zoom. In the talk, I tried to include moments on the course, to jog course participants memories ,a bit like when I did a closing plenary at the Croatian conference in 2014 when, during the conference, I filmed about 10 teachers talking about what had inspired them during the conference. In this film that you will see references to Ilona, Ken, Rakesh, Jeremy, Fiona, Margit, An, Judith and Scott Thornbury. There are also contributions from Iryna, Catherine, Anna, An, Anna Maria and a brilliant contribution from Maya talking about her father in the Yugoslav army in Kotor where the picture of the ship , the Dubrovnik, was which was built in the Glasgow shipyard was taken.It was a fantastic example of a learner contribution in a communicative classroom and what an audience-centred presenter in a Zoom room can create the atmosphere for . It was also a lesson on St Andrews day with ideas for the class that people could do today with their students and doing British Cultural Studies in a comparative, critical,contemporary way. And I'm looking forward to getting some feedback now on that lesson from "the students" who participated in it and YOU! Now, there are so many opportunities for self -observation and peer observation on Zoom and COVID 19 has opened up some truly transformational things to happen in both teacher training and ELT. At 22 minutes into the film I talked about Scott Thornbury and at other moments I talked about teaching English with bus tickets, food labels and wine labels. Real unplugged stuff! What you see on the film is a great "text "as an example of doing teacher training online and replicating the atmosphere of a "dogme" class, which I think is basically the strong form of communicative language teaching which many publishers, maybe not deliberately, kind of hijacked by packaging more communicative content in ways which tied teachers to there coursebooks. Earl Stevick famously said "“success depends less on materials, techniques, and linguistic analysis, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom." Ken Wilson mentioned this in his session on Tuesday November 4th. Scott Thornbury wrote about this in his A-Z blog.

In he plenary, I tried to capture the essence of our SOL course and hope that it will inspire both the teachers who have been on our course and other teachers, who watch this unconventional COVID closing plenary, to think of all the exciting opportunities that Zoom creates affordances for and the importance of "Preserving the best of this COVID Test" that we have had to respond to, whether we have liked it or not. Our task now, as teacher trainers, is to help teachers to gain confidence in adapting to this new, challenging situation and to never go back to what it was like before. We are in the middle of a 1945 or a 1989 moment and we need space for reflection with our colleagues and our students on what we have learnt from this experience. To save the planet we need to do things differently.