I haven’t been able to update the blog as much as I would have liked recently because I’ve been doing a couple of things behind the scenes.
I’ve been giving workshops on giving feedback to students and clients here in Berlin with a particular aim of focusing on making the positives more objective and clearer. This proved to be very fruitful for all involved and I was glad to see that the participants got a lot out of it. I also came away with a lot of food for thought, for instance, when reformulating students’ utterances, am I giving them sentences and words that they would actually say in their context? Am I speaking in their voice or my own? Building rapport and understanding my students’ situations and world has a newfound importance for me. It also got me thinking about how I can get the students to utilise the emergent ideas and language more, and how to stretch that further. This is quite exciting for me, and I hope to research these paths over the next few months.
I also wrote an article on my reflection on giving feedback to students over the last year for ELTABB which was great. It gave me an opportunity to stop and think about what I am doing, and hopefully, my work will get other teachers thinking about how they deliver their feedback. You can read about it here.
The other exciting news I can announce is that I am a CELTA Trainer in Training (TinT) and I am currently going through and completing the pre-course material that needs to be done before you can shadow your training supervisor on a course. I get started in January next year. I consider this a great step in my career and have always had the ambition to take this step ever since I decided to do the Delta. Working with new and experienced teachers, giving back a little bit to the ELT community, and diving back into my books again will be pretty exciting for me. I am in a very fortunate position as I have heard that Cambridge is not giving out these opportunities as of late, so I will make sure to work damn hard to prove my worth.
I will be documenting my progress and journey for those who are interested in moving into this role in the future, as I know it can be hard to find information on these experiences online.
If any of you have any useful articles or materials to help me on my journey, do let me know in the comments.
Best
P.J.
P.J. Ryan 