Doing Writing In Class

Anyone who has heard me speaking about Skills or read any of my lesson plans on Writing will be fully aware of the fact that I am a big advocator of doing writing in class and not at home.

I often get asked why I think this, especially since setting writing to do at home is:

1. Logical – it seems the most obvious way not to waste precious class time
2. Common – just about every course, teacher and school sets writing tasks as homework

While the logic behind this approach seems sound, it overlooks a very salient feature of writing – namely that is a skill. You would not expect your learners to develop their other skills solely at home, so why would you do expect this with writing?

In this talk, I explain my take on writing and I also try to explain why writing has ended up being the dreaded homework task that it has become.

Any thoughts, ideas or comments would be welcome – get in touch below or send me an e-mail.

An Introduction to Module 2

Developing Professional Practice

Module 2 is the part of the Delta which employers are often most concerned with, as it focuses exclusively on developing teaching practice in the classroom. The Delta overall contributes to making teachers much better educators, but it could be said that most of this development stems from the work done in Module 2.

Module 2 resembles the old Delta format in many ways. For example:

General Introduction to the Cambridge Delta

The Cambridge Delta has a long history – so long that at one point it wasn’t even a Cambridge exam but the Advanced Diploma of the Royal Society of the Arts! Its existence preceeds the CELTA, which is often seen as its predecessor, yet you don’t need to have the CELTA to do the Delta, though it often helps. What is more, the two courses have very little in common in terms of assessment and training. For example:

It’s All About the “Good-Day”

During an input session on classroom management, my Delta tutor shared some wise words with us: “the teacher should be neutral, emotionless, and independent of external factors.”

He was talking about the idea that a teacher’s emotions shouldn’t have any effect on the lesson and the atmosphere of the classroom. Simply put: whether the teacher is having a good day or a bad day should have diddly squat to do with how the lesson goes.

Luckily, when the tutor said this, he was having a good day.

The Post Method Era

Have you ever checked out the YouTube channel for the New School? If you’re remotely interested in your Continued Professional Development in the ELT industry, you should check it out. Not only is it the school where Scott Thornbury teaches, it is a leading institute on English language teaching, bringing in speakers from across the globe for talks and presentations. Amazingly, these talks are recorded and uploaded to the channel for absolutely free!

A friend of mine recently – Jye Smallwood – recently posted to a DELTA/ELT Facebook he set up a link to a New School talk on methods and methodology by Diane Larsen-Freeman. You can watch the talk here – it is basically the subject of this post: