2003 Teacher Retreats

Participants' Comments on June 2003 Retreat

At the end of this Retreat, we asked everyone to write three general and three specific comments about the day.

1. Well-organized-----poster session very useful
2. Good general discussion
3. Will be interesting to discuss specifics of entry /exit in autumn.

1. Matthew's speaking /discussion text has useful section on types of opinion for Eng. D
2. Peer evaluation sheets good idea
3. That's it.

I thought the retreat was very productive in respect to teaching methology as well as administrative concerns. I also thought I was good to see the whole Chuo clan, working together, talking time to develop our programs...together. We seen to be on the same page through different methods - top-down, bottom-up.

If offered the retreat in Izu or Nagano , I'd go overnight to either.

General
• The food was good and plentiful. More salads please next time.
• The discussions were useful. As such I would have liked to have attended the discussion group for my other class as well.

Specific
• How to teach students to make, use and analyze surveys.
• Using "How to….." as a topic for a basic presentation.
• Resources for "warm-up" activities.

General comments:
• Good
• Fun
• Stimulating
• Well organized
• Social component extremely useful.

Specific comments:
• Clearer idea of English progression /development through the faculty timetable.
• Still a need for clarification, specification of goals /objectives of courses.
• I need to re-evaluate extent of feedback tostudents & exit level so they coordinate better with Matthew's presentation.

1. Please speed up the sessions, I think we could have covered much more in the time.
2. Relaxed atmosphere / chance to meet so many other teachers - very good! Very helpful. Good to see people who are teaching the same students.

• Peer-revising through color coding
• More realistic topics for student presentation /discussion in Integrated Skills classes. i.e. less ambitious topics. Hearing what a wide variety of people are doing gives me much more confidence about what I'm doing in classes.
• Matthew's way of getting more specific examples - useful for writing classes too.

General
1. Good to get together and talk about teaching, about what each other is doing, about "common"problems, and possible solutions
2. Good to break up into groups for specific interests
3. Good to learn about how the English courses are organized and plans for the future concerning English

Specific
1.Learned about J-corner - while the class is conducted in English. Ss are supposed to maintain English in discussion. These Ss sometimes lose their concentration. A J-corner is a place where Ss can go to "exchange" needed information in Japanese about their discussion topic. So the group can maintain its English integrity.
2. Give feed-back for Ss about their progress and development
3. The pizza was delicious but with some cold beer it would have been more delicious!!!

Thanks.

General things about the retreat
1. Components well planned; posters displays interesting, gave useful information, group discussions also useful in having the opportunity to hear different perspectives.
2. Ideally I'd prefer it to be held Saturday-Sunday, but….
3. Copies of materials requested before the retreat didn't materialise. It would have been good to get these for a more concrete record.

After I wrote part 3, Mike announced that this will in fact be done.

General
1 It's good to meet the teachers who are teaching on different days, if only to get an idea of what they are like, and to see the kind of teachers our students come into contact with.
2 The schedule is a bit tough: this retreat is extremely beneficial, but also exhausting.
3 Learnng about other teacher's methods has given me confidence in the sense that it made me realize that we do share common goals & teaching methods.

Specific
1 Classroom management - how to handle latecomers, keitai in the classroom.
2 Using literary texts in reading comprehension exercises.

General
• Great combination of professional and personal, focus on teaching and having fun.
• Kept good focus in groups and as a whole people didn't have trouble "getting down to business"
• Would be nice to have more people overnight.

Specific
• Got a good, much clearer sense of what others are doing in classes and found there is much overlap.
• Found teachers want specific objectives, goals, guidelines for guidance, so long as "suggested" not required.
• People are eager and ready to help us "flesh out" guidelines and will be very helpful in the process so this should be main objective of the fall retreat.

General comments
1 Great way to meet other teachers
2 Lots of ideas shared - helpful
3 Good support system between P/T teachers and " full-time" staff
4 Beautiful and relaxing surrounding.

Specifics
1 Good ideas how to teach large lower level class. Will be helpful for next semester.
2 Learned about student-student evaluation system -will use in my class.
3 Glad the points were raised & discussed about looking at the mixed level class issue - and also new grading system idea good.

As for the general idea behind the retreat, Chuo is doing exactly the right thing by fostering a dialogue with teachers. This is far too often overlooked at other institutions. The poster idea is interesting , and it is somewhat useful, but I think treat we could cut the time for looking at the posters by 20 minutes or so. This year the last 20 minutes or so were spent just gossiping by many teachers (myself included). The session just after the poster session was least useful as it had such a "general" focus. Our group had some interesting discussion, but it could have been so much better in a slightly larger group with a more specific focus! The best session of the day was the final group when we split into groups to discuss specific courses / skills: basic discussion; writing; content courses. There was a good deal of information shared, and it was interesting to hear other teachers' perspectives on these issues! As far as something that I can use in my teaching, I may try a "language learning history" at some point with my students.

Things about the retreat
1 I'm on a diet. Pizza - no thanks!
2 More choice for the groups after lunch. We only had 3 choices but there wasn't any opportunity to talk about anything elseaside from these 3 choices.
3 More time for feedback after the groups have finished their discussions.

Useful things I learned
1 That everyone else is doing similar things in the same coures - continuity through lack of communications! Perhaps not useful, but certainly reassuring!
2 Listening to the different ways in which teachers plan and conduct presentation was good. Also it was interesting to hear how they plan to progress to the next semester.

General comments
• Good opportunity to get to know other teachers I wouldn't otherwise not meet or talk to
• Got a better idea of what other courses are like
• Learned the basic 'structure' of English classes

Specifics
• Got some advice on teaching TWE section of the TOEFL test. (Bottom-up approach, rather than top-down approach, might be better; giving students review sheets, etc.)

<General feedback>
I felt we kept much better track of time this retreat without being slave to the clock. This morning was fantastic and I felt I was learning a lot from the posters and the discussion. The quality of the posters was great because they were specific and covered cycles of activities / tasks over different lessons and courses, so I got a sense of the curriculum developing and us developing together a clearer and deeper sense of the connectons. I stayed out of the small-group discussion before lunch as we had to tidy and discuss the afternoon. That planning in the moment was great, too. The writing group this afternoon? We talked over a lot of things and again I got something. from the discussion. This sense of creating shared directions together and sharing ideas and experiences. Great teacher developmet.

<Specific feedback> Useful ideas for my teaching
1 Colored pens for writing classes.
2 Specific /tangible discussion skills beyond fluency
3 Shadowing as a basic and extremely useful confidence building communication strategy.

Three comments about the retreat
The schedule and format of the retreat worked well, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with a number of people and was able to hear how they organized their discussion classes. Also I was able to exchange some ideas concerning the TOEFL classes, especially with regard to the TWE with other teachers.

The posters were informative and enabled me to see a variety of approaches and lesson sequences, and cycles.

In the afternoon, the need to define exit skills more clearly was mentioned. For example, what is meant by 'having the students gain more confidence' and what are the best ways to achieve this? Clearly more work will need to be done to establish clear learning outcomes.

As it has been said, teaching is an egg box profession. We rarely get opportunities to actually know much about what other teachers doing in their classroom, let alone actually meet teachers who work on other days. Observation of other teacher's classes /non-judgemental peer comments / dialogues? All well and good but basically few people have time to spare for these kind of activites so what can be done to provide a continuous exchange of ideas? As not everyone can attend the retreats, which are only held twice a year there is the need for setting up some kind of continuous forum throughout the year. There is the existing e-mail c.c. list for discussion classes which is a forum for raising comments and questons about the courses and sharing successful activities and approaches. Is it being used? IN addition, besides the A4 versions of the poster presentations at the retreat, how about putting one or two A4 files with clear pockets for any one to put in lesson sequences, cycle etc. in the teachers room? Teachers would be free to browse through them and make copies if they wanted. Comments coukd be added about materials in the file. This could also be done by setting up a web site but it might entail someone having the responsibility to maintain the site.

Specifics things gained and reflected on concerning my own teaching
Through being able to say a variety of approaches to organizing discussion classes, I was able to reflect on my own. During the spring semester, I had the students work through several broad topic areas: health medical issues, consumer issues, environmental issues, travel, foreign culture and crime, law and order. In each case, the first week which was spent working through some background materials, introduced some aspects of the broad topic and also introduced a lot of lexical items. Regarding the need for building background vocabulary, this was especially of the crime/lawand order topic.

Also, I admit that I'm quite prepared to structure the content of the topics along lines that enable the students to consider crucial issues that they might otherwise miss. For example, 'atrocious' though the crimes of serial killers, child abductors and so forth may be, such crimes have virtually no impact on the day to lives of people in this society. However, the iron triangle of stupid greedy corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and the building industry degrades the lives of everyone on a daily basis. In my background reading I featured two edited readings about an Osaka housewife and a baker in Tokyo, both of whom are active in trying to make bureaucrats accountable for their criminal mismanagement of public money. I'd be interested to hear about how much guidance other teachers do in steering students into what we feel are the crucial aspects of topics or providing core vocabulary for topics.

In the broad topics I chose, there is enough in any one of these topic areas for a whole year. Next semester, I shall probably have ECS III and maybe the basic discussion group choose their own topics. Should I have had them choose freely from the beginning of the year? Or is it better to have them do activites to learn about some of the main issues in these topics plus some of the key vocabulary? Should I have individual students or groups present in front of the whole class? These and other approaches need to be evaluated. In addition, one of the most important areas to look at is how to improve the pair / group discussions.