2005 Teachers Retreat - Hayama, June 17th & 18th

Collective Brainstorming of Issues and Formats

I Course-specific
 
Introduction to Communication Skills

• Sharing ideas and approaches

Basic Discussion Skills

• How much choice students do/can have in choosing their own topics to research?
• Ways of helping students develop fluency through discussion?
• What kind of materials teachers find appropriate for student research?
• Ways of helping students start the poster presentation process?
• Ways of organizing the course into different multi-week cycles/modules?
• Helping students practice their presentation skills – how?
• Helping students be more interactive in questioning and discussion?
•  How to train students for the actual physical presentation?
•  How can we get students giving a presentation to involve the students who are listening more actively (e.g., take notes, make questions for a feedback / discussion, evaluate the presenters, etc.)?
• Using video to help students evaluate themselves - who, when and how?

Improving Discussion Skills

• Ways of organizing multi-week research and discussion cycles?
• Ways of integrating the skills?
• Different social, legal, political and international topics that students choose and are interested in?

Advanced Listening & Speaking Courses

• Sharing ideas and approaches

Academic Essay Writing Courses

• Ways to prepare and support students for writing short research papers of 500-800 words in the first year?
• Ways of building on this in the second year?
• Problems that second-year course teachers notice and what this means for feedback to the first year Introduction to Academic Essay Writing course?
• Horizontal links and connections between grammar/translation, academic paragraph writing and essay writing courses?
• How to get students focused on a topic and willing to plumb the depths of it?
• How to train students to paraphrase properly (not just alter a few words)?

English for Business / TOEIC

• Sharing ideas and approaches
• Business communication skills worth focusing on?

English for Study Abroad / TOEFL & English for Legal Study Abroad

• Sharing ideas and approaches
 

II Across Different Courses
 
• Self-study: What are some different ways to move from this teacher-directed work to student-directed self-study (as distinct from homework)? Helping students use logs (reading, listening, watching, writing logs/blogs)? Differences between near-peer modeling and teacher modeling? What kinds of preparation/review work do we feel are helpful/necessary for students to achieve, given the course objectives we are working to?
 
• Self- and peer-assessment: Sharing ideas.
 
• Vocabulary: How to help students learn vocabulary?
 
• Co-ordinated learning: How can we co-ordinate our teaching so that we reinforce and extend what other teachers are doing? How can teachers of follow-on courses best find out what students can do and have learnt to do in their previous course(s)?
 
• Homework: How much is appropriate in terms of time and student/teacher expectations?
 

III Format

Thank you for your insights and feedback. New suggested format: In the morning: starting with some short small-group conversations to get to know to each other, then moving to course-specific pairs / small groups; reporting back, then moving to areas of common concern. In the afternoon: Moving back to (different) course-specific pairs / small groups, reporting back, and going to plenary feedback and wrap-up.

IV Tangible products

According to several participants and a couple of people not attending, tangible products coming from this year’s retreat for everybody to benefit from (along the lines of “5 ideas for a particular course/area of concern / 5 discussion points / 5 activity sequences & example materials” etc.) are a good goal to aim for. A couple of people have also suggested producing mind-maps / visualizations of specific courses to share ideas and approaches about course development over the year.
 

V Attending

There are now 20 teachers attending (7 full-time, 13 part-time) - and no children. Thank you to those of you who volunteered to do child-care. Unfortunately, Mum found she had other obligations that weekend and cannot attend. We will try to continue to look at how childcare might be provided to support professional development for staff. Your suggestions would be very welcome.