The Teacher Trainer Diaries – Preparing a workshop

I’ve often been asked what my process is for preparing a workshop, especially by those who are ‘new’ to developing and running workshops. Reflecting on my initial years as a teacher educator, I can understand why – it’s an intimidating process to go through. Firstly, when you start out, you really don’t have many ‘templates’ to choose from; and secondly, there is the added pressure of trying out things in front of your peers, which, at least I felt, was more stressful than trying out things with learners. I wonder if you feel that same way?

A few weeks ago, I had to prepare a workshop for my teachers, and I thought it might be a good idea to film myself, from start to finish, and then show you what I came up with. I’ll also add my reflections on the session plan after having run the session and seen ‘the results’. Before we get into it, though, I want to preface this post by saying that whilst I consider myself as an experience trainer, I am by no means the best at workshop planning, and don’t claim to be the best. My hope in presenting this video and accompanying session plan is to show how it might be done, and what works for me. With this in mind, let’s get into it 🙂

A short film of…me, a computer and some books

The books I spoke about are:

• Tessa Woodward’s Ways of Training
• Martin Parrot’s Tasks for Language Teachers
• John Hughes’ A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT
• Tessa Woodward’s Models and Metaphors in Teacher Training

The ‘finished’ product

Trainer notes

Session handouts

My mind map

My session plan overview

Audio for mini-lecture

Activity folder

Click here for activities

Reflections on the session and materials

Now, you’ve seen me put the session together, and you’ve seen what I produced – but how did it actually go? Well, I’ve identified three positives and three negatives. Let’s explore these now:

• Positive 1: The session flowed well, and was aimed at the right level for most of the teachers. The materials aided in scaffolding the learning process, and made the content provision more interesting and less of a ‘here take this’ stage. It also enabled me to model how one might support learners in longer listening tasks.
• Positive 2: Teachers commented that they liked the number of activities that were included, which is good because I wanted to ensure that there was an appropriate mix of theory and practical ideas.
• Positive 3: The session, whilst content and activities heavy, emphasised discussion amongst teachers and critical evaluation. Teachers moved into the last part of the session, having identified both pros and cons of the activities presented. Following this, they were then able to present ideas of their own that fit the ‘criteria’ we were looking for. In total, with the ideas presented and the ideas that teachers presented we covered approximately fifteen teaching ideas.
• Negative 1: Even though teachers liked the number of activities, I feel that there were too many activities. What I really wanted was for teachers to go deep in evaluation, but as teachers were trying to get through as many of the activities as possible, their evaluations were quite shallow (still good, but there was room to go deeper, and this may have been more catalytic).
• Negative 2: Whilst the content lead to some brilliant thinking questions (i.e., questions that teachers came up with throughout the discussions), I think the content could have perhaps been presented in a way that teachers had to use it in their evaluations of the activities. When teachers were evaluating the activities, some were using the information, but others were simply evaluating ‘through their own eyes’ – this of course is fine, but I really wanted that content to be the base of the evaluation.
• Negative 3: The session and materials focused on the upper end of Young Learners, and as such we kind of didn’t focus on the lower end – those learners that we might still consider VYL but are not really infants. What I’d like to do is create another session that focuses on this age ground, because even though I incorporated chants in the activities, there are so many more ideas for developing ‘speaking’, phonological awareness, ability to interact with the younger Young Learners.

Final notes

So, you’ve been a fly on the wall for my planning. Like I said in the video, I spent longer on the planning that the execution, but I don’t see that as a negative as I’ll be able to use this session plan in the future – although it will need adapting to the context in which I use it. I also enjoy the planning process because it pushes me to learn more about the topic that I’m training teachers on. Anyway, now that you’ve seen mine, it’s only fair that I see yours 😉 I’d love to hear about the processes you go through when planning your sessions. Please do comment or get in touch!

If you’re interested in taking you knowledge of teacher education, and especially session planning further, I’d highly recommend that you check out NILE’s Trainer Development course – it is amazing!