professional development – EAP Essentials

FOBO: fear of being observed

Making lesson observation less threatening and more developmental

I’ve been thinking about observation of teaching for a workshop I’m preparing for the BALEAP Teacher Education Special Interest Group (TEdSIG). Observation certainly seems to engender mixed feelings amongst teachers (Wang & Seth, 1998; Jay, 2017)). In an earlier blog post on observation, I explained that although observation of teaching was mandatory at my institution for BALEAP accreditation, I was concerned to emphasize the developmental nature of observations. I thought this might make the experience less stressful for new teachers and more rewarding for returning teachers. We set up a variety of types of observation: short buzz or walk though observations and peer observations. In 2020, with all classes online, we were able to conduct asynchronous observation through recordings of online lessons. Although this form of observation could have mitigated some negative feelings, most teachers were aware that a particular lesson would be observed at some point. Their reactions were consistent with reports in the literature (Wang & Seth, 1998; Jay, 2017)

T 3: I had no inkling the lesson would be observed […] I am glad of the opportunity to be seen as I really am without any pretence. For better or worse!
T 16: I was aware that this lesson would be listened to by others and that always makes me slightly uncomfortable!
T 20: I think I panicked about being observed and the students for some reason chose that day to be particularly unresponsive and I ended up reading the slides.

Should EAP teachers read research?

In order to compete in the EAP field, teachers need to be able to read research.

I recently attended an online discussion of the IATEFL Research Special Interest Group, hosted by Graham Hall asking the questions: (How) do teachers read research, why, and (how) does it help them/us in the classroom … and beyond? It was an interesting discussion with a variety of viewpoints across a range of teaching contexts. The overall aim was to understand how research and theory might impact on teachers’ practice. For some teachers, the reasons for not reading research were the time and effort involved in understanding difficult academic texts, which don’t always give a clear indication of what their findings mean for professional practice. These teachers felt they didn’t need to engage with new theories in order to teach effectively in their classrooms.

What can you see in texts?

Learning to see further in and with texts

How do you select texts to use with your EAP students? Do you choose them yourself or encourage students to bring articles that interest them to class? What do you notice in a text that helps you to decide it will be useful for your students? Below is a text from Access EAP: Foundations (Unit 4, lesson 3 p. 70) that was adapted for use with low proficiency EAP students (CEFR B1) from a published academic article. What features of this text seem salient to you? If you were using it with a group of students, what tasks would you develop?