Cycle 1

Cycle 2

Cycle 3

Teaching Through the Arts

 Hanna Kryszewska

CLIL (An Arranged Marriage)

Sheelagh Deller

Meeting Change

 Adrian Underhill

Dogme and Silent Way

Paul Davis

Teaching the 'Unteachable'

Marie Delaney

Teaching Pronunciation

Tim Bowen

Coaching Skills for Teachers

Bonnie Tsai

The Richness Psychodrama, Transactional Analysis and NLP bring to EFL teaching

Mario Rinvolucri

From Activities to Lessons

Christine Frank

Storytelling for Young Learners

Eleanor Watts

Creativity for Teachers

Chaz Pugliese

Dealing with Young Learners

Luke Prodromou

Culture in our Classrooms

Gill Johnson

Teaching Through Drama

Mark Almond

Focusing on Skills

Adrian Tennant

Mon 17

Tue 18

Wed 19

Thu 20

Fri 21

Opening Plenary

Cycle 1

Session 3

Plenary 2

Cycle 3

Session 1

Plenary 3

Cycle 1

Session 1

Cycle 2

session 1

Cycle 2

Session 3

Cycle 3

Session2

Plenary 4

Cycle 1

Session 2

Cycle 2

session 2

Debates & Networking

Cycle 3

Session3

Closing Remarks

Tour of Canterbury

Evening Activity

Free Evening

Evening activity

Evening Activity

Conference Dinner

Silent Way is an „oldie but goldie”; Dogme the trendy new one. They are both neglected methodological byways which reward an exploration. These workshops are suitable for anyone who has had to go into a class at short notice and found that they have given at least as good a lesson as normal but without a plan.

These two approaches can inform our methodology and planning. They can provide practical activities and techniques for everyday classroom use. They can save us time.

The tools of Silent Way such as Cuisinaire rods are worth a look too. There will also be a brief examination of how and if these essentially material-less approaches are compatible with the use of web-based resources using data-projection. 

Coaching is a term that refers to a way of working with people that empowers them to make changes in the way that they work.  Coaches believe that we all hold the solutions to our challenges within us, or that we are able to work out how to resolve issues ourselves.

In classroom practice coaching is a very useful way to encourage students to work towards resolving their own challenges, and helps develops a sense of responsibility for their learning.  Teachers’ interest in the value of coaching in the classroom is gathering pace, as the benefits become clear.

Bonnie Tsai is a free lance teacher and trainer.  Her work takes her around the world running teacher training courses.  She lives in New York and Geneva. She has trained in such humanistic approaches as Suggestopdia with  Dr. G. Lozanov, Psychodramaturgie Lingusitic and is a Master Practioner in N.L.P.  She trained in coaching skills with Robert Dilts.

A high point in her professional  development was training with Drs. Howard Gardner and David Perkins at The Harvard Graduate School of Education.  This had led to working extensively with teachers who are charmed and enchanted by the world of the Multiple Intelligence and the potential it brings for positive change in the classroom. Bonnie works extensively with students of all ages and background.  She has done literacy work in New York and she  also works with children who have learning difficulties arising from lack of motivation and low self-esteem.  She regularly runs Teacher Training courses at Pilgrims in Canterbury England. She is on the DGSL and IAL list of approved level 3 trainers and is CELTA and CETLYL trainer and assessor. She can be reached through her web site at www.bonnie-tsai.net or her email tsaibonnie@hotmail.com.

In the first session of this cycle, we ‘ll be focusing on beginners, we'll use story-maps and actions to help us learn stories by heart.  Role-play both during and after the telling of stories will play a major part of this session, as will taking listeners' ideas to alter the course of a story and to decide the ending. In session 2  -Story-telling to story-making-

We’ll start with a simple story, we'll do a few activities designed to develop character, setting and plot.  With the help of writing frames, we'll build on a story, scaffolding the making of new stories, both by groups and individuals. 

And in the final session - Storytelling: why, how and which-, we'll discuss why storytelling is important – as well as some of the problems of telling stories to bilingual children.  We'll consider the respective advantages of oral and written stories, structurally controlled readers and "realbooks", stories that mirror children's lives and stories that enable them to escape. 

Eleanor Watts is a freelance teacher trainer, teacher and writer now living in UK. She has written more than thirty primary school textbooks, mainly for south Asia, published by Orient Longman, Longman and OUP.  All of these textbooks use stories as a living context for language teaching. She co-edited Storytelling in ELT (IATEFL, 2003), a book stories and teaching ideas by teachers across the world, and she has written Storytelling (OUP, 2006), a resource book for teachers of young learners.  Her children’s stories include the Ajanta Apartments series, published by Orient Longman.  

Email: eleanorwatts2003@yahoo.co.uk

Teachers working in all sectors of education across Europe say that over the last 15 years their classes have changed, almost beyond recognition; such has been the tide of immigration. Hitherto, teachers had mainly monocultural classes of the sort to which they were accustomed as students. Now, classes are rarely entirely monolingual and teachers are increasingly under pressure to perform in the face of, sometimes, difficult attitudes from students and parents alike. In schools where there are high numbers of immigrant pupils there is often tension between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ students. This is understandable; we often fear the unknown.  EFL teachers, working in the UK, are accustomed to working with multi-lingual, multi-cultural classes for much of the time.  But how much are the different backgrounds of our learners used to provide our students with the opportunity of understanding more about the beliefs values and behaviours of the cultures present in their classes? Could it be that lots of us shy away from looking too deeply at culture in our classrooms? Opening ‘Pandora’s box’ is dangerous, isn’t it?  Or is it? This cycle of workshops will look at what culture is, culture and language, the UK today and will provide participants with lots of activities to with their students. The sessions will be thought provoking, though light-hearted. Fun and laughter guaranteed!

Gill Johnson has been a teacher and trainer for more years than she dares to think about., though she has worked as a trainer for Pilgrims since 1994. She has worked in many countries over the years, including the USA, Europe, Turkey, Russia and South Africa. She is a CELTA trainer and assessor and, during term time, the Head of a busy MFL department and in-service trainer at a boarding school near Hastings, where she lives. Gill has just completed a book on culture in the classroom, with Mario Rinvolucri.

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated learning) can represent a huge demand on language skills for subject teachers.  For language teachers it can provide all sorts of positive rewards. 

In this workshop we will consider how we can best support the subject teachers, and how language teachers can use other subjects in order to teach a foreign language. 

The coursebook content often seems irrelevant for our learners.  We will do some classroom activities which use content from across the curriculum in order to make our teaching more interesting and relevant for all of us.

Sheelagh Deller is a teacher, teacher trainer, trainer trainer and ELT author.

She works for Pilgrims running courses for teachers all over the world.

Her latest book, Teaching Other Subjects Through English was published by Oxford University Press in March 2007.

How can schools and teachers include and teach those students whose behaviour is challenging and disruptive? These are the students we talk about in staffrooms because they make us feel incompetent and de-skilled. They seem unable to make use of the learning environment and the teacher. These pupils may have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties ; may be de-motivated and disengaged from learning ; may be withdrawn and not want to talk; or may already be diagnosed with a special need such as ADHD.

In this series of workshops you will look at :

·          Reasons why these students behave as they do; drawing on the research from educational therapy and psychology, including the effects of loss and trauma on learning

·          The reasons these students are difficult to teach ; what they ‘do’ to us as teachers and how we can manage our own states for teaching and learning

Practical strategies for reaching and teaching these students in class and around the school.

Marie Delaney is an Educational Psychotherapist,  MFL and EFL Teacher and Teacher Trainer. She has extensive experience of working with challenging behaviour – both staff and pupils! She has worked on outside school projects – at DYP a Mentoring and Education programme in Hackney,  London - as well as in schools as a Learning Support Unit manager for pupils at risk of exclusion and as Learning Mentor /LSU co-ordinator for primary and secondary schools in the London Borough of Havering. She is currently working in a school for children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties in Cork. She has been Course Director for Teacher Training at Pilgrims and  has trained teachers in the UK and abroad. Her main interests are introducing therapeutic approaches into mainstream schools to develop realistic strategies for challenging behaviour. She is the author of ‘Teaching the Unteachable’ published 2008 Worth Publishing, UK.

In this workshop we will look at the above three therapeutic areas as "feeder fields" to teaching languages.

In the first part of the workshop we will see how both Willy Urbain, Bernard Dufeu and John Morgan brought ideas and techniques into language teaching from Jacob Moreno's Psychodrama and thus helped language teachers to reach

the more unconscious layers of their students' minds, the areas that control language reception and production.

My thesis is that the work of Urbain, Dufeu and Morgan has given a real three dimensionality to language teaching.

In the second part of the workshop we will explore some of insights that the work of Eric Berne in Transactional Analysis offers language teachers.

In the third part of the workshop we will look at how Bandler and Grinder's NLP work can help us teachers think more perceptively about our students' learning process, in areas like error self-correction and creative writing, to take just two examples.

Mario frequently contributes to THE TEACHER TRAINER and to HUMANISING LANGUAGE TEACHING  www.hltmag.co.uk Mario works as a teacher and teacher trainer for Pilgrims, UK Mario’s first CD-ROM for students, Mindgame, was published by Clarity. Mario’s most recent books include: a new edition of Vocabulary, with John Morgan, Humanising your Coursebook and Using the Mother Tongue, with Sheelagh Deller, Imagine that!, with Jane Arnold and Herbert Puchta, Creative Writing, with Christine Frank, Unlocking Self-expression through NLP, with Judy Baker, Multiple Intelligences in EFL, with Herbert Puchta.

Many different factors could be the cause of our students’ demotivation and poor attention. I believe that lack of novelty in the lesson is certainly one of those. Students appreciate lessons that are lively, interesting and stimulating. Students also like a lesson/exercise that presents an element of novelty. Creativity matters to students because it can play a central issue in fueling their interest and motivation. Creativity is also important for the teachers who are seeking to give more impetus to their work, to satisfy a desire for self-expression, or quite simply, want to be creative just for fun. This workshop is for all teachers, experienced and inexperienced who believe creativity is a decision we take (Robert Sternberg), who want to develop their own creativity and see how it can be exploited in class. While some theoretical input will be provided, the sessions are very much hands on and the participants will walk away with a host of practical ideas and ready to use frameworks.

Chaz Pugliese is a trainer, teacher trainer and author working out of Paris. Currently Director of Studies (Teacher Training) for Pilgrims UK,, Chaz is a regular presenter at international conferences, has contributed over 50 articles to several ELT publications and has trained teachers in 25 countries.  His current interests are: spoken grammar and fluency, creativity issues, motivation, and teaching in the post-method era. Chaz’s first book (Creativity Strategies for Teachers) will be published by DELTA in 2010.

This practical ‘how to’ session will look at techniques teachers can borrow from the craft of acting. Theatre actors have to make every performance as fresh and energetic as the first time they play a particular character; actors maximise the use of space and movement on stage to establish relationships with other characters and to control audience attention; actors have to use their voices and bodies creatively to convey meaning and maintain audience attention and they use both pathos and humour to provoke a human reaction. 

These skills are equally important for us if we want to be as effective as possible as teachers and if we want to reduce anxiety and tension in the classroom, make our lessons enjoyable and memorable, develop productive relationships with learners and enhance classroom dynamics.  You will leave this workshop with fresh ideas for making more creative use of space, movement, body, voice and humour in your own teaching.

Never-ending change is with us all the time and in everything, perhaps now more than ever. You can never control it, but you can open to it and work with it, or you can resist it and get blown along anyway.

These three workshops offer three perspectives on intentional involvement in change processes.

·          Coaching: an approach to supporting the self directed change of others. A coach offers a practical structure within which the client (student, colleague, friend) can get clarity, direction and energy to take self-directing and appropriately challenging steps for change, supported by self learning along the way. Or something like that. This workshop takes you through the basics in two cycles, one as coach and one as client.

·          Action inquiry: Personal learning and change. What is action inquiry? Does it differ from what we already do? Can it benefit me and my learners? Can it be fun, uplifting, inspiring? This workshop will experiment with some AI tools for developing the link between our experience and our learning, for discerning our values and our assumptions, and for aligning the energy in our deep values to our actions and impacts on others.

Liberating the intelligence in the system. How can we learn to see the complex human systems in which we are embedded (classroom, staffroom, office, school, organisation) so that our daily interactions may have the additional intention of freeing up the whole system? This workshop will develop the artistry of liberating the flow of feedback intelligence that is mostly locked up in the system. Such intention-in-action can both flag the worth, and contribute to the growth, of a feedback-rich and self-organising working culture.

Adrian Underhill works as a consultant to schools on professional and organisational development.  He is author of Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation, and Series Editor of the Macmillan Books for Teachers. As an Associate of the National School of Government he facilitates groups for the development of leadership skills relevant to current complex life. He is a past-president of IATEFL (the International Association for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language), and founder of the IATEFL Teacher Development Group in 1984.

Pronunciation is an area many teachers tend to shy away from. In this series of three workshops we will look at ways to approach a number of aspects of pronunciation and making it simpler to teach. Firstly, we will look at single sounds, word stress, stress placement and meaning, then we will move on to deal with intonation patterns and sounds in contact.

There will be a number of practical techniques that are designed both to raise learners’ awareness of aspects of pronunciation and also to enable them to address specific difficulties.

Tim Bowen has taught English and trained teachers in more than 20 countries, including Russia, China, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland and Turkey. He graduated in Slavonic languages at the University of Leeds, did a postgraduate Certificate in Education (TESL) at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and has an MPhil in the field of TEFL from the University of Southampton. He is co-author of The Pronunciation Book (Longman) and Inside Teaching (Macmillan) and author of Build Your Business Grammar (Thomson-Heinle) as well as co-author of the student portfolios for the Straightforward series (Macmillan) and author of the teachers’ editions for the Attitude and Expressions series (Macmillan). His interests include contrastive linguistics, etymology and, of course, pronunciation. He is currently a free-lance teacher trainer, author and translator.

In these sessions we will focus on ways and strategies we can use to embed recipes (activities) into menus (lessons).

In the first session, we will consider the function and purpose of the activity, pacing the lesson and energizing the students. By using examples taken from the teaching of vocabulary and grammar we will look at the practical aspects of planning a whole lesson.

In the second session, we will focus on text work and we will discuss a collection of activities and exercises in the framework of the teaching of texts and will show that tasks are just as important as the text that is read.

In the final session, we will finally focus on creative writing. In particular, we will concentrate on the expansion of activities that can be used to stimulate creative writing from the perspective of the writer and that of the reader.

After her Postgraduate Diploma in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (Manchester University) Christine came to Germany, where she has been working as a teacher, teacher trainer and author for the past thirty years. Christine has had close connections with Pilgrims Language School since 1974, where she has worked as a trainer on its summer courses. Christine has also given seminars for Pilgrims and the British Council overseas. Her latest book, "Creative Writing", written with Mario Rinvolucri, was published by Helbling in January 2007.

This workshop explores the problems that arise when we teach restless, inattentive learners and suggests a wide range of practical techniques for dealing with such problems. We will build on the work of Vygotsky and existing models of motivation to create a framework for analysing and dealing with these classroom difficulties: in this scheme the following principles will play a part: rules, class management, discipline-friendly techniques, motivation, Above all, we will explore the importance of rapport, attitude and presence in effective teaching.

Dr. Luke Prodromou has published articles in ELT journals and has written over twenty textbooks. He has worked for the British Council, NILE (Norwich), University of Edinburgh, Pilgrims (Canterbury) and ESADE (Spain) and others. He has given talks in over 25 countries around the world.

He is the author of Smash (for young learners) and Attitude  (for young adults, both Macmillan). He wrote Dealing with Difficulties (Delta), a handbook for teachers, with L. Clandfield; the book won the Ben Warren Prize for 2006 and an English Speaking Union Award for 2007.

He obtained his Ph.D from the University of Nottingham. His book on English as a Lingua Franca came out in 2008 (Continuum).

In this series of practical workshops we will deal with teaching skills, any language teacher’s bread and butter.

·          Exploring reading - Reading is an essential part of learning. Both children and adults need to be motivated to read. Through reading learners are exposed to grammar and lexis in context. By focusing on the content and story and exploring what learners really understand, rather than simply whether or not they can answer a set of comprehension questions, we can make reading an enjoyable and fulfilling activity.

·          How receptive are you? - Why do listening and reading in class? How do you ‘teach’ listening & reading? Are we practicing language or developing a skill?  Are we teaching listening and reading or are we testing? What’s the role of comprehension questions?  These are some of the questions we’ll try to tackle in this practical workshop.

·          Developing Speaking - In this workshop we will look at various aspects of teaching speaking. The session is based around a series of original articles and practical tips. A number of issues are examined, such as why our students can be reluctant to speak and what we can do about it. At the end of the workshop you should have a better idea of what ‘teaching’ speaking entails and have a few ideas at your fingertips.

Adrian has run in-service workshops and programmes in over ten countries including Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Serbia & Montenegro and Republika Srpska. He has been the main tutor / course director for 7 residential Summer Schools in Serbia for primary and secondary school teachers on behalf of the Ministry of Education, English Book and Macmillan as well as 7 Winter Schools held in Belgrade.

Adrian has also been a tutor on one British Council residential course held in Bled, Slovenia in August 1999, the Course Director of two Hornby Schools and the tutor on one. These courses were held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in August 2004, Palic, Serbia in August 2006 and Nepal January 2008. Adrian has given talks and presented papers at over 15 conferences in 9 different countries and finally, he has written extensively contributing materials to over 20 coursebooks as well as writing materials for onestopenglish.com