Teacher's Classes

[sojomojo]

My school has asked me to teach the teachers twice a week. I was wondering if anyone has any advice/suggestions/lesson plans? Thanks!

[uticmmacdonald2003]

Check out: (if you haven't before)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/

The teachers at my school like to talk about current events, and this site offers summaries and reports on recent news, with sound bites, and vocab. Not too long, leaving lots of time for discussion (I used to make questions for review- get conversation flowing.)

[sojomojo]

Thanks so much! These lessons are very interesting and helpful. I'll definitely adapt them to my class. 

[Brian]

These classes can be rough. 

"Dear Abby" works well I've found, especially regarding things like marriage and family.  Separate the question from the answer, create some pre-reading and post-reading discussion questions, and be prepared to address any idioms or vocab they don't know. 

Usually I'll find an article---often about Korea---to give them, create those pre- and post-reading discussion questions, and go from there.  Teachers are interested in idioms, I've found, so I'll usually teach a few each time (directly from the article, if possible). 

[sojomojo]

thanks for the suggestion! hopefully i can get them to talk; the teachers always act like they're about to crap their pants if they speak too much english.

[sojomojo]

Here are a few websites I found that have news articles with various activities:

http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html

http://breakingnewsenglish.com/

[jessicajane]

hello peeps, I'm new to this website but came across this discussion on teaching teachers.

I had a pretty successful class with teachers a few weeks back. I chose the topic of 'Fairy Tales' and it went down really well. I introduced it as an aspect of culture and used it to compare Korean and other cultures, which brought about lively discussion (yey!)

I gave them fairy tales to read - which took up quite a bit of time (good as I had 90 minutes with them) and then we discussed them in groups. It worked really well and they enjoyed the interchange of ideas on fairy tales from different cultures.

There are a lot of files to attach here but I hope they're useful to someone. As I said, this was a 90 minute lesson, so if you have shorter lesson you could stretch it over 2.

P.S. I must add that this was teaching English teachers so there were some pretty competent speakers amongst them. This might be a bit difficult for lower level students (i.e. teachers).

[capebretonbarbarian]

I played two games that were successful in my teacher workshops.
1.  Speed Pictionary- they have one minute thirty seconds to draw six items from a theme.
 Example theme-  Things that fly-  airplane, helicopter, bee, time, mosquito, bat.
For each one guessed their team gets one point. 
See attachment for more.

2.  Categories-  Pick a letter and have them think of words for each category. 
Give them 1 point for each correct word.
For a bonus, have them pick one word they think the other team doesn't have.  Award 5 points if they are correct.   
See attachment