Teacher Development: Perceptions and Reflections

Description: The West Tokyo Chapter of JALT (the Japan Association for Language Teaching), and Tokyo JALT Chapter announces the seventh in a series of micro-conferences, each featuring several presenters exploring a particular topic for a whole day. The theme of this conference is teacher development through neuro-linguistic processing, action research, reflective practice and transcript analysis.

10:00-10:15: Doors open

10:15-12:15 Dean Charles (British Council) NLP and Teacher Perception. Neuro-linguistic programming is an attitude of mind that can be used to maximise and consistently apply best practice, as human beings in general and as teachers in particular. In this workshop, we will look at the teaching experience through the stages of lesson planning / preparation, being in the learning environment and post-lesson reflection. Applying NLP, we will examine how to develop the teaching skills that we have in these areas and attain the teaching skills that we don't yet have. The workshop will be practical and will supply participants with an NLP 'starter kit' for further research into their own teaching practice.

12:15-13:15 : Lunch

13:15-14:00 Clair Taylor (Toyo Gakuen University) Your Baseline Teaching State. In humanistic approaches to teaching 'state' is central. Your 'state' includes the way you are thinking, feeling, holding your body and breathing at any time. This state can affect your students and their participation and output in your classes. In this presentation, I will summarize the results of an action research project showing how teacher state change led to improved conversational flow in an English Lounge setting. I will invite participants to explore their own baseline teaching state and experiment with a state change activity.

14:15-15:00 Andy Boon (Toyo Gakuen University) On Becoming Reflective. In the act of teaching, we have little time to reflect on the successes, failures or puzzles that occur within our classes, and valuable opportunities for gaining insights into our pedagogic practice can be lost. There is a need, therefore, for practical ways to help us think back, to explore these experiences more deeply, and to discover what is actually happening in our classrooms. This presentation discusses the process of becoming reflective and examines a number of strategies that can be used by teachers to facilitate critical reflection on their teaching and discover new possibilities there.

15:15-17:15 Dr. John Fanselow (Professor Emeritus, Colombia University, Teachers College, U.S.A.) Take 1, Take 2, Take 3. Authors of articles about classroom interaction tend to present one interpretation of the transcripts. When asking a range of ESOL/EFL teachers to interpret transcripts from 3 articles on classroom interaction, no one has interpreted them in the same way the authors did. We should not be surprised that we all see data differently. In this workshop, I will present the 3 transcripts as well as a 3-stage process for moving beyond one-dimensional interpretations. I will invite participants to apply the process to a dialog between a teacher and a supervisor so each person can better understand the 3-stage process and to remind everyone that analyzing transcripts of teacher/supervisor interaction can help facilitate their professional development.

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Contact West Tokyo JALT Chapter:

URL: http://jwt.homestead.com/home.html

Alan Stoke:

jaltwesttokyo@yahoo.com

Andy Boon:

bromleycross@hotmail.com

Other Past Events (Archive) for West Tokyo JALT Chapter

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Oxford Teaching Seminar 2009

Time: 6:00 PM - 9:10 PM

Location: Tokyo