Episode Fourteen

Interview with TEFL Horizons Co-Founder, Lauren Harrington

Show Notes

This is a special episode of Expand Your Horizons, because the interview is with one of our co-founders! Shannon interviews Lauren all about her teaching experience in Romania, how she fell in love with the TEFL field, and that one time she was invited to do a "small training" in Brazil that ended up being a massive, nationally televised presentation! Tune in for the inside scoop on Ms. Harrington herself.

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In this Episode

• How Lauren got into the TEFL field- what inspired her to start teaching

• Her spontaneous decision to move to Romania

• What teaching was like for her without a certification or any experience

• What her life in Romania was like- her work and the day-to-day

• Her tips for teaching (very) young learners

• Why she recommends getting at least preliminary training before starting to teach

• What kept her in Romania for six years

• How her career evolved- what caused her to take the next step

• How she found her first teaching job in the United States

• How she found out about the CELTA course and learned the value of good training

• What her job at EF language school in Boston was like- and how to succeed in a private language school in the US

• What inspired her to pursue a DELTA certification

• How she got through a (surprise!) massive presentation in Brazil that she’d been told would be a small private training

• How she became a CELTA trainer

• How being a trainer affects her teaching now

• What life as a CELTA trainer is like

• What she still loves about teaching

• Her advice for anyone who wants to become a CELTA trainer

• Her advice for prospective teachers

• What she’d do differently before moving abroad if she could go back in time

• How she got into materials writing

• Her favorite travel destinations

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Interested in learning more about lesson frameworks? Check out our blog post all about them, or sign up for our newsletter for teaching tips and guidance delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

“I love when you see that moment of clarity on (your students’ or trainees’) faces. ”

“One of the things that I’m grateful for and one of the things I really push in training is using frameworks as approaches to teaching a lesson. I’m a really creative teacher, so I can bring a lot of different elements into the classroom. But I found earlier in my career that it could be really hard to structure all of those ideas (. . .) what was the end goal? Without a framework I found it hard to measure my students’ achievement of their goals.”

Episode Twelve

How to Master Classroom Management

Show Notes

In this week’s episode, we’re talking all about classroom management. First, we share what makes the biggest difference in structuring every lesson you teach: the task cycle. We discuss what it is, how to use it, and how it can revolutionize your lessons to make them more student-centered and create more opportunities for interactive learning. Then we over over additional favorite strategies for managing an adult ESL classroom naturally and masterfully.

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In this Episode

• The task cycle, or the “microstages” within each stage/ activity of your lesson. These include: giving instructions, letting students work alone, letting students check in pairs, and conducting whole class feedback

• The “burger:” a fun analogy for the task cycle

• How to make instructions clear using techniques like ICQs (instruction check questions) and demos

• Anchoring: why your placement in the classroom matters and how to make sure you’re “anchored” in the right spot

• Minimizing teacher talk: why this is essential and how you can ensure you keep your teacher talk low

• Language grade: no, we don’t mean assessment- this is how to simplify your language without sounding unnatural

• Task before text: why you don’t want to hand out papers before you finish giving instructions

• Monitoring: what you should be doing as the students are quietly working, and how the way you use this time impacts the rest of your lesson

• Interaction patterns: the whole class should never just be you interacting with the students. How to mix things up to maximize student interaction and communication

• Nominating: how to handle who’s speaking when during feedback and how to ensure all students get a chance to participate

• Avoiding echoing: the difference between echoing and “correchoing” and why you should only be doing one of them!

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Did you find this episode useful? Do you have questions about teaching you’d like us to answer on the show? Or any additional strategies you use to manage your classroom effectively? Reach out and let us know!

We’d love to hear your comments below. And if you enjoyed this episode, we’d be extremely grateful if you share it on your social media or subscribe here on iTunes and leave us a review. Your support means so much to us! For more teaching tips delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Episode Ten

Six More Grammar Lesson Tips: Advice on Planning and Resources

Show Notes

In episode eight, we brought you six actionable tips for teaching grammar lessons. Now we’re taking it all the way back to the planning stage to help you structure a successful grammar lesson from the ground up. We’ve got six more of our best, most practical tips for you- this time focused exclusively around how to plan your lesson from start to finish and how to find and use the resources you need. We’re covering everything from effective lesson structure to our favorite reference books. And we share our strategies for how to look at a course book and know exactly what to keep and what to cut.

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In this Episode

• Tip #1: Use a lesson framework. A framework is a set pattern of activities you can use to structure your lesson. It’s an essential outline that will guide your students through the lesson and ensure your main aim is achieved. Head over to the blog post on frameworks for more in-depth information.

• Tip #2: Use the course book as a jumping off point for grammar research. Did you know most course books have a “grammar bank” in the back? The grammar bank provides a clear explanation of exactly what your students need to know about the target grammar- already curated and simplified for you.

• Tip #3: Teach a lot about a little, not a little about a lot. Focus is key. Make sure you’re narrowing your focus to a digestible amount of material for your students (and for yourself!) to ensure that the students walk away really being able to use a small amount of new language, rather than still feeling confused about the ten different things you tried to teach at once.

• Tip #4: Extra time? Add more activities, not more information. Avoid the temptation to bring in new language or material near the end of your lesson. Students will benefit much more from additional opportunities to practice what they’ve just learned rather than having to completely shift their focus and try to grasp brand new information in the last fifteen minutes of class.

• Tip #5: Adapt, adapt, adapt! Take ownership of your material and be proactive in making sure it does exactly what you wan it to do. If you’re using a course book, take the exercises you want, cut the ones you don’t, and change any activity to ensure it helps streamline your lesson. Want to know what this looks like in practice? Register below for our free video training on exactly how to adapt course book material.

• Tip #6: Use the right resources. Here are a few of our favorites that we mention in this episode:

• Our online grammar course: Be Your Own Grammar Guru

• Grammar reference books, especially Teaching Tenses by Rosemary Aitken and Understanding and Using English Grammar by Betty Azar (plus more recommendations).

• Upcoming webinars on how to teach grammar

• Podcast Episode 8: Our Top Six Tips for Teaching Grammar Lessons and Podcast Episode 2: Five Misconceptions About Teaching Grammar

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Want to know exactly how these planning tips work in practice? Watch our free video workshop in which we show you how to take a page straight out of a course book and make it into a streamlined, communicative grammar lesson.

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Did you find these tips useful? Do you have questions about planning and teaching grammar? Let us know!

We’d love to hear your comments below. And if you enjoyed this episode, we’d be extremely grateful if you share it on your social media or subscribe here on iTunes and leave us a review. Your support means so much to us! For more teaching tips delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Episode One

our story and our first big teaching takeaways

Show Notes

We’re very excited (and even a little audibly nervous at first!) to kick off our initial podcast episode. We share the story of how we started out as teachers, evolved into trainers, and got to where we are now. We discuss what we thought teaching would be like going in… and how we quickly realized it was actually much different. And we share the major “aha!” moments we each experienced early on in our careers.

In this Episode…

• Our backgrounds- graduating from college “unemployable”

• Why we decided to start teaching

• Our initial training (or lack thereof!)

• How Lauren started teaching in Romania

• How Shannon started teaching in Hungary

• The coincidence(s) surrounding how we met

• What inspired us to create TEFL Horizons

• Our teaching expectations vs. reality

• The things we found most surprising when we first started teaching

• The biggest lessons we learned about how to be effective teachers

“You can’t anticipate everything that’s going to come up in a lesson...and you shouldn’t be able to! That’s real language. And at the end of the day there are real humans sitting in front of you, and their needs are individual (...) and I love that so much about teaching... it’s teaching to the individual.”