Did you know that our staff deliver training abroad?
Our most recent project was at LPJ School in Jordan, where Richenda led a week-long teacher training programme with the school’s English teachers. The aim of the course, funded by the Cambridge Nazareth Trust, was to explore and develop techniques to make learning more student-centred.
It’s our 6th year visiting LPJ School, and each time has been an immensely rewarding experience. Workshops covered a wide range of topics, including pronunciation, how to ‘humanise’ a coursebook, flexible classroom layouts, strategies for reading and listening and a chance to put yourself in a student’s shoes by learning a ‘mystery language.’ Our sessions are both active and interactive – in our view this is the best way to learn – and we were delighted with the feedback that they struck ‘the right balance between input and activity’ and that they were ‘reaping enormous dividends’ for the teachers involved.
We typically work with a group of teachers over three visits, a year apart. The first visit consists of a series of workshops, while the second and third involve classroom observations, feedback and follow-up workshops. We are always impressed with how an idea presented at our workshop is implemented, developed and transformed, with the teacher truly ‘making it their own’ and incorporating it within their personal teaching style.
Adding a Splash of Drama!
A new development this year was that we also a ran a drama workshop with David from our Theatre Express team. Theatre Express is our worldwide performing arts service, where our drama professionals visit schools around the world to run courses in English through theatre. We find this to be a very powerful complement to language learning. This time the theatre students were the teachers themselves – from subjects other than English. Exploring themes such as World War One poetry and Macavity the Cat, they developed their verbal and nonverbal communication skills and impressed us all with their final poetry readings.
We’d like to say a big thank you to all involved for your eager participation, lively ideas and of course your very warm welcome!
Shukran!
Here are some photos from our project. Some of you may recognise Jonny, who was at the Lewis Teacher Training Centre from 2012 to 2017 and joined us on this project.
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