Find out more about our events to celebrate World Teachers' Day 2021.

World Teachers' Day

UNESCO World Teachers' Day takes place every year on 5 October. It is a perfect opportunity to thank teachers for their hard work and reflect on the difficult and challenging work they do.

"In this crisis, teachers have shown, as they have done so often, great leadership and innovation in ensuring that #LearningNeverStops, that no learner is left behind. Around the world, they have worked individually and collectively to find solutions and create new learning environments for their students to allow education to continue. Their role advising on school reopening plans and supporting students with the return to school is just as important.”

Joint statement from Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, Guy Ryder, Director-General, International Labour Organization, Henrietta H. Fore, Executive Director, UNICEF, David Edwards, General Secretary, Education International on the occasion of World Teachers’ Day 2020

Since 2016, TeachingEnglish have celebrated World Teachers' Day by hosting a series of talks and workshops designed to support you in your teaching or your work in teacher development. From hosting a five-day web conference in 2016 to one-day online events in 2019 and 2020 with IATEFL, we see World Teachers' Day as an important time to offer as much support as possible to educators around the world. 

World Teachers' Day 2021

In 2021, we hosted eight talks by experienced teachers and experts in English Language Teaching. Each 60-minute session will give you the chance to think about and discuss a range of different issues and themes with English language teachers around the world, as well as providing you with practical ideas that you can take into your online or face-to-face classrooms.

Sessions

Sophia Mavridi - De Montfort University: Looking back to look ahead; Language teaching experiences during COVID-19

The rapid transition from face-to-face to alternative ways of instruction has significantly disrupted all sectors of education including English Language Teaching. While this disruption has exposed existing gaps and inequalities, it has also revealed extraordinary educational resilience and resourcefulness. 

Drawing on a large-scale study on language teaching experiences during COVID-19, this session will offer in-depth insights into language professionals’ perceptions, experiences, challenges, and opportunities as instruction shifted from face-to-face delivery to online. More importantly, it will look ahead and discuss how these positive and negative experiences can inform future decision-making, planning and strategy. 

As the findings relate specifically to teaching languages remotely, this session is relevant to language professionals (teachers, trainers, managers and policy makers) who are interested in sustaining transformative change; not just as an emergency response but as a way of moving the educational experience forward.


Lesley Fearn - Open University: Single Voices, Global Choices: An Online Community Project

There has been much research into the global value of Online Community Projects (OCPs), but little into their potential for foreign or second language teachers. Therefore, many secondary school language teachers create their theory by integrating OCPs into their curriculums, even during the recent pandemic and lockdown.

This presentation provides examples from ‘Single Voices, Global Choices’(Zielonka and Fearn, 2021), an OCP hosted on various platforms, such as WordPress, eTwinning and Teams. It explains how integrating OCPs into language curriculums can support teachers in their professional development and incite learner-centred approaches. The difficulties and compensations of learner-centred OCP activities are outlined in this presentation, and examples are given of how they motivated and empowered both teachers and learners, even during the darkest days of lockdown.

Participants following this presentation will come away with a clearer idea of what an OCP is and how it can enrich their curriculums and empower their learners.


Joe Dale - Independent language consultant: Quizzing tools, retrieval practice and multi-modal feedback in language lessons

In this webinar, Joe Dale will showcase a variety of examples of good practice in online teaching from practising secondary school languages teachers on Twitter. He will explain ways in which teachers have dealt with life during the pandemic and show how different cross-platform tools can promote collaboration, independent learning, retrieval practice and assessment opportunities in a remote teaching and hybrid teaching context. Joe will demonstrate how easy it is to enhance learning in a purposeful way with a range of tools which are device agnostic allowing learners to practise, reflect and share the results easily. Participants will have the opportunity to explore a practical evidence-based approach to formative assessment.


Matthew Ellman - Cambridge University Press: A recipe for teacher learning

To be worthwhile, teacher development needs to have an impact on teaching and learning. In this talk we’ll look at the essential ingredients of impactful teacher development activity. If you’re a teacher, you’ll learn how you can make sure that the time you spend on development is productive, and make lasting changes to your classroom practice. If you’re a trainer, you’ll find out what you can do to ensure your training makes a difference once your trainees go back to their classrooms.


Joanna Gore - British Council: Teenagers: Flow and the random factor

This session will demonstrate two approaches that stimulate teenagers’ motivation to learn:

  • Flow theory – helps us create the classroom conditions for intrinsic motivation to flourish. 
  • ‘The random factor’ (that is, exploiting activities based on an absurd premise) – takes away students’ fear of the wrong answer, and encourages critical and creative thinking.

Jessica Mackay - EIM, University of Barcelona: Using WhatsApp for interactive tasks 

As teachers, we are constantly looking for opportunities to exploit the learning potential of the tools and resources that our learners are already using. WhatsApp, or other free messaging platforms, are now almost ubiquitous in many contexts. This interactive workshop reports on a project designed to increase EFL learners’ exposure to English outside class through a programme of tasks on the social media platform ‘WhatsApp’. We will look at the different activities used, e.g. drills, Q & A and guessing games and discuss the participation generated and the type of language produced. We’ll also see how the learners’ interaction in the group went beyond the tasks set by the teacher, which has interesting implications for learner engagement, group dynamics and learner agency. Finally, we’ll use this experience to suggest some tips for encouraging successful online interaction.


Nicky Hockly - The Consultants-E: Digital literacies

Digital literacies are the technical skills and social practices needed to effectively interact with digital technologies. As English language teachers, we are helping our students to communicate in a global lingua franca in an increasingly wired world. We need to ensure that they are given not just the linguistic tools to do so, but an awareness of the wider social practices surrounding the appropriate use of language which is increasingly being mediated by technology. This workshop looks at some of the theory underpinning digital literacies and explores how teachers can develop their learners’ digital literacies (while often developing their own!). By the end of this webinar, you will have a clearer understanding of what digital literacies are, and why they are important. You will also have some practical ideas about how to develop your learners’ digital literacies in class while also supporting their language learning.


Ceri Jones & Katherine Bilsborough - ELT Footprint: Eco-literacy: What? Why? And How?

If you are thinking, Eco-literacy! What is it? Why is it important? How can I do it? … this webinar is for you. You will leave the session with a clear understanding of what eco-literacy means, why it is important and, more importantly, how you can easily start developing your learners’ eco-literacy skills … from tomorrow.


 

Comments

Submitted by SharMa on Wed, 12/22/2021 - 21:09

Greetings from Uzbekistan! 

It is nice to meet you! It is me Mamura Sharipova. I have been working as english language teacher at high schools for 9 years.

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