the three Ps and more

Though I’m writing this on July 25 I’m not going to be able to post it for a while. For a week now I’ve been immersed in intense TEFL training (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and team-building activities, along with 250 other TeachOverseas teachers. It’s been a lot of fun, but exhausting too. We’re ensconced at William Carey International University in Pasadena, CA – I’m back in a dorm room, eating at a dining hall! My typical schedule is an 8:00 “Discovery Group” discussion with 5-10 teachers. We have guiding questions each day addressing issues as varied as political perspective and Biblical authority. At 9:00 we move into the large group TEFL session with all the teachers. I’m learning a great deal about how to teach English in these sessions. The most difficult thing so far is the 80/20 ratio of student speech to teacher speech that they recommend for the language classroom. After the big group session we break into smaller, regional TEFL sessions (I’m with Central Europe, for example). After lunch we have a 1:30 session that can cover language and culture of the countries we’ll be working in, team dynamics, or other various things. At 3:45 we find out our teaching assignments for the evening, and we start planning our lessons. Immediately after dinner (if we have time to eat!) we head to our practicum site where we teach our lessons to local immigrants (or fellow teachers if there aren’t enough students). After we get back we have a debriefing of the day with the same small group with which we started.

Needless to say, it keeps me busy. I am learning a lot, though! The three Ps in the title refers to the way the suggest we plan our English classes – presentation (giving students new material), practice (reviewing and drilling the new material), production (student-centered creative language production using new material). The heavy focus is on getting to the elusive production stage (how else can you reach that annoying 80/20 ratio?). This is just the tip of the iceberg – from different learning styles to Bloom’s taxonomy, from classroom management to methods of assessment, I’m getting a crash course on how to be a teacher. What keeps me sane in all this is the interaction with the other teachers – they’re great! I get to have wonderful daily conversations about how Christians should interact with a foreign culture or about the role of traditional grammar in language education (linguistic descriptivists of the world unite!). This is what we talk over lunch – how a Christian should react when placed in an educational system that traditionally disciplines by public embarrassment and shame. I feel very blessed to be in this type of environment, at least until August 22 when it’s off to Budapest!