E V O L V E S C H O O L: TeachingEnglish newsletter 07 July 2020

TeachingEnglish newsletter

07 July 2020

Welcome to the latest edition of the TeachingEnglish newsletter!

The British Council is committed to supporting teachers and teacher educators during the Covid-19 crisis.

To this end, this week we bring you news of three webinars to give you insights in the current crisis.

We also bring you two reports focused on how education systems, teachers and teacher educators have responded to the impact of Covid-19, and details of the Language for Resilience online training series.

And for the classroom, we have two new online lessons to use with your learners.

We hope you find these resources useful.

The TeachingEnglish team

Learning at home

This lesson for primary children looks at a number of different contexts of remote learning. They will read texts about several different children and answer some questions they have written themselves. They will also identify what the children like and find difficult, and consider solutions that could help the children, as well as compare their experiences to their own.

Covid-19 insight reports

These reports explore how education systems, teachers and teacher educators have responded to the impact of Covid-19. One report provides a snapshot of the policies and practice of ministries of education in 52 countries in managing the closure of schools and the provision of remote learning in the state primary and secondary sectors. A second report provides insight into the experience and professional needs of more than 9,600 teachers and teacher educators from over 150 countries as they learn to support their learners remotely.

Language for Resilience: Dealing with very challenging behaviour

Welcome to the Language for Resilience online series. There will be five training courses for teachers in the series, each with different start dates: 1–26 June 2020: An introduction to trauma and its effects in the classroom; 6–31 July 2020: Dealing with very challenging behaviour (this module); 3–28 August 2020: Teaching with minimal resources; 7 September – 2 October 2020: Context and positioning – core skills in your context; 5–30 October 2020: Learning and resources. Find out more.

The challenges of remote learning and teacher resilience – Wednesday 8 July 2020

Teachers are experiencing some of the most dramatic changes in their careers and are under pressure to find new ways to support and reach their students. Around 70 per cent of schoolchildren are not attending school in buildings due to closures and rapid moves to remote learning. What is the impact of this change on teacher resilience and well-being? How are teachers and schools responding in different contexts? This is a panel event, with speakers from around the world, followed by questions from the audience. Read more.

Coffee shop showdown

Our latest online lesson plan for adults and older teenagers at B1 level uses video from The English Channel to help students develop listening and speaking skills. This lesson plan is both a standalone plan for one listening/video lesson and an overview of how to stage and construct listening or media-based plans more generally, with an emphasis on how top-down and bottom-up modes of processing work during the course of such a lesson.

Global north–south project-based learning: Student-to-student telecollaboration for language learning

Student-to-student projects across continents are a pedagogically sound addition to teacher-led online instruction. We outline an ongoing telecollaborative project which involves science students in the UK, Palestine and Malawi. Watch a recording of this webinar looking at student-to-student projects across continents.

British Council teaching resources survey

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, the British Council has been sharing a range of digital events, webinars, short online courses and other resources to support teachers and teacher educators around the world. Please complete our British Council survey and tell us how you have been using teaching and development resources during Covid-19.

Webinar – International research into teacher professional development: implications in the current context

Join us on 15 July for a webinar about recruitment, retention and in-service training of English language teachers in public schools/universities in Latin America and the Middle East. In the first part we review the research findings relating to teacher professional development. We then move on, in the second section, to discuss the implications of these findings and the way the situation has altered and/or been impacted by the current Covid-19 situation.