DoS Days
AISLi from Within
AISLi from Within
Most educators agree that creativity in the classroom is a positive thing. However, many of us don’t always agree on what creativity means or how we might achieve it. In this webinar I’d like to explore our definitions of creativity and the reasons behind them. In particular, I’ll challenge the belief that effective creativity is only about thinking ‘outside the box’ when in fact effective creative thinking often occurs ‘inside the box’. The webinar will include seven ways of making teaching (and management) more creative.
Over the years, language teachers have been faced with a growing number of binary distinctions, e.g. accuracy vs fluency, use vs usage, teacher-centred vs learner-centred, behaviourism vs mentalism, grammar-translation vs communication, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, exam focus vs wider communicative goals, coursebook-based vs teaching ‘unplugged’. This list is far from exhaustive.
Teachers have often felt constrained to choose between two apparent extremes, and this choice may be strongly influenced by the prevailing culture of the institution they work in.
We are currently in a time when we’re told that change is needed more than ever for our language teaching organisations to remain competitive in the market, but at the same time the climate of unpredictability brought about by the pandemic has left our staff with a very real sense of change fatigue. In this session, we’ll be taking a brief look at some frameworks for managing change, the psychological effects of change on our staff, and how change can be implemented in a way that increases buy-in and reduces anxiety.
The Eaquals Academic Management Competences Framework addresses the need for support for academic managers in terms of designing a clear path for their own development within an organisation or as they develop in their career and move from one organisation to the next. The framework provides a practical way of addressing this need both for managers and for their team.
The remit for this workshop was ‘something fun and active…it’s the last day’, so this is my attempt at engaging and motivating a wonderful group of people who are always up for a laugh, but have high expectations.A networking and team building workshop to foster future collaboration between AISLi schools and within your own school community, with some takeaways and practical ideas for your teachers to use in the classroom, too. Teambuilding activities and ice breakers help build trust and improve intrapersonal and interpersonal awareness. By creating personal maps, we will develop empathy and understanding within the group. Finally, we will discuss how to adapt the activity so that it is practical and appropriate to other professional and learning context.
