By Cath Brown
The English Language Teaching Centre (ELTC) held its Teacher Awayday this September. This was our first fully in-person cross-centre event since 2020! It was so good to meet up with ELTC colleagues from across the campus and spend the day together. Our year-round calendar is pretty busy; as well as our summer and term time pre-sessional provision, we also work in teacher training, departmental support and credit bearing modules, to name a few, so it was no mean feat getting us all together in the same room for this event.
The ELTC has a specialist Teacher Development team who worked on planning the day. Inspired by January's excellent Education Conference, we decided to adopt the theme of 'Belonging'. We asked teachers which areas for development were of the highest priority for them and this helped us to decide on key strands. In the end, we had four main strands running through the day: Belonging in HE, belonging in the research world, belonging for LGBTQI+ students, and belonging for learners with additional needs. The schedule for the morning sessions at The Wave looked like this:
We wanted to provide participants with the opportunity to discuss these same themes in greater depth in the afternoon, so we asked teachers to sign up for a reading circle. Everyone in a reading circle would read the same two articles in advance and be guided by the discussion questions provided. The discussions were around an hour long, with 4-6 people in one reading circle.
The feedback for the ELTC awayday was overwhelmingly positive. Teachers were especially positive about the relevance of the event to their own professional context. They appreciated the organisation of the morning sessions; moving as they did from a broader HE and Academic English and research perspective to consideration of the specific needs of learners in our classrooms. One participant described the day as ‘just the right balance between raising awareness, detail, signposting and discussion’.
This was the first time we'd tried reading circles as part of an awayday, and we'd definitely do this again in future. The feedback suggested that they were thought-provoking and engaging - and many of us loved the opportunity to meet in small groups: ‘The reading circle was really interesting. I enjoyed both the preparation and the discussion. An hour wasn't long enough!’
Here at the ELTC, we're already looking forward to the announcement of the Education Conference theme for 2024 - thank you to the Elevate team for the inspiration this year!
Cath Brown is the Academic Director for Professional Development and Preparatory Courses at the ELTC