Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 3; September 04

A Postgraduate Course for Teacher Trainers

Trainer Development

Tony Wright
College of St Mark and St John's, Plymouth, UK

Every year in the early Autumn a new group of postgraduate students arrives from all corners of the globe to follow our MEd in Trainer Development (ELT) course over the following year. This is an exciting time for the teaching team, as we work to create a new learning community with a group of professionals typically with widely varying backgrounds and goals.

For eight months they work together as a group, eventually doing collaborative assignments and presentations before going on to write their dissertations on issues of personal and professional interest and relevance, usually with an eye on the situation 'back at home' if they are from abroad. For some participants, typically British ELT professionals, the dissertation is also an opportunity to engage with a topic of personal relevance, even though they may not work to go to immediately following the course. This is a great opportunity to 'read all those books' and to do some research on teacher training. The dissertation marks the end of a learning process within the confines of our course. But it also signifies the beginning of a new phase in an individual's professional life, a jumping off point. It all revolves around the idea of 'development'.

On our course, development means not only the acquisition of new knowledge and skills (although we'd be disappointed if this didn't happen). It also means what Blake calls 'the altering eye' - new ways of looking at teaching and learning; alternative ways of relating to professional colleagues; an appreciation of the challenges posed by other working contexts, often in poor and disadvantaged parts of the world where teachers strive, often against impossible odds, to provide meaningful educational opportunities to children and adults.

There is no timetable for these processes to happen. They emerge from the course process, a process grounded in activities rich in possibilities for dialogue among participants and tutors. We find that attention to the following helps us in initiating and maintaining this process, from which insights and new learning emerge.

1. 'Starting from where they're at' - group members often ask us why we spend so much time finding out what they have experienced as educators and as students. Not only are we trying to acknowledge the integrity of previous experience, but we are also assisting in the learning process by tuning the course to the participants. We don't always get it right - we have to balance the competing agendas of different individuals, the agreed learning aims of the course and how individuals feel about their learning.
2. Encouraging discussion and reflection on the training activities we use. This is done in group sessions through 'thinking questions' on activities, and through writing reviews of activity on a regular basis.
3. We have already mentioned that our course is a group experience. We pay a great deal of attention to the dynamics of our group. This means taking the rough with the smooth of group life and learning from the experience, as we hope our groups do. Again, our explicit attention to the life of a group is a necessary part of the learning process.
4. Looking for contextual relevance. It is very easy on a taught programme to lose sight of the 'real professional world'. For instance, assignments are typically professional tasks (e.g. writing training materials and trainers' notes). Course participants are also members of our professional community, and we encourage informal discussion whenever we can.

By the end of the year, participants have had the opportunity to engage with

• Ideas on teaching and learning which underpin all teaching and training activity
• Professional areas like language awareness, action research and the uses of IT in education
• Different aspects of ELT of professional interest and relevance
• Training skills - from one-to-one work with teachers to the skills for working with training groups
• 'Big picture' issues such as course design for initial and continuing professional education

Our aim is for them to leave us as trainers with greater confidence and increased self-awareness, a sense of professional self-worth and a deeper understanding of what it takes to learn to be a teacher or a trainer. Most leave with a strong sense of the extent to which they have developed professionally and personally, and an awareness of what they need to do to maintain the developmental momentum that the course has provided them.

Here are some comments about the course from participants. We think they capture what the process and its outcomes mean from the participants' perspectives.

The content was approached through multiple dimensions and illustrates some of the practices followed in teacher education - case studies, project work, reflection, group discussion. The tutor allowed participants to adopt a research orientation, even to his own department's work, and his own teaching/overseas consultancy. I enjoyed the emphasis on inquiry-based and discovery-oriented approach to learning. The agenda was driven largely by the participants. (Gurmit)

Your programme is very focused, practical and really worth doing. The course gives a sense of unity and clear objectives. (Svetlana)

My strongest memories of my time at Marjon were the thrill of catching the bus every morning in anticipation of what we were going to do that day, and meeting and spending a year with the other course participants. The course gave me the confidence to be able to apply myself to things I did not necessarily know how to do. (Peter)