Last month the IHWO team headed up to Harrogate for an exciting week at IATEFL 2023. IH sponsored the event. As so many of our IH colleagues spoke on a variety of themes, as the event highlighted IH excellence in innovation. Check out the abstracts below to see what the IH speakers spoke about during this event.

Tuesday 18th

Harnessing hormones – the role of menstrual health in leadership
Jennifer Holden (International House Language Centre Palermo)

This workshop explores the role of women’s health in our language teaching organisations, investigating how raising awareness of the menstrual cycle and menopause can become a powerful tool for all leaders, both male and female. We will look at practical ways to move towards a more open dialogue surrounding hormonal health to enhance belonging and performance in our learning
communities.

Out of the question: effective questioning for leaders and trainers
Lucie Cotterill (IH British School Reggio Calabria)
Gone are the days when leaders and trainers had to have all the right answers. Now, they must ask the right questions, modelling curiosity, to promote and maximise development of themselves and those they lead / train. Participants will leave this workshop with a range of questions to ask at key points in a teacher’s employment to enhance performance.

Dialogic reflection on critical moments
Richard Chinn (King's College London & International House London)
Most would agree that reflection is key to teacher development and there are many ways of reflecting on practice. One effective way to stimulate reflection is to discuss important moments that happen in class with colleagues. This talk focuses on dialogic reflection and presents teachers and educators with practical examples of how to stimulate this kind of reflection.

Flipped CELTA training – a risk worth taking?
Judith Hudson (University of Hawaii English Language Program), Melissa Lamb (International House London), Adrian Underhill (Freelance), Connor O'Donoghue (Stafford House London), Joanna Stansfield (International House London)

Since 2019 we’ve been turning CELTA on its head. Input is done at home whilst course hours focus on emerging planning and context-related teaching concerns. Trainers have reported deeper processing of course content, more thoughtful planning, increased confidence to experiment and insightful reflection. The panel will share their experiences compared to traditional course – come and give your views.

CELTA lesson observations: finding the positives
Garth Cadden (International House London)

Teacher trainers will always look for balance between strengths of lessons they are observing and areas for development. This becomes more challenging when `key techniques` are absent, but positives can always be found. This workshop uses case studies to explore these positives, how we can focus on them in feedback and help trainees build on their successes.

Wednesday 19th April

Exploring reasons and emergent language in learner-generated texts
Danny Norrington-Davies (International House London)

After learners take part in communicative tasks and discussions, post-task feedback often focuses on sentence or phrase level language. In this workshop, we will look at ways teachers can help learners reconstruct what they said into longer texts, and how these can be used to work with emergent language and explore the reasons why learners are using specific forms

Down syndrome – excluding learners because of a chromosome?
Anette Igel, IHWO German Advisor

Teaching English in an inclusive classroom can have its challenges. When it comes to learners that have different cognitive abilities a lot of teachers shy away. This very practical and hands on workshop will show you how to create material for learners with Down syndrome and why using music and drama can play an important role when learning a language.

Spillover: how management styles spread through educational contexts
Giovanni Licata (International House Rome Accademia Britannica)

All members of ecosystems are interconnected and infinitesimally small factors can clearly have a gigantic impact. This talk reflects on the impact of school management’s actions and choices. Starting from experiences within the context of a local-community language school, this talk will explore how a spillover of well-being can happen (or not) to create a healthy work environment.

Learner perceptions of emergent language interventions
Katherine Moynihan (International House London), Alexey Solovyev (International House London)

In this talk, we will examine some of the relevant literature surrounding emergent language and look at student perceptions of different teaching intervention types. Following this, we will then propose some practical implications for teachers when working with emergent language and discuss some of the ways in which emergent language can and should be included in continuous professional development.

Friday 21st

Breaking the curse of knowledge: what new teachers actually need!
William Morrow (International House London), Marie Willoughby (International House London)
The curse of knowledge: the more experience we have in a field, the more challenging it is to relate to newcomers. IH London have started an online teacher development community (Teacher Portal) to help us identify and address real teacher needs, using engagement analytics in community, course content and resources. Come and discover what teachers really want to develop.