This academic year has started very well for me because I not only teach students which I love a lot but also provide workshops to teachers in ScoLa, especially to the ones who have been recruited this year. I have seen that there is a great interest in these workshops which I hadn’t expected because we have a great bunch of experienced teachers.

I thought we would only get interest from the new staff but surprisingly we also hear a lot of positive remarks from experienced teachers.  This is not my first experience of teacher training because I have worked in several occasions in programs involving training and development of teachers. For example, INGED (English Language Teachers Association) is like my little baby because I have been doing INGED trainings with English language teachers all over Turkey and believe that I have contributed a lot to the importance of English language teaching. In fact, I have received a lot of nice feedback from those teachers. Also, some of those teachers have made great moves in their careers. My first training experience had started in Hacettepe University in 1996 where I also organised the pre-service trainings and in-service trainings. That was a great learning tool for me. It all started in that year and continued with INGED programs. I am very lucky to be part of INGED.

Now, at Özyeğin University, at the Teacher Development Unit, we have started to share our expertise and knowledge with our enthusiastic SCoLa teachers by providing workshops, reading clubs and ICT workshops. While I was delivering those weekly workshops in the previous semester, I heard many teachers asking about what team teaching was and that they were interested in knowing more about it. So, towards the end of the first semester ( 2014-2015 academic year), we decided to plan our team teaching workshop with Bahar and afterwards we would ask teachers who would be interested in implementing a team teaching lesson in our classes. We had planned that the Team Teaching workshop would be based on Loop Input in which teachers would be able to see the actual way of doing team teaching even if it was a training workshop. When we put the team teaching workshop on the schedule, we saw that many teachers were interested and attended the session. We all had great fun learning more about team teaching since it also included team building activities. For example, one of these activities was the “Blindfolded Walk”. It was a “Trust building Activity” in which partners had to walk with their blindfolded eyes from one end to the other end with a partner. Their partners had to guide them so well so that they wouldn’t step on the “mines” which were plastic glasses turned upside down on the floors.

Following up on this, in the second semester, I had the opportunity to deliver a team teaching lesson with one of our colleagues, Wasfiyah. We had great fun while we were planning our lesson. So, we had planned carefully about how we would apply the lesson (NLL 9.3) and videotaped it so that teachers would have a chance to watch the recording on video. This was a great experience for both of us as we had to plan every detail in order to make it as efficient as possible. The class said they loved it and that we should repeat this more often. Even though it was a joint lesson, we had similar responsibilities and students were all involved in the lesson. Here is the lesson plan in case you would like to apply the same schedule:

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LESSON PLAN: NLL 9.3 READING

Aim: By the end of the lesson students will have learned some vocabulary items related to the unit. They will also have taught those vocabulary items to each other (in pairs) which will give them a chance to remember the vocabulary items later.

They will have accomplished reading a short text for getting the gist. And they will have done a jig-saw reading activity. At the end of the lesson, they will also be able to answer the questions related to the 3 short texts.

STEPS:

Warm-Up: Two teachers sit in front of the class and show the photos of two engineering projects. They talk about the two projects, one in Turkey (Marmaray) and one in Dubai (Burj El Khalifa). Students listen to them and they try to remember the information about those engineering projects. Afterwards, they answer 3 questions about those two projects. (10 mins)

  1. 1. What is it?
  2. Why was it built?
  3. What was the challenge?

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  1. Vocabulary Teaching: Students sit in two circles. Each teacher joins one group and they teach the relevant vocabulary items which students will come across in the text to their groups. One teacher teaches 6 words, the other one teaches other 6 words. Then, students in both groups are given a number which they will pair up with from the other group. So, number 1 pairs up with number 1 from the other group. Finally, students stand up and teach each other their own 6 words that they have learned from their teacher. So, in total the whole class will have learned 12 words. ( 15 mins)

 

  1. Jigsaw reading: At this stage, the class is divided into groups of three. In each group, each person reads a different text from the book and underlines the important parts from their text. Afterwards, they talk about their own text. While talking about their text, they can use the previous 3 questions to guide them in their talk. (10 mins)

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  1. If time: Answering the reading questions on the worksheet. (10 mins) This might be done in the next lesson.

I would like to thank my colleague Wasfiyah for all her effort to do a team teaching lesson with me. It was a great pleasure working with her.

by Nazan Ozcınar