Hội thảo VietTesol lần thứ được tổ chức tại Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ – Đại học Huế từ ngày 11 đến 12/10/2019.

Keynote speaker: Donald Freeman

PLENARY

TITLE: Why do language teachers (need to) use other people’s ideas?

ABSTRACT:

This presentation examines how (and why) classroom language teachers seem to depend on other people’s ideas to understand and direct what they do when they teach. As knowledge-users, teachers draw on ideas that come from sources which are beyond of the classroom itself.  What are the organizational and professional forces that drive this orientation which positions teachers as primarily users of other people’s knowledge and ideas about what they do in their classrooms?  In using these ‘imported’ ideas, teachers’ own understandings of their students often get lost or buried.  In contrast, classroom teachers have vast amounts of knowledge that usually goes untapped.  In using these understandings to direct what they do classroom teachers can become knowledge-generators. National reforms to improve teaching quality depend on developing this indigenous classroom knowledge. I will present a framework for examining this problem as well as strategies to (re)orienting the work of classroom teaching to make it more diagnostic.

WORKSHOP

WORKSHOP TITLE: Learning from experience in teacher education

WORKSHOP ABSTRACT: In this workshop, participants will meet and have the opportunity to work with a set of four basic design principles for teacher training and professional development. These principles focus on the how teachers can draw from their experiences in and out of the classroom to build their knowledge and develop reflective practices and professional communities. Examples from various teacher development projects around the world will be included. The workshop is open to all; however, it will be of most interest to those who are involved in planning and/or delivering teacher training and professional development programs.

BIO

Donald Freeman is Professor of Education, University of Michigan, where his work has focused on understanding and designing equitable professional development opportunities in ELT that are accessible to teachers across diverse teaching circumstances and contexts. He directs the Learning4Teaching Project, a series of national research studies of ELT public-sector teachers’ experiences in professional development conducted in Chile, Turkey, and Qatar. He is Senior Advisor on the ELTeach Project (National Geographic Learning), which provides on-line professional development to ELT public-sector teachers, and author, most recently, of Educating Second Language Teachers, (Oxford, 2016). He is a past president of TESOL, and member the International Advisory Council for Cambridge ESOL, and immediate past chair of the International Research Foundation for English Language Teaching (TIRF).