A bit of history
I graduated from the University of Galati in 1985 and, as I mentioned in another post, the government sent me some 800 kilometers away from home to teach English in two village schools.
I wouldn’t insist upon the next 4 years, I had a thousand reasons not to like my job, that is probably why I was so relieved when, in November 1989, my daughter was born. At the time, mothers’ leave was only four months, which was too short a time, but at least that meant I would be spared the commuting, the coal dust, the fleas and the commuters’ dirty jokes.
One month after my daughter’s birth, in December 1989, the Romanians decided they had had enough of Ceausescu and his communist system. (Telling political jokes was my “heroic” form of protest against the regime.) The Revolution brought some major changes, two of which I liked the most: mothers’ leave was extended to a year and teachers all over the country could transfer to jobs in their native towns or their spouses’ residence towns, thus reuniting families which had been separated for several years. And this is how I got transferred to a school in my native town, a very good school I should add, where nothing resembled everything I had left behind.
1991
After one year in this school, I registered for a two-week course on modern methodology in teaching English as a foreign language, organised by the British Council, the Soros Foundation for an Open Society and the Romanian Ministry of Education. The training took place in Iasi, in the first two weeks of September 1991. A team of about eight teacher trainers coming from the International House in London completely changed my career!
The IH trainers
I was 32 when this happened and had been teaching English for 7 years, using the methods I had been taught in university, from the traditional Grammar-Translation, the audio-lingual and the cognitive methods, to the humanistic approaches to language teaching (the silent way, the comprehension approach and suggestopaedia). Teachers of my generation and previous generations might remember what these methods meant and how one applied them. For those who don’t know, these methods aimed at developing the listening and speaking skills and mainly focused on acquiring vocabulary through translation, drilling, repetition and habit-formation as the central elements of teaching. “Quite boring”, I can hear the younger generations of teachers saying and I totally agree.
I had never heard of the International House in London and their teacher training programmes before 1991 but, when given the opportunity, I registered for the courses without giving it a second thought, and never regretted it! The team of IH teacher trainers was led by John Haycraft, in his mid-sixties at the time but more energetic than a youngster. As for the other team members, they were in their late-thirties or early-forties, also full of life and very enthusiastic about their work. Unfortunately, the only names I remember (besides John Haycraft) are Jane Glover and Dede Wilson. Dede was so kind as to provide two more possible names: Maria Brown and Ellie Spicer-Lindholm. (Thank you Dede and Ken!)
The workshops
The 200 Romanian teachers of English who had applied for the two-week training in Iasi knew literally nothing about such programmes, how they worked and what to expect from them, no wonder why we felt lost when presented with a list of trainer names and workshop titles to pick from. “Drama in the classroom”, “Teaching very young learners”, “Teaching primary/lower secondary/upper secondary school pupils”, “Teaching literature” are the (approximate) titles I remember and I also remember the other participants’ and my own reaction to the rich offer: which workshop to choose? Most of us entered our names on the lists of those trainers giving workshops directed to the levels we were teaching at the time, as that was the only criterion we could think of when making our choices.
Once the organizational details and the schedule were presented to the participants, we spread along the corridors of the old and famous high school hosting the event (my apologies again, I can’t remember the school name…), each group looking for the classroom of their trainer, feeling nervous and agitated about what the trainers had in store for us. At this point, I’ll only add that, as far as I remember, John Haycraft gave the “Drama” workshop, Dede Wilson gave the “Very Young Learners” workshop and Jane Glover worked with the lower-secondary group.
“Teaching English to lower-secondary school pupils”
The first thing that struck me when I entered Jane Glover’s classroom was the arrangement of the desks. She had just changed the position of those old, heavy and hard-to-move double desks, separating them into groups of two, with four teachers sitting together in each group! She smilingly greeted us as we entered the room speaking Romanian among us, we greeted her in English and then continued our chit-chat in Romanian. After having the whole group sit down, she introduced herself, presented the daily schedule, made sure we all understood the programme and the instructions and started with… announcing the objectives of the day! (Please, bear with my exclamation marks, they’re meant to show my surprise to everything I was experiencing.)
I’ll venture to say that very few of us had been exposed to communicating with native English speakers, the best English most of us had ever heard being that of our professors in university, so it was only natural for us to be shy and uncomfortable when Jane asked questions and expected answers. After all, she was talking to teachers of English, they smiled at her and nodded their heads as if they had understood her questions, why wouldn’t they answer, why would they suddenly get busy writing in their notebooks? Silence spread across the room, Jane felt somewhat disappointed, kept repeating the questions and the silence got “thicker”… you know what I’m talking about and how difficult it is for a new teacher to deal with the awkward moments before breaking the ice. Yet, to put things right and do Jane justice, it was not her we were reluctant to, it was one reminiscence of the communist regime that prevented us from venturing to speak: we had been accustomed to everybody judging everybody and criticism was at home among us…
What made the difference
I remember being among the first three who decided to risk making mistakes but speak anyway. That was why we had chosen to be there, to learn new things, to improve our teaching ways and last but not least, to take advantage of the opportunity to communicate with native speakers!
For the next two weeks, we had training classes in the morning and workshops in the afternoons, applying everything we learned. The organisers brought groups of pupils from different schools in Iasi, great kids who sacrificed the last two weeks of their summer vacation and came there every day to help us practice the new methods.
Jane showed us how enjoyable teaching English can be… She taught us how to draw even if we weren’t great artists, she showed us the effect self-made teaching materials could have on the pupils, she demonstrated how stories about fictitious characters can help us teach grammar, she sang songs just to convince us that you don’t need a great voice to be able to sing with your pupils. She made us move around the class in mingling activities, asking questions and gathering information, she made us work in pairs or groups to solve different tasks – and always varied the groups on different criteria, she played games with us and showed us role-play and mime activities, she gave us hand-outs with opposing tasks to make us practice functional vocabulary. She taught us the meaning of warm-up activities, the effect of permanently encouraging pupils, the pleasant atmosphere the teacher can create with a smile, the confidence of the well-prepared lesson.
Everything we learned in the mornings, we applied in the afternoons, “testing” everything on those kids who were so enthusiastic about how fun those classes were that they could hardly wait to come back the next day… Oh!, and she taught us one more thing: never criticise someone’s lesson! (Can you imagine how this simple rule shocked us?) To this day, I remember her words: “Criticism humiliates people who have worked hard and done their best to prepare for this class! Observing someone’s class is like watching a football game: spectators seem to know more and/or better than the players, but are always afraid of playing the game themselves.” So she asked everyone observing the afternoon classes to make two positive comments and one suggestion on what we saw…
At the end of those two weeks I returned to my school a lot more confident in my English, loaded with more methodology than I had ever learnt before, with lots of new ideas and materials, sad that the training didn’t last longer but eager to try the new things I had learned. My pupils noticed the changes and enjoyed them so much that they would have chosen to have only English classes all day long. It wasn’t long before everyone noticed the results of these changes and I felt so proud of myself for having improved my teaching and so grateful to Jane Glover and the International House in London for having helped me become a better teacher!
