A Week of Teachers' Training Session

"Welcome to XXX World!" With this, the training session week started. The first day passed listening to 2 lectures. Both of them have, or at least have had, a career as a junior high school teacher. Their lectures were not bad at all, but made me wonder what their purpose(s) might be. What use will being immersed in a world or two have use for? How useful take-it-if-you-like-it approach is? The life course(s) of the lecturers, the teachers with craftsmanship, should be researched and made explicit, so that we can see certain laws of teachers' development. They should be interviewed as such.
Today's workshop was about how to employ authentic materials in classrooms. We don't have Oral English classes anymore, and it is difficult for us to use those materials in our English I or II classes because of short of time. Although it is nice to get useful ideas created by native English speakers, I would rather like to see how they find the textbooks of English I and II, and how they "cook" them to have our students learn authentic English. That kind of workshop will be really beneficial to us.

Passing know-hows among teachers, especially from those with craftsmanship to others, is important, but not enough. The life course of each skilful teacher should be researched and made explicit how they have developed themselves. That will enable us to extract certain laws of teachers' development. Those explicit laws will then enable other teachers to apply some of the laws on themselves, which will enhance their development as a teacher.

Today's lectures or workshops, whatever you call them, didn't reveal the lecturers' secrets which have enabled their development. Is it because that secrets make a lecture a lecture? Some people condemn that teachers are only taking advantage of the knowledge gap between their students and themselves. So are lecturers?

There should be 2 kinds of training sessions or courses for teachers. One is, of course, to provide them new teaching skills. The other is to en-power their self-innovation ability itself.

Mr. Gordon was trying to bridge Japanese vowel pronunciation to that of English vowels. As he says, each vowel sounds as a result of a certain configuration of muscles in and around the mouth. In bridging Japanese and English configurations, he picked up a wise way; to focus on specific muscles. I his case, they are those of and around lips. It is a wise idea because we can easily figure out what shapes our mouth is taking.

His method also reminded me of the famous "interlanguage" argument. As a matter of fact, we can easily argue appropriateness of students' pronunciation when they follow his method. Let me, however, introduce what Deng Xiao-ping once famously put it in: Whether it is a white cat or a black cat, a cat which catches a rat is a good cat.
Mr. Takahashi theoretically introduced us how to develop students. His words reminded me of "The Zone of Proximal Development: ZPD" theory by Vigotsky. We have to assume what readiness students have, and allocate readiness dots properly so that they can connect the dots with lines easily.
Mr. Takahashi also suggested how we can develop ourselves as well. We have acquired some useful dots, but don't have lines to connect them. We can hardly reach the top or goal without them. If this session is planned to train English teachers, it should have provided training opportunities. What we are supposed to train is not only our teaching skills, but also our self-innovation ability.