At the InnovateELT conference this year titled “Power to the Learner”, I asked the question, ‘What do students say they get from their teacher?’. I wanted to know how closely their experience aligns with what the ELT profession says about good teaching. I looked at feedback from about 100 students at Oxford House who were asked to write down three things they liked about their classes. The students are mainly Spanish / Catalan adults in a private language school in Barcelona in small groups at a range of levels including general English and exam preparation classes. So here are the top 6 most ..read more

In this three-minute talk, Jack Richards, co-author with Theodore Rogers of Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, makes his prediction for the future of teacher training and development. Has he been reading From English Teacher to Learner Coach? “Good teaching means preparing learners for learning both inside and outside of the classroom and that preparing teachers for this new reality will become more and more central in the training and development of language teachers.” We quite agree, Jack ..read more

Many people assume that a coaching approach can only be effective with one-to-one teaching. In this guest post Gabriella Kovács, a trained coach, describes a coaching technique she uses with group classes. Gabriella is an ACC, ICF-accredited  language coach (Associate Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation) and business communication trainer. Her declared mission is to add dimension to ongoing language learning practices by introducing language coaching to organizations. She is currently supporting teachers to implement a language coaching approach in their day-to-day cla ..read more

Another guest post, this time from Claire Venables, who is based in Brazil and runs http://www.englishwithclaire.com. Claire shares the principles of Masterminding, the framework she uses, and some examples of how her learners are transforming the way they learn English. There is a quote that has been doing the rounds on Facebook that goes ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ This only made sense to me after I started a Mastermind group with four other motivated and determined colleagues. As our group developed, so too did the careers of the women in it. For t ..read more

We’re lucky enough to welcome to the blog Alex Strick, a writer, researcher and expert language learner as well as a language coach. Here he talks about his approach to learning and how it meshes with From English Teacher to Learner Coach, his background in learning languages, his move to coaching others in languages, not to mention a wonderful tool that he has built for learners: CoachBot. Imagine that our book was an app; well, this would be it! I’ll leave Alex to explain… I read From English Teacher to Learner Coach only recently. I received a glowing recommendation from a fellow language ..read more

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I’m pleased to introduce Phil Wade. Phil is an English teacher and coach specialising in business English. He’s also authored e-books on business English and is an active online member of the BE coaching community. In our first interview, he talks about his experiences teaching business English and how his approach has shifted into coaching. Phil, what’s your teaching background and how does coaching fit in? Hi Dan. Well, I started out tutoring university students and then worked for several language schools as a teacher and course manager, a few universities, some online organisations and I a ..read more

Duncan and I were fortunate enough to meet Jaime Miller at the Innovate conference back in April. Jaime runs the online English Success Academy which gets learners better prepared for TOEFL. Jaime invited us to talk about coaching in an interview for her website. In the interview, we define learner coaching as well as discuss some of the issues of coaching methodology and practice. Here’s the interview in full: Go on, stick it on in the background while you check facebook ..read more

There’s some interesting chat going on on the blog, though it’s hidden away in the ‘About’ page comments. You can read it here. It started with a reader, Phil, asking whether we knew any coaching courses to recommend and became a chat about whether what we do should really be called coaching. If people that work as coaches get upset at our use of the title (Duncan’s met at least one), I don’t think we need to worry too much – after all, it’s not as if we’re affiliated to any organizations from which we could be struck off. It reminds me that there are lots of types of coach out there, from lif ..read more

At its heart coaching is about helping students realise their own power; power to make choices about where, when and how they learn. Where before the challenge for students was finding access to ways of learning, the challenge now is one of choice. Twenty years ago a learner would have been hard pushed to find any decent listening material on her own; she had to rely to a large extent on her teacher. Today, that same student may be bewildered by the millions of listening opportunities available to her. Is she any better off now? Unless teachers are active English learners themselves (many are ..read more