Oct 5
Do you need a critical friend?
CPD
A Critical Friend Is One Of The Best Ways To Develop As A Teacher...
A critical (teaching) friend ISN'T someone who criticises you- it's someone who enables you to critique your own practice. If you want to know about how to put this in place and develop YOUR teaching, watch the video!
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Video transcript
A really good way to improve your teaching is to find yourself a critical friend. If this sounds a bit daunting or if you're not really sure what I mean or if you'd like to know more, keep watching.
I'm Jo Gakonga, I'm a teacher educator , a CELTA and MA TESOL tutor and I've got a website at ELT training.com where I make supportive material for English language teachers at all stages of their careers. Check it out and don’t forget to like and subscribe- I make a new video every week.
There's a lot of talk about criticality in our industry. We have to think critically, we have to reflect on critical incidents and we should use critical friends to help us develop.
I think that sometimes all this sounds rather daunting because we equate criticality with criticism… BUT it's important to keep in mind that we're not really talking about negative criticism with all its negative connotations. We’re talking about critique: the art of evaluating things.
So, a critical friend isn't someone who criticises you but someone who helps you to critique what you do. You could argue that you can do this on your own just as well and it's a lot less embarrassing. This is true but it won't be as effective I promise you.
Let me give you a little analogy.
I'm not a terribly fussy housekeeper and although my house is in a reasonable state, I don't spend a lot of time cleaning. But, when my mother-in-law visits, I suddenly look around the place and see all the dirt in the corners and then I clean it up.
This isn't because my mother-in-law criticises me. She never ever does. But I see it through her eyes and so I notice things that on an ordinary day I don't even see.
I'm sure you've had this experience too, maybe when you're showing somebody around your hometown and you suddenly see it in a much more positive light than you normally do. A critical friend is someone who is there to help you to see things in a new light, to make you notice things…. NOT to criticise, not even to give you ideas, just to help you to hold a mirror up to your own practice.
OK Jo, you say, that's great but what do I actually do with this critical friend? The easiest and most obvious thing is that you talk to them about your lessons. Your critical friend might be a colleague in the school where you work or it might just be another friend you have who's a teacher. I think it's helpful if this person knows something about English language teaching because then they understand what you're talking about… but, as long as they listen to you, this is actually the most important thing.
They could ask you questions to clarify what you said but- and again this is the important thing- they’re there to listen and help you work through things yourself, not to advise you. Maybe you meet for a coffee each week- one week you talk about your lessons- uninterrupted- for a while. The next week, your critical friend talks to you.
Another way that you could do this is to have an email conversation with your critical friend. I've had this kind of relationship with somebody and it worked remarkably well. Write your reflections on a particular lesson on a Word doc, attach it to an email and send it to your friend.
When they have time (maybe within three days?) they can reply with a question or two at the top of the same Word doc and you reply when you feel you want to. This way, you start to build up a conversation that it’s useful to look back on. Maybe do this for a month and then swap roles. Try it out and let me know in the comments below if you find it helpful. You might be surprised.
If you liked this, head on over to my website for lots of other development ideas. See you there!
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THANK YOU!
Your download has been sent to your email inbox.
If you don't see it, please check your Junk or Promotion folders and add jo.gakonga@elt-training.com to your contacts.
If you don't see it, please check your Junk or Promotion folders and add jo.gakonga@elt-training.com to your contacts.