“Message to Younger Teacher-Self”: Closing Plenary at ETAI 2015

Thanks to Jane Cohen for the photo
Thanks to Jane Cohen for the photo

 

After collecting over 50 responses from teachers of English as a foreign language from all over the world, I faced a challenging task. I had to present all these meaningful, funny, moving and useful short message to a younger teacher-self in a way that would not tire the audience at the closing plenary of the ETAI Summer Conference, 2015. After all, everyone (including me!) had just spent two action packed days of talks and presentations!

To make a long story short (long as in the number of hours I spent figuring this out), I fed all the responses into a “word cloud” generator, and used that as a means of grouping the responses. For example, “DON’T” actually turned out to be the most frequent word. Would this first group of messages (which included the word don’t) all be of the admonishing kind? As in “Don’t smile at the kids till after the holidays?”.  Nope! Take a look and see for yourself, below!

“LOVE” came out smaller in the word cloud, but the word itself calls for attention. I’m sure you think all the responses were of the “love your students” kind. Check it out – you were surprised by the first one, right?

“Salad” was quite small but demanded attention – what on earth does food have to do with advice for a younger teacher?

I’ll leave you to find out on your own.

Here’s the presentation!

(P.S. Was “moodhoovers” a new phrase for you too?! A great one!)

4 thoughts on ““Message to Younger Teacher-Self”: Closing Plenary at ETAI 2015”

  1. Thank you for such an inspiring and engaging presentation. Using the word cloud was a great way to structure your talk. I am going to go over the slides at my leisure to really process these pearls of wisdom.

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