2021-2022 Events
Lesson Planning & Time Management – Amir Esmkhani Session
The session started with a few questions about lesson planning as a warm-up. Then the presenter discussed the significance of having a lesson plan. The next section covered different parts of a lesson plan with more focus on “Lesson Aims & Objectives”, “Class Profile”, as well as “Evidence of Learning”. Crucial considerations in designing a plan such as Macro and Micro Planning, SMART Goals, and Sequential vs. Consequential Staging were presented. The last part of the presentation before the Q & A looked at Time Management.
Academic Listening & Giving Feedback – Andrew Bosson
Listening in ELT was once called the ‘Cinderella skill’ as it received relatively little focus from the perspective of ELT research, being considered a fairly straightforward skill requiring straightforward classroom tasks. Now we know that being an effective listener is an essential ability, particularly in an academic environment, and the skills required of an effective listener are multifaceted. Hence, teachers actually face a great challenge when teaching listening. In this session we explore the skills and knowledge that our learners need in order to become effective listeners especially in academic contexts such as lectures when learners are also required to take effective notes. We then explore practical ways in which we, as teachers, can teach and encourage the development of our learners’ listening skills including providing them with effective feedback to promote learning. Prior to the session, Andrew shared a listening task to introduce the key themes of his presentation.
Academic Writing – Andrew Bosson
As writing effectively is often challenging for learners in their L1, the need to learn to write academic texts in their L2 can be extremely demanding. Learners require support, motivation and considered feedback in order to make progresses. In this session we focus on the elements of academic writing and how to encourage the development of writing skills in shorter and longer texts in a variety of rhetorical patterns such as expressing opinion, making comparisons and indicating cause and effect. We also explore how teachers can provide effective, targeted feedback to help learners develop their academic writing skills.
Grading Writing (by our own instructors)
Gökçe Özgen, Müge Karayları Bayraktar, Pınar Arıpınar
This training was planned by the above instructors on the initiation of the CPD unit. This training as delivered to instructors who joined the language school in between 2020 and 2022. It demonstrated how to grade writing using a rubric. İnstructors also carried out a standardization after hearing how to grade, and how to deal with discrepancies in order to grade effectively. The need to be standardized was also clearly explained.
2020-2021 Events
In the 2020-2021 academic year, four orientation trainings and 11 additional trainings were delivered (eight in-house and three external) by the CPD unit.
In-house sessions
The CPD Unit was delighted to deliver in house trainings and facilitate peer workshops. We look forward to running more peer-lead events in the forthcoming year.
Trauma Informed Teaching by Elizabeth S. Coleman
2020 has undoubtedly been a long year that has left many of us fatigued and drained both mentally and physically. The same is true for our students, who might not have as many resources to deal with these challenges as we do. Considering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and other experiences our students may bring with them to the classroom, this workshop will provide an overview of trauma informed teaching and how it relevant to our practice as conscientious educators. First, we will examine what is meant by trauma before investigating the six components of trauma informed practice and how we can incorporate them into our lessons to support our students and each other.
Teaching ESP by Aslıhan Akın
During her workshop, Aslıhan Akın focused on how to increase the lecturers’ desire and motivation in teaching ESP. She gave some tips and had a brainstorm on various ways of teaching ESP, and she talked about how to spice up our lessons with more student engagement.
Tip Top Tips for Socrative by Hatice Granados Fuquene
As one of the CPD team members, Hatice Granados Fuquene emphasized the importance of integrating technology into our online lessons. She showed the attendees various ways of using the website, Socrative. The need to spicing up our lessons with visuals and helping students understand the necessary contents by having much more interesting quizzes, space races and even exit ticket games was referred throughout the session while exemplifying how to use the exercises on Socrative effectively in our lessons.
Utilizing Mindmeister and Edupad for Writing by Elizabeth S. Coleman
As the team leader of CPD Unit, Elizabeth Coleman introduced both Mindmeister and Edupad as a tool for our online writing lessons. She also shared how lecturers can use these websites to get students work collaboratively to produce texts. With her examples and demonstrations of using these websites more effectively, Elizabeth helped attendees benefit from her own experiences with these websites.
The Ups and Downs of Online Classroom Management by Aynur Yılmazer
Aynur Yılmazer, one of the CPD team members, shared some tips related to online classroom management and let the lecturers talk about their own experiences throughout the session. All the attendees tried to find useful ways of dealing with online classroom management. By sharing various experiences, lecturers felt that they were not alone in this journey. It was a lively, communicative session.
An Introduction to Transformative Pedagogy by Elizabeth S. Coleman
Elizabeth Coleman offered a mini workshop for our colleagues. In her session, she explored the differences between traditional pedagogical methods and transformative pedagogy. After examining the origins, she helped the lecturers to comprehend how to use transformative pedagogy more effectively in their classroom and support their students.
Let’s Share by Aynur Yılmazer
In this session, Aynur Yılmazer shared a few useful websites that our students could use to self-study. Some of the shared websites could also be used in online classes for further reading and listening. She wanted to create a list of websites that could be shared with our students as links and help them study even in their summer break to keep improving their English language skills.
To Be or Not to Be – Student Engagement in the New Era by Hatice Granados Fuquene
In this session, Hatice Granados Fuquene focused on the students who just seemed to be engaging the lessons even though they stayed silent in our online classes. She tried to find answers to the question ‘What is holding our students back from engaging?’
The dos and don’ts of online student engagement in the era of the new normal were discussed and some effective ways of handling this situation were shared throughout the session.
External sessions
The CPD Unit was delighted to work with colleagues at Oxford University Press and their freelance trainers to facilitate three externally delivered sessions.
Did you say something? by Christopher Sheen
In his session, Christopher Sheen provided us with tools for speaking and listening classes. He looked at listening and speaking from both a solo and paired perspective. He started off his session by giving in-depth meaning of ‘listening’ in contrast to hearing. He, then, focused on why speaking is psychologically tough for many of our students. After that, all lecturers progressed through some basic activities. At the end, a survey with an accompanying digital badge was offered.
Motivation and Engagement During the Pandemic by Edward Smiles
In his session, Edward Smiles paid attention to remote learning in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He also mentioned the ongoing daily disruption of the pandemic to education and commerce. As stated in the session, this abrupt change heavily impacted on students’ motivation, engagement, and perceptions of success. Consequently, we as lecturers had to continue to evolve our skill sets to embrace this virtual learning environment.
Edward reviewed some steps that online teachers could use to engage the students at the start of a lesson, as well as how we could utilize digital resources to help motivate the classroom and achieve the correct balance between instruction, tutorial, and student production.
How to Teach Reading Skills During a Pandemic by Andrew Bosson
Andrew Bosson started his session by talking about the general concept of being a reader and how it has been changing over the years. As he stated, ‘Helping our learners to become better readers seems to be a constant source of discussion for teachers in an age when, it seems, young people are less engaged readers than previous generations.’
In this session, he helped us explore the skills that make an effective reader and consider how we could address them whilst engaging and motivating our learners during the pandemic (and hopefully beyond). Andrew and the participants also considered the demands, and advantages, of the online environment to help us plan meaningful learning opportunities. The session involved interactive activities and ideas that we found useful to implement in our classes.
2018-2019 Events
Conferences attended by our faculty members in 2019
Participation in conferences makes serious contributions to teacher professional development. For this reason, our education staff is informed about both local and national conferences to be held. In addition to participating in conferences, our institution also supports the active participation of our lecturers as speakers.
2nd TESOL Turkey Conference, Osmangazi University:
Tugba Kaya delivered a poster presentation and Nihal Ozdemir explained her academic work with Eda Elmas (Yildiz Technical University) at the 2nd TESOL Turkey conference
Gokcen Ozgen and her student represented our institution at an educational event held at Sabancı University. Many higher education institutions in Turkey participated in the event.
In-house Trainings in Our Institution
In 2019, a 4-stage technology teaching activity was prepared and implemented by the teacher professional development unit.
A training on use of cartoons in the language class was given by Ezgi Gökel.
Another workshop was carried out by Hatice F. Granados. In the training, the instructors actively used the Nearpod application with their own computers and received feedback.
Güven Kimençe shared his experiences with the Slowly application and brainstormed with the participants on how it could be used in the classroom.
In another training, our teacher Didem Kurt introduced the Mendeley application, which is used for academic citations in studies.
Trainings Attended by Our Instructors
Trainings Given at Our Institution
1. Professional Development Day 1: Learn, Share and Inspire
The Learn, Share and Inspire event took place in February 2019 with the participation of all our lecturers and focused on grammar teaching in particular. The keynotes were made by Devrim Özdemir (Cambridge) and Tony Gurr (Pearson). In addition, our professional development unit supervisor Nihal Özdemir also shared the development-oriented course observation notes, and our instructors Guven Kimence, Simay Ulus, Refika Cimen, Bulent Yasar and Idil Eser, who have demonstrated exemplary practices also briefly demonstrated their practices to everyone.
2. Curriculum Design Training
As our administration believes that all our instructors need to be knowledgeable about how to design a syllabus, we organized a training session with Oxford University Press. The trainer was a Delta trainer, Jackie Halsall.
3. Assessment and Evaluation Training
Dr. Reza Vahdani (Ankara Social Sciences University) gave a 3-day assessment and evaluation training. During this training, our instructors played an active role and learned about new trends and practices as well as repeating terms about measurement and evaluation.
4. Academic Writing Training
İlkem Kayıcan (Sabancı University) gave a 2-hour training on academic writing and shared some practices in the field and findings from a study at Sabancı University with our department.
5. Academic Reading Training
Steve O’Farrell (Pearson) gave a one-hour training session to our lecturers with his ‘Motivating readers’ talk. The talk focused on how we motivate students to read both inside and outside the classroom. (29.01.2020)
External Trainings
1. Measurement and Evaluation Training – Ankara Social Sciences University
Our lecturers Fatma Funda Altınöz, Feray Gümüş, Tuğba Kaya, Sema Babacan, Utku Gürel and Fatih Bayrakçıl participated in the assessment and evaluation event organized by Ankara Social Sciences University. They interacted with participants from many other universities and had an effective week on assessment and evaluation.
2. OTA – Oxford University Press, Beykent University
Emel Z. Uğur Tibet Elmalık, Sedef Çetin, Nihal Özdemir and Emrah Gültekin took part in this three-day event organized by Oxford University Press during which they attended daily adult education and material writing trainings.
3. Train the Trainer, Cambridge Assesment
Nihal Özdemir participated in the trainer’s training event held in cooperation with Cambridge University Press, along with CPD supervisors of participating universities.
4. Curriculum Design Education – Cambridge University Press, Istanbul Commerce University
Aysen C. Usluer and İdil Eser attended the curriculum design training held in cooperation with Cambridge university Press and Istanbul Commerce University and represented our institution.
5. FOAI 12 – Question Writing III: Evaluation of Academic Listening TED University
Fırat Demir attended the 12th FOAI event held at TED University and represented our institution. This 2-day course is focused on the assessment of academic listening skills.
6. FOCI- XIX – Realistic Curriculum Goals
Selda Uzun and Begum Sarıdede represented our institution in this 2-day event held at Istanbul Aydin University and received training on creating realistic curriculum goals.
7. FOAI-13 Question Writing IV, Beykent University
EFT unit supervisor Sema Babacan attended the 13th FOAI event hosted by Beykent University and received training on writing exam questions.
8. FOCI: Integrated vs Discrete Skills Curriculum: Are we who we say we are?
The supervisor of the EDU unit, Tibet Elmalık, represented our institution at the FOCI event held at Izmir University of Economics and worked on curriculum development in collaboration with other participating lecturers for 2 celebrities.
Education Forums Hosted by IMU
Medipol University Language School hosted the FOAI Exam Writing: Evaluation of Academic Reading event (2018). Our lecturers Gamze Uçar, Matanat Mammadova and Hilal Kalkavan also took an active role in this forum, which involved the participation of many Turkish universities.
