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1 Decide:
(a) the subject of the in-service course
(b) the length of the course
(c) the number of participants.
2 How will you do a needs analysis?
Planning an In-Service Course 195
What will your goals be?
3 Do an environment analysis. Rank the three most important constraints
and their effects.
(a)
(b)
(c)
4 Design the format of the course in the form of a timetable.
Task 3 The conference workshop
One form of in-service training is the workshop offered at a conference. The
conference workshop shares some features with the more traditional in-
service training workshop discussed in this chapter, and is another way of
introducing teachers to new ideas and activities, with the aim of contributing
to improved teaching practice. Yet it also has some important differences
including:
" the exact number and background of participants are unknown
" time is restricted by the conference programme
" the workshop will be just one of several sessions participants will be
attending over the course of the conference.
You have been invited to present a workshop on fluency development at a
conference in Cambodia.
1 You have asked the conference organisers what to expect. They have
told you that many of the teachers at the conference will be from rural
schools, but there will also be some expatriate teachers from schools in
Phnom Penh, the capital city. They have also said that teachers typically
teach from the textbook, and that there is little opportunity for teachers
or students to use English outside the classroom.
What effect will these constraints have on your workshop?
2 The workshop is scheduled for a 90-minute session. What will your
goal/s be?
3 Identify the core content for your workshop, and then decide on the
sequencing. Relate the content and sequencing to the goal/s, and reflect
on the principles that underly the decisions you have made.
4 One week before the conference begins, the organisers email you again
and ask if you could reduce the time from 90 to 45 minutes. How will
you respond?
196 Planning an In-Service Course
Case Studies
1 Choose an account of a short in-service course and analyse it carefully
using the framework of goals, input and involvement described in this
chapter. Present a short description and evaluation of the course. If you
were observing the course, what would you look for? For accounts of
short in-service courses see Knight (1992), Taylor (1992), Nolasco and
Arthur (1986), Lopriore (1998), Waters and Vilches (2005).
2 Survey the topics of published in-service courses to see the sorts of issues
addressed in in-service courses. The journal English Teaching Forum
(1987) surveyed its readers to see what they were interested in reading in
the journal ( What our readers told us about themselves English Teach-
ing Forum 25, 2: 30 33). Here is their list which is ranked from most
wanted to least wanted.
Specific techniques
Methodology
Games and songs
Listening comprehension
Language analysis
Literature
EST
Broad philosophical articles.
Chapter 14
Teaching and
Curriculum Design
After working through this chapter you should be able to help teachers and learners get
the best out of a course.
Throughout this book the emphasis has been on seeing curriculum design
as a process with a variety of starting points and with continual opportunity
to return to parts of the curriculum design model to revise, reconsider and
re-evaluate. It has also been shown that curriculum design does not need to
be a large-scale operation. The whole curriculum design process can be
applied to something as small as an activity in a lesson. Alternatively, atten-
tion can be focused on just one part of the curriculum design process.
It should be clear from this that curriculum design is not the exclusive
possession of full-time curriculum designers. Teachers need to make
decisions relating to curriculum design in every lesson:
" Is this item worth spending time on?
" How will I present this material?
" What should I test?
These questions require curriculum design decisions and teachers need to
develop an awareness of the parts of the curriculum design process, the range
of options that are available, and the principles that can guide the application
of the process and the choice of options.
As a way of reviewing the model of curriculum design described in
this book, we will look at how the parts of the curriculum design model
apply to the daily work of teachers in language classes. The reason for
doing this is to show that even decisions which just relate to part of a
lesson could be improved by an understanding of the wider curriculum
design process.
Environment Analysis
Every day teachers have to consider questions like the following:
" Will this activity be interesting enough for my learners?
" Do I have enough time to do this activity?
198 Teaching and Curriculum Design
" Will this activity be too noisy?
" Do the learners know how to do this kind of activity or will I have to
explain it to them?
" Will this activity create a lot of marking for me to do?
All of these questions relate to environment analysis. They look at the practi-
cality of doing such an activity in the situation in which the teacher is
working. The purpose of environment analysis is to make sure that what
happens is likely to be successful because it takes account of the local situation.
An experienced teacher does not have to think very deeply about most
environment analysis decisions, because such a teacher knows what has
worked in the past and is aware of what the difficulties may be. One danger,
however, of relying solely on experience is that the teacher may be reluctant
to try new things or may not consider trying new things. Research on
vocabulary knowledge suggests that teachers tend to underestimate their
learners vocabulary size, and if we extend this research to other areas of
knowledge, it could be that teachers tend to have conservative views of what
their learners are capable of doing. This means that it is probably worthwhile
for a teacher to occasionally be a little adventurous in trying something
which will stretch the learners in their language use. The results might be
surprising.
It is important to remember when doing environment analysis, that it
is done to see its effect on the language course. Teachers can either work
within an environmental constraint, or they can try to overcome the con-
straint. If an activity is not likely to be interesting for the learners, then that
activity could be avoided. On the other hand, the teacher could ask: How can
I make this activity interesting? What do I need to change in the activity to
involve the learners? Most problems like this do have solutions.
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