English Teaching Methodology and Educational Management
I work as ADoS in International House Bratislava, where my focus is on helping teachers with Professional training and development. I sincerely believe that continuous education is essential in the modern professional world both in the classroom and in school as a whole. For this reason, I enrolled on a course on Educational Management with the Erasmus+ programme. The course aims to promote positive management and leadership techniques to encourage a safe and nurturing environment in educational institutions – both for the students and the staff.
On the course in Oxford International Study Centre, I worked with other participants from various universities in China and with Dr Berna Bridge as our trainer. At the start of the course, we looked at the differences between management and leadership. In these sessions, we discussed how management techniques can be useful for ensuring the day-to-day running of activities and checking their effectiveness, while leadership skills are necessary to motivate staff, identify goals and share the desire to achieve them.
Firstly, we looked at types of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Verbal communication strategies covered methods of disseminating information in large groups and deciding between face-to-face methods, which are slower but more personal, to bulletins, which have the benefit of much further reach but at the cost of being very impersonal. Non-verbal communication focussed on identifying signals in body language and tone which can indicate one’s feelings without the need for describing emotions directly.
In addition to this, we also looked at different styles of leadership as well as identifying someone’s “locus of control” – the extent to which they feel they are responsible for their own circumstances – and “high Mach” or “low Mach” individuals – denoting one’s tendency to employ methods of manipulation and persuasion to achieve their goals.
In the morning sessions, I attended some advanced classes of English with students training to be English teachers. During these sessions, I observed how different skills were taught, such as pragmatics, pronunciation, writing styles and many more. I saw how the tutors engaged the students and encouraged them to think about the potential difficulties of their students and how these can be addressed in class.
Overall, the course was very informative, and the mixture of leadership training and teacher training was very useful to bring back ideas for us here at International House Bratislava. I would highly recommend for everyone to take advantage of any available courses to continue their professional development as often as possible.
Erasmus +
