Motivation and Inspiration

Why do we attend seminars and conferences?

After the very successful ISTEK seminar, I’ve been thinking why we should attend seminars and conferences.

I’ve been teaching for 21 years. I haven’t attended any IATEFL conferences yet but it is one of my dreams. I hope it will become true one day. However, I try to attend most of the ELT events organised in Istanbul and I truly enjoy them.

I don’t always learn something new.

But do we just go there to learn something new?

No?

Then why?

For me, these are great occasions for us to learn more from the teacher trainers, speakers, writers  or more experienced teachers.

Not just to learn how to survive but to interact, to be motivated, to see that they are not alone.

Even if we are experienced, we can always find something to learn.

We can always adapt a thought, an idea to our teaching.

Every teacher has her own recipe book but we always need inspiration…

Some thoughts to be remembered from ISTEK elt

Andrew Wright reminded us that we are all characters from a storybook, he reminded that we are all stories.  He said ‘before we go out we create our image for our role to create our stories.’

Jeremy Harmer reminded us whose English we are teaching with his outstanding talk and I remember the great poem years ago I read and used in a class activity but as the others it was forgotten in the archives of my lesson ideas. ‘Beauty is a fat black woman…’ Not only he reminded us the poem, he also suggested a great activity to use with poetry.  ‘WALL DICTATION’

Herbert Puchta was extraordinary. He said ‘In times of difficulties, we need leadership qualities’. So a teacher shouldn’t only teach present perfect tense, she should also be a guide, leader to help her students find their own way.

While listening to Luke Prodromu, I realised how inspirational my 4^th grade teacher was. I remembered her reading us stories every Friday afternoon and we sitting and imagining the scenes at our desks. Maybe because of her I love reading very much, or maybe because of her I love teaching very much.

I really enjoyed Lindsey Clandfield’s talk on Culture, Celebrities and Content in an era of global English and loved his cheerfulness and twitter  guided attitude.

Nicky Hockley was great. I’m sure many teachers will start using web 2.0 tools after her examples.

The workshops I attended were wonderful, I had the chance to meet Sean Banville and learned too many useful things about teaching news. I had never realised I could do so many activities with them When I thought of news, the only activity that came into my mind was the translation.

Shelly Terrell was excellent. It was a priviledge for me to listen to her.

And I missed too many… How I wish I had the chance to attend the workshops of my PLN.

Yes, That sense was also great too.

And the Pecha Kucha’s…,

The ones who didn’t attend, missed a great, cheerful event.

I’m looking forward to the next one. I’m sure it will be as perfect as this one.

Thank you Burcu Akyol for what you’ve done.

P.S: When I started writing this post I hadn’t planned anything and this was not I meant to write but it just happened and I couldn’t control myself 🙂