MAPDLE Trainer Development (part 2)
I've now come to the end of the input on the MAPDLE Trainer Development module. There were 8 units in total, although the final one was a revision and reflection on our learning throughout the course. Towards the end of the course, the level of expected autonomy increased and the workload became heavier.
I absolutely loved the course. I know that I love every course that I do - and that's why I continue learning- but this course was quite unique. My fellow participants and I formed a strong bond, and we really worked together as a team. The level of interaction on our forums and our Zoom meetings made this feel very unlike the typical online course, where people can feel anonymous and isolated. We all came from extremely different contexts, and we were able to share our experiences with each other. This made a very rich and productive learning environment.
In the second part of the course, we focused on principles of session design and evaluation, planning and evaluating courses, and finally, observing lessons and providing different styles of feedback.
Before this module, my knowledge of this field was quite limited. Although you obviously pick things up as you go along when you are delivering teacher training, I think it's amazing that there is no obligation for trainers to have a qualification. Would you trust someone in any other field who did not have any qualifications but just expressed a desire to try out teacher training and thought they would be quite good at it? Obviously, there are a lot of skills that are transferrable from language teaching, but the subject matter, audience, and metalanguage used - amongst other things - are very different and require to be deliberately thought about. All of my fellow participants on the course agreed that it is good to be able to see the theories behind the various things you have been doing, as well as to learn new techniques and remedy other things which you may have been doing that were not so useful for the trainees or course participants.
We all felt that, in addition to the input, we had learned the most from our interactions, on the forums, and in the live sessions, with each other.
Now that the input sessions are over, there is a period of six months in which there are three assignments to be completed. There is a main assignment, in which you have to design a whole, fully worked out course, with a minimum of 50 hours, and then a choice of two options out of three. The options which I've chosen are, a sequence of materials to cover three hours for an identified group of your choice. I will be trying out these materials with my participants in January. Finally, I'm currently busy working on the supportive trainer talk option. This is a recently introduced option, designed to analyze features and functions of supportive trainer talk in one of our own training sessions, which we record, transcribe and then analyze. I am about to record this session on Zoom with my participants, and I'm really hoping that my trainer talk will be supportive! We all shared stories of training sessions in which this may not have been the case and agreed that it had a counterproductive effect on the trainees. This is a really interesting option and something which is not always thought about, with much of the emphasis often on the activities in a training session.
The whole group of us feel sorry that the input sessions are over. This module has been a very enlightening experience for me, and I have been fortunate to meet fantastic new colleagues from all over the world, many of whom have a wealth of training experience. I highly recommend this module to anyone who is considering it. The whole experience has been extremely positive, friendly, and supportive.
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