Matthew McCormack

I first came across the term IRF (‘Initiate – Respond – Feedback’) while doing the DipTESOL and designing an observation instrument for Unit 2. This is a typical classroom interaction exchange where the teacher asks a question, the student responds and the teacher responds, usually with a simple ‘Good’. While discussing this with my director of studies at the time, we both agreed that in order to create more student-centred, communicative classrooms, we needed to break this pattern in our classrooms. While observing other teachers, we would highlight this pattern and attempt to suggest alternatives, for example by using...

Background While doing my CELTA in 2017, I was given a handout that broke down a number of lesson planning frameworks, such as: text-based, test-teach-test, receptive and productive. I kept hold of this handout and it continued to influence my lesson planning up until around the time I did my DipTESOL. Over time, my lessons became a lot more organic, influenced by Dogme (Thornbury & Meddings, 2009), emergent language (Norrington-Davies, 2019) and task-based teaching (Ellis, 2020). My listening lessons, however, continued to follow the traditional pattern of listening to the text followed by comprehension questions, before moving on to a freer,...

Incremental coaching; Traditionally, observations take place once or twice a year and are often related to probationary periods, performance bonuses or contract renewals. This can lead to increased stress and is often not truly reflective of a teacher’s performance and practices. As well as this, feedback isn’t followed up until the next observation, often a year later (Ingham, 2020). Between taking the CELTA in 2017 and starting the DipTESOL in 2022, I can remember being observed six times. Three of these observations were part of the process of passing a probationary period. For two of the observations, I had...