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¨There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.¨ ~Willa Cather
On Saturday 26th September 2009, the British Council Bilbao was delighted to welcome over 180 teachers and trainers to our third annual Teachers’ Conference. With the collaboration of our colleagues at BETEA and TESOL-Spain the British Council Bilbao was once again able to offer this forum for teachers to start the school year with motivating ideas for their classes and a wider view of what’s new for the teaching profession.
Feedback from last year’s highly successful event motivated us to offer a full day of sessions, with talks appealing to teachers of Infants, Primary and Secondary school ages, adult and exam classes. We were very pleased to welcome Itziar Hormaza and Hilary Plass, presidents of BETEA and TESOL-Spain, both of whom gave sessions, Loli Iglesias, English advisor to the Education Department of the Basque Government, as well as authors and researchers sponsored by Macmillan, Cambridge University Press and Pearson.
Many of our own teachers offered talks and workshops, joined by colleagues from Segovia and Huesca working on Synthetic Phonics and Bilingual Schools projects run by the British Council together with the MEC. Last year’s session on the British Council’s Open Cities project, featuring Bilbao as one of the vanguard cities, evolved this year into a session exploring the educational material being designed around the project.
There were many more exciting sessions on the programme, from Synthetic Phonics and Juggling, to Second Life and Pecha Kucha, and participants had already earmarked some of the ones they wanted to join after reading the advance programme published on the web pages of the British Council Bilbao, TESOL- Spain and BETEA.
There was time over coffee to browse through the publishers’ stands and TESOL-Spain and BETEA tables and to meet old friends and colleagues. Coffee time also saw the raffle draw, with an interesting selection of prizes kindly donated by Cambridge University Press, Macmillan, Pearson, Vicens Vives, Oxford University Press and Heinle. This year’s Swap Shop generated a handsome pack of lesson plans and teaching tips for participants to take home with them – and many others made a note to definitely bring something with them to swap next year!
We asked all participants to put down their impressions of the sessions and the conference as a whole, and their feedback and suggestions can be found below. We are also publishing session reports and handouts from many of the speakers on our web page, which we hope will continue to serve as food for thought and a reminder of an enjoyable look at Approaches to Teaching, the calm and the storm.
We would be interested to hear from any of you who attended the conference and would like to comment on what you saw, and also from people interested in taking part in the 2010 event!
ELToutreach.bilbao@britishcouncil.es
Some useful links here:
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