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Alejandra Oliveri 's session at the  10th Anglo congress   started with an examination of what facets a  teacher has to help them when they make the transition to coordinator. Suggestions Included responsibility, experience, authority. It was mentioned that a teacher also needs to be a manager (of learning, classroom management etc.). Alejandra believes that the gradual movement into the field of management is a result of increased readiness and a new willingness to accept the increased responsibility.  Alejandra then asked the audience to think of 14 essential skills that are usually associated with teaching. These included giving encouragement, helping students to feel valued, course and lesson planning, making aims clear, assessing performance, training and research, establishing rapport, dealing with emotions, listening effectively, persuading, working with others, correcting, giving negative feedback, consulting, assessing performance, monitoring, keeping reco

10th annual Anglo conference , Montevideo, Uruguay Process writing: Allowing students to enjoy the skill they love to hate Alistair Grant Process writing has always been something I've been interested in , so I was particularly interested in Alistair's workshop and in hearing about the ideas he had for encouraging students to enjoy writing, a notoriously overlooked skill in most language classrooms. Alistair started his talk by criticising the way typical writing tasks are doled out by teachers. Apart from demotivating tasks (e.g. write an application for a job. 200 words ), many students do not know how best to go about writing something like this. After a quick warm-up literary quiz, Alistair asked the audience to do a visualisation exercise. We were asked to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in our favourite coffee shop. After being told to experience the sounds, sights and smells, in the classroom, Alistair would ask students to talk about these and h

Jeremy Harmer´s opening plenary - 10th annual Anglo congress in Montevideo, Saturday 17 August 2013 Jeremy started by praising Uruguay, which is a place where very interesting things are at work ( Plan Ceibal , for example), but unfortunately, not Jeremy's projector! Fortunately, the projector did work after Jeremy´s introduction.  Sugata Mitra's hole in the wall project in New Delhi was mentioned by Jeremy as an inspiration for this talk. In particular he was curious about the fact that the kids worked out how to use computer on their own.  Sugata Mitra sugests that if give we kids the right stimulation and the right kind of task, they don´t need teachers to help them. Jeremy recommends checking out the TED talk on Youtube that Sugata Mitra gives (see above). In it, he talks about education...in the past, the idea of school was built on values that have changed and that "I'm not saying that schools are broken, or the education system is broken...b