Delivering development

The 27th episode of Delivering Development, our podcast on continuing professional development for language teachers and administrators, takes an initial, high-level, look at AI and its impact on the languages field.

In this edition we continued with a discussion of some terms relating to blended learning, in a possibly vain attempt to gain some clearer idea of what some of the terms mean and, indeed, whether they are useful or just confuse the issue.

Earlier this year I was interviewed by Ruth Pringle as part of her project to match learners to teachers in a very targeted way. I liked the idea, but particularly liked the way we got talking about language professionals working together and helping each other rather than competing against each other. So, I asked her to come along to our podcast so we could talk more about it.

Today, the plan was to look at some of the terminology around blended learning. We did a decent job on “flipped learning”, I think, but that was all we had time for! We did cover some interesting ground on the nature of blended learning as well though.

An episode on the difficult area of teaching listening with guest Anthony Green. This is definitely a subject we are going to follow-up on!

The first of a regular series of episodes revolving around blended learning to address the need to better understand some of the fundamentals of this aspect of language teaching. We start with an overview of the field.

A short solo episode to get back in the saddle and also to publicise my interview with Ruth Pringle.

A combination of family holidays, workload, building work at home and a lot of editing means that this episode recorded at the IATEFL conference in Belfast in May is only now being published in November 2022! However, it was a really interesting, wide-ranging chat with Kevin, Neil and Pete together face-to-face for the first time for a podcast recording.

This edition is a special interview with Rachael Roberts. It seems to me that many articles, presentations etc. I have experienced about mental health put the affected person in the position of a passive adapter to a bad situation, one that is usually caused by an external agent such as an employer. The advice is to practice, for example, mindfulness, to help cope with that bad situation. That seemed wrong to me and I was interested to hear Rachael's take on it.

A concluding episode for 2021 in our podcast for language professionals. Kevin and Laura talk about some potential positive effects for the industry.