After the hustle and bustle ( and 3 or 4 Starbucks per block ) of Tokyo it was a shinkansen and two hours of local trains to get to the heart of Nara prefecture for a full three day workshop. My favourite type, with lots of time to get the teachers not just taking fish, but going out to the river and catching it for themselves.

Day 1

Basic 3 hour Japanese workshop in the morning. Then extra stuff ( picture books, card games etc.) in the afternoon. There’s no point listing everything here as over the three days we did just about everything!

Day 2 Demos & Lessons

Demo lesson for 40 2nd grade kids. It was supposed to be a nice regular lesson that’s easy for the teachers to copy. In the event the kids were hyper genki and it went with the pace of a lightspeed firework. Really easy, standard content, Warm up ( Rock, Paper, Scissors,) new English in the form of a song ( How are you?) + practise in a game ( Monster game.)

Then the main event, the teachers teaching themselves! First up they were put in groups of three and given two computers each and a copy of the curriculum. As expected it took them over 20 minutes to understand the concept of using the internet. Next they each chose a theme, looked up the lesson plan online and spent an hour reading through it and practising teaching using the CDs’ software section. Then each group in turn came to the front and taught the rest of the teachers the lesson. And they were hopeless!! Which is good, that’s what we want in the beginning, and with all the ( sometimes brutally frank ) feedback the lessons learnt were “we need to read the lesson plan not just expect the lesson to flow on its own”, “we need to plan our roles more” and how to use a mouse ( it’s amazing how many teachers can’t!).

But that was cool and as the day wore on they gradually got better and better. One group however was just unbelievably bad. They had chosen “How much?“. This isn’t the easiest lesson in Genki English but it is quite doable. But throughout the planning stage they were just worrying and worrying and worrying. Then when they came to present they had no idea. The just sat there staring at the computer and repeating the mini lesson over and over again. Then they suddenly jumped into playing the song without showing the “kids” what to do. I hate jumping in in the middle, but had to stop them. “What happened?” I asked “We don’t know what to do?” they replied. “Well, how do you fix that?”, “Hmmm, I guess we should have read the lesson plan”. It’s amazing how some teachers just expect the lessons to run themselves. But in the break time I went through line by line how to teach it and eventually they got the hang of it and with the experience ( and confidence boost!) of seeing the other teachers do so badly they turned in the best performance of the day, which was quite passable. Using real toys when singing made a great difference! Comments from the other teachers were along the lines of “after the first session I would have never have imagined the song could be as fun as it turned out to be”. Not bad then.

Then a nice meal with the teachers, an episode of Lost and some sleep at the end of an exhausting day!

Day 3 – Skits & Role Plays

I started off today by running through a couple of games we didn’t get done yesterday and they were all very impressed with the Bargaining Game and the What’s the weather like in …? game.

Then it was back to work preparing their lessons for today. And what a difference it was! It was like seeing a whole new set of experienced teachers. The harsh feedback yesterday really galvanised them and got them into gear when preparing.

Yesterday I was trying to get them more into doing skits to introduce new words, rather than simply showing and translating it. e.g. walking round the classroom banging into bits of furniture to introduce “My … hurts” for Doctor Doctor. In the beginning they didn’t quite get the hang of this and were doing things like having a load of skits, then stopping and practising the vocab then the acapella, song etc. The real idea is that you do the skit for one line, then do a bit of pronunciation practice, then introduce the next line, then practice the pronunciation etc.

By the end of the day they were soooo into this it was unbelievable. One pair of teachers had a massive box and one of them actually became Mr Monkey in the Where is Mr Monkey song. The teachers were loving it, and if it was in front of kids they would have been over the moon!

One good thing that did happen was one group of teachers, who hadn’t attended the previous days, were instead of using the correct pronunciation from the computer, were speaking the new words themselves. They had great actions, but instead of things like “rocket” or “boat”, they were getting the “students” to say “rokettoooooooo” and “boootoooo”. I was cringing, but the other teachers picked up on the difference straight away and were back in to using the computer for their own lessons.

Things kept getting better and better and one group even tried the Adjectives theme and the full Guessing Game. This is such an important theme but can be a bit tricky to teach. But they did really, really well, I think it’s the best I’ve ever seen that lesson done. There isn’t a gesture for “red” in that song, so they decided to use one of the teachers and point to her as she was wearing red. Unfortunately they got the timing wrong and pushed her forward for the word “heavy”. Needless to say this made everyone laugh out loud. So then they pushed her daughter out front for “light”. The mother wasn’t very happy!

So a fantastic three days and it was so good seeing the teachers progress from being really shy, totally unconfident and doing horribly bad classes to being able to handle lessons really well and being totally independent and even enthusiastic. The software worked great and very often the teachers who were being students had better pronunciation after copying the computer than the teacher who was teaching that lesson. Their musical skills also improved dramatically, going from a totally tone deaf Mingle to a note perfect rendition of I have a question. Plus a lot of them learnt how to use the internet for the first time!

So I was very happy. 3 days is a long time and I think we all lost a good few kgs jumping up and down and but I was very, very happy to see everything pull together so well and the teachers were totally excited and geared up to try everything they’d learned in their own classrooms next week.

So another very nice dinner, a fantastic going away present and another night in the onsen before heading off tomorrow. What a great way to end the Summer. And hopefully I’ll be back here next year. Thank you everyone, you were great!