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Past Events

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Recent LAMSIG events

Watercooler January 2022 (29 January 2022)

The Four Pillars of Teacher Support (26 February 2022)

PCE 2022 (16 May 2022) – Resilience: building a stronger ELT sector.

On March 20th, 2021 we held an all day conference “Festival of Ideas”.  For more details, and access to the recordings go to this page

Posts reporting on various LAMSIG talks and activities at the recent Liverpool IATEFL conference are available on our blog

For details of our past webinars, please check the Webinars page

PCE, Monday 1st April, 2019, Liverpool

Looking backwards, moving forward – Effective evaluation & improvement

One of the key parts of the management cycle is evaluation.  We start with a vision, use it to help us strategise and set goals and targets, and then think about the standards we would like to achieve.  Then we evaluate our success and make changes somewhere in the process. But how best to evaluate?

This pre-conference event will look at this cycle, with a focus on evaluating what has been done, and using this evaluation in effective planning and implementation.  Would you like to take a step back, look at what you do in your job and how your team / department / school functions, and see if you could be doing it better? Then this day-long workshop is for you

PCE: Brighton, Monday 9th April 2018

Personalised teacher development – is it achievable?

A workshop for managers and teachers.

Is there such a thing as truly teacher-centred professional development? If so, how can language teaching organisations benefit from it?  What might it look like? How can managers work to create the space for teachers to really define and proactively work on their own development?  How can teachers best make use of that space?

This day long pre-conference event, bringing together LAMSIG (leadership and management) and TDSIG (teacher development), will look at these questions and others.  Through a mixture of short TED style talks, plenary discussion, and open space interactions, we plan to provide ideas and options for both managers and teachers as well as giving those present the opportunity to share ideas and imagine possible ways of changing the “one size fits all Friday afternoon staff development workshop” paradigm. Thereby fostering an approach which is not only truly teacher-centred, but also one which serves the needs of the organisation and its managers.

A review of this PCE can be found on our blog

Glasgow PCE 2017 –  Ethical and Effective Recruitment and Induction

One of the key roles of the manager is recruiting the right staff – and for academic managers this will usually mean recruiting effective teachers who fit well into the organisational culture.  There are many stages to this process – all the way through from initially identifying an organisational need to providing appropriate orientation to the person hired.

In this interactive workshop we looked at some of the key – and perhaps most difficult – parts of this process:

  • Attracting the best teachers
  • Ensuring you have a non-discriminatory recruitment policy that works in practice
  • Obtaining the essential information from candidates at the application stage
  • Providing candidates with the necessary information about the job
  •  Interviewing – both face to face and at a distance – ensuring that interview criteria, questions and tasks help you select the right candidates
  •  Induction – providing staff with the best possible information about the post, the organisation and the professional support and resources available.

Participants can expect to challenge the way they currently conduct the recruitment and induction process and take away new ideas or practices to improve how their LTO operates in this area.

The presenters for this workshop were Loraine Kennedy, Marek Kiczkowiak (from TEFL Equity Advocates), George Pickering, and Josh Round.

PASE Conference, Warsaw, Polandconfimage

LAMSIG is delighted to have partnered with PASE (The Polish Association for Standards in Language Education) at their annual conference from 13th – 15th May, 2016. The theme for the conference was

The Future of Language Education in the 21st century: Knowledge and Skills. 

 

The 2016 PCE in Birmingham:

Effective Teams and Teamwork: building, participating, leading. 

image courtesy of http://www.lumaxart.com/

The LAMSIG pre-conference event at the IATEFL conference in Birmingham on Tuesday 12th April was very successful. This is what participants enjoyed:

One of the key roles of managers is to build, participate in, and manage teams effectively. This task has become more complex as the members of many teams today work at a distance from each other. 

In this interactive workshop, we explored:

  • the characteristics of effective teams
  • how teams develop
  • how to manage the competing needs of groups, individuals and tasks
  • the different roles that individuals can play in teams
  • making smart decisions in teams
  • how to manage virtual teams.

Participants deepened their understanding of how teams work and how the interplay of personalities, culture, status and roles within a team combines to create an effective (or ineffective!) working group. They also ttok away some ideas about how to help teams develop, how to support team members, how to make good decisions in teams, how to “fix” dysfunctional teams, and how to manage virtual teams.

We hope they left feeling both inspired and better able to manage and participate in teams in the workplace.

Facilitated by: Andy Hockley, Loraine Kennedy, George Pickering, Josh Round

Barcelona conference February 5,6, 2016

IH Barcelona ELT Conference

IHB conference 2015

LAMSIG were delighted to be able to continue our partnership with IH Barcelona at their annual ELT Conference.  As part of this partnership, there was a special management track at the conference with presentations by Jenny Johnson, Josh Round, Fiona Thomas and more.  There were also plenary talks by Lindsay Clandfield, Jeremy Harmer, Nick Hockley, Scott Thornbury and Catherine Walter.

LAMSIG members were able to register for this conference at a special discounted rate

Conference details can be found here http://www.ihes.com/bcn/tt/conference.html

In Autumn 2015, in partnership with ELT Ireland:Dublin event image

COMMUNICATION – from a manager’s perspective

In modern and successful English Language Teaching Organisations, effective communication plays a critical part yet it will always be one of the most difficult and complex skills that the ELT Manager needs to develop. With plenary speakers George Pickering & Fiona Thomas, ELT-ed sessions, and talks/workshops from Michael Carrier, Loraine Kennedy, Maureen McGarvey, Mike Hogan, and Gill Davidson.

A review of the day told in tweets and photos can be found here https://storify.com/ELTIreland/lamsig-elt-ireland-joint-event

The PCE in Manchester: 10th April 2015

man 2015 logo - website use onlyPeople management: managing challenging situations, groups and individuals

Managing challenging people and situations are some of the most difficult tasks and responsibilities of the academic manager. This PCE looked at some important aspects of people and conflict management through the discussion of case studies.

Under the guidance of facilitators, groups were invited to come up with solutions to challenging situations.

Individuals had the chance to:

  • Reflect on their own performance in managing challenging situations;
  • Listen to the ideas and best practices of other managers;
  • Learn from the suggestions of the seminar facilitators.

The overall aim of the day was to build up a set of best practices to take away which will help academic managers improve their people management skills.

The PCE was facilitated by Andy Hockley, Jenny Johnson, Loraine Kennedy, George Pickering and Josh Round.

On February 6th/7th LAMSIG partnered with International House Barcelona in their annual ELT Conference

The conference was a great success. Our first event in 2015 was in conjunction with the IH Barcelona ELT Conference, and featured a dedicated LAMSIG strand, featuring Jenny Johnson, Fiona Thomas, Duncan Foord, and Andy Hockley

For more details visit this site: http://www.ihes.com/bcn/tt/conference.html

Prior to that, our  most recent event was the 25th anniversary conference in association with Londosa:

londosa event

As the role of technology in education becomes more central, and the range and capability of online teaching & learning resources grow; as the expectations of EFL students and agents become more demanding, and the need to stand out in a crowded market place becomes more urgent; how can we as managers in Language Teaching Organisations ready ourselves to face the challenges of the digital age?

What role should technology play in ELT, and what are the best strategies to implement it in our schools?

And what are the digital literacies we need to develop to ensure we are at the forefront of education both as managers and educators?

The Iatefl Leadership and Management SIG and the London DoS Association have joined forces to mark their 25th anniversary with an event to allow school owners, principals, academic managers, teacher trainers and teachers to explore these questions together.

Pictures from this event are here

photo (6)

The 2014 PCE at the Harrogate IATEFL conference entitled “Preventing Burnout”

LAMSIG kicked off their conference with a successful PCE on the thorny area of Burnout, from the point of view of teachers as well as managers. Around 40 people attended and enjoyed a varied programme led by George Pickering, who gave an overview, Agnes Enyedi, who gave the story from the teachers’ viewpoint, and Andy Curtis who looked at various manager aspects. Questions raised in the Panel Discussion extended the theme and participant feedback showed that participants were pleased with the day.

Some feedback comments:

    • Each session was interesting for different reasons. All three were very useful and very helpful.
    • All 3 sessions were very interesting and thought provoking.
    • Both guys were very professional and gave worthwhile , thought provoking presentations. Aggie also presented good information from the teacher perspective. all 3 were very good

The attached article Preventing Burnout at work was written by committee member Loraine Kennedy to review and report on the day.

Photos from this event can be found on the Photos page

TESOL EVO 2014

As part of TESOL’s “Electronic Village Online” free professional development opportunities, LAMSIG was proud to be involved in an online training in Project Management. The course can be found here: http://projectmanagementevo2014.pbworks.com/w/page/70189735/Syllabus

The course ran from January 13th

ICT POSTER

 LAMSIG/Yasar University conference on “Quality and Standards in Language Teaching; A Quest for Excellence” (May 2013)

The conference was a great success, and featured plenary talks by Teresa O’Donnell, George Pickering and Adrian Underhill, as well as featured talks by Burcu Akyol, Steve Darn, Tony Gurr, Andy Hockley, Yilin Sun, and Verissimo Toste, and of course many other concurrent sessions by educators from around Turkey and beyond.

Photos from this event can be found on the Photos page

LAMSIG 1LAMSIG PCE on CPD at Liverpool IATEFL (April 2013)

Another successful event, with some extremely interesting presentations/workshops from Loraine Kennedy, Josh Rounds and Fiona Dunlop.  For a great round up of the day, visit Josh’s blog “Be the DOS”

Developing Teachers in Developing Schools (November 2012)

This event, a joint conference/event with TDSIG, took place in Brighton in November 2012.    A space at which the ideas shared at the conference and some of the plenary and other talks area available for download has been created by Anthony Gaughan and can be found here.

LAMSIG PCE on Performance Management at Glasgow IATEFL (March 2012)

One of IATEFL Online’s roving reporters, Ana Kodric, attended the LAMSIG PCE as a participant and filed the following set of reports:
1. Introduction
2. George Pickering’s session on performance management
3. Andy Hockley’s session on feedback
4. Loraine Kennedy’s session on appraisals
5. Maureen McGarvey’s session on managing poor performance

 Some pictures from two recent events – in Harrogate and in Izmir: