Roy Cross's Blog

1. The REAL (Research for Equitable Access and Learning) Centre here in Cambridge is about to start its autumn seminar series https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/real/events/ All the seminars are online (as well as f2f), and here’s the first two:

The role of hope in education: Learning from Syrian refugee youth’s strategies to navigate uncertainty Tuesday 24 October 2023, 13:00-14:00 GMT Room GS4 with Dr Hiba Salem, Research Fellow in Forced Migration Studies, University of Oxford

Exploring higher education solutions for Afghan women under the Taliban Tuesday 31 October 2023, 13:00-14:00 GMT Room GS4 with Dr Marissa Quie, Fellow, Lucy Cavendish College and Convenor, Afghanistan Desk, The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, University of Cambridge.

2. More from the REAL Centre: Sustained, purposeful investment is key to ‘leaving no girl behind’, either in education or beyond, is the finding of a recent report by a group they led into the UK government’s Leave no Girl Behind initiative, launched in 2016. Here’s a summary https://content.educ.cam.ac.uk/23-leave-no-girl-behind-analysis and PDFs of the full report and of the annexes to the report below.

3. Was this author on a hiding to nothing? Maybe she was – but she survived! An Approach to Teaching Humour by Kirstie Jackson Wilms for the IH Journal https://ihworld.com/ih-journal/issues/issue-51/an-approach-to-teaching-humour/

The rest of Issue 51 is here https://ihworld.com/ih-journal/issues/issue-51/

4. Oxford University Press’s next ELTOC is next Friday and Saturday, 27^th and 28^th October https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/eltoc/?cc=gb&selLanguage=en

It starts at 10:40 UK time with a formidably bearded Nik Peachey on Multi-Modal Literacy: Why and How. Nik’s thesis is that “it’s becoming impossible to ignore the fact that our digital world has changed the nature of literacy. Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking are no longer enough”.

5. And, finally, William Dalrymple’s talks are always good. Here’s ample notice, I hope, of one he’s giving for the Asia Scotland Institute at 12:00 UK time on Tuesday 31^st October, based on his new book, The Golden Road, looking at “forgotten chapters of history, the economic, cultural and political impact of the Red Sea route, and modern geopolitics and global trade”, Unveiling ‘The Golden Road’ – The Ancient Trade Route That Shaped Our World. Register here for free https://asiascot.com/events/unveiling-the-golden-road

1. The Nature of Networks that Support Innovation is an interesting piece on what makes networks work by Tobias Stone https://medium.com/@newsquare/the-nature-of-networks-that-support-innovation-e496784b61c3

Don’t be put off by the complex description of ‘an ideal innovation network structure’ at the beginning: Tobias explains it all in the rest of the piece!

2. The Mandates, which started on 3^rd October, is a spookily prescient series on BBC Radio 4 which tells the sorry story of the French and British ‘mandates’ in the Middle East https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001r1h6

3. I’ve just discovered the Fairtrade Schools video library https://vimeo.com/user36607237 Their films are intended for a UK schools audience but I think they might work in classrooms outside the UK if handled with care.

Here’s two that caught my eye. Farming for the Future: Hear from Banana Farmers in Colombia https://vimeo.com/804236062 and Unravelling the Thread: the story of cotton https://vimeo.com/265355008

4. Green Action ELT’s next event, Offsetting: is it the answer? Is at 14:00 UK time this Friday, 20^th October. Scroll down this page for more information https://green-action-elt.uk/events/ and register here https://nile-elt.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqdeqpqDspGtGTauZaNpoS5r4KSNhywCzM#/registration

5. And, finally, Louise Glück, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, died last Friday at the age of 80. Here’s a NYT gift article which celebrates her life and work, Five Louise Glück Poems to Get You Started https://tinyurl.com/3n6kex5h

1. Want to make ChatGPT work better for you? Talk to it like a person, like you would a co-worker or team member argues this piece by David Gewirtz for ZDNet, How to write better ChatGPT prompts for the best generative AI results https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-write-better-chatgpt-prompts/

2. It’s very difficult to strike a balance on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Even trying to do so upsets many on both sides. I’m not an expert on Middle East politics, but these two pieces seem to me to be pretty balanced:

a) Ian Bremmer’s TED talk The Israel-Hamas War — and What It Means for the World https://youtu.be/wQmBsbt9blg?feature=shared

b) Michele Groppi’s piece for The Conversation, Hamas has achieved what it wanted by attacking Israel: terror, escalation, and disruption to the international order  https://theconversation.com/hamas-has-achieved-what-it-wanted-by-attacking-israel-terror-escalation-and-disruption-to-the-international-order-215236

The Conversation is publishing a ‘rolling guide’ to their writing on the conflict https://theconversation.com/israel-hamas-war-updates-on-the-conversations-coverage-of-the-conflict-215285

I’d also expect Israel and the Palestinians, which starts next Monday, 16^th October, on BBC Radio 4 to be balanced. It’s an attempt by Katya Adler to make sense of the conflict in five short programmes https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001rv0z – might work with an advanced class, if you’re able to go there?

3. The Hay Festival and the Lviv Book Forum have just co-operated on a joint event in Lviv, which – not surprisingly – was also much concerned with war and invasion https://www.hayfestival.com/m-192-lviv-bookforum-2023.aspx Here’s a highlight, Andrey Kurkov and Jonathan Franzen in conversation with Charlotte Higginshttps://www.hayfestival.com/p-20781-jonathan-franzen-and-andrey-kurkov-in-conversation-with-charlotte-higgins-digital-event.aspx

4. In Our Time is one of the longest running programmes on BBC Radio 4. They’ve just put together a ten-episode introduction playlist to the programme from the archives, New to In Our Time? Here are ten great places to start https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1CTX7TRRsXWQP5dyPqK2Z2c/new-to-in-our-time-here-are-ten-great-places-to-start

There’s not a whole lot of overlap with the In Our Time listeners’ Top Ten, however; make of that what you will! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/wvSdFMv6yP0m6W5J8xyhBh/the-in-our-time-listeners-top-10

5. And, finally, the only colour picture of Tolstoy, taken by photography pioneer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in 1908 https://www.openculture.com/2023/09/the-only-color-picture-of-tolstoy-taken-by-photography-pioneer-sergey-prokudin-gorsky-1908.html

1. First up today, here’s a cornucopia of recordings from the TeachingEnglish celebration of World Teacher’s Day last week, with speakers from all around the world https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/world-teachers-day-2023

Scroll down to the bottom of the individual pages for each day for all the recordings and for the handouts on each session. By way of way in, how about trying one of the following? (I’ve given links to the YouTube versions as they have subtitles.)

Hafsah Aminu and Rasheedat Sadiq on Planning lessons for the 21st century learner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPLM7z3qOCc

Jorge Chacon on Increasing student autonomy inside and outside the classroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EWXuw7kY_E

Andy Keedwell on Bending the rules: developing learner awareness of how language really works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49-6g0nENek

Cecilia Nobre on Using video-based observations for self-directed development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG098ikUiXI

2. I was shocked to learn the other day that Susan Holden, an ELT publishing great, had died this summer. Here’s Melanie Butler’s obituary in the EL Gazette https://www.elgazette.com/remembering-susan-holden/ and here’s a range of very powerful testimony to Susan’s influence gathered together in this month’s edition of HLT https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct23/remembering-susan-holden-rip PDF of HLT tributes below.

3. I also had no idea that Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talk from 2006, Do schools kill creativity?,  remains the most watched of all time, had died a whole three years ago. Here’s the NYT obituary that I stumbled across over the weekend https://tinyurl.com/mr2kzhas and here’s two excerpts from it, the first of which is the moral of a great (true) story about a  primary school nativity play, which starts four minutes into his talk (link below):

“Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. But by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.”

“There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they’re allowed to. Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads.”

If you’re not one of the nearly 76 million who’ve already watched it, do watch his first TED talk, Do schools kill creativity? https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity And if you have seen it, watch it again, as I just did with great enjoyment!

Here’s Sir Ken’s other two TED talks:

Bring on the learning revolution! https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_learning_revolution

How to escape education’s death valley https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley

4. The Common Reader is Henry Oliver’s unashamedly opinionated blog https://commonreader.substack.com/ Here’s three sample posts:

Samuel Johnson, opsimath https://commonreader.substack.com/p/samuel-johnson-opsimath-755

Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century https://commonreader.substack.com/p/auden-was-the-best-poet-of-the-twentieth-90d

Philip Larkin. Poet of the almost. https://commonreader.substack.com/p/philip-larkin-poet-of-the-almost

5. And, finally, here’s another NYT gift article, this one on Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week: https://tinyurl.com/6nsua8sr

1. This month’s free IATEFL webinar is this Saturday, 7^th October at 15:00 UK time: Diversity and inclusion in EMI Contexts: Practical ideas for teachers, presented by Amira Salama from Nile University in Giza* https://www.iatefl.org/events/492

Amira’s blurb says, “Rather than delving deep into theoretical concepts, building on her recent research on EMI in Egypt and North Africa, the presenter will share some practical tools for teachers to assess their own understanding of these two concepts in bilingual (and maybe multilingual contexts) and offer some tips to successfully consider inclusion and diversity into their teaching material and instruction.”

More events – some free, some for members only – here: https://www.iatefl.org/events

*Also known as the home of The Great Sphinx https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBuLtN4aemfegjrEA

2. This week’s Teacher Tapp https://teachertapp.co.uk/articles/time-sinks-phone-bans-and-education-influencers/ includes a survey of mobile phone usage in UK schools over the last few years which suggests that the UK government’s ban announced yesterday is a bit of a catch up exercise.

3. A recording of a comprehensive* recent talk by Robert Gibson for the ICC, From Maps to Navigation Systems – Trends in Intercultural Training https://youtu.be/w1MuiDaZZGw?feature=shared More ICC videos here https://www.youtube.com/@ICClanguages and their website here https://icc-languages.eu/

*Don’t feel ashamed to dip in and out!

ICC stands (stood?) for International Certificate Conference. I well remember being thrown out of a meeting of an earlier incarnation of the ICC in Starnberg in 1986 by its redoubtable founding director, Tony Fitzpatrick, who felt my British Council employment disqualified me from attendance, given that we weren’t members – fair enough with the benefit of hindsight but not how it felt at the time to the sensitive tyro Assistant Director Germany, South!

4. I’ve just discovered the publisher Castledown. They publish a number of interesting free ELT journals https://castledown.online/journals/ (and also offer generous sample extracts from their other publications). Here’s three of the journals:

Intercultural Communication Education https://castledown.online/journals/ice/

The JALT CALL Journal https://castledown.online/journals/jaltcall/

(JALT = Japan Association for Language Teaching and CALL = Computer Assisted Language Learning)

Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics (AJAL) https://castledown.online/journals/ajal/

And here’s a review by Kin Tat Wong from the current issue of AJAL of The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching (yours for only £164) https://castledown.online/articles/AJAL_6_1_1024.pdf? PDF below.

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5. And, finally, Hanif Kureishi. This week’s TLS (Times Literary Supplement) has a review of a recent biography of Kureishi by Ruvani Ranasinha, which concludes with the following paragraph: “On Boxing Day 2022 Kureishi suffered an accident in Rome that has left him paralysed and unable to hold a pen. His world has been broken in two; his past almost seems to belong to someone else. He mourns his former life and longs to go home, but continues to write with undiminished vitality: thousands of readers are following “The Kureishi Chronicles”, which (his son) Carlo (who once said of his upbringing, “Dad can only write. He outsources everything else”) transcribes and uploads to Substack https://hanifkureishi.substack.com/”

You’ll need to register (for free) on the TLS site to read the review https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/hanif-kureishi-ruvani-ranasinha-book-review-susie-thomas/

Here’s Kureishi’s Wikipedia entry, too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanif_Kureishi

1. Here’s a useful tip from Russell Stannard, Twee: A.I. Powered Tools For English Teachers https://twee.com/

plus introductory video here https://youtu.be/5IOb5Xxk2Hk?feature=shared

2. Jessica Mackay has done a great job again this month, bringing together a very wide range of (mainly) free CPD opportunities in this blog post https://eim-ub.blogspot.com/2023/09/opportunities-autumn-2023-upcoming-cpd.html

Keep it up please, Jessica!

3. Here’s an engaging MUBI podcast interview with the film director Ken Loach, who claims he’s approaching the end of his career https://mubi.buzzsprout.com/1788738/13675694-ken-loach-calls-for-solidarity-in-the-old-oak?t=0

Loach looks back on a long career spent telling the stories of working people and considers why it might end with his most recent film, The Old Oak, which is a call for solidarity in a northern industrial town.

4. This country runs on 98 percent renewable energy is the title of a TED talk by Ramón Méndez Galain, who led Urugay’s successful and astonishingly quick energy transformation https://www.ted.com/talks/ramon_mendez_galain_this_country_runs_on_98_percent_renewable_energy

5. And, finally, are you up to speed on optimal stopping theory? Just one of the topics Hannah Fry discusses in her talk, The mathematics of love https://youtu.be/N37x4GgDVBM?feature=shared

Bit of a Guardian day, today …

1. Guardian 1: ‘English has always evolved by mistake’ says lexicographical superstar Susie Dent https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/23/susie-dent-english-has-always-evolved-by-mistake

2. The current One Stop English free offer includes an attractive set of materials and accompanying audio for young learners at three different levels, Round the World https://www.onestopenglish.com/young-learner-topics/young-learner-topics-round-the-world/557630.article PDFs and (very small!) audiofile below as well.

3. Guardian 2: There’s more to ChatGPT than a big memory, it seems https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/23/chatbots-ai-gpt-4-university-students-creativity

4. I met Charlie Gardner, the organiser of Walking in Water in a riverside pub on Sunday. Such a meeting will very likely not be possible in fifteen years’ time … https://walkinginwater.com/

More famously water-threatened is Venice, which is additionally at risk of being swamped by tourists https://theconversation.com/an-entry-fee-may-not-be-enough-to-save-venice-from-20-million-tourists-213703

5. Guardian 3: and, finally, Naomi Wood won this year’s BBC national short story award with Comorbidities https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/26/bestselling-author-naomi-wood-wins-2023-bbc-national-short-story-award and Atlas Weyland Eden won the corresponding Young Writer’s Award. You can listen to Atlas’s The Wordsmith (and all five shortlisted stories) here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2cslf9QxZKznVCqplBS0SY0/winner-of-the-2023-bbc-young-writers-award-announced

1. The National Centre for Social Research (NCSR) here in the UK https://natcen.ac.uk/ has now been tracking our social and political attitudes for forty years. In their latest annual report they say that “one clear theme emerges. On many social issues, such as sexual relations or whether women with young children should go out to work, there has been a long-run secular change trend towards a more liberal climate of opinion. In what might be thought a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms, Britain has increasingly come to believe that what people do in the bedroom, what kinds of family they live in, and how they combine family life and paid work should be up to them. The job of government is to respect and facilitate the decisions they make rather than try and take those decision for them”.

Here’s the NCSR blog post on their new report https://natcen.ac.uk/different-britain-40-years-changing-social-attitudes

2. Here’s a good, comprehensive post on what exactly Assessment for Learning is on the Macmillan blog from a NILE colleague, Jason Skeet https://www.macmillanenglish.com/blog-resources/article/advancing-learning-what-is-assessment-for-learning-and-why-is-it-important

3. You can choose whether to read or to listen to this one from The Economist, The vital art of talking to strangers https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/07/10/the-vital-art-of-talking-to-strangers

4. Helen Lewis’s blog is called The Bluestocking. Here’s her latest post, What Does Keir Starmer Believe? https://helenlewis.substack.com/p/bluestocking-special-what-does-keir

How many of my readers outside the UK have no idea at all who Keir Starmer is, I wonder? And if you haven’t heard of him (yet?), maybe this post is not for you.

5. And, finally, everything you need to know about this year’s Booker Prize shortlist https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2023-shortlist

Click on the links near the top of the page for more information on the individual books shortlisted.

1. I met Graham Tennant, the co-founder of My CPD Group, (online) on Tuesday. The platform that he and his colleagues run is primarily for consultants and companies offering CPD courses but also has a fair bit of free stuff (if you register), including ‘Bringing Nursery Rhymes to Life’ from Pyjama Drama https://mycpdgroup.com/courses/bringing-nursery-rhymes-to-life/ and Starter for 10: Maslow’s Hierarchy from Learning & Wellbeing Psychology https://mycpdgroup.com/courses/starter-for-10-maslows-hierarchy/

To find all the free courses, click on the ‘all prices’ button on the home page and select ‘Free’ https://mycpdgroup.com/

2. There are several online events coming up from OUP (Oxford University Press) this autumn. The first one is How to manage mixed abilities amongst our primary learners with Erika Osvath at 14:00 UK time next Wednesday, 27^th September https://events.oup.com/oxford-university-press/How-to-manage-mixed-abilities-amongst-our-primary

Full details of all forthcoming events here https://oup.pagetiger.com/how-to-professional-development

3. Green Action ELT continues to offer interesting online events. The next one is Big climate emotions: eco-anxiety and ELT at 14:00 UK time on Friday 29^th September. Scroll down on this page for more information on this autumn’s events https://green-action-elt.uk/events/ and you’ll find the archive of previous events here https://green-action-elt.uk/events/#past-events

4. Here’s a piece from Quanta magazine, The Usefulness of a Memory Guides Where the Brain Saves It, explaining how the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-usefulness-of-a-memory-guides-where-the-brain-saves-it-20230830/

5. And, finally, the story of a lamppost https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/audley-square-spy-lamp-post

1. Cristina Cabal works at a language school in Avilés in northern Spain, and – a bit late in the day – I’ve just discovered her very rich blog for language teachers. Here’s her latest post, on bingo https://www.cristinacabal.com/ Lots to explore in the archives.

2. Jessica Mackay’s latest post on her blog, EFL Takeaways: Shared Resources and Lesson Plans for EFL, is a really useful compilation of free online CPD this month https://efltakeaways.home.blog/2023/09/05/free-online-cpd-september-2023/ I hope she does it monthly!

3. It’s been a while since I mentioned Alexandra Mihai’s The Educationalist. Here’s her latest blog post, which has a focus on Problem-Based Learning Are your students prepared for active learning? You can help them! https://educationalist.substack.com/p/are-your-students-prepared-for-active

4. The weekly ELT Buzz News Report does a great job hoovering up stuff from all round the web https://eltbuzz.substack.com/ Here’s the latest issue, with a focus on ‘native speakerism’ https://eltbuzz.substack.com/p/the-elt-buzz-news-report-9e2

5. And, finally, here’s one I harvested from LinkedIn on a return to real books and real writing in Sweden https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/sweden-brings-more-books-and-handwriting-practice-back-to-its-tech-heavy-schools/CUBSWFL3GBHVBN4VFEEKBATT64/