Maria Heron is a practising teacher and teacher trainer with over 30 years’ experience.  She is a senior tutor and CELTA Centre Manager at NILE in the UK.  She is a presenter at international conferences and a member of the Creativity Group. Email:  maria@nile-elt.com

Rod Bolitho has been teaching and training teachers since the late 1960s.  He has undertaken consultancy work in ELT in dozens of countries, currently in Uzbekistan and Tunisia.  He has written numerous articles and books in our field, most recently ‘Language Education in a Changing World’ with Richard Rossner, to be published in March 2020. Email: rodbol44@yahoo.co.uk

Alan Maley has been involved with training teachers of TESOL/TEFL for 50 years.  He has published widely.  He was co-founder of The C Group (Creativity for Change in Language Education).  He is a regular contributor to  HLT Mag. Email: yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk

 

Introduction 

At the 2019 IATEFL Conference in Liverpool, we offered a Forum with three different angles on training and development in our field.  The forum was well attended, and because our contributions seemed to arouse a fair amount of interest, we decided to write them up for HLT in the hope of reaching a wider interest group and possibly stimulating further debate. 

A few lines by way of introduction.  Maria Heron is a very experienced CELTA manager and tutor, and she takes a critical look at CELTA and DELTA.  Rod Bolitho is a teacher educator with plenty of recent experience in the field, and his paper focusses on the phases in a teacher’s professional life and the extent to which accumulated experience among practising teachers is often wasted.  Alan Maley has had a career-long involvement in teacher education and development and is now closely involved in The Creativity Group as well as writing about professional issues.  Here he writes about the value of experience in developing expertise in teaching.

 

Are CELTA and Delta the end of the road? by Maria Heron

Over 35 years ago, and new to this country, I embarked on an initial training course, then known as the Royal Society of Arts Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Apart from the fact that I was the only non-native speaker on the course, we were quite a homogeneous group: all young, all just out of university, all females and none of us had been in the classroom as teachers.  We were the perfect tabula rasa for our trainers. It was an age of no Internet and no emails so I often wonder what happened to my fellow trainees so many years down the line and for how many of them this course was just the first step in their professional lives.

I am now CELTA Centre Manager at NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) in the UK.  Not only has the content of the course changed but also the composition of the participants. We still get trainees who have never been in the classroom as teachers, a few young ones who have just finished university, some who want a career change and older candidates who are about to retire and want to supplement their incomes or do voluntary work with refugees.

Alongside them, we get UK teachers from the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary systems, with considerable teaching experience, and who want a change of career because they no longer want to be part of a system which they perceive as too bureaucratic and too exam-oriented. Increasingly, we also get non-native teachers from the ELT sector who want or need the Cambridge qualification to enhance their career opportunities.  On our last CELTA course at NILE, we had an Indian applicant who had a BA, an MA and a PhD, and who was already doing wonderful things in the classroom. He wanted to teach abroad but had been told that his qualifications were not good enough and he needed a qualification from a native-speaking country. He was clearly ready for Delta but he could not afford the extra time and cost to be able to do this in the UK.

A typical course at NILE (May 2018) had 4 non-native speakers (some with considerable teaching experience), a UK teaching assistant from the Primary sector, a UK Primary school teacher specialising in Modern Foreign Languages, a young man from Bermuda who had just finished his PhD and had done some lecturing, a young man who had done some teaching in Spain on the basis of having completed an online TEFL course and a young couple who had just finished university and wanted to teach and travel. This mixture of trainees and teacher-learners, to use a term coined by Anderson (2018), and native and non-native candidates, makes running courses in the UK challenging. The trainees need the basics to function in the classroom and knowledge about the language, while the teacher-learners have needs drawn from their own contexts, e.g. how to deal with large classes of disengaged teenagers, when and why they can use L1 in the classroom and how to deal with parents and managers who might want them to use every exercise in the coursebook because the students have paid for them. So, despite the fact that CELTA is not a straightjacket and there is flexibility within the CELTA syllabus, unless a centre creates individual timetables, or a pick-and-mix syllabus based on needs, it is difficult to cater for the needs of such diverse groups.

When running CELTAs abroad, it is easier for centres to tailor them to the needs of the candidates. A few years ago NILE ran several CELTAs in the Perm region in Russia.  There we ran teaching practice at a local school, with learners aged 16-18, so the teachers were doing teaching practice with learners similar to the ones they would go back to teach. However, I now wonder whether some of these teachers could have worked towards a certificate for practising teachers instead. CELTA is increasingly been seen as a qualification for practising teachers. Is this the way we want to go?

If I think about my own journey, the RSA Cert gave me the love for teaching so many years ago. I remember a charismatic trainer and great students. I do not remember being bogged down by assessment criteria that now stop our trainees focusing on the students they are teaching.

There is now also very little time for any meaningful reflection that is not linked to the assessment criteria. As Mackenzie (2019; P/11) said: ‘… by making reflection a course requirement that is assessed by tutors, there is a danger that the depth and quality of the reflection will be reduced’.

We constantly have to justify what I think is a successful course.  Many enquiries from native speakers express surprise at the need to do such a demanding course when all they want to do is teach a language that they feel they can already master. While, on the other hand, non-native teachers are sceptical about a qualification that enables people who pass to function independently in the classroom after only four weeks of training and six hours of supervised teaching practice. In my country, Argentina, prospective teachers need to do four years at a Teacher Training College, with a mixture of theory and teaching practice, or to spend six years to do a degree.

I also remember my Delta, then known as the Royal Society of Arts Diploma. I remember the readings I discovered which principled my teaching, the wonderful students, the input sessions and the essays I wrote which were linked to the readings.  I do not remember writing very long lesson plans or long assessment criteria.

My experiences as a face-to-face and online Delta tutor for Module 2 are very different. I have seen teachers on Delta with very long plans, running into many pages that do not necessarily translate into good lessons. I also see assessment criteria that do not explicitly focus on developing higher-order thinking skills or creativity in the learners.

I would like to see more time on CELTA courses for non-assessed reflection and inputs on reflection. As Dewey (1993; P/78) said: ‘We do not learn from experience.  We learn from reflecting on experience.’ My personal experience with CELTA trainees following their teaching practice is that their reflections tend to be superficial as they are at a descriptive level and they need to move to a more critical level. They focus on ticking boxes linked to their assessment and will say things such as: ‘My lesson went well because I got to the end of my plan’.

On our last CELTA course at NILE we introduced 2 new input sessions on reflection. The aims of the first one were to enable the trainees to know the importance of reflecting critically, to begin reflecting on their own experiences of teaching and learning and to expose them to Driscoll’s model of reflection, which was originally designed in the field of Medicine and show them how to apply it. We encouraged the trainees to use the template below to regularly reflect on their practice and to give themselves an action point with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic & Time-bound) targets to help improve their practice.

The second session focused on continuing to be a reflective practitioner.

I would like centres to encourage practising teachers with an ELT background, to do Delta rather than CELTA. Delta is modular and flexible so teachers can reflect on, use and develop their experience from teaching they have done. As Kiddle (2018; P/13) said in his article in the El Gazette, ‘teachers can start with Module 1 and this would allow them to assess whether they have enough methodological underpinning and theoretical understanding of learning and teaching principles to move onto other modules or they may find they need further peer or institutional support to take this step.’

I would also like to see assessment criteria for both Delta and CELTA that reward and encourage the candidates for the development of higher order thinking skills and creativity in the learners.

Complacency after completing both CELTA and Delta, together with a lack of professional development, can lead to mediocrity in teaching. Language schools and other institutions that employ teachers need to invest in our profession. CELTA is only the first step on the professional ladder and neither CELTA nor Delta should be the end of the road.  They should be part of a career-long process in professional development.

 

References

Anderson, J. (2018). ‘The future of training’ or ‘The elephant that swallowed the room’. IH Teacher Training Blog.   https://www.ihlondon.com/blog/posts/2018/the-future-of-training-or-the-elephant-that-swallowed-the-room-jason-anderson/ (accessed 7/06/19)

Dewey, J. (1933). ‘How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process’. F. Boston, MA: DC Heath

Kiddle, T. (2018). ‘A work in progress’. El Gazette, April, p/13, London

Mackenzie, L. (2019). ‘Investigating reflection in written assignments on CELTA courses’. ELT Journal, 73/1, Oxford: Oxford University Press 11-20.

 

Stages in an English teacher’s career and some of the dilemmas and questions that accompany each stage, by Rod Bolitho

A number of researchers and writers have postulated different stages in a teacher’s career, among them Huberman (1989) and Steffy (2000).  More recently, Ron White put this into an ELT context with his paper ‘Teachers’ Professional Life Cycles’ (2008).  These studies provide a backcloth to this short paper, which focuses on the issues that confront teachers in our field at each of the stages that I have identified as recognisable to most likely readers.

 

Entry to teaching

The decision to embark on the journey from being a learner to becoming a teacher is a momentous one.  Fundamental questions about self inevitably arise:

• What does it mean to be a teacher?
• Is teaching a real career?
• Will I be able to survive in the classroom?  How will I cope?
• Is my English good enough?

In some contexts, it is possible for an entrant to ask these questions in a pre-course interview, but that kind of situation is not really the place to air self-doubts and concerns of the type illustrated by these questions.  Rather it is left to would-be teachers to find out about themselves during their training or teacher education course, and that can be painful.  The decision to go for teaching is also sometimes the result of failure to qualify for a more lucrative profession, or of a mid-career change of direction, perhaps after redundancy or dissatisfaction with an existing job.  In cases - and there are many - in which there is pressure to fill places on an initial training course such as CELTA, or in countries where there is a shortage of English teachers, not too many questions may be asked of potential entrants, and their doubts may not be addressed at all.  Yet it is clear that trainees starting out with a view of teaching as a fall-back or last resort career choice may well lack the commitment and motivation to work on themselves and to aspire to success in this new career.  Interestingly, however, in some countries where teaching is well-paid and valued, Finland for example, it is a very popular career choice and there is intense competition for places on pre-service courses (for more on this, see Bolitho 2017).

 

Initial training

Here I will refer to two different pathways into teaching English. One of them, via CELTA or the Trinity College Certificate, is aimed largely at meeting private sector needs and is in each case controlled by a UK-based provider.  The other route, much more widespread in countries around the world, is aimed at meeting the demand for English teachers in state education systems and is offered at universities and other higher education institutions.  This table is an attempt to differentiate, albeit only in very general terms, between the two pathways.

Initial certificate courses	Higher education courses
Tend to reinforce a minimalist model of English teaching	Based on degree requirements and a broader educational model (e.g. in philology).  Often reinforce handed-down traditions of teaching.
Concerned with training	Concerned with teacher education
Short duration	Courses lasting 3 – 4 years
Courses are system-neutral and claim international validity	Courses are system-specific in a national context
Often theory-light and focussed on practice	Often theory-heavy and lighter on practice
Focus on language for teaching purposes	Often focus on general language improvement and on knowledge of language systems
Teaching practice with adult classes	Teaching practice in schools with children
Leading to a certificate of basic competence	Leading to a degree or higher diploma
Trainers usually very close to classroom practice	Teacher educators often distant from classroom practice
Trainees usually go straight into teaching	Some graduates go into teaching, others take higher degrees and others still make a completely different career choice.

Both models have strengths and deficits, but neither seems to prepare trainees for the long-term challenges of teaching and for a commitment to career-long professional development.  During either course, trainees have to deal with realisations such as:

• I’m finding out how different teaching English is from just knowing the language.
• Teaching practice is scary and I’m not at all confident in front of a class.
• Our methodology classes are theoretical and they don’t help me with my teaching.
• I can’t really experiment in my teaching because I’m being assessed all the time.

The tight syllabus on certificate courses and the monolithic nature of teacher education curricula often leave little or no space for trainees to engage in dialogue about their experience of the course and the doubts that inevitably arise in their minds as they confront new realities.  There are, of course some honourable exceptions to this general statement: CELTA courses with committed trainers whose engagement with their trainees extends far beyond the limits of their timetabled day, and university tutors who regularly take feedback and concern themselves with their students as individuals rather than with their groups as ‘job lots’.  If adopted more widely, this type of engagement would make such a difference by sowing the seeds of long-term professional development in student teachers, thereby reducing the high drop-out rates which sadly still prevail in the first years of active service as teachers.

 

The ‘novice-teacher’ stage

• OK, I’ve made it as a teacher and I’ve got a job.  What next?
• I’m not sure I made the right decision – every day seems like a battle for survival.
• Who can I turn to if I have problems with my teaching?
• I sometimes find myself teaching the way I was taught at school.
• Maybe teaching isn’t for me after all.

This kind of self-doubt and self-questioning often bothers newly qualified teachers in their early years of teaching.  Mentoring schemes, if well-conceived and properly organised can be of great benefit to novice teachers, but they are not widely available, and too often new teachers are left to sink or swim.  The attrition rate in the first five years of teaching is frighteningly high in many contexts and this is really a waste of human resources that could be so easily rectified if proper support structures were put in place in schools in both private and public sectors.  I visited one graduate from a UK-Malaysia BEd ELT programme in her school during her second year of service and she reported that she had been told to forget about all those new-fangled ideas about communicative teaching as they don’t work in Malaysian schools, and that she should adhere to tried and trusted methods that had been in use for decades.  She said, rather sadly, that it was more important to be accepted by her new colleagues than to fly the flag for communicative teaching.  This is typical of the way practices are perpetuated and of the dilemmas that confront novice teachers. Most will opt for social acceptance rather than revolution in such cases.  It is at this stage of their careers that they discover the essentially conservative nature of teaching as a career.  Instead of encouraging a positive approach to Continuing Professional Development, this kind of attitude prepares the way for teachers to start to stagnate and lose their energy and enthusiasm for the job.

 

Mid-career

The dilemmas faced by many mid-career teachers are different in nature from those that confront their less experienced colleagues. Typically, they have overcome most of the problems that novice teachers face and are more settled and confident, perhaps relying on routines to get them through from day to day. Here are some typical issues:

• I’m getting a bit bored with my teaching. I need a new challenge.
• I sometimes I feel I’m just an English-teaching robot.
• I need to get up to date with some of these new developments – I’m worried about falling behind.
• I’m losing my English – maybe because I just teach what’s in the coursebook.
• What do I really want for the rest of my career?

So what are the choices open to teachers at this more mature stage of their careers?   They may…..

• go for some kind of promotion within the system, as Head of Department for example
• choose to move into training.
• take on mentoring duties.
• go for a higher degree and seek refuge in academia.
• decide to write materials.
• decide to undertake in-service training.
• take a career break.
• take a role in a teachers’ association or in organising a conference

Each of these options may be helpful in some way to teachers who choose them, but there are some caveats about most of them.   Teaching is not really a good basis for moving into a management position.  Good teachers don’t necessarily make good leaders or managers.  Working with adults is different from working with children, and training requires an extra layer of skills over and above those needed for teaching.  Taking a Masters course or studying for a PhD are both big commitments which represent a move on to territory controlled by academics rather than fellow teachers.  This is a pathway which is advocated in some of the Teacher Development Frameworks which have proliferated in recent years, such as the British Council’s version (British Council 2015).  Those who make this move may be lost to teaching, and those who return will probably discover that a PhD never made anyone a better teacher.  Going on an in-service course may be a shot in the arm for a jaded, mid-career teacher, but the impact of such courses seldom lasts, and INSETT alone is no substitute for a well thought through CPD plan.

Because mid-career teachers are generally seen as capable of deciding things for themselves, schools often take them for granted and offer little in the way of support for decision-making about next steps.  And there are seldom any obvious incentives for good teachers to remain in the classroom where they are most needed.  Some schools have appraisal systems to help teachers to set their own targets in line with institutional priorities, but that is the exception rather than the rule.  Experienced mid-career teachers constitute a potentially valuable human resource pool, able to make their experience available to younger colleagues or to their institution as a whole.  Far too little serious thought has been given to ways of achieving this, whether within or beyond the bounds of an institution, maybe because human resource management has not really taken root in educational settings.    These teachers are often simply not sufficiently valued.  Small wonder, then that so many seek satisfaction outside, regarding school as nothing more or less than a place to earn a living.

 

Late career and exit

I have myself been guilty of using the term ‘dinosaur’ to describe teachers nearing the end of their service and sometimes displaying characteristics like resistance to change (I’ve been successful teaching like this for so many years – why should I change now?); indignation about the demands placed on them (I’m supposed to teach 21^st Century Skills, but I’m a language teacher.  I teach my subject, not critical thinking, teamwork skills and all that stuff); tiredness (I don’t want to retire yet, but a day’s teaching sometimes exhausts me); insecurity, which commonly underlies negative attitudes and behaviours (all this new technology is beyond me – I’ll be glad to get out). 

Left to fester and expand, these attitudes will create a negative vortex in any staffroom and will all too often become a source of conflict.  Generation-based cliques are always bad for morale. Wise leaders in an institution will devote thought and planning to finding ways of making these older teachers feel valued and to enable them to continue to make a visible contribution to the development of teaching and learning. I well remember my time teaching English in a Language Centre at a German university near the start of my career.  In staff seminars, we took it in turns to present a video of ourselves teaching in a typical manner.  My turn came around and I was there for all to see, conducting an all-action lesson, with no silences and total student involvement.  I received positive feedback from most colleagues, but when it was the turn of the elderly Czech language lecturer to speak, he said (translated from German), ‘My respect, Herr Bolitho, but are you going to teach like that for the next thirty years?  How will you keep it up?  And what about your students?  They have no time or space to breathe or to think about what they are learning.’  I will always be grateful for that intervention from a colleague who I had hitherto regarded as something of a dinosaur.  I have now solemnly resolved never to use the term again!

Leaders should look at ways of offering late career options such as moving from full-time to part-time teaching, mentoring younger teachers, chairing staff meetings and leading discussions. In far too many contexts, the potentially invaluable source of know-how and experience that late career teachers can offer is simply neglected.

 

Conclusion

So many teachers spend large parts of their careers in relative isolation, often left to take important and life-changing decisions without support or advice. For far too many, a career path becomes a downward spiral, culminating in disenchantment and bitterness.  A root and branch review of career structures and possible trajectories, such as those proposed in some CPD frameworks, at school level in the private sector and at system level in the state sector, might help to ensure that all the valuable human potential that accumulates during a teaching career is not wasted, and that good teachers are not lost to teaching for want of good CPD opportunities.

 

References

Bolitho, R. (2017)   Transitions in the life of a Teacher   Based on a paper given at the NILE@21 Conference and available at: https://www.nile-elt.com/blog/page/2

British Council (2015) Continuing Professional Development Framework for Teachers   available at: https://www.britishcouncil.in/sites/default/files/cpd_framework_for_teachers.pdf  accessed 6.06.2019

Huberman, M. (1989) The Professional Life Cycle of Teachers   Teachers’ College Record: 91/1

Steffy, B.E. et al (eds) (2000) Life Cycle of the Career Teacher   Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press

White, R.V. (2008) Teachers’ Professional Life Cycles   International House Journal of Education and Development: 28    http://ihjournal.com/teachers-professional-life-cycles accessed 8 .8.2016

 

Developing expertise through experience, by Alan Maley

Prabhu’s (1987) concept of ‘the teacher’s sense of plausibility’ contends that teachers build their personal theories of teaching and learning through a continuing process of reflection on their lived experiences.  It is this process which fuels their personal and professional growth. We might term this the ‘plausibility’ paradigm.  It is broadly heuristic: ‘Whatever training we give them, teachers will adapt and transform it according to what works for them and to the belief system they have evolved, and this is forged through the experiences they undergo’.

This conceptualisation of teacher development is significantly different from the dominant, current ‘training’ paradigm. The ‘training’ paradigm is broadly algorithmic in nature: ‘If we give teachers X forms of training, they will emerge with Y competences.’  On closer examination, this proves to be a simplified, if not simplistic approach to developing teacher competence.  It is based on a number of questionable and rarely-stated premises: that ‘we’, the gate-keepers, know best what teachers need to learn; that trainees will in fact ‘learn’, internalise and apply what we teach them; that this training package will be relevant in all material, economic, geographical and cultural contexts; that this set of competences will remain valid throughout a teacher’s career.  This is, of course, not to deny the need for core knowledge and skills.  I simply argue that this core package is not alone sufficient to prepare teachers for the unpredictability they will inevitably encounter more or less daily in the classroom arena.

I suggest therefore that it is worth exploring in more detail the ways in which teachers develop professionally and personally by building a personal theory of teaching action based upon their own accumulated experiences - and reflection on them.   By weaving together the five experiential strands of places, key personal influences, ideas, publications and critical moments, I believe that we can demonstrate how these factors have influenced the direction of our own continuing development of a personal ‘theory’ of teaching.  To put this to the test, I invited 20 experienced professionals worldwide to reflect on their own professional developmental pathways.  The results appear in a book published by the British Council, titled Developing Expertise through Experience (2019). Their narrative accounts seem to support the ‘plausibility’ argument.   There does therefore appear to be a case for including a more experiential reflective strand in the fabric of training and development programmes.

Traditionally, of course, it has been claimed that the acquisition of an ability to deal with the unpredictable, moment-by-moment unfolding scenarios of classroom teaching would somehow take care of itself, and that such an ability cannot be ‘taught’ but only slowly acquired by trial and error.  Adrian Underhill (2014) and I (2012) have taken issue with this view and argue that it is possible both to raise awareness of the unpredictability factor and to go some way in helping both trainee and in-service teachers come to terms with it.

So how might we go about this? 

• We could draw on published materials from the field of foreign language teaching and make space for discussing them in a regular and structured manner. These might include Lew Barnett’s, The Way We Are, (1988) a collection of teachers’ reports on their histories as teachers.  Esther Ramani’s Theorising from the classroom (1987) is an early example of looking at teachers’ conceptualisation of their practices. In Ghosts behind the blackboard, Ephraim Weintraub (1989) highlights the way we are all in some sense replicating the way we ourselves were taught.  Joachim Appel’s classic account of a language teacher’s life in his Diary of a Language Teacher (1995) also offers rich pickings for discussion.  Pickett’s survey of experienced language learners’ personal accounts is also suggestive and could be replicated. (Pickett, 1978). A recent account of teacher creativity in my book with Tamas Kiss might also be the starting point for further practical work (Maley & Kiss, 2017: 161-201).  Floris & Renandya’s recent collection of teachers’ stories (2020) accompanied by reflective activities also offers a rich resource.
• We could extend the discussion to more personal and wide-ranging accounts of teaching experiences.  For example, Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man (2006), Daniel Pennac’s School Blues (2010), Ashton Warner’s Teacher (1963) and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989) all offer rich material to stimulate discussion of key issues. There are also many issues arising from books like The School that I’d Like (Blishen 1969) and Letter to a Teacher (1970), which look at learning from the learners’ point of view.
• We could create space for discussion of trainees’ own personal histories, key turning- points, highs and lows, and their current areas of interest and growth.  One striking fact to emerge from the study I conducted (see above, Maley, 2019 forthcoming) was how important early language learning and other early learning experiences were to the formation of enduring attitudes, beliefs and values. 
• We could focus on the importance of spontaneity and improvisation in teaching.  (Maley and Underhill, 2012; Underhill, 2014)  This would highlight the insufficiency of preparation (Planning) in dealing with unpredictability (Preparedness).  One way to do this would be by offering training in clowning. (Lutzker, 2007).  (See also, www.nosetonose.info.uk/ for practical courses on clowning.)  Work on Impro activities would also be a way in to this whole area.  (Johnstone, 1989, 1999; Poynton,2013)
• For those working with the British Council publication (Maley, 2019), a whole raft of possible Continuing Educational Development (CPDs) activities are provided in the e-file which accompanies the book.

To summarise, I believe current teacher training programmes concentrate on an algorithmic model which assumes a high degree of predictability in the classroom.  What they offer is necessary knowledge and skills, of that there is no doubt, but it is not alone sufficient. What they largely leave out are the highly personal factors which contribute to teachers’ evolving ‘sense of plausibility’.  I am suggesting that there are practical ways in which we can raise awareness of the contribution individual narratives can make, and help teachers foster their spontaneity in response to the unpredictable.

 

References

Appel, J. (1995) Diary of a Language Teacher.  London: Heinemann.

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963) Teacher.  Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Barnett, L. (1988) The Way We Are. Barcelona: ESADE.)

Blishen, E. (1969) The School that I’d Like.  Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Floris, F. D. and W.A. Renandya. (2020) Inspirational Stories for English language Classrooms. Jakarta: TEFLIN.

Hoffman, E. (1989) Lost in Translation.  London: Vintage.

Johnson, K. (1989) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.  London: Methuen Drama.

Johnson, K. (1999) Improvisation for Storytellers.  London: Faber and Faber.

Lutzker, P. (2007)   The Art of Foreign Language Teaching: Improvisation and drama in teacher development and language learning.  Tubingen and Basel: Francke Verlag.

Maley, A. (2016) The Teacher’s Sense of Plausibility Revisited. Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching, 11(1), May 2016, 1-29.

Maley, A. (2019) (ed) Developing Expertise through Experience.  London: British Council.

Maley, A. and A. Underhill.  (2012)  Expect the unexpected.  English Teaching Professional.  No 82, Sept. 2012, 4-7.

Maley, A. and T. Kiss. (2018) Creativity and English Language Teaching: from inspiration to implementation.  London: Palgrave Macmillan. 161-198.

McCourt, F. (2006) Teacher Man.  New York: Harper Perennial.

Nose-to-Nose.  www.nosetonose.info.uk/

Pennac, D. (2010) School Blues.  London: Maclehose Press.

Pickett, D. (ed.) (1978) The Foreign Language Learning Process.  London: British Council.  (pdf file freely downloadable)

Poynton, R. (2013) DO/IMPROVISE.  London: The Do Book Company.

Prabhu, N.S. (1987) Second Language Pedagogy.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ramani, E. (1987) Theorizing from the classroom.  ELTJournal, 41 (1): 3-11.

School of Barbiana.  (1970) Letter to a Teacher.  Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Underhill, A. (2014) Training for the unpredictable. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL. Vol. 13, Number 2: 59-69.                                                                   

Weintraub, E. (1989)  An interview with Ephraim Weintraub. The Teacher Trainer, 3, 1, 1.