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The flipped classroom can be a good or a bad technique in terms of the results and preparation time. It is time consuming for teachers because Teachers spend much more time to prepare activities but it’s time saving in the classroom since pre-text activities should be done at home not in class. If students do their preparations then it will be an engaging and encouraging activity. They will come to class by already learned pre-required information so this will let them be confident and participate more in the activities.
My first concern is what if they don’t study. If they don’t, whole point of flipped classroom is gone. And extra and tiresome activities would take place both for students and the teacher. Also it may be applied in city centres but how about the town and villages where there is a poor internet connection?
If it’s directed and done by step by step, I think it will foster self-development awareness and get their own responsibility.
The reasons I mentioned until now, are the things my collegues will agree with me. Because the student&family profile and the environment are approximately the same and I’m sure they have this kind of problems too.

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Speaking and also listening activities are the most challenging ones among the four skills. You have to take lots of things into consideration such as students’ level, vocabulary knowledge, expression or chunks they know. All these criteria change according to the region, city or even family status. So when I want to do a speaking sessions with my colleagues I have difficulty in choosing the levels I use. Because we all come from different parts of Turkey and the problems we face in the class also differ from each other. Am I going to do the session for those who work in the East? Or am I going to do the sessions for those who work in a better conditions? That’s the one difficulty I face when I do the sessions with my colleagues.
There are lots of challenges when it comes to speaking and listening activities. If we talk about the major ones, I probably list those ones as incommon challenges me and my colleagues face: not enough vocabulary knowledge, deficiency in grammar, confidence or shyness problems and reluctance. Wherever they are, I’m sure they all face them in speaking/listening activities. As for my learners, plus the challenges mentioned above, my students may have most fundamental problems I think. Their first language is Kurdish and they have been learning Turkish as a second language and use Turkish only in school with us(teachers). So how can i teach them English even when they don’t know Turkish well enough? I tried to teach English by using just English, not through Turkish. I tried different activities based on different abilities and tasks. But at the end the result is the same. If you have any suggestions about it, I’m ready to hear!
We tried my activities today’s sessions. I like all of them but I enjoyed most when I took a video on Flipgrid. It was enjoyable and interesting. It increased curiosity and creativity, for all of us I think. Commenting on each other’s video and knowing someone will watch and comment on our video foster collaboration and creativity. I also like paper slide. My learners can do the colouring and speaking part and I shoot them! I probably won’t be able to use Flipgrid in my classes right know but I can use paper slide and gallery walk activity.
Note: The activities I use in my classes may look like a kind of simple but that’s the reality I face in my local working area. If you want me to write something hypothetical, like what if I work in a city center and in a big school, please let me know:)

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Using online tools for writing… well, we can consider it in both ways. Getting out of traditional teaching methods, using new methods or tools make students more motivated. In a technology era, people get involved more in tablets or mobile phone. Using these kind of tools encourages them, helps them to be more creative since they feel more relaxed by being somewhere they know. On the other hand, using the tech requires many things. The family’s social status, income status, geographical circumstances etc. I work in a small village. Some of my students have tablet some don’t. Even they have it, we have an internet problem so they don’t use the online tools. This makes them demotivated. There is also another situation in which students get everything easily and their imagination or problem solving abilities rust slowly. So it depends on where you work or how you use it.

Writing may be the most difficult one among the four abilities. Teaching them is as hard as writing itself. To me,  Make it simple and fun can be influential. Show them they can do it and do it in a funnier and creative way like group learning or adding some physical activities can help them and the teachers when it comes to teaching writing.

In today’s workshop, I mostly enjoyed the one about the websites. A team gets together, search for the information, discuss which information to add their paper and write the infos in a systematical way. All of these activity require speaking, critical thinking and writing. And yes, I think my colleagues would be interested in exploring this method, too. And also correcting according to the subjects can draw their attentions too.

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In today’s sessions, we both discussed the authentic and course book listening activities. There are pros and cons for each of them.
The course book listening activities can be quicker to prepare. And generally post listening activities are given in the book. Also these activities can be recorded by non native speakers so they don’t give the sense of natural. But they have clarity and students can understand more easily than authentic book. For my student between 8-11 y.o. I prefer to use them. But I have to say that before listening, I give them specific task like try to hear the words we have learned today.
as for authentic listening activities, I think they are most catchy and they can learn or hear from the native speakers themselves. First they are exposed to the target language. The more they’re exposed the more it becomes easier to understand and use the language. Then they can understand or guess the meaning of a word by the context. Plus, target culture and customs and expressions can be learned. You can also set the level of listening according to your students level. Of course you can do that in course book too. Yet, it’s always good to hear them from native speakers.
We can adapt the metarials in course book and authentic book according to the students’ levels. We can use physical metarials like papers, crayons or cut&paste activities or we can use technological devices like tablets, smartphones, laptops etc. For instances, when we teach the past tense… as a pre-listening activities, we can remind the seconds forms of the verbs and the unit vocabulary. In this part we should clearly express the task. Then while-listening activities, fill in the gap, searching answers for a specific questions or just focus on the second form of verbs can be some examples. Post reading activities should involve more group or peer work. Since they individually understand the text and it’s time to discuss it. Even if they don’t, peers support each other. They ask questions and express their ideas. Or for these question, technological tools can be used as quizzlet. (For central parts of Turkey the activities can be done by using Padlets, wordwall etc.)
For my students, since I work in a small village school, the questions they ask will be as simple as possible. Since I decide the level according to my students this won’t be a problem.

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The grammar method used in my area depends on the subject I think. I mean if I teach likes&dislikes, preferences, or sometimes present continuous I generally use implicit teaching. It’s more fun to see students try to guess my form. But past and perfect tenses or conditions for example, I think explicit teaching is used more. The subjects like these can be really hard to teach and learn in implicit way. In my area I think teachers think this way.
The first thing to pass on local teachers is this; use the implicit way. It’s more about direct and permanent. As we talk in the class, translation just makes it harder. Learners need to think in English. The second one is simplification of grammar. There are lots of rules and boring things to learn or even memorise. So do it in a funny way. One of the most valuable thing I learned from this ELT is the importance or using technology. Even if learners don’t have the access, teachers can do it in the classroom.
My collegues in my area probably agree with me about this ideas. However using them is something different. Using these methods takes a lot of time for teachers to prepare and it’s exhausting. They will agree but I think most of them won’t use it. I want them all to use these methods. Yet there will be someone who doesn’t.
To make my classes more  communicative with grammar I can use games, group works or technology. I like Loom application. I may use it or prepare a group work in a competitive way. Students like competitions because it’s fun. Group work can have stimulating effect to communicate each other. By helping the weaker ones and making harder for successful ones they can do it and peer learning can happen too.

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Using vocabulary and grammar is a tricky way. In short terms, Using Language 1 can look like time saving since students understand the topic immediately. In long terms, for disadvantages can be observed. Students forget about what they learn and just to give  the meaning in Turkish is not a fun way. They like guessing games and when I do teach them implicit way and in a way they can guess the meaning and form, students enjoyed it much more. And they take the info to their long term memory from short term memory. For not to use translation method, more games and activities should be involved in lessons.  So lessons will be more interactive and communicative.
I agree with the importance of vocabulary notebooks. Learners feel more involved in learning English when they have one. They can go and check the words already learned and can see how many words they learned. It’s a great motivation, I think, to see their improvement. If they write sample sentence under the vocabulary it will be better. However the words aren’t learned in an alphabetical way. If they write words in the order they learn, it can be confusing and demotivated. To store all the information in their vocabulary notebooks, learners should do some kind of categorising. It can be an alphabetical order or it can  be categorised according to the topics.
Getting to know words is like getting to know a friend. I’m totally agree with it. Every word has more than one meaning. In different contexts or  even in the same context you can find a lot of choices as for meaning. To be exposed to word in a short time of period or to come across with the same words when we read books or something, it will stimulate our memory and we will learn other meaning/aspects. If we spend more time with words we learned, we will get used to each other and the words become our own words. Like friends, the more you spend together the better you know  each other.

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Yes, it’s more clear to me what facilitators do in PLC sessions. She/be basically organises the activity and mirrors the participants. What activities should/shouldn’t be done, the needs of participants etc. When I came here I got tired   and lost my motivation. Working in the same school and in the same environment for a long time for a teacher is not sth effective. I love the way PLC made me feel. I hope I can share the same joy and excitement I felt in here with my colleagues too.
In this course I met wonderful English teachers who have innovator ideas and different professional backgrounds. It’s really exciting to talk to each other about the same&different problems we face. So they are really precious to me. I’m glad that I got to chance to know them.
If I’m to speak about Bitlis (Turkish city in the east) it’s not a big city so we can do sessions face to face and work on the problems we face.  Because I know that we are facing the same kind of problem. We can also use applications to keep in touch and share our ideas and experiences. We can prepare activities according to our mutual problems.
Especially today’s micro-PLC sessions, everything seems to me more clear. How to design a session, what to do or not to do, how to make it fun, planning, where and when to stress important points etc. Theoretically I don’t have any questions right now. But practically I’m not sure about it. There may be some different conditions that I will need a help.

Note: I’m really glad to meet you two. Thanks for everything from start to till now.🥰💐