Our Teacher Training Workshop on the 30th November was a terrific success. Macmillan Education and the Confucius Institute co-hosted the event at University Place at the University of Manchester. It was a perfect venue, located in the heart of the University and it comfortably accommodated over 100 delegates which were made up of primary, secondary and university teachers. The attendees not only came from the Greater Manchester area but also from different parts of the country including Northern Ireland which is really indicative of the quality training people were expecting and thus received from Ms. Lik Suen, Dr. Duo Luan and Dr. Zhu Zhu.
All three teachers used the Textbook; Discover China book 1 in their training and delivered three very different sessions which made the day very varied, interesting as well as highly practical and useful.
Ms. Lik Suen
The day began with Lik’s session ‘Textbook Adaptation’. She cleverly illustrated how a textbook like Discover China can be adapted for different students with different needs. She set various tasks for different skills. She gave the delegates the opportunity to set questions suitable for GCSE. students and levels beyond this. People naturally formed groups and collectively tackled the tasks with some sharing interesting feedback.
Dr. Zhu Zhu
The session that followed this was ‘Teaching Strategies: What does a student-centred approach really mean?’ and this was delivered by Dr. Zhu Zhu in her native tongue. The delegates were also invited to share their own experiences and good practice. There was so much talent and knowledge present amongst the delegates. One of the great benefits of an event like this is that it provides a great opportunity for people to share their own teaching experiences and approaches and so people also learn so much from one another.
Dr. Duo Luan
Duo began her session with a lego activity which captured everybodys interest and then she talked about visual taching such as colour coding. She introduced some apps such a QR Code function in Quizlet. Many teachers present expressed their wish to try this within their own teaching settings.
Teaching resources for teachers are an important part of their toolkit. They are hugely beneficial as they not only add variety to learning but they also compliment and support the teaching. We at Macmillan Education would like to use the My Discover China website to stock and supply Teaching resources but we need people to supply them having used and tested them. If you have resources you use and would like to share, please email them to discoverchina@macmillaneducation.com.
