Анита Модестова - Authentic for the classroom

Anita will also participate in #YARCONF23 as a speaker, join us Modestova is a CELTA qualified teacher, psychologist and business trainer. She specialises in teaching general English to adults, low levels and also delivers seminars on how to build your career as a self-employed teacher. Anita manages her own professional development community for teachers of English - Teachers Teach Teachers: Authentic for the classroom It feels like somehow at some point of our professional development we, teachers, are told we’re not good enough: not good enough to share our own experiences and use our own voice in our classroom - teachers must reduce their Teacher Talking Time, not good enough to write our own texts or record our own videos for our own students - teachers should spend hours googling something authentic their students might like. There’s something deeply wrong about this approach, don’t you think? Some time ago I came across an idea that ‘authentic for the world’ doesn’t mean ‘authentic for the classroom’. During my talk I’d like to question the need of ‘bringing’ only ‘100% authentic’ materials to the classroom (I’m going to share a painful CELTA memory here) and promote the idea of creating them yourselves. I’m going to share my experience and ideas on what you can do and, hopefully, inspire you to try it with your class.