Teacher Professional Development Courses
with Antoine Marcq

The aim of this course is to make teaching English more effective for the students and more efficient for the teacher. Our goal as teachers is to help students develop both accuracy and fluency at all the skills they need to succeed. We are going to learn and practice a simple and flexible approach to lesson planning that is easily adaptable to any textbook or methodology used in ELT. This very practical 16 academic hour course, is divided into several problematics and solutions to make the best of our time with students, to build their reflexes, and turn their accuracy into fluency.

The course is separated into problematics and solutions as such:

• Problematic 1: Why do students often develop fluency or accuracy but not both?
  Solution: Overview of student abilities, motivation and factors teachers can influence
• Problematic 2: How to lead students to accurate knowledge?
  Reference: "System 1 and System 2 Thought Processes" theory
  Solution:
  - Clear, reliable explanations relying on communicational necessity
  - A systematic approach to practice activities
  
• Problematic 3: How to help students develop fluent skills?
  Reference: "Deliberate Practice" theory
  Solution:
  - Automate activities to transfer knowledge to skills
  - Error correction techniques
  - A consistent build in difficulty to build strong reflexes
• Problematic 4: How to assess fluency of a skill and plan future lesson
  Solution:
  - Argumentation and the pyramid of “I’m right”
  - Structures of answers expected
  - Automating structures and strategies
  - Brainstorming, outlining and reverse engineering
  - Building dexterity

The aim of this course is to make ЕГЭ Exam Preparation as effective and efficient as possible given the current level of the student. Our goal as teachers is to help our students achieve the best grade they can given their current level of English. We are going to learn and practice motivation techniques and exam preparation strategies to ensure that our students take and pass their ЕГЭ exam in the best conditions possible. We are not going to focus on developing English skills in this course, only on exam taking strategies. This very practical 16 academic hour course, is divided into several problematics and solutions to devise the best exam taking strategies, how to implement them and how to automate them in our students.

The course is separated into problematics and solutions as such:

• Problematic 1: What principles does the ЕГЭ exam follow and how do those help or hinder our students’ success?
  Solution: 
  - Overview of exam parts
  - Overview of exam grading criteria
  - Student motivation and engagement
  - Mock exams and student grading sheets
  
• Problematic 2: What are the best exam strategies for Reading and Listening parts and how do we automate them in our students?
  Solution:
  - Reading strategy for exams
  - Listening strategy for exams
  - Student attention: arrogance versus confidence
  - Automating the strategies
  - The strength of keywords
• Problematic 3: What difficulties do students face at the Use of English part and how do we help students face up to the challenge?
  Solution:
  - Word transformation automation and activities
  - Accuracy strategies
• Problematic 4: How can we help our students get maximum points at the Speaking and Writing parts of the exam?
  Solution:
  - Speaking activities designed to test fluency
  - An assessment based on spontaneous use of skills
  - A lesson planning system based on the systematic approach to building up practice