Business Trip to Aomori: Aomori English Model

May 9-10, 2019

On May 10 a workshop took place at Aomori Prefectural School Education Center. Eighteen teachers in various leading roles gathered from all regions of the prefecture. Some are engaged in elementary school education, others junior high, and yet others senior high education. I was invited to the event as a lecturer as well as a facilitator of discussion.

The workshop started at 9:50. My part started at 10:05 and ended at 12:05. It was a two-hour event.

Though my part was just two hours, I came to the city on the previous night to prepare for the morning start, taking a little more than three hours one way.

Thanks to ample mental rehearsal on the previous night in my quiet hotel room, I was able to present two model lessons energetically, and facilitate active and focused discussions.

Mr. S, who organized today's event, is very keen to improve the overall teaching competency of English teachers in Aomori so that students can benefit from their improvement and eventually can demonstrate their (=students') improved competency in reality as well as numerically such as in English proficiency tests.

Mr. S and all the participants were genuinely motivated to create something positive from the event. They are particularly interested in establishing what they call "Aomori English Model," an effective teaching model that all English teachers in Aomori can follow as the Polar Star. They are also concerned about how to share effective teaching methods and common educational values with all the remaining teachers working in every corner of the prefecture.

I presented two model lessons that addressed their two biggest concerns:
1) How to enable junior high students to manipulate target English to speak about themselves
2) How to make reading lessons more communicative in senior high level

They seemed to enjoy both of my demos. I got good feedback from a number of participants. Also, they seemed to trigger some good discussion.

I gave them a complete written scenario of both lessons so that they can review and reproduce them later if they want to.

Though I left there past noon, the teachers were scheduled to have discussion in the afternoon among themselves, based on what they saw and learned in my two-hour session. Hopefully, something good will come out of it.