By Ben Keegan

Many of the SISU Haipei teaching staff met on Thursday 555162465th November 20555162468 for a professional development session, observed by Professor Wang Xiaoling. The discussion lasted around 90 minutes from 555162462:00 to 555162463:30.

In the session Damon Hansen delivered an excellently researched presentation on how to motivate students, looking at the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that lead to dedicated or otherwise students. Following this thorough analysis, Paul Hofman suggested that one way to motivate students is remembering that success breeds success: therefore at the beginning of a course test material should be fairly easy to give everyone a feeling of success, before becoming steadily more challenging.

Chen Liqing suggested that group work should involve students of mixed ability with the teacher assuming a directorial or facilitative role. Michael Shoenberger commented that growth language is very useful in building motivation as it concentrates on enhancing students'appreciation of their own development, not a fixation on performance in tests.

Chen Liqing next talked about providing more useful online information for both students and teachers. For the benefit of the students it was suggested that those teachers doing IELTS training could record model answers for the students. Romain Vuattoux suggested that many resources for this could also be found online and shared. Chen Jia and Chen Liqing noted that they have had great success with asking the students to record their voices in their class groups and seek feedback from their classmates. For the benefit of the teachers it was suggested that documentation on effective teaching methods and classes could be shared online to aid current and future teachers. The SISU cloud was thought the best place for this.

Finally, Ben Keegan gave six suggestions for how to get students using more English in class. Paul Hofman commented that while to speaking class teachers it may appear that students are not using enough English, when Haipei graduates were encountered overseas they could communicate effectively in English. Natalya Zavjalova suggested that reminding students that they should be speaking English, and the importance of this, worked well in her class.