English Teaching Talks - Managing resources

About the English Teaching Talks series

English Teaching Talks is new series produced by the British Council and presented by English language teaching experts from around the world. Divided into 6 short episodes, each video gives practical and useful advice, and is designed to help you develop your skills as an English language teacher in a number of different areas. 

Other episodes in the series are available. Click or tap on the title of the talk to visit the page:

• Integrating ICT - Nik Peachey
• Assessing learning - Carolyn Westbrook and Richard Spiby
• Learning Outside the Classroom - Claudia Rey
• Inclusion - Susan Douglas

About the videos

In this series of six short videos, Renee Selikowitz offers guidance and practical ideas for choosing, preparing and storing resources for a range of ages. She includes ideas for resources that can be used for; presentation, practising all four skills, classroom management, encouraging collaboration, independence, creativity and critical thinking, personalisation and also allowing teachers more time to monitor and give feedback.

Below is a list of each video. Click or tap the title of each video to watch it on YouTube. All videos include subtitles in English:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: What is a resource?

Part 3: How resources support learning

Part 4: What is a good resource?

Part 5: Using a resource portfolio

Part 6: Activities with resources

Watch part 1 below and watch all the videos on YouTube

Rationale

Renee tells us that to create, adapt and be able to reuse resources to make learning more personalised and memorable for their learners, teachers need to:

• Identify possible resources around them (and treat everything around as a possible resource).
• Understand how different resources can make things memorable and support and personalise learning for a variety of learner preferences  
• Use criteria to help identify good resources for the aims of a lesson.
• Identify what would be in their ideal ‘resource portfolio’.
• Know about ‘low tech’ quick and easy to create resources

Pre-viewing task

Before you watch the videos, think about your answers to the questions below. If you are using this resource as part of your professional development in your institution, discuss the questions below with your colleagues:

• What is a resource?
• How do resources support learning?
• What questions can help us identify if a resource is a ‘good’ resource?
• What is a resource portfolio and how can it be used?
• What easy to prepare ‘low-tech’ resources create learning opportunities?

While viewing

• What ideas does Renee give for each of the points in the pre-viewing task?

After viewing

• Were your answers to the pre-viewing task different from the suggestions Renee made on the videos? If so, Why? (e.g. your context/ access to resources/ age of your students)?
• Renee suggested that ‘learners can make resources themselves for use in class’. Do you agree? What resources do your learners or could your learners make?
• What ideas does Renee give for the following parts of her ‘resource portfolio’
  • Pictures
  • Post its (small bits of paper)
  • Dice
• What categories would you have/ do you have in your resource portfolio?
• What are you going to do in the next day/ week/ month as a result of watching this video?