This year I have taken part in five ‘Amazing Minds’ events for Pearson Longman in Greece, the UK, Japan, Taiwan and China. For each event the idea is to get the participants interacting with each other (rather than just with the presenter). My role involved letting them watch some of the lessons and lesson excerpts we filmed for The Practice of English Language Teaching and How to Teach English whch lead them on to working intensively in groups to decide what qualities good teachers possess. Overwhelmingly the qualities they rated were that good teachers were passionate (about what they do), caring (for the affective potential in a lesson), knowledgeable (not just about language, but also about methodology), organised (because, as one teacher commented, being disorganised takes more time – and because students recognise organisation as professionalism), flexible (you have to react to what happens in a lesson), reflective (because teaching blindly without thinking about what you are doing will never help you to be a better teacher) and curious (because once you stop learning, you may as well stop teaching!).

We called teachers with these qualities ‘Teacher A’ and contrasted them with Teacher B (see the ‘filming teachers’ handout). Teacher B may be a perfectly good person, a friend and colleague, but they are not having much success, perhaps because of a loss of confidence, outside pressures, a difficult group, a lack of personal motivation. One of our participants in Taiwan said ‘all of us go through periods of being Teacher B' – a comment full of wisdom I thought). We then discussed how to help Teacher B, through sharing, peer observation, focusing on what he or she does well rather than badly (what Nur Kurtoglu at Aston University calls ‘confirmatory feedback’).

It has been fascinating working with teachers like this and watching them share their experiences (and experience). The best way to progress is through this kind of sharing, it seems to me.