by Glenn Standish
Language teaching conferences are very much part of our yearly academic calendar. There are many to choose from, coming in all shapes and forms, from large-scale week-long international events such as IATEFL to much smaller local gatherings. Of course, post COVID there is still a wealth of online conferences and webinars out there for us to ponder. Thanks to Lucie Cotterill and her extensive list of webinars that she shares each Wednesday with all the IH Directors of Studies around the world, we know exactly what there is on offer online - and most Directors will be quick to share this information with their staff, of course!
International House World Organisation is also certainly no stranger to delivering top-quality face-to-face ELT conferences. Besides the two big internal IH conferences, for Directors and for Academic Managers and Trainers, there are the many in-house teacher training days - IH London, IH Milan, IH Brno, IH Kiev, and of course my own IH Toruń. The list is often added to - IH Bielsko-Biała will be looking to run their first conference in about a decade in 2025.
Running a conference or teacher training day is a great way to promote IH as a leading brand in language education but also helps market each school in terms of high-quality teacher training. It shows that we as an organisation are at the top of the game by providing much-needed continuous professional development to our staff.
In this article, I want to share some thoughts about how to organise and run a conference or teacher training day. As you’ll find, though there are obstacles to running such events, these can be overcome readily enough; the biggest problem is that of getting started. There are no training courses that I know of to help with running an event - but my hope is that articles like this one will help!
IH Toruń and IH Bydgoszcz had been running many small internal teacher training days between the schools for years. These were mainly low-key events run by the teachers for the teachers. This, for me, is the ideal way to begin. Start small, and build up to something grander.
It was back in early 2014 that the then DoS of IH Bydgoszcz Tim Brombley gave me the idea for IH Toruń to extend its invite to these events to other IH schools. The first event started rather modestly with about 40 participants mainly made up of teachers from the 2 schools as well as one external guest speaker (Mike Caitlin, who had been visiting us at the time) and also Kate Snook the then-DoS of IH Katowice. The following year we then started inviting teachers from across Poland, including state school teachers, and then gradually opened this invite out to neighbouring countries. This can be considered a viable pathway for growing your event - start small and local; expand to include teachers beyond your immediate (or IH) network; and then, when your event reaches the stage of name recognition, look to take the next step and go international. But, as I shall soon describe, this growth pattern brings with it fresh challenges.
Slowly but surely we expanded the event and it has grown each and every year to an average of 150 participants. Our biggest event was all set to take place on Saturday 14th March 2020 with Scott Thornbury. However, a certain pandemic put an end to that and I was left with no choice but to pull the plug literally 2 days before. I did manage to resurrect the event 8 months later with Scott presenting online (together with many other ELT experts such as Carol Reed, Adrian Underhill, Andrew Walkley, John Hughes, and Jill Hadfield) in what turned out to be a 13-hour all-day/night marathon event on Zoom with over 400 participants popping in and out throughout. It was interesting finding myself hosting the event and acting more like a TV presenter juggling the different sessions and holding the whole thing together - again, not something they teach you on most teacher training courses, so if this looks like it is going to happen to you, my advice is to reach out to someone who has been through the experience, and ask to pick their brain!
The following year we ran a much smaller hybrid event with a limited number of socially-distanced participants, but owing to technical issues I vow never to work with streaming tech again! Even though there does seem to still be a demand for online conferences and events, there is nothing better than a live face-to-face event; hybrid events are something to consider, but be aware that you can easily find yourself running two conferences simultaneously - one online, and one face-to-face.
So what does it take to run an ELT conference?
Pre-Conference:
- You need to start planning well in advance (I usually know the date of my next conference at least a year ahead). If you’ve reached the stage of wanting a big-name guest speaker, be aware that ELT celebrities have a packed conference calendar and might need more than a year’s notice!
- You need to choose a date which does not clash with any other ELT event (e.g. IATEFL, local conferences, another IH conference, etc) - so if you haven’t already started keeping a calendar of ELT events, I’d recommend getting on it!
- Find a conference venue if you need one for plenaries (this of course depends on your budget – but they will vary between hotel conference rooms to school assembly halls). Again you need to book these well in advance, especially with hotels as they do get booked up early with weddings, parties, etc
- Plan your list of presenters. Use IHWO channels to put a call out for any IH staff who may like to run a workshop or present a talk. To support inclusion make sure you have an even split of genders and speakers from a diversity of backgrounds. In terms of guest speakers, there are many well-known ELT figures that you can contact. It is of course vital that you pay your guest speakers (e.g. fee, travel expenses, accommodation, daily living expenses, etc) as you should never expect them to do it for free. It may be worth contacting publishers for sponsorship
- Should your conference have a theme? This one comes down to taste. IH Brno run two very successful events each year - the first one being aimed at teaching younger learners, and the second covering a wider array of topics. But if you go too specific, you will put off potential attendees on the one hand and make life difficult for your speakers on the other
- As you bring in speaker proposals, aim for a mix of topics and approaches. Not every session needs to be practical, but you’ll want your attendees to have ideas to take home for use in their lessons. Think about how you’ll timetable your sessions so that you don’t have any periods in which all of the sessions are either practical or theoretical
- Set a deadline by which speakers can send you their abstracts, bios, and profile pics. Make sure you create a spreadsheet or Google Doc so that you can keep tabs on who has sent you what - the success of any event depends on how well organised you are even six months before
- You may want to create a special conference slideshow template for the speakers to use. If so, do make sure you send it to them in advance
- Presenters often prefer to bring their slides on a memory stick on the day of the event but it is best for them to also send you the file as a backup and have it set up on designated computers/laptops on the day of the event. Do bear in mind though to check video files as embedded files might not play if sent as an attachment
- Set up a ticket sales website. I often use Eventbrite
- Make the conference programme. I use MS Word but never print it out anymore – you can save it as a PDF and upload it to the cloud and then share it with the participants. Again this is much more sustainable
During the conference:
- Invite publishers to set up a paid-for stall at your conference (a great way to generate some extra income)
- Avoid giving out gadgets, conference bags, pens, etc to help be sustainable
- Ask teachers to be volunteers on the day to help run the registration desk or act as ushers. It might help if they wear branded T-shirts so that they stand out
- Always have an after-party for the participants to unwind and mingle with each other. I strongly believe that conference networking is just as important as the actual content of the conference
Post-conference:
- Post-conference (perhaps a day or two afterwards) send out a survey to the participants to get feedback and help improve for subsequent years. You can use either Google Forms or Survey Monkey for this
- Ask permission from the speakers to distribute their slides, and share these with participants via the cloud; you can combine this email with the one with the survey
- Above all, have fun and enjoy the sense of achievement that you will get for days and months to come!
If you need any further tips on how to run an ELT conference for your school or would like to present or participate at next year’s IH Toruń Teacher Training Day (scheduled for early/mid-2025) then please contact the author at [email protected].
Author Biography
Glenn Standish is originally from New Zealand but was brought up in Saudi Arabia and the UK. He has been teaching English in Poland for 22 years and is currently the Director of Studies of IH Torun. He is also a tutor for the IHCYLT and IHCAM courses, a course moderator and an inspector for IH World. He loves presenting on the conference circuit and has been to 62 countries. He has given workshops in many countries such as Colombia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Ukraine, the UK and many more.