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Yesterday I ended up watching three programmes on Teachers TV http://www.teachers.tv without meaning to. Yes, it is strangely compulsive as the reviews said when it first started last year. I have ambivalent feelings about it though. On the one hand the format of 15 minute programmes, tightly focussed on specific topics of interest to school teachers is an excellent training resource which I wish had existed back in the days when I was doing my teacher training and am grateful for now. But on the other hand, why just teacher’s TV? Why not doctor’s TV and policeman’s TV? Why not salesman’s TV? I have long thought that everyone has an opinion on teaching and think they are experts simply because they have been to school. Teachers, especially in the UK, seem to have been subjected to massive interference in their right to exercise their professional judgement, the latest incident being that a reading method is now being prescribed and by implication, others proscribed.
My field of interest is language learning and it amazes me that people who are not teachers can be so sure of themselves that they feel able to dictate by law how teaching ought to be done.
The programmes I watched included two language teaching programmes and I was shocked that what I was seeing was being touted as good practice when it seemed that most of the lesson was being done through the medium of English rather than French, the target language. The programme was mainly about how to raise motivation,