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Excellent. Thank you very much. Uh I'm happy, honored, and humbled to be here uh joining you from across the globe. My name is Amir and today I'll be talking about teacher agency. What it is, why it matters and how we can apply that in our classes. Thank you for being here. Uh let's start. Uh it all began a couple of months ago when I wanted to observe one of my colleagues. So this was a classroom of primary students in Vietnam and the class was co-taught by Vietnamese and foreign teachers. This

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class uh was supposed to be for a foreign teacher and me and the foreign teacher walked inside the class and the teacher uh set up his stuff and after a couple of minutes they started uh teaching the assigned pages and the schedule and after some minutes they realized that apparently this lesson has been already taught by the Vietnamese teacher. So the teacher started to be a bit nervous especially because he was also being observed and you know how much we teachers love being observed. Uh so he

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thought for a couple of seconds and after that he decided to carry on teaching the same pages and the same lesson and this was not a very engaging lesson for students. After the session, I started uh examining teacher agency uh more seriously and that's when teacher agency became more prominent for me. Before I talk about one definition of teacher agency, I want you to put in the chat box one or two words, a couple of phrases. What do you think teacher agency is? What what comes to mind when

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you think of teacher agency? identity sharing good practice uh coralally I love that one group teachers helping one another networking ability creativity dedication management somebody says I don't know that's great if you don't know I hope I will leave you with some food for thought exchanging ideas management making choices yet yeah yeah excellent wonderful yeah Okay, great. Love it. Thank you very much. Right. I I believe all of you are correct. Uh so in literature there are a lot of uh

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different definitions for teacher agency but I love this one the best uh by Johnson and Golic in which uh it boils down to is that teacher agency is when we realize we need to take action then we take action and we effectuate change to facilitate learning and create a learning environment. ment which is conducive to our learners learning and after that I was thinking to myself that okay this is obviously something really important but are we teachers sufficiently made aware of this in formal teacher training courses in

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in-house workshops professional development webinars such as this one and to me at least the answer was an honor what you'll know despite its significance So I think teacher agency is really important and here I have listed five factors which is not exhaustive but I think that is sufficient for us to start to consider teacher agency more seriously. First uh factor in my opinion is responsive teaching and responsive teaching basically is when we realize that we need to teach our learners according to what they need uh and what

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happens in the classroom rather than a mechanical uh pedigogy of going through some pages or just covering some uh parts of the syllabus. So when we start actually responding to our learners needs that is when actual learning can take place and this in turn can motivate our learners to be more eager to want to participate in the classroom activities and all of these would hopefully result in a better classroom rapport when teachers and students have established a healthy relationship with one one

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another. Uh the other thing which we will shortly uh see is creativity. I think when we start to use our own agency, we are going to leave a lot of room for creativity not only for us teachers but also for our learners. uh and finally I guess all of these things would uh come together to create a dynamic environment where uh teachers and learners cocreate an engaging context where learning genuine learning can more easily take place. Now I guess uh some of you know these two handsome gentlemen. Uh,

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one simple idea to be able to implement teacher agency in our class is that purple scrambled word. Let's see if you can on a scramble it in the chat box. Can you decode it? Look at the purple word. Let's see who can decode it the first in the chat box. There you go. Uh, I'm not sure if I can pronounce Sita Sita Roba Carroll. No, you you were the first. Hold on. Great. Right. Okay. So here uh Underh Hill and Streer uh a couple of years ago I read an article uh on their website actually was a blog and they

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said uh we teachers only need to upgrade learners language whenever we see that they already know something and that hit home when I was learning about teacher agency and I realized that yeah this is exactly what we need to do instead of having to repeat the same pages sometimes teachers, we don't have any agency in choosing the textbook and going ahead of the syllabus or sometimes even not going back to review some of the lessons that have already been taught. But we can always upgrade our

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learners uh language and we can do that in uh many different ways. The first one is by observing more experienced teachers. So I think uh peer observation is one of the most powerful tools that we have and with the right mindset whenever we try to observe uh another teacher we can certainly walk away with some food for thought. And here there are three interesting ideas that I asked Chad GPT to tell me to say that if I walk into a class and I am fully ready to teach a beautifully prepared grammatical point or vocabulary

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lesson or whatever and then I realize that my students already know everything about it. What do you suggest? Uh these are some very interesting ideas that Kat GPT told me. The first one is for example if you're teaching comparatives and your students already know everything you can ask them to create a job advertisement or an advertisement of any topic with the use of comparatives. The other one is role plays which is something I'm going to show you from my own classes and that is actually the

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main part of my talk today. And finally some mini lessons that we can assign our students to come and they teach something to their peers. All of them are interesting and they have got some valid points but ultimately I would like to share something with you that I have done in my classes and they have invariably achieved the results that I had in mind without fail and that is dialogues. The picture you see is uh a picture of one of my classes uh from a public school here in Vietnam. Uh these are

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fourth graders and the topic of the lesson was uh housework. So in this class I realized this is for maybe uh five months ago. I walked inside the class and I realized that all of my students had already learned uh house chores with their Vietnamese teachers and they knew them all very well. What we did at the beginning of the class is that um we played some rounds of charades. So students elicited these lexical chunks uh from their peers. And when I saw that they already know everything, uh these four phrases that

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you see in the red box are the ones that they didn't know. So I tried to find something that they didn't already know. So after they tried to uh play that and convey the message through gestures to their friends and their friends knew what it is but not in English, that was a great learning magic moment for me to upgrade the language. So iron the clothes, mop the floor, vacuum the floor and dust the table or shelves were four new phrases that they didn't know. But what happened after that is the main

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thing that I really love and this is what I call a teacher learner centric dialogue. I have written this. So this is uh a very short dialogue that I have created in the class uh divided into A and B and colorcoded. The students can choose whatever housework they want and incorporate that into the dialogue. But there is more to it than meets the eye. Here I have put well, so a type of discourse marker. Here I have put uh a subject question with uh who for example who mops the floor and I have put one s

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and an asterisk next to that for my students without teaching them to know that okay here I can choose whatever I want but who makes the bed who washes the dishes. Uh it was very interesting the students uh did the dialogue with one another and when they were pretty good at that. What I focused on was pronunciation. Here again in their book there was no uh pink focus on pronunciation of for example here the tonic stress on my father does for example but who mops the floor my father does or I do and they

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seem to really enjoy that or the falling intonation for wh questions what about you or who mops the floor things like that and I think there is much more than it uh so this dialogue is something that I created so all of the sentences the template is something that I created But learners themselves got into pers and they started to run the dialogue with their peers. The other type of dialogue is inside the language center. This is a group of uh 11 year old 10 11 year old students at um a B1 level. So in their

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book here they have a textbook. In their book, they had learned some functional language and phrases such as what's up, no way, absolutely, tell me about it. And the Vietnamese teacher had translated all of these things to them, which is not necessarily something bad. And they knew what these all mean. What I did inside the class is what I call teacherled learner generated dialect. So here I ask my students, okay, you know all of these things. Now I want you to choose any topic you want, the topic of

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your choice. Go ahead and create a dialogue and you need to use all of these in your dialogue uh between 9, 10, 11 exchanges. So a very short dialogue and I already modeled one for them. So they started choosing their own topics. Everybody was engaged. They uh chose their teammates. And this one was uh one of the interesting dialogues that I took a picture of between F and Yui. So the conversation starts with hey what's up? I'm going to the cinema. What about you? What are you going to watch? Absolutely

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I can't wait. Here there's a tiny grammatical mistake. It's discuss uh and later they realize and they have corrected this. Something interesting here is that uh UEI one student says it cost 500,000 Vietnam down which is uh more or less uh about $20 which is too expensive for Vietnam because here if I'm not mistaken the the movie tickets are about 80,000 or 100. Then Poop says no way it's too expensive which is amazing language. Then after that UI says well if you say so. Uh and I think it's cheap. So Yui is

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probably one of those rich kids in the class. And then Foop says, "Tell me about it." And that is an indicator to me to realize that okay here FUP and probably Foop and Yui both are not 100% sure of the meaning of tell me about it or when can we actually use that inside the class. Unless Foop is a hypocrite and first says it is too expensive and as soon as he says no, he's cheap. Oh yeah, tell me about it. uh after they created something like this and this is only one example. Uh there were a couple of others that

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students had more or less similar problems. Uh I put this on the board and the students try to uh correct themselves. They realize if there is something weird in the conversation but ultimately it was very interesting because everyone was engaged. I didn't uh divert from the topic. I didn't teach something different because that was my uh lesson objective to review and teach the functional language which which was already taught to my students. Uh at the end the the latest English teaching book

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that I read a couple of months ago was by Scott Thormer 66 uh uh essential designs for uh language lessons essential designs if I'm not mistaken. And I came across uh this beautiful sentence and it immediately reminded me of teacher agency again that expert teachers are those uh that they show flexibility in their lessons. They respond properly to their uh learners. And to me, I immediately said, "Yeah, I agree." But I don't think we have to wait until we become expert teachers before we start

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to use our own agency to deliver engaging and interesting lessons for our learners. Uh maybe uh that uhert teachers could be a bit misleading. Uh so I think uh all of us whether we are uh just some early career teachers or some seasoned educators can start to use our agency much more effectively to ensure that we can create an environment for our learners where they can uh uh flower and where they can grow uh in a safe environment. Uh these are my resources. I think I'm finishing whether uh a bit early in time

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or on time. And now I am ready to to fill the questions. Thank you very much.