Mark Andrews: How we respond to criticism is crucial to our development as teachers

On the occasion of our Teachers’ Day 2025, we asked Mark Andrews, one of the speakers, a few questions. Read his answers below.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and your expertise?

I had my first teaching experience in Bavaria at the age of 18 before I went to university. After doing an Eastern European Studies degree at Bradford I was offered a job in the German Democratic Republic teaching in a university in Rostock. After two years I did a one year Post Graduate Certificate in Education in ELT in Manchester and returned to teach in the GDR in East Berlin for two more years. I then worked in a private language school in Brighton for two years before working for two years at Palacky University in Olomouc.

I then did an MA in ELT at Lancaster University before returning to Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic as a teacher trainer in Pardubice and then Olomouc. In 1996 I worked for the British Council in Budapest till 2002 and then stayed on at the university till 2011 when I started working as training director for SOL in Devon (Sharing One Language) till 2022. Since then I have been working as a freelance teacher and teacher trainer .

My main area of expertise is in intercultural learning and teaching with linguistic, cultural and pedagogical aims.  I have also been involved in co-organising teaching unplugged (Dogme ELT) courses and am interested in teaching in materials light, conversation driven and working with emergent language ways.

What are you going to talk about at the conference? How do you think the audience will benefit from your insights?

If you treat your students as people first, learners second and learners of English third then maybe something might get learnt. If you make it your primary goal to establish good rapport with a new group, then the teaching will both feel and be so much easier. You don’t have to be an actor or an entertainer to be a good teacher, in fact you can be a good teacher if you are a fairly quiet reserved person.

Crucial though is that students know and feel that you care for them both as people and as learners and as learners of English. In this workshop we will explore practical ways in which teachers can be the kind of teacher that students with different personalities can feel comfortable with. We will also look at what it means to treat students as if they are serious about learning even though they might not seem to be and how giving students a say in decision making can also be a key part of student interest and participation in class.

Do you recall any particular experience or aha-moment that you have had recently in terms of teaching or learning?

Getting my Stasi file from East Berlin at the beginning of the pandemic.  I was informed on by 18 people and it was really interesting to read what they wrote about me including my teaching. I think it’s made me realise again how useful it can be to have people come and observe you and then to talk about it afterwards or to video yourself and then watch it carefully with a view to try to understand what you do in class and why you do it.

When you see yourself from a perspective you haven’t seen before it can be unsurprisingly thought-provoking, puzzling, disorienting but maybe enlightening too, especially when it is written by a Stasi informer about you in a 285-page file on you, your personality, your teaching and your political opinions.

It’s good to try and make sense of things that have happened to you in the past…we don’t often make the time to do it but if we did more then I think it would have a very positive impact on our teaching and on our lives in general. In my Stasi file there were several criticisms of me as a person and of me as a teacher and they made me think very hard about what I was like as an unqualified 25-year-old teacher.

What are you working on/learning at the moment?

I think over my career as a teacher I’ve been really interested in bringing my own photographs into the classroom as springboards for discussion and have encouraged students to bring their own photographs in too. When I did my PGCE course in Manchester we looked at describe and draw activities, picture descriptions and information gap activities using photographs as well as spotting the differences in pictures. I think it is good to go beyond picture description into interpreting pictures and I am now involved in collecting key photos from my life which have influenced my life and which have also informed my teaching. This is one example.

If you were supposed to give only a single piece of advice to fresh graduates who start their teaching path, what would it be?

I think how we respond to criticism is crucial to our development as a teacher and instead of trying to be defensive and to justify what we do in the face of criticism; it can be more productive to really try to understand where the criticism is coming from and to open up space for dialogue which can benefit both the observer and the observed in a teacher development context.

Thank you.

You can meet Mark Andrews at our Teachers’ Day 2025.