SDCs

Okay, now I think I get more of where you're coming from and the reasons for your complaints. From what it sounds like, the planning session was a mess and the minutes even more so.

Like marudate said, soft skills are important and there's concrete skills there that ALTs can use in their work.

A smart goal is a goal with concrete, specific markers. For example when people are talking about language study "I want to know all the kanji" is not a smart goal. A smart goal would be, "by doing this and this and this and spending at least x hours a week studying, I want to be able to read (a newspaper/manga/video game Japanese) and at least grasp the overall concept by the end of the year." Smart goals are not overwhelmingly vague and unreachable, they include timelines, and they include HOW the goal is going to be reached. It's like planning a curriculum. You can say that students should be able to do THIS by the end of the year, but that's not really helpful until you break that down into steps with smaller goals throughout the year.

"Help JETs find their purpose in life" is hugely vague, completely undoable in the course of a one-day conference, and completely disregards all of the various experiences and personal goals each JET has. That's why it's not a smart goal.

Thanks for the links songbanana.

Hello folks, since there is a discussion going on about SDCs I hope it's okay for me to post here. I'm not actually involved in planning SDC at all, but our ALT PA is and she is having some struggles. Recently the number of ES ALTs increased a lot in our prefecture, but the way that SDC is currently structured doesn't help them at all, because they basically divide into groups with JTEs and do lesson demonstrations and presentations and discussions, but no BOE will allow any of their elementary school teachers to come to SDC so the ES ALTs, mostly first years, got a JHS JTE who none of them had worked with before and who stayed silent the entire time. Apparently it was a pretty meaningless for them.

I would really appreciate it if some folks who help organise SDCs could share whether JTEs attend as well and what kinds of things are done to accommodate for ES teachers. From the sounds of it some people have a bunch of presentations and stuff that aren't necessarily about teaching, but from what I understand we don't do anything like that at ours.

(pimpin the PA FB group for your ALT PA)
As someone who also taught at ES, this was a big priority for me as PA so I'm glad to see you also recognize the problem. There is very little support for ES ALTs at school and at SDC. Here is what we do, I can tell you more about how it came to happen if it's a direction you think would work for your area.

-more workshops/general teaching presentations by and for ES ALTs. We have at least a couple of the 12-16 workshops of various styles on this topic, and ALTs who do ES and JHS can choose to attend.
-being careful with language and audience throughout SDC so that ES ALTs feel involved (saying "JTE or HRT" and making sure other presentations and workshops incorporate suggestions for all levels)
-for the past ∞ years, ES ALTs have come without a HRT from their school. They still give lesson demonstrations and workshops, they just do it on their own. This isn't ideal but I think it's better than dragging a JHS JTE out of school to 同行 a stranger they've never worked with.

-this year after pushing real hard for it for years, we got ES level "regional leaders" to come to the second half of the first day of SDC. These teachers are generally in charge of the professional development of their area (my understanding) so they didn't work with the JET ALTs but they did work with private ones/others who don't come to our SDC. To accommodate them, we did all activities that afternoon in English and Japanese and made the pamphlet bilingual. Next year I'm hoping to buff up our "accommodations" for them now that we have a precedent, and try to get a teacher from the actual schools our JETs teach at.

Huh. Interesting.

Our SDCs are entirely workshop based and we don't do anything like your groupwork. Many or most of them are level-specific or say in the descriptions that because they're taught by X-level ALTs and JTEs it's going to be leaning towards that level, but others are welcome to come. But there's a fairly good balance between ES, JHS, and SHS I think. I also don't think there's many ONLY ES people.

Your SDC sounds more like the conferences my city/gun held for English teachers. There would be a demonstration class, then we would be split into categories to do group discussions and maybe come up with a lesson plan together. It would be hosted by an ES or JHS in alternate years, and all ALTs taught at both JHS and ES (because it was municipal there were no SHS teachers). I'd say on average we got put into one JTE discussion, two HRT discussions, and one only-ALT discussion. But then my city was focusing very heavily on English in elementary school. As of this coming April, all 1st and 2nd graders are going to have English 20 times a year, and 3-6 grades 35 times a year. So in preparatin for that they've been including HRTs in conferences and trying to really include the ALTs.

...Sorry, that got off topic.

This information is really useful, thank you both! It sounds like there are definitely things we can be doing to accommodate the ES ALTs even if we can't convince the BOEs to send any teachers (we can maybe try some of those methods to convince them next year though).

Usually at ES level one teacher will 代表 for the school - usually the 英語担当 or a 5th/6th grade teacher. I think they're supposed to share their findings with other teachers although I doubt there's too much time for that.

You know who you should use, if you can change it at this point, is Dr. Tim Murphey who teaches at Kanda University in Chiba. He had super practical and useful advice, and has a really good understanding of the ALT situation and ESL in Japan. Also it was really interactive (if you are like me it might not be your style but everyone else enjoyed it) and was a huge hit at our SDC. PM if you want his email!