I with my counterpart at Universitas Sriwijaya and the coordinator for KOPERTIS are putting together a series of workshops and seminars as part of an outreach program to promote professional development among university and college lecturers. Our shared goal is for lecturers to improve their teaching skills and to take more ownership of the professional development. This first workshop was in Lampung to private university and college lecturers in that area.

Another presenter was John Pederson an AMINEF English teaching assistant (ETA) in Sakaiyu. He is from the U.S., like myself and a participant in a Fulbright grant program. This was his first experience at giving a professional presentation and everyone present thought he did a very good job.

I was the second presenter and my topic was Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). I started with a warm-up activity to allow participant to be able to experience CLT in action. All the participants as were able to interact with each other at the same time to accomplish their task and complete the activity. This was followed by a Power Point presentation to give participants the theory and background behind CLT. I then by gave the participants two more CLT activities so that they can be given an idea of the variety of activities incorporating CLT. The last part of the presentation involved addressing the use of role-playing in the CLT. We discussed the structure for creating role-play activities. Unfortunately time didn’t allowed participants the opportunity to go through a role-play activity but they were able to plan out one using the structure given during the power point presentation.

The participants worked hard and showed interest in both mine and the other participants’ presentations. However, as with other presentations the idea was to give them an introduction to the ideas presented. The hope was that they will further explore these ideas and develop them into workable approaches. This will improve the overall quality of their teaching.

The participants seemed appreciative that we all were able to take the time to come as far as we did to work with them. The biggest challenge for them seems to be able to put the proper time and preparation to properly utilize these new ideas. They also need to gain enough experience and to learn from their mistakes in order to be proficient in them.

John went last and his presentation was on team-teaching and also to give some information about Fulbright programs that might be of interests to the participants. An interesting incident at the end of his lecture happened when one of the participants gave him her broach as a gift to his mother back home in America. He had mentioned that she loved them and the woman gave him the broach to give to her as a present.