Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell
March 8, 2013
This is the third set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?” and “More tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Develop a strong personal learning community. I can’t handle too much social networking. I’ve […]
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March 6, 2013
Read the first post on easing into developing curriculum. Recently the topic for the weekly Twitter chat addressing world language teaching issues, #langchat, was the role of the textbook in the classroom. Teachers on Twitter just seem naturally more progressive to me anyway, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how many teachers are working to break […]
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March 5, 2013
This is part 3 in a short series on songs and activities that improve student accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present. Carmelina – Jorge Correa This is a fun song. If you’re interested in an identical use of no me hagas sufrir, no me hagas llorar, check out Manny Manuel’s No me hagas […]
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March 1, 2013
More tips on avoiding burnout
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This is the second post in a series on tips to avoid burnout. See “Burning out or burning bright?” and continue to check back on Fridays for more tips on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Abandon perfectionism. I’ve found that teachers tend to have a perfectionist personality (raising my hand […]
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February 27, 2013
In Spanish 3 we just wrapped up a unit I reworked to continue working on students’ narration in the past, framed within understanding and talking about the news. This activity we did combines culture, interest, interpretive (reading) skills, presentational (writing), and interpersonal (speaking) skills. First, using a newspaper website or a regional/international version of […]
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February 25, 2013
Recently the topic for the weekly Twitter chat addressing world language teaching issues, #langchat, was the role of the textbook in the classroom. Teachers on Twitter just seem naturally more progressive to me anyway, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how many teachers are working to break their chains to the textbook. What’s wrong […]
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February 22, 2013
This is what your students are hearing. Comprehensible input is the key! Make sure you’re giving your students lots of input, but it’s at least as important to make sure that they’re understanding what you’re saying.
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February 21, 2013
Burning out or burning bright?
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Some time ago a couple of tweets came from my PLN that caught my eye. Blair Richards (@ouiouicestlavie) commented, “4 years into teaching and I’m exhausted. Any wisdom on how to make this a sustainable career without killing myself?” Then Katie Hellerman (@klhellerman) wrote, “I love #TPRS and the results. But even after 3 years I find […]
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February 19, 2013
Feel like your class is disengaged and/or bored? This atmosphere could be rooted in all sorts of problems, but one of the main causes is that you have students focused on the same activity for too long. Based on research, your brain needs breaks from a particular learning-intensive activity in order to process and encode […]
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February 15, 2013
Fun activity #8: A cantar
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In 2011 I blogged about what a boring teacher I really am and how I was inspired by some conference workshops to make things more fun in the classroom. This is the eighth post on the activities that came out of those experiences: “let’s sing.” My lyrics file is currently over 230 pages long. Usually, […]
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February 13, 2013
A while back, a hashtag hit the trending topics on Twitter in Mexico: #quierounnovioque. I used the program Archivist to save the tweets and export them to an Excel file. I often do this if the teaching value of a particular trending topic hits me. In this case, the tweets were full of subjunctive used because […]
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February 8, 2013
Tech tools gone wrong
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When I first became active on Twitter, I followed the general #edchat quite a bit and was stunned and fascinated by all the tech tools people were tweeting about. I read blog posts and reviews about the latest web 2.0 tool someone was using in X class and got excited. I tried many new tools […]
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