Curriculum
April 25, 2013
Can you control vocabulary?
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A few months ago, as part of the student choice homework activity, one of my best AP students chose to label ten items in her house she didn’t know the word for and keep the labels up for one week. She probably is the student with the most chance of success on the exam. Her […]
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April 15, 2013
No, not the latest John Gresham to while away the class period. Whether it’s for field trips, ceremony practice, or just a widespread illness, sometimes I have a class where many of the students are gone. Inevitably this leads to the same request: a free day. For some reason, my students think that because their […]
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March 22, 2013
Last tips on avoiding burnout
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This is the last set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?,” “More tips on avoiding burnout,” “Still more tips on avoiding burnout,” and “Even more tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Stop looking […]
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March 18, 2013
Developing curriculum is time consuming but worth it – unless the time it takes makes you give up on communicative teaching all together! I’ve blogged about some ways and even more ways on easing into developing curriculum. Here are two more. Tackle one unit, one class at a time. This is part of taking baby steps. If you’re […]
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March 15, 2013
This is the fourth set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?,” “More tips on avoiding burnout,” and “Still more tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Organize your bookmarks. A few weeks ago our […]
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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 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 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 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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January 21, 2013
Paragraph form
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The rubric I use to score all performance assessments (which I almost completely stole from colleagues) has an entire section called “function/structure” that I use to identify how proficiently students communicate in “paragraph length.” Indeed, the AP rubric (from 2007, which will be changing for 2014) talks about “paragraphing,” and for speaking uses words like […]
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January 4, 2013
It’s no secret that I advocate using almost all authentic materials from the beginning. Using authentic materials with novices is both possible and critical. Here’s an example of an activity you could do with novice learners in a unit on entertainment or technology, with communicative goals like expressing likes or dislikes or talking about your […]
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