best practices
April 23, 2024
O say, can you see, by 2024’s bright sunlight? O’er the schoolyard’s chain link fence, we watch another school day unfurl. Saintly teachers never glare, lest they hurt children’s delicate sensitivities. Bubbles don’t burst in the air, because everyone is too busy evaluating opportunities to use AI. Friends, buckle up for a Sara-Elizabeth post on […]
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May 9, 2023
Remember that car that was parked two spaces down from you, at that store you went to, for that thing you wanted to buy? Of course you don’t. Every day, thousands of events pass through our experience, and they do not stay with us. For most of us, these experiences go in, they’re briefly acknowledged […]
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October 19, 2022
In the language teaching field, we have a long, treasured history of arguing and drama. We may agree or disagree on classroom setup, teacher recruitment efforts, and the best ways to encourage learners to study abroad, but primarily, our arguments center on one question: What works (or doesn’t work) for successful language acquisition? In true Sra. […]
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December 30, 2018
Happy new year, friends. 2018 is a wrap! I’ll end this year as a tie for the lowest number of posts in my 10 years of blogging, but that’s understandable. The first part of the year was a major step back as I rested from several professional areas between November 2017 and September 2018. I’m […]
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July 20, 2016
When I graduated from my master’s program in Linguistics with an emphasis on Second Language Acquisition, I suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding. I thought that there was a consensus on the general principles guiding how language acquisition works, what that means the second time around, and what that understanding ought to mean for the classroom […]
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July 11, 2016
Quiz for you: What percentage of target language use does the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages recommend teachers and students use in the classroom? Almost every teacher I know and work with can answer this question. How could we not when it becomes such a torment for so many? Answer: 90% or higher. […]
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May 25, 2016
The internet and the calendar (and Allison, Maris, Wendy, Melanie, Valerie, and Megan) say it’s time to confess and reflect. Inspired by a summary of an old #langchat, and then having that inspiration reinforced by these reflective teachers sharing their journey, here is a post more for me than for you. What will – or […]
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March 30, 2016
My friend Amy Lenord and I are tired of drawing out our primacy/recency map on paper to keep us focused on planning the right stuff at the right time. So, a couple of weeks ago Amy emailed me the template she had whipped up to print out and fill in. It was super simple and […]
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February 24, 2016
In eleven years of lesson planning, I’ve learned to have a healthy fear of one particular word in that process: and. Picture this: Recently I’m working on a lesson plan, and because I’m “behind” and trying to catch up on the syllabus (which I wrote, and can really change anytime I want), here’s what I end […]
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September 28, 2015
The Best Laid Plans (KWLA ’15)
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Given how long Thomas Sauer and I have been colleagues and friends, I can’t believe we haven’t presented together before. Well, we fixed that on Saturday and presented a 3-hour workshop on effective lesson planning. Two things: 1. Three hours was not enough. 2. I learned at least as much from Thomas as anyone there learned […]
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the world language teaching profession recently, it’s that we’re plagued with arguments about why one method trumps another. As it turns out, we’re wasting our time on that argument, and we should be asking a different question altogether. I know, I’ve dropped off the internet a bit lately and […]
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April 21, 2015
Three before me
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What could you get out of #langchat? You never know! No matter how many years you’ve been teaching, everyone’s bound to come away with some treasurable, profitable nuggets from #langchat. I’m not even sure which recent #langchat this came from. It could have been when we were discussing grit, how we could help learners persevere […]
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