One of my top two most widely-used ideas ever is abandoning homework in favor of a weekly “fluency” activity involving a whole lot of student choice. [Incidentally, the other is the YouTube commercial cloze quizzes – in 2.5 years about 60 teachers have joined this project.] Basically, the concept is that instead of you assigning students […]
If someone asked me what motivated my students the most -to continue learning on their own, to more vocabulary, to greater accuracy- my answer would certainly be music. Just this week one of my Spanish 3 students who is struggling the most with any level of verb accuracy identified forms of conseguir and what they […]
Are you still sold on the idea that homework is a necessary evil? Consider a few “worst” practices before you give students another assignment to be completed at home: “But doesn’t practice help?” Yes, practice helps. But only if you’re practicing the right things and doing it consistently. My problems with this argument: What happens […]
After a busy but fun month of traveling here and there on vacation, it’s back to school and back to the blog! We teachers have been at school this past week, and the kids come back Monday. Where did that summer go? One goal I accomplished this summer was reading The Homework Myth by Alfie […]
There are a lot of problems with current world language teaching in the U.S. I think the biggest problem is that we’re trying to teach it the way we teach everything else, when language used for communication is not learned or stored the way other subjects are, and the answer is to look back at […]
I despise traditional homework. I think in language acquisition, it doesn’t help. If you want kids to learn to drill conjugations, give them worksheets, but otherwise, keep ALL your assignments and assessment communicative. For me, this means that most of what I could ask them to do at home, they’ll get frustrated doing on their […]