This is one in a series of posts in which I look back on 10 years of blogging and reflect on posts from the past. In my last post, I reflected back on one of the most popular posts I’ve … Continue reading Reflections on… Teaching Like Mike Leigh?
Let’s face it, one of the hardest things for us teachers to do sometimes is to shut up. We can feel the need to keep teaching all the time and somewhere deep in our subconscious we have been led to believe that teaching means talking.
Maybe we don’t realise what we are doing, or we find it hard to resist. We might be waiting for the training that makes us realise it’s okay to be quiet for a while, or we might have a great story we want to share and half way through we realise we’re really going on a bit too much here. Continue reading “Shut Up!”
Since I like to push my students to engage critically with materials, I’m always on the lookout for interesting and demanding stimuli for my lessons. Subsequently this book was just what I was looking for.
Here are a couple of quotes that I came across recently that resonated with me and my teaching so I thought I’d share them with you. Do they mean anything to you? Click on the image to make it larger. Taken from here. Taken by me here. Louis Agassiz biography here. Continue reading Quotes of the Day
So Dogme ELT was one of the big issues of the conference. Big surprise, I hear you say. Well I’m sorry if you’re tired hearing about it, but it’s not going away. If this conference proved anything, it showed firstly that there are still a lot of teachers who don’t know what Dogme ELT is, and secondly that even some of the ones who have heard of it don’t really know what it is, even though they think they do. More about that later… Continue reading “IATEFL Issues: Dogme (or Wandering Naked Through the Dogme Forest…)”
I’m currently reading Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley’s Digital Play, published by DELTA, for a book review (which I’ll share with you as soon as it’s online). So far it’s a great book, passionately and convincingly arguing for a place for video games in the ELT classroom.
The second part of the book, and the biggest, contains a myriad of activities, including ones that are about video games rather than using video games. I was particularly struck by an activity on page 39 called Game Chatalogue. The essence of the activity is that students use video game catalogues to discuss what they find interesting. Continue reading “Video Games Unplugged”
In the third and final part of Yitzha (Icha) Sarwono’s guest blog post, she will show us how she uses teaching booths as part of her unplugged Montessori teaching. You can read part one here and part two here.
In part one Yitzha (Icha) Sarwono described how the central elements of Montessori define her teaching. In this part, she tells us about she became interested in Dogme ELT and how she has tried to implement it in her own class so far.
In May I was lucky enough to attend an amazing event in Barcelona with loads of like-minded, interesting people. I was entertained, enriched and absorbed in a wonderful occasion, and I hope can go back next year. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the IATEFL Teacher Development SIG Unplugged Conference, but the Primavera Sound music festival. Continue reading “Why the music festival should have been unplugged”
The Teacher James 