Last weekend I had a pretty scary lesson observation… I’ve been observed more at British Council Thailand than in any other teaching job, which is to me a good thing. There have been formal observations twice a year, observations during… Read More ›
reflections
Students that make my job easy
Full marks to my awesome teen class last week. The work they produced was fantastic and I’m so proud of them. We did a short project based on describing graphs. It started off with scanning tasks and a few activities… Read More ›
Quizlet Teacher account – worth it?
I’ve been using Quizlet in class for a while. This term I’m getting to grips with it a bit more as part of a project for my MA. Huh, Quizlet? Quizlet is a site which allows you to create your own… Read More ›
Classroom silence and digital natives
Svetlana Kandybovich recently wrote a post about allowing students thinking time. It’s full of useful ideas for the classroom and well worth a read. Something else worth reading is ‘The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World’ by… Read More ›
Random realia and peculiar props
I think it hit home about five minutes before the lesson: ‘Am I really going to base a 30 minute activity around this bottle of murky water? Surely this can’t work…’ Most of the activities I’ve tried from ‘Teaching Grammar… Read More ›
What I learnt from my first TESOL conference
Finally, some time to reflect on CamTESOL, which was held on 18-19 February. It was my first ever teaching conference (both attending and presenting), so thought I’d jot down a few reflections. Presenting is tough but rewarding… Teaching and presenting… Read More ›
Supporting young learners
Young learner classes at our school are mostly organised by age. This means there can be quite a range of abilities, and differentiation* is an important part of planning. I generally find that our materials can be a bit on… Read More ›
Making it up as you go along…
I had a brief chat with TalkTEFL after class about how some activities we make up during class work better than the things we plan! Today was a prime example. My teen class were really lacking a bit of get… Read More ›
A rant about comprehension questions
On my module in materials development we’ve just looked at reading and listening tasks. We spoke about what makes good/bad comprehension questions. ‘Plain sense’ questions are seen as pretty ineffective, as they just test familiarity with sentence structure rather than… Read More ›
Experimenting with ‘the Inner Workbench’
Originally posted on Jamie Clayton's ELT blog:
In Meaningful Action, Underhill explains his concept of the Inner Workbench: the place in our mind where we hear and manipulate inner speech. Putting learners in touch with this place as they…
ELT Planning 