Tomorrow (that’s Thursday 28 June 2012) at 1pm to 2pm Central European Time, I am honoured to be giving a Webinar at the invitation of the British Council Teaching English team. I will be summarising and exploring the ideas and issues that you can read about in my recent posts on What makes a lesson […]
What makes a lesson GREAT? Part #5
Here is the final part in a five-part series of posts inspired by Mike Harrison, who asked on the IATEFL Facebook page “what makes a lesson GREAT?” My answer was: Group Dynamic Relevance to learners’ lives Emergent language Attentiveness Thoughtfulness You can find my posts on the first four characteristics by clicking on them above. […]
What makes a lesson GREAT? Part #4
Here is the much-delayed part four in a five-part series of posts inspired by Mike Harrison, who asked on the IATEFL Facebook page “what makes a lesson GREAT?” My answer was: Group Dynamic Relevance to learners’ lives Emergent language Attentiveness Thoughtfulness You can find my posts on the first three characteristics by clicking on them […]
What makes a lesson GREAT? Part #3
This is the third installment in a short series of posts inspired by a question posed by Mike Harrison – you can give him your own answer on the IATEFL Facebook page. To recap, I thought the following things were likely to make a lesson GREAT: Group dynamic Relevance to learners’ lives Emergent language Attentiveness […]
What makes a lesson GREAT? Pt. 2
This is the second instalment of a series of five posts that I have started in order to expand on a short answer I gave to Mike Harrison over on the IATEFL Facebook group page in response to the question what makes a lesson GREAT? It was the capitalisation that gave me the idea to […]
What makes a lesson GREAT? Part 1 (and a postscript)
This was the question posed by Mike Harrison on the IATEFL facebook page recently. Considering the space constraints of commenting on a platform like that, and given my Faible for whimsical responses to serious questions, I replied thus: If you are familiar with acrostics, a form of poetry where the first letters in each line […]
On Why The (Unplugged) Revolution Will Not Be Televised
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjaADbq_2AI (Gil Scott-Heron reciting The Revolution Will Not Be Televised) There is nothing like a conference to re-ignite debate.
Cooking Unplugged (or: the roaring in the oven)
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about food recently. Granted, this soon after the festive excesses of the Christmas/New Year period, the last thing you may want to read about is food, but please bear with me for a while. Recent debate over in Chia Suan Chong’s Devil’s Advocate blog series drew my attention back once more […]
Christmas ELT Appeal: Worst Case Scenario Survival Toolkit
I got an email a few days ago from a teacher in Australia called Rufus. She works with teachers in parts of the world where resources that many of us take for granted can be scarce, and where others that we may occasionally get our hands on are pure pipe dream. She asked me to […]
A Different Kind Of Scaffolding in ELT
There was a trainee teacher on my last CELTA course who had come to us without any academic background to speak of but with a wealth of life experience; in the end, he turned out to be one of the most interesting trainees I’ve worked with.