Tag Archives: teaching

Understanding

September 20, 2013Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, helping, judging, respect, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Ben Dalton

I have mentioned in previous posts that I have only two rules in my classroom: have fun and respect one another. At the beginning of each term, I have my students work out what that means based on various topics including cell phone use in the classroom, attendance, and cultures. From that, we build a code of classroom conduct that each of us, including myself, need to follow. It works well and it tells my students I respect them as a person and I hope that they would do the same for me.

A week ago, I came across this news article of a teacher in Mexico who confronted her students about some nasty things that had been tweeted about the teacher by one of the students. I won’t get into details, but the teacher used the classroom to address the issue in a very direct way. The comments on the CNN news article show a number of people in support of the teacher saying, “She is the authority in her classroom,” and “Humiliation is needed in schools, much more of it”. The whole event, from student to teacher to administration to the general public’s reaction has made me feel sad. I don’t think the issue here is ‘putting someone in their place’. I think the real issue is how we view one another as human beings.

After reading the article and watching the video, I started to think about each person or group of people affected by this event and I started to see how complex this issue is and how difficult it is to ‘place blame’ (not that I think we should). I decided to break it down in a sort of chronological order as things progressed. Continue reading Understanding →

Stinging

September 12, 2013Uncategorizedcritique, efl, elt, esl, esol, reflection, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Dawn Huczek

Today was one of those days. A day in which you thought things were going really well until the rug was pulled out from under you in the most unexpected way. The kind of day that stings and sits with you for a while. I’m not angry or even sorry that it happened. I’m sorry that something precipitated it, but not the actual event. Continue reading Stinging →

Connecting

September 11, 2013Uncategorizedefl, elt, eltchat, esl, esol, reflection, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Trevor Leyenhorst

One of my favourite television shows when I was a kid was a program by James Burke called Connections. For those of you who don’t know the series, it was a documentary style show that showed how one item could lead to a completely different thing through a series of ‘connections’. The show attempted to show how one item relied on a series of things happening in order for it to occur.

During my MA TESOL program, I was required to read and interact with the book Language Teaching Awareness: A Guide to Exploring Beliefs and Practices by Jerry G. Gebhard and Robert Oprandy (1999). In this book, the authors explore various ways in which teachers can become more aware of the way they approach their teaching. The process of reading and journalling about what I was learning was quite eye-opening. I became a more reflective teacher as a result and that has continued through the use of this blog and through other means.

In chapter seven of this book, Oprandy talks about ways in which we can reflect on the connections we make between our personal life and our teaching. He does this through a series of connecting questions that he wrote for himself. He encourages teachers to take time to write their own questions based on what they are experiencing. For the sake of this post, I have decided to summarize the responses to his own questions and then attempt to answer those same questions for myself. Here are his results: Continue reading Connecting →

Marketing

September 2, 2013Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, esol, marketing, promotion, social media, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Diane Parkhouse

Let me start off this post with little caveat, I am not writing this in response to any one person or event. I am not attempting to insult or put down anyone. That is the last thing I want to happen. I apologize in advance if it comes across that way. If you feel I have crossed the line, feel free to let me know directly or through the comment section below. Thank you.

Before I became a teacher, I was involved in retail sales for a number of years. I sold many things including cameras, computers, computer classes, and so on. I will be the first to admit that I am not ‘sold’ on selling techniques. I feel they depersonalize things to the point of almost dehumanizing the purchaser. When you become focussed on the sale more than the person, you are reducing the person to their money. I believe the job of a sales person should be that of assistant. You need to assess what the person needs and then help them find what works best for THEM, not your pocketbook. You are the person who (should) know the product or service best and then connect what the person needs or wants to what matches them.

Being a teaching professional sometimes forces us to take on the role of salesperson. We need to market ourselves in order to get the position we need. Waiting around for the ‘right job’ to come along rarely works and often leads to disappointment. There is a place for ‘selling’ ourselves as professionals, but I fear that we often start to take on the characteristics of the salesperson that we hate the most. Here are some of the things to think about: Continue reading Marketing →

Supporting

August 31, 2013Uncategorizedassessing, efl, ell, elt, esl, esol, learning disabilities, supporting, teaching, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Britt Reints

During the last visit with my cousin, her husband shared an amusing story about fixing their van. He is a mechanic by trade and certainly know what he is doing, but this recent event left him scratching his head. He had gone into a parts store and asked for an alternator for his vehicle. Upon giving them the year and model number, the person working at the parts department looked up the part number for the alternator and promptly found it for him. Taking it home, my cousin’s husband took the time to look up how to install it on that model, switched out the old alternator for the new one, and attempted to start the vehicle. Nothing. Completely dead. He pored over the schematics and checked everything over once again. Still nothing. So, he took the part back and told them it was defective. The man behind the counter, grabbed another one and exchanged it for him. Same thing. Nothing. Back he went to the shop. This time, they started to accuse him of not installing it properly. He insisted he knew what he was doing. They exchanged it one more time. Same result. So, after some investigation, it was determined that the part he had been sold the first time was for the vehicle one year newer and the car manufacturer had reversed the polarity of the alternator. Everything else was the same, but the direction of the current was reversed. The initial problem had led to a series of exchanges for the same part, never checking on whether he was sold the correct thing in the first place.

It makes me think about how we deal with learning disabilities in the language classroom. Continue reading Supporting →

Travelling

August 25, 2013Uncategorizedcoursebooks, curriculum, elt, esl, esol, guide, material development, metaphors, teaching, tesl, tesol, travellingnathanghall

Image courtesy of Jaymis Loveday

Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article by Ian McGrath on the use of metaphor to describe how teachers and students view coursebooks in the English language classroom. The article was interesting in itself and I may eventually get around to exploring it in depth in a future post, but the topic did cause me to think about which metaphor I would use to describe coursebooks. My metaphor came quickly enough and started to snowball after that. I will try my best to unravel it a bit for you. Continue reading Travelling →

Seizing

August 12, 2013Uncategorizedelt, esl, esol, teaching, tesl, tesol, timenathanghall

Image courtesy of North Charleston

I hate wristwatches and pretty much always have. I got my first watch for my sixth birthday that had a little boy with a dog on it. I loved the watch to look at, but I just didn’t like wearing. I am one of those strange people that hates having things on their wrist. Drives me completely crazy. As a result of my slightly obsessive behaviour, I was forced to rely on my ‘internal clock’ to keep me on time. I have honed that skill quite nicely, thank you very much, to the point that my wife thinks it is fun to test my from time to time. I am usually within about 10 minutes of the correct time, so I still have some room to grow. For more precise time, I rely on my cell phone, of course.

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast that was talking about time and the speaker mentioned that the ancient Greeks used to use two main words for time: chronos for measuring time (ie. seconds, hours, days, etc.), and kairos which has a number of nuances to it, but generally means the quality of the time. Continue reading Seizing →

Flipping

July 24, 2013Uncategorizedcurriculum, elt, flipping, sal khan, teaching, videosnathanghall

Image courtesy of the San Jose Public Library

When I was a young boy growing up in British Columbia, we had an educational channel on TV called The Knowledge Network. One of the unique features at the time was that you could take distance classes from Athabasca University that used content being broadcast on The Knowledge Network as part of the lecture material for the course. I remember thinking as a kid that this was pretty cool.

Fast-forward to today and this is hardly groundbreaking. We can access material on-demand and on various platforms. We can even interact with one another using Skype or Google Hangouts, attend webinars, and tweet with professionals from around the world including renowned authors, professors, and other professionals.

So, where does this leave us? The latest trend is in the area of blended learning called flipping. Continue reading Flipping →

Praising

July 13, 2013Uncategorizedfeedback, observing, praise, teachingnathanghall

Image courtesy of  Evan Hahn

I was doing a practicum observation the other day and I asked the instructor what she would like me to focus on. She mentioned a couple of other items before mentioning how she gives feedback to the students. “I think I praise them too much,” she stated. It got me thinking, can we praise students “too much”?

Giving correction in the classroom is something that most teachers struggle with. How can we give students correction without making them feel discouraged? I find it interesting that we talk about give out too much correction, but we rarely discuss too much praise.

Continue reading Praising →

Standardizing

July 11, 2013Uncategorizedcreating, edtech, Littlejohn, material development, standards, teachingnathanghall

Image courtesy of C. G. P. Grey

The other day, I came across an interesting article from Andrew Littlejohn called Language Teaching Materials and the (Very) Big Picture (2012). I have had the opportunity to read through some other articles by Littlejohn in the past and I was intrigued by what he had to say about material development since that is something I am working on presently.

Continue reading →

ELT Reflections

Musings of a teacher always in training