I sooo wish I had been able to offer these sooner, but I’ll be thrilled if they can still help any Spanish, French, German, or Latin teachers and their students! The linked slides, images, and tutorials are intended to help you support students’ exposure to and comprehension of the target language while enjoying a visual […]
I’m a martial artist. Most of my training is in Japanese and South Asian martial arts, but in the fall I started studying Tai Chi as well. My teacher has a phrase that his teacher would say whenever a student was worrying about whether their hand should be turned like this or like that, or […]
I’m all about improving teaching and learning without creating more work for anybody. The most recent pair of videos in the Tuned-In Teacher Mantra series addresses two of my favorite techniques for doing just that—in both face-to-face and virtual teaching. I’ve described the Buy-In Switcheroo and Making Lemonade before (in this post), but I believe […]
What is a place you would love to visit? It may be a place you’ve been and can’t wait to get back to. It may be a place you’ve never been before. The fact that we all have such places makes this one of my favorite classroom conversation starters. I ask almost every group I […]
How Did This Get Here? is a simple, no-prep interaction that can be a standalone activity or a recurring routine. Inspired by “Thank the Farmer,” an activity in Susan Kaiser Greenland’s Mindful Games (p. 47), it invites students to ponder the provenance of an item they take for granted. Channeled through my language-teacher-brain, it also fosters […]
Both during my summer travels and in online teacher communities a recent pattern has stood out: anxiety for the new school year, often in spite of—or perhaps because of—extensive prior experience. Others experiencing anxiety are new to the profession or, like you, are boldly trying new ways of teaching. I identify so strongly with this […]
A year is a bit like a class session: You plan some things before it starts, but only in the thick of it do you see what you really need to do. So, yes, I do have a classic resolution: to visit the dentist in 2019. (Don’t chortle through your splendent teeth—this is a serious […]
This post narrows the focus of the previous posts on Your Teaching Body (Location & Variation, Movement & Posture) right down to our hands and faces. The uses of gestures as meta-conversation, especially, are easy to learn and much more powerful than I realized when I first began to explore them. This post is the […]
Your students are tremendously fortunate to have YOU as their teacher. Don’t let anyone–including yourself–tell you otherwise! No one else cares about your students like you do. This makes you uniquely able to exercise the patience that teaching often requires and to advocate for your students–with the administration, with other teachers, in the community, with their […]
Back from blogging exile, I’m itching to share a series on tricks and techniques that observers in my classes at this summer’s iFLT and Express Fluency conferences found especially memorable! I’m especially excited to offer an expansive collection of voice and body techniques for joyful, successful teaching. See also: techniques highlighted after Express Fluency ‘17, including […]