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Classroom Experiences

To Sir, with Love

‘To Sir, with Love‘ was perhaps the most watched and the most loved movie in my teenage years. The East London high school teacher who gave up on the school textbooks to teach his rowdy, disruptive students about life, was every teenage kid’s hero. I’ve just come across  the website below, which  offers a glimpse...Read More

The Olympic Games are coming!

The 9th grade students at Colégio A. Liessin recently had a lesson to revise parts of the body. Students were familiar with most of the words as they start learning them in kindergarten through the famous song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. Our challenge was to find a way to make students practise vocabulary already...Read More

The Dangerous Trap of Questions in the Classroom

I´m a mother of teens. As a mother, it is almost unavoidable to ask too many questions, and to my despair getting monosyllabic answers. The story goes more or less like this, “So how was school today?” “OK”. And sometimes the most I can get is, “boring as always”. Well, being a teacher, this questioning...Read More

Shameful experiences: do you contribute to the transmission of shame in class?

Hi everyone! This month I address a difficult topic – shame. Shame is a tabooed emotion. Yet, teachers and students commonly mention shame and shameful experiences. For teachers, the question is: do you contribute to the transmission of shame? Can we experience healthier teacher-student interaction: one marked by dignity rather than shame? Shame is painful...Read More

More than content, we want to make connections

In these last years, while writing my M.A. thesis, I’ve come to recognize the power of learning through stories. As a narrative researcher, now I understand that by telling our stories we educate not only ourselves, but give others the chance to make meaning of their own stories through ours (Connely and Clandinin, 2000). The...Read More

Revisiting ELT Mantras #6: Reading aloud

Picture the scene: There I was, a shy 13-year-old boy, dressed in an itchy, ill-fitting school uniform in the middle of a German language class. Our teacher, Mrs. Dawson, a strict woman who ruled the classroom with an iron fist, is going round the class calling out people to read chunks of a text out...Read More

The hazy line between lexis and grammar

This post is a short account of two lessons I taught in 2002 which helped me to make sense of something I’d read about in the late 90s, but couldn’t get my head around. Not until then anyway. If you’ve been following me for some time, you know that I’m a big believer in experiential...Read More
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