Professional Development // Browsing posts in Professional Development
What Do You Think about Online Education?
“…remediation—going over and over something that you really ought to already know—is less embarrassing when you can do it privately, with no one watching. ” -How Khan Academy is Changing the Rules of Education. Clive Thompson. Now that’s something to think about. I wonder how it applies to an ESL classroom. Any thoughts? What would ...
Engage! Use Laughter
Tomorrow I’m helping my students to get ready for a test. The theme? 1st and 2nd conditional sentences, and expressing and defending their opinion. There are two ways to teach grammar. The mind numbing way, where you shut your student’s brian off with borring rule after rule, and then there’s the fun way, where you ...
How Teachers Plan.
A few questions from one teacher to another… How do you go about lesson planning? Do you plan a few classes, or weeks in advance, or do you keep your lesson planning down to a ‘day at a time’ format? What are your planning tools? Do you have a favorite planning routine or format that ...
Challenge Yourself: What are you reading?
So maybe you don’t have access to professional development school. Maybe you can’t afford the tuition, or maybe you can’t afford the time right now for ‘professional’ professional development. But let’s not allow that to be a game breaker in our quest to improve ourselves as teachers. In my last post, I invited you to ...
An Invitation to Challenge Yourself
Just wondering: How well do you go about challenging yourself to be a better teacher? And when I ask you that question, I’m also asking myself it too. One of my favorite teaching quotes is: “He who dares to teach, must never cease to learn.” – Richard Henry Dann. So what are you doing to ...
One way to Differentiate Yourself as a Teacher
Are you looking for ways to make your teaching stand out? Maybe you’re hunting for more classes. Maybe you’re trying to get students to refer you to other potential students. Or maybe you’re just trying to do your job really well for yourself and someone else. Today I read an article that I’d like to ...
Spark: What’s Your Sweet Spot?
Are you really meant to teach? Have you thought about what your ‘vocation’ is? (Vocation: ’a job you do because you feel it is your purpose in life…’ ) P.T. Barnum said: “Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his particular genius, he cannot succeed.” (Art ...
What Could You Do with Free Course Content?
Materials are one of the most expensive parts of learning English. Course books + cds + dvds+ workbooks = well over $1000 pesos. When I first started Epicenter, one of the things I tried doing was propose that we go bookless with students to help them avoid all the excess costs mentioned above. It didn’t ...
How to Build Student Confidence
If you work with adult English students, you’ll quickly discover that developing student self-confidence is a major key to success. We’ve talked about this before: beginner level adult students are not just trying to learn English with you. They are also having to learn how to beat down powerful feelings of fear and self-conciousness. Think ...
What Have Your Students Taught You? (And what are you doing about it?)
This first stage of change was most important, it turned out, not for what Oliver taught the town — but for what the town taught him. He assumed a great deal about the town’s receptivity and its nature, underestimating the cumulative power of inertia and collective attitudes. Once he realized that the resistance came from ...
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