Become a more confident language teacher.
It’s January– you’re tired, they’re tired. Routines have started feeling…routine…and the same old challenges that you’ve been dealing with since the fall are starting to feel really old. Now is a particularly great time of year to be predictable in expectations but unpredictable in planning. Instead of starting the next unit or chapter and working…
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Something that I lovetty love love about the ability to connect with other teachers via Ye Grande Ole Internet is the way that ideas expand exponentially as they are kicked back and forth among us. Fan N Pick has long been one of my favorite Kagan Cooperative Learning structures, and I used it quite often…
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Can you believe that I didn’t realize what a glyph was until last year? I mean, I had been using them, I just didn’t know what they were called. I kept seeing the word ‘glyph’ on Pinterest and ignoring it because it sounded like something I wouldn’t like. Some kind of a really intense reading…
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It’s no secret that I loved my past life as a self-identified ‘cooperative learning’ teacher. Thanks to the Anchorage School District and my methods teacher, I attended my fair share of Kagan strategies as a pre-service teacher and newbie public school teacher. Once I learned about Comprehensible Input from Michele Whaley, Cooperative Learning Martina retired.…
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So #langchat tonight was crazy. We celebrated “Throwback Thursday” by using the old “free-for-all” format in which a topic is given at the beginning, but the conversation is not moderated. #langchat has grown significantly, and while I prefer the free-for-all format to the moderator Q – participant A format, it was clear tonight that there…
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As you know, NOVELTY in lesson planning is a big deal. When we aren’t switching up the content (silly stories, current events, classic literature, pop culture, history…), we’re switching up the delivery. We’re switching up the task. We’re switching up the groups. We’re always doing something new because brains crave novelty (gracias, Krashen via Gaab). PQA is…
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As an Alaskan, PNCFL is my ‘home’ region, but with Minneapolis just a six-hour direct flight from Anchorage, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend this year’s CSCTFL conference. Paired with a day spent observing Susan Block Johnson and an afternoon QAR session, it was the perfect way to spend this past week. I…
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Instead of playing with a deck of cards, play this familiar children’s game with original cards filled with images or text as an opportunity to to get students speaking in low-risk situation even as they continue interacting with a text (’cause it’s all about the input, baby!). Before you play Go Fish Prepare students for…
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Freeze Frame is a fun, interactive way to review a story by assigning to students to groups that create physical depictions of scenes from a story (short film, class story, novel, etc.) in ‘freeze frame’ vignettes. If you’ve been to a TPRS training in the last few years, it’s likely that you are familiar with the…
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