Making it though
Drawing from a personal experience in these last few difficult months, I reflect briefly on how seriously teachers’ mental health is taken by educational institutions.
practical aspects of teaching
What’s in my teacher’s bag
Most of my teaching is done off-site, in various places from state schools to companies and offices. This means that the learning environments I find myself in vary enormously, and so does the equipment available. Which is why I bring with me what I call my “on-the-go classroom” in a laptop bag. This way I
Fighting climate change: lesson notes
Today I would like to share a very successful lesson I created for a B2 (upper-intermediate) group around the topic of climate change and this article by The Guardian. This is a very rough plan and needs fine-tuning, mainly to suit your learners needs and interests. I have used this lesson with both adults and
Re-engaging teenage students
This is a follow-up to my previous post about a student who completely switched off during my first lesson with his group. I had another (the third) lesson with the group today, and here’s what I did to improve the situation. How I tweaked my lesson After the first couple of lessons, during which I “studied”
Students switching off
I have recently started a new course with a small group of 17-18-year-olds in a school. The course is aimed at supporting the work their classroom teacher is doing, with a possible outcome being to then prepare the students for a certification. I had my first lesson last week, and as usual I prepared a
Getting to know each other activities for YLs
A few weeks back I had to cover a lesson with a small group of young learners (6-7 boys and girls aged 10-11). It was the group’s first lesson, and while some students knew each other from the previous year, there were also some new students so I decided to devote about half the lesson
About mindfulness in ELT (again!)
Last year I wrote a blog post about what I perceived as a commodification of an amazing Buddhist concept: mindfulness, or sati. Today, I would like to go back on the topic, after I’ve recently attended: I now feel I have familiarised with both aspects a little bit more, so I would like to update my previous post
‘I don’t understand nothing!’
How many times have we hear this phrase coming out of one of our student’s mouth? The student who feels she can’t understand ‘nothing’ because she missed a word — or even a phrase — and so switches off completely for the rest of the listening activity, or of the whole lesson. Recently, one of the tasks
Exam preparation: a lesson plan
Today I’d like to share a lesson with you. It’s a lesson structure more than a lesson plan, as it is easily adaptable to many exams — I used it with all the Cambridge suite, but I’m sure you can adapt it with IELTS or TOEFL too. I generally use it as first lesson for
Freedom in the classroom: Open Sankoré
Free and open source IWB software that I find really useful in my everyday teaching.