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Notice how the wheel makes interesting little equations:

satisfied + pleased = content

triumphant + illustrious = proud

fond = romantic = affectionate

satisfied + relieved = peaceful

helpless + frightened = scared

compassionate + caring = tender

stunned + confused + amazed + overcome + moved = surprised

Speaking practice:

Personality

Review of 60 personality adjectives

Review of 24 adjectives of emotion

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(Advanced) Personality Adjectives and emotions

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Notice how the wheel makes interesting little equations: satisfied + pleased = content triumphant + illustrious = proud fond = romantic = affectionate satisfied + relieved = peaceful helpless + frightened = scared compassionate + caring = tender stunned + confused + amazed + overcome + moved = surprised Speaking practice: Personality Review of 60 personality adjectives Review of 24 adjectives of emotion

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All you need for these fun speaking games are some dice. I recommend you buy a few sets and carry them around with you all the time.
Dice are a great resource for TEFL teachers because they are portable and suitable for adults and kids
What I love about dice is that the options are endless, only limited by your imagination and creative ability. Let's look at a few ways to use them.

1. Tense reviews : Choose which tenses you want to practise (Advanced learners can practise all 12, Elementary learners could practise 2 or 3). Assign a number to each tense, for example, 6 is Present Perfect simple. Students roll the dice and have to create a sentence using the tense that corresponds with the number. Experiment with different variations such as positive, negative, questions, active, passive, correct & incorrect, subject & object pronouns etc.

2. Question formation: Choose a question word for each number on the first dice: 1 = Who, 2 = Why, 3 = Where, 4 = When, 5 = What, 6 = How. Choose a topic for each number on the second dice: 1 = Food, 2 = Sport, 3 = Hobbies, 4 =Jobs, 5 = Clothes, 6 = Travel. If a student rolls a 3 and a 1, they have to create a question such as: Where did you eat dinner last night? You could use a third dice roll to determine who answers the question. If you have been teaching modals, use should, must, can etc. Great for Business students who can practise interview scenarios and students preparing for speaking exams.

3. Conditionals: The first dice represents the 'If' clause and the second shows the result. Let students choose verbs for each number on both dice. Choose a topic like Crime to practise verbs:1 = burgle, 2 = steal, 3 = murder, 4 = mug, 5 = deceive, 6 = lie. The second dice (the results), could be possible punishments such as 1 = 10 years in prison, 2 = community service, 3 = stand in the corner etc. Students can play judge and jury, a roll of 1 and 6 could produce sentences such as: If you burgled my house, I would force you to stand in the corner of the room for 10 minutes. OK, it sounds ridiculous but the students will have a lot of fun and activate lots of vocabulary. Create superstitions, threats, promises, regrets etc.

4. Story building: Create stories using the dice. Get students to create 12 characters, 12 locations, 12 verbs. Each roll of the dice continues the story. Before long, they'll be generating dozens of ideas and plot lines.

5. Practising phonemes. Choose some phonemes you want your students to practise and assign them a number from 1 to 12 (vowels), 1 - 24 (consonants). They get points for finding words which have these sounds.

6. Functional language: The first dice shows the context such as relationships, work, travel, health. The second dice can be used to practise functions (regret, giving opinions, apologising) and their exponents (I wish I hadn't, In my opinion, I'm awfully sorry). Before you know it, students will be creating fantastic mini-dialogues, peer-teaching, discussing meaning etc.

7. General vocabulary game: Match a letter to a number. For instance, p is 4. A student rolls the first dice. The second dice dictates how many words they have to say with this letter. This requires no preparation and great for recycling / activating vocabulary. Also, the categories game works with dice and students can play it in groups.

8. Phrasal verbs: The first dice indicates the verb (put, give, take, stand, look, get), the second dice is used for the preposition / particle (up, away, in, out, under, over). Students win points for creating real phrasal verbs and using them in sentences (2 and 1 might result in a sentence such as: He gave up smoking after he visited the doctor.

Tip: Make the games competitive by having different scoring systems. Two I like are:

The Dice Bomb: If students complete task or use language correctly, they roll the dice to determine how many points they'll receive. Get the other team to choose a bomb number, e.g. 3. If the first team roll 4, they'll get 4 points; if they roll the bomb number (3), they lose all their points.

Dice Gambling: Teams or students can choose to get 3 points for correct answers. However, they can gamble and roll the dice again and this new number will give them their points.

Finally, use dice to nominate students to answer questions or do certain tasks. This random element keeps them engaged and on their toes.

Let me know if you have any other dice games to use with your English students.

I'm a teacher trainer doing lots of different things in Granada, Spain and back in the UK. I've been a Course Director on Trinity TESOL programmes, worked as an EAP tutor at universities in the UK, spent a couple of years as a DoS at a wonderful school in London, and have also dabbled in online teaching, course creation, blogging and materials development. View All Posts

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Rolling Dice: Speaking Games for TEFL teachers

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All you need for these fun speaking games are some dice. I recommend you buy a few sets and carry them around with you all the time. Dice are a great resource for TEFL teachers because they are portable and suitable for adults and kids What I love about dice is that the options are...

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Every year I can't believe how quickly time has flown by... it seems like just yesterday I was getting ready for a new year with new students, new ideas and new curriculum.

I know how crazy the end of the year can be for teachers and students alike... it's an endless list of school events to attend, meetings to go to, paperwork to be filed, grading, report cards and cleaning up of all my mess! #mydeskisadisaster #willieverbeabletodigmyselfout

Here are some of the things I do to help make it through the chaotic last month or two of school.

I go through all of my piles (I seem to have sooo many piles!!) and sort them into three categories.

Then (and this is key for me!) - I deal with all three piles right away! I SHRED all important documents that don't need to be kept... I march out to our recycling station and RECYCLE my pile of papers into the bin... and then I file all of the papers that I need to KEEP.

I know this may seem a little (or a lot crazy!)... but if I've got time, I like to get as prepared as possible for next year. Where I teach in British Columbia, Canada we don't get any paid prep time at the start of the year. We can go into school early to set up our classrooms, organize our curriculum, photocopy papers etc... but it's all done on our own time. However, we do have a few days in June to prep for next year and I take full advantage of them to do what I can. It helps make my summer a little more enjoyable.

I spend some time with my students asking them to reflect on their school year and who helped them along the way. I think it's important for students to spend a few minutes writing a thank you note to a teacher or staff member in our building thanking them for support, assistance, encouragement or help during the year. I provide a 'thank-you' note template photocopied on to colored paper - I let them choose the color and the template. About half of my students want to deliver the note themselves, the other half ask me to do it. I don't grade their letters, I don't read their letters... it's all up to the students what they want to say. My coworkers LOVE to receive the notes and it's fun to watch how excited my students are to share them. Grab a FREE copy of the templates and lesson plan and get started today!

Lastly, I try to find student activities that are low prep for me, engaging for the students and don't require any grading (or very little). Here are some of my favorite activities to help you get through the last few weeks of the year! Click each image below to check them out!

I hope you have a fantastic summer!!

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Every year I can't believe how quickly time has flown by... it seems like just yesterday I was getting ready for a new year with new students, new ideas and new curriculum. I know how crazy the end of the year can be for teachers and students alike...

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Welcome to Reflections of an English Language Teacher! To help you find your way around, here is a map of what you can find on this website. To visit each page, click on the picture or the link provided. 1. Reflections: The blog - regularly updated with new posts about anything and everything ELT-related.

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If you're really that interested, you could probably do worse than to check out my Linked In Profile, which also has the added benefit of saving me from typing it all out again:

While I work for International House Coimbra and have worked for various IH affiliated schools throughout my teaching career, the views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers or the International House World Organisation, though I like to think they might agree with me every now and again.

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Who am I? If you're really that interested, you could probably do worse than to check out my Linked In Profile, which also has the added benefit of saving me from typing it all out again: While I work for International House Coimbra and have worked for various IH affiliated schools throughout my teaching career,...

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Teaching Village - We're better when we work together!

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eltteaching #learning #elttips #lessonplan #lessonplans #esl #efl #elt #englishisfun

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My wife sent me a video some weeks ago that I knew would be able to generate some interesting conversation. However, at the time, I couldn't come up with an idea for a text for it and just saved it for future use.

Yesterday I came across the video again, this time on Facebook, and remembered having read something about Trump coming from an immigrant family. I put two and two together and a conversation lesson was born.

This is aimed at adult students, but could easily be used with teenagers who are 15-18, or any group that you think is mature enough to deal with the idea of heritage.

Continue reading

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My wife sent me a video some weeks ago that I knew would be able to generate some interesting conversation. However, at the time, I couldn't come up with an idea for a text for it and just saved it for future use.

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My Vocation is my Vacation: Resources, Materials and Ideas

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Below is an interview that was a long time coming! Clare and I talked about doing an interview quite while back and here it is below. We talked about a range of issues including materials development and she offered up a nice range of ideas and links. I thank Clare for taking the time to answer my questions. Enjoy!

Hello Clare, thanks for stopping by. We talked about doing this interview a while back and I'm so glad to be finally doing it. Can I get you a drink? What are you having?
Ooh, I love a good cup of tea! You, know I still get my friends and family to bring me 'proper' tea bags when they come and visit me in Germany!
Okay some nice tea coming right up. Please make yourself comfortable. So, what is new?
Thanks! Well, I'm quite busy at the moment, though that in itself is nothing really new! Usually September is a pretty quiet time for me, at work I mean, but I told my parents and some friends in England that, and now I've been busy with visitors coming and going for long weekends! But, you know, it's quite nice doing day trips and whatnot with them - I feel a bit like I'm on holiday, too, and it's really good to forget about work for a few days! But I'll be back in the office, and the classroom, soon enough: the new term always comes round so quickly, doesn't it?
Oh for sure. My term started in late August and it was a bit of a shock to me. So, what do you do exactly?
I teach EAP at Trier University, in Germany. Well, that doesn't quite capture it! I'm the team leader for EAP teaching within the English Studies Department, on top of my full-time teaching load, which is 16 hours per week. Doesn't sound much does it? But with all the preparation and marking it can sometimes be more than a full-time job. And I'm also in charge of the Erasmus exchanges for our Department, so for all the students of ours who go to study at our European partner unis and the students from those universities who come to study with us for a term or year. Oh, and on the side I'm a materials writer of sorts - it's something I've just recently started getting into! But the thing that is really 'my job', is being an EAP lecturer.
Yes, I'd like to talk about materials development. For now could you please tell us about your students and courses.
So I teach 8 two-hour classes each week, for semesters that run for about 15 weeks. A winter and a summer semester each year. The classes I teach cover a pretty wide spread: from oral presentations and academic writing, to translation, British cultural studies, and phonetics. Translation is probably one of my favourites. My MA was in translation, so I really am a translation nerd! I know it's not always approved of in the ELT world, but with my generally monolingual groups learners, I think it's helpful. And it also opens lots of doors to discuss interference from their first language, German, and also cultural differences, for example when a culturally-specific concept pops up in one of the translation texts.

Because I teach within the academic department, rather than a general language centre or whatever, all of my students have English Studies as one of their main degree subjects. Most of them are on degrees that will qualify them to be secondary-school EFL teachers in future. It means that my classes are part of their English Studies modules, and so I only see each group of students once a week. But it also means that the students have actually chosen to study English, so the general level of motivation is quite high. So is their level of English! In Germany, students are expected to leave high school with about a B2 level in English, and most of our students are even better than that. At the master's level, especially if the students have spent time abroad in an English-speaking country, they're often C2 level, so basically bilingual! It's very rewarding to see! But it's also hard to find materials for them, for their language development.
Oh wow. Many of my students are future translators so I should pick your brain at some point. You mentioned materials writing. We took Katherine Bilsborough's iTDi course back in June 2016 on That is great. I think the sense of community was amazing on that course. On a somewhat similar note, I see you joined Twitter in 2014. How has social networking impacted your development? Creating ELT Materials. What are your lasting memories of the course. OR What are your takeaways from the course?
Yes, it was a great course, wasn't it? Kath touched on a lot of things I had kind of already heard about, but it was great to discuss them in detail, and to get them together in my head in a more structured way. I'd say my biggest take-away was about writing instructions. And blurbs. So that other teachers can use the materials I create. In my team, we often share things we've made for our classes, but I think it was probably quite hard sometimes for my colleagues to see how I used the materials in the classroom, and so sharing probably wasn't really effective. But from Kath, and with practice, I've learnt how to write clear instructions for the tasks I create, and also clear and concise blurbs or teaching notes, so that other teachers can follow what I intend to be done with the materials. I think Kath's message, that all teachers are also materials writers in someway, is important, too. There seems to be, well often, a kind of conceptual gap. You know, when teachers think of 'materials writers', a lot of them probably just think of the big names, the authors of published textbooks. But most teachers write or adapt materials for their own teaching, so we're all materials writers, whether we publish them or not. That's a really key point for me. It was great that Kath emphasised it - it's really influenced the way I think about materials writing!

I also really liked the community feeling that built up among us participants on that course. I wasn't sure beforehand how that would pan out on a MOOC, but, you know, I'm still in touch with several of you guys that I 'met' on that course!

Wow! Has it really been so long? I love Twitter! It's the key way I keep in touch with people in the ELT world, and with you and the other people I met on Kath's course. I use Twitter for professional networking, for my PLN, and separate that from Facebook, where I'm only 'friends' with people I've actually met - like old school friends, my immediate colleagues and so on. Although, having said that, I am in a few groups on Facebook that are about English teaching.
Nice! Are there any posts you'd like to share here?
But Twitter is the social network I would recommend to anyone interested in CPD as a teacher, especially in ELT. I mean, it's any easy way to keep up with what's going on, people post articles and blogs and things like that, which I probably wouldn't get to know about without Twitter. And also events, webinars, conferences and the like: I usually find out about those from Twitter. And I use it to share my own blog posts.
That was very cool and something I remembered quite well. Sorry to interupt. Please continue...
For me, what I really like about Twitter, is also that it kind of flattens the hierarchy. Do you know what I mean? So, you can be in touch with all those 'big names', if you want. It's like, everyone is equal, valued for their contributions, not for their professional status or whatever.
Excellent. Thank you. You have a talk coming up, right? What is about?
Good points, for sure. Let's move on from micro-blogging to blogging. I enjoy your blog. What do you usually write about?
Well, it's a bit of a mix really! I guess I always kind of figured it would be, since I have so many interests within teaching, which is why I went with the name Clare's ELT Compendium. I post materials I have created, and ideas on how to teach certain things or handle certain situations, but also my reflections on my own teaching or on what's going on in ELT. I summarise conference talks I hear, review relevant books, and report on action research I do. So a real mix! But I think it captures me, as a teacher, with all the things that a teacher thinks about and does, it captures all of that. An all-round ELT blog!
Sounds interesting for sure. As a note for readers, here is a link about the talk. Do you have more to add on this topic?
Haha, all of them?! It depends on what you're interested in. One post that got quite a bit of attention recently was about a project I did with my MA-level students. We wrote an ebook and published it on smashwords - within a 15-week semester! Lots of people seem interested in how we managed it, so I wrote it up in a blog post.

Also, last year, I did a series of posts called "7 Days 7 Ways" all about professional development for ELT teachers. It covers everything that I do for my CPD, like blogs, webinars, reading teaching magazines, etc. That, I'd say, is definitely worth a read!

Actually, I have a couple! The next one is an online talk, "Using Multimodal Learner-Driven Feedback to Provide Sustainable Feedback on L2 Writing". I'm giving it as part of the LTSIG and OllRen online conference. It's on 5th October, at 4.25pm UK time, if you'd like to join!
Oh, okay. Wow. I was right. You are busy! Can you say more about MAWSIG? Like, what is it? What do you do there? How is it pronounced?
Basically, I'll be reporting on research I've done into developing a procedure of learner-driven feedback on L2 essays. In LDF, as I call it, the feedback is given by the teacher, but the student can decide what they receive feedback on, and in what form, so via email or audio recording or whatever.
Thank you! Are there any books or blog posts or anything you'd recommend to those getting into materials development?
I came up with LDF by combining some other feedback ideas I'd heard and read about, and did a study with my students to see how they liked it. I'm going to be giving a talk on more general ideas on feedback at the TEASIG event in Luton at the end of October, too! Feedback has been my 'baby', my topic, for a while, so I've got plenty to say about it!

Oh, and I'll also be at the TESOL Spain convention next March, giving a talk that combines two of my other interests - the topic is "How can research inform our ELT materials writing?" It'll be part of a strand that MaWSIG are running at that convention.
Thank you for this. I'd sort of forgotten to keep checking back with some of these so it was a nice chance to catch up. Stepping away from ELT for a moment, what are some non-ELT books you'd like to recommend?
Ok, so firstly, we pronounce it like 'more sig'. It stands for Materials Writing Special Interest Group, which is a bit of a mouthful! It's one of IATEFL's special interest groups, SIGs, and we aim to provide networking and professional development for anyone who is involved in creating materials for English language learners. It's one of the younger SIGs, and also one of the more active ones, I think. I'm on the events team, and we organise meetups, conferences and things like that. Online and face-to-face conferences. Also, one of my biggest contributions so far has been getting a materials writing competition off the ground, aimed at teachers who write, or unpublished materials writers. You can check out the upcoming events and the competition, oh and also a pretty active blog, on our website: mawsig.iatefl.org

Well, the MaWSIG blog on our website is a great resource for this! Otherwise, I'd recommend people check out the books published by ELTTeacher2Writer, they're all 'how to' type guides on writing different kinds of materials for ELT.
The last one is a favorite of mine so I will have to check out the others! Thank you for taking the time to do this. It's been a pleasure and I hope and believe it's been helpful for readers as well. Thank you! I won't pressure you about a guest post just yet!

Oh, and recently, ETPedia have brought out a materials writing one, it's by John Hughes and Lindsay Clandfield. That's a really easy one to dip into for ideas, too, so a worthwhile investment!

I like to read general teaching books, too. One that I really liked was ' How to Teach so Students Remember ', it's by Marilee Sprenger.

If you're talking about fiction, I like crime mysteries, like by Elizabeth George or P.J. Tracy, and also novels that include social criticism, like by Ben Elton. My all-time favourite is George Orwell's '1984'.

Thank you, Mike! Bye!

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Below is an interview that was a long time coming! Clare and I talked about doing an interview quite while back and here it is below. We talked about a range of issues including materials development and she offered up a nice range of ideas and links.

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A few weeks ago, someone in the ELT world tweeted that Salma Patel's blog, which deals with management of the UK National Health Service, had a post that gave a good, brief summary of research paradigms. I went to the blog and found the post:

Published in 2015, it's had 168,622 views so far, and there are dozens of comments at the end thanking Patel for his "clear", "brilliant", "superb", "excellent", "amazing", "extremely useful" explanations.

The explanation starts with a summary of the main components of a research paradigm and there is then a video which explains the text. Patel begins by saying that there are two main approaches to research:

1. Filling knowledge gap: positivist

2. Problem-solving: interpretive.

He explains:
In the first you read a lot of books .....and you find a gap in the research. ......It is objective. What is the meaning of objective? Reality is external to us - I don't know the reality. So, I propose a hypothesis. What is the meaning of a hypothesis? There is a relationship between X and Y, or not. That's it. In the second, you identify a problem, you ask "Why?". There is no single reality so we have to look at reality from different perspectives, understand different characters, different people, .. So there's no reality here. That's why we have to go ourselves into the organisation and talk to people.
So there you have it: scientific, quantitative research is most suitable for research projects which seek to fill a knowledge gap, while qualitative research (which assumes that there's no such thing as objective reality) is the best way to go about problem solving.

Scientific research is, of course, nothing like Patel's description of it. Nor is positivism what Patel says it is, and nor does his chart present a reliable or useful guide to research projects.

The aim of scientific research is, precisely, to solve problems, or, to put it another way, to explain phenomena. The collection of empirical data, the organisation of taxonomies, etc. are carried out not for their own sakes but in the service of an explanatory theory. Hypotheses are the beginning of attempts to solve problems and should lead to theories that explain a certain group of phenomena. The aim is to unify descriptions and low-level theories into a general causal theory.

SLA research carried out under the umbrella of cognitive science adopts these aims and methods, and although far from achieving any general theory, it still has some claim to be part of what Kuhn calls a mature science tradition. In contrast, the sort of work Patel encourages falls, at best, into Kuhn's "immature science" bag, in the 'pre-paradigm' period. It's clear from the literature that some sociologists and sociolinguists want no part of the scientific enterprise, but Patel's biased and distorted description of different approaches to research fails to properly explain either the realist or the relativist case. In order to provide newcomers with a clear, balanced, well informed introduction to research methodology, I think Patel needs a better grasp than he shows of the philosophy of science, the history of western philosophy, and how evidence-based research is conceived and conducted.

In response to information given to me by Steve Brown, Carol Goodey and others earlier this year, I wrote a post on Research Paradigms where I commented on the way that various influential sociology departments have developed their own particular post-Khunian narrative concerning how research is carried out. I said at the time that I was really surprised to learn how widely these daft notions of 'positivism' and 'research paradigms' had spread, but I find the fact that Patel's post has reached over 160,000 grateful post graduate students quite shocking. Did nobody catch so much as a whiff of baloney? Nobody took the trouble to, ahem, deconstruct the text?

A more respectable version of Patel's presentation can be found in Scotland (2012), which is cited, but it's hardly any better. In the end, we can trace most of this "revised", post-Kuhnian treatment of paradigms back to Lincoln and Guba (1985) who proposed a "Constructivist paradigm" as a replacement for "the conventional, scientific, or positivist paradigm of enquiry". This view is idealist ("what is real is a construction in the minds of individuals"), pluralist and relativist:

There are multiple, often conflicting, constructions and all (at least potentially) are meaningful. The question of which or whether constructions are true is sociohistorically relative. (Lincoln and Guba, 1985: 85).

Lincoln and Guba assume that the observer can't and shouldn't be neatly disentangled from the observed in the activity of inquiring into constructions. Constructions in turn are resident in the minds of individuals:

They do not exist outside of the persons who created and hold them; they are not part of some "objective" world that exists apart from their constructors (Lincoln and Guba, 1985: 143).

Thus constructivism is based on the principle of interaction.

The results of an enquiry are always shaped by the interaction of inquirer and inquired into which renders the distinction between ontology and epistemology obsolete: what can be known and the individual who comes to know it are fused into a coherent whole (Guba: 1990: 19).

Note that Patel has either overlooked or ignored the fact that, according to the leading lights in his "constructivist paradigm", the distinction between ontology and epistemology is obsolete. In any case, if you want to find the roots of the full-blown idealist, relativist, pluralist, your-experience-of-me-experiencing-you-experiencing-the-teapot, topsy-turvy, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't world of post-modern sociology, you need look no further than Lincoln and Guba, 1985. And if you want a demonstation of why it's so much baloney, see Gross & Levitt, 1994; and Sokal & Bricmont, 1998.

Not far behind in terms of culpability for all this mess comes Crotty (1998), whose "seminal work" on research in the social sciences is required reading in thousands of undergraduate and post graduate courses all over the world. Crotty's work quite wrongly states that positivism started with the work of Francis Bacon, completely misrepresents the work of the positivists themselves, and misrepresents the work of Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend too. At one point, Crotty says that the real target of Feyerabend's criticism were "the positivists", despite the fact that before Feyerabend's Against Method was published, positivists - scientists and philosophers alike - had thankfully disappeared. I challenge Crotty to find a scientific department in any university anywhere on the planet run by self-proclaimed positivists.

C.P. Snow, in his 1959 lecture, first described the 'two cultures' of science and the humanities (see Snow, 1993), since when the gap has widened considerably. Eleven years ago, Gregg (2006) noted that in the field of SLA, a look at the 'applied linguistics' literature

t urns up doubts about the value of controlling for variables (Block, 1996), reduction of empirical claims to metaphors (Schumann, 1983; Lantolf, 1996), mockery of empirical claims in SLA as 'physics envy' and denials of the possibility of achieving objective knowledge (Lantolf, 1996), even wholesale rejection of the values and methods of empirical research (Johnson, 2004). Although the standpoints are various, one common thread unites these critiques: a fundamental misunderstanding of what science, and in particular cognitive science, is about (see, e.g. Gregg et al., 1997; Gregg, 2000; 2002).

Today, blogs and twitter exchanges abound with references to white coats, laboratory conditions and the other trappings of so-called positivists (including Chomsky of course) who, it's claimed, fail to make any connections with the real world, even though, ironically enough, they're the only ones who believe in such a thing. In my own case, in exchanges with Marek Kiczkowiak of TEFL Advocates about the existence (or not) of native speakers, I refer to the "sociolinguistic twaddle that obfuscates a simple psychological reality", while he refers to "the fantastic beast the NS has become in theoretical linguistics and SLA labs". I'd say that in this case it's Kiczkowiak who shows a typically depreciating and ignorant attitude towards SLA cognitive research, while I limit myself to the claim that regardless of how difficult it might be for sociolinguists to decide who belongs to what social group, there are such things as native speakers, and it is the case (a case worth researching) that most people who learn a L2 fall short of native competence. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I.

Patel's post is more evidence of the need to remain critical in our reading and thinking about our profession. There are so many examples of low standards of scholarship, rational criticism and intellectual honesty in the work of those who do research and teacher training that we need to be constantly on our guard. Down with baloney!
References
Crotty, M. (1998) The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. London, Routledge.

Gregg, K. R. (2006) Taking a social turn for the worse: the language socialization paradigm for second language acquisition. Second Language Research 22, 4; pp. 413-442.

Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N. (1994) Higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lincoln,Y. & Guba, R. (1985) Naturalistic Enquiry. Newbury Park; Sage.

Scotland, J. (2012) Exploring the philosophical underpinnings of research: Relating ontology and epistemology to the methodology and methods of the scientific, interpretive, and critical research paradigms. English Language Teaching, 5(9), pp.9-16.

Snow, C.P. (1993) The two cultures. Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

Sokal, A.D. and Bricmont, J. (1998) I ntellectual impostures. London, Verso.

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A few weeks ago, someone in the ELT world tweeted that Salma Patel's blog, which deals with management of the UK National Health Service, had a post that gave a good, brief summary of research paradigms. I went to the blog and found the post: Published in 2015, it's had 168,622 views so far, and there are dozens of comments at the end thanking Patel for his "clear", "brilliant", "superb", "excellent", "amazing", "extremely useful" explanations.

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If you want to know what Demand High is (and isn’t) – read the original explanatory front page here: https://demandhighelt.wordpress.com/what-is-demand-high/

Where Are We Now?

We’ve been quiet on this blog and Facebook for a while. But our inquiry (and our tea-drinking) has continued while we have been running Demand High seminars and workshops in many countries. This has given us feedback and experience to integrate and build on.

So … Where is DH now? Here’s a quick overview of DH to date (January 2015).

Phase One
We launched the Demand High meme at IATEFL in March 2012. We argued that communicative language teaching had painted itself into a corner, encouraging a lot of “fun” and familiar ritualised activity types, work groupings and materials but with limited apparent engagement with the “dirty” part of dealing with language and learning, and so on. We suggested ways of dealing with these issues, but people kept saying: “OK, this is interesting – but what can we DO?”

Phase Two
In our workshops we started to offer a wider range of focussed practical chalk-face techniques, examples and guidance. Yet even when we did this we found it challenging to capture the essence of DH in a way that was demonstrable in conference plenaries or one hour workshops, because what we were talking about was a facet of live teaching that is by definition hard to catch.

Phase Three
So now we are wondering. Can we formulate something more concrete and accessible for classroom teachers? Something that teachers, can, if they wish, read about and then take into class and try? Not just a set of raw ideas but detailed guidelines for teaching.

So this is where we are now (perhaps)…

• Demand High is the meme – the raw idea that we can ask more of our students, that we can challenge them and base our teaching around going where the learning is, working at each individual’s learning edge. We still encourage every teacher to experiment with that simple but challenging starting point in their own contexts with their own students.

• Alongside that we are now intend to develop something we will provisionally call Learning-Centred Teaching – (yes, learning) a set of clearly-stated ideas and concrete practical classroom techniques that teachers can read and experiment with.

Over the coming months, please read, join in and help us find out where this is going and whether it’s useful.

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Developing Mentee's Identity as a Teacher
Komila Tangirova Abstract Mentorship is a rewarding process, beneficial both for a mentor and a mentee. However, various factors are to be taken into account for making it effective. Having participated in the Mentoring Programme with MA students, I have come to realise that being a mentor does not only involve transferring your knowledge to inexperienced teachers, but letting them explore their own potentials and boosting their confidence in becoming a teacher. In this paper, the qualities of effective mentoring and the approaches that are important in the development of a mentee's identity as a teacher will be investigated based on research in this area as well as the data collected during my own mentoring experience. Keywords: Introduction mentorship, teacher identity, mentor, mentee, effective Effective mentorship
Various definitions for mentoring are provided in the literature (Leaver & Oxford, 2000; Arnold, 2006; Pitton, 2006; Bozeman & Feeney, 2007; Jonson, 2008; Hobson, 2009; Nakamura et al. 2009; Lea, 2011; Delaney, 2012; Laverick, 2016). For me, personally, mentoring has felt to be the process of providing professional assistance with minimal intrusion into mentees' developing own styles of teaching. Having participated in the Mentoring Programme with MA students, I have come to realise that being a mentor does not only involve transferring your knowledge to inexperienced teachers, but letting them explore their own potentials and boosting their confidence in becoming a teacher. In this paper, the qualities of effective mentoring and the approaches that are important in the development of a mentee's identity as a teacher will be investigated based on research in this area as well as the data collected during my own mentoring experience.

First, it is important to look into what effective mentoring is and how to approach this task professionally. As I started mentoring, I was concerned about doing it right. I also felt I needed some theory and knowledge of how to mentor, as taking on this responsibility without prior research and preparation seemed challenging. Delaney emphasises the resemblance of good mentoring with good teaching (2012, p. 188). Parallels that he draws between these two, in my opinion, noble tasks are reasonable. However, he also questions whether "mentoring is really a skill that can be learned" (2012, p. 198). The answer to this seems to be given in Sanchez et al. who argue that "being a good mentor is not necessarily an inherent skill" and cite Athanases and Achinstein pointing out that "good mentors are developed through conscious, deliberate, ongoing learning" (2006, p. 3). In addition, "just as having good subject knowledge is not enough to be a good teacher, so being a good teacher is not enough to be a good mentor, it requires additional skills and knowledge" (Malderez and Bodóczky, 1999, p. 18). Continue reading

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The Warwick ELT, an ELT-based ezine run by a group of MA ELT students in the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, promotes informed discussion of developments in ELT and draws attention to research and innovative practices related to English language learning and teaching and teacher education.

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When you're learning a new language, authentic materials can be quite scary and off-putting. While this is true for all skills, such as reading a newspaper or trying to maintain a conversation with a native speaker, it's particularly true when it comes to listening. When turning your ear to an authentic radio programme, TV episode or eaves dropping on a conversation in a café, it can be so hard to make heads or tails of what's being said.

This is because listening is live: the words are spoken and then are gone again in a split second. You don't have the option to go back and look at the words again, like in reading, or check that you've understood it correctly, like in speaking. Listening happens in real-time and you've got to get it the first time, otherwise you might not get it right at all.

Listening is a challenge for language learners of all levels. However, where higher level learners can manage to understand a lot of what they hear, lower level learners are lucky if they can pick out a word or two from what must seem like a sea of noise.

Listening isn't easy for lower levels, which is why we often use specially-made materials for these levels. Such materials often take the form of dumbed down texts, with high frequency words, clear pronunciation and a slow pace. Of course, the pedagogical justification for this can be found in theories of learning, such as Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.

However, despite the methodologically sound reasons for simplifying listening texts, is there any justification for exposing lower level learners to authentic listening materials? Keep reading to find out... Continue reading

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When you're learning a new language, authentic materials can be quite scary and off-putting. While this is true for all skills, such as reading a newspaper or trying to maintain a conversation with a native speaker, it's particularly true when it comes to listening.

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September 23, 2019 · 11:12 am
This is a guest post by Gabriella Lawson, Teacher Developer for Monash College English Language Centre. Gaby is responsible for helping to develop teachers' classroom delivery through designing and running professional development and observing and feeding back on teaching practice.
Our main focus is always on teaching and helping our students, so it is sometimes easy to forget that in order to get the best out of our students, we need to get the best out of ourselves. Professor John Hattie has said that one of the reasons Growth Mindset may not have made an impact on student results was a lack of teacher training. It becomes a bit like 'do as I say but not as I do' if the school has a Growth Mindset policy, but the teacher hasn't fully understood how that works in practice yet.

Growth Mindset could give us some much needed answers about why our students are not motivated. In English language teaching, we see some students giving up who believe they are not good at English. We see students avoiding speaking in class due to a fear of mistakes. Other examples are students who avoid going to free extra workshops even though they need help. That's why we need to train teachers to develop a growth mindset about their own teaching. After all, what teachers believe about learning has a big influence on what students believe about learning.

Mistakes are how we learn. Brain plasticity means that as we form new neural pathways there will be misfires; recent research tells us that our brains are more likely to remember and correct a mistake if we have positive feelings about the lesson. Similarly, teachers are more likely to take feedback if they have positive feelings about their observation. If teachers aren't worried about losing face, they are more likely to take risks in the classroom or ask for help when they face a challenge instead of suffering in silence until the complaints roll in.

The first step is to see observations as professional development, so the aim is for teachers to choose something they'd like to get better at. The second is to stop thinking of observations as 'teacher observations' but to think of them as 'lesson observations'. If teachers feel they are being evaluated as a person, research supporting Growth Mindset suggests that any negative feedback could result in a crisis of confidence. I think a lesson is a piece of work, like an essay draft, we often teach the same lesson again and again, course after course: it is in a constant process of refinement and development. When the lesson is observed, it is under construction, so there will be parts that are working well and parts that could work better. Observation feedback needs to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson not the teacher.

Debate about what is good or bad teaching is very subjective, you can avoid this by looking at strengths and weaknesses against a set of criteria. This is why it is important to use something like the BALEAP Competency Framework for Teachers of Academic English to give feedback with e.g. No.7. Student autonomy - has the lesson demonstrated that the teacher has integrated tasks which develop learner autonomy? To what extent did it work? How could it have worked better?

Lesson observations are a great opportunity for learning what growth mindset means in practice. When teachers can separate their sense of self from their teaching, they can reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson more objectively. If we apply Growth Mindset to the process of developing teachers, it is more likely that 'sticky' Growth Mindset behaviours will be passed on to our students, also as a bonus, observations will be much less stressful and more productive for everyone.
Gabriella Lawson
September 16, 2019 · 10:30 am

Growth mindset has become something of a buzzword over the last few years. While you would have to have been living under a rock not to have heard the term, you may well not be entirely sure what it means (and you wouldn't be the only one, as we shall see).

What exactly is growth mindset?

It all started to hit the public consciousness with a piece of research done in 1998 by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller, who divided a group of 10-12 year olds into two groups. Both groups were told that they had done well on a test, but the first group were praised for their intelligence, while the second group were praised for the effort they had put in. Dweck and Mueller subsequently found that the first group didn't want to take any risks that might make them look less intelligent, while the second group kept trying hard and therefore actually did better. The second group had more of a growth mindset.

If you decide that you are naturally bad at something, you may feel this is fixed, and therefore not even try, whereas in most cases you could improve through effort. Equally, if you are told you are naturally bright, you may shy away from trying anything difficult in case you show yourself up by failing. Therefore it is important to praise students for effort rather than for intelligence.

For a more in depth explanation, take a look at this video of Carol Dweck.

I think most teachers would recognise the truth in this, and the idea has been pretty enthusiastically received. However, more recently there have been a number of articles and research studies stating that growth mindset 'doesn't actually work.'

Why might people think it doesn't work?

First of all, the key ideas are not always very well understood. Sometimes teachers have interpreted it as ' if you believe you can do it, you can'- which is self-evidently nonsense. Or 'everyone can do everything brilliantly if they just try hard enough'- also rubbish. Everyone can get better at something through practice, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily ever be great at it. Growth mindset isn't about wishful thinking.

Secondly, telling students about growth mindset or that they should have a growth mindset, is not the same as actually changing their mindset. Read this great article about that (thanks Gaby Lawson for sharing it with me). People can definitely change, but not because someone else tells them to. Beliefs about ourselves are usually very deeply engrained, even in children, and they don't change overnight or because other people want them to. We also have to take into account the messages our students are likely to be getting at home, such as the parent who says, 'Oh, you get being bad at maths from me.'

And a recent survey of teachers in the USA found that while 98% of teachers felt that growth mindset was a good thing, only 50% knew any strategies aimed at encouraging it. So, clearly we need to think more about how to help students (and teachers) develop it, rather than just exhorting them to put in more effort or think positive.

For the next blog post on ELT Resourceful I have invited Gaby Lawson, Teacher Developer at Monash College, to talk about her work on applying Carol Dweck's research to teacher development.

April 16, 2019 · 12:39 pm

In this lesson plan designed for the British Council Teaching English site, we explore the topic of creativity and innovation. This lesson was devised to mark World Creativity and Innovation Day on 21st April. However, it could be used at any time of year as this is not specifically mentioned.

The lesson begins by looking at what is involved in being creative, trying to expand this beyond the usual areas of art or creative writing.

The students then do a reading activity where they match the headings to each section. They then identify the synonyms which will have enabled them to do this task and focus on the idea of avoiding repetition. They read the text again and discuss which ideas they personally find most useful.

The lesson finishes with a creativity task, followed up by a final discussion.

Aims:

Encourage students to think about their own creativity and how they could develop it further

Expand students' vocabulary and ability to avoid repetition using a range of synonyms

Provide reading and speaking practice around the topic of creativity and innovation

Age/Level:
Teenage learners at CEF level B2

Time:

50-60 minutes

Materials:

The lesson plan and student worksheets can be downloaded here

January 14, 2019 · 10:58 am

A free downloadable lesson about Sophie Scholl, a young German girl who took the brave decision to stand up to the Nazis, during World War II. The lesson could be used to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, or at any other time of the year.

The lesson starts with a couple of lead-in discussion questions and then students watch a short trailer for a film about Sophie Scholl. Note that the film is in German with English subtitles. In this lesson the video is only used as a lead-in, the main input is in a reading text.

After watching the video, the students read the text to check their ideas. They then carry out an exam style note completion task, before matching some possibly unknown words in the text with their definitions.

The lesson is aimed at B2/C1 students.

To round up there is a final discussion task.
Download lesson plan PDF here: elt resourceful - Sophie Scholl and The White Rose
Filed under Exploiting authentic reading materials, Exploiting authentic recordings and videos, Vocabulary

October 22, 2018 · 1:47 pm

In this lesson plan designed for the British Council Teaching English site, students read a first-person account by a person who stammers, about how he would prefer people to respond when he does so. After some discussion about the topic, the lesson goes on to focus on some different grammatical structures to express preference and sometimes annoyance: would rather/sooner, would prefer, wish. There is some practice using sentence transformation (as found in FCE) and then some more personalised practice.

Aims:

To help students understand more about stammering and how (not) to respond when someone stammers

To practise reading for specific information

To be able to use a range of structures for expressing preference and/or annoyance: would prefer, would sooner, would rather, wish.

Age:

Adults and older teenagers

Level:

CEF level B1+/B2 (especially useful for Cambridge First Certificate preparation)

Time:

45 minutes

Materials:

The lesson plan and student worksheets can be found and downloaded here

Filed under classroom ideas, Downloadable lesson materials, FCE, Uncategorized

October 2, 2018 · 10:36 am

Considering that our brains are the key tool for learning, it is surprising how rarely teacher education focuses on neuroscience. Education is full of vague statements about only using 10% of our brains, or using the right or left brain, or being a kinaesthetic learner, but are these really based in science?

Friday 5th October 2018 is World Teacher's Day and to celebrate I presented a free webinar as part of the British Council's 5 on 5. In my session we looked at what recent research has to tell us about learning, looking specifically at motivation and memory, and how to apply these findings in the classroom to help students learn more easily and effectively.

You can watch a recording of the webinar here

In this lesson plan designed for the British Council Teaching English site, we explore the topic of vitiligo, an autoimmune condition which causes some people to lose pigment in their skin, and look at how attitudes are changing towards what does or does not make someone attractive.

This lesson was devised to mark World Vitiligo Day on 25 June. However, it could be used at any time of year as this is not specifically mentioned.

The lesson begins with students looking at a photo of a young woman with vitiligo and discussing their reactions to the photo. They then go on to read about a model with vitiligo, Chantelle Brown-Young (also known as Winnie Harlow- pictured above), and discover what makes her special. The lesson reviews a range of tenses that might be used in a biography of a living person and looks at how to organise such a text, before the students go on to write their own.

Aims:

To encourage students to question their perception of what is beautiful and become more tolerant of difference

To practise reading for specific information (true/false)

To revise a range of tenses that students should know at B1 level

To help students structure and write a biography-type text

Age:

Adults/older teenagers

Level:

CEF Level B1 (intermediate) or strong A2 (pre-intermediate)

Time:

45-60 minutes

Materials:

Teachers notes and student worksheets can be downloaded here.

Filed under Downloadable lesson materials, Reading, Writing

Speaking in English is something that many students find stressful or anxiety provoking. They can fear making mistakes, failing to understand the person they're speaking too, or simply drying up. So shouldn't we try to make speaking activities as stress free as possible?

There are certainly benefits to making sure students are well prepared, that they have the necessary language, that they have a clear idea of what the task demands. However, there are also some good arguments for not trying to remove all stress, and even adding some pressure at times
Read the rest of the article here
Filed under classroom management, motivation, neuroscience, Speaking, Teaching methodology

March 28, 2018 · 10:50 am

Most spiders have four pairs of eyes, which enable them to see what is happening all around them. And most teachers can only wish they had the same ability.

Good teachers do appear to have 'eyes in the back of their heads' though. They seem able to sense not just when a student is confused or off task, but even the moment before they are about to go off-task. This ability is sometimes referred to as 'with-it-ness', a term coined by the educationalist, Jacob Kounin (1977). Through observing many different classes, Kounin came to the conclusion that the most effective teachers were able to pick up on quite subtle changes in their students' emotions and behaviour and respond quickly and effectively.

More recently, Robert Marzano (2003) wrote a summary of more than 100 experiments designed to find out which classroom management techniques caused the biggest decrease in disruptions. He looked at explaining and negotiating rules, relationships between teachers and students, rewards and punishments and what he called 'mental set'. This last was a combination of awareness, or with-it-ness, and a conscious control over how the teacher responded to a disruption.

He found that, by quite some margin, mental set had the biggest positive effect, reducing the number of disruptions by 40%.

What Marzano refers to as mental set could equally well be called mindful awareness, meaning that a more mindful teacher can expect a considerably less disruptive classroom, and by extension, his or her students can expect to do better overall.

Kounin, Jacob S. (1977) Discipline and Group Management in Classrooms. Huntington, N. Y

Marzano, R (2003) What works in schools: translating research into action, ASCD

If you're interested in mindfulness, check out my new site www.life-resourceful.com

Filed under mental set, Teaching methodology, Uncategorized, Working with groups

March 26, 2018 · 11:40 am

Every teacher recognises the concept of the intermediate plateau.

Students at intermediate, or upper intermediate level start to feel that they aren't making real progress anymore. They just don't feel as if they're getting significantly better, despite putting in plenty of hard work.

Feeling this way can be pretty de-motivating and it's one of the key reasons why learners often give up at this stage.

In this post for the British Council Teaching English site, I explore how recent findings in neuroscience can help us motivate our learners to go beyond the plateau.

Click here to read more.

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Full of tips and ideas for creating ELT and ESOL resources

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Dear teachers!

It is with great pleasure that I write my first post in this blog. Since I started teaching, I have been developing creative worksheets and board games to bring fun to my students. Now, I intend to share my work with all of you to spread fun all over the classrooms! I hope you enjoy it!

We must not forget what Walt Disney once said:

"Adults are only kids grown up, anyway!"

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Dear teachers! It is with great pleasure that I write my first post in this blog. Since I started teaching, I have been developing creative worksheets and board games to bring fun to my students. Now, I intend to share my work with all of you to spread fun all over the classrooms! I hope you enjoy it!

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Almost everybody needs to save money, so I thought this lesson plan may come handy.
Topic: Taking extreme measures to save money and saving money in the household bills

Aims: Debate the best and worst ways to save money through analysing a humourous text and watching a video.

Materials: Presentation, Timeout article and Youtube video

Worksheets: Article1 - ways to save money & Videoactivity - ways to save money

You can use the presentation here

Lead-in: Discuss Rita Rodney's quote. Ask students: How do you save money? What's the most extreme or embarrassing thing you've done to save money?

Pre-reading task: Show collage of 5 pictures and tell them: You are going to read an article where some Londoners share the most extreme things they have done to save money. Can you predict some of the things they did by looking at the pictures?

Talk about the picture from the article. How can students relate the picture to the heading of the article?

Reading for gist: Ask students to read the text quickly, without focusing on single words or expressions. Ask them the questions.

Answer key: a) False b) True c) False d) True

Reading for specific information: Read the text thoroughly and ask the questions.

Answer key: a) 70p pretzel and free coffee b) 30 minutes c) Answers vary d) To save up to move to Manchester. e) Answers vary f) Answers vary g) Answers vary

Pre-listening task: Show them the pictures and ask: What are the best ways to save money on your utility bills, phone, TV and rent?

While-listening task: Tell them that they are going to watch a video on how to save money on your monthly bills. Ask them: Have they mentioned any of the tips discussed in the previous task?
Post-listening tasks:

1. Students watch the video again up to 2:48 and fill in the sentences. Answer key: a) pricey b) Binge-watching / a little bit / hundreds of dollars c) willing to / satisfied d) apps / track / monthly e) When it comes to / homeowners

2. Students watch the video from 2:48 and answer the questions. Answer key: a) pre-paid and family plan b) they can get tax deductions for your phone expenses c) Housing d) It may bring substantial discounts e) answers vary f) answers vary g) answers vary h) answers vary

Focus on Grammar: May, Might and Could for giving suggestions

Answer key: Top-down ( 5 ) ( 4 ) ( 1 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 )

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Almost everybody needs to save money, so I thought this lesson plan may come handy. Topic: Taking extreme measures to save money and saving money in the household bills Aims: Debate the best and worst ways to save money through analysing a humourous text and watching a video.

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This post is largely about different types of mind maps and their value to both their creator and reader. Mind mapping has played a large part in the diploma journey for me this past year, and I'd like to just outline some of what I understand mind maps to be, and their value for learners.
Revision Mapping
At their simplest, mind maps are a means of organising information, and I first started using them solely for this purpose, during my pre-course reading for my diploma course.

Initially I used them to summarise and organise what I was reading into a more visual form to enable me to refer back and quickly locate information. What I found was that the process of organising the information also served as a form of revision, both in re-presenting the information, and in that the tie spent colouring/shading allowed me to further process and consider the information in a relaxed state. Let's call this form of mind mapping ' revision mapping '.
Reflective Mapping
Taking this a step further, as opposed to just summarising and organising what other people were writing, I then started using mind maps as a means of answering questions and brainstorming.

This is a particularly interesting process for me, in that the nature of writing in this medium seems to allow more of a stream of consciousness than formatted text, which I believe places a (subconscious?) pressure the writer to craft the text into something more clearly (and traditionally) structured.

Mind mapping, on the other hand seems to express an internal dialogue, and the writing within it is very much a process, one thought leading to another. As this form of mind mapping begins with a question or a point for consideration / exploration, and is very much concerned with one's own reflections, let's call it ' reflective mapping '.

This approach is something that I found particularly suited me in reflecting on my observed lessons during my diploma course. The format allowed me the freedom to explore my thoughts in response to the lesson at the same time as illustrate the connections and relationships between various aspects of what I was discussing.

But the freedom from traditional structural restraints that this medium allows, raises important questions about the relationship between writer (or creator) and reader. How lucid are reflective mind maps for the reader? Is the written text less opaque?

The gravity of the answers to these questions entirely depends upon who the mind maps are created for. Are they created for the reader in order to communicate and/or explain a concept? Or are they solely for the purpose of the creator, as a process in themselves, and/or to serve as a visual and written record of an experience?

I would say that the reflective mind maps I've created during the course - especially those that follow observed lessons - are for both myself and the reader. They are simultaneously a means of reflecting on a process and experience for my own development, and a means of communicating those reflections to the observer. My identification of the reader - the observer - is an important point. While primarily my reflections are to support and record my own development (be they in the form of mind maps or solely written text), there is always some awareness - no matter how small - that they will be read by one of my tutors. Thus, my reflective mind maps for my observed lessons assume that the reader, having observed that lesson, has more understanding of the points I discuss than an outsider might.

Reflection is about consideration; it's about thinking deeply; it's about revealing the nature of something. My reflective blog in its entirety is both a record of my journey and a part of the journey itself.
Thought Mapping
Returning to mind mapping, the third type I want to identify are created for the creator - not as a finished product (although the aesthetic can often be quite pleasing), but as a practice in themselves. A journey of discovery.

Nick Sousanis (2015:70) said 'we draw not to transcribe ideas from our heads but to generate them in search of greater understanding'. This, for me, has perhaps been the most poignant element of the diploma course. Beginning with my investigations into the impact of metaphors on elements of teaching, and moving on to the use of graphic frameworks in the classroom, my journey has largely been concerned with how metaphors (text based or visual) can trigger, influence and reveal concepts and ideas in learning.

For the materials module I decided to keep a 'map', as opposed to a notebook, and as the module went on my notes became more and more visual. The space that the paper allowed enabled me to illustrate connections and links between different areas and aspects of what I was thinking. The note making process in itself is interesting - different people choose to record different words for different reasons. But more interesting, for me, is the visual element.

Parts of this (I call it my 'materials map') began with a doodle, an unfocused, diffuse thinking, pen to paper activity. But the doodles in themselves then triggered further thoughts, or questions, in relation to the topic.

As a mind map this may be interesting for a reader, but is arguably far less transparent than written text. It presents options about where to begin, and thoughts often articulated so briefly that they may be open to interpretation. But for me this is far more representative of the inner workings of my mind than the more readable reflective mind maps above - and certainly more representative that the revision mind maps. Let's call this type ' thought mapping '. Despite the potential lack of lucidity in thinking maps, I include this one here in more detail, for a number of reasons.

Parts of it may be of interest to the reader - and more comprehensible to those that know me.

Some of the detail demonstrates more clearly the point I make about doodles and drawing serving to reveal and trigger further thought.

It's a part of my process, and thus a part of my blog

Each of the three types of mind maps I've identified: revision, reflective and thought mapping - has a value to the creator and the reader, in varying ways.

The use of visuals in ELT is something I've been interested in for a long time, and at the beginning of the diploma course was an area I identified as wanting to explore further. I couldn't have predicted the direction my thoughts and explorations would take, and it's both exciting and rewarding to observe how my own learning processes have informed my specialised interests in teaching methodologies and techniques.

The most exciting thing that's emerged for me during this process has been my interest in the use of learner generated visuals as a means of exploration and discovery, and thought mapping plays a large part in this. Learner generated visuals and ways in which we can support learners in conceptualising language is an area I'm keen to explore further.

Encouraging learners to create their own, personalised, visual representations can be a powerful way to explore and evaluate language, enhancing interest and motivation as well as aiding retention, processing and comprehension. I'm in the process of putting together a workshop session on this topic, which will explore a variety of practical activities for helping learners to conceptualise language through visual representations, from graphic frameworks to visual metaphors, using a range of media. I also want the session to address learner inhibitions, demonstrating that artistic skill is not a prerequisite for exploring the non-verbal background of language.

Sousanis, N. (2015) Unflattening. London: Harvard University Press. p70.

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This post is largely about different types of mind maps and their value to both their creator and reader. Mind mapping has played a large part in the diploma journey for me this past year, and I'd like to just outline some of what I understand mind maps to be, and their value for learners.

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This is one more post in my series of posts about the EVO 2017 session on teaching listening. In this post I want to summarize one more issue that was raised during the session: the use of authentic materials with lower levels.

Below you'll find some of the ideas and experiences that the teachers participating in the session shared:

1. Watching short clips for fun

2. Using songs

3. Grading the task by using the material as a warmer or a lead in

4. Micro listening: focus on grammar

5. Vox pop videos for word hunt or micro listening

6. Watching the video without the sound

7. Some thoughts on the role of assessment and a case study: following a news story

8. Authentic listening (and speaking) out of class

But first, let's look at some pros and cons of using authentic materials with lower levels.

A lot of the session participants voiced concerns about using authentic materials with lower level learners, such as:

it takes a lot of time to find extracts that lower level learners would have any chance of coping with;

even with these extracts, the learners are often frustrated that they don't understand much;

one often hears 'grade the task not the text'. But what are some examples of graded tasks? And won't it happen that we've graded the task, but the learners fail their 'inner task' of understanding more or less everything, and still feel frustrated?

So do lower level learners need to work with authentic materials at all? Here are some reasons why they do:

the learners might be exposed to authentic materials outside class (especially in ESL / business Engish settings, but also on the Internet and while they travel) - they need to prepare for that in the safe classroom environment;

coping in some way with authentic materials gives tremendous sense of achievement to lower level students

using authentic materials in class will give the learners the courage to try to 'get out there' and start practicing out of class, which is great for language acquisition. This will be especially useful if we discuss with the learners specific ideas where they might find suitable materials and what they could do with them.

So what are some sources of lower level materials, and how can we use them in class?
1. Watching short clips for fun

Oksana Kirsanova, an English teacher from Russia, encourages her learners simply to watch very simple funny videos like the one below.

The video could be shown in class or shared with the learners to watch at home. The learners watch for enjoyment - Oksana sets no task. If the video contains a lot of dialogue, she finds a version with Russian subs.

This is a very simple way to introduce the learners to authentic materials. You probably know a lot of good videos already (who hasn't shown of We're sinking at some point in class?) but it's worth building a bigger collection and showing/sharing the videos regularly throughout the course. One good source of such videos is funny commercials. There are lots of compilations on YouTube - if only some commercials in a compilation are appropriate, use TubeChop.com to isolate and share only those bits you want to share (here's an example of a clips isolated with TubeChop).

2. Using songs

This can be extremely motivating for learners, especially teens (but not only)! There are lots of songs that are suitable for lower levels because the pronunciation is very clear. Again, it's worth building up a collection to use throughout the course (or Google some ready-made collections, like this one). There are two challenges: doable tasks and finding songs that are relevant for the learners.

Some ideas for tasks:

Svetlana Bogolepova (Russia) got her learners to listen to Yesterday by Beatles and clap every time they heard the word 'yesterday' - which is a very simple activity that encourages the learners to notice the words they know in songs. I think this kind of activity could be a great lead-in (or warmer / filler) to some topics dealt with at Elementary level (e.g. adverbs of time or past simple).

We got more examples of tasks to be used with songs from this article by Nik Peachey on A framework on planning a listening skills lesson (scroll to 'Applying the framework to a song'). Some of the tasks that Nik offers are:

listening to the song and deciding if it's happy or sad;

listening and ordering jumbled up lyrics;

listening and correcting mistakes in a summary of the song pre-written by a teacher.

Regarding the question of finding relevant songs, I'd predict this would be a real issue with teens, who might not be very motivated by having to listen to, say, Abba! I think the best idea with learners who feel strongly about this is to involve them in creating/maintaining a list of songs with clear pronunciation. The learners could be encouraged to maintain a Padlet.com board like this one curated by Teaching English - British Council.

3. Grading the task by using the material as a warmer or a lead in

One of the concerns that the participants of the EVO raised was that the learners are bound to understand little in authentic materials, which will frustrate them. One way to help learners feel more OK with the fact that they don't understand everything is to use the material not as the main listening text in the lesson, but as a warmer, setting a task that the learners could cope with.

E.g. with the following video the learners could

watch the video and guess the topic of the lesson (food)

watch the video and note down all foods they could see

a word hunt activity: watch the video and note down all food-related vocabulary they heard someone say

4. Micro listening: focus on grammar

This is something I love doing with my lower level students: using video compilations that show lots of examples of just one grammar point, like this one:

I normally do this as a part of a grammar lesson, asking the learners to fill the gaps the transcript:

1. Spider-Man ________ hero.
2. ______ ready? ______ born ready.
3. A hundred years ago, ______ one and a half billion people on Earth.
4. Exactly! ______ a worker, but now _______ war hero!
5. Oh, right! _______ my sister.
6. But ______ young and proud!

You'll find the end of this exercise and a lot more links to such videos in this blog post.

A big issue is that these videos come with hard-coded subs. I dealt with this simply by dragging some kind of window, e.g. an open notepad document, over the subs area.

Another issue that one session participant raised was that these extracts are decontextualized. I think that that's not much of a problem, because the visual element is so rich it provides micro context - notice how the feeling that one gets watching these videos is very different from if you were listening to the extracts.

5. Vox pop videos for word hunt or micro listening

Another source of videos that are ideal for word hunt or micro listening, because they naturally provide multiple examples of the same language feature, are so called vox pop videos (videos in which people in the street get asked the same question - normally there are two or three questions per video).

I've found several sources of such videos:

Speakout video podcasts for all levels, including Starter and Elementary, freely available on their site. For example, the learners could watch the following video and note down all family vocabulary they can hear (word hunt) or count the number of times the word 'my' is used (this could lead to a micro 'pronunciation for listeners' activity, as 'my' is often pronounced as 'mu'):

Real English videos uses the same idea. E.g. in this video people in the streets say how old they are - the learners could listen and note down the numbers they hear

Vox Pop International, an authentic YouTube channel, also contains some videos suitable for lower levels. E.g. watching this video the learners could note down all adverbs of frequency they hear:

If you are subscribed to onestopenglish, they recently created Live from London, a great collection of such videos with worksheets and transcripts. Here's a sample video, with ideas how it can be used with Pre-Intermediate learners and higher.

If you want to try how listening to such videos feels, why not try this video in Mandarin Chinese shared by Curt Ford, another EVO participant:

What I like about vox pop videos is that they're so adaptable to a range of activities: while they could easily be used for a quick micro-listening activity or a 'word hunt' warmer as described above, they could also be used in the traditional gist - details - follow-up lesson shape:

Stage 1: the teacher board the two or three questions asked in the video on the board, uses tubechop to play the corresponding two or three extracts in which people answer the questions, the learners watch and match the extracts to the questions (Variation for a higher level group: the learners watch and guess the questions).

Stage 2: the learners do a micro-listening (fill in gaps focusing on one grammar feature) or a word hunt activity.

Stage 3: the questions are used for a speaking activity (either in pairs or mingling).

6. Watching the video without the sound

Heather McKay shared an activity that helps the learners to draw on the paralinguistic features in the clip (body language, context, facial expressions, etc). Before watching the clip with the sound, she plays it several times without the sound, for the learners to draft the dialogue/share their predictions with each other.

Here's a sample clip she has used this approach with:

A useful source of such clips is Claudio Azevedo's web sites/blogs: http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/

7. Some thoughts on the role of assessment and a case study: following a news story

Two session participants, Tanja Debevc and Keith Murdiff, reported on their experience of what happens when authentic materials become part of the end-of-course exam. They have experienced a real positive backwash, as both the teachers and the learners want to target the type of material that the learners will be assessed with. A big challenge is, of course, designing graded exam tasks that the learners would cope with. Tanja shared a link to a book which features exam tasks for lower levels based on authentic materials.

What is more, their experience shows that the learners cope with a lot more than we assume they might cope with. In particular, Keith prepares his learners for an exam in which they need to follow a news story. This is why one of the tasks he sets to his learners is to choose a news story and listen to all news they can find related to the story (online and on the radio) over a period of time. Keith's experience is that the learners have a lot of context (as he puts it, context is king), the learners are able to cope with, benefit from and enjoy difficult listening texts and discern a lot of detail. The learners are provided with a worksheet that focuses on story-key vocabulary, main actors and their role in the story, predictions on how the story will develop and a summary of the news. The learners use this framework to follow up on their listening in class, sharing with other class members.

8. Authentic listening (and speaking) out of class

I think that the idea for getting the learners to follow a news story outlined above exemplifies two key ingredients for encouraging listening to authentic materials out or class: the learners need specific ideas what to listen/watch and they need very specific tasks to do while they listen.

Recently I attended a webinar on encouraging learner autonomy by David Nunan in which he shared a number of case studies from a book they'd published a year ago. One of the stories he shared really brought home for me how important it is for the learners to be helped both with the ideas what to listen to and the tasks - I want to share it here albeit this story goes beyond the topics of listening and using authentic materials with lower levels.

In one of the case studies presented by Nunan Mark Cadd, a researcher, was looking into the problem that many students who come back from a summer abroad don't seem to have improved their language skills that much. The reason is often that they tended to spend time with other students studying a language but they weren't interacting with the target community.

So he set up a program in which the learners were required, through 12 contact tasks, to interact with local residents and report her reflection back to the teachers.

Sample task
Task: attend a festival or another public event celebrated in the culture. Speak with at least two members of the culture who are present. Choose two who are quite different, e.g. young vs old, male vs female, etc. Ask why the event is important.

Reflection: Which festival, fair, public event etc did you investigate? What is its history? Did you learn anything meaningful about the culture? If so, what? Did you notice any difference between your style of communication and theirs? If so, what were they? Did you have problems understanding them? If so, what did you do about it?

Reflection needed to be posted to a website available to the teacher and other students.

Cadd found that the fact that they were required to do these tasks was initially challenging and scary for the learners, but over time they found that their anxiety lowered and their confidence, fluency and cultural sensitivity improved. Furthermore, they were able to make connections between what they learned in the classroom and the language they were using out of the classroom.

This story made me think of my recent week-long visit to Germany: I love the language but I didn't practice it at all. I thought how much easier it would be for me to strike up conversations and take advantage of the language environment if I was on a mission to collect evidence for a project - this would not only give me ideas what to look out for and what to talk about, but also serve as a passable conversation starter, and I would feel a lot less self conscious about asking people questions. I think this idea could and should be applied to the wider issue of scaffolding the learners' interaction with the target culture, whether they live in a country where their target language is spoken, or interact with the culture on the Internet.

If you'd like to provide your learners with a 'menu' of resources they could explore out of class, you could find some useful links on this list that the participants of the EVO session complied - but we didn't work on a menu of autonomous activities.
All in all, I'm extremely grateful to the participants of the #listeningEVO for the wealth of ideas they've shared on this topic. There's everything here I could wish for: from really simple activities to help introduce authentic materials and build the learners' confidence, to evidence that it's possible to plunge the learners at the deep end, provided they get scaffolding and that the institution supports this with higher level decisions such as the contents of the exams. Lots to think about and try out in class.

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This is one more post in my series of posts about the EVO 2017 session on teaching listening. In this post I want to summarize one more issue that was raised during the session: the use of authentic materials with lower levels.

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Szkolenia i darmowe webinaria dla nauczycieli języków obcych. Blog o innowacjach i inspiracjach dla edukacji. Pozytywnie zakręcona społeczność nauczycieli

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There has been a lot of interest in the flipped classroom. This past week the Flipped Class Conference occurred at Woodland Park High School in Woodland Park Colorado and during the pre-conference a team of flipped teachers got together to write a three-part article about the nature of the Flipped Class. This first article is an attempt to define what the Flipped Class is and what it is NOT.

The traditional definition of a flipped class is:

Where videos take the place of direct instruction

This then allows students to get individual time in class to work with their teacher on key learning activities.

It is called the flipped class because what used to be classwork (the "lecture" is done at home via teacher-created videos and what used to be homework (assigned problems) is now done in class.

But from our perspective, as successful flipped teachers, we believe it is so much more. We also realize there is a lot of mis-information about the Flipped Classroom and quite a bit of controversy about whether or not this is a viable instructional methodology. Thus the purpose of this article is to list out what we believe it is and what we believe it is not. The Flipped Classroom is NOT:

A synonym for online videos. When most people hear about the flipped class all they think about are the videos. It is the the interaction and the meaningful learning activities that occur during the face-to-face time that is most important.

About replacing teachers with videos.

An online course.

Students working without structure.

Students spending the entire class staring at a computer screen.

Students working in isolation.

The Flipped Classroom IS:
Video Montage from Conference Below Jon Bergmann is one of the first teachers to flip his classroom and has recently co-authored a book on the the Flipped Class which is to be published by ISTE press. He is the Lead Technology Facilitator at the Joseph Sears School in Kenilworth, Illinois.

Jerry Overmyer has teaching experience in secondary and college mathematics. He is the coordinator for MAST WebConnect, and provides expertise on quality resources for teachers and students in mathematics and science. He is the creator of the Flipped Class Network.

Brett Wilie is a secondary science teacher from the Dallas, Texas area. Brett has been an educator for 13 years and has been a Science Department Chair for the past 5 years. He has recently been nominated to the "20 Educators to Watch Project" and was recently a presenter at the Flipped Class Conference.

A means to INCREASE interaction and personalized contact time between students and teachers.

An environment where students take responsibility for their own learning.

A classroom where the teacher is not the "sage on the stage", but the "guide on the side".

A blending of direct instruction with constructivist learning.

A classroom where students who are absent due to illness or extra-curricular activities such as athletics or field-trips, don't get left behind.

A class where content is permanently archived for review or remediation.

A class where all students are engaged in their learning.

A place where all students can get a personalized education.

In the upcoming second of three articles featured at The Daily Riff tomorrow, we will discuss more in depth how to go about flipping the class and the stages involved in doing so successfully.

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The Flipped Class: Myths vs. Reality - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

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There has been a lot of interest in the flipped classroom. This past week the Flipped Class Conference occurred at Woodland Park High School in Woodland Park Colorado and during the pre-conference a team of flipped teachers got together to write a three-part article about the nature of the Flipped Class.

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This series of postings are the result of a training presentation I was asked to deliver for Moroccan teachers of English in Kinitra on 15th December 08.

To prepare the session I looked back at many of the postings from my blogs over the last 18 months and thought about some of the changes that have been taking place in the way online video sharing has developed.

I've split the materials from the session into four sections.
These are by no means conclusive. With the spread of broadband access the potential for education and for language teaching and development and autonomous teacher development is huge, but still as yet largely under exploited as the discussion that followed my session highlighted.

Some of the potential problems we highlighted were:

Inappropriate content

Dead links

Teacher preparation time

Blocked sites

Lack of connectivity

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading this series of postings, which are in main part a summary of my work in this area over the last 18 months, and that they give some insight into some of the potential and a few of the ways we can overcome the problems. If you have experienced other problems, by all means leave a comment.
Nik Peachey

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Online Video: What does it have to offer teachers and learners?

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This series of postings are the result of a training presentation I was asked to deliver for Moroccan teachers of English in Kinitra on 15th December 08. To prepare the session I looked back at many of the postings from my blogs over the last 18 months and thought about some of the changes that have been taking place in the way online video sharing has developed.

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Turn to Your Neighbor: The Official Peer Instruction Blog

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Flipped Class Tool and Resource List from Turn to Your Neighbor

We will keep a (clearly very incomplete) list of tools and resources we use and/or discover relative to flipped teaching here. Help us grow this list using the form at the bottom of the page. We try to emphasize free tools on this page. There are many paid, inexpensive tools that we are big fans of including Screenflow (screencasting software) and Learning Catalytics (classroom response and assessment system).

Turn to Your Neighbor! blog.peerinstruction.net - tons of practical, evidence-based help with flipping using innovative methods check out these in particular

Hundreds of Tips on Flipped Teaching and Peer Instruction

Some people who do cool stuff with flipped classrooms

(very incomplete list in no order, please feel free to send suggestions - find others at flipped learning network and peer instruction network)

Eric Mazur, Harvard professor, flipping with Peer Instruction, Project-based Learning, and Team-based Learning

Julie Schell, Harvard researcher, studies, speaks and writes about innovative flipped classrooms, founder of #flippedtip series and Turn to Your Neighbor. Read more about Julie at www.julieschell.com

Jon Bergmann, Aaaron Sams, Ramsey Musallam leaders of the flipped learning movement

Brian Bennett, creator of #flipclass chat

Gregory Green, school principal who flipped his entire school

Lorena Barba, Professor flipping university classrooms

Robert Talbert, Professor, writer of Casting out Nines, flipping his class with Learning Catalytics

Kari Arfstrom, executive director of the Flipped Learning Network

Jennifer Ebbeler, Professor at University of Texas, Austin, flipping a huge Classics course - writes an awesome blog about innovative teaching and learning.

Cynthia Bailey Lee and Beth Simon out of UCSD, launched Peerinstuction4Cs - an extensive and incredible resource specifically for using Peer Instruction in Computer Science.

Methods

What it is is: Think-Pair-Share is a collaborative learning technique introduced by Frank Lyman in the 1980s (see Lyman, F., 1987, Think- Pair- Share: An expanding teaching technique: MAA-CIE Cooperative News). It involves posing a question to students in class, having them think about their answer individually and then sharing their response with a neighbor.

Why TTYN likes it: Think-Pair-Share is a central feature of Peer Instruction. It's easy, requires no technology, and can help boost activity in class within seconds.

Social Networks

What it is: The official social network founded by Julie Schell and Eric Mazur for current and future users of Peer Instruction. Read more about the Network here or join here.

Why TTYN likes it: Because innovation, in teaching or elsewhere, rarely happens in insolation. Use the network to connect, share, and learn with other educators across the globe.

Software

What it is: "Educreations is a global community where anyone can teach what they know and learn what they don't." It is an interactive cloud-based whiteboard to be used on iPad. You can record your lesson as you write on the whiteboard with voice annotation and then publish your recording on the web in a matter of seconds.

Why TTYN likes it: Recommended to TTYN by a reader, who reported that she appreciates that students must log in to Educreations to view the videos, which provides her with a roster of who has completed assignments.

What it is: NB is a social annotation tool. It allows instructors to upload reading assignments in PDF format and then transforms the reading into an object where students and course staff can highlight important passages, pose and answer questions, and write commentary. Take a guided tour of NB here.

Why TTYN likes it: In flipped classrooms, we feel strongly that students need to be just as actively engaged outside of class as as they need to be in class. NB allows instructors to engage students beyond the passive activities of simply watching a video lecture or reading a document.

What it is: A free tool from Utah State University Center for Innovative Design and Instruction "that creates a syllabus in native PDF format" with a unique learning objectives portion that maps to Bloom's Taxonomy. Requires Adobe Reader.

Why TTYN likes it: Makes it easy to build learning objectives into your syllabus. Here is a video tutorial on how to use it.

What it is: PeerWise is a educational social software tool which allows students to write their own questions and share them with peers. From the PeerWise website: "Students use PeerWise to create and to explain their understanding of course related assessment questions, and to answer and discuss questions created by their peers."

Why TTN likes it: PeerWise helps teachers flip their classrooms in innovative ways. The system gives students the opportunity to think about subject matter in the way an instructor must - posing interesting questions about a topic AND evaluating answers, logic, and reasoning to those questions among their peers. And it is free. Search #peerwise or @peerwise to see what students and teachers are saying about the tool. Peer Instruction Network members, including Simon Bates at UBC, have used PeerWise with great success.

What it is: Many teachers are interested in flipping their classrooms by putting lecture content online for students to view, and review, at home. A free tool I've recently discovered is called " Showme " -an "interactive white board" on an iPad (yes, and iPad is required). Showme brands themselves as "The Online Learning Community," and on their site you can see hundreds of examples of how teachers are using Showmes to create online tutorials or lessons.

Why TTYN likes it: Some teachers are taking the ideas behind think-pair-share and Peer Instruction to new levels using Showme, giving students opportunities to create with subject matter, work together, and teach one other using the cloud-based app. See this video introducing Showme.

What it is: "Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Why TTYN likes it: While the features are limited (you can only use with a class of 50), Socrative is extremely quick to set up and easy to use. Watch a video here.

What it is: From Sophia's website: "An education platform that is customizing the way students learn by offering more than 28,000 tutorials on a variety of academic topics taught by thousands of teachers. This vibrant, first-of-its-kind learning community helps teachers enrich their classrooms, empowers students to learn in their own way, and provides a pathway to an affordable college degree."

From Turn to Your Neighbor Reader, Carrie: "I have my entire course here with videos, text, screencasts and tons more. Embeds with others and can embed google forms and educreations right into tutorial. Also offers professional development - FREE - on flipping. "

Why TTYN likes it: We love resources that teachers find helpful for flipping their classrooms. Read more about Sophia here.

What it is: Ted-Ed is Ted's new venture where anyone can create free lessons using Youtube videos and embed assessments at the end of the lesson as well as provide additional resources for the "student." Take a guided tour of Ted-Ed here.

Why TTYN likes it: Allows anyone, anywhere to easily create a free lesson and build an end of lesson assessment that is tagged to the related portion of the video. Don't like the Youtube videos that are out there? Make your own through some kind of personal capture or screencast software (e.g. Screenflow, Camtasia, etc) and then publish it to Youtube! You can see statistics on how many people have viewed your lesson and their responses to your assessment questions.

While Ted-Ed is still in Beta and needs some instructional design updates (for example, it is not intuitive to a user what "flip this lesson" means. It means you would like to make your lesson, so you are going to take that video and then make your own introduction, assessments, and resource page) we were able to create a lesson in less than 10 minutes with no previous experience using the cloud-based software. Click the image to the right to check out our Ted-Ed lesson or click here.

What it is: A video hosting site that has a cool analytics heatmap that can tell you portions of the video where students paused, or rewatched or skipped ahead. Other software programs do this as well, such as Echo 360.

Why TTYN likes it: Free hosting for 5 videos for life. Easy to read heatmap packed with tons of useful information.
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Have a cool tool or resource for flipped classrooms?

Comment here or fill out this form to submit a cool resource:

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An Annotated List of Flipped Class Tools and Resources

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We will keep a (clearly very incomplete) list of tools and resources we use and/or discover relative to flipped teaching here. Help us grow this list using the form at the bottom of the page. We try to emphasize free tools on this page.

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Mikołajki 2018 z Head Full of Ideas ⋆ Head Full of Ideas

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Pierwsze miejsce do odwiedzenia to to, w którym właśnie się znajdujecie, czyli blog! 🙂 Wczoraj pojawił się na nim nowy wpis o tematyce świątecznej - Santa's getting ready for Christmas . Bardzo mikołajkowy, ale do wykorzystania na dowolnej lekcji przed Świętami.

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Blog | Karolina Lubas - English Teacher | Kolejna witryna oparta na WordPressie