Human beings are not designed to sit still all day. Thousands of years ago, on the plains of the Serengeti in Africa, people walked 10-20 kilometers every day (Medina, 2014). It has only been...
Learning students’ names is hard. And I’m not particularly good at it. And my teaching situation makes it challenging. My students have maybe 20 teachers. Some of these teachers are young. Some are old. Many...
Most teachers would agree that ideally only English should be spoken in English class. However, in practice this is often more easily said than done. It’s easy to see why students struggle – young...
Pronunciation is like an art to me, and I’ve always enjoyed it. It is like learning how to play guitar, where we have to figure out when to use different picking strategies or strumming...
On the first day of school in Busan, South Korea, I stood at the front of my class five minutes before the bell rang waiting to greet my new middle school students. After seven...
“Daddy, play it again!” my four-year-old daughter said. “The same song? Again?” (We’d already listened to it nine times in a row.) Later that night, we would read the same storybook three times straight....
I use Steps to Success to motivate and track student achievement in a variety of areas.If you can measure it, you can track it using Steps to Success! Here, I’ll use the example of...
The real St. Patrick is shrouded in a deep mist (like many of his followers). Legend has it that he brought Christianity to the Emerald Isle while simultaneously banishing snakes. Both these are clearly...
It’s a great pleasure to share affective listening activities here at the Teaching Village. I call them affective listening activities because emotions are very present in the movement, suspense, and laughter they produce. These...
Note from Barb: 25 years ago, John F. Fanselow published Breaking Rules, encouraging teachers to really see what was happening in their classrooms, and then considering alternatives. John’s work had a powerful, positive influence on...
