Teaching strategies to motive your learners.
Flexibility and adaptability are among the most important skills any teacher should possess to foster learners’ curiosity and cognitive engagement. When I started off as an ESL teacher, I used to plan every moment of my daily lessons. My unit plans were like a puzzle as every activity, assignment, test, or exam was well-thought-out and […]
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Inquiry-based learning is a student-centered pedagogical approach offering students a rich and meaningful learning experience to foster cognitive engagement. Are you looking for new approaches that would reach all learners in your class? Are your students rather unresponsive when they need to complete assignments in the activity book, and you have run out of ideas […]
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Social distancing, self-isolation, school closures, and uncertain times have quite shaken up our lives. Undoubtedly, it is not easy to adjust to an unexpected crisis. Suddenly transitioning from classroom teaching to remote instruction while homeschooling our own children and taking care of our family are significantly demanding and overwhelming tasks. Although spending time and taking […]
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Using technology to create an alternative workspace for learners has some challenges as teachers may sometimes have limited resources, other times learners are not as tech-savvy as we expect them to be, or we are simply afraid of stepping out of our comfort zone to experiment with alternative learning and assessment tools. However, integrating technology […]
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For years, I have toyed with the idea of replacing my Halloween-themed TV show episodes I usually give around Halloween with activities offering more rigour and creativity. I have always thought of Halloween as being the best day to reward my students with a TV show, however, I have decided to do something different with […]
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On the first day of school two years ago, I asked my Grade 10 ESL learners what aspect of English class they considered the most challenging. The answer was writing. They found writing difficult because they were short of ideas. Indeed, to have enough ideas, ESL learners need to read and collect information from various […]
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I always try to find new ways to inspire my students. That is why I have chosen to include more video-based lessons in my curriculum. Since I started using TED talks, short videos and TV shows, they have literally transformed my ESL classes. My students pay more attention in class and their performance is a […]
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What Is Differentiated Instruction? Today’s inclusive multicultural classrooms challenge teachers to respond to learner differences by creating a meaningful learning environment. Therefore, we, teachers, need to use various engaging teaching and learning strategies to allow our students to acquire information and showcase their talent, creativity and learning in multiple ways. Differentiated instruction involves both selecting […]
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The flipped classroom is a new pedagogical or instructional model that inverts the so-called traditional teaching method in the classroom by offering students the possibility to watch course content at home to get ready for the class. Switching from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered teaching practice The flipped classroom instructional model puts students in the center […]
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What is Picture Walk? Picture Walk is a reading strategy that enhances students’ comprehension of a text or story before reading it. With the teacher’s guidance, learners preview the text or the story in order to make predictions, anticipate the events, make connections to the text and infer what the story is about. Through Picture […]
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