Session 259: Celebrating Magical Moments in the Classroom. This #ukedchat was hosted by @NVandenAbeele with the focus on those ‘magical moments’ in the classroom. Inspired by the quote (see image), the session explored how you cope when lessons go ‘off plan’, and you run with what is capturing the interest of your pupils. In particular, the session asked: What are conceivable positive consequences of deviating from an original lesson plan? What drawbacks can deviating from an original lesson plan have? What do you do with lesson plans / lesson notes after a lesson that contains such magic moments? Can these deviated moments be predicted? The Summary The session’s main topic was magic moments, as defined by Jeremy Harmer is his book How to teach English as events that happen in a lesson which the teacher didn’t expect and/but which may well be extremely beneficial for the students even though they weren’t part of the original plan.
In his book, J. Tweet of the Week: Other notable Tweets: Testing & assessment – have we been doing the right things for the wrong reasons? A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition.
I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.William James, The principles of psychology (1890) Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.David Ogilvy Tests are rubbish, right? Most tests are conducted in order to produced summative information on how much students have learned and as such have (possibly rightly) attracted lots of ire. In my post on desirable difficulties I reported the following nugget: We think we know more than in fact we do. This is something I’ve only just begun to research and experiment with, but the implications are fascinating. They are: Guess what?