What my two-year-old has taught me about language learning – Part 2 | ETp Learning a language is a complex process and the ease with which nearly every child becomes a native speaker in their language has perplexed many for generations. The child learns to discriminate between the individual sounds of his/her language, identify word boundaries, attach meaning to lexis and acquire the complex grammatical structures, all of which is considered difficult for the second language learner, but yet seemingly effortless to the child. Although there are significant differences between first language acquisition (FLA) and second language acquisition (SLA), I have found through observing my two-year-old daughter’s language development important lessons even for the EFL teacher. In my last blogpost, I looked at the blurry distinction between lexis and grammar, the importance of imitation without fear, and the power of inductive learning and pattern-deduction. Here are two more things my two-year-old has taught me about language learning: 7. 8. Bibliography Yu, C., D.
When Cops Choose Empathy About four years ago, in a city park in western Washington State, Joe Winters encountered a woman in the throes of a psychotic episode. As he sat down next to her, she told him that she had purchased the bench that they now shared and that it was her home. “I didn’t buy the hallucinations, but I tried to validate the feelings underneath them,” Winters told me.
Empathy Is Still Lacking in the Leaders Who Need It Most Many people and a host of commentators instinctively recoiled at the callous management practices described in a scathing New York Times article last month about Amazon. So did Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. In a memo to Amazon employees, he wrote, “Our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.” He’s right, not only on humanitarian grounds but also for reasons that should appeal to a hard-headed businessman like him. At Amazon and other businesses, the “e-word” should be the watchword. For three years my colleagues and I at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism crisscrossed the U.S. and travelled to other nations asking business leaders what attributes executives must have to succeed in today’s digital, global economy. These so-called “soft” attributes constitute a distinctive way of seeing the world. Frankly, when empathy kept coming up in our research, I was surprised. What is empathy?
amazon.co I know it is absurdly early in the year to be choosing the top book of the year, but here goes. I recommend Empathy by Roman Krznaric for both the quality of the content and its importance. Empathy, he tells us, is ‘the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.’ Krznaric rejects the self-interested individualism that has been promoted for over 300 years by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins. He argues that we need to ‘switch on our empathetic brains’ if many of the world’s ills are to be solved. We need to overcome barriers such as prejudice, authority, distance and denial if we are to boost our empathy skills, he says. He utilises some pretty impressive case studies to argue that it is possible; from Oskar Schindler to Beecher Stowe - author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin - to Gandhi and Mandela.
amazon Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baron-Cohen – review The word "empathy" has been in use for little more than 100 years – it was coined in 1909, a translation of a German psychologist's neologism whose literal meaning is "feeling into" – but the concept is an ancient one. A capacity to feel what others feel, to delight and suffer with them, has been long associated with higher modes of consciousness ("The man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures," declares the millenniums-old Isha Upanishad, "knows no fear"). Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, has a particular interest in the nature and functioning of empathy. He has written two previous books on the subject, Mindblindness and The Essential Difference (in which he put forward the intriguing theory that autism is an extreme form of the less emotionally literate "male" brain).
Empathy In Action: One Teacher’s Story, Techniques and Tips | Start Empathy Did you ever say that you would never grow up to be like one of your parents? Then years later find that following your passion led to a similar path? Leah Anderson promised herself she would not be a teacher, like her mom. But a year of working for Youth Venture in Los Angeles changed that. Fast forward a few years and Leah is teaching at Voyager Academy, a public charter elementary school in Durham, North Carolina. Voyager is part of a network of Ashoka Changemaker Schools recognized for teaching skills that include teamwork, empathy, critical thinking, and imaginative problem solving along side reading, writing, and arithmetic. An important part of this is project-based learning. Constructive Critiques. Creative Collaboration. Taking Action. What has project-based learning and seeing empathy in action taught Leah? 1. 2. 3. You never know where following your—or your students’—passion may lead.
Practical Pedagogies 2015: Ewan McIntosh Ewan's Background Ewan McIntosh is an award-winning educator and the founder of NoTosh Limited, based in Scotland, Australia and San Francisco, with a global reputation for researching and delivering new learning opportunities for some of the world’s top creative companies and school districts. The team has a unique ongoing experience in creativity in creative contexts (we work with some of the world’s top fashion, media and tech companies) and research-based learning and teaching development with schools. Ewan is also the author of the new book "How to come up with Great Ideas and Actually Make them Happen" Ewan's Keynote “The Failure Talk”, which sets out how one might deal with the inevitable tension of seeing something new, not necessarily seeing how to apply it, or being provoked with research that conflicts with “what we’ve always done”. Ewan's Workshops Making sense of complex data is another key skill students require for the wider world. Ewan McIntosh: "The Problem Finders"
MacDonald Duck Re-Visited: Implications for Culture, Society and Education | Global Issues SIG This article written by the founding father of our SIG puts ELT today into wider social, economic, political perspectives. It reminds me that my main aim as an educator is to encourage a critical, non-conformist stance in my students. Encourage them to shake off social conditioning, see the world around them with fresh eyes, question taken-for-granted assumptions, and find personal meaning in the Aristotle quotation: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation”.Margit Szesztay Introduction “If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it, the frog will eventually let itself be boiled to death.” In the first part of the paper, I shall focus on the de-humanizing pressures we are all subject to. Part I. Consumerism The urge to consume an ever-increasing range of goods and services in ever larger quantities, and the built-in obsolescence which makes it necessary to replace them ever more rapidly is now such a commonplace that it has come to seem natural.
Your Innovation Team Shouldn’t Run Like a Well-Oiled Machine Most innovation teams inside large companies are set up to operate like well-oiled machines. They move in a specified direction at a predictable speed. Since the early 1900s, this model has been the prevailing paradigm for how organizations are designed and run. The problem is that while this approach enables large-scale production, it doesn’t seem to work for innovation. It wasn’t just random chance that led innovation teams to adopt a certain approach; leaders played a big role in setting those working cultures. Based on our research, there are four conditions that leaders need to put in place if they want their teams to have the same kind of resilience as ant colonies (they do manage to thrive in some of the harshest areas of the planet). 1. Organizations, of course, are not composed of ants. 2. Rich, frequent, and candid communication is also important for organizational teams to find innovations as quickly as possible. 3. 4.
Stop, Start, Continue: Conceptual Understanding Meets Applied Problem Solving I recently became the Chief Academic Officer for the International Baccalaureate (IB) after more than two decades of working in and leading IB schools. In IB World Schools, we endeavor to create internationally-minded young people who, recognizing our common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help make a better and more peaceful world. Just prior to taking this position, I led the intense experiential living and learning of a United World College (UWC). I was part of an intimate and remotely-located community of 160 students who lived on the Vancouver Island site, along with faculty and their families, for two intensive pre-university years of transformational learning. Together, we pursued the UWC mission of making education a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for a sustainable future. Every year we built a community that modeled what all of us wished for in the wider world. What should we stop doing? How might we help to make that happen? Stop rushing.
Fuel Creativity in the Classroom With Divergent Thinking Recently, I showed a group of students in my high school art class a film called Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink), about a seven-year-old boy named Ludovic who identifies as female. Ludovic has an active imagination, but is bullied by both adults and other kids who are unnerved by his desire to wear dresses and play with dolls. The film challenged my students to broaden their understanding of gender and identity and led to a discussion about ways in which our imaginations are limited when we are forced to be who we are not. It also reminded me of other examples in which character is forced to choose an identity, such as the movie Divergent, based on the popular trilogy of novels by Veronica Roth. In Divergent, a dystopian future society has been divided into five factions based on perceived virtues. Defining Divergent Thinking The word divergent is partly defined as "tending to be different or develop in different directions." In the Classroom: Strategies Strategy #2: Let the Music Play
18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently This list has been expanded into the new book, “Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind,” by Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman. Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process. Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). While there’s no “typical” creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. They daydream. They “fail up.”