‘I’ve given up marking – and so should you’ Teachers are marking too much. Or, at the very least, we’re doing far too much of the wrong sort of marking; the sort of marking that keeps pencil cases open, and mouths and hearts shut. We’re spending too much time ticking, flicking and dicking about in the children’s books and it simply isn’t fair. On us or on them. According to the Department for Education’s Workload Challenge report of 2015, the majority of teachers believe that marking is something that takes “too much time”. Yet, worryingly – given this rather large allocation of time – teachers deem marking to be the second most “unnecessary and unproductive” task they undertake; narrowly beaten only by data entry and analysis. Pupils beam with pride as I listen to them read aloud a piece of work This perverse situation has presumably been caused by the more earnest among us wrongly interpreting “feedback” as “spending loads of time writing comments in books that kids will spend no time reading”. It does not have to be this way. 1.
Schools Often Fail to Educate, Support English-Language Learners - Learning the Language Schools across the United States often provide substandard instruction and social-emotional support to the nation's English-language learners—and fail to properly train the educators who teach them, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds. Noting that limited English proficiency remains a substantial barrier to academic success for millions of children in K-12 schools, the study explores how under-resourced schools and under-prepared educators can hinder efforts to help those students learn and master English. The committee behind the report—consisting of a who's who of experts on language acquisition and educators—also explored the struggles of specific populations of English-learners such as those with disabilities, who are less likely than their native English-speaking peers to be referred to early intervention and special education programs. Here's a link to the full report. For Further Reading on This Topic:
A Guide to Use Blogs to Help Students Achieve Fluency You have met Veronika Palovska on my blog before. She is an online teacher with a unique niche: she teaches writing to online creative entrepreneurs and teachers at DoYouSpeakFreedom.Com. Writing is essential when it comes to communication, and it takes up a part of our time as teacherpreneurs. Today I wanted to introduce a slightly different angle for my posts. I asked Veronika to share with us how you can use blogs in your online teaching to enhance your students’ language immersion and boost their fluency. I was born in a non-English speaking country. When I was learning English in school, textbooks were the only medium we had access to. When the teachers wanted to pepper our lessons with some “real-life” English, they brought in a Beatles song, a British newspaper clipping, or a Mr. Remembering this feeling, as a teacher, I don’t let my students get used to the luxury of English textbooks and EFL learning material. Nowadays, the possibilities are endless.
A27. Comprehensible Input: What Teachers Can Do - Empowering ELLs Did you get to read about Ayaka’s story in the previous article? It illustrates how Entering ELs can engage in critical thinking activities even though they are completely new to English. In Ayaka’s case, we focused on what we could do to help her learn and ignored all the rest until later. As I worked with Ayaka, I only had two priorities – first develop comprehensible input, then foster engagement. This is teacher speak for: Students can participate if they understand the content and the instructions. My first priority was to help Ayaka comprehend the instructions so that she can engage with the content. The Diagram The diagram below, divided into two sections, is the visual embodiment of these two priorities. The turquoise section denotes ways students themselves can demonstrate understanding, known as comprehensible output (Haynes, n.d), which I’ll explain in the next post. Comprehensible Input: What Teachers Can Do Direct Instruction Joint Construction Mr. Student: It stands for noun.
25 ideas for using WhatsApp with English language students | Oxford University Press Philip Haines is the Senior Consultant for Oxford University Press, Mexico. As well as being a teacher and teacher trainer, he is also the co-author of several series, many of which are published by OUP. Today he joins us to provide 25 engaging and useful classroom activities for language learners using WhatsApp. There are three main obstacles to the use of technology in ELT. First is the availability of technology and internet connection in the classroom. Second is teacher techno-phobia. WhatsApp or similar messaging services can help overcome these obstacles. Many self-confessed, techno-phobic teachers that I know use WhatsApp on a regular basis in their private lives, so already feel quite comfortable with it. Here are 25 ideas of how to make good use of WhatsApp for language learning. Like this: Like Loading...
Three Things Top Performing Students Know That Their Peers Miss | MindShift | KQED News Every class has students who excel and those who don’t. The reasons behind academic performance are myriad, but when Douglas Barton and his team at Elevate Education set out to study and benchmark the most effective practices used by top students in Australia, the U.K., South Africa and the U.S. they found three common practices. The company has used its findings to coach students on the most effective study strategies. Barton says 50 – 90 percent of students say IQ has the biggest impact on their ability to get good grades. The other reason students often give for not succeeding at the level they want is that they aren’t working hard enough. One of biggest differences between top students and everyone else was that when they study, they take practice tests. Lastly, Barton says when the best students make studying schedules for themselves they first include things they like to do on their schedule and then work study time in after.
Effective Revision Strategies I led the 15 Minute Forum tonight, as a late replacement, for a member of staff who was ironically leading a Year 11 Revision session. The focus of the session was to share some effective revision strategies which could be used by teachers with their students. I wanted to start by actually thinking about the word ‘revision’. to correct faults and make improvements in (a book etc)to study one’s previous work, notes etc in preparation for an examination etcthe act of rewriting something However, should this only happen at the end of a two-year cycle? to look over, study, or examine againto look over, study, or examine againto go over or restudy material In essence, the same meaning, but when I use the word reviewing students see this as a more frequent episode rather than revision at the end of the course. As a school, we are basing our exam preparation programme around the work of the Learning Scientists and particularly their ‘Six Strategies for Effective Learning’. Like this:
Response: Understanding the Benefits of a Student's Home Language (This is the second post in a three-part series. You can see Part One here.) The new "question-of-the-week" is: What is the role, if any, of an ELL student's home language in the classroom? In Part One of this series, Melissa Eddington, Wendi Pillars, Tracey Flores, Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo, and Mary Ann Zehr offered their thoughts. Today, Rosa Isiah, Tan Huynh, Karen Nemeth, Sarah Thomas contribute their responses to the question. Response From Rosa Isiah Rosa Isiah, Ed. "It is hard to argue that we are teaching the whole child when school policy dictates that students leave their language and culture at the schoolhouse door" (Cummins, 2005). The number of English Learners has dramatically increased over the last two decades. Home Language and Academic Identity The home language of our English Learners plays a major role in the development of their academic identity and overall educational success. Culture and Home Language: English learner Assets Home Language in the Classroom