The Ideal Teacher’s Teaching Reflections – Issue 2
Teaching Reflections from The Ideal Teacher’s Week – Week Beginning 23rd April 2018 In my current school, students don’t get a choice of the language that they take in Year 7 and they must continue with this same language (French, German or Spanish) all the way through to GCSE. This causes resentment towards the subject in some students, as well as a lack of motivation to work, since they haven’t had the choice in opting for this subject – a great challenge for any teacher! My mission, as The Ideal Teacher, is to be a teacher who engages all pupils in all lessons, gets them excited about language learning and…
The Ideal Teacher’s Reflective Teaching – Issue 1
Reflective Practice in Teaching This week was the first week back to school for The Ideal Teacher after the Easter holidays and although it went quickly, it was pretty intense! I came straight home on Monday at 5pm and went to sleep – not the ideal start to the week, but it shows how much and how quickly you can get out of the swing of your normal routine. Despite the shock to the system, I enjoyed my lessons and made some progress in my aim to becoming ‘The Ideal Teacher’ this week. If you’re interested in my journey of reflective practice in teaching, please read on! If reflective teaching…
Emojis Vocabulary Builder – Condensed Version
The Emoji Mindmap Trend Last year, I saw Dannielle Warren using the Emoji Mindmap that she had put together from a Google image, which included a massive number of emojis to annotate on to recap and improve vocabulary, the idea for which she got from Miss Meyrick. As soon as I saw this imaginative teaching resource, I felt my students would absolutely love to try it to revise vocabulary. It was an ‘on trend’ vocabulary builder idea which could also be combined with spontaneous writing/speaking skills. As with many other creative teaching ideas found online, I put the Emoji Mindmap on my to-do-list to help student improve vocabulary and kept…
3 Free Language Learning Apps To Improve Vocabulary
How To Learn Vocabulary with Free Language Learning Apps – A Review/Comparison ‘Quizzes should be learning experiences for our students and we can make them into powerful ones’ (Fink, 2003) With the advent of the internet, it has never been easier to learn languages online and with this in mind, I wanted to put together a review of three of the most useful free quiz based learning apps and websites for the classroom and home that I have found and/or used. I recommend them when my students ask me how to learn vocabulary for French or German, or request a language game to help improve vocabulary or for grammar practice.…
How To Ask Questions Language Edition
The art of asking can be quite a daunting task for many in their own language, let alone a foreign language. This post aims to discuss why we need to know how to ask questions, provide a comprehensive explanation of how to ask questions in French, Spanish, English and German, as well as suggest some helpful and innovative resources for practising the art of asking questions and replying to them in French, German and other languages. Why Do We Need To Know How To Ask Questions? Questions help make sense of the world, they empower people as learners and are pivotal for solving problems, finding solutions and enacting change (Godinho,…
Behaviour Management Strategies For New Teachers
Behaviour Management – Issues When I was doing my QTS training, one of the worries I often had was about classroom behaviour management strategies. I had loads of questions: ‘what if the students don’t listen?’ and ‘what if I can’t keep control of the classroom?’ This made me anxious every time I went into a lesson with a trickier class. Behaviour Management – Is There Really A Magic Answer? Even after reading all the literature I could find on behaviour management strategies by Bill Rogers, for example, and doing external behaviour management courses lead by training providers as part of my CPD, I couldn’t really find a magic answer to…
Retrieval Practice Grids in MFL
The Practice of Retrieval ‘When we think about learning, we typically focus on getting information into students’ heads. What if, instead, we focus on getting information out of students’ heads?’ (Agarwal, 2017) Whilst I feel the quotation is useful in introducing retrieval practice, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: ‘the process of getting something back from somewhere’, it’s a process teachers do automatically on a daily basis. This could be in the form of recaps at the beginning of lessons, through questioning or activities during the lessonas well as in a mini-plenary or a final plenary. It is also the idea of summative assessments at the end of a unit or in KS4, for GCSE…
