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Building Community Doing the Learning Style Inventories with the kids also serves as a community-building activity because that is exactly what the learning styles inventory does, and often in just a few days. You will see the difference when you do this activity properly. Getting Started First you need an inventory. You can find them […]

When you tell a student, “Wow! you tested out as a highly visual learner, so obviously this class is going to be more of a challenge for you than a highly auditory learner like Mikey over there! I’m glad I know this now. Since you tested as high visual/ kinesthetic I am going to try

The learning styles message arrives within a context of what is best for the class and not what is best for any one student who happens to be good at doing worksheets and who thinks that – just because they dominate their other classes because they are good memorizers – they get to dominate your

Some other points to reflect on about learning styles inventories: 1. You can learn lots of valuable information about your class makeup. In one small class of about 15 students made up largely of boys, 70% of the class was tactile but only two of them presented that way – the others had learned to

Here is a question about what to do about teaching grammar when the kids will have to matriculate next year to a grammar teacher: What resources would you recommend for teaching grammar? It’s nearing the end of the year and part of me wants to switch gears and give students some explicit grammar instruction in

Got a few questions this morning –  Q. I’m still having issues going from a character to a story. I feel pressed to develop a problem and a solution on the spot.  A. I think that such pressure is self-induced. I never put any pressure on myself to create a story because most of the

Al Franken as Stuart Smalley famously said this memorable line on SNL years ago: “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!” Why did this particular line reverberate with so many people? What in it spoke to us as a truth? In my own situation, in spite of the way my

Now that summer is approaching, my prayer for all of us is that we stop trying so hard for stories, stop trying to be entertainers, and finally lift the heavy wooden yoke from our creased and tired shoulders, rest deeply this summer and come back without the yoke on our shoulders. Being well prepared in

We need to learn to teach our students with love.  We also need to assess them in terms that convey approval and love. In the past, we assigned value to them for how many words/verbs they “knew”. The kids who “knew” more were sent the message that they were somehow better and more deserving of

Accept that you may not get a problem going in a tableau. It’s not a big deal. If you have to control everything, if you have to know what the problem is before the story starts and if you have to force it into existence in the story, you will not access the magic of

We are not deliverers-of-instructional-language-services. Teachers who mistakenly think that their job is to deliver language services – well-built and well-planned lessons that divide the language into little pieces all nicely wrapped up in a bow – are missing the point about how languages are acquired. Like the three white guys in the image below, they

If you have done any work with communicative language instruction before, you probably have heard the term “Circling”. Here are my thoughts on it: Circling doesn’t work very well. It’s an old technique that has lost its shine. If you feel that your recent communicative teaching has been boring, look to Circling as a possible