(by Dr. Alva Lefevre - the "L" in L&M Educational Consulting) I’ve been teaching for what seems to be a very long time. I’ve studied the research, practiced the strategies, and gathered a lot of information about my students. Some things worked and, over time, became part of my repertoire and others fell flat and eventually disappeared. I tried models; didn’t like them; and finally realized that I must redefine the way I teach with each new group of students. I am presently teaching a course titled “Theories of Second Language Acquisition” at the university level and my students often joke that the name alone is enough to put you to sleep. Over the last several years, parts of my course have been moving online making it a “hybrid”, with some sessions taking place on campus and others being in an online format (asynchronous). Embracing technology was not hard. Learning to live with it was another matter. It was already a challenge to get to know my...
One school year has ended and the next is (hopefully after a time of rest) soon to begin. Summer is a good time to reflect upon what worked in my classes and what did not. What will I keep? What will I change? What will I eliminate? What would I like to tweak or try? Reflective practice... is the habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge, technical skills, reasoning, emotions, values and reflection in daily practice for the benefit of the individuals and communities being served. (Epstein and Hundert, 2002) Introduced in 1987 by Donald Schon, the concept of reflective practice is a way for beginning teachers to match their own practices to those of successful practitioners and for experienced educators to reflect on the effectiveness of their lessons and to be aware of the need to change practices and/or direction as their student population changes. As the concept grew in popularity, many schools, colleges, and departments of education began designing teacher educati...
Summer always seems to bring not only a time of reflection but a time of "spring cleaning" and preparing for the new school year. For me personally, it is also a time of packing and moving this particular summer...As I have been sorting and resorting, I decided it was time to add some resources to our blog in order to round out our "collections" for teachers. That being said, I am distracted from our postings on the Common Core, but will be back commenting in future posts. So...some recent additions to the blog include www.wordsift.com under Picture File Cards. Cut and paste a passage and it will lift vocabulary and find sources for images. Great for making chants and poems more comprehensible. Tag Galaxy www.taggalaxy.de/ finds images for you when you type in key words, and don't forget both National Geographic www.nationalgeographic.com and National Geographic for Kids Photo Gallery kids.nationalgeographic/kids/photos/gallery/. Two other recent picture file c...
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