A few days ago*, I visited Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. When I arrived, the wind was bitingly cold, and the lake shore was obscured by thick flurries of snowflakes. I was there to see the place where Henry David Thoreau, renowned writer and naturalist, had spent two years, two
One great thing about TED Talks is that they cover a huge variety of interesting topics – big ideas that will engage both you and your learners. But sometimes, they can be fairly technical. Some teachers hesitate to bring technical material into the classroom because they feel they don’t have
If you’re familiar with materials from National Geographic Learning you’ll know that they include a lot of images, texts and topics about people and places from different countries. For this reason, you can often exploit the cross-cultural aspects of the material and help your students build their intercultural awareness alongside
Thank you for those who participated in the first month of the Life around the World Contest! In last month’s photo, artists perform the fire dragon dance during a celebration for Spring Festival at Wuhan Happy Valley, Hubei, China. Dragons are a symbol of China and are believed to bring good
“Now is the time that we need to rethink what we mean by the word ‘literacy’.” – Professor Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer What does “literacy” mean? Traditionally, it’s the ability to read and write, but in today’s interconnected and high-tech world that definition may no
Welcome to the second post in this series. In the previous post we looked at definitions of creativity and talked about the importance of developing creative skills in our classrooms, not only for our learners but also for teachers! In this post I’ll be looking at a framework you can
Bringing some creativity into the classroom is a great way to motivate teenagers. It allows them to express themselves; it encourages independent thought and it can often give you, the teacher, a little time off. It’s important to prepare students for any creative activity. As a writer, I know only
You may be asking why a whole post is devoted to the subject of multi-sensory learning when the other posts in this series have included two or three factors that influence memory. The answer is because multi-sensory learning really implies experiential learning, which accounts for much of what we learn
Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley explore questions about vocabulary that give you more feedback from your learners. Perhaps the most common kind of question that many teachers learn to ask during initial training is Concept-Checking Questions (CCQs). The basic idea is that after explaining what something means, teachers need to
Before taking a critical look at critical thinking, it may be useful to come up with a clear definition of the concept. One way to think about it is to focus on the type of thinking required: “Critical thinking is thinking that is clear, logical, open-minded, and based on evidence.”