Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Meaning before details

...or the importance of schema/background activation. Someone on a listserv I subscribe to recommended John Medina's Brain Rules blog. I am so impressed with it, I want to share it here. His 12/30/2009 post, Meaning Before Details, is an important reminder that one should never introduce new information without first giving students a framework on which to organize it. Attaching something new to something old somehow makes it "stick" better. The schema video on their blog (and on Youtube) really brings this home. The first time I watched it, I didn't have a clue what they were talking about. With the schema activation they provide at the end, I understood it perfectly! What are the implications of this for language teaching? The first step of any lesson plan template is "schema activation" or "activate background knowledge," but too often I've thought of this step as a means of merely getting students' attention or getting them interested in what was to follow. I have a tendency to speed through the schema activation in order to get to the real lesson. I had never understood the connection between schema activation and memory by association. I am fascinated with how much is being done lately to apply the findings of brain research to classroom practices.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

How I spent my Christmas vacation

I suspect I'm not the only teacher for whom "vacation" means a time to rethink, reorganize, clear clutter, and make a new and better plan for the coming semester's classes. One habit I'm trying to break is the photocopying/handouts syndrome. It is costly in terms of both time and the earth's resources. When there are extra copies left over, it seems wasteful to just recycle them, so I file them away for future use, but there are problems with this system. First, by the time the topic comes up again, I'm likely to have forgotten about the file. Second, I find I quickly run out of places to keep those files. Third, and most significant I think, is that if I do remember I have the file, I discover that I want to tweak the handout to make it better, so the copies I've so carefully saved end up in the recycle box after all. It would have been better to start with recycling the extra copies or, even better, to not have made them in the first place. Less paper, less clutter, less waste. It's an ideal to work toward.

On the electronic front, I have to confess that I have not yet experimented with the Wii remote faux Smart Board (see previous post), but I did revamp my list of ESL links for students. Instead of having them on a page of our family website, I gave them a home of their own at esolfavorites.com. I've retested all the links and added new ones I've been keeping on a "to do" list for the site, including links to sites for speaking and pronunciation that I hadn't included before. I especially like the Google translation feature that I incorporated on the home page, along with a short summary of my current philosophy of how people learn languages.