Category: Volume 9 Issue 8

The Optimal Seating Plan? Letting Your Students Choose A Content-Rich Maker Project Authentic materials in the classroom: the advantages Five reasons why feedback may be the most important skill Focusing on vocabulary for academic writing Action research: how it can help your EFL classroom.

How you arrange your seating can be an asset for differentiating instruction. Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City, California, uses different seating configurations for independent work, collaborative work, mini lessons, and large-group discussions. Through scaffolded guidance from their teachers—which includes a personalized learning platform, daily goals, and a culture of formative assessment—students understand… Continue reading The Optimal Seating Plan? Letting Your Students Choose

My job as a makerspace teacher is to create learning experiences that apply what my awesome third-grade students are learning in other classes and help them develop collaboration skills and unleash their creativity. I recently had them create cardboard armor, a learning experience designed to meet the students’ needs to work more thoughtfully and to… Continue reading A Content-Rich Maker Project

In the first part of a new series on authenticity, our regular contributor and Unlock author Lewis Lansford asks teachers to consider the advantages of using authentic materials in the ELT classroom. I asked a dozen teaching colleagues (identified below by their initials) for reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of using authentic materials in the classroom.

Giving effective feedback is a vital part of communication, whether inside or outside the boardroom or classroom. Bob Dignen explains why. Different aspects of communication lay claim to being the most important: listening effectively or building trust, for example. Though these are important, the critical skill for me is feedback, both giving and getting. Effective… Continue reading Five reasons why feedback may be the most important skill

When it comes to helping students with academic vocabulary, the range of words and phrases they might encounter in the course of their academic studies is huge and can be somewhat daunting. So when we were putting together the new Oxford Academic Vocabulary Practicebooks, we decided quite early on that the most useful area to… Continue reading Focusing on vocabulary for academic writing

A classic model of teacher development involves learning about the latest ideas on our practice, and applying them to our classrooms. Action Research takes the opposite approach. In this process we find out what happens in our own classrooms so that we can understand them better and so make better-informed teaching decisions.  In other words,… Continue reading Action research: how it can help your EFL classroom