Television is an excellent source of authentic and engaging content for your classroom. It’s easy enough to find educational films for your classroom, but the real fun and the real challenge lie in reality TV. Today I’m sharing one of my most popular lesson plans based on the reality TV show Catfish. MTV’s Catfish is…
The affective filter is a psychological filter that, for better or worse, can affect a student’s ability to learn a second language. According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, “affective” means “referring to, arising from, or influencing feelings or emotions.”
Think of this affective filter as a wall; when it’s high, it inhibits learning. When it’s low, the students are better able to learn and acquire new information.
Some surefire ways to raise the affective filter include too much error correction, lack of self-confidence, and feelings of embarrassment or shame. Unfortunately, these are all-too-common phenomena that, when left untreated, can prevent student growth and, even worse, result in a lifetime of distress.
Even if you’ve never heard the term “impostor syndrome,” chances are that you’ve experienced it before, especially if you worked or studied in a high-achieving environment such as a college or university. It basically sums up in psychological terms the phenomenon that takes place when you transition from being a “big fish in a small…
Being a freelance English teacher comes with a lot of freedom. As a freelancer, you are in control of your own schedule, how much or how little to want to work, where you want to work, whom you want to work with, the materials you use, and the type of English you want to teach….
2021, with the world still mostly locked down, looks a lot like 2020. Yes, some economies are opening up more than before, but the majority are still not there yet. These are the times that call for urgency about the values that come from lessons we ought to be living out. Now is the time…
I first started teaching English as a volunteer tutor while studying art history at New College of Florida. Since then, teaching ESL and art history have been intertwined in my life and in my classroom. For me, I can share two passions simultaneously; for the students, fine art helps encourage creativity and critical thinking while…
As someone who just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s New York Times Best Seller Antifragile, I’d like to share ways that we can build antifragility in our students. “What’s ‘antifragility’?” you might ask. As Taleb nicely puts it, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets…
December is here and so are all the winter holidays! Holidays and traditions are a great way to engage your students and bring some variety and fun to your ESL students. This year, I’ve made a completely digital Christmas scavenger hunt. This activity builds English skills as well as digital literacy and research skills. It…
We’re nine months into this global pandemic now, having nearly 60 million confirmed COVID-19 cases to date. It seems the situation is getting better, but have we become better through it? This new normal has challenged teachers to prepare and conduct their classes in new ways. Education in third world countries like the Philippines especially…
With nearly 400 years of Spanish, Japanese, and American colonial history and hundreds of years of trade and settlements of people from places such as China and the Indian subcontinent, it should come as no surprise that the Philippines today is home to a wide variety of ethnicities, languages and dialects, and religious and spiritual…