Classroom interaction blog posts

Sugata Mitra, ed-tech evangelist

Saturday - April 5th, 2014
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/145

Sugata Mitra argued with evangelical flourish that, given the right resources, children will learn without schooling. He said that the right resource has now come into existence and is potentially available to every child: the internet. To support this argument, Mitra described what have become known as “the hole in the wall” experiments.

  • General
  • Classroom interaction
  • Materials design
  • Motivation

Kathleen Graves, teacher's teacher

Saturday - April 5th, 2014
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/145

Kathleen Graves’s title contained the paradox that in teaching, you sometimes have to be less efficient to be more efficient. In a time in which testing and accountability have become paramount, in an attempt to cut out the dead wood in education, we have neglected the learner and a broader vision of what learning is for.

  • General
  • Classroom interaction
  • Motivation
  • Syllabus design

Danny Norrington Davies focuses on process before product in learner talk

Sunday - April 14th, 2013
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
IATEFL-Liverpool - hancockmcdonald.com/taxonomy/term/159/feed

Danny, an IH teacher trainer in London, began by suggesting that after classroom speaking activities, many teachers make the mistake of feeding back only on task achievement, rather than getting up close to the processes and strategies by which the learners reached this outcome.

  • General
  • Classroom interaction

Nicola Alonge on critical thinking through questions

Friday - March 15th, 2013
Posted by: 
Annie McDonald
- hancockmcdonald.com/blog.xml/147

Nichola began her presentation by getting us to respond to different questions about an Antonio Lopez Madrid painting to illustrate the difference between knowledge-based questions and those which encourage critical-thinking skills at different levels.

  • Classroom interaction

Tim Murphey on appreciative inquiry

Sunday - February 24th, 2013
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Tim Murphey on appreciative inquiry - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/tim-murphey-appreciative-inquiry

Tim Murphey began what was a very feelgood session by recommending an action log at the start of each lesson. You put up on the board a list of all the activities you're going to be doing, and as the lesson progresses, the learners write how they felt about each activity. The teacher may go further by collecting and 'publishing' these logs so students can see each other's comments.

  • General
  • Classroom interaction

GRETA Granada (Spain): Christopher Roland on discipline

Sunday - October 21st, 2012
Posted by: 
Annie McDonald
- hancockmcdonald.com/blog.xml/147

Christopher opened the session by imploring management to make sure that the spirit of an institution is behind its teachers so they know they have supported when it comes to issues of discipline. He then gave an entertaining and thought-provoking plenary on how to deal with challenging teaching situations and defuse tension in classrooms with primary, teenager or adult students.

  • Classroom interaction

IATEFL Hungary: Margit Szesztay on the power of questions

Sunday - October 7th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
- hancockmcdonald.com/blog.xml/147

As well as her plenary on teacher development, Margit Szesztay presented this very practical, classroom-focussed workshop on harnessing the power of questions. First of all, she asked participants to simply formulate one question we would like to ask, and then ask it to as many other participants as possible.

  • Classroom interaction

Classroom Codeswitching

Friday - March 16th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Mark Hancock presenting in Poland

In this short video, Mark explains the reason for code-switching between Polish and English in an information gap activity. For more on this topic, see the article "Behind Classroom Code Switching: Layering and Language Choice in L2 Learner Interaction".

  • Classroom interaction
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