Tuesday 20 March 2012

Day Two


Day Two of the online conference experience, and I have whiled away the evening flitting around the British Council Glasgow Online website, and collecting various interview nuggets which I plan to apply to my own classroom. Here they are:

Adrian Underhill’s “portable” mantra: “See what’s going on. Do something different. Learn from it.” An appealing idea, but Adrian himself was quick to point out its limitations. How do we see what is really going on in our own classroom?

Alan Maley’s ideas for teaching creative writing to learners of all levels. It’s a common assumption that creative writing should only be tackled with higher level learners, (it’s certainly one I’ve been guilty of making) so it was really nice to hear Alan’s suggestion for a simple metaphor poem which can be attempted with lower level learners. He suggests writing two columns of nouns. Learners then match the nouns from each column together to create metaphors and then write a line to explain each one, e.g.
Love is an egg,
Be careful you don’t drop it.
Freedom is a flute
I look forward to trying this out!

Finally, I really enjoyed hearing from Adam Simpson, blogathon winner. His tips about blogging have given me food for thought, as well as pointing me in the direction of his erudite (and very entertaining) blog:  http://www.yearinthelifeofanenglishteacher.com The blogathon sounds like fun - I'll be keeping a look out for a repeat event!