fourC

Rethinking level descriptors

By seburnt On August 15, 2011 · 20 Comments · In Collaboration, Commentary

The traditional labels used in our industry ranging from Elementary to Advanced beg for a constant myriad of issues to arise for program coordinators, teachers and students. Whenever they come up during a session, it seems like the best solution would be to abandon these labels altogether, but doing so would raise different problems, solutions for which seem to be placing labels. It’s a cyclical conundrum which does not evidently have one nice, tidy fix. Hopefully through some dialogue, we can expose each other to a variety of ways we’ve dealt with the problems.

We are models, a post thanks to @MargaretAtwood

By seburnt On August 10, 2011 · 10 Comments · In Commentary

We learned. We did learn, in a spirit of vengefulness: we would give Mr. Erskine no excuses. There was nothing he wanted more than to get a foot on each of our necks–well, he would be denied the pleasure, if possible. What we really learned from him was how to cheat. It was difficult to fake the mathematics, but we spent many hours in the late afternoons cribbing up out translations of Ovid from a couple of books in Grandfather’s library–old translation by eminent Victorians, with small print and complicated vocabularies. We would get the sense of the passage from these books, then substitute other, simpler words, and add a few mistakes, to make it look as if we’d done it ourselves. Whatever we did, though, Mr. Erskine would slash up our translations with his red pencil and write savage comments in the margins. We didn’t learn much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery.^“1

Reform Symposium is an important conference model

By seburnt On August 7, 2011 · 4 Comments · In Events

Most everyone who reads this blog regularly either went to, presented at or knows someone who was involved with the recent 3rd Reform Symposium (RSCON) from July 29 – 31. Many that don’t populate my local environment. Why is that? Because they haven’t gotten past the idea that professional development only validly happens in face-to-face contexts and/or they don’t have time to learn how to navigate the online system. I don’t blame people for these attitudes: our industry often feeds into it. That’s why we need RSCON.

Tagged with: conferences • reflect

Learner interaction in reading & writing activities

By seburnt On July 31, 2011 · 2 Comments · In Activities

Do your students look forward to skimming an article for its main ideas? No? Shocking. There’s often a couple of hiccups we face with many reading and writing practice activities: they’re not always authentic; there’s minimal interaction between students; they’re not actually practicing reading or writing skills at all.

Tagged with: conferences • Reading • workshops • Writing

Novel in an hour – an #RSCON3 session preface

By seburnt On July 25, 2011 · 7 Comments · In Activities

I was sitting at my desk in the basement of Wetmore Hall, watching instructors before 10AM scrambling through the resource library fixed to one wall of my office when one asked me if I’d read the book she’d planned to use with her students, hoping that I’d be able to tell her the ending since she hadn’t quite finished it overnight. Overnight?! I thought. I’m lucky to finish a novel in a month. Her retort? Her students would complete it in an hour. A novel in an hour? I gasped with disbelief. Yes! She said. It’s a TRIBES activity learnt when doing her Bachelors of Education degree and it’s a wonderful thing for exposure to books, critical thinking and interaction among students.

NNESTs and NESTs are both ok (unless you’re Bob Dylan)

By seburnt On July 17, 2011 · 8 Comments · In Commentary

I hadn’t heard this term until I started reading about it on blogs like Cecilia Lemos’ (@CeciELT). In fact, it’s her post from November 2010 entitled Nothing More… Nothing Less… that inspires my post today. When I dug up this post, it actually surprised me how she introduced it, like admitting to being a NNEST was equivalent to facing the fact that you were addicted to a life threatening drug. Indeed, Ceci had felt ashamed, “felt less of a teacher” and “as if [she] were admitting to a flaw.” Portuguese being her mother tongue, despite years of classroom experience and learning in an English-speaking environment, it kept her feeling separated from and defeated by NESTs. What struck me most of all was this: