Writing ELL Stories: Filling the Context/Language Gap

The Matchmaker with the Magic Touch

– scroll down for an explanation of how this ELL (English Language Learner) story came to be –

Young-Il was very happy to meet this matchmaker. As the years passed, he was growing more tired with his mother’s nagging. She never missed a moment to tell him how important it was for him to get married. As his mother saw it, the problem is that Young-ll always had his head in the clouds.  He didn’t take life seriously. She listened to Young-Il talk about his dreams of traveling to far away lands and meeting the love of his life in a remote country.

His dreaming didn’t stop his mother from trying to find him a wife. Actually, it encouraged her. She didn’t want him to leave her. This is why she found JeongAh, the best matchmaker in town. According to her friends, JeongAh had the magic touch. She never failed to make a match. So to set his mother’s worries aside, Young-Il decided to meet her. He had also heard of her special ability through his friends, so Young-Il didn’t mind taking a break from his dreams in order to meet the woman JeongAh would match him with.

This woman was JiMin. JiMin had long, straight, black hair, and she was very slender. She had legs that went on for miles. JiMin was beautiful and also quite intelligent. Perhaps this is why she was so skeptical about the matchmaker. She didn’t really believe her friends when they told her that JeongAh never failed to make a match, but JiMin usually took what anyone said with a grain of salt. She had to see something to believe it. Despite her skepticism, however, she decided to go with the flow. She accepted the blind date, met Young-Il at the café, and waited to see how the night would unfold.

Luckily she hadn’t denied the blind date or she would have had egg on her face. This guy was fantastic! She thought he had a good head on his shoulders. Just because he was a dreamer didn’t mean he wasn’t smart. He was very intelligent, and JiMin knew right away that he would be a sensible father. He would raise their children well.

She also knew she could marry him because he seemed to have a heart of gold. He told her about how he took care of his mother after his father died. He drove her where she needed to go, and cooked meals for her whenever he had the time.

JeongAh had proved once again that she did indeed have the best matchmaking skills in town. JiMin set aside her doubts and fell head over heels in love with Young-Il. He felt the same. Happily, his mother never had to plead with him to get married ever again.

I had three reasons for writing this story for my course participants:

• I couldn’t find a text with the idioms I wanted to use.
• I wanted to teach these idioms because I thought they would work well with the acrostic poem they would write about their partner during the final activity.
• I wanted the participants to realize that there are other ways to learn vocabulary, idioms, and the like without giving them a definition, so I removed the idioms from the text, wrote them on the board, and they filled in the gaps.

How did I come up with a story about a matchmaker? I wrote the idioms on a piece of paper and waited. I knew I wanted to write something that was relevant to their context. Looking at the words on the page, this was the topic that came to mind, and as I found out during our class, it was very relevant. The participants had a lot to say about their experiences with matchmakers. Did you know that if a Korean woman wants to marry a lawyer or a doctor, she can pay up to 100,000won (88.00US) per set up? Compare that to 50,000 twenty years ago. Hmmm, I wonder if those doctors are really worth the price.  Ok, back on track.

Will I write another story when I find myself in a similar situation? Absolutely. It was a rewarding experience. I enjoyed this new writing process (though I need more practice writing fiction), and my lesson aims were accomplished.

Are there other teachers out there writing fiction for their students? Kevin Stein at The Other Things Matter was my source of inspiration. Why not stop by his blog to let him know what you’ve written, and why you chose to write.

Happy writing!

The Laughing Diary Intervention

I just added two new categories to my Feelings & Needs category list (see list on the left): fun and humor. How could they have evaded me for this long?

Just a week ago my sister saw a t-shirt with the word “serious” on it and said I *should buy it. Nothing like a sister to set things straight. It seems that focused attention on all-things-TESOL was starting to take its toll: limited utterances of joy; too many conversations about what’s wrong with the Korean education system; and a vague memory of the term joke. Then the other night I caught myself Googling “Why so serious?“. It was time for an intervention.

PLN to the rescue! It started with Anne Hendler’s self-directed plea for ease and joy in her post Best Medicine, where she put forward a challenge for others to join her in keeping track of things that made them chuckle. If it wasn’t for her, I may not have finally noticed my humor drought.

The ever inspiring and “woopingly” funny Vicky Loras was the first to take up the challenge with a delightful description of family and events that make her smile. Then this afternoon saw two more of our hilarious Twitter friends/colleagues, Kevin Stein and Laura Phelps, list up some items that had me having a healing lol at my desk. Thanks to all this inspiration, laughter came back into my life.

Here are my first picks:

1. Sawyer in “Lost”

When I need a little downtime, I have a few go-to TV series I like to indulge in. I’m now re-watching Lost. Lost fan or not, I think you’ll understand why Sawyer’s one-liners get me all the time.

2. zombo.com

Just click and turn up your speakers. You won’t regret it. Big thanks to Mike Griffin for sharing this with me during one of my bouts of seriousness.

3. Lou and me speaking our household language: Acadian with specially added twists of exaggerated slang, franglais and turns of phrase.

This picture was taken during such a sisterly dialogue:

vargué tight

The words that were uttered for the picture below are what made me vargué tight (Clare Acadian for laughing wholeheartedly). Note: tight is used as an intensifier (see bigtime (adv.) or the synonyms for tight (adv.): securely; soundly.)

H’allons nous gasser tight.

So while searching for videos that could give you an example of what we sound like, I came upon this:

Seeing my family name used for the parody brought a comforting chuckle. Well played (there was a mighty long list of LeBlanc’s in our phone book when I was growing up). I had forgotten how much I loved This Hour Has 22 Minutes, so that was an added laughing bonus.

And through this searching adventure, I remembered this movie: Les gossipeuses by Phil Comeau, filmed in the 70s in my hometown with a homegrown cast.

photo from http://www.nfb.ca

Nothing like the Clare dialect delivered through the lips of a gossipeuse for a good laugh. This is the perfect example of what Lou and I sounded like at times:

• Gossiping with the gals: from the beginning to 4:30
• A little franglais svp: 18:50 – 19:35
• The classic gossipeuse phone call: 40:09 – (especially 41:43) – 42:07  (the woman on the phone, and the main character, used to be my jazz and tap dance teacher back in the day.)

Miss you Lou. Check out her rockin’ blog! Le blog musical.

4. Mullets – Mullets were a big theme on Twitter this week. I had the pleasure of teaching this word to my course participants during a culture class on stereotypes. This was the featured picture:

Enough said.

Hehe…

The Creative Joy of Final Learning Statements

In three days, our training course will be over. In these final days, it’s time for participants to look back over their four months together and reflect on what’s been meaningful and what they’ve learned. To help them do this, I asked them to respond to a list of questions Mary Scholl (SIT teacher-trainer) created and kindly shared with me. Below are a few examples:

• If you were to choose 10 words to describe your experience in the course, what would they be?
• If your experience in the course were like weaving a beautiful cloth, what would be the threads that hold the cloth together?
• How would you explain your experience in this course to a five year old?
• What would your ideal motto be in the future?
• If you had to sell this course, what would your slogan and ad campaign look like?
• Go through all of your journal entries from the course. Choose the ones that are most meaningful to you. Why are they meaningful?
• Make a metaphor for how the course has affected you. Be juicy and deep in your description.

With these questions, they created final learning statements that would then become the front cover of  their learning portfolios. They kept this portfolio throughout my writing course.  I encouraged the participants to be as creative as they wanted, and as you’ll see, they didn’t hold back. During our final learning statement gallery walk (gallery walk explanation coming soon), I was inspired at each turn. I hope you feel inspired too.

Please enjoy the artistic exhbilition of learning!

Privacy tip: Notice the funky, random strips on some of the statements? To keep the anonymity of my participants, I used the smartphone app Labelbox to cover their names.

Grounded in Reflective Blogging

2012 has been an interesting year so far, and that’s putting it mildly. It’s been full of incredible highs, but also a few unrelenting lows. I’ve been going through some difficult personal stuff: existential dilemma sort of stuff. In the last few months I’ve even heard myself say, “The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not that sure of anything.” I felt like I had lost my groundedness. I’m happy to say that at least one foot has now secured itself to the earth.

As a teacher, this feeling just wasn’t cutting it. How could I teach when all I wanted to do was float away? A teacher is supposed to be sure. A teacher is supposed to be a tree her students can lean on: rooted.

I’d wonder, “How did I get here? Why am I letting my confidence slip away?”

Then I remembered my blog. Last year, I wrote a post a week. Monday was my day. I’d start writing in the afternoon and there was no way that post wasn’t going to be published before midnight. — And can you believe this was before I understood how to use Twitter? I only figured out the beauty of developing Twitter PLN (personal learning network) in October 2011! But that’s a story for another time.

I wrote about classroom moments that caught my attention during the week. Sometimes I’d write rigorous reflections à la ELC. Sometimes I’d simply share my thoughts on what a participant said or did. I loved organizing tags and categories, and I found playing with my blog’s layout quite meditative.

My blog was where I grounded myself. It was where I reflected. It was where I explored my beliefs and examined my actions. Via these reflections I was developing an understanding of my teaching and of myself. I was growing confidence.

2012 has not seen me blogging to this degree. For the most part, I’ve been neglecting my blog and tending to other matters.

Then it occurred to me: could it be that by not blogging I was creating more lows for myself? Was there a direct relation between my reflective blogging and the confidence I felt last year? I’ve been fascinated by this theory.

I’ve always said that my reflective practice helped me become a more confident teacher, but here I’ve been, barely writing. Of course, many other factors are surely connected to me losing my footing. But could I not be the subject of my own theory? If one gains confidence through habitual reflection, then wouldn’t the reverse be true?

Well, it’s Monday, and here’s my post. I’m not sure if I’m back like I was last year, but I’d like to try. I posted last Monday, and I’m grateful for the amazing feedback I got. This, and other friendly nudgings, definitely encouraged me to try again this Monday. I’m looking forward to testing out my theory, and seeing if I manage to ground myself again.

Ticking the Native Language Box

This past weekend, over a round table discussion with friends (not necessarily the academic kind), the question “What is a native English speaker?” was thrown into the mix. The talk was inspired by Michael Griffin’s latest post, A letter to Korean English teachers. This discussion reminded me of all the times I had to tick that dreaded box on application forms: identify your mother tongue.

You see, as soon as I ticked that box, I already knew people would approach me with a whole lot of misplaced assumptions: they’d speak to me in French; I’d respond in a standardized version of French speckled with intermittent structures of Franglais and my Acadian dialect; they’d have a hard time understanding me; and finally we’d start speaking English anyway. Why did this happen?

a little history

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post (Practicing Nonviolence in My Mother Tongue Isn’t So Easy), I grew up in an Acadian-French speaking community in Nova Scotia, Canada.  French is considered to be a minority language in this province.

As my grandparents’ and parents’ generations were growing up, they faced confusing linguistic messages.  During the early 1900s officials in the Nova Scotia Department of Education, who were of English descent, created curricula for Acadian public schools that were designed to ‘integrate’ French-speaking children into the dominant English culture (Deveau and Ross 1992, 154).  Deveau and Ross (1992, 155) describe the dualism that my grandparents’ and parents’ generation faced between this school system and their home life:

Acadian children were doubly disadvantaged:  they came to school speaking one language and were expected to learn everything, including reading and writing, in another language.  Their mother tongue, the very basis of their culture, was thus placed immediately in an inferior position.

The regulations of this educational system created immense linguistic alterations for the Acadian community. In 1931 thirty-two percent of Acadians had stopped considering French their mother tongue; then in 1971, 59.3 percent felt the same (Deveau and Ross 1992, 164).  The assimilation was a quasi-success.

But by the time it was my turn to go to school (early 80s), things were changing. I went to a francophone elementary school. When I was in middle and high school, I had the choice to continue my studies in English or French. I chose French.

My elementary school – École Jean-Marie Gay

The community was bridging the gap between school and home. Then finally, in 1996, a decision was made to find a more suitable working balance between both languages, when the *Conseil scolaire acadien provincial (Acadian school board) was lawfully established.  As a result of the unrelenting efforts of Acadian educational and parental organizations, children of Acadian heritage must now be educated solely in their native language.  Children of English-speaking families also have their own schools.

*I’m happy to say that my father was the superintendent of this school board from 2001 to 2006. The story of what he’s done for the Acadian community could be a blog/book in itself. Something I hope to see one day.

Why the Conflict with the box?

I’ve been speaking English my whole life. I don’t remember when I started. I’m sure cable television, the Sweet Valley Twins, Video Hits, and all those rockin’ 80s radio tunes had something to do with this learning. I’m also sure that this, connected to the teasing I got  for the way I pronounced “th” from my English-speaking cousin, and the English classes I had since I was in third grade, made for what I consider to be a seamless learning experience. With this practice and knowledge, I went to an English university, and since then I’ve been living my life in English. When I decided to make English teaching my career, it came with a lot of reflecting on what I just shared with you.

My mother tongue is a dialect. I speak it with family, friends and people in the wider Acadian community. I rarely read French books, but when I do, I enjoy them. Though it would take a lot of work to write a good French essay, I teach an advanced EFL writing course.  When I speak French to francophones from other countries (Quebec included), they hear my accent (stemming from years of living in anglophone communities, and from my dialect) and assume I’m an English speaker. Due to the discomfort and confusion, we usually revert to English.

So now when I’m asked what my native language is, I just tick the English box. I’ve made my peace. It’s just easier. Not just for me, but also for whoever is at the receiving end of that box.

But is this what it’s come to? In order for you to believe my English ability, I have to fit into some box? What’s the criteria for that box? It’s obviously not as clear as you think.

Have you ever felt confused about how to answer when asked about your native language? How have you felt, and how do you respond?

Deveau, A. and Ross S. (1992). The Acadians of Nova Scotia: Past and Present. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing.

Our Reflective Community

You know that feeling when everything comes together at the right moment? I’m experiencing one of these moments right now.

A year ago I was asked if I was interested in organizing a “branch” of the KOTESOL Reflective Practice (RP) Special Interest Group (SIG) in Daegu. I said no. I just didn’t have the space in my life, so I turned down the idea.

Well, last Saturday, with the inspiring support (and nudging) of my friend and colleague KongJu (Princess) Suh, I facilitated our first Daegu RP-SIG meeting. A year after the initial request, the moment was right. There are some things that are just stronger than you, and the energy of the reflective teacher’s community here in Korea is one of these things.

Over a year ago, the RP-SIG was created by Michael Griffin (Mike), Manpal Sahota and Kevin Giddens. Since then, the Seoul RP-SIG, along with Daejeon’s group, has been very successful in raising the awareness of teachers from all professional backgrounds about the concept of reflective practice. Although I’ve supported the SIG by presenting about reflection at a few conferences, the more I heard about what was going on during the monthly meetings, the more excited I got about starting something in Daegu.

what’s the RP-SIG all about?

Seoul RP-SIG meeting (Mike facilitating)

In his article, The Reflective Practice SIG: What Is It? How
Can It Help You?, in the Spring 2012, TEC (The English Connection) News, Mike gives us a clear image of the SIG’s vision.

It seems to me that professional development often amounts to one person at the front of the room telling others how and why they should do something. In the RP-SIG, we try to get away from that and have members come to their own conclusions about their own teaching practices. It was with this vision of professional development in mind that we held the first RP-SIG meeting in February, 2011. The RP-SIG’s purpose is (a) to challenge our perceptions of who we are and what we do, (b) to build strategies to become a more aware educator, and (c) to share and learn through each others’ experiences and beliefs.

Challenging perceptions? Becoming a more aware educator? Sharing and learning through experiences and beliefs? Who wouldn’t want to be part of such a rich community? Mike definitely makes a convincing case for anyone who wants to start such a community of teachers.

Princess’ Daegu KOTESOL workshop on how to teach writing to Korean high school students

This community is what my nudger, Princess, was hoping to see in Daegu. One evening in March over dinner — after we had spent a few hours working on the presentation she was going to give on how to teach writing to high school students — Princess shared her dream of starting a group where English teachers could come together and talk about teaching. At this point, I was more keen about the idea of launching the SIG. We talked and got quite excited about it. But we wanted to be sure we could give it our all, so we decided to think it over and make it happen when the time was right. Three weeks ago, Princess called me and the plans for last Saturday were set in motion.

Model of an RP-SIG meeting

Knowing about Mike’s success in facilitating the Seoul RP-SIG meetings, I wanted to follow his model. He shares the meeting’s structure in the TEC News:

A typical RP-SIG meeting consists of  four parts: (a) ice-breaker – an interactive warming up session to break the ice, (b) check-in – groups of 3 or 4 discuss personal reflective goals, (c) discussion – facilitator leads group discussion to promote reflective practice, and (d) check-out – reaffirmation of personal goals and direction. We hope that members can take the ideas, thoughts, and experiences from the meetings and transfer them to their own contexts.

Since it was our first meeting, the nine teachers in attendance checked-in by introducing themselves and explained a bit about why they wanted to be part of the SIG. A few said they felt like they were becoming lazy in their teaching practices and wanted to feel better about teaching.

We then moved into the discussion part of the meeting where I decided to follow the model I had presented about a few weeks earlier (see An Image of Reflection: learning from my RP workshop). In pairs, we each shared a teaching/learning moment and explored it via the Experiential Learning Cycle. Our partner’s role was to help keep us focused by asking questions that pertained to each stage (ie: description stage – How many students were there? How big is the class? Was it a hot day?). Between each stage we regrouped and discussed how we felt about the process. This was extremely rich in that it allowed us to get a deeper understanding of the process while also getting a deeper understanding of our teaching/learning moment.

The meeting ended with the check-out. We made reflection goals for the month, shared them with each other, and decided we would share the results of our goal regardless of whether or not we were able to accomplish it. The important point is we are here to support each other as reflective teachers no matter what the results.

The beginning for us, how about for you?

So this is the beginning of our reflective community in Daegu! I’m very excited to see where we will go, but more importantly I’m very happy to be part of the larger RP community. Throughout its first year, the RP-SIG has been incredibly supportive, inspiring, and motivating. Teachers now have a place where they can share their experiences and expand there ideas in a safe environment.

I hope this post has given you more clarity on what a reflective teaching community can look like. Maybe you are now also inspired to start your own group. The reflective vibe is quite contagious. If you do decide to start a group, let us know! We’d love to help you out.

An Image of Reflection: learning from my RP workshop

Reflection is deeply personal. When I talk about reflection, you may have a completely different image of the concept floating around in your mind. This feeling is comparable to when you find yourself in a discussion about the meaning of life or spirituality. We may be using the same words, but our image of what these mean is probably quite different.

This is something I realized about the concept of reflective practice two weeks ago at the Busan KOTESOL’s Reflective Practice Symposium.

Note: Please read Anne Hendler’s summary of the day’s presentations, Meta-Reflection, at her new blog, LivingLearning: Life and Learning in South Korea. The title of her post touches on the complexity of such a discussion. Talking about how you think about thinking? Very meta. Very personal.

After listening to all the presenters, and after doing my own workshop (see my last post KOTESOL Workshop – Reflective Practice: Formulating Your Experience for the abstract), I got a better look at the mental images I hold about the concept of reflection. I realized that maybe the word “reflection” triggered a different picture in my mind.  This picture is the Experiential Learning Cycle (ELC), and the one I shared with symposium attendees.

Now I’d like to share this image with you. To do this, I’ll post parts of the script (in italics) I prepared for my workshop, comment on this, and refer to the slides and worksheet I used.

My ELC Workshop

Before learning about the concept of reflective practice, I was just a teacher trying to do the best I could. If I felt unsatisfied with something that happened in class, I’d mull things over, make a few modifications, and do it all over again. (see slide 2)

However, I noticed nothing really changed. I still had a sense that I wasn’t improving. I was still dissatisfied with the way my lessons were going. (still on slide 2)

While working on my summer MA TESOL at SIT, I realized where this dissatisfaction came from: it came from not reflecting on my lessons as deeply as I could.

The MA is based on experiential learning, so teachers who were accepted had to have at least two years experience. The program puts as much importance on our experiences with teaching and learning as it does on pedagogical and linguistic theories. The framework we used to reflect on these experiences was the ELC, which stems from John Dewey and David Kolb‘s research.

Slide 4 – The Experiential Learning Cycle: First, everything begins with an experience. Then you can see that “feelings” are off to the side. Some teachers/reflectors believe that before we can get through the rest of the cycle, whether it be during a post-observation feedback session or in your reflective journal, it is helpful to discharge the feelings are created by the experience. Then we have description, interpretation and an action plan, which brings us to our next experience. I’ll be explaining these in more depth below.

By looking at my teaching through the framework of this cycle, I finally noticed a change. I saw teaching as a place of exploration and experimentation. I started to understand why I did the things I did. I saw new possibilities and I wasn’t scared to try them out. “Mistakes” weren’t mistakes anymore; they were gifts. (This last statement may be a good topic for another blog post.) I became a more confident teacher, and if I ever felt my confidence waning, I knew that the ELC could get me out of that rut.

At this point in the workshop, I presented a classroom moment, and our task was to take it through the cycle. For the first task (see the worksheet below), attendees differentiated between an observation and an interpretation. Can you make the distinction?

The idea is that when we describe something in the ELC, we want to make the description as detailed as possible. It is something we are able to observe. This part of the workshop was intended to help attendees make a distinction between description and interpretation because we are so used to mixing them. The idea is that by simply describing, we are able to get the distance we need to make constructive judgments about what happened, which leads us into the next stage of the cycle: interpretation.

From the handout you can see that groups were asked to generate as many possible reasons as to why they thought that moment occurred, and also guess what that means for teaching and learning in general. An experience contains many dimensions, and this stage allows us to look at it from this perspective. It is not enough to guess one reason and move on the action plan. The interpretation stage asks you to exhaust all possibilities (time, linguistic challenges, culture, teacher behavior, student’s life…) so that your action plan has a stronger foundation. It was on this foundation that attendees then created their own SMART action plans (see slides 7 through 10) for future encounters with a similar experience.

What did I learn about my image?

I like my image of reflective practice. It works for me, and I know it works for some of my colleagues (one of these being Michael Griffin who did a “remix” of my presentation today). I got positive feedback from symposium attendees, but I’m still not sure that my vision of reflection stuck with them. I’m okay with this.

In my mind, if teachers are thinking and talking about teaching in constructive ways, then I’m happy. For me reflection is about raising one’s awareness. If you’re deepening your awareness about teaching and learning, I’d welcome a closer look at your image.

So what’s your image of reflective practice?

KOTESOL Workshop – Reflective Practice: Formulating Your Experience

Reflection. It’s a hot word in the ELT world. What I find interesting is that in all my Twitter curating, Google Alerts, and blogosphere explorations, I’ve discovered that educators seem to attach different meanings to the term. For some it’s about mulling over something that happened in class; for others it’s an in depth exploration of a teaching/learning experience. I find myself connecting more to the perspective of the second camp.

When I think of reflective practice, I immediately refer to the experiential learning cycle. I believe that when teachers reflect on an experience using this model, they are better equipped to address their future teaching/learning needs. My own experience with this cycle has helped me develop into a more confident teacher who sees successes and faults as simple launching points for self-improvement.

I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to share my perspective on this reflective cycle at the KOTESOL Busan Reflective Practice Symposium next Saturday, April 21. Among a group of other reflective practitioners, including my good friend Michael Griffin, I’ll be conducting a workshop that hopes to shed light on this form of reflection. Below is the workshop’s abstract:

Reflective Practice: Formulating Your Experience

Reflective practice can be a magic formula for better teaching, but the trick is that you are the only one who possesses the knowledge to make it work. Luckily, this formula – based on the Experiential Learning Cycle (see Dewey, Kolb, and Rodgers) – is not out of reach. During the workshop, attendees will reflect on a classroom experience by taking it through each step of the cycle: description, interpretation/analysis, and action planning. With the guidance of the facilitator, attendees will gain clarity into each step, as well as insight into the value of pausing and taking a good look at each of these points. Attendees can expect to leave the workshop with a solid understanding of how to use the Experiential Learning Cycle to deepen their reflective practice and their awareness of what goes on in their classroom. With this awareness, it is the facilitator’s hope that attendees will realize how the Experiential Learning Cycle can make a positive difference in their teaching and learning.

Even if you can’t make it to the symposium, I am grateful for your support. Thank you!

Smart Phones in School – inspired by an IATEFL post

This essay was written by Lee Yeongheon, a middle school English teacher who teaches in Ulsan, South Korea. She was inspired to write this after I asked her and other course participants questions for this post, Got Bandwidth? @IATEFL 2012. Yeongheon and I are excited to share this with you, and look forward to your comments and feedback.

Linking Experiences: How We Learn to Teach

What do Penny Ur, Willy Cardoso, and James E. Zull have in common? They all presented at the 2012 IATEFL Conference, and they all referenced the connection between reflecting on experience and learning.

If you know me, or my blog, you know that I’m quite passionate about the subject of reflective teaching. I’ve done a few presentations/workshops on the subject, and will soon be doing another at the KOTESOL Reflective Practice Symposium in Busan on April 21. I’m very excited about this, especially since I’ll be in the good company of friend and reflective practitioner, Michael Griffin.

This shameless plug is simply to say that when I saw these three speakers on Glasgow IATEFL Online, my mind quickly made links to how their individual takes on teaching and learning connected to my understanding of the experiential learning cycle and reflective practice. Here are the links I noticed.