O-sensei was lovely. She played the piano exquisitely. Her activities ran like clockwork, and when speaking to the room, she was warm and radiated intelligence in a way that reassured us that she knew what she was doing. My son, Dana, had drawn a picture of our family that was posted on the wall. Strangely, Dana’s picture did not look like a cloud of truck exhaust fumes.

ask … a) Do I know the needs? What am I doing to determine the needs? b) What decisions have I made so far, am I making now, and do I need to make in order to connect this lesson with those needs?"

Being an EFL teacher in Japan is a great line

Avoid the habit of assuming, just because you “covered” something, that that is enough. Whatever else student-centered-ness might mean, at the very least, we should all be able to agree that it means seeking tangible proof of what the kids are getting out of what you are doing.

Here's a quick lesson plan that aims to give students a chance to ask and answer questions using frequency adverbs.

Exit Tickets must be cultivated as a meaningful element of your instruction or they should not be deployed at all.

Here, Martin Scorsese is eloquent in discussing the importance of film literacy but I want to take what he says about film literacy a bit further.

How do you close the lesson in such a way

In observing foreign teachers in Japanese schools, one of the

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.