My own pedagogical to-do list this year…

Inspired by the amazing Tom Sherrington’s post here on his own pedagogical to-do list I thought I’d write about my own areas that I wanted to work on this academic year…so here goes,

1) Testing as a means of improving learning. I want to include more ways of incorporating these ten benefits of testing and how they can be applied to languages.  

2) Using more live modelling. In Fun Learning Activities, with FLA 28 ‘Seeing Double’ I have recorded myself doing ‘live modelling’ and played this to the class and I now want to do more live modelling as referred to in the excellent ‘Making Every Lesson Count: Six principles to support great teaching and learning’ and talk through what I’m doing as I’m doing it; starting with paragraph-building will be the first step.

3) Finding ways to use metacognition on listening past papers; the blog that I’ve read a good dozen times I reckon was John Tomsett’s blog on metacognition. I’ve been doing some of this on a past reading paper (the AQA 2015 higher reading paper if anyone’s interested, am happy to share this…) but what I’d love to do is to focus on the sounds, breaks in utterance and model my own thinking of what is being said on the paper while trying to predict what mistakes the students will make and why).

4) Trialling some ‘Micro-listening enhancers’ as referred to by Dr Gianfranco Conti in his wonderful blog. The listening paper has often been a paper I’ve always felt was a little less under my control as I wanted it to be in terms of preparing students more effectively on the phonological level of the target language so I’m going to be starting more of a phonological focus sooner rather than later in the students’ learning.   

Four things will do for now I think, any more than this and you just end up not really doing any of them as effectively as you want…