Helping Students Learn From Mistakes

Subscribing to Edutopia on Facebook is probably the most helpful thing I've done lately -- they often have articles that make me think and help direct my teaching. Often I already know the information, and they just remind me about good pedagogy. That was the case with this recent article about "Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes." Check it out!

Vocabulary Book Review

As an ELD teacher, I am teaching way more vocabulary than I ever have before. I have found this book to be an invaluable resource. It combines vocabulary with writing skills, creativity and presentation -- a win, win, win for any ELD classroom. I can't recommend it enough!!

So far I have tried the selling a word (persuasion) strategy and the news story strategy (who, when, what, where, why), and both of them worked very well. Remember that these are students who don't like to write -- but they were able to do this and do it well enough to teach their classmates. Their retention was very good based on a quick assessment the next class period. The nice thing about it is that I let their peers assess how they've done -- if they know what the word is, they pass, but if the students can't tell me what the word meant, the authors go back and make their definition better -- real world instant feedback.