📖 From the teacher's desk: Managing 20 front-of-house staff at The Ivy in Sydney, I learned that how you give instructions determines everything — even more than the instructions themselves. In the classroom, I discovered…
📖 From the teacher's desk: "Do you understand?" — I must have asked this dozens of times in my first observed teaching practice. And every student nodded. And then not one of them could do…
📖 From the teacher's desk: On my CELTA course, writing lesson aims was the first thing I had to master — and the first thing I got wrong. My early aims were teacher-focused ("to teach…
My best lessons during my 120 supervised teaching hours were the ones where learners were so busy doing something real — deciding, debating, creating — that they forgot I was teaching them language. That is…
One observation feedback I received during my 120 supervised teaching hours stayed with me: 'The activities were good, but I couldn't see why they were in that order.' A lesson is not a pile of…
I made errors in French every day for three years. The best teachers let me talk first and corrected me after. The worst interrupted mid-sentence and I'd lose the word, the idea, and the confidence.…
The best moment in any class I taught was when a learner produced the language I was trying to teach — before I had written it on the board. That is eliciting: drawing language from…
My trainer said it in week one and I've never forgotten: 'Do you understand?' is the least useful question in a classroom. The only honest answer is 'yes' — because 'no' is embarrassing. You want…
In the feedback room after a lesson observation, the first question is always the same: 'What was your main aim?' If you can't answer in one clear sentence, the lesson was probably unclear. I had…
🎙 From the classroom: My lesson plan from week two of teacher training had this aim: 'To improve speaking skills.' My observer handed it back. 'What will they be able to do by the end?'…
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Sourov Deb EI · SIRET 106 764 061 00011 · Saint-Pierre, La Réunion