EdCamp Santiago: The First Seven Days
Dedicated to all the educators, world-wide, who have participated in an EdCamp.
Go forth, spread the word to the far corners of the Earth, something is happening.
There’s something going on, a R(E)volution in teacher professional development. It’s called EdCamp….
A conference, that’s not a conference. An “unconference” is a better term. A new paradigm in teacher professional development, a new, creative, innovative way of staying up to date on what matters most to teachers. As I said, it’s a paradigm shift in teacher professional development. Let me repeat: Paradigm Shift.
The Chilean National English Test
SIMCE Ingles 2010: The development of the national English test in Chile coincides with my story, which is woven autobiographically into the larger story, a test which apparently resulted in only 11% of students able to achieve a passing score. This book will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will reveal secrets to you that you thought you already knew about tests, test-making, and test-reporting. More importantly, you leave the reading of this book with a renewed sense of confidence in who you are, and what you do…
“How do you become a good teacher?” Those of you who know me from reading my writing already know my answer. The short answer, the simple answer, the easy to understand answer. It has two parts.
First, love what you do. Love being a teacher so much that if you had the power to be anything on Earth, pilot, astronaut, doctor, dentist, taxi-driver, singer, dancer, artist, musician, anything at all, you would still choose to be a teacher. Love being a teacher, that’s number one.
Amazon Author Page: Thomas Jerome Baker
Spelling is the Cinderella of language learning. Ask a teacher how to teach spelling, and the answer will most likely be echoed by students: Read books.
Pay attention to words. Notice them. While knowing words is important, what can be done to spell unknown words is the larger question.
This book will take a look at both the spelling of known and unknown words, and be an experiential account of the author’s encounter with spelling as both a learner and a teacher of English as a Foreign Language.
Super Spelling Skills
Learning by heart.
The process of storing the spellings of rare, strange, and / or unusual words, from a student’s short-term memory, into long-term memory, has always required conscious effort, day after day, in a variety of ways, until automaticity and thus mastery, is achieved.
Several mnemonic training techniques used by champion spellers all around the world can be, and should be, used by Teachers and Spelling Coaches to train anyone to be a master speller.
Kinesthetic Learning
Many of these techniques employ kinesthetic learning. By relating a mental concept with a series of movements – almost like dancing – you can store a series of letters into the brain much more quickly and more permanently than by using repetition as your only method to learn to spell words.
Teach your learners / students to trace the letters into their hand as they are saying the letters out loud. This will reinforce in three kinesthetic ways: with the motions of the mouth and lips, the fingers of one hand moving, and the feeling of the motion on the other palm.
Larger body motions can also be used to learn and remember correct spelling, which makes learning a much more active experience. Among other things, Brain-based learning tells us that the large motions increase the flow of blood to the brain, making it more receptive to the learning process.
Sessions of studying like this will be more effective if they are done in small timed sessions of no more than ten to fifteen minutes, with 5-minute breaks to give the brain time to refresh and ready itself to respond properly, attentively, alertly, consciously, to the next set of words.
Do not try to learn large quanttities of words before a test, the effort will usually backfire, causing a “laguna mental” or blackout at a critical moment, right when one needs to remember a word, but find yourself mentally, “blocked”.
The idea is to reinforce correct spellings, but a tired speller may be reinforcing incorrect spellings. This is obviously not the goal of studying spelling words.
Again, it takes many countless repetitions to come close to transferring the correct spelling from short term memory into long term memory.
The word should be repeated again, and again, and again, and again, and yet again, over and over, harmoniously, melodically, rhythmically, like a drill, until the motions and the sounds almost lose their symbolic meaning.
Removing the sounds from their meanings, turning them into a song of a child, a litany, a chant, can also be a good strategy.
Saying “En-thu-si-asm” syllable by syllable, makes the brain identify the sections as individual pieces each of which can be spelled correctly. The repetition of the sounds becomes melodic, tapping into auditory learning skills that we all developed as children through singing and listening to nursery rhymes.
Hard-to-Spell-Words
This brings us to another strategy for learning hard to spell words: learn them in groups that follow similar patterns.
In the sample sentence below, all of the words with “-ei-” combinations follow the same pattern. If all of them are learned at the same time, they will become associated with each other and reinforce the correct spelling.
Rule: “i” before “e”, except after “c”.
Examples: believe, retrieve,
Examples: receive, receipt
This seems easy enough to learn, but there are countless exceptions to the rule. So, what to do?
Answer: Learn the exceptions in groups, in a creative or meaningful way:
Example sentence: “Neither of the foreign sovereigns wanted either of the feisty heifers for protein, and they seized the weird kaleidoscope from the counterfeit poltergeist!”
Whether in a simple list or through a sentence (no matter how nonsensical), rolling all the similar spellings into a group helps to both categorize and memorize.
Finally: Do not forget the obvious: Read. Read. Read. A wide variety of books. Science fiction. Detective. Murder. Mystery. Autobiography. Fiction. Non-fiction. Thriller. Romance. Comedy. Comics. Newspapers. Magazines. Street signs. Restaurant menus. Plane tickets. Phone bills. Electricity bills. Advertising pamphlets. Billboards. CD covers. Cereal boxes.
Here is the key: the more you read, the more new words you learn. The more you read, the more times you see words spelled correctly, and unconscious learning takes over.
The more times your eyes (and brain) see correctly spelled words, the easier it is to catch mistakes. Rules give way to an innate ability, to sense, to feel, to see with the “mind’s eye” that a word feels “wrong.”
It’s kinda like being SpiderMan, with a highly developed sense for correct word spellings…
Oh, here’s the most important thing: be consistent. Better to train every day a week for 30 minutes instead of 4 hours a day for 3 days before the SpellEvent.
Good luck on becoming a Champion Speller!
Best regards,
Thomas
Amazon Author Page: Thomas Jerome Baker
profesorbaker
