April 30 2015The Importance of a Great Teacher
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. A while ago, I did a video on classroom learning and independent learning and it may have appeared as if I was contrasting the one with the other. Certainly, I have had some rather un-dynamic and unsuccessful language-learning experience in classrooms, I think many of us have, but one should always be careful because I have met a teacher, a tremendously dynamic teacher, who teaches high school in the United States in Delaware. I had an interaction with his Spanish class. He’s a teacher of Spanish and I talked to some of his students who have learned extremely well and who are very enthusiastic because the teacher is enthusiastic. In fact, we have developed a program with them around LingQ, which becomes then one of the tools he uses. He’s very much a proponent of the Krashen Approach, the input-based learning approach. In fact, he organized a conference at his school where he invited educators in the area and had Stephen Krashen come and present to them, more than once. I also participated in that discussion, as well, and there are other equally enthusiastic teachers at the school _________. I just wanted to mention this because it was exciting for me to talk, first of all, to the learners, this teacher’s Spanish learners, and then to other teachers down there. Although, the weight, the inertia of curricula, everything that is sort of part of that whole institutionalized learning system we have, some of that can sometimes discourage initiatives. But here’s a teacher, and others like him, who are doing what they think is best for their students and have infected their students with this enthusiasm for language learning and it was very, very encouraging to see. I’m not naming any names because I don’t have his permission to talk about them, but I just want to say that if you have an enthusiastic teacher who understands the importance of input and enjoying the language, real meaningful situations in the language, that classroom can be a wonderful place to learn. Thank you for listening.
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