Guest Post: Being Yourself

I'm delighted to welcome back Ania Musielak to the blog. Ania is a passionate teacher and teacher trainer from Poland who I have been lucky to see speak at international conferences. She is well known for her energetic and dynamic presentations, often speaking about her passions of drama and literature. Here she argues that in our teaching we shouldn't chase the latest trends and that our lessons must reflect our personalities and strengths. When I was 19 I started my driving course. All my friends already had driving licenses, some even had their own cars and they said that...

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Shut Up!

Let's face it, one of the hardest things for us teachers to do sometimes is to shut up. We can feel the need to keep teaching all the time and somewhere deep in our subconscious  we have been led to believe that teaching means talking. Maybe we don't realise what we are doing, or we find it hard to resist. We might be waiting for the training that makes us realise it's okay to be quiet for a while, or we might have a great story we want to share and half way through we realise we're really going on a bit too much here.  Either way, it's surprisingly hard and many...

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Time to Think!

So summer is over. The leaves are turning brown and the nights are coming in. This can only mean one thing: it's time to start blogging again. After two months off, it's time to go back to the keyboard, dust off some of those Google docs that have been sitting in the ideas folder and get writing. And I can't wait, I've got so many things I want to share with you. Firstly, I hope you like the new design of this blog. I decided it was time for a spring clean, so I've spruced it up with a new template and easier navigation. I'm not completely finished yet and there are still a few things I'd...

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