This site represents the collaborative and creative work of the Fall 2015 participants in a fully integrated course pairing: Education 8500, the Principles and Practices of Language Education, and Education 8505, Introduction to Classroom Observation. It comprises three major components: reflecting on practices and principles and how they are related; reporting on observations of lessons and what has been learned; and the collaborative building of a Teaching Repertoire.

On the REFLECTIONS page, you will find thoughts, reactions, discussions arising from a variety of experiences – class activities, guest speakers, field trips, teaching experiences, readings, peer discussions, and the like. These posts will draw specific, meaningful connections between practices (specific learning tasks, materials, tools and procedures) and principles (underlying precepts and concepts which inform our practice).

In the DESIGN component, there are two sets of posts, both closely related to the semester-long curriculum design project.  The first reflections involve issues, tools, procedures and findings from the needs assessment stage.  After we have assembled and processed data from project stakeholders and existing resources relevant to the new curriculum, we pause to reflect on the significance of needs assessment and what we have learned from engaging in its practices.  The second set of posts will express individual reactions to the second stage of the project, the design of a syllabus and the detailed planning of a small number of units and lessons.

In the third component, we build our professional repertoire by archiving concrete, specific ideas for language learning and teaching. In the SKILLS category: tasks to develop listening, reading, speaking and writing proficiencies. INTERACTION specifies ways to facilitate exchanges among learners (pair and small group classroom tasks and group projects) and between learners and the world, including digital tools and online resources.. The PROCESS/AWARENESS category features, first, tasks that prepare learners for output through preparation and rehearsal and forms of feedback and assessment once output has been produced; and, second, meta tasks of two kinds: learning about language (or language awareness raising) and learning about learning (from learner training to various forms of reflection to self-, peer and instructor assessment).