American English Dan

When I was teaching at Wise Up school of English in Brazil, the administrator and owner of the school encouraged the teachers to research pedagogical topics related to our classroom experiences and then present them to the other teachers for discussion. We did this every Friday, and took turns presenting. I believe I owe a lot my success in my Master's Degree courses to the knowledge I gained from these in-house Professional Development sessions, both as a result of the research I did to present and the presentations of the other teachers. In that spirit I would like to share my presentation on Action Research with you. Action research can be a powerful means to help solve some classroom, or other localized school issues that you perceive as a result of your everyday teaching or leadership experiences. Citations and references are provided within and at the end of the presentation. The following presentation is a model of a formative Action Research Project. It is not an actu...

If you are like me, the word "Free" got your attention.  OK, so nothing in life is free, but if I don't need a large cash outlay to use something really useful, then that's OK with me.  Powtoon is one of those online resources that can make your multimedia stuff better without opening your wallet much.  This online app lets you easily create animated presentations.  Some feature require payment, but you can do a lot of things for free to start with.  If you need more features of higher resolution formats, then it may cost you.  I created this embedded "Mission Impossible" theme presentation in about 5 minutes.

So, the big question is, "Should we allow students to use smartphones in the classroom?"  In many classrooms, that question has turned into "How do we prevent it?"  Teachers have creative solutions like the cell phone jail block .  However, and please let me stand on my soapbox for a minute because there is no getting around it, nearly every student has a personal smart device, and they are going to bring them to school, instead of banning a perfectly awesome learning tool, teachers and parents could incorporate them into a blended learning model like the flipped classroom.   To begin, there are lots of awesome learning apps  that teachers can encourage students to use in class and at home.  There are also a lot of online reference materials, starting with online dictionaries .  When teaching ESL to my adult students, I always walk them through the steps of downloading at least two major English language dictionaries, not bilingual ones.  Normal...

I do not intend to turn this blog into a running obituary, but I believe it is important to mention that Bob Dorough passed away on April 24th, 2018.  He was 94 years old.  He was one of the creators of the Schoolhouse Rock animated musical series that ran during the period from 1973-1985.  They were created to help children learn and remember content they needed in their school classes. I can still sing many of these tunes I heard on TV when I was a child. There are many studies surrounding the Multiple Intelligences Theory of Howard Gardner ( Brualdi, 1998).  Gardner examines seven intelligences which he defines as   "the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings" ( Gardner  & Hatch, 1989).  One of the seven is musical intelligence.  People may possess and use forms of these intelligences in various mixtures with individuals having greater abilities in some areas than others....

Literacy is an important issue for ESL teachers.  I was saddened to hear that Barbara Bush passed away  yesterday.   Barbara Bush was a champion for  literacy .   She was responsible for helping to pass the  National Literacy Act of 1991.  She started a  foundation to promote literacy which you can access here.   I met her personally during a fund raiser at a Women's literacy club in Naples Florida. I was a news cameraman covering the event..  When it came time for our interview she leaned over to me and asked, "May I give you some advice in a motherly way?"  "Sure, of course!" I replied.  " You had  better close the barn door before the horse gets out."  I had forgotten to zip up my pants. - Dan

As part of my Masters in Education program at American College of Education , I recently took a course in ethics related to using humans as research subjects .  This course was through the National Institutes of Health and led to a certification.  Some of my peers questioned why it would be necessary for teachers to be concerned about how to treat human subjects in research.  However, when you think about it, we are constantly observing our students, gathering data, experimenting with our methods and planning, and making adjustments based on student feedback.  We often share our observations about our students with our peers and with students' parents.  We also guide our students' use of and access to outside information.  This could be considered study of human subjects, and as such has certain ethical ramifications. The three basic ethical principles that came from the Belmont Report  are: Respect for persons , which involves informed consent; Benef...

I stole the title for this post directly from a 2014 blog post by Alfie Kohn (  https://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/no-tests/  ), who is a writer of many books and articles about education.  I was alerted to his website by my Twitter connection to Dr. Stephen Krashen (@skrashen), the well-known explorer of language acquisition theory.  Both of their accounts are worth following because they frequently post links to great resources for educators.  This particular article touches on a theme that remains a hot topic in educational discussions, and I'm pretty sure we haven't solved the issues it raises. There are a couple of comments I would like to make in response to his article.  The first is that I generally agree with his point that there are many effective ways to judge student progress that are not formal tests.  I wish I had known more about some of these when I was teaching English in Brazil.  I know for a fact that I was unable to pass certain...