The Motivated Classroom

In this first podcast collaboration, I chat with Darren Leslie of the wonderful Becoming Educated podcast. We talk about our roles as 'teaching and learning research leads' at our respective schools, how we got into these positions, why we feel its important to have internal, evidence based, professional development on-going throughout the year and how we got started on this podcast journey! A brilliant conversation that we could have continued all day!

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This question and answer episode looks at how to overcome the difficulties of moving classrooms, what we can and should teach when we only see students for less than 1 hour per week and finally how we can go about creating a class slogan or motto based on our co-created values from the class constitution. Thank you to Sophie Harrison, Sophie Miller and Amanda Miller for the great questions!

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The final episode in the three-part series on motivating young language learners following up on the interviews with researcher Dr. Quint Oga-Baldwin in episode 63 and with primary school Dutch teacher, Marianne de Best, in episode 64. In this episode we discuss what secondary or high school teachers can learn from our elementary colleagues teaching languages to very young learners.

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In this second episode in the 3-part series on motivating young language learners, Dutch teacher and author, Marianne de Best, tells us all about practical, zero-prep, strategies we can put in place right away in our classrooms to reach our young learners. Marianne provides listeners with excellent and fun tips to both reach and teach our young learners whilst staying in the target language and providing them with compelling, comprehensible inputs so as to acquire the language with ease! A must-listen for all language teachers! 

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In this episode, I had the absolute pleasure to be joined by eminent Self-Determination Theory researcher, Dr. Quint Oga-Baldwin. Professor Oga-Baldwin has conducted years of research into motivation of young learners of English in Japan and has published extensively. We discuss what classroom teachers can learn from the research on young learners and how we can apply these findings to build a more motivated classroom. Second and Third level language teachers also have so much to gain from the work done with younger learners!

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Music! A key component in every language acquisition classroom but what are the most effective ways to implement it! In this episode I discuss how I bring music into the classroom, ensuring it is understandable and engaging for the students! Most importantly, music allows us a direct door into the target language culture by learning about the lyrics, the background and the artists! I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. 

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This practical episode is all about listening activities in the language classroom that are designed to motivate and engage our students. Listening activities in a textbook are often painfully boring for our students due to the lack of autonomy. The 12 activities outlined in this episode engage and motivate our students to listen intently and therefore acquire more language naturally!

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What does the physical learning environment do for motivation and engagement of our language learners? In this episode, the idea of 'going deskless' is discussed outlining the pros, the cons and the logistical challenges. Research around the physical make up of the classroom is also explored and in particular the impact of classroom decorations and posters. How much is too much? Should we even have classroom displays?

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Thank you to all the listeners who submitted questions for this Q&A episode. We are discussing how to reach and motivate those particularly resistant students, what we can about the increased usage of online translators and finally how we can make teaching spelling fun, effective and engaging!

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I'm joined by the fantastic Dr. Chris Martin in this episode to discuss the importance of positive parental engagement and how this can impact upon language learning motivation for your students. Chris shares findings from his own research in this area as well as many easy to implement practical tips for the language classroom.

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