Teaching tip: When introducing language targets, a useful technique David Paul recommends is to simply put the language out there. For example, rather than carefully pre-teaching to ensure no mistakes are made, we can look at a child, smile and say [language target]. If she cannot answer, smile again and ask other children. Aim to generate the feeling, “Here is an interesting puzzle to be solved. Trying to solve it could be fun.”

In this way, students, from the very outset, experience dealing with the unknown and making mistakes along the way as an integrated part of learning, rather than something to be avoided.

Teaching tip: When a child makes an error, hold off. Pause, then offer a gesture — a raised eyebrow, or counting the words on your fingers, or a hint — that nudges them to find and fix it themselves. The wait time does a surprising amount of the teaching. View mistakes as learning opportunities.

Teaching tip: when planning lessons or activities, rather than starting with an explanation, think of ways of introducing the lesson target that encourage exploration. The ISLE approach to teaching physics gives some great examples here: www.islephysics.net/philosoph… I will share some examples for the language classroom in the future posts.