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Gameshow inspired review games are a staple of secondary education. Students love them. Teachers love them, and technology has made them easier to make and more fun to play than ever.  But, especially in a big class, (and I teach in a state with ELA classes capped at 40 students) there is a flaw—the downtime between turns.  When teams take turns answering questions, if there are more than two teams, there are several minutes when a team doesn’t have a question to answer. If t

The future kind of sucks. I don’t mean that it won’t be good, or, at least, contain some good. I’m sure it will. I’m sure wonderful things will happen. I hope wonderful things will happen to me, and to my family, and to my students, and to my community. But I’ve realized as I’ve been planning this new semester of high school study skills, that the future really sucks as a motivator.  I say this because most of the time, the future we describe to students is a lie, and they kn

Listening is essential to learning a language. Sometimes as ESL teachers, we jump right to analysis questions, and word studies, and making connections, and we forget to just assign listening activities. You can purchase a lesson based on this audio here .

The first thing new ESL teachers ask is, "What do I teach?" Teaching high school ESL or ELD or ESOL (whatever acronym your school...

It's back to school season, and for many teachers, that means spending some time staring at the walls. That's not to say we aren't hard...

Purposeful phonics instruction in high school can be a game changer in for multilingual learners, but it's not easy to find great phonics...

Ricky Reads a Story (from I Love Lucy) Down the Line of Translation (I Love Lucy) Fire Drill (The Office) The Short Red Carpet (Parks and...

Get newcomers practicing listening to and writing fractions in English with this interactive game.

I learned this year that so much of teaching multilingual students in the core subjects is about finding the right word. It's like fly...