Best Practice 5: Personalizing

Best Practice 5: Personalizing

Textbook activities, worksheets, and exercises should be seen as opportunities to be expanded on, not busy work. Whenever possible, encourage students to respond orally and provide their personal opinions on the topic. Such personalization helps students to remember new concepts because it provides them with the opportunity to use them in personally relevant ways. Thus example gap-fill exercises like “My partner ______ very early every morning” can be turned into questions (Do you get up very early every morning?) which will begin a real, personally relevant conversation between two students in which they can talk to each other about themselves. This kind of conversation can take place in front of the class as a whole or, more usefully, in isolated pairs. An easy way to check comprehension is to ask students to report to the class what they learned about their classmate. **As an added bonus, this also forces students to change responses from the first person I or We to the third person He/She or They.