We are all looking for something new to stimulate the language learning classroom. This course will show participants how to design creative tasks that motivate students, how teachers can prepare students for life outside the classroom, creative ways of starting lessons that engage students, and innovations in teaching spelling to ESL learners.

The trends of professional development shifted from focusing only on enhancing teachers’ teaching skills to research skills. The importance of this stems from the fact that a teacher who is also a researcher has the potential to self-reflect and share experiences based on evidence from researching teaching and learning. This course introduces the key aspects that a teacher, who is interested in research, needs to consider to design and conduct his/her own research activity. The course starts with possible quantitative and qualitative research designs for classroom environment, it then introduces the most common ways to analyze each type of data, and provides teachers with tips for writing-up their research projects and getting published.

The series of sessions under this theme addresses some of the most critical matters which K-12 teachers are recommended to handle across the K-12 spectrum to understand how learners respond to the teaching and learning environment, and why they respond in such ways. Comprehending this relies on a substantive amount of self-reflection, effective classroom management, planning and profound thinking from the teacher. To address these matters, the course starts with managing possible ways to break writing skills into learnable steps, followed by ways to adapt teaching material to help children with dyslexia. At generic level, the effectiveness of classroom instructions is discussed through critical evaluation of the participants’ current practice. The course concludes with the involvement of the participants in developing hands-on strategies for encouraging critical skills among young learners.

This pre-conference course is designed to train, motivate and nurture a reflective teacher. The elements of this course focus on specialist skills that an ESL teacher requires for efficiency and effectiveness.

Teachers today are faced with a challenge in the classroom where we often teach students of different levels, different aptitudes, and different motivations. In this course, participants will learn how best to secure differentiated instruction, how to use graphic organizers to visually stimulate students’ cognitive abilities, how to prepare ourselves to be engaged with our profession and students, how to best facilitate our learners becoming literate in the target language.

Without a doubt the biggest innovation in the world today is the development of the internet and wireless technology. Our students seem more engaged with those technologies than with anything we do with them in the classroom. This course shows teachers how to harness these new technologies to engage students in ways they never believed possible. The goals of this course are to learn how to use mobile phones to most effectively engage students and use augmented reality and virtual learning environments to engage students.