I really need some stupid pedagogical tricks, very fast. I can be very good in the classroom, but I need the trick to be consistently excellent. One thing I thought of is to hand out "A for the Day" cards. They are index cards in which I write A for the Day and hand out to students who have contributed exceptionally to the discussion.
The other trick I have is to make sure the classroom is really where I want to be, and that whatever I happen to be teaching is the thing that interests me the most in that particular moment, even if it is not what I'm most interested in more generally. It never works for me if I wish I were somewhere else teaching something else to somebody else, because the students somehow catch on to that. I don't know how, but they do.
Finally, since I dominate classroom discussions when I'm not careful, I am going to make sure that at least 3 students speak between my interventions: profe, estudiante, estudiante, estudiante, profe, estudiante, estudiante, estudiante, estudiante, estudiante, profe....
My motto: the trick is not to get the students interested but to keep the teacher interested. Once you master that part, everything else just happens naturally.
ResponderEliminarThat's what I was getting at. You can try to entertain the students and keep them interested that way, but what really works is modeling your own level of interest. It helps that I am sincerely interested in the subjunctive.
ResponderEliminar