Today is my last day in the office before heading off to the Philippines for my first Teachers Helping Teachers activities in 2009. I am preparing four presentations for our conference/seminar in San Jose del Monte (just outside Manila) and a workshop on the Island of Mindoro. We will also visit the village of Banilad and meet with elementary-school students there, so I need to prepare some mini lessons and activities. Here is a list of presentation titles and short summaries.

Aligning our learning objectives, instructional strategies and assessment
In this presentation, I will discuss how to write good learning objectives, and then how to select instructional strategies and types of assessment that fit best with those objectives. Many times, how teachers teach and assess their students is not in line with what they hope students will be able to do with the knowledge and skills they gain.

A bag full of tricks
I will share some of my favorite activities and ideas for keeping students active, engaged and motivated. Some examples are shadow talking, find my mistake, dictogloss and line-up dialogues.

Looking for Lev in all the wrong places (plenary speech)
This presentation will be a brief introduction to the work of educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky, but will focus more on how some ideas from other fields can help both teachers and students prepare themselves for the new challenges of modern times.

Strategies for Teaching Speech Communication
In this workshop, I will introduce the topic of public speaking as well as several activities aimed at developing overall public speaking proficiency and specific public speaking skills.

I am also excited about this trip because I will get to meet the student my wife and I are sponsoring in Banilad. His name is Benjamin and he is eleven years old. I promise to upload some new pictures to my website when I return.

See you all soon,
Brent

San Lorenzo students in Calapan, Mindoro