Dropping Keys

Overall, I feel so rewarded to have had the opportunity to work with Jen Hickey at the IESL program. Her years of experience really helped me to learn so much more and faster than had I taught a course on my own. It was both a blessing and a curse to have taught a content-based […]

This week has been more of a focus on the final projects that they are to complete for the next week. As a requirement for the project, the students are to interview someone on the topic that they are researching and include it in their presentation or movie or paper. To introduce the interviewing project […]

This week was AWESOME! It was probably one of my favorite units for this course because the students were really able to open up. They also seemed really interested in the concept of stereotypes. One thing I wished we had more time for though was for the students to find more examples from the media […]

This week Jen and I decided to dedicate to analyzing ‘fake news’, and understanding what it is and what role it plays in US society. This was a fun unit because not only was it interesting for the students, but it also created A LOT of great discussions. The highlight of the week was definitely […]

This week Jen and I decided to focus on celebrities and the paparazzi to better explain the concept of free speech. After teaching them about the heavy emphasis on free speech that the paparazzi uses to be able to pry into the lives of public figures, we thought that it would be fun to hold […]

This week was only a partial week of teaching as Wednesday and Thursday were presentation days. Jen and I decided to dedicate the first half of the week working on the presentations and learning about free speech. The concept of free speech was fairly new to most of the students as the countries that they’re […]

  Monday April 22 Discuss HW reading: Students talk about their answers to the questions. Discuss as a class. Have them answer critical process questions comparing two news sources: 2 pairs compare Fox and MSNBC 2 pairs compare CNN and BBC 1 pair compares NPR to Aljazeera Answer questions and discuss. Tuesday April 23 – […]

This week students learned about the importance of how a company’s image is portrayed to the consumer. We dedicated the time to learning about press releases, and they even wrote one! One of the other ESL classes in the program was holding a ‘Moth Event’ in which the students tell stories. Monday April 15 Skim […]

The first week was more of an introduction to the concept of media literacy. This week, Jen and I decided to dedicate the unit to advertisements in the media. Print ads and commercials are such an integral part of our daily lives, and can be simple to analyze–which makes for a perfect topic to start […]

Week one, in my opinion, went well. The students seemed consistently interested in the content of the course–which is so important since it’s a content-based elective… Since the first week involves more laying of the knowledge foundation, there was a lot more of the logistical aspects of learning (if that even makes sense). Since the […]