Bilingual Teacher Education

  I know how difficult it is when your coordinator or director comes to you saying that you will have to change your whole planning and the way you plan to a new methodology or teaching philosophy… You just think right away that all you had planned and taught until that moment will become rubbish.  When someone comes and proposes that directly, or tries to sell you a new course, in a way, your brain takes the same path. Unless you already know a lot about what the other one is trying to sell, you will most likely try to divert from it. You won’t buy it. With that in mind, I want to propose one thing to you, that don’t know a lot about my work yet, to get to know it. Because, yes! I want you to change your lessons so you are less overwhelmed, but I would never consider your experience and previous teaching rubbish. I know how much you already know and how much effort you’ve put into becoming the teacher you are now. So I thought that an ebook, with 15 songs accompanied by strat...

If you followed my posts about creating versions to enhance learning, you might have thought, “Ah, Débora, it's very easy for you to talk about singing, inventing and all that, but I don't have a background in music, I sing out of tune, I don't have rhythm and I have no creativity or talent for music.” Calm down! All is not lost. Let's talk about it... I'll start from the end… Talent. I'm one of those who doesn't believe in talent...sorry. As Isaac Asimov would say: “Whoever has talent will succeed in proportion. However, only if you persist in what you do.” That is... it's no use having talent if you don't use or practice. So let's put out what you already have and let's practice, practice, practice. Thinking about creativity, let's go the same way. It's no use being creative if you don't have food for your processes. Here comes the study part so that the practice is effective. You want to know what to do and how to do it so that...

 T oday I want to share with you how I choose the repertoire.  If I can borrow from the outstanding Érica @trina, “It depends…”  First, it depends on the audience : who is going to participate in the lesson? Second, it depends on the learning objective : why am I teaching those songs? Then, it depends on the time I have: thinking about the why, I have to define how many songs I will use. Finally, I try to make as many connections as possible: is there any project or concept that they must learn or are working at? After I have that mapped out I start looking and remembering the repertoire that I already have and I draft the planning. Then, if I need any new songs, I go to my resource bank and dig into them or adjust the planning. And you? How do you choose the repertoire you sing with your students?

  Dear teacher You are probably back in the classroom a few days now and I bet you already thought that you need ideas to make your students more engaged in the lessons, that they don’t focus when you are giving them the instructions, that they are not learning the content you are sharing with them, etc. I am not going to promise you a magic trick that will make them do all that, but what I can do is help you understand how to change some things about your routine in the classroom and as a result, those things will most likely cease to happen. As Eric Jensen, Ph.D. says, “Using music is an excellent way to influence or change the states of your students, to help with those transitions, or bring them back from a break and let them know it is time to start something new.” When I moved from music teacher to classroom teacher, one thing that I struggled a lot with was to have my students transitioning between tasks without having to tell them a hundred times what to do and where to go....

  Today I have learnt that if I want I can be a reader. I have updated my list of books of 2023 and I was really impressed. I have managed to read around 3k pages last year… a good average I suppose for someone that works full-time, with a house, a husband, two kids and a dog, without a support system always available. Of course the majority of the time I read is when I have either my parents or my in-laws around, but this year I have managed to organise myself in a way that I could read a little bit most of the days.  But you might be asking yourself how I manage to do that. I will share some of the things I do…  Plan/Cook my weekly meals Whenever I can, I will use some time of the weekend to plan the meals for the Week. Most likely, I will batch Cook on Sunday. I will sit (or better stand) for around 2 hours and Cook 5 different meals. I have some ready-made menus I have bought from @cozinhamoderna but I usually adapt it. Doing this saves me around 1h30m everyday, as I ...

  Hello teacher, Some time ago, I was thinking about the learning process and how we take a long time to process and memorise new content. Actually, I would not consider it memorise, but consolidate. Did you know that our temporal lobe is the one responsible to process our memory and also language? Humans possess this ability to process the world through language. We have two specialised areas in the brain designed (or evolved) to process language, Broca’ and Wernicke’s areas. Some studies will say that Broca’s area is also key to processing music. Débora! Stop using all of this theory and get back to what is important. Why do I take so long to learn new songs to use with my students? First of all, if you are a bilingual teacher, working in Brazil, how many of you actually studied in a bilingual/international school? How many were brought up in English and had the privilege to have someone singing for/with you in English? So just take some pressure from you right now. Secondly, whe...

I don’t sing this song anymore with my students…. “Ring Around the Rosie” is a really cute song and my very young learners loved to sing and dance to it. It was my favourite song to sing with toddlers after a movement song or dancing moment of my lesson, so they could just go back to the circle without me asking them or telling them to go to the circle again. Now let me tell you why I stopped singing it. "Ring Around the Rosie" might sound like a cute kids' song, but believe it or not, it's tied to something pretty grim - the Great Plague in 17th century London. If you don’t know the lyrics, they go like this: "Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down." Seems innocent, right? Well, it's said to hide some dark stuff. "Ring around the rosie" might refer to the red rashes that people got from the plague. "Pocket full of posies" could mean carrying flowers or herbs because folks believed they could ke...