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« Nous n'avons pas besoin de parler français, nous avons besoin du français pour parler » (André Belleau).

« Nous n'avons pas besoin de parler français, nous avons besoin du français pour parler » (André Belleau).

In my Learning Through Projects series, I wrote about crafting questions that drive projects. Developing interesting, relevant, and meaningful driving questions is challenging. To help teachers with project based learning, Global Digital Citizenship Foundation has free publications with ideas and resource links. The publications are PDFs and are licensed under Creative Commons, so you may distribute or print them as long as you do not modify them in any way.

Telling our story is an essential part of our humanness. It allows us to feel part of the community that knows our story, and it fosters empathy for those that surround us. Story is a powerful force in shaping mental models, motivating and persuading others, and teaching the lessons of life. Telling story extends back to a time when oral history dominated the tools of communication. And now the flood of technology tools that allow for instant communication has spun us back into a golden age where story again dominates the media landscape.

t's no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Without curiosity, Sir Isaac Newton would have never formulated the laws of physics, Alexander Fleming probably wouldn't have discovered penicillin, and Marie Curie's pioneering research on radioactivity may not exist.

In 1968, two researchers conducted a fascinating study that proved the extent to which teacher expectations influence student performance. Positive expectations influence performance positively, and negative expectations influence performance negatively. In educational circles, this has been termed the Pygmalion Effect, or more colloquially, a self-fulfilling prophecy. What has always intrigued me about this study is specifically what the teachers did to communicate that they believed a certain set of students had "unusual potential for academic growth." The research isn't overly explicit about this, but it indicates that the teachers "may have paid closer attention to the students, and treated them differently in times of difficulty." This begs the following questions: Why can't teachers treat all of their students like this? How do we communicate to students whether we believe in them or not?

Todas las lenguas tienen un vocabulario base, es decir, es como el soporte para comunicar. Es aquel léxico que está siempre presente en la vida cotidiana, que impregna cada intento de comunicar algo, sencillamente, aquel que nos impide expresar hasta la idea más simple si lo ignoramos. Es por ello que debes aprenderlo urgentemente para poder hablar francés satisfactoriamente. El "diccionario de frecuencias de la lengua francesa del CNRS"  o "Dictionnaire des fréquences de la langue française du CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique)" en francés, ha listado los 100 verbos más utilizados en francés.

HOW would you rank "important" languages? If asked to rattle them off, many people start with English, but after that are reluctant to go further. Important how, they ask. One approach would be to look at people and money: surely a language is important if it is spoken by lots of people, in countries with great wealth (and presumably, therefore, power).

You know the hardest thing about teaching with project-based learning? Explaining it to someone. It seems to me that whenever I asked someone the definition of PBL, the description was always so complicated that my eyes would begin to glaze over immediately. So to help you in your own musings, I've devised an elevator speech to help you clearly see what's it all about.