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Category: critical thinking
The Success of NorthStar: Enduring, Evolving, Engaging
Frances Boyd
The prize-winning academic English series NorthStar continues to meet the needs of students and teachers all over the world. In its fourth edition, the series endures by retaining its essential qualities. Yet NorthStar also evolves with updated content and expanded online tools. And the books continue to engage and challenge the hearts and minds of learners.
Enduring
Why have secondary and tertiary institutions all over the world continued to rely on NorthStar to help students reach their academic goals? What qualities have endured in the fast-changing textbook landscape?
The NorthStar series takes high-beginners to an advanced level in carefully scaffolded units. The series pioneered the two-strand design, offering both a listening & speaking and a reading & writing volume on each proficiency level. Students work with authentic or semi-authentic listening and reading material that respects their intellect and feeds their curiosity. Exercises and activities constantly integrate skills and recycle language. In addition, students engage in critical thinking on virtually every page of every book. This seamless blending of intelligent content and rigorous language study has been a hallmark of the NorthStar series from the start. Continue reading
The Central Role of Literature in the ESL/EFL Classroom
Sybil Marcus
Earlier this year, my colleague Jamie Reinstein and I were corresponding about the value and joy of using literature in ESL education. We found that our experiences were closely aligned, and he invited me to run a workshop on literature and ESL at the Community College of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, U.S. Since he was using my anthology A World of Fiction 2 as the text for his advanced class, he also suggested that I take over for the morning and teach a story from the book.
I decided that I would ask Jamie’s students to read Peter Meinke’s short story “The Cranes,” which is about an elderly couple on an outing to the Gulf of Mexico. Although the story seems innocuous at first, the events lead to an enigmatic ending that prompts reconsideration of what’s been happening all along.
Like many ESL classes, Jamie’s class was made up of a mix of nationalities with students from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They quickly made me feel very welcome and we settled down to business. I had requested that students read the story for homework and then come to class with a written explanation of what the ending meant to them and why. Continue reading
NorthStar 4e is a Winner!
We are excited to announce that NorthStar, Reading and Writing, Level 3 was one of this year’s EDDIE award winners! The awards are run by ComputED Gazette, a valuable educational resource, which has been serving the online community for over 20 years. The Gazette sponsors two national awards The Best Educational Software Awards (BESSIES) in the spring, and the Education Software Review Awards (EDDIES) in the summer.
The Awards target innovative and content-rich programs (including apps for iPad and Android) and websites that augment the classroom curriculum and improve teacher productivity, providing parents and teachers with the technology to foster educational excellence. Some selection criteria were academic content, potential for broad classroom use, technical merit, subject approach, and management system.
Checkout the new edition of NorthStar, so you can see what all the excitement is about!
Constructivism: Increasing Student Engagement
Susan Gaer
Constructivism is an educational philosophy that became popular in the early 1990s. The basic framework of constructivism is that students create their own learning; that is, we can’t teach students to learn – they have to learn for themselves. Using this framework, teachers take on the role of facilitator, and each student learns what he or she needs to. This fits in well with the new Bloom’s taxonomy where creating becomes the most powerful rung on the taxonomy ladder. Constructivist learning also fits right in with multi-level instruction and flipped learning.
Constructivist theory posits that there is no learning unless learners have created it from experiences; therefore, when using the constructivist approach, you are also creating a more engaged classroom that is student centered. Here are a few techniques that I use to make my classroom more constructivist. Continue reading
