Stories from classrooms worldwide
Trường Tiếng Việt Của Em turns two classic Vietnamese workbooks into 40 online lessons for diaspora families.
TVTrường Tiếng Việt Của EmVietnamese language & culture · CanadaNewly published
Most learners memorise characters. The ones who read comfortably learned to see the parts inside them.
After 300 IB students I stopped treating maths anxiety as a confidence problem and started treating it as a structure problem.
A kitchen scale, a bicycle wheel and a phone camera explain more about momentum than any diagram I have drawn.
Music
Scales feel like homework. The chord under a favourite chorus feels like a secret being handed over.
Sofia Almeida·5 min
English
What I tell every new adult learner who apologises for their accent in the first ten seconds of a trial lesson.
Amelia Hartwell·4 min
Mathematics
One unglamorous routine at the start of every lesson did more for my students' grades than any resource I bought.
Priya Raman·6 min
Spanish
Subtitles off, notebook closed, one scene at a time - the fastest listening practice I have found in nine years.
Mateo Rivas·7 min
Primary education
Six weeks on one question about the lake behind our school, and the tightest planning I have ever done.
Aino Virtanen·7 min
Primary education
What replaced the number was harder for me and much clearer for the children.
Aino Virtanen·6 min
Academic English
Most IELTS writing bands in Hanoi are lost in the planning, not the grammar. Here is the ten minutes I now insist on.
Nguyễn Bảo Châu·6 min
Academic English
My learners are engineers, nurses and shop owners. Anything that needs an hour of homework fails by week three.
Nguyễn Bảo Châu·5 min
Inclusive education
He could explain a chapter he had listened to and not read a paragraph of it. That is not laziness.
Nadia Osman·7 min
Inclusive education
Individual adaptations for six children collapsed by October. Designing one lesson with several routes through it did not.
Nadia Osman·6 min
History & civics
Two contradictory newspaper reports of the same afternoon in 1968 taught more method than a term of my explanations.
Tomáš Kovač·7 min
History & civics
A civics class that debates well is not a class of quiet children. It is a class with rules it wrote itself.
Tomáš Kovač·6 min
English
Not a sales pitch and not a test. Thirty minutes to find out what the learner has been avoiding.
Amelia Hartwell·5 min
Japanese
Two pages, three columns and a rule about what may never be written in it.
Yuki Tanabe·5 min
Physics
Three signs that the course I designed in March is now holding a student back in June.
Lukas Vogel·5 min
Mathematics
Telling a family that the exam date is unrealistic is the most useful thing I do all year.
Priya Raman·6 min
