21st Century Skills for Young Learners

 As teachers and educators, we want to prepare our students for the 21st Century world. We want to engage them, encourage their independence, nurture their curiosity and motivate them to find out more. But at the same time, we also have to cover a syllabus and ensure that students are learning English in a guided and structured environment. How can we transform our classroom into a place where students not only learn the grammar, functions and vocabulary of the English language, but also develop the skills needed to explore this ever-changing world? In this workshop/talk we will consider why 21st Century skills are important and how we can develop and encourage them in our students. I will examine some of the ways we can integrate the core skills of critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration into our language lessons and, using examples from National Geographic Learning’s Look series, I will show how these skills can naturally evolve from language learning tasks.

Harnessing Curiosity in the YL Classroom

To be successful teachers we need to be able engage our young learners by developing activities that appeal to their basic psychological and intellectual needs – and at the heart of that is curiosity. In this interactive session we’ll explore the importance of appealing to our learners’ natural curiosity and how exactly being curious helps learning. Referencing National Geographic Learning’s Our World series, we’ll then look at a number of different ways in which we can harness our learners’ curiosity in the English language classroom to spark a love of learning English.