A day later than usual: busier yesterday than I expected to be!
1. Advancing Learning: Fast-forward 2023 is Macmillan English’s ninety-minute distillation of the best thirty ideas from their last season of professional development events, split into 3 main segments: Young Learners, Teenagers and Young Adults. There’s three ‘sittings’ next Wednesday, June 7th, at 10:00, 14:30 and 21:30 UK time. More info and registration here https://www.macmillanenglish.com/training-events/events-webinars/event/advancing-learning-fast-forward
and on the same page you’ll find both recordings of the 2022 and 2021 events and downloads of the accompanying booklets – PDFs of both below.
More good stuff on the Macmillan blog here https://www.macmillanenglish.com/blog-resources
2. Teacher Tapp conducts regular weekly polls of the opinion of teachers in the UK. They recently asked 2,666 teachers in the UK their views on the teaching of foreign languages at primary school https://teachertapp.co.uk/articles/gcse-revision-sessions-languages-in-primary-schools-more/
They also discovered the good news that more teachers in the UK are getting professional development than a year ago and found that this article, Questioning for retrieval: five mistakes to avoid was the most read over the last week.
Mistake 1? Asking for hands up!
Mistake 2? Mostly asking the boys!
Find out the other three here https://improvingteaching.co.uk/2023/04/23/questioning-for-retrieval-five-mistakes-to-avoid/
Other good articles at the bottom of their blog post page each week.
3. To my astonishment, it’s over six months since we last visited the UKFIET blog https://www.ukfiet.org/blog/ Recent posts include
Localization Only Succeeds if Women and Girls are at the Center https://www.ukfiet.org/2023/localization-only-succeeds-if-women-and-girls-are-at-the-center/
It’s High Time to Rethink Existing Approaches to Educational Accountability https://www.ukfiet.org/2023/its-high-time-to-rethink-existing-approaches-to-educational-accountability/
Education that Listens to Those Most Affected by Climate Change https://www.ukfiet.org/2023/education-that-listens-to-those-most-affected-by-climate-change/
Choose one to read over the weekend?
4. And, finally, a cloak-and-dagger story from The New Yorker’s ‘Annals of Crime’ series (that I hope you can read without a subscription), A Confession Exposes India’s Secret Hacking Industry: the country has developed a lucrative specialty, cyberattacks for hire.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-crime/a-confession-exposes-indias-secret-hacking-industry
5. And, extra-finally and also criminally, from Spiegel International, just in case you can’t read that New Yorker piece, A New Look at the Great Quedlinburg Art Robbery.
“In 1945, an American officer pilfered valuable pieces from Germany’s most important art collection and sent them to Texas, setting off a long search for the items. Now, experts are wondering: Was he just a simple thief? Or was he trying to save the treasure from the Nazis?”
Roy Cross's Blog 