Fernando de Morais, MA

My teaching style is conversational/dialogical. When I plan a lesson, my primary concern is with the questions I should ask the students in order to get them interested and willing to take one more step forward. So, if you had a look at my lesson plans, you would see nothing but a series of questions. This approach allows me to keep the goal (let’s say, a particular grammatical point) always in mind while tailoring the actual path we take toward it to the students’ real interests at the moment. The idea is to get the student to feel that, irrespective of what he is learning at the moment, he is learning it because doing it was the natural step to take, not because that was what I happened to have planned to do. That is the ideal, at least. In the end. it all comes down to a lot of forethought and a lot of improvisation.