The Bureau

Loving this post about buzzwords in education. I've had to sit through a lot of meetings and read a lot of emails recently about whether my editorial team should be training our writers to utilise the ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) methodology, or the PPP methodology (Present, Practice, Produce). Then again there's TTT (Test, Teach, Test) or ARC (Authentic use, Restricted use, Clarification).

Now I'm not against theory. There's not much I'd rather do than read a good paper on educational methodology, or sit about debating the best way to teach a language, but when I've got three months to get three novice writers to churn out tonnes of content, and that content has to be teachable, engaging and relevant, I go for the pragmatic approach every time. So when the conversation gets overly theoretical, my translation software kicks in:

Is there enough authentic use in this lesson? = Will the students get a chance to speak?
Are the materials engaging? = Are there lots of fun pictures? Will students stay awake?
Does the lesson flow in a logical sequence? = Will the teacher take less than five minutes to work out how to teach the lesson?
Is there an overarching outcome? = Do students get to do something useful at the end?
Has the methodology been correctly applied? = Will the teacher want to kill the writer by the end of the lesson?

Week 1 of content production nearly over - so far my three writers have produced some lovely lessons. Only eleven weeks to go.