• activities,  Digital tools,  Diversity,  International collaboration,  pre-service teachers,  relational education,  teacher-education

    GatherEd: Learning and Creating Global Teacher Education

    May 17, 2023

    What does GatherEd mean to me? For the second time, GatherEd has provided an opportunity to halt the everyday race, always loaded with local worries, administration, tasks and surroundings, to zoom out of routine and into crucial issues from a different perspective. GatherEd means a chance to grapple with the complexity of education in a changing global reality, collaboratively unpacking terms like multiculturalism and multilingualism. GatherEd has given me the space to think about global teacher education, digital responsibility, inclusion, accessibility and democratic competencies alongside dedicated colleagues from Norway, Iceland, Greece, Spain and Israel. I am grateful for the invitation to attend my second GatherEd workshop at the University of…

    Read More
  • activities,  pre-service teachers,  relational education,  teacher-education,  Teaching,  Writing

    Nice to meet you: Letters and questionnaires for building relationships with students

    November 2, 2022

    Teaching and learning are relational processes; building significant relationships in large classes requires planning, time, and hard work. Showing genuine interest in who my students are as individuals is crucial in developing trust and a feeling of safety in my classroom.  At the beginning of each academic semester, I make sure I allow my pre-service teacher students at the Oranim College of Education to introduce themselves to me in different ways. I devote most of the first lesson to an introductory letter in a few of my courses. In the past ten years or more, I have been following a strategy I learned from Professor Julian Kitchen from Brock University…

    Read More
  • activities,  lesson planning,  pre-service teachers,  Teaching

    Can you break the code? A quiet warm-up

    November 1, 2022

    Two of my didactics courses opened last week with the beginning of the 2022-2023 academic year. I began both lessons with a quiet activity which allowed the students to get seated, calm down, look around the room and get ready for the class in an easygoing fashion.I presented a message in code and asked the students to translate it into their notebooks. In the “Teaching English to Young Learners” course, they read a note from me in English, and in the “Literacy: Didactics for Hebrew Teaching” course, they read a quotation about language in Hebrew. While the students were reading the message, working alone or with a neighbour, I had…

    Read More