1. Teaching 21st century students Dante CuevasAdapted from the talk given at theMextesol Morelos RegionalConvention on September 9, 2012With speakers notes in white

2. Is language a conscious or unconscious process? 3. Can you remember having a (boring) teacher with little or noemotional expressiveness? How much do you rememberlearning in classes like this? 4. Give yourclassesWithout any form of emotion inthe classroom our teachings arebound to fade into oblivion 5. Youre about to be given a sneak peek into myupcoming book Neuro-Emotional Learningwhich places emotion at the core of itsapproach to learning. 6. EMOTIONALCONTEXT!Many dont realize it but it is possibleto engineer emotional environmentsin the classroom and were about tolook at some crafty methods for doingso. 7. To be or not to be that is the questionThis quote from Shakespearecan be said in many tones ofemotion and as you varyyour emotional tone you varythe responses elicited fromothers. Every linguisticexchange carries some formof emotional undercurrentthat we often overlook. 8. For this reason it is important for us as teachers to beaware of the emotional content embedded in thecommunication we use to engage with students.*particularly if there is little or no emotion present.Practicing emotional awareness in the classroom will helpyou to see that, indeed, there is a connection betweenyour emotional state and what you can achieve in theclassroom. Make emotional awareness a priority in yourclass, significant gains can be made in 2-3 months. 9. Paying attention to our emotional state in the classroom is onlypart of this emotional engineering process, we are now goingto look at other ways to engage students 10. Nowadays, our students areaccustomed to receivinginformation in dynamic andvisually-rich ways, if we cannotmatch this informational style inthe classroom we are sure todisengage our students.For this reason we are going tolook at some online tools thathelp us do just that. *textbooks alone are notenough! 11. Offline ViewingFor those of youwithout an internetconnection in theclassroomoffliberty.com is oneway in which you canview multimediacontent offline. 12. Youtube has thousandsof professionally-madeand visually-beautifuldocumentaries thatcan complement mosttopics that are coveredin a typical languageclassroom. A great wayto engage students. 13. Here is a great site that can be used in several different ways in the classroom. One idea that came up in this talk is having groups of studentscheck out three different sites on photosynth and picking one to share withthe class. 14. Another recommendedsite is Scale of theUniverse which allowsstudents to compare thesize of everything fromthe universe itself to thesubatomic phenomena atthe smallest levels ofphysical existence. Greatfor exploring scientifictopics in the classroom. 15. Googles Ngram Viewer allows you to track the evolution of languagethrough a massive database of books dating back to the 1800s. Checkthe relevance of any given word in the course of written history. 16. This section comes directly from myupcoming book Neuro-EmotionalLearning in which I cover theimportance of certain listeningtechniques when engaging with ourstudents so that we may boost theirretention. 17. Whenever introducing new material in the classroom it isimportant to connect it to our students life references or itwill not have any meaning for them and henceforth noretention. Use their vocabulary and their ideas of the way theworld works to introduce new content.No grounding, no meaning 18. Connecting info to students in subjective ways helps to boost retention fullreport here:http://students.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/2105?e=stangorsocial_1.0-ch04_s01 19. 1. No emotion, no retention2. New internet tools are great for engaging students3. Listen empathically and connect new content to students experiences and understandings.