Tag: Professional Development for Teachers

When Quality Became Something to Prove

March 13, 2026March 13, 2026 eltvista.com

You leave a lesson feeling that something real happened. Students were thinking. The room felt alive. Someone who usually stays quiet spoke up. A discussion took an unexpected turn and learners suddenly began using language in ways that felt genuine rather than rehearsed.

Then the observation feedback arrives.

The comments may mention pacing, clearer staging of activities, or whether instructions could have been simplified. None of these points are necessarily wrong. Yet they can feel strangely disconnected from what the teacher experienced in the room.

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Of Resolutions, Humbug, and Community—A Reflective Riff on Scrooge

December 18, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Long before resolutions became annual rituals, Charles Dickens, the nineteenth-century English novelist and social critic, offered a rather effective alternative. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge does not sit down and draft a list of behavioural targets or learning outcomes. He is shown his life—where it came from, how it currently unfolds, and where it is heading if nothing changes.

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Creativity Is Not a Strategy—It’s a Birthright: Reclaiming the Human Side of Teaching in a Testing Culture

December 1, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

In humanistic teaching, creativity is foundational because language itself is creative. Every sentence a learner forms is an act of risk-taking and self-expression. When instruction becomes reduced to test preparation, we mute the very capacities we claim to nurture: voice, imagination, identity.

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