Headway scholarship
TASK 1
“Headway makes a difference to teachers as well as students”
My name is Gloria and I have been a teacher for over 22 years. I use Headway at a state secondary school in Caleta Olivia, a coast city in southern Patagonia. I have been teaching my 11th and 12th graders with Headway for seven or eight years already. I have mainly made use of the Elementary level, third edition. It is by far my favourite one. That may be due to the many classroom experiences I can relate to it.
With the beginning of each school year, new students arrived, and with them, the joy of new ideas.
Headway has been both motivating and challenging to me from the very moment I taught my first class with it. I fell in love with it instantly. The topics chosen, the language presentation, the photos and texts selected, the activities suggested, the extra material in the Teacher’s and Resource Books... The list could go on and on. Even the characters are adorable!
Last year we began working with Internet in the language classroom and that was particularly demanding and rewarding at the same time. The units from the book were the stepping stones for us to start interesting projects. We also shared a virtual classroom on Edmodo, and that gave students the opportunity to show their final tasks to their classmates.
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By the end of the school year all students were asked to answer an online survey. Among other things, it revealed that 82 % of students had found Headway of great importance to understand the contents they studied and to accomplish the given tasks.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12GQAfuU3zyJQCo3KX8K2yWyn-58Nb0tF6J63TgGAl90/edit
I think that speaks for itself: teenagers are extremely exacting when it comes to the course book they are presented with.
The first project we did was the biography of a famous person they admired. The related unit from the book (Elementary, third edition) was “Then and Now”. After my students read about Amelia Earhart and Yuri Gagarin, they were eager to do research and write about their favourite people. They came up with astonishing PPT Presentations!
The second project had to do with unit 10 from the same book, “Bigger and better!”. When they read about the different resorts in “Paradise Islands”, they wanted to do the same with the hotels in our city. In small groups, they prepared lovely brochures with information and photos of the hotels available, and also produced comparative and superlative sentences about them!
Another interesting project came after studying unit 11, “Looking Good!” Students prepared videos describing people and uploaded them to YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeT-zrhX3iU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6-ekj05Yac
These are just a few examples of how motivating Headway can be. As the years go by, teachers and students can come up with new ideas based on the book and make both, teaching and learning, memorable experiences.
I guess all this proves that...
“Headway makes a difference to teachers as well as students”.