My Teaching Philosophy

Spain has been my home for the last 7 years and during that time I have worked as a Marketing Professor and a Business ESL Teacher. For me this opportunity has been nothing less than luck mixed with the desire to be able to combine my teaching talents with my knowledge of business.

In the process of teaching ESL to a variety of students I realized that after years of studying English in public and private institutions few students could actually converse in English. They could successfully fill out grammar exercises, but the nuances of the language were lost to many. Here was a great parallel to my rather inept ability to learn Spanish after eight years of high school and university classes.

So I decided to go back to basics and investigate all of the learning theory that I had studied while I was an Education major. Nothing there, just more exercises to fill in, fill out, and file. Then I remembered as a Psychology major in Los Angeles I took a class in Physiological Psychology, studying what chemical and neuronal processes take place as we learn. Nothing there either. Finally I turned on the computer and watched a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, “Schools Kill Creativity,” and I remembered. We learn by doing, not by pulling apart a whole, organic, living language.

Moreover a quick search on the Internet revealed from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research: Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction that language is not just for those left brained people any more. Science now recognizes that it is the right side of the brain’s hemisphere that interprets the emotional connotation of words or how we say something. This connotation of words is what we learn when we are actually living the language.

I refocused my classes away from grammar books and pulled out my CDs, DVDs, lap top and paint brushes. I began to develop classes in both Marketing and ESL based on interactivity. The more I could engage the class the less likely I was to see the Deer In Headlights Look from my students and behavior problems declined. I used songs, dance steps, TV, radio, played games, told stories, showed films, read cartoons, did role playing, baked cookies, shared recipes, set up a market, wrote mystery stories, and worked with Lumosity.com to help develop conceptualization skills. In short my goal was to make learning an interactive, interesting, and memorable event. And just coincidentally, I learned Spanish in the process as I had to communicate in real time with all of the shop owners, taxi cab drivers, police officers, and bus drivers, who directed me across the city of Barcelona as I made the purchases that would facilitate learning in my classrooms.

These classes have been a joy to teach both the Marketing and the ESL classes.  It has been a fantastic experience to watch students from all over the world develop that "Ah ha moment" when the concepts and principles of learning by doing become realized.