Welcome to The Intuitive Language Teacher, a place for teachers, especially language teachers, who want to change students’ lives.
I’m Robert Harrell. I teach German in a public high school, write books, and travel. For several years, I have used Comprehensible Input in my classes, and now I want to inspire and empower other language teachers to bring an intuitive approach to classroom instruction and be able to explain that approach to others.
The purpose of TILT (The Intuitive Language Teacher) is to share the story of my journeys both figurative and literal as a language teacher, as well as my thoughts for the future.
I write about professional and personal development with the conviction that you don’t have to do things a certain way just because “that’s the way we’ve ‘always’ done it.” There’s usually more than one right way to do something.
I write about my experiences and plans for providing practical as well as theoretical materials for classroom teachers and students with the belief that teaching is one of the most significant things we can do – one of the key ways to create value – and learning a new language provides access to a new way of seeing the world.
I write about my experiences and those of others with the understanding that these experiences inform not only our teaching but the lives of others as they experience them through us.
What you’ll find here:
Professional Development ideas and materials
Comprehensible Input ideas
My experiences writing for students and others and ideas about that
My travel experiences and ideas
My philosophy and musings on life, teaching, and travel
The theme that links these seemingly disparate foci is the idea of teaching intuitively.
While some people think that a person either is intuitive or not, this is not the case. Everyone uses “intuition” as well as “sensing” (to use the terms from psychology) in everyday life.
For example, we are “sensing” when we savor a delicious dessert, see that the traffic signal has turned green, follow a recipe or set of instructions, or memorize a presentation. On the other hand, we are “intuiting” when we “read between the lines” of what a person says or does, contemplate where our decisions now will take us in the future, look at the “big picture”, or “tweak” a procedure and create a new way of doing something.
Intuition draws on experience and knowledge from many different places and brings them together without conscious reasoning. Given the dynamic nature of a classroom, teachers rely on intuition all the time as they make spontaneous decisions during instruction; prepare lesson plans and imagine how they will play out in class; consider the needs of the whole class; and adapt procedures, strategies, and activities to create a new way of engaging students.
This blog will be exploring knowledge and experience from teaching, research, travel, and writing to inform and empower readers to follow their own intuition and defend their decisions to others.
You can follow my blog by RSS, updates in your inbox, or just checking in here at the site. Look for a newsletter (new post) every week.
All writing on this site is provided free of charge with no outside advertising. If you’d like to support what I do, share it with others. I ask only that you give proper credit to your sources, whoever and whatever they may be.
I’ll see you on the Road