About

I work in Japan, at the British Council in Tokyo, where I’ve been for a couple of years. I teach a nice mix of YL and adult classes.

Like many others, my teaching went through a complete overhaul when I did the Cambridge Delta. I began to focus much more on emerging language in lessons and tried out Dogme, or Teaching Unplugged, for the first time in my Experimental Practice.

My EP amounted to a lot of reading and one lesson taught. It made a strong impression and on coming back to Japan I felt an unavoidable pull towards using a Dogme approach in my teaching.

There are many great accounts out there of teachers experiencing the ups and downs of teaching unplugged. I wasn’t sure initially what to write about, but this blog has evolved into a collection of lessons that I found successful.

I’ve felt recently that it might be more beneficial for my teaching to be more critical of my efforts in this blog, but I tend to do that a bit too much naturally anyway. Therefore I thought back to my initial experiments with the approach and the most problematic part was ‘a way in’ – how do you actually go about walking into a class with nothing prepared for the first time and know how to handle it?

Consequently, this blog has now become oriented towards teachers less familiar with Dogme, perhaps wanting to try it out, giving successful examples of real lessons and hopefully providing some inspiration.

Beyond that, I hope people just looking for new ideas may also find it a useful resource. Please feel free to steal ideas , try things out for yourself and leave a comment or two!

Enjoy!