For our October meeting, Andrew Boon will be covering two separate topics. We hope you can join us for one or both.

Designing critical thinking activities for the classroom

In the first presentation, I will outline Hadley & Boon's (2023) cyclical process to introduce critical thinking into the language classroom. This involves the learners becoming better critical thinkers via raising awareness of their individual beliefs and biases, listening to or reading carefully the information they receive, and considering potential weaknesses within the arguments. It also explains how I designed a series of activities to orient learners to the critical thinking process and to introduce them to various logical fallacies that may be used to mislead listeners or readers. Participants will be introduced to several of these critical thinking activities. They will be encouraged to adapt them or design original activities for their own particular teaching context.

Facilitating reflective practice online

In the second presentation, I will describe how teachers may make use of the Cooperative Development (CD) (Edge, 2002) or Instant Messenger Cooperative Development (IMCD) (Boon 2005, 2007, 2015, 2019) framework to interact together within a virtual non-judgmental environment to reflect on and investigate pedagogic puzzles, to make discoveries about our teaching, and to determine plans of action of how best to proceed in our classes. Participants will also be encouraged to undertake their own short CD/IMCD sessions regarding their teaching and to reflect on their experiences of using the framework.

Andrew Boon is a Professor in the faculty of Global Communications at Toyo Gakuen University, Tokyo, Japan. He has been teaching in Japan for over 25 years and holds a PhD from Aston University. His research focuses on learner support and discovery in non-judgmental environments. He has presented at numerous conferences, written coursebooks and graded readers, and has published articles on teacher development, motivation, and methodology. His is also the co-author of the forthcoming title, Critical Thinking ('Research and Resources in Language Teaching' series, Routledge).

Note

Each presentation will run for approximately 1 hour with a 30-minute break in between.
This session will be held online. The link to join via Zoom is below

Topic: Kitakyushu JALT October Meeting
Time: Oct 15, 2022 05:30 PM Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82057528875?pwd=SXdGZVl3MXYwQnhidDByR3pnaHZUdz09
Meeting ID: 820 5752 8875
Passcode: 794830

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