Work from students' strenghts and interests!!

When teaching teens, a variety of aspects must be considered by teachers.
This time, we would like to give you, our dearest cyber teachers, some useful pieces of advice to implement in your classroom, and to take into account if you have to deal with teens.
First of all, you have to know how your students feel about the subject. Secondly, what their English language expectations are.
In order you could atain these 2 main objectives you can consider the following ideas:

• Give possitive feedback that supports students' beliefs that they can do well.
• Ensure opportunities for students' success by assigning tasks that are neither too easy nor to difficult.
• Help students find personal meaning and value in the materials.
• Create an atmosphere that is open and positive.
• Help students find that they are valued members of a learning community.
• Vary your teaching methods. Break the routine by incorporating a variety of teaching activities and methods in your class such as: role play, brainstorming, debates, audiovisual presentations, guest speakers, group work, discussions, and so on.

If you are able to follow these guidelines we are totally sure you will be an effective teacher and what it is more important and significant: you will be stressing your students learning rather than grades and results!

just give them a try!

We hope you enjoy this post!

As we obviously observe as teachers, to be an adolescent is to be in a transition process where, as it is mentioned before, their thinking process becomes more complex and their emotions are stronger. This may cause some difficulties in teenagers to focus their attention on studying, for example. We as teachers need to be aware of these changes that these students are having because if we ignore them we can cause them a tremendous damage.

This is the moment where teenagers are recognizing themselves as individuals who have a special identity. This identity they are building is extremely fragile since they are particularly sensitive to every single reaction people have toward them. They are creating their self-consciousness about their growing process. Teenagers are changing in every aspect of their lives: physically, mentally, and obviously they are aware and concerned about how people and society accept them or not.

Since teenagers are in a transition process we, as teachers who are concerned about how to deal with those emotional unbalanced state of mind, have to be aware of some important details that we are going to present you now:

Self-esteem & Self-image: Teenagers are extremely concerned about how do they look to other people. It is tremendously important to them to be accepted by their closest group of people and to the society in general. That means that we as teachers cannot hurt them in terms of self-esteem, we need to encourage them to be themselves not to be what other people want them to become.

Ego: Students need to have a proper level of ego. They need to feel that they can actually do whatever they set themselves as a goal. The big issue here is that we have to help them to set themselves realistic goals in order to not let them fell frustrated if they by any reason cannot achieve those goals.

Embarrassment: We, teachers, must avoid, by all means, every single kind of embarrassment to our teenagers. This action could really damage and harm them in their self-esteem which is, as I mentioned before, extremely fragile.

As a conclusion what we teachers have to do is to give positive feedback to students that supports their beliefs about that they can do well in everything that they want to do. We have to be careful though, about those high goals maybe not so realistic because they can be frustrated if they are not able to achieve them, so the thing that we must do well is guide them and help them sincerely and give them the enough support that they need.

In their Teens, adolescents suffer different psychological and cognitive changes. Here you are going to learn what these changes are.
The first one is related to the cognitive development that an adolescent experiments. According to Piaget in adolescence, teens are in a stage which is called “Formal Operations”. That mainly means that teenagers start developing a capacity to think in an abstract way, allowing them to manage and get information under a more flexible perspective. Besides, there is also an increase in the intellectual capacity of adolescents along with a development in their scientific thinking. All this, as a consequence of human cerebral maturing.
Identity and Vocation are another aspect we cannot forget once we are involved in the Teens’ world. Adolescence is a difficult age in which young people have to build an identity and define a vocation to follow. It is a stage plenty of challenges and decisions to be taken. Believe it or not, this is a hard task for adolescents because they have to establish what their interests are, but also what their needs, and whishes are. It is a period of time in which most of their decisions are going to have especially connections with their childhood and their previous experiences and knowledge about how society works, and what it accepts or what does not.
According to Erikson the main task of adolescents in their teens is to face the crisis between identity and confusion in order to become a unique adult with a coherent sense of himself, and with a social perspective of the society, as well. However, it can also be possible that some aspects of this crisis reappear in adulthood building the real identity.
These are some important aspects teachers cannot ignore if they really want to accomplish learning when teaching teens. It is also essential that educators take into account all the multiple factors that influence adolescence development since the cognitive changes until the emotional and social development.