How Much of What You Know is Wrong?
Why you need to start updating your knowledge.
How much time do you spend updating your knowledge? How many of your TEFL teaching beliefs are now outdated? New research is released daily, about language acquisition, linguistics, neuromyths that just won’t die. … how sure are you that what you know is really up to date?
One of the most important skills we need as teachers is the ability to critically reflect in the face of new evidence — and to actually keep up with new ideas.
The Speed of Knowledge
There are some bodies of knowledge that are fixed, where very few (if any) changes occur. Chess, for example, or music — the theory of each of these updates relatively slowly, as their fundamentals stay the same.
There are also fields of study that change almost daily — computing would be a good example.
Language learning and teaching are somewhere in the middle. I would argue that the speed at which this new knowledge is generated is getting faster, along with just about every other field of study.
So what can you do about it?
