Long Presentation (45 minutes) Reflecting on Intuition in Language Teaching and Research more

Sun, Sep 17, 14:15-15:00 Asia/Tokyo

During the course of a single lesson, language teachers make hundreds of on-the-spot decisions about how to proceed. If concurrently engaged in practitioner research and teaching, even more so. Intuition plays a vital role in the optimal distribution of mental resources, allowing experienced practitioners to make such decisions quickly, based on tacit knowledge and an accurate sense of what they feel is best in a given moment. Developing this sense of intuition takes years of practice, although our actions based on intuitions may not always be the most facilitative for the circumstances at hand. In this workshop, we will commence by looking briefly at the anatomy of intuition, drawing out its many different qualities. Based on past research from general education, as well as tentative findings from the presenters, the majority of the workshop will then prompt participants to consider and discuss their experiences of different forms of intuition. We anticipate that the session will be empowering for participants, encouraging them to recognize the ways in which metacognitive strategies such as reflecting on, or examining classroom data about, intuition can play a part in improving both our teaching/researching, as well as our mental health.