Michelle Ocriciano

26 POSTS

Michelle Ocriciano was a blogger for English teaching professional for 2.5 years, writing her final post for us in December 2021. During her time as a blogger for ETp, she wrote 25 posts which reflect her experiences being in ELT for over 20 years, and the different hats she's worn as a teacher, teacher trainer, academic manager, learning and teaching consultant, and researcher. Her posts encourage reflection, discussion of controversial and topical teaching issues and evaluation of evidence/learning from other fields of education to better inform our teaching. Michelle holds a BA in Linguistics, a BEd Secondary, a BA in Pedagogy and an MA in Applied Linguistics. She is currently a PhD candidate and EAP teacher at the University of Queensland in sunny Brisbane, Australia. She is also a registered counsellor focused on student support and anxiety reduction.

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Backwards design for course and school (re)development

2021-12-16

Backwards Design seems to be everywhere now. But what does it mean? It’s becoming clear it is not a philosophy of teaching nor an approach to teaching – it is a planning framework. Read on to find out more and what it means for us as teachers, and our teaching.

Online assessment

2021-04-26

Writing assessments is usually a challenging task. This can be especially true when it comes to online assessments in language learning. In this blogpost, Michelle discusses how online assessments shouldn't be the same as traditional face-to-face ones.

Multiliteracy and multimodality

2019-10-22

What do we mean by multiliteracy? How can multimodality help us get a message across? In this blogpost, Michelle Ocriciano provides a simple definition of literacy, explores the concept of multiliteracy and multimodality and wraps up by talking about the international literacy day.

Assessing your professional development as you teach live online

2019-08-01

We have never talked as much about online teaching as we have in recent times! But how do you organise your learning around your technology use? Read on to learn about TPACKS, how it defines the role of technology in teaching and what learning you can add to MyCPD.

Anxiety in the language classroom

2019-05-16

Have you noticed that people are becoming more anxious around you? Are you getting the same sense from your learners? How can you help them? This blogpost discusses how student anxiety seems to getting more common and how your learners might feel, whilst giving tips about what can be done to reduce such anxiety.

Putting on your own (online) event

2019-04-03

In this blog post, Michelle Ocriciano reflects on her conference experience to date before moving on to give some suggestions on set up an online or local event for groups of teachers or a school thinking of holding one of their own.

Do we really need to be that resilient?

2018-09-17

Have you ever been told to be (more) resilient? What does it mean anyway? Although some might say resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, read this week’s blog post to discover a new way of looking into resilience.

Changes and the postmethod

2018-04-20

What methods do you use when teaching English? Why do you do this or that activity? What’s its purpose? These are questions we may ask ourselves, if we had the time to do so. So, how can we adjust? This post sheds light on these questions and much more.

ADHD in the classroom

2016-05-16

How much do you know about SEND? Do any of your students have ADHD? In this post, Michelle reveals more about the disorder, which is considered to be the most common neuropsychiatric condition in children, and its common characteristics, before looking at how you can help those learners in the classroom.

Shedding light on the mystery of how students learn

2016-04-08

When Michelle Ocriciano (one of our new bloggers for English Teaching Professional) started teaching, she had a 5-year degree in Linguistics and teaching, and thought she could conquer the world. She felt that she basically knew two things very well: 1) language teaching is social and 2) knowledge of how language works is essential. But the fact is that she still had many questions, and the more she taught, the more those questions bothered her. Read on to find out what Michelle discovered about the way students really learn.

Hey! How are you? Teacher wellbeing in the New Year

2016-02-23

Language teaching is a particularly demanding subject and can drain teachers emotionally. Teachers are often concerned about students’ wellbeing, but tend to neglect their own. After the holidays in December, January is often seen as a good time to reflect, make some New Year’s resolutions and map out the year ahead or new term. So, if one of your resolutions is to take better care of yourself (or should be!), read Michelle Ocriciano’s straightforward tips on how to improve teachers’ wellbeing.

But teacher, English here is different, right?

2015-12-04

When Michelle Ocriciano first moved to Australia she realized that her students kept saying ‘But English here is very different, right?’. Find out about different varieties of English, and its use as a lingua franca, and enjoy all the resources!

Procrastination, laziness and trauma-informed teaching

2015-11-25

As remote teaching becomes the new norm, we may be shifting our attention from how to use technology to teach online to what we are teaching and how students are responding to it. Not following deadlines or completing tasks can be closely related to the collective trauma the world is facing right now.

The Native teacher and advertising

2015-09-22

As we go back to the new normal, schools are starting to think about ways to increase their number of students. An unfortunate and unethical way of doing it is by advertising their "Native English teachers”. Read on and find out a better way to advertise courses with product differentiation and design thinking.

F for Feedback and E for Empathy

2015-09-03

I only truly understood the importance of feedback and counselling when I started teaching IELTS classes. Some learners would panic, even cry, during their speaking practice, so I knew I had to provide something more than just corrective feedback …