As an adjunct professor for The College of New Jersey's Global program, I have the opportunity to travel to different regions of the world to teach graduate education courses to international teachers. We condense a semester worth of work into 8 very intensive days of learning. Because these teachers primarily teach in American or British schools, they have the challenge of teaching host country students who often have limited English acquisition. Fittingly, we explore a plethora of strategies that my students can then use in their classrooms to help make the curriculum accessible to their own students. We also explore how students can become self-regulated learners who know how to set goals, apply strategies, and evaluate their outcomes. We also think about how we can restore intrinsic motivation, both for my students and for their respective students. I teach them about the Six Cs of Motivation (choice, challenge, control, collaboration, constructed meaning, and consequences).

We then engage in an Off-Site Field Experience, aka field trip! (This is where the super authentic learning comes in!) We decide on a very local location where there is barely any English access. My students are divided into teams and they must engage in tasks where they must demonstrate their level of self-regulation as they plan for the field trip. We then set off for the field trip, where the teams are tasked with getting information from the locals who don't speak English by using the strategies they learned in class. As they engage in the field trip throughout the day, they realize, reflect, and then articulate how the Six Cs of motivation was embedded throughout the series of tasks. The teachers emerge with a tremendous sense of compassion, respect, and understanding for their English language learning students, and a greater appreciation for the value of becoming a self-regulated learner who is intrinsically motivated to learn. Authentic pedagogy at its best!

Below is a link to the site where there are pictures and videos about the Off-Site Field Experience that was done in Mallorca, Spain:

http://www.upthebarconsulting.com/mallorca-spain.html